1. Analyse your business

Before you can understand how much more you can make in your business you need to figure out what your business is doing, knowingly or unknowingly, to drive customers to your door.

You must understand why they buy from you and not from your competitor or why they buy from your competitor and not you. You must know the following variables:

1. What is your cost per acquisition/sale?
2. What is your clients average lifetime value?
3. What is the allowable cost per acquisition/sale?
4. What are your attrition rates?

You must break down your revenue generating processes and isolate and identify the cost per acquisition for each one so that you can understand exactly which sales or marketing effort is generating or losing money for you. Until and unless you do this you are blindly running your business.

Who are your customers? Do you know their names, where they are from, their addresses, email and phone number? Do you keep in touch with them regularly? What niche if any or many do you serve?

These are just some of the questions you will face when you start to analyse your business.

2. Systematise your processes

Every part of your business is systematic, if it isn't it should be. And the same goes for your marketing. Until and unless you start to understand that marketing is a process that can be measured, analysed and systematised you have no idea how much more revenue you can generate from it or how much money you are losing because of it.

Systematisation needs to be applied to all parts of your business so that the service or product you deliver is congruent with your sales, marketing and brand values and message. Even your unique selling proposition needs to be systematised and incorporated into every process so that it becomes the driving force behind the way you deliver on it.

You cannot systematise until you ask yourself the following:

1. Is our marketing systematised and do we use our USP in all our marketing?
2. Do we have a vision and does everyone know what it is?
3. Can the business be run without you?
4. Do you have a standards and procedures manual?

You cannot systematise your business if you do not understand each and every process and break them down to sub-processes.

3. Optimise your opportunities

Here is where it gets really fun! Once you have analysed and systematised your businesses we can identify your hidden opportunities and your overlooked assets and start to optimise and maximise your products, services, customer base, distribution pipelines and profit centre's.

Optimisation can and should be applied to every area of your business. What can you optimise?

1. Optimise your marketing and advertising
2. Optimise your selling processes
3. Optimise your product combinations
4. Optimise your delivery and fulfillment
5. Optimise your support

Optimisation in marketing is key because that's what drives clients to you. In traditional display advertising or direct mail you have a fixed cost whether your advert pulls a 1% response or a 20% response. The same advert with just a change in headline can yield as much as a 2000% increase in sales. You won't know it until you've tried it but only change one variable at a time to test your marketing.

Optimising is the key to building a successful and sustainable business that will keep growing even after you are tired of it. With optimisation the same staff, same expenditure of time and money can double, triple and quadruple your business literally overnight.