Are You Applying the Wrong Solution to Your Problem?

Show Notes

• Sometimes in business we apply someone’s suggested solution to our problem and don’t see the results we want. When this happens we are most likely applying the wrong solution to our problem.
• At any point in time, in any system, there is one thing that controls the flow of energy through that system.
• If you focus time and energy on releasing whatever constriction there is on the system, then you will see massive results in terms of what comes out of the system.
• Most small businesses need to be concerned with the flow of profit because they are not leveraging other means of getting value.
• In order to change the flow of profit, you need to evaluate if the strategy or tool someone is trying to sell you matches up with your business needs at that time.
• The greatest tool Infusionsoft offers to small business owners is not automation, but rather data.
• Data from Infusionsoft can be used to help identify restrictions in your business processes.
• The yellow brick road is a series of steps that need to happen in order for money to enter your business and then go into your personal bank account. Check out Fix Your Funnel’s Education tab on our site to learn more about The Yellow Brick Road Method.
• The flow of money often involves:
  • Making someone aware that our business exists
  • Identifying the person that is interested
  • Initiating a customer relationship
  • Ensuring that money flows through the fulfillment process where we keep the promises we made during marketing and then into our personal bank account.

• Understanding this path is critical in order to understand what is constricting the flow of money through that system.
• In order to increase your profit, you need to understand the process the money goes through.
• Ask yourself, “What do I dislike about my business?” Often this will help you to identify the constraint in your business.
• Once you identify the problem, then you can look for real solutions.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Hello, this is Ryan Chapman with Fix Your Funnel. And in today's episode, I'm going to be talking about a question that you may have had before which is, you're following the advice of a guru, and you're not getting the results that they said you would get, and you're thinking to yourself, why isn't this working for me? If you ever found yourself in that scenario, don't worry. It's actually probably not your fault. And to be totally honest, it's probably not the fault of the guru. What happened was, we applied the wrong solution for the problem that you actually have in your business today.

This is a common occurrence that happens more frequently than we'd probably like to know. It often results in people either thinking that the guru that they hired or that they started to follow was an idiot or that what they were selling was a total sham. Now, in some cases, that may actually be true, but more frequently what happened is the solution that they were providing just didn't match up with the biggest problem in your business right now. [00:01:00] And this is what we're going to be talking about today's podcast.

How do you identify what is actually the biggest problem in your business and make sure you're focusing on that instead of the wrong thing and then not getting the kind of results that you expect and getting frustrated?

This all comes down to this concept of, in nature, in a system, at any one point in time, there's one thing that controls the flow of energy in that system. That may sound a little esoteric, a little fuzzy, but let's put it into another scenario where it will make total sense. Let's imagine that in your front yard, you have a hose and that hose is hooked up to the spigot and it's turned on full-blast. How much water comes out the end of that hose is determined by one thing in that system, which goes from spigot to the end of the hose.

There's only one thing in that whole process between spigot, the hose, all the way to the end of the hose that controls the flow [00:02:00] at any point in time. It may be the amount of water that's coming out of the spigot. But if you go and you crimp that hose, or you grab it and you bend it, we're gonna notice the flow of water coming out the end of the hose change. At that point in time, there's only one thing that's controlling the flow of how much water gets out of that hose and it's that place where you crimp the hose or where you bent it and folded it over on itself.

As you start to release that hose, what you're going to discover is that the flow is going to increase of the water coming out the end of the hose. Unless there's somebody else stepping on the hose, and then at that point, that stepping on the hose may become the thing that's controlling the flow of water through that hose or the control of energy through that system.

So, at any point in time in any system, whether it's the hose in the front yard, your business, your body, whatever, there's one thing that's controlling the flow of energy through that system.

If you focus time and energy on [00:03:00] releasing that constriction on that system, and it you spend it in the right place, then you're going to see some massive results in terms of what comes out of it, assuming that there's not another, constriction on that system right after that that was only slightly better than what you had just released. But this is the way that businesses work.

At any point in time in your business, there's something that is constricting the flow of money or, in particular, profit because really we don't care about the flow of money in a business, we care about the flow of profit in the business. Unless you're playing at a totally different level, where I assume that like Jeff Bezos is with Amazon. He's obviously not concerned with profit at this point of his game, he's worried about just the flow of cash.

For most small businesses, we have to be concerned about the flow of profit because we're not leveraging other means of getting value. Because that's a scenario in your business today, we need the flow of profit to be our primary focus in terms of how good is this [00:04:00] business working.

Now, how do we change the flow of profit? Well, if we just listen to whatever guru gets our attention around us and starts telling us here's the latest tool that you need, and that could be me, you know, here's the latest strategy you need, that could be somebody else. Whatever the thing is that people are telling you need to have today, we need to also have an evaluation process we put on that before we start buying hook, line, and sinker into what they're telling us. Honestly, what they're telling us could be totally true, but not true for our business at that moment in time.

You need to have a way of evaluating if the strategy, if the tool, if the process, if this approach, if whatever this advice is matches up with the need of your business at that moment in time.

This was the basis for my book, How To Fix Your Funnel. A lot of people, I think, that have not read that book and have seen it think that it's all about text message marketing or direct mail or how to do things with our tools, but in reality, I don't talk about our tools at all in that book. I [00:05:00] talked principally about this topic of, how do you determine where is the constriction point in your business and focus in on that so you actually get maximum return for investment of time, energy, effort, whatever the case may be that you're putting into your business.

This is the big question that you have to answer. Honestly, it's not as difficult as it sounds on the surface.

Now, there are some things that you can do that can help yourself. For example, if you have reports on what's happening in your business, and actually, it was writing this book, How To Fix Your Funnel, that led me to make the statement that the greatest power that Infusionsoft offered the small business owners wasn't automation, but rather data. That data can be used to identify constrictions in your business' processes if you've got that down to coming into Infusionsoft.

So what we need to look at when we're looking at this as we look at first, what is our Yellow Brick Road, and if you haven't heard of the concept of yellow brick road, if you go to fixyourfunnel.com, there's an education option in the main menu. If you click on that, there will be a few videos [00:06:00] on the yellow brick road, but to sum it up in a very brief format, yellow brick road is that series of steps that needs to happen for money to enter into your business and then go into your bank account. When I say bank account, I mean your personal bank account, not your business bank account.

So, what is that flow of money that has to happen? And usually that flow of money involves, how do we make someone aware that our business exist? How do we identify the person who's interested in that? How do we then get that person enter into a customer relationship with us, whether it's a one-time purchase or multiple purchases or long-term relationship? And then how does that money then flow through the fulfillment process where we keep the promises made in marketing and sales and deliver on those? And then maybe collecting the money depending on where that happens in the business process and ultimately the money getting through all expenses and entering into our personal business account.

Understanding that path in your business is critical for you to be able to then make evaluations about what is constricting the flow of money [00:07:00] through that that system. If you can't identify the system it's very difficult.

So imagine if we go back to that hose scenario, if you were just in this scenario where there was just water coming out of nowhere on one side and you were aware that water was coming in on the other side, but you weren't aware the path that was following, in other words you couldn't see the hose, you couldn't see what might be parked on top of it or what might be folding it over on itself.

If you didn't have the ability to see that, you would never be able to address those constraints and increase the amount of water coming out the other end. In order for us to increase the amount of profit that goes into our bank account, we have to really have an understanding of the process that that money flows through and how those processes are connected and related so we can be able to start affecting how well profit flows through it.

If we're going to take a step back this even takes us to a bigger question, which is is this business even capable of creating cash flow? And if it is capable of creating cash flow, is that [00:08:00] the best design of a system? We might ask ourselves some of those questions and if we're satisfied with the answers, like, this is the best I can do with what I have right now, and we say, okay, this is what I'm going to be working with, then we need to understand what that looks like.

Once we understand what that looks like, now, we start looking for signs of back up. If you've ever folded a hose over, depending on the quality of that hose, you may have noticed that the host starting to bulge a little bit right after where you crimped it and you folded it over.

If you squeeze the hose after you've folded it over, on the water side, where the water is coming from, you noticed it got extremely hard. This was a sign that there's a backup occurring there. If we look at the hose to the right of the fold, we notice that it's kind of soft and it's easy to move because there's nothing putting pressure on it.

In a business, we can look at this the same way. Typically what we do is we look for unpleasant things in the business. What are the things that we hate about the business personally, and [00:09:00] there's no qualifications on this. If you want to get a really good picture, and you have multiple team members on your team, you ask them the same question. You realize, to you, this is the question, to you, what is the thing you hate most about this business right now? That's an unqualified question because you're trying to get at what we call undesirable effects.

What are the things that will reflect that there is a problem in the business? And problems in the business for people who are good business people, intuition tells them where the problem is. And it turns out to be something they hate about the business. So you got to ask yourself this question. What do I dislike about this business? And when you ask that question, it's not to complain. It's not to whine. It's simply to identify, what is the constraint in the business? The constraint is normally shown by the things you don't like in the business.

If you are a great salesperson, but your business isn't great at fulfilling the promises you made in your marketing and sales, then you [00:10:00] probably hate the fulfillment process. This is probably a sign to you that there's something wrong there because it creates all the complaints and all the people that are upset. We may think, oh, well, this is a problem the business. I just need to find a business where I don't have to fulfill.

No, you need to understand why it is that that's a problem in the business because when you understand what the root problem is to that, then that gives you the opportunity to start looking for real solutions.

In our next podcast, we're going to talk about, how do you find the real solutions once you identify the actual constraint? This is really important and this is where a lot of people mess it up. If they even identify the constraint, if they even identify the thing that's stopping the flow of cash in their business, they then mess up when they try and solve that problem.

Once you identify what that problem is your business, what is this thing that is creating havoc in the business that's preventing the flow of money in this business, we need to solve that. And the best ways to solve that, we're going to address them next podcast. This is Ryan Chapman from Fix Your Funnel. Keep moving forward.