Bill Ross: Today, I have with us Jacob Aldrich, who is an international business advisor and keynote speaker. He has worked with 400 businesses in 14 countries, creating over $1 billion in new revenue. On top of that, he has delivered his signature workshops to more than 2,000 business owners, and is a Virtual Speaker Hall of Fame nominee. Alongside his wife and business partner, Harmony, and their 6-year-old daughter, Jacob leads a full-time travel family, visiting 6 to 10 countries per year. He is actually joining us right now from Tunisia in North Africa. I am jealous.

Jacob, welcome to the Expert Interview Series.

Jacob Aldridge: Thank you for the invitation, it's good to be here.

Bill Ross: Fantastic. Well, this is a very short, quick action-packed interview series to get some strategy out of you for the people who are listening, the business owners and founders. So I'm going to jump right into the question, and that is, what is the most effective strategy you recommend for business owners to increase sales while also strengthening their company's reputation?

Jacob Aldridge: And whenever I hear that either-or and conversation, that conflict, we want to increase sales, and we're worried about the reputation, or do we focus on reputation and sales? When I hear that conflict, especially when the word strategy is thrown around.

To me, it comes back to a core question, which is what I call capacity planning, and the capacity engine within small business.

So if you take all of the components of the business, your team, the machinery if you have it, trucks out on the road, you combine them all, your business has a capacity to generate a certain amount of revenue. An engine can get a certain amount of power out, your business can get out a certain amount of revenue. And when we get stuck on that question, do we increase sales, do we handle reputation, do we do any of the other million great ideas that every business owner has before breakfast each day.

Bringing it back to that simple question helps to focus that strategic decision, which is as simple as, if we've got excess capacity in the engine today, how do we get more power out of it?

And if we've got the pedal to the metal, and that engine is really firing on all cylinders, then we need to get a bigger engine.

And if you need a bigger engine, you need to increase the capacity of your business to generate revenue, that's where more sales leads to a worse reputation, so everything falls over. You've essentially put nitro into the engine when you're already going at 120 miles an hour down the interstate.

And the engine's going to blow up. And that's going to blow up in terms of customer service, it's going to blow up in your business's ability to deliver on the sales promise.

And similarly, if your engine's at 40 or 50%, I know a lot of businesses at the moment, there's a lot of uncertainty around, they are running at 40-50% of capacity. And if you focus too much there on brand, reputation.

Growth in that regard, then you run the risk of having an even bigger engine that's just idling away, and that's not great for culture, it's not great for the team. That's where you really do need to focus on sales. And so that, to me, is the effective strategy, is first and foremost asking, are we powering up the engine we have?

Or are we growing a bigger engine?

Bill Ross: Gotcha, gotcha. So with that two polar opposite situations, how do you actually explain to a business to figure out where they are right now? Because they obviously need to make a critical decision at this point before they go down the wrong path, right?

Jacob Aldridge: And the beautiful thing about the capacity calculations is how objective you can be with them, and especially rolling that out to a team. I've worked in a lot of teams where they feel really busy, and they are really just being ineffective. They're busy without being productive. And when you can map out how that business generates revenue, you can do those calculations and lay it all out on a single page.

So a law firm, for example, you've got a number of lawyers, they have an hourly rate, there's a certain number of hours you expect them to bill each day. You can do those calculations very, very quickly and easily. If you've got a trade-based home services business, maybe it's a little trickier to do those calculations, and the bigger the business, the more complex sometimes those assumptions have to be.

But you can take that exercise and map out the numbers.

What could we be doing in a perfect world? What could we be doing in a real world? And what are we actually doing right now? And is that what we're expecting? And an interesting thing I find is most business owners do have a good intuition around it. I can run the beautiful spreadsheet as a consultant, and I'll often be pretty close to what the business owner said was their gut feel at the start of the exercise, but at least then we can go to the team and point to the spreadsheet, say, really, you're busy, and you're underperforming, we need to change something.

Bill Ross: Okay, so now they've made the decision about which direction they need to go, okay? And depending on that decision, what's the next step?

Jacob Aldridge: Well, then it comes to, well really, there are 6 ways to get more power out of your current engine, and there are 6 ways to grow the engine. And the 6 ways to get power out, it's efficiency and it's revenue. So, it's things like better culture, better systems and processes, better analytics and data reporting.

But very much better marketing, better sales. If you have a team sitting around, not producing revenue, that's usually because you don't have enough clients. Go out and find more clients.

And then once you've found them, if you are running that engine towards capacity and you need to grow it, well, that's where you can start thinking a little bit more, like, how do we add more people, is the most common one, but how do we add more products? Your second product is always more profitable than your first.

How do we find some other distribution channels into market? How do we really ramp up our belief system as an organization so that we can see a much bigger opportunity in the game that we're playing?

And that's where you can then start unfolding the specifics within your business. Where are those inefficiencies? Where are those growth opportunities? And business grows in steps. You power up the engine, then you get a bigger engine, then you power that up, then you get a bigger engine. And if you can map out those steps, and lay out a strategic roadmap for your team, it gets implemented much faster, and the team are on board with that journey, which just makes a world of difference when you come into work each day.

Bill Ross: So really, you're talking about, for the most part, before they worry about all the outside noise, essentially, is to really take a step back, look at the internal workings and structure of their business right now, and make a good, clear evaluation of what they need to do before they take any steps, essentially. And because they do that, then they can actually have a successful path, and a quicker path to the result that they're looking for.

Jacob Aldridge: Spot on. I could not have done that better myself, Bill. I'll need you on stage with me next time I get up to try and explain this.

Bill Ross: I don't know that I have quite the stage-speaking presence that you do, so we'll leave it up, we'll leave that for you.

Jacob Aldridge: The challenge business owners, entrepreneurs, we're all guilty of… it's the squirrel, it's the bright, shiny object syndrome. Every time you listen to a podcast, every time you go to another conference, another event, another, you know, rubber chicken dinner, you get another great idea. And so, exactly as you describe it, before you dive into all of those ideas and try and weigh them up, or assess them, or evaluate each individual idea.

Taking that time to go, well, what is the structure of the business? What are we trying to achieve? Where do we want to go? But what is the structure of the business today? And therefore, what do we need? Otherwise, you're implementing what might be a good idea, but it's not the capacity opportunity for your business today. You add new products onto a team that's not selling.

Those products aren't going to work. You add more sales into a team that's already busy, and effectively busy, they're going to drop the ball on some of those clients. So, having an understanding of that means you can choose the right shiny object, and then we can have a chat about how you implement that properly, instead of just bouncing off to the next squirrel the next day.

Bill Ross: Gotcha. Okay, so you brought this up, so I'm gonna ask a question that is a little out of left field myself, and that is, okay, all these shiny objects, how do you advise people to, ignore the things that are coming in that is grabbing their attention every single day, and focus really on what needs to be the case, which is what you just talked. Figure out what they actually need, as opposed to grabbing whatever shows up in front of them.

Jacob Aldridge: And if you've got the business to the point where you're over about 33 employees, that's where you can step into more of that visionary role and bring in that COO, what some systems call the integrator, someone who's actually in charge of the day-to-day operations to let you go and float up in the clouds.

The simplest thing that I do with my clients is give them permission to capture all those ideas, and to create a super simple Kanban board, which is now, next, future. So now, these are the three to five strategic priorities that my business is designing or implementing now. I've communicated within the team, the team know those are the priorities, we're not changing those.

Next are the three to five next priorities that are coming, based on that capacity growth plan. I've communicated those to the team. The team know that they're flexible. If a better opportunity comes along, we might change that order. And then the future is all the ideas that I've had, all the ideas my team has had, captured, documented, visible for everyone to see, perhaps.

So that they know that they've got some input into the strategy, and that every time a now project gets completed and we celebrate, and the next project gets moved forward, there's space to go, of all these other opportunities, what are we bringing into that strategic pipeline?

And in that way, you as the entrepreneur feel that your ideas are being heard, are being captured, and not being lost, but you start to see the benefit of actually properly designing and fully implementing your ideas, instead of You know, half doing them, which is where you just end up with a business that's going around in circles, everyone feeling busy, and there's too much month at the end of the money, because you're not actually using your engine to create the commercial outcome that you want.

Bill Ross: I love it. I think you just gave… every business owner a key strategic piece of advice on how to deal with, you know, all these shiny objects. I mean, frankly, we all get them, we all love them, and it's a real problem, and I think what you just laid out was amazing, including the original advice. So, thank you so much.

I do have one more quick question for you, and that is simply. If people want to know more, they want to find out, you know, how you can help them, or anything else about you, what do they do? How do they find you?

Jacob Aldridge: Well, the fun thing is to just Google Jacob Aldridge and see what shows up, but if you want something specific, I'll put a little bit of information here. If you go to jacobAldridge.com forward slash capacity, I'll outline some of what I've explained to you here, Bill, so that people can maybe watch another video, read a little bit more about that specific topic, and see how they could implement that, to then go and implement all those shiny objects in a way that makes you, makes you happy.

Bill Ross: That's great. Fantastic. Well, listen, thank you for your time today. I'm gonna go ahead and let you get back to your travels, and again, thank you so much.

Jacob Aldridge: Thank you, Bill.