An Open Letter to Entrepreneurs Struggling to Grow Their Business

I find it difficult to tell you this…

For years, I’ve prided myself as being the “go-to marketing guy” for entrepreneurs seeking advanced marketing strategies to generate NEWtraffic, leads, and sales to rapidly grow their businesses.

After all, I thought this is exactly what you wanted… So I gave it to you.

These efforts generated millions of dollars in sales for my business coaching clients (some of you reading this may have even benefited).

However, there’s one problem…

My approach was backwards.

…I started from the end and worked to the beginning (instead of the other way around).

This resulted in more effort, more time, and more resources.

Now, I kept doing it because that’s what everyone else in my industry proclaimed to be the “secret for growing a business.”

Experience quickly told me that something didn’t feel right.

And I seemed to be the only one who took notice…

Want to see what I mean?

Check your email right now.

Without fail, you’ll find experts persuading you to buy their pay per click, social media, marketing funnel, mobile marketing, product launch, direct mail, webinar, print advertising, radio, telemarketing strategy, and so forth…

Am I right?

They all claim their program will help you grow. Yet, if you’re like me and purchased many of these trainings, you likely noticed the results are never as easy as promised.

Well, here’s why:

The guru world is designed to sell you the latest and greatest trinket…

Even if they know it’s not the “real secret.”

Old doesn’t sell as well as new and shiny…

The sheer amount of potential strategies for your business is overwhelming.

And like they say about the weather here in New Hampshire, give it a few moments, it’ll change…

The fact is, you’ll always see a new marketing strategy touted as the next best thing.

Yet, a new marketing strategy does not always translate into the most intelligent way for you to grow your business right now.

That’s why I began to ask myself, “What is the smartest and fastest way to grow a business?”

Then the answer came to me.

And I made an announcement to the world:

Forget about creating a new marketing strategy… at least for now…

Experts couldn’t believe what I said…

After all, there’s money to be made in pitching new strategies?—?just as those before me did…

But my loyalty is with my clients and followers?—?who I feel need to hear it firsthand from me.

The truth is, I never found it “easy” or “fast” to make money with a brand new strategy, without first going through what I’m about to share with you.

So… it’s not fair for me to pretend to be someone or claim to accomplish something I have not…

Creating a widely profitable strategy took time…

It took testing…

It took work…

It took patience…

Sometimes, it took money…

And the worst part:

This is completely normal when you try to make a new strategy work for you.

Kevin Daum, an Inc. 500 entrepreneur and best-selling author, said it best:

“There’s nothing wrong with hard work, but smart work will help you achieve success sooner and easier.”

Developing a brand-new strategy is the hardest, most expensive way to grow a business.

(I wish someone told me that when I struggled growing my first multimillion-dollar business.)

So, therein lies the question:

“How can you create the same or better results by working smarter?”

As I took a step back, I began to notice something…

Our fastest, easiest, and often most profitable results with clients came when we did NOT start by building a new strategy.

Another strategy produced a bigger return.

Often in as little as days (as opposed to weeks)…

And I’m not talking about a few dollars here and there?—?I’m talking about strategies with the potential to instantly ignite as much as 35% growth.

Ongoing…

With the potential for ever-increasing profits.

It changed everything.

The Single Biggest Source of Untapped Profits for Small Business Owners… That Nobody’s Talking About

Believe it or not, you learned this secret in high-school physics…

It’s a universal truth or law about how the world works…

And it directly applies to your business. No exceptions.

Ready?

Now, when I tell you what it is, you must continue reading for the full explanation…

Here it is:

It’s also referred to as momentum.

You’ll see how this holds the secret to your business growth in just a moment…

As it turns out, the reason creating a brand new strategy takes so much time, energy, and money is because the strategy has no momentum!

That’s why it’s harder to get your first 1,000 customers than your next 1,000 customers.

So what do you do now?

Introducing The O.S.I. Method for Growing a Business

The Predictable Profits Playbook lays the foundations for dominating any market and staying on top.

The strategies in the book are imperative to creating a leading company.

However, that’s not what we’re talking about here…

We’re talking about growing your business and the steps to make it happen.

Actually, here are the only 3 steps to growing your business:

1. Optimization
2. Systemization
3. Innovation

And they must happen exactly in this order.

Let me explain.

STEP 1: OPTIMIZATION?—?The Fastest Way to Immediate Profits

If the problem with starting a new strategy is that “an object at rest stays at rest,” then it only makes sense to go where there’s already momentum…

Right?

And that’s precisely the first step in growing a business:

Identify all the high-impact areas containing business momentum.

Where are the opportunities inside your business that already generate leads, clients, and sales?

• Website?
• Email?
• Direct mail?
• Sales team?
• Advertising?
• Telemarketing?
• Promotions?
• Events?
• Referrals?
• Articles?

Create a sheet (like the one here). Then identify the impact areas and the current results from each effort.

These are your most rapid growth opportunities.

Furniture retailer Blue Dot identified their website as an impact area.

Without spending any more money, they optimized their landing page. Simply changing their visual images of color swatches to a text-only display instantly increased total order conversions by 62.4%.

Not bad, right?

And that was just ONE impact area.

You’re reading this post on my blog, and because I get regular leads from this page, it’s a point of business momentum.

Like most people, I had the sidebar of my blog on the right:

In an effort to maximize my potential, I tested the sidebar by positioning it on the left:

The result? I better than DOUBLED the email opt-ins I averaged over the last 8 months!

Traffic Czar Justin Brooke made the change on his website and received a 300% increase in opt-ins (thanks for the tip!).

How long did it take me to make this change?

90 seconds.

How much did it cost me?

Nothing.

What’s the impact of this change?

$$$$$

Think about it: if the average lead on your list is worth $1 per month to your business, doubling your average daily opt-ins could instantly double your list revenue.

And you can do it in less time than it takes you to drink a cup of coffee.

In another example, we helped on of our business coaching clients sell a $7,500 program.

Sales were good, but we suspected they could be better…

After a few months of testing, we simply added an extra follow up step to the sales process and instantly increased sales by 400%.

We alsohelped a client with a direct mail campaign. Initial conversions were very good; however, by simply changing the digest cover and adding photos to the testimonials we helped them increase sales by 40% above their control.

The examples are endless…

STEP 2: SYSTEMIZATION?—?A Winning Process for Automatic Sales & Growth

Your ultimate objective (as outlined in the Predictable Profits Playbook) is tocreate at least one new profit center a quarter.

This is an approach we call establishing “The Money Wheel?”?—?a systematic method creating more predictability and growth opportunities for your business…

However, having a Money Wheel? is impossible if you don’t have the right systems and processes in place.

Therefore, only after you accomplish Step 1, and have a fully optimized impact area, can you move to the next stage of systemizing your business.

In many cases, using a CRM like Infusionsoft allows you to instantly automate many marketing functions.

You can use it to create autoresponders, follow up marketing campaigns, cart abandonment campaigns, customer reengagement strategies, evergreen marketing funnels, referral systems, and so forth.

You can have campaigns that automatically send email instructions to certain people based on various actions, inactions, and purchases.

For example, if you’re an Insiders’ Club Member and your credit card expires, our CRM triggers a series of emails prior to expiration, during expiration, and finally, if you haven’t responded yet, triggers an email to my assistant to call you before your subscription is interrupted.

You can use marketing automation to systemize anything and everything possible, creating more leverage for you to work on your business instead of in our business.

However, let’s face it, you can’t automate everything…

For example, Hudson News discovered that Dasani bottled water was a top-seller at its 400 newsstands. To optimize sales, the cashier asked any purchaser at the point of sale, “Do you want water today?”

(Sounds vaguely familiar to McDonald’s billion-dollar “You want fries with that?” question, right?)

Hudson News customers now spend more money.

So here’s the deal: wherever you are missing a system, sales people will forget, point of sales will fade away, and you’ll lose profits.

In order to ensure your sales people, management team, customer support, etc. implement the strategies you set in place, you must create a system and process.

You can use a tool like Sweet Process to document those non-automated processes and systems.

And once it’s documented, in order for us to measure the campaign’s effectiveness, it must be tracked and monitored.

(How many water bottles did Cashier #1 sell today versus Cashier #2? Does it fall within our daily average? If not, why? Did it go up? Why?)

The same strategy works for restaurants, software companies, lawyers, doctors, retailers… You name it.

Systems and automation simplify the process, create leverage for getting more done with less effort, and drive increased profits.

STEP 3: INNOVATION?—?Developing Key Profit Centers

This is the phase where you develop new profit centers…

Things like creating a brand new advertising effort…

Conducting a product launch…

Establishing a new direct-mail campaign…

Email marketing…

Social media…

…and so forth.

It’s also where you test against your existing profit centers and attempt to establish new controls.

And create industry firsts…

This is how we generated over $1.17 million for a client in under 10 days…

Or $250,000 in 24 hours.

It’s exciting!

However, unlike what you might read in sales pitches, it’s also the area that typically takes the most skill, strategy, time, and resources.

Sorry folks, there’s no reliable holy grail or pixie dust that magically creates profits out of thin air?—?without first putting in a little elbow grease.

Fortunately, the first two steps above often illuminate the ripest opportunity for innovation.

A mentor once described developing new strategies as “drilling for oil.”

You find fertile ground…

Make a plan…

Drill and test for results…

Adjust as necessary…

Once you find a steady flow, drill deeper and focus your efforts to pull as much revenue as possible.

The point is this:

You and I have one thing in common: we only have 24 hours in a day. How you spend that time?—?whether working harder or smarter?—?is up to you.

As far as working smarter, this 3-step process is the easiest, fastest, and most efficient way to grow your business.

Like the story? Thanks! Hit the like button and we’ll keep the good stuff coming :)

Looking for an advanced marketing strategy to grow your small business? Register for this Free Marketing Workshop and get the 3-step marketing strategy shared among many of the fastest growing companies in the world.