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7 KILLER Tips To Make Your Business A Machine!

One of the reasons people start a company is because they want freedom. Freedom can mean different things for different people, but before you get that from your business, you need to turn your business into a machine!

Maybe some of you deal with problems in your country that stunt your growth, or maybe you have some adversity you’re dealing with no matter where you’re from… but these 7 tips will allow you to be more successful.

7 Tips To Have Freedom In Your Life and In Your Business

Tip 1: Identify Your Target Market

Sounds basic doesn’t it? Unfortunately it really isn’t basic and it’s something that the majority of people struggle with. Before you send your first email, before you send your first connection request on linkedin, before you pick up the phone to cold call and before you spend a dime on advertising you need to identify your target market.

Identifying your target market isn’t as simple as saying, “I want to build websites for landscaping companies that don’t currently have websites”. First things first, your audience is not a created entity, your audience contains people. Human beings that you can help with your product or service.

You should understand that data, your data and existing public data is your friend. Use it. Use it to your advantage and use it to identify market segments.

And…

Buyer-Persona

Create Your Buyer Personas.

If you read some of the content HubSpot puts out, chances are you’ve heard about buyer personas, how to create them, etc. They don’t often discuss why it’s important.

When you create your buyer personas, you can have a greater understanding of the people you’re trying to reach. Yes, most customers are truly individual and you can’t create personas for everybody but you can generalize the persona based on the market segment.

Creating personas before you start marketing allows you to:

  • Identify your audience
  • Understand what they want
  • Understand the problems they have
  • Clearly identify the solutions you have for them
  • Have better marketing decisions
  • Better ROI with direct marketing
  • Better sales conversions due to enhanced position and messaging

There are plenty of other benefits as well. Identify your target market, take segments, and create personas for those segments.

How does this allow you to have more financial freedom in your business? The answer is simple, really. Without any additional work, with the exception of honing in on your marketing to target these personas and segments, you’re able to maximize your current assets and marketing capabilities to bring a better return on investment. It also allows you to have more targeted leads and easier sales.

Tip #2 – Implement The 1-3-6 Plan For Goal Setting

What is the 1-3-6 plan? The 1-3-6 plan is a short term set of goals you want to achieve in your business or even your personal life.

1-3-6, stands for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months.

Yeah yeah, I know you’re also thinking, “what about long term goals?”. Well, long term goals are also something you should have figured out but the 1-3-6 plan is what allows you to get there.

Doing this has dramatically helped me in my business, personal life, as well as with this blog!

Here’s What You Do…

Take a big yellow legal sized notepad. Separate the page with 2 vertical lines so you have 3 sections. In the far left that is labeled 1 month, middle is 3 months, far right is 6 months.

You have a lot of lines to fill up with goals. Where do you want to be in 6 months? What things do you want to accomplish? Fill it all out. Your 6 month goals are your longer term yet short term goals. Your 3 month goals are things that allow you to fulfill your 6 month goals and your 1 month goals allow you to fulfill the 3 month goals.

This is important because you must understand that going anywhere in life, takes work. It’s not a single thing that you do, it’s a compilation of action and focus that allows you to get where you’re going. What you do today, effects you tomorrow.

goal-setting

When it comes to goal setting, you don’t want generic goals. The 1-3-6 system allows for you to have very detailed, almost micro goals that helps you plan out your future.

How does this allow you to have more financial freedom in your business? It doesn’t directly. However, it allows you to stay on a path to get to the finish line. While you could have financial goals, I wouldn’t advise you to make financial goals part of your 1-3-6 setup because financial freedom doesn’t come from writing it on a piece of paper, it comes from executing a plan and setting goals allows you to reverse engineer what you need to do to get there.

Tip 3 – Marketing That Can Be Automated Is Your Best Friend

Now, I’m not talking about marketing automation software and advanced lead scoring systems. I’m talking about marketing, that can be scaled and automated.

A lot of people when they first start out, resort to cold calling to generate leads and sales. That’s fine for short term revenue but the problem with cold calling is that unless you have other people doing it for you, you can’t scale it up yourself. Another problem is that when you stop calling, you stop generating leads. I’m NOT against cold calling, but when we look at financial freedom for your life and business, that freedom can not exist when you’re dependent on leads and sales generated from the phone.

I like to utilize methods that don’t take a lot of maintenance. Something that you can set up and continue to automate.

Email marketing is one of those methods, but only effective and ideal for b2b businesses. If you’re dealing with consumers, it won’t be easy generating the list unless you’re doing strictly opt in based email marketing, which would be pretty time consuming when starting up.

For B2B however, it’s very easy to generate a list, using some scraping software such as Mobile Renegade. If you have problems getting email delivered, check out my Ice Cold Email Gold guide.

The great thing about email marketing is that once you have a list generated, you can spend a day scheduling email content to go out for the next few months. You continue bringing in leads and sales without having to do additional work.

Email marketing isn’t the only thing though, you can run print advertisements, pay per click campaigns, and use SEO for top of the funnel content to continuously bring in leads.

The point is to try to invest your marketing dollars into high ROI and more automated or at least semi-automated forms of marketing.

How does this allow you to have more financial freedom in your business? Your first goal with marketing should be to be profitable. Plain and simple. Now when you’re talking about financial freedom, and just straight up freedom in your business, you start to want to switch gears and allow your marketing to be more automated. This allows you to not be tied down to the day to day marketing tasks but still reap the rewards.

Which is better? 5K/mo from cold calling or 4K/mo generated from mass, automated, cold emailing? I would make the argument that cold emailing would be better even at a lower revenue amount because your time is freed up and allowing you to work on other projects or other semi-automated marketing methods.

You also want to keep in mind that some manual tasks that bring a decent ROI can be outsourced for pretty cheap.

Which brings us to the next tip…

Tip 4 – You Should Be Constantly Replacing Yourself

replacing-yourself

I hate hearing the constant hype about “Work ON your business, not IN your business”. Seriously, that phrase is such BS and it comes from people already running multimillion dollar companies.

It may seem like I’m a little off topic here, but it all ties together, bare with me. I know it’s a sexy catchphrase and it’s regurgitated by coaches, consultants and those selling stuff to other people wanting to “live the dream”.

The problem is, these people forget what it was like to start a company. If you’re a solo business owner, or a consultant, you need to work hard to build your business. You’re working both IN your business and ON your business. You can’t live the “e-myth lifestyle” when you’re simply trying to grow enough to survive.

So PLEASE, PLEASE eliminate that line of thinking from your brain. Stop saying it, stop preaching it, it’s nonsense.

Now here is the proper approach.

Instead of thinking about unicorns and mermaids, you should be thinking about how you can replace yourself. Replacing yourself, doesn’t mean you exit the business and someone else does your job for you. Replacing yourself means replacing yourself from doing certain tasks.

One of the first hires many business owners make, is a bookkeeper and accountant. Business owners are capable of keeping good records, they can file their own taxes, but why not pass that off to someone that is better at it than you?

Here’s an example of how I would replace myself…

When I started out:

I’m selling web design services, I do the marketing, I handle the fulfillment. When it comes to fulfillment, I do everything. How do I replace myself? It doesn’t happen overnight, it happens in stages.

First stage..  I outsource and find a graphic designer… I’m not good at graphics, it’s time consuming, and my biggest weakness.

2nd stage… I find someone that can work around the CMS I’m using, install plugins, create forms, add content

3rd stage… I find someone that can do CSS to make modifications to a template

Those first 3 stages or steps, essentially allow me to outsource the entire fulfillment side of web design, aside from project management, and customer interaction. Things that I used to do, can now be outsourced and my time has freed up to focus on other tasks.

Just those three steps of delegation and I’m nearly out of the fulfillment side of the business and can focus on marketing and sales.

To give another micro-example… Let’s say I’m on LinkedIn trying to build my own group, heck, or even I’m in groups, trying to message people and generate a few leads. This isn’t very efficient in terms of time, but I don’t want to stop because it generates some good leads every now and then. If I invest 15 hours a week in outreach on linkedin, couldn’t I outsource that to someone at $2/hr? Absolutely.

The outsourcer does the ground work, and I only have to talk to interested leads. 15 hours a week at $2/hr is only $120/mo. Just getting ONE sale every 3 months would make it worth it, but worst case scenario I would expect 1 sale per month which is an extremely good ROI for me.

Forget about working ON your business instead of IN your business. Focus on replacing yourself… time after time, task after task. It’s more realistic and something everyone can do no matter what level they’re at in their business.

It’s not just about outsourcing. Think of it as delegating.

How does this allow you to have more financial freedom in your business? Whether you want to outsource or have employees and just delegate tasks, either way, it is essential for growth in your business. Sometimes it’s hard letting go, but it’s necessary if you want to scale, and if you want to have freedom while running a business.

Tip 5: Create Repeatable Processes In Your Business

Without doing this, you’re doomed to be unsatisfied, sitting on a plateau. Your growth, well, it won’t be growth anymore. At best, it will be stagnant, but more realistically if you’re not growing, you’re declining.

Everything in a successful business is based on systems and processes.

business-processes

This is a great quote I came across, but unsure of the author:

During your first year in business, your success is really about what you personally do and the product you build. After the first year in business, your success is determined more by the people you hire than by you. After the first year, or even the first few months, stop trying to do everything. Hire smart people and help them put systems in place so that things happen even when you’re not there. Let’s look at a few key systems that you should think about creating in the early stages of your business.

How can you build a system? A system is simply a set of processes. That’s all.

One of the first things I had to do when I first started an office and had employees was to start using a CRM. I setup processes for myself first, to be efficient in tracking leads, scheduling followups and it helped me not lose any leads through the cracks, which happens even with a CRM.

The processes I created worked great, and I could create that process in the CRM automatically when there was a new lead. It was easily repeatable so it made things easy for the sales team.

Another example of a system created long before starting an office, was with project management. I’ve always used Teamwork (actually not always, it took me a lot of trials before finding the right one) when it comes to project management. I’ve been able to create a system, with processes for each project. Each project has similar things that need to be complete, and I’ve been able to create a template so even someone with no technical knowledge could manage a project from 0% to 100% completion.

You should have a system for everything. What are common things you do? You already have a process to do those things, is your process something someone can easily replicate? If not, what can you do to make it easier?

Remember when we talked about marketing that can be automated? You should do whatever you can to automate your systems and processes as well.

How does this allow you to have more financial freedom in your business? You want growth don’t you? In order to have higher growth and higher profits you need to be able to create systems and processes for everything you do. This allows you to satisfy tip #4, when it comes to replacing yourself. You’re creating a machine that works FOR you, whether you’re working or not.

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Tip #6 – Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone

Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. I learned that at a very very young age. I didn’t want to pickup my teenage mutant ninja turtles toys from my bedroom, but if I didn’t, the boogieman was going to come and take my toys away. Thanks Mom for the lesson.

Seriously though, stepping out of your comfort zone is going to be a necessity when it comes to running a business. If you’re comfortable, you’re probably not getting where you want to be.

Since this post is about freedom, not just financial freedom but freedom in your business, it may seem weird that I’m suggesting this to you. Maybe you thought freedom meant you can do what you want all the time.

That would be nice… but in order to get to that point in your business, and sustain that level you need to push yourself out of the comfort zone.

comfortzone

Don’t be comfortable where you are in revenue. Don’t be comfortable where you are when it comes to lead generation, conversions, efficiency. You have to always push forward.

One example of pushing out of your comfort zone is related to marketing. You’re comfortable with direct mail, maybe google adwords, but you don’t want to invest money into facebook. Maybe you don’t want to invest in Twitter, slideshare, youtube, or other places that are going to pop up tomorrow.

You have to be able to manage a little bit of risk in order to continue growing.

Gary Vaynerchuk in a keynote presentation said it’s not about width, it’s about the depth, of your presence. What he means by that is that it’s not about how wide of a reach you have with a specific method or how effective you are with your Google Adwords campaigns, or direct mail campaigns, but that it’s about the DEPTH of your marketing strategy. How many different ways can you reach out to your target audience?

I talk about this with my basic “quadruple marketing threat” strategy to skyrocket conversions. Not relying on one platform or one method, but instead, using multiple platforms and methods to generate the same initial goal, a sale.

I remember the first time I sent some direct mail postcards. I was a little worried, even though it really only cost me about $400 but that was $400 more than I really wanted to spend. I was worried I wouldn’t get any leads, or any sales.

It wasn’t comfortable to me, to go through that process and wait…. wait on my investment to show a return.

If I wasn’t willing to step out of my comfort zone and send that direct mail campaign, I wouldn’t have generated one of my best customers, I wouldn’t have had a record month in sales, and I wouldn’t have generated $8,500 from a very small investment.

I think the entire concept of a “comfort zone” is kind of funny. The people that are too scared to step out of it, are usually the ones that are the most unhappy with their lives. Doesn’t seem very comfortable to me.

What are you missing out on by staying in your comfort zone?

How does this allow you to have more financial freedom in your business? Being in a position to take some risks can bring you great rewards. It doesn’t have to be risk when it comes to investing money, but maybe it’s a risk of failure you’re afraid of. Either way, risk has many rewards, and some of the best rewards have come from when I have failed, and learned from my failures to come back and produce some amazing results.

Tip #7 – Always Reinvest Money To Scale Up Marketing

This one seems so simple, and something that would be common sense to a lot of people but it’s something a lot of people don’t do. Myself included sometimes.

If you do any type of investing, maybe in an IRA or regular brokerage account, chances are you know you should be reinvesting dividends.

Same thing with marketing. You have a marketing budget? Great… throw it out the window. Keep reinvesting money from the sales converted from the marketing, into some MORE marketing, as long as you’re having a decent ROI.

You want to continue reinvesting so you can continue growing your company.

The money isn’t for you to spend on yourself. So much for financial freedom in your business right? Well, you need to do this so one day you will be in the position to reap the rewards.

Having systems and processes, knowing your buyer personas, you’re using marketing mediums that can be automated, and reinvesting money so you can scale your marketing efforts… this is a machine you have built.

It’s a machine you can leave, and since you’ve followed the tip about replacing yourself, over and over again, it’s a machine that will continue producing revenue. It’s not focused on you.

How does this allow you to have more financial freedom in your business? If your marketing is making you money, why wouldn’t you scale up? Take a hit on the income you’re going to take out from the business and start reinvesting so you can have triple or quadruple the amount on a monthly basis. This is where real growth happens.

The Bottom Line

If you follow these 7 tips, you’re going to be a monster. You will create a monster of a company, or I should say, machine.

Following these tips… you simply can’t go wrong.

Is there anything you think should be added? Did this post help you? Give you new insight? Shape your thought process? Let me know what you think in the comments below!

P.S. Remember, sharing is caring…facebook, twitter, linkedin, and any business/marketing forum would be much appreciated not just from me, but probably the people that read it as well.

Have a safe weekend.

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