I'm going to go out on a limb and guess your business is just like mine - we both want, expect, and need to make money. While there are other reasons to be in business, making money has to be up there at the top. It takes money to feed, cloth, and otherwise raise a family - whether it's mine or yours, it's all the same. We have to make money to survive.

So, if even at the most philanthropic moments of our business lives, we still need to make a profit, don't overlook the number of ways to make money on top of the way you're probably making money today.

Let me explain.

There are three ways a business can make money - get more new customers, increase the value of your average sale, and increase the volume and frequency of repeat purchases. That's it. There are no other ways. Everything a business does can be mapped back to one or more of these three ways to make money.

And your business should be actively pursing all three ways.

In future posts I'll breakdown each of the three ways to make money and offer some ideas to get you thinking. For now, the big thing to get straight in our heads is we need to have all three ways to make money active in our business. We can't put all our eggs in one revenue basket and we can't afford to leave profits on the table.

Unless we shift to a barter economy, we need to remain creative and active in all ways to make money.