7 Ways to Level Up Your Business

If you're anything like me, when the new year rolls around, you're usually super excited about the things you want to achieve.??You have more ideas than you know what to do with. The hardest part about that is knowing which ones of those ideas are the ones that are going to level you up: take your business and your personal life to that next level. In this podcast, I've outlined seven key areas that you should focus on in the new year. If you work on any of these areas, you're going to see a drastic increase in your business.

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Mike: If you're anything like me, when the new year rolls around, you're usually super excited about what's going on and the things you want to achieve. You have more ideas than you know what to do with. The hardest part about that is knowing which ones of those ideas are the ones that are going to level you up: take your business and your personal life to that next level. Today, I've outlined seven key areas, that if you work on these areas, actually if you work on any one of them, you don't even have to work on all seven. If you work on any of these areas, you're going to see a drastic increase in your business.

The first area that I want to talk about is: focusing on the customer experience. When someone comes into your sales funnel, however they get there, whether it was a referral, whether you found them on SAM.gov, whether it was an RFP. Doesn't matter how you found them. Maybe you met them at a conference. Doesn't matter. Everyone enters a customer journey with you. Have you mapped that out? If you haven't mapped out what that looks like, that's a huge opportunity there. One of the things that I always look at is: along the customer journey, where do people fallout? Where is the biggest drop off point in the customer journey and how can I fix that? That's one area you can fix in your customer experience.

The next one is your products and services. Is there anything you can do Your products or services? When I was in the software business, we were constantly getting emails and phone calls, support requests, about different things that our customers wanted us to fix.

?It was always a challenge to figure out which one of these things is the most important thing? Which bug fix? Which feature add? Whatever it may be. What is the next thing that's going to be the most important? And we basically had to list them all out and rank them. So if you're looking at your products and services, are there some areas in there where you know it needs improvement?

Maybe your response time isn't as fast as it should be. Maybe there's some automation that you need to implement to make it quicker for the clients, or whatever it is. Maybe it's that you need to be 24/7 and right now you're only business hours or whatever it is. Maybe there's something really, really simple in the way you deliver your products or whatever it may be. There's always room for improvement in your products and services, and that all goes back to the customer experience.

The last one on my list here for customer experience is customer intimacy. How well do you know your customers? Have you taken the time to learn what's important to them? Have you had some of those casual conversations where you talk about their favorite football team or baseball team or anything personal to learn anything about maybe their goals?

?Maybe they've been at that job for five, six years and there's a really big promotion they're looking for or something like that. How much time have you spent getting to actually know the people at the end of the line here in your customer journey? You know all of those people that are involved in you selling to the government.

There's contracting officers. There's cores. There's small business reps. There's the actual program project managers, engineers. There's all these different people. And how much time have you spent getting to know what's important to them? You don't have to sit there and go, well, we've got a hundred customers, Mike, and it would be crazy to try and figure this out for all of our customers. Pick the top 10. Just pick the top 10. Out of the top 10 say, look, we're going to get to know our CO's better and we're going to get to know the project managers better. And that's where we're going to start. In the first quarter of this year, that's our focus. And after we do that, we're going to go to the next 10.

And after we do that, we'll go to the next 10 until we get through all those. And once we get through all those, then we're going to go back and look at support engineers or whoever it may be. We're going to go to that next level. So you’ve got to start somewhere. Just focus on getting through that and then expanding those relationships.

Narrator: Did you know we have our own government contracting community? It's called Federal Access. And inside Federal Access, you have all the tools, tips, strategies, documents, templates, everything you're ever going to need to be a government contractor. But you also get brought into our ecosystem. You get into our private LinkedIn group and you get into our live events and all that kind of thing when you become a member of Federal Access. To learn more, go to federal-access.com/gamechangers. Now, let's get back into this episode.

Mike: The next one here is equally as important and that is employee engagement. When it comes to employee engagement, the game is real simple. You want to find and retain the best employees. That's really the game. Find and retain the best employees. There's a lot of different ways to do that.

I'm going to talk about a couple of those here. One of those is training and development: constantly offering things to educate and make them better. It doesn't always have to just be business related. Maybe there's a cooking class or something like that, that you could offer to your team and say, Hey, this is something that I know a handful of people have talked to me about.

They really like cooking. They really like wine. They really like whatever. And we're going to have a class on that. And we're going to host it and pay for it and bring somebody in. And you could do that, whether it is in person or even virtually. You can do that that way. That's, that's a really good way to do it.

Another thing is career planning and goal setting. Do you actually sit down with your employees and say, Hey, you are a junior level, entry level, whatever person in this team. And in order to get to a senior level, in order to become a manager, in order to become whatever: here's the path you have to go down.

Are you interested in that? Do you want me to mentor you down that path? Is that something you're interested in? Just showing interest in an employee is usually enough to make them say, wow, this company really cares about me. And then sitting down with them to do some goal setting. Like look: over the next year maybe you want to, you know, hit the max bonus you can get from the company or max raise you can get. Maybe there's some certifications you want to get. Or there's a vacation or something that you want to go on and you've got to hit some goals in order to do that. Help them figure out ways to make their life better and actually plan some of those things. Because most people never sit down and learn those skills. And you can do that with your employees.

Another thing on the employee engagement side is the culture. There's a lot of ways you can work on your culture, whether it's surveys. Or whether you just take action and do snacks or gift boxes. Or again, going back to the virtual events and maybe you're hosting a cooking class or whatever it may be.

There's a lot of ways to improve the culture. And I've actually heard about that a lot lately from companies that are more remote, where one of the things they are focusing on is group events. Where they will do a wine tasting and before the event they'll send everybody a box of wine. Then they will host the event.

They'll have somebody on from the winery. And they'll bring 'em all up on Zoom. They'll talk about the wines. They'll have cheeses and different things. So that's one thing you could do. But that's just one area. You could host a book club. You could host all kinds of different events. I think there's a Bespoke company or something along those lines where they do like the wilderness type of kits and things they send.

So you could send something like that to those people and you could go through it on a Zoom or something along those lines. There's a lot of ways to engage and improve the quality of your people's life. And it doesn't cost a whole lot of money. I've always heard that the average bad hire costs around $60,000. Between all the work and effort you've got to go through and the fact that hey, they may not be portraying your brand properly. There's all kind of damage that a bad hire can do. So when you find a good hire, it's worth thousands of dollars to nurture them and keep them in the business.

?The next one on my list is: diversify your revenue streams. A lot of people never take the time to look at complimentary products and service to diversify their revenue streams. Most entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurs I talk to, are really scattered. And they have products and services that have no relation to their main product or service. I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about is sitting down and saying, what is a complimentary product or service that we should be selling to our customers that we don't today?

Or even better yet, what is something that we do sell, but we've never had a conversation with our customers about? I can't tell you how many times you'll sit down and talk to a client. You all of a sudden bring up something you do and they'll say this phrase: huh, I didn't know you did that. Or I didn't know you sold that. It goes back to: you may have a product or service that you could be selling that you're not. So what should you be selling to your current target agencies, current clients that you're not today? Another way to diversify your revenue streams is to actually look for a new agency to sell to.

That one sounds super simple. And it really is. It's looking and seeing: is there someone that you should be selling to and you've just not taken the time to? Let's now add that to our radar.

The next thing on my list is to develop a strong teaming strategy. And it starts with, number one, investing more time with the right people. If you've talked to a dozen teaming partners and only two or three are really doing anything, you need to invest more time with them. If there are two or three that you're like shaking your head like, why aren't we doing more with them? I go back to the question: are you spending enough time with them? If you're not spending enough time with them, then those are people that you have to spend more time with. So how do you spend more time with them?

It's really easy. Commit to a monthly call and commit to some goals. Most of the teaming relationships that I see, most of the mentor-protégé relationships I see, that aren't working: it's because you haven't committed to anything. And if you're not committed to anything, then stuff pops up occasionally and you have a phone call. It's a really casual conversation, and that is not going to take your business to the next level. You're not going to level up anything with just these very casual relationships. You’ve got to be very persistent and you've got to be very focused and intentional about what you want to achieve with these relationships. So commit to a monthly call and set goals with your teaming partners.

The next one on my list is to enhance your online presence. The first thing I'm going to ask you to do is go review your website. Go review your website and see if it needs updated. I will tell you, out of all of the consultations I do, I usually only have maybe one or two companies a year that say, we just updated our website. Everything's up to date. We're really happy with our brand. That's one out of maybe 300 to 500 people I'll speak to this year. The majority of people are like, yeah, we haven't updated our website in a really long time. And I'll go click on something and the links don't work. Go review your website and make sure it's still relevant. That's number one on your online presence.

And the next one is: if you really want to make a splash this year in social media, you don't have to worry about what you're doing on TikTok or Facebook or any of that. LinkedIn is the place you need to be. And I would recommend maybe you hire a social media expert to come in and help you develop a LinkedIn strategy, not just for you the business owner, but for your team. There's probably anywhere from three to five employees on your team that all need to be using LinkedIn. I would say everybody in your company, but there's, there's always a handful, especially all the salespeople and stuff like that. Those folks need a strategy on how they're going to use LinkedIn to grow the business. Whether it is reaching out to the contracting officers and all that that are on there or teaming partners. There's a lot of opportunity on LinkedIn. And if you bring in somebody who's a social media expert, they'll be able to help you pinpoint that for you.

The next one on my list is a really simple one, and I'll be really quick with this one. It's very self-serving in this one. It's hire a coach or consultant. You know, if you've been in this business for any length of time and you are not happy about where you are with the business, you need to go hire a coach or a consultant. You can reach out to me. I'd be happy to sit down and do a one-on-one session with you. Tell you what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, all that kind of stuff, point you in the right direction. If coaching makes sense, I'll go over that with you. But you need to think about this one. Especially if you're a business owner and you don't have a big executive team. Like if it's just you, it's lonely being a business owner. It's very, very lonely. And all too often, you know, you can't see the problems because you're so close to them. You need that perspective from somebody on the outside saying, well why are you doing this? Why are you doing that? Hey, this doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. You know, if you made this little bitty change, it would blow your mind. And so hire a coach or consultant.

The last one on here is also self-serving, but it's self-serving for you. And that is to level up your self-care. If you are trying to go from six to seven figures, or seven figures to eight figures, or whatever that number may be in your business, you have got to take better care of yourself. That is number one. You need more sleep. You need to enjoy the business. You need to have some hobbies and things like that.

You need to do things that actually replenish not just your mind, but your body and your, I would say your spirit to continue in this business. Again, being a business owner is often lonely. There's often a lot of demands on there. There's a lot of stress, and there's stress internally from you.

There may be stress from your team. There may be stress from your family. You need a way to rejuvenate yourself and constantly be refreshing, basically. You need to be powering down and powering on ready to rock and roll. And it doesn't mean that every week you need to do something. But you need to have regular intervals where you're taking time out of the business. Regular intervals where you're like, you know what, Friday afternoons, that's my hiking day. Or every other Friday I'm going to the gun range. Or every other Friday I, you know what I'm going to go get a massage because I like doing that. Or, every other Friday, I am going to skip out of town and go to the movies. It's whatever you enjoy. And then there's also all of the home commitments, whether you have kids, or maybe it's just you and your dog or whatever it may be. There are commitments at home. And if you don't have any commitments at home, then maybe you spend more time on your hobbies, whatever it may be. But there's the simple commitments of laundry, food, cleaning the house, all those kind of things.

And maybe this year, one of the things you want to do to get back some of that time is you want to hire a housekeeper. That is not near as expensive as you would think it is. We used to have, uh, when we lived near St. Louis, we had this woman, she was amazing. I wish she would've moved with us., you know, she would come to our house maybe twice a month and it was $75 and she would clean the house top to bottom. I even caught her one time ironing my shirts. And this was $75, right? She'd come spend a couple hours. She was amazing. She was a retired person who just had that extra time and liked doing it. You know, she actually became sort of like part of the family. It was like having that grandma who'd come over, but she did our laundry and, and cleaned up the house and stuff.

Things like that don't cost near as much as you would think to offload something you don't like so you can spend time doing more of the things that are important to you. Level up your self-care. Look at ways you need to take better care of yourself, whether it's a better meal plan, exercise, time with your family, time with your hobbies, time with your friends, time with your dog. Doesn't really matter to me. But you need to take better care of yourself.

?If you like this episode today, I want to highly encourage you to go listen to episode 245. It's called Six Simple Tips for Business Planning. And it kind of ties right into this because we're talking about leveling up the business. In that episode, I talk about really simple strategies that will help you implement all of the ideas that we talked about today.

Narrator: I really hope you enjoyed the podcast today. If you did, I would really appreciate it if you would like and subscribe to the podcast and screenshot it and tag me on LinkedIn or whatever social media you use. So thank you again for joining us today, and we'll see you next time.