Russell’s new strategy to take home more money without increasing sales, and what’s the #1 reason why business exists…
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Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a very rainy Marketing in your Car. It’s raining today. I’m heading into the office and I’m really excited for today. This morning, I had my accountability call with Carl White. I talked about it in an earlier podcast about the power of accountability calls, and finding an accountability partner as someone to hold you accountable.
So far, it’s been going really good. What’s fun is it’s nice having Carl. He’s such a very opposite personality from me. I think that what he brings to the table for me are just things I don’t have right now that are really cool. One of the things he was talking about which I appreciate him so much for this. It’s going to be my big focus for today is he was talking about in his company before, he would look at how much money he would make and then look at what he was actually taking home, and that percentage.
He was like, I don’t remember exactly, 15% or whatever. He was like, “How do I change that to 40 percent?” That became the goal. That was his focus. It needs to be 40 or 50%, whatever the number is. He started working and working on focusing on that. How do I take home a bigger piece each month?
He said that became one his key drivers, not how much money does the company make but how much money does he actually get to take home which is interesting to me because I think my problem is my focus has always been what’s our top line revenue. It’s a good goal to have. In fact, this month we just broke our record which I was really excited about. We had an awesome month. We did that literally without, I don’t think we hardly emailed our list at all. We didn’t do a product launch or anything and it was still probably one of the best months we’ve ever had.
I think the only time we’ve had higher months was back when we had the call center. We had 100 employes but definitely since we’ve shrunk down to about 13 people now, definitely the biggest month we’ve had by a long shot. Being with that, what I took home from that wasn’t that exciting to me. That was my frustration today on my accountability call.
What I decided to do and I’m really excited for this actually, which is funny because the least favorite part for me in our business is accounting, and accountants and stuff like that but we just hired an accountant in house. What I’m going to be doing with her is going through all of our stuff and probably spend two or three days just going through and really trying to understand the numbers because again, they’re like my enemy right now. I hate them.
Understanding them a lot better and figuring out how do I change our business so that I can take home a bigger percentage, I’m not even sure right now what percentage I’m taking home but change that to whatever it is to how do I take home 30, 40, or 50 percent. In business, that’s really the only thing that really matters. That’s not true. There are two things that matter. One is that you’re providing value to the end customer and number two is that the owner is getting paid, the owner is making money.
It was funny, when I was at Boise State, I had this finance class. I also had an economics class. My economics teacher asked a question. He said, “What’s the purpose of a business?” He was like, “Oh, to create jobs, do this, and do that,” all these things. In my finance class, my teacher who I really liked, he said, “The only purpose of a business is to make the owner money, that’s it. If it’s not for that, what’s the purpose of it?”
Obviously hopefully you’re selling something that’s going to provide value to the end customer but the only purpose of the business is to make money for the owner. I think I’m probably more in the middle of those two schools of thought but it made me think about that. Having a business, creating jobs and stuff like that is good but if you as the owner is not getting what you need out of it, what’s the point of it? You just have an average paid job, depending on what you’re doing.
That’s my big focus for this week. There’s going to be less of how can I sell more stuff. I think we got that under control. It’s going and growing. It’s exciting, but more of let’s look at the numbers and really figure out what we are actually making, take immediate costs away, this and that, and then what’s it going to take for me to increase what I’m taking home. How do we change our commission structures, our profit share structure with our internal team so that everyone is incentivized to pay me more?
It’s kind of exciting. I’m not sure what’s going to come of it. I have no idea. That’s part of the fun of the creation of it all. That’s my goal is to sit down in front of a whiteboard for four or five hours today and try to map that out and figure out a way to make that work. I’m excited.
If I figure out the solution, I’ll report back to you guys and let you know but just start thinking about that in your business. Start thinking about how can you set up things so that the goal of the business is to pay you, and one of your KPI, your key performance indicators should be how much money, what percentage of the money that the company is making, you’re able to take home each month.
I think if you do that, even if it doesn’t increase your money, gross sales, it should increase the money you take home which is really the point of this whole game anyway. There’s some advice for today. I’ll let you know how it turns out for me. Other than that, I’m at the office. I got to get out in this cold rain and run to the door. I’m going to jump off now and I’ll talk to you guys soon.