Michael Zipursky’s Guide to Accelerating Business Growth

Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners to prepare for exit so you can maximise the valuation of your business and then exit on your terms. This is the Exit Insights podcast presented by Succession Plus. I’m Darryl Bates-Brownsword, and today we’ve got a slightly different but special episode. And I’ll explain that in a sec, but I’ve got Michael Zipursky joining me today. How are you, Michael?

I’m great, Darryl. Good to be with you.

Great, Michael. Look, we are running and starting a special series on some of the functions of the business and some of the systems and the key systems in the business that are critical to the overall operations of the business, but they still contribute significantly to building the valuation of the business. And one of those key systems, as we see it, is building your marketing machine so that you’ve got a ongoing, almost lever driven, reliable source of leads that you know how to activate and generate for your business, that are positioned and generate to a flow for the sales team to activate and, well, generate revenue for the business.

And in a recent conversation we had with together, you said, well, hey, that sounds like something that I know all about. So, and you do it a lot for consulting businesses, is that right? Why don’t you give us a little bit of background about what you do? And I guess, what’s your background in building marketing machines?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, our company is consulting success. We’ve worked with thousands of consultants all around the world to help them to build more profitable, strategic, and really help them to scale and grow their consulting businesses. I’ve been building consulting business for the last 20 years, 15 now years. Working with consultants and marketing is probably the biggest challenge that any professional services firm has.

It tends to be a big challenge for even people outside of professional services. And I think today we’ll talk about building the marketing machine from my experience, which is really about professional services and consulting businesses, but the foundation or the fundamentals of marketing in many cases do apply well beyond that into different industries and sectors.

Yeah. And before we jump into the machine, you mentioned you’ve been doing it for 15 plus years, at least over that period of time. Have you noticed any differences in the way marketing occurs in industry?

Yeah, I mean, there’s lots of changes. Marketing is one of these things that if you really study it and pay attention to it, there are elements of psychology that, you know, may appear that they don’t really change their timeless, and I believe there are many of those principles. However, marketers are very good at kind of ruining the opportunity meaning that, you know, if you go back in the day, many people would do, let’s say, a certain kind of webinar, and that worked really great at the beginning, but then you have everybody piling in and now it gets saturated and it doesn’t work as well as it used to. And the same thing you could say for things like Facebook ads or whatever the latest, shiniest opportunity was. Marketers are very good at identifying the opportunities, exploiting them, if you will.

But as everyone starts to do that and jumps in, those opportunities tend to just become commonplace. The buyer that you’re looking to reach tends to respond less to it because they’re inundated with the same kind of message. And so that’s one of the functions of marketing, is that you can’t just set something and forget it. You always need to be paying attention, you need to be tracking, you need to be measuring, you need to be thinking about what comes next. Because if you just rest on your laurels, you’re going to end up seeing that your lead flow and opportunities will tend to dwindle.

Yeah. The thought that was in the back of my mind as I was thinking about having this conversation with you is, I guess, about 20 years ago, the beginning of the internet time prior to that, most marketing was in Australia, where I’ve seen is the yellow Pages and any sort of publication and advertising, and no one knew about you until they got your brochure, although, unless you’re big enough to advertise on a tally, I guess. But no one really knew about SME small businesses until they’d had some sort of contact with you.

So, and over the 20 years where nothing’s hidden now, people already know about you before they’ve, and they’ve researched you and they’ve looked you up on social media and LinkedIn and your website and everything, and they’ve checked you out before they even have a sales call with you. So I’m just guessing, and I’d love to get your insights as to how that’s changed with the Internet and online, how that’s changed the blend and I guess even the crossover between sales and marketing.

Yeah, I mean, we could definitely get very tactical on this and look at the functions of different types of marketing. And if you look at something like direct mail, which, again, going back to the yellow pages days, very savvy marketers would invest heavily into things like direct mail. And then it dipped for a while and people would say things like, yeah, direct mail is dead, but now it’s coming back and it has been for the last several years that again, savvy marketers and business owners are looking at direct mail as a big opportunity because most people, the majority of the market is not using it.

And so that’s just kind of one way to, to view this. But I think the big shift you mentioned, Darryl, that when a consumer or a buyer is now approaching you, they’ve already done their research and that’s really important. And so the approach and kind of mindset that we’ve always had when it relates to marketing is that marketing shouldn’t be something that you do to somebody. It should be something that you do for somebody, meaning that you’re marketing. And what we believe the most effective marketing is marketing that is really all about providing value to the buyer.

So for you as a brand, if you’re always creating valuable resources or you’re just getting in front of your ideal clients and you have content, you have assets that help buyers to essentially sell themselves on you because you’re conveying and communicating and providing so much value that when they reach you, the question is no longer can you help us or are you good at what you do, your marketing has already done that for you. It’s already provided that level of credibility and communicated that expertise. Now when somebody reaches out to you, the conversation isn’t so much about you having to try and persuade about your credentials. Those already have been established. It’s not just about, is this the right fit for our specific situation that changes the dynamic when done well for the whole sales team as well.

Cool. So I’m sitting here, Michael, and I’m listening to you define a bit of, and lay some groundwork and foundations around marketing and principles. And I’m thinking we should go through the process of a business owner sat there and they’re thinking, hey look, I need to build a marketing machine. The guys have dropped this term marketing machine. I love the idea of having some sort of crank handle that I can put some input in the top of the funnel, turn the handle and know exactly what’s going to come out of the funnel.

And if we’re going to design that marketing machine, perhaps we should start with and get clear on your definition for marketing. I think you just started to touch on it there, but let’s start with a definition so we can really be clear for business owners really looking to get their head around this.

Yeah, I mean, the way I view marketing is really all about getting in front of your ideal clients, making them aware that you exist, but also already pre selling them, not by doing something. People often feel that sales is a bad thing and it has this kind of bad rap. But I view marketing as a way that you’re already getting somebody to feel and see that you are very good at what you do.

And so by providing value, creating awareness, you’re bringing people into your world. That’s what demand generation is all about and capturing demand. And so the role of marketing is to bring people into your world, have them become comfortable with your brand, make them already feel like they can trust you. You have good things going on. And so your good marketing will self select.

It’ll push away the wrong people, but it will attract more of the right people. And so now that gets them into your world. And then it’s the job of sales to have those conversations and kind of enroll or engage the highest quality buyers and prospects.

Okay, so marketing is about communicating to the marketplace that you exist and who you exist for. I guess if, if I was to capture what you..

Yeah, it’s, I mean. It’s to really get the, the attention and awareness of ideal clients. Right. Just so that they know that you exist and they know exactly what you do. And if they are the right ideal client, then they, based on what you’re putting out there, they’re going to be drawn to, towards you to want to learn more. If you have a, if you have the ability to solve the problem that they have, or you can create an improvement that they’re looking for and we can definitely get into the steps.

Darryl, you talked about breaking it down. I’d be happy to walk through the steps that we help our clients go through to really start building out that marketing engine.

Yeah. And that’s the next question, Michael going, look, we now got an agreed, if you like, or a foundation definition for marketing. Where would you start? You’re working with a consulting business and they’re going, Michael, my marketing is all bit of spray and pray at the moment. It’s not joined up. I want to build a machine. Where should I start? What’s the resources you need to begin with?

Totally. I mean, we see this all the time with clients who come in and they say things like, I have a marketing problem or a lead generation problem. And inevitably what we always look at is going back to square one and viewing or reviewing some of the foundation. The first element in effective marketing is what we call ideal client clarity, meaning that you need to be really clear on who your ideal client is. And this is true whether you’re just starting.

So we have people who are brand new to consulting this is critical for them. We have also people who are running seven figure consulting businesses, and they’ve got to that place just on the back of referrals in their network. And now they want to get to that next level. But they don’t have an actual intentional, proactive marketing system. It’s also important for them to do this exercise saying, ideal client clarity is not about a statement of, we work with small businesses or we help even manufacturing companies.

All that is too broad. You need to have real clarity on exactly who your ideal client is to the level of what does that person look like? What are their pain points, their problems, what’s top of mind for them? What’s their job title, where they located it geographically, what size organisation do they work in? The more that you understand exactly who that ideal client is and not only say what they have characteristic wise, but also what they don’t have, the clearer you are on that, the easier it becomes to market effectively to those people.

And this is a really hard thing for many people to do because it’s an exercise in subtraction, not in addition. And in business building, the idea of addition is usually one that’s easier. It’s like, let’s add these things, let’s bring in new ideas that’s easier to do. It’s harder to subtract, it’s harder to take things away, because psychologically you feel like you’re losing potential market share or opportunity. Yet when you study the most effective and most successful companies in almost any industry, the way that they got to initial levels of scale and hyper growth was by subtraction, not by addition.

They removed things, got hyper kind of focused, and that allowed them to really connect and land. Take stripe, the payment processor. If you go look at their website today, it’ll say things like payment processing for all types of businesses, everyone around the world. You look at large consulting firms, same thing. They have 25 different capabilities.

And people look at this and go, oh, yeah, they do everything for everyone. It’s like, well, that’s true, but these are because they’re billion plus dollar organisations. They have the resources. But go back in time when these companies got started, and in Stripe’s case, as a payment processor, they did payments for developers because they clearly saw that PayPal and other payment processes were not focusing on the developer marketplace. They were providing more general solutions.

They were actually a pain in the backside to work with if you were a developer. So they carved that market out of that’s what allowed them to really get traction. So for everyone who’s joining us right now. There’s always an 80-20. And so getting really targeted around who is that true, true dream client.

That’s step number one. And then step number two is once you’ve defined the ideal client. Yeah, go ahead.

Before you go to number two, Mike, I’m just wondering, what I heard you say is we really need to focus in, and if we’re talking about small consulting businesses, you got to take away takeaway. Takeaway and really refine in on who you’re ideal target client is. I’m just wondering, what sort of resistance or pushback do you get from that, from business owners when you go, this is the ideal approach if you really want to be successful.

Yeah. So I’d say there’s two levels of pushback that typically kind of come up here. The first is from those who are maybe earlier in this kind of earlier stage in this exercise. And there’s just more the fear of, well, I’m saying no to a lot of potential opportunity.

And that’s just, you know, you have to say trust the process. And even just study and look at others that have been successful in this area. This is what they’ve all done. And what you’re feeling, that hesitation, that fear is completely normal, and they just have to kind of get over it and trust the process. For those who have been in business for, you know, for a period of time, you just look at the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. So what we take our clients that are at a higher level and have more track record. If you do an analysis of your client base, if you do a profitability analysis or analysis by project type, you’ll start to see that you might feel like everyone’s equal, but you’re going to find that there’s actually a smaller group of clients that have certain characteristics, that, for example, maybe it’s a much smaller number of clients, but they provide the majority of your revenue or of your profit. And so then you start to go, okay, well, what makes these clients unique? What characteristics do they have?

We saw this with one client who, they’re about $800,000 a year, and they were treating all their clients the same. When we did this analysis, we found that they had a very small number of clients who were larger, and those larger clients were the ones that contributed about 80% of their revenues. Yet they were marketing, going to market, and their message was for smaller businesses, and there was no distinction, no definition, no differentiation yet just making that one switch to really focus on the larger organisations and understanding what the pricing strategy then meant that they could charge even more than they had been. And starting to shift away from the smaller companies completely changed the dynamic of their business and led to significant growth. But if they hadn’t done that, if they had just continued to treat all clients the same, they would have missed that big opportunity.

Absolutely. Okay, so step one is let’s get really clear on who our ideal client is. It may be worth doing some client based categorisation and just see the makeup of our client base and the age old 80-20 rule that leads us on.

What’s step two? We’ve narrowed our client base. We’ve got our. I’m sure there’s an acronym, there is an ICP or whatever the marketers use. What’s step two?

Yeah. So step two is what we refer to as the magnetic message. And this is the message that gets the attention and interest of your ideal clients. It’s what really creates differentiation. It communicates to your ideal clients who you are, what you do, what problems you solve, and why should they care what actually separates you from others in the marketplace? And this is so important. When people say, I have a marketing problem, I have a lead generation problem, you can almost always of track it back to these two things.

They don’t have real clarity around their ideal client, or they have a message that’s just far too broad and it’s not really resonating with anybody. They’re maybe trying to convey that they do five different things for five different types of people. And I think we all kind of see this showing up in our businesses and our lives these days, where there’s more opportunity, more optionality, more variables and variations than ever before. And that’ll likely only continue to increase. So if you want to stand out, you need to have a message that speaks directly to your ideal client.

And you can’t do that if you’re treating everybody the same or if you have five different types of clients that you have in mind when you’re going to market. So the more narrow you are, the more focused you are on exactly who you want to serve that dream client, then you can develop a message that speaks to the number one pain point or problem that they have, that they’re actually looking to solve. And keep in mind that your magnetic message is not meant to convey every single thing that you can do. It’s not meant to convey, you know, everyone that you work with or every skill or service offering or product that you have. It’s simply meant to do one thing, and that is to get the attention and interest of your ideal clients.

So they want to have a conversation with you. When they raise their hand and say, yeah, that’s really interesting. Tell me more, Darryl. How does that work? How do you do that? I’d be interested in exploring that further. I think that could maybe be a fit for what we’re trying to figure out ourselves. Once you have that hook and they want to learn more. Now you get into a conversation, and that’s where you can start to talk about everything else that you can do and all your other services or products that might be beneficial for them, depending on the situation and what you discovered in that conversation. But a big mistake that people make is they try and cram too much into a message.

And when you cram too much into a message, you end up just creating mess and noise and nothing really stands out. And then it doesn’t matter. People often talk about marketing from the perspective of what kind of marketing should I do? Should I do emails, should I do webinars, should I do ads, should I do speaking? Should I do this, that, and the other.

You can do all those things, plus 100 other things. But if you’re not clear on who your ideal client is and you don’t have a message that really gets their attention, you’re not going to see a lot of response. We had one client who had studied search engine optimisation, and they were creating lots of content because that’s what the quote unquote gurus online told them that they should do. And they were seeing, they were building their list, they were getting more people into their audience, and all those good things were happening, but they weren’t generating any more leads. Well, at the end of the day, they’re nothing.

They weren’t an ad based business. So having more people was of no value to them unless they were actually having more conversations with the right kinds of people. And so we looked at their newsletter and the messages they were sending out, and we very clearly saw that there was no powerful magnetic message in there. There was no really compelling call to action. And so we just worked with them to make that one adjustment to their call to action inside of it.

The first time they sent out that newsletter, they got seven people responding back saying, yeah, I’m interested. And these are all high value, you know, high five and six figure deal opportunities. Every time they send out that newsletter, kind of subsequent to that, they’re getting between five and seven people responding saying, yeah, this is interesting. I’d like to learn more. So it’s not so much about the method of marketing lots of things can work, and we can talk about different applications of that, if that would be helpful, Darryl.

But I’d say that the key is that message. Once you have that, then you can find what medium is going to be the right one to reach the actual ideal client you’ve identified.

Yeah. So what I’m hearing, Michael, is that we’ve got to start with the big picture and form a strategy. And so far, what we’ve touched on is let’s get really clear who our ideal client is. We’ve already got our product, so we’ve got a solution to a problem, potentially. Then we go, okay, so who wants that solution? Who’s the ideal person that our solution works for? And then the next one you’ve got, you’ve said your magnetic message. So step two is all about, okay, so now we know who wants that.

How do we communicate to them in a way that really just at the right level of hook, you don’t want to overwhelm them. You just need to get enough, bait them with enough or entice them with enough is, I think, is more appropriate language. Entice them with enough that you’ve captured their imagination and their engagement for them to start a conversation with you, because that hook includes, why us? How do we solve the problem better than everyone else?

Correct.

And so they’re the two first levels of what I’ll call the strategic, the big picture. Is there any more at a strategic level that you think we need to address?

Yeah, so those are the first two as we kind of talk more as pillars. The next then is what we refer to as strategic offers. And so this now, once you’re very clear on who your ideal client is and you have a way to get their attention, but then the next is thinking about, well, what are the products or services?

What does the actual solution look like? So you’ve identified the problem and you go to market by saying, here’s the problem that we can solve. The next piece is figuring, well, how can you best solve that problem? And that’s also a very strategic conversation, because for most people, in most businesses, there’s more than one way that you can solve that problem. But if you try and come at it from too many different angles and you have too many different offerings, again, that creates a lot more waste and complexity, and it’s really hard to scale complexity.

When you talk about this idea of, I know for the work that you do, Darryl, and your company, your focus is on increasing the value of companies, making them so they can sell more effectively and at a higher valuation, one.

Of the first things that message right. And communicating it well.

There we go. And if you think about what do most buyers of businesses do when somebody acquires a business? One of the first things they typically do to increase the value of that business is they go into it, they review and analyse the profitability and the revenue and all this of the different offerings, and they typically just cut the things that aren’t really contributing much to the bottom line and focus more on what is already working and right away they see improvements from that.

So this is a part of the strategic conversation to figure out, well, if we’re clear on our ideal client, and we have now a way to get their attention, what do we actually, what should we offer them and why? The conversation around the offers is directly connected to who the ideal client is. Because when you know exactly who your ideal client is, this idea of sales actually becomes very easy. We find even people, we have many clients who consider themselves to be introverts or come from a scientific or more technical background. They don’t wake up thinking like, I can’t wait to sell.

Like that’s just marketing. And sales for many people isn’t something that they’re excited about. But when you simply kind of go through this exercise and you can see that, well, I know exactly who my ideal clients are, I know what their pain points are, I know what they need and what solution would be best for them. Now it becomes easy because you’re simply just offering what you know people really want and is going to benefit them, as opposed to feeling like you have to try and persuade them to do something that is not going to be in their best interests. So that’s the third part of it, is we describe this as kind of looking at all of your years of experience and expertise, your skills, and how do you package that, position, that place value on that and then price it.

So it also includes the pricing strategy to create a lot of confidence around your offers. And that could also, for a more established business, definitely include analysis of their different products and services, the profitability of each of those, demand levels of each of those, and some history around it to help to further refine where to place more focus and therefore likely sell more of what’s already working for you. And that will also increase the value of the business.

Yeah, so I’m glad you mentioned that and sort of said what I’m hearing is you’re going that there’s a number of strategic areas that we need to address and they all need to appear. Maybe that’s they all need to logically fit together.

And, you know, if we get the right clients, the magnetic message is going to appeal to those right clients. It’s going to feel like a natural fit. And then you touched on pricing and packaging, and we won’t go too much into that because that’s another topic in the series that I’ve got lined up, and I don’t want you to steal their thunder, because I’m sure you probably would with your knowledge. But pricing and packaging also needs to be a natural fit for the people with that problem. And when they hear the message and when they hear the pricing, they’ll go, yeah, of course, that’s how I should pay for this.

Yes. Okay, so we’ve got correct

What comes after the strategic offer, Michael?

Yeah, step four, I guess. Yes, step four. The fourth pillar is really what we now talk about as the marketing engine. So once you have all these pieces in place, now you can actually go to market with a lot of confidence, because you know who your ideal client is. You have a message that your confidence is going to get their attention, interest. There’s ways, I mean, I know we don’t have time to go into all this in detail here today, but there’s ways to validate each of these steps and to make sure that you’re not just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping that things stick again. The validation helps with this, but the marketing engine, now, because you know who your ideal client is, you can be very strategic in how you actually go out and build your marketing engine. When you know that you have a certain type of ideal client, let’s say that they’re a VP of operations in a manufacturing company.

Well, now it’s very easy to go, what conferences do VPs of operations in manufacturing companies go to, or what podcasts do they listen to or what publications do they read. So you can ask yourself these questions. And so it’s not like identifying and finding the ideal client and deciding then based on what exists and where they are, what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are. Now you can strategically make the decision of where to place your focus from a marketing perspective. And we’ve seen consistently that in order to reach a million, even $3 million or so per year, you just need one marketing channel.

In some cases, you can even go to get to 5 million with just one marketing channel that you’ve really mastered. You don’t need to have five or six different kind of marketing activities. People these days, just because it’s easy to do a lot, they end up spreading themselves very thin. They think, well, I need to be doing this in social media. I need to be doing this with ads, this, this, this.

They have lots of stuff going on, but they’re not really seeing great impact from it because it’s like they’re dipping their toes in the water, that they’re not actually, you know, applying or trying to master any one thing. So I think the message I would offer for everybody is that you don’t need to do a lot of stuff to create real growth. You can find one path that, based on your knowledge of your ideal client, is a great way to get in front of them that aligns with your strengths and what you or somebody on your team is very good at. And you go after that and you just work on getting that better and better to the point of where you feel like, hey, we can’t really do much more with this. Now you look at adding on another channel, and so you might start off by focusing on just attending events where your ideal clients are and just doing that consistently because you see that it works really well.

You get a bunch of leads every time you do it, or somebody on your team does it, and you max that out and go, okay, great. We’re now at $2 million a year. I feel like we’re kind of maxed out here. Maybe we have a system in place for it so that I, the founder, I’m not doing all of speak anymore. Maybe I have others on my team doing it.

So shifting reliance away from the founder, which is also very important when we talk about valuation, selling a business, and then you add another channel, maybe it’s okay, let’s get really good at LinkedIn ads, or let’s get really good at partnerships. Each of these things, one by one, can add millions of dollars to the value of a business and in terms of revenue and profit to a business. So that’s what I would say, is that it’s not so much about all the different marketing methods potentially can work, but the conversation around, should it be direct mail, should it be webinars, should it be speaking, should it be podcasts? Really comes down to, well, what is the way that your ideal clients consume information? What is the easiest, most effective, the highest ROI, potential way of getting in front of them? Once you’ve identified that, then it’s very easy to build a strategy and a plan to make that happen.

Yeah. Okay. So what I think I’m hearing is the most important thing is get the high level, the strategic pillars right first. And we’ve touched on those already.

If you get those right, then you can be really efficient and effective with getting that message to market because you’re only sending one message to the market and you’re not confusing the marketplace with that in mind. And for the first two or 3 million I think you mentioned, you can really focus on getting that message through one channel and, and really fine tuning that channel. So you know how that channel works. You get really good at using that channel. You’re effective, you’re efficient and you’ve got a good ROI off that channel.

You’re getting good at monitoring that, that channel and, and, you know, making small changes and testing all the time to get that channel right, working. Then, then you can explore and go, okay, I’m really clear on my marketing message. I fine tuned it all. I know what I need to say. I know that this channel works well.

I’ll keep that channel going and I’ve, I’m ready to scale my business a bit more. Now let me try another channel and I’ll keep this first engine or machine going. Now let me try another channel and then I can replicate it. And I guess you keep testing and measuring and with modern day Internet marketing, I know pre Internet, the marketing directors used to go, well, 50% of your marketing budgets wasted. We just don’t know which 50% correct.

Nowadays, it’s a lot easier to measure the ROI with all the online channels. It’s so much more effective to measure the return, isn’t it?

Yeah. I would just offer for people to consider, if you’ve ever felt that you’re doing a lot, you feel productive, you feel there’s a lot of activity going on in your marketing and inside of your business, but you’re not seeing the level of response or traction or growth. It’s almost certainly related to you doing too much and missing some of those fundamentals.

So if you’re feeling really busy, like, yeah, we’re doing lots of things, and I hear these are the right things to do, but you’re not getting the traction, you’re not getting the response or the results. It’s almost always because you don’t have the fundamentals. Meaning maybe you’re casting two out of a net. You’re not really being clear on the ideal client. You need to define that, you know, and kind of focus and narrow in even more.

Right.

Your message is too broad and is not, you know, really speaking to the ideal client in, in a way that cuts through all the other noise and feels unique and is, you know, compelling enough or, and this could be a, an or an. And it’s usually in addition to that, you’re just sprinkling a bunch of stuff, but you’re nothing going deep enough and you’re not giving yourself enough opportunity. And that often looks like, yeah, we’re doing some social media, we’re posting on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever pretty consistently. We’ve been trying a little bit of ads here or there.

We’ve been trying to make a partnership work here or there. It’s like there’s lots of stuff that’s happening and there’s a good solid, with good intentions attempt to make this happen. But you need to master one area. If you’re a kind of, again, dipping your toes in each one, it doesn’t give you the opportunity to really track and test and lean in enough to get something really working very well. And what we’ve seen very consistently, the people that have the greatest success, the businesses that are the most profitable and are growing at the fastest rates, tend to get really good at one area first.

So you ask them, how do you grow your business at this point? Oh, I just do a lot of speaking events. Oh, that’s interesting. How did you grow your business to this point? But we just mastered, like, partnerships.

Oh, okay. And an outsider looks at and goes like, oh, that’s so interesting. Like, you’re doing so little. Like, if I was in your position, I would do so much more, which is not incorrect, but the fact is the reason, or it’s because they did so little and just focused on it is what created success for them. And so now once they get to that level where they feel like they’ve kind of exhausted that or hit a bit of a plateau in that one area, now it makes sense to go, well, what else could we do? What is that next bucket or lever that we can pull that will help us to get the business to that next level?

Yeah. And I really like that point about, let’s just focus in on doing one channel. Get the message right, the strategic pillars right, and then just actually take that message to market. Just focus on one pillar really well.

Michael, have you got any thoughts on, like, getting the marketing right for any business is fundamental. It’s critical to success. It’s a function that I think when you get it right and you’ve got a marketing engine or a marketing machine, it becomes part of the IP or the know how of your business. And I think it absolutely adds value to you, to your business. Have you got any thoughts around as a business is growing and they’re learning the marketing function, how they can transition or get the best of both worlds by getting outsourced marketing resources, but actually having the knowledge and the know how inside the business so that they can get that valuation kicker.

Yeah, I think that’s kind of a cast or I should say goes across or beyond just marketing into other functions of any business, which is really about documentation and systems. Right. You know, having Sops, standard operating procedures where it’s not just, you know, marketing isn’t just living in one person’s head, it’s making sure that you document. What does that process look like? How do we actually go out and bring people into our world?

What are the steps that we, you know, we go through? What needs to happen in order for this to be passed off? And so step number one is to document that. I mean, today, using a tool like loom, it’s very easy to record videos and ask anybody in your team to record videos of what they’re actually doing and put that into, you know, a folder. Then if that person is sick, they’re unavailable, they leave.

They want, you want to transition them to, you know, other, maybe higher value areas inside the business, and you need somebody to take over what they’re doing. Now you have this kind of treasure trove of step by step guidance that somebody else can come in, watch those videos, and very quickly take that over. And so when we talk about this idea of exiting a business or increasing the valuation, one of the big things. And Darryl, I mean, you know this very well, but it’s reliance on any one person. And so the stronger and more effective and kind of time tested systems that you have where the business can operate, it can not only kind of function and survive, but it can actually thrive without the reliance on the founder or any one key person, the more valuable it becomes because it reduces the risk for an acquirer because they feel like, well, once we take this on, if we remove this one person, things are still going to function because look how well this company has everything documented.

And so I think that’s really what it comes down to. And we could talk about the outsourced side of people often try to bring in outsourced marketing, and there’s pros and cons to that. But I’d say in terms of whether you’re working with somebody externally or internally documenting what’s working and of course, keeping tracking what you’re doing so that you know what’s working so you can do more of it and what’s not working so you can do less of it, is incredibly important. But once you’ve captured something that and identified something that has been working, then you definitely want to document that process so that it doesn’t just live in one person’s head.

Yeah, yeah. And we’re big fans of documenting the business model and getting right all the way through to systems. And, yeah, I can draw listeners to one of the episodes we had. We had Dave Jennings on the podcast, so, you know Dave.

Yeah.

So the author of Systemology, absolute authority on, you know, when it comes to systemising businesses. And so I don’t recall the episode, but it’s probably a year or so now ago, if listeners want to tune into that one. So good to see that, you know, it’s all coming together. But if we’re going to outsource, let’s make sure we systemise the process so that we own the process. As the business owner, we may be outsourcing the task, but we own the methodology. And it’s our methodology, and we’re asking them to run our methodology. Is that sort of summarising what you are expressing?

Yeah, I mean, I think so. Definitely. When it’s an internal person, whether they’re a contractor or part time or full time, having them document what they’re doing is in any function is incredibly important for the business. When you’re working with an outsource, let’s say you’re working with an agency, there may be parts of their process that you can’t document because it’s their IP.

But I think it’s worthwhile to have that conversation with anyone that you’re working with to try and understand as much as you can and document as much as you can what’s working, what isn’t. So you might not be able to actually document exactly what they’re doing because that might be their own IP and they may not want to share that, which could be understandable. But having conversations and asking the questions of, like, let’s just take maybe advertising, what targeting is working best right now, what ads, you know, what headlines are working best right now, what creative graphics are working best right now. So you, as the business owner or your team should be documenting that and keeping track of it, because if for some reason that agency is no longer available, something happens, you want to be able to say, hey, we have the elements, we know what works, and then it just becomes easier for you to bring somebody in to kind of take over or keep that running. So I think regardless of whether it’s internal or external, having conversations around that, documenting it is still incredibly important.

Yeah, thanks. So Michael, I’ve got, what about referrals? You’re working a lot with consultants and professional services, and it’s not uncommon. I often hear it. They go, well, we don’t need to do marketing.

We got all our work from referrals. And to me I gasp and I go, okay, so how do you control that? Do you have a mechanism? Do you have a machine, mister client, around how you generate referrals? Or are you just sitting back and hoping and waiting?

How do referrals work? Do you have an engine to generate referral leads? What are your thoughts on referrals?

Yeah, we do. I mean, you’re 100% correct on this, that the vast majority of people get, especially in professional services, get their business from referrals.

And most of those people have a very passive approach to them, right. They wait for them to come. When they do, it’s great. There’s very few people who have a proactive system and process. They’re not strategic with referrals. And so that’s really an opportunity. Now, all this being said, there comes a time in almost every business where the referrals that you used to get, you no longer get at the same level. The flow, it’s kind of like, I call it referral, well, starts to dry up. And so either it’s just because of people have changed, there’s different organisations, your relationships aren’t as strong as they used to be. And so that’s one kind of reason is just naturally the amount of referrals that you got prior, you may not be getting today or you might not be getting in the future.

So that’s number one. But number two is people often, or I should say, realise that in order to get to that next level of growth in their business, they can’t rely only on referrals. Referrals are great when they come, but it’s not something you can control. So if you want to achieve greater growth, you need a way that you can control essentially that, you know, if I put $1 in, I’m going to be able to get $2, $3, $5 out of, and then I can put more, you know, instead of putting $1, and now I’m going to put $10 in and put $15 in and $20 in, right. And so on and so forth.

And so referrals are great and you should cherish them, you should value them, you should do everything that you can to get more of them. And I’ve talked to many business owners, especially in the professional services world, consulting world where they’re a five or ten or $15 million business and the vast majority of their business still comes from referrals. But what’s interesting is when you kind of peel the layers of that story back, it’s not just that they’re doing great work, that people come to them. They’re also doing other things that support referrals. And so they might not think about it in terms of, yeah, we’re doing marketing, but they’re speaking or they’re going on podcasts, right?

Or they’ve, they have a plan with their, their team members and employees to go out and, you know, bring in new people or they’re, they’re hosting events. So they are doing marketing. It’s just not, maybe they don’t view it as, as marketing directly, but I think for anyone who wants to ultimately be in control of your business, referrals again are great when they come. But if you’re just waiting, then you don’t have control over your lead generation, you don’t have control over your marketing. And just because you’ve gotten great business to this point through referrals doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to have that going forward.

And I can’t tell you, Darryl, a number of clients that I’ve spoke to over the years who will say things like our business, it’s doing so amazing right now. We have more business than we can handle. I’m booked out for the next six months or twelve months. I think I’m just going to take my foot off the marketing gas pedal because things are just in a really great place. And then in almost every situation, something unexpected will happen, whether it’s the economy or their clients.

A client will pause, a client will say, hey, I think actually we can’t really do this right now. Something will come up and then they’ve lost their momentum. They don’t actually have now the level of business that they were expecting. And so the advice that I always offer to people is regardless of where you are in your business earlier stage, you’re going to need to push harder on the marketing pedal to get more momentum going and to accelerate. But even when you’re very well established, you should still always be applying some pressure to that marketing gas pedal because what you’re doing today isn’t going to create results for you tomorrow.

What you’re doing today is going to create results for you in 90 days or 120 days from today. And so it’s really critical. I’d say referrals are great, but they’re not saying that you ultimately control, and so investing in your marketing and working on that consistently is really the way to ensure that your business will continue to grow regardless of what’s happening around you. And in many cases, there’s things that you can’t control.

Yeah, that’s really sage advice. Always be marketing, because if you don’t, you’ll end up on that boom and bust client roller coaster. And that’s chaos for any professional service business. Michael, you’ve covered so much ground and you’ve given us so much good structure around building a marketing machine and getting those strategic pillars right first and then applying the, the message and communicating that through one or more channels, but really sticking to the focus and not straying too far. Yeah, that’s me, I guess, summarising it and just capturing what I’ve heard. The key points are, I’d love to know, what are the messages that you want to make sure that listeners walk away having heard from you and your sharing of your knowledge today?

Yeah, well, I mean, one principle that we share with clients all the time is this kind of concept of imperfect action, that it’s really easy when you talk about marketing to kind of get lost and trying to perfect everything, to have the website fully updated to create, to polish the marketing materials.

It goes on and on. Yet at the end of the day, what matters most is not what you think. You can create the most elaborate plan for your marketing and go to market and find that it doesn’t work. And so we’re very big believers in. Go out and test.

If you have an idea of, let’s say, a new message that you’re developing or a new email campaign or whatever it might be, go out and put it in the market. Don’t overthink it. Of course, test with initial small group, but look at what the actual results tell you because you can have the best plan, but the person who actually decides whether your plan works or not is the end client. You’re going to learn very quickly when you go to market, whether what you’ve created resonates and creates the response and result that you want. And if it does fantastic, then lean into it and do more of it.

If it doesn’t, then you go back and you think, well, what else could we change here? Or try. And so that’s a mindset that we’ve seen work really well for people, and especially in the consulting world. Most consultants tend to be perfectionists. They tend to be kind of quite conservative, and they don’t want to make mistakes or the wrong kind of first impression.

So they, they spend a lot of time trying to get things just right, but they spend too much time doing that, which means they’re wasting time not going out and actually getting the feedback that matters most. That’s really what I would encourage people to do and kind of layer that mindset on. It’s not just about throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s being strategic, going through the pillars and process that I talked about. But then as you’re doing that, testing along the way and getting feedback and having conversations with the actual market.

Get it out to market quick and test it and get real customer feedback rather than what you think is the feedback is the message by the sound of it.

Yeah, definitely.

Michael Zipursky. So, Michael, look, I really appreciate you sharing this. Your thoughts on how to build a marketing machine. Getting this right is critical for any business if they want to get close to maximising their valuation. Thanks for being on the exit Insights podcast today. My pleasure.

Thanks for having me, Darryl.