5 Hacks to Increase ROI In Your Business

A lot of the times the management and marketing and sales do not talk to each other and they don't know how this is actually affecting the true cost of doing business. And that's why they're in the tough spot they're in.

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I have never experienced a pre roll ad at an event that's pretty interesting. So yeah, I just want to chat with you guys about this. Everybody is experiencing inflation. Everything is going up. You've seen a lot of the statistics and I'll go over a couple of them, but I just wanted to talk about how you can increase profits when everything costs more. And a lot of it applies wherever you are in the organizational structure. So if you own a business, then it will help you figure out how to make more profit. If you are a marketer, then it will help you figure out maybe some different things to do with your offers, some different things to test and see how can you do more with less, Right? So a few things that are going on. We had the inflation rate for August, 8.3%, which is this year has been the highest in over 40 years. Right. Which means you take home less, 83,000 less a year, effectively per million dollars that you make. It's like this stuff adds up. It's when you see it as a statistic, that's one thing. But to me, when you see what it means to you in your actual business in your pocket, it's a different thing. Jobless claims this past week were 213,000. We've seen those have been Running at the lowest rates in about 50 years. Meaning that it's more expensive to get people to work. For us, the average wage increase has been 5.9, but if you hop jobs, which everyone is advising people to do now, it's about 12%. So you've got a lot of increases in labor. As a matter of fact, labor to sales ratios right now 20 to 35%, which means that over what it used to be, you're making about 12 to $20,000 less per year per million in sales. So you got all of this stuff that is going kind of against us and you say, well, how can I do the same? How do I stay in the same place? And that's what a lot of people are asking. But I think it's good to ask, how could I actually do more? How can I do more despite inflation? So I'm going to talk about five different things that you can do to actually turn this to your advantage. One is optimizing your pricing strategies. The second is going to be how can I adjust my product and customer mix? We'll talk about optimizing your value ladder and how to optimize profit based offers. And then last but not least, how can you acquire across your value chain? So diving into the first one, optimizing price strategies, one of the easiest things that you can do to make more money is to raise prices. Now everybody has caught onto this. That's why there's so many prices being raised, right? But what's cool about that is when you raise prices, every bit of the increased income goes to the bottom line profit. There is no additional cost in raising the price. They get the same thing they got before, you just pay more for it, right? So some of the effective ways we can do this would be to ask should we increase prices at all? And I think one of the things, like a lot of people are hesitant, like they'll wait until the last possible minute. But if you're not testing prices on a regular basis, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. So this applies again, I just want to drive this home. If you own a business, you should be price testing. But even if you are marketing for somebody else and you want to be a rock star, price test your offers, like that's a big deal. What's really cool is if you can figure out what your current margin is. What is the current margin? The profit margin in any offer. And to do that you take trailing twelve months profits divided by trailing twelve months sales. That's going to give us a Percentage. So if you have some rough guesstimate as to what that is, take your phone out right now and put the calculator in and figure out, what margin am I working with? Because once you know that, then you can say, how would a 1% price increase affect my profits? And it depends, of course, on what your margin is. If your Profit margin is 40%, meaning on a million dollars in sales, you're going to take $400,000 home, your new profit would be at a 1% increase, $10,000. The percentage would be 2.5. And as your margin goes down, the profit increase goes up. What gets really exciting to me is when we say, well, how does it apply to our company? How does it apply to our company? And so if you want to figure out what is the price increase that you need to get rid of inflation, just to say, I'm going to break even. Then divide your current inflation rate, right? Which now is 8.3, I think it was between 8.5 and 8.2, I think, in the last few months, by your applicable profit increase, right? So if you do that, like if we had a 25% margin and we say inflation's running 8.4% and our profit increase per 1% would be 4, we'd have to increase our profits by 2.1% to neutralize inflation. Current price at a dollar, if we just add 2.1% of that, we're only raising prices from $100 to $102.10. I think one of the big things that stops us from raising prices is not really being aware of the relationship between the percentage increase in prices and how it affects the percentage increase in profits and how little it actually costs our customer. So as long as the value is there, you have to feel comfortable with the value you're getting. But testing makes a huge amount of sense. So a $2.10 price improvement increases profits. 8.4% neutralizes inflation. That's because there's a difference between top line and bottom line, right? It's all affected by what margin you're at. And so always test to validate. But we've found that very few people are going to react adversely and buy less with a 5% profit increase. Excuse me, price increase. So if you have a 5% price increase and let's say you're operating at a 15% margin, that's a 33% increase in profits. That's pretty crazy from a 5% increase in prices. I mean, like in our businesses, the first thing that we do when we go in and acquire a new company is we'll start price testing. Most people still are resistant to testing prices and to raising prices. Okay, if it's 10%, it can be a 67% increase in your profit margin. I just want to, like, that's crazy. Where are you going to find that kind of increase in profits without having to do a whole bunch. Without having to add a bunch of costs? It's a big, big, big benefit. So then a lot of people say, okay, well, should I lower my prices?

Should I.

Well, I make it up in volume. If I lower my prices, maybe so many people will buy that weren't going to buy before that I'll be able to be more profitable. But if you run the math, you'll see it has an inverse relationship to increasing prices. So, for example, if we have a 5% price decrease and we're operating at a 15% margin, it's going to decrease our profit percentage by 33%. Meaning we're going to have to sell a whole lot more stuff like, can we really increase sales by just lowering prices a tiny little bit by a third? It could be very difficult. 5% price increase. Excuse me, Decrease would have to generate a 33% increase in sales to maintain the same profit. So again, when we're thinking about our offers and we're saying, well, we can increase our conversion rate if we lower our prices. Let's test that. I mean, it's going to have to be a pretty big increase. I'm not saying don't test it. I'm just saying you want to really, really look at the numbers. Okay, so here's just an example. If we had a $200,000 profit before and we lower it by five points, we end up with 150,000 in profit. Our 20% profit margin decreases to 15%. And our $200,000 in profit at 15%, if we divide that by our margin, says that I'd have to sell $333,000 more in sales. That's just. It's really hard to make that up. Okay, really hard to make that up. So what are some alternatives to price increases? Maybe you still, like, you test and you find that there's resistance to the price. What are some other things that you can do? Well, there's a few cool things, right? Consider replacing the prices instead of raising them. What does that mean? So change the pricing model. There's all kinds of pricing models. So don't get locked into thinking you have to stick with the one you have first. You could move to subscription. Adobe did this. They switched from packaged software to subscriptions. We did this at Digital Marketer. We've done it in a lot of our businesses. They went from 4 billion in sales to 16 billion in sales. They went from 743 million in profit to 6.6 billion. Right. Simply from changing the pricing model. Okay. The valuation of the company grew from 22 billion to 205 billion. That's the power of knowing how you can do all these different things. They've increased and you can too. Your lifetime customer value, your profit and your valuation. EBITDA's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization. That's just a fancy way of saying profit. If you don't know what that is. The other thing you could do is refocus price attention. What are they focused on in terms of the price? So maybe you change to price per month, maybe you change to a credits model or maybe per use or per access. There's all kinds of things that you can do or per unit of consumption. We did this in a lot of our SaaS businesses where we were charging say 29 or 39 or $99 a month. We moved to credits. And so for the base amount they get a certain number of credits, whatever the average user would use. So there wasn't any complaints from those people. And the people that were power users pay more and they feel okay with that because they run out of credits. Right. So there's a lot of different things. You're just changing the focus from the price per month to price per credit, price per unit, all, all these other things. The next thing you could do is you could reprice to performance. And I'm a huge fan of this. Any kind of business that can really like any product or service that you've got that can really move the needle for your customers, think about performance based pricing. So here we're saying we're going to look at what can we do to help you and we're only going to get paid or we're going to get paid. Part of what we get paid based on the value that we bring. As long as you're bringing value, then this allows the customers to pay more. But they have no risk because they're not going to pay unless they got the value. Unless it's basically a success fee. Right. Another way to do it would be look at the case study that we've done. So we did, we have a product that sold for 1995 over 20, 21. We tested prices and 22 we tested prices, we raised from 1995 to 2009, 95 to 3009, to 4, to 5, to 6, and didn't receive any pushback until we got to 7. We got to 79.95. We were like, okay, we've tested through. That's a huge amount of elasticity in that market. Right? I mean, there's a lot of profit. All of that increase in prices was 100% profit. It all went to the bottom line. It didn't cost any more to serve somebody at 69.95 than it did at 1995. And so how much of that profit is sitting there available in your products or services right now? Test, test. Okay. So McKinsey does this thing called a pocket price waterfall. And that's. This is gonna be really probably. I want you to think about it. If you're a marketer, if you're an entrepreneur, I want you to talk to your marketing team about it. Because the different promotions and incentives that you're asking can effectively lower the price that is actually going into your pocket. So the analysis, how much of the price of what we're selling do we actually get to keep? Okay, so the goal is to capture more of the price. Right. That you already charge. So there's a lot of incentives that we use. And if you're not using these incentives, test them. Okay. So there's a whole lot of things I'm going to talk about in terms of recapturing profit margin that on the other side can increase your sales that you want to test if you're not already doing. Okay, so some of them are annual volume bonuses. So if you have any customers that would benefit from buying more, if you've got somebody that's buying repeatedly, then give. Then a lot of people will give them a volume bonus to buy more. So if you hit this bonus, then you ultimately get lower pricing. Okay. That's also eating into your margin. Okay. So I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying be aware of these things because they creep up on us. Or maybe you're carrying the cost of financing for somebody so they buy something for you. You let them buy it on credit and you don't charge them interest for it. You let them pay it off over time. Or you give a cash discount. A lot of people will give cash discounts. If you're selling high ticket stuff, people will say this is $8,000, but if you full pay, it's $6,000. Right. Or maybe you're doing 210 net 30, which is pretty common in the industry. You, if you're selling goods, you'll say, okay, if you pay in 10 days, we'll give you a 2% discount. If you pay in 30, that's when it's normally due. Okay, so there's an incentive for that. Or maybe you will do. You'll take the consignment costs. So the supplier might loan you inventory. Right. Which allows you to not have to expense that and they don't charge that. And if you're the supplier, maybe you incentivize people to buy more by saying, hey, I'll tell you what, I've got a lot of inventory here. How about if I loan it to you and I won't charge you any interest to loan it, but actually it does cost the supplier some amount to have that inventory unsold. Or maybe you're agreeing to support advertising. That's another thing you can do, right? And that's going to support local ad costs. Or you're take, you're covering the cost because Amazon makes you basically now, right? Makes all of us say, hey, free shipping. Maybe you're covering the cost of freight. Well, so if you don't do any of these things, they're all great things that you could try to incentivize more sales. And so I'd highly recommend that you think about them because a lot of people miss them. But if you are doing more than one of these things, then you may be losing a lot more of the actual price than you think. When you're looking at what is my ultimate profit. You can also get promote people to get into new target markets. They call that a promo market development discount. Okay, some other things off invoice promotions. So what about rebates? What about or affiliate discounts or tiered affiliate programs where you're paying your affiliates 30% until they sell this number of things and then 50% after they sell that. And your top affiliates, you're paying 60 online discounts where you're offering people discounts to order online versus in a physical store or on the phone because it doesn't cost you as much. Maybe there's a performance penalty where you say, hey, if we don't give you the quantity that you need within the time that you want, that's at the quality that you want, then we're going to take a discount, we're going to offer you a discount for that. Or maybe there's a slotting fee that you're paying to retailers so that you get the good shelf Space, or maybe there's a stocking allowance so that you're giving somebody who's a great customer that's got seasonal purchasing patterns a discount to buy in bulk now so that you get the money now and they've got the inventory that they need come the time that they need it, and then target customer discounts. So maybe you've decided that you want to acquire a particular kind of customer that demographically, psychographically. Right. Somewhere that's different in a different market that you're doing right now, geographically. Like, there's a lot of incentive offers that smart sellers will give to people in a developing territory. That's what creates the whole gray market. If you are in cars or photography or things like that, you can buy a lens that was meant to be sold in the Middle east here for, you know, 30% less. So those are all things that you can do. But, but what you can see is that each of those things, this is just a list of a lot of the things that I just mentioned. Each of those things eats into the actual price that you're really getting. And so when you do this analysis, this pocket price waterfall, you can see it's just a waterfall of what is my initial price that's 100% my standard list price. And then I have promotions that go on the invoice, and then I have all these off invoice promotions that I do too. So be aware of that. Because particularly when inflation comes and you are paying more for the things that you're selling and you're paying more for your customer acquisition costs, cause they keep raising those. How are you going to get this back? Recapture some of the stuff that maybe you're losing that you don't realize you're losing. And if you aren't using some of these incentives, test them all, see what can apply to you. The other thing to think about is to be aware of what's your true margin, what's the actual true profit margin that you are making. So if you do purchase incentives, and again, this is a long list of purchase incentives that people use. So, so test them, but don't forget about them. Because I can't tell you how many times we've accidentally had multiple coupon codes that people would use for something that they shouldn't get multiple discounts, but they do. Because we forgot that we had the other one that was sitting out there and there wasn't a way to limit that. Right. So affiliate performance incentives, that's where you offer affiliates, cars or other cool things, cash, whatever to, to sell a bunch of stuff. Cash discounts to drive immediate purchase. That's pretty easy. That's. Hey, if you buy it right now, right now, we will actually give it to you at this price. Otherwise the price is that. Okay. Coupons, those are discounts to purchase price that we put out there for people. Free training and coaching. So that's something that enables people to take whatever product or service that we've got. If you want to buy a Ferrari, we'll, we'll send you to the advanced tactical driving school. If you buy this, this facial care product, then we'll give you the body products as well. Right. What are the. And how to use them. Right. How to use them. Other training, free shipping. I mentioned before Guarantees and off invoice promos like customer rebates. Rebates are a big thing that a lot of people do too. And other things would be payment plans. What is the cost that it's costing you to carry for your customers? Product bonus costs. Can you put. Or are you putting physical bonuses in with digital products or digital bonuses in with physical products? And is there a cost associated with that? Promotions where you're targeting different segments. Salesforce incentives, secondary affiliate costs like finders fees. So on some of our programs, we'll pay a 5 or 10% finder's fee to somebody that brings in a big affiliate. Right. That's another. And if you're not, it's a great way to get somebody to go find a bunch of affiliates for you. Surprise and delight costs. If you've got shock and all packs. Like if somebody buys something and you send them something that's designed to just blow them away, there's a cost to that and a lot of the times it's not taken back in to the actual cost of the sale. So that's where we're what we're trying to accomplish here. And then last but not least, tech support and tech training. Okay, so use these incentives. They're all great. Just know how much they really cost and how are they affecting your margin. So the first graphic that we used was we took 100% of the purchase price and then said, what are all the things that are eating away at that this is doing the same thing, only with margin. Once we do all these cool things that I just talked about, do we really go from 100% down to maybe we're only making 20% of what we thought we were. When I go into companies and we do acquisitions or we do turnarounds, I did a lot of turnarounds A lot of the times the management and marketing and sales do not talk to each other and they don't know how this is actually affecting the true cost of doing business. And that's why they're in the tough spot they're in. Okay, so run a pocket price and margin waterfalls on a product by product basis because that applies to every single product you sell. And then also on an account by account basis to see if maybe some of your big customers have kind of weenied their way into having these giant discounts and actually sometimes will find that the biggest customers are the least profitable or not even profitable at all for some of the businesses we go into. And typically we'll find that there's a minimum of 1 to 5% of the price that is missing. And remember, 5% of the price could have a 33% impact on profitability. So that's a place to find a lot of the extra price and margin that you might be losing. Okay, that's about the most complicated thing I'm going to talk about today because it's, it's kind of mathy and, and I know that you were told there would be no math, but there's a little bit in business. I'm sorry. Okay, so some of the action steps there, set your target pocket prices by customer size, type and segment just so that you know that you've got different prices for different people based on the actual profitability and the profitability that you're targeting meets whatever your profitability goals are for the company. You just have to think about that instead of randomly saying, oh well, let's. These guys want a discount and they'll buy today if we give it to them. Don't do that. Right. Think about it. Run the numbers eliminator cap stacking of discounts. So unlike don't do what we did and accidentally leave all of your discounts active, be sure that they can only use one at a time. Okay. The other that you could do is reprice or eliminate thing that you're selling. That is sub your target. Right. Sub margin for, you know, your margin and what your target is. Then be sure everything is priced accordingly. And then prior to prioritize selling to the people that make you more money. That's really what that's saying. Okay? And last but not least, think about these off invoice costs. Because when you're going in and the accounting people are looking and saying, okay, our cost of goods sold is this. They're looking typically at the invoice and they're not looking at those off invoice things. If it shows up on the invoice, they can see it in one place. But if it's some of those things that I talked about that are off invoice, it might be slipping through. Okay, so some of the easier things to do. Adjust your product and customer mix. What does that mean? It means focus your acquisition budget efforts on the people that make you the most money. Okay, so something that we did was we have a challenge called the epic challenge, that is teaches people how to acquire businesses for little or no money out of pocket. We ran that as a paid challenge for 24, 23 challenges over the last. Pretty much every month over the last couple years. And we tested because some of my friends that run challenges said, listen, does anybody not know what a challenge is, by the way? Okay, cool. Some of my friends were saying that, well, we're running free, and we make this much so much more money doing a free challenge. So we ran a free challenge after doing about 12 challenges, and we made about half of what we made on the paid challenge. So we thought free challenges are terrible. And we did another 10 or so challenges, and then we're like, okay, let's try. Let's start trying it free again. But instead of charging the same price, let's charge more, which I'll talk about in a minute. But this is kind of interesting. So on the paid challenge, it cost US$400 to acquire a customer, but each customer was worth about $1,100. That's a pretty good ROAS 2.75. But then when we raised the price and tried the free challenge, which we didn't do the first time, the first test that we did was, let's do a free challenge, and let's not raise the price. Let's charge the same prices. Well, the free challenge here with the raised prices, which I'll talk about in a minute, our customer acquisition cost runs about $17. And that's per challenger, by the way, $18. The revenue per customer, $240. The ROAS is 14.18, which I think is better. Right. And that's like, you just have to do it all the time. And I know my business partners were, like, testing me, texting me, saying, you know, this is crazy. We're scared. We're afraid to do this, you know, but we know we have to, but we're afraid to do it. And then you get a result like that. And if especially. Cause we had tested before with the same price, and it had done so much Worse. So that's something to think about too, is like, well, you might think about a different market here we're saying let's go after people that don't want to pay up front and it costs significantly less to get them. Will they buy at the same price? We found that they wouldn't buy as much and we lost money. But we did find that we attracted enough additional people that were willing to pay more that it totally made sense. And then we went back and did a paid challenge and charged the price increase too just to prove that. And we found that it was still the free challenge was by far the winner. Kind of interesting. So eliminate or restructure low margin products or customers. Right. Prioritize your high profit, low cost offers. That's just go through and check out what do things cost. We as marketers, when we don't own the business, sometimes we're disconnected from the finance section of the business. It's important for us to know these things because then we know what's going to make the company more money and then our people that we're working for are going to be very happy with the things that we do because we're going to make more money. Right. Good to not be divorced from that. So third is rethink your value ladder. Something that Kris Krohn is amazing at and probably finds the most opportunity in businesses, and we really probably do too, is that usually the value ladder, the things that people are charging for different products or services in the customer journey aren't optimized, they haven't tested them at all, or they're missing some big thing. And even though we're supposed to be relatively smart business people, when we're dealing with lots of businesses, we might miss something too. We might miss a very good opportunity to add something at the top of the value ladder that would really make the whole business significantly more profitable. So start high and then downsell we find to be the best way to do that. We've tested it both ways. We've tested. Do a free lead magnet and then go into a $7 thing and then a $200 thing and then a 29.95 and screw that, take your top thing and start with that. The people that want to buy that top thing don't want to go through that process and you're going to lose them. Right. So give them the chance to buy the most expensive thing first and then downsell to the people that cannot afford to acquire that value. Okay, that's super, super helpful. So case in point, we increased our price from 6,995 to 4,42,000, $48,000. That's where my partner said, you're fricking crazy. Right? It's not going to work that increase. We increased our customer service. We didn't just say, okay, it now costs roughly 10 times what it cost before to get this. We said, how can we serve our customer better? What do we find our most successful customers do? How long are they in? How long do they need to make the things happen that they're causing, that's causing them to come in in the first place? And then what value can we do? And our costs increased a bit, but nowhere near the difference between 69.95 and $48,000. And that increased our sales pacing from $3 million a year to 14.4 million, which also is better. Okay. I mean, that's a big difference. That's a huge difference. Right. And then create or add low cost, high margin products or services. So for us, we added, it didn't cost us much to put on event. Events are surprisingly expensive. Chris is really smart. He bought a building and lets the event pay for the building. We prefer to finance hotels. We think it's a really good idea to not build equity in real estate and just spend a lot of money with hotels because where else can you pay $200 a gallon for coffee? Really? Right. So we added these events cost us about 50 grand to put on. We do them once a month. And we added new sales of about 7.5 million per year with a gross profit of about 6.9 million. By doing these small events. That's a very low cost thing for us to do. 50k to produce a tremendous amount of sales, 600, $700,000 a month. Right. And then our fulfillment is almost nothing because we're still selling the same thing that we sell in other places. So what things, what ways can you serve your customer that have very high perceived value that will also produce a tremendous amount of profit? Okay. Because every 6.9 million in profit helps. I've said it since I was young and I'm still saying today and nobody's proved me wrong yet. Okay, so what are some of the things that you can think about adding? Right, and this is true. Whether you've got an E Commerce product, a brick and mortar store, a SaaS, or an info product or whatever else you might be selling, is there one on one coaching or product setup help that you can offer? The perceived value of that is super, super high. The cost is typically very Low. Okay, automation. What can you have software do? Or inexpensive humans that will make things easier for your customer. Right. So my business partner Ryan Dice says if it's that it's automated, if I don't have to do it. Right. You can automate something with people that you pay money and probably do it for less than a lot of software while you're developing the software. Okay. So just don't feel like you can automate things in immediately. Just figure out how can I do that without me having to do it. The next would be done for you. People really like just getting the result. They don't buy the drill because they want to have a drill or a bit. They want a hole. If you can sell them hole, then that's going to be better done with you. If you can't afford or the thing that you're doing doesn't allow you to do done for you because you need the customer or the client to participate, then think about done with you. What if we just do it with you? We'll do it together and that's very, very valuable. Do that in a group format, by the way, which is kind of cool. That'll. That'll really make the cost better. If you're selling software, you can do things that will drive people crazy, like download insurance. Right. I definitely like paying that. You can have extended coaching or extended memberships. There's a lot of things that you can do that don't cost a whole lot of money that are very, very high margin because the customer wants it and you actually end up with happier customers. Okay. Some other things, extended warranty, group coaching, live event tickets. Give them longer access to things, give them upgrades, masterminds or user groups, sales enhancements and upgrades. All of these are things that help the customer achieve the thing that they wanted when they bought your product or service in the first place and they're willing to pay for it. And last but not least, tech support or training packages. I think just in services. I want to say Russell Brunson has clickfunnels. The last I saw, 36% of their revenue was from services that they sell to clickfunnels people, not the actual software itself. Apple's done an amazing job of becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world off and on. Right. By adding services to all the hardware they do because that's Apple TV, the iTunes store all of that stuff. Right. Then how do we create profit optimized offers? How do we create profit optimized offers? Well, bundles are great. So take high perceived Value low cost items and put those with high cost items to improve your average order value and your margin. That's a very good way to do that. Unbundles. I have a company that I consult for that goes out and buys bundled suites of software and unbundles them like they do 10 things like Adobe does. And they unbundle them and then sell them all individually and make more money and then take them public and cash out with a bunch of money. It's so fun. I mean, it's like you can bundle, you can unbundle. Just depends on what the customers want. And then use sensitivity. Test your price sensitivity versus quality sensitivity versus quantity sensitive offers. I might talk about quantity sensitive offers, but how many of you feel like that if you ever buy something that at the store, like potato chips or vegan vegetable chips or whatever, that the bag seems to be slightly bigger than the amount of things necessary to fill the bag? Right. You don't typically get that. Well, that is appearance sensitivity. Right? They are. You get the same size bag that you used to, but it has, every year it has fewer and fewer of those things in it and more air. Right? But the price doesn't change. So you're making more margin, but you're not having to change the price. I think that's kind of sketchy that they do that, but that is something you can do, create new value propositions. So one of the things that they did in food was they're like, you don't want to eat that much. We'll put only 100 calories in the snack pack for you, but we're going to charge you three times as much as if you bought it in bulk. How about that? Right? That's, that is something the customer wants. Because the customer says, I can't possibly only eat 100 calories because these things are amazing, right? Like, we got you, we got you. We'll do that for you. It's 100 calories snap pack. So what can you do like that that will create new value propositions for your customers? Because maybe they don't care about the price so much. They care about not having more than 100 calories. Okay. Cold Coke at the checkout. Cold Coke at the checkout costs per ounce an insane amount more than just buying the cans that are literally 10 yards away, probably on an end cap. So you're standing in line and you're looking at the Coke and you're like, I sure would like a Coke. And then you look back there and you're like that Coke's cheap, but it's hot. This Coke's cold, right? And they put it in a different bottle so they make it a little bit harder because back there it's probably cans and here it's this different sized bottle. And so you buy the bottle. Well, that's a new value proposition. What if you had your Coke cold, in a different bottle, ready to drink, right, while you are checking out? Wouldn't that be nice? Yes, it would. How much can we charge for that? An insane amount, right? It's crazy. The price per ounce is insane. So can you find things that your customer values that they're willing to pay more for that they don't care? They care more about the convenience or the value that you're offering in this new format, be it 100 Cal Snack Pack or a cold Coke or whatever you're willing to do. Brainstorm those things. Those are fantastic offers to make. Okay. 30 day express sprints we found in our training programs far outperformed 90 day video courses. Two reasons. One is I'd rather do it in 30 days than 90. I believe I can do it in 30 days instead of 90. And you're going to do it with me in a sprint. Because a sprint is really just, hey, you know what? You should watch these videos and then you should do that thing. And then. Did you do that thing? Did you do it? Did you do it? Did you do it? How about now? Did you do it? How about now? That's a sprint, right? It's basically the same thing with a little bit of accountability. Okay. Custom products and services that cost more with longer lead time than in stock offers. If somebody wants something custom, you should charge more for it because it will cost you more to provide custom things than to provide repeatable. Crank out able inventory able things. Okay, Repositioning the value. Can you take overvalued or fatigued offers, offers that everybody's seen, and then raise prices? Like, basically, if you recreate the offers that have played out as something else, just breathe new life into them and it can be very small changes, then that gives you an opportunity to make more money and sell more multiples as well. Sell multiples of product to increase your average order value, reduce effective CAC and shipping costs. We found when we originally started selling T shirts that we thought people would just want to buy a T shirt. And then we said, oh, well, some people started asking us, can I buy more than one? I'm like, it's the same T shirt. Yeah, but I like it and I want to buy more than One, how many more do you want to buy? So then we tested and we found that about 20% of the people would buy five or more T shirts. All we had to do was put a little dropdown that said quantity desired. Right? So if you're not giving people the opportunity to do that, especially if they're talking to you and saying, can I buy more, then that's a great opportunity. Digital bonuses. Can you add lower, no cost digital bonuses to physical products? If you've already got things that you've paid for, those are called sunk costs. Can you reposition those as bonuses or additional value to enhance the value and get people to act faster to buy things that you want to sell them? So event recordings, tickets to already scheduled events, you already recorded the event. It costs $10,000 to go to that event. Fantastic. It's a $10,000 bonus. It costs you literally nothing to make it available to people as a digital bonus. What about tickets to events that you've already scheduled? We're going to have this event every year no matter what. So if I throw in a ticket to this event and it causes you to buy my high priced thing because you're like, that's cool, I get that event too. It doesn't cost me any more. This event costs what it costs to put on, right? Existing memberships that you've got or existing group coaching programs that you've got. All of those can increase average order value and margin because they got huge perceived benefit and you already have them, you already paying for them. And then the fifth thing is acquiring across your value chain. So I love to acquire. This is going up and down my supply and distribution chain. They call it vertical integration. So if you can buy your suppliers and you can buy your outsourcers and you can buy your distributors and your affiliates, then you can capture more of the profit margin that is in the ultimate value chain of whatever you're selling. All of those people own businesses and all of those people have to make profit. But if you own the entire value chain, you can make significantly more profit and most likely provide it at provide things at a better supply, quicker, higher quality and not lose anything in the process. So what to acquire? The easy one is the manufacturers. You know, I don't have any manufacturers. I sell digital products. No problem. Who's your outsourced provider? Are you outsourcing your agency work? Are you outsourcing content production? Are you outsourcing customer service? Are you outsourcing sales? Are you outsourcing your rep network? Right. All of those are things that we don't think of as supply chain, but those are our suppliers. If we're selling digital products, what about media and agencies? Can we acquire the people that have already aggregated the attention and eyeballs of our ideal customer profile? Then we own the leads. And by the way, we stopped our competitors from owning those leads. That's pretty cool. What about distributors and wholesalers? Well, distributors and wholesalers, distributors. Maybe you don't have any distributors because you're not selling a physical product, but I'll bet you that you've got affiliates. And if you don't, you're dumb because people will sell your stuff for you. So if you've got affiliates, though, if you've got big affiliates that are making a lot of money from what you're doing, buy them. Because you can probably buy them and make more per year than you are paying them from the financing. In other words, you can probably buy them and have them pay for themselves. We did that with Pete Vargas. He had somebody who was paying over a million dollars a year as an affiliate and was like, why don't you just buy them? And he bought them. And not only did he pick up the million dollars a year that he was paying before, which now increases the profit of his business and increases the valuation, but he also has that as a platform to promote other things. Right. So win. Win. So distributors, wholesalers, affiliates, and retailers. So five steps were optimize your pricing strategies. Think about your product and customer mix. Think about how can I tweak my value ladder to find things to put on there that aren't on there right now and rearrange my offers to be profit optimized and then acquiring up and down the value chain. So that's really it. And I want you to think about this in terms of if I'm a marketer, if I'm a finance person, if I'm an owner, or maybe you're wearing all those hats, but all of those functions need to talk to each other. That's really what this is about. Because if you don't, you're leaving a whole lot of money on the table and you might find yourself in a turnaround situation or out of a job. Right. Because the company can't make it. So lots of ways to add value. I hope that was helpful. Thank you guys very much. Give it up for Roland Frazier. Ever wondered how some people build real wealth through acquisitions, while others just sit on the sidelines? Well, I'm here to tell you it's not about luck. It's about having the right system, the right deals and the right guidance. And that's exactly what we give you in the EPIC Deal Fast Track. If you've been thinking about buying a business, but you keep getting stuck, whether it's finding the right deal, structuring the financing, or negotiating with sellers, you are not alone. Too many people waste months, even years just thinking about acquiring a business while the real opportunities pass them by. The EPIC Deal Fast Track is not another course. It's actually an implementation program and it's designed to get you from the idea to the acquisition in just 16 weeks or less. 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