In the days leading up to the New Year this year, how were you feeling about your business?
Were you proud of yourself for the last year and optimistic for this year?
Or did you write off the year completely and just start looking towards this year?
… and if it was the second, was that preceded by a little disappointment in yourself for not doing everything you set out to do?
It happens…
But that doesn’t mean it has to.
Too often, we’re so optimistic at the beginning of the year and little by little, we settle back into our comfortable ways and forget all about the goals we set for ourselves at the beginning of the year.
Even though you might’ve grown a little last year, it doesn’t live up to our actual goals.
And as an empire builder, chances are, a HUGE part of the goals you fell short on were your business.
So what if it didn’t have to be like that?
What if your goals became a standard that you knew you’d hit rather than a target that you wish, hope and pray to hit?
I’m curious…
Is your business like a toddler that is erratic and unpredictable or is it like a soldier who is routine and scheduled?
Chances are, if you’re not reaching your goals, it’s because your business is more like the toddler than it is the soldier.
When your business becomes like a soldier that follows systems and routines, that’s when you get to step out of the every day grind of your business and start working on the high-level strategy, growth and the fun stuff.
Here’s the thing though…
No one ever wants to hear that because it’s boring.
You started a business because you wanted freedom and you wanted to work for yourself, not because you wanted to be a slave to your business.
There are two types of freedom.
There’s immediate freedom that allows you to skip work tomorrow if you want to and that lets you design your branding the way you want to.
Delayed freedom is the freedom that you’re actually seeking.
It’s the freedom that allows you to actually make money in your sleep, to go on vacation for a month if you want and to know that your business is still working without you.
Howeverrrr, you have to put in the work up front for that to be your reality in the future.
Like I said, boring, right?
I’m not saying it’s always boring… but it’s definitely more mundane than when you get to work solely on impulse and on what you feel like working on.
Unfortunately, the thing we WANT to work on isn’t always the thing we SHOULD be working on.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know though.
However, once you start systemizing your business, you discover time and mental white space to work on the fun stuff and systemizing your business becomes SUPER addicting once you start seeing the effects of it.
Ready to take this to another level?
If you’re sporadic in your business, your income probably looks a liiiiitle like this…
And your time is the complete opposite of that like the blue line…
And as a result, you only spend time looking for new business when you have time, even though you have no income, like the orange line…
Sound familiar?
Orrrr, even if you do have a business that generates consistent revenue, it’s probably because you’re the main hustler that’s looks for new business AND you’re also servicing that business… So if you took a vacation (or worse, something happened to you), your whole business would come to a screeching halt.
Here’s the perfect example of exactly that…
My dad passed away a few months ago.
I’m not telling you that for your sympathy or anything… It’s actually relevant to where we’re going with this.
He owned one of the largest granite fabrication companies in South Florida and he was super proud of it.
My dad was a marine and was super old-school (he still used hanging envelopes for his customer files, preferred cash over card and built all of his relationships on the honor system).
It worked for him.
He made about $500k a year…
Then he died.
He didn’t plan for succession and even though he had a team of people doing administrative stuff for him, he never built systems into his business that could run without him because he was stubborn and set in his ways so his business died with him.
… and what makes it worse is that I’m pretty confident that the stress of running his business is what caused the heart attack that killed him at 51.
So, if you’re working like an animal, systemizing your business isn’t just something that’ll be nice to do.
Your life could literally depend on it.
Now before you go run out like a crazy person and buying a whole bunch of tools that are supposed to make a certain part of your business easier, I need you to read, eat, memorize and write down this next statement…
Before we can start systemizing your business, we need to know what’s going on in the business currently and where the holes are.
Too often, we’re like “I need more business” so the seemingly logical answer is to get more leads… So we go spend a whole bunch of money on new leads.
But we don’t have systems in place to handle all of those new leads so then we can’t convert those leads and instead of realizing that there’s a hole in our business, we just write them off as “bad leads”
… Or you hear that someone in your industry is KILLIN it with a specific system, so you go run and dump a whole bunch of money into it, only to find that you didn’t get the same results.
That’s because there’s a hole in your business.
So let’s break that cycle.
Tracking the numbers in your business is one of the most boring parts of running a business and it’s so easy to dismiss because on a daily basis, it doesn’t seem like it’s that important when you have 100 bajillion other things to do.
Soooo when you get busy, tracking your numbers is the first thing to fall by the wayside.
But let me ask you a question…
How many clients do you need this year to reach your income goal?
… and how many leads do you need to get that many clients?
If you don’t know the answer to both of those without batting an eye, that’s the very first problem… and having a general idea of what those numbers are in your business isn’t good enough.
On a different (but related) note, I’m a little extra by nature.
So because I like to be extra, my ideas are always extra and I always design my systems to be extra… and over time, the fluff falls away to leave the gold.
Leaving me with the cold, hard, results-getting stuff… The 20% that gets the most results without any of the fluff.
So lucky for you, I’ve already TRIED to make this complicated so you don’t have to.
We’re going to make this super simple.
Your business comes down to four numbers… and basically everything else just comes down to vanity metrics or numbers that are taken care of by the four that we’re tracking.
(Vanity metrics are those numbers that make us feel good (like hitting 10k followers) but don’t actually mean anything on it’s own.)
The Four Numbers To Track In Your Business
Ok, so now that we know what your business model is, here are the four numbers…
- Engagements
- Leads
- Presentations
- Commitments
They all go by different names, but that’s basically what it comes down to.
Depending on your business model, engagements can count as contacts, pageviews or subscribers. These are the interactions people with you, your business and your brand.
Next, you have leads. These are people who raise their hand and say, “yes, I have a problem I want to fix or a desire I want to fulfill and I’d like to do it sooner than later.”
They might not be ready to commit to working with you yet, but they’re someone who you know that you can help.
Your funnel is basically the process that someone goes through from the time they come in contact with your brand all the way to the time they decide to hire you, buy from you or work with you.
After someone enters your funnel, at some point they’re going to realize that you can help them with their problem or fulfill their desire.
Those people will raise their hand to learn more about your product or service.
That’s where you book an appointment.
Of the people who book an appointment with you, some of them will commit to hiring, buying from or working with you.
That’s where the commitment comes in.
Their commitment is a genuine decision to buy from you and can come in the form of a signed agreement, hitting the “buy” button and getting to the checkout page.
That’s it.
Those are the four numbers.
The little voice in your brain is probably like, “but what about ___?”
There are SO many numbers in your business that you could track that trying to track them all makes it too complicated.
What you focus on, expands.
For now, let’s break down these numbers for you.
Breaking The Numbers Down
Based on your income goal, you can set goals that you KNOW you’ll reach and systematically scale your business.
Here’s how you should start looking at your business:
Let’s say you have an income goal of $100k for the year and your average revenue per client is $1,000.
In order to reach your goal, you need 100 clients for the year.
(These are totally hypothetical numbers, I’m just using an example).
Let’s say 90% of the people who commit to you (whether that’s by landing on the checkout page or signing an agreement), end up as a closed sale.
That means you’d need 111 commitments for the year.
In our hypothetical business, 75% of people who we present to make a commitment to buy from us
In order to get those 111 commitments, you need to go on 150 appointments for the year.
Working our way backwards again, 10% of the people who enter our sales funnel (more on that in the next post) decide to learn more about our business.
That means we’d need 1500 leads for the year.
In this pretend business, we decide to do Facebook ads that lead to a landing page with a free download and that landing page converts at 60%.
That means 2500 would have to see our landing page for the year for us to get 100 clients for the year.
Breaking that down even further…
On a weekly basis, here’s what this looks like:
- 48 people see your ad
- 29 people opt-in to your lead magnet
- 3 of them click through to the landing page or schedule an appointment
- 2.5 of them commit (this week you need 2 but next week you need 3)
- 2 closed sales
So if you were this business owner, you know that your job is to get 2 sales every week and you know exactly what you need to do to make that happen.
All of these numbers are totally made up in this example, but do you see how your business becomes more predictable in this way and how your goals become way more achievable?
Reaching your goals isn’t magic.
It’s strategy.
At the end of the day, it’s not about leads.
It’s about appointments… and that’s what you should be spending your time on.
If you want to learn how to make your business this predictable, we’re hosting a totally free online conference that will help you turn Facebook into an appointment-generating machine.
Check it out right here:
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