MBA861 A Marketing Strategy That Works & How To Do It

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium support, and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster, and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O. Welcome to the Hunter, the business podcast that helps you build a business with less heartache and more results with our deep dive lessons from the Real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA and Webinar Ninja, our webinar platform. And in today's lesson, we're going to get into a very important topic, probably the most important topic when it comes to the survival of your business. Chances are, if you're in your first year of business and you haven't had the explosive growth of Instagram, you're still grinding. You're in the grind. And you're often asking yourself that nagging question, is my business failing? Will I be around next year or the year after that? Is my thing really a thing in my marketplace? These questions are absolutely normal and they're actually quite healthy. Too many business owners don't ask this question early enough. Now, a quick disclaimer. This episode. This lesson is going to be very, very honest, very straight up, because this is a serious issue and we need to tackle it head on. Let's get real. Failing is a real possibility for your business. For my business. Recognizing this is healthy and practical. Now, recognizing this doesn't mean that you can't turn things around. If things are not going well or you recognize that you are failing, you still can do well. Be successful, be a great entrepreneur. I mean, just ask Richard Branson, billionaire and founder of Virginia. He's had over 15 huge public business failures, from Virgin Brides to Virgin Cola. But he continues to be a success as an entrepreneur. He's still doing all right. You need to be aware of what's happening in your business and if and why it's failing. So in today's episode, you'll learn the number one reason why any business or product fails and how to detect it before it's too late. And because sharing is caring, you're going to learn from my own failures and how at times I was able to pivot and turn things around. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So let's start by just stating the number one reason any business fails. And it's one word. Money. Shocking, right? But let me explain. Some people think they fail because the site was not designed well enough, or the refund policy was too generous, or their Facebook ad campaign just didn't convert, or they simply didn't have what it takes. But here's the raw truth. Your business fails when more money goes out than comes in. When your expenses, including paying yourself a wage, is more than your revenue. Plain and simple. Now there are causes for this. But not having enough capital, not making more than you're spending, is a reason why any business fails. You need to make money. You need to make more money than you're spending. I know this seems over simplistic, but I can't tell you how many businesses I've seen struggle because they're not understanding this concept. They think they can grow. They think they can spend. They think they can dream without making money or not making enough money. The finances of your business is so important and I'm going to tell you later on, you don't need to be an accountant to understand this or how to get this in check and make sure that you could turn things around before things go really south. Money is important in business. Cash flow is important. Now let me be clear. There are many startups out there that are not making a profit at the moment, but they're not failures. Why? Because they're tracking their revenue growth trends. They know they'll be profitable in the not so distant future. They know because they have the data to prove it. Not a hunch. And we're going to talk about this type of data in detail later on. So let me give you an example. Say your business is making $5,000 a month, but your expenses are 8,000amonth. This is bad, right? You're spending 3,000 more than you're actually making, but your monthly growth is at 20%. That means in less than three months, the business will break even at 8K. That means that they're going to be making 8,000 and spending 8,000. And in seven months, they'll be making 16,000. If the rate of 20% growth maintains now, $16,000 is double their expenses. They're making 100% profit within seven months. Now, this is a very simplistic example. But if their expenses don't change, but their growth is strong and stays consistent, they can grind it out. But mind you, those first three months until they break even, they have to have enough capital to cover those losses, that 3k or so a month, every month. Long story short, businesses fail because their founders don't do the math. If you're the leader of your company, if you're the founder, if you're the CEO, it's your job. It's your job to do the math. And when I say do the math, there are two things you need to do. And you don't need to have an accounting degree to do these things. Again, these are very simple things that you can do. Number one, you need to take the time to make sure that you're profitable or that profitability is around the corner. That means you actually have to open up a spreadsheet. Look at all your expenses, look at all your revenue. Are you profitable right now? And remember, in that expenses column, you got to put down, if you're paying yourself or whatever your expenses are for, you know, living your life or your own personal expenses, that's an expense. So you got to make sure maybe you're profitable right now, but you need to make sure you need to know this. And if you're not, how off are you? Number two, you need to track revenue and expenses. I'm talking about ongoing. Got to keep on tracking this month in, month out. And if you're just getting started, if you're in that first few months, you may even want to track this, you know, every week or every two weeks. Now, I know you might be thinking, well, how do I do this when it comes to revenue or expenses? How do I track this stuff? How do I make sure that. That I know what's coming in and out? Well, luckily there's technology. Luckily there's some great software that you can use. I was in this space many times, and I've explored a lot of different options. And currently, when it comes to revenue and tracking growth trends and knowing how much money you should be making next month and the month after that according to your growth percentage, there's a great tool that we use called baremetrics. Bare Metrics is founded by Josh Pickford. He's a good guy. I know him a bit. But the thing about barometrics is that it's easy to use and it's gorgeous looking. It's not too expensive, especially if you're just getting started and they charge you based on your revenue. So the more money you're making, the more expensive your plan will be. So it kind of grows with you. Now, barometrics is great for tracking revenue, how much money you're making every month, how much reoccurring money you're making. This is especially important if you have a SaaS business or a business that has a reoccurring income, whether it's a membership site or a software. It also will track how much money you're making over the year as well as, you know, predictions or forecasts. Let's take a look at, you know, at the rate of your growth, when will you be hitting certain numbers? And this is really important to know when you're going to be profitable or how profitable you're going to be in the future. There are other tools out there. I recommend barometrics because we've used a lot. It does cost money to use, but it's money well spent because you're tracking your revenue and knowing exactly how much money you're making. And not to go too long on barometrics, but it ties right into your payment processor, whether It's Stripe or PayPal or Braintree or something else. So it knows exactly when you're charging customers and how much money you're making on a regular basis. Now, Braintree is not paying us a dime to say this. This is a pure testimonial from my own experience, my own recommendation. Do your homework and see if it's a good fit for you. But what about expenses? Money's coming out, right? So how do you track expenses? Well, we use a tool called Xeroxero. It tracks all your expenses right from your bank account. So you basically hook up your bank account to Xero and every time there's a deduction, and you can, you know, add credit cards, things like that, it tracks it and you can actually itemize what exactly that expense was. And it's great for tax purposes. And if you have an accountant they can use this software to, you know, do your taxes. It's very smart and easy to use. And you can also track overall revenue here, but no growth trend tools here. But you can at least know the most important stat at a glance is your revenue more than your expenses. So if you have an accountant, zero is great. If you don't have an accountant, zero is also great because it's going to give you the data you need. This is the bare minimum you have to do this. You have to know the money that's coming in, the trends are coming in, as well as your expenses. Now I'm going to give you some examples from my own experience. What happens when you don't do this. I remember one of the first online businesses I had was an ebay store. Now I was doing arbitrage, which means I was buying a product and then reselling it on Amazon for a higher price and making a profit. So I really didn't do any of this. I thought, hey, I'm making a profit. I know I'm going to be selling it more than I'm buying it for. So this should be a no brainer. I should be making money every single time I should be making a profit. No reason to do any accounting or, or look at my revenue or my expenses. Wrong, because there are other expenses other than your actual product and the actual price of the product that you're selling. I mean, ebay takes a fee, payment processors take a fee. You have your own expenses whether you're paying yourself or not. If you freelance somebody and hire somebody to do some work for you, if you're doing any kind of lead gen, if you have any kind of website that you're doing some content where you can drive traffic to, there's hosting, there's ad expenses, there's all these other expenses that you have to keep track of. And I kind of just ballparked it in my mind. Then after a year or so of doing this and working really hard, look at my bank account. I was like, there's not much difference from my statement, my balance from last year. I should be making more money. My expenses have really changed. I haven't spent the money that I made. Then I realized after sitting down, opening up an Excel sheet and putting down all my expenses and looking at all the profit I made that year, I realized my expenses were more than my profit. And I realized, wow, this business is failing. I had to tell myself the raw truth. Hey, this is not successful. A business has to be profitable to be successful. Okay? Now that I've drilled it in your head that you have to track profitability. What do you do? If you have tracked it and realized you're not profitable, your business is at the risk of failing, what do you do? You have three choices. Again, these are simple answers, but action needs to be taken. Number one, spend less. And this is the first thing I would do. Look at your expenses. I just recently did this with our business webinar, Ninja. Look at all your expenses. Is there anything that you can cut out? Is there anything that's not critical to you actually running the business? If you remove any of these expenses will affect your growth in any way? If so, how much will it affect? It is a marginal or will it really decrease growth? Be clinical. I mean, the larger your business, the larger your team, the more important this is. Take a look at everything. I mean, I looked at one of my item lines and it was a subscription to some training program. And that training program was great. But my staff has already all taken that training. And even though it's not a huge, huge expense, but it's expensive, it was about $500 a year. I thought to myself, well, do I really need this anymore? Do I need to renew next year? I don't. Because I can get somebody from my staff to train somebody new. They already learned it. They can train somebody else. That skill is already in my workforce, in my team, and they can help other people learn it as well. So I can cut that out. And you go through each item. One of the things that you can really look at is how you managing certain aspects of your business, like customer service. Are you using a separate software for customer service versus onboarding? Are using a different service for maybe your tutorials or your help desk? Maybe you can find a service that does all of them where you use their tool. It's more cost effective than using a whole bunch of other hodgepodge tools to make it happen, to make your business run. And it's costing you more because you're paying a monthly fee for each service. We're looking into that. We're actually in the process of moving from Zendesk to Intercom for our customer service. Now, Intercom has four different aspects that we actually use, but we don't have them all under one roof. It's all four different systems, four different actual monthly costs. And with Intercom, we can save some money by just using one service. It's a little bit more expensive than using one other service somewhere else. But we're going to be saving money overall because we won't be needing to sign up for all these separate services. You get the point. Be clinical. Look at every expense. What can you cut out? Cut it out. It's the first thing you can do that might be enough. That might be enough for you to be profitable. If not, option number two is that you have three choices. Number one is spend less. Number two, make more. You gotta make more sales. Now there are different things you could do. You can make more sales like I mentioned or you can just plainly make more money. Meaning that you can increase your prices, you can charge more, you can offer more. So one customer doesn't just buy once. They buy multiple times. You offer different products to them. You offer maybe more long term commitments. Go with an annual plan versus giving them an incentive to go with an annual plan versus a monthly plan. The bottom line is, is that you need to figure out ways to make more revenue. So option one, spend less. Option two, make more money. Whether that's raising prices, offering different services, converting existing customers to higher price services or long term commitments so it reduces churn. So you know that you're going to have that customer for the full year or two years and that'll keep things a little bit more consistent. And then there's a third option. Do both. Spend less, make more. That's optimal. That's really what you want to do now. This is a strategy you want to use to get profitable. Once you're profitable, you're going to have to take a look at your profits and what to do with it. And that's a different story because you're going to need to spend on your business to grow. Whether it's new talent, better talent, whether it's marketing, investing in research or technology or things like that. So mind you that you may be cutting expenses now, but you're going to need to spend on your business once you're profitable. Introducing new Sylvania LED Ultra fog and power sport lights. This powerful upgrade delivers cool white clarity and crisp visibility on the road ahead. So you can reignite the love for your car with lights that make it feel like day one. And built with a compact design for a DIY install. These fog lights are backed by over 100 years of lighting expertise to bring you LED ultra night vision and help you see better at night. 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To wrap up. Today's lesson on how to know your business is failing. The good news is you can know easily with the numbers. The numbers don't lie. I know that for some of us, we think that this is boring. Tracking the numbers and tracking revenue and all that stuff and expenses. It's not fun and as exciting as creating and putting things out there in the world. But if you want to continue to do that, you got to make sure you're profitable. This is so important now. If you can afford it and you just can't do this and you won't do it, you got to hire somebody to do it. Get a full time accountant, because you need to make sure this is in order. I can't tell you how many businesses I've seen and businesses that I've run. I just gave you an example with my ebay store, one of my first businesses that go under because of this. They're so wrapped up in the idea and the product and the implementation, which is all important. But they forget if I do it, if I actually go through it, will I be making money? And that's the purpose of a business. You need to make sure you're profitable. Yes, there are benefits to running a business like helping others and offering great features and offering great solutions and helping people with their issues and their problems and their pains. All that stuff is great. And that's why we're entrepreneurs. But you can't keep doing that if it's not sustainable, if you're not making money, if you're not making more money than you're spending, get this in order or you're asking for trouble. And once this is in order and your revenue is more than your expenses, you're making a profit, a consistent profit. You can start to work on your growth and how fast you want to grow. If you want to grow slowly and that way you don't have to, you know, hire more people very quickly. That's up to you. But now you're in that privileged state where you can control the tap a little bit, where you can say, okay, this is how fast I want to grow. This is how slow I want to grow. Now that everything is taken care of, your expenses are taken care of, your expenses, your actual personal expenses, paying yourself is taken care of and your business is sustainable. It's a good place to be. So use that as a motivator to actually get this in order. If you have everything in order, good for you. That is fantastic. Keep it up. Don't lose sight of that even when you grow, even when you expand. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I hope this lesson was helpful. If it was, let me know in an itunes rating and review. Let me know what you think of the show, what you thought of this particular lesson, or any particular lesson. We love hearing from you. Your feedback really helps us improve the show, lets us really tweak things and give you what you're looking for and really teach the things that you need. Just go to itunes and search the $100 NBA show and just rate and review us. Thank you so much in advance. All right, everybody, that's it for me today. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. The one thing I realized as I grew as an entrepreneur, the more success I had was a direct result of me building better habits, having better habits as an entrepreneur. And the number one habit that has helped me is being mindful of our expenses and our revenue. This is something that's always a top of mind. And as a leader of your company, you need to be on top of this. You have to be top of mind of this. Even if you have a full time accountant, you need to know where you stand because you're going to be making decisions all the time about what to spend, how you're going to spend your revenue, what kind of hires, how many hires, how much you're going to spend on those hires. I need to know if you're able to do that. No reason to think about hiring somebody new if you can't afford it. You get the point. Embrace it. Make it part of your skill set and I guarantee you will not regret it. All right, guys, I'll check you in the next episode. See you next Monday. Take care. Of.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll. ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.