“Paying attention to simple little things that most men neglect, makes a few men rich.”
-Henry Ford-

At this time of the year, when we are making New Year’s resolutions and setting goals, it is useful to look back at that great vision and reflect. Not from a glass half-empty perspective, that serves no one. But from a perspective that says “Whatever I can conceive, I can achieve!” This means you are making progress towards your goals, but still have things you want to achieve. I am not going to talk to you about goal setting. If you own your own business, you are probably already pretty good at that.

The difference between those entrepreneurs who shatter the glass ceiling and make gobs of profit and those that simply make a living from their business is quite simple. Those that break through this ceiling are those that are constantly learning, always searching and finding ideas that give them greater knowledge, insight and skill that will take them further, higher and faster.

In that spirit, today I want to show you a key secret to getting what you want. I can almost hear you saying “This guy is really full of BS, that’s just marketing speak!”

The truth is, I wish I had understood what I am going to share with you today more clearly years ago. Unfortunately, it has taken me many years to really internalize this concept and make it my own, even though I have known it for some time. This secret is so fundamental and so important that if you learn it, truly understand it and consistently apply it, I can guarantee that you will become rich.

What is it that you wanted when you started out?

  • A better income

  • A business that someone will want to buy

  • More time to do the things you enjoy

  • The freedom to do the kind of work you like, when you like

  • Two or three vacations a year

  • No financial worries

My guess is that whatever you wanted when you started out, you probably still want it now. You may be closer to it, but in all likelihood you still want it.

When I talk to business owners, many of them tell me they are stressed, wear too many hats and are always time pressured. More importantly they complain that they work too hard for the money they make, but can see no way out.

Today and over the next few issues of Street Smart Marketer, I will share with you some of the things you can do to lead the kind of life you desire and build your business to run the way you want it to. You can create a business that generates huge profits, while enabling you to take a few months off every year.

There is a lot of ground to cover and there are many issues, so I will deal with each over a period and give you the information in installments. These tips will be far more strategic than what you have been getting, but each has the potential to truly leverage your business to much higher levels than you believe are possible right now.

For most people, the answers to growing a successful business are sitting right there in front of them, but they are so busy earning a living they don’t see them and consequently do not make any real money.

I want to help you identify and mine untapped profit centres and assets in your business. I also want to show you how to get more time for yourself to do the things you want to do.

We all want to achieve this, so how do we get started?

The key is in figuring out the way to grow your business that produces the best levels of success and that requires the least amount of investment and effort. This is not as difficult as it sounds. There are only a few sources of growth. So, the first step is in identifying them and then understanding how you can take advantage of each of them to produce the result you want.

If you ask 10 business owners how they intend to grow their businesses this year, 9 of them will tell you by bringing in new customers. Let’s examine a typical business. It doesn’t really matter what kind of business since these principles work in every industry.

Let’s say you are a quick print firm and you did about $300,000 in revenue last year. This year you want to grow by 25%. So you plan to bring in 25% more customers. This sounds simple enough, but unless you have a strategy that’s already yielding that kind of growth it might be a lot more difficult than you imagine. Bringing in new customers is the most expensive and riskiest strategy you can employ. You definitely need new customers. Any business that doesn’t get new customers eventually shrivels up and dies.

So what else can you do? Well let’s look at your options for growth:

  • You can increase your number of new prospects.

  • You can increase the conversion rates for new prospects.

  • You could increase the number of transactions each customer does with you each year.

  • You can increase the dollars they spend each time they buy.

  • You can increase your margins.

This gives you 5 choices instead of one. Did you know that if you decided to increase each of these by 10% you could increase your sales revenues by more than 45%? How much easier and cheaper would it be to increase each of these by 10%, than to increase new customers by 25%. For each there are many tactics to achieve this. I teach more than 30 of them in my Rapid Growth Mentoring Program. All you need is one or two effective tactics at work leveraging each of these strategies to achieve geometric growth in your business.

Even if you could easily increase your customers by 25%, what would the impact be if you increased each of these areas by 5 or 10% at the same time? Do the math, you’ll be astounded! Most of us never think of our business this way.

These five strategies combine to create the StreetSmart Revenue Growth Formula.

So, if you are generating a 100 new prospects each year or each month and your conversion rate is 20%, you generate 20 new clients, but if you increase your conversion rate to 25% by reversing the risk, you now generate 25 new clients. No extra cost, no extra effort, just extra sales and extra profit. It is a simple matter of multiplying each figure by the next.

This is a perfect example of leverage; multiplying the effect of each strategy by the power of the other strategies. This is the difference between linear growth which is 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 10 and geometric growth which is 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 32. If you are running your business with a linear growth model, what are you leaving on the table? Geometric growth takes a little bit more work to set up, but once it’s operating the results are staggering.

It doesn’t matter what business you are in, there are ways to apply this formula even in businesses where you only have one thing to sell and customers only buy it once.

Make it one of your objectives this year to learn how to grow you business geometrically instead of linearly.