In this series, building a bulletproof business about the foundations you need to have to create a bulletproof business. My goal as I've said, I think every episode is for you to understand where you're at in your business in terms of, do you own a job? Do you want a business? Where are you at? If I have to guess, there's a lot of people listening to this, that owns the job, you know, we're, we're transitioning in this business from job to business and there's many things that we're doing so that it's not my job, that it's my business. And you know, one of those things is standard operating procedures or processes or systems like whatever it is you want to call it, SOP, processes, systems. That is, that is what you need in your business so that other people can do the things in your business without you looking over their shoulder, right? And you should have a system process, SOP, whatever you want to call it in place for everything in your business. You know, one of the things that we do, I have an admin that gets in usually before me and she reviews leads every day. The leads that have come in since, you know, basically overnight, evening overnight kind of thing, and then tells me what leads, and then she sending out information and doing follow-ups, but that system is in place. On a daily basis that gets done. So in your business, like what are the daily, weekly, monthly functions? If you have vehicles, like what are the daily, weekly, monthly functions to make sure there's vehicles last? In our business, we did daily check-ins, check-outs, walkarounds. We did weekly reviews of the trucks, physical like eyes on, tracked mileage, all of that stuff so that we would know when an oil change is needed and when services need it. We did that with equipment. Same thing, like they get, you have people going out to do service. One of the hardest parts for non-skilled services like cleaning, for instance, is cleaning as an opinion. And everybody has a different opinion of what clean is. Some people believe clean is just no dirt. Okay. Others believe that clean is no dirt, but organized. Okay. Are they wrong? No, they're both right, but it's someone's opinion versus another. So what's your opinion, and how do you want that opinion to be portrayed across your company? If you don't have an SOP, you don't have a process. You don't have a system for people to follow. There's no way for someone to understand what your opinion is on that matter. And obviously, if it's your business, you want your opinion to shine through. So develop SOPs processes, systems, write them down, make videos, make them to where people can use them for training to be able to do the work that needs to be done. So you can get away from owning a job, begin to own a business, begin to build a bulletproof business. So you can DMN8 the day.

So we're talking about building a bulletproof business. This is probably like the seventh episode, the eighth episode of this series. The whole goal of this is for you to have introspection and to reflect on, do you own a business? Do you own a job? And then wherever you're at like to get to that next level, if you own a business, great, if you truly own a business, like you don't have to show up and revenue still happens, you truly own a business. Now it's optimizing that business, right? If you do own a job and you're trying to get to the own a business, not own a job, then you have to understand kind of the foundations, and that's what we've been talking about. And one of those foundations is metrics. Understanding your metrics. Some people call it KPIs. I call it metrics. I grew up in sales, and in sales, everything's about a metric, the basic, the beginning, where everything starts like you should know how many contacts a day you have to make to make $500. How many contacts you have to a day to make, to make a thousand dollars? You should know that, period. If you don't, you need to sit down and you need to break everything down in your business that you do, so you understand what the metrics are. Should be around sales, it should be around marketing, should be around operations. You should understand those baselines to help you know what minimum activity has to be done to get X. And you see unless you grew up in a sales background, or unless you've done a lot of reading and training on marketing or sales, you're not gonna, you're not gonna understand that. And you're not going to know it, unfortunately. So you need to research it. You need to find out everything that you can about getting the baselines, getting to the baselines, understanding those metrics that are going to help you measure, grow, and optimize because that's what metrics do they help you measure. They help you grow, and they help you optimize. So you want to get out of this owning a job mentality. You want to get out of this, owning a job on a daily basis. You want to own a business, start understanding the metrics, start tracking the metrics you inspect, what you expect, and that will help you understand what you do well, what you don't do well, what the business needs to pivot to what the business should be focusing on. And it'll get you focused on those things that grow your business and make it bulletproof so that you can go from owning a job to owning a business. And implementing metrics on a consistent basis across the platform of your business. Then tracking those metrics, it's going to help you DMN8 the day.

So we're talking about building a bulletproof business, building a bulletproof business, and things that you need to be doing in your business to focus on building that bulletproof business. You see, we get caught up in what we think we have with this, with our business. We get caught up in thinking that something is something it's not, I'm just going to break it down for you. We think we own a business when we really own a job and you probably quit a job to start your quote-unquote business. Why don't I say you want a job? Well, do you have to show up every single day to make sure that revenue happens? Yes or no? That's the number one way you can tell if you own a job or not. If you don't have to show up every day and revenue still happens, then you own a business, but if you personally have to show up every single day to make revenue happen, you own a job. So there's things you can do to transition out of owning a job into owning a business. And one of those, the biggest transitions you can make is adding players to your team. Maybe you're a solopreneur right now. Definitely own a job. Definitely do. But you want to get to where you're owning a business. You're building a bulletproof business. So begin adding team players. But Gary, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to headaches. It's so hard to hire people. I mean, you can come up with excuses to tell me why ice cream is no good for you. If you want it to, really, you could, you know. You could tell me why ice cream is the most horrible food in the world, and it tastes bad if you want it to. We could. And we all know that ice cream isn't and you should eat ice cream every day, except you'll get fat, so you can't. But anyway, in other words, quit being a damn negative Nelly. Add team players. All the negatives that are around team players is because the person hiring them does a sh*tty job at hiring them. You do a good job and adding team players, you'll get solid team players. If you do a sh*tty job at adding team players, you will get sh*tty team players and that's hurting your virgin ears. Don't get sh*tty team players. It's on you, period. You want to build your business. You want to grow into a dynamic organization. You want to have a bulletproof business, then develop a system that makes people want to be a part of your mission. Develop a system that gives people the ability to be something inside of your organization, to change their life, to help you grow your business, to help you achieve your mission. But I own a power washing company. I own a roofing company. I own this, I own that. So create a freaking mission. Create a mission that other people can get behind inside of your business to change their life, to help you change your life, to help you grow your business, to help you build a bulletproof business. So you can DMN8 the day.

So we're talking about building a bulletproof business. Building a bulletproof business. This should get you into a very contemplate state of where you're at in your business and what you want to have happened in the next year, three, five years. Like we should all always have a plan. We should always understand those plans. We should always write those plans down, and we should share those plans with our team. But part of the foundational success of a business is the ability to find and to communicate to prospects on a consistent basis. Now I've talked about customers, I've talked about customers, right? But you, you should also have a big, huge bank of prospects. Prospecting is the lifeblood of marketing for your business. Customers are the lifeblood of your business, but prospecting is the lifeblood of marketing for your business. So you should constantly be looking for new prospects that can pay you potentially money, because if you can find those prospects on a continuous, consistent basis, then you know that you're always going to get more customers, and getting customers is the name of the game. So what are some ways you should be prospecting continuously? Well, I think you should have multiple, multiple sources of prospecting. Sure, you're going to have some like, you know, things that are very high volume, let's call them things like pay-per-click. So Google ads, Facebook ads. You're going to have social media where you're posting on social media. Maybe, maybe you're a service business and you use yard signs or bandit signs. And if you are a service business, you should be using bandit signs on a weekly basis. Maybe you have direct mail campaigns. Maybe you do a lot of referral-type stuff where you're constantly reaching out to your customer base and asking them for referrals. In fact, I did an episode on how to create, a solid referral program that generates referrals for your business. You should be doing those things on a constant continuous basis, and then you should be communicating with those prospects. If they turn you down, they turn you down, continue to communicate. So we had, we had two different, communication channels. One was for customers and one was for prospects. Actually, we had three. Customers, current prospects, and declined prospects. And we communicated to each one of them on a monthly basis at a minimum. The declined prospects, they got a little pissy sometimes, and they would say things like stop and enter curse word, texting me, like stop, enter curse word, emailing me like stuff like that can say, I don't care. We would still communicate. We still continually communicated. And, those would turn into leads again and potentially business. We understood that 5% of our decline prospects would turn into leads over a 12 month period after they went into the decline state. So I wanted to get that 5%. I think we had like three to 4,000 declined prospects, at the end of the business when we went to sell it. So if I continue to communicate with them, I was getting 10 to 15 leads a month just from declined prospects. Why wouldn't I do that? Sending an email, sending a text. Like sending a piece of mail automated would generate 10 to 15 leads a month, well, sign me up. Right? But we get, we get confused and we think they don't want to hear from us cause they turned us down or they don't want this or that. No, no, no. You generated that lead. You paid the money for that lead. You should continually, continually communicate with that prospect. And if you're not, you're not building a solid foundation to build a bulletproof business. Again, automation and delegation will help you DMN8 your market. If you're not automating or delegating, you're not going to DMN8. And so prospect follow-up should be delegated and it should be continuous. It should be constant because if you're doing that prospect communication on a consistent basis, you'll definitely DMN8 the day.

We're talking about building a bulletproof business in this series. My hope is that you're contemplating, you're inward thinking, and you're looking at how you can grow your business, make it more bulletproof, get rid of owning a job, start owning a business like whatever that is, where you're at, my goal is you get there. So we would be remiss without talking about the number one thing it takes to own a business. Think about it for a second, what's the number one thing it takes to own a business. Customers! It takes customers. If you don't have customers, you don't have a business. You have pretty equipment, awesome trucks, know how to do some cool, whatever it is, but if you don't have somebody writing checks, it ain't a business. Think about that for a second. Writing checks makes it a business. That's exactly right. Like if somebody is not paying you to do something, it's not a business. So what do you need to do to get customers? And you see not just get customers but get customers consistently and continuously, and then continue to market to those customers. You see a lot of people get focused on the get of the customers, but then they don't maintain the data so they can continually market to them. Communicate with them, get more business from them. They miss that part. They miss that piece of it, and when you miss that piece of it, then you lose out on the opportunity and the ability to grow your business and to make it bulletproof. See customers are the backbone. Customers are the reason customers are the lifeblood of your business. And if you can't get customers, you can't grow your business. If you don't have customers, you won't have a bulletproof business. If you don't continually market to those customers, you won't be bulletproof. What's continually marketing? I have guys telling me, I touch, I touch base with my customers probably too much. And so my follow-up question as well, what's too much? I've emailed him like three times this year. Okay, it's November. You should have emailed them at least 11 times this year. Well, I called them one time. Okay. You should've called them 11 times this year. Well, I sent them a couple of texts and I could tell that they didn't like it anymore. Okay. How could you tell? Because someone sent stop or 10 people sent stop or a hundred people, who cares! Keep sending the text messages, period. Little, little antidote I'll give you, we had a Christmas light business. And I was sending out text messages to our pressure washing customers, to get them to bite on wanting quotes for Christmas lights. And we use the system that I could see who would opt out of the text messages and they would opt-out. And then, the next year I would opt them back into the text messages, and I would send them a message about Christmas lights. And no one ever said, "Hey, I opted out last year. How come you keep taxing to me?" But people did say, you know what? And the people that actually opted out the next year or the year after would say, "you know what? I want to get a quote for Christmas lights." If I wouldn't have been aggressive and opted those people back in, then I wouldn't have had the opportunity to get them a Christmas light quote. One of them ended up being a $5,000 a year, Christmas light installation. I think the opt-in was a good thing. And you see, I don't care what I think my customers think about my communication. What I care about is continually communicating, and that's what you should do too. You want to build a bulletproof business, get customers and continually communicate to those customers. You'll DMN8 the day.

I'm talking about building a bulletproof business building that bulletproof business reminds me of a couple of books that I've read recently, that I would recommend you guys take a chance, and when I say read, let's be clear. I don't read. I listen. I don't know about you, but just listening to a book gives me so much more insight and lets me pick up so much more. So one of those is Becoming Bulletproof it's by a secret, Former secret service agent, Evy Poumpouras. She's a badass! She's on a presidential detail for the last two presidents. I believe she was on Bush and Brock's presidential detail, not, not Donald's and, she's a bad-ass in the secret service. This book talks about some things that she faced, obviously, a female and the secret service. You don't see a ton of those and she was on the presidential detail. So everything you need to know, you just found out about that. And then the other one is Bulletproof Business by Ryan Stewmen. I would check those two books out just to get kind of an understanding of bulletproof, like what it means, what you should be doing to become bulletproof. Obviously, if you think bulletproof, you think of bulletproof vests, something that keeps you from dying. And that's what we're trying to do here is build a bulletproof business. And one of those things that you need to be doing foundationally is releasing information on a monthly or weekly basis, depending upon your budget. And the way to do that is through press releases. There are multiple press release distribution companies out there and press release has helped with multiple things. Not to mention search, not to mention awareness, not to mention branding, but it also provides consistent continuous information being fed to your community through local news platforms, their websites. Boom! Press releases are important. Press releases should be done consistently, continuously, and they should be press-worthy type of information. You hire somebody that's a good press release. You move into a new building location shop, that's a good press release. You start out offering a new service, that's a good press release. You accomplished something that not many in your industry have done, that's a good press release. Like there's multiple opportunities to create press releases, have to be written and then they have to be distributed. But press releases are a great foundation for creating that bulletproof business because you see you put those press releases out there, they get picked up by news organizations, they become index and index means that they are in the search vault forever. That's what you want. You want the name of your company to be in the search vault forever. For-ever. And if you do the right things, if you're constantly looking at ways to promote your company, release information about your company, then you're going to start to build that bulletproof business. You're going to start to get the focus on how to sustain business long-term. Utilize press releases on a consistent basis. You'll definitely DMN8 the day.

We're talking about building a bullet-proof business. And every time I say that that alliteration like building a bulletproof business means a lot, man, it can be powerful to have a bulletproof business. You know, I've talked already about the difference between owning a business and owning a job. And hopefully, you're listening to this series and you're reflecting and you're contemplating, and you're understanding where you're at in your business cycle. And my hope for you is to go from owning a job to owning a business. That's my hope for you on a daily basis, not just from this podcast, but my hope for you is to understand that owning a business is the goal, not owning a job. You see, we want to own that job. We want to control everything. We want to have our hands on everything and see building a bulletproof business requires trust. And how do you build trust while you build trust by helping people understand the purpose and the why behind it? So one of those foundational steps that you have to create is a social media presence that exists for your business. Now I'll be the first one to admit, this is the hardest thing for us to do because our company is built around me and in my quest to build a bulletproof business, we have to get really focused on building content around the company, and not just me. I have some pretty strong social media followings, LinkedIn, couple thousand, I think almost five digits there. Instagram, 30, something thousand Facebook, 10, 15,000, YouTube, 10, 15,000. I'm not, I mean, I'm just off the top of my head. Me. DMN8 Partners, it's like a couple thousand. If you add them all together across all platforms, a couple thousand, maybe 5,000 total. So there's the problem. We have to disconnect Gary Geiman from DMN8 Partners in order to build a bulletproof business. So you look at your social media platforms, you look at those profiles for the business. How often are you posting? How often are you engaging? How often are you creating awareness around that company brand? I think it's important for the individual who's the leader to be out front. And I think it's important for that person who's at the, at the front of the show, the CEO, whatever his title is, her title is, to be at the front, but at some point, you have to decide, okay, is this about me? Or is this about a company? If it's about you, you're going to own that job. You're going to own that job. And maybe that's what you want, but I'll be honest with you. I don't want to own a job. I'm going to hit 50 next year. That's f*cking old. 50. I'm going to hit 50 next year. I got a lot of things I want to do. And they don't revolve around going into an office on a daily basis. They don't revolve around making sure that I'm delivering something related to building this business, because I got other people in place and I'm going to put more people in place to do the things that need to be done to grow this business. So social media needs to be the thing that gets pushed for your company, not you. Well, maybe you're already there. Congratulations. Maybe you're not, but begin to decide and focus on, okay, content on social media, is it leader based or is it company-based? Get more company-based. Get more skewed to the company side and begin to produce content on a daily basis for the company to get awareness, to get branding. So you can DMN8 the day.

We're talking about building a bulletproof business. Say that three times fast, that alliteration will get you every time. Building a bulletproof business, so I want to break down 11 different areas you need to focus on to begin to build a solid foundation so that you can start to build a bulletproof business. And I'm going to start today with good old search, search optimization, or Google search, whatever you want to call it. We want to make sure that we're showing up in search for the services that we provide when customers and potential prospects are looking for those services. So how do we, how do we create that? Well, search is created and optimized by one thing, content, content, content, content that content can be used for all kinds of things, developing websites, developing blog posts, developing guests posts, developing press releases, but it's all built off of content. Now, obviously, there are multiple layers of how to optimize search, but this is all built on content. It's all built on content. And so one of the first things in building a bulletproof business is to begin to figure out ways to develop content without you doing the content. So what are those ways? Well, one copywriters, hiring copywriters. Now this can be expensive and it can be very tedious and finding the right copywriters, but if you find the right copywriter, you can begin to have them develop content. The next one is employees having employees develop content and produce content on a consistent basis because if you're the only one in the business producing content and you get hit by the proverbial bus, the content production stops, and if you can't continue to produce content, you can't continue to improve your search rankings regardless. And so your business is over. The bulletproof business becomes the bullet hole business, and now it's sunk, and you're no longer in business. So creating content and having others create content and producing content for the business is a foundational building block in growing a bulletproof business. When was the last time someone besides you built content-produced content for your business? A long time ago? Never? Maybe every once in a while? Has to be daily! Start building out the purpose and the reason why content has to be done and then begin to plug people into roles of producing content. You begin to develop content, you begin to develop a strong search ranking process with that content and showing up in search. You're growing your business. You're getting more leads, a definitely DMN8 the day.

Ask questions a lot about, you know, building a business and creating an organization or creating a business that can be successful ongoing. One of the things that I've put my mind to lately has been creating systems around what it is we do, mainly because I get asked this question all the time. Like what, what happens if you get hit by a bus, odds are I'm never going to get hit by a bus. Who knows the Garrett, I could walk out of here and get hit by a f*cking tank, but anyway, probably not going to get hit by a bus, but you know, life is life. Unfortunately, the day we, the day we are born begins the end of our hard time on earth. It starts a countdown and that's just stone-cold facts. So at some point, I'm not going to be here. And we, we need to have systems around what DMN8 partners does so that it's not just about Gary Geiman and every business I've ever created, it's always been about what value I bring to people, regardless of what the delivery of that value was. Exterior cleaning, Christmas lights, mortgage, marketing. I never really thought about creating an ongoing entity until the last year or so. And, I've been focused on creating what I call a bullet-proof business. I believe there are multiple things you have to do to create that bulletproof business, but you have to begin to structure things around every area of your business that don't require you, because see if your business requires you to be in it all the time, you don't really own a business, you own a job. I mean, that's what it is. And so if you're, if you're wanting to create something that can sustain itself without you, that can grow without you, that can make money without you. You have to begin to focus on creating this type of business. And you know, this podcast will be released in December of 2021. But if you hear me speak in 2022, you're going to hear me speak a lot about building a bulletproof business, because that's what I'm going to be talking about to every business owner that I interact with, whether it be in a group setting, one-on-one setting, a sales setting, we're going to talk about building a bulletproof business. So, begin to look at your business that way. What areas of the business am I involved in? Okay, now that you've identified those what area of the business that I am involved in, can I back away from and allow someone else to perform that activity or allow automation to perform that activity you see, unless you're willing to delegate and automate, you're never going to DMN8 and delegation and automation are the keys to a longterm businesses success or should say business apostrophe success. If you think about any large organization, you know, Tesla, Elon Musk. Elon Musk, ain't turning wrenches to build Teslas. But Gary is totally different, totally different kind of business. That's a business as what it is. Elon Musk does not own a job, he owns a company. You know, Jeff Bezos is not putting books into boxes to send them out to you. At one point he was, he's not now. And that was a long time ago, like 1996. So what can you do to remove yourself from putting the books in the boxes and delivering them to your customers? What can you do to make yourself begin to build that bulletproof business? I'm going to talk about this over the next couple episodes, 11 to be exact. And we're going to dive into ways that you can build a bulletproof business because if you're building a bulletproof business, you're definitely going to DMN8 the day!

Yesterday about competitor analysis and how that can make you great can help you rank in your market. Probably the quickest way to do it is through competitor analysis and then doing what they do and do it better. Not probably, it is. There's also another follow the leader, and that is the colleague analysis outside of your market. You know what I'm talking about? Those companies that do what you do in other markets, but they're the best in their market. These are guys that probably can give you some information, cause they're not threatened by, they're not threatened by your business because you're not in the same market, but they're in the same industry ranking at the top of search in their marketplace. So, do the same thing. Like, find out what it is they do duplicate, do it better. Ask them, what they do. Duplicate, do it better. I can remember a conversation I had with Dave Carroll in 2015, we were talking about property managers and we both were doing similar things, but not the same thing. And we both took one tip from each other and pour gasoline on it, and we both saw our business go crazy. I can remember in 2015 taking one thing that he was doing, that he told me about that we weren't going add it to my process, and I woke up on Monday morning with 11 leads in my inbox and from property managers. And prior to that, like I had gotten one or two a week. I got 11 on Monday. I was like, "holy sh*t! How am I going to get these quotes out?" I mean, it generated almost six figures in revenue, just from those 11 leads. It was ridiculous. We had one job that was $22,000 come from those leads because he told me one thing that I added to mine. And then he had similar opportunities that happened to him. He took something that I was doing it, add it to him. And his leads increased. His conversions increased. So do colleague analysis, find out what they do, find out what's working for them, and then go do it. The key is this. The key is this. We can know all of this information. We have all this information at our hands, but unless we put it into practice and unless we put it to work, we're not going to get the benefit. Having the information is part of it, but doing the work is the other part of it. You want to DMN8 your market. You want to DMN8 your market and be the leader so that others are following you. You got to do what your competitors are doing and do it better. You gotta do what your colleagues are doing and do it better. Just talking about it and thinking about it isn't gonna get you there. And yes, every market has competition and every market is competitive. Trust me, I've heard it all all the time. I got guys in rural areas that have like five competitors and they're like, oh my God, we're so competitive. And then you got guys and places like Atlanta to where there's five companies on the same street. Competition is everywhere. Figure out what the competition is doing and do it better. Figure out what your colleagues are doing and do it better. That's how you DMN8 your market. That's how you grow your business. And that's how you DMN8 the Day!