Posted by Sam Polimeni
The secret to being a great chef is building great recipes, and while a master chef can certainly do his or her best to make a bad recipe better, there’s no way around the fact that adding more ingredients to an already bad recipe does nothing but make more bad food.
The same is true of business. If you have a profitable and well-oiled business, it’s easy to make it grow – you just keep doing more of what you’ve been doing to make it great. You double the recipe.
But if you have a bad business, and you want to grow, the only thing you’ll end up with when you double the recipe is a bigger problem to solve. If your business isn’t ready to scale, growth has the potential to kill it, which is why you need to follow this three step plan to profit.
Step 1: Know the Numbers
You absolutely must get on top of your financials, and build a strong financial operations system. This means you need to know the numbers at all times, even if those numbers aren’t pretty. Knowing the numbers will show you the difference between maintaining, and being profitable. Focus on the latter.
Step 2: Add Capacity
Put an infrastructure in place that allows you to double the recipe. This means that you need access to more people, more product, and more money. If you know that for every dollar you spend on advertising, you’re going to earn two dollars back, then you need to find a way to increase the amount of money going into advertising. If creating more product is the key to profitable, then you must find a way to create more product. You have to be ready to scale.
Step 3: Grow
When you know the numbers and have the infrastructure in place, the only thing left to do is turn on the faucet. In this stage, you know who your ideal customers are, how to reach them, and how much profit they bring. Now, you’re just trying to get to more of them than before, each and every day. More product, more people, and more revenue.
While the three step plan to growth sounds simple in theory, in practice it can be frightening, and overwhelming, especially at step 1. In our client seminars and workshops, we show clients how to get started on the right foot, and how to prepare for all of the bumps that may occur along the way.
This isn’t something you can delegate, and it’s important to get it right if you want to succeed as a business owner. Contact us today to learn how you can get started with your own three step plan to profit.
