CEO Warrior Podcast with Mike Agugliaro

Summary: Mike Agugliaro takes a break to share some crucial relationship training for business owners. If you want your employees and team members to stick around for the long term and give you their best work, you have to be able to understand what they need, want, and desire from you. Learn how to avoid conflict and creating lasting relationships by having one simple conversation with your employees right now.   Key Lessons Learned: Relationship Problems When we look at our employees there is always questions and relationship problems. Why are they not happy? Why do they feel let down? In all your relationships, including with your employees, there are needs. Everyone has needs, some are simple, like food, water, and air, but some are more complex and unique to the individual. Needs are the first level of wants. Understanding what someone needs can allow you to create alignment with them so that you can also get what you need. Wants are the second level. We want more money, new clothes, a new car, opportunity, etc. Desires are higher level wants, they are more long term and ambitious. We desire a bigger house, an empire, etc. If you can understand a person’s needs, wants, and desires you can get everyone aligned and on the same page. It’s a tool that you can implement in your company to create alignment between your business and your team. Clarity creates alignment, alignment creates accountability. You don’t have to grant whatever it is the person desires, but you can be a path that allows them to reach it. Once you’ve done this exercise with an employee or prospective employee it’s time to flip it around and establish what you need, want, and desire from the relationship as well. Oftentimes employees will leave a company because one of their needs aren’t being met. Failing to fulfill something that you promised is a common relationship problem. Don’t promise something that you don’t intend or can’t deliver. Sometimes you have to take what you want into your own hands instead of waiting for the other person to satisfy you. Employees are like any other relationship, if their needs and wants are not met the relationship will fall apart. The conversation can be tricky but it’s essential if you want to be able to work together and ultimately avoid relationship problems that cause employees to leave. Links To Resources Mentioned Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Mike Agugliaro talks about success and failure today and why you need to understand two crucial insights. Without them you will never feel successful and failure will always loom over the horizon. Key Lessons Learned: Success vs Failure A lot of people say that success is a mindset, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s understanding what success looks like for you. There are many layers of success and sometimes we let happen is we let one thing that we look at as a failure consume our mind. It becomes our ultimate failure. There is confusion between success vs failure, specifically on what to do and what not to do. The fastest way to find success is to find someone to show you what to do, just like the wise masters of the past. How will know you have succeeded and will you be satisfied when you get there? For most people, the trouble is the goal posts keep moving. There is one cardinal rule that has to be steadfast. If you never have clarity on what success looks like for you, how can you ever feel any satisfaction in your life? Get completely clear on what success means. If your success target is too far or too large, it won’t drive you. You need defined criteria that is imminent for you to feel motivated. People tend to focus on their failures and they tend to overshadow all the small and big ways they’ve succeeded in the past. Winning small games helps you stay in the big game and hit the big targets. You can’t create alignment without hyper clarity on what success looks like for you and your business. Ask your employees what success looks like for them this week. People will drive themselves way more than you ever could. When your team starts leading themselves to success, that’s when you’re ultra successful. The leaders job is to lead only until everyone can lead themselves, that’s when they should step back. Failing Forward You have to rewire your perceptions. Instead of thinking of something that went wrong in your life being a failure, consider it a lesson that will get you closer to where you want to go. The success vs failure paradigm should be success or lesson learned. A real failure is something that doesn’t have a lesson behind it. Just because something can always be better, that doesn’t mean you didn’t achieve success. Don’t look at something as just a success or failure, always look for the lessons that you can carry forward into the next experience. Contracts keep people aligned, Service Level Agreements are about agreeing on what success and failure look like between companies. Links To Resources Mentioned Servicebusinessgrowth.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

What would happen to your family and your business if you couldn’t work anymore? Learn about the consequences of success and why small mindedness will prevent you from making an impact on the world. Find out why your business and your life won’t grow until you work on yourself and create permanent lasting change.   Key Lessons Learned: Success Success is many things. You’re successful just to be alive today. The consequences of lack of success come out in many ways including stress, pressure, anxiety, frustration, and anger. They all come from a lack of the success that you wanted. Your perception of what growth is and what it takes determines how you feel about it. Don’t let small mindedness keep you small. Many people believe they are small, but is that really true or is that just a choice. Some people have already accepted defeat. You can only accomplish things at the level of your thinking. When you’re digging a ditch it comes down to either you’re going to beat this task or it’s going to beat you. It becomes a question of your definition of success. It’s not difficult to grow a company or achieve success, it’s just different. The common idea is that it takes weeks to create a change in behavior but that’s not true. One moment can change your whole life. It’s not grow or die in terms of the business, it’s death of success and freedom and the belief you will be able to achieve what you wanted. The brain is nothing more than a computer. Whatever you tell it, it will create. If you tell yourself you’re small, you will be small. Even believing your company to be big can be a form of small mindedness if it stops you from trying to grow. What you would tell your five year old child, you should tell yourself. When you visualize the outcome and tell yourself a different story, your story is going to change. People sabotage themselves because they tell themselves a story that keeps them small. You can’t hone a new skill set with the same mindset. Temporary motivation doesn’t work, you need permanent change. For Mike permanent change happens in a total immersion environment, you have to figure out what method works for you. You can’t move on to the next thing until permanent change has occurred. If you want greater results you need to work on yourself first before you work on your company. Success is mandatory because there will be pain down the road for your family. Ask yourself “what’s the consequence of not moving quicker?” The bigger you grow the more you can impact the world. Risk What happens to your business if you get hurt and can’t work or if you died? Mike tells the story of his former boss who passed away due to cancer. After passing away the business quickly fell apart because there was no plan or people in place to keep it going. Are you setting the stage for your family? Will they be protected if something goes wrong? Links To Resources Mentioned https://www.servicebusinessedge.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

In this episode of the CEO Warrior podcast the roles are reversed and Jay Abraham is interviewing Mike Agugliaro. Jay and Mike discuss the origins of Gold Medal Service and CEO Warrior and talk about the biggest mindset change that Mike made over the course of his business that allowed him to go from two guys and a truck to generating $30+ million a year in revenue before selling his company.   Key Lessons Learned: CEO Warrior CEO Warrior was given birth by Mike Agugliaro and Mike Disney in an effort to completely transform the way the service industry operates. They turn service contractors into strategic and thoughtful entrepreneurs. Mike takes in high growth oriented contractors and uses his teaching and training to level up their business and doubling their results and success. CEO Warrior is an organization that gets people taking positive, powerful, and decisive action. When Mike started out the only training he really had was what he learned at a vocational school. He had been on his own since the age of 15 and there’s one thing everyone who has had a similar experience knows, you learn how to survive. Mike convinced his partner to venture out and start their own service business despite the fact that they had good jobs at the time. Little did they realize they that the first ten years would be extremely difficult. They were young, knew they could work hard, and were willing to trade dollars for hours but that started to change when they got a bit older and started having kids. Everything changed when Mike’s partner declared that he was finished, that he wanted to quit and couldn’t take it anymore. This put Mike on the path to looking for people who had already figured it out. Imagine what you can do if you knew what to do. That was the lesson that Mike and his partner learned and that thought transformed everything. You can try to wing it or you can find out what you need to know in order to succeed and really increase your chances. Mike realized that marketing was one of the keys. Most small business owners didn’t understand what marketing means and what it can do. Change is uncomfortable but if you don’t try to do something different you’re just going to stay the same. The most important asset to people is their time. Times have changed and people now want convenience and simplicity. Becoming a source of one and adding additional trades allows you to serve your customers faster and more efficiently. It also lead to scalable and sustainable growth for the company. Mindset Change The biggest shift in thinking that Mike had was going from working in the business to working on the business. Going from the work itself to figuring out how to find new customers, creating assets in the brand, and creating a sustaining and multiplying business. It’s hard to grow a million dollar business with a hundred thousand dollar mind. Mindset change begins with your personal identity and then radiates out to your brand and your people. After changing the brand, Mike realized that they needed to get around people that not only knew the business but would be around to make sure they don’t make critical mistakes. When you find the best in the world you realize that one conversation with them can move you forward faster than a year with someone who hasn’t gone that far. You have to want hurtful truths instead of comforting lies. You always have a choice, but if you trust someone who has the expertise and you get out of your own way, things will change very quickly. Connecting the right people with the right leverage can lead to a decade’s worth of progress in six months. When you remove the weak links in your business the whole chain becomes much stronger. In order to appreciate expertise you have to appreciate as an asset that can pay greater dividends than any piece of machinery or technique you can use. Why would you want your business to be just a paycheck if it could be a wealth creation engine? Struggling people are usually surrounded by other struggling people. There are a lot of people that settle and begin to resent their life. Being around and mentored by people that think different is very important. Once Mike started to believe in himself, he started to reevaluate his language and thought patterns. Once Mike articulated and believed the vision he had for the business, it became a question of not whether they will succeed, it was how big do they want to get? There are no problems, only opportunities. One of the greatest enlightenments that anyone can have is the moment they know that the reason they are on the planet. That’s a mindset change that transforms the way you think about the world and your place in it. If you can get mind growth and then turn that new growth into your mindset change, the effects on your life can be profound. There are very few reasons why someone can’t win this game unless they choose not to. Nobody retires from what they love. You grow or die, and that’s true in business and life. It’s impossible to stay neutral and not making a decision isn’t possible. Inaction is a decision in itself. You have control of 98% of what happens to you, are you going to be a victim or a victor? If you knew you were going to live to 100, what would you do differently? Be brave enough to step and move into your greater self. Tactics One of the smaller changes with disproportionate impact on Mike’s business was changing the way they answered the phone. Instead of just a quick transaction they began to focus on building a rapport with them and understanding what they really want. If you don’t have a framework of delivery everything about your business will appear to be episodic and inconsistent. Mike found out that the more they trained and coached, the more empowered and confident the team began to feel. If you verbalize your commitment to train your team and follow up, your team will reciprocate and commit back. Every process and element of your business should reinforce the same message. Links To Resources Mentioned https://www.ceowarrior.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Discover the blueprint to billions used by master marketer Jay Abraham to grow your service business and gain the all-important position of preeminence in your market. Find out how helping your customers understand the value you provide can transform your business and how the Socratic method of interviewing can lead you to hidden business insights you never thought were possible. Key Lessons Learned: Why? Optimization is the highest and best use of your time and resources. If you don’t fall in love with the people you’re serving, and that includes your team, you’re not going to be able to create something great. You may be passionate about what you do but are you passionate about the people you do it for. Most people just want to grow a business and make money, but you need to know what your endgame is. Why are you building a business in the first place? If you don’t understand marketing, you are not playing the game, business is playing you. You are rewarded in your business life for the value you create for others. If you’re not focused on that and instead focused on making money, you probably never will. It takes the same level of effort to build a business that is a systemless mess with no value as it does to build something worth a small fortune. You’re the one who chose your business and you should use it facilitate what you want to achieve in your life.   Traditional vs Non-Traditional It’s not necessary to go through the arduous traditional ways of growing a business. There are many different and creative ways to accomplish the same goals faster or cheaper. Most businesses spend money on advertising and ignore their referral business, but that’s going about trust completely backwards. You must test your marketing assumptions. One small variable can be responsible for 2x-4x the results. There are 50 impact points in your business that you don’t even know about and they all have variability. A 10% increase in 20 to 30 small points in your business can lead to many hundreds of percent increase in profit. Never launch something in your company and give it to everybody, that’s a good way to blow it up. Everyone could double their business right now by doing it better. Different articulations and ways of expressing yourself can make a major difference. Your headlines should convey the most self serving benefit that the other side can expect to receive when they take the next step. You don’t have to recreate the wheel, you can learn, adopt, and borrow from other methods that have worked before.   Education Marketing Give your customer the understanding to appreciate the value of what you are creating for them. Most people don’t understand that human beings need to understand why you’re better. “The reason why…” can be your force multiplier. The things you do may be the same as everyone else, but if you tell the story and no one else does you will have a preemptive story in your market. Masterful marketing is more science than talent. You have to measure the lifetime value of different types of clients and leads. The way to get better answers is to learn how to ask better questions.   The Power Team The first thing you have to understand is that no one is great at everything and you need to figure out what someone’s strengths and motivations are. Your team looks to you for their security, fulfillment, and acknowledgement. If you don’t feed and nourish that you are doing a disservice to them and constraining your own growth. Your team has to see that you are committed to their best interest. Train your team in more than just your systems, train them on trust building, communication, and collaboration. You have to be able to acknowledge and appreciate other people’s different points of view. 95% of small and medium businesses never reach their goals because they don’t have goals, they have vague hopes and dreams. A business not examined constantly is a business not worth owning. Your team can produce more multiplied profit for your business but not if they don’t understand what performance metrics look like what to strive for. Interview your best employees on how they do what they do, it can be quite profound for the employee at the same time because they often don’t know exactly how they do it.

Attract Convert Deliver Scale with Jay Abraham. Listen to the legendary Jay Abraham reveal the reasons you’re always in the business of selling and why learning is meaningless without taking action. Finally, discover what Jay Abraham would do if he were starting over today and had to grow a business ASAP and what the three most important skills you have in your arsenal are.   Key Lessons Learned: Business Growth Everything you do in marketing should be a profit center. Everyone on your team is in sales because you are always selling your company’s unique position in the market, you’re in the job of selling the vision of the business to each other, and you’re selling the quality of the opportunity you are offering if you’re trying to hire them. Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Don’t delude yourself into believing you have mastered anything more than the outer periphery of all that’s possible. The greatest tragedy of expertise is that the people that need it the most discount it the most. You can’t grow at the pace that is possible on your own. You need to have collaborative thinking partners to help you reach your potential. Learning without doing is like being in the stands watching the game instead of playing it. You have to take what you learn and execute. It’s yours to lose. Showing up is not the commitment, it’s merely the preparation. You need to be masterful at quantified, direct response marketing. Most business owners are two dimensional, part of being preeminent is knowing that you will have and planning for a higher quality of client and you will be their trusted advisor for life. You have to be strategic, not tactical.   Links To Resources Mentioned Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Discover the secrets behind becoming a master problem solver like Jay Abraham and leveraging the invisible resources that are all around you. Jay Abraham joins Mike Agugliaro in a special VIP session to reveal the keys to multiplying your business, generating wealth that lasts, and how to make a real change in the world around you.   Key Lessons Learned: Solving Problems Like Jay Abraham Your revenue system has around 50 impact points that could probably be made 10%-20% more effective, the cumulative effect could lead to many hundreds of percent increase in your profit. If you are going to run a business, you have to decide ahead of time what that means. Most people are decently paid employees of a job they happen to own but that leaves them without an asset. You want to have an enterprise that will work harder for you than you do for it. You have to control your situation or your situation controls you. For a business to work for you it needs a few components. It needs sustainable marketing that creates different factors: continually predictable and profitable income, a system that creates sustainable future income, the ability to identify opportunistic income, and the pride of knowing that you are helping people improve their lives. Most people are not trained in marketing and how to make sure the offer is focused on the optimal benefit to the consumer. Most spend money on advertising that isn’t forged to understand the psychology or needs of the market. You have to go many stages to go from protective curiosity to open checkbook with that kind of traffic. Referral business will pay more, pay on time, and often refer others, and they do it for free. There are nine drivers of business that produce exponential results. If you change your marketing, your strategy, or your ideology, you will change your result. Wherever there is variation instead of a system, you will have slippage. Your business should access the market from as many vantage points as possible. The military has a concept called a force multiplier, where each element has a compounding effect on the others. What is it in your business or personal life that you know you need to fix, but haven’t? Your issue has to be powerful enough to make people take action to solve their pain. Business is really simple, it’s about providing greater advantage, value, or contribution to the market than your competitor and taking as much risk out of the transaction as possible. There are three categories of clients that you serve, the first category are those who pay you, the second are the people you pay, and the third are the vendors you work with. You don’t have to master particular marketing strategies, but you have to at least make sure you aren’t illiterate in them. It’s very rare that your first attempt at a marketing piece will be the best one that your market will respond to. You have to create variations and test to see what works. One tiny change could mean the difference of 2-4x times the results. If you have a business that is underperforming, the first thing you have to do is know that it’s underperforming and you can’t know that unless you know how much more is possible. You can’t optimize without some knowledge of the options and opportunities that are available. 90% of entrepreneurs only utilize 20% of the realistic capability of what their team is possible of, because they don’t train them to reach their highest level. Higher the best and cry only once, pay them what they are worth. Because if you hire the worst you are going to cry everytime. If you can’t afford to hire the best find the most trainable and invest in them, then pay them what they are worth as they develop. Don’t exploit them. Be on a mission, create a movement, and live both of them.   Wealth Strategies You can’t make the world better unless you have enough resources. Greatness is a function of more than being a good entrepreneur, or father, or spouse, or leader. You have to be a good contributor to your environment and making the world better than when you arrived. The smartest wealth builders move slow so they can go faster when things are in place. One such strategy is to take what you’ve done, codify it, and find another business you can apply the same principles to. Look at things that occur before, during, and after your customers use your services and either own or start those because they are already highly aligned. Your role is to be the strategist and set the stage for your business using foresight, insight, and hindsight. If you’re trying to build wealth, aiming for the 10x moonshot is not what Jay recommends. You need to look at options that are sustainable, semi or pure passive income with appreciation that you can’t screw up. Giving yourself flexibility and options is only possible if you have vehicles that work for you. Wealth is probably not going to come from something high tech that you don’t understand. It will probably be pretty boring but will helped by new technology rather than replaced. If you’re going to buy a property, don’t buy on price. Buy on sustainability, the probability of the neighbourhood staying constant, and buy the least expensive home in the most expensive neighbourhood. Invest with a portfolio mindset and hedge your bets. Never start off with something highly speculative with a low probability of success. Look for endurability. Take assets and turn them into opportunities. Some of the most valuable assets you have are intangible. You have access to infinite capital almost at will if you understand it properly. It’s not about the money, it’s about what you want to do with the money. Your problem is always going to be the solution to someone else’s bigger problem that they don’t even know they have. There is always a way to leverage other people’s resources and assets. There are streams of wealth everywhere if you have the eyes to see them. Almost anything you want that you don’t think you can afford, you can acquire if you can prove results by converting them to a share of profits or savings, or if you can metric it and analyze its annual yield, you can get an investor.   Links To Resources Mentioned Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Learn about the three primary components of growing a business and how you can use them to explode your service business. Discover the real reason you are in business and why you are thinking about sales all wrong. Find out what it means to really lead from the front, and how get your team on board with your vision for the future.   Key Lessons Learned: Managing Risk Ask yourself what could go wrong. It’s possible for your creative idea to cost you a million dollars if you don’t think about the risks involved. You have to do your due diligence with everything you try in your business. The bigger you get, the more you have to lose. If you’re going to be a coach in this world, make sure you have the success and the scars to share, then take on the ethical responsibility and know that you are playing with someone’s life. Business and life is not easy, it takes honest work and plenty of effort to achieve anything worthwhile. Growing a Business There are three components to growing a business: marketing, sales, and leadership. Every business is in the business of marketing. You should understand the difference between the psychology of marketing and persuasion. Marketing is different for each business, just because it worked for one does not mean it will work for your business. Diversify your marketing and don’t rely on one platform for everything. Make a list of all the marketing vehicles you could consider. If you don’t have a list, you are just going to be sold by what other people have. Evaluate your list, pick what might work for you but choose based off of ROI and test out the results. Avoid long term contracts. When measuring ROI you have to measure results at the beginning of the process, not at the end. You have to come at sales from a serving perspective first. If you’re amazing, people buy amazing. The greatest sales people in the world don’t have to convince anyone of anything. Be relentless in trying to achieve better results for your business and your customers. You have to lead your people. Are you leading by example or are you leading by force? You must always look for the skill sets you don’t have now that will grow your business to the next level. Every $5 million there is another level of understanding and evolution. Your team should be growing your business with you. How can you implement new levels of achievement with a team that isn’t evolving? Your business will always lower to the lowest level of mindset in your business. Mindset Master something at a level that you can understand. Find someone that is willing to teach and who you are willing to learn from. If you don’t reflect on your life, you will end up living through the same cycles of success and failure over and over again. The only difference between confrontation and conversation is the emotion you attach to it. The results you have are the results you deserve. If you don’t evolve as a person, how can you expect to become successful as a person? Your belief system is either holding you back or pushing you forward. Ask questions when you’re learning new things and try to get to the why and the how of what you’re hearing. Links To Resources Mentioned servicebusinessedge.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Get the strategies and motivation to crush your goals this year. Learn to lead an unstoppable team and make more money than ever... with less stress and more free time. Discover the secrets behind building a roadmap for each area of your business that drives results in your service business.   Key Lessons Learned: Service Business Do your due diligence, every state has different rules about what you can and can’t do in a service business. Don’t do something that will put your business at risk. Taking action is the key, knowledge on its own is useless, applied knowledge is how you move the needle. Whenever you learn something think about it in the context of three things: what you will start doing, stop doing, and keep doing. Mindset Your mindset has to be in the game all the time if you are going to grow the business you want, it’s not something you can compromise on. If you’re not engaged, you should consider doing something else. Plan your day the day before. If you are not prepared, you have already failed. Clarity on your targets and goals is very important. Does your team understand why the target is what it is and how to get to it? If there is clarity in the number, it’s usually attainable. How clear is your team on your vision for where you want your service business to go? Your employees should understand the expectations of them and their role in the company, they should also understand your role in supporting them. Are your vendors aligned with your vision for the business. Alignment with your employees, vendors, and family makes everything easier. Are you building targets that will help you get to your focus target? Track your important metrics so you know whether you are winning or behind your target. Being a world class service business is how you set yourself apart from other businesses and avoid the race to the bottom. Don’t just watch what your competitors are doing, study it. Studying allows you to be tactical instead of reactive. Serve people rather than selling them. Be in the relationship business instead of the transaction business. If you approach selling from a serving perspective, you will do right by your customer and avoid compromising your integrity. Every service business owner should have 6-9 goals that they want to accomplish in the next 90 days. When you put in the effort to accomplish a task reward yourself. Consider the return on investment and return on time when you complete each task so you understand how much you are accomplishing. The 90 day roadmap will highlight the most important things you need to do in your business, prioritized by importance. Delegation Don’t do mule’s work when you should be doing warrior’s work. There are a number of third party companies that can take all the business activities off your hands that you don’t do well. When you do everything it takes away your ability to focus on big picture activities. Recruiting Building a powerful culture is a great platform for easy recruiting. Culture comes from treating people with respect and core values. Your employees will be your best advocate. Build your recruiting roadmap and incorporate it into everything you do. Marketing Without marketing, you have noone to sell to. Your sales department has to be engaged at a level that makes sense for your business, don’t promise more than your business can deliver. Use tools and mentors that will allow you to grow to the next level. Marketing is the keystone to your growth roadmap. Profit Build your profit into everything you do. When you’re small, profit is easily attainable. When you start growing, you have to begin measuring everything in order to maintain profitability. The average company in this industry has a profit margin of 3-5% which is pretty low. It takes a lot more effort to generate revenue with a time and material model as opposed to a flat rate. Measure constantly so you understand where you stand against your budget. Measure opportunity, how many times you made a sell, and the value of that success. Outbound Most businesses reach out to their existing customers but they don’t do it often enough or consistent enough. Someone in your company should be calling the customers that end up saying no, and it has to be consistent. Outbounding is also a chance to evaluate the performance of the salesperson and ask for reviews. Outbound has the ability to fill your schedule during the downtimes, educate your customers about your other services. Dedicate certain times of the week to outbound calls even if you’re a small team. Links To Resources Mentioned servicebusinessedge.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!

Find out how to use a strategy called "heat-mapping" to squeeze more leads from your website traffic (no one is doing this but you'll hear from someone who has perfected it!) Hear the top tips and tricks to convert more of your site traffic into paying customers - you'll be able to IMMEDIATELY implement these to get more customers right away. PLUS... the latest strategies, tactics and cutting-edge info about mobile-friendly sites, site speed and more. Master the low-hanging fruit that is easy to fix but is costing you business.   Key Lessons Learned: Website Strategy People think websites are one and done jobs, but they are an ongoing optimization process. Websites are an investment, it drives a lot of your business today. It’s your digital storefront and it’s often someone’s first impression of your business. A website is one of the best marketing tools for your business that you can have. Pick the top one to three objectives you want your website strategy to serve and then look through your home page and eliminate 50% of the content on there that doesn’t accomplish those objectives. If you give someone too many options, they often end up making no decision at all. The first question you have to answer is “who is your customer?”, without knowing that you can’t design a proper website strategy. The next question is “what is the outcome you desire?” The outcome may not be the same as the first action the user takes. The first action step may be to consume content or download a lead magnet. Split testing is crucial to understand what is actually working with your website strategy. There is never one perfect solution for everyone so you have to test your assumptions. Heat mapping your website’s pages is a great way to get insights into what your website users are looking at. Don’t make your visitors work for what they want to use your website for. Analytics are vital, you need to understand what is working and what doesn’t. Outsource this to the pros. A poor website isn’t just the loss of the price of the site, it could also be losing you hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue. Make your phone number big and visible, and make sure your visitors know that you’re open and ready for business. Every click you make a user go through to get something in return will lower your conversion rate, make the process and quick and easy as you can. There is a difference between the brand and the voice of the brand, make sure your voice is trustworthy and likable. Stack the examples of your credibility. Social media links on your website may actually just be a distraction and a lot of the time, they won’t convert. Links To Resources Mentioned https://www.seequs.com Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review in iTunes!