Tools To Build A Business FAST

We're going to talk about mapping out your machine from two different aspects. The first aspect we're going to talk about is just the technology stack. One of the things that I heard mentioned during Elise's presentation is somebody said, hey, what technology do I need? I'm with Elise. I think you get the technology that you can afford that can do what you need it to do. For right now, I'll tell you. For example, email automation is a mainstay in today's business marketplace. At some level, you need to have a bare bones email marketing system. I personally use ActiveCampaign. There are free resources like Mailchimp. A lot of them don't actually have a lot of automation categories, but they're things like start where you're at. And when I think about it, all the things that I've been sharing with you, all the lessons I've been learning, all the things I've been sharing with you guys, the big business started with this.

That's. It started with a hammer.

It's important. No matter where you are in your business right now, it's important for you to start where you're at and build to where you're going.

We have been building a business for the last two and a half now, three days, trying to give you the living illustration of what it takes to go step by step by step by step. I did a quick analysis last night and I was looking over the marketplace and I was like, you know what, in the marketplace I don't see, I still don't see any programs that specialize in what we're trying to build here.

And to be quite honest, if you guys have gotten value from it. Have you? Yeah. Really? Yeah. All right. Just making sure. All right. Well, in order for me to build this out, I need your help to let people know it exists.

Yes. People build businesses all the time for money, as you guys know. At some point in time, as I've been telling you for the last several days, if you will focus on the impact that your business can make, the income will come. One of the things I wanted to piggyback on that Alicia mentioned when she was talking to Elise was Alicia, one of the things I think that could be beneficial is being able to connect with that person in that moment based on where their heart is. Right. They're going through a major life transformation.

How can you come across as tender hearted and empathetic and respectful?

How can you come across in such a way that allows you to walk beside them where they feel like they're having Somebody to walk beside them so they feel less scary. Maybe there's a way to create a consignment project. Well, look, I'll walk with you through this process. You and I will do this together. I'm gonna help you get out from under this foreclosure or get away from this foreclosure in a way that you don't get hurt or the hurting is lessened. Right. When you're building out your business, you gotta again, we've hit it on it. I mean, to me, it's all about service. The secret sauce is always service. Always, always service.

How can you position your product, your service, your business to solve that emotional need, the philosophical need, the external need, the internal need, and beyond.

And then it comes down to the tools you use. So as we look at this, we're gonna talk about two different things. We're gonna talk about kind of mapping out your machine, kind of building out your framework a little bit. From a technology standpoint. These are gonna be bite sized things. I'm happy to talk with you guys offline about some of the stuff that we use. I gave you a running list yesterday of some of the things that we use that are in your workbook. And there's other things that I'm happy to disclose with you guys. So. So let's talk about what a website really is.

A website is really a billboard of a business.

It's a billboard of your business and it's got to be treated that way.

You don't want to half butt your website.

And the reason you don't want to half butt it is because almost everybody is looking for a product, a service, et cetera, via a cell phone. The vast majority of the traffic that happens now on Google and Facebook and I can tell you from analytical data, is about 78% from a mobile device.

And the balance is from a desktop of some kind.

Now, what people often don't remember about this is there's actually some things that let the customer know that you're a safe bet to do business with.

One of those things is what's called an SSL certificate. Have you guys ever seen the little lock that's in the corner of your search window?

Well, here's the rule. If you don't see that little lock and you're on somebody's checkout page, that checkout page is prone to being hacked. This SSL certificate is what puts that little lock up there, which means the transaction in and of itself is encrypted. Now, there's different levels of SSLs. But companies like SiteGround.

Have free SSL certificates all the way up to paid SSL certificates. SSL certificates.

So you want to make sure your website is hosted on a quality domain. We have recently began moving all of our, what we call digital property or digital property assets from SiteGround because that was a great place to start over to Google. Believe it or not, Google has actually created their own version of a hosted system.

Now I have bought domain names through SiteGround, I bought domain names through GoDaddy and I bought domain names in different places. Key attribute is making sure that when you are choosing your business's name, just go into Google and see if it already exists.

I was trying to buy unstoppableonline.com just recently because essentially that's going to be the online school, right? Well, believe it or not, they have what's called a squatter and the squatter refused to sell me the domain unless I paid him $5,000. And I told him you know what? I can deal with a hyphen unstoppable hyphen online cost me $12.50.

Get creative but do your searches. You don't want trademark infringements, you don't want copyright infringements, you don't want to the best of your ability, make it unique to you. But once this hosted service is set, once the SSL certificate set, you want to make sure your website is absolutely fast and mobile.

Absolutely fast and mobile. Why a simple one second? A simple one second delay in speed or I'm sorry, advancement in speed on your website can boost your conversions by over 35%.

People are impatient now. That's why TikTok is probably the biggest social platform right now because it's like 10 seconds of people dancing, right? Getting boogie on, right? I haven't got that far on TikTok yet, mainly because I can't dance. But I didn't hear right. People's attention span is short. You need that website to load fast.

If you want nice things like background videos like in the background. If you want things that are image heavy, there's tools to basically bring those things down in size so when they go to low they don't load so fast or take as long to load. One of the resources as a program. This is not in your workbook so go ahead and write this down. Is a system called WP Engine.

WP Engine. It bolts onto a WordPress site. Really, really good and in conjunction with a Google based hosting solution with an SSL certificate, it'll make your website load really fast.

That One thing that we did with stevenscoggins.com that one thing that we did, we just launched it, relaunched it probably. Well, we've relaunched it like 16 times. But in the most recent iteration where we didn't really monkey with the website, we just put it on a different server capacity. The website loaded 4 seconds faster.

I've had an increase in traffic of 65% just visiting the website. The average time someone spent on the website was approximately 60% longer than they had before.

Subtle things.

Subtle things. Increasing the checkout efficiency. You know, Elise talked about this, like, remove all the barriers of entry to have somebody do business with you. I'm doing. We have an upstart division in the construction business called cat remodeling. And every time I find out there's a customer problem, I see that's a roadblock, right? If they're not happy and they're not and there's something happening, maybe they're not getting a text or an email or something on time, I want to remove that roadblock. So doing business with me is easier and easier and easier and easier and easier all the way till you get to the Amazon standard where it's like a one button push.

And your technology platforms, now, your online store stuff for like WooCommerce, like I mentioned yesterday, can do that if it's properly set up.

It may surprise you, but the average person will charge you anywhere from five to $25,000 to build an actual website up to six pages. To have that function properly, to have your Google Tag appropriately installed, have your Facebook Pixel properly installed, to have your AdSense properly tracking, to have what's called retargeting, which now we're starting to get in the weeds a little bit. So I'm gonna come back up out of the weeds. But these types of things need to be instituted. What they didn't tell you is I got so frustrated paying people to build websites for me that never functioned properly, never did the right thing, that with the exception of some of the stuff that Brad did for me, I began building them myself.

And I got to where I got used to using Elementor Pro, like we talked about, I got used to using WooCommerce. I know my way in the back end of the website. Now, I'm not a developer, I'm not an engineer, but I can build a page. So if I want to launch a new product or service just by doing the work to learn how to build it, which you can find on YouTube all day long, all day long, there's tutorials on how to build websites using WooCommerce using a WordPress WooCommerce Elementor Pro scenario. And every website will look completely different and function different.

You can save yourself $5,000 if you want to spend 15 hours just learning how to use a program. Now I can launch a landing page. I'll give you an example. I'm going to share something with you guys a little bit later on. Based on Yalls feedback to me from yesterday, a young man that got up at that microphone, man, goodness gracious, it tore me up all night last night in a good way. Because I'll tell you this, that I didn't tell him this yesterday, but I wanted to do this event two years ago.

I felt an urging in my heart to start this crusade two years ago. But instead I listened to my team at the time who had the best interest, but I didn't follow my instinct and we focused on the Life Mastery space. And I told you before, everybody needs Life Mastery help, but not everybody wants it.

You know what the crazy part about it is? I have never seen a hungrier group of people in front of me ever in my life. You know what I learned?

I learned that this is where I need to be.

You guys taught me that. You taught me that.

But as a result, last night, one of our team who's not here today was able to go into our system last night and build an entire landing page for you guys later. In one day.

I want you to get out of the mindset that one, you can't do it because you can.

And two, that you shouldn't do it because in some cases you should.

One of the things that I think has helped me garner the respect of my team members in the larger businesses over time is the fact that I have done every single position in that business at least once. At least once I have a basic level of understanding of what it's like to sweat on a job site or freeze on a job site or work in the rain or drive a nail and hit my thumb and bust my knuckles and cut myself. I used to go into work and I would come home with scars all over my hands and I would have no idea where they came from.

I know what it's like to sit up at 2am or 3am and do bids and estimates because a customer that I was trying to solicit required that I had my bid in by Monday morning at 9am I know what it's like to burn through an entire weekend trying to order job packages and stuff myself with Excel Spreadsheets and all this kind of stuff. I know what it's like to be the warranty guy, the guy who goes and picks up the material in the back of the delivery truck and then drives it to the job site, unloads it myself and goes back to the delivery service again and do it all over again.

I want to encourage you to learn the basic fundamentals of your business so when you start leading team members, you're able to do it with a level of empathy and competency.

Now, I would be lying to you if I said I was perfect. I'm still learning every single day. The man that I'll bring up here after I speak in this particular session has taught me a great deal about what to pay attention to. He was also one of the first people that told me about what I mentioned to you yesterday, where I had the wrong financial person in the wrong seat. And he warned me ahead of time.

But you heard Joe talk about my loyalty. I was trying. I saw potential in somebody. I wanted to give them a chance.

But they weren't ready.

And the way you help people get ready is by you understanding how to build your thing yourself. At least from a bare bones necessity overview. You need to be competent so you can check on things. All right, let's move back to the website. You could also consider using what's called a landing page. A landing page is a little bit different than a website entirely because a website normally has multiple pages that are used to help Google crawl your website through what's called SEO search engine optimization. And it's looking for specific words to make you to rank your website at a certain standard for whatever your product or service you're trying to provide. Does that make sense? A landing page, on the other hand, is custom built for that one thing. That's the thing that we built last night for you guys. Because I'm not as much as I do. I was not going to release any of this stuff officially until last part of this year because I want to edit it. And then when I heard that young man get up at that microphone last night and said he wished he had it two years ago, I'm like, we're going to wait another day.

I need you guys to have that same level of emotional intent.