Hey there,
It is Matthew Larsen, back with my daily newsletter.
In this email, we will talk about the three things you need to work on to improve your business, and why I start with you.
You probably watch my YouTube videos for the lead generation stuff. We will cover that, but there are three things I want you to think about:
You.
Your business.
Your lead generation funnel.
All three matter. But improving one does not automatically improve the others.
A better landing page does not make you more disciplined. Getting more leads does not teach you how to organise your day or finish what you start.
Improving your ability to focus, learn and follow through, however, makes it easier to improve both your business and your funnel. You can understand what needs to happen and actually do it.
That is why I start with the person.
You
This is about you and your ability to do what your goals require.
Your skills, focus, leadership, work ethic, consistency, beliefs, character traits, knowledge and organised planning all affect that.
You can know exactly what you should be doing and still not do it. You can have a good idea, start working on it, get distracted and leave it unfinished.
If that keeps happening, knowing more about marketing will only get you so far.
You need to work on how you spend your time, how you approach difficult work and how consistently you follow through. You also need to understand what you actually want from your life.
As you develop these things, you become more capable of using what you learn. You can spend longer on something that matters, learn what you need to learn and keep working when the first attempt does not go well.
That carries into both your business and your funnel.
Your Business
This is about the business you are asking people to buy from.
There are seven things I look at here, which I call the Core Seven:
Industry: The market you operate in.
ICP: Your ideal customer profile. The specific type of person or business you want to serve.
Offer: What you sell and what the customer gets.
Unit Economics: What you earn from a customer compared with what it costs to acquire and serve them.
Big Idea: The central idea behind your offer and why your approach makes sense.
Messaging: How you explain the problem, your offer and the reasons someone should care.
Proof: The evidence that you can do what you say you can do.
These affect how easy it is to get clients and whether getting those clients produces a worthwhile business.
You could build a funnel that brings in plenty of people, but if the offer does not make sense to them, you will struggle to sell it.
If you do sell it but it costs too much to deliver, more sales can create more work without leaving you much money.
We need to improve the business that sits behind the funnel as well.
Your Lead Generation Funnel
Your funnel is how people find you, learn about what you do and become customers.
This includes your paid ads, content, pages, videos, follow-up and sales process.
For a book-a-call funnel, I break it into four phases:
Clicks: Get people interested enough to click through.
Calls: Get qualified people to book.
Shows: Get them to attend.
Closes: Make the sale.
We need to work on the individual parts and how they connect. Someone should be able to move from finding you to buying without having to figure out what to do next.
Your business gives you something worth selling. Your funnel gives people a way to discover it and buy it. Your personal ability determines how well you build, operate and improve both.
The Theory Of Constraints
The Theory of Constraints is about identifying the part of a system that currently limits its performance.
Improving that part gives the rest of the system room to produce more. Improving something else may do very little while the same constraint remains.
You could have a business and funnel designed at a 10/10 level, but if your ability to execute is at a 2/10 level, you will struggle to get the results they are capable of producing.
Perhaps you never finish building the funnel. Perhaps you stop following up, or keep changing direction before you have done enough work to see what happens.
The other two pillars cannot make up for work that never gets done.
In that situation, you are the constraint.
What I Have Seen Across 1,800+ Businesses
I have worked with more than 1,800 businesses.
In almost every case, the person running the business was the problem.
If I had to guess, I would break down the biggest constraint like this:
97% of the time, it was them.
2.9% of the time, it was their business.
0.1% of the time, it was their funnel.
Those percentages are my estimate. But they reflect what I have seen.
You can understand what needs to change in your business and still spend months without actually changing it. Your ability to focus and consistently finish what you start affects everything else.
The business itself is usually the next biggest constraint. That is where the Core Seven come in.
The lead generation and funnel part is usually quite straightforward after a while.
How To Implement
Look at what is actually limiting you right now.
If you know what needs to happen but consistently leave the work unfinished, you need to work on your ability to execute. More marketing information will only get you so far if you do not use it.
If you are doing the work consistently but losing money on every customer, you need to address the business economics.
If the service sells and you deliver it well, but hardly anyone finds you, you need to work on the funnel.
As you improve one constraint, something else can become the thing holding you back.
Find what is limiting you, improve it, then identify what is limiting you next.
You need to work on all three. I start with you because improving your ability to do the work helps you make the changes the other two need.
Hope this email was worth your time,
Matthew Larsen