The 2 Most Important Business Questions!
There are two questions every successful entrepreneur asks themselves on a regular basis.?
And that regular basis may be annually, quarterly, or even daily, depending on how quickly your business is growing right now.?
And these two questions point out the weakest aspects of their business.?
The parts that might be getting weaker as they grow, so they can fix them before they begin to hurt their growth...?
When you focus on these things, you don’t get stuck in your growth like most companies do, and you can scale faster in the coming months than most of your competitors scale in an entire year.?
In fact, it’s questions like these that helped me grow multiple successful companies at the same time that most companies struggle to grow just one.?
And every successful entrepreneur I know is great at asking themselves and their team questions like these.?
So if you become good at one thing this year, become good at asking yourself the right questions that lead to growth.?
One of the first questions that I like to look at and that most fast-growing companies look at is this:?
As it stands right now, can your business function without you??
Most entrepreneurs are going to answer no to that question.?
But then, there's businesspeople who, if they walked away for a month, the business would still function (at some decent capacity) without them. and some might even be able to walk away for a couple of months, and the business would function while they're gone.?
But for most entrepreneurs, their businesses cannot function for any length of time without them.?
And most businesses go through cycles, so you have to ask yourself this question on a regular basis.?
But if you answered yes, then we go to the next question, which is:?
As it stands right now, can your business grow without you? Not just function, but growth!?
It's very rare that any business that was not actually built to grow ever even gets to a point where it can function and grow without the person who started it driving the bus.?
When I go into a business, either as an owner, advisor, or investor, there are four things I look at every time.?
These four things tell me exactly where I need to put the greatest amount of my time in order to make that investment not only grow but also become automatic, because there's a team of people who are self-motivated.?
And I'm going to tell you what those four areas of focus are, so they're on your radar too.?
The four areas we look at for any business, whether it's one of the businesses inside my personal portfolio, one that I am investing in, or one of the companies I’m advising, are:?
Exposure?
Conversion?
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Lifetime value?
And organization?
Exposure is the number of your perfect target audience who sees your brand in a positive light at the exact time you need them to see it.
If you’re an influencer and every time you put out a video, thousands of your target audience watch it, then that’s your exposure.?
Or if you buy an ad on a big podcast that thousands of your target audience watch, then that’s your exposure.?
Or maybe you get interviewed on a big podcast that’ll stay online forever, and that podcast gets millions of downloads by your target audience, then that’s your exposure.?
And where most companies get this wrong is that they either have only one source of exposure or they have way too many sources of exposure, meaning…?
If your company sells supplements, and maybe the great majority of your advertising is on Facebook, and since Facebook ads have worked out so well for you in the past and you've built a $10, $20, or $40 million supplement company, you think Facebook traffic is going to continue forever, so you put almost all your effort behind that one source of exposure.?
But no marketing platform keeps performing forever, and to be quite honest, building a $30 million or $40 million supplement company using just Facebook ads is really not that difficult to do.?
But you have to be willing to spend a ton of money testing Facebook ads, and you’ll probably have very little profit to put in your pocket at the end of the day.?
In that situation, you definitely shouldn’t be able to sleep at night, because you should know that everything you’ve built could crumble if and when your Facebook ads stop working at the level they have.?
So, in that situation, the best use of your time is finding new ways to double, or 10x, or 40x, your exposure by using other platforms.?
The other hole that a lot of companies get stuck in is when they aren't doing well on one platform they tend to take a shotgun approach, and they put some time into Facebook ads and some time into Google, and then they go to a seminar and they hear about affiliate marketing, so they put some money there, and then they go to another seminar and they hear about TikTok ads, or they read a book and they think Instagram ads are the way to go.?
So, their marketing is so limited that they never gain maximum traction on any one platform.?
The idea is to get momentum on one platform first.?
And the definition of momentum is to be ROI-positive, meaning every penny you spend on ads, and on any agency fees, comes back to you plus more, and that plus more is your profit.?
And then use your profit to begin testing another similar platform that has a similar audience, similar buying habits, and similar algorithms.?
Don't test a completely different market, because the idea is to use the momentum you've gained on one platform to shorten your success curve on the next platform and amplify your results.?
The four areas I look at are always:?
No matter what stage of growth you're at right now, whether you're struggling to break the million-dollar mark or you're already at the 10, 50, or 100-dollar mark or more, those four areas absolutely always need to be on either youe radar or other people’s radar inside of your company.?
Probably when you first start in business, it's going to be on your radar, and as you grow, you’ll hire rock stars who know what to focus on, and drive growth for the company.