How Do I Make My Business More Predictable?

How do you make your business more predictable? That’s what one of my clients, Naya had asked. And today I want to share a few steps that you can take to make your business more predictable.

What’s going on everybody? It’s your boy Greg Hickman here with system, my assistant Donna. Why? And like I said, I want to break down five steps that you can be taking in your business to make it more predictable. So, uh, the other day I was running a free training to a handful of our clients and I asked the question, how do I make my business more predictable? And this is sort of a loaded question, but I want to share five high level tips for you to rethink your business so that it can become predictable. Because the reality is that the way most businesses and specifically service providers, that’s who we work a lot with, their business model isn’t in a place where they can actually create a new systems to make it predictable in the first place. So a little t’s right there is that systems are involved.

But what I want to do is want to write down five things that you need to do to make your business more predictable. Let’s go. Tip Number one is to have a specialized Avatar, right? Many service providers fall victim to having a bunch of different clients in different types of businesses, essentially different avatars. I’m working with chiropractors over here, I’m working with marketing agencies, I’m working with Hvac companies, I’m working with plumbers. And the challenge with that is if you serve a bunch of different types of clients, first of all, likely you’re going to offer them a variety of different services because a lot of them need different things. So when you don’t have a specialized avatar that you really start to spread yourself really thin and it turns into a multitude of problems. One being that it’s really difficult to create systems on actually getting your clients results because they all need different things.

So if everything is custom, everything is unique. Creating any sort of standardization and repeatability is nearly impossible. And then on the flip side of that, by not specializing in having, you know, a single avatar or at least one or two avatars versus 10 your marketing becomes really diluted. How do you go out into the marketplace and say, we help this person achieve this result? Because the reality is you help a lot of different people do a lot of different things. So going out into the marketplace with a very generalized message of we help everybody do everything, doesn’t really carry much weight and isn’t really going to connect with your ideal client. So it’s gonna be really difficult to start to attract people to you, thus you’re always going to be chasing them manually. So tip number one is to have a specialized avatar. Tip number two is to narrow down your deliverables.

You have to simplify the service you offer. If in that previous scenario where you have 10 different avatars, right? And you have a handful of avatars for each of your different services, right? So say you have five different services and you have one or two clients for each of those services, it’s going to be really difficult to create a system to deliver that result more efficiently with less headache, with less overwhelmed, with less cost. Because again, you’re not doing the same thing enough times over and over and over again to realize the efficiencies that could exist. So you need to narrow down the deliverables and really start to sell one outcome. So if you work with chiropractors, you need to deliver them one outcome. If you work with, you know, Facebook ad agencies, you need to deliver them one outcome. Stop being the full service.

We’ll do everything generalist service provider, because that is the core obstacle that you’re going to face in creating a more predictable business. So first we specialize our avatar. Secondly, we narrow down our deliverables. Three, when we’ve done the first two things, we can then get to improve our client results. So if you’re only working with one type of person and you’re only delivering a very narrowed deliverable or simplify the services or service that you’re offering, you will deliver it over and over and over and over again. And guess what? You’ll get really good at delivering that result. Here are clients. So over time you will actually improve how fast and how effective you are with getting their client the desired result that they came to you for. So you’re going to get even more demand for people that have a similar problem. And once you’ve solved it, you know, a handful of times, you’ll really start to realize that, hey, I actually have a process to deliver this and now I can start to streamline it.

And that’s where you’re going to start to see a lot of the efficiencies that will really begin to make your business predictable. So first we specialize avatar. Number two, we narrowed down our deliverables. And three, we then improve our client results for is putting a team around you. So once you’ve done the first three things, knowing who you need on your team to help you deliver those results and remove you as the owner from the day to day operations really starts to become clear. So if you’re always talking to one type of Avatar, when you go get that marketing person to help you, speaking to that one person is going to be way easier to teach them how to talk to one avatar versus 10 on the flip side, on the delivery side, if you want to remove yourself from certain parts of fulfillment and delivery, if you’re always delivering the same result over and over and over again, once you put a system in place, putting people in the right seats within that delivery process is going to be way clear to you and you’ll be able to really streamline your delivery in most cases with just one or two people instead of possibly like five, six, 10 different high level consultants that cost a lot of money that you kinda got to keep at arm’s reach just in case you have that new client.

So when we put, start putting a team around us, if we’ve done the first three items right, if we’ve specialized our Avatar, if we’ve narrowed down our deliverables and we’ve improved our client results, we start to have that repeatable process. We’re going to know exactly who we need and how many people will need to really start to deliver those results, both on the marketing and the sales side as well as on the delivery side to be able to remove ourselves as the owner from these processes. Then number five is we get to install automation and the systems. So as we have people going through the motions, going through the step by step plays of, of the sales and marketing and the delivery of those client results, we will identify areas that we can use software technology to make all of our lives easier. How do we automate our lead generation for selling that one outcome?

How do we systemize our sales process for making our sales rep’s lives a whole lot easier so that when leads show up to the sales call that they already know what we do, they know our price points. Um, it’s really just a matter of figuring out if it’s a good fit or not. If we can systemize the sales process, any average salesperson can become a rockstar salesperson. And then on the delivery side, when you have automation in place and a, an onboarding process, you can actually onboard new clients more effectively and get them into momentum before you ever even really start doing work. So if we close that gap from the trip, from the transaction to when we first have our kickoff call, or when the work actually starts to happen, we’re going to have our clients show up as what we call the ready client.

And they’re ready to get going. They’ve already done some work. They’ve already put some thought into how they can be successful within our process and we actually can create great clients. So to answer your question and I his question, how do I make my business more predictable? Step number one is to have a specialized avatar. Step number two is to narrow down our deliverables. Step number three is to improve our client results. Step number four is to build a team around us. Put a team around you. And number five is to install automation and systems. And Hey, if you found this video helpful, go and share it with a fellow service provider. That is your payments to me. If you’ve got value from this video, and if you’re looking to be around more service providers that are really seeking to build a more leveraged business model, a more predictable business, join us in our free Facebook group called the scalable service provider. I’ll put a link below this video and we hope to see you there.