Achieving Ridiculously Consistent Growth with Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch

It’s time for another deep dive into the IBO podcast archives! This month, the time machine takes us back to August 6, 2021, to Episode 196: How to Achieve Ridiculously Consistent Growth with Duct Tape Marketing founder John Jantsch.

Jantsch, a successful business owner and thought leader, is the author of The Ultimate Marketing Engine: 5 Steps to Achieve Ridiculously Consistent Growth. He graciously agreed to sit down with IBO co-founder Amy Foley to share some tidbits from his book. Read on for some of the highlights of the discussion.

Prioritize Processes

While some business owners might view systems or repeatable processes as “cookie cutter,” it’s an ideal way to ensure you’re providing consistently top-notch services to your clientele while achieving consistent growth, the ability to delegate, and increased sustainable profitability.

Building rock-solid systems has been the secret to Duct Tape Marketing’s decades of success, said Jantsch. Creating systems provides the much-needed underpinning to your company’s growth!

Narrow Your Focus

It can be easy to get into the habit of trying to be everything to everybody, especially when launching your business. After all, it’s best to have a wide base of clientele, isn’t it? According to Jantsch, that’s not the case.

Instead, Jantsch urged business owners to narrow their focus to their best customers. Put your energy toward the people to whom you can deliver the best value rather than chasing opportunities that won’t stand the test of time or be a good fit for your business in the long run.

Chasing anything that comes your way is a quick way to get dragged into a cycle of ups and downs, eventually eroding your profit and leaving dissatisfied customers in your wake. This is detrimental to any agency!

Create an Ideal Customer Profile

Rather than spending your time and energy running after prospects, take some time to determine what your ideal customer looks like. What are their problems? How are you equipped to provide them with solutions?

Jantsch noted that the old 80/20 cliche pans out time after time-- 80% of your profit is created by 20% of your client base. Why not focus on that 20% instead of going out of your way (and potentially out of your area of expertise) to please the 80% that aren’t contributing much to your bottom line?

Sit down and strategize about what you can do to grow WITH that vital 20% that’s keeping your business afloat. You can focus your services, your hiring, and your overall strategy on this small pool of clients and find that your business can grow beyond your expectations.

Map the Customer Success Track

At Duct Tape Marketing, Jantsch created the “customer success track,” which starts at the foundational stage, aka where you find the customer when they first engage with your business. The best way to build trust with new customers is to show them how they can grow with a blueprint that clearly outlines the milestones they’ll meet along the way.

How do you develop this track? First, determine where your clients start when they come to you. At Duct Tape Marketing, Jantsch found that most new customers in the “foundational” stage come to them with an iffy website, little to no content, and an SEO strategy that he described as “a mess.” Bottom line? They might have an online presence, but it’s not doing anything for their business.

Before they can even address these baseline issues, Duct Tape Marketing encourages their clients to do some soul searching; they need to figure out who their best clients are and determine which stage they’re at now.

Then, it’s important to figure out where they WANT to be-- what’s their ultimate goal? Is it something that the business can help them achieve? From there, Jantsch and company address the next stage-- attracting leads. Then, they can create strategies for every subsequent stage that follows.

What Comes First? Not Website Redesign!

Amy mentioned that many agencies want to jump immediately into overhauling their outdated websites, assuming that will resolve their stagnant growth. Where in the process does this come into play?

“Websites are the #1 thing they ask for,” Jantsch laughed. However, Duct Tape Marketing cautions against an immediate website redesign. First, it’s important to create a strategy. Narrow your focus and the factors that make an ideal client. Determine your most profitable services. Figure out which problems you’re solving for your ideal client. Once you’ve tackled all of that, THEN it’s time to beautify your website.

Jantsch also pointed out that narrowing your focus doesn’t just mean winnowing down your clients, it also means applying a laser focus to the services you offer. What do you do best? Get into the habit of saying no to things that don’t fall into that category, and create a content strategy promoting the areas in which you excel.

Strategy Before Tactics

It’s important to remember that your website, content, and SEO are the foundation upon which you build your strategy before you go out and generate leads. Ideally, you should create a strategy that will play into your very best services-- highlight what you do best. If you give the impression that you’re a jack of all trades, it can diminish your level of expertise in the eyes of potential (and existing) clients.

Ready for more? Check out the podcast! If you’d like to learn more about the five steps to achieve ridiculously consistent growth, grab the book!

Want to learn more about Inbound Back Office? I’d be happy to help! You can grab time with my scheduling link.