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How To Systematize Your Business If It Isn’t Working

Remember when you first started your business and you measured time from one deadline to the next, one task to the next?

One of the biggest challenges you’ll have when you start a business is the number of tasks that you’re taking on.

You’re the expert at everything. You wear the suit and make executive decisions and chat with clients. You roll up your sleeves to make the coffee and fix the photocopier when it breaks down.

The business becomes a part of you so you are living and breathing and dreaming it from morning until night.

At this point, your friends and family are probably wondering where you’ve gone, if you can be separated from your business the way employees can be separated from their jobs. Clearly, you need to make some changes to your professional life so you can have more of a personal life. But how?

The good news is, it’s possible to systematize your business if it isn’t working. It starts with a closer look at all the roles in your company, and then deciding how you can delegate responsibilities to other people.

Watch this video on how to systematize your business so you’re working on it, not in it.

 

1. Decide What All The Aspects Of Your Business Are

In a typical internet business, for example, you have so many aspects to manage. You have content, copywriting, list building, getting traffic, having offers, technology, and finance. These are some key areas you have to focus on.

Right now, you may be working on all of the areas shown below.

You could be working on all of these areas of your business.

 

In each of these seven aspects, you may also be working on any or all of these tasks.

You could be completing all of these tasks.

 

Maybe you’ve done most of these tasks before, maybe you don’t know how to even begin doing some of these things, like a teleseminar or RSS feed.

As you expand your business, you will need some help with any of these seven areas. At this moment, let’s pause and take a look at the org chart of your business to see where you need help.

2. Draw Out An Org Chart And Decide On Roles In Your Organization

An organizational chart, or org chart, shows all the roles in your business, from you, the CEO, to everyone else in management and those with the least amount of responsibility.

This is what an org chart looks like for a typical business with one person. Now you can see why entrepreneurs seem to have split personalities. You have to do all the roles and handle all of the tasks.

No wonder you’re overwhelmed! You’re the only one in your org chart.

 

You can also see that this format cannot work over time. You cannot sustain it.

If you aren’t feeling the exhaustion already, you will. You can’t just stick your head in the sand and hope the problem will go away.

Now instead of just putting your name on all of the roles and responsibilities, like you did in the org chart above, diagram it out more clearly by role. You have several responsibilities but they all contribute to the same end objective.

As the CEO, your objective is to work on the mission. You are the leader, the conductor of the team. To turn your dreams into reality, you need to figure out what roles contribute to your mission.

Every business has four core functions: operations, finance, marketing, and people. Each function includes different responsibilities. When you’ve figured out the functions of your business, you can start clarifying expectations for each role.

Decide on roles and describe each role.

 

3. Assign Names That Clarify Your Expectations For Each Role

Define and name each position in your business but give careful consideration to each name. For example, there is an assumption of seniority when you call someone the Director versus calling someone the Sales Manager.

The way you create a title also makes a huge difference. For each position, assign a name that shows your expectations for each.

If you called someone a Marketing Manager, what do you think that person’s job would be? What if you called that same person the Chief of Revenue Generation instead? Notice how the purpose for that person changes depending on the role you assign them.

4. Systematizing Your Business Requires A Clear Plan

You are not your business. You are you. You create value in the marketplace and you create wealth for your family.

To separate yourself from your business, start delegating others for the other roles in the organizational chart. It may not happen overnight. You will still be in many of the roles when you start.

Over time, you will find someone to be your Chief of Revenue Generation. That is their role. Their responsibilities will be to generate revenue for the company, and that may include different aspects of marketing.

But to systematize your business, you must first decide on all the roles and responsibilities in your company, starting with you as the CEO. Over time, you will find people to take on those responsibilities as you delegate more tasks to other people, while you continue to oversee the mission.

This method is the first step to take so you’re working on your business, not in it.

Are you working on your business, or in it? Comment below.

The Best Strategy To Get Clients Fast

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you want to grow your business fast. But if you want high-paying clients, then you must be willing to go against conventional wisdom.

Not everyone can be your client. If you say, “Anyone is my client,” then you’re in trouble.

Many new entrepreneurs think everyone and anyone with money is a potential lead. But for you, you must be more selective.

Most advice out there recommends that you talk to everyone you know, get involved in local business communities, optimize your website, and get into as many social media platforms as possible. But what happens if you try to catch a fish with a tiny net in an enormous sea?

You’re lucky to catch a fish or two! So if you’re patient enough to grow your business slowly, if you want to talk to dozens of people to get your first client, then follow those conventional strategies that require a high degree of time and effort. Eventually, you will find your first client. But your troubles don’t end there.

You’re new and no one has heard of you, so your first client doesn’t want to pay you hundreds or thousands of dollars. You might even have to offer some advice or service for free, just to get your first testimonial. Meanwhile, your rent and your phone and electricity bills are waiting to be paid. So what can you do to cut through this slow and painful growth stage? Is there a way to fast forward this process?

Back when I was running my one-man advertising agency as a copywriter, I was trying to get clients from all over the place. I would do the work for anyone who would hire me. As long as the client breathed, they were good enough for me. Everyone was my customer.

However, over time and with more experience, I realized that to grow my business, I had to use one powerful strategy which I’m going to teach you today to get that ideal high-paying client fast.

Watch this video to learn how to grow your business faster.

The Kingpin Strategy to Get Clients

Here’s the problem. If everyone is your customer, then nobody is your customer. What I needed was that one account that would improve the quality of my clientele. I didn’t need dozens of clients paying me a few hundred each for my services.

I just needed a couple of high-ticket clients paying me thousands for the same service. My goal was to make the same income with fewer clients. So what I had to do was find the kind of client I would attract when I had more experience… and attract that client now.

When I was struggling as a copywriter, I came across a book called Guerilla Marketing. It’s a very famous book series on small business and marketing written by Jay Conrad Levinson. Now Jay has sold over 20 million books worldwide for the Guerrilla Marketing series. He was one of the most well-known educators and marketing gurus of our time before he passed away. So I approached Jay.

At the time, Jay was marketing a Guerilla Marketing Association membership. I went to his website and saw what he did so I rewrote the entire page. I sent it to the Guerrilla Marketing Association and got a reply from Jay personally. He thanked me because I had delivered value before asking for anything in return.

“Wow, you know what, young man, that’s very nice of you,” he said. He actually used the material and it helped him to generate more sales. Afterwards, I asked him, “Hey, Jay, since you’re getting value, is it okay if you give me some kind of recommendation and endorsement?” He said he was more than happy to do that. And he did.

That was my first Kingpin client.

By getting Jay Conrad Levinson, a well-known marketing guru with credibility and authority for so many small business owners, I could approach potential clients differently. I could say, “I have an endorsement from Jay Levinson who wrote Guerilla Marketing, who sold 20 million books.” That reference impressed my next client.

At the beginning of your career, when you’re  establishing credibility and reputation, don’t chase everybody. Decide on the one person or company that will launch your career and serve them.

For example, in the tech world if you could work with Google or Amazon or Microsoft you could get then get other high quality clients. Everybody else will look at that account and say, “If you’re good enough for them, you’re good enough for me.”

You skip that learning curve and grow your business much faster. You can also use this technique to draw in more customers at one time.

 

The Kingpin Strategy To Get Clients Fast

Let me give you another example of the Kingpin Strategy from a different perspective. In the United States, they have these huge events. The Learning Annex back then was doing massive conferences with 5,000 to 25,000 people using this Kingpin Strategy.

They would bring in “Kingpin speakers,” such as Donald Trump before he was president, Tony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, and Bill Clinton to draw people in.

They paid them a huge speaking fee to have them show up at the event. At the same time, platform speakers or platform closers who aren’t paid to be there will offer their programs or products. They would make a 60-minute or 90-minute pitch on stage to draw in the crowd.

These events don’t make money from 5 to 20 thousand people’s tickets.They make money from these platform closers. The event organizer would do a split with anything that the closers sell. Imagine if someone is speaking to 10,000 people and he is selling a $1,000 package.

If he sells 500 of them a day, a multi-day event would generate millions of dollars. The platform closures would get a 30 to 50 percent commission because the organizers are the ones spending all the money. The organizers made millions upon millions of dollars from these conferences going around North America, even the U.K. That’s how the business model works.

That’s the Kingpin Strategy from a different perspective. So ask yourself the question. Who is that one company, that one organization you could get that would change everything. From then on, you leverage that one person’s name or that organization’s name for the rest of your career. Before you know it, you go from a nobody to a somebody.

How will you apply the Kingpin Strategy to get new clients? Comment below.

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