Simple Strategies For Uncovering Hidden Profits In Your Business
10 Oct 2025 · 37 min
In this Magnetic Marketing Podcast episode, host Dan Kennedy interviews Steve Wilkenhoff, author of Found Money, to reveal why many business owners mistakenly believe that sales and customers automatically generate profit. Steve, a former CPA, explains that a business’s true purpose is to generate enough cash to fund the owner’s dream lifestyle, and that achieving this requires moving from merely measuring results to actively creating them. They outline four common "money‑making myths": (1) revenue equals profit, (2) acquiring any customer equals profit, (3) a great product guarantees profit, and (4) price cuts are harmless. To counter these myths, they introduce practical frameworks: a Customer Profitability Map that plots each client’s profitability against a subjective "resonance" score, revealing hidden liability customers and cross‑sell opportunities; a resonance‑based 4‑quadrant grid; and a systematic approach to defining and tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that predict financial outcomes before they appear in the profit‑and‑loss statement. The conversation is peppered with vivid case studies – renaming the Patagonian toothfish to "Chilean sea bass" to boost sales, a boutique gym that failed because of poor pricing, Las Vegas casinos losing $1 billion despite rising ancillary revenue, and a dry‑cleaning chain that grew average customer value 175 % through targeted cross‑sell coupons. They also discuss reallocating marketing spend based on profitability data (e.g., halting direct‑mail to low‑resonance segments). Throughout, Dan and Steve stress daily KPI monitoring, aligning staff incentives with leading metrics, and treating business activities, products, and customers as the three levers that create profit. The episode ends with actionable hidden‑profit tips and a call to explore Steve’s Found Money Roadmap course.
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If you've ever believed that the minute that you get a new customer, your business is going to make money, you might be in for a surprise. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, we get to listen to a very special interview between Dan Kennedy and Steve Wilkenhoff. Now Steve started as an accountant and has since transitioned out of accounting in order to help businesses understand their finances, because in truth, business owners think we understand how we grow a business. We make sales. That unfortunately is a myth. There are pieces about the business game that are bigger and broader than just making sales and getting customers in the door. And that is where Steve Wilkenhoff comes in. And so we're gonna be talking about some of the creative paths that you can take in order to be able to discover the hidden profits and cash flow that are sitting inside of your business you may not be recognizing today and you might be missing in order to help you live that dream lifestyle Faster, including 2 hidden profit tips, the key performance indicators you should be looking at, and more. So let's jump in with Dan Kennedy and Steve Wilkinghoff as we talk through the simple strategies for uncovering hidden profits and cash flow in your business.
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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Good morning everybody, or whatever time of day it is in the time zone that you are in. Welcome to another Diamond Call with us, today is Steve Wilkinghoff, and Steve is the author of the book Found Money: Simple Strategies for Uncovering the Hidden Profit and Cash Flow in Your Business. Steve and I were just talking before we began about some of the calculations that business owners do not make about their businesses that give them sort of deluded viewpoints or get them in trouble, or to use his terminology, fail to get them to their dream lifestyle. And so we're going to get to that. So Steve, welcome.
Thanks, Dan.
We appreciate you being here.
Thanks, I'm happy to be here.
At least it keeps you indoors. You told me you were in Alberta, so you managed to find a place colder than where I am.
With the wind chill.
So, you know, at least you have an excuse to be indoors.
Exactly.
Before we dig in, I'm going to let you, uh, sort of do your own, uh, intro and tell people a little bit about your background and what it is that you do.
Yeah, thanks, Dan. My background is as an accountant, and that's when I started out my business career. I got a Chartered Accounting designation, which in what we call CPAs in Canada, and had an accounting practice. And at the time, I was dissatisfied with how most accountants had talked to their business owners, and I wanted to be different and help business owners understand their profit and loss and explain it when I sat down with them at the end of each year. And I did that for a number of years. The practice grew really quickly. And then suddenly one day I realized when I was talking to a client that I was still misleading them because as good as I was doing describing financial statements to them, nothing I had said— for example, in the meeting we had said, "I'll increase revenue 5% and shave expenses 2% and look how much money you'll make next year." And it just hit me like a ton of bricks that that was just math. And I really hadn't done them anything helpful as far as what they were going to do when they went back to the business that afternoon. And at that point in my life, I transitioned more out of accounting and tried to get into helping business owners understand how to create the financial results and not just measure it. And that led to the book Found Money being published just a little over 3 years ago now. And it's become quite popular. And since then I've developed more systems and methodologies. And now I work with business owners and really I can't stress that enough, help them figure out how to create the financial results 'Cause that's really what's missing from most business owners. Anyone can measure it. Creating it is the art.
Yeah, no disrespect to you accountant guys, you know.
Oh, disrespect us? I make fun of our own profession.
I always say that the reason somebody's a bean counter is generally because they don't know how to grow beanstalks. And so they have to count other people's beans, you know. But I also often make the point that, you know, math is— Money Math is extremely important. So, so I want to start broad and then kind of get narrow. Sure. And so the broad thing that you write quite a bit about, and we both really talk a lot about it, is really what the purposes of being in business in the first place are and how businesses really do make money and and how they don't make money. You write about how people misunderstand that, so I'd like for you to talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, well, you know, let's just hit on that. The first point there about the purpose of the business, and I certainly know you talk a lot about that. I talk about it as well in the book, but, you know, the purpose of any business is only to make money. A business can't do anything else and be sustainable because it's an animal that was created and invented by man only to make money. I like to say as a business its purpose is to make money, but enough money to fund your dream lifestyle. Because if it's not doing that, a business isn't sustainable. Take a look at a lot of surgeons and physicians. They have a business that makes them money, But they work really, really hard, you know, 80, 90, 100-hour weeks. That's not sustainable. They get burnt out. They throw their health out the window to do that. And so an effective business, and one that's going to succeed long-term for any of us, has to make enough money to serve our dream lifestyle.
You know, it's such a cool point that I don't think people really think about it at all, really, as sort of what you describe as pricing the lifestyle into the economics of the business. I don't think people really, you know, deliberately do that. They just sort of think it's going to be taken care of with the money that's left over.
Yes, I would say, you know, on that, it's most business owners fall into what I call the taker mentality, where, you know, they're not pricing in what they want out of the business. And so they work like a dog in the business They try stuff and at the end of it they take whatever the business will allow them. I'll take enough money, hopefully it will let me take more money next year. Hopefully it will let me take a vacation. Hopefully it will let me take enough money to help pay for the kids' education. But what they have to do is start to think like a trader, T-R-A-D-E-R, not traitor, but trader, where they're saying, okay, I'm investing my emotional capital, yes, my financial capital, but also my relationship capital because there's other things I could be doing. "In return for all of those things that I'm trading, here's what I'm demanding back from my business in terms of financial results and what it's going to let me do in my personal life and with the time I'm not working the business and what kind of activities." Once the business owner does that, an amazing thing happens because now the infinite array of possibilities financially that any business could create instantly become focused to a single point. Because if you define your dream lifestyle thinking like a trader, the answer is your business needs to make X number of dollars for you in this way, and instantly you have clarity. Okay, now I need to figure out how I'm going to go with the customers that are going to let me do that, and how am I going to price the products and deliver them and sell them. But it's a real amazing mind shift, and whenever I work with a business owner, and that's why it's also the first chapter in the book, It seems a little almost ethereal or cosmic, but you need to start there in anyone's business. Anyone listening, define your dream lifestyle because until you do that, even if you're creating a good financial result, you're just really guessing and you're lucky so far.
What are people wrong-headed about in how businesses make money and how they don't make money?
I'll start with how they're wrong about how their businesses make money. There's 4, I call them money-making myths. The first one is people get this false assumption that the business makes money when it sells something. I like to say that's just the starting point in any business. I mean, if you're not selling things, you don't have the potential to make money. But that's all sales and selling something is. It's potential. It's like a sculptor with this big block of stone. That's the revenue you make from selling something. What happens to the business owner and what happens to actually make money is just like a sculptor chipping all the parts of that stone away, and if you do it right, you end up with this beautiful, beautiful monument at the end. If you do it poorly, you end up with nothing but a chipped mass of stone. Statue with no nose. It's not even small businesses that get it wrong. Typical example, I'll give you just a recent example. A public company, think of Amazon. We all hear great about Amazon. Third quarter 2012, its revenue was up by 27%, so over a quarter increase from Q3 of 2011. But in that same quarter, Q3 of 2012, it actually lost 60 cents a share. Now it was a public company, so 60 cents a share, but the previous year when sales were down 27% lower, it actually made 11 cents a share. So there's proof of the pudding. Big business, small business, just selling something and generating revenue does not make you money. There's a lot more that happens in the business. Then the second misconception is that a business is going to make money when it gets a customer. Again, it's just not true. There have been studies done. One of the ones I really like was they actually went in and looked at online electronic retailers and appliance retailers. They found when they drilled into the study that shockingly, only 24% of customers of these businesses actually made money for the business, and the other 76% lost money for them. If you think about what that's actually meaning, picture this flat line on your page or draw a flat horizontal line and over a third, two-thirds or three-quarters of your customers dig a hole because they're losing you money and then the other 24% have to not only fill that hole back in to get you back to level but then actually make the money that you're going to end up making.
That's such a powerful idea because Hardly anybody really does a job of comparative analysis of profitable versus unprofitable customers, sources of customers. Big gripe of mine is equivalency of source.
Oh yeah.
You know, and again, looking at the raw number. So gee, this ad media costs us $20 to get a customer. This ad media costs us $5 to get a customer. The $5 media is good, the $20 media is bad. Well, only if you tag the customers and track them for 6 months or a year or longer and know what their comparative revenue value is. And as you point out, even more important, what their comparative net profit value is.
Absolutely. One of the things in the book is I talk about customer profitability mapping. That's if you take all your customers or if you have hundreds or thousands, you take a sample of your customers and you basically rank them according to how profitable they are to your business as well as you assign them what I call a resonance score, which is just a subjective score between 1 and 10 that essentially is how good of a fit they are with your business or how poor of a fit, you know, basically the pain in the butt factor. So a client that has a resonance score of 10 is, you love, the relationship is so awesome. Every time they phone in or walk in or you deal with them, it's pleasant. And a resonance score of 1 is an absolute nightmare. But what's important is you plot those two independently. So you assign a resonance score completely independent of how profitable they are, and if you do that and you plot them, you end up with this 4-quadrant grid which we talk about in the book. For example, picture your customers that are highly profitable to you but are on your lower half of your resonance score. Those are what I call hidden liability clients because the statistics show and the reports show and experience shows a client that you have low resonance for, that you don't like, feels similarly to you. Those are the clients that are going to move or the customers who are going to leave a competitor changes or a new competitor opens or given any potential opportunity, they're going to leave you. Not a bad thing from the point of the resonance score because you don't like them, but the ones that are highly profitable, it will gut you like a fish because that's profit that's going to just disappear from your business and it's going to gut you like a fish and really sting. So we call them a hidden liability. So again, it's figuring out that customer profitability map and where are they coming from, who's attracting what kind of advertising, or what kind of advertising is attracting which type of customer.
Yeah, the loop back into marketing that people need to understand, and it's easiest to explain it in connection with direct mail, but it really affects pretty much all media, is if you do the process that you've just described, and you now wind up with a clearer idea of who you ought to be pursuing, and you're able to eliminate a bunch of people you might otherwise pursue. We did this with a client of mine last year. I'm not going to name them because some people will be offended with the outcome, but it's about a $20 million a year business, and it is very lead generation, new customer in the door driven.. And it operates within a niche of maybe 40,000 eligible customers total in the country. And so they finally bit the bullet last year and have literally stopped all direct mail to women in this particular niche. Because almost without exception the resonance was poor, the value differential was negative. Now, what that makes possible is now marketing to 20-some-odd thousand people instead of 40-some-odd thousand people, which immediately allows you to spend twice as much marketing to the 20,000. Doing a better job of marketing to them. And you have— you're not spending any more money, you're just reallocating resources intelligently. And, and so that, that analysis process that you describe in the book is really something somebody should, should do in their business. The, the other one that I kind of wanted to point you at that is a great source of hidden losses or hidden profits in business, just as the customer issue is the actual product issue, the deliverable issue. Yeah, you know, which, which products and activities actually make you money and which products and activities don't.
Mm-hmm. And a lot of business owners, you know, have that completely wrong as well. For a few reasons. One, sometimes they just don't know how to look or they don't have a process to look. A lot of times, like you had said earlier, Dan, where they just treat equivalency and they say, wow, this product, this person bought the product or this lead for this product came from a certain place and they don't distinguish or they don't track the data well. And that's actually one of the— I got off on a tangent, but That's another one of the myths that business owners fall victim to, is that, "All I need is a wonderful product or service and I'll make money automatically." When you hear somebody say that, it sounds silly, but yet a lot of business owners in their business act like that's the case. Of course, there are tons of companies out there that have fantastic products. One I like to talk about, it happened about 3 years ago. It's actually not in the book, but it was just a personal thing. There was a gym opened up close to me. It was like a boxing slice MMA gym. I mean, it really tied into the guys' testosterone level and it was cool. It had weight equipment and 30-second stations and heavy bag stations. It was amazing. It was a ton of fun and I went there and in about a year and a bit, gosh, I lost 50-55 pounds. I went from 265 pounds to 210. I was working out every day. It was fun. I felt great. I referred a ton of friends to the business. It was, as far as I'm concerned, the best thing I'd ever seen as far as fitness. A year and a half later, the guy closed it. Crushed my soul. I was so sad to see it, but he just wasn't making any money at it. Because he hadn't priced it well enough. He thought his product was the gym. I would have gladly paid more, so would have all the other members, but he never asked. He didn't price his product well. He just assumed if it was good, he'd make money. He ended up going out of business.
There's a story in the Financial News Today. Vegas, in 2012, for the 4th year in a row, the casinos all lost money. And in 2012, they lost over $1 billion all combined. And this is perhaps a mystery to them. It's no mystery to me. And if you spent any time there, it wouldn't— over the years, it wouldn't be a mystery to you either. And then the, the fact— the next fact in the report reveals all, which is every year of these 4 years their restaurant and bar and nightclub revenues have been going up and their gambling revenues have been going down, and consequently they're losing $1 billion. And so they've, they've driven off the older whales, the older gamblers, the big spenders. They've replaced them with customers who don't gamble and sleep all day and then go to the clubs. And it's very hard to justify a 50,000-square-foot facility to be in the nightclub business. And, and it's the democratization of sources of revenue. You know, it doesn't matter where we get the revenue from as long as we get revenue increases. Well, it matters a lot. Absolutely. And in this case, to the tune of $1 billion.
Well, and when they, you know, you and I are the converted here, obviously, but, you know, they could even look at their total visitor count and say, oh, well, you know, visitors are increasing. But if the visitors that are increasing are all the ones who are going to the clubs and not gambling, that's a dangerous and potentially deadly trend because, you know, you You're getting more and more people who are making you less and less money. One of the things I always tell clients is one of the worst fates in the world is to be an awesome marketer with a product that loses you money because you just go bankrupt faster.
Yep. Or to, which is what they've done and what at times I've been encouraged to do and have resisted, is to be an awesome marketer who adjusts what you do to appeal to bigger numbers of lower-value customers. Right. And you wind up in the same place, you know, dead.
Yeah, and I mean the math is exponential on that, right? I mean just further to that point, if you adjust your message and attract more but a lower-level customer and you run the numbers on that, I mean, Sometimes it's insane how much you actually have to increase your customer count to actually replace that lost profit, and generally it's unattainable. Same with a price cut. I know no one on this call hopefully does it because if you're a follower of Dan's, clearly you're not a price cutter. But in some ways, attracting more customers who are less profitable is no different than just giving a price cut to your business. So if you thump your chest and say, "I'm not going to ever do price cuts," but yet you chase more unprofitable customers, guess what? You still are kind of doing price cutting.
That's exactly right. Hey, I want to ask you and have you explain to people the whole thing about key performance indicators and essentially being able to be predictive rather than reactive.
Yeah.— let's step back. Once you've defined that dream lifestyle and you've figured out what the business model is that's going to drive the financial result you want, now it's a matter of changing things in your business. Key performance indicators are simply measures you use in your business that tell you if you're on track to make the money you want before the money is ever in your bank account. So really, We are predicting a financial result with non-predictive, and that is the key thing about a key performance indicator. It is not a financial measure. It is number of new leads, where are they coming from, leads that convert into an appointment. And there are all sorts of those numbers where— An example I use is suppose you have a photography business and you hire a new receptionist. You cannot go to that new receptionist a receptionist on the first day he or she starts work and say to them, "You need to help me make more money next year. Start doing it or else." Because there is zero line of sight. They have no clue how they can help you make more money. However, if you sat down the very first day with that same receptionist and told him or her, "Hey, you know what? You're actually one of the most important links in the chain in our business. Every time someone comes in and inquires or asks about one of our photography packages, Your job is to make sure they come in and have a viewing and have a consultation. And if you can do that, that's how we make money in this business. And historically, 5 out of every 10 people that have called in have become an appointment. And if you can get that to 6 or 7 out of 10, I can actually pay you $50 or $100 of a bonus because you've run the math and you know what that is worth. But that's now a key performance indicator. Is actual appointments compared to actually phone increase. And you can tell your receptionist, look, if you can move this up to 8 out of 10, you're going to help us make so much more money. Your bonus will be X number of dollars. And you know at the end of this week, okay, well, it used to be 5 out of 10. Now it's 6 out of 10. So whatever that receptionist changed, whatever she experimented with and changed how she had done it, or if our marketing changed, or whatever that change was in our business, We know we're going to make our financial results. We either 5 out of 10, we're 6 out of 10, we're on target. The flip side works too. Suppose next week it slides to 4 out of 10. Well, we know right away before it even shows up in a profit and loss, before it ever shows up in my bank account, I know I need to take corrective action instantly to get that back towards 5. So you're actually— that's what I talk about creating a financial result. We're creating it in the trenches. About the customers and the products and the services and how we talk to the clients and our prospects. And if you do that, your profit and loss becomes a joke because by the time it ever shows up there and your accountant ever sees it or your bookkeeper ever sees it, it's ancient history to you because you're already working on next month's or next week's. So your profit and loss ends up becoming something you just look at more for tax purposes, but you're driving your business off your key performance indicators.
Yeah, these things are so important, you know, to be on top of it moment by moment, day to day, and to know that the right activities are taking place to get the right result. And, you know, in management they talk about annual performance reviews with people, and I've always laughed because if you're a parent and you do an annual performance review with your children, you know, that's not going to work out real well. It kind of needs to be done day to day or the whole place will be Lord of the Flies. I mean, the house will have been burned down and the only food anybody's going to be eating is going to be fudge and they're all going to be indiscriminately breeding and, you know, so that's not going to work. And the same thing is really true with staff. It's true with ourselves. It's true with our advertising and marketing investments. You know, the performance review sort of needs to be daily so you can take corrective action. And most people really aren't doing it. No. And I did a call earlier today for Bill Goff, who is one of my Titanium members, and he coaches insurance agency owners, mostly Allstate Insurance insurance agency owners. And we did a call based on the No BS Ruthless Management of People and Profits book. And we really talked about this exact point, that business owners doom themselves to enormous frustration with staff and doom staff to failure because there's really no program. There's really no agreed-upon clear means of measuring whether we're succeeding or failing on a day-to-day basis. And everything in your book about creating these indicators, you know, addresses that.
And you made a really good point when you were talking about being on top of— and you mentioned the word activities. And, you know, everyone who listens to this needs to realize any financial result, good, bad, or indifferent, is created by Business is a combination of 3 things. It's your customers, and it's the products and services, and it's the activities that put those together. And so you're right, when you're measuring and tracking those activities, and tracking your data on the customers, products, and services, you know what's going on with your financial results before they even happen.
All right, I have— and we promised people hidden profits— so I have 2 specific things from your big course that I want to— all right, ask you about in just a second that reveal places to absolutely go find a hidden profit opportunity. Perfect. So, two specific hidden profit tips. One, if you wouldn't mind, tell the Patagonian toothfish story.
The Patagonian toothfish, I love it because 'Cause what happened was, you know, there's a fish called Patagonian toothfish.
I did not know that.
And believe it or not, they had a hard time selling fish. And, you know, in restaurants and in supermarkets, they just couldn't sell the fish. I can't imagine why. Yeah, I mean, it sounds really attractive. I mean, like most people, that sounds really attractive. Sounds like this gross, disgusting, bony, disgusting fish. However, most of us have probably eaten sea bass or rock bass, and what they did is they just changed the name of the Patagonian toothfish and essentially invented a new name and sold it under that new name, and now everyone loves the fish, and it's the same fish. So there's an example of how, you know, you talk about activities in a business affecting the financial results. You've got something no one wants to buy and you took the activity of changing the name and suddenly you've changed your financial results.
There's an old— it's old now— very similar story. You may know it about Stu Leonard's Supermarkets.
I do know it because I read it in your books all the time. Yeah, Tom Peters.
I love the story. Tom Peters always told it, and, you know, so they made this big deal about going down to the fish market every morning and bringing fresh fish back to sell in the grocery store, and they would clean it and neatly wrap it and display it and put fresh fish signs around it, and nobody was buying it. And when they finally talked to a bunch of their customers, they found out nobody really believed it was fresh fish because It didn't look like fresh fish from the fish market. And as soon as they restored it to its uncleaned, right-from-the-market condition and slapped it in a wood cart with ice underneath it and a fresh fish sign, everybody snapped it up at premium prices.
But, you know, I love that story because again, activity is driving a financial result. Who would have thought? Putting a wooden cart and ice and fish on top of it could drive a financial result.
But of course, the point is somewhere in everybody's business there is a Patagonian toothfish. Yes. Right, there's something that could be doing much better without changing its core, what it actually is, but changing something about the way it's presented or the way it's priced or who it's presented to. So the second one I have for you, it kind of really follows naturally, is the whole issue of cross-selling and creating a cross-sell customer plan.
Yes. That comes out of the customer profitability map. So remember when I was saying you map out profitability versus your resonance score. If you picture clients clients who you have a high resonance with, so you love them, great relationship, they love your business, they love your team, they're a delight to deal with, but they're amongst your lowest profitability clients, they're what I call in the cross-sell quadrant. The reason they're there is two reasons. I call it nibbling or gagging. In one case, gagging is you have such a good relationship with these people that you actually have a hard time emotionally charging them what you should charge. It's Little Mrs. Smith and you've raised everyone else's prices 3 years ago, but you just can't bring yourself to raise Mrs. Smith's prices. That's the gagging side. Most clients are there because of nibbling in which we let them buy 1 or 2 things that we could sell them and we don't tell them all the other stuff we can sell them. Again, that cross-sell plan and there are tools in the in the big course, in the Found Money Roadmap course where you know what, you go in and you can actually look at your customers and come up with— you can come up with your own ideas right now on a scratch pad. Say, "Okay, customers who don't buy everything I could sell them, what am I going to do in my business right now? What are me and my team going to do to have them buy more?" What you'll find, and I've done this analysis before, and you'll find if you do it, is what I call the cross-sell potential. So imagine out of all your cross-sell quadrant customers, if you move a certain percentage of them up to the average of what I call your target more, which are your high resonance, highly profitable clients, your jewel box clients, you'll be amazed at the financial results that you can get in your business. I have seen businesses literally, we've mapped out a customer profitability map and the business owner in one case It was quite a small retail business and the owner wanted to make more money, not a huge amount of extra money, but enough so that he could bring his son in the business and he could retire. He thought he couldn't do it. He had been in business for 20 years. Ran his customer profitability map and said, look, your cross-sell quadrant, all you have to do is move 10% of those clients up to your target more quadrant and you'll make the money you want. You can mathematically do that. So he sat there and he said, "So what are you saying?" I'm like, "Out of these 100 people, for example, get 10 of them to buy more stuff that you're already selling to other people." His jaw literally dropped. It was like a $100,000 swing in a business that had been paying this guy about $50,000 to $60,000 a year. I mean, it was a really small business, but we doubled his income over a customer profitability map issue. That's that cross-sell plan and the potential of cross-selling. Can literally transform a business. It's a jaw-dropper as far as creating financial results and found money.
Yeah, there's a— I met him, I don't know, probably 8, 9 years ago. There's a guy who I assume he's still around. He's literally a manual labor consultant in the dry cleaning industry. He showed me a case history. One of his big tricks is is. So he was working with this 3 or 4 dry cleaning shops all owned by the same owner. And the guy was not a bad marketer. And so amongst many of the things that he did is he— the month of your— he got the birthdays of his customers. And if he didn't have that, he used the anniversary date of the first time you became a customer. And you would get a card.. And you would get a coupon to get— I don't remember the dollar amount— but a certain amount of cleaning free that month as a customer appreciation thing, right? And so all that's fine, you know, but really all it does is give away cleaning. And so the consultant said, well, let's take a look at your customers and see who brings in what kind of cleaning. And so some people only bring in men's clothing and the wife launders everything of hers. Some people never bring in drapes and furniture coverings. Some people never bring in winter coats in the spring, etc. So they identified what we would now call 5 cross-sell opportunities. And now the gift coupon, if the ones who never brought in any winter coats, they got the coupon to bring in winter clothes. The ones that never brought in any rugs or carpets or drapes, they got a coupon to bring in that, etc., etc. And now this same campaign, giving away in dollar value the same amount as customer appreciation gifts, In 2 years, it increased the average customer value by 175% because it got them using services they were not using, and once they used them, they kept using them. And it would be hard to find anything in a business, really, that offers the same kind of multiplier effect than this.
Well, and it's almost all pure profit. I mean, aside from your direct costs, because you've already paid to get that customer in once. As far as generating that lead the first time, you've done the hard work, you've got them in. It costs you postage. If that's what you have to do, mail them something, it costs you postage and a letter, and that's cheaper than trying to get a new customer.
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