How to Grow Your Small Business - A 6 Step Plan

Imagine you could trade brains with a business owner who's already had tons of success. You'd pretty much be set for life. You know, you wouldn't have to take any business courses, learn lessons the expensive way, or go through any of those business growing pains. Okay, maybe you can't switch brains, but you can download the experience of a hugely successful business owner in Donald Miller's newest book, How to Grow Your Small Business. And in this video, I'm going to sum up the most important lessons from the book for all you small business owners. If you could just implement one or two key lessons from this book, you could honestly shorten your learning curve by years and probably save tens of thousands of dollars. As the author says, he's made about 500 mistakes in his business, but he's gotten these six things exactly right. That's the idea behind How to Grow Your Small Business. And the book is structured all around this central metaphor of your business as an airplane. Some are big 747s capable of flying over entire oceans, but others are single engine prop planes designed for short recreational flights. But every business, like every plane, needs a flight plan if it's going to successfully move from runway to runway. Now, I'm not just going to summarize the book and leave it there. There's just way too much good stuff in here to do it justice like that. What I'm going to do instead is give a brief overview of the structure of the book, and then I'm going to share my favorite takeaways from each section so you'll have some really good ideas of things you can start improving right away in your own business and grow just like the title says. Miller says that any successful business, just like an airplane, has six key components. In the cockpit, you have leadership, aka you probably. So this is the brains of the operation. It's the place in your business with all the buttons and the switches, and great businesses are built here. It's also the place where you'll make your biggest mistakes. And the right engine is your marketing, generating thrust. And the goal with good marketing is to clearly communicate the value that you offer to your customers. A good jet engine pulls air in one end and back out the other, but a lack of clarity in your marketing means it gets gunked up and the engine just doesn't work properly. Then the left engine is your sales. So you generate leads in sales by always leading with your customer's story with the customer as the hero of their own story. Your business is just the tool that those customers use to solve their problems. Then each engine rests on the wings. So these are the products or services that you're selling. Just like raising or lowering flaps, you have to optimize your offers for revenue and profit so that you can have liftoff. The body of the plane is your overhead. Employee salaries if you have employees, taxes, fixed expenses, all that kind of stuff. So if your body gets too heavy, you're going to find yourself needing more and more lift from your engines to make up for it. And finally, you have the fuel tanks. So rather than jet fuel, your business always needs a healthy cash flow. And the more you have coming in, the higher your plane can fly. So those are the big ideas here. But what are the most important tidbits from the book that you can actually use to grow? Donald Miller's take on leadership is that when you start, it's all about the skill of the pilot in the cockpit. You know, before you can get up in the air and hit the autopilot switch, you've got to take some manual control. In other words, how well your business takes off is all about you, the owner. And what's one of the first things pilots do while prepping the plane? They review the flight plan. The top mistake that business leaders make from the cockpit of their business is similar. They don't create a clear vision. So if you want to avoid this mistake, Miller recommends a few key steps. First, create a clear and inspiring mission statement. Miller recommends getting hyper-specific here with a formula. So you want three distinct details here, X, Y, and Z. We will accomplish X by Y because of Z. That means that every mission statement has a specific goal, X, a specific deadline, Y, and a reason for doing it, Z. So you need all three elements if the mission statement is going to be both clear and inspiring. And customers buy from you to solve a problem. So that means you have to clearly define both the customer's problem and how your solution fixes it. For me personally, the most important parts of this section relate to specificity and clarity. Those are two of the most important things you need to get right. If you have a team and you give them an unclear mission, it's not their fault if they produce the wrong output. And if you're running a micro-business with no employees, you might be wondering, you know, what this has to do with you. You're not commanding an army here, but when you're your own business, you also have to lead yourself. And clarity up here in your head is the same as clarity in your business. Here's one tip that any solopreneur can use. Start with what the author calls smart goals. And smart goals are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time sensitive. So every variable here is essential because using smart goals gives you ways to measure your daily tasks against your bigger mission. So don't just say, I want to make more money this year. Instead say, I want to bring in $50,000 in additional revenue by December 1st. Be as specific as possible. So if you can measure your goals, you won't have to wonder so much about which steps come next. Now let's talk marketing and sales. So Donald has a really unique take here. He says that too many businesses focus on how their logo looks or the color of their website. And I can tell you as a former designer, this could not be any more true. You know, people love to start with this stuff, but they shouldn't get too bogged down with it. What really matters in your marketing is how you The really valuable stuff in this section is that Donald gives you really clear examples of how to use marketing effectively. I personally love the idea of a three-step process plan. So the customer has a problem and your business is the solution. Present that problem and solution in just three easy steps so that working with you sounds so simple, it's basically a slam dunk decision. Let's say you offer a service with lots of complicated steps, like an extermination business. You may have like a 12-step checklist to work through for every job you take on, but all your client's thinking is, I've got bugs and I want those bugs gone. So you present a three-step framework. Invite us in for a consultation to check out your bugs. We'll assess the problems at your house or business. We'll give you a free estimate, including a plan of action for getting rid of the bugs. The client doesn't have to know what goes into that estimate or what the estimate even says. Not at this stage anyway. You've just created a three-step process plan that takes them from having bugs to having a safe, healthy place to live or work. Problem and solution, but the first step should always be how to get the ball rolling toward working with you, which is the call to action. You'll always want to include that CTA in the process plan because it gives your prospects a really clear first step. Don't make it complicated for them. If they like the sound of your solution, they just need to know one thing. What do I do next? Miller also points out here another mistake that businesses make. They don't generate urgency. Great salespeople create a sense of urgency and stakes with their services. So what are stakes? Simple. Just the negative consequences if someone doesn't buy from you. If you don't hire that exterminator, maybe termites eat your house and it collapses. So those are pretty high stakes. If you define a clear problem, a specific three-step solution, then highlight a few consequences if the customer doesn't act, you have a great recipe to make sales. But most businesses don't sit down and work out any of these things. So before you create your landing page, you want to get in your customer's head a bit. You know, what's the main pain point that they have and how can your business solve it? No business ever lifts off the ground until you have a product or a service that actually solves your customer's problem. Miller's opinion here is that what you sell, not how you sell it, works the way that wings do. So a product with a really high profit margin is giving you plenty of lift, right? You don't need to go very fast spending all sorts of money on fuel to keep the plane in the air. But you also want to minimize the downside, you know, avoiding products that cost you too much time, money, and energy. And it's true, if you can sell one product at a higher margin than another, you should probably keep on selling it. Personally, I'd rather sell my digital course for 100% profit than a book that I would have to have printed and then mark up like 30%. So imagine you're running a small lawn care business. You know, your services range from lawn mowing and hedge trimming to more specialized tasks like landscaping and tree surgery. Now you notice something, your general lawn mowing services take up 70% of your time, but contribute less to your overall profits compared to the more specialized tasks. On the other hand, landscaping and tree surgery, though they take less of your time, they generate a higher profit margin. So you decide to make a shift. You know, you start promoting and prioritizing those specialized services more. You start advertising your expertise in landscaping and tree surgery, positioning yourself as a specialist rather than a generalist in the market. And as a result, you start to attract customers who are willing to pay for these higher margin services. Your profits start to rise without adding extra hours of work or expanding your team. You've effectively lifted your business higher just by focusing on your most profitable services. So the wings of your business could already be there in your service lineup. The trick is just to identify which one gives you the highest flight, aka the most profit. So just ask yourself now, which service is your jet engine? And of all the 17 business and marketing books I read last year, there are three more that were true game changers for my business. And I'm going to show you all the big lessons I learned in those books in this video right here. So there's one part of one of these books that I can literally never unsee now that I know about it. So click right here. Trust me, you want to see this.