This is Why Great Business Owners Stay Broke (& How To Fix It)

If you've got a lead magnet out and they've downloaded it, that person's just waved a huge red flag saying, hey, I have that problem. Can you please help me? And then you're just like, hey, here's my email automations that's going to tell you a story about why I started my business. There's a reason that's not working. If you're doing that right now. It's not about getting a better email nurture sequence. It's about actively contacting that person who needs help and saying, hey, just tell me a little bit more about what you're experiencing. I'll see if I can help you.

Welcome to the Success School podcast. We're on episode 102. Today we're talking about why great business owners stay broke.

Ooh, spicy, spicy.

Spice alert. Step. How you feeling?

I feel very good. Do you know why I feel very good?

Why?

Because I feel very validated. Actually, I went to my myotherapist shout out to Vanessa at MYO Care in Whiffets and she was doing some needling, some cupping, and she said, steph, when was the last time you were in? And she looked at my first appointment with her, which was back in August 2023. Now I haven't been in for about eight months since then. And she said, why are we still working on this same problem, which is my hip on my left hip, the front of my hip is a little tight. It's been pinching for apparently two years old, that old mummy hip. And she said, I think it's time that you get an mri. And I was like, you're probably right. Actually, probably do need to take this a little bit more seriously. I keep thinking that stretching is going to do it, but stretching does not do it. And I kind of berate myself. I'm not that good at stretching. Like I don't do it as routinely as I would like. But there are people who don't stretch who don't have a hip as bad as mine. So I think we're past the point of it being stretch related. So I'm going to book an mri. I'm going to get this.

Old peptides.

I don't like needles.

Yeah, I mean, it's not up. Let's get it done.

I need to get an mri, find out what's actually going on. So anyway, I feel very validated, but I also feel great because the cupping and the needling was amazing.

I also feel validated all the time by AI. That's my personal update Today. So we were in the caravan the other weekend and electrics went down and we were like, fucking up shit creek without a paddle, basically. And I was like, oh, how am I going to get through this? I'm holding my hands up like Donald Trump here. But it was like we took a photo of the electrics. I uploaded ChatGPT and I was like, my electric's not working, what do I do? And ChatGPT gave me like a step by step process. It was amazing. And then I said, all right, this is working. This is not. Here's what's plugged in. This fuses out. This is not. And it literally gave me a step by step on how to restart the electrical system in our caravan. It was amazing.

Amazing.

We would have been so fucked with.

Yeah, because I was googling. Nothing was coming up. Nothing.

ChatGPT is not just for copywriting or making content. It's actually for being handy AF and being a tradie. I think I like tools with Tim is elevated now with.

Well, the generator also messed up the same weekend. The generator, I think you flooded it.

Yeah.

Didn't know what happened. Just stopped working. Generator powers caravan so it's, you know, important power.

Yeah.

And you fixed it because AI told you exactly how. So basically now you're the world's handiest man, you and your robot.

A hundred percent. My robots, they're taking over the world. So today we're talking about why business owners stay broke. And what you guys need to know is being great at delivery isn't enough. The market rewards visibility, confidence and systems.

Most people are missing revenue because they're too busy doing it's not because they're not skilled enough. And I think ultimately it comes down to the fact that there are people, people who are way worse than you at what you do, who are making way more money than you do. And honestly, that should piss you off because they're better at marketing or they're better at sales because they show up more. And it's simply down to the fact that, you know, you're relying on your skill to pay the bills. And unfortunately, that's not the way business works.

So, guys, an uncomfortable truth here is that if you're under 10 million, you're in the sales and marketing game. That's it. 80% of your time or more should be spent on sales and marketing, not what color is your branding, website, photo shoots, that kind of stuff. You, you are literally in the sales and marketing game. That's what you should be doing every single day. So we're going to give you guys a step by step strategy today to not stay broke and become a successful business owner and entrepreneur. Steph, do you want to kick us off with step one?

I do, I do want to touch on this because we do give branding, website and shit a bit of a bad rep. It's not. You do need those things. Okay. But you don't need to mess with them every six months.

Yeah.

Because you feel like you need to do something different. Okay. It is important to have a brand that looks good and we do recommend a lot of people for branding. We do recomm a good understanding of what brand means, not just as colors and logos, but you know, who you are and what your values are. All those things very important. So please don't overlook that work. You do need a good website that is absolutely imperative and super important, but you do not need to change it every six months to match your new updated brand that you just pay for again for the third time. So it's not about the fact that you shouldn't need those things. It's about the fact that people spend too much time fixing those things when those things are not the things that need to be fixed because they're scared of doing the real work. And the real work is that you need to, number one, build a repeatable sales team engine. So if you're relying on referrals or random Instagram dms or waiting for someone to drop in, or a lead magnet that you're hoping your email sequence is going to somehow capture and convert into a sales call, it's going to convert into a sale. You're playing a very, very slow, slow, slow business growth game. Okay? If you are really serious about taking your business to 20k, 30k, 40k, 50k months, it's really important that you are able to get leads daily, not just when you choose to show up and advertise your lead magnet. Okay? So if you're not getting leads daily, whether that's through ads or organic, that's a problem. That's a, it's a really big red flag. You need to be getting leads daily. Um, and when we talk about leads, we're ideally looking for name, email and phone number, not just the name of someone and downloading your lead magnet. Okay? The second thing that you need to do is you need to contact those leads. So whether that's in a phone call, a text message, email, dm, there needs to be some outreach happening to that person. That person's just waved a huge red flag saying, hey, I have the problem, if you've got a lead magnet out and they've downloaded it, they basically, I have that problem. Can you please help me? And then you're just like, hey, here's my email automations that's going to tell you a story about why I started my business. There's a reason that's not working. If you're doing that right now. It's not about getting a better email nurture sequence. It's about actively contacting that person who needs help and saying, hey, just tell me a little bit more about what you're experiencing. I'll see if I can help you. Okay? And then last but not least, you need to have a pipeline of sales calls booked each week. Okay? And the way that you get sales calls booked is that you ask people to book them, you make offers. It's, it's, it's, it sounds so simple. It like saying it sounds so simple, but you're scared and you're not doing it. And it's frustrating because if you just knew the power of having an ad turned on that generated leads that you contacted and you offered those people calls to talk to you about solving their problem that they obviously have because they just downloaded your fricking thing, you would have a $50,000 business per month, every single month, without fail. It's the simplest thing in the world, but we overcomplicate it because we're scared.

And that's coming from us. Guys, we did the math. We booked a thousand sales calls in 12 months in that exact process. So I just wanted to give you like a tactical on what you need there. So Steph did speak a little bit about the marketing stuff. So you need a landing page, Then you need a booking calendar. That booking calendar should ask about five questions. Name, email number. After that you should be sending them some reminder text messages, emails. Then from there you want to have a sales script or a framework or a presentation that you go through. Then you want to be following up with the people as well, sending them brochures, documents, that kind of stuff. So you need all that stuff. So it's got to be tick, tick, tick, checkbox. We're going to get into step two. You need to treat your content like positioning, not just posting. So in every single piece of content you should be conveying trust. We should be building know, like and trust. And it should be moving the needle or moving them closer to signing up with your program, offer or product. So there are kind of four pillars that you need in your content. The first one is problem Solution content. The second one is objection. Handling content. The third one is content that shows who you are as a brand or a person. And the fourth one is you want to be teaching them something valuable. So what I want you guys to do is audit your content. Do you have those four pieces? If no. Yes, you need to add them in because that does create a well rounded brand online with content and you need to build that. And it has to be in an engine that you run all the time, regardless if you're sick, if you feel like it, if you can't be bothered. If it's summer, it's winter, you got the SADs. Like whatever it is, you have to be building this as an engine. So we did mention that the first part of this was build a repeatable sales engine that could be from like a sales process and a marketing engine. Number two is you have to have a content engine. Okay?

And guys, if you're spending more than two hours a week on content, I'm telling you right now, you are not utilizing the full power of AI because we live in a world now where one content should be the easiest thing to outsource of all time now. And you should be able to outsource it to your team. And when I say outsource, it's not to say that it's not coming from you. There's so many ways that you can make it still come from you. But the repurposing podcasts and we're repurposing content you've already written and you're creating new content from that content, okay? But it should be taking you no more than two hours a week. So if you're spending more than two hours a week, then it, you're wasting time. And if you are spending more than two hours a week, the problem is that when you get tired, when things get busy, when you need an extra 2, 3, 4, 5 hours to work on a new project or put out a fire for a client, the first thing that's going to go is your content and your marketing. And then in six weeks time, you're going to wonder why I've got no leads, why I've got no clients. Because it takes about that amount of time for people to start dropping off and they stop seeing you and they forget about you and you become irrelevant. And then all of a sudden you're like, push, go again. You start marketing again. But they haven't seen you for six weeks, so they're, you're out of the algorithm. It's much harder to get their attention again. And so marketing has to be something that can be run very easily and ideally without you. Number three is that you need to map your lead to sale process. Guys, I feel like we probably bang on about this, but we hope that repetition leads to your understanding of how important this is. But you need to know your numbers. So you need to know how many leads you get, how many of those leads book sales calls and how many of those sales calls close. And if you know those numbers, it's going to be really easy for you to optimize your processes in between those things happening. So if you're not getting enough sales calls, but you're also not getting enough leads, and it's a marketing issue, we have to pump some more marketing behind things. We have to optimize our marketing processes. If you're getting leads but they're not converting to calls, and we need to optimize our nurture sequences, our nurture processes. If you're getting a lot of calls but you're not getting any closes or not enough closes, then that tells me that we need to optimize your sales call process. Those are all very important things to optimize. But you can't optimize all at once. And if you are not tracking the numbers and you don't know which one of those optimize, you probably throw all of your time and energy and money at marketing. When marketing very well and very often is actually not the problem.

I just want to give you guys some KPIs on these. So in terms of leads, you guys really need to work out how many leads you need to get one client. So if that's 10 leads, 20 leads, 30 leads, whatever it is, you need to know that number. You need to start tracking that so you can look back at your KPIs of previous weeks or whatever and go through your messages and work this out. But you need to know that number. Secondly, you need to know what your close percentage is. So for every sales call you have, what is your close percentage? Is it 20%, 30%, 50%, 60%? You want to be aiming for 50% as a minimum. The more you scale out to cold audiences or people that don't like you, the lower that percentage will be. So we get this quite often in success school. People are like, yeah, I've got no problem selling people like, I'm a really good salesperson. And they're just selling like their friends and family and people they know what, that's super easy to do. It's really hard to Sell a stranger off the street on a product that you have. So it's not like a true representation of how good you are as a salesperson if you're just selling everyone that loves you. So 50% is kind of where you need to be. You need to have a leads number as well. And then in terms of like a lead cost. So if you're running paid ads, I think anything under $10 is really good for a lead cost. And for B2C, it can be even cheaper. So fitness, nutrition, those types of things. B2C can be like $2, $3 even under a dollar. B2B businesses are a little bit more expensive. So just in recap, guys, 50% close rate, work out your leads and then in terms of cost per lead, under $10 are the main ones you need.

We KPI our clients. If you're not getting 7 inquiries every single week for your business from organic or paid marketing, then it's a marketing issue, okay? Because ultimately some of those people are going to cancel their calls. So if they get inquiries that someone's saying, hey, actually it's either them booking calls or they're saying, I want to work with you. If you get seven, then you know, one or two of them are not going to show up because they're busy or something's going on. Close at 50%. So only, you know, two or maximum three of those people are going to close. And most people need more than two to three new clients. A. So the reality is, if you're not getting seven inquiries, it's a marketing issue. If you're getting 20, 30, 40 people interested but then not converting to calls, so they're putting their hand up saying they're interested but not converting to calls. You're not getting enough sales calls booked, then it's a nurture issue. And if you're getting on sales calls, lots of them, and no one's buying, then it's a sales issue. Here's what not to do. So please don't assume clients will just come. Please don't pray and hope and wait until you know they drop into your lap like you deserve better than that. You can get better than that. All you need to do is put in a little bit of effort. Don't rely on your talent alone. You may be the most skilled, whatever it is, ops manager, va, fitness coach, whatever you are, you may be the most skilled person, but if you don't market and sell yourself, then your skill is going to go completely under acknowledged and you're going to see people fly ahead of you that are way worse than you simply because they focused on marketing and sales. Okay? So it's really important that you don't just rely on being good enough at your skill. You have to get good enough at sales and marketing. Don't wait for perfect on content or funnels. Tim and I launch most things. I would love to say 80% done, but I don't even think it's that far. I reckon it's like 50 or 60% done. Spelling mistakes, terrible photos, not very well optimized landing pages. We just get it up because we know that we probably can drive a lot of traffic there because we're pretty good at marketing and we just want to test it and see what kind of interest it gets. Don't play small because you're afraid of rejection. Yes, people are going to say no. Yes, people are going to not show up to your calls. Yes, people are going to say that you're too expensive. That's just part of the game, so don't make it mean anything about you. And last but not least, don't assume all leads and sales should close. This is a really common one. People are like, oh, I'm just really frustrated because, like, two people said no this week. And I'm like, of course you're not going to get 100% of people who get on sales calls that are going to be like, yes, I want to buy your stuff. 50% close rate for a reason, guys. That means 50% of people say no or not right now or I can't afford it. That doesn't mean that you're attracting the wrong leads. That's just part of the sales game.

All right, guys, we're going to get into listener questions. This one's from Liv. Should I do more freebies or just start making offers? Steph, what do you think?

I need so much more context to be able to answer this question correctly. So I would say that depending on the stage of business you're at, if you're in the very beginning stage of business and you've got an offer that you're bring it to market for the first time, drop the price, run it as a beta, get some people into it, go offers over freebies all day. Okay. If you're planning on doing a group coaching launch or something that you've never done before, you have a bit of an audience and you're wanting to build up to be able to get people optimized to buy a group coaching thing. I would be running some freebies to build the audience to make sure that you have people to actually sell to. That would be my M.O. for that. I think freebies really have a place, but freebies without strategy have no place. So there's no point having a freebie unless you're gonna reach out to and contact the leads. If you don't have an intention of reaching out and contacting leads, you may as well just make offers.

Yeah, my thoughts are offers, generally, if you're broke, make offers. If you need new clients, make offers. Where I did this at the gym that we used to own is I would launch a new beta offer every two weeks. I would just change who it was for and what the outcome was. So we're always launching an offer and it worked really well. So it was like a mum's fat loss thing. We had an Olympic lifting program. We had like a powerlifting program. We had like a muscle game program. We just launched different programs, different betas all the time. And it just attracted people to come and do a 28 day thing or a 14 day thing. And it was much better than being like, hey, here's my fat loss ebook. Because that's, yes, they're interested in it, but this is actual intent and it shows that they have high intent to engage in the service. So for me it's always make more offers if you want more money. All of us clients that make the most money make the most offers. Like there's just, that's just how it works. So guys, just a quick recap of today. Skill or your skill level doesn't equal income. You need to be more visible. You probably need to market more than you think you do. Content isn't a chore. It's a cash generator. Content, like organic is. I think it's a big branding piece. More than like I'm gonna generate heaps of clients and hundreds of clients. It's more like a people will go there to see what you're about. Make offers every damn week if possible. The more offers you make, the more money you make. And then lastly, stop hiding behind the work. Start selling what you do do.

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