The Poolside Sketch That Still Runs My Whole Business

Good morning. This is a good one today. Um, you know, I was looking through and I was hoping as I'm going through this to find the genesis moments of things that I'm still using 30 years later. And today is one of those days.

And it reminds me of, if you've ever seen the uh documentary about the Beatles and there's a scene where Paul is trying to work out the song uh Get Back and uh they're sitting around and they're just strumming the uh the guitar and they're trying to work out what the song is and they're making up the lyrics as they go. I was had a flashback to one of those things because this is in uh you know 1997 early in the year and I have this vision of Eban Pagan and Joe Stump and I sitting around the pool at Joe's place in Ensenus, California. And I had been working on this idea for a long time. And I'm realizing now the more I see these ideas that are coming here that they're all this combination of, you know, at least three things that we're combining here.

So we talked about the storyboarding as a way of creating customer journeys or creating um you know sequential things looking for benchmarks in things and I was also reading a book called the loyalty effect and the I forget who the author is but the general idea was that people go through uh different levels that you have what they call prospects, shoppers, customers, clients, and advocates. And the whole idea is to help people climb the loyalty ladder. And so I was looking at that and thinking in our situation, what is it that is happening um in our uh in our business here to advance somebody all the way? And I kind of added one before where what is somebody before they're a prospect?

They're a suspect. So in my mind, this evolution, this progression is to try and put a category on what uh what are we doing in each of those levels to advance somebody through a total relationship with us. So this is the beginning as a storyboard of what became what's now the eight profit activators. There were seven steps in this process.

So number one was select uh your target market which is now profit activator one is select a single target market. You see how it's evolved there. Section two was to compel prospects to call you. Number three was to educate and motivate prospects to meet you.

So everything this is, do you remember how I would go through this process is take this and then list down all the things? What do we need to do to fully select a market? And then what do we need to do to compel somebody to call? And once they've called, they immediately move into that they are now a prospect because we've uh we know who they are.

Then we need to educate and motivate them for the next step which is to meet with you because we can't present your unique service offer until we're meeting with somebody until we have their full attention. And uh so present your unique service offer is what became profit activator number four. And then number five is deliver worldclass service which has been now evolved to you know deliver a world-class experience a way of getting the result in a superior way with an amazing experience for people. And then number six was to provide afterale service as soon as somebody's done the actual transactional part of it.

We talked the other day about how to get referrals or to keep the uh keep the momentum going for the 30 60 90 days after somebody has uh done business with you. And then number seven was to nurture lifetime relationships. And all seven of those are uh present today in the eight profit activators. But I've added an eighth profit activator which is to orchestrate referrals.

And that's different than nurturing lifetime relationships. And so looking at this now, you know, I see the value of this constant journaling to gather all the stuff that like I was constantly being exposed to things. I was taking in new information. I was processing it in my journals and I was combining it with the things that I'm learning.

Like what happens when you combine this story board with the idea of the um with the idea of the loyalty ladder and my thinking about what we need to do to advance people through a lifetime relationship. And that's uh that's pretty exciting to see the the genesis of it. And we'll see how the application of this one mental model is responsible for everything that I do now with a business. This is a universally true set of heruristics that I can use to create um you know amazing systems that overlay and create what we now call a breakthrough blueprint.

We can create a blueprint using these uh using these plans here. So I would encourage you to think through your own models. Are you paying attention to the things that you are taking in? You're thinking and processing and applying them to the things that you are already doing and then creating, documenting them and creating your own intellectual property.

I got a funny email the other day from Rick. It says, Dean, question. are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you? And I laughed to myself because I was thinking, you know, yes, I I can do that.

That's what I do. is the funny thing. What I really realized is that every idea that I've had, every dollar that I've made over the last 30 years has gone through my brain, through my pen onto a piece of paper in my journal before it went out into the real world. And if I can turn people on to that activity as a driver for what to do, what to think about, what to ask yourself to draw out, what the next most valuable action is for you, and how to find the most profitable things that you can install in your business.

I'm all for it. m. I'm going to do for the first time a 50inute profitfinder workshop and you're going to join me live on Zoom and we're going to go through a 50inute exercise. Bring your pen.

Bring a notebook or piece of paper. And I'm going to guide you through a thinking process that will help you identify where the lowest hanging fruit is in your business and maybe some fruit that you didn't even know was there. But I'm going to show you where to look for it. So, it's free.

It's for you. m. this Friday. Just watch.

Go to What did we call the website, Josh? >> 50inut profitfinder. m.