MBA892 How To Master The 3 Branches of Your Business

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And you might be pretty surprised with some of the truths I'm gonna be giving you in today's lesson. But the reason why I wanna give this lesson is because these three aspects are so important and without them, you have a business on your hands. You can't stay in business, you can't grow, you can't be profitable. So you got to make sure you have these three branches in order. How to manage them, how to prioritize them. That's what today's lesson is all about. I'm going to go into detail about each branch because it's quite important to know why they're important because there's going to be times in your business where you're going to need to make a decision between focusing on one branch versus the other. You ever get stuck in business and you're like, I don't really know what's going to move the needle. How do I push it forward? Is it advertising? Is it sales? Is it service? I need to change the product. Understanding these three branches will guide you in these difficult times. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So how do you master the three branches of your business? Well, let's get into detail what these three branches are and how to prioritize them, depending on the phase your business is in. Are you just getting started? Are you starting to mature and be profitable, or are you really mature, a global brand and you're at that level or you're even looking to sell your company? All right, so let's get into it. Branch number one. The first branch is what I call smarketing. Now why do I call it smarketing? Well, it combines sales and marketing. They kind of go hand in hand. You could see this as a department or a focus in your business. This will include writing blog posts, doing podcast episodes. This is content marketing, making sales calls, doing webinars, sales copy, email copy, everything to get people to recognize and to get eyeballs on your product and then convert those people into customers. So we're gonna call that smarketing. Branch number one. Branch number two is your product itself. You can call it product, you can call offering. So no matter what you're offering your customers, this is number two. It could be physical goods, it could be software, it could be a service like being a photographer. But at the end of the day, you're delivering something in exchange for money. That's something I like to call a product, and that's a branch in your business. Building that product, improving that product. For us at Webinar Ninja, for example, our product is the software itself. Building the software, improving, adding features, sometimes removing features that people don't like, making it more efficient, faster, things like that. That's the product, all right. Branch number three is service. And that's taking care of your customers or even your potential customers. So you could see this kind of cyclical. You know, you're going to market to people, they're going to buy your product, and then when they buy your product, you're going to serve them through customer service, through follow up, through training. And that good service is going to keep them as customers as well as leave a good taste in their mouth. They're Going to tell others about their great service and that will market your business and then the cycle begins. But you need these three in your business. No matter what your business is, you need to have some sort of sales and marketing strategy and team and effort. And that team could just be you. But the point is, is that there's gotta be some sort of action to get people to know about your product as well as buy it. You need to have a product. This could be a product that you created or a product that you're reselling, like Amazon. I mean, most of Amazon products are not their own. And lastly, service is making sure your customers are happy, answering questions, and even servicing people that might be interested in your product. You can call that service or you can even throw that in the marketing bucket. The point is, is that you have to take care of your customers once you have them. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of money, a lot of time to get your customers in the first place. It's a lot more important to keep your customers, keep them happy and keep them buying than trying to get new customers. A lot easier to do that. It's a lot more important. So service is a huge, huge part. And it's what they're going to remember. It's the experience they're having with your company, with your brand. So why these three and how do you prioritize these when you're starting out, let's say in phase one. Now, in my experience, most people will focus on branch number two the most, the product, which is not a terrible thing to do. But often they focus to the point they neglect the other branches where they just want to perfect the product. They want to just work on the product, they want to work on their craft. And they're not really too bothered about marketing or sales. They don't really have a system or even somebody to take care of service for them. Customer service, answering emails, answering questions, and they just put their head down and work on the product. This is common in a lot of freelance businesses, especially in the arts, whether it's filmmaking or photography or graphic design, they just focus on their craft. They love their art. They try to, you know, create the best art. But let me tell you something, just as a business owner, if I don't know about you, I can't buy what you're offering. So you have to be able to market and sell. And if dealing with you, if you know the service that you offer, your quote unquote bedside manner is horrible, I'm not gonna wanna deal with you again. I'll just find another person to provide me that service. It might not be perfect, it might be the same level of quality, but it'll be close. And the person will respond to my emails, they'll be kind to me, they'll be on time, they'll stay in budget, stay in deadline, and the experience will be better. And I'll go with that person because they focused on all the branches. Don't get me wrong, the product is important. This is what people are buying. But it's not the only thing that's important. And in fact, it's not the thing at every stage in your business, especially when you're starting out. A lot of people don't put their product out because they think it's not perfect enough. Let me save you the trouble. It's not going to be perfect. In fact, one of my favorite quotes by Ben Horowitz is one of the best ways to create a great product is to put out a bad product. Putting out a bad product allows you to learn what people don't want. It lets you improve, iterate and create a good product. And it's really easy to put out a bad or mediocre product out quickly just to get a proof of concept. But you know what, if you put out any kind of product and no one knows you exist, you're not going to get any feedback, you're not going to be able to improve upon anything, you're not going to sell, you're not going to be able to be sustainable. And that's just the reality. A lot of entrepreneurs that get started get stuck in this and don't realize the importance of what I call smarketing, sales and marketing. So even before you have a product or create anything out in the world, you have to have an audience. And this is where marketing comes in. You have to blog. You have to create some sort of awareness around you. If you're listening to this show and you've happened to purchase something that I offer, whether it's $100 MBA or webinar ninja, it's probably because you heard about me somewhere. Whether it's on this podcast, whether it's via a blog post, whether you did a Google search and that content popped up and you saw that on Google, that didn't happen by accident. You know, there's a lot of things that go into place in order for you to be found. So you got to make sure that you put the content out there. So building an audience, building a way for people to find you is so important. Even before you create a product, you may think that's backwards, but you actually want to build the product for the audience. You're not going to buy this product, right? You're creating it. So by building an audience first, you can find out what they're struggling with, what they need help with, what products they're looking for, what products are using right now that are not really doing the job. And with that information, you can create a product for them. And again, you don't have to spend years on this product. You can create a minimal viable product, get it out there, iterate. Take Ben Horowitz advice. Put a bad quote, unquote product out there. Of course it's not going to be horrible, but it's going to be with flaws and that's okay. Lastly, the third branch service. A lot of people, when they neglect it, their whole business hemorrhages. They're like, I have all these sales coming in, I have all these customers, I have incredible SEO, I have credible marketing, I have a great sales team, but we're barely breaking even. What's going on here? Well, you're probably experiencing what's called churn or a customer revolving door where people are buying your product but they're not buying again, or they're not renewing or they're canceling or they're refunding. And a lot of that can be avoided through great customer service. Some people cancel because they they just didn't get a response from customer service or the response was very delayed a few days. Customer service is one of those things that you can invest in. Once you have some great marketing, you have a product for sale, you have to have great service along with it. That's going to keep your customers happy and you continue to earn their business. So now we understand the importance of all three branches and how they kind of work together. So I just mentioned when you're first getting started, you know, you have to actually be known. You have to be out there. So, you know, smarketing, marketing and sales is really important. So let me get really practical. Step one, you have to have some regular content being produced, whether it's a video on YouTube, whether it's a blog post, whether it's a podcast, whether it's infographics, whatever it is, find what you enjoy best, what your strengths are at, and create that content. You have to position yourself as somebody who knows a little bit about your market. That way they can know and like and trust you and eventually buy from you. You got to build a relationship right you got to build that email list as well as, you know, nurture that list. Make sure they know that you're giving them your best effort and giving them as much support as possible. Now, this is not going to happen overnight, but as you start building content, you're going to become well known and you're going to be easily found on Google. If you're blogging, if you're doing YouTube and you're looking for some tips on how to really maximize your SEO, your Google SEO, I highly recommend Brian Dean's video channel on YouTube. His blog backlinko.com is great. But you got to put out content by building that community, by building an awareness, by having a free opt in, you know, by offering a free PDF or ebook or course for people that visit your website in exchange for their email, you start building an audience with that. You can start asking them what they're struggling with. You can ask them just with an email really how you can help. What are the top three things that annoy them in their business or whatever marketplace you're in. And there you can start analyzing, hey, what products can I produce for this audience? That's when step two comes in. Product. Now we all have great big ideas of the product we want to create. Trust me, I have big ideas for my own products, but I have to tame myself, right? I have to have some self control and realize you got to take baby steps, you got to take steps towards that goal. I always say that big companies like Apple or Walmart, you know, Sam Walton didn't start one day with, you know, thousands upon thousands of stores across America and across the world. No, started with one store. So you gotta start somewhere and then start improving and start building, start growing your product. So you have all these big ideas, put them in a word doc somewhere and just see what's the minimal thing I can do to solve the problem. Trying to solve, yes, there's some fancy things I want, but how about just keeping it super simple? And trust me, people want simple because simple means I can use it as a personal example with Webinar Ninja. As we came out with webinar ninja 1, 2 and 3 and 4 and now 5. Every time we iterated, we didn't just add things, we removed things. Because sometimes when you clutter your product, when you try to add too many things, whether it's software or a physical product or a book, it doesn't really solve the problem, makes things harder for them. People value simplicity. There's a project management tool called Trello that just got Bought out by Atlassian, which is a huge Australian company. And they have a product called Jira, which is their competitor. Jira is highly complicated, lots of features. It takes like three days just to understand how to use it right. But Trello is intuitive, it's easy, it's simple, it doesn't have a lot of features. It's very simple. It's drag and drop. It takes you two minutes to know how to use it. And Atlassian, the owners of Jira, realized, hey, that's super simple. That's what people like. I'm going to buy that company and almost go back in time and become a simpler software. So you get it. Start small, start simple, and then put it out in the world. See what they say, see what the customers think. Iterate, change, start making some sales, get some money in, start doing business. And then of course, lastly, service. Make sure you have some sort of system, whether it's using Zendesk or Intercom, to be able to communicate with your customers, to be able to answer their questions easily and efficiently. If you can't hire customer service agents right now, that's okay. Nicole and I answered all our own support tickets for a very long time before we built the team we have now at Webinar Ninja and the hundred dollar mba. So even if you don't have anybody, having the right tools can make it easy for you to answer. Even you just spend one hour or two hours a day answering tickets, it's going to really help you build and keep your customers. All right, that kind of covers phase one and I want to spend a lot of time on that because it's so important. Phase two in your business, these three branches have importance as well. But the product starts to get promoted. Your product really starts to become the focal point. You're becoming well known now. You have some great marketing strategies in place. You have some, great, you know, sales tactics that you use. You're doing webinars or doing email marketing, whatever it takes, and you have customer service in order. So I would put product first, then I would put sales and marketing, smarteting and then service. But if for any reason during your phase two of your business, where you're starting to grow, starting to be profitable, you're on your two feet now and you're a real business now. It's not just an idea, you're sustaining your lifestyle via your business. But for any reason during that period where you're like, you know what, cash is low, we need more money, we need to make a higher, we can't Afford it. You got to up the volume on smarketing. People don't understand that. You got to keep on marketing, you got to keep on selling and you got to pump up the volume every so often so your product can get sold. It's not going to sell itself. Even the best products in the world do marketing. Look at Ford, look at Apple, look at Honda. They're all these guys, they're constantly spending money on marketing. And that leads me to phase three where your business is matured. You're going to be pushing marketing like crazy. Why? Because the product is going to take a bit longer to change and innovate than it normally did. Because you have a bigger team, you're not as nimble as you used to be and you're bigger than just a product. You're a brand. Again, I mentioned some big brands before, you know, Apple or Nike. These companies do a lot of marketing and for good reason. It's a given. Their product is great and they're not marketing for customers now, they're marketing for customers in the future. There's a survey that I recall and I don't remember the exact data, but to give you an idea, they surveyed some teenagers, 18, 19 year old, 20 year olds, people that are about to drive a car. And they asked them what their dream car is. And the top car was BMW. Now you might be surprised because most people that age can't afford a BMW. But BMW markets with that in mind. It markets that, hey, I want to get this customer. When they can afford me, they know me as the ultimate driving machine. And when you can afford that car, usually it's around your 30s, you feel young again because you got the car you wanted when you were a kid. Yes, it's pure genius, but the point is that they're spending on marketing and yes, the product improves, but the iterations of the product being improved are not as frequent. You know, the 3 Series BMW hasn't changed in five, six years. While a smaller company like Webinar Ninja, for example, example, not as big as BMW. We've iterated our product a few times in the last five years.

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Tips before we wrap up today's lesson so with these three branches smarketing sales and marketing, product and service, you're going to need to allocate money, time, effort on all three branches. Sometimes you're going to spend more on certain branches, in certain times, certain circumstances. But that's okay. Being mindful of these three branches is even enough. So you know, hey, I haven't spent much on marketing or I haven't really improved my service lately. Or maybe I need to hire some new talent to improve my product. Remember, without the right audience, without having an audience, you have no product to sell or you have nobody to sell it to. Without a solid product, you have no way to service the customers that buy that product. So it all goes hand in hand. But remember, without these three branches, if this is the only thing you take away from today's lesson, without these three branches you do not have a business. So you got to make sure you have strategies that you are focusing on all three in your business. Know your tendencies. Be self aware. Are you somebody that neglects marketing and sales? If so, you need to get that sorted asap because without it you will have no income. So if that means hiring somebody to take care of sales and marketing for you, do it. If it means you taking some courses and just, you know, shaking off the fear, do that. If you are somebody who just analyzes and is a perfectionist and wants to just focus on the product, understand the damage you're doing to your business. If you only do that, I'm not saying don't have the best product possible. I think the best product does win when it's coupled with great service and great marketing and great sales and great products. Again, don't happen overnight. It takes years, decades sometimes to get to that point. Guys, thank you so much for listening to the $100 me a show. Thank you for subscribing. If you're not a subscriber yet, make sure you smash that subscribe button on itunes, Stitcher, Overcast, whatever you use. So you get all our episodes automatically. When you subscribe, they get downloaded to your device while you're sleeping. Really? So make sure you hit subscribe right now. All right, that's it for me today guys. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. If it helps, write these three branches in a big piece of paper like a poster. If you want smarketing product service and just put it where you work by your office. If you want to write it on a post it note and slap it on your monitor, do that. Remind yourself to make sure that these three are in check at all times. Alright, thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in the next episode. Take care.

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