Pillars Of Leverage

Why its everything when it comes to growing your business.The pillars of leverage shows that fast growth is because of using others in some way, and that working with others is what leads to success.

The pillars need a strong foundation so they don't sink, this means putting in place a reliable system to retain your leverage and allow it to grow. the foundation and pillars make up your wealth temple which is all the leverage you have available. the best strategy is to get other wealth temples to build your own and as wealth temples are owned by humans you must learn how to leverage human efforts.

NOTE: This article will be continually updated to make it more valuable

The pillars are:

Human
Money
Skills
Time
Resources

Lets get right into the pillars starting with the most important pillar, Human.

Human

Human resources can be tapped by
Networks (such as social media)
Outsourcing/employing others
Joint ventures/teamwork
Your audience
Others audiences

Human resources are those people which you can get to work with you whenever its due to wanting to help you or having a stake in the relationship. (The Joint Venture Model goes into more detail about this pillar)

Not all relationships are equal you want to think about these concepts when picking where to target:

Influencers
Connections
Relevance
Reach

Influencers

Is the person an authority that people trust? If so a positive word about you can greatly impact your business and leverage their audience and the authoritative trust they have built.

Getting influencer's on board with you is very important to growing your system.

Connections

Does the person in particular have connections to a key person? If so befriending them and getting them to like you can become your way to that person.

Relevance

How relevant is the target to your business? If your business is to do with wealth, entrepreneurship, property investors and stock investors make sense as a similar audience, however health items is a bad idea.

Reach

How far can this person reach? Do they 1000 followers or more like 30,000 followers. Reach is very important just don't forget about how relevant their audience is.

Tapping into networks

Theres two main types those you know personally and those through social media. For overall networking you should refer to my other model the Granting Authority Model.

In general you want to go through social media and decide the following

Where should I target my marketing
Whom should I befriend
Where do my customers and potential connectors go
Which groups have I become popular in

With social media your overall objective is to build a following which you can direct to do something.

Where should I target?

What does your audience like? If you find they like similar companies, then targeting those companies could help you achieve customers.

Imagine your on Facebook you run your audience insights and learn they like the following pages Tate, Saatchi and Victoria and Albert Museum. because of this you can run ads targeting people that also like those pages. Since they are relevant to your audience.

Are their businesses similar to yours on your network that you can use to target your audience?

Whom should I befriend?

As mentioned above with the concepts using those concepts look for people that you see as high value targets, you should start out with smaller value and gradually increase as you grow your brand.

Imagine your trying to promote your Facebook group, it would make sense to befriend the page admins that run the groups you participate in as they are more likely to help you.

Because of taking the time to help the admins they will help you whenever its pinning some of your posts, recommending you etc.

Where do my customers and potential connectors go?

You need to participate in groups and figure out who are potential connectors, they are usually those that participate regularly in groups. Fortunately connectors and customers tend to be in the same type of groups.

When you have found a list of potential groups join the ones that are big not small ones under 100 members, your looking for 500+, if you can check to make sure the group is not filled with spam you want high quality.

Which groups have I become popular in?

In you social media network which groups have you established a clear status in? Over time an audience will view you in some way whenever its negative such as a spammer or positive such as an authority.

Outsourcing/employing others

This is all about getting others to work with you this is mainly to increase how much time is in the time bank to complete tasks that pop up.

Joint ventures/teamwork

This is one of the secrets to growing fast, using others systems to grow your own, amazon did it, eBay did it Facebook does it. Others systems is the best way to grow your own system even if your already big. (The Joint Venture Model covers this)

Your audience

This is your list and reach that you have, the bigger your audience the easier it will be to get more results. Whenever its sales, interviews or joint ventures.

Remember you want to work on building an audience you own, I am working on a resource all to do with this. (coming soon)

Others audiences

This is similar except you use others audience to help build your own, this is very important and is also included in my resource I'm making.

Money

Money is one of the strongest levers you can use, money can buy the parts of he other levers. This is why those that get venture capital can start out strong as millions can make them able to systemise their leverage well unlike a start up with no capital.

The core forms of money are:

Your money

System based money

Others money

Your money

This speaks for itself this is what you invest into your business. Now you don't need to spend a fortune to start under £100 a month is ideal during your start up phase.

System based money

This is what your system makes, there are some key metrics to keep an eye on which are:
LTV (lifetime value)
CAC (customer acquisition cost)

These key metrics can be used to pay for the following with system money: (NOTE:I plan to write articles on these areas)
Affiliate programs
PPC ads
Solo ads
Social media ads
And more

LTV (lifetime value)

This is all about how much a customer is worth to the business, if your just starting ou they tend to be low as you will have few product ranges and not an established brand.

Lets say you have around £5000 worth of products and services a customer can buy, this will be the possible ceiling of any customers lifetime value.

Imagine getting high traffic ads that are hard to compete with because of having a high LTV per customer, you should look at 4 areas when it comes to LTV

Immediate LTV

This is how much the customer will spend when they buy from you, take for example you offer a book to affiliates and they only get paid on traffic that buys the book.

when the traffic from them buys you use a one time only offer such as top 10 questions and with this upsell you keep all of the profits.

Immediate LTV is mainly about recovering your cost quickly whenever its through ads such as adwords and social media ads or partnership schemes such as affiliates or joint ventures.

Short term LTV

This is the average value of a customer within a year, I usually split them up either monthly or quarterly, this helps you estimate how much new/old customers spend within certain time frames.

From this you can maximise your marketing instead of wasting money, you should spend little and find out how much on average a new customer spends within a month.

Imagine your spending money on Facebook ads you pay £10 a day which in a month is roughly £300, now from those customers you find out within the month they spent £700. Because of this you decide to double your ads to £20 a month, bringing in much more traffic.

Yearly LTV

Yearly LTV is all about the average spending of your customers over the year. This is more to do with long term growth instead of immediacy changes. This is best for subscription models to figure out how much you make each year.

Imagine you have a membership site that charges £10 a month or £100 a year, from your data you see the average member leaves after 6 months so you make around £60 per member. It may make sense to promote the yearly subscription more.

Long term LTV

Here you look at how much your customers are worth overall, the two factors that influence this is your brand and the total possible a customer can spend with you.

Some models have infinite potential mainly due to the fact they are ongoing such as a membership subscription, the infinity models tend to have flaws such as it takes time to grow the LTV unlike other models.

You want to mix short term high return models such as courses with long term infinite return such as a subscription.

CAC

This is all to do with how much you spend to get a stranger to become a customer, the lower the cost generally the better it is. There may be exceptions as higher initial costs may increase those customers LTV.

Use commissions for affiliates etc to figure out the cost compared to the potential LTV per customer. It may make sense to offer high commissions to get lots of dedicated affiliates.

Imagine your commissioned product sells for £100 and you currently only offer 50% so a CAC of £50, while those customers continue o buy products/services and in a year are worth £500.

Now thats around £450 profit per customer in a year so if why not offer 100% commission? That will be £400 profit per customer not a big difference yet in the traffic brought to you it can be.

Others money

Theres two types of money from others. That which is free and those that come with some sort of back payment. To many businesses opt for venture capital which in return they give up big stakes in their businesses which should be avoided.

Money you pay back

There are many ways to get money which you pay back, the main one I will cover is using commissions.
The various types are:
Venture capital
Loans
And commissions

Commissions

Commissions are best used when you can pay back through a system such as instantly after a sale has been made. Commissions is a powerful weapon you can leverage.

When we look at big affiliates they bear all the costs to market to their audience and they get paid when they make you a sale, because of this you pay nothing in marketing only in sales. Your leveraging their money and assets.

Skills

With skills there are two main types

Your skill
Employed skills.

Before we go into that we will look at what makes a skill a skill, first of all you need to be good at it and not just starting out, there is no problem in building a skill you plan to use such as marketing, just don't build skills which wont help you in the long run when you can outsource it.

The factors in a skill are:
Competence
Previous experience
Speed and quality

Competence

This is to do with their mastery within the skill level, for example if they are a graphic designer, how good are they at using different techniques etc. This is all about their general ability.

You want to make sure you learn a lot about the skill imagine you want to focus on Facebook marketing, then only understanding Facebook ads shows limited competence as that will be missing a lot of marketing opportunities such as groups, messaging Facebook pages and general post engagement.

Previous experience

This is all to do with what they did in the past, this is a good predictor of the future, if they did well marketing on Facebook through groups because of that you can assume they will do well again.

Speed and quality

How fast can they do the work? And is the quality acceptable?

Imagine you hired a programmer they take months and the app doesn't even work, because of that you view them as lacking skills in app development.

While another programmer takes a week less yet their app is flawless because of this you endorse him about his app development skills.

Your skills

Decide what you would love to do and what tasks are high value, imagine emails those from customers can be outsourced while those that are from connections should go straight to you.

If you love to write then do it as you can work on the skill and find ways of making it high value such as copy writing, guest articles and creating products.

Always look at the cost/profit per hour of the tasks and consider outsourcing them if:
1. They are repetitive and low value
2. Very specialised and time consuming

Employed skills

This is where you get others to use their skills to help you whenever you pay them or they give it for free.

This area deserves its own article which I plan to do for now key items you should consider are:

Cost to outsource
Capability of worker
Their motivation
Commitment to your cause

Time

With all tasks imagine a time bank the ways you can increase the amount in your time bank is

Your own time
Others time
System time

The beginning

In the beginning you will mainly use your own time, this is due to the fact that others and systematic based is difficult to implement and takes time and money to do so.

You can have some forms such as free social media accounts, a simple autoresponder and hosting is the essential system based time workers you start with.

Your own time

If you have nothing then your own time is used up mostly, at the start you need to do high value and low value tasks. Over time when your building your system look at ways to reduce your need in low value tasks.

Lets imagine IT work its expensive to outsource completely yet when you focus on bigger return tasks such as marketing it will far exceed the expenses of using others time.

Others time

These are the people work for you, whenever free or paid, generally you want to check their skills before hiring them, (have a cheat sheet for this)

Its best to have others use their time on lower value tasks while you work on high value tasks such as marketing and strategy.

System time

This is all about systems that help decrease the time needed by making it easier such as automation, tracking and being self reliant.

Resources

These are anything else such as:

Commodities
Key assets
Land
Endorsements

Generally anything thats not in the other pillars and can be used, from ultra specific such as a partner having local SEO nailed, to the general such as the authority of a publication. (I will expand upon this overtime)

Commodities

These are assets that are not unique such as paper, corn etc these items, help in producing a key asset such as paper for printing out a physical book.

Key assets

This is anything that can increase your ability to produce such as machinery, transport, staff, products, copyrights etc

Land

This can allow you to use local SEO to be number 1 in areas, if you have a office near a city Google will likely put you near the top for local results.

Endorsements

These are statements from trusted people that help you, such as building your brand selling a product etc.