When Trust is High…

When Trust is High, so are your profits.

In his book “The Speed of Trust”, Stephen M.R. Covey said there is an economics to Trust.

Low trust = low speed and high cost

High trust = high speed and low cost

Low trust causes friction whether it is caused by low Character or low Competence or both.

Low trust causes hidden agendas, politics, personal conflicts, win-lose thinking, defensive and protective communication.

Low trust slows everything down – every decision, communication and every relationship.

High Trust on the other hand, produces speed.

There is one thing that is common to every individual, relationship, team, organization, nation, economy and civilization – the one thing that if removed, will destroy the most powerful government, the most successful business, the most thriving economy, the most influential leadership, the greatest friendship, the strongest character, the deepest love.  Trust.

Not long ago I shot a quick video, simply using my iPhone to explain to some of my Real Estate partners why I felt I was so successful in that industry.  (Not to digress, but this simple and inexpensive method of video marketing is a potential gold mine for you. We will teach you and implement it for you.)

Because trust is based off of principles, my message works regardless of the industry, location or time.

Learn more here:

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Here’s my definition of TRUST

Trust = Competence + Character demonstrated over Time.

When trust is high:

  • Communication is easy and effortless.
  • The emotional bank account with everyone in your Circle of Concern is high so mistakes are more easily forgiven.
  • When mistakes are made, meaning is still understood.
  • Everything in your life goes smoother and momentum is always in a positive direction.

Conversely, when trust is low:

  • Communication is ineffective, time-consuming and difficult.
  • Every little mistake is taken personally by the offended.

In my experience, I have found that people instinctively trust someone whose communication and personality is based on accurate Principles –those founded on God’s Natural Laws.

People recognize when they are being manipulated for the benefit of the manipulator.

15 Habits to cultivate within yourself and your business that will help you build strong meaningful relations – both personal and business:

1. Be Honest & Authentic. Always be straight with people.

2. Act with Kindness & Courtesy. Be Respectful of everyone; even those who might be “in-your-face”. You may have to “fire” a customer one day, but be respectful about it and then move on.

3. Be Transparent – An Educated Customer is the Best Customer. Consistently tell the world what you offer, why you offer it and how it will benefit them.
Tell the complete story about what makes you and your product or service unique. You don’t have to just tell the good, tell some bad as well. Every product or service will not be the right fit for everyone. Admit it right up front. Stating what you can’t do builds trust and alleviates unpleasant problems down the road. I’d rather lose the sale right up front and build a reputation of integrity than lose a client after the sale due to disappointment.

4. Apologize When Wrong. When you screw up, take responsibility, apologize and make some sort of meaningful restitution.

5. Be Loyal – especially to the Absent (never talk badly about anyone behind their back)

6. Deliver Results – One of the best habits you can cultivate in order to accomplish the results your clients/customers/patients expect is to adhere to clarify expectations, the next habit.

7. Clarify Expectations – Make sure everyone fully understands including yourself). Almost all conflicts are a result of violated expectations. Even though most of my business is done with a simple handshake, it is still imperative that the expectations of effort, responsibilities and results are clarified in writing.

8. Be a Student of your Business – Constantly Improve by exposing yourself to new ideas, techniques and people.

9. Be Honest about Reality. Being self-aware is one of the foundations of ever achieving greatness. You have to know what motivates and de-motivates you. What you strengths and weaknesses are.

10. Be Proactive – Take responsibility and hold yourself and others accountable. Learn to “Think Win-Win or No Deal.” Never blame someone else.

11. Listen with the Intent to Understand Rather than Simply to Respond. Ask Smart Questions and listen.

12. Keep your Promises. One of the best ways to accomplish this is under-promise, over-deliver.

13. Extend Trust -Give trust and expect it in return.

14. Actively Seek Complaints – Be open to feedback; That means proactively seek out complaints as an opportunity to build trust.

15. Have an Attitude of Gratitude.

There is a positive velocity to your life that occurs when trust is high that can’t be compensated for in any other way.

 

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Only Immediate Response Marketing

If you are not creating Immediate Response marketing, you are wasting your money.

Most brick & mortar, mom & pop owned and operated businesses advertise and market like the Big Brand boys.   Their marketing is full of platitudes pushing the wrong agenda of Image, Brand and Presence.

 

Dan Kennedy, marketing guru, shared these sad facts that coincidently follow the 80/20 Principle:

1% of Small Business Owners create tremendous income and wealth for themselves.  They DOMINATE their market within their industry.

4% do quite well. They are prosperous and have created a very nice lifestyle for themselves and their families.

15% make a good living.

80% struggle day-to-day or fail altogether.

 

When I owned my new car franchised dealership I fought a continual battle.

The factory charged me several hundred dollars per car/truck that they designated as “co-op advertising funds”.

They would give that money back to me IF I advertised to promote their Image, Brand and Presence.

I can’t adequately communicate how much this irked me and how short-sighted I viewed this.

Like all “Policies & Regulations” there were loopholes, but what a waste of time and energy to have to run my business that way.

Those small businesses in the 20% tiers don’t blindly follow the crowd. They adhere to a different way of doing business and that especially applies to their marketing.

According to Dan Kennedy:  Your Marketing Strategy needs to be and can be much SIMPLER.

  1. Every $1.00 spent on marketing has to provide you an IMMEDIATE Return-on-Investment (ROI) – FAST! Like TODAY preferably.
  2. That ROI must able to be accurately tracked back to that $1.00 spent.
  3. DO NOT spend a $1.00 that does not IMMEDIATELY return more than it costs you.

We will not take on a client where we do not feel confident we can bring them a return 3 to 5x’s what they spend for our advice, strategies and plans.

As a small business owner with limited resources, your sole agenda has to be to SELL SOMETHING TODAY!

You cannot afford any other way of thinking.

Every marketing communication you create from now on must be created with these 7 Rules at the forefront of your thinking:

  1. It must be created with the intent to get a sale TODAY!
  2. Every marketing/advertising communication will have an Intriguing and near Impossible-to-Refuse Offer in it.
  3. Always, always have a reason for the prospect or customer to RESPOND – Immediately.
  4. It must have very clear instructions on What you want them to do, When and How.  Always make it easy to do business with you AND to say YES!
  5. Every marketing/advertising communication will be trackable. “You can’t manage what you don’t or can’t measure.”
  6. Brand-building will only be done using NO-COST methods. Absolutely no platitudes.
  7. Follow-up will be built right into every marketing communication.

 

If you are spending money with agencies, radio stations, television ads, newspaper ads, online advertising, websites, postcards, brochures, etc. and they are not adhering to these rules. Fire them! NOW!   You are on the path to joining or remaining in that 80% that just survive.

Our Desired End Results for every owner we work with is to get them to that 1%.

Only Immediate Response Marketing will get you there.

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Why Businesses Fail

Reason One why businesses fail or at best remain average:

They don’t fully understand their 100% Financial Capacity so they don’t fully realize how much they are actually “leaving on the table” as additional profit to invest in growth.

Let’s look at a simple example of a Restaurant: If you have 30 tables and average 1 hour to turn the table and you are open 10 hours per day, 6 days a week and average ticket is $25 and average table is 2 people.

30 tables x 10 hours x $50 (2x $25) = $15,000 in sales per day would be 100% Capacity….$90,000 per week.

If you are currently averaging $23,000 per week you are 25% of Capacity.

Now I’m not saying it is going to be easy to get to $90,000 in revenue per week, but at least now the owner fully realizes what his full potential is at this very moment.

When I conducted this exercise with my Service Director of my auto dealership, it suddenly took off his blinders as to the full potential of our fixed operations and suddenly there was innovation born of confidence.

It turned out there were a lot of what I call “low-hanging” fruit solutions to dramatically improve our back-end.

Most of us, unless we receive some sort of external stimulation, just see the world based on past experiences and it taints our possibility thinking.

We get stuck in a certain paradigm and unless we are nudged out by some external force, we accept things the way they have always been.

Here is a story to illustrate.

“At a recent family gathering my wife was helping her mom make dinner. As they were about to put the beef roast into the pan, grandma cut the ends off. My wife asked her why she always cut the ends off; was it to somehow let the juices flow more freely? Her mom said no, I’ve always just done it that way, because my mom always did it that way.
As it happened great-grandma was in the living room, so my wife and her mother went and asked her why she always cut the end of the roast off.
‘I cut the ends off because my pot was too small to hold a full roast!”

This is just one of the advantages to having a consultant, coach or adviser on your team.

We’ll take you to a different level of thinking.

Stephen Covey, author of The 7 habits of Highly Effective People said:

If you want to make minor, incremental changes and improvements, work on practices, behavior or attitudes.  But if you want to make significant, quantum improvement, work on paradigms.   

Learn more at my video: 100% Financial Capacity

 

Second Reason: They don’t have a clear understanding of who their Ideal Target Audience is and/or what they want.

I’m sure you are somewhat familiar with the 80/20 Principle.

This principle states that 20% of your customers are generating 80% of your revenue.

These are your champions. And these are the people you want to reward and retain, get referrals from and just as importantly, duplicate.

You can actually take this even a step further and identify the 20% of the 20% (4%) that is generating 64% of your revenue.

It is uncanny how accurate this is.

Remember, the single easiest and cost-effective way to double your business is to have each client bring you another client…preferably just like them (assuming they are a 20% ‘er)

To market and sell your business, product or service properly, the very first thing you must do is get clear on WHO your ideal customer is, where they are hanging out, what their challenges are, etc…Every marketing piece must know what your clients and potential clients “hot buttons” are, where they get their information and what’s important or relevant to them.

Customers only care what’s important to them, not what’s important to you.

Cardinal Rule: Always remember that the customer is thinking What’s In It For Me? (WIIFM)

Once you find who the target truly is then you can know how to create your most intriguing message.

The more you know about this Ideal Target Audience the easier it is to duplicate them.  We have found Facebook’s marketing tool to be one of the most effective ways to accomplish this.

There are 5 major components to help identify  your Ideal Target Audience.

In some cases, you’ll need to survey or have conversations with existing customers to accurately flesh out your target audience.

  1. What are their Goals and Values
  2. Where Does Your Target Client Get His or Her information?
  3. Demographic Information
  4. Challenges and Pain Points
  5. Psychographic information

All we need is an email or phone number of your Ideal customers and with Facebook marketing we can find potential new customers who have similar traits. (think birds of a feather, flock together)

 

That brings us to the third ReasonNot knowing the Lifetime Value of your Customer.

Just like knowing what your 100% Financial Capacity is, knowing what the average Lifetime Value of each customer gives you the advantage over your competition of knowing  exactly how much you can spend or ethically bribe someone to be your client.

And by incorporating our 80/20 Analysis we can help you identify the value of each level of your customers which will allow you to reward each level according to their value to your business.

You won’t believe what an eye-opening experience it is to see in black and white, the difference in values.

I had lunch a few weeks back with the president of a local bank. They inadvertently discovered that approximately 600 of their 12,000 customers were earning them enough to break-even.

Interestingly, this 600 accounted for around 5% of their total clients.

They created 4 categories or quadrants of clients based on their value.

Another interesting thing they found was that in the 4th quadrant, or about 80% of their customers, they were actually losing money on them.

This knowledge allowed them to create different levels of service for each quadrant.

They have pulled out all the stops to learn everything they can about these 600, in terms of the 5 major components to help identify  your Ideal Target Audience.

And they stay in constant and consistent communication with things these 600 individually value.

He told me that within 120 days, they almost doubled the business from these 600.

I then opened his eyes to how we can now help him “duplicate” these 600 and take his business to a whole ‘nother level.

Here’s another thing, don’t think of reward as only free stuff, but what extra services can you invest in to reward your clients.

Let me give you an example…
Let’s say that your average client brings an average profit of $75 on the 1st sale. He or she repurchases three more times a year, with an average order amount of $300 and on each $300 reorder you make $150 gross profit.
With the average life of a customer’s patronage being 2 years, every new client is worth $975.
(Note: You need to determine how many years your average customer stays with you; it may be 10 years)

Theoretically you could spend $975 to bring in new clients and still break even.

If you KNOW you can afford to spend up to $975 in acquiring a new customer then you can create advertising, special offers and deals with that key number in mind…

or, here is an example as an auto dealer:

Let’s say that you make a gross profit of $1400 on the sale of a used car.
This customer then typically spends another $100 in that first year of ownership on normal maintenance of which $70 is gross profit.

The first year Value of your average customer then is $1470.

However, let’s also say that your average customer stays with you 3 years and spends an average of $400 a year on service work at $210 gross profit for each visit.

Now you have a Lifetime Value (LTV) of $1470 first year + $210 GP x 3 years = $630, for a total LTV of $2100.

This does not include the number of people he refers to you over that 3 year period that you really didn’t have to spend any money chasing and convincing to buy from you and they have the same $2100 value. 

Now, think of what you might learn if we were to go thru an 80/20 Analysis on these customers and help you discover who the 4% are that are generating 64% of your revenue.

Do you begin to see the why it really is not that hard to DOMINATE your market?

Your competitors who don’t know these Essential Elements will either lose their nerve or lose serious money trying to compete with you because the key metrics for every business are different.

 

The fourth element that most business owners fail at is not knowing your Unique Message.

Every business and business owner is unique and has a unique story to tell.

It is thinking about and articulating, in every advertising, marketing and sales presentation a consistent message of what makes you and/or what you sell UNIQUE and it’s commonly called your USP.
Learn more here:  USP! What is Your Unique Selling proposition? 

The more clearly you communicate what makes you the better choice (benefits, advantages, guarantee, etc) the more often people will choose you over your competition and see you as more valuable.

You can easily tell people why they should choose you in your marketing and have them come in presold.

All your marketing should be built around explaining and reinforcing your USP to your prospects and current customers.

Here is a great example: An Educated Customer is the Best Customer. The Schlitz Brewery story 

 

Fifth, is failing to Make it Easy for your customers or clients to do business with you.

Having a Risk Free Guarantee gives you a clear and compelling advantage over your competition.

A Risk Free Guarantee makes it Easier for your clients to say YES than NO.

Look at every aspect of your business from the products or services you provide to your clients and even your employees and make a list of all the obstacles to your clients or employees that could prevent any of them from purchasing from you, dealing with you or choosing you over your competition.

We have a whole series of questions that lead you thru discovering and creating your Risk Free Guarantee.

Learn more here: Always Make It Easy To Do Business With You

 

Finally, the sixth element, is the failure to realize It’s all about relationships.

Principles, Consistency and Innovation are usually lacking.

Two huge mistakes almost all businesses do that are essential to creating trusting relationships because without these two low-hanging fruit activities, you can’t know enough about who your customers or clients are to build meaningful long-term relationships.

  1. Failure to capture contact information of everyone, and I mean everyone, that visits your web site or your brick & mortar part of your business.
    (You need: name, address, phone# and/or email)
  2. Failure to create a consistent Marketing strategy and system for follow-up.

Building trusting relationships takes constant and consistent communication with information of value to each particular customer.

This is a lot easier than you may think, especially once we’ve helped you create SIMPLE, SIMPLE systems and processes for each of the 6 Essential Elements that are unique to our Principle Centered Marketing, Selling and Business Practices advisory and consulting business.

Not having a trusted adviser or coach on your team certainly isn’t the death knell of your business. But, not having someone on your team who can constantly challenge you and hold you accountable is definitely going to hold you back from ever DOMINATING your market within your industry.

 

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Crap…I’m Paralyzed!

In my 30+ years of leading, managing and training people, I have helped hundreds create a personal “Vision Map” for their own Desired End Results.

The biggest stumbling block is always their being PARALYZED with fear of the unknown or unknowable.

One…they either can’t visualize an end result they think they can achieve.
(This is where I have to convince them that they want what they want  and
for the time-being just forget about whether they think it’s possible or not.)

OR

Two…they can visualize what they want BUT can’t see themselves going
from where they are to where they want to be.
The GAP is just too wide….so they get PARALYZED  and do nothing.

 

Think: The Six Days of Creation
(ideas paraphrased from “Principle Centered Leadership” by Stephen Covey)

“A little bit at a time all the time has the greatest possibility of success.”

“Persist without exception.”

Aesop’s fable: “The Tortoise and the Hare.”

K.I.S.S.  – Keep It Simple Stupid

These are all maxims that demonstrate the Principle of The Law of the Farm
(sequential development process)
that is the key to success.

As recorded in Genesis, God created the earth in six days.
Each day was important and each in its own time:
First day:  light
Second day: sky and water
Third day: land and seas
Fourth day: sun, moon and stars
Fifth day: fish and birds
Sixth day: animals and man

  • As children, we learn to turn over then sit up, then crawl, then walk
    and then run. Each step is important and critical. No step can be skipped.
  • In school we study basic math before algebra, algebra before calculus.
    We simply cannot do calculus until we understand algebra.
  • In construction we build a strong foundation before doing any framing
    and finishing work.

The notion here is that there is a natural sequence to succeeding.

Progress in any endeavor means you have to accept that you may be at Day 2 in knowledge or experience and it would be foolish to try expect Day 6 results.

To conquer this “paralysis” that prevents most people from even starting much less “finishing” –  think about and understand these six “implications” of this “six-day” principle.

Growth is a natural process – You reap what you sow; algebra before calculus; crawling before walking.

Comparisons are Dangerous – compare yourself only to yourself.
The Principle of Constant Improvement is: Be better today than yesterday
and be better tomorrow that today.

Remember “there is no wrong way; there is Good – there is Better – and then there is Best.”

We are all at different “days” in our creation process – I may be at day
one in one area of my personal growth development and someone else may
be at day 5 in that area; whereas, I may be at day six in one area and that
same person is only at day one.

Your day four may be my day two.                     .

There is no short cut – If I am at day two and desire to move to day six
I must go thru the sequence of day three, four and five in order.
This where being HONEST is critical.

If you are not honest and authentic you will lose – PERIOD.

To improve we must start from where we are – By doing “one more push-up” than I did the day before, I can more easily get to 30 in a month’s time.
Just start from where you’re at and keep moving forward and improving as you go.

Be a Student of your business.

Be honest about Current Reality – we need to understand our strengths and
weaknesses and be honest about them. Know what motivates us and what
de-motivates us. Almost everyone I have ever worked with in this process
just simply did not know where to start so they developed paralysis.

The key to not being paralyzed is always begin where you are, at your day one.

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