What are the 4 Essentials?

I’ve read hundreds of books by experts on business and marketing. What I found is that there is a lot advice out there, some of it works, some of it doesn’t. Most small business owners don’t have the time to read a bunch of books. And I realized that something was missing.

There needed to be a simple way for a small business owner to see how things fit into the big picture and to decide what to do next that would help their business the most.

So I took everything that actually works from all those books and from what I’ve tried in my business and in helping my clients, and I condensed it all down into a quick and easy-to-understand framework.

How can this help your business?

Once you understand these 4 essentials, it helps you see how everything fits together: sales, marketing, Websites, SEO, social media, and more.

• You’ll be able to create a simple, overall plan, and stay focused and energized to take actions that will help your business the most.
• And it gives you a simple way to measure the effectiveness of your systems and track your progress as you make improvements.
• You’ll be confident that you’re using your time and money on the most effective thing you can do right now.
• And you’ll be able to business that’s sustainably and consistently profitable over the long-term, one that enables you to create the lifestyle that you want.

Essential #1: Irresistible Offer

It’s more than just what you offer and how much you charge.

1. It involves having a clear focus on who your target audience of potential customers is, what problems they have, how they feel, and the outcome or results they’re looking for.
2. It’s using their own words to create attention-grabbing, motivating, reusable content in a variety of formats.
3. And creating an attractive visual identity with a logo, colors, and images that convey trust and professionalism.

The goal is to have the tools in place so you can quickly and consistently create motivating content that presents an irresistible offer with clear benefits to your target audience.

Essential #2: Gather New Leads

This involves using a variety of methods to show your offer to as many people in your target audience as possible, while spending as little money as possible. A few basic methods are...

• Direct person-to-person sales.
• Referrals from your existing customers or other businesses.
• People who follow your content.
• Paid ads like Google or Facebook.
• Having your Website show up when people search online.

The goal is to create a dragnet, a system that consistently gathers new leads from your target audience.

And you can track how effective your lead gathering methods are by measuring the number of new leads that each method brings in every month.

Essential #3: Convert Into Sales

Your goal is to use tools like those to build an efficient, automated system for getting your leads to become paying customers… in as few steps and as quickly as possible. Depending on your business, these steps could include:

• A landing page on your Website.
• A lead form where they enter their contact information.
• Online appointment scheduling.
• Automatic series of emails.
• A tool to help you personally followup on every lead with a email or phone call.
• Online proposal approval tool.
• One-click online credit card payments.

What you’re doing is progressively building an automated system for converting leads into sales… like a little factory where leads go in one end and paying customers come out the other.

You can measure your progress and the overall effectiveness of your conversion system by tracking your conversion rate: the percentage of new leads that become paying customers. And you can track your “funnel”: how many people go through each step of your sales process.

Essential #4: Generate Recurring Revenue

It’s way cheaper to get sales from an existing customer than it is to find and convert a new one.

So find out what your customers need on a regular basis, preferably monthly, then figure out ways to deliver it to them and get paid automatically. Here are a few examples of how to do it:

• Upsell feature on your Website.
• Automatic followup email to offer a followup service.
• Memberships or subscriptions for your products and services, and automatically get paid monthly or yearly.

The goal is to continually look for ways to gradually increase your recurring revenue. You’re building a little revenue replicator machine that takes each customer and pumps out profits every month. The more money that is automatically deposited in your checking account each month, the less you have to hustle for.

You can track your progress by measuring your Monthly Recurring Revenue as a total amount and as a percentage of your total monthly sales.

What about your business?

I use the 4 Essentials to continually develop my own business, and I use them as a playbook for helping my clients.

What would your business look like if you had all 4 of those essential systems in place?

We can help you create the systems and use the tools you need to create a profitable and sustainable business.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I wish you success and hope that this energizes you and propels you forward in reaching your goals.

- Tyson