If you ask the owner of nearly any service-based business owner what they want most for their business, and the answer you’ll most often hear is “I want more clients”.
And that’s exactly what most of them spend the majority of their marketing time, money and effort on… acquiring new clients.
Getting clients is critical to the success of any business, but there are other, more effective ways to improve your profitability and make more money.
Many businesses could double their profits by concentrating their efforts on a few key areas that are overlooked by nearly every business owner.
Even when it comes to getting more clients (which most business owners do focus on), the focus is often on getting more ‘enquiries’ without focusing on whether you can improve the number of those enquiries you ‘convert’ into paying clients. There’s no point in spending a lot of time, effort and money on marketing your business if you are letting visitors to your website, or callers to your business slip through the net. So if you ‘conversion rate’ is low, this is a good place to focus on making improvements.
Consider this: if you currently spend £50 on marketing to get each enquiry, and you typically get one new paying client worth £1,000 for every 10 enquiries you get, it’s costing you £500 to get a client worth £1,000. What if you could get 5 new clients from every 10 enquiries you get? Now it would only be costing you £250 to get 5 clients worth £5,000. Not only that, but think about how much time you’d save if you could get 5 new clients by talking to 10 enquiries, rather than by talking to 50 enquiries?
Other areas to pay particular attention to include: the average amount you get from each client each time they hire you, the profit margin of your services, the number of transactions your clients make with you in a given period of time, the total value of your clients to your business over their ‘lifetime’ of doing business with you, and the number of referrals you get from your clients.
If you’re not paying attention to each of these areas (as well as a number of other factors that can make a major impact on your business’ profitability), you’re either missing out on money you could be earning, or you’re strengthening your competition by allowing them to harvest that money… money that rightfully, should be in your bank account, and not in theirs.
Now, here’s the exciting part: you don’t have to make big improvements in these areas to see big results. All it takes is small, incremental improvements, and the results will add up to something much greater.
You see, these areas of your business are the ‘Profit Zones’ – areas that, if you pay attention to them and improve them, will result in you improving your profits and making more money. And because they work on a cumulative basis, just a 10% increase on each of the 7 Profit Zones in your business could add up to an increase in profitability of 80% or more. I call this the 7 Profit Zones Formula for dramatic business growth.
So isn’t it time you stopped putting all your focus on new enquiries and started thinking about other (easier) ways to grow your business?
So, if you want to work out how much more profit and income you could be earning if you improved each Profit Zone in your business by 10% or more, download a copy of my free guide to The 7 Profit Zones Formula to Dramatic Business Growth. This report will show you exactly how to calculate the improvement in profitability you would get by improving each of the 7 Profit Zones in your business in the next 12 months.
Or, you can apply for a no cost 15 minute ‘Focus Session‘ with me and I’ll help you work out how much profit and income you could achieve with small improvements in each area. Once we’ve worked out how much more profit and income you could achieve with small improvements in each area, I’ll also help you uncover the biggest challenges in your business that might be slowing you down or stopping you from achieving that growth, and what to do about them. Apply now.