3 Tips Guaranteed to Take Your Business to the Next Level

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today we are going to be talking about three ways you can grow. Not just grow, but double your business. As we head into the new year it's about to be. It is 2020. We just started 2020. But how can you double the size of your business this coming year? Three actionable, out of the box tips for you today. So what I'm gonna be sharing before we get into the show, a big thank you, today's sponsor, which is Gusto. If you haven't already, go to gusto.com bitco bootcamp. Use that link for a special offer for 90 days, you can try out their software. Right now, you're probably getting your W2s together for your employees. You're trying to get everything, collect all that information. That's time that needs to be spent on a whole lot more other things like we're going to be talking about today, not collecting paperwork and running payroll. Spend the six, nine, ten bucks a month, whatever it is, and allow a software like Gusta to take over and make sure those things are done to code and that these are done quickly and efficiently. So check it out Today, go to gusto.combootcamp all right, without any further delay, we are talking about the three things that you can do this year to double the size of your business. Now, when I was thinking about these, there's probably you could come up with 100 of these. And I've probably mentioned a lot of tips and things on the show. However, I wanted to give kind of three kind of things that you might not hear about. Kind of out of the box, little bit from left field, but things that I instantly thought of when I thought about someone, because I had someone ask me this morning, how can I double my business in 2020? And usually you just kind of chuckle and laugh and say, you know, work hard, blah, blah, blah. I was like, what would I think if someone needed answers on that? What would I give in terms of an answer? Number one, take a pay cut. Take a pay cut and use that money to hire someone to do your job. Take a pay cut. Now, if you're a business owner, what that means when you take a pay cut, it means you take from the business in order to take less money from the business, means you need to downsize your personal expenses. Maybe that means downsize your house, your car, you know, make. Go on one vacation instead of five. Whatever it is. Whatever it is, you downsize your personal lifestyle in order to take less money away from the business. Keeping money in Business allows you to grow the business. Okay? Money is required, cash is required for growth. I've always said it before, growth sucks cash. Those three words you must remember when your business is scaling, there's a reason why Uber and all these massive tech startups lose money every single quarter because they're growing so fast. But growth sucks cash. Remember those three words. If you're really trying to double your business, you cannot double your business. Let me take that back. It's rare to double your business and be super profitable and have massive margins and have the most profitable year ever. And yet you've been plateau, plateau in terms of revenue and all of a sudden dou and your profit margins go up. That can be luck. That could be market trends. A fad comes along and somehow you're in the middle of it. But if you're actually going to be inputting more, something like if you want to double the output, the sales, the revenue of your business, there's gotta be more input, okay? Unless something like I just mentioned out of the blue happens, if you actually want to be governing the scalability and the growth of your business and you want to double it, you're going to have to increase the inputs into the business. And this is what I like to think about. Every single dollar that I can save personally and keep in the business usually is going to give me a 5, 10, 20 times multiple. So if I can save $1 today and save that dollar for a year by keeping it in the business, that dollar is going to probably be 5, 10, $20 next year. That's the power of small business, is because it's so scalable, you can literally take a couple thousand dollars and make into a $200,000 business. That's a huge return on investment. You can' investment in the stock market. You know, 2019 was one of the best years of the stock market for The S&P 500, NASDAQ, new Dow, all of that. However, a dollar spent there might have doubled if you were lucky last year. A dollar spent in your business, you can get 5, 10, 20 times multiple if you actually use that money appropriately and the input is going into a machine. Like your business should be looked as a machine to grow money. So you input money, it grows in your business and it should be exporting, it should be outputting more money. And so the problem is a lot of business owners, they take so much money on the front side, they're taking so much money from the business before it even goes into the business. And when I say into the Business, I mean marketing, investing in the business, you know, investing in equipment, investing in growth, expansion, you know, hiring more people. So what do you need to do? You take a pay cut. So less money goes down to you personally, more money goes into the input of the business allowing you to hire another person that allows you to get out of like the mundane role or whatever, something that is holding you back from focusing on sales and hiring. And then you focus on those things that's gonna lead to growth, that's gonna increase the engine, that's gonna increase the output. But the number one thing you have to do is take a pay cut. In order to do that, you have to reduce your personal expenses and that will help you grow your business. All right. The number one reason I attribute to quickly scaling businesses, being able to play like I do with multiple companies and things, the number one reason when I look back in 10 years will be that I reduced my personal expenses to almost nothing in order to be able to invest all the money into the companies and allow them to grow and thrive. And when they have down months, it's okay because I'm not taking money off the top or and not even down months when I need to pour money into the business and lose money on paper. But you're investing into the company where you're buying capex like capital expenditures or you're buying out a company or investing in marketing or in people or in training, those are all investments. And you lose money on that month or that quarter or that year. But you know that in the long run it's going to make money. You can't do those things if you're sucking money into your really nice car or a really nice house or going on these crazy vacations or whatever. So there's a balance. I'm not saying you need to live on nothing, but I just feel like a lot of times we as business owners feel like we need to have some sort of perception of being a business owner. And therefore we get a truck that's twice as expensive we should buy, we get a house that's twice the size as we really need. And those are things that we can cut back on, invest into the business and have a much higher return down the road. If we're just patient number two, if you want to double your business this year is invest in brand over marketing. Let me actually show you something here. If you're watching the video.

This right here is investing in branding over marketing. Alright, so this is the book that I authored this past year and it is called Local Entrepreneurial stories behind Whatcom County's iconic brands and small business owners. Try to show this to the. This line right here is because it's literally straight from Amazon. It says not for resale and it is just for author. It's an author copy. You can buy this on Amazon if you want, but really it's for Whatcom county, where we have our local shop. And you can see this is branding. Okay? So this costs money. This probably costs me, I want to say, five to $7,000 to produce, to get this all made. Interview. I interviewed them, put this all together, designed, whatever, probably five to $7,000 plus my time. I interviewed eight different businesses in our local area that are kind of iconic to our county, and I put them into a book. And now this is branding, all right? It has a big Augusta Max, our mascot on there. So that's branding right there. It has my story. The first chapter is my story of how I started Augusta Lawn Care. These are all. This is branding. I didn't go out and spend marketing dollars on.

Newspapers or flyers or on Facebook ads or on Google Ads. This is branding, all right? This is gonna create something that will live forever once I've paid it. It just lives forever. This will always bring us new leads, more awareness, and people will buy from us. The greatest.

Return on investment and the lowest customer acquisition cost is gonna come from someone that reads this book and becomes a customer. Cause literally, you know why? Cause the customer acqu. Negative. They are paying me to get this book. They're going to read this book. I'm going to make money on buying this book, then when they buy this book, and then I'm going to make more money when they come to Augusta because of the branding behind the book. Okay? So instead of spending money all the time on marketing and getting in return for dollars a click or in return for dollars a phone call, try to do things that are more branding. Now you say, well, I'm not going to write a book, okay? There's other ways that you can do branding in your local market. If you're a local business, you can do things in your local community that are more branding. There's guerrilla marketing, but also more branding things. For example, you can have a show. You can start a video channel. You can start showing behind the scenes of your business. You can use your social media as a way to create brand and share everything about your industry and bring on industry professionals and start a podcast about it. You can use your website to show all about the behind the scenes in the process of Making your product or your service, these are all ways to do branding. You don't have to pay anymore. How I kind of look at branding is you usually have to pay for something or you do something. There's some sort of input for a while, whether it be labor, time, money, whatever, but then it lives forever. With marketing, you got to pay for someone to click and then guess what? The next time someone comes along, you got to pay for them to click again. And then as soon as you take away your marketing budget, no more clicks. With this, it lives forever. It's a one time shot. Okay, so these are the kind of things I'm looking for in terms of branding. These can be things that you do within your community. These can be JVs, joint ventures that you do with other competitors. Whatever it might be, branding is where you want to be at. It's a lowest customer acquisition cost and it's going to be the thing that's going to be the most stable and the thing you're going to depend on in the future if you really want to grow your business quickly. Because guess what, if you depend on customer acquisition cost of any dollar amount and it's great because you can pump money in and get leads and customers out, that's fantastic. Until the math doesn't work out anymore, right? Until the click costs too much, until a competitor out prices or outbids you on that click, or the cost of the mailer goes up, whatever it might be. Until that happens, it's all fine and dandy. But this won't go away. Branding doesn't go away. Branding lasts forever. So invest in brand over marketing. And the reason I talk about that, I don't think you should be 100% branding. Maybe do 20% branding and 80% marketing. If you're looking at your budget you're gonna spend to bring in new business, think about, okay, If I spend 20% of that $100,000 on creating some sort of image or a website, or creating some sort of personal brand or brand around the business and the company and behind the scenes and bringing on industry leaders, what can I do to create a brand around my business? Okay, number three, if you want double the size of your business this year, save cash and buy out a struggling competitor. Alright, this is something I don't talk a lot about, but Augusta Lawn Care locally has probably grown on average 10 to 20% every year. The big jumps though, everyone's like, well no it hasn't because it's been like five years and it got really fast to where you were at. But what happened is that the big jumps were acquisitions. Like literally, we've done three acquisitions and I'm gonna be talking a lot about them at Landscape Summit because we just finished our third biggest acquisition that we've ever done on landscaping. I've acquired the gym and things, but I'm talking about landscaping companies. We've done three. We did a really, really small one, a mid sized one, we just finished a really, really big one. And so I'm gonna be talking a lot about that at the Landscape Summit. So if you're a landscaper, you definitely want to be there. But this is something you gotta be thinking about if you're saving cash. And remember, this goes back to kinda number one is that take a pay cut, like reduce your personal expenses so that you can keep the money in the business. The reason you wanna do that is save cash. Now when everyone's doing great and wonderful and you have ton in, all your competitors are doing fantastic, Barriers of entry are low, People can get money all day long from banks, all of that. Save your money and then wait for a rainy day. Wait for your competitor to hit retirement, wait for them to come into some sort of issue and they have to get out of the business and there's some sort of problem that makes that they're going to sell it for pennies on the dollar. That's the time that you definitely want to have money in the bank, cash saved up. So that's why I'm a big advocate like you save your money. Save your money. I hate cash. Cash is depreciating asset. It becomes worth less, less and less as time goes on. I want to get rid of cash. I want to invest in real tangible assets like businesses and real estate and things like that. However, I want to be saving cash so that when a local competitor does go down, I have the money to step in, give the cash right away and get that acquisition. So we just finished one right now. I'm going to be talking a lot about it in a couple weeks at Landscape Summit. But this is something you have to think about. Save your cash. You have like maybe 10 competitors in your local market, maybe a 50, maybe a one or two. You've got to be saving cash because if there's ever a rainy day and they go up for sale, you can buy them for pennies on the dollar if you have cash, because you move fast. The reason we just got this recent acquisition is because I was able to move fast. There was cash in the bank. We had saved up for something like this and we were able to, you know, spring on the opportunity, take it and like massive mass, like the amount that we paid versus the value that we will make this business into by making the systems better, doing a few different, changing a few different things. Like it is incredible that one acquisition literally probably increased the value by like 10 times what we paid for it instantly. And we would not be able to do that if we didn't have cash in the bank. So save your cash, get ready for a rainy day because that's the time to buy your competitor out and that's the time you can make big jumps of revenue and easily double your business. That one acquisition will be probably 50% if not more than 50% increase in our business locally at Augusta Lawn Care. Alright, number one was take a pay cut and hire someone to do your job which will allow you to focus on the things that actually move the needle, which is hiring and it is getting more sales. That's what you gotta be focusing on. Whether it be marketing, branding, all those things. If you're not focusing on those things, take a pay cut, use that money to then go hire someone to do the jobs that you should not be doing. Number two, invest in branding over marketing, not 100%. Maybe you've only ever done marketing, maybe you've only done advertising. But start investing in branding because it is the thing that is going to pay dividends in the long run. Number three is save cash and get ready to buy out a struggling competitor. Because you can make massive leaps and bounds in revenue in talent acquisition, in brand, in size and scope of your footprint, in your marketplace and in your industry. This is the place you've got to be. These are the three things you must do to double your business. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you next time. Be great. Til nothing else pays.