Track Small Business KPIs to Grow Your Business 📊🚀💰 - Q&A Session

Welcome back to the show. My name is Phil Risher and on today's episode we're going to be diving into Q and A. I got three great questions for you. If you want to submit a question for a show in the future, you can go on LinkedIn and you can comment or message me Phil Risher. I'll put a link in the show notes or down below as well. Or you can go to flashconsulting.com questions and you can submit it right there. Whatever's easiest for you. If you have a question, you know, just let us know. All right, so the first question that we have here, it actually came up when I was talking with one of our clients. And this is a close to eight figure business and we were talking about tracking business numbers. And so before we kind of get into the depths of what we were talking about, I thought it would be good to kind of share what those numbers are that you typically would want to track on a monthly basis. And this is what we do at our company when we're looking at year over year progress and data. And if you're looking at starting a company or, or you're thinking about from a financial perspective, how do companies actually grow, this is what they do. And so the, there's a couple of things here. So I listed them out and I'm just going to tell you about them and kind of talk through them. So the first one that we always look at is lead flow. And this is how many leads did you get last month or this month? So let's say it's January we want to look at year over year. So last January versus this January. The reason is because a lot of businesses, they're going to be seasonal. And so January to January just kind of gives it an even playing field for the most part. There could be drastic things that happened to your business like rain or no rain or heat wave or no heat wave. But for the most part, we want to try to look at apples to apples, January to January. And so the first thing we're looking at is lead flow. Where did leads come from? Were they calls, were they web forms? And did we increase the lead flow from 100 to 110, a 10% increase? The second thing we're going to look at is how many jobs were booked. So we got a hundred leads and then let's say we book 80 jobs. That means that we had an 80% booking rate. And again, we're looking at year over year because we want to try to see, well, we got a hundred Leads, but we only book 50 of them. Were the leads not good, or is our booking rate down for some reason? And so we're trying to pull these numbers all the way through to a sale. So we look at leads, where leads up, how many leads do we get? Jobs booked, Were jobs booked up? How many jobs did we book? And that booking percentage difference between the leads and the jobs booked, Then the next thing is estimates. How many estimates did we actually run or do or submit or send out? And so we're kind of walking through this path of leads, jobs booked, estimates, and then the last one ultimately is sales and revenue generated. And so if we can dial in those four things, Leads, jobs booked, estimates, and then ultimately what was sold in revenue, there's a bunch of numbers in between there that we can get to. But if we can dial in those four things, any business should be able to grow if you can manage those numbers. And so we're looking at leads growth, jobs growth, estimates growth, and then, then revenue, obviously growth. A lot of times people say, I'm slow. And those four core areas, you can pull out each one and say, well, why am I slow? So I'll give you two other ones that we track for most companies that are really important. The first one is new customers. So, yeah, it's great to say that our leads grew, but how many new customers did we get? Because if it's all returning customers. Returning customers is a part of marketing, and we made content about that before, but we also want new customers to come in, so how are we doing on new customers? And then the second one is Google Reviews. And the reason that this is so important is because part of your ranking on Google is Google Reviews. And so if you're not ranking, if you're not getting reviews, then nine times out of ten, your competitors are, and it's gonna hurt your rankings. So it's very competitive. So we track how many Google reviews do we get in a month, in a year, and try to benchmark ourselves versus the competition. Because Google Reviews are kind of like the king of search engine optimization. So really, those are the six things. Leads, jobs booked, estimates, sold, revenue, new customers, and reviews. And we're trying to track all that stuff. The conversation that came up with this client was, okay, great, but this is kind of a manual process to pull all this data in. And so is there a way to automate this process? And some CRMs, like Service Titan, Housecall Pro, kind of, they will allow you to pull some of this data from a dashboard that they already create which makes it more of a streamlined process, but again, you still have to kind of go in and pull and dissect the data out. And so he was asking me about Power Bi, or it's not called Google Data Studio anymore, but whatever the silly name that they came up with is, but like a Power Bi or some dashboard that would pull in all this data from Google, reviews from your CRM, maybe even from QuickBooks, seeing your new customers that have come in, and then putting it into a simple dashboard for you. And he was asking me like, hey, have you ever looked at this before or done this before? And I know that there are some companies out there that pull in different dashboards, but it actually made me think, because he was asking me like, hey, do you know anyone that does this? Have you ever thought about doing this before? And it kind of led me into the next question, which was one that came from a listener. And he was asking like, well, what should I learn first? And he was asking like, should I learn a product or a service first and then try to go out and figure out a solution, a person to sell it to? You know, there's all this, like, silly TikTok videos and all stuff that are like, they're trying to sell you on a course to learn a skill, and then they're saying, yeah, this is a problem out there that people are facing. And then you have to go out and sell this solution that you've just bought to try to figure out. And it's very backwards. And so that was basically his question was like, well, where do I start with this process? Is like, do I learn a skill and then go out and sell it or what? And so this Power BI discussion about how to track your business numbers, it correlated perfectly with this question. And basically what it comes down to is that people have problems. Like, this client has a problem, and the problem is that he wants all of his data into one dashboard. And so the questions that we can ask him are this. What problems are you facing? I'm looking for a dashboard for my Power BI to pull my numbers in. Okay, how much would you pay if I were to solve that problem for you? Or there was a solution out there, I would pay $5,000. Okay. Do you have an idea of what a solution might look like for you? Yeah, you could use Power Bi. And how long would this realistically take for you to say, like, yeah, this is good. Let's say three months. Okay, so now you have the problem, you have the solution, you have how much someone would pay for this and then you also have how long they're anticipating that it's going to take. Okay, so if you were to say, okay, well, instead of $5,000, obviously, I'm just getting started, so let me just do this for you for $1,000, and I'll work directly with you so that way we can build this exactly how you want to. It's going to take me some learning, but I'm willing to invest that time so that way I can build a product and a solution that's going to fit your needs. Does that sound fair? I'm sure he would do that. But even if it was for free, just to learn the solution and figure it out, I'm sure that that would be something that's going to be interested in as well. So the second question, as I mentioned, was about, like, well, what do I learn and then how do I sell it or what do I do first? And really the question should be, what problem is out there that I can solve that's worth my while? So with this example, let's say he's going to pay $5,000. He would pay $5,000 for the solution. Well, you work with him for the next two months and you build the ultimate solution. And you document your processes and your standard operating procedures for how exactly you got to this point and you did this. And then he says, wow, this is great. And he gives you an amazing review and a testimonial. He records a video and says, you're great. Then he takes that, and then now you have a blueprint so you can go out and sell it to other people that probably have the same problem. And so even if you're running a business, I mean, you would know this if you're running a business is like, don't go searching for the next solution. Go searching for the next problem to solve. And that's really what it comes down to. And it leads right into our third question, which is why I put these all together, which is this one came from YouTube and this was a cleaning company. And they asked, like, well, how do you bundle packages to increase your profitability and bundle different services? And how do you know when to add a new service on? And so what we've seen, and we work with a bunch of different companies that do anything from H Vac and plumbing and indoor air quality to carpet cleaning and new flooring, right? So they're lumping in different services together that they're layering on top to, again, increase their profits. And it goes into that. Don't just chase A solution because it's going to increase your profit, chase a problem that your clients are looking for. So the way that you could do this is when you're out doing a service for your client, let's say you do carpet cleaning and you want to add on floor refinishing, for example, wood for finishing, whatever. Then when you're cleaning their carpet, you could ask them like, hey, have you ever had this service completed? No. Is this a problem that you have? Yes. And you can kind of work through that and come up with those same questions, which is like, well, how much would you pay for something like this? How long would you intend something like this to take? What solution would you envision would be your goal outcome or your goal solution? And they can kind of walk you through those steps. There is one caveat to this, which this is something that I've really focused on in my business, which is the 1, 1, 1 rule, I guess is what it's called. I've heard Hormozi talk about, I've heard other guys talk about as well, which is up until $1 million in revenue, you focus on one avatar, which is one specific type of customer, one service. So you only do one service. So that way you can get really great at it and you get them from one channel. So what this means is for my business, for example, we have one avatar, and that's small business owners, local service, business owners, specifically in the home service industry. So carpet cleaning, rug cleaning, those types of coming air duct cleaning, H vac, electrical, plumbing, lawn care, you name it. That's the type of companies that we're working with. That's our avatar is those types of people, one service. We only offer one service, which is marketing consulting, where we work with them in their business as a fractional marketing team. We have a consultant that's designated to them. We only have one service. And then one channel is where do we get our clients from? And this is the part where we haven't really found our honeyhole of where we get clients from. We get some from referrals, we get some from videos, we get some from LinkedIn, we get some from networking. So all over, there's not one specifically that we can pinpoint, but if you can narrow in on one channel that you're really good at, that gets you a bunch of clients. That's really what it comes down to. So the reason I'm sharing this is that you don't want to write this up until a million dollars. So let's say you're doing $300,000. And you're trying to layer in all these, you're trying to do H vac, electrical, plumbing and all this stuff. What happens is it will dilute the service that you're offering. And so you're not going to be able to really scale the business because you're doing all this random stuff in your SOPs. You're not going to be able to hire the right people and build your company. So and I'm sure anyone that's 5, 6, 10, 20 million would also say like, yeah, I waited until I got to $2 million in revenue, then I added on this service that got me another million dollars because I could leverage the customers that already know like and trust me to cross sell them these other services. Now for our business, people ask us this all the time. We don't do like videography services for example. We don't do TikTok ads or whatever. There's a bunch of things that we don't do. And could we make money? If people ask us and we say yeah, we do that, of course we could. But what happens is that then it's a whole nother standard operating procedure, a whole other process to manage when if we just say no, we don't do that, but we do this stuff really, really good and we crush it for people. It makes it a lot more cut and dry as you're scaling your business. So to sum it all up when it comes to when do you offer a new service, in my opinion is if it's closely knit to your business, for example carpet and rug cleaning. It doesn't, it's not too far off from what you currently do, then you could layer that in. If it's something that takes a whole nother set of standard operating procedures and products that and stuff you have to buy and invest money in, then maybe look at waiting till you get to that million dollar mark to actually bring on another service. But when it comes to bundling, I think that there's a lot of value in bundling services which what my company does is what we just have one thing that we sell and we put it all in there because we, we know that if we do it fractionally it's not going to get you the result that you want. So like let's just do it the right way the first time and like get the great result that you're going to like. So three questions that we had, how to track your business numbers. We discussed like what were the business numbers that you wanted to look at? We talked about the business opportunity that arose from a conversation with my client, which then led us into the question of like, well, do I learn the solution and then go and find the problem or how does that work? And so we use that as an example and then we discuss like, well, when do you offer a new service that you from a business that you currently already have and how do you layer that stuff in? So if you found this content valuable, be sure to hit like and subscribe. Drop a comment. It's very, very important to me that I get feedback because I want to know what you guys like to listen to and what you like to talk about. So if you have ideas for shows in the future, let me know. I'm very reachable. LinkedIn is the best way to find me Phil Risher again. I'll put a link down below and I'll see you all in the next episode.