Editor’s Note: This post was pulled from one of Roland Frasier’s Traffic & Conversion Summit talks.
There are 5 things you can do in your business to grow really fast.
#1: Co-Branding with Product Integration Partnerships
Tap into a businesses network of customers to build your own customer base.
- Dominos partners with Days Inn & Travel Lodge and put Domino’s cards in each hotel room
- Rolls Royce partners with Country Clubs
- Rolls Royce doesn’t pay them anything, the benefit for the country club is the experience they can give to their customers
- Casper and West Elm Furniture Company
- They’re the mattresses on all of the beds because West Elm doesn’t sell mattresses
Increase the value of their business to their customers (like Rolls Royce) or have a fee to promote it (Dominos), or have a revenue share. You can also look for companies that are already in these partnerships and make a better deal for them.
- For example, another mattress company could give West Elm Furniture Company more revenue share and replace Casper
#2: Tap The Curiously Powerful Effect of Butterfly Leverage
Butterfly leverage is all about finding ways to make more money off of one product or service.
What are all of the ways you can monetize something that you’re doing? Each time you’re going to do something, look for other opportunities to monetize.
For example, you can turn one event into several events and create a 7-figure ROI. T&C did this with Richard Branson.
- Hire Richard Branson to speak at T&C
- Offer a private reception with Branson at $15,000/ticket
- $300,000 in profit that goes to Richard Branson’s foundation (we didn’t have to pay out-of-pocket to get him here)
- Anyone who got a ticket becomes a War Room prospect (20 prospects added)
- Offer a private business lunch with Branson
- We offered a win a seat at lunch with Richard Branson contests
- Got 1,522 pixels
- Business Lunch Live Podcast Episode featuring Branson
- Led to 2,372 podcast subscribers
- Put us in the Top 200 Worldwide Charts
- Sold 619 T&C tickets via Sir Richard Branson coupon code
- $330,000 in revenue
- Sold 728 more via speaker announcements
- Every speaker at the show wanted to be identified as sharing the stage with Richard Branson
- They all emailed their list to show this off
- $720,000 in revenue
The end effect of all of this was an additional $1.5 million dollars.
#3: Structure To “Sell The Eggs” And Keep The Geese
This allows us to sell one part of our business without losing all of the momentum we’ve created over the past few years. Essentially, we’re spinning off of our operation assets and keeping our platform.
For example: T&C sold a domain name, an attendee list, and a trademark to Clarion Partners. We kept the sponsorship sales company, the media company (DigitalMarketer), our mastermind (War Room), and our staffing company (no employees went with the sale of the company).
Our next step in the event world is to partner with Brendon Burchard to acquire half of his Expert’s Academy. Our leverage was to bring our sponsorship company, media company, and event staffing to the partnership. What did we do? Took T&C out of the picture and replaced it with Expert’s Academy. Next year, we can do the same thing with a different event. It’s not a formula of selling our eggs but keeping our goose.
Clarion Partners is already interested in buying that event. We have a machine that can turn itself on to event after event to create new assets.
Structure like this so you never end up without a platform.
#4: Scale Most Impactful Activities, Eliminate Least Impactful Activities, And Verticalize
First think about the kinds of businesses that you have. There are 4 types:
When you systemize and analyze what you’re doing like this it helps you make good decisions around what to focus on for leverage in the future.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What are the most impactful activities you enjoy right now?
- What least impactful activities can we eliminate?
- What additional vertical can you expand your most impactful activities into?
#5: Grow Through Acquisitions
There are 4 steps to acquire for growth.
Step 1: Decide which types of businesses to acquire.
- Acquire your competitor to get them out of the market
- Acquire media
- Facebook group
- LinkedIn account
- YouTube account
- Acquire for a team
- Buy a company with products or services
- Consolidate the supply and distribution chain
- Acquire intellectual property (IP)
- Customer list
Step 2: Buy businesses for nothing down.
8 Business Purchase Strategies:
- Owner carry
- Buy a company for $X if they will carry back the financing and let you pay it back over time
- You can add the option of giving interest
- Earn-out
- Based on the performance going forward you can get additional money for the company you sold
- If you’re buying the company it reduces the risk
- Swaps
- Swap stock or assets in one company
- Asset-based lending
- Buy the company but have the company pay for itself through assets they already have
- Split equity
- Self-liquidating payments
- Payment equal to what you know you can make back
- Baseline
- Offer the first $3 million that comes in as the baseline and after you do your magic, everything on top is split 50/50 and after 3 years if the 50/50 is equal we throw away that baseline
- Pipe wrench
- If you contribute more than 10% of the customers to another company
- Don’t build their brand for them
- Give me equity in your company
Step 3: Find the exit multiple for each profit center.
Find the multiple for your industry and pivot your business to the highest multiple possible. Here’s a #V/sales business valuation chart that shows what multiple your business is:
Step 4: Reposition toward the highest exit multiple.
Which exit multiple creates the greatest exit value? For example, 584
DigitalMarketer’s looks this:
Our multiple went from 0.91 in 2014 to 7.73 just by changing what we did.
