Financial and Lifestyle Freedom for UK Business Owners

As the CEO, we don’t make the maximum impact in our business by doing the operations. We make the impact by being the CEO, by moving really into that leadership role in our business. If you are heavily involved in the day-to-day operations of your business still and you are trying to scale at the same time, then you are leaving a lot of money on the table. It is time to get support in the operations side properly so you can scale.

In terms of having the money to take on team, remember that each team member you have in your business should be generating you four times their salary, at least, in revenue. Therefore, if you have team on board just now that are not doing that and they are just a cost to your business, then you need to reevaluate their positions and see how they can move to a 4X impact.

Once you do that, then you can afford to hire that operations person that will support you and will, in themselves, deliver 4X. Because even if someone is not in a sales role, they can deliver a 4X impact. For example, an operations person can generate referrals from existing clients to hit their 4X.

Now, if you don’t have any team yet, the same still applies. You still need to get someone into operations and you need to get them up to 4X fast. That means you need to map out what their first 90 days with your business looks like to ensure this happens. This should be something that you have in place with all new hires. One of your major roles as the CEO is to coach, mentor, and support your team to reach the 4X level. In doing that, in being a true CEO, you support the wealth maximisation of your business. In you having the maximum impact on your team, it delivers the maximum wealth.

So what does coaching, mentoring, supporting your team look like on a practical level? What does it really actually mean? Well, for us here at Annette & Co., it means daily huddle meetings, making sure everyone is clear on the targets and what their day looks like. It means weekly one-to-ones with direct reports, monthly all-hands vision and goal meetings, biweekly sales meetings, weekly marketing meetings. It means shadowing, it means formal training sessions.

I know for a lot of people, when you left corporate you never wanted to see another meeting again and I have just listed off a whole host of meetings. Because when we were in corporate it felt like there was so many meetings just for the sake of having a meeting, but meetings run well are incredibly important to make sure that everyone is moving in the same direction towards the vision and the goals and everybody is contributing to the business wealth. And yes, my week does have a lot of meetings in there, but that is what is driving my business forward. By me ensuring my team are hitting their goals, ensuring I have maximum impact with them so the business can have maximum wealth. Of course, that relates to maximum profits as well.

I hope that this episode has been useful in understanding maximum impact equaling maximum wealth. I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth Community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search Uncover Wealth Community or go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup. I do a live teach in there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday and I would love to have you there.

Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth, and get more money in your pocket.

In today’s episode, I am speaking about churn. This episode is the audio from a Facebook live that I previously did, but the content is incredibly useful, so I wanted to share it with you here on the podcast. So, let’s dive in.

I wanted to talk about churn and what churn is, why it’s important and what you need to be thinking about when it comes to churn.

First off, customer churn, also known as attrition, customer turnover is a really incredibly important number to understand in your business, if you are doing anything that is run on a monthly basis, whether that’s a membership, whether that’s just monthly coaching, a group programme, whatever that might be, it’s really important to understand what churn is because churn is the annual percentage rate at which customers or clients stop subscribing, being members, whatever it is that they are.

So like I said, churn is also customer attrition. It’s customer turnover. It is the annual percentage rate at which customers stop basically being customers for those people that come to you on a monthly basis for whatever it is that you’re offering.

And churn is incredibly important because it directly affects your service’s profitability, so it’s really common to assume that the profitability of the surveys is directly in relation to the growth of the customer base, but the thing is with churn it basically shows you how much the customer base is potentially shrinking versus growing.

If you are just focusing on growing the customer base, growing the customer base, growing the customer base and you’re not focusing on churn, what you need to make sure is that for every new customer that you get on board, you’re not losing somebody off the backend. Okay? If you keep losing customers, if your churn rate is quite high, you keep needing to get more and more and more and more new ones.

You need to keep acquiring them faster and faster and more and more and that costs money. It costs way, way more to get a new customer on board or new client on board than it does to keep your existing ones, so if all you’re doing is focusing on the growth, the client numbers, the customer number growth and you’re not looking at churn, then actually you’re probably spending way more then you need to be on acquiring customers and growing your revenues, growing your business.

If you focus on churn and focus on making sure that the ones that you have are not going anywhere, that they are sticky, is another word that people like to use. If you focus on that, actually you need to spend way less on terms of marketing and getting new people in, because you don’t need to keep replacing ones that you’ve lost.

Not only that, if you focus on decreasing churn, usually a big, big part of focusing on decreasing churn on increasing the value and the experience that you give to the customer or client, making sure they have an awesome experience. They’re going to speak wonderfully about you when they are out and about thereby naturally, organically by word of mouth, ideally and hopefully increasing the number of people that come into your business as well. So it’s a double whammy win/win there, if you start focusing on churn in your business.

The question that people often ask me when I come to look at their businesses is, “Is my churn rate okay? Is it a good rate?” And what we would say is that 5 to 7% annual churn is a good rate. That roughly translates to roundabout 0.42 to .58% monthly, if you’re looking at a monthly churn rate.

So what that means is that companies with an acceptable churn rate only lose about one out of every 200 customers a month. Or you can translate to us monetarily. So one pound out of every 200 pounds a month, of course you can 10X that up, 100X that up and multiply that out to look at what you might expect for your monthly churn rate.

So if you’re hitting those targets, you’re hitting that amount and you have a really solid platform in which you are growing your calling and customer base. If you are not hitting those, I highly, highly, highly recommend that you start focusing on churn, because you will see a massive impact on all areas of your business. You’ll see an increase in referrals and you’ll see a decrease in ad spend to your audiences in order to get them to come on board because you just won’t need to spend that much to retain the level of revenue that you want.

The next question of course, leads to how can you then decrease churn? Okay, so one of the big things is leaning in to your best customers, making them feel loved, making sure that they feel wanted so that they stay, so that they’re sticky.

The second is being proactive with your communication. One massive reason why people leave programmes, people leave services, is because communication is poor. I hear it all the time. So many times when clients move over to me, they cite the communication from their previous accountant as being a big, big reason why they move over. Communication is so incredibly important and people often overlook and they assume that their clients and customers know stuff that they just don’t. I see it as well with my clients. I’m inside a lot of my clients’ Facebook groups and programme Facebook groups, and a lot of the time I see questions around like when is this happening? How is this happening? Don’t ever assume your customer client knows stuff. Remind them, tell them what’s happening, where and why and how. Increase that communication.

he third thing that you can do to help decrease that churn rate is having a defined roadmap for new customers, so a really clear onboarding process that helps your new customers and clients understand the expectations, understand what they are going to experience and when and how. That can massively help because in the beginning when someone new comes on board they can, particularly if you are taking them into your membership or something like that, they can feel incredibly overwhelmed with the volume of information so if you have a defined roadmap for them, that can massively, massively increase the amount that they stay.

Number four, asking for feedback often. Making sure that you survey and ask your people how they’re getting on, what do they need more help with, making them feel loved in that way and understood and giving you feedback so that you can tailor your solution better to them to make them more likely to stay as well.

Of course, when churn does happen, try to analyse why that happens. Some people do things like exit interviews for people that leave their memberships or there programmes. Tat can be really a really good thing to have to get to understand why people are actually leaving.

Identifying your at risk customers. That can also be a really big one. So what is it that causes customers to leave and therefore, which group of your customers are currently at risk? Where is that sitting and what can you do in order to change that? You can also use trigger-based emails in your automation sequences, so that if clients are doing something or not doing something, it may be a red flag to you that they are more likely to leave. They’re more likely to move on. So if you have a membership, if they’ve not logged in for a little while, that could be a big red flag for you that actually they’re not getting on with what they need to do and therefore they’re more than likely to cancel.

Like I said before, improving customer service is another way to decrease churn and this is the biggie really, and actually a lot of these points that I have covered kind of are covered in improving customer service as well, but making sure that your customer really feels loved, feels cared for, feels understood and knows that you have their best interest at heart.

Another one, reminding your customers or clients of the value that you have available to them, making sure that they’re making use of the full value that you are able to provide to them.

And the last one, thanking your customers or clients. Making them feel valued, making them feel wanted can be a great way to decrease churn as well.

I hope this episode has been useful in understanding churn. I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search Uncover Wealth Community or go to AnnetteAndCo.Co.Uk/FBGroup. I do a live teach in there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday, and I would love to have you there. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let us find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth and get more money in your pocket.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking about the three ways to grow a business. So, let’s dive in. You might be surprised to learn there are just three ways. It’s ideal to have all of these three in place if you want to consistently and successfully scale your business. If you do have all three in place, then I can guarantee your business will quickly reach or at least get very close to its overall potential. No matter how young or old, successful or not your business is, most entrepreneurs are only using one or possibly two of these. And often the ones they are using can be significantly improved, which is why I want to cover these off today. It doesn’t matter if you are a newbie starting out or if you’re a seven-plus-figure business owner. It is a great reminder to have these in place in your business. So here they are.

The first is, of course, lead generation, getting more qualified leads. This is the one that the vast majority of businesses put all their focus on, getting more clients, moving people from never having heard of you to becoming a client but this is the hardest way. This is the way that costs the most in terms of time and in terms of money. Ad spend to a cold audience to warm them up and convert them is more expensive. It also takes time generally, to warm people up and move them to a sale. That is not to say that lead generation is not important. It is massively important and you should have lead generation happening in your business every single day. Yes, I did say every day, to move people through but it’s not one that should be focused on solely at the cost of all other areas. They need attention as well.

The second is sales conversion. Generating more customers from your leads monitoring and increasing your conversion rates is an area that can be easily overlooked and often is. Many, many entrepreneurs don’t track conversion rates at all and it’s a massive, massive oversight. And I have seen this in seven and eight-figure businesses as well, not looking at the actual conversion rates. If you don’t have a really close eye on the conversion rates from all activities, not just looking at your landing page, conversion rates in lead pages or whatever it is that you’re using, then it makes it really hard to predict the outcome of your actions and incredibly hard to hit your profit plan as a result. You need to understand the conversion rates from every piece of conversion activity.

So sales calls, for example, you need to be tracking what the conversion rate is on them. Tracking and monitoring conversion rates over time is a critical matrix that you need to measure for your success and then act upon what the matrix is telling you, what actions need to be taken in the business to increase the conversion rate. Is your conversion rate an acceptable one to you or not an acceptable one?

The third area is customer maximisation, which includes things like increasing the average sales value, increasing the number of purchases, getting more referrals from customers, increasing the buyer lifetime, and reducing customer loss or churn rate. Again, these are areas that are very, very often looked, not just by five-figure business owners and low six-figure but high six-figure, seven-figure, and even eight-figure business owners I’ve seen overlooking these numbers. So churn is a big one that I see when I start working with clients is that so many people do not track and monitor churn. And as a result, it makes it very, very hard to predict what your revenue is going to be from current clients on an ongoing basis.

Tracking churn also gives you an indicator if your programme is going well for your clients or if there are delivery issues. I’m speaking about churn in Uncover Wealth Radio Episode 11. I realise you’re listening to Episode 10 just now, so if you’re listening in real time, you’re going to have to wait until the next one comes out to do that. But if you are binge-listening, you can check out Episode 11 after this and learn more about churn in that episode.

Referrals coming from customers is also an area that people do not concentrate on enough. You don’t need ad spend to get referrals from your customers. You need to do a great job and you need to ask for referrals. It is something that can be built into your process really easily and it’s a good idea to have team members who are focused on operations, having referrals as a matrix for them. You can and should bonus them on referrals and getting referrals from their clients and customers that they are speaking to.

There are a number of proven strategies that you can apply to massively improve on each of these areas that I’ve been speaking about it. By combining the power of each, you have the ability to scale your business to even greater heights that you perhaps hadn’t thought possible. I hope this episode has been useful in understanding the three ways to grow a business and it’s given you a little bit of food for thought in some areas that you can be concentrating on over the next little while to increase your business and scale your business.

I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search Uncover Wealth Community or go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup. I do a live teaching there every single Tuesday for training Tuesday and I would love to have you there. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth, and get more money in your pockets.

Welcome to Uncover Wealth Radio Episode 9 In todays episode I am speaking about How to get your business out of debtSo let’s dive in….First off let’s address what debt actually is – debt is previous overspending – it is prior spending in your business that your revenue at that time could not support. And if you want to get out of debt, you need to find a way of your revenue supporting that now as well as supporting your current other business spending, your tax payments and your own take home pay.The first things that we need to do is make sure that our current business spending is as lean as possible to free up any available funds for debt payments.I cover off the big exercise that I do for this with client and in my own business every quarter in episode 6 of the podcast – so if you have not listened to that one I urge you to listen to it once you have listened to this episode as that is the first step.Now that you have got your business spending to as lean as possible, it’s time to work out what funds are available for debt repayment.You can do this by taking your currently monthly revenue, less your lean business expenses, less money for VAT and tax, less your take home – what is left? That would typically be your profit which you could distribute to yourself – however, due to spending habits previously, this profit now needs to be directed into debt repayment. I don’t recommend that you divert every penny of profit into debt repayment – but I do think it should be around 99% of the profit – so calculate what that is for you in £ terms.Now you need to look at all the debts you have.List them all out – every penny – everything due to suppliers, to staff, to your parents, to your grandma, to HMRC, on Credit Cards – every single penny. You can’t know how to tackle it if you don’t know exactly what you are dealing with. And I know it can be scary to see these numbers written out in black and white – but it really is important that you have a complete picture.Now I want you to note beside the debt amounts, what are the monthly minimums on each debt?And what does those monthly minimums total to be?Once you have that total compare that to the amount you have available each month for debt repayment – is the amount available more or less than the monthly minimums.We need the amount available to be more – if it’s not – then you need to go back to the lean expenses exercise and work out how it can be. You need a gap there.If you have done it again and there is still no gap – then you are going to have to negotiate with those you owe money to, to see if you can get your monthly minimums lower – but this is only a short term fix and will led to you being in debt for a very long time – this is a last resort and I do not recommend this as a solution to your current debt situation.Now if you have more for debt repayment available than your monthly minimums that is great – what we need to do now is work out which debt to pay down first.I like to use something called the debt snowball – what that systems states is that you pay down the smallest debt first (not the one with the highest interest rate – but the one with the smallest £ amount outstanding.  Use the available extra to pay that first – that might take you one month and might take you one year…but get that one paid down first, whilst still making your minimum payments on all debt.Once that one is paid down you move onto the next smallest one – and concentrate on paying that down in full…then you repeat…It might take you years to pay off all the debt…and during that time you are going to need to be as lean as you can on your business expenses – but that is not a bad habit to get into either.I hope that makes sense.I know that it can be scary and this might feel like a long drawn out process to get that debt paid down, particularly if you have a large amount of debt…but this is the way to make sure that you are getting everything you owe paid off and still making those minimum payments.I hope that this episode has been useful for understanding how to How to get your business out of debtI also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth Community – this is my private community on Facebook – you can search Uncover Wealth community or go to https://annettandco.co.uk/FBGroup. I do a live teach in there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday and I’d love to have you there.

Thank’s so much for listening, until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth and get more money in your pockets.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking about raising your prices and still providing awesome value for your clients, so let’s dive in. I want to talk today about an exercise that you can do which lets you raise your prices pretty significantly but still feel like you’re providing great value to your clients, and they feel like they are receiving awesome value as well.

I know that when it comes to thinking about raising our prices, it can be a bit scary, so how can we do it and actually feel really, really good about it and feel like it’s a win-win for both parties? What I want you to do is start by writing down every single thing that you deliver at your current price point. Write down your current price point and every single thing that you deliver to your client for that price.

Now, it might be stuff that you don’t even tell them about that you do anyway. I want you to write down every single thing that is involved in delivering that service to that client at that price point. Once you’ve got all of that down on paper, what I then want you to do is I want you to double the price, and then write down everything that you would deliver if that price were double. Okay?

 So it will probably include all of the things that you’ve already written down, and then usually some extra stuff too. Write down everything that you would include for that doubled price, and then once you’ve got all that written down, the next thing to do is double that price. So now you’ve got a doubled doubled price, because you doubled the price the first time, then you doubled it again.

Now I want you to write down everything that you would be able to deliver that would be possible to deliver for that doubled doubled price. Write down everything that you would want to include for that doubled doubled price. Then once you’ve got that, so you’ve got your three lots of prices and your three lots of services essentially that you’re going to deliver for that, I want you to see if you can work out a way in order to deliver the things that you wrote under the top level, the double doubled price, for the price of the middle one, so the doubled price.

You want to be delivering the double double value for the doubled price. In that way, if you can work out a way that you can do that, that you can do that profitably and you can feel really good about that, then you can straight away double your price and you’re quadrupling your value to your clients, which makes it an amazing experience for them as well. So they are still getting huge, huge amounts of value from you. They are paying double, but they are getting quadruple value. You feel good about the price, they feel great about the value, and it becomes a massive win-win situation for everyone.

I hope that this episode has been useful for understanding how you can raise prices and still provide awesome value for your clients. I also want to invite you to step into the Uncover Wealth community. This is my private community on Facebook. You can search Uncovered Wealth community, or you can go to annetteandco.co.uk/fbgroup. I do a live teaching there every single Tuesday for Training Tuesday, and I would love to have you in there. So thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth, and get more money in your pockets.