How to Raise the Standards in Your Business
Louis Massaro’s talk urges business owners to stop chasing every new initiative and instead continuously optimize existing systems. He presents a repeatable, team-driven process: pick one area (e.g., sales), map the current process as-is, collect simple metrics (leads → estimates → follow-ups → bookings), identify key profit drivers, brainstorm tactical improvements with the team, set clear measurable targets and an owner, run focused 30–90 day improvement sprints, and measure the revenue impact. Emphasis is on simplicity, incremental gains (e.g., +5–10% improvements), culturalizing optimization, and avoiding unnecessary complexity or premature expansion.
Chapters
I think if we're all honest with ourselves, we know that there are areas of improvement in our business, period. We need to look at our business in each area and say, are those areas of my business up to the standards that I require for myself in my life and in my business? Right now? It's time to raise those standards. As entrepreneurs, we. We have the gift and the curse of taking on new initiatives, right? You've got to take on new initiatives, you've got to be able to go for it. You've got to be able to, you know, look to expand, look to grow, look to take on something new. But a lot of times we do it at the expense of the money that is right under our noses, that's right here for us to get. And the process of doing that in the process for, you know, really going after two of the most dangerous words that we could really, you know, that's part of an entrepreneur, a business owner is new and next, right? When we start thinking new and next, we need to use that as an indicator to say, okay, before I go on to what's new, before I go on to what's next, let me make sure that I have my existing business dialed in, my existing business optimized. And I know that I've been guilty of this over the years of kind of moving on too quickly to something new when I could have kept it much simpler. I could have optimized what I had right there in my current business as opposed to taking on new initiatives. And now I've done it so much over the years to that I know, hey, wait, wait, wait. Like, I'm excited about this new thing. I'm excited about this next thing. However, I'm using that as an indicator to say, okay, before I move on to this next thing that I might be excited about, I might have gotten my team excited about, my family might be excited about it. You know, that's your heart is in that new thing. You've got to make sure that you're not forgetting what got you to where you're at, your current business. And I think if we're all honest with ourselves, we know that there are areas of improvement in our business, period. I don't care who you are, I don't care how great your business is going. This is ongoing optimization. You know, you can't just go to the gym for 30 days, get in shape, and then think like, that's it, that, that you're just going to stay in shape. It doesn't work that way. It's the same way with our business. So today, I want to give you a process for this that you could use in every area of your business, that you should use in every area of your business consistently throughout the year so that you're always optimizing. And once you dial this in, this is something you're going to do with you and with your team. It just becomes an ongoing process of system and process optimization in your business that will improve everything that you're doing now, which will improve your bottom line, which will improve your customer satisfaction, which will reduce your stress, and which will make you feel congruent with the person that you want to be. Because if you're in this here today, I know you're somebody to pride yourself in being at that high level of achievement, right? You have higher standards for yourself than most people do. So at the same time, we need to look at our business in each area, right? Marketing, sales operations, customer support, accounting, business development. Say, are those areas of my business up to the standards that I require for myself in my life and in my business right now? Is there anybody here that feels like every area of their business is completely 100% up to the standards that they want to see? Is there anybody that is there? No. No, we're not. And if you are there, it's time to raise the bar, right? It's time to raise those standards. As you approach getting there, it's like, okay, how can we make it better? How can we make it better? And once you get it to a place where it's better, and you're like, okay, Louis, I can't optimize it anymore. I can't make it any better, okay, well, you either need to grow in that business or you need to expand or take on something else. Because if we stay stagnant, if we're not growing, we're dying. You know, it might be nice for a little while to feel a sense of peace and calm in that mini retirement, but I could tell you from firsthand experience, like, you need to be working on something. You need to be going. I know that's in each and every one of you, right? It's in each and every one of you. You know, I can't remember the exact statistics of people that retire and how they die within a few years, right? Because they've got nothing driving them. They've got nothing pushing them. But what we want to do is we want to set up not only yourself to be constant. You know, you don't want to be on this hamster wheel of optimization. You just want to build this into the way you do business, right? This now becomes a way for you to set up your team to constantly be optimizing. You know, how many of you feel like, you know, show me by your hands. How many feel like when you're not pushing and when you're not the one that's saying, let's make this better, that it's not getting done, you know, that maybe, you know, that it's not happening without you. Theresa, I love the dog. It looks like my guy. They could be brothers. You know, we want to set this up to where your business is optimizing itself. It's part of the culture. It's part of the infrastructure, right? It's built in. It's not just a system of sales, a system of marketing, a system of operations, a system of customer support and creating raving fans and a system of accounting. It's optimizing those systems. Ongoing, right? Ongoing. And I'm kind of beating this home today because I know I need it, and I know many of you need it. Anybody in business needs this message because it's the same tendency that got you to get up off the couch and start your business and go out there and go after it and take the chance and take the risk and, you know, look to reap the rewards that also will make you step away and get distracted and go after those shiny objects. You know, you hear somebody, I'm doing this. I'm doing that. This is working for me. That's working for me. And all these things are really sexy. But optimizing the fundamentals, how do we make that sexy? How do we make that to where you want to do that? And I believe the way to do that is to associate that with what you want. Right? We think what we want is external, but really it's already inside the four walls of your business. And it's optimizing what you have so that you have more money, more time, more freedom, more pride in the job that you do, and less stress from worrying about if it's going to get done correctly. You know, and I know many of you have great businesses that run really good, but is it growing and is it improving when you're not putting your foot on the gas? Right? So this, as we're going through this, I want you to think about your team. I want you to think about who you could involve in this process of optimizing each area of your business. And you're going to want to do this on a regular basis. You're going to want to pick one area of your business, start with that and really go all in in that one area, 30 days to 90 days, optimizing the systems, optimizing the processes, looking for the key profit drivers that you could drive and create more, not only revenue, but profits out of that area. And this is challenging. This is challenging. You know, like Warren Buffett said, he said, you know, when you see the masses going in one direction, go in the other direction. It's the same with this. The masses are sitting there, they have a business, but they're looking at other people's business. They're looking at what's going on out there. They're following something on social media and saying, oh, wait, I need to do that. Oh, wait, I need to do this. Oh, this other new thing is going to be the answer to my money problems. And the reality is, if we have the association with optimization of our business, that, that is going to give us what we want, then we could start to really sink our teeth into that. And the risk of taking on new or doing what's next without taking care of what you, that it spirals out of control really quick. You know, it might seem very harmless right now at this stage, wherever you're at, right? And this could be you, you could be just starting, or you could be 20 years in the business. You could have an eight figure. It's all the same. It's all the same. Once you start reaching for outside, once you start reaching for more, instead of optimizing what you have, what you're doing is you're kind of diluting your efforts. You know, you're digging a bunch of shallow holes as opposed to digging a deep hole. And there does become a time where you need to go dig other holes because there, there is a point of diminishing returns on optimizing what you have, and you want to take on more. But most of the time that's, that's not the case. Most of the time we create complexity when we really need to be looking for simplicity, right? We need to look for the ways to keep things simple and create more money, right? Like if you're bored, don't go create a monster in your business that you're, you're, you know, you might launch it. This new next thing seems exciting, but then once you launch it, you got to take care of it. So now you've created more complexity, more stuff to take care of, right? If you're bored, go get a hobby. You know, if you're bored, set some goals to optimize your business to increase the profits so that you don't have so much more to do that doesn't give you the return that you're really looking for. And as I'm saying this, I'm talking to myself right now, too. You know, like I said, I've done this so much over the years. You know, if you know my story of how I expanded my moving companies, this is. This is. This is what I needed to hear at that time. This exact message is what I needed to hear at the time where I'm like, I'm going to open up this office, then this office, then this office. It was optimize what you have, get that dialed in, create a system and a process of optimization that happens without you, then go and open up the additional locations, right? And that wasn't the only time, you know, there was time and time I could think of multiple times. So enough times to where now when I recognize, hey, what's that new thing? What's that next thing? And I'm excited about it, right? And we want to go after what we're excited for. But I relate it to, you know, I think about a kid who wants ice cream, you know, or an adult who wants ice cream, and it's like, look, in order to get that ice cream, you got to eat your vegetables first. You know, you've got to take care of the thing that you know is going to take care of you before you go after just what you want and what you desire. And so that's kind of what I envision. Anytime I see something, you know, some, you know, I've got a lot of. I've got a lot of business ideas that are basically in the queue right there, ready to go. But I'm like, nope, you know what? Optimize first. Build the team first. Get the team so that they're optimizing without you. And it's not just people are doing things. Only when you're saying, hey, do things right, then you've got a business that's not just maintaining, but it's thriving while you start to either stack more on top of that or, you know, kind of plant some other seeds in other areas. Is this resonating? Are you guys with me? You getting what I'm saying here today? So it's not about slowing down. It's just about optimization. I want to give you a tool that you could pull out, that you could use in the business you're in, and a business that you're going to be in and just a system for you and your team to optimize for you and your team to. Create a machine of optimization, right? Not a one time initiative because one time initiatives give you one time results. Again, you can't go to the gym for 30 days and get in shape and then think you're good. Doesn't happen that way, right? So there always, always, always are areas in our business that we need to optimize. So let's walk through this today. All right, first thing we want to do. Excuse me, let me get some more. Okay, first thing we want to do is we want to identify optimization opportunities. Identify optimization opportunities. Okay? So I want you to think about one area of your business. Right now. You, it's already popping in your head, you know, which area needs optimization the most. I don't have to tell you what it is. It's going to be different for everybody, right? And if you're unsure, write down the different areas of your business, give them a scale, rate them from 1 to 10 on how you feel they're operating. And then you want to start either at the weakest point or the area where you feel would be that one domino that would help knock the rest over. It reminds me of if you guys haven't read Gary Keller's book, the One Thing. It's a great book and the message is, what's the one thing that if I do it will make everything else easier or unnecessary, Right? And it's about focusing on that one thing until it's done. And that's what we want to do with the optimization. Right. Instead of trying to optimize all areas of the business at once, which can be done if you have an extensive team of leaders that, that take on each area on their own and are by themselves optimizing an area. But typically it doesn't work that way in small business. We wanna take one area at a time. We wanna optimize it. All right, so what you wanna do first is you wanna map out your current process for that area. What I mean by that is literally map it out, right? Whether you wanna use a software or a piece of paper with a pen or a whiteboard or whatever it might be, you literally map it out. And I've got this big marker here, but I'll try to do this. So like, So you kind of map out, You just kind of draw the connection. What's the first point in that process? So if this is sales, right, it's like, okay, a lead comes in after a lead comes in under. That would be the way that you manage Those leads, All right, what we're looking for is we're looking for holes and gaps in the process. We're looking for areas of weakness and also areas of strength because we want to recognize those as we're going through them as well. So the leads and how we manage those leads, then how we give estimates, right? Then our follow up process, how's that being done? Then booking the job itself. And what you want to do is you want to map it out as it is. Now. This is about assessing reality. This isn't about mapping out the way you want it yet. This is about assessing the way that it is. Okay. Because now you've got something simple like we don't need to over complicate things. I think in business and a lot of the stuff out there, people tend to really over complicate it so that they sound smart. I don't know why, I don't know why they want to over complicate it. But it doesn't need to be that complicated. Like, literally, if I had either a thinner pen or a bigger piece of paper, I could get it all done right here. Right? If your process is bigger than one sheet of paper, it's too complicated of a process. So now that we have it, we engage our team and we look at it together. And we want to start by gathering the specific, you know, how many leads, right? Let's get the numbers, let's get the data on this. How many leads are coming in per day, per week, per month? Out of those leads, how many estimates are we giving? Okay, what's the follow up? You know, what's the percentage of follow up? How many follow ups are being done? How consistently are they being done? And out of all that, how many jobs are being booked? So now you've got some data. So literally you could do this all like this. So let's say, you know, you've got 100 leads out of the hundred leads you're given. You know, let's just say 50 estimates. Out of those 50 estimates, you're doing 40 follow ups. And then let's say you're booking 10 jobs. Right? Again, simple. Now, could you use some kind of chart online? Sure. You Want to use LucidChart or you want to use, you know, Vizio, or you want to use something like that to visually represent it. Great. But I think the best way to do it is to show a map, right? Not just bullet points, but show a map so everybody on the team could see, excuse me, how it all connects. This is powerful. The first time I did this with my team and then even years later, when I've done it recently in newer businesses, it's like the people are like, wow, this is so helpful. Somebody that's been doing their job for years that now sees it visually represented can connect the dots and now your conversation is meaningful. So now you not only have a meaningful conversation and you've got the data, but now you start looking for, okay, where are the gaps? Where can we make improvements? Right. You know, can we get more leads? You know, because what do we want to do? We want to make more money, right? So can we get more leads? Let's explore that. Can we give more estimate? How do we get more estimates? Because we know the more estimates we get, the more book jobs we get. Right? How about our follow up? Can we improve that by 5%? And we start to notice where we're at and we do that. We have everybody on the team do this. So you could do this together, you could do it individually and then get together and discuss it. But it's to create alignment with your team as well. Right? Again, this is about creating a system to where your team is optimizing. They're not like, my job is to answer the phone and when someone calls, I tell them this and then I tell them that and then I send them this email. No, you want your team to be thinking about optimization, right? So when you do something like this and you have a conversation of like, look, these are the leads, these are the estimates, this is the follow up, these are the book jobs. Not only during that session are they thinking about ways to improve all that, but they're thinking about it as they're going about their job. Right? Because now you've planted it in their head that it's not just about do your job, it's about how do we make this better, how do we optimize? Okay, so the next thing we want to do once we've identified optimization opportunities is we also want to identify the key profit drivers. The key profit drivers. We want this all time back to profit. You know, when you do a good job for your customer, that should, you should be able to make the link for how that comes back to profit. Right. And so you know very easily when you look at just doing a good job for your customer, well, positive review, that helps your sales conversion, that lowers your marketing cost. Right, Right there increases profit, repeat customers jobs, you get that you don't have to pay for marketing referral customers. Right. So we want to identify the key profit drivers. So how do you do that. What are the main components that impact this area of the business? All right, so let's just kind of look at this as an example again. And you know, well, the amount of leads you get, that's a key profit driver. The more leads, if you're working them, right, if you're feeding leads into a sales system of any sort in any business, and you know, you're able to determine what your conversion is, well, then it's like, okay, let's get more leads. So the leads themselves are a profit driver. How do we get more leads? I mean, right now, if you had to get 20% more leads, if you had to get 10% more leads, could you do it? Could you find a way to get 10% more leads? Whether it's print advertising, online advertising, social media, billboards, a bus bench, whatever it might be, do you have a way to get 10% more leads? And so what we're doing is we're looking for incremental increases in each step of the process, the key components in the process. You look at each one and how do we improve that? And what are the key profit drivers within that? Right. What are the key profit drivers within that? So you know, what do you need to measure in that process? Remember, we're doing one process at a time. So if you're feeling like, whoa, this is a lot to figure out, my whole business. No, it's not. You're going to take one process at a time and you're going to like drill down on it for 30 days minimum, up to 90 days. So you want to just identify in each individual process that you're looking at, what are the key profit drivers there? So leads, sales, conversion, transaction value. What about retention? Out of the stuff you book, how many are you keeping from canceling? Or if you have a business that's ongoing, you have recurring business storage or any other business, let's say you've got a subscription based business where people are paying you monthly, how do you retain them? Right. How do you keep the churn down? How do you keep people from canceling their service? That retention is a key profit driver in your business, so are repeat customers, so are referrals, so are reviews. You know, if you haven't made the connection yet, that online reviews equal money in your pocket, positive online reviews equal money in your pocket and negative online reviews equal money out of your pocket. I'm telling you right now, it's a thing. It's black and white. It is a thing, you know. So, yes, get upset when that Negative review comes in. I know the feeling. It's gut wrenching. You could be having the best day and all of a sudden you get that notification, that one star review comes in for that person that you didn't even see it coming. Well, it's a problem, right? So we just want to identify what these are. This isn't about right now. We're not, we're not fixing the problem yet. You know, that's something that, you know, I want to express. Like, it's so important when doing this strategic planning and the strategic execution that we don't jump from strategy and vision immediately into action. You know, you've got to discipline yourself. And a lot of people's minds work that way, right? And that's okay. And especially entrepreneurs, business owners, because, you know, we're go getters, right? We're like, let's go get it. Like, okay, we talked about it for a minute. All right, I'm ready. I know what I need to do. Let's go. But we want to make sure we take this time to really analyze where we're at. And then from there, once we've done that, then we could create a clear and measurable plan. A clear and measurable plan. All right, so now you took one area of your business, you've mapped it out, you've identified, you know, where some of the gaps might be. You've identified the key profit drivers in that process alone. Again, not your whole business. One process at a time. Okay, and now you want to engage the entire team or department, right? You don't, you don't have to bring everybody in that's not really involved in that, but as many people as you can. Because now what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to brainstorm tactical solutions, right? And when you're doing a brainstorming session, there's no idea is a bad idea. No idea is a bad idea. You know, it's like you want to. Somebody put something out there, whether you're putting it up on a whiteboard, whether you're all on a shared Google Doc, whether you just have a bunch of notepads, doesn't matter. Ideas come, you don't shut them down. You know, if anything you want to add to that idea, you know, like, well, we could start adding, outsourcing our calls to the Philippines, you know, instead of going, ah, that's a dumb idea, which then makes that person say, you know what, I'm not offering up any more ideas because, like, it's safer here. To just be quiet and not get shut down. You say, okay, you know, we could also, we could also outsource to India too, or even somewhere in the U.S. good, good idea. What else? Come on, what else we got? And this is, this is a big deal. You know, I love to do this with my team because we don't have the same perspective. We don't all have the same perspective. And everybody's perspective is valuable, you know, especially in your business. They're, they're working it from a different angle, right? They have a different vantage point based on where they are on the field, if you will. And they see things differently than you do. They have different biases than you do. So we want to get all those ideas and now we want to create targets for optimization. Targets for optimization. So what does that mean? That means, okay, going back to this same example, leads, we get 100 leads a week, a month, whatever it might be, we want to increase it by 10%. Okay, so we're going to get 110 leads now, right? We have a closing rate of 20%. Can we increase that to 23% or 25%? It could be, you know, life changing to you and your business with just a 5% increase in your bookings and what you close. You know, it doesn't take this like, let's double this and let's double that. If you've got a booking percentage and you could increase it by 5%, you know, and now you can say, okay, we increase the leads by 10%. We increase the amount of estimates that we actually end up giving by 5%, by 10%. How do we do that? We set up some automation. Emails that go out and we don't get in touch with anybody that helps get them on the phone. You know, we implement the text messaging, we implement some automation. We start leaving better voicemails to get them to call us back, right? Can we, can we give 5, 10% more estimates? All right, now you're creating optimization targets. Out of those, can we close 5% more, 10% more? How can we do that? Have we trained our team in overcoming objections? Have we given them a good script? We definitely have room for improvement there. You know, these are the conversations that are happening as you're going through this brainstorming and you're looking for ways to set individual. So you're taking, you're taking basically the process, right, each component, and you're looking for a way to optimize each component so you're really breaking down your business instead of looking at like, oh, it's my business. What do I do to optimize? Which is completely overwhelming and will stress you out and make you not do it and feel bad and it's not good, right? You're breaking it down to one process within the business, and then you're breaking that down to the different components of the process and just looking for ways to make incremental improvements to all of the profit drivers, you know, and you start having that conversation, how can we improve this, this, this and this? And you start brainstorming ideas, right? And when you let the ideas fly, there's something magical about. Even if it's two people in the room, it's two people, 10 people, 20 people. You start creating an environment where all ideas are welcome. You'll be amazed at the things you're not thinking about right now and what you're able to do. I mean, all these incremental increases are huge. Are huge. I mean, like, there's money right now to go get in your business. If you start thinking about it, who's already thinking, like, I know where there's some money just before even going through these processes. Right, Cool. All right. So now what's important is we want to. We're creating this plan, right? Clear and measurable. So we need to, number one, we need to establish what, what, what optimized or done looks like. Like, here's our target. Let's establish what that looks like. Otherwise, it's just like, let's get better, let's get better, let's get better. It's like, no, no, let's increase this by 5%. Let's increase this by 2%. Let's increase this by 10, whatever it might be, these are our targets. Whether you hit them or not doesn't matter because you will improve. And when you do it in each of those different areas, it'll improve geometrically, right? So now what you want to do is you want to establish what are the resources you need. Who's going to own this project of improving this particular process? Somebody needs to own it, might be you, might be somebody on your team. And then you need a definite deadline to achieve the outcome. This can't be, like, ongoing. It needs to be like, this is 30 days, this is 90 days. This is what we need to do it. And that needs to be clear. Remember, clear and measurable. What are the targets specifically? You know, and what I would suggest you do is get out a spreadsheet. Once you have all your numbers currently, here's how many leads we get a Week, a day, a month, you know, whatever, whichever one you want to run off of. Here's how many estimates were given, here's how much follow up we're doing, here's how much, how many jobs we're booking. You have that, then next to it in the spreadsheet, you look at what the impact is, right? So now you've got your current, we're just using sales as an example. You've got your current key profit drivers and where you are, what reality is today, okay? And I don't care if you don't know your numbers, that's okay. This is like, go find out that one number. If you have to literally count all the phone calls that came in and count all the phone calls that came in, hopefully you've got a CRM that you could tell these numbers. This isn't about like, don't feel like you've got to go do all your books and figure all this out. Like, no, you just need to go figure out some numbers. And if you're like, I don't know them, then you know what? Start doing your optimization based on a weekly basis. And from today until seven days from now, count everything that happens, everything that comes in so that you have a starting point. And then you put your new targets next to that. And you look at the revenue that was produced by what is, and you start looking at the revenue that will be produced when you hit those targets. That is your motivation to stick with what you have in front of you instead of going and chasing down shiny objects. Because you'll start to see that those little increases here and there are going to make a major impact to your bottom line. Hey, my friend, before you go, you've got to hurry and watch these next few videos over here. They will absolutely help you take your moving company to the next level. Go watch them now and I'll see you over there.
