How to Grow Your Business in 2024

In this video, if you're looking to grow your business in 2024, we're going to discuss some strategies, some numbers, some things that you can implement to help you grow your business real quick. My name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting and we work with local service businesses to help them grow. We do free marketing audits. So if that's something that you're interested in for your business, I'll put a link down below. All right, let's get right into this video. So on this channel, we've talked a lot about this Flash customer journey. If you don't know what it is, there's visibility, conversions and retargeting. So what I would recommend is go through these different channels and audit your company in 20, or if you're in 2024 currently and go through and see like, well, what am I doing and what am I not doing? What am I doing? Not doing good enough. So I'll give you a quick overview of these things and areas that we typically see companies missing out on. So organic search online. If you don't have a process for getting Google reviews, that's a big opportunity. If you're not running Google Local service ads, that's a big opportunity. We made videos about that before, but you could actually see the cost of Google Local service ads in your area. Social media. If you're not in your local Facebook groups, that's a big opportunity. If you're not going to any type of like BNI or chamber of commerce or networking groups building these referral networks, that's a really great opportunity to get leads. Direct mail. This one is a little bit expensive, but you can use this tool like Send Gym and do some blasts around different neighborhoods. And a lot of these tie into CRMs. Prospect call. Just call in some of your old prospects or your past customers that you did service for years back that haven't used you again, just say, hey, what's up? You, you know, wanted to see how things are going and then see if they would want to use you again. And the last thing is building these business to business relationships. So obviously people want to go for realtors and property managers, but there's other secondary ones too. Like if you do moving, maybe there's a junk removal company that you can share leads back and forth with or something like that where you can build these relationships. So if you're looking to grow and create visibility for your business, audit these and think about your business. Are you, Am I doing all these? Have I tried one? Have I not tried one and then try one. From a conversions perspective on your website, you should have some call to actions like a chat widget here. So if you don't have that, you need to get that. You should make sure that you only have one or two call to actions above the fold. So if you see ours that discuss your business, discuss your business. For service businesses, you might have one that says like get a quote and schedule. Now, anytime someone comes to your site, they want to know how much is it going to cost and when can you do it. And so that's how you can audit your site for those lead conversion tools. The other thing is you want to know these numbers here. So we're going to get into some of these numbers that you need to know. But basically you want to have a process to go through from lead to scheduling appointments and giving to an estimate to ultimately selling the job and then trying to track your leads all the way back to visibility because that's what you know what you need to do more of. So coming up with the conversion pipeline or stages, even if you use HubSpot or even if you use a CRM, just like keeping track of your conversion metrics is really important. And we're going to talk about those with know your numbers. I'll give you four numbers that you need to know. All right, and then the last one. This is where most people miss the mark is in the retargeting side. And so with retargeting you definitely got to do some type of a newsletter. It could be quarterly, but definitely something that stays top of mind with your customers. And we've shared some frameworks around this before. But basically you want to share like a recent project that you did cross selling another service, a local type of content piece, like 5 Things to do in your city in this month and then a customer reviewer testimonial and then have a couple call to actions in there. Those work really good to stay top of mind asking your past customers to like you and share your stuff on social media. And then text message marketing. This is a really big one for 2024 because everyone is texting. It's getting more and more the craze. So you want to make sure that you're doing some type of text marketing. There's a ton of platforms out there and we've talked about them before, but that's a big opportunity. Oh, I skipped this one. Asking for reviews and referrals. So if you are completing a job and you're not asking for a review, whether it's an automated process or it's a manual process. You're missing out on SEO. You're missing out on building a solid brand in your marketplace. And so that is something that you want to come up with. You could we have a video on how to make something like this with a QR code to get reviews? But there's a bunch of other ways you can get reviews. And then same thing with asking for referrals in your newsletter. You could ask for a referral like, hey, if you know someone that's interested, you know, send this email to them and they'll get 10% off if they use this specific code or something like that. Works good. So audit your, your, your company on these things if you're not doing any of them. The ones that I would definitely start with is start with your Google business profile, start getting reviews, come up with some of those lead captures on your website, go to some networking groups, maybe do some type of email marketing to your customers, run some Google local service ads. But if you're new, it might be hard to rank on these. But that's kind of what I would really start with and then start building this out as you're building your marketing plan in your business. All right, the next thing, if you're trying to grow your business in 2024, this plane over here, we shared videos about this before. This is from a book from Donald Miller called How to grow your small business. And basically what he says is that a business is like an airplane. The leadership is the cockpit. The right engine is the marketing funnel, the sales. The left engine is the sales team. The cash flow is your fuel. The overhead is your body, like your team, your people. And then your products or services are your wings. And, and so when you start thinking about your business, and I made a video about this whole process, but when you think about your business, there's all these moving parts here. And so if you're literally out here on the wings, you know, doing the service, and you're running these marketing and running these sales calls, and you're not up here running the plane, it's very hard to grow your business because if you're just going all over the place, you don't have a pilot. And so when you start to grow your business, a lot of times people, they get stuck in the technician mindset and they get stuck over here. So this video is more just like to give you permission that if you're stuck in the, in the technician mindset or you're stuck doing a lot of these Services is really try to elevate yourself into the cockpit. If it fails, you know, and maybe the service doesn't go according to plan or it doesn't work out, you should be able to recover from that. And so you want to make sure that you're training these people to do the services and managing your cash flow. But really this is just a reminder that if you're a business owner and you're watching this video, your goal is to be the cockpit and be in the cockpit and be the pilot. And so if you're not doing that, then think about your business and how you can alleviate some of these things. Cash flow management processes like a book called Profit First. Whether it's hiring more people, because you're all numbers that we need to look at. We made a video about this before, but basically these are the four numbers that you need to really try to dial in for 2024. So your customer acquisition cost. So in your CRM or however you keep track of your customers, you want to see how many new customers that you're getting on a month to month or year to year basis. And if you're growing your new customers, then you're able to see, okay, very, very high level. I spent $1,000 and I got 10 new customers. So my new customer acquisition cost is $100 customer. If you can dial in your numbers that well, then you know, okay, well, if I spent $2,000, then I'll get 20 new customers. And you can figure out if that works with what you're actually charging. And that ties into your average ticket here. So what is your average ticket? If you were to do 10 jobs, what's your average job amount? A simple way to do this is how many jobs did I do last month? What was my revenue? That can be your average ticket. And you could break this down by your different categories. But to keep things high level, that's how you can get started. The next thing is your booking rate. If I give you 10 leads, how many jobs or appointments are you scheduling off those 10 leads? And if you don't know, if you're not keeping track of your booking rate, you're missing out on tons of opportunity. Because let's say your booking rate is 10 or 20%. A lot of companies in the service spaces are at 50, 60%, some are 40%. But if you're below that, then you're really, there's some issue, there's something wrong. So if you're not 40, 50, 60%, and we have some that are even 70%, then you should be focusing on your booking rate because a lot of times you're just going to be over here blaming all your marketing when really it's a disconnect between your leads and your scheduled jobs. And then the last one is your close rate. So same thing. If you have a really good booking rate but then you're not closing, you're getting to the estimate, you're not closing these deals. Well, this percentage here, something's wrong. So you got to figure out what's wrong and what's a good closing percentage. Now if your industry is different, I can give you like some quick high level numbers. Typically we're seeing closing rates between 20 to 40%. 30% is good. Other industries we see up to 50%. But if you're above 50%, then you probably look at increasing your prices because or you're just really that good. I don't know. But once you dial in these numbers, you can, you know, add some more money to your marketing budget to get more customers. Since now you know your customer acquisition costs, you can make sure that you're charging the right amount so that you can achieve this customer acquisition cost. You're ensuring that you're booking the leads that you're getting into customers. Then the last thing is you're actually closing the deals which you're making money. So if you're looking at switching up your marketing, even like a marketing audit for what you're currently doing and maybe some opportunities to grow your business into the future, that's what we do at Flash. We partner with companies to help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. And so we'd love the opportunity to do that for you. You can go to our website. If not, it's all good, hit like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next video. See ya.