In this episode, Ben reflects on the year 2023 and helps listeners set plans in motion for a successful 2024 in their video businesses. He emphasises the importance of analysing financials and setting goals to achieve desired revenue and profit. Ben explains how to increase leads, conversion rates, average dollar sale, and the number of transactions to grow a business. He provides a step-by-step process for planning and identifies the ideal customers to target. Ben concludes by inviting listeners to join his Strategy Board program for support and guidance in achieving their goals.
Takeaways
- Take the time to analyse your financials and understand the levers you can pull to grow your business.
- Set specific revenue and profit goals for 2024 and plan measurable actions to achieve them.
- Identify your ideal customers based on what you enjoy doing, what you do best, and what is most profitable.
- Seek external support, such as joining a program or working with a coach, to help you reach your goals.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction and Reflection on 2023
01:22 – Setting Goals for 2024
02:46 – Analysing Financials for Business Growth
04:07 – Increasing Leads and Conversion Rate
05:05 – Increasing Average Dollar Sale and Number of Transactions
07:47 – Calculating Revenue and Profit
08:14 – Pulling Levers to Grow Profit
10:29 – Planning for 2024: Questions to Ask
12:50 – Identifying Ideal Customers
15:42 – Taking Action: Reviewing, Planning, and Seeking Support
17:34 – Conclusion and Invitation to Strategy Board Program
If you found this episode of value I’d love for you to reach out and let me know on Instagram @engage_ben or email podcast@engagevideomarketing.com
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Transcript of the Interview: ** Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.
Ben (00:02.562)
G’day my friends and welcome back to the Engage Video Marketing Podcast. Well, we are nearly at the end of 2023 and I want to ask you, how was your year? How did you go in your video business, in your video strategy operation, whatever that looks like for you. I’d love to hear from you. Reach out to me, podcast at enga and let me know how your year was. I’d love to celebrate the wins and hear from you about your challenges. So the purpose of this episode today is
Really, I want to spend some time with you rounding out 2023 and helping you set some plans in motion to have 2024 become your best year yet in your business. Now, I recently wrapped up a small group workshop called the Video Business Growth Plan workshop. Some of you guys who are listening to this podcast might have joined me for that workshop.
I wanted to take in this episode, some of the ideas that I shared in that workshop and share it with you guys on the podcast to hopefully help guide you to set up your business to be the best it can be for 2024. Sound good? All right. Well, let’s dive in. There’s a quote by Marshall Goldsmith that said, what got you here won’t get you there and if there’s anything in your business that maybe, you know, you’re not quite at the stage in business that you are, that you want to get to,
then I think that quote is really important, to recognise that in order to change results, you need to change your actions, right? So you need to think about what different actions can I take or more consistent actions do I need to take in my business in order to get to the goals that I need my business to be at in 2024 by this time 12 months from now. So I guess the first thing is, have you actually taken some time to set some goals, to put some critical thinking time into your business
or as a business owner to actually plan out what it is that 2024 potentially can look like for your business. So I’m going to walk you through a bit of a way to do that by first reflecting back on your 2023. So when you look at your 2023, you need to be spending some time analysing how you made the money that you did in your business in 2023.
Ben (02:16.514)
So look at the customers that you’ve got, look at the kinds of projects that you did, look at how you got paid in 2023 and think, do I wanna be doing more of that or less of that or different things in 2024 to get to the revenue goal? But when we’re thinking about business growth planning, I think it’s critical and it’s often overlooked to actually spend some time analyzing the financials. So let me ask you, how often do you open up a profit and loss or an income statement report in your business and look at that?
So if you’ve answered in your head there, anything more frequent than once a month, then well done, good on you. Hopefully you’re applying that insight in your business into planning and moving forward. However, for so many business owners that I coach, they very rarely look at the numbers in as much granular detail as they need to. So if you’re guilty of that, if you’re thinking, well, I don’t really look at my numbers very closely or my book keep handles that or my accountant.
then chances are this is something that you need to change in 2024 to get more focused on the growth of your business. You see, really when it comes to growing a business, what do we really want? Right? Well, think about that. What do you really want in order to grow the revenue and the profit in your business? Well, you want more customers, right? Typically we want more customers. And by getting more customers, hopefully what we also want is we want more revenue, increased income in the business. And then really…
It’s not really revenue that you want, right? It’s profit, bottom line profit, which is the money that you can take out and pay yourself or grow your wealth as a human living a life. That’s why we’re doing business right at the end of the day. It’s not a charity. So we want more customers, we want more revenue, we want more profit. But here’s the thing guys, you can’t actually go out and get more customers, right?
What you can do in order to get more customers is that you can get more leads. You can do some marketing, you can do some networking activities, you can create some campaigns to grow your lead generation in your business. So we can do that. We can go out and get more leads. Okay. And if we got a certain number of leads coming in, then we can do things to improve the conversion rate or how many of those leads convert into customers. That’s how we get to increased customers in our business.
Ben (04:36.734)
So to get increased customers, we need to increase the number of leads that we have or opportunities to sell. And then we need to increase the conversion rate of how those people are actually making, how many of those people are making a decision to buy from us to become customers. Okay, so that’s how we get customers. But then as we go further down that kind of thought pattern, then we can also think, well, okay, great. So we’ve got a certain number of customers, we can increase that in 2024.
But how does that lead to increased revenue? Well, if we get more customers and everything else stays the same, then we will get some increased revenue. But there’s more that we can do here. We can also look at how much is our average dollar sale or how much on average is a project worth to our business when we get a client say yes. So work out that number. What is your current average dollar sale and can you increase your average dollar sale? Can you lift your prices? Can you bundle things together? Can you…
charge more for what you do or work with bigger clients so that you can charge, you know, have bigger value projects. So you can increase your average dollar sale. And then you can also aim to increase the amount of times that people buy from you in a given period. So think about how often does one client do a project with you in one year? If currently that’s a low number, then that’s another opportunity for growth within your business. So you can increase the average dollar sale amount.
You can also increase the number of transactions that people buy from you. So now when you start to look at this mathematically, you’re thinking that we’ve got a certain number of customers which are generated through a certain number of leads times the conversion rate. So leads times conversion rate equals customers. And then we have customers times the average dollar sale amount times the number of transactions or the repeat purchase, how often they buy from you in the year.
And that equals your total revenue for the year for your business. Right. So let’s say that your revenue was a $120,000 business, for example, let’s just put some numbers in here. If you had a $120,000 total revenue number in your business in 2023, then, you know, potentially that came from, let’s say it’s 80 leads, you had 80 opportunities or 80 quotes throughout the year, and you had a 75% conversion rate.
Ben (06:58.238)
And hopefully if you’re following along here, the math is that you’ve got 60 customers. So you’ve generated 60 clients from 80 leads at that 75% conversion rate. And then let’s just say that your average dollar sale amount is $2,000. So 60 customers times $2,000 means that potentially you’ve got a $120,000 revenue business. That is if each customer’s only buying from you once in the year.
Right, so your number of transactions is once. So that’s not a recurring revenue model, that’s a straight up project model. $120,000 business comes from 80 leads, 75% conversion rate, 60 customers at $2,000 average sale. Okay, awesome. Now, let’s take that revenue figure and let’s apply a profit.
margin percentage to that. So let’s say that your profit margin, so everything that’s left over after all expenses and your income and your own wage has been taken out, let’s say you’ve got a 20% profit margin, means that at the end of the year, you’ve got $24,000 of revenue generated, sitting or money generated sitting in a bank account somewhere. So your total net profit for your business was $24,000. Okay, hopefully you followed along there.
I know we’re just audio only here, so it might be a little tricky. But let me just talk about how you can start to pull some levers here to grow the profit in that business. So let’s say that we try and increase all of those areas by 10%. Let’s say that we do some more marketing. We increase our leads from 80 to now we’ve got 88 leads, so 10% lift in leads. Let’s say that we lift our conversion rate by 10%, so now we’re at an 83% conversion rate. We do that by increasing or…
putting in some sales materials or improving our ability to sell or putting some say videos into our sales process, improving our proposal or our quoting template so that we get more people, 10% more people saying yes. So now we’ve got an 83% conversion rate. So now from 60 customers in 2023, our 2024 is now 73 customers in the year. Awesome. Let’s say that we increase our average dollar sale as well. We push up our prices.
Ben (09:09.578)
And now we’ve got an average dollar sale of $2,200. And let’s say that the number of transactions, so the amount of times people buy from us in the year, let’s raise that by 10% as well. So let’s say that on average, one out of every 10 people are buying from us another time. So now it’s 1.1 is the number of transactions. So we see an incremental lift in that as well. So what’s our total revenue now that we’ve done a 10% lift in leads, 10% lift to conversion rate,
10% lift in average dollar sale, and 10% lift in the number of times people are buying from you, we’ve now got a $175,692 revenue business. Okay, so we’ve added on an extra $55,600 in revenue to that business through those small incremental changes. And let’s say that we look at our profit margin as well, and we increase our profit margin by 10%.
So now we’ve ended up with a profit of $38,652 in this business. So that’s $14,652 just of extra money that’s been generated in this business, which we can go on a holiday or we can, whatever, we can pay ourselves more money. So that’s extra net profit in this business just through that 10% lift.
So hopefully that’s interesting to you, that when you start to understand the financials, you can start to think about the levers that you can pull in your business in order to get to the revenue goal that you want, and importantly, the profit goal that you want. So take some time to really understand your financials. Look at that and use that to reverse engineer your success. So look at a 12-month profit and loss statement from 2023, and use those numbers to figure out how you got to that.
that number in the first place in 2023, and what do you want to change in 2024 in order to get to the revenue and profit goal that you want your business to generate in 2024. So ask yourselves these questions in this planning process. You might want to grab a pen and paper, pull over if you’re driving, and write these questions down. The first question is, what profit do you want to generate in your business this year? What is the number, the dollar figure that you want to pull out of your business
Ben (11:27.202)
Whether that profit figure includes your wage or whether you pay yourself and then you’ve got profit left over. Whatever that net profit figure is for you, what do you want to generate in your business in 2024? And then you can work that back based on your intended net profit percentage there or your margin. What revenue is required to do that? So what revenue number do you need to hit in order to generate the profit that you want from your business?
And then you can think, well, what levers do you need to pull in order to make this a reality? So what is your average price of your services and how often do you need to sell those and how many customers do you need? Therefore, how many leads do you need in order to actually make that a reality? And then the fourth question is, is this plan achievable and sustainable for you? So, if you made $120,000 in 2023, you probably don’t wanna set yourself a goal of making
$500,000 in 2024. That’s probably not achievable and sustainable. It might be, but you need to work out what the plan is to get there. And then finally, ask yourself, what help do you need in order to get there? So that’s the last question. What do you need, whether it be staff, whether it be team, whether it be coaching, support, whatever that may be, what help do you need to get there? And if you do need help to get there, I’m gonna talk to you a little bit about it in the end of this episode about, one of the ways that I can help you do that through my Strategy Board program.
So take the time to do your numbers. That’s the first thing. The second thing I want to touch on real quick as we wrap up this planning episode for you for 2024, is get really clear on who are you chasing down, who are your ideal customers, and how are you going to identify who those are so that you can be really targeted in your business planning for 2024. So the idea I like to think about is this idea of
It’s often referred to as Ikigai as well. Maybe you’ve heard of that idea of, you know, finding, you know, your true purpose in life. It’s that Japanese idea, but really I’d like you to think of it as, as three overlapping circles, which is the idea of in circle. Number one is get really clear on what type of work do you enjoy doing in your business? Figure that out. Do that thought process. What do you really enjoy doing? What type of projects, what type of video work do you really enjoy doing? So that’s in circle. Number one.
Ben (13:46.174)
In circle number two is what types of projects can you or your company do the best? So get clear on that. Maybe it’s something that you’re just really set up well to do. And then the third one is what projects or clients are actually most profitable? So which ones actually make you good money, good profit margin? So figure out those three things. What do you enjoy doing the most? What can you and your company do the best? And what projects or clients are the most profitable? And work out the overlap here and figure out.
they’re the kinds of clients you want to be getting in 2024. And you can do that by running a total report of all the clients and projects that you worked with. So through your CRM or your bookkeeping software, generate a report of all your projects for the year and put that into an Excel spreadsheet. Filter out all the anomalies. So maybe there’ll be some strange projects in there that you don’t normally do or unnaturally big ones or a bunch of small ones that you don’t normally really want to do. So filter out those, you can delete those from your spreadsheet.
and then score each one of those projects or clients out of 10 for each of those questions. So did you enjoy it? Was it profitable? And is it the kind of work that you can be really good at, that your company’s really good at? So mark out of 10 for each of those things, so you get a total mark out of 30, and then you can rank your spreadsheet by that score. And at the top of that spreadsheet, the higher numbers will be an example of those kinds of projects or clients that you absolutely love working with.
They’re the guys that you need to go out and get more of. They’re the ones that make you money. They’re the ones that are the kind of work that you’re set up to do. So that then becomes your kind of north star of the kinds of clients that you wanna go out and find more of. So just in summary here, what I want you to do if you wanna take action on this business planning approach for 2024 is spend some time reviewing 2023, looking at what you did, what you learned, what you did well, what you could have done better.
Then plan out your roadmap for 2024. Decide on a revenue goal. Decide on a profit goal. Plan out some measurable, some specific things that you can go and do in order to get towards that goal as you get into 2024. And then finally ask yourself, who’s support do you need to get there? How are you going to make sure that you hold yourself accountable to achieving those goals that you’ve set yourself in this process? So…
Ben (16:10.066)
If it is something that you’re looking for external support, you’ve heard me talk about my strategy board program before. And I just want to take a moment here to let you know that we are in the process right now as of December, 2023, forming a new strategy board group in for 2024. So if you’re after some support and some guidance and, you know, a small group of people who are doing business with you, as well as me to join with you and help you hit your revenue goals.
and hit your targets for 2024 and grow your video business into the business that you know it needs to be or that you know it can be. Then I want to invite you to apply for the Strategy Board at enga slash board. But you need to do that by the end of 2023. Okay, so the absolute cutoff is December 31st, 2023 or else you’ll miss the opportunity to join that board program which starts in January 2024. So,
Let me know if you’ve got any questions, reach out to me, Ben at engage video marketing.com. And I hope this has been helpful for you. Go and take action, go and plan out your 2024. Your video business can, it can be the best year yet for your video business. If you want some help, go to engage video marketing.com slash board and learn more about the program there. All right, guys, that’s it from me for 2023. And that’s it for the podcast.
I am planning on releasing or re-releasing a couple of the best of episodes over the next couple of weeks. And then I’ll see you back in January, 2024 for brand new episodes of the Engage Video Marketing Podcast. I appreciate you for listening throughout this year and for being on this journey with me towards building confidence as a video strategist. All right guys, take care. Bye for now.
Ben (18:01.718)
You’re just hanging out.
