Episode Transcript

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome to the show predicated on the journey of business and life. Guys, I’m having a great day. I hope you are. And I just really appreciate y’all tuning in listening. And I hope you’re getting something out of this. And if you’re new to the show, the whole point of this is really just a documenting the journey, and really talking to people about you know, business life and really just documenting the steps.

Something that early on in business, I’ll share that Andrew and I, when we started, we we really didn’t want to be like used car salesmen, right? Like we didn’t want to be in pushy and all this stuff, we really want to understand how to serve people. And as a result, we neglected ourselves to really do our own marketing, we did a lot of word of mouth, like everything came from, you know, business at the time was a lot of referrals. But What really stunted our growth was marketing. And we were so focused on serving, so focused on the offering so focused on the product, so focus on the services and keeping promises that we didn’t mark it. And that was a problem, it actually never allowed us to grow the way we wanted to.

And I’ll tell you this, if you are really, really beginning to start in business, or if you’re early in business, or if you’re struggling in business, there’s a saying that really holds true, which is a marketing solves all problems, sales solves all problems, those two things, right, because you’re going to have sales without marketing. So really, if you think about it, it’s like that’s going to solve a lot of your problems and business, that’s going to solve a lot of your constraints in business, because now you’re generating the revenue you need in order to deal with the constraint. However, I do think too much opportunity will kill you going too fast, right? Going past your bench can can actually hurt long term brand and long term identity of the company because you’re not keeping your promises.

And when you have bad reviews or bad opinion about your brand, because you can’t keep promises. That’s when things start to break down. So as you do sales, do marketing, you’ve got to also think about production, how you’re actually going to fulfill the promises from your side that people have paid you money to do. So whether it’s a physical product, you got to think about production there, right, or whether it’s a service, you got to think about how you’re going to handle those items of service.

So going back to What I was saying earlier, though, the about where we started a few things that you really need to focus on when you’re first starting business, right? One of them is you need to focus on marketing, how are people going to know about you people don’t know about you, people are not going to be able to find you or do business with you. Second is sales, you actually have to have a process to partner with people right to start a relationship. And then that relationship ended up in a partnership, or a contractual partnership for business, right. And where there’s an exchange of value for money or time for money, and different things like that. Those are really integral.

The other part is this is you actually have to focus on production, building out production, keeping production and moving forward in those ways. Because you’ve got to, like I said, maintain your processes. And I mean, excuse me, keep your promises. And the only way for doing that is to build out processes. And franchise meant if you don’t have structure, you’re not going to be able to keep your promises, especially if you’re a service based company, right? Processes come naturally, when you’re making hard products, you’ve got to have some sort of process that the hard materials, the physical materials goes through for it to be produced. And then you end up with a physical product. But for services, it’s really intangible other than the outcome that you get at the very end of everything, right.

So for instance, like we we do a lot of revenue generation, and we do it through digital means. The problem is with the digital world, you do not have anything that’s tangible until there’s a phone call, or a result that has been delivered. So all the services in between, they’re not really felt or seen until the very end result. And that’s really true for a lot of service companies like you have a plumber come in to fix the leak. The results really aren’t seen until the water’s turned back on. And then everybody realizes, Oh, yeah, the leak is fixed, right.

And so all that being said is you’ve got to focus on marketing, you got to focus on sales, you got to focus on production. And then you need to focus on team, those four areas of where you need to focus are going to help you build What you need to build, right. You’ve got to have people you’ve got to be able to step outside of your technical work, be able to pass it to somebody else and build from that place to where you’re free to continue to build The company itself because team members, they can help you build the company. But if you’re just starting out, that’s your main goal and you’re going to be busy. You’re going to be busy because you’re working three different people’s jobs.

So anyways guys, well, I’m out of time and I’ll catch you later peace