From my experience, strategic entrepreneurs tend to earn at least 2-3x more than tactical entrepreneurs.
To demonstrate the difference between them, let’s look at a practical example of two hypothetical entrepreneurs which closely resemble thousands of entrepreneurs I’ve worked with over the past decade.
Let’s call them Tactical Tom and Strategic Sean.
Both of them currently make $30k in revenue a year, they both have an email list of 5k e-mail subscribers, they both sell only one product, and both spend 40 hours a week working on their business.
Tactical Tom acts on every idea he gets. He keeps tweaking his branding, website design, does a branded photoshoot, tries Facebook ads…
He’s working all the time, but then a year later, when he takes a look at his business report, his business still generates only $30k in revenue.
Despite his consistent effort, he burned through most of his revenue with “improvements” that he thought were necessary for his business – and now he feels like he’s stuck in the same place as a year ago.
This story repeats year after year, until he meets a fellow entrepreneur – Strategic Sean
Strategic Sean takes a deep look at his business every week, identifies the key Growth Multipliers that move the needle for his business, and says no to everything else.
He focuses 100% of his efforts on Growth Multipliers like creating new products, increasing average order value through upsells and launching more frequently.
He creates two new products that year, adds upsells to cross-sell the products and launches one of his products every month (previously, he launched his one product 3-4 times a year).
At the end of the year, he looks at the business report and sees he made $90k in revenue – he 3x-ed the revenue from last year.
This is exactly what I do when I work with my 1on1 clients.
We continuously study their business, identify the key Growth Multipliers that they should focus on and say no to everything else.
This way, they aren’t mindlessly jumping from one tactic to another, they aren’t wasting valuable time by overthinking what to do next, or by focusing on things that won’t actually grow their business.
Whenever a question like this pops up in their mind:
- “Should I hire a copywriter or a virtual assistant?”
- “Should I start Facebook ads?”
- “Should I go on podcasts?”
- “Should I develop a $27 dollar product or a $1997 product?”
- “Which product should I develop next?”
- “Should I upgrade my website or sales page design?”
- “Should I get sponsors for my Youtube channel?”
- “Should I start a membership program?”
- “Should I focus on growing my e-mail list?”
- “Should I write more blog posts?”
- Etc.
We find an answer to it – FAST – and move on to execution, knowing that the work they put in their business will bring the biggest possible bang for their buck.
As an entrepreneur, you likely have hundreds of thoughts like this every single month.
Don’t worry, you are not alone, all of us have been there.
And now, I’ll share with you how you can navigate through them without wasting any valuable time, and create a bulletproof strategy for your online business that will set you up for exponential growth in the future.
Earlier this year, I discovered a framework that changes everything.
It’s called The ICE Framework.
It was first popularized by Sean Ellis, the “godfather of Growth Hacking”.
The ICE Framework is my go-to framework for working through the hundreds of things I could do to grow my businesses and deciding which ones I will do to unlock future growth.
Sean’s framework includes 3 key metrics for evaluating each of the ideas in your business:
- Impact – Will this new feature positively impact our company and if so, by what degree?
- Confidence – How confident are you that this feature or initiative will be well received?
- Ease – How easy will it be to develop, test and launch this feature?
You rate each of the initiatives you have planned in your company through these metrics, with the scores from 1-10.
Then, you sum up the scores, and execute the ideas with the highest scores while ignoring the ones with the lowest scores.
Since we started using this framework, we 3x-ed the profit margin of our 7-figure online business (a brand with parenting courses that we sell in Slovenia).
We let go of many unprofitable projects and initiatives that drained hundreds of hours of our time and ate into the hard-earned profit.
Over the past year, I also started using this framework with a handful of my private coaching clients.
Many of them have already seen 2-3x growth in their businesses because of it, without putting in more effort, hiring a bigger team or spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising.
This framework is frequently used in tech startups, but hasn’t really been discovered or talked about in the online entrepreneurship world.
As you start using it in your business, you’ll quickly gain a competitive edge in your niche.
When we started using this framework at our company early this year, we saw that it was promising, but not perfect.
Working through it felt like a chore and resulted in many headaches.
The process of scoring the ideas from 1-10 literally made our brains hurt. We spent way too much time trying to estimate if an idea had an impact score of 5 or 7, and mostly just “guessed”, which wasn’t great either.
We wanted to make this framework work and turn it into something we could use in our business every week, by looking at it for just a few minutes.
So I sat down and quantified the framework.
I created new scores that were easily measurable, instead of vague.
It worked – and that’s how ICE 2.0 was born.
Here are the scores I came up with:
The New Impact Score
For Impact, the metric I used was revenue – as that would be the easiest way to measure impact in our business.
So instead of “Will this new feature positively impact our company and if so, by what degree”, the question for Impact became: “If this works, how much revenue can it generate for our business over the next year?”
With a new question, estimating impact became easier. I created an exponential Impact Scale that would help us easily estimate the impact of an initiative:
- 10 = 1m+
- 9 = 500k
- 8 = 250k
- 7 =100k
- 6 = 50k
- 5 = 25k
- 4 = 10k
- 3 = 5k
- 2 = 3k
- 1 = 1k
NOTE: I’ve found that this scale works well for a business that earns roughly $200k/year. If you have a smaller/bigger business, feel free to multiply or divide the numbers accordingly.
As a benchmark:
- 9-10 Impact should 2-5x your business
- 5 Impact should be equivalent to 1-2 months of revenue
- 1 Impact should be the bare minimum that makes an initiative “worth it” for your business
The New Confidence Score
For confidence, I changed the question from “How confident are you that this feature or initiative will be well received?” to “How confident am I that we will actually reach the PROJECTED REVENUE NUMBER (Impact Score) of this initiative?”
The Confidence Scale is much simpler:
- 10 = 100%
- 9 = 90%
- 8 = 80%
- 7 = 70%
- 6 = 60%
- 5 = 50%
- 4 = 40%
- 3 = 30%
- 2 = 20%
- 1 = 10%
As a benchmark:
- 10 Confidence should be something that you are 100% certain will make that impact in your business (for example, relaunching an existing best-selling product).
- 5 Confidence should me something you’re fairly confident will work, but there’s also a good chance that it won’t (for example: running Facebook advertising)
- 1 Confidence should be something that’s a long shot that you have no previous data on (for example, doing TikTok advertising)
The New Ease Score
Finally, for ease, we changed the question from “How easy will it be to develop, test, and launch this feature? “ to “How much time will this take our team to develop?”.
Here’s the Ease scale:
- 10 = an hour of less
- 9 = a few hours
- 8 = a day
- 7 = a few days
- 6 = a week
- 5 = a few weeks
- 4 = a month
- 3 = a few months
- 2 = a year
- 1 = a few years
As a benchmark:
- 1 Ease is a quick and easy experiment
- 5 Ease is a major initiative that you and your team will have to invest a lot of time in over the next few weeks
- 10 Ease is a long-term, multiple-year project
With this new and improved framework, we could work through tens of ideas in under 30 minutes (it used to take us hours). It’s quick, easy and effective.
By making this framework easy and simple to use, we could work through it every week, during our Monday Strategic Meetings.
This allows us to confidently start new initiatives in our business every week, knowing that the vast majority of them will impact our business in a positive way.
We also have a clear idea of how we can take our business from $500k/year to $1m/year or even $5m+/year. It’s all written in ICE.
This framework also made it easy for our employees from different departments to contribute to the growth of our company.
They no longer have to send e-mail suggestions to our Leadership Team, they simply add the ideas to our ICE spreadsheet.
Then, every Monday, we work through the ideas, rate the ICE scores and decide which projects we’ll put into action. It’s a well-oiled machine.
To make this process effortless, we created the ICE 2.0 spreadsheet, which includes all the metrics and automatically calculates the ICE scores.
I decided to share this spreadsheet with you, to make it as easy as possible for you to implement the ICE framework in your business.
You can make your own copy of the ICE template here.
The template will help you make strategic decisions like “what should I focus on in my business next?” much faster and help you build a much more profitable business.
Hopefully, you’ll find it as useful as we have.
Now, If you feel like working through ICE by yourself is challenging, or if you’d like to get a second set of eyes on it, I can help.
You can book a 30-minute 1on1 Strategy Call with me, where:
- I’ll ask you to fill out a quick questionnaire about your business and send me your ICE Framework with ideas. I’ll review these before our call.
- Based on the information you share with me, I’ll help you identify new Growth Multipliers that you might not have considered yet.
- Then, during our call, we’ll work through these ideas and create a 3-6 month strategic plan for your business that will help you get on track to 2x your monthly revenue.
The price of the call is $250, and you can book a call with me here.
P.S. If there are no slots available that would work for you, simply send me an e-mail to primoz@primozbozic.com with a few times that do (and the timezone) and we’ll make it work.
-Primoz
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