- In this video I'm gonna share with you
the best business advice that I know
for small business owners to grow their business.
Hi gang, James Sinclair here.
I started off as a small business owner
and I suppose now I've got to be
quite a big business owner and I'm taking all that stuff
that I've learned to help grow your business.
Over 400 staff, millions of pounds worth of turnover,
let's go!
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So, in this video I wanna share with you
the biggest things that I've learnt going from
a small business to a medium sized business
to a bigger business.
The actual strategies that I've used that actually work
and I'm really excited to share them with you,
I'm very passionate about sharing them with you
because I know this stuff works.
It's tried, tested, repeated, practiced,
put in trial in law of entrepreneurship.
So I'm just gonna bring in this flip chart right now,
over here, as we go through the salient points.
Number one.
If you really wanna earn, you've gotta learn.
You've gotta learn before you earn.
How many books are you reading?
I guarantee you if you read a book a week
on entrepreneurship, marketing and business
from people that are tried, tested and done it,
that is going to accelerate the growth of your learning.
Make sure that you've got a podcast.
If you're in the car, learning time,
get a podcast on from a business,
there's so much great content out there.
Literally fill your brain with all this great stuff.
If you don't like watching, if you don't like reading,
sorry listening, then you can watch on YouTube as well.
This is a great channel, make sure you hit subscribe
'cause we're bringing out great new content all the time.
If you really wanna do this stuff,
if you really wanna earn a decent business,
you wanna grow a decent business and you've got
responsibility to your family, your employees,
you've got to continuously learn.
Don't be the big headed idiot that thinks
they know everything.
Make sure that you're filling your brain
with brand new content all the time and
reminding yourself, because here's the big thing
I've learned about business owners,
I call it R&R.
You've gotta refresh and remind.
It's like diets.
No-one needs to pay for Weight Watchers and
Slimming World, they know if they eat less chocolate
and exercise they're gonna lose weight but people
go every week because they need to be reminded
and they need to be refreshed on the stuff
that actually works.
Religions have been doing it for years,
that's why people go to church every Sunday
'cause they refresh and remind in the culture of the church
and this is what business owners need to do.
Read the same stuff.
If you find a brilliant business book,
you'll find you'll start going off track.
Re-read that business book, it'll put you back
on track again.
It's 'cause human beings always go off and they
go into new tangents and you wanna make sure
you're on the right track.
That's why refreshing and reminding stuff
on the stuff that you know and learning from
great business leaders that have done it
is the quickest way to earn more.
So let's refresh on that.
Learn before you earn.
The more you learn, the more you earn.
Next thing, this is the big one,
this is the big one, big, big, big, big.
It's marketing beats doing.
Most business owners are doing their business.
They're the doers of the business.
You need to switch and become the marketeer
of your business.
Be the person the focus is on just getting customers
and employ people to do the doing.
But every now and then dive back in your business
and make sure things are on point,
make sure that service is great,
make sure that operations are great
but spend 80% of your time on actually
customer acquisition, getting customers
and 20% of your time on the operations.
If you follow this 80/20 rule,
80% of your time on getting customers,
marketing your business, you are gonna grow
faster than most people because most people
do marketing as a byproduct.
Oh, let's do some marketing,
we must go and get some more customers.
They don't focus on that stuff enough and if you
focus on the growing of your business
more than the running of your business,
oh my God, you will go into the stratosphere
faster than you ever thought possible.
So, tip number two is make sure you're the marketeer
of your business rather than the doer of your business.
Point number three is your three KPI rule.
What's he on about?
Loads of businesses, when they get to a certain size,
they end up having 48 KPIs that no-one can remember.
For me, there's three really important KPIs
that you wanna focus on.
Number one is average customer value.
I call it the ACV.
Track how much your customer's spend with you.
Very simple to do.
Get all your turnover, divided by your amount of customers,
track your average customer value and make sure
that's always on the up.
This shows you some really good things
because if you've got really good average customer value
you know that you're doing really good customer service.
Hey, there's loads of businesses,
like retail's a great one,
they have really high turnover but their
average customer value goes down because
people can't buy the stuff quick enough,
there's too many queues.
Maybe your website's got too many clicks
and it pushes your average customer value down.
You can find out loads of stuff.
You don't want your turnover just going up,
you want your average customer value going up
and by focusing on average customer value
you really find your profit within because it takes
a lot to find a customer, you wanna make sure you're
maximizing the most out of that customer
and that's how you do it, by tracking your
average customer value.
Next one; monthly profit and loss.
Most people, small business owners,
when they start, even medium sized business owners
turning millions of pounds, you go
what's the profit of your business?
They go, oh I'm just waiting for my accountant
to do my books.
What?
Are you absolutely stupid?
You should be in the position to tell your accountant
how much money you've made and how they're gonna
make that tax efficient for you.
You must produce at least a monthly profit and loss
so you know how much profit or loss you've made
in a single month so that you can review and improve
for the next month.
Some may be called them management accounts and the clue
is the word management, it allows you to
manage the business.
A monthly profit and loss is absolutely
super duper essential.
Number three is your labor to turnover ratio
and include yourself in this as the business owner
as a commercial salary.
Crucial.
Let me explain.
You wanna work out what your turnover is and
you wanna work out what you spend in labor,
and include yourself as a commercial salary
for what you would want to earn doing this job
for someone else if it's not your business,
and then you add that up and you divide it
and you wanna make sure that you're in the
industry standards for labor to turnover ratio.
Not too low, not too high.
If you're too low it usually means you have
terrible customer service, bad customer retention.
If it's too high you're never gonna be profitable.
So it's really simple, you'll find it out for industries.
Retail 13%, leisure 25%, day nurseries 50%.
Find out what it is for your industry standard,
put yourself in that on a commercial salary basis.
So if you take it by dividends and all of that stuff,
make sure you're putting yourself in as a PAYE person
just for the method of working it out
and make sure that you're in there as a commercial salary.
Most business owners are earning way less
than the commercial salary.
They're earning like a minimum wage basis.
You wanna work that out and find that acid test
so that you push yourself to do more.
Hope you've really enjoyed this video.
Hope it's gonna help you grow your business.
Thanks very much for watching.
Put some comments below.
Let me know what you think.
I really, and I do reply to the comments
so please put them below.
Hopefully you're gonna use this video to help
grow your business.
Thanks for watching the video,
I really hope you enjoyed it
to help grow your business.
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It gets better than that because you can some and see me
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for free, is in the video description.