Exponential Business Growth Calculator

The Exponential Business Growth Calculator is a spreadsheet to calculate the impact to your bottom line from small changes in your business. A few days ago I posted an article on the 3 Ways To Increase Revenue In Your Business. If you like, you can go read that first so you better understand the details behind the spreadsheet.

To summarize, there are only 3 ways to increase revenue in your business. They are:

1. Sell to more new customers.
2. Sell more to each customer.
3. Get more repeat sales from existing customers.

This spreadsheet calculates the changes you want to make in each area. You can use it to plan next year and achieve the income growth you want in your business.

You can download the calculator here as a Google Doc and below is a walkthrough with the example so you can see how easily it works.

You won’t be able to edit any variables on the attached spreadsheet.

If you use Google Docs choose “Make a copy” from the File menu and then make your changes on your copy.

If you use Excel or OpenOffice, choose “Download As” from the File menu and save it to your computer.

Notice The Incredible Impact On Your Business

First, only change the data in the yellow cells. If you change other cells it will screw up the formulas for the rest of the sheet. So, don’t cause trouble and stick to the yellow cells.

Section 1: Your Current Information

You can choose the time frame of this data if you want. I have it set to annual. You can change it to monthly, weekly, or daily. It doesn’t make any difference on the results. The time frame is only for your information.

Fill out your current traffic. If it’s your website, how many page views of your sales letter? If it’s store traffic or sales, how many people are you sitting in front of or walk through your store during this time frame?

Next, how many of those become New Customers? These are new transactions. In the example above we have 100,000 people visiting a site that turn into 500 new customers (sales).

After that, fill out your Average Sale Per Transaction. If you don’t already know this, take your total income from these sales ($50,000 for example) and divide it by the total number of sales transactions/new customers (500) and you’ll get your average ($50,000/500=$100 average).

Once you’ve filled out these three cells it will automatically calculate your conversion rate and your total income.

Section 2: Increase New Customer Sales

In this section you’ll be able to see what happens if you were to either Increase Your Conversion Rate or Increase Your Traffic (the amount of people that get your sales message). It also computes what happens when you increase both of these.

In this image, the first line is the results from increasing conversion rate. You become better at selling and you sell more. In the example it’s a 40% increase.

The second line is what happens when you get more people to your sales message. You become better at marketing. In the example it’s a 20% increase.

The third line is the result of improving your conversion rate AND your traffic. The increase is 68%. As you’ll continue to see, a small increase in each piece leads to large changes in your business income.

Section 2: Increase Average Sale Per Customer

In this section you can find out what happens when you Increase Your Average Sale Per Transaction. This is the average amount a person buys from you when they checkout. It’s what happens if you can make that extra upsell every now and then. It’s the results of always asking, “Would you like fries with that?”

In the example we went from an average sale of $100 to an average sale of $110. It’s a 10% increase in income. Adjust this to what you think would be reasonable to upsell in your business.

Section 4: Increase Frequency of Customer Purchase

This is where you can find out what would happen when you get some of your existing customers to buy more. Selling your existing customers is the easiest marketing you’ll ever do. Don’t neglect them.

What happens if you can get 10% of them to buy an additional $50 worth of goodies from you?

In this example it’s a 5% increase in income. That may not seem like much but if they’ve bought from you once, and you have quality products or services, chances are you’ll be able to sell more frequently than you think.

If you’re running a monthly service or membership program, this would by your customer retention. How much more would you earn if your customers stayed with you an extra month or two (or five)? When you see these results it will give you even more reasons to spend a few extra bucks to make sure they’re really happy.

Section 5: Total Increase in Income and Total % Change

This section gives you the results when you make a small change in all three areas.

With the examples already in the spreadsheet, the income went from $50,000 per year to $96,600 by making small changes. That’s a $46,600 increase in income.

Or, a 93.2% increase in income from several small changes.

If you were to add up the changes for each individual section they would only add up to a 75% increase (conversion rate 40% + increase traffic 20% + average sale 10% + increase frequency 5% = 75%). However, each improvement compounds the other results. So, instead of a 75% increase you have a 93% increase in this example.

Would you rather try and improve 93% in only your conversion rate (or traffic, or upsells, or repeat buyers) or would you rather make small improvements among all channels?

In this case, I’d say it would be at least 18% less work for you to improve this much, would you agree? 

Enjoy the spreadsheet. If you didn’t download it above, you can download it here.

You can also read The 3 Ways To Increase Revenue In Your Business for some more examples on growth in each area.