The Real Deal Offline Series: Okay, I Get It!...I'll Do Evergreen Launches For My Offline Business!

Chris,

I appreciate the post and can say that I'm with you 100% and feel the same way. Right now my offline business is KILLING IT! Sales seem to be pouring in and no signs of stopping. I have another couple businesses on the verge of closing the sale and its great! The problem is I am working(and on WF) for about 14-16 hours a day, and still behind on projects!

Even though I am on a business high right now, I'm smart enough and have enough experience to know that the high doesn't last forever. Sometimes all it takes is one disaster offline and your business can fall apart. Mine has slumped a few times and I wasn't sure if I could recover. Of course, proper planning and preparation can prevent that problem, but ultimately everyone who invests money or wants to be prepared, has a multiple stream of income!

A variety is good!

I don't know about you guys but in 20 years from now I don't want to be offering websites and SEO to people (if those things will even be around) and grinding out sales and being on the phone non stop.

Right now, I am working on my passive income with some adsense websites. I am also developing a product release, in an amazing make money online niche that has virtually NO competition with a solid amount of searches. Also need to work on building mailing lists in different niches!

Chris,

(I know with your experience you probably know this stuff but I will use your example for others to gain knowledge)

It seems like you have grown your offline business successfully but seem to be doing all the work (or at least the majority of the work) yourself.

This business is all about creating systems. Create the system and then automate it.

Scenario 1:

Your business creates websites (using web design as an example as you spoke about 5 major web site projects).

So, as you have done, you get 5 clients and charge each of them $1,000 (not your figure). So you make $5,000 (before costs).

You take 1 full month to obtain those clients and do their work. So you make $5,000 less marketing expenses to get those clients less incidental expenses to create the sites.

For ease of numbers we will make your marketing spend and incidental expenses as $100 per client = $500.

Your profit = $5000 less $500 = $4,500


Scenario 2:

You get 5 Clients for web design.

You have 4 to 5 designers/programmers (outsourced partners you or your team can work with) and an employee in your office (or outsourced again) who has experience in direct response marketing (or you train them).

You have training manuals in place for what a website should do for every client in terms of content and conversions etc. Your employee(s) are trained on these systems.

You are now no longer doing the site designs. You are no longer creating the content for the sites or coming up with the site concepts. You have staff following your originally created systems for this.

You now have more time on your hands. So you are able to focus your attentions on only overseeing the projects and bringing in more sales. As a result you bring in another 10 web design clients for the month instead of only 5.

Let's see what your profit looks like now:

Sales $15,000 (15 clients @ $1,000 each)*
Less:
Marketing & Incidentals ($1,500) ($100 per client)
Less:
Outsoucing costs ($3,000) ($300 per site) *
Less:
Employee salary ($1,500) (average salary)

Your New Profit = $9,000

* By rleasing your time from the client work you have time to bring in at least 3 times the amount of business you had time to bring in before.

** - you can easily find outsourced partners at this rate or less
for sites you can sell for $1,000. Obviously if the site is more advanced this figure will be higher but so will be your charge to your client


So, what have you just done for yourself:

1) Released the stress from yourself
2) Increased your bottom line

Scenario 3:

You now take on paid or commission based sales reps. Which brings in more business. Now depending on how large you wan to grow your business and how involved you want to be you can start employing more admin staff and managers to manage the admin staff all following the systems you have created.

You then take a chill pill and count the money rolling in to your bank account whilst your employees take care of everything.

Obviously you only go to this scenario 3 level if you want to have a large scale business.

Your attention can then be focused on investing in other markets, even creating other streams of online income etc etc.

The sky is the limit as long as you know how to create systems in your business and then have others do the work.

Riz

Riz,

You're absolutely right on and thankfully I do have systems for much of my business because I do realize that systems are the key.

Over the next 90 days my goal is to systemize every part of my business, however there's a bigger issue that I didn't realize when I started out on my offline journey.

And I know that I'm going to touch the third rail here, but here it goes...

...Website design is a beast and I'll probably focus on offering other marketing services instead of website design.

Now, before I get chewed up and spit out, let me explain.

I've been doing tons of website design projects since I got into offline marketing and every one that I've built to actually make sales or generate high quality leads has been a serious undertaking.

Maybe this is my own shortcoming, but I'm not yet at the place where I can have my assistant manage these types of projects and deal with the designers that I use as the primary point person.

Designing a website is complex once you move past the brochure website phase. See, I could whip together a brochure website in a couple of hours or just hire one of the warriors I normally use to do it.

However, once you get to a certain level, you're going to get that $3,000 - $5,000 deal and if you think a five page template website will have your client gushing with joy, you're dead wrong.

So, for me it's been more of a evolution of my personal goals and business goals. So, just like all businesses go through phases so do offline businesses. For example:

Phase 1 would be the doing everything yourself because you can't afford not to and don't have systems set up.

Phase 2 would be having the money and a good idea of a workflow process and outline of a system to outsource things.

Phase 3 is the mastery phase where you have a team of polished professionals with your blueprint system to folllow, while you work on other income streams.

Chris