I find it difficult to tell you this… For years, I’ve been the “go-to marketing guy” for entrepreneurs seeking advanced marketing strategies to generate NEW traffic, leads, and sales to rapidly grow their businesses.
After all, I thought this is exactly what you wanted… So I gave it to you.
These efforts generated millions of dollars in sales for my business coaching clients (some of you reading this may have even benefited).
However, there’s one problem…
My approach was backwards.
…It started from the end and worked to the beginning (instead of the other way around).
This resulted in more effort, more time, and more resources.
Now, I kept doing it because that’s what everyone else in my industry proclaimed to be the “secret for growing a business.”
Experience quickly told me that something didn’t feel right.
And I seemed to be the only one who took notice…
Want to see what I mean?
Check your email right now.
Without fail, you’ll find experts persuading you to buy their pay per click, social media, marketing funnel, mobile marketing, product launch, direct mail, webinar, print advertising, radio, telemarketing strategy, and so forth…
Am I right?
They all claim their program will help any entrepreneur grow. Yet, if you’re like me and purchased many of these trainings, you likely noticed the results are never as easy as promised.
Well, here’s why:
The guru world is designed to sell you the latest and greatest trinket…
Even if they know it’s not the “real secret.”
Old doesn’t sell as well as new and shiny…
The sheer amount of potential strategies for your business is overwhelming.
And like they say about the weather here in New Hampshire, give it a few moments, it’ll change…
The fact is, you’ll always see a new marketing strategy touted as the next best thing.
Yet, a new marketing strategy does not always translate into the most intelligent way for you to grow your business right now.
That’s why I began to ask myself, “What is the smartest and fastest way to grow a business?”
Then the answer came to me.
And I made an announcement to the world:
Forget about creating a new marketing strategy… at least for now…
Experts couldn’t believe what I said…
After all, there’s money to be made in pitching new strategies – just as those before me did…
But my loyalty is with my clients and followers – who I feel need to hear it firsthand from me.
The truth is, I never found it “easy” or “fast” to make money with a brand new strategy, without first going through what I’m about to share with you.
So… it’s not fair for me to pretend to be someone or claim to accomplish something I have not…
Creating a widely profitable strategy took time…
It took testing…
It took work…
It took patience…
Sometimes, it took money…
And the worst part:
This is completely normal when you try to make a new strategy work for you.
Kevin Daum, an Inc. 500 entrepreneur and best-selling author, said it best:
“There’s nothing wrong with hard work, but smart work will help you achieve success sooner and easier.”
Developing a brand-new strategy is the hardest, most expensive way to grow a business.
(I wish someone told me that when I struggled growing my first multimillion-dollar business)
So, therein lies the question every entrepreneur must face: “How can you create the same or better results by working smarter?”
As I took a step back, I began to notice something…
Our fastest, easiest, and often most profitable results with clients came when we did NOT start by building a new strategy.
Another strategy produced a bigger return.
Often in as little as days (as opposed to weeks)…
And I’m not talking about a few dollars here and there – I’m talking about strategies with the potential to instantly ignite as much as 35% growth.
Ongoing…
With the potential for ever-increasing profits.
It changed everything.
The Single Biggest Source of Untapped Profits for Entrepreneurs That Nobody’s Talking About
Believe it or not, you learned this secret in high-school physics…
It’s a universal truth or law about how the world works…
And it directly applies to your business. No exceptions.
Ready?
Now, when I tell you what it is, you must continue reading for the full explanation…
Here it is:
It’s also referred to as momentum.
You’ll see how this holds the secret to your business growth in just a moment…
As it turns out, the reason creating a brand new strategy takes so much time, energy, and money is because the strategy has no momentum!
That’s why it’s harder to get your first 1,000 customers than your next 1,000 customers.
So what do you do now?
Introducing the Predictable Profits Method for Growing a Business
The Predictable Profits Playbook lays the foundations for dominating any market and staying on top.
The strategies in the book are imperative to creating a leading company, and valuable to any budding entrepreneur.
However, that’s not what we’re talking about here…
We’re talking about growing your business and the steps to make it happen.
Actually, here are the only 3 steps to growing your business:
- Optimization
- Systemization
- Innovation
And they must happen exactly in this order.
Let me explain.
STEP 1: OPTIMIZATION – The Fastest Way to Immediate Profits
If the problem with starting a new strategy is that “an object at rest stays at rest,” then it only makes sense to go where there’s already momentum…
Right?
And that’s precisely the first step in growing a business:
Identify all the high-impact areas containing business momentum.
Where are the opportunities inside your business that already generate leads, clients, and sales?
- Website?
- Email?
- Direct mail?
- Sales team?
- Advertising?
- Telemarketing?
- Promotions?
- Events?
- Referrals?
- Articles?
These are your most rapid growth opportunities.
Furniture retailer Blue Dot identified their website as an impact area.
Without spending any more money, they optimized their landing page. Simply changing their visual images of color swatches to a text-only display instantly increased total order conversions by 62.4%.
Not bad, right?
And that was just ONE impact area.
You’re reading this post on my blog, and because I get regular leads from this page, it’s a point of business momentum.
Like most people, I had the sidebar of my blog on the right:
In an effort to maximize my potential, I tested the sidebar by positioning it on the left:
The result? I better than DOUBLED the email opt-ins I averaged over the last 8 months!
Traffic Czar Justin Brooke made the change on his website and received a 300% increase in opt-ins (thanks for the tip!).
How long did it take me to make this change?
90 seconds.
How much did it cost me?
Nothing.
What’s the impact of this change?
$$$$$
Think about it: if the average lead on your list is worth $1 per month to your business, doubling your average daily opt-ins could instantly double your list revenue.
And you can do it in less time than it takes you to drink a cup of coffee.
My rock star sales person is assisting one of our business coaching clients on selling a program priced as high as $7,500.
Sales were good, but we suspected they could be better…
Did we guess correctly?
After a few months of testing, we added an extra step to the sales process and instantly increased sales by 400%.
Recently, we helped a client with a direct mail campaign. Initial conversions were very good; however, we suspected that changing the digest cover and adding photos to the testimonials would boost sales.
The result? Approximately 40% increase above the current control.
The examples are endless…
In addition to optimizing your results, I can help you if you struggle with identifying all your impact areas and how well they’re doing.
STEP 2: SYSTEMIZATION – A Winning Process for Automatic Sales & Growth
Your ultimate objective (as outlined in the Predictable Profits Playbook) is to create at least one new profit center a quarter.
This is an approach we call establishing “The Money Wheel™” – a systematic method creating more predictability and growth opportunities for your business…
However, having a Money Wheel™ is impossible if you don’t have the right systems and processes in place.
Therefore, only after you accomplish Step 1, and have a fully optimized impact area, can you move to the next stage of systemizing your business.
In many cases, using a CRM like Infusionsoft allows you to instantly automate many marketing functions.
You can use it to create autoresponders, follow up marketing campaigns, cart abandonment campaigns, customer reengagement strategies, evergreen marketing funnels, referral systems, and so forth.
We have campaigns that automatically send email instructions to certain people based on various actions, inactions, and purchases.
For example, if you’re an Insiders’ Club Member and your credit card expires, our CRM triggers a series of emails prior to expiration, during expiration, and finally, if you haven’t responded yet, triggers an email to my assistants so you get a call before your subscription is interrupted.
We use marketing automation to systemize anything and everything possible, creating more leverage for us to work on our business instead of in our business.
However, let’s face it, you can’t automate everything…
For example, Hudson News discovered that Dasani bottled water was a top-seller at its 400 newsstands. To optimize sales, the cashier asked any purchaser at the point of sale, “Do you want water today?”
(Sounds vaguely familiar to McDonald’s billion-dollar “You want fries with that?” question, right?)
Hudson News customers now spend more money.
So here’s the deal: wherever you are missing a system, sales people will forget, point of sales will fade away, and you’ll lose profits.
In order to ensure your sales people, management team, customer support, etc. implement the strategies you set in place, you must create a system and process.
Sweet Process is the tool we use to document those non-automated processes and systems.
And once it’s documented, in order for us to measure the campaign’s effectiveness, it must be tracked and monitored.
(How many water bottles did Cashier #1 sell today versus Cashier #2? Does it fall within our daily average? If not, why? Did it go up? Why?)
The same strategy works for restaurants, software companies, lawyers, doctors, retailers… You name it. It goes for entrepreneurs of all kinds.
Systems and automation simplify the process, create leverage for getting more done with less effort, and drive increased profits.
STEP 3: INNOVATION – Developing Key Profit Centers
This is the phase where you develop new profit centers…
Things like creating a brand new advertising effort…
Conducting a product launch…
Establishing a new direct-mail campaign…
Email marketing…
Social media…
…and so forth.
It’s also where you test against your existing profit centers and attempt to establish new controls.
And create industry firsts…
This is how we generated over $1.17 million for a client in under 10 days…
Or $250,000 in 24 hours.
It’s exciting!
However, unlike what you might read in sales pitches, it’s also the area that typically takes the most skill, strategy, time, and resources.
Sorry folks, there’s no reliable holy grail or pixie dust that magically creates profits out of thin air – without first putting in a little elbow grease.
Fortunately, the first two steps above often illuminate the ripest opportunity for innovation.
A mentor once described developing new strategies as “drilling for oil.”
You find fertile ground…
Make a plan…
Drill and test for results…
Adjust as necessary…
Once you find a steady flow, drill deeper and focus your efforts to pull as much revenue as possible.
The point is this:
You and I have one thing in common: we only have 24 hours in a day. How you spend that time – whether working harder or smarter – is up to you.
As far as working smarter, this 3-step process is the easiest, fastest, and most efficient way for an entrepreneur to grow their business.
