Do you have sales coming in but you still have trouble paying all of your bills? Do you stress over keeping your employees busy enough, doing money generating activities, that you stress over payroll, stress over the bills and stress over the day to day minutia of trying to get all of your work done?
Are you ready to do something about it?
If you are, you’re going to have to be honest with yourself. When you are lost you have to first figure out where you are. You have to pinpoint your location if you are going to move from there on the journey to your destination.
When I was about 12 years old I purchased a two person inflatable boat. I had saved money from delivering newspapers, cutting lawns and shoveling driveways, but mostly from cutting lawns and delivering papers because this purchase was in the spring. The snow had melted and Dan and I were going stir crazy to get out of the house. In Jimmy Buffet’s song Boat Drinks, Jimmy gives a pretty good description of cabin fever but I’m not sure Jimmy ever really experienced what 3 straight months of cold and grey is like in the upper Midwest.
My brother Dan and I were extremely excited about our new adventure so we decided to take it for a spin. We set out to collect golf balls at Wanaki Golf Course in Menomonee Falls Wi. The Fox River runs through the center of the course and it was always loaded with golf balls. All you needed was a ball retriever but with a boat you could get a lot more balls. We would collect the balls and then sell them to golfers on the course. Wanaki was about 2 miles from my parent’s house in Brookfield. So we loaded up on our bikes and were on our way. There is nothing like carrying a boat, two oars, ball retriever and other gear on a bike but it was what we did as kids. After about an hour we were bored with collecting golf balls so we figured we’d take a little ride downstream. The water was moving pretty good because after the snow melts there is lots of extra water for a fun ride. I don’t know how long we were on the water but after roughly 5 or 6 hours we could sense it was getting a little late and we had zero idea where we were. We finally came upon a road and decided to get out and try to figure out how we were going to get home. The only hope we had was to call our mom. This was in the late 1970’s, long before cell phones. Two problems, we didn’t know where we were and we had to find a payphone to call mom. However if we could find a payphone we knew we could solve both because pay phones always had an address on them so at least we could give mom an address. Like that would help, this was before GPS. We used maps back then and mom was not very good with maps. It wasn’t long of a walk when we found a gas station. I went inside and asked the man behind the counter if he could tell me where I was. He looked at me like I was an idiot. He said, you don’t know where you are kid, how the heck did you get here? I said on a boat (when in reality it was just a raft). Where did you get off a boat around here kid? I said on the river and then he had an idea what I was asking and that I was not some lunatic farm kid. There are lots of farms in Wisconsin and there was some weird kids that grew up on them. Anyway he told me I was in Waukesha and the road we were on. Now I could call mom. Needless to say mom wasn’t happy but she came and got us and took us back to our bikes at Wanaki and we rode home.
Ah the adventures of a child. First world problems.
The point to the story was before I could get help I had to figure out where I was. I couldn’t tell my mom how to help me until I knew where I was.
If you want to fix the financial problems in your business you have to first figure out where you are. I can’t possibly know where you are but I can tell you that after over a quarter of a century as an entrepreneur and having generated over a hundred million in sales in that time, if you can figure out where you are I can help get you to where you want to go.
You will hear me say this a lot, you are one customer away. What does that mean? Business is about metrics and the most important metric, bar none, is the cost per customer acquisition. Bidding, or being the lowest price, doesn’t work because unless you have massive amounts of volume being the lowest price is the fastest way to go broke.
Why did you go into business in the first place? Because your boss wasn’t paying you what you thought you were worth. You felt you were worth more, and you are. The only problem is you jumped on a wheel of who can be the lowest price which works fine when the economy is booming but when a downturn comes the fallout is far and wide. Being the lowest price works in a good economy because there are enough crumbs left for everyone but when the economy turns, and it will it always does, there are no more crumbs.
You are only one customer away. What that means to you is when you learn how to acquire your first customer at a zero customer acquisition cost or better, where you make money from acquiring the customer, your business and your life will be forever changed. You will never have to bid another job if you don’t want to. You know why? Because you won’t have to because you will have all of the business you can possibly handle. When you learn to acquire one customer at no cost you will have the tools to acquire a thousand. While all of your competitors will be out chasing low price sales you will be acquiring customer after customer and it won’t cost you any money. That my friend is the holy grail of business. I didn’t say you wouldn’t spend money on it, I simply said it won’t cost you anything. Would you spend $100 if it brought you $200 tomorrow? How much would knowing how to do that be worth to you? Most people who know how to do this won’t teach it because if they do they put themselves out of business.
Look you no longer have to be a slave to your business but you have to figure out where you are before you can get help.
If you know where you are and you’d like to go to a different destination I can help. I didn’t say I will help but I can help if you are a fit for me and my company. You might be thinking, yeah Dave but I don’t have the extra money to spend right now. That may be true but you might want to consider the alternative. Look, if you take action on what I can show you, you will make money from now on. It won’t cost you any money. There’s a major difference between cost and investment. I’m not talking about hiring some marketing company that never gets you more business and keeps telling you marketing takes time. I am talking about turning your business into a customer acquisition machine through creating a permanent customer acquisition plan. No matter what your skill, what your product or what service you provide, you are not in that business, you are in the customer acquisition business and you must learn how to get them at zero cost or when the next downturn comes, you might be the next statistic.
If you’d like help assessing where you are let’s have a conversation about it. I promise, with everything in my soul, I will not sell you anything. I have no desire to, I don’t need customers who don’t want my help. I choose my customers very carefully (and so should you) because I can’t possibly help everyone. I only have so many hours in a week. If you are fit for me and I am a fit for you, then we will talk about moving forward, not before. If you are ready to figure out how to go from where you are now to where you want to go in the future, schedule a call with me by clicking here. I will keep the call to 15 minutes or less.
You are only one customer away.
To your lifelong prosperity,
David Mulvaney
P.S. The likelihood of a downturn in the market in the next 2 to 5 years is extremely high. Every market indicator points to it and when it happens there will be many casualties. It doesn’t have to be you. Assess where you are so you can get on a path to your dream destination. Click here to schedule the call.