MBA1121 Is Your Business Growing Too Slowly?

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Hey. Oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show Business Lessons to keep you going every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm 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 lesson you will learn how to know if your business is growing too slow. This is a question. Is your business growing too slow? This is a question we ask ourselves a lot, especially when we're starting as entrepreneurs. We're not really sure what success looks like. We're not really sure if we should be doing better, if we're doing lousy, if the business is heading towards success or failure. Well in today's lesson, we're going to make sure that you know the answers to those questions. And this is imperative so you can keep on going so you can keep building your business. If you don't know if you're making progress, then it's very demotivating. You don't know if you should keep on going. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So how do you know if your business is growing too slow? Well, the first thing we have to do is define what too slow means. If you started your business a month ago, and you're making $1000 in revenue, and then next month you make 1500. That's a 50% growth. That may seem insignificant to you, but that's pretty good. But says who? And that's what we have to do. First, we have to define what successful growth looks like along our journey. We want to create some milestones, and maybe our goal is not particularly money. Maybe it's users or email subscribers or traffic to our website. You need to choose. So the first thing you're going to do here is you're going to choose. What area in your business do you really want to grow? And I just named a few. It could be money, it could be revenue. It could also be profit. Maybe you don't really care about how many sales you make, but how much money you actually get to take home. It could be traffic to your website. It could be email subscribers. It could be signups. How many people sign up for your service? My advice is that when you're getting started, choose one metric, one piece of data, and a lot of people feel that revenue is the easiest one to track. How much money are you actually making in sales? This is really, really helpful and very important to allow you to be focused. This is actually the strategy that Facebook has been using for the last few years or since they started. They only have one goal, and that's growth. How many people sign up to Facebook users? So you need to define what your 1 growth goal is. So let's say you choose revenue. How much money you make in sales every month? When you get started, you want to have milestones. So after three months, you want to hit a milestone. After six months, you want to hit a milestone. After a year, you want to hit a milestone. After your first year, you want to aim for a certain percentage of growth. Now, how do you know what to set your milestones to? Well, it depends on what you want. And that really goes back to the actual goal you have the growth goal. If you want more users, that should be your goal. If you want more revenue, that should be your goal. If you want more email subscribers so you can grow a huger audience, that's really the goal you have right now. That should be your goal. Find out what you really want. And that goes as well with the milestones. What do you really want? Well, maybe you're saying to yourself, I want to be able to build a huge company that makes lots of money. Why? Why do you want to do that? Well, I want to be able to be semi retired. I want to be able to have enough money to travel the world and not really worry about my nine to five. Well, find out how much that's going to take. Don't use nebulous ideas in your head to gauge if you're being successful or not, if you're growing fast enough or not. Find out. Do the math. How much money do you need? You might do the math and find out. Well, I actually only need $180,000 in actual profit at the end of the year to be able to live the life I want. Well, if that's the profit, how much revenue do you need to make to hit that goal after all your expenses? Well, you might be saying, oh, it's around $400,000 I gotta hit. Okay, so remember, this is your goal. You wanna make this much money so you can be able to live that life. Now you gotta allow yourself some time to, to reach that goal. Well, how much time do you have? See how we're dealing with reality? How much time do you have? Well, if you have some time, if you have four years, that should be your goal. If you could build this business while you have your job for a year and then transition to full time entrepreneurship, because, hey, you got your revenue up to that milestone of maybe a hundred grand a year and that's enough for you to live off. Great. So set up your goals according to what you want, what you can do. So, so let's say it's four years to hit that milestone of 400,000 in revenue, and you want to be able to quit your job within a year. And you're going to need to make a hundred thousand dollars in sales to be able to quit your job. So we got to set up some milestones. Milestone number one will be in the three month mark, you guessed it, we got to hit $25,000 in sales. Because three months is a quarter of a year. Six months, 50 grand, and a year, a hundred grand. Once you hit that hundred grand, now you can start trying to pace yourself month by month by a percentage of growth. What percentage of growth do you need to have to hit 400,000 by the end of the next three years? Because you've already had a year passed. Now, I know this is a lot of math and you may have to pull up a spreadsheet, but data is your friend. Data allows you to kind of erase all the doubts and the nebulous ideas in your head and actually gives you facts to base your hunches on, to base your feelings on. So now when you ask yourself, am I growing too Slow. Well, look at the numbers. Are you on track or are you not on track based on the goals that you set? Not anybody else. Not compared to anyone else. Not compared to your competitors or your other buddy that's in business, everybody's life and circumstances are different. So make sure you set yourself up so you know how to track your own goals. Well, now what do you do if you are going too slow? If you're growing too slow based on your goals? Well, you gotta take a look at why this is happening again. Data is your friend. How many people are visiting your website? How many people are signing up for a free trial? How many people sign up to your email list? How many from that list become customers? You gotta get this data down so you can know where your leaky points are. Where are the weak points you might realize, wow, your conversion rate is really high. People that sign up for your newsletter or sign up for your opt inside become customers. 25% of them. That's huge. That just means you need more people to opt in. So you need more traffic. That means you need more content marketing. You need to do some marketing in general. Maybe marketing is not your problem. Maybe you have a conversion problem. Maybe you have a hard time communicating what your product does and you have to be simpler, clearer. Maybe you need to post a video on your homepage explaining what the benefits are of your product. That way your conversion rate increases. Sometimes when we just increase our conversion rate by a few percentage points, it can make the world of a difference. If you get a thousand people coming to your website every day and you convert at 5%, that's 50 people that become customers. That's huge. But if you take that 5% and just increase it to 7%, you got 70 people every day in a month. Those extra 20, that's 600 extra customers. That's going to give your growth quite a push. So find out where you're lacking and the only way to do that is to track it with. We have lots of lessons here on the 100 LMBA Show. Hit subscribe so you can get the archives. And we have a whole series on using Google Analytics so you can learn how to get all this data.

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To wrap up today's lesson, you need to define your own growth goals. And it's all based on your own needs, your own life circumstances. And this is not only for people who are beginners. This is for anyone who's starting any kind of business. This could be your 10th business. A friend of mine who's very successful at business, has multiple eight figure businesses, is starting a whole new software business. He's just getting started with his business, but he has growth goals that are 10 years out. He understands that he's not really going to be super competitive until another few more years and then he's going to build upon that competitive spirit and grow his company. And by the time he hits the 10 year mark, he's really hit where he wants to be. When you look at a company's growth over a 10 year period, it forces you to be patient. It forces you to realize that this takes time. And I need to just make sure that I'm constantly growing and moving forward. And when I'm not moving forward, when I'm not growing, I'm having a lackluster month or two months or quarter or even a year. I need to ask myself why? Why is that happening? I gotta be honest, is it me? Am I not putting in the work and the time and the effort and the dedication? Is it the product itself? Are customers not resonating with it? Is it the price point? Or maybe I'm just not communicating the idea clearly. Explore all these options and find out how can you turn it around. Or if you want to turn it around again, it's your choice. And that's what growth is all about. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us an iTunes rating and review. It takes two seconds and just tap on the COVID art if you're listening on Apple podcasts and you can click on the button that says write a review. We'd love to hear from our audience about what they love about the show. So we can keep doing it. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. If your growth goal, let's say, is revenue growth, and you have a month that just dips a little, it could sting, it could hurt. Use it as motivation to rally to come back stronger the next month and make up for that loss. Easy to get down to the dumps and just slide into this downward spiral. No, don't let that happen. Understand that that's just part of the game. Businesses is up and down. Just don't stay down too long. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode, Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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