In today’s highly competitive economy, every business strives to provide greater value to its clients. Spencer Vann, the co-founder and CEO of SurplusFund.com, shares his top recommendations for other business venturers to consider and live by. His venture is one of America’s known surplus fund recovery agencies helping homeowners and real estate investors alike in recovering claimables from foreclosed homes and building and growing one’s surplus fund recovery business. Here are Spencer Vann’s top five recommendations.
Hyper-optimization
Around 50-60 per cent of the financial coaching industry had reduced or stopped spending money on advertising ever since the coronavirus pandemic broke out. Vann doubled down his marketing and advertising budget and started spending more. The reason many people in the industry stopped or reduced their online ads spending is because their ACAP (a term Lucas made up which stands for automated customer acquisition process) could be inefficient. And, when the environment and markets changed it could have caused the ACAP to be no longer profitable. This happens due to non-optimization of every single detail of the acquisition process including the product delivery itself. Intense focus on one core process while optimizing everything else thus proves profitable.
Creating a blue ocean
You can’t sell what someone else is already selling. In an industry where there are a lot of competitors selling the same products and services, it’s a little easier to get away with still closing sales because of the different markets and demographics a business can market and sell to. But quite frankly, if you want to hit bigger numbers you have to have something unique. Your own set of value propositions that will help you stand out among many options for buyers or paying customers. Whether it’s your strategy, product or traffic source. Something needs to be different.
Spencer Vann
Extreme customer focus
The business world is filled with people who might not take care of their customers like they are family, especially in the financial coaching industry. This is hard to do at scale but is very vital for success, one thing that most coaches and mentors fail to consider. Your business should not be designed to make you money. Your business should be designed to solve a customer’s problem better than anyone else offering the same services or programs. The byproduct of this is making money. Many financial coaches and mentors who focus so much on money forget who actually gives it to them: the loyal paying customers.
Majoring on major things
This is quite contradictory to the first point in a certain angle. Although the first recommendation points out that you need to optimize everything else in your business, you need to also pay attention to one core process that will get you the best stream of incoming customers and sales. Spencer is naturally very analytical. He can spend all day looking at spreadsheets and dissecting every tiny detail to better understand the story a certain sheet tells. This is something Spencer Vann really loves doing. But this is not what gets you results. Always remember the 80-20 rule. Focus on the 20 per cent of the business (that specific core process that gets you customers and sales) that will produce 80 per cent of the results. Use leverage.
North Star alignment
Every owner, employee, contractor and customer needs to understand the goal and the mission of every business. Earlier on in Spencer Vann’s career, it felt like he was going in one direction while his business partner was contrarily going another and their coaches were also heading in another, etc. One thing you always need to keep your eyes on is to always be aligned toward the BHAG (big hairy audacious goal). In other words, every member of your team must be working towards a certain, single-end goal to drive the business and its excellence forward in one single direction. Otherwise the business will get lost in limbo. This, for Spencer, is key to scale.
Having these fundamentals within your skill set will help you create and build credibility and value for your business, rather than focusing on generating sales
Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/369348