Six Ways to Make Three Times More Money

Here are six ways to make three times more money this year without more marketing, more ads, and actually even more customers. The first principle is activation. The first point at which the customer receives value from the product. If you're a B2B service company and you say that you're a marketing agency, it would be probably the first time that they get leads from you. Whereas if you're a software company, it might be the first time that they log in and see the dashboard with all their information. Whereas if you're a product, a physical product, it might be when they receive the product hand in hand. I'll give you a quick story to demonstrate how important this is. So in gym launch, when we had an initiative, which was, hey, our turn right now is at about 8%. Let me just try and break it in half to 4%. And so given this is a B2B service company, I looked at it and said, okay, what's the activation point of the customer? When do they first get value from the product? The more that I honed in on looking at when people were leaving in the program, what I realized is that the people that were leaving were the people who were not making their investment back the fastest. So the people who stayed the longest made back their investment in the first 30 days. If I want more people to stay longer, how do I engineer it so that more people, all the people, make back their investment with us in the first 30 days? And so we created what we call the fast cash play. We're going to make everybody do what these people did because we looked at. why did they make their money back so quickly? Because at this point, what we were doing with gym launches, we said, hey, we've got four different paths that you can take. You can start here, here, here, here. Because I felt like, oh, that's more customized. It gives a better experience for the customer. What we lose through the customization is the certainty of delivering them with the outcome. And so we said, cool, we'll do that whole, they have to pick their own path, but the first 30 days, they need to do the fast cash play. Because what we saw was that those people that got to the 30 days and had recouped their investment, had done the fast cash play. Out of those four options, that was the one that they chose. And that's why they made their money back so fast. So then we said, fuck all these other options. That's the only thing our customers do, the fast cash play. Guess what happened? Our turn went from 8% to 3% within six months. And obviously, I say within six months because it takes time to put these things together. We had to redo the product. And then we had to see out all the customers who came in after selling new ones into this new way of doing things. And then we forever changed how we did business because we used to think that giving people more autonomy in the beginning would provide a feeling of freedom. And so therefore, they would want to stay longer. But what we learned is that we actually need to give them more direction in the beginning so that we are certain that we deliver the value that we know we can. And then after that 30 days, we can loosen it up. The likelihood that we are able to now get them to do... What the program says to do or what we tell them to do because they've already seen results is also much higher. So you get more compliance from customers. The faster you deliver results, the longer they stay. and the more compliant they will be with the things that you recommend. So you have your activation point, but the work is not done yet. We have to do something on a consistent basis to make sure that we can maximize LTV of customers, which is track and display ROI. If a tree falls in the forest, but nobody sees it, did it even happen? If you do work for a customer and you don't show them the work, did it happen? If you make progress for a customer and they don't see the progress, did it happen? And so with any company, what you wanna understand is that If you want to keep customers engaged, you need to remind them constantly that you are providing value. They don't know what the fuck you're doing if you don't tell them. You need to tell people who are external from your business what you're doing internally. And so like with anything in life, say you give instructions to an employee and you're like, here's what I want you to work on. If you don't hear anything from them, how do you know they're working on it? How do you know that they're going to hit the goal? You don't. Okay, think about it like this, right? If you go to get on an airplane. and they're like, hey, sorry, we have a delay. You're like, okay, great. What happens 30 minutes later? What happens 30 minutes later is you're like, where the fuck is my plane? And you're like, hello, where's everybody? Like, where's my plane? What's going on? Has there been anything happening? Do you know why they always let you know, hey, we would like to inform you that there's still a delay? Why have airlines figured it out that they have to consistently every 20 to 30 minutes tell you that you're still delayed? People would rather be informed and feel like they're making progress and their questions are answered then remain in the dark. For a lot of companies, they take in a customer and they say, we're gonna do all these things for you. A great example would be recruiting. We're gonna find you the fucking best COO in the world and they're gonna change your whole company. It's gonna take us a couple of weeks and then yeah, you're like amazing. By week two, when they haven't sent you an email, they haven't said jack shit to you, they haven't told you how many candidates they've reached out to, you're like. this ghosted me. He took my money and ran. This actually happened to me. When I was younger in my career, about seven years ago, I signed up with a recruiting company for the first time. And when I signed up with that recruiting company, I was super excited. And I was like, oh, I can't wait to get all these candidates. I'm sure I'm going to get them in the next five days. And then a week goes by and I hear nothing. And then the next week comes, nothing. I'm like, what the fuck? So I reach out to them and I'm like, are we still doing this? And they were like, of course, we've been doing X, Y, and Z. We've been sourcing from here. We've been doing all this stuff. And I was like, yes, that would be great to know because I feel like I paid you and I've gotten jack shit. Why is that? You don't need to get somebody to the goal immediately, but you do need to. Tell them that you're tracking to it. Doing a recruiting service. Updating them on like, here's my sourcing strategy. Here's how many people I'm going to cold email. Here's where I'm going to post your listing. And then by the way, you're going to hear from me in about two to three days, and I'm going to let you know what the response rates are of those people. And then by the end of the week on Friday, I'm going to let you know how many people passed the first interview. It's not like you need to have delivered the candidate in five days, but you need to let them know where you're at in the process. An example of this would be if you're a B2B company, let's say Gymnalt, right? Like you're driving money into their business, have them fill out a report of what they did that week and how much money they made using the systems. That's actually what we did on our coaching size. We had a document that we asked them to fill out every week, which said, like, what steps did you take? And how much money did you generate from the fast cash play? So then what does that mean? They don't need to have made back their entire investment in those five days, but they're reminded of how far they've come. Software companies do a really great job of this. A great example would be Instacart. Every freaking time I log into Instacart, what do I see? All it tells me, you have saved 5,672 hours of Instacart. Because guess who's been a customer for like since inception? I have. So it reminds me every time I use it that I don't even know what the inside of a grocery store looks like anymore. It's telling me and reinforcing my usage by letting me know how much time I've saved. And so you always want to be thinking, how can I track and report on the ROI that the customer is getting? That's why the second principle is so important of making sure that your customer knows exactly where you're at and what you're doing. The next principle is going to help you operationalize a lot of the value you give to the customers, which is called mirrored communication. Right now, you think that you're really great at making sales and marketing. What I want you to do is I want you to get in your customer's shoes and count how many times has your customer touched your business before you make a sale? How many ads do they see? How many funnels do they opt into? How many emails do they get? How many touch points with a rep do they have? How many calls do they have? How many pieces of content do they consume? And then what I want you to do is take that number and put it post-purchase. If you want to keep someone longer, take the amount of touch points you have prior to the sale and reflect them after. The second thing could be, you have content to get people to buy your thing. Why would you not have content to get people to use your thing? This is called product marketing. which is as soon as you have somebody into the business, you're no longer marketing to get customers, you're marketing to get customers to use the product. Don't you think that if you had some videos, some content, and some email communications, they'd be more likely to use it? That is why mirrored communication is so important is because it's kind of like high school, right? Where you're like, before, it's like a guy's flirting with you, doing all this stuff, and then you like make out with him, and then it's like ghost you. Maybe not everyone. Maybe not for the guys, right? But you did it to a girl, for sure. A lot of people have really great communication prior to purchase, but then afterwards, It's like they leave everyone feeling like the girl who got left in the dust. They get that feeling. They're like, oh my God, I was used. I was taken advantage of. That's the same feeling your customers have when after you make a sale, you don't talk to them. And so take the amount of touch points, mirror them to after. Now, just because your customers use your product and have consumed it, right, in some way, shape, or form, doesn't mean that they get value from it, okay? Which brings us to the fourth principle, which is time to value. Time to value is how long it takes for the customer to get value from the product after they purchase. They can use the product, but do they get value from it? What's a good example? Crest white strips. You have 30 day supply of white strips. So I'm gonna use the product on day one, but when are my teeth white? Certainly not day one. It's certainly not day two. Certainly not day four. It's 30 days. Why do you think they came out with one hour Express? Because it shortens the time to value. I put it on. and an hour later my teeth are white. It's no coincidence that they did this because they realized people felt very discouraged putting on Crest white chips every day and only getting a result 30 days later. It was a lot of work and you don't see a result until 30 days. There's a lot of businesses that have great products, but they do not know how to deliver value fast enough. So I'll give you an example. We have one company in the portfolio that they have a fantastic product, but that product is a business service and it requires both work on their part, to help the customer and actions on the customer's behalf to make the product work. So it's a two-way street. When we looked at when does somebody really recognize value from this product, it was at the six-month mark. And so the reason I thought this was a problem was because I thought they had a great product. But when renewals came around, we had 52 renewals come up one month, and they got two to renew. And I was like, I know the product is not the issue because the product's great, but the experience of the product is poor. Have you ever gone to a restaurant that's incredibly fancy and everyone's told you it's fucking amazing and you get there and you have to wait three hours before you get your first course? Or it might be that you have to wait an hour before you can get bread and appetizers. Doesn't that completely take your view of the product? The food might be fantastic, but the fact that you had to wait three hours to get a fucking steak, you're never going back there again. The same can be said for any product or service. And so I explained this to them, and I said, you've got the cold steak problem, which is you have a cold steak. Great steak, but it's just three hours too late. And so I looked at their product and I said, why is the reason it has to take six months? Why can't this take 30 days? And they're like, oh, well, Layla, you know, we've got to educate the customer and we drip one video a week for six months. And so I said, what if they watched one video a day for two weeks? What could we get done there? And so as soon as we did that, I kid you not, we reduced the time to value by five months. Customers were able to get the same result that they were getting in six months in one from a very simple change of just condensing the work. Because it's not about the time it takes, it's about the amount of videos that they consumed. It's not that it takes six months to learn the product, it's that you spaced the videos out over six months. And I think a lot of people conflate these. It's not the time, it's the things that happen in that time. So let's just take the things that happen in six months. put them in 30 days. So again, if you're like a service company, how long before they recoup their investment? How long before they see a result? If you're a pest control company, am I going to still have rats after the first spray? How many sprays do I need before there's no rats? I mean, it's simple shit like this. Just take the same amount of interactions that you have spread over a longer time horizon and condense them down into the one that you want. It's not about the time. It's about the amount of things that occur in that time. The fifth principle is called ongoing onboarding. And you're probably thinking, I thought onboarding was a one-time thing. But the reality is, just like you're always dating your spouse to keep a great marriage, you're always onboarding your customers to keep great customers. You're like, I thought I only onboarded customers once. If you want to keep a customer, you need to consistently be onboarding them. Think about this. You onboard an employee. After you onboard an employee, you have one-on-ones. You have meetings. You're talking to them consistently. The same goes for customers. So just because we've... sold the customer and then onboarded the customer, what happens next? How are we talking to the customer? So again, just like we have the mirrored communication, we want to mirror the communication through the entire process. And so for example, if you are a service company and your customer needs to know things about your product, let's give an example of a marketing agency. If I were a marketing agency today, and I were trying to keep my customers longer, I would educate them on all the things that I need them to be able to do to make my marketing effective. Because what's the most common issue with a marketing agency? They generate leads, those leads come in, the sales team says these leads are shit. Or they generate leads, the leads come in, and then they say, oh. I can't handle all these leads. It's like, how the fuck do you not have a sales team? And they're like, I didn't know I was gonna need a sales team for all this. I knew I was gonna need that much. So think about all the reasons why your product or service may not work. How can you educate the customer on those things so that they can help you prevent those things from happening? That becomes all the communication you have after you've onboarded somebody. Because what do you wanna do? You want to make sure they remain successful. And so what are all the things that could torpedo this? Why are all the reasons that they would leave? And then how can you educate them on those reasons so that they have the opportunity to stay? A lot of the reasons that customers leave companies are out of true ignorance. They don't know how to use the product. They don't know how to use the service. They don't understand how they're making it harder for them to get value out of the product or service. And so they are just ignorant. And you are the person that needs to educate them on those things. An example of this that's done really well is like in software companies. So someone gets into the software once they've been onboarded and then they're using it. They constantly, if you look at the best softwares, have tutorials that will pop up and say, hey, did you know you could do X, Y, and Z? Did you know that if you did this, it would make your life easier? Did you know we could save you two more hours if you configured this over here? The reason that they're doing that is they're trying to educate the customers that they stay longer. Think about the software that you use the most. Do you know how to use it? Do you know lots of things about the different bells and whistles and because of that you like using it more? People like using things that they know how to use. Whether it be a product, a service, doesn't matter. And so the more that they understand how to use the thing and how to get value from the thing, the more likely they are to stay for the long haul. So if you interact with different levels of stakeholders in a business, there's one thing that you need to keep in mind. The higher up the stakeholder is, the less communication that they're going to want. And so they don't want to talk to you every day, and they don't want to hear from you every day. They're probably going to want it less frequently. Why? It's less top of mind for them. They have all these other things that are coming at them. Versus if you are a marketing agency, and this is the director of marketing in the company, they want to know every day because it affects everything they do. Versus something I think about once a week. And so think about how often the stakeholder you communicate with is being affected by the product or service, the more they are affected by it and interacting with it, the more you communicate, the less they are affected by it and interacting with it, the less you communicate. So consolidate communication and make it less frequent for the higher up stakeholders and spread out the communication and make it more frequent for the lower level stakeholders. So if you have five of these six things, your company's probably on a good track to making three times more money, but you want to make sure that one thing doesn't happen, which is you don't become irrelevant. And so how do we do that? Is we need to constantly be evolving. The market is constantly changing. Therefore, your product and service should also constantly change. So a lot of people, they're trying to figure out like, how do I market more? How do I sell more? How do I trick people into staying with me? Because they're like, I don't know why they're leaving. Maybe it's because you have an innovative product in six to 12 months. It's sometimes the simple shit. And so the reality is that like no marketing, no sales and no customer success. can help when you have an outdated product. So the easiest way to prevent an outdated product is to be constantly improving your product. Because people who don't update it, it goes like this. People who are constantly improving, it goes like this. So what do you want? This or this? And if you're constantly improving your product, you never have the need to do a complete overhaul of the product. And that's what happens to a lot of companies. They acquire what I call product debt. They don't innovate their product for... months to years at a time, and then when they look at it, it's like this enormous project that's going to take six months from an entire team. And listen, it doesn't need to be that way if you do these few things. There's two things you can ask your customers to figure out what you need to do to iterate your product to make it go like this. The first one is you want to ask the current customers you have, what is your favorite thing about our product? To make it easy, you can also list out everything that you do. So for example, I did this at gym launch. I asked them like, what is your favorite thing? they all said events. And I was like, holy shit, we do only one a year. What if we just did more of these and less of all the other shit? Because what they actually rated the lowest was our tech support, which was actually a very high cost for us at the time. And it was a huge hassle. And I was like, easy for me, get rid of tech support, add on more events. Super easy. What do we do? Increase lifetime value. The second thing. is to ask your customers, what would make this product something that you couldn't live without? And what that is always telling you is what are the unmet needs of your customer, that if you were to do these things or improve the product, they would be more likely to stay for a longer period of time. So serving your customers and doing all these things sounds daunting. So at Gym Launch, we got together what we called like our inner circle. And so we said, hey, if we give you X percentage off of the product, will you meet with us once a month and give us X? product feedback, and also collect it from other people that are customers. Because they're also more likely to tell you, not tell us. And so once a month, we had what we called like a round table, and they would essentially share with us the things that people wanted more of, the things that people didn't care about, and all of the other features that other companies were coming and offering. So something that we noticed is like, who knows the most about competition in the market? Actually, our customers, because they're constantly being marketed to. by the other competitors in the market. And so we said, great, we don't need to look at any of that, but you can just tell us what's appealing about what's new in the marketplace now. We'll just take what sounds best and what is actually appealing, and then we'll just implement that into what we're doing now. So if you do this and you're doing this on a monthly basis and you have a constant product pipeline, then you never have to completely overhaul your product and redo it, you can just constantly iterate it and always stay above the curve. So hopefully if you've watched this video, I have been able to convince you that there are ways to make three times more money without getting more customers. And this actually can create a better reputation, a better brand, and a better environment for all of your employees. I know what you're thinking, which is probably a lot of this, we talked about product as well. And so if you resonated with the evolution of your product, and maybe you're thinking like, hey, I might be a little irrelevant at this point in time, I made an entire video on product itself, which you can go ahead and find here.

If you're a B2B service company and you say that you're a marketing agency, it would be probably the first time that they get leads from you. Whereas if you're a software company, it might be the first time that they log in and see the dashboard with all their information. Whereas if you're a product, a physical product, it might be when they receive the product hand in hand.

I'll give you a quick story to demonstrate how important this is. So in gym launch, when we had an initiative, which was, hey, our turn right now is at about 8%. Let me just try and break it in half to 4%.

And so given this is a B2B service company, I looked at it and said, okay, what's the activation point of the customer? When do they first get value from the product? The more that I honed in on looking at when people were leaving in the program, what I realized is that the people that were leaving were the people who were not making their investment back the fastest. So the people who stayed the longest made back their investment in the first 30 days. If I want more people to stay longer, how do I engineer it so that more people, all the people, make back their investment with us in the first 30 days?

And so we created what we call the fast cash play. We're going to make everybody do what these people did because we looked at. why did they make their money back so quickly?

Because at this point, what we were doing with gym launches, we said, hey, we've got four different paths that you can take. You can start here, here, here, here. Because I felt like, oh, that's more customized.

It gives a better experience for the customer. What we lose through the customization is the certainty of delivering them with the outcome. And so we said, cool, we'll do that whole, they have to pick their own path, but the first 30 days, they need to do the fast cash play.

Because what we saw was that those people that got to the 30 days and had recouped their investment, had done the fast cash play. Out of those four options, that was the one that they chose. And that's why they made their money back so fast.

So then we said, fuck all these other options. That's the only thing our customers do, the fast cash play. Guess what happened? Our turn went from 8% to 3% within six months. And obviously, I say within six months because it takes time to put these things together.

We had to redo the product. And then we had to see out all the customers who came in after selling new ones into this new way of doing things. And then we forever changed how we did business because we used to think that giving people more autonomy in the beginning would provide a feeling of freedom. And so therefore, they would want to stay longer.

But what we learned is that we actually need to give them more direction in the beginning so that we are certain that we deliver the value that we know we can. And then after that 30 days, we can loosen it up. The likelihood that we are able to now get them to do... What the program says to do or what we tell them to do because they've already seen results is also much higher.

So you get more compliance from customers. The faster you deliver results, the longer they stay. and the more compliant they will be with the things that you recommend. So you have your activation point, but the work is not done yet. We have to do something on a consistent basis to make sure that we can maximize LTV of customers, which is track and display ROI.

If a tree falls in the forest, but nobody sees it, did it even happen? If you do work for a customer and you don't show them the work, did it happen? If you make progress for a customer and they don't see the progress, did it happen?

And so with any company, what you wanna understand is that If you want to keep customers engaged, you need to remind them constantly that you are providing value. They don't know what the fuck you're doing if you don't tell them. You need to tell people who are external from your business what you're doing internally.

And so like with anything in life, say you give instructions to an employee and you're like, here's what I want you to work on. If you don't hear anything from them, how do you know they're working on it? How do you know that they're going to hit the goal? You don't. Okay, think about it like this, right?

If you go to get on an airplane. and they're like, hey, sorry, we have a delay. You're like, okay, great.

What happens 30 minutes later? What happens 30 minutes later is you're like, where the fuck is my plane? And you're like, hello, where's everybody? Like, where's my plane? What's going on?

Has there been anything happening? Do you know why they always let you know, hey, we would like to inform you that there's still a delay? Why have airlines figured it out that they have to consistently every 20 to 30 minutes tell you that you're still delayed? People would rather be informed and feel like they're making progress and their questions are answered then remain in the dark.

For a lot of companies, they take in a customer and they say, we're gonna do all these things for you. A great example would be recruiting. We're gonna find you the fucking best COO in the world and they're gonna change your whole company.

It's gonna take us a couple of weeks and then yeah, you're like amazing. By week two, when they haven't sent you an email, they haven't said jack shit to you, they haven't told you how many candidates they've reached out to, you're like. this ghosted me.

He took my money and ran. This actually happened to me. When I was younger in my career, about seven years ago, I signed up with a recruiting company for the first time. And when I signed up with that recruiting company, I was super excited.

And I was like, oh, I can't wait to get all these candidates. I'm sure I'm going to get them in the next five days. And then a week goes by and I hear nothing. And then the next week comes, nothing. I'm like, what the fuck?

So I reach out to them and I'm like, are we still doing this? And they were like, of course, we've been doing X, Y, and Z. We've been sourcing from here. We've been doing all this stuff.

And I was like, yes, that would be great to know because I feel like I paid you and I've gotten jack shit. Why is that? You don't need to get somebody to the goal immediately, but you do need to.

Tell them that you're tracking to it. Doing a recruiting service. Updating them on like, here's my sourcing strategy. Here's how many people I'm going to cold email. Here's where I'm going to post your listing.

And then by the way, you're going to hear from me in about two to three days, and I'm going to let you know what the response rates are of those people. And then by the end of the week on Friday, I'm going to let you know how many people passed the first interview. It's not like you need to have delivered the candidate in five days, but you need to let them know where you're at in the process.

An example of this would be if you're a B2B company, let's say Gymnalt, right? Like you're driving money into their business, have them fill out a report of what they did that week and how much money they made using the systems. That's actually what we did on our coaching size. We had a document that we asked them to fill out every week, which said, like, what steps did you take?

And how much money did you generate from the fast cash play? So then what does that mean? They don't need to have made back their entire investment in those five days, but they're reminded of how far they've come.

Software companies do a really great job of this. A great example would be Instacart. Every freaking time I log into Instacart, what do I see?

All it tells me, you have saved 5,672 hours of Instacart. Because guess who's been a customer for like since inception? I have. So it reminds me every time I use it that I don't even know what the inside of a grocery store looks like anymore.

It's telling me and reinforcing my usage by letting me know how much time I've saved. And so you always want to be thinking, how can I track and report on the ROI that the customer is getting? That's why the second principle is so important of making sure that your customer knows exactly where you're at and what you're doing.

The next principle is going to help you operationalize a lot of the value you give to the customers, which is called mirrored communication. Right now, you think that you're really great at making sales and marketing. What I want you to do is I want you to get in your customer's shoes and count how many times has your customer touched your business before you make a sale? How many ads do they see?

How many funnels do they opt into? How many emails do they get? How many touch points with a rep do they have?

How many calls do they have? How many pieces of content do they consume? And then what I want you to do is take that number and put it post-purchase.

If you want to keep someone longer, take the amount of touch points you have prior to the sale and reflect them after. The second thing could be, you have content to get people to buy your thing. Why would you not have content to get people to use your thing? This is called product marketing. which is as soon as you have somebody into the business, you're no longer marketing to get customers, you're marketing to get customers to use the product.

Don't you think that if you had some videos, some content, and some email communications, they'd be more likely to use it? That is why mirrored communication is so important is because it's kind of like high school, right? Where you're like, before, it's like a guy's flirting with you, doing all this stuff, and then you like make out with him, and then it's like ghost you.

Maybe not everyone. Maybe not for the guys, right? But you did it to a girl, for sure. A lot of people have really great communication prior to purchase, but then afterwards, It's like they leave everyone feeling like the girl who got left in the dust. They get that feeling.

They're like, oh my God, I was used. I was taken advantage of. That's the same feeling your customers have when after you make a sale, you don't talk to them.

And so take the amount of touch points, mirror them to after. Now, just because your customers use your product and have consumed it, right, in some way, shape, or form, doesn't mean that they get value from it, okay? Which brings us to the fourth principle, which is time to value.

Time to value is how long it takes for the customer to get value from the product after they purchase. They can use the product, but do they get value from it? What's a good example? Crest white strips. You have 30 day supply of white strips.

So I'm gonna use the product on day one, but when are my teeth white? Certainly not day one. It's certainly not day two. Certainly not day four. It's 30 days.

Why do you think they came out with one hour Express? Because it shortens the time to value. I put it on.

and an hour later my teeth are white. It's no coincidence that they did this because they realized people felt very discouraged putting on Crest white chips every day and only getting a result 30 days later. It was a lot of work and you don't see a result until 30 days.

There's a lot of businesses that have great products, but they do not know how to deliver value fast enough. So I'll give you an example. We have one company in the portfolio that they have a fantastic product, but that product is a business service and it requires both work on their part, to help the customer and actions on the customer's behalf to make the product work. So it's a two-way street.

When we looked at when does somebody really recognize value from this product, it was at the six-month mark. And so the reason I thought this was a problem was because I thought they had a great product. But when renewals came around, we had 52 renewals come up one month, and they got two to renew. And I was like, I know the product is not the issue because the product's great, but the experience of the product is poor.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant that's incredibly fancy and everyone's told you it's fucking amazing and you get there and you have to wait three hours before you get your first course? Or it might be that you have to wait an hour before you can get bread and appetizers. Doesn't that completely take your view of the product? The food might be fantastic, but the fact that you had to wait three hours to get a fucking steak, you're never going back there again. The same can be said for any product or service.

And so I explained this to them, and I said, you've got the cold steak problem, which is you have a cold steak. Great steak, but it's just three hours too late. And so I looked at their product and I said, why is the reason it has to take six months?

Why can't this take 30 days? And they're like, oh, well, Layla, you know, we've got to educate the customer and we drip one video a week for six months. And so I said, what if they watched one video a day for two weeks? What could we get done there? And so as soon as we did that, I kid you not, we reduced the time to value by five months.

Customers were able to get the same result that they were getting in six months in one from a very simple change of just condensing the work. Because it's not about the time it takes, it's about the amount of videos that they consumed. It's not that it takes six months to learn the product, it's that you spaced the videos out over six months.

And I think a lot of people conflate these. It's not the time, it's the things that happen in that time. So let's just take the things that happen in six months. put them in 30 days. So again, if you're like a service company, how long before they recoup their investment?

How long before they see a result? If you're a pest control company, am I going to still have rats after the first spray? How many sprays do I need before there's no rats?

I mean, it's simple shit like this. Just take the same amount of interactions that you have spread over a longer time horizon and condense them down into the one that you want. It's not about the time.

It's about the amount of things that occur in that time. The fifth principle is called ongoing onboarding. And you're probably thinking, I thought onboarding was a one-time thing.

But the reality is, just like you're always dating your spouse to keep a great marriage, you're always onboarding your customers to keep great customers. You're like, I thought I only onboarded customers once. If you want to keep a customer, you need to consistently be onboarding them.

Think about this. You onboard an employee. After you onboard an employee, you have one-on-ones.

You have meetings. You're talking to them consistently. The same goes for customers. So just because we've...

sold the customer and then onboarded the customer, what happens next? How are we talking to the customer? So again, just like we have the mirrored communication, we want to mirror the communication through the entire process. And so for example, if you are a service company and your customer needs to know things about your product, let's give an example of a marketing agency. If I were a marketing agency today, and I were trying to keep my customers longer, I would educate them on all the things that I need them to be able to do to make my marketing effective.

Because what's the most common issue with a marketing agency? They generate leads, those leads come in, the sales team says these leads are shit. Or they generate leads, the leads come in, and then they say, oh. I can't handle all these leads.

It's like, how the fuck do you not have a sales team? And they're like, I didn't know I was gonna need a sales team for all this. I knew I was gonna need that much.

So think about all the reasons why your product or service may not work. How can you educate the customer on those things so that they can help you prevent those things from happening? That becomes all the communication you have after you've onboarded somebody. Because what do you wanna do?

You want to make sure they remain successful. And so what are all the things that could torpedo this? Why are all the reasons that they would leave?

And then how can you educate them on those reasons so that they have the opportunity to stay? A lot of the reasons that customers leave companies are out of true ignorance. They don't know how to use the product.

They don't know how to use the service. They don't understand how they're making it harder for them to get value out of the product or service. And so they are just ignorant. And you are the person that needs to educate them on those things.

An example of this that's done really well is like in software companies. So someone gets into the software once they've been onboarded and then they're using it. They constantly, if you look at the best softwares, have tutorials that will pop up and say, hey, did you know you could do X, Y, and Z?

Did you know that if you did this, it would make your life easier? Did you know we could save you two more hours if you configured this over here? The reason that they're doing that is they're trying to educate the customers that they stay longer.

Think about the software that you use the most. Do you know how to use it? Do you know lots of things about the different bells and whistles and because of that you like using it more?

People like using things that they know how to use. Whether it be a product, a service, doesn't matter. And so the more that they understand how to use the thing and how to get value from the thing, the more likely they are to stay for the long haul. So if you interact with different levels of stakeholders in a business, there's one thing that you need to keep in mind. The higher up the stakeholder is, the less communication that they're going to want.

And so they don't want to talk to you every day, and they don't want to hear from you every day. They're probably going to want it less frequently. Why?

It's less top of mind for them. They have all these other things that are coming at them. Versus if you are a marketing agency, and this is the director of marketing in the company, they want to know every day because it affects everything they do. Versus something I think about once a week.

And so think about how often the stakeholder you communicate with is being affected by the product or service, the more they are affected by it and interacting with it, the more you communicate, the less they are affected by it and interacting with it, the less you communicate. So consolidate communication and make it less frequent for the higher up stakeholders and spread out the communication and make it more frequent for the lower level stakeholders. So if you have five of these six things, your company's probably on a good track to making three times more money, but you want to make sure that one thing doesn't happen, which is you don't become irrelevant. And so how do we do that?

Is we need to constantly be evolving. The market is constantly changing. Therefore, your product and service should also constantly change. So a lot of people, they're trying to figure out like, how do I market more? How do I sell more?

How do I trick people into staying with me? Because they're like, I don't know why they're leaving. Maybe it's because you have an innovative product in six to 12 months.

It's sometimes the simple shit. And so the reality is that like no marketing, no sales and no customer success. can help when you have an outdated product.

So the easiest way to prevent an outdated product is to be constantly improving your product. Because people who don't update it, it goes like this. People who are constantly improving, it goes like this.

So what do you want? This or this? And if you're constantly improving your product, you never have the need to do a complete overhaul of the product. And that's what happens to a lot of companies. They acquire what I call product debt.

They don't innovate their product for... months to years at a time, and then when they look at it, it's like this enormous project that's going to take six months from an entire team. And listen, it doesn't need to be that way if you do these few things. There's two things you can ask your customers to figure out what you need to do to iterate your product to make it go like this.

The first one is you want to ask the current customers you have, what is your favorite thing about our product? To make it easy, you can also list out everything that you do. So for example, I did this at gym launch.

I asked them like, what is your favorite thing? they all said events. And I was like, holy shit, we do only one a year. What if we just did more of these and less of all the other shit?

Because what they actually rated the lowest was our tech support, which was actually a very high cost for us at the time. And it was a huge hassle. And I was like, easy for me, get rid of tech support, add on more events. Super easy. What do we do?

Increase lifetime value. The second thing. is to ask your customers, what would make this product something that you couldn't live without?

And what that is always telling you is what are the unmet needs of your customer, that if you were to do these things or improve the product, they would be more likely to stay for a longer period of time. So serving your customers and doing all these things sounds daunting. So at Gym Launch, we got together what we called like our inner circle.

And so we said, hey, if we give you X percentage off of the product, will you meet with us once a month and give us X? product feedback, and also collect it from other people that are customers. Because they're also more likely to tell you, not tell us.

And so once a month, we had what we called like a round table, and they would essentially share with us the things that people wanted more of, the things that people didn't care about, and all of the other features that other companies were coming and offering. So something that we noticed is like, who knows the most about competition in the market? Actually, our customers, because they're constantly being marketed to. by the other competitors in the market. And so we said, great, we don't need to look at any of that, but you can just tell us what's appealing about what's new in the marketplace now.

We'll just take what sounds best and what is actually appealing, and then we'll just implement that into what we're doing now. So if you do this and you're doing this on a monthly basis and you have a constant product pipeline, then you never have to completely overhaul your product and redo it, you can just constantly iterate it and always stay above the curve. So hopefully if you've watched this video, I have been able to convince you that there are ways to make three times more money without getting more customers.

And this actually can create a better reputation, a better brand, and a better environment for all of your employees. I know what you're thinking, which is probably a lot of this, we talked about product as well. And so if you resonated with the evolution of your product, and maybe you're thinking like, hey, I might be a little irrelevant at this point in time, I made an entire video on product itself, which you can go ahead and find here.

Transcript for:Six Ways to Make Three Times More Money

Transcript for:
Six Ways to Make Three Times More Money