As you grow your business (and heck in life) you’ll constantly face moments where you have to make important decisions. In business, it might be an amazing new opportunity but one that doesn’t align with your actual goal at the moment…in which case, you have to say no. So, how do you know what opportunities to say “yes” to and which to say “no” to? Should you hire that salesperson or project manager? Should you invest in that coach or mentor? Should you get an office? Should you move? In this video, I want to break down 3 questions you can ask yourself to make better decisions… A decision-making framework if you will… I use this all the time and hope it serves you.
Transcript / MP3
Hey, what’s going on guys, Greg here. And in this video, I want to break down how to make better decisions when it comes time to grow your agency. And I want to give a quick shout out to Alex [inaudible] from the gym secrets podcast. He, and one of his more recent podcast episodes brought up this topic, which came from a book that I read about two years ago that I’ve been meaning to read again, which is this book called the road less stupid and the road less stupid, really, as you make your way through the book, it really is teaching you to spend more time thinking and asking yourself questions on how you could grow your business. And so he was rereading this book as well, highly recommend this book to any entrepreneur far and wide. If you have not read it, we’ve even given it to our Academy clients as reading material in the past. …And what’s what came up in Alex’s podcast is, you know, this decision making criteria, three questions, you can ask yourself to make better decisions. Now, for you in your situation, in your business, you might be considering doing a number of things that you’re kind of weighing right now. And you’re not sure, you know, is it worth doing, should I do this? Um, and maybe you’re stuck in that indecision. And what I can tell you is the anxiety that you feel. This is a great quote from one of my previous mentors or one of my mentors, Brad, is that anxiety lives between the alternatives. And so if you’re kind of like deciding between a or B and like you’re sitting there, like kind of mulling it over, thinking about it and you really never get around to making the decision. It actually can do a whole lot more harm than good.So when Alex shared these three questions, it got it kind of resurfaced for me. I was like, man, I really need to share this because I know many of you right now that are watching are probably asking different types of questions that could help you kind of take your business to the next level questions. Like, should I invest in a mentor or maybe a coaching program, maybe it’s our coaching program. Maybe it’s another person’s program. Should I hire that new team member? Should we build a webinar funnel? Should we insert the thing that you are considering right now? And we get stuck in sort of this indecision and obviously that creates that anxiety. So the three questions that I want you three questions that I want you to ask yourself to really decide if you should be doing it or not really are, are very simple.And come from this book, the three questions, what is the upside? What is the downside? And can I live with it? All right. Now the two examples, the first example that I want to share with you, uh, in pulling up some notes here is, for me, I’ll say, is hiring a sales rep. Okay. So we just brought on, um, two people onto our team and bringing those people on obviously has an upside and a downside and there’s expenses involved. And it was a, it was a difficult decision to make. So here’s how I looked at that process through this lens. So should I hire sales reps upside? Well, what’s the upside of hiring a sales rep? Well, really what it came down to when we did the math was we could at least double our monthly revenue in addition to, so I was like one big, like, okay, like we’re at, we hit this wall in revenue and having these people come on would easily allow us to double our monthly revenue simultaneously.It would also decrease. Greg’s like time on sales activities by a minimum of 20 hours a week. So upside is Greg gets at least 20 hours a week back. It’s probably more close, like 25 to 30, honestly, 20 to 30 hours a week back in his time. Plus they could, we could double our revenue at a minimum when these guys get up to speed. But downside is, well, it could take, you know, two to six months to really ramp them up. And from my research and talking to different people that have gone through this process, I needed to kind of expect that my revenue would go down during this process because I’d have to train them. I’d have to get them up to speed for deals that they are closing. You know, we’re not going to hit the same volume while I’m also training these people.So the downside is we could go, you know, 30, 60, realistically 90 days without having new sales. Now there’s obviously ways to mitigate some of that. But I looked at the downside as well. Our revenue is most likely going to go down for a few months while this is happening. And then the question is, well, assuming the revenue did go down by a certain percent, you know, can I live with that, knowing that what the upside is like, am I willing to tough it out for a handful of months to get these people up to speed, to experience this upside? For me, the answer was simple and it was yes. And so we committed to bringing on and hiring and building out our sales team. And, you know, Mike and Larry are now in week five or six of onboarding and they’re doing a great job. So thankfully we didn’t a while. We’re probably going to have a few less sales this month than we did the month before. Like they’re getting deals. It’s, it’s showing hope. It’s showing promise that this was a really good decision and we’re already setting up ourselves for much bigger and better months. And Greg has gotten a lot more of his time back. So that first example was the sales reps. All right, I’m gonna change the color here. And the second example I want to give you is, is really the, the, from the agency model to the kind of call it, adding the consulting or coaching stream of revenue. All right. So, um, I tell this story a lot in 2017, we, uh, we’re still kind of a funnel building automation, marketing automation agency. And we were at this point where we were doing anywhere between like 55 and 65 K a month. And really the only way I saw past that at the time was hiring more people. And we were at about eight or nine people, and I just didn’t want to bring on more people. I came from big agency, I wanted to escape that. And so when we were stuck at that point, we had to look at well, what is the upside? What is the downside? And what is, you know, the potential that can I live with it, you know, in, in making this decision in making this transition from being full service agency, to adding a new revenue stream that is more done with you, kind of the hybrid model that we preach, which is, you know, combination of coaching, consulting, training, and execution. And I know many of you watching are probably in that place. Like you’re so stuck in fulfillment, whether you’re doing 20 K a month, 50 a month, 40 a month, 50 a month, 60 a month, wherever you’re stuck, you’re just so bogged down in client fulfillment that you don’t even know.If you can have time to add this thing and you might be asking yourself, well, I know I want to get around to this, but I don’t know if I can do this right now. This is where I would be asking that question. And so let’s look at the upside. So what’s the upside. The upside is, you know, the future of your business is actually, you’ve already decided that the future of your business is in this direction. Um, other upsides could be, you know, within the next 90 days you have, you know, whatever, three to 10 paying clients that in totality require, you know, maybe three to four hours of fulfillment, whether you have the three or the 10, unlike what you do right now, which is where maybe each one comes with each new client comes with 10 hours a week. So the upside is I’m making more money with less effort.And I’ll see the benefits of that somewhere within 30, 60, 90 days. Um, and it’s sort of the direction that I want to be going in in the longterm anyway, but there’s a downside. The downside to that is, well, um, maybe you have to let go one to two of your clients right now that are not that profitable and or consuming most of your bandwidth. Maybe you need to, you know, push hard for, you know, another 30, 60 days to make it through this transition, which means, yeah, maybe you do need to work a little bit more hours and get up a little bit early, stay up a little late temporarily to position yourself, to have the business model that you want. And maybe along with that, that means that your budget or your income goes down and you need to be a little bit tighter on all of your extracurricular activities for the time being.Maybe it’s a combination of these, maybe as one of these, for us, we realized that if we added one new client in our new model, we could go back and have a conversation with two to three of our legacy clients and transition them out because one new client replaced two to three old clients, and that was a decision. So I was like, okay, well, another downside is, you know, legacy clients like having those relationships, we didn’t want to burn those bridges. So upside is it’s the future of our business. Um, we could serve five, 10, 15, 20, 50 clients a month with relatively the same amount of fulfillment, whether it was one or 50, or we could, um, you know, but with doing that, we had to obviously maybe let go of a couple of clients or not take on a few more clients right now and add a little bit more time to launched this new thing, which means I’m already exhausted. I’m going to be a little bit more exhausted, or I’m going to sacrifice some short term revenue for this potential upside revenue. And another thing of that downside is maybe it takes longer than what you planned. So that could be a thing too, but then you ask yourself, well, can you live with it? And for us, I said, if we could just get one new client in our new model, we were able to replace the revenue that was coming from a couple of clients and get 80% of our time back. So for us, it was again, a no brainer as a yes. If I had to work harder like nights, weekends, which I did to make that transition possible, did it suck? Yes. But I was able to live with that knowing it was a short term sacrifice, not the rest of my life, because I knew that if I didn’t get this upside, the rest of my life would be stuck in the fulfillment the way it had been going.So there’s, there’s two examples right there for us hiring sales reps and to starting to make this transition by adding a new revenue stream on top of what we were already doing in our agency, knowing that the longterm gain longterm plan was to fully transition out of done for you agency work, we ended up saying yes. Now if you go, depending upon what you’re doing right now, I want you to comment below what is the thing you’re considering right now? And I want you to then share one. What is the thing you’re considering? What is the upside? What is the downside? And then assuming the downside, can you live with it? I want you to comment that below, uh, and I’ll hop into the comments and I’ll share my feedback and maybe ask you some challenging questions to make you feel that you’ve chosen the right path, whether that’s yes or no, because, Hey, Hey, you might say, all right, I’m not willing to sacrifice that downside right now, which means the answer is no.And then you can move on with your life and focus on, on either the next decision or the thing that you need to be focused on in that moment. So if you are looking to grow your business, or you’ve been weighing two options or needing to make a decision so that you relieve yourself of the anxiety that comes between the space of alternatives, uh, I hope this process and decision making criteria, these three questions can help you in some way, shape or form. Let me know below and hope again, hope this finds you well, and we’ll talk to you soon. All right. So I’m obviously going to edit that video for those of you watching. That was my process for making the video. I’m going to obviously make a few cuts and edits to that, uh, in post production,since you saw me mess up and I actually sorta messed up twice, but I’m just going to go with it. Cause I caught myself early enough. Um, but while I’m here, there’s a handful of you watching. If you’re watching the replay, I’d love for you guys to participate, right? Hashtag replay and an answer to those questions that I, that I kind of prompted, which will obviously be on the YouTube channel here in a few weeks. But what is something you’re considering doing? Maybe it’s joining our program. Maybe it’s hiring a, you know, a different coach, maybe it’s hiring a specific person. Maybe it’s letting someone go. Um, whatever it is, maybe investing in a certain vacation, putting money down on a, down posit on a down payment, on something you can run this, run yourself through this criteria in a lot of different ways for a lot of different things. And I’ve found it to be really, really useful. And we’ve used it over the years and I hope it serves you too. And then again, obviously if you haven’t read the book, then definitely go read a road less stupid, which looks like that right there. Read that book, that book road less stupid. Um, cause it’s a phenomenal read and you’ll have plenty of thought provoking questions that you can be asking yourself to take things to the next level. So hope this finds you well, enjoy the rest of your day.
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