One of the reasons was because I had a blast racing the Formula racecar my college buddies and I built to do 0-60 MPH in 3.2 seconds and pull over 1 lateral G. (For the non-engineers, that means it took turns faster than a Z06 Corvette.)

It was about that time that a little software program taught me the power of being wrong.

You see, my responsibilities for our Formula SAE racecar as Engine Team Leader were to make sure our car was fast AND reliable. (Learning the reliable part was a humbling experience but a story for another day.)

Dyno run of Kettering's 2004 FSAE Car - I'm on the right in the backwards hat holding the laptop.

At the start I knew very little about engine design as my upperclassmen Chris, Tim, and Jason could fully attest. I bombarded them constantly with questions. I also raided our school library to find anything I could about engine operation.

My university made some very sophisticated software available to me to simulate how various changes to the engine would result in more or less power.

Based on the help of my more senior team members, and the books I’d been devouring, I now had enough basic theories about engine design that I could start plugging various design parameters into the software.

You see, the way the software worked was a bit tricky… You couldn’t just say, “Make me the most powerful 600cc engine possible,” and let the software spit out the answers.

You had to actually tell the software exactly which part of the engine to change. So, for instance, you might have to change the size of the exhaust to determine which diameter would result in the best performance. (FYI, bigger is not always better.)

Think of it this way… Right now you’re sitting at your computer. Let’s say it starts working slowly and web pages aren’t loading up real well. Well there’s no software out there that will just “fix” that problem.

It might be your web browser, the website’s servers, your internet connection, a virus, spyware, or another program running in the background and you have to try each one to see which is causing the problem. It might even be several problems at once.

That’s kind of how you design a car engine. You know you want it to go faster, you just have to figure out which areas to tweak to speed it up.

Ok, so I’d put in these various parameters for intake and exhaust design and then the software would test out one configuration and then report back to me how much power and torque that particular configuration would produce.

Over time I’d run hundreds and hundreds of different configurations to find the best combination.

And here’s the thing…

My idea of what should have produced the best combination of performance was often wrong.

Now as our Team Leader, Travis, used to say, “we’re engineers not scientists.” Which meant, we work in the real world not a perfectly controlled lab, so my computer simulations weren’t the final word – they were just the starting point.

To get the full picture, we actually had to get an engine, strap it onto a dynamometer (device used to measure engine power kind of like you use a scale to measure your weight), and build a test rig to test our simulated ideas in the real world.

You know what happened?

The real world taught me once again the beauty of being wrong. The dyno testing showed that some things that worked really well on the computer (like a large intake plenum) had serious limitations (like horrible throttle response) in the real world.

Ultimately the result of being wrong, admitting it, and then quickly moving forward was a phenomenal engine package.

Our primary race was an autocross-style road course for 30 laps that required even power delivery over a large RPM range.

At competition when we were on the dyno testing our car in front of the other teams, a bystander remarked, “that’s not a torque curve, that’s a torque plateau!”

That was EXACTLY what we were looking for!

That appreciation for being wrong and getting better because of it, is exactly how my internet marketing business approaches website design.

1. Strong Base theory with the Marketing RoadMap – Just like I had to know what parameters to put into the engine software, marketing requires an equally strong base on how people think and interact with websites, Google Ads, and search engines.
2. Testing at every step in the marketing process – On the car engine we tweaked every item air touched from entering the engine till leaving the muffler. In internet marketing, we test and optimize every step from the words your target customer is typing into Google, to the ad we show them, to the page they land on, to the places they click on the landing page, to the contact form that generates the lead. Every place your prospect visits is monitored, tested, and improved.
3. Real world feedback - The first month that we launch a new website is the absolute worst for performance. Why? Because at that point everything is theory. Some of it can be based on what has worked in the same industry in other parts of the country however no 2 markets are the same so what works in one city very often doesn’t work as well in another one. So we start with our best guess at what will work and then slowly but continuously improve. For your market we learn exactly what is important to website visitors by analyzing search terms, clicks, and online surveys.
4. Mistake Loving – Maybe I’m not quite as arrogant as I may have been at 21, however we do know our process is the absolute best available. The way we know this is that we openly admit when we make mistakes. When we make a mistake, we analyze WHY our theory was wrong and then we improve your website or advertising the next time around. We even tell you what we learned so you can apply the same lessons into your offline marketing.

Maybe some advertisers, web designers, or internet marketers you’ve chatted with believe they just know what will work to convert your website visitors to customers.

Well don’t be too hard on them.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I used to think I knew what would work too.

Now I know better.

To your mistake-loving success, Bryan

P.S. If your business could use some help improving internet lead-generation and you appreciate our unique approach, contact us at Optimized-Marketing.com.

One of the most common things I would hear is, “I like this website” or “I don’t like that website.”

When I’d ask a business owner about his own website and whether he was happy with it, the majority of the time the response was, “Yeah, I like it, it looks pretty good.” Or, “I like it but it could use some updating. It looks outdated.”

My question was actually a setup because his opinion about his own website is irrelevant.

That’s kind of harsh for me to say, right?

After he would tell me his opinion on his own or another website I’d ask, “Do your customer’s or prospects care about what you think looks good?”

It was kind of a verbal punch in the nose so I had to repeat the question almost every single time.

In case you think that’s a trick question, let me make it simple.

NO – Your customers don’t give a hoot about your opinion of your own website.

Your opinion or preference or feelings about your website don’t matter a lick to the visitors who come to your site. You know what does matter? Their own opinions. All they care about is themselves and quite frankly, you’re the same way.

The problem is actually worse then that… Your opinion is not only not important, it could be outright harmful to your website’s performance.

Why?

Because you know too much and yet you don’t know enough.

You have the “curse of knowledge” so you already know all the jargon and slang and vernacular of your business. When you look at your website you understand exactly what each button and drop-down and description means. To you it makes perfect sense.

Beyond that you may not even be the target consumer. In other words, if you’re a 55-year old married male and your target market is 30-45 year old mothers, no matter how hard you try, you can’t see the world exactly through the eyes of those mothers.

So you know too much about your own product, but don’t know enough about your target customer to put yourself in her shoes.

So how do I know if it’s a good website?

There are only 2 ways to determine a great website.

1. The conversion rate. Conversion can be defined in a number of ways but is generally local contacts divided by local visitors. In other words if you had 100 visitors and 5 contacted you, then the conversion rate would be 5%.
2. Test and optimize the site. If you want to improve your conversion rate, you need to setup tests throughout your website to determine exactly what will catch your visitors’ attention and get them to take action.

So the next time someone asks you if you like your website, feel free to say,  ”I love it!”

Then when they ask you why, be sure to say, “because we have a conversion rate nearly double the industry average.”

By-the-way, this is entirely true of all marketing. Unfortunately, testing which TV or Radio ad is resonating better with your target market is hard to do. So test out your marketing concepts and ideas online first, then take them offline.

It will save you a lot of time and money and will absolutely get you better results.

To your success in learning what really matters to your customers, Bryan

P.S. If you need help using your website to learn what motivates your customers, contact us at Optimized-Marketing.com and we’ll either take over your current site or create a new one for you. Either way, your conversion rate will consistently improve.

Keep in mind these myths are for service-based small businesses with the primary goal of generating leads. For e-commerce, current customer portals, forums, blogs and other types of websites the answers will be different.

1. You need to be #1 on Google. In reality, the cost/click to be #1 for all pertinent keywords is generally not cost-effective. My recent blog on Adwords Marketing addresses this in detail.
2. The goal of a website is to get people to spend time on it. For a service business the goal is to generate a lead and you have about 90 seconds to do that. Sites that get paid based on the ads they show have different goals and lots of time on site is one of them. But you’re not Facebook.
3. You can save money by putting a phone number in your Google Ad. There’s plenty of proof that this a myth. Google only makes money when you CLICK on an ad so why would they let you put a phone number in an ad if that meant they were going to lose money? They wouldn’t because they test these things.
4. Google Adwords and SEM is easy. Of every topic I mention in this post, without reservation I would claim that GREAT Google Adwords marketing is the most complicated and time-consuming thing you can do. Not only do you have to choose keywords, you have 5 different types of keywords to work with and 4 different ad types. You have to choose where to market, who to market to, what sites to market on, what problem a customer typing in a certain keyword is actually trying to solve. Dr. Glenn Livingston did studies showing a person searching for “guinea pig”, “guinea pigs”, and “guinea pig care” are all looking for vastly different things and are at different levels in the buying cycle. Then of course you have to understand how to setup scientifically sound tests to actually determine what’s working and what’s not. That’s just the beginning…
5. You need to invest in more traffic (SEO and SEM). For most websites you first need to invest in converting more visitors to leads. For instance, if your current website converts 3% and you bump that up to 4.5% that’s the equivalent of getting 50% more traffic at no extra cost. (Our 2 best sites in March 2012 were converting over 8% online in their target market.)
6. The best way to increase conversion is with a better offer. This could be true however my testing indicates that this is rarely the case. When I create a site with multiple calls-to-action such as “contact us”, “schedule an appointment” and “special offers” almost always the “special offers” gets the least traffic. Your site could perform differently, though.
7. A video on your website will increase conversion. Generally this is true, however a company that helps people organize their closet space did tests on a lead-capture page with and without a video and found a 439% increase in conversion WITHOUT a video. Does this mean video is bad? Of course not. It just means that there are a lot of other factors to consider.
8. I need to let my web designer know what to update. That’s like your accountant saying, “hey just let me know how much tax you have to pay this year and then I’ll fill out the forms.” Huh? Your web designer should be saying, “Hey Bob, we just found out that <this> performs better than <that> so add <this> to your next postcard campaign.“
9. You need to follow “best practices” to get the highest conversion. Bottom line is that there’s no such thing. I’ve used the exact same website in the exact same industry in multiple areas in the US and got vastly different results. Sure there are things you absolutely don’t want to do (like riddle your page with typos), but overall, you don’t know until you test.
10. A great website is all about great content. If you are Wikipedia, of course this is true. If you’re Bob’s Plumbing, then a great website is about giving the customer what he wants; his plumbing fixed quickly and at a fair price. He doesn’t need a video and step-by-step tutorial about how you’re going to do it. Remember, you only have 90 seconds.
11. A website is going to cost me a lot of money up-front. This is an idea I seriously disagree with. Since great websites can’t be built, they have to be tested, then what in the world are you paying for up-front? A designer’s guess at what your visitors might want to see? Is that really a good investment?
12. What works in one market for an industry will work in another. In other words, buying a pre-made website for your business doesn’t guarantee the best performance. Every market is unique because you have different income levels, education levels and competition. This basically falls under the category of “best practices” in #9 and they don’t exist.
13. My website will some day be “done.” If by done you mean it’s now done improving so we’ll leave it alone and watch it’s performance decrease, then I guess it can be done. Otherwise it’s about as done as regular maintenance on your service trucks. Stop servicing your trucks and they stop working. Same thing with your website.
14. Testing and optimizing for a small business is just too costly. Our plans start at $150/month. That’s dirt cheap for the value you get and I anticipate we’ll be raising that rate by summer 2012.
15. You’ll never be able to fully track or understand how your marketing generates leads. This is what I like to call the “we don’t want to be held accountable” sales pitch. The human mind is indeed a wonderfully complicated thing that we are just barely beginning to understand. However it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out more visitors prefer Graphic A over Graphic B so chances are pretty darn good we’ll get a better response with our offline marketing if we also go with Graphic A.
16. My business needs to be on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest. It only needs to be on social media if your customers are there and you know how to engage them regularly and professionally. It’s not easy. If you think your business could benefit from social media hire a professional.
17. The best way to increase online leads is to improve my website and get more traffic. If you’re like most small businesses the absolute best way to increase sales is to do effective email marketing. A survey by Marketing Sherpa of over 1600 marketers agree with me on this one and your prospects are begging you to communicate via email.
18. My web designer should be able to understand what I’m saying. Do you have a well thought out Marketing RoadMap including a clear understanding of your target customer, her problems, and your solutions? Ok, then yes, he should get it. If not, make a Marketing RoadMap first.
19. A website will grow your business faster than any other marketing. Of course this CAN be true. However all different types of marketing work and what works for your business in your market will require some testing and measuring. One study by Marketing Sherpa demonstrated that up to 67% of a website’s traffic can be driven from TV. A well laid out marketing plan, with your website at the core, is often your most powerful approach to lead generation as a service-based small business.

Am I missing any other common myths? If so, comment below or contact me.

To your internet marketing success, Bryan

P.S. If you are working with a website designer, print this out and use it as a cheat sheet when you interview him. Or just Contact Us for a comprehensive online marketing analysis.

You need to be #1 on Google…

I can get you contacts for $34 per contact…

Our Click-Thru-Rate is 5%…

So what? What exactly does any of that mean to your business?

In online marketing, numbers like that can easily be manipulated, tweaked, and adjusted to basically make you hear what you want to hear… Gasp! I know. Shocking, isn’t it?

So how do you get down to the brass tacks and know which marketer is actually going to perform the best for your business? Well, you need a bit of an online plan and strategy for Google Adwords and SEM. You also need to understand a bit about how Google Adwords marketing, bidding, and prices work…

For starters, you need to determine if you would be happy with 1 contact/week for $35. Or you’d prefer 5 contacts/week for $500 ($100 each). Until you answer that question (that your Google marketer should have asked you), you’ll have no idea if your online marketing is actually doing what you want.

Let’s consider a few examples…

It’s relatively easy to be #1 on Google. If the Average Cost-per-Click for a particular word is $5, then bid $10. Voila! You’re at the top. But that doesn’t really tell us if we are actually benefiting from being #1. Here’s why…

Whether your #1 or #10 your website hasn’t changed, right? Your website will have a certain conversion rate. The average for most small businesses is 2-3%.  That means if you send 100 people to your site, 2 or 3 will contact you.

Let’s be generous and say in the scenario above, your website has a 4% conversion rate so for your 100 clicks you paid $1,000 and you got 4 leads at a cost per lead of $250.

For some businesses that might be well worth it. If you’re selling products and services worth 10′s of thousands of dollars, a $250 lead cost could be a real bargain.

However… Maybe that’s a bit high… And instead you decide to bid $5.00 per click… So this time you only get 50 clicks and 2 leads for a cost per lead of $125. Same keyword… Same market… but we just dropped your cost per lead 100%.

BUT… You missed out on 2 good leads in your market.

Let’s take it even further and say you decide to bid only $2.50 per click… You get 25 clicks which generates 1 lead at a cost of $62.50…

Hot Dog what a bargain! A lead for only $62.5, now we’re talking!

However… You’re only getting access to 1/4 of the POTENTIAL leads in your market.

So are you happy to get “cheap” leads and give the majority of the rest to your competitors? Or can you afford to pay to dominate your market and get all the leads possible?

Now that you understand that, can you see how someone telling you you need to be #1 on Google or that you can get contacts for just $35 a piece isn’t the whole story?

Unfortunately, that was the simple part… The cost per lead and ROI for marketing is never that simple with Google Adwords (or any marketing) because there are hundreds of other factors to take into account. Google’s algorithms are a bit more complex than just pay more and get to a higher position…

In fact, the guy bidding $2.50/click can actually get a higher position than the one bidding $10/click if his ads are more “relevant” according to Google… And that’s where things really start to get interesting.

That’s also why it is almost always cheaper to hire an SEM specialist than to do it yourself or work with a one-size-fits-all, we-can-do- anything marketing agency.

The entire approach to SEM is completely different than any other form of marketing and ultimately your cost/contact should be going down each month while your actual contacts should be going up!

Let me repeat that… This month and next month it’s going to cost you the same amount to run a TV ad. You’ll have the same market reach and you’ll probably even get about the same results because you’re showing the same TV spot… If anything, the effectiveness of the TV ad will diminish over time as it saturates the market.

Not so with online marketing… Every month you should be getting better… Which increases your relevance and drops your costs while targeting the searchers who are more inclined to actually act.

There’s no other form of marketing like it. It requires a unique approach and a unique Google Expert to know how to harness the power.

To add just one last piece of complexity to this puzzle, Search Engine Optimization is also a significant part of your online marketing strategy. Why?

Because 75% of searches click on the Organic (SEO) results instead of the Paid (SEM) results. And that number varies proportionately to the education level of your buyers. For instance, xtudies have shown that searches with Phd’s click on paid ads only 1-2% of the time.

Disagree? Let me know in the comments. I publish my ideas to open myself up for criticism so please chime in!

To your Google marketing success, Bryan

P.S. If you’re interested in putting an Online Marketing Strategy together for your service-based business, get started today.

P.P.S. Some marketers seem to be afraid of educating their clients on the inner, top-secret workings of Google. I’ve never really agreed with that philosophy so here’s an interesting infographic on how Google makes money.

1. It’s powerful and extremely effective.
2. It’s simple to learn and easily IMPLEMENTED.
3. It’s backed up by science.
4. Few small business leaders have this concept on their radar.
5. It’s actually quite entertaining.

So take 12 minutes and watch it. Then, take ACTION!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXy__kBVq1M

1. Knowledge
2. Experience
3. Access to powerful resources
4. A Plan or System to quickly evaluate businesses
5. Strong Value Proposition and USP

But none of these are the most important thing…

To be a successful business coach, consultant or leader, you MUST get things done. The right things…

All the plans and knowledge and systems and value and experience in the world is worthless if it’s not put into action.

So the key to running a small business successfully or helping others do the same…

DISCIPLINE

The Discipline to do what you NEED to do to work ON your business each week.

The Discipline to NOT do what you want to do when it should be handled by someone else or should just be avoided altogether. (NOT doing something is generally even harder for us Type-A entrepreneurs.)

The Discipline to make a check list of all the things you need to implement and then actually DO them.

The Discipline to prepare for every meeting and phone call with an agenda (even if just to call a prospect) and then follow-up each of those meetings or phone calls with a summary to make sure everyone is on the same page.

The Discipline to set aside the time and money necessary to make an investment today that might not pay off for a month or a year.

Ok, you get the point…

If you ask me, when it comes down to getting things done, the most important trait you can have or you should look for in a business coach or consultant is Discipline.

So how can you get immensely more disciplined and productive in your own life?

Discipline yourself to do one thing every single day and you will be impressed by the results.

Every night before leaving the office, write down the 1 absolute most important thing you can accomplish tomorrow. Don’t make a mental note. WRITE IT DOWN!

The next day, if possible, do that thing right away. If you’re in a service business where the first 2 hours of the day are the busiest, make a commitment to get it done before lunch.

That way, no matter what emergencies pop up or what fires you have to put out, you have a win today! And if you do this every day, then you get a win every single day.

To your disciplined success, Bryan

P.S. Make sure at least one day a week, “Work ON my business for 2 hours” is on your list for the next day. Twice a week should be the goal.

If you pay for productivity or performance, customer service suffers because everyone just tries to fix as many widgets as fast as possible to make more money… Or pay based on customer satisfaction and now it takes your technicians 3x as long as normal so they can “take care of the customer.” Plus it adds a whole new dimension of work for your payroll department.

Not the happy customer we're looking for...

However, what if you COULD do both?

And without adding a mountain of paperwork to your payroll department each payday…

Here’s my experience with companies paying their team based on productivity and customer happiness

In 2006 I had cable internet installed at my home in Pennsylvania and had a few issues along the way. And true to the stereotype for that industry, service was less than stellar. Around that time I had a good friend who worked for them and confirmed for me that they paid a straight hourly wage. A very high hourly wage in fact. However, for some reason, paying more than the average hourly wage didn’t translate directly to better employees or better customer service.

In January 2012 I had cable internet installed in my home in New Mexico. Here’s how it went down:

1. When I called to schedule the install, they gave me an option of times for service from 7-8am, 8-10am, 10am-12pm, 12-2pm, or 2-4pm and guaranteed they would be here within that time frame or I’d get a $25 credit applied to my account. They also said he’d call me 30 minutes before arrival.
2. 7:26 am my doorbell rings. Right on time.
3. The technician tests everything, runs the lines necessary, and even shows me what he’s doing in a very friendly and professional manner.
4. I let him know the modem and router I ordered online haven’t arrived yet so I’ll have to wait to install those. He informs me that he can leave his modem there for me and when mine arrives I can return it to the office a few blocks away at no additional charge. He then tells me he only gets paid if he finishes the job and everything is working properly when he leaves.
5. He installs the modem. He has to wait for the office to configure it and test it. It doesn’t work. He installs another one and we’re up and running. Then he hands me a 5.5″x8″ piece of paper with a giant happy face on it, a big #5, and a web address and explains that if I was happy with his service he’d really appreciate it if I could go to that website and give him all 5′s. He further points out that he’s the highest rated technician in the area and he’s paid based on high scores for customer satisfaction so it’s important to him.

So as a small business owner, what can we learn from this program?

1. First off, other than not calling me 30 minutes ahead of time, I got excellent service. A small business owner who I relayed this story to told me she experienced a very similar thing from a satellite TV service man and felt he went way above and beyond the call of duty for her.
2. The technician is only paid for COMPLETED jobs and he’s paid per job, not hourly. Think that minimizes call-backs?
3. The amount per job that the technician is paid is based on the results of customer satisfaction surveys. Literally the customer defines how much the technician gets paid.
4. The technicians all know how their customer satisfaction results compare to other service technicians. That’s how my technician knew he was the highest rated installer in the area.
5. He successfully re-framed the whole experience from me buying a service from a huge, impersonal, corporate, oligopoly to a personal interaction with one of my neighbors – him.

That last part may be the most important and why I think this program will work better than straight hourly pay. He, in essence, asked me to help him, another hard-working, honest, friendly neighbor. He took the multi-billion dollar corporation almost entirely out of the equation.

That is IMMENSELY powerful because we all want to do business with other people! And we know customer loyalty is about your people.

Honestly none of that crossed my mind at the time… But looking back, it seems to me that step #5 above is the key.

When I asked the technician if he liked getting paid that way he didn’t really have a response. Almost like he never really thought about it since that’s just the way it was. He volunteered to me how much he made per week and that he felt that was good money. His income was a bit lower than the median income for the area so I didn’t think it was either too high or too low for the type of work.

So how do you implement a Compensation Plan based on productivity and customer satisfaction in your small business?

1. Before you change a single pay rate or start discussing the idea of a new pay structure with your team, implement the customer satisfaction surveys. The key to this is utilizing simple, yet powerful web technology to aggregate the results to minimize your office work. If you need help creating online customer satisfaction surveys, please contact me and my team will be glad to put this strategy in place for you for as little as $50/month. We’ll create the site and help you develop the questions. All you have to do is get your technicians to direct people to the website and read the results. This will give us the opportunity to work out any bugs and also formulate the questions that are most pertinent to your customers’ happiness.
2. Start tracking employee productivity. Whether that’s how many work orders are completed, cars are fixed, hours are billed (a metric I hate), or units delivered, there needs to be a productivity portion to your pay structure and you need a way to track it.
3. Once you’ve been tracking Customer Satisfaction and Employee Productivity for a few months, determine what combination of performance pay and customer satisfaction over the last few months would result in roughly the same pay for your team members. In other words, for most employees, implementing this new compensation plan won’t result in them making less money.
4. Hold a Team Meeting and ASK your team members what they think their performance benchmarks AND customer satisfaction scores should be. In my experience, the majority of the time your people will over-state what they are capable of doing. Most people think they get a lot more work done than they actually do.
5. Take the information from that meeting and from step #3 and formulate your new pay structure.
6. Hold another team meeting to implement.
7. Continue to hold regular team meetings to get feedback on the new program.
8. Utilize the 12-Questions Survey to touch base with your key team members individually each quarter.
9. Improve the new compensation plan if necessary! Don’t just keep doing something that doesn’t work. Admit it when you are wrong.

Have you had a different experience with companies that have similar performance-pay plans in place? Have you tried to do something similar in your business with mixed results? Let me know in the comments below!

To your success with a productivity-increasing compensation plan, Bryan

Here’s how…

1. Write down your personal goals. Your business is a means to an end. If it’s not providing what you need personally then what’s the point? This goes for you whether you are an owner or team member. If your boss doesn’t understand your personal goals or you are the leader and you don’t understand the personal goals of your team members, you’ll never attain full engagement. These goals may be, “work only 40 hours per week“, “take off early in the fall to coach my son’s soccer team“, “take an extra week of vacation this year with my family“, “donate an extra $5,000 to charities this year.” Whatever your personal goals are, write them out.
2. Write down your business goals. Now that you have your personal goals outlined, your business goals for 2012 need to be in-line with your personal goals. If they’re disconnected you won’t be nearly as motivated. Based on the examples above, if your goal is to only work 40 hours per week and you currently average 50 hours per week, your business goal becomes, “outsource, delegate, or kill 10 hours of work per week“. If your goal is tied to increased profits, such as having more money to donate to charity, then you need to figure out exactly what you will need to add to the bottom line and then work backwards from there. For instance, if you want to have an additional $5,000 for charity that would be $1250/quarter. If you convert half of your leads to sales, have an average dollar sale of $2,000, a net margin of 10%, and you average 45 sales per quarter, that means you need an additional 12.5 leads per quarter OR to increase your average sale to $2278 OR increase your margin to 11.4%. Do any one of those 3 things and you’ll have your extra $5,000 per year for charity. Better yet, target a smaller improvement in each one.
3. Brainstorm ways to achieve your goals. Now that you have concrete personal and business goals, sit down and write out everything that comes to mind that might help you reach those goals. In most instances we know that we’re wasting 10 hours per week doing low-level work that someone else can do if we just provide them with a bit of training and a procedure or checklist. Or we know that to get a few extra leads we can develop our referral program or by focusing less on website traffic and more on website conversion. Whatever the ideas, just write them all out. Don’t cross anything off or ignore it at this point. Just get it on paper or into a document.
4. Put each brainstorm item into the Business Triangle. To help us organize the ideas and start putting together a plan for how we’ll achieve each one and who on your team can help you, categorize each idea into one of the categories from the business triangle: Sales/Marketing, Service/Operation, Finance/Administration. If the idea doesn’t fit succinctly into one of those areas it probably fits into all 3. For instance if you need to improve your pay structure, performance reviews, or buy a faster server, any of those things will help all 3 areas of the triangle. For those items, I put them under the Multipliers/Leverage category since they can multiply or leverage your entire business.
5. Prioritize each item according to the 80/20 rule. Now go back through your list that’s currently broken into those 4 categories and put the items that are most beneficial in each category at the top of the list and least beneficial at the bottom. Take into account how long each item will take. For instance if the one that will be most beneficial will take you 20 hours and require the help of 3 other team members but there are 4 others that can be accomplished with 2 hours of work each, you are probably better off accomplishing the 4 smaller tasks, enjoying the benefits of those, and getting a few wins under your belt to feel confident tackling the bigger project.

In 60 minutes, that’s about all you can accomplish. From here, the next part is actually the toughest. You need to break down the To-Do list into weekly, digestible action items. Whether those items are for you or for someone else they need to be in bite-size chunks so you can feel confident in tackling 1 each week.

This is where an experienced business coach, consultant, or small business engineer can be immensely powerful. Not only can he help you determine exactly where to improve your business to achieve your goals, he can provide resources and weekly actionable items to keep you on track. He’ll save you enough time and money along the way that his service should pay for itself.

As a matter of fact, I’ve developed a Leadership Action Checklist that includes over 50 actionable improvements I’ve seen small businesses make to improve their bottom line and rely less on the owner. That list alone would almost entirely cut out steps 3 and 4 above.

Here are a few more tips on writing out your goals…

When writing goals, they need to be specific, actionable, and time-constrained. For instance, here are a few examples of poorly written goals:

• Make more money
• Spend more time with my family
• Take more vacation

Here are examples of how to make those goals more powerful:

• Be able to increase my salary by $50/week by the second quarter of 2012
• Attend 90% of my daughter’s cross-country meets (which require me to leave the office by 2:30 12 times in the fall)
• Take 4 Fridays off this summer to take weekend trips with my family to A, B, C, and D and 1 Friday off in the spring for a trip with just my wife to E

The difference between the powerful goals and the “generic” ones is immense. Your mind can picture the second set of examples very clearly and it puts PRESSURE on you to get it done. The first set of goals can easily be pushed off or even “checked off” after achieving a fraction of what you originally intended by that goal.

To make the goals even more pressing, share them with your business partner, spouse, or business coach.

To your personal and business success in 2012, Bryan

P.S. I’m working from home this week surrounded by Christmas cookies so, though I intend to do my 2012 business plan while munching on cookies, and I highly recommend it, it’s not required.

Here’s a quick sample of actual testimonials:

“Our service guy goes above and beyond the call of duty.”

“The girl in the office makes me feel like she knows me.”

“Our rep doesn’t try to sell us stuff we don’t need.”

“Our service man is wonderful – wouldn’t change him ever!“

Or how about, “We love their business because they have such great personalities.”

I didn’t make that last one up! It’s a real testimonial that we received for a small business.

You mean people are choosing their vendors based on the personalities of that vendor? Yes! Believe it or not, people want to do business with other PEOPLE!  In case you haven’t noticed, these days in the USA we aren’t real fond of doing business with our government or big corporations.

Now keep in mind, if the product or service you promised to deliver is sub-par, then you have a problem. If the customer enjoyed working with your people, chances are very high they’ll give you the opportunity to fix the problem. If not, good luck.

However, if you deliver just what you told them you would, or a little more, then it’s your people who will turn those regular customers into raving fans. Once they have your product or service there’s virtually nothing else to set you apart from everyone else who provides a product or service for them. You said you would deliver X, you delivered X, and the transaction is over.

Let’s look at a dramatic example…

The banking industry has some of the highest retention rates of any industry bordering on 90% retention of customers. You’re much more likely to get divorced than to change banks once you get married.

But, believe it or not, it’s not the free checking, savings account interest rates, or debit card rebates that get people to stick with a bank…

My mother got married when she was 19 and moved 1500 miles across the country to do so. She was in a new area and didn’t know anyone aside from my father and his family. In those first 6 years of marriage she had 5 children and guess who were often some of the first people to meet her new babies?

The tellers at the bank!

Sounds crazy, right? But in the days before direct deposit, every 2 weeks she’d have to go to the bank to deposit a paycheck and every time she’d see the same ladies. They obviously would chit-chat about her current child or the one on the way and what women don’t love to see cute little babies?

The point is, to this day, nearly 30 years later, she couldn’t tell you a darn thing about the programs or services or interest rates of that bank, but she remembers the tellers AND the bank.

If your business has any sort of regular interaction with your customers (and it should if you have recurring revenue) then the same can be true for you.

Here’s how:

1. Provide great service to YOUR team members – One of the keys to great employee productivity and retention is if they, “feel like someone at work cares about me as a person.” Call it touchy-feely, but I’m an engineer and if the science didn’t back it up, I wouldn’t point it out.
2. Collect testimonials and reward people for doing so. Not only does that show how important happy customers are to you (actions speak louder than words) it’s actually very uplifting and exciting for the people gathering the testimonials. They’re also a great marketing tool.
3. Track customer complaints. Review each one of them, immediately resolve the problem, and review with your team what happened and how we can prevent it from happening again. If you care about mistakes being made, they will too.
4. Develop a great small-business culture. The advantage to your customer in dealing with a small business is that they get to deal with real, local people and not bureaucracy. The same needs to be true for your team. If they have an issue, question, or suggestion they need to feel comfortable talking to the head-honcho. To do so, each of your team leaders needs to have regular reviews with their team members at least twice a year but ideally every 90 days. Separate those reviews from pay. The goal is to build a relationship between the 2 parties, not to bash someone.

To truly develop a team culture that promotes great service, you need to do a bit more homework. You are welcome to contact me and I’ll show you how to transform your small business culture.

Or read the following books and try to implement the changes on your own:

• First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham
• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – by Daniel Pink
• Zapp! The Lightning of Empowerment: How to Improve Productivity, Quality, and Employee Satisfaction by William C. Byham
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick M. Lencioni
• Instant Team Building by Brad Sugars

To your success fostering loyal customers, Bryan