BONUS 227: Give Your Business a Check-Up

(upbeat music) Welcome to the 10 Minute Entrepreneur Podcast. Intended to equip and encourage business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs, taught by active business owner, best-selling author, and teacher, Sean Castrina. - All right, Sean Castrina with the 10 Minute Entrepreneur Podcast. And also, obviously on YouTube, so excited to educate, equip, and encourage entrepreneurs. What we're gonna talk about today is how you can give your business a checkup. I have a startup, and I was just looking through my notes and my business plan, and I'm getting ready to have a meeting with my partners, and I just wanted to kind of go over things 'cause I feel like we're all over the place on what we're trying to accomplish. So I thought maybe this would be helpful to my audience. So how do you give your business a checkup? First thing I want you to do is ask yourself, what is your value proposition? What is it your customers are paying for? What do they expect when they write you a check, give you money, what are they getting for their money? That's your value proposition. What do your customers get of value by doing business with you? We're trying to give a strong value proposition. I know I personally want to give my customers more than what they're paying for. So when they write as a check or they pay us, they go, wow, that was, man, they really, we got something of tremendous value, and I own high-end companies. So it's hard for me to do that. So I'm always trying to add more value to it. But I was looking at the startup that I have, and I was really struggling with what we were giving our customers. Like, could we make a promise that we could deliver on this? Most of my companies are service companies. And I felt like we were really falling short on the value proposition. Because if you've listened to me, I'm really huge on the what if. The genesis of my business needs to be an audacious what if. And for this startup, it was a very audacious what if. But the more I looked at it, I felt like we couldn't deliver on that. So I have a meeting this Friday with my partner Zoom call, because they're all located somewhere in different parts of the world. And I want to shore up our value proposition. I know we have an audacious what if, but I'm concerned we can't deliver on it. And without it, I don't think we have a strong value proposition that I would bet my life on for my customers. See, I want to build a if you do business with my companies, I want to build a make a big promise to you and I want to absolutely build a bet my life I can deliver on. And in this startup, I'm not sure if we can. And I won't go forward with it until I'm absolutely sure of that. So we have this big meeting to go over our value proposition. So I want to ask you, what do customers get when they do business with your company? When they buy your product, what do they get? Is it equal to what they're paying and hopefully more? Listen, I have some very expensive cars, but I have to tell you, I feel like I'm underpaid. Yeah, I really do. I have a Mercedes SUV and I think it's worth 30,000 more than what I paid based on other cars. And it's the high end Mercedes, but I would have paid 30 more. I have a BMW M4. I've driven $130,000 convertibles. My M4 is like $94,000. I feel like I underpaid. I paid $94,000. I still feel like I underpaid because Mercedes and BMW have a tremendous value proposition. And I want that for the companies I have. So again, we're just giving your company a checkup. The first thing we're saying is, do you have a strong value proposition? What do customers get for the money they give you? That's it. I just simplified it. Next, what is your unique selling proposition? What is it that you offer that your competitors don't? Think about that. I mean, if you're just in shark-infested water and you're no different than anybody else, when we were cheaper or you think you're different-- no, you need to have a true unique selling proposition. I've shared this before, but I'm going to show you like two pizza places, three pizza places, dramatic, unique selling propositions. All three are extraordinarily wealthy companies because of this. And it's amazing. The one that I would never think is like crazy wealthy owns a sports team. But let's look at three pizza places. Pizza place one is the largest pizza-- sell more pizza than anybody in the United States. Number one, they do it in-house. Now they offer delivery now, but they are known for being a restaurant. That's pizza hot. That's the number one pizza place. The second is Domino's pizza. Well, what's their unique selling proposition? It was delivery. And they started that based on a hot pizza in 30 minutes or less. That was their unique selling proposition. Well, the third one that I'm shocked how well it does is little seizures. What was their unique selling proposition? Two pizzas for the price one, but you got to come pick it up. OK, you got to come pick it up. Two for one. It's worth it. I'll pick it up. I get two pizzas for the price one. And their pizza is very inexpensive. The person who owns the Detroit baseball team, Detroit Tigers, losing the train of thought here, obviously, owns a little seizure. So again, three different value propositions, all three are very unique. You got to decide, as you're reviewing your company, why do people buy from us? What do they get? What makes us unique? What makes us stand out from our competition? That's our unique selling proposition. OK? And then I always say if you're struggling with these, and you're really looking for a branding position, I'm going to give you the secret to creating a branding position, branding position. And it may tie up your value proposition and your unique selling proposition. So if you're kind of fuzzy on these two, ask yourself, what one promise? If we could make it and deliver on it, people would chase us down for our business. Well, let's go back to the other examples. Well, if you can get me a hot pizza in under 30 minutes, delivered, I'm in. That's a strong value proposition. That's a very unique selling proposition at the time. OK? So that works. That's a very big one promise. And again, we have little Caesars. What's there? What's their big one promise? What if we can give you two pizzas for the price of one? OK, that's a strong one promise that will make people chase us down for our business. So if you're looking to create a unique position in the marketplace, and you don't have one right now, and you're struggling, it's probably because you don't have a strong one promise. You need to have a strong one promise. Give you another one. What if we could create an electric car that could be fast and super good looking? Because you remember, most of the electric cars are like the Volt and their Prius. I mean, they're like Goats. They're slow. They're not attracted. When you look at them, it looks like half a car. And then you see a Tesla, like 060 and 3.0 seconds. And their Gorge is looking. And they have a decent price point in line with a BMW Mercedes. They figured it out. During the coronavirus, they had over $5 billion of profit this quarter. They have a backlog for their cars. Why? What if we can make this one audacious promise? We'll deliver you an electric car that's fast and good looking? All right, it worked. They're doing incredible. The most valuable-- they were worth more than general motors the other day. That's an incredible value proposition. So again, what we're trying to do is give your business to check up. When I go going through these times, people wonder why their businesses are struggling. Well, coming out of this, you're going to absolutely have to have a strong value proposition for people. You absolutely always need to have a unique selling proposition. What makes you different from your competition? You need to have a strong branding position. How are you marketing your company? What's the one thing that customers think about when they think of your company? I want it always to be the one promise that if I could deliver on it with Chase them, they chase me down for our business. That's always been my branding position of any of my companies. I hope this helped you. Again, Sean Castorina, 10 Minute Entrepreneur podcast. If you go on Amazon, I've written three books. But I'm going to give you a way, one, for free. The world's greatest business plan. If you go to my website, SeanCastorina.com, you'll get it for free, 151 page book, Free Bonus Chapter on How to Write a Business Plan that you can actually present it to investors. It's a fantastic bonus chapter. Get them excited to give it to you. Follow me on Instagram. If you have any questions, you can send them to me at Ask [email protected]. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Rate it. Subscribe to it. Tell your friends. We will talk again tomorrow.