Anthony Mink is the CEO & Co-Founder of Live Bearded.
He’s also a member of my exclusive Blue Ribbon Mastermind and one of the smartest business owners I know. That’s why Molly and I we’re excited to invite Anthony to speak at our Smart Traffic Live virtual event this year.
But we didn’t ask Anthony to speak about traffic or conversions — although he’s a pro at those, too…
No, instead we asked him to speak about something even more fundamental to his success: how to survive the chaos of operating a business.
Because business is crazy — it will always be crazy — and you need to know what’s really important so you don’t get lost in the shuffle.
In this excerpt from Anthony Mink’s session you will learn:
- Anthony’s two most important skills for any business owner
- How to create raving fans by mastering the game of adding value
- How to build a scalable system that turns value into profit
Anthony Mink On Mastering the Game of Adding Value
Hey! I’m Anthony, and I’ve been playing this game of business for 10 years now.
I started my first internet business in 2011 and over those last 10 years I’ve had the privilege to build and sell three different companies.
“I’ve made millions of dollars in revenue, I’ve lost millions of dollars, and through that process I’ve really come to love the game of business.”
But if we’re going to talk about business, then it’s important to have the same foundation, right?
Start By Defining What Your Business Is
I think Ezra said it best when he said, “Business is nothing more than a conversation around a shared experience.”
At Live Bearded, we have a conversation around the experience of having a beard. Ezra has a conversation around the experience of getting older and feeling beautiful…
And in your business, you are having a conversation around whatever experiences your customers are having and their reasons for buying your products.
“If you boil down everything we do in business to its purest form, ultimately it’s just a conversation between two people: a business and its customer.”
Master the Game of Adding Value
It’s important to note that I think of business as an intellectual sport.
The way we win at this game is to out-think, out-strategize, out-innovate, and ultimately out-execute our competition — so we really need to stay focused on what we’re trying to do.
Because there are a lot of “activities” in business, but I believe there are really just 2 core fundamentals.
For me, the most important thing we do at Live Bearded is build raving fans. We want to build a culture and community of people who truly love what we do — they like every post, read every email, and buy every product…
And the way that we do that is by really understanding our customers’ needs, so we can take people from complete strangers to raving fans, to friends, to customers, to clients, right?
How to Turn Strangers Into Raving Fans
The closer we get to our customer’s wants, fears and insecurities, the more opportunity we have to solve their problems and add value.
“If I was to summarize how to build raving fans, I would say the most important thing you need to do is find ways to add value to your customers’ lives — to serve them, to support them.”
And that value has a funny way of turning into sales, right?
So we’re creating this sustainable, scalable system that turns strangers into fans and fans into customers by adding value. The more value you add, the more sales you’re going to generate.
Once you have sales coming in, the second fundamental thing you must do is learn how to turn that cash flow into profit.
Master the Game of Business Operations
I think of this as two separate games. There is the game of value: “How do you serve and add value to your customers?”
And then there’s the game of business operations: “How do you turn sales into profits?”
You win the first game by serving your customers, and you win this second game by optimizing and maximizing business operations.
Build Profit Into Your Team Culture
That’s why one of the things that we do at Live Bearded is we talk about a profit culture.
“It may be taboo to talk about profit with your employees and to really focus on the bottom line, but I think that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
The more that we build profits, the more money we have to invest into our employees, into our benefits, into our growth, and into our marketing.
Ultimately, this creates a sustainable cycle where the value we create for our customers turns into sales…
Then we turn those sales into profits by understanding how to optimize and maximize the operations of the business. The more profits we have, the more we can invest into growth and adding value, and we can continue to scale.
Two Most Important Skills In Business
If you believe, like I do, that business is a conversation around a shared experience, then there’s really only two things that we must do as business owners:
First, we must master the game of adding value. We must find ways to add value to our customers’ lives. We must serve them…
Second, we must master the game of business operations so that we can optimize and maximize our revenues and turn those sales into profits.
There are a ton of things that we do in business, right? It’s complicated. It’s complex. Things are always breaking and going wrong…
But these are some of the ideas and strategies I use to thrive in constant chaos.
