This 1 Mistake Is Killing Your Business (Don't Let This Happen To You!)

Hey guys, Sabri Subhi here. And today I just wanted to make a 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. 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. 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 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 in the bank account. 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. However, when you factor in inflation, it's actually costing you money to keep that money in a bank account. You know, money is energy and you want to pump that energy back into your business, refeed 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 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, that's not very exciting. Now if you look at property as an investment vehicle, if you look at over the last 10, 20, 30 years, the average returns are 12%. Now, I know I'm gonna 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%. Let's take another one. Let's go for instance and have a look at like the stocks and bonds like you're typically looking at again, 7 to 9%. A dollar's going in, you're getting a dollar and 7 cents back or a dollar and 9 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 do that through advertising and specifically paid advertising. 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. 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. 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 onto 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 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. I know the unit economics. I know how much a lead is worth to my business. I know how much 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 fast fire to come back in? So 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 what I mean? And that's okay. As long as you are out there multiplying money, if you down and actually just think about it, 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 getting attention and getting 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 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, like 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 from 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. 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. 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 sales people and then 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, you know, 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 in. 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? Right. 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 gonna allow you to get to what your goals are. Hey, guys, if you're enjoying these videos, please, like, subscribe and hit the bell button as we're dropping a video like this every other day on YouTube. And if you've got any questions, just leave a comment below with heysubrey and I will do my to get to it.