Welcome back to the blog here.
My efforts to post regularly have been futile. But I’m here to share thoughts as and when I feel like it.
So today, I decided to “let out” a big secret of mine. This secret is responsible for driving a lot of the results.
This secret created rapid momentum and upward growth resulting in exponential results over time.
You see… most people trying to build a business are extremely focused on one thing or two things.
The idea of “focus on on thing” has it’s importance, especially for most people.
Everyone has heard of the man who chases two rabbits catches none.
Yet…
I’m one of the few people I know who can do ten things at once… successfully.
Compartmentalising each business into a box with a wring-fence around it.
Because of this, I have many different things growing at the same time and diversify my risk between my various projects and brands.
The way I do this is through SYSTEMS THINKING.
Now before continuing I have to warn you this that this is not for the beginner. This is for people who want to grow 10x. When you’re brand new it’s important you only focus on one or two things.
With that said, this secret strategy of mine will help you grow anything, fast.
What I do is ask questions that others do not.
- What can I prove works on a really small scale myself, and then hire others to work on?
- What can I do to get customers for brand y, that could be done over time to get exponential results?
- What can I do every single day for 10 minutes to an hour that will create massive exponential results in 6-24 months? Can I outsource it? Could we do it for 8 hours a day? Maybe more?
- If I analyse my businesses, could each step be broken down into a system that can be done over & over without losing momentum on my existing projects?
What it really comes down to is; I focus on things that can replicate and scale.
In the world of ecommerce everyone and their grandma is focused on running ads on social media for example.
Now while Facebook and Instagram are excellent; they tend to go up and down making it really hard to grow your business month in, month out.
That’s what we all want, isn’t it?
We want a business that has stable, uptrending growth.
It doesn’t have to grow every single month from the last; but at least be getting more profitable every 3-6 months.
To do this; I employ this systems thinking.
Contents
Replicate the entire business model.
With many businesses you’ll reach a ‘plateau’ phase. For whatever reason you just can’t seem to break through a revenue or profit level.
Let’s say you are doing $3000 per day in revenue or $100,000 per month.
Increasing this to $150,000 or $200,000 can be difficult.
For me; I’ve found it easier to simply start a brand new ecommerce store usually in the exact same niche.
Replicate the entire system. Create a new name, new domain, new product collections that can even be identical to the others or slightly different.
If you’re a real pro; you can simply replicate your entire business model in a different industry.
For me it’s like…
- Research competitors getting at least 20,000 visitors a month to their store.
- Look for opportunities with good search traffic potential and social media advertising potential.
- Reverse engineer all products/collections + do them slightly different or find new products all together for niche market.
- Create social media ads in the form of videos or photos.
- Launch social media ads.
- Launch Google ads.
- Copy, paste everything that is working on other store.
Instead of trying to push my one store, I simply replicate the model.
Now this can get a little extreme for a regular business owner. It’s a great way to scale your income faster, but not always the best long term decision.
So once you are happy with the stores you have you can focus on another kind of systems thinking.
Systematic Customer Acquisition
This is what most if you will want to know about.
If building ten different stores and growing like that doesn’t appeal to you just use systematic customer acquisition thinking.
The goal is to figure out a system for getting customers. Then outsource it to scale it.
Systematic Paid Advertising Scaling
First of all you’ll want to try to systematically scale your paid advertising.
You might be able to do this in many ways.
Scaling Via Ad Accounts – Usually whether you are advertising on Facebook or Google your actual ad account has a lot to do with the performance of the ads. Secret metrics the networks don’t tell us about or whatever else; this is a fact. Some ad accounts perform better than others. Also if we’re talking Facebook ads; you might launch 100 ad sets targeting different interests to find only 15-20 of them really perform well. But if you try to increase the budgets of those effective ad sets the results go to sh*t. The work-around is to simply clone the best ad sets onto many different ad accounts. Tactical loophole this; not so much a systems strategy.
Scaling Via Other Ad Platforms – if your product is selling on Facebook, it will probably sell on Google or another platform like Snapchat, Pinterest or Native Ads. Just look for other places to advertise. Clone the system. Same ads, same everything – different at platform with different users.
Scaling Via Systematic Ad Creative Creation – usually companies will have one or two good ads they try to run all year. The better more systematic way to do this is to scale with ad creatives. Create a system for how to create an effective ad. This could be a certain type of video or “top tips for x” type of content video ad. Perhaps you create many different product pages or presells and ad creatives that cater to different audiences who will all be interested in your products – but need to be talked to in a different way. Prove you can do this, then hire someone who’s job is to keep on creating more ads, more pages, testing more audiences to find winners. Over time you will gain more and more effective creative and funnels.
Systematic People Scaling
This is something that has taken me so many years to realise and answer:
“How do I ROI people?”
Who can I hire that will bring in more money in the next 3-6 months than I will pay them in salary?
Who can I hire that I can pay to do something that can be measured in the next 30 days to see the ROI on this person?
What system can I train someone to do that will result in new customers in the next one month? If it works, can I hire many people to do this?
You could think about all kinds of job positions like…
- Social media manager to grow and monetise social media accounts.
- Facebook ad expert to automatically test and scale new ad creative.
- Content writer to create high converting blog posts to convert and attract new customers.
- Expert on a different advertising platform to try “get you profitable” there too to scale your channels.
- Email marketing copywriter to mail, nurture and monetise email subscribers.
- Something a little more creative.
There are many jobs you could create in your business, and if you put one full time person on them they may result in more net profit than the cost of said person.
This is systematic scaling.
Now there’s also something a little more creative to talk about. This is something that has me really excited lately.
Well… I’ve been psyched about this for many months as I consider it one of my secret keys to dominating my verticals.
It’s the answer of this question:
- What can I do right now, that only takes time and little to no money to generate a customer?
Some of the answers I came up with were:
- Affiliate manager: someone to full time contact influencers on Instagram and pitch them to join my affiliate program to promote my product to their audience.
- Content Writer / SEO team: a person or team who focus only on creating blog content that ranks for specific keywords my target audience are interested in.
Side note: to get even more on this systems thinking you might ask: how could I make it so each piece of content turns into a new customer immediately without the Google rankings; just by syndicating it or sharing or promoting it?
- Community Infiltration: someone who spends all day on Facebook groups and Pinterest etc adding value to niche specific communities where I can share my own products and turn the users into customers.
- Direct Messaging Instagram: a lot of people do this manually to pitch their products or services and it does work. If you get smart about it and use a nice process you can template it; then hire 5 guys to message thousands of people per day. If the people cost $30 per day from India; that’s $150/day.
- Many others I won’t reveal.
HOW TO MEASURE AND ROI TIME INSTEAD OF MONEY
The point of this is that you are looking at these employees like an advertising campaign. No different to an adset on Facebook.
Let’s take hiring a team of people to do a very basic customer acquisition strategy like direct messaging niche specific Instagram profiles.
This is something that would result in too few customers to do yourself; but be as much as 2-10 times more lucrative than Facebook ads when you outsource it and scale.
So let’s say you hired 5 guys at a rock bottom price of $3.75/hour or $30 every 8 hours – five days a week.
If they message 50 people per hour, 8 hours per day that’s 400 people a day.
Five people doing this would create 2000 messages per day to niche relevant profiles who might want a free product or whatever your bait is.
Now don’t get confused people aren’t going to magically buy from your site because you sent them a message. You have to be smart with this and get creative – offering to enter a competition or get a free plus shipping product or asking them for feedback on your store can work.
So let’s take the 2000 people who get your script. Maybe 10% of them click through to your store. Out of those 200 people, 15 of them buy.
Let’s say your ideal cost per acquisition is $30 for your store. So you want to pay $30 or less on advertising to get a customer.
With this method, you would be getting 15 buyers for $150 so you’d be paying 3 times less at just $10 per sale.
This is an extreme example of using this kind of thinking, but it’s something I would imagine works very well.
The key is:
Figuring out what can be done with TIME to generate new customers that can be outsourced cheaply.
Everything costs money or time. Everyone else is so focused on how they can spend money directly on advertising to get customers.
Great strategy.
But what if you could hire 2 people to follow a system that consistently brought in 2-10 times the profit than they cost in salaries?
Some of these methods are infinitely scalable and you can just hire more and more people, each time cloning the system that gets customers on autopilot.
Those are some thoughts for you today. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions below.
