Peaceful Profits Podcast Ep. 32 - 2x Any Business In 12 Months Or Less
Synopsis:
What if you could double your revenue, profits, and freedom in just 12 months?
In this Peaceful Profits episode, Mike Shreeve shares the proven framework he uses with private consulting clients to 2x any business—without chasing shiny objects or burning out.
Learn how to run 90-day sprints, focus on the five key growth engines (finances, operations, sales/marketing, offers, and leadership), and track the KPIs that actually matter.
If you want to scale faster while working less, this episode gives you the roadmap.
Transcript:
2x Any Business In 12 Months Or Less
[00:00:00] Hello, my friends. Hope you're doing well. Mike Shreeve here. Thank you very much for listening to today's episode. We're gonna be talking about one of my favorite topics, which is how to double any business in 12 months or less. This is actually something that I do with my private consulting clients. I'm sharing this information with you because it's that time of year again.
So once a year I open up 10 to 15 slots for a private consulting cohort, and we spend 12 months together doing four things. One, doubling revenue. Two doubling margin. So profit margin [00:00:30] three, creating at least three months of cash reserves so that you could operate your business for three months, making no sales during that entire time, and still be able to pay everybody and everything, which is, I cannot tell you how amazing that is once you have that in your business.
And then, of course reducing the business owners work by at least 15 hours per week, so we double. The business. We double the profit, we double the peace of mind, and then we reduce drastically how much you work in that business. And here's my plug for today's episode. If you're interested in becoming a private consulting client of mine, and you'd like to join that cohort of about 10 [00:01:00] people, and over the next 12 weeks, we work on those four things in your business, which is guaranteed.
By the way, this is a guaranteed service. Please reach out to us at support@peacefulprofits.com. There's a full brochure that you can take a look at. This is something I've been doing for a decade. I love it. It's the work that I enjoy the most. This is not a team group coaching thing. This is working directly with me every single day for the next year to accomplish those four things.
So if you're interested, shoot us an email support@peacefulprofits.com. It is a first come, first serve basis. So there there's an application process as well, very picky about who we work with. But if you'd like that information, reach out to us. Okay, [00:01:30] plug is over. Let's get down to the details. How do you actually double a business in 12 months?
The first thing you have to understand is that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. And that if you try to look at 12 months as a single action or a single set of tasks to accomplish, you'll never actually accomplish it. So I've learned over the years. The best way to accomplish an annual go goal is through four 90 day sprints.
So we have these growth sprints and what we do in the [00:02:00] beginning. And whether you're a private consulting client of mine or not, this is a very good idea to start implementing in your business. What you do is at the beginning of the 90 days, you first take a deep assessment, okay? You're looking at everything.
How many promotions did we run? How many new leads did we get? What was the conversion rate on those leads? The cost of the leads was the sales conversion, et cetera. And you do this every 90 days. Deep assessments. When I do this with clients, there's typically 20 to 25 questions that are deep dive data gathering types of things.
And you look at, and oftentimes just this in and of itself, can help you to double your business without [00:02:30] any additional guidance. You just look at how did we perform in the past 90 days? And of the data that I'm looking at. What's, where's the low hanging fruit? If you realize your business hasn't grown in 90 days, and also you got no new leads in 90 days, guess what the fastest way to double your business is to get more than zero leads, right?
So that kind of situation can be very helpful, but it's really only the beginning. You take a deep dive, you take an assessment, analyze the resources that you have available to make the adjustments, and this is the key word, [00:03:00] adjustments. Too many people think. That the way you double something is you go start a bunch of new stuff, and that is very rarely the case in how real businesses grow very quickly.
So for example what is more likely going to get you to doubling what it is that you're already doing, double margin, double, et cetera, is to take what is currently functioning and to improve it. And so you're really looking for, and I've talked about this at length in other episodes, you're [00:03:30] really looking for opportunities of improvement with the resources you have today.
Okay. Then you set goals, realistic goals, right? I'm all about setting the big vision and going for it, but in these 90 day sprints, it's about what can you realistically achieve setting those very firm and specific goals. Then executing. When I work with my private clients, I help them to do the assessment.
I help them to set goals, AKA, put together a plan of how they're going to improve, and then I also help them to execute. So execute. It's a step and [00:04:00] it's a step on purpose because I can tell you there's a lot of people who know right now what they need to do to double their business, but they don't execute on it.
So accountability and getting stuff done and analyzing what you're doing while you're doing it is then the fourth step. So active analysis, accountability, et cetera. And you do this every 90 days, okay? That's how you eat the elephant one bite at a time, but specifically. What are we working on within those sprints?
So within assess and setting goals and executing and [00:04:30] analyzing and asking all those questions and finding a low hanging fruit, what specifically are we working on? There's two major things that drive growth in every business. The first is called the five primary growth engines. Okay, five primary growth engines.
The first primary growth engine is your financials. Are you actually charging enough? Are you overpaying for things? Are you underpaying for things? Hence you're not getting the results that you're looking. Is your business even set up correctly for the tax [00:05:00] incentives? Do you have debt in your company?
What's a an effective way to pay that debt off? Should you be taking on debt for specific growth? And so there's a whole list of. Financial strategies that directly impact what the financial nature of the business. So how much money you're making and how much money you're keeping. So one of the areas that we focus on in these 90 day sprints is your financials.
The second thing that we focus on in these 90 day sprints is the primary growth engine of operations. So these are things like [00:05:30] systems. Support. Are things chaotic or are they boring? Where are you, say, for example, losing people when they came into your program. Do you have set up in your program the most effective and efficient fulfillment processes?
Are you actually able to. Take a break from your business for a week or two and have the business function without you. How about four weeks? How about six months? Those are all measures of operational efficiency. If you can't do any of those things, or those are very seriously [00:06:00] struggling, sometimes just fixing that will allow you to double your business.
I'll give you a very simple example. If you're in a business right now. 100% of the sales and marketing is reliant upon you. Here's what I bet happens. I bet all the pennies in my pocket that this happens to you and your business all the time. You work really hard. You generate a bunch of money.
Then you work really hard to fulfill that money, and you stop focusing on the sales and marketing, which brought the money in on the first place. Then you're fulfilling, and then you get in this trap where you have valleys and mountains and valleys and [00:06:30] mountains and valleys and mountains of financial inconsistency.
That is an operational issue a. It's not a marketing strategy issue, it's not a sales strategy issue. It's not even a financial issue. That is your operations need improved, so that's why it's a primary growth engine. How about something that's even easier than that? Sometimes you just don't feel like it, right?
Sometimes you just don't feel like fulfilling or selling or whatever that reliance on a single person. A k the business owner, is a risk to the business being able [00:07:00] to gain the momentum required to double in a timeline like 12 months or less. So you're looking to spread out the risk of ups and downs through better operational procedures.
Maybe that does include team, but it doesn't always have to include team. And so that's why we focus on it as a primary growth engine. Number three, sales and marketing. Sales and marketing. Sales and marketing. Everybody knows that sales and marketing contributes to growth. What a lot of people don't know is how much it contributes to margin.
And specifically, I'll give you just a very brief example. I [00:07:30] can sell the same knowledge and skills to two different audiences, and I will have two very different margins. I'll give you an example. I can teach copywriting to people who are looking for a side hustle, and they can say, I'll teach you the skill of copywriting.
And this copywriter, this person who wants to become a copywriter, they're gonna be able to take that knowledge, what a group coaching program, product course, et cetera, and they're gonna be able to go out and make some money, right? They may make three, five, $10,000 a month, which is great. It's great upside for them.
Now, their upside is, [00:08:00] let's say top end, $10,000 a month. And so I have to price accordingly. I'm probably not going to get, massive amounts of money for that skill. I take that same skill that I have teaching people how to write better copy, and I go to a massive information publishing company or series of companies or people doing eight figures a year in info marketing.
And I'm saying, I can teach you how to write this email sequence when plugged into your business. And that's these as the typical average result. And the typical average result is something like. A million dollars in sales. Who has the bigger, upside, [00:08:30] same skillset that you possess, but it's a very different upside, right?
What does the bigger upside mean? It means you can charge way more. Now, this is an example of sales and marketing. Why? Because marketing is about taking a message about what it is you do and putting it in front of the right people who will pay you the amount of money that your business needs to hit the goals that you have.
So again, when I work with my clients, sure, we talk about sales strategies and how to close more people and how to create setters and how to, how to hire a sales team. What kind of marketing strategies are the best. But a lot of the time it's about realigning [00:09:00] offers. To make sure that what you want from the business is actually the business that you're running, because all sales and marketing is talking about what you do to the people you want to do it to.
So that very simple equation, little micro adjustments in there can lead to bigger margins which, and then of course leads to bigger revenues often. So that's that's sales and marketing. The fourth thing that we focus on during these 90 day sprints is our offers. So partially about what I just said about making sure you're making the right offers to the right people, but also, I'll give you an example.
[00:09:30] The number of people who are in the help industry right now who could add a million dollars a year to their business with just one additional offer is pretty much almost all of them. There is tremendous opportunity in really deep diving into selling better offers to your existing customers and clients.
It's one of my favorite things to do in my own business. One of my favorite things to do for the clients that I work with as a private consultant, being able to expand. I'll give you an example. Okay, so I just launched I don't really like to talk too much [00:10:00] about numbers, but I think this is a strong case for the idea.
So I'm gonna, I'm gonna mention it. I just launched a new offer in my business in one of my companies, which generated about $150,000 upfront, and then about $70,000 a month for a contract value that lasts about 10, 10 months. It's 10 or 11 months. And so $75,000 a month for the next 10 months.
It's 10, not 11, it's 10. The 11th month is that initial $15,000. That came in anyways. Point is that 100% of the. Revenue that comes [00:10:30] from that offer is allocated directly to me. In other words, it's a hundred percent profit because the company that allowed the creation of that offer specifically doesn't have expenses that go along with it.
But because of the company being able to afford itself and create offers and create clients and customers, and it pays for itself and there's margin within the company, et cetera, et cetera, you get to a point. Basically what I'm trying to say is you get to a point in your business where adding additional offers can change your overall margin.
Because you get gosh darn near close to pure profit offers. Does that make sense? So [00:11:00] offers aren't just about what it is you're doing, it's not just about creating better results for clients, although I love doing that as well, helping people to have higher success rates and their programs and things like that.
It's oftentimes it's about math. It is about trying to figure out what your goals are, creating an offer that can deliver those goals. I can't tell you how many people are really good at sales and marketing, really good at operations, really good at finances, but the offers in their business are the things that are keeping them from [00:11:30] pulling from the business what they want, whether that's joy, whether that's passion, whether that's enjoyment, or whether that's cash.
It, the offer is your business, right? And so sometimes, oftentimes many times, most of the time improvements on offers equal. Yeah. One of the biggest things you'll focus on during the 90 day sprint of doubling your business, doubling your margin, getting those cash reserves and working a lot less.
So just some thoughts there. And then there's other things too. Like for example, do your offers naturally lead to other offers? Is there clear ascensions, they're clear [00:12:00] lateral movement between offers? Do you have offers in your business right now that you should just shut down because they're giant waste of time and they're not bringing you the money that you thought that, there's all sorts of things involved in offer creation in and thinking about offers.
In the context of, is this actually going to allow me to grow rapidly or is this an offer that's going to keep me stuck at a certain level? So lots to think about there. And then of course, the fifth primary growth engine is good old team and leadership. I put team and leadership together because there's no point in having a team if you aren't willing to [00:12:30] become a leader.
And, and I'm gonna be, I'm just gonna be frank with you and transparent, especially if you're thinking of becoming a private consulting client of mine and you want me to work with you for the next 12 months. I'm going to tell you, financial is easy, operations is easy. Sales and marketing is easy.
Offers is easy compared to team and leadership. I think. There's a really good book called The Motive, which I recommend everybody read. I know a bunch of other people in this space recommend it as well. Leadership is such a critical component of growing businesses and growing them rapidly.
It's also probably the [00:13:00] hardest thing to be. And so again, when I'm working with clients, sometimes we're doing the 90 day sprint and we always wanna say, okay, let's look at the team, let's look at the team, let's look at the team. And that's, it's a valuable exercise. Are you overpaying? Are people being as efficient as they should be?
Are you getting a labor multiple that you deserve for the kind of business that you have, et cetera. And sometimes the thing you work on in the 90 day sprint is taking a long, hard look in the mirror. And asking yourself, am I the leader that I need to be in order to take this business to where I want to go?
And that can be difficult. [00:13:30] It can be challenging, it can also be life changing. One of my favorite quotes from Jim Rome, my very first mentor, the guy who helped me get off the streets. My biggest, one of my biggest regrets in life is I never got to meet him in person before he passed away, but I was able to consume all his content, et cetera.
One of the one favorite things that Jim Rohn said was. And I'm gonna butcher it here a little bit, but essentially because he said it a bunch of different ways but the idea is becoming a millionaire isn't about the million dollars. It's about becoming the kind of person who can attract a million dollars.
And I've thought about that and I've pondered over it and I've [00:14:00] countless journal entries and just thinking about that process. And I think a lot of that becoming the kind of person who can attract that kind of income, a lot of it has to do with leadership. And being a better leader. So those are the five growth engines, primary growth engines.
When I work with clients every 90 days we set goals and execute on all five of those. For the rest of your life. You can set goals and execute on all five of those every 90 days, and your business will continue to grow. Again, it's financial operations, sales, and marketing offers team leadership.
Now within all of [00:14:30] that, so those are the five primary growth engines. There are four critical KPIs that you're really going to want to focus on within each sprint and then compare to the prior sprint. So a 90 day sprint is also what? It's a quarter. It's a quarter in business. So once we complete quarter two, we'll look back and compare it to quarter one and et cetera, et cetera.
These are the four KPIs, one. Is your cost to acquire a customer? Everybody in my private consult consultation service, they can quote you on the drop of a dime. What is your [00:15:00] current cost to acquire a customer? Everybody knows that they check it every day, they live it. The second number, which they can also tell you at the drop of a hat is the lifetime value of those.
Those customers. So how much is it costing you to get a customer? How much are you making per customer? Then we ask, what is the number of daily new customers you're bringing into your business? Okay, so if we know how much it's costing, how many are you bringing in and how many how much is that worth to you every single day?
And then the last KPI that we track is how many [00:15:30] of those front end customers are turning into backend conversions? So that's really taking a look into the LTV and asking how efficient is our ascension process now with those four kpi. Those are the only KPIs you really need to be worried about because everything else in the sales, marketing and growth side of the business in terms of just sheer revenue generation can be essentially umbrellaed under each of those.
If you realize say for example you and I work together, I can tell you what the average cost to acquire a [00:16:00] customer is in your particular industry. And if it turns out that yours is way high, guess what you're going to be doing for the next 90 days? Figuring out how to get it lowered. So that might be improving the offer.
It might be changing the traffic. It might be hiring a new ads team. 'cause it turns out they didn't actually know what they were doing. You may need to, but you can see that by just focusing on those four things every 90 days, we recheck in. And try to improve those four numbers. If your cost to acquire a customer goes down while your lifetime value per customer stays the same, what happens?
You increase your margin and now costs you less [00:16:30] to bring in the same value, right? Or maybe there's a different scenario. Maybe your cost to acquire a customer is right on average with the industry, and it turns out that your LTV is really low because you don't really have good backend offers. Nobody really wants to buy a second thing once they buy one thing from you, et cetera, et cetera.
Then what are we gonna be focusing on for the next 90 days? We're gonna be increasing that LTV. Why? What? What happens there? If you've been able to stay in business so far with a very reasonable expense, but not a lot of money. After that expense. So cost to acquire a customer, the value of that customer over its lifetime [00:17:00] isn't very high.
What happens when you add another offer and that LTV shoots up? You've got an increase in revenue and you nine times outta 10 have an increase in margin, which is the money you get to keep. That's the one that we care about the most. And then of course, with the number of daily sales, sometimes, honestly, sometimes all you need to do in your business is just add a second traffic channel, right?
Everything's working fine. You just need to add some other thing that increases the volume of what's already working. Pretty simple, easy to do. Looking at how can we get more of these very profitable things [00:17:30] called customers into our business every day. And of course, the front end to back end that's typically has to do with nurture content.
Are we trying to squeeze people too hard, too early? Knowing the 1585 rule are we maybe our backend offer isn't that compelling, et cetera, et cetera. And so when you combine all this together, 90 day sprints focused on the five primary engines of growth finances. Operations, sales and marketing offers, team and leadership.
Running all of those engines of growth through the four critical KPIs of cost to [00:18:00] acquire lifetime value per acquired customer, the number of daily sales and new customers, and in the front end to back end conversion. And the front end backend conversion. There's a whole, we could talk hours about that, but essentially how many of your front end customers become backend customers is really what we're most interested in Then.
Doubling your business in 12 months is really not that complicated. Complicated is the right word. Will it be difficult? Sure. It is simple. Doesn't necessarily mean it's easy. There's work involved. You have ups and downs. There's frustration. It [00:18:30] doesn't always go right. You want it to happen yesterday and you're still doing it three and a half months, and the thing from the first 90 day sprint rolls over into the second 90 day sprint.
But at least with this very simple framework and knowing what you ought to be focused on, you'll always make progress. You'll always be able to take. Steps forward when, let's be honest, as business owners, there's so many things that are trying to make us take a step back. So many distractions. So many difficulties.
So many problems. And so I just, I found this to be highly effective. I've been following this process for myself and my private consulting [00:19:00] clients now for more than a decade. And it's worked every single time. In fact, you know what? I don't wanna overhype it. Understand that if you want to become a private consulting client, the guarantee is that we'll double your revenue, we'll double your margin, we'll get you three months of cash reserves, and then we will help you to reduce your workload by at least 15 hours per week.
But so that's the guarantee. But the guarantee is below what our typical results are for the private consulting group. Once, once you, it's once you understand the moves to make in [00:19:30] business, despite what the gurus say, those. Moves that you make to grow a business, they don't actually change.
So this method and these KPIs and these five growth factors, they've been the same for a decade. They'll be the same for five decades more. Maybe the ad platform has changed. Maybe the kind of offer that's currently working today might have changed, but finances, operations, sales, marketing offers team leadership.
That's all that's, [00:20:00] that has been since the dawn of time, right? In the world of business. And so the point is that once you really begin to learn how to recognize how to operate within and how to make big results come about within this sort of core set of central skills as a business owner. You can translate this into new companies, as I have done so, I have more than one company.
You can essentially do this on your own whenever you want. And then most importantly, and I think this is probably the biggest thing to take away, is that you [00:20:30] can transfer the skill to your team. There's nothing, like I said, there's nothing complicated going on here. I may not necessarily be easy, but it is simple.
And so as a business owner, you get to a point where once you have mastered these core skills transferring those skills becomes one of your 80 20 activities. 'cause it allows you to what, start to work yourself out of the business. 'cause now you're creating people within your company who are able to double your business.
It's the same thing. It's it's like anything in life, you are a basketball player. [00:21:00] At first. When you're very first starting, you have a coach teaching you how to dribble, how to shoot, how to rebound, how to steal, how to block. Then you play on the big time and you've perfected your ability to steal and block and dribble and shoot and all these things, and then someday you what?
You turn around and you coach it as well. So this is one of those sort of core set of skills that I think everybody should possess. Especially those who are trying to look for really strong, consistent growth over time. So there you have it. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward if you would like my direct feedback.
Assistance, [00:21:30] review your stuff, help you to come up with 90 day sprints. Analyze your data guarantee a doubling of your revenue, doubling of your margin. Three months cash reserve, and 15 hours per week. Less of work. Please shoot an email to us at support@peacefulprofits.com. This is the only offer where I work directly with people, so my team might pop in every once in a while, but this is absolutely.
And you working together for the next 12 months to accomplish something [00:22:00] amazing, but also in the prom, in the process to develop some real long-term tangible business growth skills that you can use again and again no matter where you are or what you're doing. So thank you so much for listening to today's episode.
I hope it was insightful whether we get to work together or not. Thank you again for just being here and trying to do something. A good friend of mine and I were having a really deep conversation about how incredible. Entrepreneurs are, and I just wanna send this message to those of you who are maybe in a place where you wish things were better or you're feeling like, am I [00:22:30] in the right spot?
Or what am I doing? I want you to know that you are and to do something great does require great challenges and sacrifices. And I just wanna thank you for it. I don't think, you probably don't hear that enough. I know I didn't when I was coming up. I really wish I could have heard that a lot more. But thank you for sticking through.
Thank you for trying to help people. Thank you for trying to serve others. Keep going. It is worth it. I promise. I promise it is worth it. So that is just a little message for anybody out there who needs it. Again, thank you all so much and we'll see you in the next one.