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The Business Growth Blueprint is for small business owners and entrepreneurs ready to take their success to the next level. We will sit down with successful entrepreneurs and small business owners who share their experiences—their victories, setbacks, and everything in between. It's about more than just theory; it’s about practical, actionable advice you can implement in your business immediately. Whether you’re looking to scale, improve your profitability, or navigate the daily challenges of running a business, you’ll find the insights you need right here.
Let's connect:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-m-leckemby-9360b373/
Web: https://go.peter-leckemby.com/business-coaching
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PeterLeckemby
Peter Leckemby (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Blueprint. I am very excited to be bringing this podcast to you and I hope that it will add value to you in helping you run your small business. This is a project I've been wanting to do for quite some time, so I'm excited to be finally bringing it out to the world. So The Business Growth Blueprint is a podcast for small business owners and entrepreneurs who are ready to take their success to the next level. We'll sit down with successful entrepreneurs and small business owners who will share their experiences.
They'll share their victories, their setbacks and everything in between. And it's about more than just theory. It's about practical, actionable advice that you can implement in your business, hopefully immediately. So whether you're looking to scale, improve your profitability or navigate the daily challenges of running a business, you'll find the insights you need right here. Most of these episodes will be me interviewing other business owners, whether that's
you know, a few hundred thousand in revenue or 10 million plus. The goal is to have real conversations about their real businesses, the lessons that they've learned, the lessons they wish they had learned earlier and what they would do differently.
I'll be talking to business owners across a variety of sectors and looking to tease out what really has made them successful. The goal with all of this is to give you very practical things that you can implement your business. Some of them big strategic things, some more tactical quick hits. We'll look at everything from building consistent cashflow, fixing operational inefficiencies and driving systems to operate well.
talking about difficulty generating leads or converting paying customers and building a profitable business. We'll talk marketing, we'll talk pricing strategy, we'll talk operations, we'll talk creating offers. We'll talk mindsets. It's about more than just the skillsets, it's about building the right mindsets to run a business as well. Running a business and being an entrepreneur is hard. It's very lonely. There's not a lot of people you can talk to about
what you do. Can't talk to your employees about how bad the business is, or they'll quit. Can't talk to them about how good the business is, or they'll ask for a raise. Oftentimes you can't talk to your friends or your family because they don't understand it if they're not running a business as well. So we want to be able to have good conversations that will help you understand A, you're not alone and B, there's challenges, but then there's better things on the other side of those challenges. Let's help normalize.
some of the struggles and the failures that lead to the successes. So who am I and why should you be listening to me? Why should you care about this podcast? Well, my background goes back over 25 years of leading teams. started off in home improvement retail, where I worked my way up to a store manager role, leading a $60 million business, had a couple hundred employees. I worked a lot with our professional contractors who, a lot of them ran their own businesses and home services, those types of business owners.
I learned a lot from them. From there, I got my coaching certification and also worked in merchant services where I worked with a bunch of other small business owners, whether it be restaurants, liquor stores, bakeries, beauty salons, bars, those types of restaurants. And I just love working with the business owner and the entrepreneur and the mindsets that they have because they're out there on the front lines every day, trying to grow something and build something. And that's very exciting to me. I recently.
left my corporate role as an HR leader and have decided to step out on my own in coaching and advising practice. So I am working with a team of really talented individuals and out there helping small business owners find hidden profits in their business, build systems to run their business more efficiently so they can have more free time, more cashflow, not have to worry about spending a ton on marketing and advertising to grow their business, but to be able to build solid businesses from within.
And then that growth in that advertising and marketing gives you a bigger return on the profitability side. So that's what really drives me and what excites me about what I do. Now we can talk about a lot of different strategies as we get going. And, you know, in this first episode, I just wanted to, introduce the podcast and the interview series that I'm going to be doing, but then talk about a few key strategies. And I'm going to be hosting some webinars, some profit acceleration master classes.
where we'll talk about some of these strategies and building profitable businesses. Some of the most important ones is controlling your, your cashflow. And the first one, like cutting costs, you got to look at what are you spending money on? And a lot of business owners haven't done this in a long time. I was talking to a business owner and he had just gotten off the phone when we met and had a conversation with their IT team and made some changes in their business that just
just like that, save them $600 a month. So it's simple little things that can have a big impact. It's going through all of the different subscriptions that you have, whether it's software or licensing fees for tools that you used maybe years ago that you never shut off. It's looking at your interest that you're paying on, whether it's credit cards or loans. It's looking at your lease, your internet, your phone, all of the different usage.
It's reasonable to suspect that you could probably cut three to 5 % cost right off the top. That's pure profit. Let's talk pricing, simple pricing strategy. When was the last time you raised your prices? A lot of business owners haven't raised prices in a couple of years yet. Their cost of goods keep going up. That's just margin squeeze for them. And it's profit right off the table. There's an interesting rule. It's called the five by five and a half rule.
And for a business that's running a 10 % net profit margin, if you simply cut your costs by 5 % and increase your prices by 5 .5%, you would double your profits. I want you to think about that for a second and realize how simple it would be to literally double your profits at a 10 % margin. Now, if you run a higher net margin, then it wouldn't quite double your profits, but it would no doubt have a massive impact on your profits.
And that's just two simple strategies. That's low hanging fruit is looking at your pricing and where can you cut costs. But there's so much more that we can look at. And we're going to talk about as we go through this podcast and I interview these business owners and talk about what's made them successful. There's the skill sets. You have to be good at what you do. And most business owners are good at what they do. That's what drove them into running their business in the first place. If you're a coach, you like to go out be a good coach. If you're a plumber, you're a good plumber. You want to go and.
fix plumbing problems. The challenge is, is if people can't find you and don't know about you, they can't pay you to do what you do well. So you also have to think like a marketer. You have to think like an entrepreneur who's out there generating traffic for your business and doing it profitably. Not everybody can go and hire a big sales team and the, the myth of brand marketing being the way to build your business. We're going to, we're going to bust some of those myths. We're going to talk about some of those challenges and how you can do it.
different way. We'll have some counterintuitive approaches. We'll have some non -mainstream strategies that we're going to talk about and you don't have to agree with all of them, but I encourage you to explore those. And if along this journey, there's something you hear and you want to have a conversation, you'll be able to find me on my website. It's at peter -leckenby .com and I'll drop the links in the show notes.
And you'll be able to connect with me. You can book a 15 minute strategy call and we will talk about ways that we can help you out. like to say 15 minutes could save $15 ,000 more. Now know I'm stealing that from a car insurance commercial, but it's true. In the next 30 days, I could show you how to find 15 extra thousand dollars in profit in your business in a 15 minute phone call. Other things we'll talk about is your website. Something is simple. Most websites.
Give the customer that's not a now buyer, no reason to stick around. Well, why is that? If, if, if I go to an automotive company's website and I don't have an immediate automotive problem, I'm not likely to stay on that website. What if you gave me something useful that in exchange for my email address, I would have that I could use like a quick car inspection video or how to check my fluids on my own car, how to.
Check my tires, a road trip safety checklist, something that's a value to me. And now you've got my email address and then you can send me marketing periodically. Something else that we'll talk about. And if you are doing this, you're going to get this gold right out of the first episode. If you're discounting, stop doing that. There's pure profit drain. If you offer a discount, depending on your profit margin, roughly speaking, if you offer just a 10 % discount on your services or your products.
You will have to sell 50 % more to make up for that profit loss. I want to repeat that because that's important. A simple 10 % discount requires you to sell 50 % more to make up for that profit loss. And most consumers have become desensitized to discounting. So if it's not a 40 % or more discount, they're unlikely to act on the offer that you're putting out there. And a 40 % discount.
It would be almost impossible to make up for the loss. So stop discounting if you're doing that. I know that might seem a little uncomfortable, but we'll talk throughout this on pricing strategy and why that would not be good.
Other strategies, we'll talk marketing. We'll talk about the difference between brand marketing and direct response marketing and why direct response marketing is the way for small business owners. Unless you have hundreds of millions of dollars of cash that you want to burn through on brand marketing, brand marketing is not the way to go. Direct response marketing, marketing that gets a response from your customer and that you can track it and you can measure the ROI. That is the way to grow your business profitably.
A lot of business owners rely on word of mouth or other types of marketing that they can't count on to grow their business. And if you continue to do that, you will continue to have to work your rear end off and be constantly working in your business. We want you to step back, take these strategies so you can work on your business, not in your business to zoom out and work on building a profitable engine that generates predictable cashflow.
Again, I have an affinity I've mentioned for home service providers and a lot of their business can sometimes be seasonal here in Colorado, for sure. In the mountain States where you have snow in the winter time. And if you're a landscaper and you don't do snow removal, how can you continue to run a profitable business through the winter? And we have enough good days where you can do your hardscaping business there. You know, there's a lot of different ways to do that, but talk about ways to have a profitable business year round. And that comes through great marketing and lead generation.
It comes through building long -term relationships with customers who may not be now buyers. The data suggests that one to 3 % of your customers are now buyers. The rest will buy at a future time and you need to be top of mind. And the way to do that is to have an effective campaign for building that relationship. People do business with those they know, like, and trust. How do you build those factors? So we're excited to talk about all these topics. And I know I've gone through just a few of them.
There's over 40 different strategies that we can give you to build profit engines in your business. And then we can go into the tactics of each strategy and break it down piece by piece and really help you grow that business.
I want to step back a little bit and talk about this idea of being a business owner and entrepreneur. And I was thinking about this as I left my corporate role back in the springtime of this year, I had a conversation with my wife who actually convinced me that it was the right time to do my own thing. She said, Hey, you've always wanted to do this. And I've always had those entrepreneurial. Inclinations that I've always wanted that. And it started way back when I was a kid, I was 11, 12 years old when I got my first paper route.
And went out delivering papers and had to go door to door and collect the money. And obviously the better service you gave, you got your, your payment, but you also got tips. You also had those customers that were hard to collect from. you sometimes have to go two, three months without collecting and you had to be persistent. You had to go to the door multiple times. You had to think about different times of the day to go to the door. Sometimes it was running to a few houses before I went to school to collect before they left for work.
So that taught me to, to find different ways to solve the problem that I needed to solve to make the money. Cause I had to pay the bill for the papers at the end of the month. And if I hadn't collected the money that was coming out of my own pocket. After that, you know, going through high school, working in retail, I found that to be fun and exciting. Cause you could deliver customer service, me and a couple of buddies when we were working at Kmart back in the day, we would in the summertime, kind of as a side hustle, we would deliver.
grills to customers homes if they couldn't fit them in their car or they would ask to have them built and we would go to their house and build them 20, 25 bucks. But we pocketed some extra cash that way. And not to date myself too much, but when you're making $4 and 25 cents an hour, 25 bucks for building a grill in 45 minutes is pretty good pay. So we would do things like that. Just finding those little side hustles then. And then I worked in a restaurant.
for a little while serving food and, you know, tip money. So you find ways to really delight the customer and get that extra tip money. And then I worked for a home improvement retailer that one of our core values was the entrepreneurial spirit. And they really asked you and encouraged you to think like an entrepreneur, think like a business owner to drive sales. And we used to have a lot of freedom and flexibility. And that really taught me a lot of lessons and they did a great job of building business acumen. And even as a, as a department manager,
As a 20 year old kid, 21 year old kid, you know, kid, I was an adult, but young and in college still having to be responsible for a, for a P and L and having to look at my gross margin return on investment and knowing some of those numbers, it was so valuable that would serve me later. Then when I left that and had to do my own thing, coaching and merchant services, that was just pure selling. And if you didn't sell, you didn't eat because it was a hundred percent commission sales in merchant services. And I can remember.
the pit in my stomach, having to go to those first customers and sell and cold calls. And you would walk in and as soon as they know you're in merchant services, they would say some not so choice things. Sometimes you would get called some names, you would get flat rejection and you really had to get good at navigating rejection. And that built some strength and built the muscle and getting good at sales. And I remember my third month doing merchant services and I was the number one or two rookie in the Western division.
And that was exciting. that was the most I'd ever made in any one month in my life. And, so that was, that was fun. And I was starting to build some residual sales, but I also had three boys at home. So I needed to feed them and realized that it was not the most sustainable thing. Cause I didn't have a good referral network and I just knew it would take time. It was going to take a couple of years to build that up. And I was running out of savings. So that's when I got into leadership development at a large company working in corporate.
got into HR and talent management and worked my way up, taking over that team and learned a lot about the C -suite, a lot more about business contract negotiations, having to buy from vendors, understanding the RFP process, just learned a lot more business. And it was super valuable there as well. But my mindset's always been on how I could give back. And it was in that role that the idea of a podcast first came up and I got very excited about that.
But was never able to bring it to fruition. Just was busy with other projects and things that were important to the company. And, but it was always in the back of my mind. So the first chance I got when I went out on my own this summer was thinking about how am I going to bring this podcast to life? And talking to some clients and friends who are business owners, the idea came about and this is where this, this came from. So the entrepreneurial pursuit has always been something that has excited me.
It's a group of people I love to add value to and I'm in the trenches with them building my business and marketing. So selfishly, obviously this podcast gives me an opportunity to have people know and like me as much as you don't love to hear your own voice or see your own face on a camera. It is something that I do enjoy talking to other people and having real conversations and just getting great information out there to others. And I'm going to give away all my stuff for free. This
Podcast will be free. do webinars and master classes for free. I'm going to be doing live events local here in the Denver area for free because I want to give that information away. People, you know, the best at what they do give away their information. And then I can help you with implementation. So if you want help implementing these things in your business, that's where I come in, whether we work one -on -one or we work and bring you into communities. I'm going to be starting up some communities of business owners who
can learn from each other, but also I'll be giving you the strategies and tactics the same way I would do with one -on -one. Obviously there's just a little less one -to -one time. It's one to many, but it's also a more economical way to, to get the information and the implementation help that I'm going to be delivering. So that's my business model. Pretty straightforward and simple. Also have some do it yourself online learning. If you just need to get some of the basics around business finances, we have a online MBA.
where we, small business owners can kind of get their feet deep into some of the financials and really running a business and understanding the systems and the operations of a profitable business. So we have a lot of different ways to engage and I look forward to being able to connect with the business owners out there. So don't hesitate. My email address, my contact information will be in the show notes. And I really want to connect with the business owners. What are your pain points? What are your challenges? What are the things that I can help with?
Everything I can help with, will help with. That is my goal. And I've got a great team and community that I'm part of, whether it's on the coaching side, whether it's on the entrepreneurial side, marketing, help, advising, help. You know, I've got a passion for the home services industry, but if you're in the restaurant industry or you're in running beauty salons or fitness, running a gym, I've got people that I can connect to that we can help you and we can get you the tools you need to be successful. So I look forward to this being.
Kind of a two way, I'm going to have a business owners on here. We're going to have conversations, but I also look forward to hearing from those of you who are listening to this or watching this podcast out there and being able to have that, a real connection and build a strong community. So don't hesitate to reach out. And if there's topics, if there's business owners you think I should talk to, or you are a business owner that, Hey, I want to come on the podcast. I want to share some of the lessons I've learned. Let's talk, reach out, email me and we will.
Continue to ramp this thing up. like I said, I'm excited to bring a new episode each week to you and give you lots of great value and continue to, build something phenomenal and help you have a phenomenally successful business. Again, my name is Peter Leckemby. This is the business growth blueprint, the podcast for business owners, featuring business owners to help you grow and have a phenomenal business and a phenomenal life. We'll talk to you in the next episode.
Thank you for joining me again. This is the Business Growth Blueprint. We'll talk to you soon.