MBA1107 How to Prepare for Growth + Free Ride Friday!

Want to sell your car your way? Who wouldn't? That's why CarMax offers a car selling experience designed just for you with online and in store options. Want to know what your car is worth quickly? Get an online offer in under two minutes. Want to think it over? Use OfferWatch to keep tabs on your car's value over time. Plus, CarMax offers flexible selling options with Express drop off in store or pickup at home. Selling your car is in your control with CarMax. Want to drive CarMax pickup not available everywhere. Restrictions and fee may apply. See carmax.com for details.

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And once you've left the server, you automatically enroll in the draw every week. Automatically. Until of course, you win. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Valuable business nutrition for you every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn how to prepare for growth. You might be getting ready for a launch or you might get mentioned or know that you're going to be mentioned in a big publication. Coming up online, somebody in your marketplace might be promoting your product or service and your business is about to grow. Sales are about to pour in. How do you make sure your business is prepared for it? These are golden opportunities for success. You don't want to waste them. You want to make sure that your business is ready and that you perform well when you have some traffic, when you got sales pouring in. A lot of us, we are just hoping to get some growth. We forget to prepare for it. Let's make sure that's not us. And that's what today's lesson is all about. I'm going to give you five steps, five things to make sure that you cover your bases. Because before your business starts to blow up, even if you just find out that, hey, you got mentioned in a big publication, you're starting to get some traffic, you can implement these strategies to make sure things don't go south. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. All right, let's jump right into it. Let's talk about the five things you can do to prepare for growth. Now, for most of us who have an online business, business will get done on your website. This is where your business transactions will happen. So we're going to focus on making sure your site is ready for that kind of traffic, that kind of growth. So the first thing is you got to make sure that your website hosting is up to snuff. This is where your site is being hosted. If you don't know where your site's being hosted, what kind of plan you have, what kind of traffic it can handle, you need to find out right now who's your hosting provider? You have no idea. One way to find out is who is searched. Just Google who is, and you can pop in your website address and it will tell you where your website is registered as well as where is it being hosted. And then that might ring a bell. Ah, yeah, I hosted it with hostgator. Oh no, that was WP Engines where I hosted it. Or I'm using something like Squarespace, which includes hosting. Now, why is this so important? Well, a lot of times when you sign up for your website, you're choosing the lowest price and the lowest hosting, and that's not going to be enough. If you're going to get thousands of people coming at the same time, your site will crash and they'll not be able to check out. Or worse, they could crash while they're checking out. What a horrible experience that is. They'll never come back to your website after that. So prepare before you do get that traffic and make sure you have enough hosting power. Most hosting providers will tell you how much traffic it will handle, like a hundred thousand visitors a month, 500,000, that type of thing. I think you should aim to have at least 250,000 visitors per month when you're in that beginning growth period and even beyond a million visitors a month, most successful blogs and websites have that kind of traffic. If your product is an actual app, like a iOS app, Android app, or a software that people use online, you gotta make sure that whatever host you're using to host your app will scale and will handle the traffic of all the people that are buying and downloading your software. If you're using aws, Amazon Web Services, you should be using something called the Elastic Beanstalk, which will auto scale. So no matter how much traffic you get, you can handle it. All right? That's number one. Number two is your website content, the information that you provide on your website. You gotta make sure that when you're getting all these visitors, you capitalize, review all your website pages, make sure that your homepage is compelling. If you have video, make sure your video is working perfectly. Blog posts, make sure you have something for people to chew on, to get to know who you are, to get value from your website and say, hey, this is an awesome place. Let me bookmark it. I always say your website's like your house. If you want people to come over your house, you got to make sure that you offer them something. A cup of water, a meal, something. So if somebody comes to your website, you have nothing for them to offer. So if they come to your website and you don't have anything to offer them for free, like content, then they're going to be like, this place is boring, I'm out of here. So make sure your content on your website is ready and ready for visitors. Speaking of visitors, make sure, number three, that you have enough opt ins so so people can subscribe to your email list. You're gonna get a lot of traffic in this growth period, so make sure you capitalize on this traffic. Not everybody's going to buy, not everybody's gonna be a customer. Most people won't be a customer. But you need to make sure that you can be able to contact them later on and tell them about your promotions, give them more great content, tell them about your new products. And you can't do that unless they give their email address. So make sure you have enough opt in boxes. These are the boxes that you see on websites and popups that allow people to give their name and email address to subscribe to your newsletter or to get a free course, or to get a free ebook or downloadable. These content upgrades at the bottom of a blog post. Make sure you got plenty of these on every page. It should be a priority for you to collect Email addresses when you're growing so you can be able to market to your visitors well past when they left your website. Too many people put this in the back burner, say they're going to do this later. No, no, no. Every visitor counts. Every time somebody comes to your website, your goal is to at least get them to sign up for your newsletter. Get them to sign up with your email address. If they're not gonna buy, at least you have their email address so you can continue the relationship. Build that relationship, build that trust. Alright, Number four, the fourth way to make sure you prepare for growth is a biggie and that's customer support. You gotta make sure that you are prepared to handle the traffic, you are ready to serve these customers. You're gonna get people that are gonna ask you a ton of questions before they buy, after they buy, during the buying process. And you got to make sure that you have enough hands on deck, whether that's you and your co founder or your customer service team, whether you have email support or chat support or whatever. You can't have people hanging because customer support is their first impression of your business and your service and the delivery of your product. So if somebody asks you a question before buying your product, like do you take American Express? They send an email in. If they don't get an answer in an efficient time, they're going to look elsewhere for a solution to their problem. You want to make sure that you can answer these questions as quickly as possible. My opinion within minutes. We found in our business that there is no middle ground. Either you answer your customer's questions within five minutes or within 24 hours. That's pretty much it. If they're not going to get it within five minutes, it's going to be the same impression within 24 hours. Obviously beyond 24 hours, that's really, really slow. So you really should strive to get into that sweet spot of getting their answers to them as quickly as possible of 5 minutes. This is easily done with email support software like Intercom. And even if you just do email support, try to get back to them as soon as possible, within the hour and they'll appreciate that. They'll get a positive first impression about how you serve your customers. Some of us were looking for traffic. We launch, we get some publicity, maybe somebody well known retweets something that you posted and all of a sudden you get all this traffic to your website and you're not prepared and your customer service just completely breaks down. I remember when we launched Web Indonesia 5.0, we hired a whole bunch of new customer service agents a month in advance, trained them up and made sure they were ready to go before we launched. When we launched, we were ready for all the questions, everything, so we could serve our customers without skipping a beat. And remember, the more customers you have, the more agents you're going to need. So if you're looking for growth, this is not just for the initial traffic. This is for your business after you've grown. Right. Your business and beyond. So take this seriously. Make sure your support's up to snuff. You have enough hands on deck to serve your customers as you grow.

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All right, the fifth tip in preparing for growth is to make sure you contact your payment processor. This is especially important if you use PayPal as your payment processor. But whether you use PayPal or Braintree or Stripe or whatever, or your own merchant account, you need to make sure you contact them and let them know that, hey, you're going to get an influx in sales in the near future. Why? Because often there are automated flags in the system that get raised when all of a sudden you're making all this money and there's all this transactions happening. PayPal is notorious for doing this. They'll flag your account and freeze your account. You may not be able to withdraw your funds, and worse, you may not be able to even take more transactions on. So give them a heads up. Let them know that, hey, you're expecting a bit of traffic even if you just found out right now, right now, you noticed, hey, I got published on Forbes. I might be getting some traffic. A surge of traffic and a surge of sales. Contact your payment processor. Hey, I just got mentioned in Forbes. I'm going to get a lot of Traffic right now, in the next few days. So if my sales increase dramatically, this is why, please do not lock down the account. This helps you tremendously to get ahead of the curve. Now I have to say, honestly, this has never been an issue for me with Stripe, but it doesn't hurt to shoot them an email. Now remember, they're doing this for your protection. They want to make sure that there's no fraud happening. And a lot of times it's just automated. I would definitely contact them via email so there is a paper trail. So there is a conversation, not by phone. You want to make sure that it's by email so that you can always refer to it. So just in case something does happen, they do freeze it. Even though you email them beforehand, you can say, hey, please unfreeze this immediately. I've warned you about this. I've contacted you before. This, this is what's going on. This is not fraud. This is expected. Well, there you have it. Those are my five tips for preparing for growth. Number one, make sure your website hosting can handle the traffic. Number two, make sure your website content is great, is refined. You have something for people to chew on when they visit your website. Number three, capitalize on that traffic and make sure you have a way to grab their name and email address so you can market to them later. Now, all of them are going to be buyers. So those who do visit and don't buy, at least you grab their email address. So have those opt in boxes around your website. Number four, make sure your customer support team is ready. You have enough staff, you have enough hands on deck to handle support issues. Number five, contact your payment processor and give them a heads up. There you have it. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. That wraps today's lesson. But today's episode is not over because it's Free Ride Friday. I gotta give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away ezcourse today. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. Evorg zero. Evorg zero says perfect way to start the day. Five stars. Listening to Omar's show is an upbeat way to commute to work. The content is sharp and I like how he explicitly mentions the software and tools he uses in his business. The content is sharp and I really appreciate how he mentions or explicitly describes the programs or softwares he recommends. Well, thank you Evo0 for the awesome review. You are a Free Ride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me at omar100mba net so you can claim your free ride. We do this every Friday. Everybody just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw to win a lifetime membership to one of our programs. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Difficulty in your business can be a challenge, but success can be a challenge too. How you handle the success, how you prepare for that success is something we all have to consider. Sometimes we're just so hungry for success we don't think about preparing for it. Don't let that be you. Make sure that whatever you are looking to gain to get out of your business, that you're ready to show up and be successful when you get there. Just like an athlete wants to be a champion, they got to make sure they can perform well when they get to that championship game. Same thing for you as an entrepreneur. All right, I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of Foreign.

To sell your car your way. Who wouldn't? That's why CarMax offers a car selling experience designed just for you with online and in store options. Want to know what your car is worth quickly? Get an online offer in under two minutes. Want to think it over? Use OfferWatch to keep tabs on your car's value over time. Plus, CarMax offers flexible selling options with express drop off in store or pickup at home. Selling your car is in your control with CarMax. Want to drive CarMax pickup not available everywhere. Restrictions and fee may apply. See carmax.com for details.