Essential Upgrades You Need to Make to Grow Your Business

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Welcome back to the profit lovers podcast. Today's episode is for anyone who is running their business the same way that they did when they started. So if you're wishing your business would scale, but you're not sure what you should change up what you should invest in, or what you should ditch to get your business to that next set of goals, you know, that good old saying, What Got You Here Won't Get You There? Well, it's both true and false. Totally true. If your business has stalled, and totally false, if what you're doing right now is working for you. So if you're hitting goals, you're increasing your profits and you're feeling more and more confident and in control of your business, then keep doing what you're doing. Don't change a thing. But if that is not you, and I'm going to assume most of you listening, that's not you. Then let's talk about what to do. Now. You all know, I don't love quoting old white business dudes, but I'm going to do it today. The quote, What Got You Here Won't Get You There is from the crusty old Marshall Goldsmith. Do I know he's old and crusty? Listen, he probably isn't crusty. He has a book of the same title that I haven't read. But I do believe it does have some valuable takeaways. I'm going to guess it's probably highly skewed to mediocre white dudes. But hey, we could have guessed that already. I am only stealing his core, not his ideas from the book. And I'm applying that quote to the businesses of our profit lovers. If you're not scaling your business, that is absolutely okay. It's okay. If you're happy where you are. If all of your financial needs are being met, you're putting some cash away for a rainy day, you have your regular contributions, going to your superannuation or retirement plan. There's money in your business, if you ever need to take some time out. And you're also paying yourself and you're paying your taxes. So if you're essentially enjoying your profitable plus livable, plus lovable business, that's great. If that isn't you then let's talk about what got you here. And then what needs to happen to reach your version of profitable, livable and lovable, there are going to be some key factors that will be applicable to many of you. Those include customer or client base, you're attracting and working with the tools that you're using today. And what you really need to be investing in the evolution of your offers and your pricing, and up leveling of your marketing strategy to support your evolving offers, and target market, image brand identity and sim brand voice upgrading and development and some better support around you from business strategy through to tax planning. So let's start with the customers or clients who got you here.

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Most business owners will experience that first lot of customers or clients who came to you, and your frickin thrilled. It's exciting, you're eternally grateful. And now you will do anything to keep them happy. You have few boundaries or rules in place, and you'll lacs with the ones that you do have you priced out of nervousness or fear, maybe even a little desperation to get some money into your business, you're still not 100% clear on your messaging, and the value of your offers, which is totally normal because it does take time to knock those things out. But let's flash forward a year or two. And those same customers or clients who you're attracting despite the fact that you're exhausted from over servicing them, you're hemorrhaging profits from undercharging, those customers or clients who you now can't say no to because they're keeping you afloat. Also, those customers or clients are the ones that tend to recommend more of the same type of customer or client. So you're getting referrals from the wrong type of customer or client. And that's how you're growing. Let me give you some examples without outing anyone. I worked for many years in the wholesale gift and homewares space. And I'd see small wholesalers who were starting out, and they would take on any retailer who would stock their product. And it made total sense you want people to put your product in their stores, and everyone has to start somewhere. They would allow their new stockists to buy very, very small amounts of stock very small quantities, and those stalkers would often hold suppliers to they'd be the kind of retailer who'd kick up a major stink if any other retailer within 100 kilometers, also stuck to the same product. Despite the fact that they bought tiny, tiny, tiny amounts of stock very infrequently. The outcome would be this wholesaler who couldn't go Row their business because they had allowed the retailers who purchased from them to purchase a less than profitable starting order. So if you're in wholesale, this is important, there is $1 value that you should be setting to your minimum order that is required for you to make a profit. If you're sending out $100 orders with a 50% profit margin, and it takes you 20 minutes to pack the order $5 and packing materials, then another three or four minutes to invoice the client and call them back and get your payment where you're essentially losing money. So those starter customers or clients would also have such small amounts of stock on the shelves, that it would never present well in store. So sales suffered because big plentiful displays a stock are so much more enticing. And they sell so much better than a few scattered bits and pieces that look like their leftovers. So the wholesaler became frustrated, they were finding they couldn't expand their business. They had the wrong type of customer or client to help them support or reach their next goals. And this is how many people in small business get started. Those customers or clients at first got to you, yes, they got you started. But no, they're not going to help you get where you want to go. So let me give you an example for all of our coaches or consultants or designers, virtual assistants, bookkeepers, any service based businesses, you often start out with friends and family is your first clients. So your business starts off nicely. Guess who make really awful clients, friends and family. Because they don't respect boundaries, they'll ask you to do work that you don't actually offer. And they'll often think that they're doing you a favor by giving you work, and you ended up being the assistant or dogs probably in the business doing a whole lot of stuff that you're overqualified for, does anyone still use that term dog's body? I think it's an old British term. That is something about sailors who had to do all the menial work, I could be wrong. Anyway, you get what I mean, right? As you're over servicing and learning new skills to appease and please your low paying customers and clients, then they're often sending you referrals. And because you don't want to let anyone down, you take on more clients or customers that aren't a good fit, and aren't going to help you scale your business. And I bet when they're referring to you, they're saying, you should totally call my bookkeeper, virtual assistant, graphic designer, photographer, whatever.

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She's super cheap. She works all hours of the day and night and she'll do anything for you. One of my proudest moments was when a client of mine referred me to somebody he knew was looking for a coach. And he was asked, Is she any good. And my client responded with she's blindingly expensive and worth 10 times what I pay her, which is, in my opinion, the way I want to be referred to, it's so much better than being referred to she works for peanuts, and she'll do anything you ask. So the customer or client base you have today will likely have a small percentage of people who have grown with you and your business, but the larger percentage won't have. And to meet your goals, you're going to need to slowly unconsciously peel away from the old while you replace with the new type of customer or client better fitted to where you want to go in your business. Let's talk tools next. If you bootstrapped your business like me, you didn't have a fat wad of cash to be splashing around on different tools and resources for your business, it's time to reevaluate what you're using. And if those tools and resources are going to elevate you and your business to the next level, I've had so many conversations with business owners wanting to grow, but they're not willing to invest $50 a month on Xero or QuickBooks subscription to manage their bookkeeping. Instead, they want to save the $50 and either manually keep their records, which is a huge waste of time. A good bookkeeping platform can automate so much of your manual labor. Alternatively, they're just gonna keep piling receipts into a drawer or box until tax time when they turn that hot mess over to their accountant to sort out and guess what your accountant is going to do. They're going to charge you a premium to fix your hot mess as they should I kick the A S S of my best friend's husband. I hate calling him that because he's also one of my best friends and he who he has a building company and I am mean to him for free because he's building a financial legacy for my baby besties with Ha, he's kiddies. And he has just very wisely invested in a zero add on called float. It's for cash flow projections, building companies must manage their cash flow with precision. And manually doing that, as he was when he started out just isn't cutting the mustard anymore. Did he want to spend an extra $150 a month on yet another subscription? No, obviously not. Did he listen, when I told him that if he wanted to hit 5 million in revenue on the timeline that we have, that he was going to need to invest in the tools to support him to get there? Yes, he did without question. Think about the website, you have the branding, your copy your email marketing platform, the software that you use to manage clients or billing or anything else? Is it fit for the business you want? Or is it just sufficient for the business that you have today, I worked with a client on a retail product based business and she was very conscious of spending the extra $250 a month on different tools that we needed to automate her marketing. I wanted her to add in an upsell option, plus an automated cart recovery sequence and some other conversion focused add ons and plugins. And I get that spending that money is scary. I am super conservative with my expenses in my business, I watch my money very carefully. But the investment paid off that $250 invested turned into around $1,000 per month in recovered sales and upsells. So we have our Forex that investment. But it doesn't stop there because it has also made the business scalable, and it has reduced the amount of work that she was having to do in marketing. And it will keep growing the return on that investment will

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just keep growing. Alright, let's move on to offers your offers the products or services that you have in your business need to evolve and grow as your business does. This is especially relevant for service based business owners and people who create a product that they're constantly improving and perfecting as the product or service value increases, because you're honing your craft, you're honing your offers, you should increase your pricing to you need to charge more. If we go back to my example of wholesalers who allow stockists to place tiny, tiny orders to kind of get their product out there into the market. And as you grow, you uplevel your branding and your messaging, you uplevel your packaging, and the quality of your range of products improves. So therefore, your initial order offer should also grow with that. You don't want to attract retailers who only want to place 100 or $150 First order of your stock. And then they only want to top up with $100 orders a couple of times a year. You want the stalkers to see the value in the amount of effort and time that you have invested into creating a product that will just run off their shelves great packaging, great product, we want you to attract that type of stockist, the type who wants to also invest in that relationship with you by placing a much bigger starting order and committing to purchasing more stock throughout the year. Same Same with business service based businesses. If your skills have improved, the quality of your work is better than ever, and you're offering a higher valued outcome, then your offer pricing should increase to you have the opportunity to niche down your offer and charge a premium for it. refining your offers and reviewing your pricing is a six month exercise six monthly exercise every six months. Does that mean that you have to put your prices up every six months? No, it means that you review and you pay attention to ensure your product profile is profitable. And that you're charging as you perfect your offers a little bit more and more. So now we've got you thinking about investing in more expensive tools and resources. reconsidering the value of your offers and wondering where you're going to find that next level of customer or client. This is a perfect moment to now talk about your marketing, the marketing you used, if any, because as you start out, you often don't have a budget for marketing. But that marketing budget either needs to start or it needs to grow with your offers. It's not enough to post in Facebook groups for the love of cheese's. Please stop relying on Facebook groups to grow your business. The social media posting that has no real call to action doesn't highlight outcomes of your offer. It doesn't frame you as an expert in any way. It's just not good marketing. If you want to attract a better type of customer or client, you are going to have to do a better job at marketing. And that might mean that you need to invest some cashola on some paid ads to. If you're going to be spending money on marketing, if you're going to be investing your hard earned dollars, you're going to need to ensure that you have a good, solid robust automated marketing funnel set up that will support you and help you convert people to buyers, that might require you to invest in better tools. See how this is all related. So okay, another example without me outing anyone or sharing anyone's personal info, a service based client that I worked with was marketing exclusively in facebook business groups, and in the groups of any of the paid program she was. Now because there were 20 to 30, possibly even more service providers offering the same solution in these free groups. Anytime someone asked for a recommendation for what it was she offered, she was competing against everyone else that was tagged in the comments, there was no way for her to really distinguish her offer from a crowd, other than by using pricing, she was competing in the comments of free Facebook groups for the business of someone who didn't know she previously existed, or they would have contacted her. And it's hard to charge a premium. When you're on the backfoot. Like that. It also meant that she was constantly doing sales calls that didn't lead anywhere. Because a potential client was getting on sales calls with 10 other people at the same time. They were just going through the Facebook comments and going, Okay, I'm just going to book sales calls with all these people. You cannot scale a business with that approach. Now what I want people to find my coaching offer because they saw me in a Facebook group, I want them to actively pursue working with me, because they have been listening to my podcast, they're using the plan and track. They're reading my emails, when they're doing those things, I'll happily invest without question, because they already know who I am, what I offer and what I'm about. If you go to my website amongst 100, other coaches mentioned in a random, you know, Facebook, post or comment. And all they have to go by as the testimonials on my site, and then my price. Well, I will never compete on price ever. I want people to know me, like me and trust me, and then want to do business with me. I don't want to have to win people over on price. So let's go back to this client who was also getting business from paid groups. She was a member of the client base and that group were all pretty green to business and didn't have huge budgets. They were all investing in these business courses to grow their businesses. So the only way to get their business once again was to compete on price. Her business had become a source of free advice and low price point solutions. And we had to work hard to get her out of that scenario, because she was so tied up with low budget and misaligned clients. But we did it. She invested in some upgrades to her site. She invested in a heap of great sales automation tools, some very talented PR and some paid ads. We caught up late last year. And she told me that her accountant had suggested that she could increase their profits by slashing her marketing budget. So she asked him if he knew what her cost per lead was cost per conversion was, and all of that good stuff by looking just at her Profit and Loss report and obviously, he could not. And so she told him very firmly and so confidently, which just makes my profit loving heart swell, that every single dollar of that marketing budget was being put to good use, and she would not be slashing it, she would be doubling it this year to support her next level profit

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goals as a huge proud proud coach moment. Now also on a side note, to take marketing advice from your accountant is a little risky, unless they've got a really good understanding of your cost per conversion, your cost per client, your average client retention, all of those key marketing metrics right. As we increase marketing spend, you're going to need to polish up your presence. I am a huge advocate for professional photoshoots despite the fact that I personally would prefer to chew rusty nails than stand in front of a professional photographer. This is going to be a do as I say not as I do moment. Upgrading and investing into your brand image your brand voice logos, website product photography, graphics, and your personal image elevates the perception should have the value that you offer. I know a lot of coaches who encourage crazy behavior around this spending crazy crazy behavior around personal photo shoots, insane spending, and hundreds and hundreds of photos. They do things like, I'm not kidding here, right? This is obvious a bit naive to all of this. Not a bit. I was hugely naive to all of this. I did not know this went on. But there are other coaches that will do things like hire private jets, and multimillion dollar mansions. So in the photos, you look like a gazillion now, let me be clear, those are not the kind of photos I'm talking about. I mean, if you want to do that, if you want to hire a private jet, and pretend that it's taking you somewhere when it doesn't actually leave the runway, I mean, go for gold. If you want to pay for the privilege of sitting on the runway, I'm not going to judge you go on with your fine self. My preference is that you invest in a small number of good quality photos for your business, some nice headshots, there is a coach that everyone knows, she's known very, she's very well known in the coaching circles for taking her mastermind groups on a trip to gay party off to Paris, and everyone who has done her course has a photoshoot in front of the Eiffel Tower. And for some reason, they're always wearing like a chunky necklace. I think that there might be a stylist that goes whose goes with them as well and who maybe has a little bit of a love for chunky necklaces. I'm not sure if it's part of the dress code or not. But anyway, you can tell when someone has done her mastermind, or I can tell when someone who has done that coaches mastermind, just by the look of their professional headshots. Listen, I'm just being a Jedi gossip. Now. Let's finish our intimate chat. Maybe you're listening in the birth, maybe you're naked in bed, I don't know. But let's finish our intimate chat with some final advice on What Got you here won't get you there. The service providers around you that people supporting you, like your accountant, your graphic designer, your coach may have taken you as far as they can. And you may need to level up. I had to do that last year, I finally say goodbye to a professional advisor. If I'm brutally honest, they probably weren't the right person from day one. But it certainly wasn't the right person for my next moves. Right? It's okay to outgrow people. I've had clients outgrow me. And that should be the outcome. I specialize in a certain market. And once my client exceed that, I refer them on I want my clients to outgrow me. I tried to consciously uncouple with two of my clients last year telling them that I thought they needed to level up, they're still with me, that's okay. I do love that. But at some point, in the next six to 12 months, I'm going to have to re re re engage in that conversation and say to them, you have to leave me behind, it's time for you to level up. You also have likely outgrown the level of free information you're consuming. We tend to fall in love with people when we start out. And then we don't always realize but maybe we've outgrown them. I was having this conversation with a client about a podcast that we both used to listen to religiously, we would often have quick chats after our coaching calls about the things we've learned or we'd heard on this particular podcast. A couple of months ago, my client said You know, I used to love listening to that podcast, but now I find it kind of frustrating. And my response was,

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I think we've both outgrown that podcast, our skill set have evolved and developed beyond this and that of our listeners, it's still a great podcast, it's just not right for us anymore. You might also find that you now need to stop consuming free information and start investing with the people that you follow and admire. There is huge value in investing in a coach that you've been following or listening to on a podcast, or finally joining a group coaching program or a mastermind. free information can only get you so far. And free information is designed to enlighten and inform but not usually to transform you need to invest to get the full transformation. If you think I'm not going to mention the profit lovers member's club right now well you don't know me at all. Actually, it's probably quite shocking because I'm pretty lame at promoting my own office that members club to huge freakin value. It's transformational. Its profit loving. Now there is a waitlist you can jump on But I am going to be opening membership to the waitlist this week. So you probably want to get on very quickly. In fact, if you really really want to get in, then I would suggest you send me an email. I'll give you the email address in a moment. But if you are on the waitlist, you will get your offer this week. And then after we've given the offer to waitlist, then we'll put it out into the rest of my list of subscribers. My personal email address is Melanie M. So Melanie M famila, at the profit lovers.com. And yes, I will respond to you. You can check out member's club at WWW dot the profit lovers.com There is a big fat in your face red banner at the top of every single page on my website that takes you directly to the members club page. Alright, some final takeaways from today's episode. What Got You Here Won't Get You There. So think about the areas of your business deserving of investment time polish, or refresh? Do you need to transition away from your current customer or client base? Is it time to give your offers and pricing a makeover? Are you investing in the tools that are going to support your business as it grows the business that you want? Or are you just using the tools to support the business that you have? Is your current marketing enough to attract your ideal audience that next level of customer or client? And are you in need of some sweet sweet new branding? Maybe it's some professional photos? Have you figured out who can guide you to the next level in your business and what you need to leave behind? Today's episode was a meaty one. Happy profit loving everyone.