Short-term profits are short-sighted.
We all want to make a profit from the first purchase that someone makes with us, but that’s a fantasy.
If you’re making a profit off your customers’ very first purchase then you deserve some time to celebrate.
Instead, you need to focus on providing long-term value to your customers.
There are two main ways to do this in a business.
Valuable Content
One is by being a content unicorn. Being someone who can capture the attention of millions of people through your content.
I have two favorite examples of content unicorns.
The first is my father, Frank Suarez.
He was so passionate about healing people’s metabolism that he never ran out of things to say.
Look at his YouTube channel for example (MetabolismoTV), it has thousands of videos with over 5 million subscribers.
And his content is why people have complete trust in him and what he says.
My second favorite content unicorn is Dr. Eric Berg.
When my agency began helping him, he had a few hundred thousand subscribers, now he has over 8 million subscribers.
Both Dr. Berg and my father built businesses mostly on the back of their educational material.
They both have thousands of videos, and have a combined total of millions of hours of research.
It’s mind-blowing, I know, and if you’re not in that position it’s okay no one jumps straight into that right away, they start in a gradient.
And you can build your business a second way.
Provide an Experience
Offer such a great experience with your products and services that people want to come back again and again.
Whether you’re ecommerce or brick and mortar you can always find a way to increase your customers journey to make it memorable.
Customers that come back generally become what we call advocates.
These advocates will tell everyone they know about you, and they may even make it their personal mission to get you more customers.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Dr. Berg and my father have advocates too.
But for their customers, it’s their giving nature that draws them in and keeps them around, the great products are just an added benefit.
So if you really want to think about long-term profits, you need to think about long-term growth, and nothing is more long-term than customers staying around AKA Lifetime Value.
Not a lot of gurus or entrepreneurs will tell you about customer retention because it doesn’t sound as sexy as revenue, profits, or cash flow.
But here’s the thing, customer retention is the easiest way to increase all of those.
If you had one hundred dollar bill coming in every month, you can use that 100 dollar bill to get another 100 dollar bill to come in, now you have $200 dollars coming in and then you repeat the cycle until you’ve grown so big you’re spending the money on staff, equipment, benefits, etc.
And yes, you’ll have some money drop off here and there–it’s inevitable, but if you’re constantly providing value in the form of content or an experience or both ideally then you have a system for long-term profits working for you.
That’s what this game of business is all about, expanding, growing and learning along the way.
So remember to provide value, but also think long-term–short-sightedness only gets you so far.
