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How To Get The Right Client And Make The Right Business Plan With Brandon White [Episode 89]

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What are you doing to attract clients that are the right fit for you and your business?

Synergy between client and business is critical to success. However, not everyone knows how to achieve this – or how to build their business to do so. In this episode, Doug C. Brown speaks with Brandon C. White, entrepreneur, angel investor, former venture capitalist, and host of EDGE Podcast. They discuss the ins and outs of business planning, why tradition isn’t always the right path to follow when building a business, and how to attract perfect-fit clients to your company.

 

In this episode you will learn:

 

Episode’s guest – Brandon White

CSS 87 | Business Plan

Brandon White is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and former venture capitalist with two exits (so far) and a ton of strikeouts. He also worked in marketing at America Online (AOL). Brandon started his professional career in technology in 1996 as the Founder/CEO of Worldwide Angler. Worldwide Angler was recognized as the number one social networking and e-commerce site for sport fishermen on the internet. He bought the company back from investors in 2001, renamed it Tidal Fish, and led it to a successful exit to a large media company a decade later. Currently, Brandon hosts the EDGE Podcast from his recording studio in Half Moon Bay, CA. The show gives business owners the edge to win in their business and their life with science-based tools and unscripted conversations with guests who share their playbooks and lessons learned.

Visit his website: www.myEDGEpodcast.com

Brandon is giving away free access to his 30+ page ebook, Your Guide To Building the Perfect Business Plan, including how to write a business plan in 13 easy-to-build slides. Learn more here: www.buildabusiness.io/guide-to-building-the-perfect-business-plan

transcript

How To Get The Right Client And Make The Right Business Plan With Brandon White

We’re going to do another great episode with a man named Mr. Brandon White. He is at BrandonCWhite.com. He has had a couple of very successful exits. He’s a pretty bright guy. He knows technology, sales, and all kinds of things. We’re going to talk about how we’re going to get the right client, why it’s crucial to get the right client, and how you do this through a number one vehicle that a lot of people will go, “I don’t know.” That’s called a business plan.

Brandon has a thirteen-slide business plan that takes less time to go from a flight in San Francisco to Boston and you could have your complete business plan done. If you are going to be a 1% earner in your industry and you’re like, “I own the company,” great. You want a business plan. If you want to be a 1% earner in selling, you’re also going to want a business plan as well. Believe it or not, you want to and must review these things quarterly. We’ll explain why in a moment. Let’s go talk to Brandon.

Brandon, welcome to the show. I appreciate you being here.

I’m grateful for you having me on. Thanks a lot. I always enjoy our conversations. I’m hoping that we can stay within the timeframe of your show because you and I always tend to stay on the phone for a long period of time.

That’s because you have a robust level of expertise. When I talk to you, I don’t want to get off the ground.

No, I think it’s the other way around, but I’m grateful for that. Thank you.

We’re going to talk about why it’s crucial to get the right client and why not doing that results in a loss of revenue. That all stems back from you having a lot of expertise, but one of the things is a business plan. If you wouldn’t mind, let’s talk about a business plan. A lot of people, when they talk about business plans go, “Do I have to do a business plan? What’s the point?” What would you say to say to somebody like, “Why do I have to do a business plan?”

Studies show that you increase your chances when you build a business plan. I’ve looked at real scientific research. Having said that, you have to talk about the type of business plan. This doesn’t mean that you spend six months writing the business plan, which I did for my first company in 1996. It means you need a business plan so that you can at least put down some plan and have a map of where you’re going. What I did wrote to that old-school business plan in the beginning, and I’m sure you and the readers out there are learning about that. I got my MBA a while ago. In business schools, they were still teaching these long firm business plans.

When I went to business school, it was after I had already started my first company and bought it back from the investors. I ultimately sold it. I’d raised money on another type of business plan. I said, “Why are we doing this?” They said, “It’s an exercise,” and that’s fine, but it wasn’t practical. Having a business plan doesn’t necessarily mean maybe those thoughts that come up when you said, “You got to write a business plan.” The person instantly thinks, “This is a long-form business plan and you need to write it out.” I’m way too technical, but I took all my years of experience and a lot of failures quite candidly.

I also studied what other people out there talk about. Sequoia Capital arguably is one of the most successful venture firms in the world. What do they say? What did Peter Thiel say who owns several venture firms and hedge funds and has probably created some of the most impactful companies on Earth or been involved in them? What do three other well-known people say? I looked at that, took what my ideas were, and then came up with a plan that I’ve been using ever since.

You mentioned a keyword that a lot of people go, “Come on. Research? No.” You’re coming out with a new book. What’s the title?

The working title is Back of the Napkin to Building a Business Plan in 13 Slides: It’s easy that you can do it on a flight from San Francisco to New York.

I have to take a flight to San Francisco. I’m going to test this out and give you feedback.

I’m happy to go over the slides if you want or however you want to do it, but it is thirteen slides. You could do it in twelve. This was from the experience of saying, “Where would you use this?” You’re going to use it with your team and in sales calls on a regular basis, probably some version of it, then you’re going to use it to raise money. If your company is growing and you’re in some growth mode, you’re going to need capital. You know this better than anybody. Sales teams sell. You’re going to need capital.

I’m getting technical here, but I spent a lot of time thinking about this. The meetings are 50 minutes. You see some people, even with a sales deck, which is a version of the business plan, but it’s a business plan for the product or service. They come in with like 22 or 30 slides. Tell me how that works. Not only do they do that, but they put a wall of words on there in ten-point font because they want to get it on there. Explain to me how you’re going to 1) Cover all that and 2) As soon as you put it up there, the person’s going to try to read it. You’re going to do that in 50 minutes.

You did describe the meeting I had in Rochester, New York many years ago before I knew what you teach. I did the same thing. I didn’t even have time to finish it all. Hence, I didn’t get the money either. I’d like to get your feedback on this. When I was in the military, we had an objective and a map. They’d drop us out in the middle of nowhere and say, “You got to go here.” We’d have a map, compass, and things like that. We had to figure our way there and our way back.

A business to me without a business plan is like not having a map or a compass. You might have an objective out there, “I want to do this.” I talked to a lot of people who have missions. They want to drive a mission, “I want to help this many people. I want to bring this many software pieces into the world,” or whatever it might be. There’s a mission and a goal out there, “I want to build a $100 million company.” There’s a goal. I had this call. The lady wants to drive $1 million into her business by December 31, 2022. She’s a startup company. She has no business plan, map, or whatsoever.

How many of the readers either have a $1 million business or not yet and all saying, “We want to add a few million to our revenue line?”

What’s the plan? Isn’t that what the business plan is for? Is it to talk through these points of how we’re going to achieve this?

I do a 360 review every single year. I try to make everything easy, which is my Psychology background because I have a Master’s in Psych. I study that. If you don’t make it easy, people aren’t going to do it. I ask people who are close to me or not close to me to describe me in four words and tell me my strength and weakness every year. In fact, I put it on my podcasts, “I’m not scared to be completely open.” What I tend to be is very intense because I try to get to the bare metal.

If you don't make a business plan easy, people are not going to do it. Click To Tweet

Using your example, someone’s mission is for everyone to have their software, or here’s the thing, no one cares what your mission is. What they care about is what problem you’re solving for them, which is what the business plan answers. That may be your mission and your goal, but it’s self-centered and the business plan brings out what problem are you solving for the customer. If you do not do that, the customer doesn’t care what your mission is.

CSS 87 | Business Plan
Business Plan: No one cares what your mission is. What they care about is what problem you’re solving for them, which is what the business plan answers.

 

I did an elevator pitch training, which is Slide 1 because you put up the title of your company and your logo. Here’s what people want to do in their elevator pitch, “I’m Brandon White. I’ve got an MBA and a Master’s in Psych. I’ve done 2 companies and failed 22 times. I was a venture capitalist. I worked at America Online in marketing and I did the financials and marketing. I have a service that can help you with your marketing.” First of all, you weren’t even listening when I told you what I did because no one cares. What’s the number one looked-at page by a visitor on LinkedIn?

I don’t know.

It’s the visitor’s own page. Why? Because we like hearing our name. You teach this. People like to hear their names, talk about themselves, hear about themselves, and look at themselves. It’s like people when they go to the gym, as another example. People will say to me, “I can’t go into the gym because everyone’s looking at me.” No one’s looking at you. They’re looking at themselves in the mirror. They may glance at you, but they don’t care. Going back to the business plan, it dials you in on what you’re doing and gets it down to the bare metal, which is what took me a long time.

I’m not throwing stones. I learned this in a sales meeting. I’m not going to say what company. I was in a Fortune 100 company meeting with a C-level person. I got in there because one of my investors at that time in that company knew the person. We did have a good product that would solve a real problem that they were having in their CRM. I won’t say I was nervous, but for all the things that I teach and do, for whatever reason, I walked through this doorway and lost it, I’m trying to explain why we’re good and why we have PhDs.

We did all this research and he walked down and he’s like, “Don’t ever do that again.” I was like, “What do you mean don’t ever do that? It went okay, didn’t it?” He’s like, “It went okay, but you could have cut that meeting in half and we could have got an absolute sale if you would shut your mouth about talking about yourself and what all the people in this company did or have achieved and told him what problem you saw for him.”

That was a pivotal moment in my life. From then, I always lead with the pitches, which is, “What problem are you solving?” You know if you are good at your elevator pitch if the other person asks you what your name is, how you came up with it, and what your story but you don’t get to tell that. That’s what the business plan model that I came up with does for you. It teases that out. When I teach it in person, you can watch people squirm. I’ve taught 1,500 people and you can see them shifting in the first 15 minutes of the class. How painful it is?

We’re speaking with Mr. Brandon White. He’s at BrandonCWhite.com. What’s the C stand for?

It’s Christian and I don’t like putting my middle letter in because it sounds too formal, but I was held up at an airport for Brandon White who is a criminal. Now I put the C in on. Maybe you have the same thing.

I don’t have a criminal. I have a hockey player. Doug Brown is a professional hockey NHL player. People used to think I played hockey and I’d fall down on skates. I love the fact that it’s problem-solving and the business plan talks about that. Do you mind going through the slides?

I can tell what they are. I don’t think we’ll have enough time to go through each formula. I’m not saying that because I want anyone to buy the book or take the course. It takes a minute, but it doesn’t take that long. There are thirteen slides in this model. The first one is the name of your company and your logo, which is where you give your elevator pitch. It’s vitally important to me. It’s the same thing in sales. You got to get that elevator pitch right and it’s one sentence. It’s not 30 seconds, but less than 10. People look at me and say, “That’s not possible.”

It’s possible, but it’s going to take a lot of hard work to get that. If you can’t do that, then it’s too complicated. Humans don’t have enough time for that. Slide 1) Elevator pitch. Slide 2) The problem slide. What problem are you solving? Not what your mission is or any of that, “A person does this. The pain they experience is this. The outcome is this.” That’s the formula. That’s what you have to put on that slide. Not 5 sentences, it’s a big 34-point font and it needs to be that simple, then Slide 3) The solution, which is going to be your product or service. Slide 4) Your product. Slide 5) The market opportunity. I teach that class and students still come back with the wrong thing. You can’t build that. It’s not 1% of the market. I know you teach this in all the things you do. It’s from the bottom up.

Let’s elaborate on that one because I don’t think everybody’s going to get that one like you and I do because we talk. “From the bottom up,” what does this mean?

What people will put on that slide is, “I’m building a software company. Let’s do something else. I’m going to sell windshield wipers.” I’m going to make this simple. The automobile parts market in the United States is $10 billion. I’m using round numbers here. We’re going to get 0.5% of that and that’s going to equal 0.5% times $10 million. That’s X amount of money. That’s how much this company can be worth. The bottom-up includes your rollout schedule because this is your plan.

I live in Half Moon Bay. I’m selling windshield wipers and I’m going to sell a high-end windshield wiper that doesn’t degrade in the sun, which is a big problem in California because it doesn’t rain all that often. The windshield wipers sit in the sun and then when it rains, it scratches everybody’s windshield. This is a real thing. You and I are going to sell this high-end windshield wiper.

I’m going to say, “How many people live in Half Moon Bay, California? How many cars does the average household have?” I’m going to figure that out. I’m going to make some guesses here, but I’m going to say, “How many people are going to do to get a generic windshield wiper to replace their other one? How many of them are going to buy the high-end?” There are about 10% of people. That’s how I’m going to get my number.

You’re going to keep building that out. I’m going to go from Half Moon Bay and my rollout schedule to say, “I’m going to do San Mateo County. I’m going to do Northern California or NorCal, San Francisco Bay Area, then I’m going to go to the Central Valley, then Southern California, then I’m going to take on a new state and do the same thing.” What this does for your market opportunity is it shows you some realistic numbers because everything we’re doing here is going to translate into your Excel spreadsheet in your financial projections which is another thing that nobody does, which they should because they’ll say, “It’s a guest.”

I don’t care that it’s a guest, but you don’t have an idea what your customer acquisition costs to know if that line in your P&L is right. What that does is it says, “Okay,” and then you’re matching this market opportunity with your timeline and now we have a plan because the other one has no plan. You see this probably more than I do because you’re very focused on the sales part of a business. I met with some entrepreneurs. They told me this.

They’re like, “We’re going to get 0.5% of this market and it’s $30 million.” I said, “Let’s switch to your spreadsheet. Can you go to the tab on your spreadsheet that shows me your marketing and how we’re going to get that 0.5%?” There’s no tab. They don’t know. This isn’t about just new businesses. Existing businesses that are expanding their product or service won’t do this or they’ll say, “We’re going to upsell our existing customers into that.”

“Can you go to the tab on your spreadsheet?” They’ll say, “We have an email list of 500,000 people.” “Show me the waterfall of that marketing and how that’s going to translate into sales and how that flows through?” It never happens. We’re just guessing. We’re blowing in the wind. That was a long answer to your market opportunity, but that’s what we’re doing on that slide.

If one does that in an investor meeting, the game’s over right there. It’s very unlikely that anybody’s going to move forward from that point forward. That person has already lost the deal. Should one do a business plan once, every year, or every three years? How often does a business plan or should a business plan be done?

The business plan that I’m talking about is a dynamic business plan that’s easy to build and use. You should change it quarterly as it relates to new data because you’re going to experience new data and update it. Theoretically, you are a finance person. You may be that if you’re reading. You may also be the CEO, the dishwasher, and everything else or you may be the CEO and have a finance person. They’re going to adjust their quarterly things anyway. I believe that at least you go in there and do it quarterly. Some people say, “I can’t do that. I don’t have enough time.” Fine, then you should at least do it in your shutdown meeting at the end of the year for your next year.

CSS 87 | Business Plan
Business Plan: Your business plan should be a dynamic business plan that is easy to build, use, and change regularly as it relates to new data.

 

I find a lot of businesses in the SMB space aren’t even doing shutdown meetings. I’m wondering, “How do you plan?” “We plan in January.” That’s like, “I’m planning right now. Our shutdown meeting is soon because we got to figure out 2023.” You should do it at least yearly at least so you have this roadmap and you have something to refer to. What I do is I keep ours open on my computer all the time because it’s easy to veer off, especially as a business owner entrepreneur.

It’s like you’re going to chase a shiny object, build a new product, and build a new service. It’s a billboard sitting there, like a posted note that’s like, “This is where you were if it’s in front of you.” That’s my answer. Quarterly, if you have a good process and your company’s big enough to have the infrastructure to run that, but at a minimum, yearly.

What I love about that is that it tells us what to say no to as well when we’re doing quarterly reviews and then a shutdown meeting at the end of the year. You want to define shutdown meetings so people who aren’t aware of what that might be.

For us and all the companies that I’ve had and run, it is a complete shutdown of the business. Not that we’re not selling, but we’re not doing anything else. It usually can be 3 to 5 days, depending on how big your company is. We are walking through what we did the previous year and what our goals are for the next year. We usually do it at the C-level and/or Senior VP level. It would be in a bigger company, a $100 million or $50 million plus. We’re setting all our goals, including our pipeline.

It’s a painful thing, but that’s all you’re doing that week. I’m talking about the structure, but it’s about planning sessions for the following year where you’re setting all your strategic goals. In addition to your actual numbers, your product launches, whatever you’re going to do, and in hours, we emphasize a lot the sales pipeline. I’m using the word avatar. I hate the word because it’s overused and people never do it. What are the customers that we’re going after? In the government company that I ran, we defined seven contracts that we wanted. That was our sole focus.

The only way in a quarterly meeting that you could undo that was if there was a two-page brief that says, “Here’s the opportunity. Here’s why we should do it,” because otherwise if you don’t have that rigor, you get the shiny object. By the end of the year, you chase twenty things and you didn’t get any of them. Having that shut down with all of your people, we check the phones at the door. It requires that level of concentration, then you have your business plan and you go in. You execute it. Now it’s an execution exercise, not a research exercise on the spot. Is that about how you see your shutdown meeting?

That’s pretty close to what we do as well. My head’s going up. I remember one of the companies that I was helping. We had 30,000 businesses go through this and I did this research. The first question we asked them was, “When’s the last time you’ve reviewed your goals from the time you started your business?” It blew my mind that the majority of companies, and I’m talking well over 90% of companies, never reviewed a goal ever from the day they started the process. Most of these are companies that are doing up to $20 million or $30 million. The larger companies reviewed it on a quarterly basis.

If the readers go, “This makes sense,” I’m going to challenge you on this right now. Sit down, do a business plan again, figure out where you’re going, and try this on a quarterly basis. You don’t have to be perfect, but it will tell you things like what to say no to. As entrepreneurs, a lot of times what I have found, especially with myself, it’s like, “I can monetize that.” I got fifteen ideas in the next three months that I can monetize. Sometimes I feel myself creeping into it and then I’m like, “I shouldn’t have gone down that path.”

If I had reverted back to the business plan, seven clients, that’s it. We’re going after those. That’s our target. I would’ve been able to say, “I’m not going to go down that path.” I find that to be invaluable for people and the people who don’t do it. That’s why I’m grateful you brought it up. The people who don’t do it are the ones that usually are stuck and they’re saying, “I know we could do better. I can’t figure out why.”

The other thing that I say to people is, “What’s your plan? Where did you do your review? I don’t care when it is. When’s the last time?” They’re like, “I got it in my head.” I go to the front of that meeting room, pick up the marker, and I say, “Let’s walk through the thirteen slides. Tell me what we’re doing. You got it in your head. Help me understand.” We all know what happens there in general. Some people get most of it, but it’s not in your head.

I’m the worst offender of all being an entrepreneur most of my life. It’s a relief because I’m thinking about, “I could make money there.” We could make money. We could tie that into this. We could spin that out and it’s like, “No,” and it stops you going down that drain. It’s a relief to me. Someone, which was me telling myself or us in the company telling ourselves what to do. It’s a relief sometimes when someone tells you what to do and says, “Here’s what you’re focused on. Here’s what you’re doing.” You’re like, “I can get back to work and get some work done.”

It's a relief sometimes when someone tells you what to do and says, Here's what you're focused on. Here's what you're doing. You're like, Okay, I can get back to work and actually get some work done. Click To Tweet

Getting it out of your head does magical things. You get to look at it from the outside in and now you are looking at it and going, “Maybe this wasn’t exactly what I thought was in my head.” If you don’t get it out of your head, then A) You’ll forget part of it. B) You’ll resent part of it later on. I guarantee this is going to happen. I’ll bring my wife up here. A lot of times, she’ll be thinking about something. I know she’s thinking about it and I’m like, “Tell me what you’re thinking about it.”

She goes, “I don’t have it well-formed yet.” I’m like, “Just tell me anyways,” because I know if I don’t get that out and it’s something that she’s thinking about, it could be me who’s the problem. I want to head that off right now and then change the business plan for the quarter of what I’m going to do next. This is a great analogy in life. We’re not going to have time to go through all thirteen of these. How do people get access to this?

I will give you a download and I went through these very shortly on the podcast. I would give it away for free, but you shouldn’t do that. I’ll give the outline away because I want people to have this tool. It’s not my mission. I just know how valuable it is. It does take a lot of discipline. It’s not easy. What I’ve learned in life is that if something isn’t easy and it doesn’t somehow incorporate into an existing habit, it doesn’t happen.

Even on goals, at the beginning of the year, people tend to come up with fifteen goals. My model or formula is 3 goals, 1 for my business, 1 for my actual health, and 1 for my personal life. That’s it. My exercise on the first of the year is easy. All these other people are coming up with twenty goals. You can’t do twenty goals. Multitasking isn’t even a thing except for 1% of the human race. It’s not possible.

When we have twenty things, life happens. It’s like the gym analogy. The gyms get all filled up in January and February due to resolutions, but come March, they start thinning out again. By April they’re back to normal. It was 8% to 12% occupancy is what the gyms do on an annual basis of membership’s number used to be. In January and February, it swells up in a big way. If they don’t have a habit across this whole thing, then it gets easy to forget.

It’s like, “Get up. Go to the gym. Exercise your mind and body. You’re going to be way better.” When we all have the plan to do this, we could do the same thing with our businesses because we could look at those and go, “This is the plan.” We’re going to follow a plan. I want to ask you this question. Does the plan go quarter to quarter? If you’re into some quarter and it’s like, “This isn’t working out,” do you go retool the business plan at that point or what do you do?

I do and I encourage people to do that. It doesn’t take long, That’s the point. This isn’t an eight-week exercise. This is probably one hour unless you have to do some research. If it’s, “We’re going to launch a new product or service,” you’re probably going to want to do some market research and at least some modeling in your spreadsheet to say, “We’re going to leverage existing customers. Here’s what we think our conversion rate is and contribution analysis.” At least see if you can make some money in there.

From a high-level standpoint, this should be no more than 1 hour or 2 exercises. I encourage that because it’s going to change. It has to be easy to do so that you can get it down. The idea around business plans has been, “I need a business plan to do this event, which is either start a company or raise money, and then I’m never going to do it.” My question is, “If you’re not doing that, what is the tool that you’re using to guide your business because I want it?”

I love the simplicity part of it because it doesn’t have to take a long time. When many people think of business plans, it was gigantic. You and I alluded to this in the old days. I remember doing those and this took me months to put a plan together. It is a total waste of time. For all those people who are like, “I don’t want to go to the gym,” go to the gym or do it at home. Do 20 pushups, 20 something for your abdominals, 20 squats, and 1 other exercise. It’s four exercises. It takes you fifteen minutes.

One of the most genius gym business plans that I have ever seen is this. Most gym memberships say, “$50 a month whether you come or not.” This was in Europe. I read about it. If somebody’s interested, get in touch with Doug or me and I’ll look it up, it’s in a book somewhere. Their model was this, “It’s free to come to the gym, but you have to come 2 or 3 times a week.” If you come three times a week, a gym membership is free for everyone, but they know nobody does it, but if you miss, it’s $50, which is a normal gym membership.

Here’s the genius about that. 1) There’s a huge falloff, and 2) They won’t cancel their gym membership because they feel guilty because they failed and not the company. It’s one of the most genius business plans. It was in a book called Freemium. A guy wrote it a long time ago in the first wave of the internet. You use it in that case study. It’s totally free, but you got to come to the gym.

I am a gym fanatic or I might try to ride my bike 100 to 200 miles a week. It’s my meditation. Sit-ups have made a big difference in my life, from everything, from my posture to how I feel to even riding my bike to anything I’ve done. Sit-up is one of the things that’s helped me. Pushups too. I have the ball in our living room next to our kitchen because it’s easy. I’m emphasizing this thing that you said. You got to make it easy. If it’s easy, you will do it. If it is not easy, you will not do it or it will take a long time and you’ll fail.

It’s the same thing with a business plan. That’s what I love about what you’ve done. You’ve broken it down and made it very simple that people so can do this in an hour. Once you do it over and over again, you have less time once you certain adjustments quarterly. There’s no reason not to do it except you don’t do it when it comes down to it I will say since here, at the CEO Sales Strategies, we teach people how to be in the top 1% of sellers.

If you’re a person who wants to be in the top 1%, you better be doing a business plan for your personal sales every single quarter because that’s going to tell you what to do and what not to do, especially in these times because things are changing all the time. The pandemics stirred things up, but I still see them changing all the time. People are shifting back and forth like, “Maybe I want to go to a live event now. I didn’t want to before because of the pandemic. Now I want to get back with people.”

As sellers, we’ve got to adjust to those times as well. If we’re not doing this on a quarterly basis, we’re going to get complacent then before you know it, you’ve added 20 pounds to your body and it’s like, “Why do I feel sluggish?” Why are your sales sluggish? It’s the same reason. It’s a life business parallel. What’s the name of your podcast?

The podcast I do is called the Edge. It’s to give you an edge to win in your business and in your life. You can check that out at MyEdgePodcast.com. Thank you for doing that. I’m grateful. I have my personal website where I have everything that you can get ahold of me, my real email, my real phone number, and everything’s on there. It’s at BrandonCWhite.com.

Thanks for being on the show. Thanks for bringing you’re a-game. I appreciate you being here.

Thank you much for having me. I always love the opportunity to talk with you in a conversation I always learn something.

You’re welcome.

There are lots of notes here. What did you learn? I hope you learn that doing a business plan is the map of the railroad to your goal. In other words, when you do a business plan, you are on track. You get a track down that’s going focused on that goal. You’d want to continue that train ride. Do you have to do the whole train ride in a month? No.

Don't put too many goals in the business plan. Keep it simple, simple, simple, because you can implement 'simple' Click To Tweet

That’s why you will work on this and every quarter you review because sometimes you might run into things like business weather and in-climate weather and you are going to want to adjust. This is why it’s important to have a business plan and why it’s important to adjust on a quarterly basis because what you’re doing now may not be what you’re doing months from now.

CSS 87 | Business Plan
Your Guide to Building the Perfect Business Plan

In other words, you might be on the right track, but you’ll find something opportunity-wise that comes along and you’ll adjust your business plan. Don’t put too many goals in the business plan. He keeps it down to three. Keep it simple because you can implement simple. If you make it all this complex stuff like people want you to put together a 44-page business plan, that’s insane. You don’t need that.

If you are a 1% earner in the world, you have a business plan. You must because you’re reviewing where you are and where you want to go on a consistent basis. Now you know what to say yes to and what to say no to. Get his book. This is a great book, and download what we got here for you. You can download the overview of the plan. In his book, he goes through this in much more detail.

If you love content like this and you want another subject matter on whatever it is that you’re looking for, maybe you are the expert, you know the expert or you don’t know the expert. Send an email to us at YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. Let us know what your idea is. Maybe we have you on the show or maybe we find the expert for you and we’ll bring that content to you. We’ll get back to you, either way, we’ll let you know one way or another whether this works or doesn’t work.

If you or somebody you know wants to get into the top 1% of sellers, in other words, earners worldwide in your industry, making a minimum of $500,000 a year and up net selling or if you’re a company that wants access to these elite performers who are highly trained, then reach out to me at Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com. That’s it. We have another episode of the show. We’re wrapping up. Go sell something. Sell a lot of it, but sell it profitably. Play win-win. In other words, you win. They win. Make someone happy. Make yourself happy, and have a great rest of your day. To your success.

 

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