Dienstleistungsunternehmen skalieren

0:00Unternehmer/Gast I sell fire and safety and commercial cleaning to mainly like restaurant owners when we bought it 200 plus and thank you I told my wife about that she's like why do you need Alex just watch his videos. Anyway that's a different topic yeah she's German so she's very methodical [snorts] I would like to get at least double the revenue but because of your workshop I want to get to 10 million one day but I don't I think let's double it first what's stopping me is that when we introduced the fire suppression for the restaurant Avatar and we discussed this yesterday a big key piece we were missing was for example you have this tag here it's a national fire protection code basically then the one that's 96 and needs to clean the hood cleaning in restaurants so we try to introduce that but we had zero sales process for over two decades the husband and wife team that sold it to me didn't believe in that the phone rings we pick up in two rings that's literally the process. We went down to 20% sorry yes yeah exactly we went we went down 20% the first time cuz we tried to launch that division last summer I'm in that boat right now and I have gone down another 20% again because I tried to launch it again 3 months ago [laughter] so that's what's stopping me the second thing is zero sales as we talked about the third thing is I had did some fancy roles in finance that I was telling you about and some government you know I'm on some boards and so on and so forth haven't posted on LinkedIn I bought 15,000 followers on LinkedIn people have been asking me hey man what are you up to and I'm a little bit shy to tell them that I'm in fire safety I've tested it out with a few folks here I say to them hey I went from finance to fire safety the first question is like why the hell did you do that like what you know so it's like a shocker so so yeah so just wanted to know what I'm going to give you thumbs up yeah exactly thanks. So so so you have a pretty classic issue and so this will affect more than one person more than just you so I'll fill in some of what he was explaining so he's got restaurants as an avatar right which and he also has property managers right and they've got like a hundred units at a time right so think of this as like these are whales and you've got your minnows over here and the issue is that he only has three of these and these came super you know sporadically there's no process around it the restaurants also come sporadically but there's more of them right and the main hook that he has now is that he also didn't tell you that he bought a cleaning business.

2:37That's right we did a roll up play too Right so you bought a cleaning business and then he uses the cleaning as a way to get into the restaurant That's right Okay So Do you remember what I told you last night? Yes Okay so what did I say? You said focus on the the property management persona to build on the fire and safety stuff and then after 1 year of me doing the sales you said I need to be in the business cuz I was trying to fire myself when I talked to you you said no you can't

3:06Alex >> [laughter] >> That's right that's right yeah so I so I quit my other stuff exactly I have to quit teaching I have to quit everything else and I'm property manager firms nail the fire and safety first and then after a year then slowly nudge them into cleaning. So the key here is that so I'll put a nuance into what I said so that you can cuz I said other and it's a lot to take in when we're talking so there's I didn't say that but the other part that what we're solving for is it's not that that's the solution it's that I want to solve for the greatest discrepancy between LTV to CAC on customers that are easiest to acquire right And so what I want to figure out is is it easier and more profitable to get restaurants because even if these are guys are minnows like there's tons of businesses that can make a killing with minnows there's nothing wrong with minnows we just have to look at LTV to CAC and so like maybe it costs you you know a hundred dollars to get a restaurant and a restaurant's worth you know two thousand dollars over the next five years 20 to 1 good business right now these guys might be worth you know that's supposed to be a dollar sign backwards there we go let's say these guys are worth you know twenty thousand dollars a year I know they're not but whatever let's just say they're worth twenty thousand dollars a year and it costs you four thousand dollars to acquire them now in your mind you're like man this is so much more money but the LTV to CAC ratio is actually much smaller right and so what I want to just figure out is what the LTV to CAC is between these two things and I do think that you owning it is an intelligent decision if you have an inkling as to which one of these is more profitable in terms of what it costs versus how much you make then I would start there but I would focus only on one of them because you just have to get your hands dirty and learn the actual sales process now I'll bet because you have this cleaning thing if that gets the door open for these restaurants as a pretty easy like foot in the door quite literally It does Okay well then it's like great well then this one's like property managers going to be harder to get and so if you're like cash flow constrained which I'm guessing you are given the stress I can feel right I would probably go cleaning because you can get your foot in the door and get your reps much faster and I think you'll learn the sales motion that might also apply to this property managers later so it's not like you're excluding that but for right now and this is what I hope to have happen is that you figure out the sales motion for for restaurants with this offer and you might just be like we're making a lot of money let's just keep doing this and then you can just transfer that because I'll also bet kind of like the selling you know flipping watches selling property managers going to be harder Yeah than selling restaurants and so if you do eventually want to get out of the business it'll be easier to get out of the business if you make that the customer Got it one last question to follow up on that is like we also sell like a third department that does safety compliance that's like only two or three people that do that so for example that fire sign that you have the exit sign so that needs to be there otherwise the fire department can shut you down right I haven't even touched that department because the the feedback I get from the team is like don't sell more stuff cuz we can't keep up with the current customers so don't bring more any any insights on that one?

6:06Is it profitable? It is that one is a subscription model so yeah I mean super profitable it is It's like 20k a month in revenue for example Okay cool >> and 20 clients that pay well and you know Okay Okay oil and gas companies and things like that So All right We have this you said department 20,000 a month so that department's like one person?

6:32Alex Yeah well it was one person it was a previous owner but she we hired like three more people so it's But it was the owner and now you have three people there Correct because that was like the key key person risk so all the information was in her head remember there's no processes here right the phone just rings Right So I I okay we have to take these one thing at a time so first things first we're going to ignore this cool we're going to ignore that second thing is you're going to get the sales cycle for doing this offer on the front end cuz that seems to be working for you so I wanted you to get you better at closing these deals and doing them consistently And that's a 20 year history as well of Great so that's good in terms of the cross sell which is basically what that is I would say table it for now not I mean I do think the reasoning of like we're too busy but we're also not making as much as we want is tough but the the steps of what we're going to do here is this is going to be number one and then the second thing that you're going to tackle on is the cross sell actually it'll be 1.5 is fix compliance department so that they can actually handle the customers and then so it's restaurants as number one fix the compliance department and then you'll start cross selling the compliance services but this will probably take like six to nine months to get to here just to be clear it'll probably take six months to learn this maybe three months to turn the department and figure out like you hired three people to replace one I'll bet you two of them aren't doing anything especially if they're like we're too busy it's like one person was doing this there's three of you now you're saying you're too busy something doesn't add up here and so you probably like right now your business need has four fires we just have to take one fire at a time and this is the most important fire which is getting new business so let's solve that one first

8:23>> [applause] >> If you are business owner and you are not growing as fast as you like I'd like to give you a free gift so my team and I put together the 100 million dollar scaling road map which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it and so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you what to do for each of functions of the business across product marketing sales customer success recruiting IT human resources and finance and so no matter what you're struggling with someone else has already struggled with it and solved it and so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale we'd love to help you out on the thank you page you can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business see if we can help and if we can we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live …