Become a 100K a Month Producer Without Losing Your Marbles

To become a 100K a month producer without losing your marbles means building your business properly. The issue that I’ve seen with a you-centric business is it’s almost like you’re building a cocoon around yourself. You’re starting out with this business and you’re doing things, and the more things you do, the more you’re weaving this cocoon around yourself, and you sort of isolate yourself in the middle of everything.

And then when it comes time to grow, you don’t really know how to do it because you’re stuck in the middle of this whole thing. And so for most people who want to grow beyond what they’re just capable of doing themselves or who want to create a business that could exist separately from them, where they could say, “I own that business, but I’m not operating in it every single day of the week.” That requires an entirely different mindset and entirely different approach.

David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to become a 100K a month producer without losing your marbles. Hi Jay.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe via: RSS | iTunes

Jay: Hey, David. It’s great to talk about this issue because I think, you know, people imagine I’m going to be an entrepreneur and they think about the money and the lifestyle and what they did is they actually created a job that they’re working, you know, 60 hours a week, 70 hours a week. They’re not making progress. And so they’ve created a job and they were actually trying to create a lifestyle. And so that can be very difficult.

David: Yeah, it definitely can. And I think the whole idea of trying to do it all for many people is difficult.

And different people have different tolerances for pain. So some people need to hire earlier. Some people can afford to wait. They have the bandwidth to be able to do that. I know personally for myself, I had to hire early because there were specific skills that I just wasn’t good at. And there are certain skills that you have to have in business, and if you’re not good at them, you’re going to have to hire for them.

So for me, I ended up doing it sooner rather than later, and I did it wrong. In the early stages, I ended up hiring another salesperson just like me. So we had two people who were good at sales and nobody who was good at doing the numbers and things like that. So you learn from those mistakes. But, if you want to become a 100K a month producer without losing your marbles, you need to focus on what are the things that actually need to happen in this business, well and consistently, and then do what it takes to get all that in place.

Jay: Do you think it’s possible for somebody to be a 100K producer on their own? I know you said it was difficult or you had to move sooner. I’m just curious. Do you think that somebody could say, no, I’m going to do it on my own?

David: I know it’s possible because I have clients who have done it. And I marvel with them. When they tell me what they’re doing and they tell me how they’re doing it, I’m like, “I don’t know how you do that.”

I mean, a longtime client of ours, I love her so much, her name was Barb Burcham. She passed away a few years ago. But Barb was great. She did over a million dollars a year in promotional product sales, essentially by herself. I think she might have had an assistant at one point.

And she did it on small orders. She participated in one of our mastermind discussions and she was talking about how she just has all these clients and she’s taking a lot of small orders, but she was able to do it. And I asked her, well, what sort of CRM are you using? She was doing it in Outlook and I was like, “I don’t know how you do that. I have no idea how you do that.”

There’s another great client of ours, a guy named John, who does over a million dollars a year, primarily by himself. He might also have a little bit of outside help, but he’s just able to do it. So I think a lot of it is deciding am I able to do it? I know for me, there are aspects of the job where, no, I’m just not going to do a good enough job at it where I would trust myself to handle those aspects of it.

Sales and marketing, yeah, I’m good with that. But other aspects of it in terms of ongoing operations and in terms of handling the finance and all that kind of thing that’s where I definitely need help. So it really depends a lot on the individual.

Jay: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the things that’s really hard. Some people can’t really self-assess very well. You ask them what are you good at? And they might tell you everything. And the reality is they’re not good at everything.

And so it’s hard for them to know, well, I should be focusing on this area and then I could get somebody else, like you said, to focus on the other things.

In my own case, I love to close. I’m a good closer. But I’m horrible at cold-calling and, you know, the initial contact, and those things are difficult for me. So I’ve learned that over the years. And it’s taken a long time for me to come to that understanding.

David: Yeah, I have a very similar situation. I don’t like initiating cold contact with people. And so much of the work that I’ve done and much of the work that I’ve done with my clients is to help them create marketing that initiates first contact for them and positions them as the expert so that when they do finally have a conversation, the people are feeling good about it. They’re actually excited to talk to you because they don’t view it as just somebody who’s trying to sell them something.

They view it as somebody who knows what they’re talking about is an expert in their field and is going to provide them with value just even in the communication alone.

Jay: Yeah. Is that where the Blueprint to Consistent Revenue comes in?

David: Well, the Blueprint to Consistent Revenue is really a very simple framework. And it says that if you want to get to consistent revenue, there are a couple of things that you need to do.

First, you need to maximize revenue from your existing customer base. And if you were to say, okay, what did I do in sales over the course of the last year? Pick a number. If you’re in promotional product sales and you did half a million dollars in sales, okay, that’s what I did. I did $500,000 in sales last year.

So you ask yourself, okay, what do I think that group of people is going to spend with me over the course of the next year? Is it going to be 550? Is it going to be 600? Or maybe I lost some, maybe it’s going to be 400 or 350. What’s that number likely to be?

So the first step is to maximize our existing relationships and leverage those relationships. To say, okay, if I really did my best with this existing customer base, what could it be worth? So maybe it goes from 500 to 550 or 600. Let’s say it goes to 600.

Okay, if I really focus on selling these people, I think I can get it to 600 this year. And then you say to yourself, well, what is my goal? Well, if I want to be at a million dollars in sales and I think I can get to 600 with my existing customer base, then the other four has to come from somewhere else.

Right? So that’s the second step in the Blueprint to Consistent Revenue, which is adding or layering in the appropriate new relationships. To be able to say, okay, if I think I’m going to get to 600 with my people and I need to add another 400, how many clients do I have to add? And how much do they need to be worth to me? So that’s the second part of it.

And then the third part of it is balancing seasonality and deal flow. Because there are some markets where you can generate a lot of money in certain months. And nothing in other months. You just hear the crickets chirping. It’s just very quiet. Nothing’s going on.

And if you’ve ever operated a very seasonal business like that, as I did, you recognize pretty early on that this could be a problem. And then at that point, you have to set up counter-seasonal strategies to be able to generate revenue, to fill in those gaps.

Jay: Yeah, and I think you know, talking about step number three, this is where having some type of system to track your sales trends and your revenue, I mean, if you’re sitting there saying, “wow, it’s really slow,” and you can go back and look at the same period last year or the last two years or the three years, and then suddenly go, “wait a minute, there’s a trend here.” Then you can know that ahead of time next year, and you can account for that. If you’re not tracking, you’re not going to be able to see those trends and you’re going to be reactive all the time.

And I would think to be a top producer and to do 100K a month, you can’t be reactive. You have to be proactive.

David: Right, especially if you want to do it every month. Because I had a very seasonal business. There were some months where I was doing multiple six figures and then there were some months where I was doing next to nothing.

And so you’re having to, like a squirrel, you’re having to hoard for the colder weather and you have to hang onto it and not spend it, which can be a challenge.

And there are some businesses where you know it’s an issue. In our business, we did a lot of work with public television stations and they would have pledge drives, three times a year.

They would have a big pledge drive in January, a really big pledge drive in March, and then a smaller one in August. And so those months and the months right after the pledge drives would be big money months for us. But then when they weren’t pledging, we weren’t making money from that market.

So then we had to look at what other markets are counter-seasonal, what other types of businesses could we pursue that are buying things when my primary customers are not buying things.

Jay: So that was step number two in the blueprint, right? You knew what your existing base was, and now you’re layering in on top of that because of seasonality.

David: Yeah, sort of a combination of two and three because you are adding or layering in new accounts to supplement so that you can get that consistent deal flow.

Jay: Now, in your ebook, you talked about the idea of a you-centric business. YOU-centric business? Is that a bad idea?

David: It depends. it can be a bad idea. It can work for some people. A you-centric business is ” I’m Dave.” If it’s all about Dave, Dave’s taking the calls. Dave’s taking the orders. Dave’s dealing with customer service, right? If it’s a me-centric business or if it’s a you-centric business, that’s what that means. Now, there are some people who have personalities that almost make it a you-centric business.

Their personalities are just so big that people just want to deal with them. They love dealing with them. And that could potentially be problematic.

The issue that I’ve seen with a you-centric business is it’s almost like you’re building a cocoon around yourself. You’re starting out with this business and you’re doing things, and the more things you do, the more you’re weaving this cocoon around yourself, and you sort of isolate yourself in the middle of everything.

And then when it comes time to grow, you don’t really know how to do it because you’re stuck in the middle of this whole thing. And so for most people who want to grow beyond what they’re just capable of doing themselves or who want to create a business that could exist separately from them, where they could say, “I own that business, but I’m not operating in it every single day of the week.” That requires an entirely different mindset and entirely different approach.

If you’re just good at selling and you’re good at doing all those things and you’re happy to generate the revenue you’re doing, and you’re okay with being at the center of a you-centric business, then I’m not going to say don’t do it.

But if at some point you see yourself wanting to expand beyond that, then you’re probably better off recognizing it early and then adapting your actions so that you’re not continuing to create something that is you-centric rather than something that could be grown and scaled.

Jay: Hmm, interesting. So what would you say to people who they, they, they hear this and they’re like, you know what? I’m running a you-centric business right now and I want to grow, but I don’t know if. I can afford, you know, somebody else or some help in order to get away from being you-centric.

David: Well, I think you first have to ask yourself, how important is it for me to change the whole approach? Because really you’re talking about an entirely different structure for your business.

And so if you’re like, well this is it. I’m stuck in the middle of this cocoon and I can’t afford to hire anybody else. You have to ask yourself, as we discussed in a previous podcast, why can’t you afford someone else? What are you doing? You know, how are you investing your time so that it’s not generating enough for you to be able to pay for yourself and someone else?

And that’s not an accusation. That’s just an actual honest question. What are you doing? I remember my business partner had a conversation with a woman one time who was talking about how she was working all these hours and she was generating a very small volume of sales on an annual basis.

And my business partner said to her, “well, what are you doing all day?” And I don’t think he meant for it to come out that way, but it was really the perfect question. What are you doing eight to ten hours a day that is capable of producing such small results?

What it means is either you’re doing a lot of things incorrectly or you’re doing a lot of the wrong things. You’re doing things that are not generating the revenue. So simply by focusing our attention on “what do I need to do to generate the revenue, to be able to allow me to expand beyond my cocoon?”

Also, for a lot of small business owners, sometimes it means paying other people instead of paying yourself.

And in the early stages of my business, I did that a lot. There were a lot of days where the people that I hired to work with me were making a whole lot more than I was. There were times where I wasn’t making anything because I wanted to pay the other people, because I knew that those things had to be done.

And not everybody’s capable of doing that. But if you want to grow beyond yourself, it’s likely you’re going to have to have some growing pains.

Jay: Yeah. I’ve worked for Micromanagers and they want to be involved in every little piece of the puzzle. And you can’t just hire somebody. You have to be able to hire somebody, train them, and then trust them and be able to hand that, whatever that is, to them so that you can break away from it.

And if you can’t ever get to that point, you’re still going to be you-centric, but you’re going to have a lot more expenses. You’re going to have a big payroll, but you’re still going to be you centric. Right?

David: Yeah, so making the decision, I think, is really important upfront. You’ve got to be able to make that call. And if you recognize that you can’t afford to continue to build a you-centric business, it’s going to mean taking some very different actions.

And if you’re watching this video and you’ve downloaded the 100K e-book, if you watched the Your Next 100K video. If you downloaded the 100K Cheat Sheet. All of those things will give you some really great ideas, some good starting points on how to proceed down that road to generate the kind of revenue that you need to escape the you-centric business.

Jay: Well, I love that you’ve developed all of these tools. Because we talked about being self-aware and we’ve talked about, okay, now you’ve become self-aware and you’ve realized you’re not the best at everything. All right. Now what? What do I do? And these steps will just kind of take them through that process so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

And then hopefully they’re not spending huge amounts of time every day generating a very small number of sales like you talked about.

David: Yeah, exactly. And for people who have actually accessed the material, it’s important to understand. If you’ve already got it, that’s great. Hang onto it. We’re only making it available for a limited time because the material that we’ve put out there is actually from our paid trainings.

So we’re giving people access to this to get an idea of what we do inside our paid training, so they can decide whether or not they want to participate. And if you go through that and if it makes sense to you and you say, “Hey listen, I think I’d like to do more of this,” and you decide you want to work with us, that’s great.

If not, download this stuff anyway. Take action on it anyway. Because you should be able to simply taking action on the stuff that we’re giving away for free right now, you should be able to generate a high multiple of whatever it would cost to work with us in our training programs.

Jay: So how do they get access to it, right now?

David: Well, right now you can go to TopSecrets.com/YourNext100K. That’s TopSecrets.com/YourNext100K. If you go there, you can get access to the 100K ebook, the video series on Your Next 100K, the 100K Cheat Sheet, and a video instruction on how to work you through that cheat sheet, which is designed to help you to get to your next a hundred thousand dollars in promotional product sales.

So go there and do that.

Jay: All right. Yeah, do it now before it goes back in the vault. David, thank you for offering all these great tools and thank you for spending time talking about it today.

David: Thank you, Jay.

Ready to Grow Your Sales & Profits?

If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.