Ep 45: 5 Ways to Instantly Boost Your Profits

Welcome to Dawn of a New Era, a business and marketing podcast with a difference, ranking in the top 5% globally for people who want to start, scale and grow their own business. Dawn McGruer shares tips to improve marketing, motivation and mindset, as well as her own real life challenges and experiences as an entrepreneur. Guests include some of the world’s most inspiring leaders too. So if you are an aspiring, established, or serial entrepreneur, this is your go-to podcast to fast track results and rise to meet today’s challenges and master the art of online influence and business success, and avoid common pitfalls along the way. Never miss an episode and subscribe and listen at DawnMcGruer.com.

If you’re not a numbers person, this is for you

Dawn McGruer:

Welcome to episode 45 of Dawn of a New Era with myself, Dawn McGruer. And we’re going to be talking about all aspects of marketing, motivation, and mindset. So regardless where you are in your journey of owning a business or running a side business or a side hustle, it doesn’t matter. It’s all about entrepreneurial journeys and the pitfalls and challenges. And in particular in this podcast, we’re going to focus on an essential element of business, the bit that makes it sustainable and that is profit. We’re going to be looking at five ways to instantly boost your profits in your business. And this is something that I’ve struggled with as a business owner, because let’s face it, the number side of things you either love it or hate it. I’m not really, I suppose, creative in the world of accountancy. I’m more creative in the world of content and online marketing.

Now, some people love all the facts and the figures, but if you’re not a numbers person, this is going to really help you get your momentum around money and really focus in on these five quick ways that you can boost your profit. So, number one, it’s all about customer journey. And this is focused in around looking at marketing as an actual revenue generator. Now, this is quite a controversial point because so many people in business will think about sales and marketing as two separate elements. For me, they have always been hand in hand, and marketing is central to my business, to my client’s business and it’s what drives profit in to the business each and every day. And it’s about the customer journey. Looking at where your customers come from and how profitable your customers are. So every day you need to have new leads coming into the business.

And this has to be a priority, looking at sales first within the business because every time I start work and I look at the tasks ahead, I could dive in to an endless to do list, but I try and focus on three things within the business. First of all, my priorities, my do or die tasks and one of them is sales first. Looking at the leads in the business right now, who could we focus on as a priority to turn into a paying customer? So who is already in our world, who has already expressed an interest, made an inquiry? And how do we pull that person into the next stage of that customer journey to become a raving fan and hopefully a long-term customer? Now, if you go into business one thing is for sure, we want to be profitable. We want to be sustainable, but you might be an expert in your own field. And for instance, marketing or accountancy isn’t something that you’re an expert in.

So you have to be thinking about if you outsource these things, you still have to be involved as the guiding star, the person who is driving it forward, because no one cares about your business as much as you. So my suggestion is, and this is something I do for each and every client and for our own businesses is look at the customer journey and sense check it every day. Have your leads, have the amount of people who are in your nurture sequence reduced. Now, this is all important because these are the things that make the world go round. These are the things that build to make a sustainable business. And if you don’t have these in place, it will be very difficult to succeed at the level that you deserve.

Now, customer journeys for me are a simple process. So you can map this out on a piece of paper. Just start thinking about, “Where do my customers come from now? How do I get leads each and every day?” Now that starts to form a plan and within that plan, these are the actions that need to be the priority each and every day. So if you know that sending direct messages through Facebook, for instance, or LinkedIn is driving leads and customers and getting that all important lead into the business or perhaps nurturing through to conversion, then those are the things you need to do. And try and make a list of the important actions, the things that you know will give you time, free up your day-to-day tasks and make sure that you’ve got that kind of freedom and flexibility that you became an entrepreneur for.

You have to be the guiding star

Now number two, this is a simple one and it’s all about having better practices and looking at what you can save every day. Now this is not just around time and money, it’s around the home mix within the business, right? So if your time is valuable, which it is to every single entrepreneur and you can exchange your time for money, if you are tied up and bogged down in doing tasks that are not building your business, boosting it and generating cash, then maybe you need a better practice. You need to outsource it. You need to think about what your time serves and how you are using it, because if you feel that you haven’t got the capacity to really enjoy your business, then something is fundamentally wrong. You need to step back and make a list of all the things you love doing that you do day to day.

And what I do is I have a look at last week’s calendar or diary and I look at how I spent my time in the things that I like doing, the things that energize me that really helped me boost my own business. But I don’t want to be working in my business all the time. As a business owner, we have to be that all-important guiding star, as I said. So you need to be able to take that step back and work on your business, not in it all the time. Make a list of the tasks and start thinking about how you can delegate them, how you can use your time better and a great way of doing this is time blocking. I do this all week. Every single week I have Tuesdays and Wednesdays time blocked out for particular activities.

The art of time blocking

I only do calls on a Thursday afternoon and a Friday morning. And Mondays, I have always free and I do podcast interviews in the afternoon and I do the same on a Wednesday. So I know when my time is, and I always block out time for having lunch. And one of the things I’m doing at the moment is trying to time squeeze and what this means is that instead of having the normal traditional 9:00 until 5:00 or 8:00 until 4:00 or whatever, trying to do what I’m doing in less time. And do you know what? I tried it last week and you get slightly more focused in, in getting things done. And instead of me getting caught up in other tasks, I’m uber focused on getting them done within a timescale. And it’s that old adage that the more time you have, the more time you spend on something.

So I’m trying to cut my time down into blocks whereby that I finish at 3:00 and then I start focusing on other things that are important to me. Because at the end of the day, no one wins an award for working all the hours. If you can time squeeze it and do the same amount of work in a shorter period of time, then surely that’s a good thing.

Mindset matters

Now that brings me on to number three, mindset matters. Having an attitude as an entrepreneur that is focused on why you became an entrepreneur. You watch people build their businesses, talking about cash, talking about money. Everyone’s at a different age stage in their career and people have different dreams. The reason you became an entrepreneur is unique to you and you have to think about your mindset matters. So if your whole performance is not at its peak, what is it that needs to change in the business?

So it could be that just taking more time out and having this better control over time, getting that flexibility. If you look at your calendar at the beginning of the week and feel daunted, that is not going to be an enjoyable week. You want to feel invigorated and revitalized when you start work on a Monday. If you don’t like speaking to people on a Monday, don’t speak to people on Monday. If you don’t want to do endless calls with people, don’t do them. I mean, think about why we have all these Zoom calls. To be honest, I might have three or four a week, that’s it. But you’ve got to think about what is the agenda for that call. So getting super organized, which brings me on to number four, get organized.

Think about the end to end. What’s going into the business and out? And this means from a money point of view, as much as your time. Time and money are the key principles here. And if there’s something that’s causing difficulty in the business, then you need to regear it, need to refocus. And even if it’s something like accountancy, if you’re getting bogged down in tasks, how can you make it simpler? Now, we’ve always used Xero as our accountancy tool and a tool called Hubdoc that easily allows our team to forward invoices and receipts for expenses for the business. There’s lots of these different time hacks and tools available. And the thing is, if you ask people for it, people love to recommend. So if you’re stuck, shout out, come to the group. We’ve got a Facebook group that’s focused on marketing motivation and mindset, and digging deeper into some of the subjects that I cover on the podcast.

And that’s exactly what I’m here to do. For all my podcast listeners, I invite you to come and join the party in Facebook and just search for Dawn McGruer and you will see the group come up. Now, once you’re in that group, don’t just be a voyeur, get involved. Ask these questions. If there’s things that I hit on that really resonate with you, come and build that relationship and join us in the group.

New program launch

Now, last but not least, this is number five, see the bigger picture. Now, I believe in a concept that is all about having dreams and thinking about having aspirational goals that feel truly achievable. Now, I see so many entrepreneurs settling for the fact that they are where they are. And that’s fine and it depends what your dreams are, but sometimes you just really need to push the limits to see what is possible. Now, sometimes mindset will limit you and if you don’t have the confidence behind you, then it’s going to be really difficult to get that clarity to dream big.

So when I started building my new program, which we’re launching later this year, this concept was something that I felt very passionate about. Entrepreneurs who’ve been in business for, it could be a week, a year, the whole 10, 15, 20 years, even more, it’s still true that we need to have a goal. What is the purpose? Why are we doing something? And if you’ve been running a business or you’ve been in a startup, you’re really busy, right? So you lose focus on what it is you’re actually trying to achieve. And sometimes just taking that time out and thinking about where do you want to be in a week?

Small steps. Where do you want to be in a month? Where do you want to be next quarter? Where do you want to be in six months? Where do you want to be in the next year, five and 10? And start just with a piece of paper and just start thinking, “What would it be like and what would…” Picture in your mind, what would be that picture? Thinking about imagining you within a situation. What experiences do you want to have? What do you want to be doing? What does your perfect day look like? And once you start charting this out just on one piece of paper and brain dumping, you start to release these aspirational goals, dreaming big. Everything is possible and it could be that you have scaled the business so big that you want to simplify.

It could be that your business now is not really the focus you want. You want to regear it. These things are all available for change and you don’t have to settle for what your business or how you feel right now. The great thing is, is that each and every day has new opportunity. And this is something that is very powerful in your mind and it starts to re-energize and get you excited again about what it is that you want to do. So I really hope that some of the points in this podcast that have maybe pulled some thoughts or ideas out to change the way that you drive profit into your business. Now, let me know if you enjoyed the podcast because as every podcast host knows, we all want to reach more and more or listeners and if you as an audience can help by rating and reviewing us on Apple or whatever you listen to, that would be amazing.

But most importantly, come and tell us what you’re up to. Come and join the group. Now, you can find me at DawnMcGruer.com and we are here each and every week talking about these subjects. So if there’s something you want me to cover, come and join the group and let me know, and I will see you in a week’s time. So take care and let’s look at how to really drive that profit into your business.

Thank you for listening to the Dawn of a New Era podcast. And for your free checklist to find out how to boost your business for growth, profit, and success, and join our community, go to DawnMcGruer.com.