TSH 29: My 4 pillars of profitability

Reading time 2 mins

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to diagnose what online businesses need to do to rapidly grow their profits.

If you know me, or have followed me long enough, then you know that I know, you can’t buy houses with Shopify screenshots. As I say, any mug can make sales - it’s profits, and cash that change lives.

Wealth creation is an entirely different beast, and not everyone can make it work.

So what would I do, if I worked on your business?

I’d start by questioning you on what I call The 4 Pillars of Profitability, which measure your ability to:

Perfect Your Product

Master Your Finances

Market Strategically

Operate Efficiently 

I’d then ask about what perfection means for you. I’ve given a lot of thought also, to what business owners consider perfect to look like, within their business, when it’s in its ideal state. 

Those 4 things most commonly come back to:

Money

Control

Freedom

Scale

Let's break that down

Money

Well, that’s obvious. You can buy cool stuff with money (not happiness though)!  But you can’t have money unless your product is selling - you’ve Perfected Your Product.

Control

This is a buzz word for me. Control brings peace - and holidays. But you can’t have control without Operating Effectively. 

Freedom

Financial freedom, freedom to take holidays when you want, being your own boss - a sense of not being bound by the shackles of a 9-5. But you can’t have Freedom without Mastering Your Finances. 

Scale

Girls just wanna have fun, and entrepreneurs just wanna scale. But you can’t scale without Marketing Strategically, or you burn your cash.

The Problem Vs Perfection Cycle

And so here we are in the problem versus perfection cycle. What we want, we can’t have, unless we address our problems. No different to hitting the gym and focusing on your weakest muscles - not your biggest. Everyone laughs at the big guy with the little legs - let’s not be him, lets work on our weaknesses.

I want you now to think about the 4 pillars again, and look at the below problems that can occur when you’re tackling your 4 pillars. Mentally, score yourself on a traffic light system for each of the topics - red where you see problems, amber where it’s ok, green where it’s great.

Perfect Your Product

Planning

Creating

Reporting

Master Your Finances

Knowledge

Model

Process

Market Strategically

Attract

Convert

Retain

Operate Efficiently

Supply

Serve

Process

Thinking of the above, the areas you’ve marked as red, should be the areas that you focus on immediately. 

It’s easy to exist, it’s difficult to thrive. What I mean by that, is if you’re worried about money or profitability, but you’re just living in the day to day - operating with a BAU mindset, you’re likely to make no changes. 

If you diagnose where your business is leaking money, or where it can grow sales, then focusing your efforts on your ‘next right thing’ is going to help you immensely. 

Where to focus your attention is critical

You see, the quickest way to grow profits is to know where to look - and when you’ve found where to look, you need to lock yourself in a room and solve it. 

Your order of priorities should be to work on the red areas first - stop going back to the same well, if you keep coming up thirsty. In other words, if what you’re comfortable doing isn't putting you on the path to perfection, then stop doing it, or at least do other stuff too.

My challenge to you is to select 1-6 of these red lights, and focus on them for the next 6 weeks. Here are a few questions to get you started:

Questions: Related to the above, what are the 1-6 biggest problems in your business right now? I would say, the ones that are blocking your path to perfect.

What is the problem?

What is the impact of the problem?

What is the outcome if you fix the problem?

Give the problem a project name.

Repeat that for the top 1-6 problems in your business, and you have what I call your 6 Week Solution Model. Work on them until you solve them, and if you can't solve them, get help solving them.

Summary

We all want to focus on two things. 

1. What we enjoy
2. What is easy

Remember, there’s a reason your business may not be changing your life in the way you dreamed. It’s within your control to fix it - you just have to do it.

I am opening up 5 spots for small group coaching on my Path to Profitability mode, reply if you’re a business turning over at least $1m, and you need help doubling your profits in 1-2 years.

Until next week,

Paul

If you want to work with me, here's how:

1. Startup or under $50k per month: Take my free Ecommerce Masterclass '90 Days to Ecommerce Success' here. 

2. Over $50k per month: Coaching waitlist, reply to this email for next spots (March 2024).

3. Ecom Nation - Digital marketing for your business - Recently named Australia's best digital agency.

4. Buy my book, Shopify for Dummies

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