← Business with Beers
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In building my company at over $50 million a year, I can tell you that there are levels to the game and you have to understand that what got you here won't get you there. And that at every level of the game you have to understand what is the priority, what is the focus, what is the skill or the system or the process that you need to be able to master in order to get to the next level. And so to start, let's focus on the bottom, the foundation where everybody starts, which is building your business from zero to a million dollars a year in revenue. Now this is going to apply to anybody who runs a service based business where you have a team, you have cost of goods, you have rent, you have trucks, things like that. If you run a consulting business or an agency or something where you're personally like providing the services, none of this is really going to apply to you. Okay, so zero to a million dollars a year in revenue. This is going to be the foundational stage. This is what we're going to build everything else on top of. Because if we can't get this right, nothing else matters. And most people get this wrong by, by planning ahead too much. They're thinking about expansion and AI and agents and automation and, you know, funding and all this, all this crazy stuff, which are all the right things to do. None of those things are wrong. It's just the wrong time because you don't need any of that stuff. If you're doing less than a million dollars, you have one singular objective, and that is to build your skills in three foundational elements. Number one is sales. You have to be really, really good at driving revenue into your business because if not, you have no money, you can do nothing else. So your goal is that you become proficient in sales. Now this doesn't mean that you have to go out and be Jordan Belfor and be like some super, super salesman. I'm not, I am by far not the best salesperson in my company. But for 10 years I worked in the stores every single day. I learned what it took to succeed. I pushed myself into my, outside of my own comfort zones to figure out how to sell. And I had success, I had failures, I had. I eventually started hiring people and I knew who would be good and who wasn't. But all of that because I focused on wanting to get as good as I personally could. All right, so even if you have no experience in sales, you think you're not good. Like everyone's in the sales business, you just don't know it. And all that really means is someone else has a problem and you have a solution and they pay you for it. It's not taking advantage of someone or trying some tasty thing like sitting. Sales gets a bad reputation. But at the end of the day, if you own a business, you are in sales. So the first step that as you build your skills in selling is to understand how you spend marketing dollars. That becomes a sale. And for every business there's three steps. Step number one, we generate leads. So we spend money on meta, on Google, ppc, on going to networking events and all these different things, right? So we spend money that generates interest and then we convert. Then those people are interested, they call us, usually on the phone and they fill out some sort of web form, they text you whatever it is. We convert them into estimates. So we get the person in front of us, we assess the situation, understand the problem, then we sell, right? We talk about our solution and you know, try to get the yes right there on the spot. Right. Every single business, whether you are in the dumpster, you're in window blinds, painting, roofing, turf or auto repair, we follow the same thing. And so you want to build a skill which is analyze every one of those steps along the process. So you would get really good at that first step, which is where are we spending money on marketing? How many dollars do we need to spend to get a lead? Right. What's our cost per lead? And then having a system to compare, okay, I'm spending this much on this platform, this much on this platform to understand that for us, for example, in our artificial turf business, our cost per lead is very, very low. On meta like Facebook, we might cost US$20 to get a lead, to get someone's name and phone number who's interested. On Google, our cost per lead is about $100, right? So it's five times more. But when we look at our close rates and our average tickets, which one, where should we spend more money? Well, the Google, we actually get a better roi, return on investment for every dollar that we spend. Because Google customers are more high intent, they generally have bigger budgets and we have a better closure than meta, which are like people who are like, oh, this is cool, they see an ad, I wonder what it would cost. But they're not really that serious. And so you want to build a skill, which is what I just talked about, which is how do I look at where I'm spending money and then determine what's working and what's not. And ultimately the goal is to spend money on a Minimum number of platforms that get you the most amount of return, then you're going to build skill around your conversion rate to understand what, okay, when a customer calls, what's our success rate for getting that person from interested to booked an appointment, you're going to go through what's our quote process, what's our script process, what's the speed to which we respond all these things. And then when they're in front of us, we have actually the sales process now going. We're going to look at our close rate. What is our close rate for us Midas, it's about 4, 40%. In the turf business, it's about the same. It's a little bit lower right now because we have a lot of these meta ads going on, but that's fine. And so say we have a baseline of 40%, then our skill is going to be what are the things we can do to increase that number to 45 or 50? Maybe we ask better questions, maybe we have payment plans or something that can help the customer make this more affordable. Maybe it's, we role play this over and over and over again. Right. There's lots of different things based on your business you can do to figure out how do I move that needle? But all along you are building the skill of identifying where you're at and where you want to go and what actions work and don't work. Simple as that. All right, okay. That's the first one is sales. Once we have money flowing in, okay, we've built a strong sales muscle, then we shift our attention to hiring. Now, I have hired hundreds, if not thousands of people in my career so far. And a couple observations. Number one, you get better at it. The more people you hire, the better you will get at identifying what are the traits of people that excel in this and what are the traits of the people that fail. I now could walk into a new store. So for example, we had hired somebody to, to launch, to run a store for us. And I walked in there, I met him, I said to myself, this guy is, this guy's not going to last more than six months. And guess what? Three months later, he's fired. He doesn't work out. Like I can tell immediately because I've been around it so much, I've seen so many good guys. I generally, it's a known fact that you can send a duck to an eagle school, but when it returns, it's still a duck. So essentially people are who they are and that you can give all the training and all the stuff that you want. But at the end of the day, if they're not going to make it, they're not going to make it. They are who they are. And so your better filter and skill that you learn to develop are what type of personality am I looking for? What questions can I ask to determine if I think this person is going to survive and thrive in my organization? The interviewing process and the job offer process that you are going to use to filter out so people self select that they don't want to be part of it. Those are all the things that you will start thinking through and working. As you want to build out your skill skills around hiring, You can go even simpler. So for me, one of the things we've really been focused on this past year is a skill of writing better job ads. We now treat job ads like I treat social media. We gotta have a good hook, we gotta get people's attention. We have to read and try to elicit emotion. So when they read our job ad, they feel something. They feel something that says I want to be part of these guys or at minimum I want to learn more versus you read any of our competitors ads, they're like a sterile doctor's office. They're not going to make you feel anything. Right? But again skill you learn, the more you do it, the better you get. You're constantly trying to change and evolve and grow. That is how you develop. And finally we have operations. Now your delivery has to be consistent in order to have consistent results, consistent customers that are happy and then come and return. And so this is gonna take forever, right? There's always things that you can approve. But what I really focus on in phase one, like when the businesses that I invest in and partner with are doing less than a million dollars is I wanna pick two to three things that, that I believe if we can get these things right, that nothing else matters to a degree. Right. Two to three of the most important things that are kind of the big dominoes that if those fall and those do good, then everything else is okay. For us it's the, at the inbo, the inbound phone process. So how do we handle the phones as part of that lead gen that is critical for us. Like if we are not good on the phones and nobody comes in, we look at next we look at our workflow management. So this would be, you know how when cars come in, what's our process for saying this car is waiting to be checked in, this car is waiting to be estimated, waiting for a callback, it's sold we're waiting on parts, it's in progress. Like, there's kind of these different stages that the vehicle moves through. And having a solid system so that just is smooth is key. So it's the skill to build that. And then finally for us, it's like vehicle inspections that every single car we get inspected exact same way. So it's like it's consistent. Our goal is to be able to train the basics until we can't get them wrong. Not just training until we get them right. Right. We train until we can't get them wrong. And if you skip this step and you don't build a skill around delivering consistent experiences for customers, you, you're going to have drop balls, you're going to have complaints, you're going to have finger pointing, all of that. Those are the skills that we got to build selling, hiring and operations. So if you're doing less than a million right now, think through your own business, come up with all the key things and grade yourself on how your skill set is in each one of those categories because nothing else matters if you can't get this down from there. Once we break a million, then we can focus on systems. We can focus on, you know, how do we take that skill that we have. And then we can copy, paste, copy paste, we can duple them. We can create a repeatable process for how we hire, how we market, how we sell, how we do deliver operations, all of it. But the point is like, we need to have a really strong test case that we can then create copy and paste. If everything is half baked, it's not going to really work. So I put together a whole video on this topic in terms of what it takes to build a $10 million a year business. I'm going to link it below, go and watch that on my main YouTube channel. And if there's any way I can help you, there's a link there that you can follow and it'll talk about what it looks like to work together and yeah, cheers. See you on the next one.