DreamBuilder Financial

At that point I was wondering why some people seemed to have it all figured out, making it look so easy

What was I doing wrong? I started to question if I had what it took to make it with my business It is a recipe for disaster when you start doubting your own abilities I set out to find what I was doing wrong In this process of self reflection, testing and learning from others, I discovered 5 key ingredients causing novice entrepreneurs to struggle The sooner that you and I can get past them, the faster our businesses can grow into one with routine 5-figure months The 5 key ingredients? Here they are:

• Expound On Your Why, Your Ideal Client, and The Problem to Solve The truth is, this is a lot and can really be three separate steps – heck, probably three separate posts
• As a matter of fact, there are books written on each one of these
• What are they, you ask? Let’s start with your “Why”
• The “why” is the innate purpose of the business you are building
• It is the vision that you have that goes beyond money
• It is ingrained in the fabric of the business, employees, and customers
• In his book Start With Why, Simon Sinek gives the example of the well known company Apple, who decided that their purpose was to “challenge the status quo,” their whole existence was suddenly different
• Customers know that their Apple product will be different and unique and challenge the boundaries of where technology has gone before
• Your business needs a core reason for its’ existence, the purpose it was started in the first place
• The ideal client, sometimes referred to as your target avatar or buyer persona, is the person or people you most want to target with your marketing campaigns based on your current business situation
• Your current clients aren’t always necessarily your ideal clients
• Most likely, you reading this blog post, are a small business owner who has yet to reach 6 figures in revenue
• I can make this assumption because I targeted my ideal clients by starting the post talking about my experiences at that stage in my business
• The intention was for people who related to those feelings to identify with the material and keep reading
• That was me putting targeting my ideal client into practice
• Finally, the question that you must ask: What is the problem that your ideal client has that you are trying to solve? What are their frustrations? What does their perfect future look like? Ryan Deiss, the CEO of Digital Marketer, calls this knowing your client’s “Before and After State”
• Since I love that terminology, I’ll be using it here
• These 3 key pieces of information – Why, Ideal Client and their Before and After State – are the pillars or foundation of all the marketing you do for your business
• This will drive the conversations that you have and the products you create
• I found that that I had these all wrong
• I had approached the problem by asking myself, “What do I want to sell,” instead of figuring out what my ideal client would need, to have the straightest path from their Before State to their After State
• This brings us to our second point: In his book Start With Why, Simon Sinek gives the example of the well known company Apple, who decided that their purpose was to “challenge the status quo,” their whole existence was suddenly different Customers know that their Apple product will be different and unique and challenge the boundaries of where technology has gone before Your business needs a core reason for its’ existence, the purpose it was started in the first place The ideal client, sometimes referred to as your target avatar or buyer persona, is the person or people you most want to target with your marketing campaigns based on your current business situation Your current clients aren’t always necessarily your ideal clients Most likely, you reading this blog post, are a small business owner who has yet to reach 6 figures in revenue I can make this assumption because I targeted my ideal clients by starting the post talking about my experiences at that stage in my business The intention was for people who related to those feelings to identify with the material and keep reading That was me putting targeting my ideal client into practice

Finally, the question that you must ask: What is the problem that your ideal client has that you are trying to solve? What are their frustrations? What does their perfect future look like? Ryan Deiss, the CEO of Digital Marketer, calls this knowing your client’s “Before and After State” Since I love that terminology, I’ll be using it here

These 3 key pieces of information – Why, Ideal Client and their Before and After State – are the pillars or foundation of all the marketing you do for your business This will drive the conversations that you have and the products you create

I found that that I had these all wrong I had approached the problem by asking myself, “What do I want to sell,” instead of figuring out what my ideal client would need, to have the straightest path from their Before State to their After State

This brings us to our second point:

• Choose ONE product or service When we start our business and release our first product or service, we begin to attract buyers
• However, sometimes the buyers want something different than what we have to offer, so we expand that offer to include what they want
• What also happens is that we don’t see fast enough growth and in our minds we blame the offer (the positioning of the product/service i
• e
• , price, scarcity, features, etc
• ) for not being attractive enough
• So we add more products and services in the hopes that more offers will bring in more business
• This is a huge misstep that I made and I see others frequently making as well
• It makes sense that we would react this way, however, it is just as easy to see why it is a mistake
• You only need one product to get to 5 figures per month
• If it is a high ticket product, say a $2,000 per month offer, then you only need to sell five of your product and you’ve reached your goal
• Conversely, a lower priced offering would need a greater volume of sales (for example a $100 product would have to be sold to 100 customers to achieve the same $10,000 of revenue)
• Assuming that there are enough potential customers seeking your solution, this also seems very doable
• Now that we established that this is easily doable with one offer, let’s analyze what the problem is with multiple offers
• Every offer you create requires a sales message to close the deal
• It then requires fulfillment and support on the back-end
• James Wedmore, one of the great online marketers and business acceleration coaches said that you should be spending 80% of your time selling
• To be able to make that happen with a small team or no team at all, you need to be able to replicate the efforts to service one client so that less time is spent servicing future clients
• With one offer, you can standardize the sales conversation, formalize the proposal and then create a standardized process for delivering the product or service and supporting the customer
• The key at this stage is doing as little work as possible on the fulfillment side of the business so that you can focus on selling
• So how do you choose the right one?Choosing the right service or product becomes a lot easier when you have properly identified and gotten to know your ideal client
• Remember that the goal is to provide a straight path from their current, “before” state to their desired, “after” state
• You can understand this by mapping out the journey your client needs to take, and, after understanding their needs, you create a product or service that takes them past those first few steps of their journey
• For example, the natural first step for my ideal client, the struggling or stuck new business owner, is to go through the steps on this page and then implement the changes
• I do this with a free, live five-day challenge that guides them, people like you, through these 5 steps in a basic form
• I then offer my Six Figures in a Year membership program designed to provide step-by-step direction and support through their journey
• Okay, you’ve narrowed down your offering to one single solution
• Now how do you sell it? When we start our business and release our first product or service, we begin to attract buyers However, sometimes the buyers want something different than what we have to offer, so we expand that offer to include what they want What also happens is that we don’t see fast enough growth and in our minds we blame the offer (the positioning of the product/service i e , price, scarcity, features, etc ) for not being attractive enough So we add more products and services in the hopes that more offers will bring in more business This is a huge misstep that I made and I see others frequently making as well It makes sense that we would react this way, however, it is just as easy to see why it is a mistake You only need one product to get to 5 figures per month If it is a high ticket product, say a $2,000 per month offer, then you only need to sell five of your product and you’ve reached your goal Conversely, a lower priced offering would need a greater volume of sales (for example a $100 product would have to be sold to 100 customers to achieve the same $10,000 of revenue) Assuming that there are enough potential customers seeking your solution, this also seems very doable

Now that we established that this is easily doable with one offer, let’s analyze what the problem is with multiple offers Every offer you create requires a sales message to close the deal It then requires fulfillment and support on the back-end James Wedmore, one of the great online marketers and business acceleration coaches said that you should be spending 80% of your time selling To be able to make that happen with a small team or no team at all, you need to be able to replicate the efforts to service one client so that less time is spent servicing future clients

With one offer, you can standardize the sales conversation, formalize the proposal and then create a standardized process for delivering the product or service and supporting the customer The key at this stage is doing as little work as possible on the fulfillment side of the business so that you can focus on selling So how do you choose the right one?Choosing the right service or product becomes a lot easier when you have properly identified and gotten to know your ideal client Remember that the goal is to provide a straight path from their current, “before” state to their desired, “after” state You can understand this by mapping out the journey your client needs to take, and, after understanding their needs, you create a product or service that takes them past those first few steps of their journey

For example, the natural first step for my ideal client, the struggling or stuck new business owner, is to go through the steps on this page and then implement the changes I do this with a free, live five-day challenge that guides them, people like you, through these 5 steps in a basic form I then offer my Six Figures in a Year membership program designed to provide step-by-step direction and support through their journey

Okay, you’ve narrowed down your offering to one single solution Now how do you sell it? Similar to number 2 above, the focus should be on finding a marketing and sales plan that works and then sticking with it You’ll have plenty of time to get fancy later The key to understand here is that when it comes to the marketing and sales strategy there is a difference from the exercise we just did regarding the product or service

With selecting a product or service, YOU are the expert, so you are the one who knows exactly what they need, no guessing involved When it comes to marketing and sales, you have to keep testing until you find something that works One mistake I see very often is that the metrics (or data) are not interpreted properly, and, as a result, the wrong analysis is made Let’s say that you decide to sell a product or service through a challenge, as I described earlier For the purpose of this example let’s assume that a good rate of conversion is 3%, which means that for every 100 people signed up for the challenge, there are 3 sales made

Now you run your very first challenge and you get 30 people signed up for the challenge and you make 2 sales Many people would say at that point, “I put in all this time and effort and only got 2 sales, this doesn’t work ” They then scrap the efforts and try the next plan

What they don’t see is that they converted at a rate of 6 7% (2/30 = 067), more than twice the average conversion rate! The right next move is to figure out how to get even more people to participate in the challenge and run it again Instead, most of us will pivot and try something else instead

There is another common error that is made when the data is not yet statistically relevant Now before your eyes glaze over, bear with me for a moment Using the challenge example from above, let’s say nobody purchased This looks like a 0% conversion rate, which nobody wants The problem is that the average rate is exactly that, an average Sometimes you get 0/100 and 6/100 on two separate attempts

In order to do this right, it is imperative to have the right numbers and then understand your metrics, bringing us to numbers 4 and 5

• Run the Numbers Picking the price point of your offer is not arbitrary
• You need to run your business like a business and make sure you’re bringing in the money that you should be
• When discussing the size of your business, I’ve focused on the top-line revenue, but what good is earning $10,000 in a month if it cost you $11,000 to get it? Figuring out the numbers means identifying the price point of your product and testing the profitability based on a series of assumptions
• Being a Profit First Professional, we will use the author of Profit First, Mike Michalowicz’s, formula
• Profit First guidelines for a business with less than $250k in revenue dictates the following breakdown of every revenue dollar: Profit – 5% (
• Owner’s Compensation – 50% (0

• Tax – 15% (

• Operating Expenses – 30% (0

• As long as we know one of the 5 variables, we can determine the remainder

• The simplest one to determine is the Operating Expenses
• For example, let’s assume, for simplicity, that advertising expenses are 50% of total operating expenses
• We can further assume that a lead will cost $4 (this is an example, the cost for a lead or referral can be far less or greater and varies tremendously from one business and industry to the next)
• If we anticipate a 3% conversion (3 out of every 100 leads will purchase), then each sale will cost $133
• 33 ($4/
• 3), in advertising dollars, and, therefore, $266
• 66 ($133
• 33 x 2) in total operating expenses
• Now we can easily fill in the rest of our numbers: Revenue (Price) – $888
• 87 (266
• 66 / 0
• Profit – $44

• 44 (5% of Revenue) Owner’s Compensation – $444
• 43 (50% of Revenue) Tax – $133
• 33 (15% of Revenue) Operating Expenses – $266
• 66 (already calculated) Given our cost assumptions, we have determined that the product must be sold for $889 which could be rounded to a nice marketing figure of $897
• Here’s the test: does your product provide at least $897 of value? If your product is a simple baby pacifier then probably not
• However, if the pacifier miraculously does sleep training for an infant, it may very well be able to command that price
• Another way to look at this is to think of your ideal client and ask yourself, is this product or service worth this price to them if it delivers the promised result, taking them further on their journey to their After State
• Many entrepreneurs skip the simple mathematical calculation above and arbitrarily choose a price for their product or service
• Thousands of dollars later, they wonder why they can’t make money no matter how many units, hours or packages they sell
• Worse, they are making money but not enough that they cannot get the benefit from their business that they desire

Picking the price point of your offer is not arbitrary You need to run your business like a business and make sure you’re bringing in the money that you should be When discussing the size of your business, I’ve focused on the top-line revenue, but what good is earning $10,000 in a month if it cost you $11,000 to get it? Figuring out the numbers means identifying the price point of your product and testing the profitability based on a series of assumptions Being a Profit First Professional, we will use the author of Profit First, Mike Michalowicz’s, formula Profit First guidelines for a business with less than $250k in revenue dictates the following breakdown of every revenue dollar: Profit – 5% ( 05) Owner’s Compensation – 50% (0 5) Tax – 15% ( 15) Operating Expenses – 30% (0 3) As long as we know one of the 5 variables, we can determine the remainder The simplest one to determine is the Operating Expenses For example, let’s assume, for simplicity, that advertising expenses are 50% of total operating expenses We can further assume that a lead will cost $4 (this is an example, the cost for a lead or referral can be far less or greater and varies tremendously from one business and industry to the next)

If we anticipate a 3% conversion (3 out of every 100 leads will purchase), then each sale will cost $133 33 ($4/ 3), in advertising dollars, and, therefore, $266 66 ($133 33 x 2) in total operating expenses Now we can easily fill in the rest of our numbers: Revenue (Price) – $888 87 (266 66 / 0 3) Profit – $44 44 (5% of Revenue) Owner’s Compensation – $444 43 (50% of Revenue) Tax – $133 33 (15% of Revenue) Operating Expenses – $266 66 (already calculated)