A Heads Up: This is not just your ‘average blog post’. What you have in your hands is a summary of how to scale any business and make it more profitable. This framework is the results of Greg Cassar learning as he worked with over 300 businesses and spent over $250k on his business, marketing, sales & mindset education. Let’s get stuck in on how to make you a puppet master or rainmaker in any business you choose to scale.
STEP 1 – Business Must Have Pre-Requisites
I Like To Think About Business Like A Cake. If You Don’t Have The Right Ingredients – The Reality Is… The Cake Just Won’t Rise. These are the first things I look at when seeing if we can scale a business. If one’s missing, then it’s not going to be a good fit. This step 1 in the systematic and proven approach within my business profit accelerator concept.
1. Abundance Mindset – Think Like a Millionaire
The first one is an abundance mindset, and you might be thinking, why is he starting with mindset? Mindset can be as much as 80% of success in your business according to Tony Robbins, who is certainly an authority and one of my teachers in this space. What ‘Abundance Mindset’ is about is that everything can be 100% right- supply and demand, customers, sales, everything. But as the founder, as the CEO, as the leader of your organisation, you’re actually bringing yourself to the deal so if you’re not thinking positively, if you’re not thinking bigger thoughts and dreaming bigger dreams, than you can actually sabotage a deal without even knowing it. I have turned down working with businesses on this one factor alone, that’s how important I believe it (and have witnessed it) to be.
The big Difference Between the Rich and Poor
So having an Abundance Mindset as your default is just so important. The reality is millionaires think, act and behave in a different way and they even control their emotions in a different way to what the average person does. The other huge difference between the rich and the poor is that the poor and the middle class will do the work and then get paid afterwards. The mindset of the rich is they will get paid first and then they’ll deliver on the product or the service. This is not something the read over lightly. What mindset do you carry?
2. Supply, Demand and “Selling Santa Suits In February”
The next real ‘Must Have’ requirement is Supply and Demand. I often tell this story of our Santa Clause suits business. There was demand for my Santa Clause suits, no doubt about it. I could have sold a heap of them, I’m a good marketer. I was getting sales. Then…We ran out of stock and the supplier couldn’t fulfill a new order. I remember having a conversation with my supplier, and he’s like, “Yeah, sorry, we’ve got none in stock.” And then he rings me back in February, saying, “We’re good to go again.” …. helpful right? Because everyone wants to by their Santa Clause suit in February…So Supply and Demand was just a disaster in this example.
When one Becomes the worst Number In Business:
As you grow, you need to be able to make sure that you can keep up. There’s a saying that one is the worst number in business. You don’t want just one product, you don’t want just one service, you don’t want just one channel of advertising, and you don’t want just one supplier either. Make this a mandatory requirement in your business and don’t make the same mistake as myself and thousands of others have.
3. Sound Maths – Your Financial IQ
The next one is Sound Maths. So Sound Maths is talking about financial IQ. We had a business selling books about investment property. We were actually doing really, really well if you look at it as far as the number of transactions go… But… We were selling a really small ticket item, a low-cost book around $30 and there just wasn’t a high enough profit margin. If you look at your business, you may be looking at sales but revenue is just one aspect. Profit is great as well but we really want cash. The fact is you could actually go broke but have profit on your books… Weird? So you want to figure out with your business if you’re making sales and making profit, are you left with actual cash in the hand? That is just crucial.
4. Repeat Business – Love the One You’re With
The last of our Mandatory Requirements is Repeat Business. Perhaps you’re thinking “why does he think repeat business is a mandatory must have?” Maybe you’re doing okay at the moment selling just one item. But really if you just have one product or one service, you’re really more of a promotion than you are a long term business. The reality is the cost of traffic, the cost of getting eyeballs, the cost of getting people through your doors is going to continue to rise. And what is happening is the less efficient businesses who only have one product or service are getting pushed out.
If you think about it, it’s really no different to when you were a kid, there was little convenience stores everywhere and then over the years they got pushed out by the bigger grocery stores or shopping malls. They couldn’t compete anymore.
There’s that saying of ‘Love The One You’re With’ which is true with your husband or wife or significant other. But it’s also true with your customers. Genuinely love your customer. Genuinely care about him/her and don’t just look at it as ‘how can I sell them more stuff.’ Think Lifetime Customer Value, think ‘Ok, they bought this item from me, what else is of genuine benefit to them?’ I’m really all about the win-wins.
Ok, so we’ve covered the 4 most crucial “ingredients” that will ensure a successful business long term. If you’ve passed the test at this point, it’s time to do a deeper dive into some of those pieces, in particular, the sales and marketing side of things. Then we can look at the main financial drivers for getting more available cash in your business.
STEP 2 – 3 Sales & Marketing Levers That Will Systematically Grow Your Business!
Have You Truly Harnessed The Power Of These 3 Sales and Marketing Levers In Your Business?
Lever 1: Traffic & Visibility
Traffic and Visibility really comes down to the fact that there are 4 main ways people get found these days; Google, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon. These channels are so important in the overall internet ecosystem. Individually, they are massive online machines that need more then a paragraph each to explain.
I will say this though, what they allow you to do from a Search and Display point of view, also from a targeting point of view is incredible. As an example, for an e-commerce business here’s a 12 step approach we’d use to get more eyeballs onto and ultimately more leads and sales in a business:
- Optimise Store & Cart Conversion
- Add Google AdWords
- Add Google Shopping
- Add Google Remarketing
- Add Dynamic Remarketing
- Add Facebook Remarketing
- Bing Ads
- Tripwire Offer using Facebook
- Ebay
- Amazon
- Comparison Shopping Sites
- Pinterest Promoted Pins
Lever 2: Increased Leads – More Power in Your Business
I love this one, and this is usually one that we look at first because increasing leads can have a dramatic effect on a business. We say, “Leads equals power.” What we’ve found is, as you add more lead flow into the business, the business can make better decisions.
They can price better, they can also decide, you know, which clients they want to work with and which clients they don’t. And that can save a whole bunch of money hassles, time hassles, and even just happiness of your team, that kind of thing. So…and obviously, as you double the number of leads, in theory, you’ll double the number of sales, you know, all things remaining equal.
There’s two main ways that you can get leads. One is with marketing funnels and the other one is with leads from direct, to calls, to action off your sites.
Lever 3: Increase Brand, Trust & Authority
I’ve always been a direct response marketing guy myself, and I didn’t really put a lot of thought into brand, except for in recent years. I was always about how can I spend X to get Y, which is at direct response marketing and at the other part of direct response marketing is emotional direct response marketing where you’re using emotion to get people to take responses, because as you know, people buy based on emotion and then justify with logic.
So, direct response marketing is massive but, branding and direct response marketing are now merging together. Platforms like Facebook are sorta pushing this where they don’t want all your messages hard sell, hard sell, hard sell. They want you to be putting out positive messages into the marketplace.
So, building a brand is about building that concept of singularity, you know, for your product, your service or yourself, you know, even you are a brand. So what identifies you as unique? And once you know branding and once you get more in depth into it and once you get to a more advanced level, there’s also a thing called intrinsic value. And, what intrinsic value is talking about is, how can you value within your brand so that you can charge more for your products or services than everyone else because the market believes it’s worth more. And you think about a luxury, you know, handbag brand like an Oroton or something like that. They’ve built intrinsic value, you know, into their brand.
So, this whole branding and direct response is a massive, massive area together and what if you get this right, what it can make the difference of is instead of you having to sell all the time, it’s really about people wanting to buy from you rather than you selling all the time. So, it’s not really a lever people think about but it’s just so, so powerful, and it has a flow on effect on so many other things.
STEP 3 – Grow Your Profit Using the Profit Triad – Get More Customers, Who Spend More and Buy Again
Level 4: Get More Customers
The first part of the Profit Triad is how do we get more customers? Often everyone thinks about “we’ve got to get more traffic’ , which yes that’s true, if you can double the amount of traffic, you may be able to double the amount of sales BUT it’s also an expensive way of doing it – if you first haven’t done this:
What we want to be doing first is optimising the website, optimise the presence, the calls to action, the sales page. In every business, everyone thinks every page on my website is exactly the same, but within every business there is around 3-4 or at least a few hero products, what we call “money pages” so not every page of your site should be created even.
You have to figure out, what are the money pages within your website and how can you optimise those?
One of our clients focused on this as their first action with us. We wrote new sales copy, added videos, headlines, sub-headlines, calls to action and made the order process so much easier. They gave more payment options and took away the risk with a guarantee and it had a dramatic affect on the amount of customers they received.
Another point that you might not necessarily think of with getting more sales is adding an enquire process. This same client added an enquire now option on their website. What this is about is using those four magic words “How Can We Help?” When people put up their hand for this, they might be all ready to buy but they might have just have one objection that they need to overcome, something that could be stressing them, something they want to know. If you pick up the phone and engage with them you’re more likely to get them over the line. So our client added all these things to their sales process and saw a significant increase in customers.
Lever 5: Get Them Spending More
So we now need to look at, ok how do we get them spending more? With this same client, now that their training programs were 100% full, there was actually room to increase the pricing. There was more demand and supply was limited so we were able to increase the pricing by a couple of hundred dollars. This then added more profit into the business which was fantastic.
Another thing we were able to implement with this client was, once someone had purchased that training program, the client was able to then think, ‘ok what is logical and would add value that we could tac onto their experience?’ So when they checked out and before they got to the thank you page, they added what’s called a One Click Upsell. So they were able to then say, ‘Ok, you bought this first training, this second training could add on another qualification to your experience with us, would you like to add that to your purchase?’
The result? 40% of customers who bought the first training also added on the second training which gave them another industry qualification. You can start to see now how they went from half-filled training programs to full training programs, to now having more money per order to now getting a second order on top. That’s the kind of thing they were doing to get the customer spending more.
The other thing related to getting their customers spending more was added merchandise and items that would help them while they are away attending the training programs, which just adds another income stream. So now this client has more customers and they’ve got them spending more.
Lever 6: Get Them Buying Again
So once you have more customers and you have them spending more, the next focus point is how do we get them coming back again? With this same client and their customer, it really came down to, once a customer has come and completed the in initial training course, what are some complimentary trainings that are of a more senior level that you can then offer them.
Following that, adding in auto-responders, remarketing sequences with banner ads and Facebook ads that take them on a journey and shares the story of other people who have done the more senior training course and also nurture them towards that. Then when that more senior course is coming up for registration, you can add in one or two powerful levers working together of “scarcity” and urgency” to get them coming back and buying again.
STEP 4 – The Most Important Financial IQ Levers That Influence Your Profit!
Let’s Get More Cash In your Business to Play with. We want to not necessarily make more revenue first, we want to prune wasted cost. This means more cash (profit) for you without having to spend first.
Here’s How We Do That:
Lever 7: Reduce Expenses & COGS
If you’re selling Widgets, how do you reduce the expenses of those Widgets when you’re buying them? If you’re a services Business, how can you reduce the cost of people or software ect that is takes to provide that service. You want to know this because it is actually the fastest way to double the profitability of nearly any business.
Actually, the truth is the fastest way to double the profitability of nearly any business is to reduce expenses by 10% to 15%. If you think about it like this, often what happens is, when you increase your income, increase your revenue, your expenses might increase along with it. But if you can reduce your cost, your expenses by 10% to 15% you’re actually adding profit through your whole business. It’s not really that sexy and people don’t really focus on it that much but it can have just such a massive difference because it’s pure profit.
There’s that concept called the profit wedge which is how do we keep ourselves growing but how do we make our expenses go down so that we get a bigger gap between income and expenses? It just makes so, so much difference and I wish more people, and I hope you take something from this and not only “know it” but also implement it in your business.
Lever 8 & 9: Reduce Receivable Days + Increase Payable Days (the one-two punch)
When working together, these two levers can have a dramatic effect on the amount of cash in your actual bank account without even increasing your sales at all. It’s a very powerful combination.
Reducing your receivable days: this is talking about when businesses and people owe you money, claiming that money much much faster.
We teach six proven strategies for reducing your receivable days. There are one or two that are really, really stand-out that are just so easy. It’s one of those things where once you’ve seen it you’ll go, “Oh, damn, that’s so obvious.” You’ll be thinking “Why wasn’t I always doing that?” I’ve got this saying, “To know and not to do is not to know.”
Reducing Receivable Days is a very, very powerful lever. But not on its own. It’s got to be used with the next lever which is: *Cash Flow Your Life Line – it’s important to add that cash flow really is the lifeblood of the business. Without cash, the business can die even if you’re promised a whole bunch of other money. So it’s very very important to get that in. You want it sitting in your bank account rather than someone else’s or another business’ bank account. Imagine how different it you will feel when your bank account starts to rise.
We’ve had some of our clients in business that we’ve taught this to that are now saying that their cash in the bank has risen between $30,000 and $100,000 just between these few Financial IQ levers. Not by changing anything in their styles of marketing space, but just with the Financial IQ levers.
Let’s now work into our next financial IQ lever which is our second last one.
Increased Payable Days:
This is talking about accounts payable. This is when your organisation, your company, owe money to other businesses. If you can slow that down as well as getting paid faster, what it does is, it frees up the amount of cash that’s in your bank.
This is like a one-two punch, and that’s why I love these because they work so well together. It’s so important to get these two right. As I said above, we teach six strategies for each one and it’s really about choosing one, two or three that are going to work best for you to be able to increase the cash in your business.
Lever 10: Reduce Inventory Days
Last but not least, we need to look at Reducing Inventory Days. This is not relevant to every business, but if you are holding stock it is very very relevant. What we’re talking about here is hold less stock or move your stocker faster. As you may know, when you are holding stock you can be tying up so much cash that you are always cash poor just in your stock and inventory.
Some of the businesses that we’ve taught this to has said this has ended up being their most powerful lever. It does really depend on what type of business you are but if you’re holding stock, you will begin to love this lever because it will end up freeing up the amount of cash that you have.
So imagine this is you and your business and you went from half-full sales to full capacity sales, each transaction is worth considerably more, and your customers are buying again – you can understand the dramatic difference this Profit Triad could have on your business. Plus you’ve created a system, an architecture to constantly feed new leads and new sales through and make your business more profitable. It’s exciting stuff right?
So I leave you with this question: What are you doing as far as the business profit accelerator process goes? Are there things you could be doing better to reduce cost, get more customers, get them spending more and get them coming back again?