Over the next 3 weeks I will be sharing with you 7 Essential Secrets to building a business that works…
Works for who?
Works for you, sometimes the least focused on person(s) in a business. You do not need to be a slave to your business. With focused, intentional design your business nightmare can be transformed into a dream.
These “secrets” individually are not really that secret. However, few businesses put these elements together as a collective whole, and that is a secret.
This week I am going to write about Secret #1 and Secret #2.
Let us get started…
Secret #1 – Vision
The Problem here is most people start building a business without any vision.
They just start making it up and wonder why at the end of it what they have is not working (for them).
In other words, it does not give them the things they went into business for in the first place.
What is it that people go into business for in the first place?
What we have discovered is that most people go into business to have freedom, financial independence, control of their destiny, and peace of mind.
Yet, is that what you think most businesspeople end up with?
Not really, right?
A Vision gives you the direction you are going in.
A Vision needs to be created in a way that has these elements:
- Time frame (usually 3 years).
- Description of your niche and the services you provide that niche.
- Has a strong emotional wording that inspires you every time you say it or even think about it. It gets you out of bed in the morning.
- Lastly, it has a dollar figure in it.
For example, if we decided right now to go on a road trip together and did not discuss where, when, and how we are going to get there (and we do not know where we are going anyway)– how far do you think we will get?
Or where do you think we would end up?
It is ludicrous to even imagine what that would be like, isn’t it?
The same if we were going to build a house and just grab some tools, and start building and hope that when it is all done, we have a beautiful, safe home to live in.
Again, we all know how absurd that is, and yet that is exactly what people do when they start a business. They have some vague sense of what they want, and the industry they are in, and they just start acting.
Why do you think in business that we approach things like that?
It is because we do not know that a business has a design (or needs to have a design) in the same way that a house does.
In fact, it is a bit worse than that! It goes like this – most people think that because they are good at the technical aspects of their trade, or profession or craft that means they are automatically good at that kind of business.
The problem is that a business operates along distinct design elements separate from the work of the business. For example, Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds never knew how to (or did not ever) serve one single hamburger.
His vision was a system that could be replicated repeatedly. This is what I mean by an elegantly designed business.
Secret #2 – There Are Only 4 Ways to Grow Your Business
If we were to start a brainstorming session and write down on white boards each way, we could think to grow a business how many distinct ways do you think we could produce?
If we had enough time, we could list hundreds if not thousands of different ideas and strategies to grow a business, yes?
Well, the problem is, it gets so overwhelming, with so many ideas and we have no way of knowing or measuring the actual cost and leverage of each way!
Where do you begin? How do you know what will work?
Well, the answer is – and this is great news – there are only 4 ways to grow your business!
And each idea we would have listed above will fit inside one of these 4 ways to grow.
We all intuitively know what they are!
Let me share with you…
Way Number 1 – Increase The Number of Customers of The Type You Want
Way Number 2 – Increase The Number of Times Your Customers Do Business with You
Way Number 3 – Increase The Amount of Money They Spend with You in Each Transaction
Way Number 4 – Increase The Efficiency and Effectiveness of Each Process in Your Business
And the exciting part of this way of thinking with the 4 Ways to Grow is that we can measure the impact on your profits for each way, and discover which way is the most leveraged.
Here is a simple way to break this down…
How Are the 4 Ways Measured?
Your total sales are composed of the first 3 ways to grow your business.
Your total customers X the number of times they buy from you on average X the average sale per transaction = your total sales.
When you work at increasing (even in small increments) all 3 ways at once, the compounding effect can be extraordinary.
To measure way number 4, you take your total expenses and divided it by the number of transactions to give you the cost per transaction.
When you lower the cost per transaction without sacrificing quality, service, or on-time delivery, you will be more efficient.
This is way number 4.
Thank you for reading…