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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.
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PETER LECKEMBY (00:19)
Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Business Growth Blueprint. I'm your host, Peter Leckemby, and this is our final episode of 2024. We launched this podcast back in September of this year and have had some great guests on so far and looking forward to more phenomenal guests coming up in 2025. However, I want to take a few minutes to wrap the year and give some business owners some tools to
perform an end of year reflection and also to aid in planning for 2025. I think there was some benefit in taking a few minutes to do this. I wanna share the significance of year end reflection and why it's crucial for business growth. I think it's an important part of pausing to look at where you've come, where you started the year and where you're at, even if it's been a tough year, even if you've seen economic hardship, even if your business has
not grown like you expected, it's important to take that time to reflect on that, to look at some things that might be causative in this process, and to think about ways that you can pivot in each of the key areas of your business. I forget who said it. I think it was Henry Ford that said, thinking is the hardest work there is, which is why so few partake in it. And it's important to take that time to stop and think.
A lot of times we get caught up in doing things and we don't take that time to pause and reflect. I know that was something I was very guilty of early in my leadership career. I was a doer. You got paid for getting things done and sitting down to plan and think and just let my mind wander at times did not feel like productive use of time. And I had no idea how much that was costing me as a leader and in business. I learned a lot from that time.
So I want to share some of those components and things that might help you out. So from this episode, you will learn some tips for looking back, reflecting, capturing notes, whether it be accomplishments, key lessons learned, quite frankly, failures, what didn't work. And then also some questions to ask yourself as you go into the new year, some things to think about as you start the planning process. So let's look at a 2024
year in review framework. Let's talk through what this could look like. First, let's look at the obvious, financials. Let's do a financial pulse check. Looking at your revenue. Revenue is the starting point for your business. It's your top line. Did you grow this year? By how much did you grow? What was your starting revenue, your ending revenue? Maybe month by month. What was that run rate across the year? Especially if you're in a seasonal business.
You may be the fourth quarter is a slower time or the fourth quarter is your busy time, depending on what type of business you're in. Next, look at your profit margins. Look at both gross and net. These are important benchmarks. By industry, you can look at what the averages are and you can benchmark against your industry to see how you're doing. If you have a lot of cost of goods, you're gonna see some different margins than if you have very few goods, if you don't have inventory.
you know, different fixed costs if you don't have to rent a warehouse and you just have a small office space. A lot of things will go into that, but look at your profit margins and then look at your cashflow patterns. Take a look and spend some time evaluating that. Next, talk about your customer service, the customer experience that you delivered. What were the wins? What were your most effective or successful products or services? What client feedback did you get?
What did you hear from your clients? What are your retention rates? If you have customers that repeat business, are they coming back to you? Think about customers that can be from a maintenance standpoint, whether you're a landscaper and you do the actual cutting and mowing, if you have snow removal and you have contracts, if you're a plumber or an HVAC technician, do you have...
maintenance, your furnace checkup or your air conditioner checkup. Do customers keep coming back? If you're a hair salon, do you have repeat business over and over again? Next, team development. If you have employees, key hires. Who did you hire this year? Who did you maybe let go this year? What skills did your team gain? Did you make organizational improvements? This is a key part for businesses who do have employees. Do you have
team members who are contributing to the success of the business? Are you investing in those team members so they can contribute to the success of the business?
Next, look at your marketing. What's your marketing effectiveness? What channels did you market to? What messages resonated most? Did you try new channels? Did you try new messaging? What's your testing process? Do you have a way to split test and measure effectiveness of different marketing?
How about your lead generation efforts?
Lastly, what major pivots or adaptations were made during the year?
Did you have to rethink your strategy? Did you have to adapt when a key team member left your company? Did new competition force you to look at things differently? What role did technology play in you having to shift? There's a lot of different things that might go into these pivots that happened throughout the year. It was an election year for our president and that can cause turmoil. People may be holding back from spending or after the election, maybe people change their behavior patterns.
Those are all important things to take a look at in your business.
After you've spent some time, and maybe this is a couple hours, maybe this is half a day, maybe it's a full day, really reflecting back on the year, spend some time doing it alone. Encourage your key team members, encourage your leadership team, if you have one, to spend some time doing this and then get together. And what was your shared reflection on 2024? If you have team members that are going to see some things differently than you as the owner, and you might have some key learnings that come out of that.
Next, take some time to plan for 2025. Strategic planning is so important. I think it was Eisenhower that said, planning is essential, but plans are useless. The point being, you've got to prepare for the year ahead. That gives you, it's like practicing. You got to practice for the game. Once you get in the game, the situation is going to cause you to have to pivot, adjust, and adapt.
But by doing that planning, you're much better equipped for those pivot points. Because you can think about pivots and build that into your strategic plan. If A happens, then we will do X. If B happens, then we will do Y. These are very good thought exercises for you and your team to engage in this year. So strategic planning, this is an important part. I did a webinar with a colleague of mine, a client, Mark Curtis. We did a webinar on LinkedIn earlier in
the fall talking about 2025 strategic planning. And, you know, it's never too late to do strategic planning. The only the only crime is if you don't do any strategic planning. Yes, the end of December, you should have already thought about some of this, but better now than never. And it's important that you do the exercise. And even if you did some strategic planning back in September, October, take some time, reevaluate those things have changed in the last two months.
you might be in a new head space in the last couple months. Some new learnings, some new thoughts, ideas, revisit your strategic plan. But start with a market analysis. What are emerging opportunities and or potential challenges in your market? Who are your key competitors? Have you done a SWOT analysis? This is a super important thing I like to do with every client is offering a SWOT analysis. I will go in, get some market research. I will look at their key competitors. I'll look at
key factors in their business, all of their web presence, Google reviews, customer success, all of those different components and build out a SWOT analysis. And if you're not familiar with the SWOT analysis, it's a two by two matrix and you have strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. And so it's really evaluating where you have advantages and or maybe disadvantages in the marketplace. Next revenue targets. What are your
Goals when it comes to revenue? What are your goals when it comes to profit? And what is your anchor strategies to get there? You know, I talk about profit acceleration and, you know, one thing I offer is a strategy session to sit down with any business. We'll talk through some of the core profit strategies. And if it makes sense, we'll sit down and do a more formal profit acceleration assessment where we go through their business and dig into key strategies. But let's look at your cost structures.
Let's look at your pricing strategy. What's your market position? Do you have good, clear messaging to your market? Do you have a compelling offer that your potential clients can't resist? How are you speaking to the now buyers, that three to 5%, and the not yet or someday buyers, that 95 %? It's important that you have processes to attract both of those customer bases.
So those are a lot of the profit strategies. Do you have alliances, joint ventures? Do you have bundling? Do you have upselling, downselling? If you're just a me too voice in the marketplace, you're gonna commoditize yourself. You're gonna be in a race to the bottom on price, discounting, and other things that aren't gonna help you build a sustainable profit generating engine long-term. Next, look at your customer experience. Do you have an enhancement plan for your customer experience?
Do you have a good way to collect intelligence from your customers on their experiences doing business with you? How are you getting feedback from them? And how are you leveraging that to improve your customer experience? Is every member of your team crystal clear on your expectations and standards for delivering customer experience?
Team development. Do you have a team? If you have employees, what's your plan for developing that team? What's your plan for building their capacity?
Do you have key positions that if you hired or upgraded your existing staff would help you out? A lot of times business owners will say, hey, I've had this person for a long time. They're loyal. want to, know, they feel this reciprocity to be loyal back to that employee. As the business owner, the business might be suffering because of that loyalty. So if you can't,
upgrade your team through training development. If they don't have the capacity, you need to upgrade your team by changing out the players.
I came from a talent development world, talent management space where we worked on things like succession planning. We worked on leadership development and coaching. We talked about performance evaluations, talked about culture, quite frankly. Have you built a culture that your team naturally fits into? Are you clear on your mission, vision, the company's purpose, if you will? Are you clear on your values and what's your true North as a company? It's very important that you dig into these topics.
Then marketing and sales. What is your lead generation funnel look like? How are you getting leads? How are you attracting potential clients, buyers, customers? How are you converting them? Do you have a sales process? Do you have a sales pipeline? How are you optimizing that? A lot of businesses leave this to chance. They don't have sales scripts. They don't have a crystal clear process and a funnel that they're moving their clients through.
or potential clients, their leads and converting them to customers. So what does that look like? I like to sit down with clients and talk about that lead generation pipeline and funnel and process and that sales process. Having clear sales script is really important and remembering that everybody who works for you has the potential to be a salesperson. It's not just a dedicated sales team. How are you equipping everybody? And then lastly, technology and systems. Do you have upgrades that are needed?
How are you looking at modern technologies, automation, artificial intelligence, leveraging those tools to help you be more productive, more effective, testing things? What technologies do you have? CRMs, marketing, nurturing those leads. How do you stay top of mind with your existing customers? How do you nurture new customers?
So now that you've done a review of 2024, you've taken some time to plan for 2025. Again, I think it's very reasonable that you could spend at least a half a day on each of those first two topics, reflecting back, looking forward. Then transition into action. What are you gonna do? It's great to have a plan. Now you've got to build out action steps, quarterly milestones, monthly goals, targets, weekly actions.
You got to translate that strategy and distill it down into tactics that you're going to go take action on that are going to help you move towards those targets that you set.
So in the spirit of that, I'm gonna ask you to commit to some action steps.
Start your planning, schedule it. If you remember a couple episodes ago, I had Ryan McKinney on the podcast and we talked about scheduling two hours. Go find that two hours, go find a half a day. Between Christmas and New Year's, can you block off two or three two hour chunks to do some of this?
If you're interested and would like a planning template, send me an email, reach out to me on LinkedIn, message me, peter at peter-leckemby.com. Be happy to give you a planning template to help you and a framework, some tools that'll help you be really effective in your planning and goal setting. And then third, key metrics that you should track in the upcoming year. Now we'll talk high level and then I'll get into a little bit more granular of
metrics, but at the very top, obviously you're tracking revenue, you're tracking profit, both gross and net, you've got to have all those numbers on regular basis. Number of new customers, average revenue per customer, average revenue per transaction.
Cost of labor, all of your fixed costs. Now understand what those fixed expenses are and where you might be able to save some money or where you might be able to optimize, where you have redundancy. What are some things you can do on some of those fixed costs?
Marketing, how much are you spending on advertising and marketing? How much does each lead cost you to acquire? How much does each customer cost you to acquire? What's your return on ad spend? You'll hear ROAS used a lot. Return on ad spend. That's a good metric. Your conversion rate. If you have a landing page or a website, people go to that website. Are you tracking that? Do you have analytics on that? Customer service, customer experience. Do you send a survey out?
Are you just counting on Google reviews? If you are, are you asking for those Google reviews? Track those new Google reviews. Set a benchmark for the number of new Google reviews you want to get. if you're a restaurant or service place, a Yelp review, those are always really important, I think. Whenever I go to a new city, I go to Yelp. I look for the top rated places, and it's allowed me to find some incredible restaurants and businesses, places just off the beaten path.
Other key metrics. Run some tests, split tests. If you've got an ad that goes out, you know, whether it's, you know, Valpack or yard signs, you know, have a code on there so that you can track, Hey, how did you hear about this?
Other key metrics that you might want to track if you have crews out in the field, think landscapers, think roofers, think maybe plumbers, remodelers, hardscape teams. What's the amount of unbilled labor that you're spending? How much windshield time is your crew having? Do you have a scheduling problem? Do you have an efficiency gain that can be made there? Are you tracking those metrics? So again, we're getting down into more fine-tuned metrics. And if you don't know or don't
haven't tracked these and are interested, you know, let's get together. Schedule time on my calendar. You can, I'll put it in the show notes, a link to schedule 15 minute strategy session with me and happy to walk through that and see how I might be able to help you build some of those systems out. And if it makes sense and we can work together, great, I'm happy to help you. If not, I'll still give you some information that I think would be able to allow you to make some transformational shifts in your business. So those are some of the key metrics that you're gonna wanna track.
and you should track it, quite frankly.
All right, we're gonna bring this in for landing, because I know many of you have holiday parties you wanna get to, eggnog to be drinking, last minute shopping to be doing, or whatever, maybe it's just unplugging, relaxing. Some of you, this like busiest weekend for your business, your Super Bowl weekend is coming up this next weekend. So here's what we've covered. Spent a few minutes talking about how to reflect back on 2024 and what that looks like. Then you're gonna spend some time looking at 2025 and looking at
your goals, what are your key targets? What are you going to do this next year? Set the bullseye on your target. And then you are going to write it down, get it on paper. We talked about action steps, simple planning. If you want a template, send me a message. I'll make sure I get you that. If you want to talk through key metrics, you should be tracking set up time with me as well. Happy to help you walk through that.
I'd love to invite you to email me or message me on LinkedIn. Always reach out, connect and share your plans. What questions do you have? What plans are you making? And share your successes. If you had a great year and had some incredible growth, share that. Would love to recognize you and heck, I'd love to maybe interview if you've got some things that you think the rest of the community could benefit from. Let's talk about what it looked like to come on and be a guest.
Speaking of that upcoming podcasts, I'm going to have some great guests coming up that I'm excited to bring you in 2025 But for ways that, that we can work together, obviously have one-to-one coaching for those businesses that qualify for that. Those
bigger businesses, a little more established, have some employees looking for things like profit acceleration strategies, team building and leadership development, coaching for their leadership teams, all of those services that I can offer. And then if you're a smaller business, solopreneurs, newer in the space, I am going to be launching a group coaching and mentoring community in early 2025 that you could join, get the benefit of learning from other business owners and getting more access to me as a
coach and mentor. So a lot of exciting things coming up in 2025 between the podcast, the group coaching and as well as working on a book that I will be publishing in the new year. So a lot of exciting things. I want to thank all my guests that I've had up to this point. I want to thank the support of friends and family who have been contributing on this journey. Just some fantastic people and hope everybody has a very happy holiday season, whatever holiday you celebrate.
Merry Christmas, happy new year, and get rest, spend time with those you love. The greatest present is your presence. Enjoy and have a great one. We'll see you next year.