Stampede Your Business

Last time we talked, we were still trying to figure out what this thing is. So much has happened since the last episode. We decided to get back on the horse because it's good to record where we're at as a business. Stampede has really formed a lot. We talked about how we were creating 2 companies, Stampede Web and Stampede Digital Systems. We also added Stampede Networks and we kept branching out. But there are so many aspects to creating and executing on a great marketing plan. We were playing with bringing more individuals in to do some of this work and now we have a whole team of specialists. We are learning as we go, but it's really all about giving lots of value. A few weeks ago we had a launch party. We got everyone in the same room together and got to meet each other. We shared our vision for Stampede and explained why we wanted them to be a part of it. We had a little bit of a reunion with some of the original members of the mastermind who got to see what they influenced. It was fun to see the excitement on their faces we shared where we are at as a business. And now we have this little baby that we need to care for. We've started doing some advertising and using some of our specialists to do a little bit of marketing of our own. All this time we've spent figuring out the marketing strategy and bringing people in to implement the strategy, we're now starting to think about using those strategies for ourselves and experience a little more growth. Stampede Web is starting to grow legs. The bulk of our ads right now are towards the Sales Site. It is in the hottest test bed at this time as we look to see how effective the Sales Site is. And as the Sales Site experiences success we get to start growing this thing. It's time to start asking the question, “What do we do if this thing fails?” It's never been tested before, so what do we do? What do you do when your big idea fails? You just don't quit. The really successful folks don't quit. You pivot and you keep working. We need to figure out how the Sales Site fits into the marketing funnel and into the funneling process. We've always had a grasp on it, but we've never really tested it. We're using the experts to enhance our ideas and make them better. And ideas are always better when they are actually used because you actually see what works. If you can spend money on a lottery ticket or a weekend hobby, you can spend some money on growing a business and you might just change the world. Why not? My thing has always been, “Find your Passion. Follow your Passion. Live your Purpose.” There is nothing more pure and true to living your purpose than doing that thing that inspires you, that gets you up in the morning. It doesn't matter if you are making money or not. If it's what gets you up in the morning, then you know you belong there. You know you have to do it. In the entrepreneur space, we love to live and play with “What if you were doing that thing that gets you up in the morning every single day and getting paid well for it?” Come on the ride with us and we'll see who makes the million-dollar mark first.

The E-Myth is all about management systems and how you setup the systems in your business. This episode is about how to setup a management system for managing people. E-Myth recommends that you set up this system like a game (also known as gamification). Manage Your People with Game Systems Stampede is wanting to create an affiliate program for our sales team. Gamifying the program should be easy because other affiliate programs and MLM's have already worked most of that out. Those systems provide a basic earning structure but they also offer different goals and incentives as well as the ability to level up. Make sure they understand the idea behind the work that you're asking them to do. Which is really about your mission statement. What is the big idea behind the work? Why should we even care about the game? • There was an idea behind the work that was more important than the work itself • If your idea is a positive one, your business will reflect that optimism At Stampede, everything we do is to improve business. Make it a game It has to be Real. You have to mean it. The game is a measure of you. The metrics that you are working toward in the game tell your employees what you really care about. How you act in the game establishes how you will be regarded by the other players. Are you focusing on the message or are you focusing on the metrics? What is the most important thing? And how do people view you because of your focus? The Logic of the Game What most people need is a place of community that has purpose, order, and meaning. If your business is built around the idea of the work, then it has meaning. The Rules of the Game (Not the game rules. How you should or should not create your game.) • Never figure out what you want your people to do and then try to create a game out of it. • Never create a game for your people when you're unwilling to play yourself. • Make sure there are specific ways of winning the game without ending it. • Change the game from time to time – the tactics, not the strategy. • Never expect the game to be self-sustaining. People need to be reminded of it constantly. • The game has to make sense. • The game needs to be fun from time to time. • If you can't think of a good game, steal one.

If you are out there wondering what you are going to do with your business and how to grow your business, we're wondering the same thing and that is why we are doing this podcast. This is the podcast to show what it takes to build a business from scratch without any funding, and bootstrapping our way through the whole process. We are doing it with Stampede Digital Systems that we created a year and a half ago. Today's episode is about where we are and how we're doing. Bobby has been through this with a lot of businesses and entrepreneur groups, people get in this with an idea that they need money. A good opportunity can take months, even years to make good revenue out of it. If you're expecting to earn a lot of money right out of the get-go, you might as well buy a lottery ticket. Even if you have experience and know-how, you still need investment power to make money quickly. We're in the trenches right now and playing with this. We all have other businesses and other things. This is just a pet project. We wanted to create something for small businesses that will be good for them. Even after one and a half years, we continually ask ourselves, “What is this thing that we created?” We first thought that we were going to be a marketing company. Then we became a website company. Then we became a business development company. Now, the latest definition of our business is Marketing Strategy. We now have the Marketing Audit where we sit down and figure out what's the state of your business with respect to marketing. Do you have a budget? How much time are you spending on marketing? You should spend nearly 40% of your business time on marketing. Marketing is the key to growth. Troy has been working the podcast, Know Like Trust, and meeting awesome entrepreneurs. He's been finding opportunities to expand our business in various ways. Eventually, we had blow-up. You can't win the Kentucky Derby without a little friction. You should have business partners that can speak freely about their concerns and still be able to make things work. We get that we are creating something now that we can explain and gives us clear direction on how we are assisting clients. The two parts to our business are perfect opposites. We have the Sales Site concept where we build the website for you following our blueprint/process. Just 2 weeks ago, we were arguing about whether or not we wanted to sell $500 sites. And out of that argument came a clearer, better offering. And with the Sales Sites, we have an opportunity to scale rapidly and earn a lot of money up front. The bigger your sales team, the more money you make. We have a marketing strategy team that works with clients to establish monthly subscriptions and make ongoing revenue on the back end. It is a smaller income for the business, but it can add up over time to become an army of recurring income. Blend the two together and you have a powerhouse income generator. We have the Cash Cow and the Bread and Butter that allows us to focus and expand at the same time. We've been working on this for a year and a half. We are finally at the top of the sales mountain. We finally have a pipeline of leads that is capable of providing us steady sales and consistent revenue. We are finally reaching a point where we will be launching a marketing campaign and putting money into marketing. Once we start making revenue, we can begin to expand our sales team and start growing rapidly. In the first year and a half, we've made only about $8,000 in revenue. We now have recurring revenue of $350 per month. It doesn't sound like much, but once you get the boulder rolling, it's a lot easier to keep it rolling. In six months we expect to make at least $10,000 revenue per month. If not, we will have to make a decision to see if we continue doing business.

The whole point of Stampede Your Business is to watch Stampede grow as a business so you can see how we created a million-dollar business from scratch with our own ideas. We've been using an outline. This episode is completely off script. We're offering an update on what we're doing so you don't get lost in the education. Stampede started when Bobby was looking for a tool that could do funnels and email campaigns. He'd been using multiple tools, but really wanted an all-inclusive tool that covered it all. He researched a bunch of different services and realized that Builderall has all of the tools that he wanted and more. After signing up for it and using it, he thought it was cool and started sharing it with other entrepreneurs and they created a mastermind. As entrepreneurs, they had all been frustrated with marketing companies. The original idea was to create a marketing company. Then they thought that they would just create cool websites. Troy had a team in India that he was using for some IT stuff that he was doing. Stampede has only been an official business for 6 months. We went through many different iterations as we tried to figure it out. At one point we thought of it as a marketing business. One day, Brett was trying to figure out what how to make things work with another project and he ran into Russell Brunson. He loved what he had to teach, but thought that his product, Click Funnels, was just outside his budget. This made him mad and he started thinking about this Builderall thing that Bobby had been talking about and realized that this has the power to do the same thing. After presenting his plan to Bobby, he was invited to the mastermind group. Bobby and Brett are passionate about the small business owner and entrepreneur. They felt that they had power to provide a real value to them. Building websites was already done. Click Funnels was already done. We wanted to create our own market and do something new, that works. That's when the Sales Site concept was born. We decided to create a webinar in visual format as a website. You can go to Stampedeweb.com and download the Sale Site Blueprint for free. When you know all the details of your business you see everything. You know everything about how it works. And when it comes to explaining it to people, you want to tell them everything. But people don't care. They just want to know your story and what benefits you provide. The Sales Site Blueprint was created to come at your business from the client's point of view. The Blueprint builds on information and guides you through that thought process of getting your story down. Now we start with the Blueprint, we have a questionnaire, we have a template, and we have a workflow. When we started applying this information, our client satisfaction didn't just not go down, it went up. We have added various different tools and services as we work with various other established businesses that all relate to marketing. We are using ourselves as a proof of concept. We're learning along the way. We're finding stuff that works and we're sticking to it. We have done some advertising and word of mouth. Building a million-dollar business, it not about go, go, go. It is about create, create, create and work and learn as you go. Once you have the systems in place, you can hand over the keys then stand back and watch it grow or sell it. By this time, next year, we will be in the million-dollar range. We'll be working from a million-dollar revenue to the million-dollar income.

The reason micromanagers exist is because they don't understand that he kind of information that they are trying to convey and get back from you is information that can flow smoothly if you have a process to allow that to happen. We've been talking about managing every single detail and orchestrating everything. But if you don't have a system in place to manage your people, then you become the micromanager. A management system allows you to hand over the keys and watch it run. The keys literally are the management system and the car is your business. A lot of folks hire highly skilled people who can do all the work for them. When that happens, they often get used and abused, the owner disconnects from the company and they leave the business in a worse state than it was to begin with. If you understand your business and have a management system in place, then you don't need to spend a lot of money on employees. You can hire people who haven't been “spoiled by the world.” You don't want to hire your consultants. You want to pay consultants to assist you in creating management systems and then hire people to do the work. A Management System is, like everything else, plan it down to the finest details and creating a checklist for people to follow. Checklists make all the difference. They can sometimes be daunting, but quickly become second nature. A Management System is a clear communication of what needs to be done. Management systems manage people and can be built to resemble a game. Don't be afraid of rules. Rules actually make the game more interesting and fun. Rules give you boundaries, purpose, challenges, and a way to win. If you want to create a consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders, you need to have rules. You want to hire people with the lowest possible skill level. No one can be great at everything. If you hone in on a skill, then you can become great at that skill. Also the lowest possible skillset, people tend to be more teachable. The system makes everything run with impeccable order. Create work manuals for each activity/skill that needs to be done. We have a new spreadsheet for publishing podcasts that allows us to keep track of what is getting done and when. It allows the publisher to keep track of what had been done and what needs to be done. You cannot have a sellable business if there is not uniform predictability in how your business works. No one wants to buy a business that is not uniform or predictable. Your management system has to be precise about everything, even down to the dress code. It sounds nitpicky but it sets the culture and it sets the tone. It's a piece that the employees can own. And ultimately it is all about your brand and your business culture. Having something that is clearly defined and notable makes you notable. When you hire people you have to have a management system, but it doesn't start when you hire them. You have to make sure that your system is managing you.

How Data and Systems Work Together It all comes back to Innovation. Creativity can lead to innovation, but Innovation is all about doing something new, changing how you do things. Innovation can change the world, but it doesn't have to be big. If you are keeping track of how many customers you see in the day and you know how many customer you see in the morning vs in the afternoon. Then compare how many of those customers buy your product at which time of day. Then you can plan your day better to reach more buying customers and save time. It's theoretically possible to stop innovating and continue to do business without changing anything that you do, but in the real world, if you're not innovating and growing, you are depleting. Everything you quantify allows you to reconsider what changes you can make in your processes to save you time and increase revenue. Stampede is currently using our podcast, Know Like Trust to measure what kind of businesses will work with us the best. We started with coaches and health and wellness businesses, then we switched to accounting and programming. The coaches were very eager to jump on the podcast and speak and some of them are interested in doing business with Stampede. The accountants and programmers are more reluctant to get on the podcast, but we're hoping that they are more eager to do business with us. Stampede has spent time innovating. Recent innovations have been discussed in prior episodes, like the Prospect Powermid. The original innovation happened when we decided that we don't build websites the way other people build websites. We make it easy for you to come up with your information. We tell you what we want based on specific information that we have found to be the most successful organization of information on your website. You need to orchestrate your business which is basically to create processes to tell your employees how you want the business to be run. Franchises work because there are processes and systems. You can hire really good employees that can figure out how to run your business for you and you become the product of your business. But if you orchestrate everything, then your business becomes a product of you. It's not about micromanaging, it's about giving them a patter for success. Without the processes and quantification, you don't know if it is working or even what is working. Southwest Airlines burned their rulebook but that was part of the orchestration. They orchestrated speed to completion by removing the rules that were bogging down their employees. Spontaneous discover occurs in the process of orchestrating your business. If the processes are in place and you look at it, you will find the magic. Numbers might be boring alone, but they tell stories and provide images to really help you understand your business and see the big picture. Numbers are awesome!

The concept of a funnel is that you take the masses and you narrow them down through a series of steps to actually find the people who are willing to pay for your product. We've been doing funnels forever. Back in the day, newspaper ads were a common first step in a funnel. The ad would get a person to call, or go into a store. From there, they would be in the funnel and those who wanted to buy, would buy. Those who still needed to think about it would walk away. But even those, you would want to circle back around to. Funnels were used back in the Roman times when insurance salesmen would go to the bathhouses to find potential buyers. It was the first networking meeting. Funnels are not rocket science. They are one of the simplest and most essential systems that you can have in your business. Funnels are not an internet thing. Funnels started with people yelling in the street or meeting at bathhouses and now, they are a lot more sophisticated. Funnels today gather information and reach people across the world. Stampede is building multiple funnels. We started with our Powermid of Prospects to determine what we needed in our funnel. What is our product? We sell Sales Sites What is our platform? We're using our Sales Site to sell the Sales Sites What is our process? We're using and email campaign to get people to call us How are we finding prospects? We're going to put money into a simple Facebook ad Then we built our funnel from there. The top of our funnel is the Facebook ad, reaching out to the masses (narrowed down to business owners). What is this ad supposed to do? The whole focus of the ad is to get the right people to the website. We only want people who could be interested in what's on the website. The whole purpose of the website is to get people to download the Sales Site Blueprint. The whole point of the blueprint is to get people into the email campaign. The more that a person is willing to give to receive, the more likely they will pay actual money for an end product. The email campaign is specifically designed to get them to call us. The sales person's job is to sell them a sales site. The final step in this funnel is to find more opportunities to assist this client with their business. Get out there. Figure out your funnel. And become successful.

Stampede wants to start growing our team more rapidly in sales. We have 2 sales platforms: Sales Sites + Builderall Affiliate program & In-house Business Development Sales team. Stampede held an all-hands-on-deck meeting to determine how we will onboard new sales agents onto our in-house team and develop our sales process. As a result of that conversation, we stumbled over some unexpected awesomeness. We created what is now being called the Stampede Prospect Powermid. The basic idea of the Powermid is how you create your business systems to find prospects and develop them into customers. The foundation of which is your own Product. From there you need a Platform to share your product. Add Processes for creating sales from leads. And only then will you tack on Prospecting for customers. Your Product is defined as what you're selling and who wants it. You don't know what your product is if you can't define both of these. Your Platform is like a stage where you display your product and it works like a train station platform where people go to get moved. Your platform could be brick & mortar, but it could be anything from blogs and websites to the trunk of your car. Once you have a platform, you need a Process for handling customers, moving them from slightly interested individuals to customers. Your process could include sales calls or door-to-door salesmen. And these people are usually given a script. What is your process for developing your customers? How do you move your people from one metric to another? Creating and managing lead funnels is a process for creating sales from prospects. Prospecting is like finding gold in dirt. The gold in your business is the person who actually pays money. People and businesses spend the most time and money prospecting. All of the bad experiences that you've ever had with marketing come back to this. If you don't have a process established for developing those leads, you will fail. Prospecting includes SEO, commercials, press releases, sponsorships, social media, etc. Stampede Prospect Powermid – - Build on your Product - Create a Platform - Develop Processes - Then go out and find some Prospects. This pyramid gives us a process for talking to our prospects as well. Get your copy of the Stampede Prospect Powermid online at https://spp.stampedeweb.com/

System: A set of things, actions, ideas, and information that interact with each other, and in so doing, alter other systems. Everything is a system. 3 Kinds of Systems Hard Systems Everything we Touch & Look At Soft Systems • Selling System • Identification of specific Benchmarks • Literal Scripting of Words to use for success • Creation of various Materials to use with each Script • Memorization of each Benchmark Script • Delivery of each script in Identical Fashion • Leaving your people to Communicate with and Engage each and every prospect PowerPoint Selling Process • The Appointment Presentation • The Entrepreneur Assessment Presentation • The Solutions Presentation Information Systems • Information & Benchmarks • How many calls were made? • How many prospects were reached? • How many appointments were scheduled? • How many appointments were confirmed? • How many appointments were held? • How many Assessment Presentations were scheduled? • How many Assessments were confirmed? • How many Assessments were completed? • How many Solutions Presentations were scheduled? • How many solutions Presentations were confirmed? • How many Solutions Presentations were completed? • How many solutions were sold? • What was the average dollar value?

Design and Create Systems Systems are insanely important. Without systems, you don't have business that you can step away from. With systems in place, you set expectations and are more capable of learning from your mistakes. Systems and feedback go hand-in- hand. Feedback is everything. The System Runs the Business and the People Run the System • Becomes the Solution – Provide the solution before the issues come up. • Integrates all elements required to make the business work – If you make your business to happen in a certain way, it will always work; and if it doesn't work, it's an opportunity improve. • Brings life into the Business – The system becomes your brand and allows your employees to be successful and more human. It sets the culture. Questions to Ask Yourself • How do you build your system? For every business, you need to sit down and figure out how thing work, then write it down. You have to have a vision of how you want it to look. • How do you build a business that works predictably, effortlessly, and profitably each and every day? • How do you build a business that works without you? • How do you get free of your business to live a fuller life? Work on your business and ask these questions • How can I get my business to work, but without me? • How can I get my people to work, but without my constant interference? • How can I systematize my business in such a way that it can be replicated 5,000 times, the 5,000th unit runs as smoothly as the first?

Part II: Automate Your Business This podcast uses a book outline that was created from 3 different books. - Design and Create Systems: The first system that Stampede built is the product system. We're creating and adding sales systems, and developing marketing systems including the podcasts, Stampede Your Business and Stampede Know Like Trust. - Your Systems Strategy: What systems does your business need to create and how to implement them. Your strategy should include hard systems and soft systems. - How Data and Systems Work Together: Your systems should be designed to provide data. Feedback is one of the most important parts of your systems. The greatest, overall system of feedback is money. - Create a Management System: We talk about when and who to hire and how you should manage your employees. - Your Management System should resemble a Game - Manage Your People with Game Systems: If you gamify your systems, then it is easier to hire people, because the game teaches them how to do their job so you can hire people that fit the culture you're trying to create instead of the only people who can do the work. - Create a Financial System - Setting Up your Financial System - Account Allocation Percentages - Putting the Plan into Motion - Financial System – Extras - Financial System - Quick Setup Guide

Review of Part I: Creating a Business In the first 8 episodes, we covered the following outline: - Why am I in Business in the First Place? - Plan Your Business - A Product Worth Selling - 10 Rules for Creating and Selling a Product - Your Marketing Process - Your Organizational Strategy The outline comes from 3 books: Built to Sell, The E-Myth, and Profit First Part I is all about creating a business because first you have to created a business that has the potential to get to the million dollar mark. The key to creating a million dollar business is to create a product worth selling. It's really about creating value. When you have a valuable product, you are creating value for your customers, your employees, and yourself. Systematize everything. Being successful and creating systems is all about the data. You can't be successful while ignoring the data. Systems are easy to teach so that you can hire people to replace you, not to reinvent the wheel. Systems also become your intellectual property and make up a huge part of the value of your business.

Organizing Your Company This is the last piece of creating a business. You absolutely have to organize your company. What entity type is your business going to be? The simplest way to establish a business is as a DBA. LLC's, S-corps and C-corps provide a bit of protection. Each organization type provides different tax and legal protections. If you're serious about creating your business, it is worth it to do it right. If there is more than one of you, you need to have an operating agreement to make your expectations clear and in writing. Shareholders vs. Employees - Nobody does anything great alone. You need to have someone to work with you or for you. You could make them a partner or part owner or you could hire an employee. You want to look for people that have different, complimentary strengths to you to balance you out. Assigning Tasks - When you have multiple people, every role has to be defined. You absolutely need to work with other people if you want your company to grow. And you can't be the only employee if you want your business to be sellable. • President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) • Vice-President/Marketing • Vice-President/Operations • Vice-President/Finance • Sales Manager • Advertising/Research Manager • Production Manager • Service Manager • Facilities Manager • Accounts Receivable Manager • Accounts Payable Manager Sign a contract for each position created. Even if you are doing the worker bee jobs, you need to write up a job description, set expectations for each role and sign it. Stampede created an org chart and had everyone in the organization write down their job descriptions and the job descriptions of the people that they will be responsible for in the future. Because Stampede did this, even before we knew what we were doing, we have been able to pivot and stay organized as things changed and the business grew. Prototyping the Position: Replace Yourself with a System Build your business as if it were a Franchise Prototype of its own. Franchises don't sell products, they sell systems. Systematize everything. Create an Operations Manual for each of the roles. Each role needs to have documented steps with checklists and rules that make things easy for anyone doing the job to follow. Hire people to replace you as an employee. Train them using your Operations Manual. If you don't follow the rules, why should anyone else?

Your Marketing Process No matter what cool product or service you have, people need to know about it. Find a Perceived Need and Fill It Once you have a product that fulfills the needs of your customers, you need to determine what the related need that your market experiences. The Hero's Journey is universal to humankind. The business (your business) is the guide and the client is the hero. The 2 Pillars of a Successful Marketing Strategy (If you don't understand these, you are just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks or going for popularity which doesn't pay the bills) • Demographics • Psychographics Give away free samples for marketing info. Trade something of value for information that helps you hone in on your market. This is a science. You need information or you're just pulling from your gut. Its about giving value. Stampede is creating value by starting another podcast where we invite businesses to come onto our show to talk about their business. This is a service that we offer for free. We ask them questions adapted from the Stampede Sales Site Blueprint so they can increase their Know, Like, and Trust factor and credibility with potential clients. The Common Purpose: Make a promise your customer wants to hear and deliver on that promise better than anyone else on the block. Stampede's promise is that when you create a website following our process and give us the information that we ask for, then your customers will come to know, like, and trust you, increasing your opportunities. We will create a process to get you to your target income.

If you have a service business, you can/should turn your service into a product by systematizing it. Create processes that are easy to follow and easy to train. 10 Rules for Creating and Selling a Product (from Built To Sell) 1. Don't generalize; specialized 2. Make sure that no 1 client makes up more than 15% of your business 3. Own a process. Make it duplicable and sellable 4. Don't become synonymous with your company 5. Avoid the cash suck. Charge up front 6. Don't be afraid to say “no” to projects 7. Figure out how many pipeline prospects lead to sales 8. 2 Sales reps are always better than 1 9. Hire people who are good at selling products, not services 10. Think big. Write a 3yr business plan

Create an Avatar Franchises work better than startups because they've done the research and they know their avatar. Stampede created a description of the ideal client when the business was created. We used this as a generic concept of our avatar. Now (9 months later) we are diving in to our first official avatar. An avatar is a semi-fictitious person who represents your ideal client. Also known as persona or target. Creating an avatar is both an art and a science. Marketing is just like fishing. Great fishermen know where the fish are. They know what attracts those fish. And they are skilled with creating those lures and catching those fish. It is important to name your avatar. And as you work with your avatar, you will develop an affinity for them. Step 1: Who is your Avatar? Background (ie. Job, Career Path, Family, etc) Demographics (ie. Male/Female, Age, Income, etc) Identifiers/Psychographics (ie, Demeanor, Communication Style, Attitueds, etc) Step 2: What are your Avatar's needs? Goals (ie. Primary Goals, Secondary Goals, etc.) Challenges (ie. Primary Challenges, Secondary Challenges, etc.) How to Solve (How can you assist them to ovecome their challenges and reach their goals?) Step 3: What is your Avatar's why? Quotes (Personal quotes about goals, challenges in life, etc) Objections (Why wouldn't they buy from you?) Step 4: How are you going to help your Avatar? Marketing (How you should describe your solutions to this persona or avatar?) Call to Action (What will get them to take action?) - Not just "buy my product" but any action that moves them along the steps of a relationship with you and your business. Create Multiple Avatars Make 3-5 avatars and test them out in advertising to determine what your best avatar is and then put your marketing budget into that avatar. Make an Anti-Avatar so you know what you're not looking for as well.

Create a product worth selling How do you determine if your product is good or not? What do you do if you find out that your product isn't worth selling? (from Built to Sell) Your Business must be all about your Product. Your Product must be all about your Customer. Step 1: Isolate a Product or Service with the Potential to Scale •Teachable to Employees (or can be delivered through technology) •Valuable to Customers •Product must be Repeatable (best->worst): 1. Contracts 2. Auto-Renewable Subscriptions 3. Sunk Money Renewable Subscriptions 4. Renewable Subscriptions 5. Sunk Money Consumables 6. Consumables •Enjoy Fat Margins Step 2: Create a Positive Cash Flow Cycle - Charge up Front for your Services Step 3: Hire a Sales Team Step 4: Stop Selling Everything Else

The 1st Standard of doing business is Money. The difference between a business and a hobby is money. The only reason to create a business is to sell it. Don't center your business around yourself. The 2nd Standard of doing business is An Opportunity Worth Pursuing. It doesn't matter if everyone needs your product/service if nobody wants it. You might be passionate about your widget, but can you even explain what it is? What kind of business are you in? You may have a product. But your business is not your product, it is what your product does for others. Stampede's business is Business Development, not web development. Who is your customer? Figure out the psychographics and demographics. Drill down your avatar to find your niche. Other Standards: -Where are you in business? Local? National? International? -Your timeline. When will you be ready to hire employees and have them replace you? -How are you going to be in business? Retail? Wholesale? A combination of the 2? -What standards are you going to insist upon regarding reporting, cleanliness, clothing, management, hiring, firing, training, and so forth? Plan Your Business How big should your business be? To Facilitate Growth requires Intention at the outset & Passion for Personal Transformation Plan ahead. Anticipate growth. Ask the right questions. Write it down. Until you're done planning, you're still in the Why stage. Follow the Entrepreneurial Model. It's not about what your are going to do, its asking yourself how you are going to get there. Where is your opportunity? What does my business look like to my customer? How does your business stand out from the rest? Start with your customer. Treat your business like you plan to sell it.

Why are you in business in the first place? There is a reason that starting with Why is so powerful is that it is the reason people quit or keep going. When you know your Why, you are empowered to push through the hard times and the difficulty of building a business all while continually learning. We talk about how Stampede found its Why. As independent entrepreneurs, we each had attempted different things with businesses and connected with others through entrepreneur groups, like Entrepreneur Launchpad (ELP). After reading and reviewing 3 books, The E Myth Revised by Michael Gerber, Built to Sell by John Warrillow, Profit First by Mike Michalowicz, Brett combined them to create an outline that we are using to create Stampede. This same outline has become the outline for this podcast. Stampede didn't start with an intent to create a business. It started as a mastermind of business owners looking for a way to take advantage of the web development tool, Builderall and we realized how valuable this is. What got us excited was that we could provide real value to business owners like ourselves. As we explored this further, we picked up the book, Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson, and wanted to provide the value of Clickfunnels at a much lower price and take away the headache of doing all the work. At the end of the day, our why is to create a real company for the small business owner. Businesses are supposed to grow and change. Your business may be your baby, but it needs to grow independent of you. Build your business according to what the business needs, not what you want. You have to get your ego out of the way. When you get yourself out of the way of your success, you are free to imagine your business without you. The purpose of going into business is freedom, personal growth, to live a stimulating new life. What we care about we value. If you've created a mission statement for your business, make sure that it incorporates your Why. Establish your business to incorporate your mission statement into every task. Ask yourself the following questions: -How do I wish my life to look? -How do I wish my life to be on a day-to-day basis? -What would I like to be able to say I truly know in my life, about my life? -How would I like to be with people in my life – my family, my friends, my business associates, my customers, my employees, my community? -What would I like people to think about me? -What would I like to be doing 2 years from now? 10 years from now? 20 years from now? When my life comes to a close? -What specifically would I like to learn during my life – spiritually, physically, financially, technically, intellectually? About relationships? -How much money will I need to do the things I wish to do? By when will I need it? If you have a strong Why then you get results.

As the opening episode of Stampede Your Business, we discuss the vision of the podcast and relate it back to the business that we are building, Stampede Digital Systems. Stampede Your Business came from an idea of a combination of business development books that we have combined to create the ultimate business creation program. As entrepreneurs, we are using this program to build a million dollar business with just a pen and paper. We are in the process of implementing that business plan and as the listener, you get the front row seat to the action. We show you under the hood as we create this awesomely successful business. If you have ever wanted to create a business from scratch and become hugely successful, this podcast will show you what works and what doesn't work. You can learn from our successes and mistakes to figure out what works for you. And you will see how we we create this million dollar company with very little financial risk. We share the story of Stampede Digital Systems, where it came from and how it started. We talk about the power of working with a team and how we built our team. No one obtains success alone. As a business owner, you want to get your customers to Know Like and Trust you. We practice what we preach. So come on the ride with us and Join the Stampede!