Scaling Your Business

Are you, business owner, feeling stuck at the same revenue level? Are you ready to quit your business because you just know you can’t take it to the next level –whatever level that is? Well, there are things that you can do to grow your business, whether it is a 25% increase in revenues or to 10x it! Here are some “we-have-proven-they-work” tips from Grant Cardone in his 10X Business Challenge, along with my common sense ones.

1. Have a money mindset. How much of your time do you spend actively pursuing income flows? Grant says you should 95% of your time on this activity. How much time do you spend trying to figure out your expenses? He feels you should be spending 5% of your time. If you have a money mindset, you should never take deals where you will lose money. Always go after the win. When scaling your business, have a mindset to move money forward to increase it, and not backward.
2. Put systems in place. Every company must have written systems if they want to grow. Technology helps us to do the work of more than one person. It also creates a roadmap for other people. You can purchase an end-to-end system or one specific to a particular job. This step signals your organization that you are ready to invest in moving your business forward.
3. Hire people to help you. You cannot do every job by yourself. Clone yourself – hire someone to take over some of what you do. Work on the business and not in it. Plus, hire experts because they are much better than you at a specific job. If you’re not an accountant, get one. Hire 1099 international assistants if you feel talent is too expensive in the US.
4. Marketing goes before sales. You can operate your company on a skeletal crew with today’s marketing technology (the one you put in from #1 above!). There are so many electronic marketing platforms to help you do the job that used to take 5-6 people to do. With the right tools, like ClickFunnels and social media, you can increase your sales without meeting your customers in person.
5. There are several ways to sell the same service or product. If you want to make $10,000, you can figure out several iterations of how to sell the product/service to make that amount of money. For example, a) you can sell ten (10) $1000 packages, b) sell 1000 $10 packages, c) 20 $500 packages, or d) sell 10,000 $1 items.
6. There is such a thing as “good debt.” Good debt is when you produce passive or earned income. Using borrowed money to purchase a car, a depreciating asset, is bad debt. Very few cars increase in value over time. However, borrowing money to buy an apartment building or other appreciating assets is great. So, when considering how to use your debt to increase revenue, ensure you create good debt.
7. Take action. None of the above matters if you don’t take action. Your business will not scale by itself. The same steps you took last year, will give you the same results and revenue this year, and the year after. You must take massive action on Items 1-6, and if you get only 10% of our goals, it’s more than 10% you had last year.
8. Form an advisory board. Most business owners do not have a sounding board when they have an idea. By forming an advisory board, you will get experts who can help you to scale your business. An advisory board also validates that others believe in you and your leadership abilities.

If your revenue stays the same year over year, you are actually losing money when you consider the rate of inflation. These action items sound like common sense things. You might know these principles, but you are not living them. You are not taking action on them–once you do that, you will see excellent results and never look back.