The Steve Mills Results Mastery Podcast
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The Steve Mills Results Mastery Podcast
How to Thrive Through Adversity: Optimistic Business Growth Strategies
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Hello everyone. It's great to be here and thank you for your time and your interest in my podcast. It's my first one in 2025. I don't know, I intended to be a little bit, you know, all at it. You know, let's work as hard as I can over Christmas, obviously taking a few days off, but in reality that didn't quite work out. To be honest, I had other things family commitments and so on so I'm really back to it this week. So welcome. Thank you for being here. I'm really looking forward to this year. I think it's a great opportunity. Really looking forward to this year, I think it's a great opportunity.
Speaker 1:I know you know you could say well, times are tough and you know it's really difficult, steve, and you know you hear terrible things about what's happening in the world, what's happening in the economy. If you're over in the UK, as I am, you know the political situation and cutbacks and so on and so forth. But do you know what? My belief is? That you know as many people are successful in tough times as there are in good times. Reason for that, I think, is down to the fact that people tend to think that because the world is difficult and the UK or your country, whatever that might be, might have challenges, that that means that your business has to have challenges, that your business has to fail, and nothing could be further from the truth. That that you know. If you take something like the economy, you know, and they say, oh, the economy is in decline, you know. And what happens? I believe, anyways, what happens is that the government or the bank of england or, uh, you know, your bank, whatever that is you hear that the economy is in recession and so everybody stops buying things. It's almost a self-fulfilling thing and I actually believe the media are really responsible for that.
Speaker 1:You know, we are all the time on the media, on the media constantly about the bad news. And you know, I think that when it comes to the media and what we listen to, we need to be very selective. We don't want to be filling our minds full of bad news. We don't want to be filling our minds full of negativity. We need some positivity in our lives and, you know, hopefully I can, you know, bring some of that to you here today. So you know, if now is a good time, let's just examine why. You know, I'm saying to you you know, now's a good time to market your business. Now's a good time to push forward and to grow and to develop and to invest both time, effort and money.
Speaker 1:So why is that? Why is that, steve? Well, the truth of the matter is there are several reasons. Number one this is not necessarily in any order of priority, but the first thing I want to talk about is the fact that all this bad news that's going on right now, what does it do? It not only stops, you know, joe, public from spending. You know people think, oh, I better not. You know, book that holiday. Or you know, let's go to, you know, one of the lesser supermarkets rather than the more expensive ones. And you know general cutbacks, and I'm talking primarily in the B2C market. You know the business to consumer market, but let's look at the business to business market also.
Speaker 1:What tends to happen with a lot of businesses? They cut back. They. What do they cut back on? They cut back on their the very thing that they should be moving forward. You know why do they do that. It's basically out of fear and being told again and again and again how bad things are and how awful it's all going to be.
Speaker 1:So we need to make sure that you know, as I say you don't listen to all that. As I say you don't listen to all that, I mean you take note of it. I'm not saying be ignorant of it, but don't fill your mind full of negativity about how awful everything is, because I guarantee you, there are people in your industry and my industry that are doing phenomenally well right now. Just not everybody is. Why aren't the others? Because they're closing down, they're doing less, they're taking less action. What do you get if you take less action? You get worse results. That's the truth. What do you get if you take more action? You get better results. You know, it's as simple as that. So you know, that's number one.
Speaker 1:The first thing I want you to do is to, you know, basically think about. You know, if you believe that you can grow your business, then you firstly need to think about what can you do to improve not your business but yourself. You know I love listening to a guy. Let me just see, just bear with me a second. I've got his book. I'd like to just show it you. I'm just looking for it now amongst all my books. Where is it? It's there somewhere. Do you know what? I can't see it at the moment. No, I can't say. I think I must have taken it away to to my father's house, but it's, it's, it's a fantastic book and it's called the road less stupid right, it's got a great title to it and it's a brilliant book.
Speaker 1:And and in the book he talks about, uh, what you need to do in order to to grow, to move forward. And one of the little sayings that he's got is, if you want a better business, you need to become a better business owner. And that's really my message. My message to you is how can you become a better business owner? And we really need to do that and work on your business as well as yourself. Okay, so, if you're working on yourself, what have you got to work on? What are your skills?
Speaker 1:Because in your business and in my business, we've got really three key areas of skill that we need, three key areas of skill that we need. We need skills in operations, operationally doing the work, carrying out the work of the business. Whatever it is you do, if you're a coach, a consultant, an expert in something, then you need to be good at that. Secondly, we need to be good on the financial side. You know, it might be that one of the actions that you need to take as a result of listening to this podcast is to learn more about the financial side of your business. You know, my accountancy friends tell me that most business owners don't even know how to read a balance sheet, and that is a really worrying thing. And you know, for some, the reason that they fail in business is due to lack of business acumen. So we need to make sure we do that. And thirdly, and arguably more importantly or most importantly, is sales and marketing.
Speaker 1:Because if you can't sell and market your business, you know, or you're not very good at it, or even if you just average at it, what sort of rewards do you get for being average? Let me ask you another question what sort of rewards do you get if you're poor at marketing and selling what you do? Well, the answer is not poor rewards, the answer is pain, the answer is failure. The answer is probably going out of business, and 80% of businesses fail within five years, so that's an alarming statistic. If you're average, what sort of rewards do average businesses get? You know, if you're an average consultant or coach, advisor, whatever it is you do, what sort of rewards do you get.
Speaker 1:The truth of the matter is poor. You know you're not bad at what you do, but you get poor results. You know it's like going down the gym. I go down the gym a couple of times a week but I'm not really, you know, gaining the muscle or losing the weight or whatever it is why? Because I'm not doing enough.
Speaker 1:We've got to raise our game to a standard called excellent, and when we're excellent at something we get good results. And you know that's, I don't know, it's a little bit of a pain, isn't it? It's sort of unfair. I'm like one of the best, I'm in the top 10%, but my results are only, you know, reasonably good, quite good, I do quite well.
Speaker 1:But my belief is, all the rewards in life, in relationships, in health, in sport, in business, in sales, in marketing, come when we get to a level that I call outstanding, when we stand out from the competition. That's where we get all the rewards. You know it happens in sport. You know your players at tennis, you know the number one in the world you know gets whatever they get for winning Wimbledon. You know two, three million pounds, the guy who gets through to I don't know the, the, even the first round. Who loses in the first round, who loses in the first round, is still probably in the top 100 players in the world and he gets like five grand or whatever it is. I'm not sure it's not very much. But you know my point being you know, if you can be the best in your industry, you haven't got to be that much better than your competition, you've just got to be better. So you've got to learn more. You've got to, in effect, raise your game.
Speaker 1:I always remember listening, years and years and years ago, to Tony Robbins and he said you know the secret of success. He said it's really simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. He said you've got to raise your game, you've got to raise your standards. You know, if you look at your website right now, you know and I asked you to rate your website on a scale of one to 10, with one being awful, five being average and 10 being world class where would you rate it?
Speaker 1:For most people, you're going to say, well, it's a four, it's a five, it's a six, somewhere around that, somewhere around the middle. You know it's reasonable. What about your LinkedIn profile or your LinkedIn marketing or your email marketing system? What about your paid advertising on Google or Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or YouTube. You know all these things on a scale of one to 10 are somewhere.
Speaker 1:If you're like most of the businesses that I speak to, you're either not doing some of them, so you're not doing paid advertising, for example or you're doing it and it's working okay, but not great. You know you don't win that much business from it and no matter how well it's going, there's always, always room for improvement and that's something that I've learned over the last 30 years of helping businesses. I'm a specialist that going into a business, looking at what they do and working out what is needed to be done in order to improve the performance. That's why my business is called Results Mastery, because it's about mastering your results, getting to a level called mastery where you're truly outstanding.
Speaker 1:So you know it doesn't really matter that the economy's down. You know, and often what is the economy down? It's down, like you know, and often what is the economy down? It's down, like you know, one percent. You know the we're in recession because you know, for the last two periods, the last two quarters, the country as a whole have sold 0.1 percent less than it did in the in the last quarter. You know this ain't like, you know it's. It's almost irrelevant to to us as small business owners. Uh, I believe anyway.
Speaker 1:So you know, think about that, think about you know what you're going to do to change, because if you want 2025 to be better than 2024, then you cannot do the same thing. I'm sure you've heard the same many, many times. If you always do what you've always done, then you'll always get what you've always got. And I'm here to tell you that if you keep doing what you already do, you won't even get what you've already got. You know the world of marketing is changing faster than anybody can keep up. I think I've never known in the 30 years that I've been in business now, I've never known such dramatic change as in 2024. And the one thing I can tell you about 2025 and 2026 and so on is that things are going to change. You know we're only just starting off on this AI road. You know this is the biggest thing that's happened to marketing since the Internet. And if you look back and see what we had on the first year of the Internet, it is nothing compared with what we've got now, and I just cannot imagine what the internet and AI, and you know marketing and IT and all the other industries that are affected by AI what they're going to be like in just a few years. This is not something that's going to happen in 20 years time. You know, I heard recently that 50% of the jobs that are around right now will be gone by 2030. That's only five years Now. Don't worry, because there'll be another 50% of jobs produced as a result of AI.
Speaker 1:The only question is are you going to be involved in that? You know that's a real key. Are you going to take this on board? Are you going to learn about AI and are you going to use it in your business? And those of you are thinking well, you know AI is terrible. Do you know what? It's irrelevant? You know it can be used for terrible things, no doubt, but if you use it ethically and morally and in a good way, it can also be used as a fantastic tool to help you to grow your business.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I'm going to finish now. I've got a couple of things to do just before I do. The first thing I want to give you is three tips, three tips for 2025. Okay, the first one is something that everybody knows about. You know you should be doing it. You're probably not doing it, but here we go. It's measure your results, not only your financial results how much profit you've got and so on and so forth but also your sales and marketing results. How many inquiries did you get last month? Where did they come from? How many people visit your website? How many contacts have you got on LinkedIn? What's your average unit of sale? What's your lead conversion rate? How many leads do you need to get to get a sale rate? How many leads do you need to get to get a sale? Excuse me? Next one improve your results.
Speaker 1:Once you know what you're getting, you know, once you know that you know, I don't know you get 100 people come to your website and that equals one inquiry. Well, what are you going to do? You got to work on improving your inquiry rate. Instead of it being one inquiry, you get two, three or perhaps even four inquiries for those hundred people, and or you get more people to your website. If you're getting a thousand people per month to your website, and that's equaling 10 inquiries, if you got 2000, then logically you know you could get 20 inquiries. That's doubling the number of inquiries, which, over time, will double the size of your business. So this is really important stuff. So work on improving your results and, lastly, search for new opportunities.
Speaker 1:I don't mean new sales, although you should certainly be searching for those. I mean new opportunities to market yourself. You know, if you're in what this group that I call social marketers, where they go to networking events, they've probably got a website. They're, you know, attending the odd exhibition and they're posting on LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter, that's okay. You know, keep doing that, do more of it and do it better.
Speaker 1:But also look at other things. You know people say, well, nobody opens emails. Now, you know, quite frankly, well, nobody opens emails now. You know, quite frankly, that is a load of BS. You know I win a significant amount of business from LinkedIn, and so do thousands and thousands of other businesses and probably all your competitors. So you know you should be using email. If you're not using Google AdWords or Facebook AdWords or LinkedIn, why not? Why don't you give it a test? Why don't you try to? You know, a search for this new idea that you could test and then go ahead and test it. If you need help, you know, get in touch with me or somebody in order to to get that help. Ok, so there are my three tips Measure your results, improve your results and then search for new ideas and ways in which you can market your business and make more money.
Speaker 1:Now, just to finish off, I want to tell you about what I can do to help. So I've got some new stuff coming out myself, some new programs. Firstly, I've got my Results Mastery Program. That's not new. That's been around for a little while, but basically what you do if you're interested in being a member. What you get if you're interested in being a member, rather, is we have a weekly roundtable meeting. It's completed online. We get together, we look at each other's business, we ask questions, I provide ideas, we go through our results. It's a fantastic experience. It's an hour and a half of nonstop training, business development and also it's great to work together.
Speaker 1:One of the things in small businesses we're all on our own. You know we're very busy and so on, but taking time out to go and pick the minds, the brains of myself and the other people within the group. We've got some great people in the group and you know we'd love to have you in there. So if you want to know more about that, go to my website and take a look, or book a meeting with me and I can talk to you about it further. I've also got a program that I recently launched it was back in November, I think it was and it's called Results Mastery Pro. Now this is really for small businesses. It's a Q&A every week together with some training. Ok, so this enough stuff in there for you as a one-person business just starting out. You know on your first day to make six figures in the next 12 months. I'm talking over £100,000 worth of new business. If you take action Now, you're probably thinking well, that sounds great.
Speaker 1:Steve, how much does that cost? It costs a tenner a month, ten pound. I know you're thinking that's ridiculous. Why is it so cheap? It's so cheap because I want to want a thousand people to help on an ongoing basis. So this is set up by me as a total and utter no-brainer.
Speaker 1:I think you, quite frankly, I think you'd be an idiot not to join and I don't mean to be offensive in any way and I'm certainly not saying you're an idiot. I'm sure you're not and you might have something else that you're in and so on and so forth. But you know, honestly, go and take a look. You're not tied in. Try it out for a few months and see if it works for you and if it doesn't, what's the worst that's happened? You've lost 20 quid, you know. So it's definitely a no brainer, uh, lastly, this is new, this is my results mastery six-week program.
Speaker 1:Okay, this is starting at the end of january and, um, it is what it says on the tin. Really, I suppose I would say it's like a trial period for results mastery. I'd suspect that people will join the six-week program and then some of them will move into the Results Mastery program. It's a great little program. It's live on my website. I'm going to be sending emails out about it, but, you know, please feel free to sign up or to make an inquiry to book a meeting with me again, and to book a meeting. It's really easy. Just go to my website, results-mastery, and you can book a meeting online and just get yourself set up on my website. So that's about it.
Speaker 1:Thanks ever so much for bearing with me, uh, and sticking to the end. Um, I'd like to thank you, uh, for doing so and, uh, don't forget to subscribe to my podcast and I'd love it if you'd share it with as many people as you possibly can. Share it all over social media. I'm really keen to help as many businesses. It's been my passion for 30 years helping businesses, helping businesses to overcome this problem of going bust within the first five years because they've not got enough sales, they've not made enough profit, They've not got enough money in the bank to pay the bills, and that's what I'm dedicated to trying to improve. So thank you ever so much for listening and I look forward to speaking to you again on my next podcast. Thank you.
