Today we are going to talk about maintaining business growth.

 

I’m going to share with you some questions you need to ask yourself about your existing customers. Then I’m going to give you a key question regarding your competition. Lastly, I’m going to share with you the biggest key to your business growth…..I actually invest over six figures a year into this one thing.

What are these questions to ask yourself about your existing customers?

There’s a few…so you might want to write these down.

Number one, what is it that they really want? Not what do you have, what do they want? Do they want “done for you” services? Maybe you do things in a certain location? Do they want you to come to them?

Just know that one of the things that can always be changed is price.

I’m willing to pay more to have people come to me. If I’m hiring a mentor or a trainer and I have the opportunity to bring them to me, I’m going to pay that extra money so that I don’t have to travel and be away from my family.  There are a lot of people out there that will do that.

Ask yourself…what is it that they really want. Is it help around their services, is it a certain type of management system, is it a reward system? What do they want?

The next question is, how do you get them to want to spend more with you or buy more often? What is it that your customers purchase on a regular basis? Maybe you can work a deal out with a partner or collaborate with someone to help get them “that thing” for a better price or a better service or whatever.

Get creative. The more that you can get your customer and your client relying on you for different things that they use, the better. They are going to see you and your brand as “better” and the harder it’s going to be for your competitors to take them away.

The key question about competition? 

What’s this key question about your competition that you should be asking yourself?

Before I get there I’m going to share something that I learned from a gentleman named Joseph Murphy. He wrote the book called, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, that I highly recommend. He’s a great trainer on the subconscious mind and manifestation etc. He says when it comes to your competition, you want to be very aware of your thoughts. You actually want to wish them major success. I know that that sounds a little strange depending on your competition and niche.

What you’re wishing for others…..is coming back to you. The energy that you’re sending out is coming back to you.

I used to really struggle with jealousy. I used to struggle with different people in my space. My business started growing and I started feeling better when I wished them massive success. Learn to wish them massive success, there’s enough to go around. There’s plenty of people. I wanted to address that before we talk about competition.

Now, what’s the question you should ask regarding your competition? What won’t they do?

If you’re in a space where you have bigger competitors that have bigger budgets and bigger companies and more staff and more resources….what won’t they do?

Maybe they won’t put together intimate experiences? Maybe they won’t do “done for you services”? Maybe they won’t have personal reach outs where you make people feel good or you do fun things for them? Maybe it’s they won’t do the research on their clients to understand what they’re fans of or enjoy.

One of the things that I learned from Gary Vaynerchuk is that his company will sometimes research what sports team you’re a fan of and just randomly send you a jersey. That’s really cool. Who does that? His competition doesn’t. He was building his wine company.  What wine company sends you a jersey? Nobody, exactly.

What won’t your competition do? Asking yourself that question creates a unique experience for your customers and clients and helps them see you in a different light.

Before we get to my last point, I would love to do a couple things. I want to hear from you. What’s a unique customer experience that you’ve had? The reason I want you to share that is one, to give me ideas but also to give the rest of our community ideas. What’s something unexpected, what’s something that was cool… like wow I can’t believe they did this?

I’ll tell you one thing that we do. If I meet with somebody and we have a good time, it’s a memorable experience, I’ll actually take my favorite picture of the experience and I’ll get it framed and sent to them. This cost me $10 (maybe $20) it doesn’t cost me a lot of money but they are so blown away by that and guess what? No one throws away a framed picture. Right? Especially if they also enjoyed the experience, they’re going to put it in their house.

People are going to ask them “Hey who’s that? “What are y’all doing?” Right?

That’s just one example.

I want to hear your examples. What’s did someone or a company specifically do to just blow your socks off, make you see them different? Let’s give our community some ideas to help them with their businesses.

What is the big key to maintaining your business growth? 

What is the big key to maintaining your business growth?

What is it that I spend over six figures a year on?

Self-development .

2013 was the last year that I didn’t invest over $100,000 into my education (that year it was about 80,000). I am constantly investing in myself so that I learn, so I can help my students and clients make more money, become bigger impactors, help their business etc. and I do this in in a lot of different ways.

Recently (the last two years) I’ve been investing a lot of time and a lot of money to get into my own programs. I want to share one with you. 

About two and a half years ago my wife and I were at a charity auction. One of our neighbors comes up and says “hey did you see the trip to Belize?” “No” and she said “oh my god, it looks amazing. It’s a five day trip, five couples only, a private jet, private yacht, private chef, private island...” and my wife’s like “whoo!!” She’s excited and fired up. I’m thinking in my head “that sounds terrible.” I didn’t voice that, but I thought in my head. I’m thinking “I hope we don’t win.” “I hope we don’t buy that auction.”

On the way home, I’m driving and my wife is asleep in the seat next to me. I look over and start thinking “what the hell is wrong with me?” Most humans would think that’s really cool. Why did I have such a negative reaction to that? I honestly didn’t know. I didn’t know why. I always want to be a good husband. I want to improve myself and I decided to do what I call, pluck the weed.

Plucking the weeds means you’re finding areas of your life that are incongruent with who you want to become. This was who I was and I didn’t want to be that way. It’s not congruent with who I want to be. I want to be able to be excited for that kind of thing. I decided to dig in and through series of hypnosis and different mentors and people that I hired, I actually figured it out. The reason comes from my childhood.

When I was in the third grade, I had a teacher that knew something was off. I was in a very abusive home…physically abusive. My teacher knew something was wrong and she tells me one day “hey, I want you to start meeting with a guidance counselor.” I don’t know what that means. I’m in third grade and I say “okay” and start meeting with the guidance counselor. After a little bit of time….I start to trust her and I start sharing things.

I start sharing that every morning I’m thrown against a closet and stomped. I start sharing that some days if I show up to school with a turtleneck in the summer, it’s because I have claw marks on my neck and my stepmom didn’t want people to see it.  I tell her everything because I didn’t have friends, I didn’t have people that I even talked to when I came home from school. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere, wasn’t allowed to have people over. I stayed outside till the sun went down then I had to go to my room by myself.

I tell her all these things and it kind of felt nice to talk to somebody, because I’d never been able to talk to anyone. Well one day I show up to our meeting and my dad, my stepmom and her are all in the room. She proceeds to tell them everything I’ve ever told her because she thought it was just too outrageous and that I was seeking attention….. that was a very bad day, that was a horrific day, never met with her again of course. That’s the day that I decided to never trust anybody.

The Belize trip represented a prison that I would not be able to escape. I would be stuck there in this intimate environment and I would have to open up to people. I would have to share some of my personal stuff. What happened to me when I shared in the past, I got hurt.

Not understanding that has had me turn people off my whole life, has had me keep people at bay. Without self-development, I would still have social anxiety, I would still struggle with relationships, I would still not trust anybody and not know why I didn’t have close relationships.

With self-development, I was able to to fix all those things….which greatly impacted my business.

I’m just talking about the personal stuff, but investing in marketing, sales and all these different things, investing in yourself is your best investment for you to continue growing your business.

Oh by the way…we just got back from Belize, so we did get the trip. We went and it was amazing.

If you would like to learn more about that process that I call, pluck the weeds, it’s actually chapter two of ourbook, Time, Money, Freedom.  Here’s the link Higdongroup.com/time-money-freedom, it’s published by Hay House and is a best-selling book.

The book is my wife and I sharing our 10 rules to radically reshape your life. I think it will really help you. If this resonated with you, I think it’ll really help you not just grow your business, not just grow your finances but also grow your relationships. 

Ray Higdon

Play Bigger. Make An Impact.


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