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Join the Waitlist for the Launch Your First Mastermind Workshop here >>> https://www.launchyourfirstmastermind.com Sign up for podcast  email reminders here  >>> http://brightentrepreneurpodcast.com/email Transcript: A couple of days ago, I was talking with somebody who is growing her business and she's in the messy middle and has all sorts of stuff going on and lots of really good things happening in her business at the moment. And so we were talking about how do you know what you should be focused on in order to continue growing? And there's actually a very. Easy way that you can do this, that most people don't know when they're first starting out or they don't do it when they're first starting out. That makes your focus incredibly clear incredibly quickly. And that's what I'm going to share with you today. ? When you're stuck in the messy middle of your business, you have a lot of moving parts and it feels like everything needs your attention. And it can be really hard to now exactly where you need to be focusing. A lot of times the decision to focus on something comes from either what you feel like focusing on or what you think needs to happen. Or it can come in the way of having to put out fires like, Oh my gosh, we need to do this right now because it's broken. So we're just going to go and do it. But there's a better way to decide where your focus needs to be in your business, that bright entrepreneurs now. And that's what I want to share with you today in this episode. And it came out of a wonderful conversation. I had with a quickly growing successful entrepreneur earlier this week. Who was doing all of the things, right. She has her messaging down. She's got her funnel, it's converting, but she didn't know. Okay. What do I focus on next to keep the growth happening? Where should I put my efforts? Should I be testing different ideas? Should I be optimizing what I already have? How do I know what to do next? And so we talked about this and I wanted to share it with you because I think this is something that. I'm going to be straight up honest. It's not fun and sexy at all in any way. This is not the kind of thing that everyone's like, Oh man, I really want to do this. But it is by far one of the most important things you can be doing to grow your business, because it'll show you exactly what you need to be focusing on in your specific business. Now, this is super simple. It comes down to focusing on your numbers. Once you've got everything set up, once you've been running things, when you have the actual data. And you can start looking at what is selling, what is working, what isn't working, and you can start comparing your performance over time. It'll give you. Supreme clarity into what you need to be focusing on in order to continue to grow. So I want to share with you a few of the numbers that you need to be tracking in order to know what you need to be focused on in your business, because if you're crushing it. With audience growth and you're getting tons of followers and tons of email subscribers and whatever it is, but you're not converting them into buyers. Then it's going to be clear that you need to be converting more of those people into buyers and putting your focus on selling. but the reason we need to have numbers is because sometimes we think we're not doing real well, but then when we look at the numbers, it's actually really great. And a perfect example of this was my bright future method workshop launch, which I did a couple of months ago. Because I'm so used to launching to large audiences in the photography space, it felt so much different and so much more defeating to be launching to a much smaller audience. So during the launch, my emotions were telling me, Oh my goodness, this is failing your. Just not doing it right. Your messaging is off all of these things. But then when the launch was over and I actually looked at the numbers, what they told me was pretty dang astounding. The reality was I wasn't getting a lot of sales because my email list of potential buyers was super tiny. I only had 53 people on my email list who didn't already have a version of the course. And so I was literally launching a course to 53 people. I converted over 15% of those on a $1,300 product. Now that is a phenomenal conversion rate. Like that's fantastic for a product that size. So if I had just gone off of how it felt, it would have felt like a huge failure, but because I was looking at the numbers and because I knew that my audience numbers were small, it was easy for me to say, Oh, That wasn't a failure at all. This is actually really resonating with your people. You just need more people to hear about it. You just need to have a larger email list. And it made me feel all sorts of better. I'll be straight up honest because man, so much of what we do is ruled by our emotions. And so when we are tracking the data, when we are looking at the numbers, What we think might actually be doing really poorly, might actually be going far better than we think. Plus it will give you clarity on to where you need to be focusing. So what are some of the numbers that you should be focused on as you are growing your business? So, number one, I am tracking. Audience growth. And this is absolutely so essential. It's super basic. And it's easy for people to focus on that when they're first starting out and then kind of forget about it later on in their business, as they get busier and busier. And focus on different conversion assets or different products or delivery or whatever else. I know that definitely happened to me in my photography business. I grew fast because I focused on growing my list. And then I got distracted by doing all of the things and trying to grow the team. And yeah. Whatever else it came along and my numbers started to drop because I wasn't consistently bringing in new people month after month, I was relying on the momentum that I had to keep carrying me forward. And while it got me a little ways, it definitely started to show that when I shifted my focus away from bringing new qualified leads into my business, it affected the bottom line. And so I don't want you to fall into that trap. So you should be tracking your audience growth. Now this might be your email list. This might be your social media platforms. It's probably all of them, honestly, but you definitely want to be tracking that at the very least on a monthly basis. The second thing that you're going to want to be tracking is your conversion rate. So what percentage of the people going through your launches or your evergreen funnel are buying and you want this percentage to be as high as possible? Obviously, if you're bringing the right people into your business. This rate is going to be significantly higher than if you're bringing in the wrong people. And so if you find that your conversion rates are low and I would say anything below one to 2% is very low above. That is great, but it also depends on the product you're selling the price point and a lot of different things. So giving you exact numbers is kind of a fool's game. So you'll have to look at it. It's best if you actually track your own numbers over time and just continually work on improving them. But looking at your conversion rate can help you see, okay. Am I actually bringing the right people in. And is my messaging resonating with them in a way that's getting them to want to buy and see the value in what it is I'm offering them. So you definitely want to be tracking that over time. Cause if your conversion rate is really low, you're either bringing the wrong people in or your messaging is off or your offer is off. Maybe they don't want what you're giving them. All right. The third thing that I recommend tracking is the average sale amount of the initial purchase they make with you? Now, this is especially important. If you're running an evergreen funnel or you're going to be running paid advertising, because ideally we'd like to be making at least as much money from our ads as we're spending on them. If not several times over that investment. So even if somebody is joining your membership and you're going to have them for however many months, and you know, you're going to be making more income from them in the future, you still want to be tracking what that initial value is. Now, for some of you, if you just sell a single course that has one price, this probably isn't quite as useful. But this is definitely useful for anybody who has multiple pricing options. So if you have like a yearly versus a monthly plan for your membership, or if you're like me and you have a course, but you also have an upsell for something else on the backend, you will see a fluctuating average because. You know, yes. They might just buy it straight up for what the price is, but they may also add something on to help make that bigger. And I love having an upsell on there that makes sense with what they're buying. So for me, back in my photography business, I had the, how to start the photography business course. And that was the, the main thing that they purchased. And if they wanted, at the same time, they purchased that. I also had a legal contract that they could use with their clients to book their clients. And so I would offer that to them at a pretty significant discount if they added it on at the same time that they bought the course. So it was a very logical upsell for them, something they were going to need either way and they could add it on at the point of purchase. If that average sale amount at the time of purchase is a low, you're not going to be able to spend as much money on your ads because you're going to make less money. Right. You know, if you can get that initial purchase amount to be a lot higher than any future payments are all profit. Plus you might actually make money to grow your list and to get more buyers, which is the. Ideal solution when you're paying for ads. So this is why you want to track that number. But the second thing you do want to be tracking is also the lifetime value of your customers. So that's great. We've tracked that first initial purchase, but we also want to know on average, how much does somebody spend if they become a customer now, if you have a membership, this is going to vary from month to month, but you can actually calculate the lifetime value of your clients in your membership, your members. If you have two numbers, number one, you have to know how much they're paying per month. So that's pretty easy. You've got that number. The number two, you need to have your average monthly retention rate. And so all you need to do, and I'm going to get super geeky on you here just for a second. So hang with me, but this is based on a geometric series. If you want to go look up the math yourself, but all you need to do to figure out the lifetime value of one of your members is to take one. Minus the retention rate. So if you have a 90% retention rate, um, one minus 90% is going to be 10% or 0.1, and then you. Take the monthly amount that you charge and divide it by the number you just got. So if you charge $49 a month, you'd now take $49 divided by 0.1. And that's going to tell you the lifetime value of your members, which in this case would be $490. Now this is not going to necessarily reflect reality. A hundred percent of the time, sometimes members will leave sooner. Sometimes they will leave later. You may make changes to your membership that actually increases retention over time, or maybe something crazy like a global pandemic is going to happen. That's going to drop retention over time. But it's going to give you a ballpark number to kind of know how much money you're going to make on average from your members. So it's a super , useful calculation to have. Now, if you don't do a membership or if you also have other products, you might have to go back through your database and look and see, okay, what is the average amount of money I make per. Customer, you may also want to actually see how much you're making per email subscriber the easy way to do that is just add up all the money you've made for a certain time period. And then divide that by the number of email subscribers you have on that list during that time. that's going to give you the amount of money you're making on average per subscriber, which is pretty stinking. Awesome. Because now, you know, if you want to run a Facebook ad to just. Increase your email list through your opt-in and you don't sell anything right away on the backend, you know, on average how much you can spend before you start losing money. Right? So if you, on average, you're making $12 per email subscriber per year. Then, you know, if you're only spending four to $6 for an email subscriber, you're going to double your money in the end. And so this is why this number is really important to know as well. another number that you might want to consider is things like return on ad spend. If you're running ads, there's actually a whole lot of metrics there that you're gonna want to be looking at. , what is your profit margin versus your expenses? So if you're running ads, or if you have an affiliate program where you're going to have to pay a pretty significant amount in either ad spend or commissions to your affiliates, you're going to want to see what your actual profit amount is after you take that out. Now, there are a bajillion different metrics that you can be. Tracking. I know this is not the most fun thing to do. And I also know that there are a ton of other metrics that you could be tracking and you may very well want to be tracking. These are just a few of the main ones that I recommend focusing on. As you are trying to figure out where to go next in your business, because if you're not growing your audience or if you're not converting them well, or if you're not retaining them well, like if you join, if you have a membership and people only stay for like two or three months, then maybe you need to be focusing more on retention and how to keep them engaged in your membership. And so when you're looking at all of these numbers, the beautiful thing is that it can help you get. Real clarity on where you need to focus. Going back to my launch, for example, I only had 53 people going through that launch. I would have had an incredibly stellar launch if I had had a lot more people going through it, even though it felt kind of junky because the numbers were small upfront. The only reason they were small was because my email list at the time was small it's brand new business. Didn't focus on growing a very big email list. And so my results were tiny. So it showed me very clearly that I needed to focus on getting qualified leads. Into my business because frankly, I am making an insane amount of money for every single email subscriber that is on my list. That number is very high in my business. It's multiple hundreds of dollars per email subscriber and that's that's in four months. That's. Insane. And I know I won't be able to keep that long-term most likely because I've been very personal with my people and any time you're personal, you're going to get higher results. So as you scale your business, it's going to be harder and harder to do that for as many people, but it's not impossible. And it's way higher than the $12 per year. I was getting early on in my business when I was first starting out. And so now I can see, Oh, that's actually really good. I would track these every single month. If you hate pulling all these stats together, you can easily hire a VA for what two, three hours a month to compile the numbers for you. So that all you need to do is go in and look at them and see how they've been changing over time so that you can make really wise decisions about what you need to be focusing on. So I'm focusing on email opt-ins. I also am focusing on getting. More reliable cash flow, because I know for me looking back at the last few months, my cashflow has really been a stressor with starting over with everything COVID and so as I'm growing my business, yes, I can do launches. Yes, I can offer to sell something, but if I'm not building that recurring revenue piece into my business, then I have to keep doing it again and again and again, and it's overwhelming. And so at this point, I am looking at how can I bring in both cashflow and leads? And so I'm going to be sharing more about that. I'm actually going to be running a little mini course that I'm going to be selling on how to launch your first mastermind. And I'll, you'll hear lots more about that in the future. If you want to sign up for the waitlist. You get like the very first adopters great deal. You can go to launch your first mastermind.com, enter your email there. And I'm going to give anybody who is on that wait list, a very beautiful price. , when it first comes out but. That is what I'm focusing on. It's going to bring in some cashflow, it's going to grow my leads. And then I have a very specific plan in mind for how I'm going to nurture my leads and get more people into the actual mastermind that I am running. But if I didn't know my numbers, I wouldn't know what I needed to focus on. I'd probably have given up because I would have felt like my launch was a failure, even though by the numbers. It was fantastic. And so I also want you to know your numbers so you can make an informed decision and know exactly where you need to focus, because when you know that you can move forward with confidence. And if you go back to episode two of season three, you'll see why confidence is so stinking important. If you want to be successful. In this business that you are creating, and I know you do, that's why you're here. That's why you're listening. And that's why you're still listening. Even though this podcast is all about numbers. And I know for most people, this is like the least fun topic ever, but when you know your numbers, everything becomes easier. It really does. So go do that. think about any other numbers that you need to add. in the meantime, if you have not signed up to get email reminders about when the podcast goes alive or to hear about things like the, how to launch your first mastermind workshop that I'm putting together, I would love to have you on my email list so I need to do is go to, bright entrepreneur podcast.com/email. The link is also in the show notes and sign up for the email newsletter. I promise it will be worth it because you will not miss out on a single episode, which is super important, but also when you sign up, it gives you a chance to tell me a little bit more about you and your business. And I'd love to get to know who you are. My lovely listener, because I don't know who you are. And I want to, I want to be able to. Speak to your specific situation. And I really want to help make this podcast as useful as possible for you. So when you sign up for the email list, you also get that opportunity to send a message directly to me. And I will respond maybe later on in a few months, when things go crazy, I won't be able to respond to everybody, but in this moment, as I'm recording in November of 2020, I am responding to everyone who signs up. So definitely go do that now. Can't wait to have you on the email list and would that my friends just remember that we are Prider together and the world really needs us. So let's go out and make it brighter. ?