Category: Updates
The latest updates for Your Business Growth Playbook by Jeremy Shapiro.
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Your Cold Email Has One Job
Most cold emails fail because they ask for a sale in message #1. The average reply rate is just 3.43%. Your job is smaller: get a hand raise. A reply like “interested” or a short call on the calendar—that’s a win. From Your Business Growth Playbook: outbound’s goal is simple—get someone to reply or ask…
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A Near-Perfect Close Rate Is a Funnel Warning Sign
Massive pipeline. Miserable results. You’ve got a funnel problem, but maybe not the one you think. Most founders only look for leaks: a landing page that doesn’t convert, a low show rate, an upsell nobody takes. Fixing leaks matters, tighten continuity from step to step, improve follow-up, and attract better prospects. If your opt-in page…
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Stop Planning. Start Shipping
Sales meeting with a full whiteboard of “brilliant” ideas? Been there. Most die in notebooks. Revenue shows up when you ship. I learned this the hard way, and history backs it up: James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes before the first bagless vacuum took off. Not a better idea—a better pace of implementation. WD-40 is literally…
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Growth Should Shorten Payback and Lengthen Runway
Revenue isn’t a trophy. It’s a stress test. WeWork failed it. They sprinted to scale—signing long-term office leases while selling short-term memberships. That works in a boom; it’s brutal when occupancy slips or rates rise. Then the spotlight drifted to feel-good numbers (remember “community-adjusted EBITDA?”) while cash kept bleeding. For context, in 2018 WeWork generated…
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Your 30-Day SEO Ranking Reset
Search keeps getting smarter. Your buyers do, too. If your rankings are flat, it’s not “bad luck”, it’s a signal to evolve. Here’s what’s working across clients and inside Your Business Growth Playbook: Give Crawlers A Clearer Map Dial in page titles, meta descriptions, and on-page basics with free tools like Yoast or Rank Math…
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Your Business Needs a “Fries” Strategy
The burger gets the glory. The fries mint the profit. Here’s the simple math behind a tiny add-on that fattens every ticket. At McDonald’s, the classic ‘Would you like fries with that?’ exists because cheap-to-make sides carry outsized margins. Food costs average 31-34% of sales industry-wide, and low-ingredient items like fries and drinks land well…
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Referrals Should Transfer Trust, Not Phone Numbers
Not all “referrals” are created equal. One fills your calendar with warm introductions. Another hands you a list of strangers and calls it “value.” There are really two kinds of rooms: A well-known example of the first model: Business Networking International (BNI). The strong chapters push 1:1s, targeted asks, and follow-through because introductions ride on…
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Permission Beats Pressure on LinkedIn
Most first messages on LinkedIn are proposals. That’s why they go nowhere. The fastest way to a call? Don’t ask for one—yet. A classic study by social psychologists Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser showed that people who agreed to a tiny request were far more likely to say yes to a bigger one later. That…
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Your Inbox Is Crowded. Try the Mailbox
Your inbox is overflowing. Your mailbox? Mostly crickets. Marketing mail volume dropped 40% between 2008 and 2023, from 99 billion pieces to 59 billion. That gap is a quiet competitive advantage. At a mastermind, a brick-and-mortar retailer shared how simple postcards kept pulling in new customers. An e-commerce owner borrowed the idea—and unlocked a fresh…
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Find Your Funnel’s Weakest Link
Impressions. Clicks. Opt-ins. Sales. Most founders feel their funnel. But winners track it. The one-page tracker I use (from Your Business Growth Playbook):Columns → Stage · Volume · Conv. from prior · Conv. from top · Cost · Notes · Owner.Rows → Impressions → Clicks → Opt-ins → Sales.Next, add the last 30 days of…
