31 Years of Business Growth Advice in 30 minutes

I've spent over 31 years as a business growth advisor, having worked with over 10,000 businesses and achieved an average growth margin of 45% within 12 months.

During this time, I've learned a lot of things, some of which worked and some of which didn't. I've selected my top five effective strategies that you need to know in 2026.

Watch this video and learn what I think is the difference between success and failure in business.

1. Lack of measurement - One of the biggest mistakes I see is a lack of measurement. 
   
   I'm not talking about financial measurement, although I would say financial awareness is definitely a mistake made by 80+ percent of all small business owners. Rather, I'm talking about a lack of quantification and measurement of sales and marketing results. 
   
   In this video, I discuss what you should be measuring and why you should be measuring it.
2. Testing - the three most important things in marketing and sales: testing, testing, and testing. Learn why by watching this video.
3. Better, more,
4. Better, more, new - This is one of the secrets to your success in business. 
   
   The steps are:
   1. Improve your marketing by making it better
   2. Do more of it
   3. Introduce new marketing ideas
   
   You must follow this order and not do it the other way around.
5. The last of the five key areas is AI, or artificial intelligence – I'm not talking about ChatGPT. I'm talking about maximising your AI results by learning a few AI tools that really work and can make a massive difference in your business. 
   
   I would estimate that 99% of small businesses that use AI are using less than 5% of the effectiveness of the individual AI resources.

Want to know more from me? Go to results-mastery.com and don't forget to subscribe to my podcast.

If you want to know more from me and you want to benefit from nearly 30 years of experience helping thousands of businesses in hundreds of industries all over the world and the time that I've spent learning from the worlds leading masters in the world of sales and marketing, the next step for you is to book a one-to-one meeting with me and you can do so by going to resultsmastery.com thanks very much for listening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Hello everybody! It's great to be here. My name is Steve Mills, and welcome to whether you're listening to me on my podcast or on you're on the live stream. It's great to have you here and thank you for your time. Uh today we're going live as well as uh on my podcast, which if you've not yet subscribed to, you really should. You'll find a link somewhere around this video. Um, I am live by the way, and uh I just want to clarify uh what I'm doing with my uh live stream. This is a results mastery live stream. We go live on my podcast, as I mentioned. We're also live on LinkedIn, we're live on Facebook, we're live on YouTube, uh, we're on um uh Netflix, uh not Netflix. I wish we were, we're not on Netflix yet. Uh we're on Amazon Music, we're on uh iTunes, and we're on Spotify, as well as about another 30 different uh online locations of places like uh uh radio stations and stuff like that. So it's it's great to be able to do this. I tell that you that not to impress you, but to impress upon you that if you can, if I can do it, you can do it. Why can't you? You just need the willingness to do it, a little bit of investment in money, and uh a little bit more investment in time. So uh it's a great opportunity for all of us, I believe. Today I want to talk to you about really, I suppose, what I've learned in the last 31 years uh I've been in business. Now, you know, to fit that into a 10 to 15 minute live presentation like I'm doing now would be probably pretty much impossible. Uh, so I'm gonna give you uh five highlights, five of the main things that I think could have a profound effect on your business. Uh, should you do what most people don't do, and that is implement. Implementation, I can tell you now, is one of the biggest mistakes that people make, or rather, lack of implementation. People have good intentions, they listen to somebody like myself, and then they go away and they go, Well, that was interesting, and then they do precisely diddly squat, they don't do anything as a result of it, and that ain't gonna grow your business right now. If you don't do anything following today, you're wasting your time. You might as well go and disappear off and do something else. So uh hopefully that's not the case. You're gonna be in the top probably five percent of people, or it's probably more like 0.5%, but you're gonna be in the group of people who take some action. Uh, if you've got any questions, uh feel free to put them in the chat and I'll try to um uh get uh get in touch and ask you uh uh anything else that I need, or if I can, I'll answer them right at the end. I also see um at the bottom of the page here we've got this thing scrolling along saying if you want further help with me, then go to results mastery.com. Click on one of the gold buttons there, and that'll give you access to my diary. You can book a meeting, and uh we can be meeting in the next 24 hours on Zoom. So uh um that might be something that you want to do. So let me talk to you about my 31 years. Let me just start by saying this is an important thing, I think. Where do I get all my ideas, all my knowledge from? Well, I can tell you I didn't go to university, I was too busy doing other stuff. Um, I didn't learn from you know uh what I call uh the no the normal people in this world. I learned from the real-world superstars in terms of sales, marketing, and business growth. You know, the leading experts, uh, people like Tony Robbins, who's a consultant, who earns 7 billion per year. That's with a B. That's a little bit more than me. But you know, uh the truth of the matter is, you know, he's hugely successful. And I thought to myself, I wonder what I can learn from Tony, him and probably about 20 or 30 of the other top business experts. And if you go to my website and look on the About Steve page, you'll see a list of all the people that I've learned stuff from. However, let's crack on because I want to be respectful of your time. So, number one, uh, the first thing I've got five things to show you or talk to you about, as I've said. Number one, and it is number one, I think, in in the true sense of the word, the most important thing. Without this, you know, you don't know whether the rest of it is gonna work or not. And that is what uh Michael Gerbert, the author of the e-myth, calls quantification. I call it measuring your results, and that is the one of the biggest mistakes when I work with businesses. If if you ask me over the last 31 years, when you started working with businesses, Steve, how many of them have a good understanding of their sales, marketing, and business growth-related numbers? You know, in round figures. Shall I tell you what that is? Zero, none of them, not a one. With over 10,000 businesses that I've worked with, not one of them before they worked with me could show me the full under, you know. Some of them manage measured some of it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying nobody ever managed anything. I'm talking about a full understanding of their sales and marketing numbers. So we need to measure. You cannot manage what you do not measure, and if you don't measure it, uh, you don't know whether changes in it are making things better or worse. You know, you don't know where to put your money, and you don't know how much money you can afford to spend to acquire that customer in the first place, or how much time you can afford to spend to acquire that customer in the first place. So without this, you you know, you're you're almost like marketing with a blindfold on. You're driving a car, as one of my clients uh often says, it's like driving a car looking in the rear view mirror. You don't really know where you're going, and you don't know certainly where you are right now. So measuring. So, what am I talking about? I'm talking about obviously your financial numbers, you need to know those, you know, every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year, or whatever you decide to measure, you're gonna know how much money's coming in. You know, how much of that is profit? What are your costs? Uh, you know, those, you know, what's your cash flow like? You know, those, you know, how much how much you is this tax bill gonna be that's looming in the next three months? And so how much money do you need in your bank to make sure that you can pay that? Do you have a separate account? I have what I call a tax account and a profit account. So what I do is I have a set figure of in terms of what I've got to pay tax, we all know that. Uh, and I have a set figure of what I want to make in terms of profit. And if I don't have enough money left over when I've taken the money out of my tax account and my profit account, then something is wrong with this picture. You with me? So, so you know, I need to be able to run my business on the rest, not the end of the year when I go, oh no, I've you know, I've not made enough profit. Oh, isn't that a shame? Oh, well, on with the next year. No, I need to do that now, now, every month. So, have I got enough money to run my business, having taken the profit out of it and having um uh taken the tax out of it? Really, really important. Then we look at numbers like you know, the number of inquiries that come in, where did they come from, the conversion rate of those uh uh leads into uh meetings, the conversion rate of your meetings into sales, uh, what is known as the lifetime value of a customer, how much are they worth? So if an average customer spends a thousand pounds and they stay uh they spend that every month and they stay with you for two years, you know that the average unit of sale is 24,000 pounds. So, how much can you afford to spend to buy that client? Um, is your choice. You know, you can say, well, I could allocate 2,000 pounds to buy that 24,000 pound client. Um, uh, but until and unless you know that, uh, those numbers, you you don't really know how much you can afford to spend. So, again, really important. You can then dig down to other numbers like the number of contacts you've got on LinkedIn, the number of contacts you've got in your email address, the uh in your email or database, rather, the number of people that you're communicating with, how many phone calls you make, um, how many WhatsApps you send out, how many Instagram messages, how many Facebook messages, how many LinkedIn messages, how many newsletter uh uh letters you send out, how how big is your newsletter database? I've got a newsletter database on LinkedIn, it's got about one and a half thousand people every week read my newsletter, which is you know, it's fairly new, so it's not brilliant, but it's not bad. Uh, even though I've got like 15,000 uh LinkedIn contacts. So I need to be developing both of those things. Every month I want to see if I've got more LinkedIn contacts, my newsletter's grown, uh, number of people on my email addresses, uh my email database is grown, number of people visiting my website. That's another KPI. KPI, by the way, stands for key performance indicator, uh, just in case you didn't know. So, number one, really, really important. Excuse me. Right, number two, testing. There's an old saying in marketing and in sales that the three most important things are testing, testing, and testing. And I really do believe that. In fact, it's almost like test and measure, test and measure, test and measure. So, what are we testing? We're testing things like changing the headlines on your marketing. Uh, that could be an advert, an email, a social media post, a web page. Let me give you a perfect example. On your website, if you've got a page called uh about us, yeah, can't you think of anything more boring than about us? Nobody cares about you, nobody cares about me. What they care about is how you can help. So why don't you change about us to how we help you? It just makes sense. You know, if you've got a page called Our Services, you know, what or our programs or whatever, nobody cares, nobody could care. Even if you told people what it was, if I were if I changed my page from our services to marketing services, can you see that's a step in the right direction? Uh, it might not be the best headline I could possibly come up with, but it's a step in the right direction. So testing headlines, testing the use of video, testing the words on the page. Could you improve the words on each and every page on your website? The answer categorically is yes, you could, particularly if you've not really maximized that yet. Uh, what about the use of pictures? You know, is would one picture be more likely to attract attention than another picture? Yeah, absolutely it would. So, you know, keep using these sorts of uh uh tests in order to improve performance. Let me give you a quick example. One client of mine was spending £2,000 a month on advertising in a magazine. They'd spent $12,000, they'd been there for six months, they'd win one zero business, not an inquiry at all. Uh, I changed their headline from the name of the company, which nobody knew, to what their client got when they buy that bought their service. Now, just to clarify, their service was a very expensive service. It cost two and a half million pounds. It actually was a service and a product. It was a product as well. Two and a half million quid. That month we we changed the headline to what was the benefit to the client. That month we got five inquiries, two sales, and I made them uh five million pounds. And that took me about 15 minutes to figure out. So I should have been on commission, you know. I really should. Uh, but anyway, I'm sure the checks in the post. Uh, so you know, testing can be really, really, really powerful. Change and test the headline that you use on LinkedIn, uh, the email, what you say when you stand up at a networking event. Hi, my name's Steve Mills. What I do is blah blah blah. Change that, test it, try different things. Think about what is your objective when you stand up. You want people to come up to you afterwards and say, what you said sounded really interesting. Can I book a meeting with you to talk about how you might be able to help me? That's what success at networking is all about. And if that's not happening to you, you need to test different headlines in order to improve uh the performance of the one that you use when you stand up at a networking event. Okay, next one. Uh, this is something I learned from a guy called Alex Amozi. Some of you may have heard of Alex, but he doesn't do too bad. I think he he earns something like 60 million a month. So, as a consultant, you know, again, not not bad, not bad, not in Tony's uh level, but you know, he's he's pretty much up there. And he talks about this. He talks about better, more new, better, more new. What do most people do as far as marketing's concerned? They focus on new, they focus on new, they focus on oh, let's let's do this. We've not done this before. Let's try this idea, whatever this idea might be. Let's try LinkedIn advertising, let's try Google AdWords, let's try something new before we've ever worked on improving the performance of what we're already doing, and that's where you start. Let me tell you this: all marketing, all marketing, everything that you do could work. The trouble is it probably doesn't. Why? Because you've not followed this system, you've not followed this idea of better, more new, you've not measured, you've not tested. Okay, this is really serious for you and your business, and I hope you're really getting that. So, better. What could you do to make something better? Um, I'll say your LinkedIn profile, but it doesn't matter, it could be your website, could be your this, your that, whatever, all of it. Yeah, whatever you're doing right now could be better, right? So on LinkedIn, where do you start? You start with your headlines, surprise, surprise. You know, who are you? You know, what about your company name? What about your picture? What about your banner at the top? I see so many people either don't have a banner on LinkedIn or they've got one that's sort of non-descript. You know, on my banner it says um, I'm trying to remember now exactly what it does say. It says something like Steve Mills, the results guy, uh, want to want to improve your sales and marketing results, book a meeting here, and then it's got my website on there. You know, that that's like saying, you know, if you've got this problem, do this, which is a great way of marketing your business, by the way. If you have a problem with this, do this, okay? Uh say it like it is, you know, and that's that you know, people are very, very cutie and nice ideas. And you know, let's just tell if you've got a problem with this, you've got a problem generating leads, come and book a meeting with me. That's like the best form of marketing in my world, I believe. Anyway, so let's work at each and every element of everything you could do uh in order to improve that. So we could improve the words on our LinkedIn profile, we could get more testimonials on there, we could add videos to it, we could uh improve the um uh summary of it, we could add more details, and then we can get more people to connect to it so that more people see, know, like, and trust me. Yeah? So we need to work on that. Then we look at more. Once we've got this as good as it could be, we just need to do more of it. Again, a real great story that I've got for you. That uh a few years ago I was working with a client and we were doing great, we're doing some great stuff with them. We'd taken their Facebook advertising uh from something that wasn't working to something that produced a 12x return on investment. So, in other words, for every one pound that they spent, they got 12 back. Uh, and we gradually, through a process of testing and measuring, improved and increased the amount of money that they spent. So we did more, we did more of what was already working. We got to a level where we were spending 32 grand a month and getting a 12x return on investment. I can't quite work out that what that is, but it's a lot of money, yeah, every month coming into the business. So he came to me and he said, What do you think we should do next, Steve? I said, I think we should increase it to 64 grand. And he went, Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, why would we limit the amount of money we're putting in when if we doubled it, we could put twice as much in and get twice as much out. Makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, so really, really important. And that those two become you know, the things you need to do first before you go, oh, let's try this, let's try that. What about that? That might work, you know. You know, advertising on TV might work for you, but it's a high risk, and we don't know whether it'll work or not. Let's get proof of concept. That's a really powerful word for you, by the way, or words for you. Proof of concept. Proof it work, it prove it works to me first, and then we can roll it out. We can do a small conservative test, invest a little bit of money to find out what works, what doesn't work. If it doesn't work, we can improve it. And what do we do if it doesn't work then? We improve it again. And what happens if it doesn't work then? We improve it again until we find what works, because it all works. But we're not betting the ranch with investing a small amount of time, money, and effort in order to improve the effectiveness of something. We're not just sticking it out there in the marketing world and letting it roll. That's not the way to grow your business. Um, okay, next one, number four, improve your sales and marketing skills, right? So, within this, I really do believe quite passionately, if you're going to be better uh uh creating a profit, which is the purpose of a business, there are only two ways of doing that. One is to reduce costs, the second is to increase sales. That's it. Now you can increase, sorry, you can reduce costs really quickly. You can go and save some money, you can turn the lights out while you're working if you've got a window and uh save a little bit of money, you know. So perhaps you can save 5%, 10%, maybe 20%. But the truth of the matter is. The real leverage, the real growth is in increasing sales. So you need to work on increasing sales. There are only three ways of doing that. Number one, you get more customers. Number two, you increase the average transaction value. Or number three, you increase the frequent frequency, can't say the frequency of repurchase. That's it. So to deliver that in a supermarket metaphor, you've got to get more people in the door. You've got to get them to fill their baskets more or to fill it with more expensive products or services. And you've got to get them to come back to buy from you again and again and again and again. Right now, question which one's the most difficult, expensive, and time-consuming thing to do? It's getting new customers. You know, you've got a gold mine, a gold mine sitting right now in your business. It's called the pot of gold that you're not harvesting from your current clients. Unless you start up, then obviously you've not got that. But then that pot of gold becomes the people that you know, that you used to know, that you need to re-uh connect with. So really, really important that. If you get 10 leads and that equals two new clients right now, if you manage to improve that by 20%, instead of 20 instead of getting a 20% uh conversion rate, you got a 40%, so 20% more. What happens over time is you double the size of your business. Really, really powerful. Um, convert more, work on converting more. And also, I'd say within that, develop a system, a process. Most people give up far too early, they don't keep going. You know, too, you know, I contacted them, I contacted them again, I sent them an email, contact them again. They're clearly not interested, so I don't bother. In fact, it takes eight to twelve contacts to make a sale. So they say. Now, whether that's true or not, and it's clearly gonna vary, but I do uh absolutely believe that most people give up way before they they should be giving up. So uh keep going, keep going till they die or buy, my good friend Peter Thomson would tell you. Um, and lastly, uh this is a real biggie, AI, right? Artificial intelligence. You know, if you're not learning this, you're just again chucking money out the door. Throw it go and flush a load of cash down the toilet because that's what you're doing every day. And and I want to be clear, I'm not saying I'm not talking about, oh yeah, I I know AI, I'm using uh Chat GPT, and uh, you know, I ask it to post on uh LinkedIn and Facebook. That's not using AI, you know. I believe that 99% of all small business owners use less than 5% of the true potential of AI. There, I've said it, that's true. Now I ain't got time in this. We we've gone over a little bit anyway, a little bit longer than I was hoping. Um, but you know, you need to get to grips with this. Uh, you need to go and learn how to do this. Uh, by the way, and this is not about me trying to sell you something, but if you go to my website, I am running uh a course on AI, a one-day seminar, uh, you'd be very welcome to come along to that. Or just go to YouTube and learn from you know some of the greats out there. You know, I recommend doing that as well. So uh that's about it. There's my five. Uh measure your results, test to improve them, uh focus on better, then more, then new. Uh, improve your sales skills, develop a system, and for goodness sake, embrace AI. Whether you like it or you don't like it, you think it's a good thing or a terrible thing, it is here. And I believe that if you don't learn AI, AI won't necessarily uh take your business, but somebody who knows how to use it very well could. So make sure you use that. Thanks ever so much for listening. If you do want to book a meeting with me, um feel free to do so. Um, you can do so at resultsmastery.com. And uh yeah, just get yourself there, get yourself a um a meeting with me, book it online, and uh we can be on Zoom um this time tomorrow. So thanks ever so much for listening, and I look forward to speaking to you on my next uh results mastery podcast or live stream. Thank you.