Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hi guys, I'm Stephen Edwards. I'm the director of Grow Profit First Accountant. So I'm a Chartered certified accountant. I'm the director of Grow Profit First Accountants. We've been in business for over a decade now. I've been trained as a chartered certified accountant for longer than that, probably around 15 years. And we work with clients to grow their business profitably and sustainably with Profit First Certified professionals. So yes, we are accountants, but we work with our clients a bit different. So in this video I'm going to show you a practical way to double your profit. All I need is around 17 minutes of your time and I'm going to show you how to double your profit. Thanks for watching because I'm quite excited that I'm doing something quite different. So I'm going to give you some practical tips and, and I know this seems too good to be true, but some practical tips and a real world example of how you can double your profit. I want to say double your profit in 2025, but I don't really like putting arbitrary time spans on things because that's what causes a lot of stress. It causes a lot of overwhelm. If it takes you 12 months, if it takes you 18 months, if it takes you 3 years, if it. I'm sure you can do the math and figure out how much of an impact doubling your profit will make in your business. So this isn't some wishy washy, you know, Harry Potter magic wand stuff I'm showing you. I'm going to give you practical examples of the model you can use to double your profit. The beauty with this, as in profit first and also the way we work with our clients is that it's relatively. I'm just going to move myself off the screen because if you're watching this, you can see me twice.
[00:01:52] Relatively straightforward and easy. Sorry, relatively straightforward, but it's still hard. So it's an easy process to understand, but it's still going to be hard to implement. But if you, you know, anything that's worth doing is going to be difficult. So if we're talking about doubling your profit, it best be worth it. So I'm going to dive in and show you what this is all about. The people that are listening to this and not watching, I will kind of explain everything we are doing. So I'm going to give you an example of a business who's and, and what you would do is you would substitute this business for yours and your numbers and your life because everyone's got a different model But I want to give you nice round numbers so we can really hit home what we're doing here. So we've got a million pound business in my example, okay, We've got a business currently doing a million pounds worth of revenue. It's got cost of sales and we're just going to treat this as a business, but obviously it doesn't have to be a service business. Cost of sales for people who deliver in that service, so staff who actually delivering the service of 400k. So that's 40% of the million.
[00:03:02] Okay, so that means we've got 600k left. If you're following me, we've got 500ks worth of overheads, so we've got £100,000 worth of profit and that's what we call net profit. So £100,000 out of a million pounds is a 10% net profit margin. Okay, so we've got 100k profit. That's quite nice for a million pound business. I'm going to walk you through what I call the 555 method, which is the foundation. But it's only one of the things we do when we work with people to help them identify how to double their profit, we give them a clear roadmap. So instead of chasing shiny new marketing things and constantly trying to win new customers all the time, we give you a clearer strategy to double your profit. And the 555 method is key to that. It's not the only thing. We bring in profit first. We bring in other optimization, sort of reviews and planning and techniques. But I'm going to walk you through. So if we take a million pound business, if we increase the sales by 5%. So if you are watching this, that takes the sales from a million pound to 150. So a million pound and 50,000.
[00:04:15] So if we increase the sales by 50,000, that's a 5% increase. And the reason, you know, we do 5% is most people can get their head around a 5% increase. If I said increase your sales by 50%, you will need to be gambling in your marketing or you need to be an expert marketeer. And the truth is if you can do that, you would have probably already done that. And that's probably the truth with that. But 5% we can all, you know, go along with essentially. So half a million pound business would be a 25k increase and you can do the math in yours. So a £50,000 increase for a million pound business, relatively modest in the scheme of things. So increased sales that could be doing more for your existing customers. But I'm not going to go into the details right now. There is five ways to grow your sales, which talks about that on the screen, you know, so you can increase your client retention, you can have more leads, you can increase your conversion, increase your average spend increase, increase your frequency. That's some of the things you can, you can do. So we increase that by 5% if we increase your gross profit margin. So your margin before was 60%. So that means out of a million, we kept 600k, which is 60%. If we change that to 65%, so we're increasing our margin by 5%. So for if the sales stayed the same, we would be keeping 650k, not 600k. So that means our cost of sales would have gone down from 400 to 350. If you can just sort of follow those numbers. However, we've increased our sales to 150, we've added 50k on, so we're going to keep 65% of the new number. But essentially we increased our margin by 5%. And what that means is our cost of sales has now gone down to three.
[00:06:08] So £367,500. And what that means is our gross profit has gone up from 600k, which we had on the million pounds originally, to 682,500 pounds. All we've done is increased your sales by 5% and increase your margin by 5%. And like I said, it's straightforward. It doesn't mean it's easy. But anyone watching this, I hope you can appreciate these are not crazy numbers we're talking about. We are talking about 5% changes in your business.
[00:06:38] And this is going to help you double your profit, which I will show you in a minute. And it does depend on your numbers. We call it the 555. Your numbers might not work out like this. We might need to do 666 or 777 or 333, but it's the principle and the foundation of what I'm talking about. If we then decrease your overheads by 5%.
[00:06:57] So instead of having 500K, we're going to take it to 475. So we've reduced it by 25,000, which is a 5% decrease. And when we work with businesses, often we can find a 10% decrease in their expenses. And I know it sounds too good to be true, but businesses build up slack they put fat on when they're trying to grow, which is a big part of the whole profit. First process. So that's just added a 25k increase to your, to, to, to, to your profit because we've reduced your overheads. If we add up all of those changes, when we take account all of those changes in terms of your margins, your numbers, it's increased your profit by £107,000 and £500. So we have doubled the profit in this business. It's gone from 100k to 207.5k just using the 555 review and the finance. So I'm sure you can appreciate if you've been in business for a number of years and you're chasing new customers, new customers, shiny new things, new marketing tools, new courses. Is there anything more important in your business that you should be focusing on right now?
[00:08:10] And the increase in cash for this business because obviously cash gets taken up in different areas would be at least an 80k surplus of extra cash. So that's the value. Guys, you can stop watching, reading, listening now if you want to, but I want to take you to how we want to work with people to double their profit in 25. It might take a bit longer, but we want to give people the blueprint for their business to make it more likely you are going to double your profit. Because the truth is a lot of people going to watch this and take no action. And we are all about helping people get results in their business.
[00:08:50] So this brings me to our new specialist program for 2025 which I am personally rolling out.
[00:09:00] So I'm personally going to roll out the double your profit blueprint and work with people on a one to one basis. There's a lot of stuff that needs to happen behind the scenes and I'm going to walk you through our three kind of main steps in, in terms of the process to double your profit. The 555 method is just the starting point. We look at that to see if there's any quick wins and where to focus our attention. But just going to really quickly walk you through some of the other things we do because it's quite intensive because like I said, anything that gives you amazing results is going to take a lot of effort really. So step one is we do an audit of your profit. So we, you know, we've already walked through the 555 review and that's a big part of everything. But we're profit first accountants so we already help people increase their profit. We don't always double their profit, but we've got benchmarks, we've got a proven system that's Worked for hundreds of thousands of people in the UK and across America also. So we use the profit first system benchmarks to give you a strategy in terms of what we should be aiming for for your business. We also pay attention to your industry. So if you're in the gym sector, the coffee sector, you're in the construction industry, we don't just make up the numbers, we look at what's possible. We don't want to be limited by those numbers, but we do pay attention to your particular industry. We then create a custom profit target for you. We're not just going to rely on the profit first benchmarks, we're going to create a personalized plan. Think about it as getting in financial shape, like going to the gym. You get a plan specific for you with a nutrition plan and the workouts for your business. So we're going to create the profit plan essentially fit for your business. We then go through all of your expenses. You know, I've helped people literally in one meeting save £13,000 off their expenses, which in this particular example it was £60,000 worth of sales in terms of the impact it had on their bottom line because the 13k savings went straight to the bottom line, increase their profit. They would have needed to increase their sales by 60k to have the same effect. So do you want to just keep on chasing revenue for the sake of chasing revenue? For the record, I love growing. We've just rebranded to grow accountants. We believe in growth, but I don't want you to rely on growth to be profitable and to reward yourself as the owner and to hire better team members and basically have a better business. But we do a deeper expense analysis and we distinguish between is it a nice have, is it a must have expenses expense, is it an investment? So for example, you might be investing in marketing. So we really happily clarify your different types of expenses.
[00:11:48] So it's a six week process. By the way, A lot happens behind the scenes. We have meetings at the beginning and then we do a lot of work in between. We then do some of the more analytical analysis in terms of how can we optimize your profit even more. We don't just want to rely on the 555, we look at your client segmentation. Many of you have probably heard about the 8020 paretta principle, that 20% of your customers can often give you 80% of the benefit and the financial impact. If you look at planes, the first class is probably 20% of the plane and it's probably 80% of the income for that plane. And we need to think about our business. What's the top 20% of our customers, top 20% of our services in terms of profitability? We help you look at your pricing model to see if there's any potential to increase the pricing. We help you look at the pricing culture in your business. Often, you know, the owner has all of these ideas, but the team is lagging. The team is not helping you push forward in terms of profitability. So profit first is a cultural change in your business and we help identify any gains and wins there. We look at sales and marketing efficiency. You know, some of the expressions that the fortunes in the follow up. We help you identify if you do X, Y and Z, what impact can that have in your have on your business. We help you look at your conversion rates in terms of your prospect to becoming customers. We look at your repeat customers, how much are they spending with you? We and then we help you track a dashboard and a KPI system. And when we talk about KPIs, scorecards, dashboards, we keep it simple, guys. We're talking three, probably three to seven metrics that you know what you should be doing every single week in your business to drive results and get you closer to these profit numbers we're talking about. Finally, probably after the first 30 days, we then go through the implementation plan review in terms of what happens next. Too many times I've seen people be given a plan and nothing happens. It's the same with business plans. Most people should have a business plan. The problem is they think it's too much effort. They think it should be 8 pages, 15 pages and it should be full of jargon like you're giving it to the bank. The truth is your business plan only needs to be one or two pages. So we will give you a plan and we will walk you through the implementation in terms of what you need to do to get these results. We want you to get the results. We don't want you just to read it and do nothing. We don't want to say that's amazing, that sounds good. And you don't do anything. We really want you to honestly increase your profit by up to 100%.
[00:14:31] Even if you increase your profit by 50%, I'm sure it's going to be worth your time, energy and investment of your resources.
[00:14:40] The optional upgrade post doing this program review is if you want us to keep on meeting you, to hold you accountable. That's the profit accountability sessions. So I know one of the biggest challenges of being a business owner is there's no one to hold us accountable. You know, we've got, we might have a team of customers or probably our customers hold us accountable to some extent. Extent. But who's going to make sure you do that thing this week, next week, next month? So there's the option for us to meet you on a regular basis to hold you accountable, which just increases your chances of hitting these numbers. So what's the investment? What's the guarantee? So the guarantee is the investment with us if you don't see the opportunity to get three times our investment. So whatever it's going to cost to work with us, if you don't think that we've identified three times that number in extra profit in your business and you don't believe that you're going to get those results and it's not worth it and it's not possible.
[00:15:44] You can pay us what you want if you think it's been worth nothing. Pay us nothing if you think it's been worth half of what we said we wanted the investment with us to be, pay us half. Most people that work with us when increasing their profit do get results. But, but that's the guarantee there for you because we know this works. And essentially what we're going to do is create your own custom roadmap for you to hit these numbers. Hi guys. So I just want to thank you for watching the how to double your profit blueprint. So I just want to talk about the offer for people to work with me on a one to one basis for the first few months of 2025. So as I said, I haven't got the capacity to work with dozens of people. So I'm going to work with a maximum of six people to create your blueprint over six week period of how to double your profit. It's a roadmap, it's a blueprint. You have a practical strategy, it's not some shiny new fancy marketing trick. We are accountants, you know, we're not some business coaches promising you all these special marketing techniques. We know what works and it's all based in financial foundations. We're profit first certified. So we've got the toolkit, we've got the process. And if you feel that you've got a business that's got the potential but you're not unlocking that potential. But you've got a good business. We can't take a bad business and make them great, but we can take a good business and make them great. And most people just leak in profit. So if you've got the foundations of a good business. And also, you've been in business for over two years, you're turning over more than £100,000. And more importantly, you've got the ambition and mindset to grow your business and you want to be more successful. You want to make more profit than this one to one program with myself could be for you. You just need to book in at the bottom of this page. Just click the button book in for a call, we'll have a chat and I'll see if you're a good fit for this program. If you are, I would love to help you, but I can only help a handful of people. So the sooner you book in, the quicker we can figure out if it's the right thing for you and your business.
