The term “small business” is very widely encompassing. Everything from auto repair shops to restaurants, to dry cleaners, to nail salons, to electronic repair shops, to clothing stores fall under the semantic. Despite the broad spectrum of different types of small businesses that there are, inherent to all of them (and all businesses in general) are the same 5 foundational components, and understanding what they are in and of itself is hugely impactful. They are:
1. Accounting, finance and reporting, which works in conjunction with your P.O.S technology and procedures.
2. Supply chain/service fulfillment.
3. Human Capital.
4. Brand.
and 5. Funnels, sales processes & marketing.
In this article we are going to talk about how to optimize each of those fronts for your business, one by one, no matter what kind of business you have, and what else goes into taking your business to the next level.
1. Accounting, finance and reporting
The first thing you need to understand about optimizing your business’s accounting, finance and reporting is that the term P.O.S stands for “Point of Sale”, and it refers to the moment when a customer pays you for a product or service. The moment the transaction is finalized. Somebody comes into an auto repair shop, gets an oil change (and nothing else), and then pays for it by tapping their card on the shop’s debit machine, the moment they tap their card on the debit machine is the Point of Sale.
That moment is absolutely crucial for every business, and I’m going to explain why.
If you hire Toronto Consulting Group to come in and help you make improvements to your business, the first thing we’re going to do is ask you for all of your recorded accounting information from the moment you opened the business.
Most small business owners are specialists who went into business for themselves, and this information is in a very disorganized format, and when that’s the case it’s also almost always lacking extraordinarily valuable information about the business’s costs associated with manufacturing or purchasing their product(s) and/or delivering their service(s) (these costs in accounting are referred to as “variable expenses”) and other powerful data points that can easily be captured once they know how to and understand why it’s important.
So what we do is we organize it for them.
It’s obviously different for different businesses, but the starting point generally is the same universally. Generally we start with these questions:
1. How much revenue (total sales before expenses) has the business made year to date?
2. How much revenue has the business made every year since opening?
3. Of the year to date revenue, how much of it has come from each product and/or service that you sell?
4. What about for every year since the business first opened?
5. What is your net income year-to-date (your total revenue minus total expenses)?
6. What is your net income for each respective year since the business first opened?
7. We have the total revenue Y.T.D, and the composition of each product and/or service that it came from. Now what are the Y.T.D variable expenses associated with each of those products and/or services?
8. What about for every year since the business first opened?
9. If the nature of your business is such that these numbers relating to the variable expenses vary, give me all of the data transaction by transaction for both Y.T.D, and for every year since the business first opened.
10. What have your fixed expenses been Y.T.D?
11. What have your fixed expenses been every year since the business first opened?
12. Give me all of the data that you have relating to sales since the business first opened.
Getting the answers for all of the questions from 1-11 generally takes between a laser focused 3-5 hours to a week, and is on the very high end of the spectrum of impact-to-effort ratio actions that you can possibly take.
If you don’t already know them, you’re going to be shocked by how much you learn about your business from them.
When you have ten things that you need to do, what’s the first thing that you do? You write them down. Then you do each of them and cross them off one by one as you complete them.
Otherwise you start doing the first task, and the more focus that you put into doing that task, the more you forget about your concept of the other ones that need to get done, you forget tasks, and then when they come back to your attention again, it’s usually because you’ve run into a metaphysical roadblock that requires getting the task done, the urgency of the task has made it harder to ignore, and a feeling on the spectrum of degrees of panicking has arisen and is now forcing you to remember it and put more focus into it.
Similarly, if you haven’t been keeping track of the answers to those questions for your business, your concept of the answers to them are going to be based off of what you can remember in the moment (the panic factor isn’t at play here too, so it’s also not a problem that will resolve itself in that way). Analyzing your accounting data and writing the answers to them down is literally forcing yourself to remember all of the relevant information relating to them, and is going to give you a comprehensive picture to correct your concept based on what you can remember in the moment. And the degree of the average discrepancy of what most business owners can remember in the moment, and their guesses of what the objective facts will be, versus the comprehensive picture and what they actually uncover the objective facts to be, tends to be massive, and they tend to be very surprised.
By getting organized in this way, and having this picture of the objective facts, you’re going to suddenly have a picture of how your business is actually doing, how it’s improved over time, and what has driven the improvements. It’s going to make you look at old decisions that you made in a new light, and you’re also going to gain an accurately weighted concept of the most important aspects of your business and how they have shifted over time.
It’s also going to give you a birds-eye view of your business, and enable you to make truly informed decisions.
Now is the part where I explain to you why the P.O.S is such a crucial moment for literally every business.
It’s one thing to write these numbers down and have a concept of them at a snapshot in time. But there are two considerations that now arise: is this written down format the best format for us to sift through this data (keep in mind there’s likely going to be at least hundreds of pages of it), and then what are we going to do in three months when there’s more data; are we going to have to go through this whole process again in the future?
Every business on the planet that succeeds above a certain threshold uses a software to visualize this data. That threshold is actually quite low, and many, many small businesses are achieving a level of success above it. A lot of people get confused about what the term “P.O.S” means, because the term used for this type of software is frequently referred to as “a P.O.S”.
But as you know, the P.O.S is actually a moment in time; the moment that a customer pays for a product or service and completes a transaction. That visualization software is part of it—it is indeed a P.O.S technology, but there’s also the payment terminal and checkout hardware (which is also important for our purposes).
So we get all of the answers to those questions, that’s the first step. Then we get you a P.O.S system that includes a visualization software, a checkout interface where you can input information about the of products and/or services that a customer purchases by quickly and easily selecting from a set of drop down menus at the P.O.S, and a payment terminal that are all connected to each other.
Some examples of companies that sell P.O.S systems like this are Square, Lightspeed, and Clover.
They have technology teams that work with new customers to migrate this data into their visualization software, and then they set it up for you so that every time a new transaction goes through, the visualization software automatically gets updated, and it’s versatile and easy to change if you want to add in new products and/or services, if costs change, or in the event that an error arises or whatever you might need to change. Many of the companies that sell these systems also offer 24/7 technical support and you can literally just call them and they’ll update the system for you to whatever specifications that you tell them. So we input the answers to these questions and all of the corresponding data at the present snapshot in time into a visualization software, and then set up a system so that the software automatically gets updated every time a new transaction goes through. We do it once, and then you never have to worry about it again and everything is fully automated.
So to summarize this section: the optimal way to do your accounting, finance and reporting is: get your accounting organized, input the data into a visualization software, and then fully automate the updating of the visualization software from your point of sale.
2. Supply chain and service fulfillment:
We’re going to talk about the products/supply chain side first:
I’m going to start this section with a quote from “Elon Musk”, by Walter Isaacson:
You can widen people out and flatten them with what I’m about to teach you, but you’re an idiot if you do that in any situation other than very selective circumstances (instead of taking 20% of somebody’s 100%, you are almost always much better off teaching them how to increase their 100% to 500% and taking what you feel is fair and won’t inhibit their growth from that); that is only for when somebody’s actions towards you makes them into your enemy.
That said, here is my best relatively concise advise on how to improve your social skills:
1. You need to become clear on your purpose and have a sense of direction. Life is about loving your spouse and creating the best life for yourselves that you possibly can. Worship your spouse, pamper yourselves, and learn together and become as rich and high status as you possibly can. Truly the only relationship that really matters is the one with your spouse (those who are dearest to you are an extension of that relationship).
I’m not saying “never, ever let anybody be too busy to hang out with you or covet anybody’s presence”. But what I am saying is that once become clear on your purpose and start moving with a sense of direction, you never will, and you and your spouse’s relationship with others becomes doing things for them.
2. Intentionally define your convictions, never hide them (I’m certainly not saying never remain silent and smile), and create a dynamic set of principles to live your life by.
Most people not only don’t know what their convictions are: they don’t have any. What they say they believe varies depending on who they’re talking to and they’ve never really sat down and thought about what they actually believe.
Take as much time as you need, and sit down and think about what you really believe. (Note: it’s also very important to know what you don’t know, and when your opinion about something is that you don’t have enough information about it yet to formulate an opinion about it). Do you believe that “climate change” is real? Do you believe that anybody can become a billionaire entrepreneur? What do you think is the biggest inhibitor for most people to becoming a billionaire entrepreneur? What do you think the purpose of life is? Sit down for hours and hours and consciously decide what you believe about everything.
Convictions are what you believe, principles are your intentionally decided methodologies for how to deal with real world situations distilled into objective facts. The same situation arises 1,000 times, you do the same thing 1,000 times. There’s no arbitrary how you feel bullshit, or changing your answer based on how somebody asks you.
I’ll give you an example: if somebody owes me money, and they agree to pay by a certain date, there is no excuse under the sun I will accept for their not having my money by that date. I don’t care if their mom just died, if they fell off a bridge and were rendered physically incapable of paying me …whatever nonsense excuse they can come up with that they think might absolve them of having to keep their word to me. You say you’re going to pay me my money by a date, you make sure I have my money on that day.
This applies to a lot more things than just money too.
Another way to think of principles is the rules by which you intentionally decide to live you life.
Figure out what you believe the appropriate way to deal with every situation is from a birds eye view (sit down and think of what the most pressing situations are that you’d like to do a better job dealing with, and as you move through life, and new situations arise, decide what your principles are for dealing with those ones too – principles are dynamic and it’s like the law in that new fact patterns arise, and you have to assess them and make an apprehension of what you think is appropriate based on the rules, except in this case you unilaterally decide what those rules are, and change them to account for discrepancies between your unsound theoretical logical determinations about correct hypothetical courses of action in given scenarios and the unanticipated empirical factual scenarios that cause you to become aware of their logical flaws as they arise); what your principles are, make sure you adhere to them, and then constantly challenge them and look to improve upon them.
3. All of our lives are comprised of habitual behaviours that we gravitate towards when we’re not consciously thinking about what we’re doing. Identify what these behaviours are in your life: both good and bad. Ask yourself: “if I had complete self-control and discipline 100% of the time, what would I intentionally decide for my habits to be”? Make the list exhaustive, and write them all down. Good habits can be intentionally cultivated. There are two factors that go into turning something you do into a habit: frequency and intensity (I highly recommend reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Atomic Habits by James Clear and other books about habits to really get a comprehensive understanding of how they work and how to intentionally cultivate them). If you do something everyday for 6 months with the intention of forming it as a permanent habit, you will keep on doing it forever. Take each of those ideal habits, and get in the habit of doing all of them, one by one. You also don’t have to take six months between each item if you’re zealous in your pursuit of this goal either. 67 days is how long it really takes to cultivate a new habit, and there’s no rule that says that you have to do them all one at a time.
4. Get in the habit of reading for three hours everyday. There are so many reasons for why this one is so important. We think two different types of thoughts: intentionally formulated ones, and auto suggestion. Auto suggestion is a regurgitation of the syntaxted word emotions and pictoral representations that we allow ourselves to perceive. If you watch “the News” everyday, that is terrorizing you in your auto suggestion. If you read books for three hours everyday, that is constantly teaching you about incredible new things, enriching your vocabulary, giving you new concepts and knowledgeability, giving you a more informed perspective, and giving you a much richer auto suggestion. The enriching of your vocabulary and new concepts and knowledgibilities also very poignantly enhances the intentionally formulated thoughts you can come up with, and how you can communicate. It also makes you an incomparably better conversationalist, not just teaches you about they way things are, (like for example how China came to have nuclear weapons …or how the Soviet Union before them came to) but also teaches you how to do things. Get in the habit of reading for three hours everyday.
5. Get in the habit of working out and doing yoga. If you can immediately afford to, I recommend furnishing a beautiful home gym and yoga room for yourself, hiring a top of the line personal trainer, and doing HIIT workouts, cardio and yoga. If your budget is more constrained right now, I recommend doing Beachbody on Demand Workout Programs (my favourites are Insanity and Core De Force) and Yoga International. To get in the habit of working out, a good way to start is to do three rounds of Insanity and 100% adhere to it’s workout calendar. Don’t ever feel ashamed if you felt tired and didn’t work out as hard as you could have. Focus on showing up everyday and getting into the habit of working out. (Note: once you start to get really fit, stretching (or Hatha Yoga) regimens become absolutely crucial for avoiding debilitating injuries, preventing your muscles from wearing out, and enable you to continue cultivating your athletic abilities indefinitely, and their benefits far from end there).
6. Act purposively and always know why you’re doing something before you’re doing it. Have you ever had somebody disingenuously ask you about something you wanted to talk about and then interrupt you and/or make stupid comments about it? Why did they do that? Before they opened their mouth, what was their intention? Probably to appease a feeling nervousness. If they asked themselves, why am I opening my mouth to speak right now before they did, and realized what their intention was, do you think they would have purpositively done it? That’s what it means to act purpositively: when you’re on the threshhold of action, you need to know what your intention is before you decide whether or not you want to do it. As you get more emotionally intelligent you become much faster at this and eventually you reach a point where every action you take is purpositive and you don’t even have to think about your intentions at all. On the threshhold of actions, consider your intentions first, and as well, of course, take actions that originate based on what you intend. When you’re trying to get things done, take actions that will help you get them done (that can involve the people around you). And as a lover and asset accumulator, you should always have things that you’re trying to get done.
7. When people ask you to do something isolate the action and ask yourself, “does this benefit me, make sense for me to do, or is it somebody trying to take advantage of me. When you do something for somebody there should always be a quid-pro quo. To isolate the action means that the reason they give you for why they want you to do something, and the urgency with which they convey it matter zero percent to you. “What is this person asking me to do? Does it benefit me, make sense for me, or is it them trying to take advantage of me?”
8. You certainly don’t always need to listen, but when you do, give the person your 100% attention and really listen. Something to know about listening is that we automatically listen to people when they’re talking about things that we care about. When we’re asking about something because it’s important to the other person, that’s when we have to turn the intentional gears on. Don’t let people just ramble on talking about nonsense to you. Ask probing questions and actively derive an understanding out loud with them about what they’re telling you if they’re not communicating in a way that’s captivating your attention. That’s really the key. Don’t just bridge off of something they say and ask an unpurpositively intended question. If they tell you, I went out with a group of friends, and we found this spot that had the best hot chocolate ever, don’t ask about other instances where they have had good hot chocolate. (Looking people in the eyes, smiling, and letting them speak is so powerful by the way). Ask yourself “why are they telling me this”?, “what information would I actually like to know?” and “what do I really want to be talking about with this person in this moment, and what am I doing right now in full context and what is my intention in this interaction”?
9. Err on the side of communicating concisely. There’s two main reasons to do this. 1. You believe silly things and are more likely to sound stupid if you talk more, and 2. because when there’s curt ambiguity, people fill in the blanks in a way that they know is incorrect, and not only can they can never say a negative word to you about it, because they know it’s their fault, and it makes them assume the best about you and what you’re trying to say. Beyond that, if you write something for example, and a thousand people read it, some of them might be delirious in the moment that they’re reading it and have a very hard time struing together the meaning of what you’re saying. Communicating concisely increases the proportion of people who will be able to understand the meaning of your communications.
3. Human Capital:
Managing Human Capital is one of my favourite aspects of business. I’ve never seen a single business that does even a remotely good job at it, the entire structure and ways that companies think about it is so completely absurd and inoptimal, and my approach is so intuitive, so beautiful and makes so much sense.
After I teach you this, you will look at a company like Apple, Google or Microsoft and you won’t be able to help but laugh at how absurdly ineffective they are and will never be able to take them seriously again.
This is seriously a lot more advanced and incomparably better than what all of them are doing combined, times a thousand.
I can’t talk enough shit here, and you’re going to see why.
We’ll start with a high level overview of my approach to Human Resources.
(Note: this is how the process would work for a Fortune 500 company that wanted to do this – we’re going how you can do it for your small business after).
1. Document every task that your organization gets done (in it’s workflow) into two categories: recurring tasks, and non recurring tasks, and everything that you are working on right now, a historical record of you workflow data, and create a visualization software for it that automatically gets updated to reflect your organizations running to do list. (note: for an organization like Apple, there might be more than a million tasks on this list, but trust me they could do it no problem and so can you for your business).
2. Make a visual representation of each tasks, every employee that’s involved in working on it, their reporting chain, and all dealines and recurring frequencies associated with the task within the software.
3. Identify all tasks that are even remotely menial.
4. Work with your employees to delinearize their job functions and free up human capital by using technology to automate every single one of those tasks. The organization structure will still remain in place, and you don’t fire anybody, but it’s an organization wide project, at the end of which the only remnant of what almost all of their old jobs were that will remain is ensuring that the technology that’s doing the tasks that they used to do is operating smoothly.
(This is a primer before we move on to the next step and something that I 100% genuinely believe and purposely haven’t said up until now (Note: organizations today have inherited their structures from an ideology that likens worker labour to slavery, so if you’re the owner of a big or small business, and your organization is among the 100% of organizations in the world that fails this test, so terrible): if you want to get a good approximation of an organization, find the most pathetic employee who works for the company and judge them based on that).
5. At the end of that process, you will have a lot of employees that have nothing to do and who have a fully open calendar. Start investing heavily into your employees. Circulate a list of mandatory books that everyone in your organization needs to read, and pay them to read for three hours a day every day without exception, spend a lot of money on luxurious facilities for working out and doing yoga, and create programs to get them all in the habit of working out and doing yoga so that over time they will all cultivate the physique of elite athletes and become qualified to be yoga instructors if they wanted to, and start bringing in top business thought leaders and educating all of them to become top level executives (focus mainly on business to begin with, but as time progresses, bring in thought leaders in whatever areas that you and your employees want).
6. Update your organizations work flow so that all of the tasks that have been automated by technology have been replaced with the oversight and maintenance of the technology that is managing those tasks, and so that the workflow only includes tasks that need to be completed by humans now.
7. Make a version of the workflow software that’s available to every employee that works for your company, with a lot of search functions, that emphasizes the most urgent tasks (the ones where the deadline is coming up the soonest), and the most important ones, and create a culture where everybody is in constant communication with one another, and employees do not have linear job functions and are always enthusiastically scrambling to contribute as much as they can to the completion of these tasks. If the deadline for a task is rapidly approaching that still hasn’t been completely the anxiety in the atmosphere should be palpable, and your employees genuinely and vehemently love your company and their work, and come in everyday and work on what they want to, and don’t look silly for giving their all to a company that doesn’t care about them).
Now, let’s talk about how you can optimize the Human Capital for your small business.
1. The first thing you need to do is take inventory of how many employees you already have working for you. How many are full time, how many are part time, and how many are independant contractors? How many are paid yearly, how many are paid hourly or in a different way? Many, many small busineeses don’t presently have any employees who the pay yearly, which means their employees don’t truly work for them full time.
That presents a problem, because when you pay an employee by the hour, the job feels a lot more tenuous to them, they have a lot less at stake in the success of the business, and it’s difficult to delinearize their job functions and direct them in such a way as to autonomously and with great efficacy get all of the items on your to do list done.
The first step to optimizing the Human Capital for your business is to get as many full time yearly salaried employees working for you as possible. Hire from your pool of current employees, and/or hire new employees. But hire as many full time employees as possible, and think of them as the real employees of your company that are there for the long term, and gradually—or preferably immediately, phase out all other forms of employment contracts between you and your employees (independant contractors that you hire for specific jobs don’t count).
2. Next is getting organized. Write an exhaustive list of every item on your to do list for the business that you can possibly think of (you can also add new ones that you aren’t presently doing, then take another sheet of paper and separate them into recurring and non recurring items, and business processes. Under your “recurring” items, add “making weekly to-do lists” and “making non designated fixed time interval to do lists for whenever the need arises”.
Then, on another sheet of paper, write out all of your business processes that pertain directly to dealing with customers, servicing them, completing their transactions and accepting payments from them at the P.O.S, and after the sale procedures.
So you’ve got your recurring and non recurring to do list items, and another sheet of paper that overlaps with items on those lists that details every process involved in dealing with your customers.
Next, get a whole bunch of papers, and for each item on your to do list, use one of the papers to detail your processes for doing it, and/or how you want it to get done.
Again, feel free to get your employees to do the heavy lifting in this process.
Now you’re going to have a bunch of disorganized sheets of paper with very valuable information on them. Next, make a new Google Drive (or a more advanced cloud or non cloud based software) and create five folders in it. “Notes and planning”, “Weekly To-do lists”, “Non designated fixed time interval to do lists for whenever the need arises to-do lists”. “Procedures that relate directly to servicing customers”, and “Non-directly related to serving customers procedures”, and either type up everything on those sheets of paper yourself, or have your employees do it. Then, put your initial very thorough to do list of everything you could think of in the “Non designated fixed time interval to do lists for whenever the need arises” folder; the sheet of paper where you separated them into recurring and non-recurring items into “Notes and planning”, the paper with all of your business processes that pertain directly to dealing with customers, servicing them, completing their transactions and accepting payments from them at the P.O.S in the “Procedures that relate directly to servicing customers” folder, and all of the other procedure papers under the “Non-directly related to serving customers procedures” folders.
Finally, if you’re not already, start using a calendar where you can schedule time and also add tasks (I use Google Calendar) and make sure you you schedule a recurring task for each recurring item on your to do list, and start using it to plan your day everyday, and schedule the time you spend working on what. Also determine which non recurring tasks you want to assign to which employees, and by when it needs to get done, and schedule those ones too on your Calendar, and the ones you want to get done yourself, and schedule time for yourself to work on them.
3. Start working on improving your skills as a manager. Literally every piece of advice I listed in the Supply Chain section under “cultivate relationship building/people skills:” also applies here too. You and your employees are on a quest to perpetuate the interest of the business and yourselves personally. You are the leader, and you need to be loved and respected by your employees, and set an example for them to follow. Reading for three hours a day is going to help you immeasurably here. Once you’re organized and have a running concept of what needs to get done and when, fight very hard to never give up a dreaded inch on a single deadline unless you absolutely have to. When there’s a looming deadline that’s coming up, you need to feel a sense of panic, and get everyone in your vicinity feeling it too and doing everything they can to help get it completed.
4. Start investing in developing your employees. Some things will involve money, but many will not. Get them to read the “cultivate relationship building/people skills:” under the Supply Chain section of this article too,
5. You will naturally gravitate towards doing this as you you synthasize more and more of what you’ve learned here, and learn more and synthesize that too, but put intentional effort towards augmenting your business’ processes, and the items that you put on your to-do lists. Once processes start to become outdated, add an “Old procceses archive” folder to your Google Drive, and start updating the processes and adding the old versions to that folder.
4. Brand:
The term “brand” is commonly known, and very uncommonly understood. Most people think of a brand as the type of feel that you get from interacting with a business. Like the theme of a party. It’s so much more important than that. Your business’s brand is the aggregate manifestation of every interaction that you, your employees and your business has with everyone, and your reputation. The objective merit of your business’s social standing.
We live in a coherent, metaphysical, emotionally intelligent universe, where cause-effect relationships and logic are built into the laws of physics and are absolutely [inescapable/unavoidable]. In such a universe, there are right and wrong actions that you can take, and degrees of right and wrong actions that you can take. Having a merited reputation for reliability, honesty and frankness and being self aware and charismatic are right actions that you can take. They are also concepts that in an infinite, ever expanding and relative universe are impossible to precisely measure and fully optimize beyond the reproach of possible improvement.
It’s generally pretty easy to gauge where something lies on the relative spectrum of degrees of right and wrong though. Especially when we’re judging the work of others and what they say and do.
The best non-tailored advice I can give you aside from about how to optimize your brand aside from giving you an explicit understanding of what it actually is is the same as how to cultivate your social skills (see the link to that article here).
Aside from that, care about not appearances from an angle, but objective, contextualized appearances, and the objective contextualized appearance of absolutely everything.
That includes caring about making sure you have a clean and sanitary place of work (both in the sections that customers can see and can not see), caring about your social media posts, caring about your business’s logo, caring about having smart accounting processes and making informed business decisions, caring about eating good healthy food and pursuing the living of your life optimally in private. Absolutely everything that has to do with you, your employees and your business.
The power of having a strong brand that elicits trust based on aggregate built up and ever and acceleratingly increasing merit over time is immeasurable. And the dopamine releases, positive feelings, and prerogative enablements are absolutely delightful.
If you aren’t already obsessed with the perpetuation and proliferation of your brand, I strongly advise you to start today.
5. Funnels, sales processes & marketing:
The first thing I need to explain to you about Funnels, sales processes & marketing is what a funnel is:
A funnel is the mapping out of you customers’ customer experiences, from the point that they become aware of you and your company, to after you sell a product and or service, or a combination of products and or services to them.
(If you don’t already know what your P.O.S is, read this article first [link to article].)
There are three components to funnels:
1. Every distinctive physical and online location where you sell any products and/or services or a and a P.O.S can occur.
There are two sub components to these.
1.1 Digital and physical store fronts, and
1.2 Explicitly created product and service bundle offers.
To simplify this, and to make it easier to understand and for us to talk about, we’ll call these physical and online locations your “distinct possible P.O.S nets”.
2. Every selling process associated with one of those distinct possible P.O.S nets (note: one distinct possible P.O.S net can have multiple different selling processes for different types of leads in different contexts).
and 3. Every lead generation process and marketing communication that leads prospective customers through one of those selling processes, or directly to the distinct possible P.O.S net.
The selling processes associated with the distinct possible P.O.S net are what constitute the funnel (technically each respective selling process associated with a distinct possible P.O.S net is it’s own funnel, but it’s absurdly difficult and vastly unnecessarily over complicated to try and explain them in that way; my definition of a funnel always when I’m talking about them, unless I explicitly say that I’m talking about a specific customer experience map is all of the adjoining sales process that link to one distinct possible P.O.S net (rather than each sales process represents its own funnel), and the lead generation and marketing communications that generate the leads are your traffic driving activities.
When a lot of people think of marketing, they erroneously only think of traffic driving activities.
When mapping out your funnel(s), you start with the distinct possible P.O.S net at the end of the diagram (and for bundle offers, if it’s relevant, the structure of the offer for the distinct possible P.O.S net (there might be opt in components to the base offer commonly referred to by the specialists in this domain as order form bumps and upsells), then you add the conjoining sales processes for it to the left of it, or as the previous step.
If you’re a small business owner with one store front and who doesn’t sell online, that is your one funnel, and in terms of your marketing strategy, while it is very good to understand what funnels are, you very well might want to start with traffic driving activities to it as it is, as creating these sales processes and particularly setting up a new distinct possible P.O.S net properly can be quite an arduous undertaking requiring a high level of executive expertise.
Everybody looking to optimize those two components of their funnels should read “Dotcom Secrets” and “Expert Secrets” by Russel Brunson, who is one of the world’s most formidable experts in that domain.
When anybody buys anything, there’s a matrix of possible situation categories that they might fall into as to why they’re buying it.
Generally speaking, most business owners in their area of specialization are extraordinarily well versed and knowledgeable about these situations and usually have no trouble identifying all of them.
What you need to do if you want to optimize those two domains comprehensively is look at who you’re selling to, why they buy, what’s the most premium thing that you could sell them, what’s at the front end most baseline thing or things that you sell them, what are the natural next things for them to buy if any in between that most premium offering and your baseline offerings (this offer structure that you sell your products and services in is referred to by the specialists in this domain as your “value ladder”), and then make sales processes, speaking to all of the different situations that perspective buyers of those most baseline offerings might fall into and filling in their knowledge gaps in your domain of expertise, and then creating CRM infrastructure to track where they are in the value ladder, the situation that they are in, and automate selling processes to ascend them up to the top of the value ladder and maintain the relationship between them and your business in a completely self-aware, design thinking engineered fashion.
Like I said, this can be a very arduous undertaking that requires extensive executive expertise and project management skills. You know your level of motivation and have a good sense of your own capabilities, and need to make the decision for yourself if you’re ready to pursue this avenue for your marketing strategy.
Setting up this process for the vast majority of business owners is akin to pursuing a five times revenue expansion. If you just maintain or improve your physical and/or digital distinct possible P.O.S net, that will more than suffice.
Another thing that you can do is share your expertise in a fixed format addressing a specific situation relevant to your prospective customers that you’d like to share your expertise in as one of the sales processes components of your funnel. You can explicitly link it to your distinct possible P.O.S net, but you also don’t have to. It can also be just to enhance your brand, establish yourself as an authority in your area of expertise, and/or because you genuinely want people to be better informed on the topic.
(This article was actually created as a sales process addressing one of the possible matrix of situations for why people buy Toronto Consulting Group’s “Toronto Consulting Group Business Analysis And Recommendations Report” distinct possible P.O.S net that I created for all three of those reasons).
Those books by Russell Brunson are concise, very informative, easy to read, and I seriously can’t think of any two better books on the topic of marketing (going through his funnel eco system is also a pleasure and very educational). I highly recommend you read them even if you’re only interested in pursuing Traffic Driving methodologies as part of your marketing strategy.
Now let’s talk about marketing.
When it comes to marketing, social media is the channel that you need to focus all of your efforts on. How well you do on social media is in direct correlation with how good of a marketer you are, and when you get really good there’s no limit to how much traffic you’ll get and sales you’ll generate from it. My articles about how to improve your social skills and your brand will be very helpful here (here’s the link to them if you haven’t already read the (developing your social skills [ ..]; brand [ .. ]).
Aside from that, really put some effort and investment into development very high quality branding, invest in social media tools like canva pro, and take pictures and videos of all of the coolest aspects of your business that you’re the most passionate about, and put a lot of effort into making every caption and the written components of your social media extraordinary.
The two primary channels that I recommend you focus on are Instagram and Twitter. Tik Tok is also a great one.
I also recommend that if you have the savvy to set it up that you use the bio website functions within Instagram and Twitter and Tik Tok if it’s available to you in your country to identify leads by which situation they are in, capture their emails, and lead them through one of your selling processes, or set up some version of a design thinking engineered website that compliments your social media.
Hiring independent contractors on Fiverr is a very effective way to get this done, optimize your business’ branding, and get all kinds of other business tasks done in a very efficient and highly cost effective manner.
You should be passionate about your business and be its biggest advocate everywhere you go and always be coming up with innovative new ideas for how to market it, both on and off of social media. When you’re truly proud of what you do and have that kind of energy about it, you automatically do a fantastic job on your social media.
Follow and engage with the influencers and ideologues in your domain of specialization that you want to on their pages, engage back with those who engage with you on your page, and follow those who you want to too (my article about cultivating your social skills will be extraordinarily helpful for this).
