Let’s take — for me — Napoleon’s finest hour and The Battle of Austerlitz (1805) to illustrate what I mean and then we’ll draw all the modern parallels you need.

At Austerlitz, Napoleon was — as usual — outnumbered: Napoleon fielded around 70,000 troops, while his enemies had closer to 90,000.

In business terms, he was the upstart on the block.

So what did he do?

First, he cleverly convinced his enemies that he was weaker than he really with an insincere proposal of peace negotiations.

Then, when his allies decided to attack, which he knew was coming, he knew when and where they’d strike and blew them away with an attack of his own at their weakest point.

The victory sent shockwaves through the aristocratic palaces of Europe.

But why was his strategy such a work of genius?

Napoleon’s mantra was always,“faire son theme en deux facons,” roughly translated as "To proceed with two options."

Sure, he had to outmanoeuvre the advances of the allies on the day.

But the “faire son theme en deux facons” strategy he conceived was ready to roll out, day in, day out.

Okay, so you’re probably not the next Napoleon of digital marketing.

You’re too busy running your own Empire for a start.

BUT

The key takeaway here is clear.

Napoleon ‘decisively’ won the battle against overwhelming odds because he had a well defined strategy:

• Aggressive out manoeuvring. — STRATEGY 1
• Surrounding his enemies before they even knew he was coming. — STRATEGY 2

All he did was apply this strategy over and over again (when he didn’t, it didn’t work out for him so well).

And the successful agencies, the players with six, seven or even eight figure profits always have a predictable method for generating clients and they know these two numbers.

• Cost to generate a call. — STRATEGY 1
• Cost to acquire a client. — STRATEGY 2

They have a system in place and understand these two simple metrics so if they spend ‘so much’ on marketing they'll get a new client.

They've taken the guess work away from marketing their business.

The thing is that most business owners create paid campaigns that flop ...

Which is why a lot of people give it a shot and then think:

“This is not working for me!” or “I don’t need advertising.”

And of course, you don’t actually need to invest in paid advertising.

But it’s like playing defense.

You're focusing on how much money you can SAVE instead of how much money you can MAKE.

So I’ll put it another way ...

If you wanted to lose weight fast, then you’d probably NEED TO INVEST in joining a gym.

And if you wanted improve your performance and reduce your chance of injury, then you’d probably NEED TO INVEST in a personal trainer.

I think you can see where I’m going here but same goes for advertising your business.

That is fast growth.

And it’s only possible when you are able to use paid advertising to grow with profitability.

The trick is hiring a specialist to advertise your business at a profit.

But it doesn’t end there:

Napoleon was also the master of innovation.

Whilst his enemies fought in a traditional eighteenth-century manner, Napoleon considered and introduced any novel tactic that made their organisation, tactics and strategy outmoded.

Do that, you’ll still bag and tag the 4% ready to buy today, but you’ll also begin to wean the 96% into action much, much faster than ever before.

And that's all about maximising performance gains.

But before you dive in with your necessary upgrades, you need to start by fully understanding what you’re working with.

You need to map out and plan every little contingency ..