Summary: Mike Agugliaro takes a break to share some crucial relationship training for business owners. If you want your employees and team members to stick around for the long term and give you their best work, you have to be able to understand what they need, want, and desire from you. Learn how to avoid conflict and creating lasting relationships by having one simple conversation with your employees right now. Key Lessons Learned: Relationship Problems When we look at our employees there is always questions and relationship problems. Why are they not happy? Why do they feel let down? In all your relationships, including with your employees, there are needs. Everyone has needs, some are simple, like food, water, and air, but some are more complex and unique to the individual. Needs are the first level of wants. Understanding what someone needs can allow you to create alignment with them so that you can also get what you need. Wants are the second level. We want more money, new clothes, a new car, opportunity, etc. Desires are higher level wants, they are more long term and ambitious. We desire a bigger house, an empire, etc. If you can understand a person’s needs, wants, and desires you can get everyone aligned and on the same page. It’s a tool that you can implement in your company to create alignment between your business and your team. Clarity creates alignment, alignment creates accountability. You don’t have to grant whatever it is the person desires, but you can be a path that allows them to reach it. Once you’ve done this exercise with an employee or prospective employee it’s time to flip it around and establish what you need, want, and desire from the relationship as well. Oftentimes employees will leave a company because one of their needs aren’t being met. Failing to fulfill something that you promised is a common relationship problem. Don’t promise something that you don’t intend or can’t deliver. Sometimes you have to take what you want into your own hands instead of waiting for the other person to satisfy you. Employees are like any other relationship, if their needs and wants are not met the relationship will fall apart. The conversation can be tricky but it’s essential if you want to be able to work together and ultimately avoid relationship problems that cause employees to leave. Links To Resources Mentioned Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Mike Agugliaro talks about success and failure today and why you need to understand two crucial insights. Without them you will never feel successful and failure will always loom over the horizon. Key Lessons Learned: Success vs Failure A lot of people say that success is a mindset, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s understanding what success looks like for you. There are many layers of success and sometimes we let happen is we let one thing that we look at as a failure consume our mind. It becomes our ultimate failure. There is confusion between success vs failure, specifically on what to do and what not to do. The fastest way to find success is to find someone to show you what to do, just like the wise masters of the past. How will know you have succeeded and will you be satisfied when you get there? For most people, the trouble is the goal posts keep moving. There is one cardinal rule that has to be steadfast. If you never have clarity on what success looks like for you, how can you ever feel any satisfaction in your life? Get completely clear on what success means. If your success target is too far or too large, it won’t drive you. You need defined criteria that is imminent for you to feel motivated. People tend to focus on their failures and they tend to overshadow all the small and big ways they’ve succeeded in the past. Winning small games helps you stay in the big game and hit the big targets. You can’t create alignment without hyper clarity on what success looks like for you and your business. Ask your employees what success looks like for them this week. People will drive themselves way more than you ever could. When your team starts leading themselves to success, that’s when you’re ultra successful. The leaders job is to lead only until everyone can lead themselves, that’s when they should step back. Failing Forward You have to rewire your perceptions. Instead of thinking of something that went wrong in your life being a failure, consider it a lesson that will get you closer to where you want to go. The success vs failure paradigm should be success or lesson learned. A real failure is something that doesn’t have a lesson behind it. Just because something can always be better, that doesn’t mean you didn’t achieve success. Don’t look at something as just a success or failure, always look for the lessons that you can carry forward into the next experience. Contracts keep people aligned, Service Level Agreements are about agreeing on what success and failure look like between companies. Links To Resources Mentioned Servicebusinessgrowth.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
What would happen to your family and your business if you couldn’t work anymore? Learn about the consequences of success and why small mindedness will prevent you from making an impact on the world. Find out why your business and your life won’t grow until you work on yourself and create permanent lasting change. Key Lessons Learned: Success Success is many things. You’re successful just to be alive today. The consequences of lack of success come out in many ways including stress, pressure, anxiety, frustration, and anger. They all come from a lack of the success that you wanted. Your perception of what growth is and what it takes determines how you feel about it. Don’t let small mindedness keep you small. Many people believe they are small, but is that really true or is that just a choice. Some people have already accepted defeat. You can only accomplish things at the level of your thinking. When you’re digging a ditch it comes down to either you’re going to beat this task or it’s going to beat you. It becomes a question of your definition of success. It’s not difficult to grow a company or achieve success, it’s just different. The common idea is that it takes weeks to create a change in behavior but that’s not true. One moment can change your whole life. It’s not grow or die in terms of the business, it’s death of success and freedom and the belief you will be able to achieve what you wanted. The brain is nothing more than a computer. Whatever you tell it, it will create. If you tell yourself you’re small, you will be small. Even believing your company to be big can be a form of small mindedness if it stops you from trying to grow. What you would tell your five year old child, you should tell yourself. When you visualize the outcome and tell yourself a different story, your story is going to change. People sabotage themselves because they tell themselves a story that keeps them small. You can’t hone a new skill set with the same mindset. Temporary motivation doesn’t work, you need permanent change. For Mike permanent change happens in a total immersion environment, you have to figure out what method works for you. You can’t move on to the next thing until permanent change has occurred. If you want greater results you need to work on yourself first before you work on your company. Success is mandatory because there will be pain down the road for your family. Ask yourself “what’s the consequence of not moving quicker?” The bigger you grow the more you can impact the world. Risk What happens to your business if you get hurt and can’t work or if you died? Mike tells the story of his former boss who passed away due to cancer. After passing away the business quickly fell apart because there was no plan or people in place to keep it going. Are you setting the stage for your family? Will they be protected if something goes wrong? Links To Resources Mentioned https://www.servicebusinessedge.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
In this episode of the CEO Warrior podcast the roles are reversed and Jay Abraham is interviewing Mike Agugliaro. Jay and Mike discuss the origins of Gold Medal Service and CEO Warrior and talk about the biggest mindset change that Mike made over the course of his business that allowed him to go from two guys and a truck to generating $30+ million a year in revenue before selling his company. Key Lessons Learned: CEO Warrior CEO Warrior was given birth by Mike Agugliaro and Mike Disney in an effort to completely transform the way the service industry operates. They turn service contractors into strategic and thoughtful entrepreneurs. Mike takes in high growth oriented contractors and uses his teaching and training to level up their business and doubling their results and success. CEO Warrior is an organization that gets people taking positive, powerful, and decisive action. When Mike started out the only training he really had was what he learned at a vocational school. He had been on his own since the age of 15 and there’s one thing everyone who has had a similar experience knows, you learn how to survive. Mike convinced his partner to venture out and start their own service business despite the fact that they had good jobs at the time. Little did they realize they that the first ten years would be extremely difficult. They were young, knew they could work hard, and were willing to trade dollars for hours but that started to change when they got a bit older and started having kids. Everything changed when Mike’s partner declared that he was finished, that he wanted to quit and couldn’t take it anymore. This put Mike on the path to looking for people who had already figured it out. Imagine what you can do if you knew what to do. That was the lesson that Mike and his partner learned and that thought transformed everything. You can try to wing it or you can find out what you need to know in order to succeed and really increase your chances. Mike realized that marketing was one of the keys. Most small business owners didn’t understand what marketing means and what it can do. Change is uncomfortable but if you don’t try to do something different you’re just going to stay the same. The most important asset to people is their time. Times have changed and people now want convenience and simplicity. Becoming a source of one and adding additional trades allows you to serve your customers faster and more efficiently. It also lead to scalable and sustainable growth for the company. Mindset Change The biggest shift in thinking that Mike had was going from working in the business to working on the business. Going from the work itself to figuring out how to find new customers, creating assets in the brand, and creating a sustaining and multiplying business. It’s hard to grow a million dollar business with a hundred thousand dollar mind. Mindset change begins with your personal identity and then radiates out to your brand and your people. After changing the brand, Mike realized that they needed to get around people that not only knew the business but would be around to make sure they don’t make critical mistakes. When you find the best in the world you realize that one conversation with them can move you forward faster than a year with someone who hasn’t gone that far. You have to want hurtful truths instead of comforting lies. You always have a choice, but if you trust someone who has the expertise and you get out of your own way, things will change very quickly. Connecting the right people with the right leverage can lead to a decade’s worth of progress in six months. When you remove the weak links in your business the whole chain becomes much stronger. In order to appreciate expertise you have to appreciate as an asset that can pay greater dividends than any piece of machinery or technique you can use. Why would you want your business to be just a paycheck if it could be a wealth creation engine? Struggling people are usually surrounded by other struggling people. There are a lot of people that settle and begin to resent their life. Being around and mentored by people that think different is very important. Once Mike started to believe in himself, he started to reevaluate his language and thought patterns. Once Mike articulated and believed the vision he had for the business, it became a question of not whether they will succeed, it was how big do they want to get? There are no problems, only opportunities. One of the greatest enlightenments that anyone can have is the moment they know that the reason they are on the planet. That’s a mindset change that transforms the way you think about the world and your place in it. If you can get mind growth and then turn that new growth into your mindset change, the effects on your life can be profound. There are very few reasons why someone can’t win this game unless they choose not to. Nobody retires from what they love. You grow or die, and that’s true in business and life. It’s impossible to stay neutral and not making a decision isn’t possible. Inaction is a decision in itself. You have control of 98% of what happens to you, are you going to be a victim or a victor? If you knew you were going to live to 100, what would you do differently? Be brave enough to step and move into your greater self. Tactics One of the smaller changes with disproportionate impact on Mike’s business was changing the way they answered the phone. Instead of just a quick transaction they began to focus on building a rapport with them and understanding what they really want. If you don’t have a framework of delivery everything about your business will appear to be episodic and inconsistent. Mike found out that the more they trained and coached, the more empowered and confident the team began to feel. If you verbalize your commitment to train your team and follow up, your team will reciprocate and commit back. Every process and element of your business should reinforce the same message. Links To Resources Mentioned https://www.ceowarrior.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Discover the blueprint to billions used by master marketer Jay Abraham to grow your service business and gain the all-important position of preeminence in your market. Find out how helping your customers understand the value you provide can transform your business and how the Socratic method of interviewing can lead you to hidden business insights you never thought were possible. Key Lessons Learned: Why? Optimization is the highest and best use of your time and resources. If you don’t fall in love with the people you’re serving, and that includes your team, you’re not going to be able to create something great. You may be passionate about what you do but are you passionate about the people you do it for. Most people just want to grow a business and make money, but you need to know what your endgame is. Why are you building a business in the first place? If you don’t understand marketing, you are not playing the game, business is playing you. You are rewarded in your business life for the value you create for others. If you’re not focused on that and instead focused on making money, you probably never will. It takes the same level of effort to build a business that is a systemless mess with no value as it does to build something worth a small fortune. You’re the one who chose your business and you should use it facilitate what you want to achieve in your life. Traditional vs Non-Traditional It’s not necessary to go through the arduous traditional ways of growing a business. There are many different and creative ways to accomplish the same goals faster or cheaper. Most businesses spend money on advertising and ignore their referral business, but that’s going about trust completely backwards. You must test your marketing assumptions. One small variable can be responsible for 2x-4x the results. There are 50 impact points in your business that you don’t even know about and they all have variability. A 10% increase in 20 to 30 small points in your business can lead to many hundreds of percent increase in profit. Never launch something in your company and give it to everybody, that’s a good way to blow it up. Everyone could double their business right now by doing it better. Different articulations and ways of expressing yourself can make a major difference. Your headlines should convey the most self serving benefit that the other side can expect to receive when they take the next step. You don’t have to recreate the wheel, you can learn, adopt, and borrow from other methods that have worked before. Education Marketing Give your customer the understanding to appreciate the value of what you are creating for them. Most people don’t understand that human beings need to understand why you’re better. “The reason why…” can be your force multiplier. The things you do may be the same as everyone else, but if you tell the story and no one else does you will have a preemptive story in your market. Masterful marketing is more science than talent. You have to measure the lifetime value of different types of clients and leads. The way to get better answers is to learn how to ask better questions. The Power Team The first thing you have to understand is that no one is great at everything and you need to figure out what someone’s strengths and motivations are. Your team looks to you for their security, fulfillment, and acknowledgement. If you don’t feed and nourish that you are doing a disservice to them and constraining your own growth. Your team has to see that you are committed to their best interest. Train your team in more than just your systems, train them on trust building, communication, and collaboration. You have to be able to acknowledge and appreciate other people’s different points of view. 95% of small and medium businesses never reach their goals because they don’t have goals, they have vague hopes and dreams. A business not examined constantly is a business not worth owning. Your team can produce more multiplied profit for your business but not if they don’t understand what performance metrics look like what to strive for. Interview your best employees on how they do what they do, it can be quite profound for the employee at the same time because they often don’t know exactly how they do it.
Attract Convert Deliver Scale with Jay Abraham. Listen to the legendary Jay Abraham reveal the reasons you’re always in the business of selling and why learning is meaningless without taking action. Finally, discover what Jay Abraham would do if he were starting over today and had to grow a business ASAP and what the three most important skills you have in your arsenal are. Key Lessons Learned: Business Growth Everything you do in marketing should be a profit center. Everyone on your team is in sales because you are always selling your company’s unique position in the market, you’re in the job of selling the vision of the business to each other, and you’re selling the quality of the opportunity you are offering if you’re trying to hire them. Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Don’t delude yourself into believing you have mastered anything more than the outer periphery of all that’s possible. The greatest tragedy of expertise is that the people that need it the most discount it the most. You can’t grow at the pace that is possible on your own. You need to have collaborative thinking partners to help you reach your potential. Learning without doing is like being in the stands watching the game instead of playing it. You have to take what you learn and execute. It’s yours to lose. Showing up is not the commitment, it’s merely the preparation. You need to be masterful at quantified, direct response marketing. Most business owners are two dimensional, part of being preeminent is knowing that you will have and planning for a higher quality of client and you will be their trusted advisor for life. You have to be strategic, not tactical. Links To Resources Mentioned Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Discover the secrets behind becoming a master problem solver like Jay Abraham and leveraging the invisible resources that are all around you. Jay Abraham joins Mike Agugliaro in a special VIP session to reveal the keys to multiplying your business, generating wealth that lasts, and how to make a real change in the world around you. Key Lessons Learned: Solving Problems Like Jay Abraham Your revenue system has around 50 impact points that could probably be made 10%-20% more effective, the cumulative effect could lead to many hundreds of percent increase in your profit. If you are going to run a business, you have to decide ahead of time what that means. Most people are decently paid employees of a job they happen to own but that leaves them without an asset. You want to have an enterprise that will work harder for you than you do for it. You have to control your situation or your situation controls you. For a business to work for you it needs a few components. It needs sustainable marketing that creates different factors: continually predictable and profitable income, a system that creates sustainable future income, the ability to identify opportunistic income, and the pride of knowing that you are helping people improve their lives. Most people are not trained in marketing and how to make sure the offer is focused on the optimal benefit to the consumer. Most spend money on advertising that isn’t forged to understand the psychology or needs of the market. You have to go many stages to go from protective curiosity to open checkbook with that kind of traffic. Referral business will pay more, pay on time, and often refer others, and they do it for free. There are nine drivers of business that produce exponential results. If you change your marketing, your strategy, or your ideology, you will change your result. Wherever there is variation instead of a system, you will have slippage. Your business should access the market from as many vantage points as possible. The military has a concept called a force multiplier, where each element has a compounding effect on the others. What is it in your business or personal life that you know you need to fix, but haven’t? Your issue has to be powerful enough to make people take action to solve their pain. Business is really simple, it’s about providing greater advantage, value, or contribution to the market than your competitor and taking as much risk out of the transaction as possible. There are three categories of clients that you serve, the first category are those who pay you, the second are the people you pay, and the third are the vendors you work with. You don’t have to master particular marketing strategies, but you have to at least make sure you aren’t illiterate in them. It’s very rare that your first attempt at a marketing piece will be the best one that your market will respond to. You have to create variations and test to see what works. One tiny change could mean the difference of 2-4x times the results. If you have a business that is underperforming, the first thing you have to do is know that it’s underperforming and you can’t know that unless you know how much more is possible. You can’t optimize without some knowledge of the options and opportunities that are available. 90% of entrepreneurs only utilize 20% of the realistic capability of what their team is possible of, because they don’t train them to reach their highest level. Higher the best and cry only once, pay them what they are worth. Because if you hire the worst you are going to cry everytime. If you can’t afford to hire the best find the most trainable and invest in them, then pay them what they are worth as they develop. Don’t exploit them. Be on a mission, create a movement, and live both of them. Wealth Strategies You can’t make the world better unless you have enough resources. Greatness is a function of more than being a good entrepreneur, or father, or spouse, or leader. You have to be a good contributor to your environment and making the world better than when you arrived. The smartest wealth builders move slow so they can go faster when things are in place. One such strategy is to take what you’ve done, codify it, and find another business you can apply the same principles to. Look at things that occur before, during, and after your customers use your services and either own or start those because they are already highly aligned. Your role is to be the strategist and set the stage for your business using foresight, insight, and hindsight. If you’re trying to build wealth, aiming for the 10x moonshot is not what Jay recommends. You need to look at options that are sustainable, semi or pure passive income with appreciation that you can’t screw up. Giving yourself flexibility and options is only possible if you have vehicles that work for you. Wealth is probably not going to come from something high tech that you don’t understand. It will probably be pretty boring but will helped by new technology rather than replaced. If you’re going to buy a property, don’t buy on price. Buy on sustainability, the probability of the neighbourhood staying constant, and buy the least expensive home in the most expensive neighbourhood. Invest with a portfolio mindset and hedge your bets. Never start off with something highly speculative with a low probability of success. Look for endurability. Take assets and turn them into opportunities. Some of the most valuable assets you have are intangible. You have access to infinite capital almost at will if you understand it properly. It’s not about the money, it’s about what you want to do with the money. Your problem is always going to be the solution to someone else’s bigger problem that they don’t even know they have. There is always a way to leverage other people’s resources and assets. There are streams of wealth everywhere if you have the eyes to see them. Almost anything you want that you don’t think you can afford, you can acquire if you can prove results by converting them to a share of profits or savings, or if you can metric it and analyze its annual yield, you can get an investor. Links To Resources Mentioned Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Learn about the three primary components of growing a business and how you can use them to explode your service business. Discover the real reason you are in business and why you are thinking about sales all wrong. Find out what it means to really lead from the front, and how get your team on board with your vision for the future. Key Lessons Learned: Managing Risk Ask yourself what could go wrong. It’s possible for your creative idea to cost you a million dollars if you don’t think about the risks involved. You have to do your due diligence with everything you try in your business. The bigger you get, the more you have to lose. If you’re going to be a coach in this world, make sure you have the success and the scars to share, then take on the ethical responsibility and know that you are playing with someone’s life. Business and life is not easy, it takes honest work and plenty of effort to achieve anything worthwhile. Growing a Business There are three components to growing a business: marketing, sales, and leadership. Every business is in the business of marketing. You should understand the difference between the psychology of marketing and persuasion. Marketing is different for each business, just because it worked for one does not mean it will work for your business. Diversify your marketing and don’t rely on one platform for everything. Make a list of all the marketing vehicles you could consider. If you don’t have a list, you are just going to be sold by what other people have. Evaluate your list, pick what might work for you but choose based off of ROI and test out the results. Avoid long term contracts. When measuring ROI you have to measure results at the beginning of the process, not at the end. You have to come at sales from a serving perspective first. If you’re amazing, people buy amazing. The greatest sales people in the world don’t have to convince anyone of anything. Be relentless in trying to achieve better results for your business and your customers. You have to lead your people. Are you leading by example or are you leading by force? You must always look for the skill sets you don’t have now that will grow your business to the next level. Every $5 million there is another level of understanding and evolution. Your team should be growing your business with you. How can you implement new levels of achievement with a team that isn’t evolving? Your business will always lower to the lowest level of mindset in your business. Mindset Master something at a level that you can understand. Find someone that is willing to teach and who you are willing to learn from. If you don’t reflect on your life, you will end up living through the same cycles of success and failure over and over again. The only difference between confrontation and conversation is the emotion you attach to it. The results you have are the results you deserve. If you don’t evolve as a person, how can you expect to become successful as a person? Your belief system is either holding you back or pushing you forward. Ask questions when you’re learning new things and try to get to the why and the how of what you’re hearing. Links To Resources Mentioned servicebusinessedge.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Get the strategies and motivation to crush your goals this year. Learn to lead an unstoppable team and make more money than ever... with less stress and more free time. Discover the secrets behind building a roadmap for each area of your business that drives results in your service business. Key Lessons Learned: Service Business Do your due diligence, every state has different rules about what you can and can’t do in a service business. Don’t do something that will put your business at risk. Taking action is the key, knowledge on its own is useless, applied knowledge is how you move the needle. Whenever you learn something think about it in the context of three things: what you will start doing, stop doing, and keep doing. Mindset Your mindset has to be in the game all the time if you are going to grow the business you want, it’s not something you can compromise on. If you’re not engaged, you should consider doing something else. Plan your day the day before. If you are not prepared, you have already failed. Clarity on your targets and goals is very important. Does your team understand why the target is what it is and how to get to it? If there is clarity in the number, it’s usually attainable. How clear is your team on your vision for where you want your service business to go? Your employees should understand the expectations of them and their role in the company, they should also understand your role in supporting them. Are your vendors aligned with your vision for the business. Alignment with your employees, vendors, and family makes everything easier. Are you building targets that will help you get to your focus target? Track your important metrics so you know whether you are winning or behind your target. Being a world class service business is how you set yourself apart from other businesses and avoid the race to the bottom. Don’t just watch what your competitors are doing, study it. Studying allows you to be tactical instead of reactive. Serve people rather than selling them. Be in the relationship business instead of the transaction business. If you approach selling from a serving perspective, you will do right by your customer and avoid compromising your integrity. Every service business owner should have 6-9 goals that they want to accomplish in the next 90 days. When you put in the effort to accomplish a task reward yourself. Consider the return on investment and return on time when you complete each task so you understand how much you are accomplishing. The 90 day roadmap will highlight the most important things you need to do in your business, prioritized by importance. Delegation Don’t do mule’s work when you should be doing warrior’s work. There are a number of third party companies that can take all the business activities off your hands that you don’t do well. When you do everything it takes away your ability to focus on big picture activities. Recruiting Building a powerful culture is a great platform for easy recruiting. Culture comes from treating people with respect and core values. Your employees will be your best advocate. Build your recruiting roadmap and incorporate it into everything you do. Marketing Without marketing, you have noone to sell to. Your sales department has to be engaged at a level that makes sense for your business, don’t promise more than your business can deliver. Use tools and mentors that will allow you to grow to the next level. Marketing is the keystone to your growth roadmap. Profit Build your profit into everything you do. When you’re small, profit is easily attainable. When you start growing, you have to begin measuring everything in order to maintain profitability. The average company in this industry has a profit margin of 3-5% which is pretty low. It takes a lot more effort to generate revenue with a time and material model as opposed to a flat rate. Measure constantly so you understand where you stand against your budget. Measure opportunity, how many times you made a sell, and the value of that success. Outbound Most businesses reach out to their existing customers but they don’t do it often enough or consistent enough. Someone in your company should be calling the customers that end up saying no, and it has to be consistent. Outbounding is also a chance to evaluate the performance of the salesperson and ask for reviews. Outbound has the ability to fill your schedule during the downtimes, educate your customers about your other services. Dedicate certain times of the week to outbound calls even if you’re a small team. Links To Resources Mentioned servicebusinessedge.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Find out how to use a strategy called "heat-mapping" to squeeze more leads from your website traffic (no one is doing this but you'll hear from someone who has perfected it!) Hear the top tips and tricks to convert more of your site traffic into paying customers - you'll be able to IMMEDIATELY implement these to get more customers right away. PLUS... the latest strategies, tactics and cutting-edge info about mobile-friendly sites, site speed and more. Master the low-hanging fruit that is easy to fix but is costing you business. Key Lessons Learned: Website Strategy People think websites are one and done jobs, but they are an ongoing optimization process. Websites are an investment, it drives a lot of your business today. It’s your digital storefront and it’s often someone’s first impression of your business. A website is one of the best marketing tools for your business that you can have. Pick the top one to three objectives you want your website strategy to serve and then look through your home page and eliminate 50% of the content on there that doesn’t accomplish those objectives. If you give someone too many options, they often end up making no decision at all. The first question you have to answer is “who is your customer?”, without knowing that you can’t design a proper website strategy. The next question is “what is the outcome you desire?” The outcome may not be the same as the first action the user takes. The first action step may be to consume content or download a lead magnet. Split testing is crucial to understand what is actually working with your website strategy. There is never one perfect solution for everyone so you have to test your assumptions. Heat mapping your website’s pages is a great way to get insights into what your website users are looking at. Don’t make your visitors work for what they want to use your website for. Analytics are vital, you need to understand what is working and what doesn’t. Outsource this to the pros. A poor website isn’t just the loss of the price of the site, it could also be losing you hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue. Make your phone number big and visible, and make sure your visitors know that you’re open and ready for business. Every click you make a user go through to get something in return will lower your conversion rate, make the process and quick and easy as you can. There is a difference between the brand and the voice of the brand, make sure your voice is trustworthy and likable. Stack the examples of your credibility. Social media links on your website may actually just be a distraction and a lot of the time, they won’t convert. Links To Resources Mentioned https://www.seequs.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Discover the proven strategy to generate more sales from your customers - without discounting or coupons. Discover creative advertising strategies that really set your business apart from competitors (hint: they leverage the way your customers think about promotions) Motivate your customers to purchase today - put a stop to objections like "I'll have to think about it" and increase your close percentages... and do it WITHOUT dropping prices or offering discounts (plus this is something your sales team can really get behind) Key Lessons Learned: Sales Strategies Do your due diligence, every state has different rules about what you can and can’t do in business. Don’t do something that will put your business at risk. You have to have your systems in place. If you don’t look good, smell good, and act right, all the sales strategies in the world won’t matter. Increasing perceived value is one of the most impactful things you can do, it enables you to charge more for your products and services. You need to use yard signs, they are essentially mini billboards that go on your customers lawn. Offering incentives is a great way to avoid negotiating your fees. It can also be used to upsell customers who are hovering around the middle offering. Having a compelling incentive program is an excellent way to fill the lulls in your work schedule. People buy because of a why, buy we also have to sell from our why. If you’re suffering in your business, it’s because a lack of knowledge and education. You need to start learning about marketing and business. Incentive Programs Incentive programs in a marketing world creates emotional movement. The sales process is all about helping lead someone to make the best decision for themselves and their family. Sales is not about you. Creating value for the consumer is the heart of an incentive program. Cruising is the most popular vacation type in the world and the typical cruising customer also happens to be the ideal client for most service businesses. The cruise industry has a tremendous cost of acquisition, by leveraging that you can get these cruise vouchers from anywhere from $99 to $199. The perceived value of a cruise voucher is huge, especially compared to a straight discount. The most important thing to a person is a day off, the second most important is what they do on their day off. You have to answer the how and the why or else your customers will automatically say no, even if it’s a great offer. It will just seem too good to be true. Cruise vouchers are also great for sales contests and motivating your sales team. You can even get your vendors to buy you cruise vouchers by convincing them it will help you sell more of their products. Membership Programs Everyone should have a membership program, no matter what services you offer. It’s not about making money off the membership, it’s about creating value. Incentives are a great way to close more memberships. Technical support is one of the easiest services to offer to make memberships more enticing. Lead Generation Leveraging a vacation incentive to generate leads can be one of the most powerful things you do to increase sales. The perceived value of the cruise voucher is the game changer. Links To Resources Mentioned https://www.increaseoursales.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Mike Agugliaro reveals the secret 3+3+3 formula for success in your service business. Discover the secrets behind growing a $30+ million company while transforming your life while harnessing your personal power within. Key Lessons Learned: Service Business Success Secrets Habits don’t have to take months to form, you can create new habits almost immediately with the right mindset. There are three key strategies from making money, saving money, and keeping money. Many people commit to two of these but leave out the last one. If you want to make money and save money, you better learn how to keep it too! The problem with service business owners today is their lack of ability to focus and be present for an hour to learn something new and execute on it. Many service business owners were brave when they started but they are no longer brave today. We have forgotten how strong we are. What does the bigger you look like? The number one investment you can make is in yourself. Invest with someone that will tell you the hard truth. There are no excuses if you are willing to take action. If you don’t take massive action you will stay where you are. Failure is predicting a future that never happened, don’t let failure hold you back. Your time on earth will end at some point no matter what, whether or not you stand still or try something new. You can make more money and work less, with less headache, you just have to figure it out. Get passionate to solve your problem. You need the right person, the right system, and the right process if you want to succeed. Who is your avatar and how do you get more of them? Do you have systems in place for the before, during, and after units of your business? Systems equate to profitability. Manage, Monetize, and Diversify. Monetization is putting your money in the right place to deliver the maximum return in the shortest period of time. Everything you do has an ROI, figure it out. Diversify your income streams and your opportunities. Focusing is how you make money, diversification is how you keep it. A culture mindset shift from the employees to the owner is the number one game changer. It’s not about what you say, it’s more about what you show. Inbound Leads Inbound is all about WOW service is what you say, how you say it, and what it means. Your words are magic and what you say counts. People are used to hearing scripted responses, talk to them as a real human being instead of a robot. Say your words with passion, purpose, and power. That’s how you create magnetism that will draw people in. It’s not about booking a call, it’s about starting a relationship. What would you do if the next call to your business was worth a million dollars? Credibility Credibility is all about why us, what we do, how we do it. Your products and services are not what you do, how you treat people and serve others is what you do. Additional Opportunity Plant the seed for the future and continuing the relationship. Talk about the 1+1 model. What does your customer need right now and what should they think about. If you can turn every call into a 1+1 conversation, your business will explode. Everyone loves a free gift. Coupons create cross pollination for your other services. Customer Service Set the stage, frame the outcome, and then create the outcome. Tell them where you are going to go today and how you are going to solve the problem. Don’t stop creating a rapport until you create a connection with your customer. Your customer should feel like you are sending a knight in shining armor to your house. What you say and how you say it should be different depending on the person, a script can’t cover it. Customer Experience Packet The customer packet is information and literature that helps the customer make better decisions. It’s like the wedding gifts for your new relationship. It builds rapport, reinforces the relationship and magnetizes you to the customers, and has value. No one throws value away. Would you spend $5 to secure $50,000? Of course you would. Give value to your customer and you won’t be selling them on your services, the value you provide will sell you. Follow Up Check in on the delivery. This can be automated or manual. Reinforce the buying decision. Let them know why they chose your service business. Reframe future ongoing business. You have a relationship, reframe it for the future. Testimonials Once you blow them away with great service, ask the customer for a testimonial. Referrals are all about who they know, what they need, and win, win, win. Power, Theme, Leadership Some people are just lacking a little bit of power. Power gives you endurance and allows you to push longer and harder than everyone else. People buy from people with power. Power attracts power. What is your personal theme that you are going to live with this year? Your theme should be everywhere, when you live and breathe your mantra, your life will change. Your theme is your mission. Without expansion you can’t grow your service business. You’re exactly where you are with the skill sets that you have. You have to live on purpose. Links To Resources Mentioned http://www.servicebusinessedge.com http://www.ceowarrior.com 844-273-BOOM (2666) Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Mike Agugliaro shares the Breakthrough Thinking Model that will help you make sure that you end 2018 strong and start off 2019 with power and focus. Learn how the changing seasons don’t have to affect your service business the some guru’s say and how you can engineer your business for powerful growth all year long. Key Lessons Learned: The End of the Year People often want to start off the new year moving really fast. They want to sprint towards their goals and drive hard but the end of the year holidays tend to slow people down. The season changes into winter and we start to get into hibernation mode. This can be a double hit to our businesses. You have time before the end of the year to course correct and prevent yourself from falling into the gap. You have to have a sense of teaching with your team. Education applied equals power, if you can educate your team and help them apply the knowledge you will get results. The decline begins right after the summer season. A lot of gurus say that once September arrives you’ve entered shoulder season but we have to ask ourselves if that’s actually true. We have to clear the belief and programming that these drops are unavoidable, that some seasons are just worse than others. Don’t “fall” into winter waiting to “spring” into summer. Start making changes now instead of waiting for New Years. The only real competition you have is with yourself. Taking Breakthrough Action To take action, you first have to understand what’s happening within your ecosystem. Once you understand the situation, you can take control of the situation. Once you choose to create your own economy, everything changes. I lot of people get trapped in the idea of “this is what I do” instead of thinking “this is one of the things I do.” A SuperTech with skill in more than one trade is not controlled by the season, they just switch the work they do depending on the time of year. What are you going to start doing today? Planning, thinking different, higher level education are all important. If you don’t have the education on how to grow, you can’t really be surprised that you are not where you want to be. What do you have to stop doing? Procrastination, complaining, hanging around weak people, a lot of what you are capable of is determined by your peer group. Your stop list is your most powerful list. What are you going to keep doing? Working hard, skilled work, being friendly, what are the most important things you already do that you will double down on. If you start eating a salad everyday, you will probably feel better, but not if you’re eating terrible food the rest of the time. You have to stop the bad habits to let the good ones shine. What is the breakthrough in what you just learned? A breakthrough is a personal evolution where you take ownership of the concept and it shapes your thinking from then on. Links To Resources Mentioned Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Mike Agugliaro and Stephanie discuss the four pillars of success when it comes to inventory management and breakdown a number of strategies you can use to manage your inventory so you can keep growing your business. Learn about product standardization, vendor consolidation, order frequency, replenishing, and improving productivity overall. Main Questions Asked: What are some of the biggest problems contractors deal with when it comes to material? What is the first conversation you have with potential partners? What does vendor consolidation mean? How does the inventory management process work? Key Lessons Learned: Inventory Management When you deliver amazing value, and a really great product, and you get it done in a reasonable time, what pops out is profit. When you deal with any inventory, there is always going to be a problem. Unaccounted inventory is a major issue along with dead inventory and forecasting what you need to bring in. Unaccounted inventory may also be a nice way of saying theft. As contractors, we are focused on the money side and generating revenue, but material can be like a hole in your bucket. Every aspect of your supply chain comes with a price. Systems create profit. If you want to keep generating profit, you must have a system to manage your material and partner with the right companies. A BMI system requires a minimum amount of space and a dedicated employee, but it also has to make sense. For Barnett, the threshold is somewhere around $600,000 in in Barnett sales before they will consider moving forward. Everytime you place an order, it costs your business around $100. Reducing the numbers of PO’s that get cut over the day by dealing with a smaller number of vendors can streamline your costs considerably. It’s very hard to grow a large profitable company without managing the growth of your inventory. Working with a local supply house will probably not help your business grow past them. There are three categories of solution for inventory management from Barnett: Organizing, Managing, and Replenishing. If you feel overwhelmed by your inventory, just commit to doing one thing a little bit better, and then build off of that. Partnerships Vendors have to make decisions with who to work with everyday. You can learn a lot from your vendor partners from listening to them when they are talking about their own distribution and supply chain issues. Do yourself a favour and partner with a company that cares about the growth of your business and isn’t just interested in your next order. Being partnered with the right company can give you a major edge over your competitors by sharing with you whenever new items come in that you can take to the market. Barnett customizes their supply chain solutions to the businesses that they partner with. A partner success team can be a major asset in building a mutually beneficial relationship. You need to have a plan for selling and processes in place before you can work well with a partner like Barnett. Mindset Small thinking gets small results. Never say no, say how. Where are you today and where do you want to go? You need to come up with a roadmap and reverse engineer how to get there. Money may not be everything, but money changes the planet. Learning curves are for when you are doing it alone. Be big, be brave, be bold. Links To Resources Mentioned 856-513-5210 stephanie.streck@ebarnett.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Learn how to recruit like a master. Discover recruiting strategies you can use to find productive new employees from day 1, onboard new employees with automated processes that gets them on the job on day one! See how you can understand if employees are performing and if they need improvement while keeping everyone productive. Learn how developing your staff improves employee morale, increases retention and produces productive teams and more. Key Lessons Learned: Recruiting The Best People The right person, doing the right things, in the right place, with the right culture and the right systems makes it easy to run a growing business. You are either training your employees and your customers, or they are training you. It’s easy to find great people, it takes energy and effort to maintain great people. If you keep hiring great people and they keep leaving, hiring isn’t your problem. You have to solve the problem first. The first step to solving anything is clarity. Do your employees feel driven to succeed like you do? To have the company you want, you have to use the tools and strategies that the greatest companies use. How much does it cost you to have bad employees? Bad hires happen from bad processes and bad systems. A lot of times your employees fail you because you allow it to happen. What are you going to start doing, stop doing, and keep doing? Recruiting and hiring is a function of one thing, marketing. It’s about becoming magnetic to the right people. Similar to customers, you have to identify your employee avatar and know exactly who they are. Know how to talk to them and know how to deliver. Growth opportunity is the number one recruiting strategies. The little things like paid birthdays and tool allowances are more effective than 401k’s at this point. By 2020, 75% of the industry will be Millennials. They expect constant information and constant contact as well as feedback. The number one reason people leave their company in the industry is they don’t feel like they don’t have a voice in that company. Add what’s important to the job seekers you want to attract and add it to your job posting. Figure out what makes you unique and communicate that. Your copy for your job posting should be written by a copywriter, it should use emotional language that moves people closer to you. Survey your culture for information that you can leverage for recruiting. A vision for the future is the number one magnet for attracting people to your business. Strong leaders are who people want to work for. Residual income programs are one of the best ways to retain excellent people. BirdDogHR BirdDog is a multilevel resource that is easily adjusted and configurable to attract the right people. If you fish with the right bait, you will catch the right fish. BirdDog will work anywhere that someone can access their smartphone. It better be easy to apply, because people are applying to 10 job posts at a time. You should always be recruiting, you can’t be held hostage by underperformers. When you recruit all the time, you start to build a hot list of people who are ready to make the switch as soon as the opportunity comes up. Stay in front of prospective employees and stay on top of their mind, the time may not be right now but in six months to a year the timing may be perfect. The person who serves great employees the best becomes the magnet. Work your referral network, let people know you’re hiring. Links To Resources Mentioned birddoghr.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Learn how to harness the cutting edge marketing strategy that is changing the game for service businesses. Learn how to get more sales, more money per sale, and more repeated sales - discover how to harness the latest trend to generate WAY more sales (and all kinds of other benefits, too). Get the industry insider's information that NO ONE ELSE is sharing, and get in on the bottom floor (because this trend is growing fast and will continue to grow). Key Lessons Learned: CallCap Voice Broadcasting CallCap Voice broadcasting is a prerecorded message that gets sent out to phone numbers at scale. You can reach thousands of people in a small amount of time. It’s very cheap when compared to direct mail and other outreach methods. Common uses include maintenance reminders, new product announcements, and membership expirations. You can also create something that reinforces your company’s culture every single week. The response rate is typically very high. If you’re bad at planning for you business, you’re probably going to be bad with voice broadcasting. Build it once and then automate the process. Let your agents know when you are doing a voice broadcast so they know how to handle the call. Leak them out on a schedule that allows you to fill the gaps in your schedule. Don’t try to hide the fact that it’s a recorded message. Don’t stop broadcasting if you have a couple people complain, there are always some complaints. Send them a fruit basket and if they want to unsubscribe, let them. If you have an customer list, and you’re not outbound broadcasting, you are wasting your time. Follow Up Surveys If you want to control what’s happening before it becomes a problem, the automated survey is the key. As soon as you close a job, send out the survey and get your feedback right there and then. People are not afraid to give an automated survey an honest response. Leave a phone number so your customer has the opportunity to call you and leave their feedback directly if they want to. Exceeding expectations is a process, you have to measure your feedback in order to know how to get better. Text Messaging Text messaging has a 98% read rate and are opened in the first three seconds received. It has a 19% click through rate and the highest rate of customer satisfaction. Informative videos are a good content option for text broadcasts. You can also send out appointment reminders and notifications without requiring an opt in from the customer. Do you due diligence on this but informational info that doesn’t have a sale message in it don’t need opt ins as well. Text messages after a job is done are a great way to generate reviews online. The sky's the limit, get creative with text broadcasts and nurture the customer lifecycle. Generating opt ins can be done by offering a coupon on your website, integrating it with your social media, putting it on your printed materials, and training your team to ask for permission. You need to be passionate when it comes to developing a list of opt ins. Set expectations at the beginning and let the customer know how many messages you are going to send, don’t spam people. Short codes are not necessary for most service businesses, a local number is probably a much better option. Send valuable information four times before you ask for the sale. You will be known as a resource for information instead of spammy sales messages. Education creates awareness, awareness creates buying habits. The more touch points you have with your customers, the better. Frequency and follow up are how you win the game. Analysis Even the best agent can lose a call. CallCap has a team of analysts that listen to every call within 15 minutes and will help you save some of those lost opportunities. Think of it like insurance against losing calls and potential revenue for your business. If you listen to the calls that you lost, that’s when you will learn what you need to work on. Links To Resources Mentioned Retailmenot.com Callcap.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Brian Kaskavalciyan joins Mike Agugliaro to talk about maximizing your profits in your service business using direct marketing. Find out how to keep your customers happy, get them to buy more often, increase the dollar value of every sale, and double your income in record time. Key Lessons Learned: Direct Marketing The service business is relatively simple to market, the customer has a problem now and they need a solution now. Marketing your business is essentially about creating customers, keeping customers, and multiplying customers. To be an effective marketer of plumbing/HVAC solutions you need to be where your customers are looking for a solution, provide them a customer experience that they will love, and do everything you can to nurture and protect that customer. Your competition wants your customers, which is why you have to protect them fiercely. There are four ways to increase your sales and profits: get new customers, increase the average transaction value of each sale, get your customers to buy more often, and increase the average buying lifetime value of a customer. Acquiring customers is the most expensive and risky way to grow your business. Most businesses are obsessed with getting new customers, but without a system to protect those customers, they could leave your business like a hole in a leaky bucket. What is the Lifetime Profit Value of your average customer? The more money you get out of a customer, the more money you can spend to acquire a customer. If you don’t commit to creating long term relationships with your customers, you are throwing away your potential profits. One of the best things you can do as a business owner is shop your own business from the perspective of a customer. Walt Disney’s Law of Unlimited Abundance: “Do what you do so well, that when people see you do it, they want to see you do it again, and will bring others to see you do it.” Upsells, cross-sells, price strategies, and adding value are ways you can increase your average sale. Many companies are afraid to charge the right price in order to earn the right profit. You should be earning a minimum of 10%-15% profit in your business. Who do you have to become in order to earn the right to premium pricing? Educate the customer about the other services you offer, every time you get the customer to return it increases the likelihood of them returning again and again. Getting that second sale is crucial. You must always be reminding your customers who you are, all the solutions you provide, the benefits of working with you, and how to get a hold of you. Consistency is key. Physical newsletters are extremely powerful for staying in touch and on top of mind. Make sure your newsletter doesn’t have an agenda behind it. Take a multichannel approach to direct marketing. You can’t rely on just one channel. There is a fine line between staying in touch and making people mad, you should be trying to engage them and creating a two way conversation. You have to evaluate the return on investment on each of your direct marketing methods. With knowing the ROI, how can you course correct? If your sending your customers gifts, are you giving them what they want or is it something generic. Direct mail is still one of the best direct marketing methods you can use to grow your business. Links To Resources Mentioned www.g4mg.com/warrior 305-856-8788 Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
There is a crucial skill that every service business owner should have… but very few actually have this skill and are using it. Problem is, you NEED this skill because you’re called upon every day to use it. Mastering this skill will elevate your business; not mastering it will mean stress and frustration. Key Lessons Learned: Decision Making Process Everybody has a decision making process that they do but don’t understand. You definitely have a process, but nearly no one has it written down. A process has to have a sequence of things that you go through, criteria you use to evaluate different courses of action. For business decisions, you first need to consider the Return on Investment, Return on Time, and Return on Life. There are more things to think about, but if you skip those first three you could get into big trouble. If you can’t find good employees, it’s not because they are no good employees, it’s because you suck at finding them. You probably lack a defined decision making process that you need to find and hire the right people. The fourth criteria is how will the decision serve your employees? The fifth criteria is will this decision serve your clients? The last two criteria can help you check off the first three and will let you know if you’re on the right track to the best decision. The final piece of the puzzle is the sanity check, if the sanity check says no, the decision has to be a no. If you can check off all the boxes, the decision is simple and easy. You must have a written process for how you make decisions in your business. Your customers also have a decision making process and you can actually share your process in order to help them out. Links To Resources Mentioned http://www.servicebusinessedge.com http://www.ceowarrior.com 844-273-BOOM (2666) Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
When my service business started to grow, I thought “this is it: I’m going to make good money from here on out.” Then something happened: I made some money and then hit a plateau. Then I made more money and hit another plateau. I learned that business growth isn’t a straight line. But what else I learned shocked me... Key Lessons Learned: Business Growth We start out with the delusion that the knowledge and skills we have today will be what we need to grow and scale our business tomorrow. Most people start out with the goal of a million dollars in business revenue, thinking that at that point the business will be able to keep it up and they can take a 10% salary. A million dollars is a mental milestone, it can take some people 1 year and others up to 20 years. To get from 1 million to 5 million in revenue, a lot of the things you do today will not be acceptable in the future and you may not make it. Chaos in your business will pull you down, a lack of processes, software, or culture will hold your business growth back. Some businesses get to 5 million in revenue in 2 years or less because they take advantage of adding additional lines to their services, but if they don’t get the foundational business aspects correct before getting there, they are going to run into big problems. Most people can not grow past two levels without expanding their skills. The skill set you have today can not be the skill set you have at the next level, otherwise you will flushing through people constantly and testing your business culture everyday. You have to know what you need before you need it. Hire people for what you are going to need before you are late and absolutely require it. Everyone wants to have an empire, they just may not believe they can achieve one. If you are experiencing chaos in your business at any level, know that it’s unnecessary. Chaos is a just lack of knowledge. Knowledge is not power, applied knowledge is power. Look into the future and ask yourself where you want to be in two years. Reverse engineer how to get there and then do the work to achieve that business growth. Are you growing for what you want or for what you need? Links To Resources Mentioned http://www.servicebusinessedge.com http://www.ceowarrior.com 844-273-BOOM (2666) Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!
Mike Agugliaro breaks down what you need to be thinking about now in order to succeed in the future. Find out what you can do to make sure that a powerful fall filled with strong growth for your business follows and explosive summer, instead of suffering from the cold weather downturn that afflicts most service businesses. Key Lessons Learned: Preparing For The Future Summer and Fall are neither good or bad for a service business, they are just different. You have to prepare for the seasons before they arrive, not when they arrive. The seasons are not about the temperature going up or down, it’s the emotional state of your customers that go up or down. In the summer, people are happy and spending freely. In the fall, it gets darker earlier and people start hunkering down. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Start planning for what you are going to talk about to your customers and when, in July, not in September. You have to prepare people’s minds to not stop spending, but to instead spend money on problems they didn’t know they needed to fix. There is a five step process to get your service business ready for the transition to fall: Plan, Pre-schedule, Educate, Motivate, and Evaluate. You can pre-sell, go after clients that didn’t buy over the summer and schedule them for September instead, and educate the client on things they should think about. Motivate your clients to get the job done in the future and evaluate your plan and course correct if necessary. Prepare your PPC, press releases, outbound, and email for the future seasons, not just the next couple of weeks. Links To Resources Mentioned http://www.servicebusinessedge.com http://www.ceowarrior.com 844-273-BOOM (2666) Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes