Welcome to the Inside BS Show. My name is Dave Lorenzo, and my personal brand is that I am the godfather of growth. Now, the question that I receive most often is, okay Dave, well you're the godfather of growth, and you're also the co-founder of Exit Success Lab.

How do you reconcile those two brands? How do you connect both of those brands together? The way I answer that question is informative for you as a business owner, because it's going to help you focus on what you need to do in order to build a business that acts like an investment. And that's what we do at Exit Success Lab. We focus on helping you build a business that can run without your day-to-day involvement, that pays you distributions throughout the course of the year, and that increases in value day after day, month after month, and year after year.

The way we do that is by focusing first and foremost on growth. So if you're listening to this podcast right now, you're listening to today's show, and your business is not doing a million dollars a year in annual revenue, that's the first thing you need to focus on. You need to focus your energy, your efforts on getting to a million dollars a year in annual revenue.

Why is that important? It's important because that threshold, that mark, that milestone is indicative of a business that can expend the resources necessary to foster exponential growth in the future. Let me explain what I mean. If you're listening to this today, and you're a solopreneur, you're a sole practitioner in a professional service firm, or you're a family business owner, and your family business is under the one million dollar threshold, you don't have resources to do advertising.

You don't have resources to build a sales team. So you need to accelerate the growth process so that you get to a million dollars a year in annual revenue. Once you get to that point in your business journey, you will have resources available to hire at least one salesperson.

You will have resources available to invest in some advertising and some advanced lead generation strategies. Once you do this, you're unlocking leverage in the growth process, and this is what people who purchase a business are looking for. When a business is sold, the buyer of that business is buying predictable future profit.

Without a growth plan that actually works, there is no predictable future profit. So when we are engaged, when Exit Success Lab is engaged by a business owner, the very first thing we look at is predictability of profit, and that's driven by growth on a year over year basis. If you come to us and your business has not grown during the last three years, your profit has not increased over the last three years, you're not going to be able to sell that business.

That's the harsh reality. If you want to build a business that acts like an investment, you need to be able to predict what your growth is going to be one year, three years, five years into the future. So where should you start? The first place you should start is with your ideal clients.

Now, how do you identify ideal clients? You identify ideal clients by determining who the people are or who the companies are that pay you the most money for the value you provide, and you also cross-match those people or those businesses with the businesses that are easiest for your company, for your firm, for your business to attract. Ideal clients are people who pay the most money for the value you provide and are easiest to attract. So that means that your message is highly resonant.

Your message connects with the audience that is your ideal client. If you manufacture widgets and there is a certain category of widget purchaser that is ideal for you, all of your efforts should be spent providing maximum value to those target clients. It is very easy to be distracted.

It is very easy to have what we call shiny object syndrome. It's very easy to chase after clients that are not ideal for you. Everyone is vulnerable to this syndrome, this shiny object syndrome.

You have to resist that with all of your energy, and when you're in the process of expansion, you need to focus exclusively on ideal clients and work that angle, work that market, work those folks, those businesses as hard as you possibly can, and you need to employ leverage. So what does that mean? I had lunch on Friday. This is Monday.

I had lunch just a few days ago with a really sharp business owner, and she said to me, Dave, I had a great week. I spent the entire week driving around to my ideal client's offices, dropping off food, and leaving my business card and telling them that I wanted to help them, I wanted to deliver value to them. And I said, wonderful.

How many of those folks were you able to connect with? She said, well, I went to 30 businesses during the course of this week, and I said, how many conversations did you have? She said, well, I didn't have any conversations with decision makers, but they all have my food, they all have my business card, and I said, what's your plan to convert those outreach opportunities into actual business? And she looked at me and she said, well, I'm just hoping that after they eat the food, they get the business card and they call me and they say, thank you for the food. How can you help me? And I said to her, I said, well, there's two things that I think you should think about related to that process. I said, that process is fantastic if it's a salesperson who delivered the 30 trays of food to people, businesses, and then the salesperson had a very specific, direct, step-by-step follow-up process to convert at least three of those 30 people into paying clients for you.

And she looked at me and she said, really? And she said, why? Why have somebody else do that and you don't think people are gonna call me? I said, no. I said, people are gonna be, they're gonna have full bellies for 15, 20 minutes after they eat your food. They may read your business card and be grateful and two or three of them may call to say thank you.

But the disconnect is where the food and your service come together because this woman is not a chef. She didn't drop off a food product that she makes and she sells. In fact, she's a professional service provider.

So the food is totally unrelated to what she does. And she spent her time as the business owner going out and doing this. So I said to her, you did a good portion of the work upfront by identifying who the ideal clients were, but you didn't use any leverage.

How long did it take you to deliver these 30 trays of food? And she said, well, she said, it took me probably 40 hours this week because I had to drive around, drop off the food, talk to somebody who was there, make sure they gave the food to the decision maker. And I said, that was an enormous amount of time. That's an entire work week.

You personally as the owner spent doing sales activity. There's no leverage in that. Let's take the list of targeted people and create a follow-up sequence.

And then let's take a list of people who look just like those folks, a list of people who look just like your ideal clients and let's target them with direct mail, with email, with gifts that are related to your products and services. And then let's assign someone to call those people after each outreach attempt and set appointments for them to talk to you about how you can help them. I said, when we refine this process even further, we will teach the person who's doing the outreach phone call to set the appointments for themselves and they can close those folks.

And once you have this process down where someone else identifies the targets, someone else does the outreach to the targets, someone else handles the follow-up to the targets and someone else closes the targets, you can duplicate that over and over again so that you have 10 people doing this outreach. So if every time the salesperson reaches out to 30 people, you close three, you now know that if you have three people doing this same outreach sequence, as long as there's proof that it works, you will get nine clients a month from the outreach. And if the average client you onboard provides you with $5,000 in initial revenue, nine times five is $45,000 per month.

You can spend up to $45,000 a month acquiring these clients. You can get three great salespeople and do a really good job of providing some follow-up in order to break even and then make a ton of money when you sell them the second and the third product or service afterwards. This is employing leverage in your growth process and now you've created a predictable system for growing every single month.

Think about that for a moment. This business owner identified her ideal clients and she was going out and doing the sales process herself. She didn't have any follow-up process in place and she had no predictability of revenue and no leverage.

And in one conversation that took about 15 minutes, we transformed that into a growth process that created predictable, reliable revenue on a monthly basis. This is your mission as a business owner. So if you're listening to the sound of my voice now and you're doing less than $1 million in annual revenue, then you probably have time as a business owner to do this yourself, put the follow-up system in place, and with the revenue you source from your first outreach program like the one I just outlined, I want you then to invest in bringing someone on board who can do this for you.

That is how you begin the process of predictable revenue growth and that leads to predictable profit and that leads to an increase in business value. So to bring this back to where we first started, I'm the godfather of growth because I help you develop systems, develop processes for growing your business in a predictable, reliable way and that is how we initially begin to increase the value of every business we work with. If you're interested in discovering more ways to employ leverage to grow your business, whether you're doing $1 million in revenue or $10 million in revenue, Exit Success Lab is the place for you.

I want you to reach out to me. Give me a call at 305-692-5531. 305-692-5531.

Leave me your name, your email address, and your phone number and I will personally reach out to you to discuss ways that you can use this system, this process to employ leverage and to grow your business exponentially. My name is Dave Lorenzo. I am the godfather of growth and this is the Inside BS Show.

I'll be back here tomorrow with another strategy to help you increase the value of your business and make a great living and live a great life.