How To Troubleshoot Your Business

Transcription

How can you be the detective of your own business? How can you troubleshoot your business when maybe it’s not going as right as you’d like it to be? Well that’s what we’re going to talk about on today’s Healthpreneur podcast.

Troubleshooting your business, knowing your blind spots, and coaching

You’ve got your business and let’s say things are not really working out as good as you hope. What do you do? Well you only know what you know, right? So that’s why I’m here to give you a bit of perspective and a bit of wisdom and a bit of 30,000 foot view to help you navigate some of those issues.

Here’s why this is important, because if you don’t know your blind spots, you’re going to run into problems with your business, okay? So if you are running your business and you don’t know why you’re not generating the income you want to generate, that’s a big problem. That is a big problem that you need to fix. If you don’t know how to do that, that’s going to be an issue, right?

Or, let’s say that your expense are higher than you want and your profit’s not there and you’re looking at … you’re trying to figure out, “Where did the money go?” And if you don’t know where those leaks are, then again, that’s going to be an issue because you’re going to very quickly run out of business. So the challenge is having the wherewithal to know what to look at and where to look and this is very challenging sometimes, and this is why one of the most important, number one recommendation I can make to you, is you have to be working with a coach. It’s really simple. If you’re a coach and you’re watching this and you don’t have your own coach, you’re a bit of a hypocrite, let’s just be honest, right?

I have two coaches right now and I’ve had at least one coach every single year for the past eight years of my business. I’ve invested more than half a million dollars in coaching, events, masterminds, et cetera. I don’t say that to brag, but I say that because the more that I invest in coaching, the more I’m able to grow as a person and the more my business grows, and the more we’re able to help others. So quite honestly again, if you’re a coach and you’re not working with your own coach, you should not be coaching other people. You defy the logic of coaching. By you not coaching with somebody else, you’re essentially telling your clients, “Hey, coach with me because I know everything, but I don’t need my own coach.” Do you see the disconnect there? So I just want to just get that off my chest because I think that’s way too rampant in our world of coaching.

It’s like, “Hey, I’m the best coach but I actually don’t have my own coach.” Okay, that’s a bit of … do you see the disconnect issue, right? So let’s just talk about that. Number one is you have to have a coach because you only know what you know. If you’re driving and you can’t see your blind spot and you decide to change lanes, well that’s going to be an issue if there’s a car coming there. That’s why a lot of cars nowadays have blind spot indicators, where at least the side view mirror will start to blink and flash if there is someone coming there.

How to get certainty and speed in your business

So a coach is kind of like that blind spot indicator, who is going to say, “Hey whoa, whoa, whoa, before you go there, check this out. Just double check.” Or, if you’re a little bit stuck and you don’t know where to go, somebody who’s been there before can really show you the way. It’s like, “Listen if you don’t know what you don’t know, you only know what you do know.” So if you’re working with a coach who … First there’s two important things to consider when working with a coach. Number one, they have already created the results you want and number two, their core values or philosophy is in line with yours because there’s a lot of people that can help with money, but do you align with their core values, yes or no? That’s up to you. So I would only align on those two criteria.

So if they’ve shown that they have done this before, then they’ve obviously been able to overlook, or not overlook but circumvent, some obstacles that many other people behind them might be dealing with. So they’ve gone down this path and they recognize that over here on the right, there’s a pothole. On the left there was this little snake trap. Over here there was this little ditch and now, you’re coming behind them but they’re not giving you any guidance because you’re not working with them yet. So you on your own are having to fall into the pothole, fall into the ditch and figure that out on your own.

Well if you have the coach working with you, almost like a sherpa, then you guys walk side by side together, the coach is showing you, “Hey, watch out over there, don’t go there, it’s not a good thing, it’s a ditch, you’re going to fall and break your leg. Instead, go this way.” That is why having a coach is so important because a coach is going to buy you certainty and speed. Those are the two biggest things you’re going to get from having a coach. So they’re going to show you exactly what’s not working, how to improve it and how to move forward. So that’s number one in terms of the importance of having a coach and why it’s important to be able to troubleshoot your business because trying to troubleshoot your business on your own with your limited knowledge of what you know about your business is challenging.

So let’s just say that you are working with a coach, or you’re not, but let’s just say that you have some degree of wisdom around the moving pieces or the moving parts of your business. So the first thing is your business model ideally should be simple. Now, my health and fitness business is anything but simple, it’s very complicated, a lot of moving parts, way too many funnels, way too many products, 95% of which could be blown up and it wouldn’t impact our business at all. So the number one thing I can recommend to you, I mean other than coaching obviously, is to simply your business.

Why simplifying leads to better troubleshooting

Boil it down to honestly less than a handful of moving parts. Our Healthpreneur business is very simple, we’ve got four moving parts, that’s about it. So we’ve got our Perfect Client Pipeline that generates 95% of our revenue and then I do some stuff that produces content.

So it’s pretty straightforward. Then obviously there’s the delivery in terms of how we coach our clients, which is another issue, which is looking at how we deliver our coaching to our clients but we’re not doing a thousand different things, we don’t have … we have two products. We have two programs, we’ve got our workshop and our masterminds, that’s it. We don’t have $97 courses, we don’t have lead magnets, we don’t have 1,200 funnels that we have to worry about and optimize. We don’t have any of that stuff and I think if you have any of that stuff, I would strongly suggest blowing it up if it’s not working.

“Okay Yuri, well I think it’s working.” Here’s how you know it’s working, look in your bank and if what you see in your bank is not what you want, it’s not working, let’s just be very honest and stop sugar coating the truth, cut the shit and just be honest with yourself, “What I’m doing is not working.” Or, “I’m crushing it.” It’s delusional thinking like, “Oh but this is going to turn around, I feel like this is the year. I’m starting to get some traction.” Look, listen, that might happen and it might happen in the next five or 10 years, I don’t know. It might happen sooner, I hope it does, but if you’ve been doing this for any amount of time and you’re not where you want to be, you have to do something different because most of you watching this are not following the right strategy.

How I troubleshoot and help others track their numbers

If you are working with us, and this is going to sound really arrogant. If you are working as one of our clients, you are following the right strategy. You are doing the right thing and now you just have to stay committed to the path. “How do I know it’s the right thing?” Because number one, I would not put all of my money on black if I didn’t believe black was the winner. I’m all in with what we’re doing and the reason I’m all in is because I’ve done everything else. I’ve done everything else. The affiliate marketing, the funnels, the book launches, the funnel hacking. Whatever you’re thinking of doing or you’re doing, I’ve probably done it over the past 13 years now. Some of it’s worked, some of it hasn’t, some of it takes a long time, some of it works quicker and what we help our clients with is what I believe to be the most impactful and the fastest way to grow a profitable coaching business.

So if you’re watching this, you’re one of our clients, hey just stay on the path, you’re doing the right thing. For everyone else, if you’re not one of our clients and you’re watching this or listening to this and you’re like, “Man, I’m not really getting the results I want.” Well you got to look at the strategy, you got to look at the strategy and you’ve got to understand, is it too complicated, is it producing results? If it is too complicated and not producing results, you need a better, simpler model. A really good book called The One Thing, I can’t remember who the author is, it boils this down to you just got to focus on one thing, do it really well and the simpler the better.

See, I believe that people who make things complicated don’t really know what they’re talking about. It’s the people who are able to simplify complexity who I believe are the true masters. If you’re watching this, you’re probably a master when it comes to your health or fitness expertise. You’re able to simplify complexity for a lot of people but when it comes to your business, your business might be a frigging buffet of whatever, a lot of complexity. Listen, I’ve been there man, I’ve been there. I’ve gone down the road of massive complexity. That’s why when we started Healthpreneur years ago, I said to myself, “I will never do that again. Knowing what I know now, here’s what I would do instead.” And this is exactly what we do.

So your second step to troubleshooting your business is to simplify it, okay? Less is more, trim away the fat, get rid of all the nonsense that’s not working. The third thing is to really know … If you’re in a boat, so imagine you’re in a boat and you’re paddling away. You’re paddling away, you’re paddling away but the boat is just not going anywhere. You have to have the wherewithal to look down and see where the holes are that are allowing the water to come into the boat and forcing you to sink. So you have to be able to identify what the moving parts are in your business, what the needle movers are and you have to … This comes back down to knowing your numbers. You have to know your numbers because if you aren’t tracking your numbers, well you are not measuring what really matters in your business.

So I’ll give you a great example. So this past week I was looking back over our data. We have a score card that we track every single week. Looking back over the past two months, I’m looking at our trends, ROI, all of our critical numbers, and I notice something interesting. I was like, “Huh, why would … ” This week was amazing and this week was amazing as well and then we had a bit of a slump. We had a little bit of a … I mean, not a major slump obviously but compared to what it was before. I said, “What’s going on there?” So I put on my detective hat and I said, “Okay, Mr. Detective, what is going on that’s causing this little downturn?” So I thought of all sorts of different things and then I cross-referenced those theories to eliminate any other possibilities.

I said, “Okay, I thought it was this but well, compared to this that actually doesn’t make sense.” So you actually become a scientist. You’re split testing theories. So what I find was that there was one really interesting component in our pipeline that was a simple fix and that when I looked at the conversion rates and numbers in the rest of the pipeline, it came down to that one little piece and it’s almost like the plumber coming to your house. Famous story, the plumber comes to the house to fix a busted pipe and does it in about five or 10 minutes, give the invoice to the client and it’s like 300 bucks. The clients like, “What the hell? You were here for five or 10 minutes.” “Yeah on the invoice, here’s the breakdown. Fixed pipe … ” whatever it was, “20 bucks, 10 years of going to school to know where to look for the broken issue, 300 bucks.” Whatever that analogy of that story is.

That’s the thing is when you’re able to have the know-how and the knowledge to look at where are things breaking down and you can fix that, that becomes really, really interesting because here’s the way most people approach this. Their pipeline isn’t working, or their funnel isn’t working, so because they don’t understand how to fix their own problem, they start doing other things. They start building more stuff. They start creating the next funnel, the next challenge, the next lead magnet and all they had to do was plug the one leak in the boat, but they didn’t know where the leak was so they couldn’t fix it because they weren’t tracking their numbers and they couldn’t see the leak.

So if you’re not tracking your numbers, I want you to start and I’m going to give you three numbers to look at. Number one, you have to look at new leads coming in. Leads coming in, calls booked, however you want to determine leads. Number two is your revenue, and number three’s your profit. Those are three really important metrics you need to look at, leads, revenue and profit. Everything else is kind of secondary but those are three really important metrics to look at and if you’re not tracking those on a weekly basis, you will run into problems.

So I want you to become, whether you’re structure organized or not, I want you to become maniacal when it comes to tracking your data. I hate numbers. I don’t want to look at spreadsheets, I don’t want to look at P and L statements but I can’t turn a blind eye to that stuff just because I don’t want to because what happens when you do that is you run into issues with the IRS, or in our case, the CRA in Canada, because you’re not paying attention to how much you owe in tax. You run into issues with your ad spend for instance. You think you’re doing well but you’re really not and you’re blowing money, or there may be opportunities that you’re not taking advantage of because you’re not aware of what the numbers look like. So it’s really important you get this stuff dialed in.

Get a coach, simplify your business, and know your numbers

So let’s recap the three things you need to troubleshoot your business. Number one is you need to have a coach, 100%. Number two is you need to simplify your business so that when you are looking at number three, knowing your numbers, you’re not looking at a thousand different variables, you’re looking at a handful. Those are the three things you need to really help troubleshoot your business and make things better moving forward, okay? So I hope this serves you well. If it has, well you know what to do and I’ll see you in the 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. 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, 7-Figure Health 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.