Every successful business owner knows that money does grow on trees. On “Money Trees” – that is on successful systems that generate sales consistently, and make their owners rich.
What is required to create such a system? How can you plant a tree that grows money with your name printed on it, ready for you to collect it?
Well, over the years I’ve understood that at the heart of every Money Tree is a 4M Profit System.
What’s a 4M Profit System?
The 4M Profit System is the heart of every business, the reason why the business exists, and the reason why it works and continues to allow its owner to print money.
There are four components to a 4M Profit System, and when all of them are working together, congruently, then you have a Money Tree.
The four components of the 4M Profit System are: ME (meaning the owner of the business), MARKET, MEDIA and MESSAGE.
Your goal if you’re already running a business is to make sure that all components are working together, congruently. That means that they’re working towards a common goal (making profits), in a unified manner.
Because if they’re not, then your Profit System will fail. You can assign a coefficient from 0 to 10 for each. And the result of the multiplication of the four coefficients is the strength of your system.
Notice that if any ONE of the coefficients is 0, then the entire system fails. There are four such situations, over which we’ll go later.
For now, let’s quickly go over each component of the system.
ME – The Owner of The Business
Many people start by asking “how can I make a lot of money?”. The first term of that question is “I”. But unfortunately most people focus just on the money part.
But unless you get a very clear idea of who you are (your identity), what your values are, and what your goals are, you will fail. And here’s why:
When you don’t have a clear picture of who you are, you will build a business that is incongruent with you and your goals. And you won’t get anywhere, because subconsciously you will sabotage yourself.
You will NOT want to be successful, because you know you will be unfulfilled.
So how do you take care of the “ME” factor?
I have a very simple way that works for me, and will likely work for you as well. It involves three exercises.
First exercise. Just grab a pen and paper or open a Word document, and start writing out “My Ideal Life”.
And then proceed to describe your ideal life in detail. Spend 20 minutes doing this, and add as many details as you can.
This gives you an overarching perspective on what you desire.
Then you grab another piece of paper, and you write as follows for the second exercise: “My Ideal Day”. Underneath, you proceed to describe the day you would choose to live, if you had to live it over and over again to infinity, describing each and every activity in detail, from morning to night, considering that there are no consequences for anything.
How you wake up, what you look at, where you are, who you’re with – include everything.
Remember, this has to be something that you LOVE – because it will repeat over and over again. You have to dig deeper than $50 million dollars, 30 lady friends, and 20 Lambos. Because you will get bored with those.
So take 30 minutes to go through this in-depth.
And finally, take 10 minutes for the third exercise. Grab another piece of paper and write “I’m floating above my own body at my funeral, and I’m listening to what people are saying about me… what is the ONE word that they use to describe me?”
This will tell you who you aspire to be. Your true, deeply held identity, built around your core values.
So at the price of 1 hour, you can get a LOT of insight into what you truly want and who you are. You will want to make sure that your business and money-making fits into what you discover about yourself.
Because you can make a lot more money if you go collecting money that already has your name printed on it, than if you’re looking for other people’s money.
Next…
MARKET – The People You’re Selling To
The MARKET & ME factors, if we had to pick any, are probably the most important ones. The market that you pick is very important.
It must be congruent with who you are, but that’s not the only criteria. It must also be a real market – meaning that people are willing to pay for the products or services you want to sell.
If people in sufficiently large numbers are not buying what you’re selling, then you have a hobby, not a Money Tree.
So the way you make sure that there is a market is that you start NOT from your brilliant product or service idea, but from the needs and desires that people have.
To do that, I recommend you use a framework like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
All you have to do is pick a NEED that you want to help people fulfil. A need that is congruent with your ME factor.
The best products and services to sell for a beginner are ones that satisfy needs at the BOTTOM of the pyramid, and here’s why:
• Needs at the bottom of the pyramid are survival needs, and there is a tremendous biological pressure applied on human beings to fulfil those needs.
• Because of this added pressure, it’s much easier to sell these products to people who need them and lack them. The PAIN is almost unbearable, driving people to buy almost by itself.
• Actions to buy tend to be impulsive, whereas the higher you get on the pyramid, the more deliberation the actions to purchase take, and the more reason comes into play, ie the harder the sale.
So you can pick a category that you like, such as:
BREATHING
Look at people who struggle to breathe. Or look at people who need to protect themselves from breathing in poisonous gases, or catching Coronavirus.
These are HUGE, perennial markets. All you have to do is look into the category and identify them. A potential market could be people requiring masks to protect themselves from noxious gases inside mines.
Can you deliver a solution for them? Can you reach that market?
FOOD
Another huge source of potential wealth. Look into people with unresolved problems… allergies, Celiac disease, WEIGHT LOSS, and on and on and on.
These are perennial markets. They were here yesterday, and they will be there tomorrow. All you have to do to get started is to identify WHICH products are selling, and then start selling something similar. As you bring in more cash, you will innovate, and make the products and the methods of delivering on the desire even better.
WATER
Non-polluted clean water, water filters, desalination, water pollution, the problems here are again worth BILLIONS of dollars in market value.
And I could go on.
You get the idea.
After you have picked your category and investigated it a little, it’s time to dig down and find out WHICH products or services are selling in the specific market you picked.
For example, let’s say you picked BREATHING, and more specifically breathing problems for people who struggle with Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
So you go on Amazon, or Aliexpress, or any BIG shopping place, and check out the best sellers. For example:
An example of some products you could have a look at:
So two of them are breathers, the other is a supplement for respiratory support.
Then you find the categories for each one, and sort by best sellers. Here you go:
• Amazon Best Sellers: Best Breathing Trainers & Monitors
• Amazon Best Sellers: Best Detox & Cleanse Weight Loss Products
Now look at those products, and their promises. Look at the very best sellers, which you KNOW are probably doing MILLIONS every year.
If you’re just starting out, I’d look for someone who can manufacture a similar product for you or private label it, and you can start selling it right away.
As money starts coming in, you’ll invest to make your product better and innovate. In the beginning, always copy your competitors, as you grow, start innovating.
The same holds true if you’re selling a service.
By picking a STRONG market, with a lot of BUYING pressure, with real needs, then you prevent yourself from making one of the biggest mistakes in business: no market need, or building something no one wants.
MEDIA – The Vehicle That Helps You Connect With The Market
Having a strong MEDIA coefficient means that you have a vehicle at your disposal that EASILY connects you with your prospects. If you can’t reach your market, you don’t have a business that can scale, and your Money Tree will wither and die.
This usually means that it is TOO EXPENSIVE to reach your prospects. This is sometimes true in markets with high barriers of entry where being able to get in contact with your prospects is too difficult and expensive.
When trying to look at your MEDIA, you have to assess what methods exist to reach your clients, how much each costs, and the volume of prospects you can reach. The lower the cost, and the higher the volume, the better the respective media is.
The easiest shortcut is to identify one place where a lot of your prospects can be found. This ensures both low cost and high volume.
For example, maybe there is a trade show for real estate investors, where you can reach a lot of them in one go, assuming they’re your target audience.
Or if your target customers are YouTube channel owners, then you know that each channel email is publicly available, so it is quite cheap to find the emails and reach out to them.
Business models where it is difficult to reach your prospects have lower media coefficients. For example, if your target is Amazon FBA businesses, then it’s harder to reach them since their contact details aren’t made publicly available on Amazon. These details are hard to find.
So you’d have to look for conferences & expositions where they attend, or groups they’re a part of, email lists that you can purchase and similar methods to reach them.
If your market is seniors in rural areas with little access to technology, then they will be even harder to reach at scale than my previous Amazon example. This market would have a very low coefficient for its MEDIA.
So begin by making a list of the places where you can find a high density of your target audience. Do they hang out in certain Facebook groups? Can you find their email addresses in a single place? Do they live in the same neighborhoods?
Some of these questions will require research to answer, but it is very important that you take your time to determine what MEDIA you have at your disposal to reach your market, and if the costs make sense for your business.
Another trick you can use here is to think of who already has your customers but is not a direct competitor. For example, if you’re starting a web design business, who has your customers already?
One answer would be hosting companies. So you can reach out to them, and try to strike a partnership. Maybe you offer a discount to all their customers, and a share of the revenue for them.
This way you leverage other people’s assets and the goodwill they have already built to reach out to your target market. Such deals typically give you high media coefficients, making it very easy to access your market.
Once you have found a media that gives you a low cost and allows you to reach a high volume of your target market, you can move onto the next step.
MESSAGE – How You Project Yourself To Your Market
And finally, you know what you want, you picked a market, and you have a way to reach them cost effectively. The only missing ingredient now is the right message – the message that will get them to take action and buy what you’re selling.
The message is a critical factor. It is the message that does the selling for you, so it may very well be the most critical factor when it comes to the actual execution of your 4M Profit System.
The core of your message is your Unique Value Proposition (UVP). Every communication that you put out must be built around your UVP. The UVP is essentially the ONE reason that customers have for choosing YOU over all alternatives, and part with their money.
I use a complete proprietary framework to develop UVPs, called the 6Ps Value Chain. It takes you systematically through the process that every billion-dollar company has used to develop theirs, consciously or unconsciously.
The result of that is a UVP that gives your customer the strongest possible reason to choose your product over all your competitors. And your UVP will be responsible for most of the sales that you make – so it’s vital that you get it right.
Once you have your UVP, you must develop your marketing materials that you’ll use to contact your prospects. They will be built around your UVP, and they must come in a format that fits the MEDIA you have chosen.
Regardless of how you’ll deliver your message, it must effectively sell your product or service to your market. You need copywriting for that, specifically direct response copywriting.
My favorite “quick intro” to copywriting is the book Ca$hvertising by Drew Eric Whitman. Which you should read if you want to write your own messaging. Otherwise it is most effective that you hire a professional copywriter to help you develop your promotion and sales materials.
At the core of direct response copywriting lies the idea that every message you put out there has one goal in mind: to make sales.
Not to please your target market, not to get them to think it’s cute, no. Just to make sales.
And the only way to make sure it does that is to track the results. Tracking the results of your messaging is essential if you want to know how effective it is.
In fact, it is unlikely that you will have the most effective message the first time you put it out there. You need to track results and listen to feedback from your market, and test. Always test on a small segment a different message, and see if the results are better.
If they are, then replace your main message with the one that works better.
The bottom line is that the STRENGTH of your message depends on the strength of your UVP, and how well your marketing materials communicate that UVP in an engaging, sales-driven manner.
A lot of messaging makes the mistake of “trying to build relationships”, or “add value”, and so on. That’s wrong. The bottom line is that if your messaging isn’t making the cash register ring, then it’s wrong.
Assessing your 4M System
To assess the strength of your 4M System, you must give each component a grade, from 0 to 10. Then you multiply the answers. These are intuitive, so based on the understanding you just gained above, assess each of the four factors from a scale of 0-10, where 0 is inexistent or completely ineffective, and 10 is perfectly functional.
Here’s an example.
Generally, in most markets, you must always ensure that any Profit System you plan has a score of 900 or greater. If it doesn’t, find a way to get it there, or otherwise scratch the idea, and find a better one. This typically involves changing the MARKET you’ll serve.
And finally, let’s discuss what happens when you DO have a strong 4M Profit System.
Deep Influence – The Result of a Strong 4M Profit System
The right person connecting with the right media to the right market, and delivering the right message results in DEEP INFLUENCE.
Deep influence is the concept that I developed to describe the magical thing that happens when the 4Ms are aligned.
It results in effortless sales, loyal customers, and a strong, unbreakable brand. Exponential growth. Word of mouth. The Holy Grail of business.
Some people call this preeminence, others call it market dominance. It doesn’t matter how you call it.
Deep Influence is the real force behind your Money Tree. It attracts customers, it gets them to talk about you to others, and it leads to effortless sales, it positions you as the foremost authority.
Accessing Deep Influence turns you from no sales to millions. It turns you from a nobody, into a pre-eminent authority that people listen to. It gives you wealth and security. It gets you to stand head and shoulders above your competitors, respected by your peers.
And finally, it results in freedom, giving you a meaningful life, where you provide value to the world, live with a sense of purpose, reach your wildest goals and fulfil your craziest dreams.
All that is required is the congruence between the 4M parts of your Profit System. When this happens, you get something that is more than the sum of the parts, something magical.
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