Ep137: 3 Ways Your Business Is Bleeding Money Right Now

All right, we are back for another episode, episode 137 of the Leveraged CEO Podcast. We're going to talk about the 3 ways your business is bleeding money right now. So I've got 3 really good examples here. We're going to go through one by one in terms of what's actually happening because I'm getting these from people that I'm talking to, and then I'm going to show you how to actually fix these 3 things. As well from this episode. So number 1, which is probably the, the easiest one to fix, and everyone like just doesn't fix this for some reason, is the slow lead response. So prime example, if you're on the tools all day, whether you're electrician, whether you're a PT, gym owner, whatever it is, you know, bookkeeper, whatever it is, if you're on the tools all day and you don't contact lead back within 5 minutes, you're literally throwing money away. Absolutely throwing money away, especially if you're doing paid advertising. Because what happens is when people do paid advertising, as soon as someone clicks on that ad, Meta goes, okay, cool, this person's interested in this. They're gonna bombard them with competitors of yours, and the person who gets back to them the fastest Pretty much wins every single time. Okay, so let me ask you this. If you had, let's use like a high-ticket coach or like even a tradie, for example, an electrician might have like the average spend. I think I saw someone else, their average, no, it was a concreter. Concreter average spend was at least $10K. And he said he was only getting 20% of the jobs that come through. If he was to have someone or an AI agent respond and prequalify those leads within 5 minutes, he'd be making an extra $5,000 to $10,000 a week. A week. So I gave you guys 2 options here. You can either And there's a few options you can go through depending on the business, but if you just had someone that would contact the leads— and you can just get like an admin person to do this as well, by the way, doesn't have to be someone like in sales— just to say, hey, look, we got your inquiry, I'm going to get Tom, Bob, whoever to send you a quote, uh, within 24 hours. And then we'll, we'll get your problem sorted. Because a lot of the time when people are searching for like a business or a problem, they've got an immediate problem that they need fixing, right? So as soon as they find someone to fix that problem, they're not gonna go somewhere else. Prime example, when I, you know, like silly example, my, my son got stuck in the car. He locked himself in the car. We had to get a locksmith. I literally just called the first person that could get there the fastest. So if they could get to me within 30 minutes, I didn't care about the price. It's because I obviously needed that something happens straight away. It's obviously a pretty extreme example, but let's look at another example. But the point of the matter is I only went with the first person that got back to me. First person that answered, the first person that got back to me. If they took too long to get back to me, it was too late. I had an immediate, immediate decision that I needed to get something sorted by. Let me do another example. Let's just say you wanted your lawn mowed, and you, you know, those sites where you just, you put in your details, and then it's like, cool, you'll have 3 people send you through a quote. If someone sends you through a quote in 5 minutes, you're like, cool, nice, found someone. I don't need to look at any other ones. Otherwise, if no one gets back to you within the first couple hours, you're gonna get ads on social media, you're gonna keep looking for someone to solve that problem for you. So speed to lead is almost the most important thing in business when it comes to marketing or sales. So, but you can also get like an AI agent to do this type of stuff for you as well. You can get automations through CRM, you can even get an AI agent to have a conversation with the lead as well. You can get a chatbot. There's so many things you can do. Okay, so you just, you're just leaving money on the table, especially if you sell high-ticket stuff. So the question for you is, how long does it take for you to get back to leads? If you don't know, that's probably something for you to really consider because You're leaving money on the table. So the other thing you can do is you can also hire an appointment setter, which you can do on a commission-only rate if you prefer, where they just get paid based on how many appointments they book or a percentage of the sale that comes through. Prime example, if you had an offer for $5K, $10K, let's say it's $5K, you might give them like 5% commission of that contract value. So if it's $5K, 5% of that would be $250. Imagine if they did 5 of them a week, 5 appointments that closed. They make $1,000 a week and they're just calling people. Like, it's super, super easy role. They're just calling people and booking people in. So food for thought. Number 2, admin that's late or it never happens. So this kind of is not so much similar to the last one, but it's all about time saving. So if someone, so they email you to get a quote or to join, and let's say you've got 100, 150 emails sitting in your inbox that you have to get through and it takes you a couple of days to catch up. Couple of days go by and guess what's happened? They have gone somewhere else. So this is similar to speed to lead, but this is admin related, not so much when people inquire for marketing. Okay, so the admin side of things need to obviously be managed or have a deadline behind it. But you guys need to be on top of what's coming into your inbox. Very big, because if you miss this type of stuff, that is opportunities. Going begging. So again, a couple of things you can do. You can get like an AI agent that manages your inbox to see what's highest priority. You can even draft emails or even get an AI agent to do the emails for you on your behalf, which, you know, you obviously need to train up the AI to be able to do those things. Or again, you could get like a VA to help you with the admin side of things. You can get a VA to manage your inbox. You can get a VA to manage your schedule so you don't miss these things. Okay, the other thing as well in terms of the admin, um, general rule of thumb, anything that, uh, happens more than 5 times gets either like a template or an AI agent that's trained on how to do it. Prime example, onboarding becomes like a workflow, so it's just an automated sequence for onboarding, uh, or an SOP sequence if there's some manual tasks that need to be done. Invoicing, you know, should be automated to a degree or semi-automated. I'm sure you can get an admin to help you with chasing up invoices, building up templates, etc., etc. Okay, so that's number 2. Number 3 is the biggest one, which is your hours. So let's just say you're doing 40 hours a week, but then only 5 of those 40 hours is to do with like revenue generating activities. So most of it's to do with managing the team, or maybe you're on the tools doing delivery. You've only got 5 hours a week of actually moving the business forward. So what would happen is if you were to get back 20 hours a week and you could spend that, you know, you don't have to spend the whole 20 hours, maybe you could spend 10 extra hours a week on revenue generating activities, things that actually move the business forward. What would actually happen to that? What would happen if you were able to get back an extra, you know, whatever, if you were able to get back an extra 10 hours or 5 hours a week doing an extra 5 sales calls a week and you close 2 extra deals a week worth $10K each? It's actually $20K a week of contract coming through. That's an extra $60K, $24K, $60K, no, that's $80K a month. of contracted revenue. Marketing doesn't change, by the way. This is just being able to focus on extra sales calls. Just, just an example, right? But, you know, if you were able to delegate or even delete or even automate, you know, 10, 20 hours a week and you spent that extra time doing more sales, more marketing, what is the opportunity cost? I can tell you right now, it'll, it'll add up. Quite a bit. So this, if this sounds like these are some problems for you, what we need to do, check on the link in the description below, and you'll see an application on how to work with us. We don't work with everyone, so fill in the details and apply. It'll tell you if you are a fit or not, and then we'll have a conversation to see if it's gonna be a perfect fit, because we don't work with everyone, but we do help people get their time back. And then we help them grow the business. So we help you get 20 hours a week back and then we help you double the business. This is about getting your time back plus making more money, the best of everything. So if that sounds like you, in the description there's a link, click on that link and click apply. But this is the type of stuff that holds business owners back. Everyone thinks they need to work all the time, but in reality you need to work on the things that actually build the business or move the business forward. not just working all the time. So delegate the stuff that doesn't need your attention or automate, either, either one. And then you focus on the things that actually move the business forward and then watch how fast the business grows in the next 12 months. So that sounds like you, let's have a conversation. If not, keep following along and I will see you in next week's episode. Have an epic evening, team.