Why You Should Grow (Not Cut) Your Expenses

Transcription

Hey, welcome back to the show. And in today’s episode, we’re be talking about why you should grow and not cut your expenses in order to grow your business.

Now, this might sound a bit counterintuitive based on a lot of the traditional thinking and teaching that we all receive in terms of financial wisdom, business growth and so forth. But I want to ask you a question. Let me ask you this. If you want to grow your business, how can you grow your business?

All the ways to grow your business

What are the ways you can grow your business? Well, let’s look at a few. We can do blogging, we can do YouTube, we can do social media posting, we could do networking events, we can do some speaking. We could, God forbid, post flyers at Starbucks. What else? We could do some joint ventures and affiliate marketing, right? So those are like the main ways that we can grow our business.

But there’s also one more way that we can grow our business. It’s actually two more ways, sorry. First obviously is paid advertising. Second is people. Now, what I want to get you to think about is that the fastest way and the most sure fire way to grow your business is by spending more money, and I know this sounds weird. Let me, just hear me out here. Let’s put the paid advertising and team to the side for a second, because those are going to involve investment. They’re going to involve you spending money, right? Now, if you don’t spend money, if you don’t grow your expenses, what else are you going to do? What? Are you going to rely on those first seven rates, different options that I just gave you, blogging, YouTube, Instagram, social media, wherever, and you can do all that stuff, okay? You certainly can, but I need to let you know something is that the reality is that’s going to take you a very, very long time to get results from those endeavors.

How to navigate social media advertising and why you won’t grow for free

We know that Facebook has publicly told us that organic reach on Facebook is less than 2%, which means if you post a recipe of yours or a post of yours on your Facebook fan page, less than 2% of people are going to see that. What that means is this, if you have a thousand followers, 20 of them are going to see your posts. So Facebook, which by the way owns Instagram, has told us if you want to play, you got to pay. So that’s why you need to take your business seriously. This is not some kind of hobby, this is not something you do just on a whim. Building a serious business is not easy. I don’t ever want you to think it is. It’s great to set the intention for frictionless living and removing a lot of the obstacles and that’s all good and you should, but if you’re going into business thinking, everything’s going to be for free and you’re looking for the cheap options every single time two things are going to happen.

Number one, they’re not going to be in business very long or number two, it’s going to take you 10 times longer to get where you want to get to. So the fastest way to grow your business is by spending money. Listen, you could blog, right? You can read a blog post every single day and I guarantee you no one’s going to see it. I promise you that, unless your name is doctor Oz and you have a massive platform already, nobody is going to see your stuff and that’s because Google, according to its most recent update a couple of months ago has told us that you have to be highly credentialed, highly authoritative in order to be ranked in Google. So, what’s the point of playing that game? What is the point of writing a 5,000 word blog posts that you spend hours writing that no one’s going to see?

Why it’s critical to use Facebook and when not to use it

Here’s a better option. Think of Facebook as your blog. Every single time you want to write something, put it up on Facebook, put some money behind it, and now it’s going to get in front of people. Okay? That’s the nature. That’s the game we’re playing guys. That is the reality in 2019. Facebook is your blog, Facebook is your YouTube channel, Facebook is your email list. I want you to think of that because if you think you can’t get in front of the right people, it’s because you’re looking to get in front of them in a free fashion. Obviously you can’t get in front of them because they’re not finding your stuff. So how do people find your stuff? Well, you put it in front of them. How do you put it in front of them? You have to pay. You have to pay. That is the only way you’re going to grow your business. So that’s what I’m talking about, about growing your expenses in order to grow your business.

It’s not about cutting expenses, it’s not a booklet for cheaper options. Let’s reduce our budget here. I want you to spend more, but it needs to be done intelligently. Listen, in our health business accelerator program, we help our clients do this because we know the alternatives that I just mentioned are going to take forever to see results from. So my good friend Josh Axe runs doctoraxe.com, arguably the largest health website on the planet. Then we’re getting 30 million visitors per month before Google made that algorithm change and overnight they lost 11 million visitors per month based on that one algorithm change. Now you’re not Dr. Axe, I’m not Dr. Ax. Most of us don’t have websites that are ever going to get there. I mean, my health website gets a million visitors per month, that’s pretty cool to be 10 years to build that. I don’t think you need to do that. It’s a waste of time. So if you’re getting 3000 visitors per month in your website and all of a sudden Google makes a change and now you’re down to 30, you don’t have a business anymore.

Now you might be saying, okay, well you’re already well, what if Facebook shuts my ad account down? My ads don’t get approved. Listen, that can certainly happen, but the good news is that you can get up and running again the same day. You can set up another Ad account, you can talk to Facebook. Sometimes they’ll reverse on appeal and so forth. I’ve had at least eight Ad accounts shut down in my time on Facebook. And yes, it’s frustrating, but for me it’s worthwhile because my people are on Facebook. Facebook has a billion people. If you are targeting men and women who want to lose weight, improve their health, get over her thyroid issues, regrow their hair, whatever it is, Facebook has your people. Facebook is your email list, you just have to give them a bit of money to tap into some of those people, and if you’re not willing to do that, maybe you shouldn’t be in business. Okay?

Why would you not advertise on Facebook? Let’s look at a couple of reasons why. Number one, you don’t know what to do. That’s totally fine, you should not advertise if you don’t know what to do. That’s why you should work with us because we can help you do that. Number two, is you don’t know how to set up your ads. Like you don’t know how to write ads, you don’t know what type of images to use and this goes back into point one, which is you don’t know what to do. So all of this stuff well like setting up audiences, setting up your campaign properly, all that stuff falls into I don’t know what to do. And if you don’t know what to do, then you need to work with someone who knows what the heck they’re doing, and that’s what we do every single day. 95% of our revenue is Facebook ad driven. We’ve figured a few things out, we work with some of the best ad experts in the world and as a client of ours, you get access to those people.

Second reason people would not advertise on Facebook is because they’re scared, and honestly, this is probably going to be the biggest thing holding you back in any aspect of your life, is you don’t do what you know you need to do because you are scared. What if Facebook advertising doesn’t work out? What if I lose all my money? Well, first of all, Facebook doesn’t have access to your bank account. You tell Facebook how much money you want to spend, and I would recommend starting at $10 to $15 a day. So what’s the worst thing that can happen if you ran ads for one month and you lost $300. What’s the worst thing that could happen, you lost $300? Does that mean Facebook advertising doesn’t work? No, it works because there are thousands of businesses that are crushing it on Facebook ads or using Facebook ads. What that means is that you don’t know what you’re doing or your offer isn’t strong enough. And again, if you’re trying to do this on your own, the likelihood of you succeeding, unless you’re an amazing marketer, is slim to none.

Growing your business with the right team and coaching

I would say if you’re not getting the right coaching and support, don’t even run Facebook ads if you don’t know what you’re doing. Don’t just put up a post and boost it, if you have no overarching strategy for what you’re doing. But when you do have a strategy, your goal should be, how much money can I give Facebook? How much money can I give? I can’t give Facebook enough money. Our dilemma is that we are targeting coaches within the health space. Our audience size is maybe 2 to 3 million. So the dilemma we run into is that our audience is too small and still we’re building a very successful business, but for most of you guys listening and watching to this, you’re targeting the general public. Even if it’s a niche, you’re still talking to tens of millions of people and they are on Facebook, right? So my goal is like how much money can I give Facebook?

Right no we spend about $2,000 a day on Facebook ads. I want to get Facebook more money and we have to do that very strategically because we can’t scale as rapidly as we could with a health business just based on our audience science. Right? So when you get to the point where you really have a pipeline dialed in where you know you give Facebook $1, they gave you five, you’ve won the lottery. Then you don’t have to worry about blogging. You don’t have to worry about social media, you don’t have to worry about any of that nonsense. It’s you continue doing more of what’s working and isn’t going to work right away and probably not. You’re going to have to tweak a few things. You have to figure a few things, you have to improve and fix a few leaks here and there, that’s part of the game. That’s part of the game of building a business. Okay?

If you’re expecting to be, “Okay, I got everything deployed where are my clients? Oh, they are not coming in?” This doesn’t work. No, no, no, it doesn’t work like that. It does not work like that. You have to be in this for the long haul. You have to understand what goes into building a business. Rome wasn’t built in a day, right? They probably had all sorts of issues building the coliseum. Oh my God, this marble doesn’t fit. It’s too expensive, it’s too heavy. How do we put it in here? Whatever, but you make it happen. You make it happen and you have to focus on your dream because your dream is what matters, right? And when you run into those obstacles, you have to come back to your why. So number one is we need to be spending more money on advertising. And again, you have to be doing so in a way that’s intelligent.

I’m not saying give money to Facebook because I’m telling you to advertise on Facebook. I don’t care, I have no vested interest in Facebook other than the fact that it has all the clients that we’re looking for and it has all the clients you’re looking for as well. So if you’re looking to get more clients, attract more clients. If clients attraction is your biggest problem, your biggest problem is that you’re not advertising on Facebook and you’re not doing that because you don’t know what to do or you’re scared. Okay? So please get the guidance and coaching to help you do that. Second way we can grow our expenses is by hiring people, right? Hiring people buys you speed, advertising on Facebook or any other platform for that matter buys you speed. So if you want to make $100,000 a year, you can do that. And for most people organically, that’s going to take them at least two years unless you’re again, super, super savvy marketers.

But for most people, if you want to go from zero to 100, you can do that in a couple months. There’s no speed limit on growing your business. It’s all up here in your head, okay? The only limiter on your growth is it’s in your head. Oh, it’s not possible. There’s no way I can make a million dollars in a month. Well, there is, right? There is, but you have to believe that and you have to be able to take the risk. You have to become more confident with your offer to be able to put more money behind that. I’m not saying you should do that in month one, but it’s possible. So Facebook advertising will buy you speed. Same with hiring people. You hire great people to come in and do the work for you. Do the work with you, other coaches, designers, developers, and like whatever, like whatever you need help with your business. You have two options, you could figure it out all by yourself and burn yourself out and start to hate your work.

Or number two is you find other people who are great at what you hate doing and you have them do the work and you pay them for that. And you’re going to get to a point in your business where you’re going to take less profit outs for yourself, but you’re going to buy herself a lot more time. A lot more time, and there’s no right or wrong answer to that really, but I think most of us want freedom more than we want money, but in order to have freedom, you have to have money. Right? So it’s like this catch 22. I had a conversation yesterday with a lady who we had to rebook our call because something happened with her husband and she wasn’t in the right frame of mind. So I’m like, “Hey, totally fine. We’ll just book for another day.” And she said, “Listen, I really want to speak to you. I know you’re super busy.” And I’m thinking to myself, I’m not super busy.

I have a lot of free time. I make myself busy because I love what I work, but I don’t have to do anything. I could literally sit on the couch and watch TV all day long if I want it to, and maybe work a handful of hours a week. I could do that if I want it to, but I don’t because I love what I do and I want to really push the limits. So I have made the conscious decision to hire amazing people around me so that I can re-gain freedom in my life because I want to be with my kids. I want to have time to think, I want to have time to go play tennis, I want to have time to travel. I don’t want to have to be the only person who’s taking phone calls, who’s coaching clients, who’s doing everything in my business. So you should, I would say if you had to choose one of two things, if you’re at a point in your business where you’re just starting, the number one thing you can do, you’re not going to be hiring people right away, because let’s just be honest, okay?

The number one thing you can do in terms of expanding your expenses, number one is to hire a coach and I would strongly recommend you work with us if you’re a good fit. Number two, is you spend a couple dollars a day on Facebook ads. It’s not how much you spend, it’s the practice of doing so. Spend 10 to 15 bucks a day. Just have a look at what’s going on. Get more comfortable with how it all works, and in a couple of months you’ll feel like you’re like, “You know what? I’ve got this thing dialed in. I really understand this now.” And when you’re able to pay for clients like you’re doing with Facebook ads, you’ve won the lottery. That’s the holy grail of business. The holy grail of businesses is not like asking people for favors. Can you promote my stuff? Can you mention me on your summit? Like all that stuff is fine, right? But you’re not going to grow a business like that.

Yuri Elkaim:                         The holy grail of building a business is you can go into any markets, any advertising platform, spend 100 bucks, make a thousand, spend 100 bucks, make 200, whatever it is. But when you understand how to turn advertising into profit you’ve cracked the code, you have cracked the code and that’s why, that’s the only thing we help our clients do right from the get go. Because if you’re starting from scratch, you should not be wasting her time with nonsense. You need to step out of your comfort zone and spent a bit of money with Facebook to amplify our message, to get your message in front of your ideal clients and to get those clients coming into your pipeline. That’s the number one thing you should do right from day one. And I wish I had known this back in 2006 when I started. I don’t know if Facebook was around them, but I wasted way too much time. That’s time I can never get back, at least money you can get back. Time, you’ll never get back.

Growing your message and business with the Perfect Client Pipeline

So you’ve got two choices, you can waste your time doing everything for free or you can take your business seriously and invest in your business. Invest in growing your message, amplifying your message, getting your stuff in front of more people by advertising it, and doing so on a smart fashion. I’m not talking about like lead magnets and stupid $10 products, I’m talking about in our case is what we call a perfect client pipeline, all right? Getting your message in front of the right people. 95% of people we work with don’t even know who I am before they see my Facebook ads, so that’s the power of what Facebook can do for your business. And again, you have to be willing to step out of your comfort zone. And now I’m not asking you to take out a second mortgage on your house. We’re saying, “Hey, whip out your credit card. Spend $10 a day on Facebook ads.” Worse thing that happens, you lose 300 bucks a month. You going to be okay? I think you will be okay.

But what’s the upside? And the upside there is no ceiling on the upside. There is no ceiling. You could be making … Again, I’m not going to make income claims, but you can be making, you could lose 300 bucks, but you can make a hell of a lot more than 300 bucks if you know what I’m saying. Right? So you just have to get your … You got to rewire your brain around this idea of on the balance sheet of your P and L statement, you should be seeing increasing expenses and as those expenses go up, your income should go up as well. And ideally your profit should, more or less stay the same, but as you grow your company, it’s going to go down a bit based on overhead team, et cetera. But overall you’ll be in a better place and that my friend is how you grow your company, how you grow your business, how you grow your income by growing your expenses, not cutting them.

Does that make sense? If it does, terrific. If it doesn’t, I wish you all the best and please let me know how things are going in five years when you’re still doing things for free. But when you’re serious about putting on your big boy pants and playing with the big boys, then let us know. All right? So for now, hope this podcast has found you well. Hope it’s given you a bit of a wake-up call of what it takes to succeed in 2019 and beyond, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

Hey, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of the Healthpreneur podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, here’s what I’d like you to do right now. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the Healthpreneur podcast on iTunes and while you’re there, leave us a rating or review. It helps us get in front of more people and change more lives, and if you’re ready to start or scale your health or fitness coaching business, and want to start getting in front of more people working with them at a higher level without trading time for money, then I invite you to check out our free seven figure business blueprint training totally free right now and you can do so at healthpreneurgroup.com/training. For now, thank you so much for joining us. Continue to be great, do great and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.