We were lucky to catch up with Charles Gaudet recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Charles, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry

In today’s uncertain economy, three main trends are forming right now.

– BUYERS HAVE BECOME RESEARCHERS. In 2019, the average buyer looked at between 14-17 different sources of information, and now they’re looking at more than 27 sources before making a purchase decision.

– YOU HAVE MORE COMPETITORS. You’re no longer competing against companies in the same industry; you’re competing against everyone who wants access to the dollar you’ve budgeted to spend on anything.

– YOU MUST BECOME A “MUST-HAVE” RATHER THAN A “NICE-TO-HAVE.” With consumers seeking to tighten their budgets, they’re cutting out things that are “nice-to-have” and keeping those that are a “must-have.”

You will win these trends through a series of:

– Staying top of mind while they are researching (using strategies like retargeting, email marketing, and social selling).

– Educating your client on why investing in your product/service is the best decision they can make for themselves right now (including better than doing nothing at all).

– Illustrating the unique advantages of your offering and why you’re different.

Charles, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve been an entrepreneur since four and never had a “real job.”

After graduating from college, I started a business nominated by Ernst & Young as “One of the Nation’s Best Seed-Stage Companies.” By the age of 24, I founded my first multi-million dollar business.

Since then, I continued to build and grow many different companies until 2010, when someone offered to pay me to help them grow their business, and that’s when I founded Predictable Profits.

Just with the work we did in 2020, The International Business Times called me “The Go-To Business Coach for 7 & 8 Figure Businesses,” and Disrupt referenced me as “the top business coach for seven and eight-figure companies.”

Over the years, we’ve helped many companies earn their spot on the Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Companies List (including one agency that we took from $1M to over $24 million within three years).

Today, we continue work with some of the top CEOs who are asking themselves one of three questions:

– What will it take to grow my company faster?
– Or some months are feast, other months are famine – how can I bring more predictability into our sales? Or
– My business is too dependent on me, what needs to happen to make it more of a self-growing, self-managing business?

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Business is never stagnant and always moving. The most valuable asset an entrepreneur has is their ability to adapt.

And because strategies work until they don’t work, it’s essential to monitor the data and quickly make changes.

Outbound marketing is a perfect example of a strategy we use and share with our business coaching clients.

Back in the day, you could download thousands of names, enter them into an email software program, press send and get more appointments by noon than most people would set in a week.

When that stopped working, marketers flocked to LinkedIn bots, which worked for a short while until it became so popular that prospects considered it spam and failed to respond.

In 2020, we re reinvented the outbound prospecting strategy using a series of pre-heating strategies, social selling, and personalized emails. This allowed our clients to set an average of one to three appointments daily and worked remarkably well for almost two years.

Now outbound marketing has changed again.

So we’ve reinvented outbound and focused on a targeted strategy while changing the call to action from “are you available Wednesday at 1:00 pm?” to engagement (simply starting a conversation).

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I grew up hearing: “the secret to success is hard work.”

As a result, hard work was my primary strategy. I’d set my alarm for 3:30 am so I wouldn’t accidentally “oversleep” and work every waking hour of every day.

This continued for years until I ended up in the hospital with a stress-related condition shutting down my organs.

At that point, I realized I needed a different strategy. It wasn’t until I started studying the options that I found many other people working less than I did, yet they made ten times more.

CEOs work hard, but hard work isn’t their primary strategy.

Top CEOs have other scalable strategies for getting more done with less time.

They’re resourceful and strategic.

So I became obsessed with creating a strategic advantage. Within a year of being in the hospital, I built my first multi-million dollar business which (according to my accountant) had one of the highest profit margins in the industry.

And that’s what created the foundation that’s now known as the Predictable Profits Methodology and the backbone that’s helped thousands of other CEOs.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://predictableprofits.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/predictableprofits/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PredictableProfits/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2615202/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesgaudet
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/predictableprofits

Image Credits
Forbes Councils Exchange