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You can't save your way to prosperity! - Alan Berg, CSPYou can’t save your way to prosperity!

We’ve all heard the phrase “cut costs to boost profits,” but is that really the best way to grow your wedding business? Are you focusing too much on trimming expenses and missing out on bigger opportunities? In this episode, I delve into why investing in your business can yield far more significant returns than just cutting corners. I discuss practical ways to increase sales, enhance profitability, and make smarter investments that will propel your business forward.

Listen to this new 6-minute episode for insights on shifting your focus from saving to smart investing for a more prosperous business.

Episode Summary: 

In this episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast, I dive into the concept that you can’t save your way to prosperity; instead, you need to focus on increasing sales and making smart investments. I discuss the difference between everyday expenses, which have a limited potential for savings, and investments, which can provide higher returns over time. By concentrating on boosting your sales and profitability, you’ll see much greater benefits than simply trying to cut costs. I also emphasize the value of investing in marketing, training, and enhancing customer value perception. Tune in to learn how to set your wedding business on a path to greater success and long-term profitability!

If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 

 

Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com  

 

View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/

 

You can’t save your way to prosperity. Ooh, where is he going with this one? Listen to this episode and find out. Hi, it’s Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. You can’t save your way to prosperity. This is actually a chapter in one of my books. I think it’s in wit, wisdom, and the business of weddings. And I came across this phrase the other day, and I was like, you know what? I want to talk about this again.

I don’t know if I’ve talked about this on the podcast yet directly, but I certainly have spoken about this in my consulting and certainly in the book. But let me talk about what I mean here. In a business, you have expenses, you have investments, and it’s certainly important to control our expenses because our expenses are things that you don’t expect to get more utility out of and more value out of than what you paid for it. So when I pay my electric bill, it’s because I got electricity. I didn’t expect anything else. I expected to get that. I expected to get it all the time, and that was it. There you go.

If I put gas in my car, I expect to get where I’m going with the gas. I don’t expect any more. I don’t expect any less. Those are expenses. Rent, your mortgage payments, things like that. Those are expenses. We have to pay them. We’re getting what we paid for, and that’s it.

Investments, on the other hand, are things that you, you hope will get a higher return than what you paid. So we can start with investments like you buy a stock. If you buy a stock, or if you buy a mutual fund or an ETF or something like that, you hope that that value will go up, right? There’s an increase in value there. When you invest in advertising, you hope that you will get back more than you paid for it. These are investment type things. The thing is that when you’re trying to increase your profitability, the best way to do it is on the sales side, not on the expense side. And again, you should look at your expenses and certainly manage them. But the reason I say you should look on the sales side is because the upside is unlimited on the sales side, whereas the expense reduction is always limited.

The most you can save is what you’re spending for something. So if you stop paying the electric bill, the electric gets turned off. You save that bill. But what did that do for you? Now you’re sitting in the dark. That doesn’t help you there. So the other side of it is you can do different things on the sales end, on the sales, on the marketing, on the following up, on the learning, investing in your education, learning how to convert more leads, learning how to get ghosted less, and things like that. You can do that side. And there is no particular upper limit to where that can go in terms of increase in profitability versus on the expense side.

You cant save your way to prosperity because the most you can ever save is only what youre spending. And the thing is, you cant spend that much less on certain things. Certainly now, with inflation and stuff like that, things have gone up in price. That also changes your profitability. So what do you need to do? You need to increase on the sales side, increase on the profit side, as opposed to trying to reduce on the expense side as the place where youll see the most benefit. Now, again, you do want to see benefit. I remember when we changed all of our light bulbs to compact fluorescence. The electric bill went down, changed them to leds, the electric bill went down more, put on solar panels, electric bill went down more.

These are all things that we can do. Of course, that was an investment. Solar panels were an investment. You could say that the led light bulbs were an investment because theyre going to continue to pay that dividend of a reduced electric bill over time. Absolutely. But again, theres still a limit to how much you can save on your telephone, on your Internet, on your tv, if you have a tv subscription, like we have Dish network, right. You can save on that. So there’s always a limit to how much you can save, but there’s no limit to how much more you can sell.

And the proof of that, very simply, is think about when you started in business and think about where you are now. So unless you started last week or last month, I would hope that your sales are significantly higher than when you first started. Right. I think of first starting go way, way back when you first started. Think about your prices. Are your prices higher than they were? Yes. Why did you raise your prices? Because your customers perceived that value being there, right. That’s what we do.

We don’t just raise them because we want to raise a price. We raise them because our customers perceive the value to be higher. And therefore, when they invest with you and they are investing with you, when they invest with you, they’re getting a return that they feel is worth it. I always say that when you raise your price, it’s always scary. And the first time a customer says yes, they’ve proved that it’s right. That’s it because the customer puts the value on it. You put the price, they put the value. So if you’re trying to increase your profitability, yes, take a look at expenses.

But don’t waste too much time looking at the expense side because there’ll be some obvious places to do it. But if you think about it incrementally, you start, you save $100 or $200 there. If you made one more sale, wouldnt that bring that in? Yeah, it would. It would bring that in many, many times over. So thats what you want to be looking at is how can I increase my profitability on the sales side as opposed to how do I just keep reducing my expenses, reducing my expenses? Because you could end up wasting a lot of time. If you put that same amount of effort into following up more or increasing your sales in some other ways, thats going to pay way more dividends than trying to reduce the expenses. So if you want to get into prosperity, where you want to be more prosperous than you are right now, you’re not going to do it by saving. You’re going to do it by investing.

And investing could be in marketing and networking, in advertising, and it might be in training. Right? That’s a great way to be investing in yourself because that pays dividends for the rest of your life. So you can’t save your way to prosperity, but you can be more profitable by paying attention to the top line and how you can control that hope. It gave you something to think about.

 

I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected] or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

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©2024 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

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