Podcast - How To Build A Business Process

Joshua was recently on The Financial Freedom Podcast.

Check out the episode below:

Conversation Transcript

Lorna Poole: Welcome to the financial freedom podcast with your host Lorna Poole, sharing the secrets to creating wealth investing and that all important money mindset to find out more and accelerate your journey to financial freedom. Head on over to www.LornaPoole.com to get started.

Lorna Poole: Welcome everybody welcome financial freedom podcast. Would you like to build a business with processes that can get you farther ahead in your journey to financial freedom by automating what works and discontinuing, what doesn't work? Well, my guest expert today is Joshua Maddux. He's the CEO of 95Visual. He has an in depth background in websites planning strategy development and architecture from managing web projects to building on migrating large web applications. Joshua helps 95Visual clients establish and maintain a better web presence. Through information architecture, project manager on web strategy. Joshua, Great to have you here.

Joshua: Yeah. Great to be with you.

Lorna Poole: Why is this such an important part of building a successful business?

Joshua: Yeah, so setting up a plan for any type of business or any type of plan or a process. There's a lot of business coaches and a lot of well known business strategists that will talk about if you don't have a plan, then you're planning to fail. So many business owners when you ask, Hey, what is your marketing plan? Or what is your financial plan? Or where do you want to be in two years? They really don't know. And it's one of those things where if you hop in the car and you start driving and you don't have a plan of where you're going, you're never going to get there. But if you plan to go to the restaurant that's five miles down the road, you're, you can get there. You may, you know, you may take the long way around, but you'll get there. And that's really, on the planning aspect of that.

Lorna Poole: I agree. I think people get into business all shiny new and they'll tell you build a website, but they don't tell you how that website needs to work to be successful in complementing where you want to go.

Joshua: Yeah, definitely. You know, we're talking about the element of a business process and talking about planning in that sense and you know, websites, building a website is a huge element to, you know, to having a business process in place. Some people will build out a website and, you know, they don't really know how that fits into their business plan. And if you're a sales type business, if you have anything to sell, think through it. You know, even if it's a product or a service, think through it as you're hiring a sales person, what information would you want a salesperson to know? You know, you're not going to hire a salesperson if you're a, you know, let's say you're a roofing contractor, you're not going to highly hire a salesperson and say, just go sit in the corner for six months and we'll figure out what to do with you. We'll, we, when we, you know, when we get there that's wasting a lot of money. And so you're not, you know, you're not going to do that with an actual person. Don't do that with your website. And so it's, it's what type of processes and procedures can you have in place, not only to help grow your business, but also to ensure that your website is bringing you the value that you need.

Lorna Poole: I love the way you've said that because I've, I've, I've never really thought about that. But of course if you were to hire a sales rep, you'd want them going out there knowing how to sell, knowing how to bring in the business and knowing how to transfer that from the conversation into the sale. So in regards to what we're talking about here, you're talking about building a process as a business or in the website

Joshua: On both sides. So, you know, I will say, for instance, we have a client of ours who has a physical location and people need to make a sort of a reservation to come in. And that person who, you know, if they have a new client, that new potential prospect may call them a talk on the phone for 10 or 15 minutes, get to understand the business a little better. And you'll may have a half a dozen questions where if they have, you know, for sake of argument, let's call it a chiropractor. And so, but if you've been to this same chiropractor, you know, five, six, seven times, you know how they work, you know exactly what you're expecting, all you need to do is ensure that, that there's availability next Thursday afternoon. That's all you need to know. And so for this client, we have a web form on their website that you can go to and punch in the day and time that you'd like to come in, your name, your email address and phone number and just hit submit and you're putting in a booking request.

Joshua: And then on the office side they get an email with that information, they can double check the schedule and they just click a button to reply that say, you know, thanks. You know, that's been booked. Or, Hey, that's getting all that time that you wanted, you know, 3:00 PM on Thursday is not available. How about 3:30 or 4 o'clock. And so it cuts that time, you know, from that phone call from a, you know, 20 minute phone call to a super quick, you know. And the other thing is, you know, let's say I was looking to, you know, to book a chiropractic appointment and it's, you know, nine o'clock at night and they're not open. So now I, you know, I call there's nobody at the office. So it's like, it's this sort of round and round type aspect. And if I were to leave a voicemail, I'd say, Hey, I want to come in for an appointment and then hang up.

Joshua: And then they'd call me back while I'm at work. They leave a call, you know, a voicemail. And so we play phone tag for three or four days until we actually get an appointment scheduled. And so with something like a contact form, and I know this is the process that I'm talking about right now, is simply just utilizing the contact form on your website properly. If you're a business that you need to provide a quote for some thing or you need 95% of your customers submit a booking request or a schedule request or a specific request for a quote, then have that contact form on your website, have some minimal amount of information that they have to figure, you know, fill out. So you have a little bit more of an understanding of, you know, what exactly you know, that may be, and you, you know, you don't have to spend quite as much time talking on the phone to each customer. Cause you know, you as a business owner, your time is valuable and you want to make sure that you're utilizing that to the best of your ability. So yeah.

Lorna Poole: What about marketing or traffic? What processes are for that?

Joshua: Yeah. So on the marketing side, you know, so let's say that chiropractor example that we just, you know, we're talking about so you know, if you want more customers as a, you know, as like a chiropractor or whatever utilizing Facebook ads or Google ads or you know, there's tons of other search engines and platforms that you can use, but ensuring that you know, you're targeting the correct age demographic, you're targeting the correct income bracket, you're targeting the correct geolocation. If you're a brick and mortar store and you're targeting customers who are two, three, 400 miles away, unless you are a hotel or a resorts or something like that, if you're just a brick and mortar convenience store or a chiropractor or a dentist targeting customers 200 plus miles away from your location is not going to work. You want to target people that are, you know, zero to 10 miles, there's zero to 20 miles. So ensuring sort of that location aspect. So utilizing the marketing to help drive traffic to a website and increase, you know, increased the number of contacts and increase the number of people clicking on your website and filling out that contact form is, you know, is all definitely a business building aspect.

Lorna Poole: And what about conversion from traffic to sales and all that, you know, what processes need to be in place for that?

Joshua: Yeah, so you know, for us, looking at and monitoring conversion and so, you know, if you get a hundred people to come to a landing page on your website to come to your contact page or come to whatever typically if you get two to 3% of the people filling out a contact form, that's actually really good. It sounds really low, but you know, two to 3% is actually really is actually sort of a decent sort of minimum conversion. And so being able to track that, whether it's utilizing Google analytics or there's, you know, Google analytics is free and with highly recommend anybody who has a website to add the Google analytics code to their site. There's a ton of other paid services as well that offer some other tracking in addition. But Google analytics is a great place to start.

Joshua: And so from there it's, you know, you can make little adjustments to your contact page. And you know, one of the things that we always see is like if someone says you know, Hey, do you want this, you know, free PDF file, just give me your email address. That languaging, like, give me your email sounds offensive. And, but if you change that from that to something as, you know, where would you like me to send this? And it's like, Oh, okay. I just have to give them the email address because they need to send me information. And so it's, it's thinking about it from, you know, the customer's perspective. The other thing is you can always start to poke around the internet and look at, you know, what are three or four other companies doing? What are, you know, what things, when you go to a website, do you get frustrated by and don't do those? What things? When you go to a website, you're like, that was really easy. How can I, you know, create a process or create something like that on my site and you sort of think through it and go from there.

Lorna Poole: Yeah. What about, okay, what about, you know, there are costs involved. If, if you're building a business or, you know, you're out the early stages, there needs to be a balance between what's coming to you and the costs involve of like, you know, say maybe Facebook ads or Google ads. I mean, you can spend any money on that, but if it's not bringing you decent traffic and then that's not converting to somebody contacting your form and then converting into sales, I mean, how can you sorta be confident at what you're doing is going to bring you the business you desire.

Joshua: Yeah. So on the marketing side that's a, big question unpack here, but let's, you know, let's go dive through that. So, you know, I think the first element that I want to touch on is what's called cost of acquisition. Yeah. Every business should know what costs their cost of acquisition is.

Joshua: And, and for those who are listening and maybe don't know that term exactly, cost of acquisition is what it costs you to get a new customer. And so, if you are a business and you offer a referral program and you pay, you know, 10% referral or you pay $200, you know, for any referral that's given, that's your, you know, that's your cost of acquisition. If you have to run Google ads and you know, your conversion rates 10% and each click costs $5, that means you know, it's $5. It and if your conversions only 10%, then you're about spending about $50 onads. And so you're spending about 50 bucks on ads, you know, to convert that one customer. You also want to think through the time, you know, for you to spend on the phone. If you're spending an hour with each customer on the phone and walking them through stuff and you know, answering questions and all that stuff, that's again, sort of a cost of acquisition.

Joshua: And really can drive that price point up a little bit. And so, you know, looking at, you know, the cost of acquisition and obviously, you know, if you're a small business and you don't have thousands of dollars to spend on advertising, what do you do? And so, you know, I would say one of the biggest things to try is definitely looking at and utilizing referrals. Referrals are a great way for you to ensure that you can help grow your business. So go back to your customers who've been super satisfied with your services and offer them incentive to refer business to. And that way you only pay out a referral fee when you make a sale. That's a super awesome way to help grow your business a little bit. And also make sure you're keeping your costs down from a marketing perspective.

Joshua: The other thing that you know, we'll tell clients to do is find someone who maybe is in the same space and has a similar offering but doesn't provide the services that you do. Can you partner with them and maybe share, share the advertising dollars a little bit. But the other point that I'll talk about is, you know, we have, we've had clients before where they're spending $1,000 on Facebook and $1,000 on Google and the customers that they're getting from one platform or the other, you know, they're getting five times, six times, seven times the amount of leads from one platform versus the other platform. And it's like, okay, we're getting a lot more leads from this one platform. Maybe we should scale back our spend on the platform that's not working as great. One of the things that from an advertising perspective and talking about the cost of conversion and all this type of stuff is don't leave your Google ad words, your Facebook ads or any social media advertising.

Joshua: Don't leave it unattended. You want to check in on this stuff, you know, once a week, you know, once every other week. Because what happens is, is if it starts to get off track and you don't stop it or you don't correct it, it'll continue to get further and further and further off of track. And so you think about it like a, like a ship in the water. If a ship, you know, is, is two degrees off course and only goes a mile, they're not too far, but if they go a hundred miles, they're way off course. Andsome advertising platforms can, that can happen. They get way off course and it can happen relatively fast depending on how much money you're spending on those platforms. So definitely keeping an eye on those is a huge thing. That'll help save money on the advertising and you'll make sure that you're not spending money where you're not supposed to be.

Joshua: An example of that would be, let's say you are a contractor and you were looking to install windows into, you know, into homes. And so if you just did a keyword ad on Google ads for the word windows, you're going to get everybody who's looking to buy a window for their home. You're going to get everybody who's looking to look up information on windows as in the operating system. You're going to get everybody who's, you know, Google searching things about, you know, window for my Ford F150 truck. It's too broad. And so, if you're not putting a geolocation on that, you're getting everybody around the world. And so ensuring that you really scale that in and, and make sure that, you know, if you're doing, you know, you're a contractor and you're doing windows for a home, so maybe it's home window replacement that's gonna get you the customers you want. Rather than just having a broad keyword that's gonna get you a ton of people that have nothing to do with what you're looking for.

Lorna Poole: You know what Josh, I love what you've shared with us and I think we've talked about kind of like the overall picture and you know, thinking about your business plan, your, your, your website strategy. And I think that's amazing information for everybody. Just to sorta bring it all together. What's the kind of one aha you want to leave the listeners with?

Joshua: Yeah, so I think, you know, I think the biggest thing, I do want to circle back a little bit on the business process, process side. I will say for us we have sort of a process we go through for every client. If it's a web design, you know, website we're building, we have like this six page PDF that we walk every client through that asks them questions about, you know, why are they in business and what do they need from their website and all that type of stuff. And it really helps our clients think through and, and ensure that we're not missing anything. We actually have this one page of that packet that walks through, like whose responsibility is it for the photos, who's responsibility is it for contents, for any of this type of stuff. It's making sure all those expectations are outlined up front.

Joshua: And that's just part of our process. It's something that's super easy, but it also helps make sure that, you know, we talked about from a marketing perspective, referrals are awesome. And so if you have a process in place that ensures that your customers know what the expectations are up front, they're going to be more satisfied, they're more satisfied, they're more likely to refer you if they're more likely to refer you. That's gonna help build your business. And it sort of all stems from that. But I think the biggest thing, you know, we talked about your website sort of being like a salesperson. But one of the things I often will talk about you know, with business owners is if you treat your website like a pet rock, it is going to act like one, it's just gonna sit there and do nothing. And sadly I've definitely seen my fair share of pet rock marketing websites. They just don't provide much information and don't provide much value and sadly cost the business a lot of money to make.

Lorna Poole: What's the difference between a pet rock website on a website that's really working for you?

Joshua: Yeah, so I would say a few things are knowing who your ideal client is for a business, you need to know who your ideal client is. Who are you speaking to? If you don't know who you're talking to. If you're talking, you know, if you're a contractor talking to a homeowner, know that, know what their rough ages know, you know, do they have kids? Do they not have kids? And I'm, I'm generalizing this a little bit, but you know, you want to know that. You want to have some content on your website that really talks about, you know, the services or the products that you as a business have and how they're gonna benefit that customer who's reading the website. Have information about you as a business owner. Have a good bio that really showcases, you know, your credibility and your qualifications. You know, you've been doing this 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whatever it is, show your qualifications and, and let your, you know, let your customers see that. Those are all definitely really, really big things and would definitely encourage businesses to do.

Lorna Poole: Love it Joshua, thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing and let us know how people can find out more about you.

Joshua: Yeah, so I own a company 95Visual. We're a web design and marketing company. You can go to 95Visual.com and we've actually put together a page on our website, 95Visual.com/plan we have three internal documents that we use. Our Ideal Client Workbook, Our How To Write A Bio, and Our Content Planner, all three of those we've made publicly available for listeners. And we also have a PDF on there that is 10 Easy Steps To Help You Build A Website. It walks through some different elements that you need to know as you're starting that process or if you have a website, sort of a look at how your website fits in within that. So again, it's 95Visual.com/plan. I'm personally on LinkedIn, we're on, you know, our businesses on Facebook and Twitter and, and all the social networking sites as well. So I'd love to connect with people there.

Lorna Poole: Thank you Joshua. Thank you for being here.

Joshua: Awesome. It was good chatting with you. Thank you.