people blindly spend money hand over fist on their marketing without ever reviewing the results. They limit themselves to a few basic areas-like a weekly ad in the local newspaper-without every asking themselves, Is this really the best medium? Could I get a better return on the investment by writing a better ad?

If you belong to this group, the good news is you're not alone. Most people do it. But by the end of this book you won't be taking any more chances with your marketing. You'll know exactly what will work best, and importantly, you'll be constantly testing and measuring your results so not a cent is wasted.

Part 3-My Mechanic and the Business Chassis

The third section of the book revolves around my mechanic. That's right, Charlie, my mechanic.

This chapter will change the way you think about the world of making money. What we're going to do is break down your business into the five different areas that constitute your profitability: the leads you can generate, the conversion rate of those leads into sales, the transaction rate of those customers-how many times they buy, the average dollar amount spent per sale, and then your margins.

This is what I call the Business Chassis and when grasped, it'll blow your mind. It will provide you with an infinitely simpler way of understanding the factors that make your business more profitable, and as a result you can do something constructive about it.

As previously mentioned, one of my biggest challenges was figuring out the best way to relay the message, because it literally sounds too good to be true. So instead of just explaining how it works, I thought I'd relay an encounter with Charlie, a small businessman with big dreams.

After a little pep talk about how all business revolves around the aforementioned Business Chassis, I could see Charlie was ready to do anything to improve his very promising, yet completely unfulfilled, enterprise. It was then that I decided to take Charlie on a little tour. XIII