How Do You Expand Your Business Profitably

Have you ever wondered how do you scale your business?

Join me on this episode of the virtual entrepreneur, I am super excited to be here with you today and I with some really cool stuff, share with you if you are new to this podcast, first of all, a very warm welcome. On a previous episode we talked about how to create a powerful lead magnet using everything you already know and have at your disposal.

And then we also talked about some things to consider as you go into the marketplace because as you're creating a lead magnet. Your goal is to attract dream customers, right, dream, clients, actually. And I recently learned the difference between customer and client, and I'm also super delighted to share with you that as well, so you're ready for it. Here it is.

So a customer buys goods or services, or commodities from you.

Whereas, a client is someone who is under your care in well being, as well as even advice. Right. So, when you're in business, your goal is to develop clients, instead of developing customers because customers by product, a shop on price, you know they do all this research, they're just going to ever come give them with clients, they're there because they trust you, they want to build a long term relationship business relationship with you. And so it's an investment to have a client because when you need them, they'll be there. Whereas a customer is, you spending money to acquire them when you spend as you spend as to acquire customers.

But when you use referrals and systems, that's when you build client base, That's when you build client relationships. Right. And it takes work and energy, just not as much money, maybe money as well but not in the same sense as advertising world, that makes sense. Anyway, so if you're new to this podcast a very warm welcome. We talked a little bit about how to build your lead magnet if you don't go to a previous episode, you'll find a tonne of content on how to get started building a lead magnet.

You can find the note for that episode on Herbet marketing help.com That is fetch er B E RT marketing help.com.

And one thing I forgot to mention on our previous episode is once you've created all this content, you can use simple platforms like Fiverr, or you can hire someone freelancer to design some graphics for you so that you're not spending time doing things you least enjoy and you're spending time doing the things that you're enjoy and have more impact,

impactful, and you've more experienced doing, because that will free you to work at a higher level of momentum, should I say, now that's a let's jump today's episode which is on, how do you actually expand your business, right, because in a past episode we talked about assessing your mass understanding exactly, you know, how the platform is before you can start doing anything.

Looking at the marketplace and looking at how it is right, marking your territory right we talked about segmenting your market. And then, you know, defining your V. Your verticals, right, the points which are going to attack first.

Or maybe, rather, the market places that you're gonna go into first right what are your numbers, what is the size, the numbers right what is the size of revenue that was the next step right, and how much money is in your marketplace, total, so you know if you've a big goals you know exactly what to tackle. And then the next thing is defining your channels, how are you going to go there, what are your method of getting to that clients getting those customers,

because having a very good channel means that you can get your customers efficiently without spending a tonne of money on ads, sometimes one contract could pay you so much more than all the ads you can then as many ads as you can spend right, the next thing is you know, selling on value rather than on price, which is a very big distinction. It's a very very powerful difference, right. So there's all these things here that you can use to leverage to your advantage.

Right. And so with that said, the other thing to consider is your ideal clients are going to be, with several types of mindset and one of the mindset is either the management type of buyers or the user type of buyers their technical buyers or their economic buyers right, if they're management, then, you know, they're in it, to try and help capture in the market share, that's what they're thinking, with their users, they're thinking of how will I be able to use this.

Will my team use this right these are the mindset, if they're technical they're wondering, will it fit with some of the equipment and software and services that we're already using or will that be extra work, try to integrate it all together. And then if they economically are thinking in terms of pricing. Cutting, cutting costs, and you know your ideal client is mostly economic based, if the CEO, right, CEO, Chief Financial Officer, CFO, yeah CFO not CEO, CFO, Chief Financial Officer because they're looking at the finances more.

And one thing I've learned is this you know, if financial reports usually tell you more about the history but not so much you know about where the business is going so you need to be mindset, mindful of that. So there may be more focused in cutting costs because when they look at the financial reports they only see the history, whereas other people such as the CEO, they're more focused on trying to see where can we improve.

Where can we get you know, drive forward to get all those results anyway, I'm straying a little bit from the lesson here and the lessons I want to share with you is, how do you expand your market and I think all this fits together into when you're deciding how do you expand your market. So I learned that there are three key points that you want to focus on when deciding to, to expand your market. The first is the first is essentially your market, marketing optimization.

Right. And, you know, look for things that you can leverage what are the things that you can leverage and then the other thing is Strategy Optimization, the strategy you're using is the most effective one. Sometimes some of the most effective strategies may be using a strategy from a different industry in your industry. And then the third part would be the business model can it be improved. Sometimes the business model we are using is just very, very limited. And I am going to explain a little bit that in the moment.

But with that kind of mindset, you know, marketing, optimization started Strategy Optimization and business model optimization with those key points down. So here are the three ways you can now start to expand your business right so the first method would be to advance.

Right. So, By this I mean, you could introduce new products, right, you could introduce new products, and I'll tell you a quick story. So recently I was thinking well I had this photography business, and I loved it, but I didn't want to be a photographer all the time. In fact, I didn't want to be a photographer at all. If I speak honestly because it involves me being there to do the work and I didn't want to do that. I want it to be able to do work, where I have, you know, team of employees who enjoy and love doing what they do, and I am just focused on building a business with being a photographer.

You need to have this relationship with either another photographer or to just be in a position where you can do the photography and build the business and I didn't want to do the photography part because it actually takes much more of the time. But, and especially if you want to take enough photos so I was thinking how do you expand a business of this kind of photography type of business.

There are many service type of businesses, how do you expand that. And it took me a while, and I realised there are two methods, they're actually much more but there are two methods that came to my head very very quickly. And the first was, well not very quickly after what two methods came. The first one was is the franchise model.

And funny enough when I started photography, that's the model that I wanted to approach right, you build a photography business, and reduce it down to a system that anyone can use to create photography professional photography for corporate. Yeah, because if you look at corporates, mostly, most of the time they want to refer to the events for their PR and marketing, and for their meeting, right, meetings, so if you can create synthesize a system for that, which I was able to do you know, just systematise an approach to do that, which was able to do you can essentially create a business that you can franchise, right.

So you, you start selling the photography business rather than becoming a photographer, which was my approach initially, but it takes a little while to refine and it takes much much longer to refine the process to get it there, especially since I didn't know fully how you would go about approaching that type of business.

So that was the first model which is to franchise, it is actually the very first way to expand it if you think about it, because with all the different types of cameras, all you need to do is create a method that could be, you know, very simply, a method of synthesising that business and bringing everything together. I'm thinking out loud here as I'm talking, and then the next thing.

The next method of expanding this business was to leverage the knowledge, the know how that you have as a photographer, right, because as a photographer you've polished this skill of capturing photos.

Right, so if you can leverage that knowledge, you can also expand and start selling those services. And what that means is you can sell so much more knowledge than you can ever work in your day per day. Right, so that will be a faster way of expanding. So with that said, there are two methods they have expanding by advancing, you know, so one is you can introduce a new product or service.

Another one is, you can take an expansive advance, which is adding complimentary services, right, so for example if you have a photography, you could add some videography at the back end, or you add some specialised type of product service at the back end. Right. And then the other one will be to enter into a new market, right. So, from what photography, they may be targeting corporate but you may decide to enter to the wedding photography. Or you may decide to enjoy the portrait corporate portrait photography, right, so there's that type of knowledge as well.

Then the next day could be read by someone else's business. And then, as a percentage and then you earn every year as a percentage, right. So, that would be another way that you could go about expanding your business, right, and if you buy a business that complements yours, what that could mean is, You have another business that neatly fits at the back end or front end of your business, reducing the cost of customer acquisition and increasing product sales, as well as market reach right. And the other thing becomes you know, essentially, to think about three things right competitive complimentary and deliver, and derivative type of businesses, right.

So, videography is a derivative. But complimentary will be something else like content marketing.

In this case in terms of photography business type and then competitive will be another type of photography business maybe just a portrait photography business, but the goal here is to look at all these opportunities as pieces of the puzzle, and see where can you fit them in your big picture of how you want to grow your business so that you have more time because the reason why I wanted to explore this, because in the creative businesses, We tend to get stuck on our creative potential. And what we enjoy doing, which may be the photography part, but the business part is just as crucial and by getting the business part right.

It may actually allow us more room, and more time to do what we enjoy more for example if you leverage the content that we know our expertise, we will have those as online courses that someone can buy at whenever time wherever they are in the world.

But for us, is a photographer. It can also mean that we can reduce the amount of photographs we take per year, and still be super and highly profitable. Right. In fact, it will even allow us to take vacations for months on end without ever limiting our abilities without ever limiting opportunities in what we do. So, I want to share that with you tonight and I use photography specifically because it was one of those where it's a very creative business, but the opportunities are endless and hopefully as we go on, we'll explore more.

So thank you so much for tuning in on this episode and I hope you got a tonne of value in this in helping you see your business and how you can expand it, the notes for this episode can be found at Herbet marketing help calm, that is AGR BRT marketing help.com and I will talk to you on our next episode of the virtual intrapreneur.

And as always, Have a wonderful evening.