The conundrum that faces so many business owners is that you end up in the same spot year after year.
Perhaps your business is a little bigger and gross a little more each year but do you have more in your bank account to show for it?
Are you tired of everyone else getting paid but it never seems to end up in your savings account?
I’ve known people whose businesses gross over 5 million in sales, yet the owners took home less than 200k.
If you are taking home less than 5% of your company sales you are doing it wrong and the reality is you should be keeping 10% or more.
If any of that sounds like you I’d like to show you how you can take 5 simple steps and accumulate some cash that goes directly into your pocket.
Let’s get to it.
- Isolate Profit
In order to accumulate cash, you need to start when you get paid.
Take a percentage, somewhere between 2% and 10% and put it into a separate business savings account.
Do this first. Do not pay any bills, payroll or insurance.
Don’t pay anything else until this is done.
Put this money in an account that you do not have the ability to transfer electronically.
Make sure you have to go to the bank to make a deposit or a withdraw of these funds.
You want to make this money as hard to get at as possible because you will be tempted to dip into it.
Do not touch it. Pretend it doesn’t exist.
The temptation will be real I promise but the satisfaction of writing yourself a huge bonus check at the end of the year will be worth it.
- Sell Things You Haven’t Used For 2 Years Or More
If you have been in business a while you have accumulated some stuff.
It’s been said one man’s junk is another man’s treasure and there isn’t truer statement when looking at the stuff we accumulate in business.
I was surprised to find that I had accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars of crap over a 20 year period which unfortunately was no longer worth hundreds of thousands of dollars but it was worth tens of thousands of dollars.
If you are not using it is costing you money.
Sell it and put the money into the profit isolation account.
I was surprised to see how much space it was taking for me to store all of this stuff.
Use Craigslist, Swip/Swap or LetGo.
You might even have your kids or employees take care of this for you.
Besides the fact that your kids are probably better at it anyway.
If your mortgage/rent costs you $12/SF per year, which is $1/SF per month.
If you have a bunch of stuff taking up 200 SF it’s costing you $200 per month to store it.
Selling it will give you money now and will give you some space for products that can earn you a profit now.
- Get Some Referring Partners
A referring partner is someone in a business that can cross over to your business, some like to call this networking but I call this networking on steroids.
If you own an HVAC business you likely have a few friends who are in the electrical business. Offer to send them referrals when you find a customer in need then request that they reciprocate.
Offer them a small token for every customer they send you, offer to do the same for them.
Too many business owners don’t do a great job of this and miss out on a gold mine of referrals.
If you become good at referring your clients to others it will come back to you big time.
Remember to isolate profit as laid out in step 1.
- Teach A Course
You can do this at a local community college but my preference would be online.
You are an expert at what you do and believe it or not you have knowledge that other people would love to have and some will pay you handsomely for it.
You don’t have to be a writer either just pull out your smartphone and talk on a subject in which you are an expert and show them how to solve a problem or make someone’s life better.
Use a service like Rev to have it converted to text, it’s $1 per minute and the transcription is done very well.
Create 5 to 10 modules and sell them online.
One of the easiest places to do this is using a service like Thinkific.
Teaching a course does a few things to help your business.
It positions you as an expert and forces you to become better at conveying your message in a manner that becomes easier for others to understand.
Often people don’t buy from you because they don’t clearly understand how your product or service will make their life better or solve their problem.
There’s an expression in marketing, the confused mind decides nothing and teaching forces you to simplify your message to the point where it becomes easy for your prospect to understand how you can make their life better.
- Get New Customers
Now that you have understood how to better clarify your message, create a piece of content that you can give away in exchange for your prospect’s name and e-mail address.
You can do this with a webinar, eBook or video.
You just want to be sure the content solves your prospect’s problem or makes their life better. This will position you as an expert and make them more likely to seek you out when they need help.
People buy from those who they like and trust and everyone trusts an expert and experts are simply those in an industry who teach about how their products or services improve the lives of others.
Make connections in LinkedIn with those who might be your ideal customer, you never know.
Don’t make this complex, simply create the content and start making connections through LinkedIn and ask for permission to send them your content.
Don’t just send it to them, they might not be interested in it anyway, ask them and give them the option to say yes or no.
You will be really surprised, I’ve helped people take this one step and create tens of thousands of dollars in new monthly business inside of 60 days.
When you do generate new sales, remember to do step 1, it will change your life.
To your lifelong prosperity,
David Mulvaney
P.S. If you would like to get new customers using LinkedIn, I can help you. I have a free live webinar you can attend. To get details, click here.