Here are some of the things that have been a revelation for us growing our business:

1. How Do You Define Your Target Market?

Most startups want to target ‘everyone’, and even those that think they have a target market don’t really have one. Even Facebook knew that their target market, especially at the start, was socially active college students in the United States aged 18-23. Even more so, how do you understand what the psychology of your target market is?

2. How Do You Position For Profit?

Most businesses are not positioned to profit. Think about it. Many tech platforms can’t go into profitability; the most profitable ones typically have high-ticket consultations for high-value customers adding profit to their model (think SalesForce or some accounting or online marketing software).

3. How Do You Generate Leads With Education?

Today, businesses such as Facebook and LinkedIn are using seminars, webinars and PDF guides as part of their education process to sell their premium features.

4. How Do You Profit From One-To-Many Presentations Instead Of Old-School One-On-One?

An example of this is how a bank or financial institution holds an event for high net-worth clients and gets dozens of clients at one event, instead of sending sales consultants over many months for the same result. How much more profitable, productive and time-saving is this?

5. How Do You Automate All This Marketing And Sales Together?

From landing pages, conversions and traffic to email autoresponders and payment solutions. If they are not systemised and automated, then you can’t scale.

When you have these things in place, you start having a system that you can scale … all the way up to $1M and above, without needing to try to duplicate yourself multiple times. This is especially important in light of the focus in the start-up scene on investments and valuations. A business will never provide ROI to investors if they never figure out how to be profitable and sustainable.

I hope this sheds some light on the immense value of having the right positioning, educational marketing, sales mechanisms and systems in place, which help make us a lot more money in a lot less time.

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