Why Your Business Feels Boring (and What It Means)

If your business is on cruise control, it's profitable and you're trying to figure out what to do next. This video is for you when you're going from growth mode where all you think about is growing the business and you switch into profit mode. First off, we are going to raise prices. We are also going to not buy more trucks and equipment. So we're switching from growth mode where we buy trucks, hire more people, get more customers, to profit mode where we raise prices. We actually are not buying more trucks and equipment and just optimizing at the and then refill. And I'm staying there, I'm optimizing what am I supposed to do? And this is where I feel like so many people fail to really squeeze all the juice out of profit mode. Cause pricing is the biggest lever. The biggest lever in your business is raising your prices. Cause if you can raise your prices by 25%, you will likely double the profits of the business. The thing I don't talk a lot about is there are a lot of other levers inside of your business of operational efficiency. And that's the thing to really get maniacal about and really hyper focus once you switch into profit mode. Because in the past do follow up phone calls, how to do automations to follow up, those are things, those things are important for growth mode. But once you go into profit mode where those things are automated, you've already got that part figured out. You're not getting as many leads because you're not spending money on ads, you're not putting out thousands of door hangers. What am I supposed to be focused on now? Because now every single month I'm only getting 60 or 70 leads because I don't do any advertising. I'm not getting a 100, 120 like I was back in the day when I was in growth mode trying to grow the number of customers that I had. So what do I focus on? Operational efficiency. So we have pricing. That is a huge lever in the business once I go into profit mode. But there are so many other 1%, 2%, 3%, 4%, 10%, 15% wins in the business when it comes to operational efficiency. And the thing is when you were in growth mode, you just overlooked those things because you were focused on growth. And the most important thing to do when you are in growth mode is get to capacity. It is get more customers. So then once I get to more customers, I can get another truck, hire more people, increase top line revenue. And those are easy numbers to benchmark yourself against. How many trucks Do I have? How many customers do I have? What's my total revenue? What's harder is to quantify the impact that making operational efficiencies in your business more streamlined is going to make what's my interview process look like. Better yet, how do I even get applicants? Okay, maybe I, I should have a automation inside copilot that texts an applicant three days, two days, one day before their interview. You just completely overlook that. You're like, look, give the person the job, maybe hire two people knowing that one of them ain't going to work out and we just rock and roll because you're in growth mode. But in profit mode we start looking at operational efficiency and saving ourselves all the extra hassle of onboarding two people, knowing that one's not going to show up and instead investing a little time energy into making operational efficiencies, making sure that the one person is successful in their role. And so I just mentioned a few. They're like, how do I actually find talent, interview talent, retain talent, train talent. Like your training process, I can guarantee you, because I did the same thing in growth mode is completely overlooked and you just like throw people in the truck, you give them a uniform, maybe have a little sheet, go over a couple of things. All right, you're good to go. In profit mode, you're not hiring more people. And the chaos that is created in growth mode is you have new customers coming on all the time and they're the ones that need the most support and help. You also have a whole bunch of new employees that also need way more support, way more training, way more involvement. In profit mode you don't get ton, a ton of new customers. And so what we want to do is make things tighter and get the little cracks that you kind of overlooked in the past. We've got to get really hyper fixated and it's okay because the energy that you used to put towards getting new customers is now going to be deployed against solving little problems in the business, little chinks in the armor, little cracks. And it's not going to be as fun as growing by 20% this month or growing by 100% this year. Going to be. I'm going to take this entire day and I'm going to make sure that our email deliverability is higher because I remove all the links and all the images out of our emails and our text messages. I'm going to spend all of the day making sure that all of our automations are tweaked just right to increase our close ratio, increase Our conversion rate, increase the level of people that pay on time. I'm going to change the way that this document looks like for new employees. So they actually do a training, some sort of training checklist. Because in the past, you threw them in the truck. Now you might take a day, a week, two weeks, a month, figure out, okay, what does a new employee need to do their first day, their second day, their third day? What did I expect of them after a week? What should I expect them after two weeks? Who signs off on each of these tasks? Should I actually just throw them in the truck with all these roles and responsibilities, or should I have a checklist of, hey, day one, very simple task, day two, slightly more difficult. And over the course of two weeks, I actually train them up. And I know that everything in the business they actually trained on because someone's signing off on it each day. That's a training system that increases operational efficiency. You say, well, I don't really see the numbers, I don't see the revenue. But what doesn't show on a PNL is the fact that now your retention goes up, the amount of yellow slips and callbacks to customers property goes down. Your training is tighter. And for that reason, there's a lot of operational efficiencies that are gained. And that's not fun. It's not as sexy as growing your revenue or getting more trucks or hire more people, but it will make you more money if you're in business, business to make more money, being in growth mode is not it. It's being in profit mode. And the first lever you should be pulling is your pricing. Absolutely. But here's the thing. You can raise your prices a whole lot more if your churn gets cut in half because you trained your employees better and had way less callbacks. And so it's a compounding effect of fixing all these little things in the business. There's so much opportunity, but it takes a mindset change. And this is what I was talking about with the owner inside of Augusta is like, hey, in the past, you had these benchmarks of success, growth, revenue, employees, truck. All right, we're switching that to, I am looking at every little thing, and I'm willing to almost micromanage for a small period of time to ensure that we get operational efficiency. So maybe you listen to all the phone calls, the calls that are coming into your business. Maybe you actually sit down with your admin person, okay, when they say this, say this, okay? When they ask for this service, give them an upsell for this service, okay? When you do your opener, say your name like this, okay? If there's a gap in the call, say it like this. And this is a huge mindset change when you're going from growth mode to profit mode. Because if you think you're going to let your business go in cruise control and you not get in the operational weeds and you just raise prices, we hit capacity and we make more profit. And I won't ever try to fix things in the business. If you're thinking your business actually increase control, you are in the first steps of becoming completely obsolete. Technology is going to catch up with you. Competitors will catch up with you. They will. The person is maniacally focused on making their product and service better, will eventually catch up to you. And so if you switch from growth mode to profit mode, I am going to look at all the little tiny issues in my business that I used to overlook. I'm going to look at things like, what's the cost? Can I save a couple hundred dollars a month on this bill? If I park my trucks in a certain way, do I save an extra 10, 20, 30 seconds every single time? Can I actually standardize the type of fuel we're using, the type of truck that we're using? When we get a new piece of equipment, how does that enter the system? Do we have a protocol, a checklist for brakes? Checking the brakes, for checking the air pressure, for ensuring that the lights are all in the trucks? What's the safety protocol? Because what we're now trying to do is put defensive measures, walls, moats around the business. We're in profit mode. We're not trying to grow, grow, grow. We're trying to defend, defend. We're going on the defense. And one of those things is I'm going to have better training around safety so that I don't have a lawsuit that puts me out of business. So I'm looking for existential threats to the business, and I'm trying to guard those. I'm also ensuring that I'm modifying and improving slightly all my product and service. These are going to be massive, revolutionary changes. You're not going to institute technology now. We're going all robotic. We're going all electric. These are huge operational changes that you don't actually get a lot of benefit from. Going from gas to electric, from, from one type of machine to robotics is not going to give you the increase in efficiency that you think you're going to get. Where all the gains are are the 30 or 40 little tiny tweaks in your business. Modifying all the automations, changing the emails and streamlining the way the web forms look, streamlining the website. How do I get it from 3 seconds page load down to 1 second page load? These are all the little things that you have not thought about for years because you focused on growth. But by doing these things you're going to get equivalent of raising prices which is always the number one thing you do in profit mode. It's the biggest lever but there's so many other opportunities and you can deploy all that energy you have as an entrepreneur to change and improve and make things better towards operational efficiencies that you have overlooked. While you are in growth mode, I encourage you to do this. This is where all the money is made and make your business more efficient. Improve the product and service, reduce your churn, increase how fast you get to estimates by thinking about like instant pricing on your website. All these little things is where the real money is made. You stepped over those nickels to collect the quarters so you could grow the business. But now those pennies are adding up. The business is big enough to where making small little tweaks in the business makes a huge impact on the profit and loss statement.