Stampede Your Business

Last time we talked, we were still trying to figure out what this thing is. So much has happened since the last episode. We decided to get back on the horse because it’s good to record where we’re at as a business.

Stampede has really formed a lot. We talked about how we were creating 2 companies, Stampede Web and Stampede Digital Systems. We also added Stampede Networks and we kept branching out. But there are so many aspects to creating and executing on a great marketing plan. We were playing with bringing more individuals in to do some of this work and now we have a whole team of specialists.

We are learning as we go, but it’s really all about giving lots of value.

A few weeks ago we had a launch party. We got everyone in the same room together and got to meet each other. We shared our vision for Stampede and explained why we wanted them to be a part of it. We had a little bit of a reunion with some of the original members of the mastermind who got to see what they influenced. It was fun to see the excitement on their faces we shared where we are at as a business. And now we have this little baby that we need to care for.

We’ve started doing some advertising and using some of our specialists to do a little bit of marketing of our own. All this time we’ve spent figuring out the marketing strategy and bringing people in to implement the strategy, we’re now starting to think about using those strategies for ourselves and experience a little more growth.

Stampede Web is starting to grow legs. The bulk of our ads right now are towards the Sales Site. It is in the hottest test bed at this time as we look to see how effective the Sales Site is. And as the Sales Site experiences success we get to start growing this thing.

It’s time to start asking the question, “What do we do if this thing fails?” It’s never been tested before, so what do we do? What do you do when your big idea fails? You just don’t quit. The really successful folks don’t quit. You pivot and you keep working. We need to figure out how the Sales Site fits into the marketing funnel and into the funneling process. We’ve always had a grasp on it, but we’ve never really tested it.

We’re using the experts to enhance our ideas and make them better. And ideas are always better when they are actually used because you actually see what works. If you can spend money on a lottery ticket or a weekend hobby, you can spend some money on growing a business and you might just change the world. Why not?

My thing has always been, “Find your Passion. Follow your Passion. Live your Purpose.” There is nothing more pure and true to living your purpose than doing that thing that inspires you, that gets you up in the morning. It doesn’t matter if you are making money or not. If it’s what gets you up in the morning, then you know you belong there. You know you have to do it. In the entrepreneur space, we love to live and play with “What if you were doing that thing that gets you up in the morning every single day and getting paid well for it?”

Come on the ride with us and we’ll see who makes the million-dollar mark first.

The E-Myth is all about management systems and how you setup the systems in your business. This episode is about how to setup a management system for managing people. E-Myth recommends that you set up this system like a game (also known as gamification).

Manage Your People with Game Systems

Stampede is wanting to create an affiliate program for our sales team. Gamifying the program should be easy because other affiliate programs and MLM’s have already worked most of that out. Those systems provide a basic earning structure but they also offer different goals and incentives as well as the ability to level up.

Make sure they understand the idea behind the work that you’re asking them to do. Which is really about your mission statement. What is the big idea behind the work? Why should we even care about the game?

• There was an idea behind the work that was more important than the work itself

• If your idea is a positive one, your business will reflect that optimism

At Stampede, everything we do is to improve business.

Make it a game

It has to be Real. You have to mean it.

The game is a measure of you. The metrics that you are working toward in the game tell your employees what you really care about.

How you act in the game establishes how you will be regarded by the other players. Are you focusing on the message or are you focusing on the metrics? What is the most important thing? And how do people view you because of your focus?

The Logic of the Game

What most people need is a place of community that has purpose, order, and meaning. If your business is built around the idea of the work, then it has meaning.

The Rules of the Game (Not the game rules. How you should or should not create your game.)

• Never figure out what you want your people to do and then try to create a game out of it.

• Never create a game for your people when you’re unwilling to play yourself.

• Make sure there are specific ways of winning the game without ending it.

• Change the game from time to time – the tactics, not the strategy.

• Never expect the game to be self-sustaining. People need to be reminded of it constantly.

• The game has to make sense.

• The game needs to be fun from time to time.

• If you can’t think of a good game, steal one.

If you are out there wondering what you are going to do with your business and how to grow your business, we’re wondering the same thing and that is why we are doing this podcast. This is the podcast to show what it takes to build a business from scratch without any funding, and bootstrapping our way through the whole process. We are doing it with Stampede Digital Systems that we created a year and a half ago. Today’s episode is about where we are and how we’re doing.

Bobby has been through this with a lot of businesses and entrepreneur groups, people get in this with an idea that they need money. A good opportunity can take months, even years to make good revenue out of it. If you’re expecting to earn a lot of money right out of the get-go, you might as well buy a lottery ticket. Even if you have experience and know-how, you still need investment power to make money quickly.

We’re in the trenches right now and playing with this. We all have other businesses and other things. This is just a pet project. We wanted to create something for small businesses that will be good for them.

Even after one and a half years, we continually ask ourselves, “What is this thing that we created?” We first thought that we were going to be a marketing company. Then we became a website company. Then we became a business development company. Now, the latest definition of our business is Marketing Strategy.

We now have the Marketing Audit where we sit down and figure out what’s the state of your business with respect to marketing. Do you have a budget? How much time are you spending on marketing? You should spend nearly 40% of your business time on marketing. Marketing is the key to growth.

Troy has been working the podcast, Know Like Trust, and meeting awesome entrepreneurs. He’s been finding opportunities to expand our business in various ways. Eventually, we had blow-up. You can’t win the Kentucky Derby without a little friction. You should have business partners that can speak freely about their concerns and still be able to make things work.

We get that we are creating something now that we can explain and gives us clear direction on how we are assisting clients. The two parts to our business are perfect opposites.

We have the Sales Site concept where we build the website for you following our blueprint/process. Just 2 weeks ago, we were arguing about whether or not we wanted to sell $500 sites. And out of that argument came a clearer, better offering. And with the Sales Sites, we have an opportunity to scale rapidly and earn a lot of money up front. The bigger your sales team, the more money you make.

We have a marketing strategy team that works with clients to establish monthly subscriptions and make ongoing revenue on the back end. It is a smaller income for the business, but it can add up over time to become an army of recurring income.

Blend the two together and you have a powerhouse income generator. We have the Cash Cow and the Bread and Butter that allows us to focus and expand at the same time.

We’ve been working on this for a year and a half. We are finally at the top of the sales mountain. We finally have a pipeline of leads that is capable of providing us steady sales and consistent revenue. We are finally reaching a point where we will be launching a marketing campaign and putting money into marketing. Once we start making revenue, we can begin to expand our sales team and start growing rapidly.

In the first year and a half, we’ve made only about $8,000 in revenue. We now have recurring revenue of $350 per month. It doesn’t sound like much, but once you get the boulder rolling, it’s a lot easier to keep it rolling. In six months we expect to make at least $10,000 revenue per month. If not, we will have to make a decision to see if we continue doing business.

The whole point of Stampede Your Business is to watch Stampede grow as a business so you can see how we created a million-dollar business from scratch with our own ideas. We’ve been using an outline. This episode is completely off script. We’re offering an update on what we’re doing so you don’t get lost in the education.

Stampede started when Bobby was looking for a tool that could do funnels and email campaigns. He’d been using multiple tools, but really wanted an all-inclusive tool that covered it all. He researched a bunch of different services and realized that Builderall has all of the tools that he wanted and more. After signing up for it and using it, he thought it was cool and started sharing it with other entrepreneurs and they created a mastermind.

As entrepreneurs, they had all been frustrated with marketing companies. The original idea was to create a marketing company. Then they thought that they would just create cool websites. Troy had a team in India that he was using for some IT stuff that he was doing.

Stampede has only been an official business for 6 months.

We went through many different iterations as we tried to figure it out. At one point we thought of it as a marketing business.

One day, Brett was trying to figure out what how to make things work with another project and he ran into Russell Brunson. He loved what he had to teach, but thought that his product, Click Funnels, was just outside his budget. This made him mad and he started thinking about this Builderall thing that Bobby had been talking about and realized that this has the power to do the same thing. After presenting his plan to Bobby, he was invited to the mastermind group.

Bobby and Brett are passionate about the small business owner and entrepreneur. They felt that they had power to provide a real value to them. Building websites was already done. Click Funnels was already done. We wanted to create our own market and do something new, that works. That’s when the Sales Site concept was born. We decided to create a webinar in visual format as a website.

You can go to Stampedeweb.com and download the Sale Site Blueprint for free.

When you know all the details of your business you see everything. You know everything about how it works. And when it comes to explaining it to people, you want to tell them everything. But people don’t care. They just want to know your story and what benefits you provide. The Sales Site Blueprint was created to come at your business from the client’s point of view. The Blueprint builds on information and guides you through that thought process of getting your story down.

Now we start with the Blueprint, we have a questionnaire, we have a template, and we have a workflow. When we started applying this information, our client satisfaction didn’t just not go down, it went up.

We have added various different tools and services as we work with various other established businesses that all relate to marketing. We are using ourselves as a proof of concept. We’re learning along the way. We’re finding stuff that works and we’re sticking to it. We have done some advertising and word of mouth. Building a million-dollar business, it not about go, go, go. It is about create, create, create and work and learn as you go. Once you have the systems in place, you can hand over the keys then stand back and watch it grow or sell it.

By this time, next year, we will be in the million-dollar range. We’ll be working from a million-dollar revenue to the million-dollar income.

The reason micromanagers exist is because they don’t understand that he kind of information that they are trying to convey and get back from you is information that can flow smoothly if you have a process to allow that to happen. We’ve been talking about managing every single detail and orchestrating everything. But if you don’t have a system in place to manage your people, then you become the micromanager.

A management system allows you to hand over the keys and watch it run. The keys literally are the management system and the car is your business.

A lot of folks hire highly skilled people who can do all the work for them. When that happens, they often get used and abused, the owner disconnects from the company and they leave the business in a worse state than it was to begin with. If you understand your business and have a management system in place, then you don’t need to spend a lot of money on employees. You can hire people who haven’t been “spoiled by the world.”

You don’t want to hire your consultants. You want to pay consultants to assist you in creating management systems and then hire people to do the work.

A Management System is, like everything else, plan it down to the finest details and creating a checklist for people to follow. Checklists make all the difference. They can sometimes be daunting, but quickly become second nature. A Management System is a clear communication of what needs to be done.

Management systems manage people and can be built to resemble a game. Don’t be afraid of rules. Rules actually make the game more interesting and fun. Rules give you boundaries, purpose, challenges, and a way to win.

If you want to create a consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders, you need to have rules.

You want to hire people with the lowest possible skill level. No one can be great at everything. If you hone in on a skill, then you can become great at that skill. Also the lowest possible skillset, people tend to be more teachable.

The system makes everything run with impeccable order.

Create work manuals for each activity/skill that needs to be done. We have a new spreadsheet for publishing podcasts that allows us to keep track of what is getting done and when. It allows the publisher to keep track of what had been done and what needs to be done.

You cannot have a sellable business if there is not uniform predictability in how your business works. No one wants to buy a business that is not uniform or predictable.

Your management system has to be precise about everything, even down to the dress code. It sounds nitpicky but it sets the culture and it sets the tone. It’s a piece that the employees can own. And ultimately it is all about your brand and your business culture. Having something that is clearly defined and notable makes you notable.

When you hire people you have to have a management system, but it doesn’t start when you hire them. You have to make sure that your system is managing you.

How Data and Systems Work Together

It all comes back to Innovation.

Creativity can lead to innovation, but Innovation is all about doing something new, changing how you do things. Innovation can change the world, but it doesn’t have to be big.

If you are keeping track of how many customers you see in the day and you know how many customer you see in the morning vs in the afternoon. Then compare how many of those customers buy your product at which time of day. Then you can plan your day better to reach more buying customers and save time.

It’s theoretically possible to stop innovating and continue to do business without changing anything that you do, but in the real world, if you’re not innovating and growing, you are depleting.

Everything you quantify allows you to reconsider what changes you can make in your processes to save you time and increase revenue.

Stampede is currently using our podcast, Know Like Trust to measure what kind of businesses will work with us the best. We started with coaches and health and wellness businesses, then we switched to accounting and programming. The coaches were very eager to jump on the podcast and speak and some of them are interested in doing business with Stampede. The accountants and programmers are more reluctant to get on the podcast, but we’re hoping that they are more eager to do business with us.

Stampede has spent time innovating. Recent innovations have been discussed in prior episodes, like the Prospect Powermid. The original innovation happened when we decided that we don’t build websites the way other people build websites. We make it easy for you to come up with your information. We tell you what we want based on specific information that we have found to be the most successful organization of information on your website.

You need to orchestrate your business which is basically to create processes to tell your employees how you want the business to be run. Franchises work because there are processes and systems. You can hire really good employees that can figure out how to run your business for you and you become the product of your business. But if you orchestrate everything, then your business becomes a product of you.

It’s not about micromanaging, it’s about giving them a patter for success. Without the processes and quantification, you don’t know if it is working or even what is working. Southwest Airlines burned their rulebook but that was part of the orchestration. They orchestrated speed to completion by removing the rules that were bogging down their employees.

Spontaneous discover occurs in the process of orchestrating your business. If the processes are in place and you look at it, you will find the magic. Numbers might be boring alone, but they tell stories and provide images to really help you understand your business and see the big picture. Numbers are awesome!

The concept of a funnel is that you take the masses and you narrow them down through a series of steps to actually find the people who are willing to pay for your product. We've been doing funnels forever.

Back in the day, newspaper ads were a common first step in a funnel. The ad would get a person to call, or go into a store. From there, they would be in the funnel and those who wanted to buy, would buy. Those who still needed to think about it would walk away. But even those, you would want to circle back around to.

Funnels were used back in the Roman times when insurance salesmen would go to the bathhouses to find potential buyers. It was the first networking meeting.

Funnels are not rocket science. They are one of the simplest and most essential systems that you can have in your business. Funnels are not an internet thing. Funnels started with people yelling in the street or meeting at bathhouses and now, they are a lot more sophisticated. Funnels today gather information and reach people across the world.

Stampede is building multiple funnels. We started with our Powermid of Prospects to determine what we needed in our funnel.

What is our product? We sell Sales Sites

What is our platform? We’re using our Sales Site to sell the Sales Sites

What is our process? We’re using and email campaign to get people to call us

How are we finding prospects? We’re going to put money into a simple Facebook ad

Then we built our funnel from there.

The top of our funnel is the Facebook ad, reaching out to the masses (narrowed down to business owners). What is this ad supposed to do? The whole focus of the ad is to get the right people to the website. We only want people who could be interested in what’s on the website.

The whole purpose of the website is to get people to download the Sales Site Blueprint.

The whole point of the blueprint is to get people into the email campaign. The more that a person is willing to give to receive, the more likely they will pay actual money for an end product.

The email campaign is specifically designed to get them to call us.

The sales person’s job is to sell them a sales site.

The final step in this funnel is to find more opportunities to assist this client with their business.

Get out there. Figure out your funnel. And become successful.

Stampede wants to start growing our team more rapidly in sales. We have 2 sales platforms: Sales Sites + Builderall Affiliate program & In-house Business Development Sales team.

Stampede held an all-hands-on-deck meeting to determine how we will onboard new sales agents onto our in-house team and develop our sales process. As a result of that conversation, we stumbled over some unexpected awesomeness. We created what is now being called the Stampede Prospect Powermid.

The basic idea of the Powermid is how you create your business systems to find prospects and develop them into customers. The foundation of which is your own Product. From there you need a Platform to share your product. Add Processes for creating sales from leads. And only then will you tack on Prospecting for customers.

Your Product is defined as what you’re selling and who wants it. You don’t know what your product is if you can’t define both of these.

Your Platform is like a stage where you display your product and it works like a train station platform where people go to get moved. Your platform could be brick & mortar, but it could be anything from blogs and websites to the trunk of your car.

Once you have a platform, you need a Process for handling customers, moving them from slightly interested individuals to customers. Your process could include sales calls or door-to-door salesmen. And these people are usually given a script. What is your process for developing your customers? How do you move your people from one metric to another? Creating and managing lead funnels is a process for creating sales from prospects.

Prospecting is like finding gold in dirt. The gold in your business is the person who actually pays money. People and businesses spend the most time and money prospecting. All of the bad experiences that you’ve ever had with marketing come back to this. If you don’t have a process established for developing those leads, you will fail. Prospecting includes SEO, commercials, press releases, sponsorships, social media, etc.

Stampede Prospect Powermid –

- Build on your Product

- Create a Platform

- Develop Processes

- Then go out and find some Prospects.

This pyramid gives us a process for talking to our prospects as well.

Get your copy of the Stampede Prospect Powermid online at https://spp.stampedeweb.com/

System: A set of things, actions, ideas, and information that interact with each other, and in so doing, alter other systems. Everything is a system.

3 Kinds of Systems

 Hard Systems

Design and Create Systems

Systems are insanely important. Without systems, you don’t have business that you can step away from. With systems in place, you set expectations and are more capable of learning from your mistakes. Systems and feedback go hand-in- hand. Feedback is everything.

The System Runs the Business and the People Run the System

• Becomes the Solution – Provide the solution before the issues come up.

• Integrates all elements required to make the business work – If you make your business to happen in a certain way, it will always work; and if it doesn’t work, it’s an opportunity improve.

• Brings life into the Business – The system becomes your brand and allows your employees to be successful and more human. It sets the culture.

Questions to Ask Yourself

• How do you build your system? For every business, you need to sit down and figure out how thing work, then write it down. You have to have a vision of how you want it to look.

• How do you build a business that works predictably, effortlessly, and profitably each and every day?

• How do you build a business that works without you?

• How do you get free of your business to live a fuller life?

Work on your business and ask these questions

• How can I get my business to work, but without me?

• How can I get my people to work, but without my constant interference?

• How can I systematize my business in such a way that it can be replicated 5,000 times, the 5,000th unit runs as smoothly as the first?