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So my first business did $300,000 a year, and that's when I was in college. Then my second business a little later did about a million dollars a year, pretty quick. And then I sort of got stuck in the 2 to 3 million dollars a year range, which a lot of entrepreneurs do. And honestly, those are the successful entrepreneurs. There's nothing wrong with having a low seven figure business. It's just not what I ever aspired to do. I knew that I couldn't have the impact that I wanted being stuck at that level. So I kept pushing, trying to figure out what was keeping me stuck, what was hold. And I finally figured it out. I call it front end design. And it might be the most important piece and the most neglected piece of any business, because front end design affects everything. It basically dictates the entire company the success of the company. And it's the thing that holds back 95% of business builders from ever reaching their true potential. So today I'm going to break it down for you. This session that you're about to watch comes straight from Influicity Academy, which is the training center for our clients at Influicity. This is private training. There's no public access. But I wanted to pull this lesson out and share it with you because it's had so much impact, not only on me, but on hundreds of other businesses who have seen this lesson. Hope it does the same for you. Here it is. You're listening to Making it with John Davidson. In this lesson, we'll look at what is a front end design and why do you need one. So let's just start off with some really high level definitions. When I say front end, I'm talking about the front door. And no matter how many products and services you offer, only one can be the front door to your business. And I'll give you an analogy. I want you to think about this for a second. Think that you're having a dinner party at your house, okay? And you invite me over. I'm going to be a guest in your home. And so I drive to your house and I pull up in your driveway and I walk down a path and I probably get to a porch or a door, knock on the door, or I ring the doorbell, you answer. I come in, probably take my shoes off, maybe I sit on a bench right there and then we walk into the kitchen. You're having a dinner party. So maybe there'll be drinks, there'll be some appetizers, other people there, maybe we have a seat in the kitchen. Or go to a bar or, like a little nook, or we go to the family room and sit on the couch. And then maybe at one point I'll need to use the restroom. And maybe it's a new house. So you'll give me a tour of the place. You'll say, hey, let me show you around the place. Check out the backyard, check out the upstairs, the basement. And there's a sequence and an order to that, right? It all started with me pulling up on your driveway and walking up a path to your front door. I didn't, like, get to your house and then go to the back window or walk to the side and knock on the door and say, hey, should I come in through the garage? Like, of course not. I came in through the front door. And I didn't even have to think about that. Because houses are designed in such a way that it's pretty obvious where you park and where you walk in. And that really is how you should think about your business, but on an even more choreographed level, because we're talking about just a house party. But your business has to be polished and choreographed, and you need a beautiful front door that everybody goes into and everybody has the same experience. No matter what you sell, whether you're selling something for $1,000, 10,000, a million, 20 million, it's all gonna be a choreographed experience. And that experience includes a qualification process, an offer, a sales pitch, an onboarding, and a delivery, which we'll get to in a second. But that is how you think about the front end system. And just picture a front door, and your business needs one of those. The front end creates the. And the relationship creates the opportunity for everything else. A great way to think about this, actually. And every great business is like, this is an assembly line. So every new client enters through the same door and everything becomes standardized. And the five levels of the assembly line for the front end are qualification. So you got the same acceptance criteria for every client you have. Maybe it's a revenue number or a number of staff if you're selling to a certain business, or it's a health condition if you're selling a medical service, or it's a desire if you're selling, like, music lessons or swimming lessons. People want to reach a certain level of achievement. They want to be able to play the piano, or they want to be able to swim a certain number of laps. So there's a qualification there. Then you have the offer. We call it the front end offer. And that's the same thing with the same outcome. Usually the same price. Not always, but usually the same price. I'll talk about where the differences are there in a second. Number three, you've got the sales pitch, so you've got the same story, the same mechanism presented in the same way. You have the onboarding, which is again the same process, the same sequence, the same first experience, and you have delivery. The same scope, the same milestones, the same output. Now, one thing I'll just mention now, I'll talk about this more a little later in the lesson is it's different if you have a standardized product versus a custom product. So an example of a standardized product is I sell accounting services to small business. An example of a custom product is I sell defense Systems to the US Department of Defense. Because when you're selling to the US Department of Defense and you have a $30 million order, that's going to be a custom experience. But the assembly line process, hey, who talks to them on the first point of contact, what does our proposal process look like? Like that's still going to be an assembly line. And then if you're selling something to a small business, it's going to obviously be an assembly line approach. So that's how we think about it across the board. Standardization is how businesses scale and custom everything is how a founder stays trapped, how you have, how you have one or two executives where if they leave, the whole business falls apart. And the nice thing about a front end system is that if done right, it pays for your whole acquisition. So the front end offer sets up the price. The price alone doesn't determine whether the acquisition price is covered. You have to also figure everything else out. So for example, if your qualification process is loose and you spend time on bad fit clients who are never going to buy because they can't buy, then your margin disappears before the pitch because you're selling to people that were never going to buy anyways. If the offer isn't appealing, you can't possibly serve as many customers because they're not going to be attracted to that offer. We'll tell you how to fix that. If the sales pitch is weak, you won't be closing the revenue. You should. Not because the offer is not good, not because people don't want it, because you suck at sales. It happens. I've seen it. If the onboarding is chaotic, you pay more for labor and the client experience suffers. And then if the delivery is inconsistent, churn kills the back end people leave before you have the ability to sell them more. Because once we talk about the front end System. We will talk about the back end system a little later. So all five components have to work for your front end system to pay for everything. Okay, so what we're talking about here really is being able to bring people in and have them pay for themselves at the same time. Right. We want customer financed acquisition whenever we can get it. You don't always need it. You might have the money to bring clients on board and get paid later. But we want to build the ideal business where every client that comes on board pays you for the privilege of coming on board and pays you pretty much immediately. If your business is doing a million bucks a year or more in sales and you think you could be growing faster, head over to JohnDavids.com growing up. I want to show you the growth system we've used at influicity with over 200 clients in just the last year. Go to johndavids.com grow watch the short video and if it sounds like it could be helpful to you, book a call on that page. And one more thing guys, if you already have a marketing budget, spending on Google Ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, TikTok, LinkedIn, do not skip this. Go to johndavids.com grow and I'll see you there. So some really simple math. If the front end offer price is $8,000 and the cost of acquiring the client and the delivery through everything we just talked about is $1,000 in total, then you're looking at a net of $7,000 in gross profit on that first transaction. Now let's make a distinction between front end and back end. Front end is what we're going to talk about mostly through this training. And the front end product, service or offer is the first thing you sell to a new client. It's designed to acquire the client. The real point of it at the end of the day is to bring the client on board. The back end is everything that follows once the relationship is established. So it's upsells, cross sells, downsells. It's effectively everything else that you do. Your product, your service. So simple example, if you are the accounting firm that offers an R and D tax credit program will get you money that is owed to you in taxes. But your main business, your back end, is accounting and all the accounting services that come with it, that would be the back end. All right, so let's look at the spectrum from a fully standardized front end to a fully custom front end and the messy middle where you don't want to be, where so many businesses are and they should not be there. So we'll start over at the fully standardized side. So if you're selling something and you've got the same front door every time, you've got the same price every time, the same delivery process, it can scale without you. Like once you build that system, it just grows and grows and grows. I'll give you some examples in a second. Who belongs here? Things like accounting firms, aesthetic clinics, home services, fire safety, digital agencies, coaching programs. Like almost every business actually belongs here. Unless what you're selling is so high end and it's so custom, or your customer is so demanding and they're paying so much money, those are the exceptions. On the fully custom side, that's where we get to. So it's bespoke by design. The thing you're selling has to be custom fit for every single client. It's complex, multi year in scope. It's got a massive contract value. The margins justify the custom work. Who belongs here? Aerospace and defense, heavy machinery, government infrastructure, industrial construction, enterprise, erp, custom shipbuilding. Like we're talking about big things here. So over on the left side, the front end offer is, let's say a paid product or a paid service. It's priced to cover the acquisition cost, the cost to get the customer and profit on that first transaction. Over on the right side, the front end offer can be a high touch proposal. So it's not even. We're not even selling you anything. We're just doing a proposal for you, trying to win your business. The margins are very large and they're so large that the CAC is basically irrelevant. If I have to spend $50,000 to win a $50 million contract, I'll do it. And I'm willing to lose 20 of those bids because I'll spend a million to win 50 million. That's great. That's a 50 to 1 ROI. So that's how you need to think about it. Now let's look at the danger zone. The messy middle is when the offer varies by client. The price is negotiated each time, delivery is reinvented each time. And the founder or the key man is the bottleneck. Usually the founder. Not always can be other executives. But you've got people in there that are basically just bandaging all the mistakes up and hiding the mistakes that really can be fixed pretty easily. Right? Custom scope and low margin. You absorb the cost of custom work and you have thin margins and you cannot scale. You cannot scale. All right, so in practice, what does this look like? Here's a very, very simple example. I have an accounting firm. And I offer R and D tax credits, research and development tax credits. I do it as an audit for software companies. Same scope, same price, every time. Simple. A fully custom example is that same accounting firm selling to a Fortune 500 buyer. Right? A huge company. You can't dictate the scope at that point. So custom is appropriate here because I'm trying to sell you on, let's say, a $15 million annual contract. Okay, I'm willing to do custom work here. I'm willing to do custom front end work because we're justified in it. The danger zone is that small business accountant who treats every $5,000 client or $2,000 client like they are a Fortune 500 company. Like the work has to all be custom. The pitch has to all be custom. I have to come out and see how you. You don't need to do any of that. And you're fooling yourself. And I've seen these businesses, it's crazy. It's crazy the amount of work they do to win a deal when it looks a lot like the deal they won last time. They didn't need to do all that work. They're just. They think what they do is so important and so different and so special. It's like when you have the specialized skills. When your business has those skills in a box, you need to be able to move them like an assembly line. Don't fall into that danger zone. Okay, now let's look at some industry examples to make this more real. So we'll start with the accounting firm. The avatar for this accounting firm is software companies with 50 plus employees. That's who we want to serve. The back end is accounting services. So what do they do? They do financial compliance, they do tax filings, they do audits, they do advisory, they do bookkeeping. They do all the stuff that a normal accounting firm would do. It's just a normal accounting firm. The front end offer is we'll get you a $50,000 tax credit or you pay nothing. Okay. That is a super compelling offer, I think. Right? And you could charge, let's say, $8,500 for that because you're getting them $50,000. An $8,500 fee is totally reasonable. And they don't pay anything if they don't get the money. So the reason I like to show this example is because people start to think like, oh, my firm, my company, my thing. We can't do an offer because this is what we do. We can't have a front end because we just Offer these services or we have too many things that we do. We can't figure out the front end version of this. Nah, you probably can. You just gotta get creative and you gotta make sure it checks all the boxes. Qualification. Can it be the same acceptance criteria every time? So in that case of the accounting firm offer, I might ask the question, have you gotten any RD tax credits in the last two years? And I know as the accountant, if you haven't gotten any R and D tax credits, there's about a 99% chance that I can do that for you and you meet the 50 employee minimum. Great. You qualify the offer. We've already talked about that offer. Same thing, same outcome, same price. The sales pitch. We can put together a beautiful sales pitch around that. Great story and a great outcome. The onboarding process can be totally standardized and the delivery can be totally standardized. So this checks all the boxes. Let's do another. Commercial cleaning service is the business type. The avatar. In this case, let's say restaurants with 25,000 square feet of space. The back end, what we do normally is complete cleaning and janitorial services. Again, totally normal business. What could be my front end offer? Kill 99% of the germs you don't even see. With our premium deep clean with hygiene service, for 1,950 bucks, clear outcome one time, we can qualify easily. Checks all the boxes. Wealth management, that's the business type. Let's say my avatar is business owners with $10 million in assets or $10 million in revenue or the back end that I'm offering is wealth management services. Just like any old wealth manager, that's what I offer. And what's my front end offer? Create your family trust with a full audit of your assets. Entity review trust drafting and documented asset protection plan. Spend a little now to save a lot later. Sounds pretty good. That sounds pretty good. If I'm a business owner with $10 million in assets, I might be very interested in that for $7,500. And then once I go through that, I can be a client for life with your backend. Let's do one more private golf instruction. Okay, so my target here, my avatar is amateur golfers with a household income of 250,000. Why? Because we want to make some money. They got to have a nice household income. My back end is golf lessons. Super simple. Any education, business. This works. By the way, I hope as you're listening to me here, you're thinking about your business or any business. It's very, very versatile. This works basically across the board. So golf lessons is the back end and my front end offer can be improve your handicap by five strokes in 30 days with the Precision Swing System for $998. So these are just some examples and we're going to get into detail into how we craft these in a little bit. But I hope you're thinking now about all the creative approaches you can take with your business. And let's keep going. That's it, guys. Get my best stuff to your inbox@johndavids.com if you sell B2B products or services and you want to generate more qualified sales opportunities, I want you to head over to JohnDavids.com grow. I'll show you the growth system we've used at influicity with 40 B2B companies in just the last year. Go to johndavids.com grow and watch the short video. And by the way, if you're already spending money on LinkedIn and trade shows and sales enablement and all the rest, this is is even more important because it could give you a huge advantage in the marketplace. Go to johndavids.com grow and I'll see you there.