The Word Of Mouth Virus Killing Your Business

Hey guys, Sabri Subhi here. And today I just wanted to make your video for you from this issue that I see that is just completely rampant in the business community. And this thing is like a virus. That literally infects businesses and really the founders of businesses and they don't even know that they have it. And that's this issue of people wearing the fact that they don't advertise or that they get all their customers from word of mouth as like a badge of honor and they like shine it up and they just walk around with it on their chest just as a complete badge of honor, of pride. Like you speak to people and they're like, yeah, like, I don't advertise. I get all of my customers from word of mouth. And like, as soon as that comes out of somebody's mouth, like, I know that they're broke and I know that they're playing down here when they could be playing up here. And it's not that I have anything against word of mouth that we get a lot of word of mouth business in my business from the work that we do. And it's great, right? It's like the icing on the cake. But it isn't the cake, it's like having a bowl of icing. What are you going to do with this thing if you don't have new customers coming in to fuel that word of mouth engine? Really, if you think about like your business, right, just say for instance, you're getting two to three clients per month from word of mouth and each client is worth a couple of grand to you and you've been doing that for a number of years. And typically most businesses have like a little nest egg or like a safety net of cash that's sitting, sitting in the bank account, right? And when you speak to most businesses that are being successful, that nest egg is at least a million bucks where they've just got kind of a million dollars sitting there in cash. And you know, if you look around the world right now and you look at like the interest rates that you get paid on that cash, it is literally abysmal. You don't actually get paid like we're talking about, you know, 1, 2, 3% max. However, when you factor in inflation, it's actually costing you money to keep that money in a bank account. And most people don't look at it that way. And you know, if you have that money just sitting away and it's not working, it's actually just degrading and it's regressing and it's losing value. You know, money is energy and you want to pump that energy back into your business, re feed it back in as like a feedback loop and really just accelerate your business. Because if you've got a bunch of cash sitting in your bank account, let's just have a little look and kind of what the different investment vehicles are like. If you've got a million bucks sitting in the bank account or 100k or 500k, let's have a look at how you can put that money to work. So we've already covered, if you look at a high interest savings account, 1 to 3% max. Yeah. Putting $1 in and getting a dollar and 3 cents back. Right. So that's not very exciting. Now obviously, then there's property investment and stocks and bonds. Let's have a little those right now. If you look at property as an investment vehicle and if you look at over the last 10, 20, 30 years, the average returns are 12%. Now, I know I'm going to have a whole bunch of property people jumping in and hating on this and saying, oh well, my clients get a 2 or 300% return or whatever it might be. And look, that may be the case in isolated incidents, right. Or that might be the case in a certain market. But if you look, I've looked at the stats and if you basically have a look over the last 10, 20, 30 years, the average returns are 12%. Now let's take another one, let's go for instance, and have a look at like the stocks and bonds. Like that's a, you know, a way that you could invest money in and get a return back on that money. Right? And typically, if you look at stocks and bonds as an asset to invest in and get a return on your money, you're typically looking at again, 7 to 9%. Right. A dollar is going in, you're getting a dollar and seven cents back or a dollar and nine cents back. This isn't the kind of thing that's going to build generational wealth. It's not something that's really going to elevate you to a whole new level. And you know, there are better ways to do it. And that's really by investing in your business, Right. There's no other vehicle that can give you the returns to invest in your business. You need to get attention. You need to get in front of your prospects to create opportunity for more people to buy whatever the product or service is that you're selling. And you know, what is the way that you do that? You do that through advertising and specifically paid advertising. Okay? So, you know, if you. If you can kind of have a machine where you put $1 in and $2 comes back out, or $3 or $5 or $10, like, these are not unheard of numbers. Like, these are very common in online advertising and marketing and just a general advertising to be getting those kind of returns where you put a dollar in and $2 comes back out, or you put $1,000 in and, you know, two, three, five, even $10,000 comes back out. So the question that, you know, I pose to these people is that, like, yeah, look, word of mouth is great, and it's a fantastic way to get new clients in, but that doesn't change the fact that if I was in the market for the product or service that you sell and, you know, what am I doing when I'm looking for a product or service, right? Am I going and asking all of my friends and just hoping that they have somebody, or am I jumping onto Google? Well, you know, 94% of people are jumping on Google and looking for products and services. So if you're not there, you are literally invisible to your marketplace, right? So while you're getting the word of mouth, you know, if my wife or my brother or my best friend or myself was in the market for what it is that you do and we jumped on the Google and we couldn't find you, how would you ever get our business? How would we ever be able to come a client with you? And that's a question that I put to a lot of business owners, and they basically just shrug and say, well, you wouldn't be able to find us right now. That's an opportunity, right? That's an opportunity that you can take that money that's just sitting there and rotting and you can put it to work and you can start to multiply that. You know, in my business, you know, if our ads go down for some particular reason, like, I am running around these offices like a madman, and I'm like, we need to get the ads live. Call our rep, call our rep, call our Facebook or Google rep. Like, we need to get back online immediately. Now, that's the mindset of somebody that wants to grow, that wants to push and wants to scale. I'm not looking at if my ads go down for a day or a couple of hours, like, oh, awesome, I get to save some money. I look at what is that costing my business to not be out there in the marketplace and getting new clients in? Because, you know, I know the unit economics. I know how much a lead is worth to my business. I know how much, you know, running traffic is worth to my business. So when I don't run it for a day or for an hour, it's costing me money. And that's really the way that you want to think about it is all this time that you go without pushing and shoving and getting your message out there to the marketplace, you are literally losing so much money. It's not. You're not winning. You're not in an incredible situation because you get all your customers. Word of mouth, no great business was built by word of mouth alone. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's a lot of a viral loop that gets businesses growing and growing really quickly. But at the end of the day, you know, it comes down to how are you getting that initial customer base, how are you going out there and fueling that fire to come back in to. Then it kicks off a lot of word of mouth, customers coming in from referrals and other people talking about you in the marketplace. So, you know, we do SEO in our business. You know, we do Facebook ads, Google Ads, remarketing Gmail ads, YouTube, like every single avenue that. That really you can do. And you're not always going to get the same return on each channel, do you know? I mean, and that's okay as long as you are out there multiplying money. Because growing a business, like, if you sit down and actually just think about it, most people have like these esoteric ideas, and they're like, how am I going to grow my business? Or I really want to get to this scale in my business. You know, growing a business is mathematics. That's literally it. Once you've got a firm grip on those numbers and, you know, for, you know, how much a lead is worth to your business, basically what you can do is you can pick a goal, like a financial goal for your business that you want to hit, and it might be a million dollars a year. And once you start running some ads for a while and some advertising and start, you know, getting attention and getting lead leads coming in or getting sales coming in, you can find out what it costs you to get a customer. Then you can divide how many leads you need to get in order to get a customer, and you can work out exactly how much a lead is worth to your business. And then if we come back to like that $1 million target or a 10 million or $100 million target, and then you can just back into that, you can reverse in and Go. Okay, cool. I want to get to a million. This is how many leads I'm going to need to get. This is how much I'm going to need to spend in order to get those leads. And this is how many customers it's going to generate for my business. So when you're looking at growing your business, unless you are advertising, you know, you're going to be operating by whatever fate just falls in your lap that month. Like, I had a great month. I got three referrals this month, right? You know, that's no way to look at growing a business because as I said, okay, you want to get to a million dollars. Like, you know, how many referrals are you going to need to get that? And then how are you going to just generate those referrals like clockwork, where, you know, without a shadow of a doubt they're coming into your business? And that predictability and that consistency is what you literally need in your business for you to have the peace of mind to be able to go out there and like, hire people and pay salaries and get an office and start investing in your business as a vehicle for wealth. Like, you need that predictability. Otherwise you're just going to be up at night, like tossing and turning, and you're going to wake up at 3am in like a deep sweat, panicking, like, holy shit, how am I going to make pay run right now? And if you're kind of having these thoughts right now, I can tell you right now that's because you haven't found a way to predictably and consistently go out there and buy customers. Yes, buy them. Go out there and spend money to buy them and bring them in your business where you make more than what it costs you to buy them enough to sustain your business in high enough volumes that you can repeat that cycle and you can go and hire more people and then get. Generate more leads and more salespeople and more people to deliver the work. And you can start building a machine that runs without you and will ultimately help you to get to where you want to go. So I've got one piece of advice. It's like, you know, in terms of word of mouth, like, that's fine if you want to be doing that in your business, and every business should be doing that. But what you really need to do is find out a way that you can hire somebody or you can run ads yourself and you can get people. You can get your message in front of people, get them to generate a lead or do whatever it is that you're asking them to do bring them into your business consistently where you know exactly how much they're worth to you and your business over their lifetime and how much it costs you and then it's all a matter about where do we want to go like we can just turn the dial up and scale this puppy up to whatever it is that I want to do and you're not just sitting around thinking like how am I going to do that I really wonder like what is the next steps for me to grow my business? You will know without a shadow of a doubt like this is exactly how much you need to spend in order to get you to your target so I highly suggest that you basically you know if you're one of those people that looks as not advertising as a badge of honor you need to get that badge and you need to burn that sucker because that's holding you back. It's a limiting belief and that's not going to allow you to get to what your goals are. It.