Part II: Automate Your Business

This podcast uses a book outline that was created from 3 different books. 

 - Design and Create Systems: The first system that Stampede built is the product system. We're creating and adding sales systems, and developing marketing systems including the podcasts, Stampede Your Business and Stampede Know Like Trust.

 - Your Systems Strategy: What systems does your business need to create and how to implement them. Your strategy should include hard systems and soft systems.

 - How Data and Systems Work Together:  Your systems should be designed to provide data. Feedback is one of the most important parts of your systems. The greatest, overall system of feedback is money.

 - Create a Management System: We talk about when and who to hire and how you should manage your employees.

    - Your Management System should resemble a Game

    - Manage Your People with Game Systems: If you gamify your systems, then it is easier to hire people, because the game teaches them how to do their job so you can hire people that fit the culture you're trying to create instead of the only people who can do the work.

 - Create a Financial System

Review of Part I: Creating a Business

In the first 8 episodes, we covered the following outline:

    -  Why am I in Business in the First Place?

The outline comes from 3 books: Built to Sell, The E-Myth, and Profit First

Part I is all about creating a business because first you have to created a business that has the potential to get to the million dollar mark.

The key to creating a million dollar business is to create a product worth selling. It's really about creating value. When you have a valuable product, you are creating value for your customers, your employees, and yourself.

Systematize everything. Being successful and creating systems is all about the data. You can't be successful while ignoring the data. Systems are easy to teach so that you can hire people to replace you, not to reinvent the wheel. Systems also become your intellectual property and make up a huge part of the value of your business.

Organizing Your Company

This is the last piece of creating a business. You absolutely have to organize your company.

What entity type is your business going to be? The simplest way to establish a business is as a DBA. LLC's, S-corps and C-corps provide a bit of protection. Each organization type provides different tax and legal protections. If you're serious about creating your business, it is worth it to do it right. If there is more than one of you, you need to have an operating agreement to make your expectations clear and in writing.

Shareholders vs. Employees - Nobody does anything great alone. You need to have someone to work with you or for you. You could make them a partner or part owner or you could hire an employee. You want to look for people that have different, complimentary strengths to you to balance you out.

Assigning Tasks - When you have multiple people, every role has to be defined. You absolutely need to work with other people if you want your company to grow. And you can't be the only employee if you want your business to be sellable.

Sign a contract for each position created. Even if you are doing the worker bee jobs, you need to write up a job description, set expectations for each role and sign it. Stampede created an org chart and had everyone in the organization write down their job descriptions and the job descriptions of the people that they will be responsible for in the future. Because Stampede did this, even before we knew what we were doing, we have been able to pivot and stay organized as things changed and the business grew.

Prototyping the Position: Replace Yourself with a System

Build your business as if it were a Franchise Prototype of its own. Franchises don't sell products, they sell systems. Systematize everything.

Create an Operations Manual for each of the roles. Each role needs to have documented steps with checklists and rules that make things easy for anyone doing the job to follow.

Hire people to replace you as an employee. Train them using your Operations Manual.

If you don’t follow the rules, why should anyone else?

Your Marketing Process

No matter what cool product or service you have, people need to know about it.

Find a Perceived Need and Fill It

The 2 Pillars of a Successful Marketing Strategy (If you don't understand these, you are just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks or going for popularity which doesn't pay the bills)

Give away free samples for marketing info. Trade something of value for information that helps you hone in on your market. This is a science. You need information or you're just pulling from your gut. Its about giving value.

Stampede is creating value by starting another podcast where we invite businesses to come onto our show to talk about their business. This is a service that we offer for free. We ask them questions adapted from the Stampede Sales Site Blueprint so they can increase their Know, Like, and Trust factor and credibility with potential clients.

The Common Purpose: Make a promise your customer wants to hear and deliver on that promise better than anyone else on the block.

Stampede's promise is that when you create a website following our process and give us the information that we ask for, then your customers will come to know, like, and trust you, increasing your opportunities. We will create a process to get you to your target income.

If you have a service business, you can/should turn your service into a product by systematizing it. Create processes that are easy to follow and easy to train.

10 Rules for Creating and Selling a Product (from Built To Sell)

1.  Don’t generalize; specialized

2.  Make sure that no 1 client makes up more than 15% of your business

3.  Own a process. Make it duplicable and sellable

4.  Don’t become synonymous with your company

5.  Avoid the cash suck. Charge up front

6.  Don’t be afraid to say “no” to projects

7.  Figure out how many pipeline prospects lead to sales

8.  2 Sales reps are always better than 1

9.  Hire people who are good at selling products, not services

10. Think big. Write a 3yr business plan

Create an Avatar

Franchises work better than startups because they've done the research and they know their avatar.

Stampede created a description of the ideal client when the business was created. We used this as a generic concept of our avatar. Now (9 months later) we are diving in to our first official avatar.

An avatar is a semi-fictitious person who represents your ideal client. Also known as persona or target.

Creating an avatar is both an art and a science. Marketing is just like fishing. Great fishermen know where the fish are. They know what attracts those fish. And they are skilled with creating those lures and catching those fish. 

It is important to name your avatar. And as you work with your avatar, you will develop an affinity for them.

Step 1: Who is your Avatar?

Background (ie. Job, Career Path, Family, etc)

Step 2: What are your Avatar's needs?

Goals (ie. Primary Goals, Secondary Goals, etc.)

Step 3: What is your Avatar's why?

Quotes (Personal quotes about goals, challenges in life, etc)

Step 4: How are you going to help your Avatar?

Marketing (How you should describe your solutions to this persona or avatar?)

Create Multiple Avatars

Make 3-5 avatars and test them out in advertising to determine what your best avatar is and then put your marketing budget into that avatar.

Create a product worth selling

How do you determine if your product is good or not? What do you do if you find out that your product isn’t worth selling?

(from Built to Sell)

Your Business must be all about your Product. Your Product must be all about your Customer.

Step 1: Isolate a Product or Service with the Potential to Scale

    •Teachable to Employees (or can be delivered through technology)

    •Valuable to Customers

    •Product must be Repeatable (best->worst):

    •Enjoy Fat Margins

Step 2: Create a Positive Cash Flow Cycle - Charge up Front for your Services

Step 3: Hire a Sales Team

Step 4: Stop Selling Everything Else

The 1st Standard of doing business is Money. The difference between a business and a hobby is money. The only reason to create a business is to sell it. Don't center your business around yourself.

The 2nd Standard of doing business is An Opportunity Worth Pursuing. It doesn't matter if everyone needs your product/service if nobody wants it. You might be passionate about your widget, but can you even explain what it is?

What kind of business are you in? You may have a product. But your business is not your product, it is what your product does for others. Stampede's business is Business Development, not web development.

Who is your customer? Figure out the psychographics and demographics. Drill down your avatar to find your niche.

Other Standards: 

-Where are you in business? Local? National? International?

Plan Your Business

How big should your business be?

To Facilitate Growth requires Intention at the outset & Passion for Personal Transformation

Plan ahead. Anticipate growth. Ask the right questions. Write it down. Until you're done planning, you're still in the Why stage.

Follow the Entrepreneurial Model. It's not about what your are going to do, its asking yourself how you are going to get there. Where is your opportunity? What does my business look like to my customer? How does your business stand out from the rest? Start with your customer.

Treat your business like you plan to sell it.

Why are you in business in the first place?

There is a reason that starting with Why is so powerful is that it is the reason people quit or keep going. When you know your Why, you are empowered to push through the hard times and the difficulty of building a business all while continually learning.

We talk about how Stampede found its Why.

As independent entrepreneurs, we each had attempted different things with businesses and connected with others through entrepreneur groups, like Entrepreneur Launchpad (ELP). After reading and reviewing 3 books, The E Myth Revised by Michael Gerber, Built to Sell by John Warrillow, Profit First by Mike Michalowicz, Brett combined them to create an outline that we are using to create Stampede. This same outline has become the outline for this podcast. 

Stampede didn't start with an intent to create a business. It started as a mastermind of business owners looking for a way to take advantage of the web development tool, Builderall and we realized how valuable this is. What got us excited was that we could provide real value to business owners like ourselves. As we explored this further, we picked up the book, Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson, and wanted to provide the value of Clickfunnels at a much lower price and take away the headache of doing all the work. At the end of the day, our why is to create a real company for the small business owner.

Businesses are supposed to grow and change. Your business may be your baby, but it needs to grow independent of you. 

Build your business according to what the business needs, not what you want. You have to get your ego out of the way.

When you get yourself out of the way of your success, you are free to imagine your business without you.

The purpose of going into business is freedom, personal growth, to live a stimulating new life.

What we care about we value. If you've created a mission statement for your business, make sure that it incorporates your Why. Establish your business to incorporate your mission statement into every task. 

Ask yourself the following questions:

-How do I wish my life to look?

If you have a strong Why then you get results.

As the opening episode of Stampede Your Business, we discuss the vision of the podcast and relate it back to the business that we are building, Stampede Digital Systems. 

Stampede Your Business came from an idea of a combination of business development books that we have combined to create the ultimate business creation program. As entrepreneurs, we are using this program to build a million dollar business with just a pen and paper. We are in the process of implementing that business plan and as the listener, you get the front row seat to the action. We show you under the hood as we create this awesomely successful business. 

If you have ever wanted to create a business from scratch and become hugely successful, this podcast will show you what works and what doesn't work. You can learn from our successes and mistakes to figure out what works for you. And you will see how we we create this million dollar company with very little financial risk.

We share the story of Stampede Digital Systems, where it came from and how it started.

We talk about the power of working with a team and how we built our team. No one obtains success alone.

As a business owner, you want to get your customers to Know Like and Trust you.

We practice what we preach.

So come on the ride with us and Join the Stampede!