Creating A Business Plan

Have you ever found yourself working hard, day after day, doing the same thing and
getting by, but not really knowing where youre going?
Its easy to do in businessespecially if you dont have a plan. Growth doesnt
happen automatically and what might feel like progress could actually
be wandering around in circles if you dont have any direction.
One sentence. Thats what Matt says you should be able to condense the purpose of
your business down to. Can you tell people what you do in a sentence? What is your
mission statement?
You need to know what separates you from the competition. What is your unique
selling proposition (USP)?
Matt talks about his very first business. He tells the story of his familys snow cone
business and how he got started with selling.
I ask him whether you should make growth or hiring a goal and how to know the
right time to hire.
Show Notes
Write Down Your Business Idea

05:38 Sean: Matt, when you wake up, do you start a business beforeyour
morning coffee or after?

05:43 Matt: Usually after the coffee is when all the magic happens.

05:52 Sean: So for someone coming from the last episode, having validated
their idea, how do they go about creating a business plan? Whats the first
step?

06:02 Matt: First you want to write down you business idea, but try to do
that in one sentence. Ideally you should be able to describe for someone else
in one sentence what it is you do. For example Sean, when I first met you,
you were the hand-lettering guy. Once you get that on paper, write down
your mission statement. Again, you want to try to keep that to one sentence
as well. Business people and potential investors are not going to want to read
a 4,000 pixel tall page of content. Keep it short and sweet.

07:10 Sean: I used to be a letterer, but now, its hard to tell people in a
single sentence what I do with all the things I have going on. So heres a trick
I used to condense it: I was at a meet-up and someone asked meWhat do

you do? and I said, Do you have 20 minutes? So we sat down and I spent
about 20 minutes telling him everything. Now here is the key, after telling
him all of that I asked, Okay, now imagine someone comes and sits next to
you and asks you what Sean does for a living. What is your answer to
them? He wasnt as emotionally wrapped up in all of the details of what I do,
so he answered and said, Well, it sounds like youve had success in client
work, products, and teaching, and now you want to help other people do the
same. Telling someone else the full story and then having them tell it back to
you is a great way to condense it, because they dont care about all of the
details. Theyre just going to give you the gist of it. He was right, I want to
help people make a living with what theyre passionate about.
Set Short, Medium, and Long-Term Goals

09:07 Matt: So weve written everything down. Weve got our idea, our
mission statement, and our vision. The next thing you need to have is goals.
What are your goals for this business? You want to have short, medium, and
long-term goals. Of course when you put a plan together, it may not go
exactly the way you expect it to, but you want to have a ballpark idea. Your
short term goals are going to be things youd like to accomplish within a year.
Youve got to be realistic with these goals. We want to hustle, but we dont
want to overdo it. We dont want to kill ourselves. Typically people will write
down ten. Most will actually accomplish about five or seven. The real hustlers
will get about ten.

10:19 Sean: Now, you said that a year is a short amount of time. If youre
calling one year short, whats long?

10:29 Matt: Long would be considered between six and ten years.

10:32 Sean: You have six year goals?

10:34 Matt: Yes, I do.

10:36 Sean: Why do you recommend these goals, specifically the lengths?

10:43 Matt: It helps you stay motivated and also helps you to prioritize
different things. You get excited when youre starting a business and its easy
to overcommit yourself in that excitement. Its good to have many goals, but
youve got to sort them out and classify them by different lengths. This way
you can focus on the shorter-term goals and make focused progress.
If you are seeking investors, it looks really attractive to be consistently hitting
your short term milestones. When they see how well youre managing your
goals, theyre going to feel like youre more reliable and be more willing to
invest.

12:25 Sean: At the point when youve hit some of your shorter term goals,
do you look up to see where you are in the context of your longer-term goals?
If youre not taking on investors, do you still recommend these goal lengths
for someone whos bootstrapping?

12:51 Matt: I would absolutely recommend those lengths to someone who is

bootstrapping. Ultimately, Im not setting these goals for an investor, Im
setting them for me. Im focused on what we can realistically accomplish. A
short-term goal is within one year. A medium goal is somewhere between one
and three years. I generally try to have already broken even by the end of
the first year, but thats not always realistic for every type of business.

13:35 Sean: Would you feel comfortable giving an example of a one year and
a three year goal with a specific business that you have? You could use the
snow cone example. Tell people who dont know what you mean when you
say snow cone.

14:02 Matt: We live in Texas, with 120 degree weather. You have to have
some ice and if you can throw some flavoring in there with sugar, were
jumping up and down. When we first started the snow cone business, I was a
10 year old little punk just running around. We didnt know how to have a
business plan, but we had an idea of some goals we could set. We gave
ourselves a realistic one year goal. We had a total of 3 trailers of which only
one was renovated. We said we wanted to have at least two trailers going
within one year which meant we needed to renovate one trailer and find a
location for it. That also meant that we needed more space to get more
supplies and we needed more employees. Financially, you want to have a
realistic goal about what youll be making. Like I said, we push our
businesses, so our goal was to turn a $30,000 profit within the first year. For
a three year goal we were wanting to triple the first year. We were looking at
making $90,000 by our third year. For our three year goals, we were also
looking at expanding, getting more locations, more customers, and
ultimately boosting our income.

16:31 Sean: The reason you want to have this is because as youre going, its
really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day things that need to be done
and to forget to think about how you can make your business grow.

Having large goals helps to keep you focused on growth.

16:57 Matt: It really helps because a lot of times you can get discouraged. In
our first year we had a lot of things go wrong because we werent familiar
with all of the moving parts. We had an A/C unit go out and trouble figuring
out things with employees and contracts. Within that first year we had to

work out a lot of bugs. When we got to the next year, we had better structure
in place.

17:43 Sean: When someone is starting out with a business plan and theyre
anticipating growing, do you think they should have a goal of hiring
employees or should they have a goal of growing which may eventually
necessitate bringing on employees? Should the goal be to bring someone on
and if so, do you need to have smaller goals before that, like getting enough
revenue to meet payroll and that kind of thing?

18:27 Matt: I love that question and it can be answered so many different
ways. It depends on whether or not your business needs other people to get
it going. Its a myth, because most businesses can start as a one person
operation. Its not going to be as complex or robust as you want it to be, but
you can definitely start it with one person.

19:12 Sean: Do you think people should start like that and focus on growing
before they think about bringing people on?

19:20 Matt: Start it by yourself and build some capital. As you track your
expenses and cash flow, youll be able to see how much extra money you
have to work with for growth. Youll be able to see whether or not youll be
able to consistently pay someone. You dont want to hire someone if youre
not able to consistently make payroll. Determine if you can take on a parttime or full-time employee and if youre doing really well, maybe you can
take on several full-time employees. Then, you want to start thinking about
how you can start to detach yourself from it. The reason this is important is
because you want to be the brain behind your business and not the
hands. You dont want to be the muscle forever because youll eventually
get worn out.

Provide a Unique Offer

20:49 Sean: Zooming back out on creating a business plan. Can you speak to
the unique offer you want to make?

21:07 Matt: So youve thrown your goals up on the whiteboard, now you
want to ask What makes my business unique? What is it youre offering
that distinguishes you from your competitors?

21:26 Sean: Cory, lets say someone wants to hire you for video. Matt,
actually really wants to hire you for video, for real. Why should he hire you
and not some other guys brother who does video?

22:06 Matt: Can I answer for him? Maybe this isnt his answer, but this is
why Id want to hire Cory. I know that Seans standard for everything is high,

so I know that anyone he hires operates at that standard. Seans not just
going to hire anyone, so obviously Cory must be pretty good, otherwise he
wouldnt be here.

22:41 Cory: So my answer should be You should hire me because Seans

standards are so high.

22:50 Sean: Thats a good word put in for you, but you dont have to base it
on someone else. You can say your standards are so high. Youregoing to
focus on the details, maybe even produce music for it if you need to. Youre
not just here to get a job done, youre here to tell their story.

23:26 Matt: If I didnt know Sean and I didnt know Cory, Id want to look at
his work. If I saw the quality in his work and his pricing was reasonable, hed
be my guy.

24:15 Sean: So someone needs to think about what they have, what they
can give to the client, and what their product does that some other product
doesnt.

Everyone isnt going to love your idea just because you think its the best.
You have to be able to explain to your customer why its the best.

24:36 Sean: The most recent thing Ive been working on is my course
at ValueBasedPricing.com. I just finished creating a guide, 7 Value
Discovering Questions to Ask Your Client, that Im giving away for people who
subscribe there. There are other people out there talking about Value-Based
Pricing, and basically, what Im offering is attention to detail. What Im also
offering is a tool that takes all eight factors that go into discovering that
value-based price. You can plug in all of those variables and it will give you an
accurate Value-Based Price that you can use with your client. It doesnt figure
out everything for you, but it does make your job a lot easier. Thats what
were offering that makes us unique. Were giving people a tool in addition to
the high quality videos were producing for the course. Additionally, its
coming from a source they trust, which is me. Even if I was giving people the
exact same content as someone else, the fact that its coming from me, a
source they trust, means something.

Your unique offering can include the brand youve built because youve developed
trust with people.

27:21 Matt: Thank you for sharing that. Thats a perfect example of
something that there is a niche for, your unique twist, how its different from
your competitors, and how that will put you on the top.

27:32 Sean: Dont discount your voice. Even if your product doesnt have a
lot of unique features, the fact that its your voice can mean something if you
have an audience. I pride myself in my ability to break down complex
systems and explain it well to people. I think that ability, in and of itself, is
unique value I offer to people because, maybe one of my competitors
understands Value-Based Pricing, but either the way they are explaining it or
the medium theyre using to present it isnt as easy to understand for people.
The medium, in addition to the quality that Im offering, is unique. I
encourage you to look at it from different angles. Its not always about the
different features.

28:22 Matt: Another point I want to make is that you need to keep your idea
simple. Dont get complex and try to explain everything about it. Obviously
you want to have features and understand the details of your business for
yourself, but you want to keep it simple for other people. Theyre not going to
commit a bunch of time to understanding the complexity of your business
idea. Give people something simple they can grab ahold of.

28:56 Sean: If people are having a really hard time distilling that down,
would you say they may need to take a serious look at how complex their
business is?

29:17 Matt: Definitely. Its okay to have details, but sometimes for your own
benefit youve got to force yourself to zoom out and focus on a more
simplistic version of your business.

29:50 Sean: Can you speak a little to perception and marketing?

29:55 Matt: You want to make sure that people are going to think your
unique business idea is something valid. Its not about validating the entire
business plan, but making sure that your audience is in alignment with your
unique offering.

30:57 Sean: Does marketing come before demand?

31:06 Matt: Demand should be first and marketing comes after that.
Typically, in the business plans that I accept, we always look for demand
before we talk about marketing. I ask, Is there even demand for this?
Because if theres not, lets not waste our time here. The next question I ask
is Is there competition? You want to do your research and make sure
theres some competition out there.

31:56 Sean: Some people are afraid of competition. Theyre saying things
like, Someone else is already doing the same thing as me. They were here
before me. Theyve been doing it longer. What if they take all of my
customers?

32:18 Matt: When youre playing basketball and youre down 10 points, do
you just pack up and walk off the court? Do you say, Okay guys, lets call it
quits and go to CiCis Pizza? Just because theres competition, are you really
going to walk off the court? No, youre going to pull it together, make a plan
with your team, and execute and hopefully beat those guys.

33:13 Sean: If you dont have someone to play against, youre just a team
alone in a gym with no audiencetheres no game going on.

33:23 Matt: And youre not making any money off of those ticket sales.

No one will buy tickets to watch you shoot baskets by yourself.

Youve got to have competition.

33:38 Matt: You can also learn from your competition, especially if youre
new to your industry. Your competition is always going to be thinking of ways
they can offer a unique spin and that also helps you. Im not saying that you
want to put all of your focus on your competition, but you do want to ensure
there is competition because it shows you theres a market for what youre
offering. I was telling you earlier Sean, there was a house I was bidding on
and it had 45 other offers on it. So what does that tell me? Obviously, this
house is a gold mine. Thats the way I like to think of it. Thats really
encouraging to me. Other people are saying, Thats really depressing. Youre
probably not going to get it. Maybe I wont get that house, but it tells me
that Im looking at the right kind of houses.

34:36 Sean: For someone to buy your product, theyre probably going to
need to be exposed to it multiple times (Related: e153 The Magic of 7).
Maybe they saw your product on your website, found it in a search, or read
about it in a reviewthese are little seeds planted along they way.

35:14 If your target customer comes to you, theyve probably been exposed
to other offerings. If they havent and youre the first, youre probably not
going to close the deal. You might get lucky, but if its just you in a specific
market, youre the one who has to put those seven tokens in until this person
is ready to go. Maybe a customer has read a competitors blog or been to their
website, but by the time they get to you, youre their seventh interaction and
theyre ready to buy.

Your competition is actually helping youbecause theyre priming your

customers.

36:18 Matt: Thats where your unique offer comes in. Your competition
primes the customer, then they come to your page and see the unique twist
youve got to your product, and that causes them to want to buy it from you.

36:32 Sean: People dont give that unique selling point enough weight
because they feel like its not very significant, but once a customer is primed,
that one little hook could be the thing that sells them on you.

36:46 Matt: In all of my businesses, well usually throw in something free, or

well give a little discount. The customer will really appreciate that and even
though it costs us some money, it will hook the customer long term. Youve
got to keep in mind how the small investments you make in your customers
now can bring you large returns later.

Online & Offline Marketing

37:40 Sean: How does marketing play into the business plan that you
create?

37:55 Matt: I dont like to get too deep into the marketing because its
constantly changing. You have to set a marketing plan and adjust it as you
go. Let your goals drive your marketing plan. If you plan too far out you
may miss out on the newer, more effective marketing techniques that
surface along the way.

38:39 Sean: Start out with something simple, dont worry about having it all
mapped out in the beginning. Even if you have it mapped out, its going to
change. Its an iterative process.

39:07 Matt: When youre going through your business plan, dont hurt
yourself by making it complex. Make it as simple as possible and write it
down. As you go you might add more to it and things are going to change,
but you want to start with some guidelines to follow that will give you
direction. Make a simple marketing plan that you think will work for you.

39:37 Sean: Back to the snow cone business: youre just starting a snow
cone business. What does that look like for the person who is coming up with
the business plan for the snow cone business? What is the simplified version
of a marketing plan for that?

40:06 Matt: People have actually told me to, Just open the windows and
stand by the cash register, youre good to go. Thats like saying Im going
to drop my net into the ocean and the fish are going to swim right in. Im
sorry. Its not going to happen. One of our locations was set in front of a
grocery store and we had a ton of traffic coming through, but just because
you have a lot of traffic coming through doesnt mean youre going to get a
lot of business. Fortunately back when we did it, people didnt have cell
phones, so you didnt have to worry about people looking down at their
screens the whole time. Now we have a strategy where one of the snow cone

trucks makes distracting sounds to get people to look up from their phone.
You dont want to just have the visual, you want to have the audio.

41:30 Back in the day we put some signs out with balloons and this worked
for us because we had the traffic there. Another one of our strategies was to
put one of our pretty people out their with a tray giving out samples. That
brought a ton of people, especially families. We also made sure our signs
were very colorful and had a large inflatable penguin holding a snow cone.
The little kids would flock to the penguin and they would make their parents
buy the snow cone.

42:48 Sean: Thats interesting! The person who is going to buy isnt
necessarily the person youre trying to attract. The penguin is for the kid, its
not for the parent. You want to reach the person who has leverage on the
person who actually has the wallet.

43:29 Matt: Heres a great example of this: Gary Vaynerchuk, a social media
marketing genius, wanted to get a big client. The gentleman that owned that
business he was after was way older and didnt pay much attention to social
media, which is one of Garys strategies for getting new clients. So he
targeted the mans grandkids through social media and the grandkids told
their grandpa that they needed to check Gary out. Gary was able to get in
touch with the owner, they forged a relationship, and he was able to land that
account, not by targeting the owner, but by targeting the grandkids. Thats
what we would do back then is we would target the kids. Wed also give the
parents coupons whether they purchased something from us or not which
sweetened the deal a little for them. See how were just hashing out different
marketing ideas along the way? Theres no complexity to our approach. We
were just constantly changing and trying new things.

45:53 Sean: Lets do some marketing brainstorming for my Value-Based

Pricing course. Im not doing any paid marketing. I just finished this huge 3
part series and Cory and I are going to be working on exclusive videos for
subscribers that Ill send them when theyre completed. Were going to be
doing content marketing, but we dont have any other plans, so Id like to
hear some of your ideas.

46:49 Matt: Im glad you brought that up. This is what I love about our
combo because you are a wizard when it comes to online business and Im
really comfortable with a physical customer base.

47:22 Sean: How is Matt making millions of dollars, with 30 followers on

Twitter and no website? There are a lot of people who are doing really well in
the physical space, and thats what I like about this dynamic because you talk
about interacting with people in the physical space.

48:01 Matt: Thats not to say Im not interested in online marketing. Im

starting to explore some of that stuff now. Back in the day I was so
comfortable operating in the physical realm and thought, Why reinvent the
wheel here? Now that Im starting to mentor people, I want to be able to
offer some expertise around online marketing. Thats why I like to follow
people like you and Gary Vaynerchuk. While I like to be able to offer physical
marketing methods, I really like the online techniques Ive learned and have
even implemented some of them. An example is our carpet cleaning
business. We had one of our technicians go through the whole cleaning
process and we took video of it and cut it together really nice. We showed it
to a realtor and they hired us to clean all of their 20 to 30 houses. Now weve
given that to all of our technicians to show on an iPad and were able to use
that as a tool to convert customers. Thats why its a good idea to pay
attention to what other people are doing, but dont just do exactly what
theyre doingput your own spin on it.

50:54 Sean: Do you have any ideas about how I might market my course?

51:23 Matt: Something I would do is engage the older demographic on

Facebook. If you have a strong presence on Facebook I would target people
who are in business and let them know about Value-Based Pricing. If you
dont have a presence on Facebook you can find some other social
networking outlet and engage with people who fit into your target
demographic.

52:36 Sean: Im glad you said that. For Learn Lettering, the largest source of
traffic is Pinterest. The right person pins it on Pinterest and it blows up. One
page that got pinned is getting 25,000 views per month.

52:58 Matt: Would you have added Pinterest to your original marketing
plan?

53:06 Sean: Not really. I pinned stuff there sometimes, but this kinda just
happened.

53:13 Matt: Thats the best way. You want to try different things, and maybe
the right person on whatever platform will share it and then youve got a
really nice source of traffic to your site.

53:33 Sean: Not all of those people are ready to buy immediately, but Im
priming them. Thats where the auto-responder series comes in. I recently
just decided that my next course is specifically going to be on email
marketing and automation with MailChimp, tying that into using custom
integrations with WooCommerce, and Ecommerce 360 data. When people
come to the landing page and theyre not ready to buy, they sign up for the
newsletter at the bottom to get the free guide and an auto responder series.

After they become familiar with the material and start to trust me, eventually
theyll buy. Rather than just push people to buy, I want to prime them.
If I send people to something that provides value over time, thats going to
build trust. Ive heard about people offering a free webinar Facebookfree
training around some skilland at the end of that, they offer the opportunity
for the people who are ready for more to buy a course. Ive heard that
converts pretty well so thats something were talking about doing.

56:02 Matt: Thats one of the things in the future were thinking about
implementing.

56:17 Sean: Do you do something like that in the physical space? Maybe a
free presentation and then up-sell them?

56:28 Matt: When I spoke at UTSA, I gave them some really valuable insight
and advice about investing in themselves. That was video taped, and a
couple of other professors found out about it. One of the professors shared it
with a multi-billionaire. So from that I started getting emails from people
asking me to help them invest their money. That was just a free thing that I
did with the students where I asked them each to give me a dollar, promised I
would invest it, and come back to give them each a return of three dollars.
They were pretty skeptical, but when I came back and delivered on that
promise, I had their attention and interest. Many of them started really
opening up to the idea of investing.

59:59 Sean: The moral of that is: you taught. Thats all a webinar is except
its online. You do that for free, you give people some value, and then you let
them know about your offer. Matt, if you had a course on investing, at the
end of the presentation you could share that with the audience and maybe
5% of people would buy.

1:00:39 Matt: One of the professors who watched the tape of this
presentation I did for free, sent me an investor who ended up investing a
little more than $200,000 with me. Thats an opportunity thats priceless. The
conversion rate can be huge on giving out free value, and a webinar is a
great way to do that.

Asking the Right Questions About Your Customer

1:01:32 The customer is something I like to finalize the business plan with. A
lot of people want to make apps because theyve seen people make millions
of dollars off of it. You can do that, but you have to answer these questions:
Who, what, where,and why? First, who is your customer?

1:02:25 Sean: A lot of people dont think about this. They have this product
and think that people are just going to come buy it. Whos going to buy

it? All the great people, Sean. No, youve got to define this person. Thats
the only way you can effectively market to someone.
If youre so worried about reaching everyonethat youre afraid to go after a specific
customer, youre not going to reach anyone.

1:03:04 Youve got to get specific. Once youre confident in the person youre
trying to target, you can put out a marketing campaign thats very pointed.
For example, I could do a very general email marketing course for anyone
and everyone, but with a very specific focusMailchimp, automation, Woocommerce, email marketing, Ecommerce 360 data, and segmentationIm
ruling out a lot of people. You dont use Mailchimp? This isnt for you. You
dont use Woo-Commerce? This isnt for you. But for the people that do want
this, its a no brainer. You dont need everyone in the world. You dont need
seven billion customers, you need 700 customers. If you keep it too
general, you might get seven customers, or 70.

1:04:32 Matt: The next question is, What should the customer expect from
you product? With your course, Sean, youve already written down what the
customer should expect. Youve got to answer the question, What am I
going to present to these guys to get them to buy my stuff? By the time you
get to the customer, you want to already be able to answer questions about
what the customer is looking for, how your unique offer is going to meet their
needs, and what your product is going to be able to do for them. You dont
want to go too long on this, but you want to be equipped with this content.
Another question I really like is, Where is my customer? For me, the answer
is local.

1:05:37 Sean: I think is speaks not just to geographical location, but also to
where they are in their journey. Are they a beginner? Are they an advanced
person? Are they freelancers with a little bit of money? Are the freelancers
who have never done their first job?

1:06:03 Matt: Exactly. You want to bring all of that and put that in a little
paragraph so you have your where. Finally youve got to answer the
question, Why would the customer want to buy this from me? Sean, why
would someone want your Value-Based Pricing course?

1:06:52 Sean: I reached a point where I was charging $8,000 for a logo. That
sounds really good to a lot of people. Until I found out that $8,000 for a logo
was a really good deal. That means that someone got a lot of value out of my
services and they would have paid more. Im wanting to help the people who
know theyre creating value for their clients that they should be charging
more, but dont know how to have the conversations with the client or even
get to the point where the client is actually thanking them for what theyre
charging.

1:07:32 How can you charge $20,000 to $50,000 for a logo design project
and have the client thank you? For a lot of people its a race to the bottom.
They want to give their client the lowest rate so they can get the business.
How do you get to the point where youre charging more than everyone else
and the client is thanking you? This course is the difference between your
next project being $8,000 or $20,000. We give real examples and real case
studies. In a sentence, the why is this: You should be pricing based on
the value you create for your clients, and Im going to show you how to
do it.

1:09:02 Matt: A lot of people will take a whole day to figure out their
sentence, but you should really just take about an hour. Let it be a little guide
that you can adjust and revise along your journey.