May 4, 2018

Grow your business brain-dump

Some thoughts I sent someone struggling to grow his business:

1) From the book “The ONE Thing”:

What’s The ONE Thing you can do in your business that, if done, will make everything else unnecessary or easier to do?

If you don’t know what your ONE Thing is, then your ONE Thing is working out what your ONE Thing is.

2) 80/20 analysis:

What marketing channel and funnel is working best for you? What if you doubled down on that?

What marketing channels are not working well for you? What if you paused them for the moment?

Where’s the biggest leak in your main funnel?

What product is making you the most money?

Who are your best customers? Can you find more of them? What if you doubled the number of your best customers?

Which of your customers are the biggest drain? What if you cut them?

What small change would move the needle the most for you?

3) Customer LTV:

“Sales solve everything.” … can you make more sales, or are you running at capacity already?

What’s your average order value?

What’s your average customer Life-Time-Value?

Do you have something for all pricing tiers?

4) Monthly subscriptions:

Do your customers/clients signup and pay you in automated monthly recurring payments?

If not, what can you offer them that they can pay monthly for?

5) Your business infrastructure:

This consists of your People, Processes, and Technology (and I think in that order of importance).

Start giving small pieces of work out? Ideally to someone who’ll do a better job than you, but even if you delegate/outsource to a junior/VA then reducing some of your coal-face workload will help you work on your business.

I prefer dealing with freelancers/contractors. They have more initiative and are more fun to be around anyway.

Work with good people and they’ll develop and document your processes, and then your technology.

Work with lower skilled people or those with less initiative and you’ll likely have to develop the processes and technology for them to use – before you hire them.

Personally, I’ll only take on employees after my processes and technology are such that I can use lower skilled people. My job as a business owner isn’t to employ people though, so that’s not a “goal” of mine. I’ll only do it if it makes sense.

Treat each piece of work you hand out as a small test to see how well that person does. You may have to kiss a lot of frogs.

Bear in mind that “The person who’ll run with the ball is the person who catches it.” Keeness beats expertise in my experience.

Have you documented your main processes and written repeatable SOPs? (Bear in mind it’s not really repeatable until someone else can do it.)

Do you have an asset register listing all your SOPs?

6) You:

Are you selling the wrong product? As the business owner the product you’re building to sell is your business, not the product or service your business sells.

Do you have trusted peers you can bounce ideas off? A mastermind? Maybe even give some more info here and let forum members bounce ideas off you?