So much attention is paid to e-commerce businesses these days, but what about applying Business Made Simple for brick-and-mortar businesses? Increase your cash flow and freedom by reading this article and applying the principles.
Business Made Simple For Brick-and-Mortar
- What is Business Made Simple?
- What BMS Course Should I Do First?
- How to Grow A Local Business?
- The 6 Key Parts of Your Local Business
- Leadership: Become a Business on a Mission
- Marketing: Focus on These 2 Strategies
- Sales: Do This and Add an Additional $100K Per year
- Products: This Yearly Habit Gives You Peace & Clarity
- Overhead: Debt-Free in 14 months & Finance Tools
- Cashflow: Know Your Numbers
Here is all you need to know about Business Made Simple and its courses to understand what works and what doesn’t for your brick-and-mortar business.
What is Business Made Simple?
Business Made Simple is a collection of online courses that help you grow your business. Most local business owners focus on getting more website traffic and clients. They aren’t blocking off time to work ON their business since they are working IN their business, fulfilling what was sold. Look, we get it… you’re busy! We know what it’s like to be bogged down with a never-ending task list. But here’s the reality. This is what is holding you back from hitting that next financial goal. It’s that simple.
Whether it’s 5-figures a month or paying yourself a salary of $250 thousand this year, I’ve helped hundreds of people learn how to grow a local business with these courses. Currently, there are 10 courses. BMS has helped my clients identify and strengthen the weak areas of their business.
Take these 3 steps.
- Use my special link to buy for $275.
- This month schedule your 2 free 30-minute coaching calls with me.
- Implement what you learn and grow your local business.
You went into business for a reason. It’s time to evaluate what is working and what isn’t. It’s time to develop a plan to take your business to the next level, thereby taking YOU to your next level. What would life look like if you made this commitment?
Sure, you’re spending money upfront and committing time to get this done. But what could you gain? More free time to spend with your family? More disposable income even through rough economic times? That trip to Italy (or you fill in the blank)? What would you do with your extra time and income?
What BMS Course Should I Do First?
Maybe you aren’t ready to buy Business Made Simple for $275. Fair enough. We get it. Here’s a link to a powerful free trial. Those of you who bought BMS and got the bonus of two coaching calls with me, lean in. It can feel overwhelming when you’re starting a new program, but there’s no room to stagnate in fear when you own and operate a business. Am I right?
I’m sure you are thinking, what BMS course should I do first? I’m biased, and I want everyone to start with the Messaging course and then the Marketing course since I want you to get more clients and make more sales. However, you can take that same assessment and learn how to make your business more profitable.
Try it; FREE for 7 days.
- Sign up for your free 7-day trial.
- Learn how you are doing in the 6 areas of your business.
- Fix your business with a plan for the next steps you can take immediately.
How to Grow a Local Business?
So you want to know how to grow your local business? There’s no point in being IN business if you’re not experiencing some steady growth, right? You want more website traffic, quality sales calls, and clients. But the problem is people keep telling you to do more social media and film reels. Listen, using social media to ‘reel in’ customers is great. However, local brick-and-mortar businesses want people within 10 miles of their physical location to find them on Google.
You need a strategy to show up on more local searches. A strategy for local SEO and Google ads that will attract ideal clients to book a sales call or walk into your storefront. I believe everyone should have a website that converts. In big cities like San Diego or Atlanta, brick-and-mortar or local service businesses have a lot of competition. You were called to the marketplace and have a purpose to fulfill.
How to Grow a Business is the third Business Made Simple course you should go through. For 5 years, I’ve filmed these 10 Local Marketing Minute video series. Search the #localmarketingminute on Facebook or Instagram.
Blogging will help you grow your business. It’s a great way to answer the frequently asked questions you get from your customers and provides you with somewhere to send them in order to increase their trust in you.
The 6 Key Parts of Your Local Business
In the Business Made Simple course How to Grow a Business, Donald Miller uses the airplane analogy to talk about the 6 key parts of your business. Most local businesses are missing a productive operating system.
Your business runs like an airplane. If you’re a visual person, take a look at the diagram for a more detailed description.
- Leadership
- Marketing
- Sales
- Products
- Overhead and Operations
- Cash Flow
The cockpit is your leadership, and 7 areas impact you leading well. The right engine is marketing. If you don’t have consistent cash flow, I like to start here with clients. The left engine is sales. If your company makes less than $100 thousand, you’ve got to be getting on sales calls. The wings are your products and services. The body is your overhead. And finally, the fuel tanks are your cash flow.
This year focus on these 6 areas, and you’ll know how to grow your local business.
Let’s talk about the 6 parts of the airplane.
Leadership: Become a Business on a Mission
Starting with leadership and how to become a business on a mission. Leadership is the cockpit of your plane. You can’t fly a plane without a pilot. Okay, wisecrackers… I know there’s an autopilot feature on many planes, but someone needed to design autopilot, right?
Think back to why you opened your business. You probably wanted to provide a better life for your family, or you saw something missing in the marketplace and took your opportunity. When you have a clear mission and purpose, you’ll attract awesome talent and clients —many times I skip these Business Made Simple courses because my clients need to increase cash flow.
But once we fix your right engine of marketing, you’ll have room to breathe and do leadership development. Business owners fall into two categories the visionary or the integrator that makes the vision happen. I thought I was the integrator for the first 5 years of working with my husband at RebelFish Local. I’m very organized, and implementing what I learned is easy, but I finally realized that I’m a visionary.
Do you know which role you fit into and fulfill?
Let’s get to the right engine…
Marketing: Focus on These 2 Strategies
The right engine is marketing. You must focus on these 2 strategies.
- Clarify your message.
Even if there are hundreds of real estate agents or financial planners in your city, you provide a unique approach to helping your clients solve their top problems related to your service. When you get clear on what your ideal client wants and the problem that is in the way to having success with your help, you’ll add an extra 5 figures a month in revenue.
2. Create a sales funnel.
There are 5 parts to a sales funnel. The hub for these 5 parts is your website—the words and layout of your website matter. When people leave your website, it is generally because you didn’t provide them with what they wanted. If you confuse, you lose. When you have a sales funnel with free and paid options for working with you, you’ll have more leads in your funnel that you can turn into clients over the next 90 days.
Getting your messaging squared away is key to improving your sales. Knowing what your target customer is looking for and how to communicate that YOU have what they need will send your sales soaring.
Sound like a plan? Let’s move on…
Sales: Do This and Add an Additional $100K Per Year
The left engine is sales. When you develop your sales team and processes, you’ll add an additional $100 thousand this year. I guarantee this when clients are in my 90-day Website That Books Calls coaching program.
There are 3 areas:
- Messaging
- Marketing
- Getting more website traffic
When you update your website and put focus on those 3 areas, you’ll have a website that converts. If you don’t have a sales team yet, that’s ok you can still follow my system. Ensure you have the proper infrastructure in place, as you’ll have to be efficient on your sales call and follow-up system.
Products: This Yearly Habit Gives You Peace & Clarity
When I talk about your wings as products, you may think but wait, I have services, not products. I hear you. At RebelFish Local, we have services too, but they are created in a way that can duplicate the results following a similar process for the clients that hire our marketing agency. That’s how your service becomes a product. When you can turn a service into a product you can repeat repeatedly, this is how you’ll get more referrals and have more successful clients.
Once a year, I look at all the products and services our company has sold. For example, I take all the revenue numbers for all the StoryBrand website work for the year, then divide by gross revenue and multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
Once I do it for our 5 products, I can quickly see how to improve our customer journey and if we should eliminate or wramp up the paid ads for sales funnels that are working really well. There is nothing more valuable than peace. You can’t buy it, but you can establish regular habits leading to clarity of mind, thereby increasing your peace. This yearly habit gives you peace and clarity and is one I highly recommend implementing.
Overhead: Debt-Free in 14 months & Finance Tools
The body of the airplane is your overhead. It’s the central part of the operation, and frankly, it’s where many bodies are found once that fuselage is found after a crash.
I know, I know… that’s an incredibly graphic way to speak of business. But it’s true. When a plane (business) goes down, many times, a business owner will look back, dissect their operation, and discover that they could have avoided disaster by changing some things around with regard to their overhead. I think we can all agree that this is NOT the time to study and dissect your business operations.
Many local service businesses have left their offices and been working from home, so overhead is very low. That’s great for them! But for brick-and-mortar businesses, your labor, lease, and cost of goods are much higher. Some businesses got that Small Business Administration loan, and even though it’s at 3% interest, taking 30 years to pay it off will be a terrible financial decision. You’ll owe almost double.
We’re not just all talk and no action at LizCortes and RebelFish Local… We did the hard work of calculating the compounding interest, and that’s what motivated us to pay off those last 2 debts. We paid off both our SBA loan and my student loans last summer. Over 14 months, we used the EveryDollar budgeting tool and paid off $145 thousand in debt. We also saved 3-6 months of personal and business expenses in our emergency fund.
You can experience financial peace and really enjoy the profit from your business. Imagine what your daily life and business would look like if you had the peace that comes with being financially sound. There’s a freedom that comes with financial stability – freedom to create and build even more, whether personal or business.
Speaking of numbers and knowing them…
Cash Flow: Know Your Numbers
Knowing your numbers is the sixth key to growing your local business. The fuel tanks are your cash flow. That makes sense, right? Having fuel in your tank will propel you toward success, but you HAVE TO KNOW your numbers.
Knowing your numbers is key to being able to make sound business decisions. When you understand where your money is coming from and where it’s going, you can decide what needs to be done to change course, if necessary. In any business, being aware of your current situation is important. You’re an entrepreneur, so you know this. But it’s sometimes hard to nail down the time to really look into this for the sake of your business (and your peace of mind). But, you must make this a practice.
Let’s talk a little about your personal finances because the fact is, if your personal finances are a mess, then you can’t possibly have the focus of mind for your business finances.
Dave Ramsey helped us get out of debt, save, and invest 15% for retirement. The book, Profit First, helped us to set up our business bank accounts, and now we are following Our Rich Journey’s 365 Days to FIRE program. FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early.
Your FI number is the total amount of expenses you think you’ll have yearly in retirement. Imagine having your stocks or real estate investment cover your family’s expenses, and you could retire if you wanted to. But it starts with knowing your numbers. They tell you what the real story is with regard to your finances.
Get these areas squared away and watch your local business grow! We promise these areas will make all the difference in your business and life.
Are you still on the fence about whether or not a Business Made Simple membership would benefit you? Schedule a call with me today, and we’ll talk it out so you can be confident you’re making the right decision for you and your business.