Search
Home
Archive
Tags
Authors
Login
Sign Up
Jul 28, 2026
Episode #1: How to Increase Revenue
Episode #1: How to Increase Revenue
00:00
05:24
Transcript
0:00
Hey, welcome to the Increasing Revenue Podcast. I'm Alex Mancini, and I've spent the last ten years generating more than three hundred million dollars for small and medium businesses across Canada and the U.S.
0:12
In this episode, I want to show you exactly how to increase revenue reliably and without burning out your team. Let's start with the obvious. Every business leader wants to increase revenue.
0:24
You want it, I want it, the coffee shop on the corner wants it. The barber down the street wants it. The problem isn't wanting it.
0:32
The problem is generating it reliably quarter after quarter without wrecking your team or your brand along the way.
0:39
By wrecking, I mean clogged processes, burnt-out employees, quick fixes that cost you more than they earn in the end. You get the point. So how do you actually do this?
0:50
Ask ten leaders in your business how to increase revenue, and you'll get at least five different answers. Someone will say, "Tweak the product." Someone else will blame the competition.
1:01
Someone else will say, "Increase the marketing budget." Here's the thing, we're all biased. Biased by our own behavior as consumers, by our own domain expertise, by the culture we work in.
1:14
We each see the business through the lens of our own day-to-day, and that means we see the fix in silo. Here's a real example.
1:22
When I work with marketing departments, they think about lowering CPA, or cost per acquisition, purely as a marketing problem: better creatives, better targeting, smarter spend allocation.
1:33
But what if the sales team is actually underperforming? What if customer satisfaction has quietly been dropping, and that's dragging down reviews, which is then dragging down conversion?
1:45
Ask that same marketing leader how to lower CPA, and they'll optimize within their own lane, not because they're wrong to, but because stepping outside it feels like stepping on someone else's toes.
1:58
That's my first insight. One person has to own revenue. Not two, not three, one.
2:07
If your business is big enough, that might be a dedicated revenue executive, or in a small business, it's often the founder, or an executive from another function takes it on. A fractional revenue executive works too.
2:20
However you structure it, that person needs to be in every conversation about revenue, and they need a real understanding of every lever: marketing, sales, customer success, product. Now, let's say that's you.
2:34
What do you actually do next? Well, you have to start turning outputs into inputs. What do I mean by that? Increasing revenue means reconciling your inputs and your outputs.
2:48
An input is something you do, like returning a customer call in under sixty seconds. An output is what you measure after the fact, like cost per acquisition.
2:58
Most businesses set goals for outputs, increase revenue, lower CPA, raise customer satisfaction, but they almost never translate those into input goals, the actual day-to-day actions that move the number.
3:12
And as your business grows, the number of things you and your team do every day grows exponentially as well. So what's the ideal here?
3:19
Honestly, it'd be a formula, something you could run a regression on, telling you if Jane replies to emails in under one minute instead of ten, revenue grows five percent. That's not really realistic though.
3:32
So here's the tool I use, a three-column table: input, output, and delta. Here's how it works with a real example. Let's say your output is sales call closing rate. You want it to go up.
3:44
Your input is the response time to new leads.
3:49
Then your delta, or hypothesis, is that if you cut response time from four hours to five minutes, it will lift your closing rate by, let's say, two points, and that's worth about forty thousand dollars a quarter.
4:03
You do this for every output that touches revenue across the customer journey. Marketing spend, CPA, closing rate, NPS, whatever applies to you. Don't reinvent the wheel, just use the outputs you already track.
4:17
For each one, list the inputs that actually drive it, usually more than one. Then in that third column, answer this question for every row.
4:28
In dollars, what's the gap between where we are now and where we'd be if we improved this input in the next quarter, the next year, over five years? Sort the list by biggest dollar opportunity first.
4:43
It sounds almost too simple, but I rarely see it actually done. What I see instead is a team picking a random input based on gut feeling, spending the whole quarter on it, and then wondering why revenue barely moved.
4:57
So here's the takeaway. One owner, inputs mapped to outputs. Sort by the biggest dollar gaps first. That's the whole thing. It's simple.
5:07
Do this exercise with your team, revisit it every quarter, and you will see revenue move predictably, not by accident.
5:15
If you want weekly insights on growing revenue for small and medium businesses, visit alexmancini.com and subscribe.
Increasing Revenue with Alex Mancini
Listen on
Apple Podcasts
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Spotify
Recent episodes
No results found
