Category Archives for "Business Growth Guide"

Use these 7 remarkable secrets to confidently grow your agency

Use these 7 remarkable secrets to confidently grow your agency

Who Are Your Best Customers?

If you don't have customers, you don't have a company. You may be amazing at what you do, but if you can't find the right people, you're never going to stay in business. It all starts by solving a problem for the right person.

The truth of the matter is this: you shouldn't run after just any customer. What you need to focus on is attracting the right kind of customer. The type of customer that pays you and that you actually like!

If you don't like your customers and you don't genuinely want to serve them, they will sniff you out. You have to care enough to solve a problem your customers want solved...

Take The Business Growth Quiz

Take The Quiz

Find An Underserved Market

What if you could get your customers to pay you more while making your competition irrelevant? You can! All it takes is narrowing down a group of people that nobody else is paying attention to.

Find the smallest group you can with a specific problem and solve that problem better than anyone else. If you serve them better than anyone else, you will become their only option.

Niche, Niche, Niche.

Create Straightforward Packages

Once you narrow down the underserved market you want to reach and a specific problem you can solve, it is time to productize your service.

Instead of customizing what you offer for each customer, create simple, straightforward packages and pricing anyone can understand. While your competition is busy writing up long custom proposals, your customer will be signing up for your packages because they understand how it solves their problem.

Customers often want a custom package. The thing is, they hired your for a reason; you know what you are doing. Why let them waste both of your time creating a cumbersome custom proposals when you already know what they need. A little education and a clear packaged deal make asking for the sale as easy as 1-2-3!

Processes Are Where The Magic Happens

Now that you productized your service, you can create processes to get a repeatable outcome every single time. The more times you sell your offering, the better and more efficient your processes becomes. You can quickly teach other people how to reproduce exactly what you do so you can focus on more important parts of your business or spend a little more time off work.

Most of the time you, as the business owner, are the bottleneck keeping growth from happening in your company. Processes get you out of the way so your business will have the room it needs to grow. You will be able to use software to automate parts of your business that would not have been possible otherwise.

Take The Business Growth Quiz

Take The Quiz

Be Part Of Something Bigger Than Yourself

As humans we have a deep longing to be part of something larger than life. We want to feel like the pain and suffering we experience in the world is part of a bigger story. When you tap into your purpose as a business that is bigger than yourself or your company, it rallies people behind your cause. Even something as simple as making your customer's life a little easier is a noble thing.

Our lives are so busy. The society we live in is stressed out to the max. Extended stress is detrimental to our bodies. Helping your customer eliminate stress so they can live a longer more healthy life is a noble cause.

Serve other people to find your purpose and live out that purpose through your work. Not only does it bring meaning to your life but it will also pays a lot better in the long run as well.

Say The Right Words Every Time

Spend time simplifying the way you communicate about your business. Condense the description of your offerings down to a few sentences. Create a communication guide that helps your language stay consistent. Make sure that what you are conveying through sales and marketing lines up with what your product will deliver.

Having consistent language will help you to measure and test outcomes and bring on new employees while maintaining excellence. When you communicate clearly it makes it much easier for your customer to purchase. You want there to be as little friction as possible in the buying process. Clear communication helps to keep things simple and moving forward.

This Is Only The Beginning

Steps 1-6 lay a foundation that needs to be tested. Write down as much as you can. Test each part in the real world. Your customers, position, products, processes, why statement, and communication guide all need to be validated. The areas they are lacking need to be refined.

The process of testing and refining is never over. However, once you have everything running smoothly you can begin to scale. If everything is in place you will be able to scale your business much faster.

Take The Business Growth Quiz

Take The Quiz

This topic and the rest of the steps in the Business Growth Guide are covered in much greater detail in the Brand Compass Course. You can access the first section of the course, which covers the customer profile, here

Test – Refine – Scale

This Is Only The Beginning

Steps 1-6 lay a foundation that needs to be tested. Write down as much as you can. Test each part in the real world. Your customers, position, products, processes, purpose, and communication guide all need to be validated. The areas they are lacking need to be refined.

Test

Now that you have each of the five foundations for business growth written down on paper, you can test each portion. As you learn more about your customer and how they respond to your messaging and offerings, you can make changes confidently.

Is your customer profile accurate?

Is your offering relevant?

Is your messaging invoking a response from your customers?

Refine

As you test, you will find areas you need to fix. Don't think of it as being wrong, think of it as being that much closer to being right. Every time you test and find a new way of doing things you are serving your customers better, and you are that much better at your job.

Go back to what you have written down and rewrite it armed with your new knowledge from testing.

Scale

Once you have tested and refined your process for a few months, you will start to have a well-oiled machine. You will get to the point where your tests are much more specific, and the refinements get smaller and smaller. Once you hit that point, it is time to scale.

Now you know exactly how your customers will react and you know your language is on point. Now begin to automate, delegate, and outsource your processes. You can ramp up your marketing knowing that your ideal customers will be attracted to your offer.

You will always be testing and refining, but now it is time to relax a little bit and let all the hard work you did to get here sink in. Take some of that hard earned cash you just earned from growing a profitable business and go sip a piña colada on a beach somewhere.

You've earned it!

How To Actually Get From A-Z

Now you have a basic knowledge of the 7 Proven Steps To Grow Your Business, but what do you do from here? How do you fill in the gaps and level-up your business? On your own, it is much easier said than done.

We know how hard making these 7-steps are so we made it so easy for you by creating a pre-branding, pre-growth course called the Brand Compass Course. The Brand Compass Course goes in depth into how to develop a customer profile, position your brand, productize your service, create processes, and create a clear one-page communication guide. It's all you need to start implementing the 7 proven steps to grow your business.

Are up ready to level-up your business? Sign up for the Brand Compass Course and get instant access today.

Create A Communication Guide

Say The Right Words Every Time

Keep It Simple

Don't feel like you have to fill up a whole page. The simpler, the better. If nobody is going to read the one page, it doesn't do any good.

What are the key elements you need to communicate your message to your customers? Boil those elements down to a few sentences.

Why A Communication Guide?

Your communication guide is what every person in your company will use to stay on the same page. Keeping consistency is vital to increase sales and reduce customer turnover.

It will also help you explain your business to shareholders, potential employees, and vendors.

It isn't over until...

Well, actually the process never ends. Now comes the fun part, testing!

In tomorrow's post, we will cover testing in more detail.

Define Your Purpose

Be Part Of Something Bigger Than Yourself

As humans, we have a deep longing to be part of something larger than life. We want to feel like the pain and suffering we experience in the world is part of a bigger story. When you tap into your purpose as a business that is bigger than yourself or your company, it rallies people behind your cause. Even something as simple as making your customer's life a little easier is a noble thing.

Our lives are so busy. The society we live in is stressed out to the max. Extended stress is detrimental to our bodies. It is virtuous to Help your customer eliminate stress so they can live a longer more healthy life.

Serve other people to find your purpose and live out that purpose through your work. Not only does it bring meaning to your life but it will also pay a lot better in the long run as well.

Here is how to start defining your purpose:

Goals

What are your personal goals for your business?

Do you want to have more freedom?

Do you want to have less stress?

Do you want to make more money?

What do you want to get out of your business?

Write your goals down.

What are your values?

What values shape your worldview?

What drives you?

What gets you out of bed on Monday morning?

What gives you purpose or meaning in your life?

Overlap

Where do your goals and values overlap with your ideal customers?

What do your customers share in common with you?

Do you share common goals, interests, or motivations with your ideal customer?

Pursue Purpose

Money is great for a while, but it won't keep you motivated forever. Pursuing purpose and meaning as a core part of your business will help you stay in it for the long haul. When you seek purposeful work, you can inspire employees who share a common goal and rally customers behind your vision.

No amount of money can motivate employees like a shared goal or values. Nothing will motivate a customer to rave about you and keep coming back as a shared purpose will.

Pursuing meaning and purpose in your work will pay dividends in the long-game.

Pull It All Together

Now that we have the core five elements for growing your business, it's time to pull it all together into a cohesive one-pager.

In tomorrow's post, we will talk about the importance of a clear communication guide.

Build Scalable Processes

Processes Are Where The Magic Happens

Templatize

The first step to creating processes is to create a template for delivering your service. Take your productized service and break it down into steps. Define what parts of your offering can be the same with every customer and write them down.

You can save a lot of time and money if the structure of every project you do is the same, but the content is different. Done correctly, your customer will assume everything is custom, but your template significantly decreases the amount of time you spend.

If you have positioned yourself to serve a specific niche with a specific product, templating your offering allows you do offer a better solution for your customer. You have found what works. Why change it for every customer instead of building on the success you have already had.

Map Out The Steps

Write out your process for delivering your product and break it down into steps. Every time you go through the process with your customers, refine the steps to make your process even better. If you spend the time to create "pillars" for your product that need to be fulfilled every time, even a customer that needs a truly custom solution will go faster because you have written out what foundational things need to happen every time.

Processes give you guidelines, not hard rules. I often hear people say that processes steal their creativity. Most of the time this isn't true. Processes give you the freedom to be creative. Instead of spending a large part of your time figuring out how to help your customer, you can spend almost all of your time creatively implementing something you already know will work.

Processes are like a canvas and a medium like watercolor. Now you know where to paint and the tools you need to make the painting. Now you are free to paint a watercolor masterpiece rather than spend your time figuring out what medium to use and where to use it.

Automate, Delegate and Outsource

When you have clear steps in your process, you can automate, delegate, or outsource effectively. You now have your processes mapped out clearly into steps. All you have to do is use automation software, delegate tasks to a team member, and outsource parts of your business to a vendor or virtual assistant.

How do you know what to delegate? Anything that isn't in your strength zone and doesn't require your input as the business owner can and ultimately should be automated, delegated, or outsource.

It may be cheaper to get things off your plate than you think.

Why Should Someone Work With You?

What are your goals for your business and are they enough to inspire people to buy from you?

We will explore this topic in tomorrow's post!

Productize Your Service

Create Straightforward Packages

Once you narrow down the underserved market you want to reach and a specific problem you can solve, it is time to productize your service.

Why Productize?

Productizing your service will help you:

Save time
Be more clear about what you offer
Eliminate friction to purchase
Create efficiency
Make sharing about what you offer easier for others

Be Clear About What You Offer

Before you can productize your service, you have to be clear about what you do for your customer. If can't explain what you offer and how it solves your customers problem in a few sentences you will struggle to productize your offering. This is the most challenging part of the process for a lot of people.

Take time to simplify what you do into basic steps. Take out a piece of paper and begin to identify your offering at a high level. Breaking down what you do into parts will also help you to create processes, which we will cover more in depth in the next post.

What are the most important parts of your solution? What are the key components you can offer to differentiate yourself? What are the elements of your offering that have to happen every time?

Start by writing out everything that you offer. Then simplify that down to one page. Then half a page. Finally, simplify your offering down to a paragraph.

Don't cheat. Limiting yourself to one paragraph will help you decide what about your offering is truly important.

Create Packages

Take your simplified explanation of what you do and create packages based on the most common needs you run into. You can either only offer those packages or use them to build out a custom solution but save a lot of time in the process. If possible, I highly recommend offering a set price package whenever possible.

Offering a set price allows you to sell based on the value you are offering not on the work you actually do. The more efficient you are, the more you will make.

Position Your Brand

Make Your Competition Irrelevant

What if you could make your competition disappear? You don't need to learn magic to practice this disappearing act. All you need is the ability to look at things differently.

If you are reading this post, there is a good chance you either run your own business or are planning to start one. In that case, you already see things differently and are off to a good start.

Making your competition disappear does take a little work, but it may be easier than you think. It all starts by position your brand.

Take Your Positions Please

Positioning is the way people see your brand* vs. the competition. People will always position you in their own minds. The goal of creating a message, and a brand that represents your message, is to position yourself as the leader or go to for your prospects. When positioning is successful, your prospects automatically think of you when they have a problem that you solve.

Here are a few examples of companies that have positioned themselves extremely well:

Search Engine = Google

Coffee = Starbucks

Social Media = Facebook

Rideshare = Uber

As a small business, you can't successfully position yourself as the global leader in a large segment. You will not be able to be "The Graphic Designer" or "The Web Developer". But don't worry, position is still the most powerful tool you have to separate yourself from the competition and make more money at the same time.

The answer comes from a little word with a disputed pronunciation. Niche.

*Brand = (The image and words that live in peoples mind when they think of your business. Think of branding as your business' clothes, personality, and message.)

A Niche Idea

Niche ("Nitch", "Nish", or "Neesh") means to specialize your offering on a small industry, segment, or problem.

The goal is to focus on solving a specific problem for a specific group of people nobody else is helping. It needs to be a group of people you care about and where you can find ideal customers. You want to find the smallest viable group of people you can who all share a common problem you can solve.

Niching has a lot of advantages. Here are just a few:

Limit competition. Charge more. Find prospects easier. Turn former competition into advocates. Create processes and templates to save time and money. Communicate a clear message since you know exactly who you are serving and what you do for them.

The list goes on and on.

An example of a niche business is a web developer who creates websites that help build trust for local mom and pop auto mechanics.

To Niche Or Not To Niche

Here are all the reasons why you shouldn't niche your small business:

...

There are NO good reasons not to niche for 99.9% of small businesses. Especially professional services businesses.

The argument is that when you niche you are missing out on opportunities. To share a clear message and create processes that can scale, you have to niche. The broader your offering, the more competition you will have and the less potent your work will be for your customers.

If I have two accountants approach me, which one will be more appealing to me?

"I am an accountant, and I help businesses with their bookkeeping."

"I am an accountant that helps small business consultants make more money by setting up automated processes, simplified bookkeeping, and easy-to-understand reports."

Definitely the second one. Not only that, but I work with a lot of other small business consultants that, if they did a good job, I would be able to refer them to. It is much harder to refer a generalist than it is to refer a specialist.

I recommend niching both the group of people you serve and your offering. Some people are very successful at niching to a specific industry or just niching the product they offer.

For instance, my friend, Brian Wallace - Infographic Expert, only offers infographics. His company, NowSourcing researches, creates, and promotes infographics. They are the number one infographic company in the country. Infographics are specialized enough to where he doesn't need to specialize towards a specific industry.

Don't fix what is working.

Identify An Underserved Market

To eliminate competition you have to make yourself the best and only option. The fasted way to do that is to find a small group of people (industry or specific segment of an industry) that no one else is focusing on. This group of people need to have a problem that has to be solved and be overjoyed that someone is paying attention to them.

A lot of times you can identify the right group to serve by identifying your ideal customers as we discussed in the previous post.

What Problem Are You Solving?

Now that you know who you are helping, what problem are you solving for them? What keeps them up at night? How can you fix that problem for them better than anyone else?

If you find an underserved market and solve a specific problem no one else is solving that needs to be solved, you won't have to worry about competition.

Making It Too Easy

The last step in making your business the obvious choice is to eliminate as much friction as possible. Make it stupidly easy for your prospects to work with you.

The best way to eliminate friction is to productize your offering.

We will cover productizing in the next post.

Identify Your Ideal Customer

No Customers = No Business

The first stop on your business growth journey is to identify your ideal customer. It is impossible to grow your business if you don’t know who you are serving. That is why identifying your ideal customer is the foundation for business growth.

If you don't have customers, you don't have a company. You may be amazing at what you do, but if you can't find the right people, you're never going to stay in business. It all starts by solving a problem for the right person.

The truth of the matter is this: you shouldn't run after just any customer. What you need to focus on is attracting the right kind of customer. The type of customer that pays you and that you actually like!

Who are your best customers?

I want you to take a second and think of your BEST customers. You have to determine what is important to you. These aren't necessarily the customers who pay you the most money. Instead, I want you to think of the customers that love you and that you love to work for. The ones that get you out of bed on Monday morning.

Now that you have a customer in mind, why do they like working with you? Why do you like working with them? Take a moment and write down your answers.

Do they pay on time? Do they ask you for the least revisions? Do they share about you with other people?

Once you identify the traits and characteristics of your ideal customer, you can focus on the next part: identifying their problem. here...

Are you solving the right problem?

Now you have an idea of who your ideal customer is. What problem can you solve for them?

People rarely buy from a desire. Most of the time, people buy because of a pain point or problem in their life. If they cannot solve a problem on their own, they are far more willing to pay someone to help them.

You have to stop thinking about what you do and start thinking about what is keeping your customer up at night. If you identify a problem nobody is solving; you can charge more money while making your competition irrelevant.

Do you even care?

As Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

If you want to get out of the customers game, you have to care about them. Do you genuinely want to help the people you want to reach?

If you don’t actually care about them and their problems, they will find out.

Write everything down!

As you start to formulate who your ideal customers are, you have to write down everything, and I mean everything about them. What they want. What they like. What drives them. How old they are. Where they hang out. And so on.

Make yourself the only option.

In order to get out of a bidding war with your competitors, you have to be the only option for your customer. To do that, you have to position your brand correctly.

We will cover how to position yourself to make your competition irrelevant in tomorrows post.

Until tomorrow,