How To Get Your Profits Unstuck & The Only 3 Ways To Grow Your Business

Do you have the business of your dreams? Have you succeeded beyond your wildest imagination, making more money than you know what to do with? If so, why the hell are you listening to me? I could probably learn a few things from you. For everybody else today we're going to talk about how to get your business unstuck or why it isn't 10 or 20 times bigger than it is.

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap them in bacon for business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now, here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

Welcome back to the kitchen. I am Brad Costanzo and I want to welcome you all, the first time listeners. Thank you for joining me. Feel free to go check out some of the other episodes where we share all types of proven business strategies. And today I'm going to talk about something that I experienced a few years back. And it is one of the most grueling experiences you can have as a business owner. Probably next to total failure and implosion of your business. And that's that plateau where you are stuck and don't know what to do. Maybe you're mired down in a million problems and you, you're just not sure how to grow your business and get it unstuck. Well, then today's show is for you. First of all, thank you for reviewing it on itunes in advance. And if you like this show and this episode, please run over there and let me know what you think. Or send an email to askbradaconrappbusiness.com tell me your favorite bacon wrap strategy as well as your biggest challenges and problems and just maybe I'll cover them and solve them for you on a future show. So without any further ado, let's get going. If you're stuck in your business, if you've plateaued, if you've hit that point where you just don't quite know what to do or you're wondering why you're not much bigger than you believe you could be or should be, well, there's four primary reasons. Number one is a lack of marketing. It is the number one killer of small business growth. You have to get new customers in the door constantly, repeatably and predictably. Number two, you may have a lack of talent, which is having the right people in the right places. And, you know, top People are usually working for companies that are growing. So if you're not, there's a very good chance you could be losing some of your best folks to your competition. Another reason you could be stuck is the lack of predictable systems. Systems are so important in any business. If you don't believe that, we read Michael Gerber's the E Myth Revisited on Amazon. It is an amazing testimonial to the power of building good systems. Good systems keep good people around, and oftentimes good people build those good systems. They are absolutely crucial if you wish to scale your business. The final reason you're probably stuck is a lack of capital. You need money in order to do all the things and all the growth that you want to do. One of the mistakes I see a lot of business owners make is that they focus too much on raising capital and getting money first before they take care of the other three. Marketing, talent and systems. But think about it this way. If you've got good marketing and sales, that means money is coming in and you have a lot less money problems. Plus, if you've got good marketing, good sales, customer growth, good people, and tight systems, then there should be no lack of capital people, because that's the kind of business people will invest in and banks will lend to and other entities will purchase. So lack of marketing, lack of talent, lack of systems, and lack of capital are probably your biggest problems. We're going to cover all four today on Bacon Wrap Business. We're going to start with marketing because that has the most opportunity to move the needle. And it is my personal favorite. I'm a marketing geek through and through, and most business owners really only have a few options when it comes to marketing. They can learn it themselves and in a few years potentially be very good at it. And honestly, that's really what an entrepreneur and a business owner should be doing, is focusing on building the business, driving new revenue and growth and profits. But it's so easy to get mired down in everything else. So learning it yourself is one option, but it's oftentimes the slowest option and only a smart option for those who are bootstrapping it. You can hire it done. You can hire a director of marketing or a marketing manager, and that's great if you're a large growing corporation and you've got stock options and you can afford huge salaries. However, real marketing strategists, one who have gone out in the field and done it themselves and know their worth, the ones who are the best of the best, almost never work for just a paycheck. And that brings it to the third option which is a marketing partner. So whether you partner up and give full blown equity in your business to a marketing strategist or you work with one on a consulting basis, but with a pay for performance and a piece of the entire business, that's the option that is the best for most businesses. Because truthfully, the person who is in charge of helping to drive the revenue and profits and sales should have a vested interest in its outcome. They should rise with the tide and sink if everything else does. So those are your options. Learn it yourself, hire it done, or partner. In fact, I get that question a lot of how I work with my clients. Do I charge by the hour, by the project, etc. And the answer is I partner with my clients. I always have a vested interest in what I'm doing so that we are on the same side of the table. And when I'm able to move the needle, I'm able to share in the rewards along with my client partners. So that may answer that future question in case you're ever wondering how I work now, try as you might, you will not find more than three ways to grow any business now. The first of which is obviously to get more customers. No matter what kind of business you are brick and mortar mom and pop shop or an online e commerce company or professional services organization, you have to get new customers. There's a lot of ways to do this, from paid advertising to strategic alliances and joint ventures with other companies, to online paid media, search engine optimization, doing direct mail, using YouTube, Facebook, social media. Now there's a lot of methods to get people coming in the door. I personally keep a cheat sheet of about 36 different methods. I believe it's about three dozen different methods of acquiring new customers. And it doesn't really matter what type of business it is. Although I focus on the most optimal strategy to get new customers coming in. But it ranges from things like direct mail to online and digital marketing, which happens to be a major core competency of mine, to setting up strategic alliances and joint ventures. Probably my absolute favorite way to get new customers coming in. From Facebook advertising and social media, to using Groupon, AdWords, Amazon.com and even iTunes. Yes, what you're listening to right now does generate a significant amount of business for me, otherwise why would I be doing it? These are a handful of the dozens of strategies that I personally use and it allows me to triple new customer acquisition for most of my clients in about 90 days or less. Now the second way you grow your business is you raise the amount of money each customer spends whenever they buy or the average transaction value. I did a bacon wrap business episode on this the other day. You can find it here on itunes and it is four ways to increase your profits by 30% or more in 30 days or less. Please go download it. But I'll go over briefly the strategies here. The first one is to upsell your clients. Give them something of value immediately after purchasing the product or sometimes before purchasing it. You know how McDonald's says, do you want fries with that? Well, you can do that in your own business as well if you increasing the amount of things that people purchase, especially after they've made the first purchase and at the point of purchase. There is also cross selling. And you can think about Amazon, you know, whenever you buy a product or you're looking at a product, let's say you just made a purchase and they go, you know, customers who bought that also like this. Well, you can do that with your own business as well. You can cross sell your own things, you can cross sell other people's things, and you can put it all together to increase the amount of profit you make on every single sale. You can also bundle products and services together, whether it's your own products that you're bundling or other people's products that allow you to charge more and more often. You can do that in order to increase your profits. It's little strategies like these, where the details are much more tedious that allow me to increase the transaction profits, sometimes by 300% in 90 days or less. Now, the third and final way to grow a business besides getting more customers and getting those customers to spend more money is getting get them to spend more money more often. And that is to increase the frequency of purchases. There's four major methods to do that and I'll cover those real briefly right now. The first one is to be in continuous contact with your customers. You can do that with an email, newsletter, direct mail, telephone calls, text messaging, obviously social media, and a really cool strategy called retargeting, which is when somebody visits your website, you can now place a small little cookie on their browser and that allows your ads to up pop follow them around the Internet wherever they go. There's a very good chance that you have been retargeted by somebody else if you notice the same ad all the time, everywhere you go on the Internet. And it's a great way to stay in front of them, making offers and getting them to buy more often. Speaking of more often Another way is something as simple as adding a continuity program or billing them monthly to continue to buy your product. If you have a physical product, you can get them on an auto ship. If it is a digital product like a information product or a membership site, you can build them every single month to get something and as opposed to them coming back to to remember to purchase. Even Amazon offers this right now. You can get a discount if you sign up for an auto ship program on Amazon.com on a lot of different products such as supplements. Now, one of my personal favorite ways to get customers to purchase more frequently is a loyalty program. You can give away VIP promotions and points and frequency discounts or free merchandise. You can incentivize referrals. Heck, I mean, think about the airlines and credit cards. They are always offering loyalty programs and frequent flyer miles. Well, you can do this whether you're an e commerce business online or you're a brick and mortar shop, a hairdresser, or anybody who has the reason to offer continual business and loyalty to your customers. In fact, I've got a proven loyalty program that I use with several of my clients and it works like gangbusters. Now, if you run out of things of your own to sell them, you can sell other people's products as well. Think of a joint venture or an affiliate relationship. If you sell a certain product, but they're very likely to purchase another product based upon their demographic or their circumstance, you can do an alliance with another company that will give you a referral fee to sell theirs. This way you get more customers spending more money more often with you. These are just four simple strategies. But if you do this effective, it can literally triple how often your customers come back to your business. Now let's do a little math. What is one strip of bacon plus one strip of bacon? I'm joking. Here's the business math that I want to bring to you and really bring this point home. First, understand that each one of the strategies I shared, getting more customers, really raising the profit per sale and increasing frequency. Each one of those by itself can triple your business's growth if done correctly. So back to the math. If Your profit is $1,000 a day, if you get triple the customers, well, that's $3,000 a day, right? Well, now if you triple the profit on every single sale, that 3,000 becomes 9,000. And if you get them buying three times as often and you triple the frequency, that 9,000 becomes $27,000 per day. That's 1,000 to 27,000 simply by optimizing these three proven ways to grow any business. Now, here's where we have a lot of fun. If you've got a business doing $1,000 a day originally, that's $365,000 a year. Most companies of that size, if you go to sell it, you could get about three times earnings for it, plus or minus. But if you triple all of those factors and you go from $1,000 a day to $27,000 a day, that's nearly $10 million, about $9.8 million in revenue. Now, what do you think that is worth? If you just tripled the value there, you're looking at potentially 27, almost $30 million in value for $10 million company. Now, if you haven't thought about selling your company, well, number one, I don't believe you. But number two, you're crazy. Because this is where real wealth is created. And especially when you're able to get to the point of $10 million and more in your revenues, you open up an entire new ecosystem for buyers. Let me give you an example. Oftentimes, a private equity firm will purchase your business. If you're doing $10 million or more at three to six times multiples, that's not bad, right? I mean, if you just sold it at even one times multiple, $10 million, you're 10 times better than you were prior. But private equity firms are notorious for not paying a lot of money. And that's because they do the next strategy, which is they build them up a little more and then they sell them to M and A firms or mergers and acquisitions firms. Now, these companies will oftentimes aggregate several businesses very similar to this, get the economies of scale, and they'll pay 8 to 12 times earnings. Now, that is an enormous jump from 3 times. Now, if you're a small business owner, I may be getting out of your comfort zone. You may think this is not possible for you at all. But hang with me, because this is where the real magic happens. These mergers and acquisition firms will often package up these smaller businesses $10 million or so, and they will improve their efficiencies and economies of scale, maybe bring new management in it for one primary reason. They want to take this company public. But they must meet strict expectations and have a way to double their money. So they IPO it, they bring it out, they bring it public, and then the stock market investors, you know, mom and pop investing on Wall street, end up purchasing the company at, you know, 15, 20, sometimes outrageous multiples. But as a business owner, this should be your Goal. If you can get to the $10 million mark or more, there is a world of opportunity for you to package this up and either sell it to an M and A firm or even take it public yourself. And that is where real wealth happens. And I want to take a super quick sidetrack here and tell you that I read a book a few years ago and I absolutely loved it. It's by a guy named M.J. deMarco. And the book's name is the Fast, I'm sorry, Millionaire Fast Lane. And what was really great in this book is in the very beginning of it, he mentioned something about the concept of get rich quick. And he's like, a lot of people think that Get Rich Quick is a. Is a scam, that it doesn't exist. I'm here to tell you that it does exist, he said. And Get Rich Easy doesn't. But Get Rich Quick does. And here's the example he used. If you start a business and work on it for five years, maybe you work 18 hours a day on it. Hopefully you don't do that. But if you do and you bust your butt and really make it Happen, and in five years you sell that business for $5 million, right? Or more, maybe a little less, would you consider that getting rich quick? Well, by most standards, five years over the course of a career is lightning speed. So Get Rich Quick does Easy does happen, Get Rich Easy doesn't. And his whole point was what made that happen is the exit. It's the liquidation event that allows you to take your business that is doing really well and sell it for multiple times what it's doing right now. And you can think of that as somebody giving you several years of your life back to you. Because it may have taken you 3 to 5, to 7 to 10, whatever years to earn that money on your own. Somebody's willing to give you a lump sum. That's what happened when I sold my first business for several times earnings is they gave me a lump sum of cash and I walked away. It was almost like somebody gave me several years of my life. As a business owner, this is a direction you should be looking to take. And the only way that you can effectively do that is by focusing on the three business growth.

Pillars, which is getting more customers, spending more money more often. And you too can do the same thing. Now, if you're having trouble finding out how you can do this and run your entire business at the exact same time, there is help out there, remember, you can learn it yourself, which is partially what you're doing listening to the bacon Wrap business show. You can hire a director of marketing and hopefully they've got your interest in mind or you can partner with others who can help you move the needle and do it by taking a vested interest. That is what I do. I am not currently looking for many new opportunities, but I always have my eye out for folks that I can help. And if you believe that there is a strategy that I could help you implement, whether it is just a quick strategy or you'd like me to take a look at your entire operation and you'd like a free second opinion, send an email to askbradaconrappbusiness.com and use the subject line Second Opinion. I'll be happy to see what the areas that I think you need the most improvement are. Maybe we'll feature you on Bacon Wrap Business Show. Maybe we'll put you in the hot seat. Or we can talk one on one and see if there's an opportunity to help you grow your business too. Now I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, please do me a huge favor and leave a review on itunes. It helps dramatically. Both myself it helps the show get up the rankings, which means more people see it, thus more you can I don't they're not paying anything so this is not a customer but more audience acquisition and we're all in the same business of getting more eyeballs on what we have to offer. This is one of the ways I offer value to the market and let people know that there is help out there. If you ask. If you have any other questions, if you have your own awesome strategies that you'd like to share or be featured on the show or be in a hot seat, send an email to askbradaconrappbusiness.com leave a review and until next time, keep on wrapping that business in bacon.

Sam.