Your Profit Road Map for More Sales & a Truly Sustainable Business

What do you think you need to gain in order for your business to change and grow? Too often entrepreneurs get hyped up to chase vanity metrics like huge numbers of Instagram followers or email subscribers. Ultimately though, gaining five or 10 new clients is all you need to have a massive impact on your business.

The simplest, easiest way for getting those clients isn’t something sexy or glamorous. It involves using a real strategy to invite people in, actually connect with them, and let them know how you can help. Continuing on with this series to avoid hustle and burnout, today I talk about the second strategy you need to adopt to grow a truly sustainable business.



On this episode of Promote Yourself to CEO:

3:27 – I rant (again) about an issue in the business world that sets so many people up for failure.

5:18 – What is a predictable profit plan? It’s key to how I help entrepreneurs break out of the feast or famine cycle, so I walk you through how to put one together.

10:00 – I reveal the most important, but least discussed part of a profit plan. If you don’t have this, it’ll break your business.

10:45 – People get so focused on marketing and sales that they forget about this piece of the puzzle and end up with a lot of unhappy clients.

15:00 – What will be your strategies for marketing, sales, and delivery? I use The CEO Collective as an example.

17:13 – Consider this if you have no idea when you should promote your signature offer. I give more examples from my business.

20:14 – Full upfront payment is awesome! But you’ll love extending payment plans to clients for this incredibly powerful reason.

25:04 – How can you ensure that you don’t experience a revenue gap?

Mentioned in Your Profit Road Map for More Sustainable Sales

 


How would 5 or 10 new clients change your business? Often I'm talking about entrepreneurs who are so caught up in the hype and vanity metrics of hitting 10,000 followers on Instagram or adding 300, 500 new subscribers to their email lists, but when it comes down to it, what would really make a massive impact in their business right now is getting 5 or 10 new clients and the simplest, easiest way to get those clients, well, it's not sexy and it's not glamorous, it's making sure that you have a real strategy to get those people through the door, actually connecting with them, and letting them know how you can help.

Well, if you're ready for more sustainable success in your business, then keep on listening because today we are talking about our second big strategy to keep your business growing without the hustle and burnout.

Are you ready to grow from stressed-out solopreneur to competent CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook, and I've spent more than 15 years helping women entrepreneurs sustainably scale their businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way, and practical profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Hey there, CEOs. Welcome back to this series all about how we can end the burnout and hustle culture that is creating entrepreneurial poverty for women business owners with these three core growth strategies. These three core growth strategies I'm sharing with you this month aren't sexy, they aren't hype-y, but I promise you, they work.

If you have been following along with the series, then I hope you're starting to think about how you can implement these into your business. The very first episode of this whole series, we dove in and talked about entrepreneurial poverty, which is the lack of time, energy, and money, which creates this snowball effect of more and more and more challenges for women entrepreneurs in their businesses.

We talked about why we need to let go, we need to break free and unhook ourselves, deprogram ourselves from the hustle culture that we all find ourselves in, and really start thinking about how we can create more sustainable success in our business.

Now, the next episode after that, the second in the series was all about pricing and the power of pricing your products, programs, and services correctly, to make sure that they're not only profitable but that they are sustainable for you through the long term and how even a small pricing increase of 20% to 25% can make a massive difference.

But if you want to dramatically shift things in your business, it will be one of the biggest levers you can pull. It sounds simple, but it truly is one of the fastest ways to make a massive difference in your business is adjusting your pricing strategy so that your prices are more profitable.

Well, today, we're talking about the second big lever that we can pull, the second big strategy that we can implement and that is getting more clients. But I'm not talking about getting thousands of people to buy something at a super low affordable price point. We're not talking about products that are under $10 or even under $100.

This is going to be a little bit of a Rach rant but this is just one of those things that I think is setting so many small business owners up for failure instead of for success. There's a ton of bad information and bad advice floating around the internet, usually from some guru talking about how you can have a million dollars by selling low price point offers, something for $20 and if you set that up, and then have a series of funnels and upsells, downsells, crosssells, you will be able to create a seven, eight, or 10-figure business, whatever they're coming up with now.

What they leave out of this entire equation when they're putting these overly simplified graphics together is that they are not educating clients. That when you go for high, high volume, which is required for super low price point, when you are going after a huge quantity of sales, there is so much that needs to happen behind the scenes in order to make that work.

In order to make sales at a very high volume and a low price point work, first, you have to have a massive audience. Over the last few years, entrepreneurs have seen that growing an audience, whether that audience is email list subscribers, social media followers, or just general traffic to your business, people watching video content you might be creating, people listening to your podcast, all of those different strategies that we talk about all the time, it is much more difficult these days to grow an audience than it was even just a few years ago.

Five or 10 years ago when a lot of the superstar entrepreneur influencer celebrities were getting started, they were getting started at the very beginnings of social media, at the very beginnings of YouTube, at the very beginnings of podcasting becoming such a force.

You need to have context here on what they are teaching you and really think about “Are they teaching me something that is relevant right now in a world where marketing is changing so incredibly fast? Or are they teaching me something that might have worked for them years ago, and duplicating that is going to be nearly impossible because that platform has shifted? Everything about it has shifted as that platform became more developed, as it became more sophisticated, as users became more sophisticated and more in tune. What has changed from what they were able to see success with?”

I think this is just so, so, so crucially important. Context is key. That's why I always share with people I started this podcast almost a decade ago. I have been on the upswing of a lot of social media. I have seen the rise and fall of it all, and I'm never going to sugarcoat any of it being easy because, to be honest, it's not and the reach, especially organic reach of all of those things has continued to drop over the years and they will only continue to drop.

Even newer platforms that are coming up, they will have a surge of early adopters who are able to grow platforms really quickly, they're able to grow huge audience size, but at some point as that, let's say social media platform gets more mature and their audience goes from just early adopters to more of a mass adoption, that platform is going to start introducing ads and there's going to be more competition, more content being created, which means that organic reach is just going to continue to decline.

It's really hard to repeat that kind of success unless you happen to be catching something on the upswing and you're willing to be a super early adopter. That has been the only time that I have seen breakout success when it comes to getting in front of a huge volume of people has been if you are a super early adopter to a platform and you are just able to ride that wave because there's an arbitrage there, there's a lot of people joining a platform, but they're not producing content, so being one of the first content producers on a platform can be a huge asset.

The other big thing to think about is your network, other people who maybe didn't ride the social media wave to grow their audience, but let's say they had a lot of people behind the scenes promoting them, this is another huge one that we often don't really know about unless we're able to connect the dots and see all the relationships.

But a lot of people who became incredibly popular and who really do have some of the biggest businesses out there right now, it wasn't just because of social media, it was also because of the connections they had and how they affiliate-marketed for each other, how they cross-promoted for each other, and really were able to leverage other people's audiences to grow their business. Riding the wave of social media, being able to cross-promote with other people's audiences, and having an extensive network to do that.

The final big thing was having money to dump into advertising. I remember back in the day when running Facebook ads just got started, we were getting new subscribers joining our offers for so expensive, I mean joining our email list for under 50 cents per email subscriber and then joining our programs pretty quickly afterwards, I mean, it was costing so little to get started back in the day in 2014, 2015, 2016. Those numbers are gone, and they will not return.

Now the people who are still talking about how ads are the way, you have to be selling a high ticket offer. Because the cost to acquire a new client using ads is really really, really expensive. I'm sharing all this because I think context is important. Nuance is important. You can't make a marketing strategy if you're not really understanding the current economy you're in, the current marketing world you're in, the current trends and patterns of what's actually going on.

All of those very, very simplified posts on social media saying you only need to sell to 2,000 people at this price point in order to get that, selling to 2,000 people is really really, really freaking hard. Anybody who acts like that as just a piece of cake has a lot of other privileges, advantages, and probably time in the game.

They either have been in business for a lot longer or they have a lot of people in their corner. They have an extensive network or they have extensive funds to go out there and spend on all of this. If that is not you or you don't have that trifecta of privilege, then we need to talk about what really works to get clients because there's a massive difference between needing to get hundreds or thousands of clients a year or a couple of dozen.

That's where most of the small businesses that I work with are. They're not working at huge, massive high volume. They're focused on working with a more select group of clients. This is so crucially important, the math tells us it will be easier here to focus on a select group of clients who pay higher price points for your products, programs, and services.

These are generally going to be clients who are paying you and I'll say paying you over the course of a year because, in some businesses, it's going to look a little different, I'll get to that in a second, but they need to be paying you at least $1,000 or more. These are four or five-figure offers. It's important to think about clients paying you in terms of a year because I have so many clients, for example, who are in industries where they can't always sell like a “package.”

Let's say you are in the healthcare field, and you're accepting insurance and accepting cash-pay clients, you're not going to be able to as easily come up with a package that people can buy in a lump sum simply because that's not how insurance generally works.

If you were all cash pay, that would be different. We have to think about that. That's why I'm saying over the course of a year, how much does a client spend with you for a year? If you are a chiropractor, and they're coming in and they're seeing you twice a month, and your cost of a visit is $75, what does that look like, your client value for the year? That's what we're going to base it off of.

The rest of you who have more of a clear container product, program, or service where you're not having to parse out by individual sessions because you're not dealing with those specifics, this will be a little easier to wrap your head around.

But the thing I want you to think about when it comes to getting more clients when it comes to increasing sales volume here is that if you are constantly finding yourself in that feast-or-famine cycle where you are either full of clients, your calendar is full, your client docket is full, your programs are selling out, and then that wraps up, the clients wrap up, and you have to turn around and restart the sales and marketing systems again, which means your business is always going like start-stop, start-stop, you start doing your marketing and sales, getting new clients in, and then you stop because now you've got to deliver to them.

Then the delivery is done and you hit start again on the sales and marketing and then you have to stop again because now you have to deliver to them. If that is what has been going on for you, if you've had a really hard time continuously doing marketing and sales in your business because it feels really overwhelming on top of keeping up with the delivery of your products, programs, and services to your clients, then we need to make sure we're mapping out a 12-month profit plan.

What is a profit plan? If you've been around me long enough, you know I love a good plan. You know I love some Post-Its and a calendar and mapping things out. You may have heard me talk about this before. It's one of our most popular free resources. But I really want to walk through this today because this is one of the ways that we help people start to plan out their marketing and sales strategy so that it becomes more sustainable to keep those two things running even while you aren't doing delivery of your products, programs, and services.

You're no longer doing the start-stop, start-stop. Instead, you're getting it going, getting momentum with it, and hopefully building some systems and infrastructure around it so that it can run on cruise control even if you personally day to day are focused on working directly with your clients.

I think this is going to be really helpful to walk through and I encourage you to go download the guide that goes with this episode. You can go download the 12-month Profit Plan Guide and when you have this, you are going to see how much easier it will be to maintain momentum, doing that start-stop, start-stop feast-or-famine cycle in your business and get to your revenue goals more consistently because you're constantly building momentum.

Download the 12-month Profit Plan and then let's get into it. When I'm helping people create a predictable profit plan and we're actually planning when and how they're going to get the sales we're looking for, the first thing we do is basically make a calendar.

Now you can do this, again, download the guide, you can pull out, I'm looking at my big desktop-print paper planner, you can grab a poster board, I don't care, you can whiteboard it out, it doesn't matter. I like to do this by quickly scratching out three months.

I divide it with two lines going vertical so you have three columns, and then three lines going horizontal. That creates a grid where we have three boxes on the top, three boxes on the second row, three boxes on the third row, and three boxes on the bottom row, one for each month.

Then you can write it in there, whatever months. I will do this really quickly anytime I'm talking with somebody because it is so helpful to be able to visually see it. Being able to visually see the calendar, being able to visually see these things is going to make your life a little bit easier, I promise.

Now the first thing we do once we have that year at a glance 12 squares in front of us is we want to be thinking about your baseline revenue first. Your baseline revenue is what covers the majority of your business expenses. This is what you need to do to essentially break even in your business month after month.

Yes, I do include what I need to break even with, including my own pay, because I'm the sole provider for my family, it needs to pay me every single month so I want to be making calculations based on that. When I'm doing baseline revenue, I'm looking at what is my signature offer. What is my signature product, program, or service?

Now if you don't have a signature product, program, or service, I promise you that creating one is going to be a game changer. Because this becomes a thing you are known for. This is what most of your clients are going through, this process you have created in this product, program, or service in order to get them from point A to point B.

I love having a signature offer as a premium offer. I do not look at this as a low price point introductory offer. This is like the signature all-roads-lead-to-this offer. It truly is the bread and butter of your business. It's bringing in that baseline revenue. It's covering all of your expenses and now we're going to proactively plan when we are promoting this offer two to four times per year.

Why is it so important? I often find that people don't plan their promotions in advance. Instead, they're reactively panic promoting what they have to offer, and because they don't have a plan, they're not giving themselves the gift of time here, they're not building real assets. They're not building out the systems that will help them to streamline the marketing and sales activities in their business.

One thing I tell every single client working with me inside of The CEO Collective is for each thing that you offer, for each product, program, or service you have, you need to build out three core systems in order to streamline and systematize it. This is the secret to getting out of hustle mode is systems.

You need to have a marketing system for that offer. What is the Attract, Engage, and Nurture information, content, or connection that takes people through the customer journey that takes them from finding you for the very first time to learning about what it is you offer to understanding how you can help them achieve their goals or solve that problem?

Helping them see that your offer is the right fit for them, you're the right person to help them solve that offer, that's all the front end of marketing. We need to make sure all the marketing, all of the content leading up to the point of actually inviting them to buy your product, program, or service is leading people in the right direction.

We have to have a strategy around this. This is why we're not just coming up with content whenever an idea pops into our head, there's a process we're trying to take people through. You might have noticed, I do a series here on the podcast. That is part of this. We pick a topic that is guiding people through a series of content that then will lead to an invitation. You want to have a clear marketing strategy in place to attract, engage, and nurture.

The next thing you'll need to have in place is a sales strategy. How are you actually making sales for that product, program, or service? This might change a little bit offer to offer. For example, inside of The CEO Collective, we have enrollment periods where we will open applications, we’ll have an application period, and we'll be accepting and reviewing applications, based on applications, we’ll either accept them or deny them.

Then once those who are accepted have a chance to get all the final details about joining us inside of The CEO Collective, they get a chance to talk to me and get all their questions answered, etc. That's a bit more high touch, more comprehensive sales process that we're taking people through.

You might have a much simpler sales process for some of your things. Maybe you have something like an on-demand program you're trying to offer. Whatever sales mechanism you have, you have to have a system there. You want to make sure you know from the point that people are now, they know who you are and they are hearing about your offer, how am I taking them from hearing about my offer to buying my offer? What does that process look like? That's your sales system.

Then you are going to have your delivery system. This is probably one of the most important. It's one of the least talked about out there in the business world. But this is all about designing a delivery process, a customer experience that guides people through the delivery of your product, program, and service.

This is something that needs to be proactively designed, not reactively crisis-managed. If you've ever been on the receiving end of a great customer experience, it felt like there was always clarity and direction, and you know what the next step is, you know what to do, and you know where to go, if you've ever been on the receiving end of a bad delivery experience, you probably tried to check out and then there was no information, you didn't get any emails, you didn't know what's going on, it was very confusing, so you want to have a clear process in place.

This is really important because if you don't have the delivery of your product, program, or service dialed in and a clear system in place, whether it's automated or not, it could be automated, it could be a hybrid of automation and more high touch delivery, combination is fine, but if you don't have a process in place when you add more people to your business, it'll break your business, and breaking your business is no fun, because then you're back in panic mode, and we're trying to avoid panic mode.

Remember, panic is not a business strategy. We want to stay out of that zone. We want to make sure that we are systematizing these three things for each offer that we have. We want to have the clear marketing strategy, we want to know how we're talking about this, how we're getting in front of people, then we want to have the clear sales strategy, how we're inviting them to learn about this particular offer, how we're selling it, how are we promoting it?

Are we sending out sales emails? Are we doing sales calls? Are we hosting a webinar? Are we hosting a live training? What is the sales strategy there? How are you following up with people? What is the timeline here? What is the enrollment period here?

Then finally, how are you delivering your product, program, or service? We need to know what is your capacity for delivering. How does delivery work? How many people can you manage through this delivery process before your team needs more support, or you need to put more people on your team?

It's really important to think about all three of those. I see a lot of people who get so focused on talking about marketing and sales but they never talk about delivery and they just act like just scaling your business is just about more marketing, more marketing, more sales, more sales, but on the back end is a lot of unhappy clients, a lot of unhappy team, a lot of frustrated people, because the delivery isn't running smoothly.

We have to make sure we have all of those pieces of the puzzle in place. We have to have all three of those systems for each offer. For each offer that you have, the more systems you need to have. They start to grow the complexity of your business exponentially.

Let's say you have three offers. Well, that means for each of those three offers, you have to have a marketing system, a sales system, a delivery system, so you have nine systems to sell three offers. It just gets more complex from there. You're really making a decision based on how many offers you're going to have, how complex your business is going to be.

I think this is really important because when you add layers of complication into your business, it's incredibly hard to scale sustainably. It's hard for your team to understand where the priority is. It's really easy for balls to get dropped because there are so many different things that they're checking in on that are a little bit different. It can be very inefficient to have a huge suite of products, programs, and services unless you have a massive team to back it up.

That's my insight there into the systems that you need to have. We want to start creating systems here. We want to create these systems with them becoming assets for our business in mind, meaning an asset is something that is valuable, and it creates more value, it continues to increase in value.

This is where we're doing the hard work once, we're putting 80% of the hard work into creating the marketing system, the sales system, or the delivery system. Then maintaining that system and optimizing that system only takes 20% of the effort as we're continuing on.

Let's circle back to the profit plan. How do we make sure we're consistently getting more clients? I gave you the first step. We want to take your signature product, program, or service and we want to make sure we are deciding which months we are going to do a dedicated promotion for that offer. I'd recommend two to four promotions a year.

It is really important that we think about this. Again, it's the bread and butter of our business so we need to make sure we are promoting it enough. Often, we aren't promoting our offers enough. We're creating a lot of content, we're doing a lot of marketing activity, but we're not connecting the dots between marketing and delivery, which is inviting people to take the next step.

Your signature offer needs to be plugged into your calendar two to four times a year. For example, inside of The CEO Collective, we have seen that we have a natural enrollment cycle because The CEO Collective is built around our 90 Day CEO Operating System. Inside our 90 Day CEO Operating System is our quarterly CEO Retreat where we're actually creating our 90-day plans.

Those retreats happen during various specific months. They happen in March. They happen in June. They happen in September, and they happen in December. The ideal time for us to promote The CEO Collective is the month before the CEO Retreat because we have seen that if we have an enrollment period for The CEO Collective in August to start on September 1st, then those clients are able to be onboarded in the first couple weeks of September and be ready to attend their first CEO Retreat along with the rest of the members of The CEO Collective.

That has become our rhythm. We planned it out that way. It's a quarterly enrollment aligning with the rhythm of our 90 Day CEO Operating System. For your business, it could look different. There were many years where I would have a September promotion, then I would have a January promotion, and I would have a May promotion. I'd have three a year for a program that was my signature offer like five years ago.

That worked really well for us because if you happen to have a product, program, or service that is helping people achieve a goal, think about New Year's resolutions, if your product, program, or service is aligned with people's New Year's resolutions, promote in January. Have a game plan to hit the ground running January 1st so that you can capitalize on the fact that people are thinking about achieving their goals in January.

Same thing with September. It's a lot of that back-to-school energy. It has been just trained into us for such a long time. Maybe you still have kids who are going back to school, but I feel like September signals to a lot of people that “Okay, we're out of summer, we're out of vacation mode, it's time to get back into our normal routine.”

Again, goal-oriented stuff, things that people are achieving or goals that they're setting September and January tend to be really good and then May was always a lower volume launch, but at least it was something in the midpoint to keep the momentum going throughout the year.

That's one way I did it as well. There is really no right or wrong way here. But as you're plugging your promotions into your calendar, I do want you to think about the seasonality of your business. I want you to be thinking about what your clients are already tuned into in their business.

If your clients are distracted at the beginning of summer, let's say June or July, because their kids are out of school, they're now starting to take vacations, etc, etc, that is not a great month for you to do a huge promotion. However, maybe you're in an industry where there's a ton happening in June.

For example, maybe you're doing sailing lessons. Maybe you're doing things around weddings, who knows? Think about what your clients are actively doing and interested in in order to think about the right months to dedicate for those promotions.

Hopefully, that will help with that. You want to plug in two to four times that you're going to actively promote your offer. You want to make sure that you have your signature offer plugged in there and that should help you create your baseline revenue.

From there, we want to be able to actually plug in the in-between months. Once we have our signature offer plugged in, we know what months we're going to be doing a lot of sales activity for that signature offer, then we want to plug in other offers.

You might have something that is like a more introductory bite-sized offer, something that is maybe pulled out of your signature offer or it's a smaller component of your signature offer that provides a great introduction to working with you and is at a lower price point and a lower level of commitment.

An example of this in my business is The CEO Retreat. We have The CEO Retreat included in the year-long CEO Collective program. But if you wanted to attend a retreat on its own, you can purchase a ticket just to The CEO Retreat and have a full immersive experience of what it's like to work with us.

That can be a great in-between for your signature offer launches. If we are doing a big promotion of let's say, enrollment for The CEO Collective in August, then we may have done a promotion for the upcoming CEO Retreat the month before to get people excited about what's coming up.

You can plug those in, your introductory offers, your bite-size offers, you're getting people a taste of what you have so that then they can hopefully filter up into your bigger program. You might also have what I call your more client-only offers or alumni offers.

As you work with people over the years, you're going to find there are probably people who would work with you again. They're finishing a product, program, or service with you and then they're going, “Well, what's next? I really liked working with you? What is the next step? Is there another way I can work with you?”

This is where you might have a client-only offer. Maybe you go from a group program to offering them one on one. Or maybe you have a program that's only available for alumni of your former program. You can create a different offer.

The nice thing about having that in your profit plan is this is more of an internal promotion. You're not necessarily talking about it everywhere. Your whole email list, your whole social media, whatever. This is probably something you're offering on an individual basis internally just for people who are already inside of your program. That can be another great way to cover those gaps in the months in between.

As I'm wrapping up this concept of mapping out month by month what is the core thing you're promoting this month, choosing each month, you have a product, program, or service you're actively promoting, the final thing I want to say about this is this is really going to help your cash flow.

By starting with your signature offer, again, this is ideally your bread and butter offer, it’s making up a good chunk of your revenue, this is usually a higher ticket offer, it's usually four or five figures, by having this two to four times a year, you're establishing a really great rhythm here of people joining that offer, which means you're getting a good infusion of cash flow into your business on at least a quarterly basis I would hope.

If you are accepting payment plans, it will smooth out your cash flow even more. Let's say you have an offer that every quarter you're opening the doors, you might have a good number of people who pay in full for that offer and you might have a good number of people who are taking a payment plan.

There's usually some combination. Usually, we see that 40% to 60% of our clients pay in full which is awesome because it means that month I had a higher amount of cash collected from new clients, but the payment plan over time is accumulating month after month, meaning the people who have previously enrolled are continuously paying me a payment plan, and then when we open the doors again and there's another layer of payment plans adding on top of it, it really smooths out the recurring cash flow month after month.

I really love having a payment plan for that reason because then I'm not just having four spikes in cash collected and then nothing the other couple of months or a lot less because I'm promoting smaller offers. I'm able to level that out which just makes the cash flow management a little bit easier. But it's really nice when you're able to do that.

It's also nice because if you have an offer that has a timeframe associated with it, so let's say somebody's joining your program, it's six months long, six months is up and they're done with their six-month payment plan, that means your incoming cash flow drops down by however many people just rolled off, so by staggering out your enrollments, let's say you have a six-month program, but you're doing an enrollment every three months, that means you're never going to drop to zero.

You're always going to have at least the previous enrollment cycle still in their payment plan. If you have extended payment plans beyond that, it helps even more. These are different things that I think about all the time. I think recurring revenue takes a lot of the pressure off. It can really help you manage your cash flow, especially if you aren't sure yet what to expect on a cash flow basis.

It's a little bit easier to manage when you're having a consistent amount every single month instead of just huge spikes based on when you're doing sales activity. It also helps you to manage things like your team expenses. Let's say if you have a payment plan and you have a baseline revenue because of those payment plans coming in, now you know better how much you have available to not just pay yourself but also pay your team, pay your overhead, invest forward, and to other things.

It makes it just a little bit easier for planning. There's a lot to think about here. I've also seen on the flip side that payment plans can actually be tricky if your clients go from half pay-in-full to half payment plan to all payment plans.

This is another conversation that's really, really relevant this year in particular, we have seen a lot of people shift to saying they just want the payment plan which means while you'll get the total collected over a longer period of time, maybe if you are depending on that bigger infusion of cash from pay-in-fulls, you don't have that right now.

It's really important to be watching these things and making decisions accordingly. You might realize that the payment plans aren't enough because you need that cash infusion to look ahead to the next few months and be able to cover new investments you want to make, etc.

In that case, you might make some decisions around whether or not to offer the payment plan or whether or not to partner with a payment plan provider. Working with something like a Wise bank, an Affirm, or Klarna, etc, I know SamCart and ThriveCart have both come out to say that they are now partnering with buy-now-pay-later service providers because of this huge influx of people preferring to do some payment plan versus pay in full.

I'm not trying to get too off track with that conversation. But ideally, if you have half and half, pay in full, and payment plans, you would have enough of an infusion of cash flow to provide your baseline revenue but also to give you that little bump so that you can invest forward into your business or cover expenses as they're coming up.

But it's really hard to plan that if you don't know when you're promoting things. That is the goal of today's episode is to just get you sitting down, sketching out the year so you have 12 squares in a year, again, three by four, where you can say, “This month I'm promoting this offer. This month I'm promoting this offer,” and trying to really make some goals around that so that you can get the clarity you need around what kind of sales you need in order to achieve the ultimate goals you have for your business.

I hope this is helpful. I think getting more clients really is easier when you have a game plan in place. It's easier when you are not struggling with that whole start-stop, start-stop and instead, you're able to start building these assets that you can rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

As we are opening enrollment for The CEO Collective this month, we aren't creating all of this from scratch, a lot of these assets we already had. I just had to go in there and make a few little tweaks in order to run our enrollment cycle again. That is what I want to see you get to.

It's not sexy. It's a lot of spreadsheets and Google documents, a little bit of editing, but it makes life so much easier when you know when to expect the promotions to happen, which then leads to the revenue, which then leads to your predictable profit plan.

I hope this was helpful. I cannot wait to hear your feedback from this. Also, keep on listening because we have another episode here all about how to tap into the existing revenue in your business and you won't want to miss that one.