Fix these 18 things to get to $5M

In this video, we're going to go through the $1 to $5 million dilemma and why people get stuck. And there's specifically four problems that we're going to look at. And there's 18 things to fix. And in this video, we're going to walk through every single one of them. So that way you have a blueprint to go from 1 million to $5 million in revenue. All right, so to get to a million dollars in revenue, usually this is the growth equation. You get more leads, you get more work, you hire techs, you make more money, you get out of the field. And, and this is a very normal situation to get to 1 to 2 million, you just do more of all of these things and you're going to close more deals, you're going to get more leads, you're going to hire some more people, you're going to make more money, then you're going to ultimately get out of the field. And the way that you do that is you run more ads or run ads, whether that's Google Ads, yelp ads, Angie HomeAdvisor, Facebook, whatever ads that you choose, do SEO, do social media content or ads on social media. And if you're Advanced, you do B2B relationships, referral based marketing, you do email marketing to your customers, and text marketing. All of these things will continue to work to get you to 5 million. But there's other problems that you're going to face that I'm going to walk you through today to hopefully you can solve them to get to $5 million. All right, so the first problem is inside of your CRM, and there are five things that you need to fix inside of your CRM. Most CRMs, service titan, jobber, housecall, pro, workizing, they all have very similar things. And inside of them, we run into five main problems. The first thing is clean data. We get on calls all the time with businesses, and the data is not to the level that we need it to be. And unfortunately then you don't know what's actually working and not working. So clean data, what does exactly clean data mean? So down here, these are the numbers that you would want to track on a monthly basis, which is why number two is monthly reporting is you got to get clean data with monthly reporting. And these are the things you need to know your lead count year over year. So last January we did 80 leads. This January we did 100 leads. And inside of all the CRMs, there's different ways to track these leads, but you got to figure it out. You need to Know your lead count number two is your job count. Same thing. We got this many leads, we did this many jobs. After those jobs, you did this many estimates. Then the close rate, average ticket, new customers, and you kind of walk through the steps and this is what clean data is. So first thing to solve, get clean data. It's going to illuminate all the problems that you would have in your business when you actually know the numbers. So clean data, monthly reporting. Once you get this part dialed in, then you can set KPIs key performance indicators, which basically says, okay, with lead count, if we want to grow X amount, then we need to increase our lead count to this number or we need 100 leads per month. And that's going to solve this problem for us. And you can start to look at these numbers and say, okay, well this doesn't match up with what we need. So how can I solve this inside of my business? And we're going to go through some of these other problems and fixes are going to solve these things. The other part of the CRM that most people have issues with is automations. So inside of your CRM there might be some canned automations like Jobber, Housecall Pro, they have some very basic automations that you can run, which are not bad. But there is a bunch of other automations that you can connect with Zapier and other platforms which would allow you to turn on like lead nurture sequences, estimate nurture sequences, follow up 6 months, 12 months based off of their city, their states. There's a lot of other automations that people don't utilize inside of their CRM, even just the basic ones at that, which that's the lead and estimate nurture that most people don't have. Most people, they get leads, they don't know where they're going. Maybe they add them into their CRM hopefully. But most of the times they get calls and stuff all over the place, but they're not actually adding them to their CRM and nurturing their leads. And same thing with estimates, it's on the salesperson to nurture the estimates. There's not really any process. So those are the five things that inside of a CRM that need to get fixed. And the summary of this problem is you need to become an investor, not an operator. And the reason that I selected this terminology specifically is because when you're an investor in something, let's say that you're going to give someone $100,000 and invest in their business, you're going to want to know these numbers here on a monthly basis. You're not just an operator inside of this business. So you need to start thinking that you're an investor in your business. And you need to be pulling this data and giving it to yourself as if you're the investor and saying, hey, our lead count was down a little bit, our jobs was up, our estimate count, but I think, you know, we got this new customer's average ticket. You're looking at the numbers that's going to drive this is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6 numbers in here. If you just pull these every single month, you're going to start thinking like an investor inside of your own business. All right, next problem that we have is in the sales process. This is a big one. A lot of times to get to a million dollars, you, you are probably the number one salesperson or the best salesperson inside of your company. And naturally you're probably always going to be the best salesperson, but you can't be the only salesperson. And there's five things specifically that you need to fix in this process. And before we get into the actual salesperson, a lot of it starts with the CSR. Usually to get to a million or 2 million, your CSRs are going to be more order taker types like, hey, just answer the phones, answer any questions, tell them this is our pricing, whatever, try to get us out there. And that's the basic CSR portion. To get to a 5 million, you need to start thinking of it differently. You need to be thinking of inside sales reps, people that are not just CSRs or order takers. They're going to be consultative sales type of people that are helping you grow your business and jumping ahead a little bit. Having some type of a call script is very important for your CSR training that way it's a standardized process. You'll see a theme throughout all these problems, but most of the times they're one to two. They there's a lot of turnover and choppiness inside of the business because you're hiring people and you, you have a vision for what they're going to do, but there's no systems or processes dialed in for them to actually follow and they just burn out. And you're like, oh, that's not the right person, that's not the right person. And you just keep spinning your wheels and you keep saying it's not the right person, not the right person. So having a CSR training program that has scripts involved is very important and also recordings involved with csrs. Call recordings that were great calls. Maybe you hop on the phones and you just take your phone and you click record, and you just record a great call that you did. The second one is their technician incentive and sales. This is a really big one. A lot of times when you're 1 to 5 million. Let's just go back over here so you can see you're getting leads, you're getting work, you're hiring techs. Like this part, this portion right here. So when you get leads and you are getting more work, you know all the leads that are coming through, you know all the jobs that are being run, and then you know the sales that's going in and out of your business just naturally, you know the flow of things. But when you start growing, you don't know, right? You're doing five times more jobs, five times more leads are coming in, five times more work. So there's no way that you could know all the sales opportunities, which is why they're slipping through the cracks, which is why you need to fix the tech incentive program or the general sales process. And tech incentive program basically means, you know, you have technicians going out and they need to be finding opportunities for you to upsell. A lot of times you might just know the job, and you might just know what's going on, and you might get called out here and there and you sell some jobs, and you need to actually build out a process to turn that into a repeatable thing so that it snowballs and compounds. As you do more jobs and bring more jobs in the books, then you're closing more estimates. On top of that same thing with your sales process. You need to have this tight, and it kind of goes into your price book that you need to have a profitable price book in there. But all this has to be pretty tight inside of your CRM, inside of your sales process. When it comes to recordings, I mentioned before, having that CSR recording, having the sales process recording, making sure that everything is recorded. So that way, when you bring on new people, you have systems and processes in place with scripts and price books. In the sales process, a lot of times it's, you were the salesperson and now you have to elevate to the sales leader. And the reason that most people get stuck here is because it's a totally different skillset to lead a sales team opposed to being a salesperson. And you have to look at the numbers differently and train people differently than just like going out and selling stuff. You have to actually look at the numbers and coaching and scripts and all that. All right. The third problem that most people run into is performance marketing. This is what my company does, performance marketing. And this is why we solve this problem for a lot of companies. But here's the big ones that we run into is four things to fix. One, you're running Google Ads, you're doing SEO, doing social media, all this other stuff. Maybe you're not doing any of these down here, but you're running ads and you don't know if it's working. You don't get a return on ad spend on a monthly basis. You have no idea. If you're just praying to the Google gods, please give me leads, I don't know if it's working or not. You don't know. And that's why you need a return on ad spend every single month. Same thing with your customer acquisition costs. You're spending all this money on marketing, but you don't know if it's getting you new customers or just returning customers. A really quick way to solve this is how much money did you spend on marketing last month? And then inside of your CRM, how many new customers did you get? That will give you your customer acquisition cost, because that's truly marketing dollars. New customers, customer acquisition cost number three, most people are not doing is retargeting. And over here I mentioned the more advanced people are doing email marketing and text marketing. And not just sporadic emails going out, but on a cadence that's a monthly cadence. Making sure that your open rates and click through rates are good. And then calling the people that are in your emails and making sure that they're actually going to use your service or turning them into warm sales opportunities. And, and the last piece of fixing this is no more cookie cutter marketing. What I mean by cookie cutter is a lot of times people are, okay, I'm gonna pay this guy 200 bucks to do some SEO. I'm gonna pay this company to do 200, 200 bucks to do some Facebook ads. I'm gonna do this. And it's very just like cookie cutter rinse and repeat. They just do the same thing for different people. And you're mostly looking at as lead channels. And the summary here is becoming a business leader, not a marketer. Because when you have like all these marketing minions all around just doing random things and there's no cohesive game plan that's actually pulling a return on ad spend or, or tracking any of your data in here to make sure that these are actually working, you're basically just a glorified marketing manager. Trying to piecemeal this marketing thing together for you. And like I said, this is exactly what my company solves for businesses. That's why I know these problems so well. Cause I talked to so many business owners. But the performance marketing, these are the four things to fix. And it's specifically looking at performance marketing in your business. Not just doing marketing and not you trying to point all these people to do some random marketing and piece all these people together. Actually having a cohesive team and game plan that's going to grow your business over time. All right. And then the last problem that most people face is internal structure. And this, we run into this one a lot because the 1 to 2, the 1 to $2 million range, you have to start deploying a lot of cash to bring on people. And up to a million, you might, you know, I'm real profitable, feeling good about myself. Then you have to start deploying cash to bring in a sales or operations manager. And that's usually the first one. Whatever you're not good at, you need to hire the other person. You need to have an ops manager that runs point and then you run point on the sales leader or vice versa. But usually you have to fix this problem. And to get to 5 million, you usually have to have both fixed sales and ops manager. And you're more of the coo, maybe even the visionary type as you scale up. But sales and ops manager is huge because you can't be putting out fires in the field and managing your sales team and managing your closings. You have to either delegate one or the other or wrap up and be the COO. Same thing with internal structure. With systems and SOPs, we get on calls and we ask people, you know, what's your, what's your sales process look like? What's your lead to close process look like? And we're trying to pull this stuff out. And most people don't have any systems or SOPs in their business, which is why you have to dial them in as you are scaling your business. And more importantly, you have to get them dialed in before you scale because it's going to lead to scaling. And some of the basic systems and SOPs from a sales perspective is like that CSR call script. What happens when you get an estimate that's signed, Just even documenting what that looks like. You could record a loom video like this and just take the transcript and turn it into an sop. That way when you bring someone on, you just, here you go. There's a great book called buy back your Time from Dan Martell and he has this five rung replacement ladder. First you hire an admin. So you need to have a csr, someone who's managing your email and managing the phones. Then you have to get delivery, which is like technicians out in the field. Usually you have this when you get to a million dollars. The third one is marketing, which kind of goes back to this performance marketing. You don't want to be the marketing kingpin director in your business. You might have ideas, but you need to have a team that's working every single day to help you market your business. And then the fourth one is sales. The sales piece is so huge because to get to 5 million you can't be the only salesperson, let alone the best salesperson in your business. You have to have more salespeople. And then the fifth one is management that he talks about and buying back your time and, and we're talking a lot about that. In this infrastructure and internal structure stage of you need to have some managers in place to help you. And the last piece is auditing your time. As you want to grow your business, you have to audit your time to make sure that you're spending time on what matters the most. You have this unique ability. What you don't want to do is be spending your time on $10 tasks. You know, you don't want to be spending your time on filing things. You don't want to be spending your time on sending out random emails. All these Ars collections estimate follows whatever that that looks like that can be given to someone to do for 10, 20, $30 an hour. Those are things that to go to 5 million you should not be doing. And so like I do this for my business. I literally audit my time every single day to try to drill down on what am I really good at, what moves the needle and what can I give to someone else that maybe they really enjoy doing. Auditing your time is huge. And most people don't do this, which is why they can't focus on fixing all these problems because they don't have any time to even on the business. They're stuck in the business. So the summary for this one is becoming a business leader, not a doer. And the question that you need to ask is who not how, who not how is the big question and overarching to go from 1 to 5 million because you can't fix all these things in your business. You can't fix the performance marketing. You need to ask who is a good marketing company to work with. Sales process, you can't fix your CSR training. If you've never done it, you can't fix your sales process. So who's going to help coach me on my sales process? That's a great question. Who's going to help me fix my CRM and dial in these numbers? These are all questions that you should be asking as you start to solve these problems. All right. If you want to see how we've implemented some of this performance marketing strategies and worked with other companies, I'll put a video up above here of how we help scale another company. And that one's not out. You can check this one out.