When is the last time you spent a day working on implementing a new process, idea or project that moved your business forward? Instead of putting out fires.
How many hours a week do you work on your business?
How often do you search for ideas to improve a process in your business?
Hopefully the answer isn’t never.
You know the saying, if you aren’t growing your dying, or something like that.
If you spend your entire day doing the same thing over and over again, reacting to problems, and putting out fires, how can you improve?
You MUST carve out time to work ON your business.
In my restaurants, we had a 3-4 year period where our sales went from less than $200k to over $900k. We moved fast.
Things broke.
Every 3-6 months we would settle into the new volume and focus on growth again.
Each time I had to replace myself. There’s only so much you can do.
Initially, I would answer the phone, send out quotes, send the orders to the store for production, meet potential wedding clients for tastings, cook the food, deliver the food, run the weddings.
In the beginning, there’s not enough volume to pay someone to help.
After a while I was spending 4 hours a day on the phone and sending out quotes via email.
So we hired an office person who could handle all of the admin work.
Then we got to the point where we were running 20+ deliveries a week and 2-3 weddings on the weekend.
Delivery drivers, wedding leads.
Until we finally hired an operations manager who manages a $900k+ catering business.
I was always trying to replace myself if I spent more than 20% of my time on something.
This is how you grow, but where do you start?
Focus
Forget time management, think about impact management.
I’ve worked with several people over the years who like to brag about how busy they are, but are they doing the right kinds of work?
Should you be micromanaging your employees making sure they follow a certain procedure 100% like scraping product out of a container to minimize waste?
Or going out in the community, rubbing elbows with other business owners drumming up business, like $5-10k holiday catering parties?
I chose the latter.
Maximize LTV
Where does your business need the most help?
I’d say many small business owners think they need more customers but in reality, they haven’t maximized the value of their existing customers.
Once you have a customer, don’t kick them to the curb and forget about them.
Develop a relationship.
It’s so much easier to sell your existing customer something than selling to a new one.
Talk to them. Find out what they need.
What products/services are they looking for before or after they buy yours?
What else can you create for them?
What other businesses might want access to your customers? Can you create a rev share partnership?
When I was 24, I begged my dad to open a second location. I wanted it so bad I thought for sure it was the way.
I built fancy financial models that showed us how much money we were going to make.
My mom passed away in 2011 and blessed us with an opportunity to make it happen.
Nothing about my financial models came true.
Over the next 12-18 months we learned some hard lessons.
At one point we were about $30k away from maxing out all of our credit lines and capital.
My dad mortgaged one of his rentals. The emotions I felt at the time were intense: guilt, fear, and anxiety.
Luckily for us we had a core group of 4-5 managers that really helped us pull through.
Looking back, if we had just focused on growing our catering sales with one location, we probably could have doubled our cash flow.
Focus on the thing that will have the biggest impact on your business.
80/20
You might not know it’s called the Pareto principle but undoubtedly you know what the 80/20 rule it.
80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers.
80% of the work is done by 20% of your staff.
This rule can be applied to almost every area of your business. So as you are focusing your time on improving your business, you must analyze everything to see what is truly moving the needle.
We applied this rule multiple times with our restaurants as we grew.
The first time I didn’t even know what it was called but I was analyzing our menu. It was huge. I knew we didn’t need everything that was on it.
At the time our POS wasn’t the greatest and the only way to get data out of it was to print it on terminal paper….
So I printed a report that showed every single item we sold over a one month period, the quantity and the total dollar amount. On terminal paper.
I’m talking a 100 ft receipt.
That I manually transcribed into Excel so I could run a pivot table. You have to do what you have to do sometimes.
The data doesn’t lie. Our meal deals accounted for nearly half of our sales. Jumbo rib plates put the most dollars in the drawer even though it had a higher food cost.
There were several side orders that we hardly sold at all despite my dad believing we did. I think sometimes you hear one person rave about something and it alters your perception.
With this data, we were able to redesign our menu to put the jumbo rib plates front and center followed by the meal deals and eliminated several things.
What resulted was higher sales, better cash flow and a simplified ordering process since we were able to remove several items off of the order guide.
Sure there was one customer who told me every time he saw me he missed our sweet potato fries.
And my cousin won’t let me forget how much she loved the corn dog nuggets.
You can’t please everyone, 95% of the people, 95% of the time my dad would always say.
It works on multiple levels
The neat thing about the 80/20 rule is it works as you work up the value ladder.
So could say 64% of your sales come from 4% of your customers and 51% come from the top 1% of your customers.
You should have offers for each one of these levels.
I read about this concept in Perry Marshall’s book but I struggled to come up with a high ticket offer for our most loyal, die-hard fans.
One after speaking with my neighbor who recently purchased a gym franchise it hit me like a ton of bricks. Or I just borrowed an idea.
He paid for Alex Hormozi’s gym launch program which wasn’t cheap. But one of the first things they had him do to generate cash flow was to sell a lifetime membership to the gym that included 1 year of personal training for $5k.
The personal training alone was worth $5k so it seemed like a no brainer to me.
Here’s the other part, they put a cap on it so there were only 4 spots available to create scarcity.
How could we sell this?
BBQ 4 Life, one meal a day, not valid for delivery, not transferrable. $5k.
It still didn’t seem quite attractive enough so at the last minute I added a $1k catering credit as well. So a built-in 20% discount.
Crafted the email with scarcity, only 4 available, fill out a form that is time stamped so it will be first come first serve.
Clicked send not knowing what would happen.
Well, we had about 20 people register.
So I started sending out the payment link in order of the registrations and quickly realized people don’t read instructions and they thought this was a giveaway 🙂
After a few conversations and non-responses I just sent the link to everyone. What’s the worst that could happen? We sell more than 4?
Well sure enough the first payment came through. Then another.
And that ended up being all we sold but I was stoked. We just got two people (super loyal fans) to hand us $5k each.
Now we had $10k to go out and find more business.
I figured it might take them 3 years to burn through actual food costs. I was confident by then their contribution would more than pay for itself.
These two individuals were already in our stores 3-5 times a week, but now we saw them every day.
Now every employee knew their name, and they would chat with us every time they claimed their daily meal.
And how many people do you think they told about us?
The 80/20 rule is not just for sales. You should use the principle for every area of your business:
- Sales
- Advertising
- Operations
Learn Fast
If you want to outpace 99% of businesses, you need to be learning and evolving faster than they do. Knowledge is power, but only if you apply it.
When I came back to help my dad grow the family business one of the first things I realized was that we had no concept of marketing.
We’d run coupons in a local penny saver magazine.
Sure it would bring people in, they would leave and that was it. There was no long-term relationship.
I knew there had to be a better way.
I started reading everything I could get my hands on. The neat thing about books that are less than 20 years old or so is that they almost always reference other books where the author “learned” the concept.
So each book I finished added another 3-5 to my list.
After a half dozen or so I noticed a common thread with direct marketing and ran with it.
Now when I consume content it’s for a specific problem so if I’m able to take one idea that resonates with me and my business, I’ll implement it right away.
Most people consume knowledge passively—they read books, listen to podcasts, or take courses, but they never implement it. That’s why you need to follow The Evolution Loop:
The Evolution Loop
- Consume – Every month, dive into a book, course, podcast, or expert insights on a topic that could improve your business. Whether it’s marketing, leadership, sales, or systems, learning from those who have already figured it out compresses your timeline to success.
- Test – Knowledge without action is useless. Implement one actionable idea each month. Just one. If you try to do everything at once, you’ll do nothing well. Focus on executing a single high-impact strategy.
- Track – Measure your results. Did the change increase revenue, improve efficiency, or enhance customer experience? If you don’t track, you’re flying blind.
- Refine – If it worked, double down. If it didn’t, analyze why, adjust, and try again. Each cycle builds momentum.
Small, Consistent Improvements = Massive Competitive Advantage
Most businesses do the same thing for years and wonder why they don’t grow. But small, consistent improvements—compounded over time—create a massive gap between you and the competition.
Imagine making just a 1% improvement every week. In a year, your business isn’t 52% better. Thanks to compounding, it’s nearly 68% better. Meanwhile, your competitors, who haven’t changed, are falling further behind.
Most people overestimate what they can do in a day but underestimate what they can achieve in a year with disciplined execution. Stay in The Evolution Loop, and within 6-12 months, you’ll look back and realize you’ve left 99% of your competition in the dust.
The businesses that dominate aren’t the ones that work the hardest. They’re the ones who learn, adapt, and execute the fastest. Which one will you be?
Take Action
Learning fast is only half the battle. The real separator between struggling businesses and industry leaders is execution. Knowledge is potential power—only action makes it real.
When I started trying to figure out marketing I’m not going to lie, it took me way longer than I wanted to get things going.
Back then I was worried about things being perfect instead of just DOING something.
I spent too much time planning.
Most likely what you are trying to do isn’t rocket science.
Keep it simple.
The Action Formula
- Set Clear Priorities – With everything you’ve learned, identify the one thing that will make the biggest impact this month. Don’t get distracted by shiny objects.
- Create a Deadline – Ideas without deadlines are just dreams. Set a clear date by which you’ll implement the change.
- Commit Publicly – Tell your team, a mentor, or a peer what you’re working on. Accountability increases follow-through.
- Take the First Step Today – No matter how small, do something right now to move forward. Action builds momentum.
Execution Beats Perfection
Perfectionism kills progress. The best businesses don’t wait for the perfect moment—they iterate fast, launch, and improve as they go. Speed matters. Every week you delay, your competitors inch ahead.
Will you be the business that plans forever or the one that executes and wins?