Why Marketing Alone Won't Grow Your Business | Secrets Revealed

Video, we're going to discuss how to grow your local service business. Specifically why marketing alone won't grow your business. This video was actually created because of this book right here, how to grow your small business with Donald Miller. I have no affiliation with them, I just like reading books. And when I read this book I was like, man, this makes sense. I need to share this content. And in this video I'm going to discuss how you can grow your local service business, how marketing plays a role in that, and how you can utilize marketing to help you take your business to the next level. Real quick. My name is Phil Risher. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. We work with local service businesses to help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. And in this video and YouTube channel we talk about how to grow your local service business. So if you like content like that, be sure to hit like and subscribe. Alright, so let's get right into this video. So in this book, how to grow your small business, there are six, a six step plan that he outlines in here and these are just the six steps. But in this book he literally dives deep into how to do these things. So here are the six steps to grow your small business. The first thing is leadership. Second thing is marketing. Third thing is sales, products and service, cash flow, overhead. Now these are in no specific order to grow your business. These are just the six parts. And I'm going to show you how these actually look in a business because he gives an awesome explanation of how this looks. So a lot of times people reach out to us and they're just kind of getting started or they're starting to scale their business. And so we're going to go through all the different steps. Starting out, scaling your business and then running a seven and eight figure service business and how this looks for you. Alright, so when you're starting out, this is his analogy that he uses in this book, which is awesome. Think of it like an airplane. You have your marketing and sales. He puts them together up here because essentially you're going to be doing a little bit of marketing here and there. And this is going to be your propeller to kind of get you off the ground and going. You have you literally running the business in the cockpit and this is your leadership. Then you have your products or services, which are your wings, this is going to carry you. Then, then you have your cash flow which is your fuel tanks, these are your reserves. And then you have your overhead and operations which is you literally it's the body of the airplane. Okay, so think about your business and think about how this might correlate to you if you had just started your business or where you're at now. Once you take the next step, which is a lot of times people are doing some type of marketing. Maybe they join a networking group, maybe they do a little bit here, a little bit there, and they start to get. They get the plane off the ground, literally flying. Now what they do is they start to get into their grow phase. And so now the airplane expands. Now you can see they have a right wing, which is your marketing wing. You have your left wing, which is your sales wing. You have your products and services that are on the back of this. And the bigger the marketing and the sales, right, the faster that it's going to fly. However, if you don't take care of your fuel tanks and if you're overhead now you see that they added an additional person on here. If it's not all scalable in the same fashion, right, what's gonna happen? Let's say that you had this huge airplane here, and you had this huge marketing engine, and you stuck that huge marketing engine over here on this plane. You're just gonna be going around in circles on marketing because you have this huge marketing arm, but you don't have the sales, you don't have the team, you don't have the cash, you don't have the products and services to leverage your marketing and your sales components. And so as I'm reading this, I'm looking at this and I'm saying, okay, well, let's think about the business that we work with or have worked with in the past. Why did they fail? Right. For example, we worked with one company and we were cranking their marketing. They had a decent sales side of things. Literally, in the first six months, we generated over $100,000 in revenue for them. And so from a marketing and sales perspective, we were cranking right along. And what we found was that really the issue was in their cash flow and their overhead. It was just so huge for the amount of marketing and sales that we had that the plane ended up not running. It ended up going out of business because they weren't able to sustain the spending inside of the business that was building their overhead and their cash flow. Now, another example of this is another business that we worked with, which was we had this awesome marketing engine over here. And they weren't this small by any means, but what was happening was their sales engine over here was basically like a little Prop 1, right? Like this. So what ended up happening was we generated, literally year over year, 100 more leads in over one month. And so they had hundreds of leads coming into their business, but they weren't capitalizing on any of them in sales. And in fact, when we listened to some of their calls, because we audit the calls, some of their employees were even stealing money from them. One employee said, hey, yeah, the company would charge you 500 for this, but I could just come out after hours and do it for a hundred bucks. Literally. We heard that on a call, and we sent it to the business, and we said, hey, there's an issue here, which then leads to leadership. Their response back to us was, yeah, you know, we really need him around. So we just put up with it from time to time. He doesn't do it all the time. And so what happens then is that they're looking at marketing as if it's going to take them to the promised land, when in reality, there are six parts to growing your small business, and marketing is just one component, and sales is just one component. So basically what I'm getting at is that you could have the best marketing plan in the world, and you could be generating a ton of leads, but if you don't have the infrastructure from a sales perspective, from an overhead perspective, to be able to do all this work, from a products and service perspective, to be able to make sure the customers are happy with the work that you're doing, and more importantly, if you're still stuck on the truck and you don't have the leadership capabilities to run this huge thing, if you're out here, you know, loading luggage up, and you're out here, you know, giving out beverages and coffee and peanuts along the flight, you're not actually flying the plane. Well, what's going to happen to the plane? It's not going to work. And so what I would challenge you to do is to think about your business and how you're scaling the business and try to layer in parts into your business, whether it's your marketing and your sales. And you're really evaluating your business as if it's an airplane. And you're saying, okay, let's zoom out at my business and look at these six pillars. What do I need to focus on next? There's a really good book out there called Fix this Next by Mike Michalowicz. And basically he goes through and think about, like, what's the big issue that you're facing? Because all of these things, you could fix little things in your business, but what's the next step that you need to take. And it should be pretty glaring to you to say like, I really need to focus on working on my business and not in my business or I really need to increase my leads or I need to increase my sales conversion rate or I need to build up a cash revenue so that way I have cash flow to sustain my business through slow periods. I need to work on my products and services so that my service is excellent so that people continue to come back. I need to look at how can I scale my business with bringing on new people and build out standard operating procedures so that I can train people or whatever those mechanisms are to help you take your business to the next level. So if you're looking at growing and you're looking at a marketing system that and you want a marketing system that's like this for your business, that's what we do at Flash Consulting, we'd be happy to talk with you. But if you're kind of just getting started out or you're scaling this YouTube channel and our blog posts on our website are really, really good for helping you get started with marketing and even sales, we talk about in there as well. So be sure to hit like and subscribe. And if you like content like this, please drop a comment below or or like, it just helps us know what to keep posting and we'll see you in the next video.