Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Excuses. Here I am. So.
[00:00:05] Hi, guys. Welcome to the Profit first podcast. I'm Stephen Edwards. I'm the founder of Grow Profit First Accountants. In this podcast, we talk about all things profit first, but we also talk about all things that can help you build a better business. Making more profit is one of the key things you can do to build a better business because it gives you so much more freedom, so much more opportunity, and so many more options in terms of the direct direction you go in your business. You can hire better team members, you can hire a personal assistant. You can be pickier with the customers you take on. It's just generally a better place to be in when you make more money. So the topic of this week is all about how can you optimize the three main ways to grow a business so business can be complicated? I don't know about you, but the more you read, the more you learn. That gets to this point where you. You get overwhelmed. You actually get more conf. Confusion rather than clarity when you're on this. This kind of growth journey as a business owner. And it's only when you come through the other side, it starts to make a lot of sense. So hopefully today I will be sharing one of those concepts with you because we all think there's 12 different things we can do in our business at the same time. There's, you know, all these books we can read, there's all these podcasts we can watch and listen to. Actually, when we really break it down, there's three things we can do to grow your business business. And I'm going to share those with you. Number one is you can get more customers. You can basically do more of what you're already doing. And the problem is that is what most people are doing. It's, it's valid. It's one of the main things you can do to grow business, but it's the only thing they're doing. They're focusing on getting more customers, which is great, but it's only the starting point. Number two, which is one of the most important things you can actually do is increase the average transaction value of your customer. So. So if your customer at the moment, on average is worth a thousand pounds a year, can you make it 1200 pounds a year? You've just increased your revenue by 20%.
[00:02:15] Finally, the other thing you can do is make your customer buy more often. Probably chose the wrong word. I don't mean make, but how can you create the environment? How can you create an offer and provide enough value that your customers buy from you more often. So this is what we call purchase frequency. How can they buy from you more often? So they're the topics. Let's dive in. So, you know, myth number one is really getting more clients is the only way to grow your business. It, you know, I've been there, I've been guilty. I love marketing. I love, you know, more people joining our business because we get to help more people. And it's exciting. We can grow our team, we can grow our revenue, we can help people, they can grow. But the problem is it kind of gives you this illusion of growth, and that's really what profit first is all about. Turnover is vanity. Profit is sanity. And too often we are focusing purely on getting more customers to grow our revenue, because if we're bringing more customers in, but we're. We're not pricing it properly. Now, let's pretend I talk about this in my book, how to build a Business that Runs without you. If, if you price something wrong, you could end up needing something stupid, like six times more customers to get the same amount of profit. So more is not always better. You know, you're just scaling in efficiency, essentially. We've been through that journey ourself.
[00:03:38] We've, you know, not all services, not all customers are equal. So you need to get clear on what you're scaling up. You do not want to be scaling up those problems. And that's why more, more, more is not always the answer. So if it's. It could be more customers, it can be more of the same type of work. That's not always the right answer, but it's, it's part of the equation, essentially. So, you know, leave a number. One is getting more customers. But if you've got your pricing right and you're happy with your pricing, you're happy with, you're happy with your ideal customer, then getting more customers is a good thing. Don't get me wrong, that is a good thing. But we need to be clear on those things first. If you, if you don't really know what your main offer is, if you don't know what your ideal customer is, and you just say yes to every single person who walks through the shop, walks through the front door, who picks up the phone, that's when you scale the problems. And also when we're talking about getting more customers, it's not just marketing. It's not just word of mouth. It could be strategic partnerships. It could be going on someone else's podcast. It can be having a partner with a complimentary service, a complimentary product, you can get that synergy, you know, opc other people's customers. How can you finance professionals do this all the time? So IFAs financial advisors, they reach out to people like us, they reach out to accountants, they reach out to solicitors. How can you get that synergy in your business? How can your product complement or your service complement someone else's product or service? How can you piggyback off what they're already doing? So there's other ways to get new customers. It's not just simply marketing, of course. Marketing is one of the biggest things you can do, you know, at the moment, are you relying on word of mouth, but you're doing no marketing. Are you doing paid marketing? I do paid advertising. I do Google AdWords. Are you doing meta ads? So there's so many different things we can do, but once you're clear on your ideal customer, you're clear on your pricing. Yes, getting more customers makes a difference, but sometimes it might be optimizing your sales process. So let's pretend you're getting 10 leads through or potential customers. If you're a service business, for argument's sake, in a week, I just make up the number in a week. And it might be that you're currently signing up 2 out of 10. Bringing more customers in might not be the answer. Making it 20 and then bringing in four might not be as good an idea as focusing on how can we get 4 from 10 instead of 4 from 20. This is called your conversion rate. So this, this might be a better customer journey, it might be articulating the value, it might be providing better collateral and an experience and, and building better relationships as part of the kind of prospect journey, or increasing the amount of customers who buy from you. If you're running a shop, it's the people that come into the shop. So if people come into the shop, there will be a percentage of people who buy from you. Rather than just trying to get more and more and more people into the shop, how can you get more people who go into the shop to buy from you? So These are all LinkedIn to get in more customers. So you need to build the foundations first. Number two is increasing the average transaction value.
[00:06:54] So McDonald's is absolutely the king of this. They're the masters of this. They're not the only people that do it, but I think they, they probably done it at scale some time ago. So that's why they're. The best example is do you want fries with that? Not only do you want fries with that, do you Want large fries with that? Do you want a large Coke? That's increasing the average transact and value. These examples are all around us. You know, on another note, success leaves clues. If you can study life, study other businesses, you know, the, the upselling, the options from, you can learn from other businesses. If you just copy what your direct competitors are doing, you're going to be limited in your thinking. So take inspiration from other businesses out there in terms of increasing the average transaction value. Could it, you know, a supermarket, for example, they have things on the end of the AIs, what's your equivalent to things on the end of the aisles? Or could it be that you have a premium offer? So you have a normal offer and you have a premium offer, and that's always to increase the average transaction value.
[00:08:01] Number three is how can you get people to buy more often? So instead of buying from you once a year, how can you make people buy twice a year? If you can make someone buy the same thing three times a year, you have just tripled your revenue. If every single customer does that, I know it's not that simple, but have you ever asked that question, have you got pen and paper or notepad and just thought for 20 minutes, how can I get my customers to buy more often? That's what we're talking about today. That's the logic, that's the philosophy. And what I'm talking today is if you don't think about these things, they are never going to happen. Yeah. So other ways is to get people to buy more often is to let them know you've got things they might want to buy. You know, I've had, I won't mention the industry, industry and the businesses, but I've bought services from people and I would have probably bought again, but I've never heard anything from that business. If they would have let me know every week, every two weeks. That's why newsletters are quite good. You'll, you'll either listen to this on the podcast or reading the newsletter. That's why they're pretty good. It's because you're letting people know you exist. You're telling people that you've got things that can help their business or you can help them improve their life in some way or their business in some way. So putting yourself out there is key. And all of that links into increasing the lifetime value that our TV is a marketeer's term, the lifetime value of your customer. You know, doing these strategies could increase the lifetime value massively for a particular customer. But the magic with everything I'm talking about today is if you get 10% more customers, if you increase the transaction value by 10%, if you get people to buy more often by 10%, like in terms of your whole customer base, those 10% increases compound and you get a 33% impact on your revenue, a third extra revenue by just a small 10% increase in each area. So some of the things we do in our. In our business, we call it a value gap calculator.
[00:10:04] And we do this exercise with your numbers. We help you figure out what if you can increase your revenue, your margin, reduce your overheads. Because small changes compound to have a exponential, potentially exponential impact on your business.
[00:10:19] So the exciting thing about this is those changes I've mentioned could increase your profit in your business, yes, your own profit in your business by 50% to 100% on average, if you do all of the strategies. But even if you increased it by 10 or 20%, what does that mean for you? You know, what does that mean for you and your family? But it's realistic. If you've got the time, the resources, the commitment, we can be giving you a roadmap to double your profit. And here's the exciting bit. You don't need to remember everything I said. You don't need go off and learn this. I am going to share with you the prompt to do this yourself using ChatGPT or any AI model that you prefer. If you're listening to this, you can join our newsletter on Beehive and I'll just get the.
[00:11:08] As I'm doing this live, I'll just get the address for you to subscribe to. Get that from Beehive in a second. Or if you're actually listening to the newsletter, if you're listening to the. Sorry. If you're reading the newsletter, the prompt will be on there. But if you want the prompt and you're listening to this, the easiest way is to probably drop me an email.
[00:11:28] So it's Stephen with a P H S T e p h ian at Cheltenham c h e outien h a m Cheltenham taxaccountants.co.uk I know that's a long one, it's an old email address, but if you reach out to me personally, I can share the prompt with you. If you're listening to the podcast or just go onto our website, it's probably easier.
[00:11:50] We are grow, we are grow so W E G R O so W E A R E We are grow G R O without the w co.uk and I can share the prompt with you. But if you're, if you're reading the newsletter, you've already got the prompt. So how does the prompt work? You put it into Chat GPT, you paste the prompt and it will literally lead you through the three step process I've talked about. And it will act as a business consultant for you and your business. It will literally lead you through the three main areas so getting more customers, increasing average transaction value and increasing frequency. And it will lead you through it. However, I know that most people don't suffer from lack of knowledge. So I can give you all these tools and you might not actually do something. So just to make it clear, I want to share with you the three things you can do. Listening, watching or reading this because there's a lot of people out there in the world that listen to things, they read things, but they don't, don't do anything. And I'm a, I'm a big believer in your subconscious. You need to consume, you need to learn, you need to educate yourself. However, if you don't take the action, nothing is going to happen. I am potentially giving you a blueprint to double your profit. So here's the three options. You can use the prompt. At the very minimum, please do that. You can use the prompt. You can, as I said, if you're listening to this, it'd be in the description for the podcast. Anyway, go on to our website. We are grow.co.uk say reach out and we can share that with you. If you're, if you're reading it will be on there but use the prompt. Paste it into your preferred AI model. You know I use ChatGPT. If you're using Chat GPT, I'd prefer you to either use the Pro version, which is a paid for work version or the thinking version. So just change it to thinking because it does make a difference. It spends more time analyzing the situation and that will give you a roadmap for how to potentially double your own profit it in the next 12 to 18 months. The other option is you can join one of our workshops in 2026. We're really excited. We're not only launching the Grow Academy for clients or if you're not a client, you can subscribe to it and join with lots of done for you templates, resources, training videos. We're also launching in online live workshops one of we're about to do one for creating your own business plan in 2026. I know some of you have shown interest in that and we'll be sharing the details Pretty soon. But we'll also be doing workshop on the strategies I'm talking today, how to potentially double your profit by focusing on these three levers. And if you're a client, the exciting news is that workshop will be free. You can join. It would be a larger workshop and it'll just be a one off workshop and there'd be some materials for you to go away. If you're not a client, there would be a small fee for investment for you to join. However, if you're really excited and you just want to make more money now, you want to get started, you want to get the ball rolling, I am creating a beta group so up to three people just to fine tune, just to test, just to hone in for getting the success in your business. So the difference with this is it's, it's one to one and it's a VIP group. So there's only going to be three people and myself in this small group and I will spend time with you personally creating your own plan to double your profit. So it's not. Here you go, here's the prompt.
[00:15:15] I will be acting as your consultant and I will be making sure we create the best, the most robust, most realistic plan for your business in 2026 in terms of doubling your profit. This is not to be confused with the business planning session because that's a bigger plan. That's, you know, what your KPIs and what you want your revenue to be, all those sort of things. I am talking about practical, tangible ways to actually double your profit. So if you're interested in that, there's literally only going to be three, three business owners. Please reach out and I can share details, but I want you to do one of those things. I want to either use the prompt, I want to either reach out and let us know you're ready for the workshop in 2026 or if you want to get started really quickly, reach out. If you want to be part of the VIP beta group, but you need to do something because there's money on the table for you and your business. You just need to take action. Thanks guys and I'll see you next week. Excuses. Here I am. So.
