Transcription
Most business owners are doing about 20 jobs inside the business. And that right there is why it feels so hard. You're doing the work. You're managing the people. You're sorting invoices. You're sending out the emails. You're putting out whatever fire popped up this morning. And somewhere beneath all of that, you're supposed to be finding the next client and closing them as well. So, you work all day every day and you still feel like when you go to bed, you are behind. You're chasing your tail and you're never quite catching it.
But here is the thing. Business owners who actually grow their businesses, the ones who seem calm, the ones who seem to have it handled, the ones that look like they work less than what you do but earn a lot more. Well, they're not doing 20 jobs. They're doing just four. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly what those four jobs are and why they are the only ones that move your revenue forward and how focusing on them is going to let you grow faster whilst taking a huge amount of stress off your plate.
All of this is because there is one thing that separates business owners who break through versus the ones that stay stuck. And it's this. You are not an employee in your own business. You are the owner. And these two should be completely separate jobs.
Now, when you started out, you had no choice, right? You had to deliver the work. You had to do your books, do your accounting, you had to answer the phone, you had to chase sales, you had to do all of this all at once. And that's pretty normal when someone first starts out running a service-based business. That's how most businesses begin. You did everything because there's no one else or no other systems to help get the work done.
But somewhere along the way, the business grew and you kept the same old habits. You kept doing everything. You still treat yourself like the most senior employee in the business rather than the owner of it. And the most expensive version of this, the one that almost nobody notices, is that you're still treating sales and revenue like a task that you'll get to when you've got a spare minute after everything else that needs doing rather than the key part and focus of your job as the business owner.
And with that, let me ask you something. If you hired someone to deliver your service and you found out that they were spending half of their week trying to do bookkeeping rather than the thing that you actually hired them for, you'd have a word with them, right? You'd be pretty pissed off. You'd pull them to one side and you'd go, "Hey, listen, mate. That's not your job. Focus on what I'm paying you to do."
And it's no different for you. Your job as the business owner is to build a business that generates clients, then delivers your service, and it does it all predictably. And that is it. And anything that isn't moving you towards that is by any definition you not doing your job.
And now I know what you're thinking, right? You might be thinking, "Well, I hate sales. I don't really want to do sales. I'd rather I'd rather put it off even though I know it's important." And that is exactly the belief that I want to break in this video because how you feel about sales is irrelevant. In fact, if you feel anything about sales at all, then it just means you've not built a system yet that takes all of the sales stress and the the the pressure revenue generation off your shoulders. And importantly for you, building this sales system is one of your four key jobs that you have as a business owner. Okay?
So, your first job is to build the sales system. And the best way that I've got to explain what I mean by this is to think about how most business owners actually sell. They sell by ear. There's no written process. There's just you improvising deal by deal, doing whatever feels right in the moment based on the last conversation that you had. One client you followed up twice and then ignored them. Another potential customer you forgot about for three weeks before you got back to them. One you quoted on your initial discovery call. Another you sent a proposal four days later. It all kind of works, right? It all kind of works sort of most of the time, but it only really works when you're the one doing it.
And this is because this entire spiderweb of a sales process that you're currently using lives in your head. And that is the problem. A business where the selling only exists inside the business owner's head isn't a business with a sales system. It's a business with a very tired and probably pissed-off owner.
So, the first and most important job you've got as a business owner is to get all of this out of your head and onto paper or onto a screen. The goal is to build a system that a salesperson could follow if you hired one and they walked into your business and you wanted them to drive revenue not three, six months from now, which is the usual ramp-up time for a salesperson in the service industry. No, if you wanted them to drive revenue tomorrow.
And all this is probably a lot simpler than what it seems. You just got to map out every step that a client goes through from the first time that they hear about you to the moment that they pay their invoice and get it all documented. You know, who do you speak to first? Or how do they come across you and your website and your brand and then become a lead? What do you say to them? What are the series of questions that help them understand their problem and then position you as a solution to that problem? What happens after a call goes well? What happens after that prospect eventually goes quiet? Write the whole thing down and try and build a straight line of sequential activities that need to be done for the buyer to complete their buyer's journey and to start working with you.
And the goal here is to build a system that then means that the entirety of the sales process isn't randomly improvised every time you engage with a new prospect. And when you do that, two things happen. The first thing is that sales stops depending on your mood and your memory. So it stops being the thing that you just didn't get around to this week. It just runs the same way over and over and again. It becomes immune to your emotions whether you're feeling good, bad, sharp, or slow.
The second thing is that the system becomes a process, a series of standard operating procedures that can be handed on to someone else. And this matters an awful lot if you want to grow your business. I'm going to come back to that in a second. But because you can't delegate a process that lives in your head, you need to get it written down. You need to get it systematized.
And this is one of the first things that we do when people come through my sales.com academy mentorship. I just went through this process literally last week with a bloke called Jim. He sells a series of high-tech engineering services to the aviation market. And he's been stuck at around $50,000 a year or so for about a decade at this point in revenue. And why is that? Well, it's because every single opportunity that came his way over the past decade, well, it took him 10 times longer to manage, to sell, to propose, to close than it should have done because he thought wrongly. He thought that he needed a bespoke approach to every single client that he worked with. When the reality is that over the course of a one-to-one call that we did and then a couple of consulting calls over the rest of the week, we pulled his entire sales process out of his head. We removed all the dumb parts that he was doing that he didn't need to do, the buyer didn't care about either, and now he's got a seamless step-by-step plan for the next prospect that comes into his funnel to run through. He feels much more confident about the process, and then his buyers are going to have a much better experience as well. So, his conversion rate absolutely is going to skyrocket on the back of this exercise as well.
So, build the system first and get it out of your head. And that is the number one job for business owners.
Now, job number two is what makes sure that the sales system is actually giving you the data to improve it because you can't track a process if it's invisible. And the best way that I can explain this is to think about driving at night at high speed with no speedometer, with no fuel gauge, with nothing in front of you. Sure, you know that you're moving, right? The car's going forward, but you've got no idea how fast you're going, how much fuel you've got left, or you're going to crash into something that's in front of you if your headlights aren't working either. You're just driving and you're hoping for the best.
And that's exactly how most business owners run their sales system. They're moving, you know, work's coming in, they're driving a bit of revenue, people are getting paid, and it's not too much of a stress from that front. But when people join my mentorship and I ask them, "What's actually in your pipeline right now? What's likely to close this month? What's gone quiet? What is your total pipeline value?" and then a series of calculations that we do to reinforce these numbers. Well, they can't tell you. You get this blank stare every time. There is no dashboard. There's no accountability. People just run along and they have a feeling about things. And these feelings change depending on whether they're having a good week or a bad week.
And that right there is where this feast and famine cycle that most service businesses come from. It's not bad luck if your sales go up and down and up and down. It's not the market. It's that you can't see what's coming. So, you can't do anything about it until it's already too late. And then you go into panic mode and drum up a bunch of revenue to survive.
So, the second job, job number two for business owners is to make your sales system measurable. You need to put some numbers on it. You need to know how many conversations you're having each week. How many of these leads to a discovery call? How many opportunities are stuck at the decision phase? How many close? What you need is a dashboard, a CRM, heck, even just a spreadsheet. For some small businesses, a spreadsheet. If you're doing less than a million dollars a year, a spreadsheet might do the job for you right here.
Because all we're trying to do is achieve this transformation where we're going from having a feeling about the data, the results, the reality that we're living in versus having actual actionable data again on a screen in front of us. And this is the thing that every business owner that I work with, they don't say this outright most of the time, but they secretly want it. They want the ability to sit down with a coffee at the beginning of the month and look at the numbers and actually know what's coming instead of guessing, instead of lying awake at 3:00 a.m. on a weekend trying to do pipeline math in your head of if this deal comes in and that one doesn't look very good and I forgot about this one and trying to get everything to align, all the stars to align.
Instead, we just build a dashboard or use a CRM or even a spreadsheet. And you can then you can just give yourself a pat on the back every month when you sit down and really study it because all of the hard work for this month's cash has already been done. That revenue generation has been done in weeks and months previous and you get to again pat yourself on the back and just look at the you ponder on what you're going to buy with all that incoming cash.
So job number one, you build the system. Job number two, you make it measurable so you can actually see it and action it as well. Which then leads us straight into job number three that business owners have got to focus on because now that you've got a system and you can see it working, the next question is who's going to be running it? Okay?
So job number three is to build the team that runs the system so that you can stop being the bottleneck to your revenue generation and your future financial security and wealth. And look, just think how dumb it is to tie the amount of cash that you're going to take home each year to the number of hours that you have in a day. The business owner who closes every single deal hasn't built a business. They built themselves a very stressful job that's masquerading as a profitable limited company.
So job number three for business owners is to take the sales system that you built in job one and now that's all documented and it's all working. Time to pass it on to someone else or at least part of it. Pass it on to someone else. And this is exactly why the order of these jobs matters as well because you couldn't do this back when the sales process lived in your head. There would be nothing to hand over.
And this is the stress, right? And some business owners will hire a salesperson or five salespeople over the course of a decade and they won't have any success with them. It's because you're expecting that person to have, without massive amount of friction, without them stressing, without them pissing you off. You're hoping that they're going to be able to pull the sales process out of your head and do all that work for you. Obviously, this doesn't work unless you've got an extremely talented salesperson that can do some of this workload for you.
But now there's a process. You can train someone to follow it. And they can either literally drive revenue whilst you sleep or hang out with your kids or spend time with your hobbies. They're still going to be driving revenue and building your wealth. Or more likely than not, they're going to be able to drive revenue whilst you get on with other things in the business.
And when you do that, two things change. You get your time back because all the deals that are in the pipeline right now, they don't have to engage with you to progress. And also, the business can finally grow past you as the bottleneck because it's no longer capped by how many conversations you can have in a week. And that isn't even a real constraint either. That then comes down to how much energy do you have? How do you feel? What's going on with your personal life, family? There's all these complications that come. It's not as easy to say, well, I've got 10 hours in a day. I can do 10 conversations. It becomes a lot more nuanced and complicated with that.
But again, once that process is in place and you can hand parts of it or the entirety off to someone else, it becomes a lot more simple from your side as to the steps that are required to keep growing revenue past the point that you are right now.
But with all that said, let's keep going because there is a fourth job and this is the one that quietly decides whether the other three jobs actually get implemented and how successful they are at growing your revenue. So here is the truth. You can build the perfect sales system. You can make it measurable. You can hire a team to run it and it can still fall apart. And the reason why it may fall apart is the same every single time. And that reason is you.
And this might be the most useful part of this entire video. Imagine a plant growing in a pot. Well, that plant can only grow as big as the pot is going to allow it to because once the roots fill the pot, then the plant just stops growing. It doesn't matter how nutrient-dense the soil is or what plant food you give it or how much you water it. Once those roots hit the edge of that container, the plant growth has been contained.
And your business is the plant and you, the owner of the business, are the pot. The skills, the habits, the way of thinking, the mindset, the limiting beliefs that you have right now, that's what got you to couple hundred grand, half a million, a couple of million dollars in revenue, wherever you are right now. But those skills are not the same that's going to take your business's revenue to that next level. The business owner who can run a business that does five million a year is a completely different person to the business owner who is stuck at $500,000 a year in revenue. They might not be smarter. I know plenty of business owners that make a ton of money who are not all that smart. They might not be luckier. They're just a person who is growing their business in a bigger pot.
So job four is to work on yourself constantly, consistently over a long period of time. You should always be asking yourself, how am I holding the business back? And the answer is, and I say this in my consulting, the answer is different for everyone. For some business owners, it's that they genuinely can't stop doing the delivery because that's the thing that they love. And selling feels like a chore, and so it's always pushed off into the background and never happens. Obviously, inevitably, if you do that long enough, you're going to end up with no clients to deliver to. That's the real problem here.
For some business owners, it's that they avoid the numbers because the numbers strip away how they feel about their situation and they just don't want to face the reality that is in front of them. For some business owners, it's a belief that sits deep in the back of their mind in their subconscious. And until that belief goes, this limiting belief, there is no selling system that's going to stick because they're just going to quietly, unconsciously sabotage it when it is implemented.
And this is the interesting thing that I see when I work with business owners. They often join the mentorship thinking that they need their sales systems building out and they need coaching on that front. But what I often find is that once I help them work out a few mental game issues, do a bit of consulting both one-on-one in the group coaching call in the community, they find that the rest of their sales bottlenecks disappear and they were the problem in the first place.
So figure out where you're getting in your own way and be honest about it. If you're struggling to uncover what that thing is, you don't have to work with me. There's plenty of people out there to go and work with. But get some outside help to understand what those issues are and then go to work leveling up your sales skills, your business skills, your mindset because when you grow, the pot gets bigger and your business is going to grow to fill it.
So they are the four jobs that you as a business owner should be focusing on. Build a sales system, make it measurable, build the team to run it, and then work on yourself. And if you get those four jobs right, you're going to stop being the bottleneck. You're going to stop this super painful cycle of feast and famine and feast and famine that most service businesses go through. And you're finally going to start to make the money that you've always dreamed of.
And if you're currently doing less than 5 million a year in revenue, watch this video to learn the quickest way to get consistent revenue growth. And it's actually kind of shocking how few people know how this works.