SMARTSTART Your Business Therapy (part 5)

We all go through stages in our entrepreneurial adventures where it seems everyone else has the answers and we are still in the dark ready to ransom our kingdom for a match. The truth is no one has all the answers and many don’t know what questions to ask!

When you’re struggling to find your voice or even just your confidence, it’s easy to see others as being so much more advanced than you are but, truthfully, we’re all students, all the time. Some of us are attending the school of hard knocks, others have earned scholarships at the school of the starry-eyed but ill-informed and many of us are self-taught and home-schooled.

There are so many sources of information out there. Who do you turn to? How do you know if they are the right people to help you? How do you make the best use of what they know that you don’t?

When I faced this dilemma for the first time, I planned an imaginary meeting with the people I most respected in my industry. I thought deeply about what to ask and why I wanted to know more about that. I pictured them giving me their best advice which I weighed carefully and implemented. I sat in their chairs and pretended I thought just like they did, knew what they knew, felt what they felt.

But then I took that fantasy a step further. I looked them up. I wrote and called asking for an hour of their time. I told them why I wanted to meet with them and didn’t pretend to be more than who I was — simply a person who was interested in learning from the best.

Guess what happened? They took my calls. They met with me. They gave me their best advice and (bonus) a good talking to and/or a swift kick in the ass when I needed it. Not one of them tried to talk me out of my big ideas.

Better yet. I listened to them. Where it made sense, I changed my behaviour or my approach without compromising myself. Things seemed instantly better in so many ways. I learned and progressed much faster than if I’d tried to go it alone.

You probably have people you look up to too. What if you had an hour to spend with them? What would you ask? How would you want them to help you? More importantly, why haven’t you contacted them yet? (And if you have, tell us what happened!)

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SMARTSTART Your Business Therapy (part 4)

We all have things about our work that we enjoy doing and do very well. Then there are those tasks we just can’t stand or simply suck at. It isn’t unusual, when first starting out, to have to do everything ourselves. Typically, that leads to much procrastination. And too much procrastination can lead to disaster.

If you were to take an honest look at how you’re spending your day right now, I’m willing to bet you’ll find a great many examples of procrastination disguised as “busy work”. When what you need to focus on to move your needles forward is “productive work”.

In our eBook, The SMARTSTART Guide to Pricing, we discuss the importance of understanding how much busy work is really costing you. Your goal, as a business owner, is to offload all tasks you can hire out for cheaper than your baseline standard hourly rate as soon as possible. (If you don’t know how to calculate your rates, you might want to read our book! The cost of lost sales, of customer unhappiness and of doing nothing adds up fast.)

Everyone has a to-do list a mile long; you are not the exception. Equally important is you not-to-do list. And not everything on your to-do list needs to be done, and certainly not everything needs to be done to perfection. Indeed, perfection is not the goal; excellence will be tolerated. Examining the level at which you are performing all tasks can often open your eyes to ways in which you are impacting revenue simply by the way you work.

Don’t have a not-to-do list yet? Start building one right now. Post it where you can see it. Always know when something is worth doing and worth doing well. That’s one of your most important responsibilities. You owe it to yourself and your clients. ‘Nuff said?

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SMARTSTART Your Business Therapy (part 3)

We recently conducted an exercise where we asked the question

“If we gave you $100,000 today, how would you spend it to maximize profits?”

I didn’t come up with the intriguing question on my own — that credit goes to A Smart Bear known as Jason Cohen. The answers, both mine and those submitted by others, were extremely interesting! It’s a question well worth considering to be sure.

Haven’t you ever played the “what if” game when fantasizing about winning the lottery? Your odds to win are certainly much better in building your own business. Perhaps you should start thinking of your business as the lottery you control. You can play with any prize amount (why limit yourself to $100K?) and you should expect some damn good business ideas to come from the exercise.

From there all you need to do is expand your thinking to come up with a few ways of actually getting the money; then spend it as planned. What could be cooler?’ Or more fun?

Jason had another great question as well that is also worth considering very seriously. It was

“If you were forced to hire someone today, how would you define his/her job such that s/he would cover the expense?”

As a former Fortune 500 executive, I remember asking myself that very question back in the day and more than once. It always led to the exact strategy needed to move my department forward. It works for independent business owners too. Try it, you’ll see what I mean, I’m sure. At the very least it’ll open your eyes to tasks and priorities that may require some adjustment.

Besides, sooner or later your business will expand to include others. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how to make the best use of these resources? You could start with offloading tasks you hate and those you shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Or, you can delegate or outsource tasks that, if they weren’t done as perfectly by someone else, wouldn’t negatively impact your business.

So, when was the last time you fantasized changing the operation of your business? (Hint: There’s no time like the present.)

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SMARTSTART Your Business Therapy (part 2)

To continue on from the previous post, knowing what you’re selling, who buys it and why isn’t enough. It’s a great start. But it’s not enough.

We must probe your business more deeply. For example, there may be many things preventing sales in your business but there is only one number one.  You must correctly identify what that is. Let me be blunt. You’re probably fooling yourself as to what the showstopper is. So we’ll look at the list of possibilities to isolate that one thing. Then, we’ll work out a plan to remedy it.

I’ll ask you how many ways you are currently collecting feedback from your customers, potential customers and lost sales. This is very important to your future. Customers buy what they want, not what you think they need. Let them tell you what that is and you’ll save yourself a whole lot of wasted time, energy and money. (Remember, you’re dealing with all three currencies with every business decision you make.)

FYI: You’ll be rated on a score of 10 but there are actually 12 ways to get feedback. You should be doing as many of them as possible. The extra two are automatic bonus points for you. Most take less than a day to implement.

(By the way, SMARTSTART members learn all 12 methods which is why they are most likely moving the needle for their businesses farther than you. They don’t guess. They know.)

That pretty much covers examining what can be done to be bringing more money into your business and leads us to the true killer question, “What is the date your business dies if you never make another penny at it?”

The point of being in business is to stay in business. Nothing crystallizes your thinking faster than knowing when it’ll be game over if you don’t make it work. Post that date where you can see it on a daily basis and you’ve got yourself an effective tool for beating procrastination and maintaining focused attention on revenue-generating activities.

By now you may be thinking I’m not very sympathetic to your entrepreneurial spirit. Nothing could be further from the truth. But, as mentioned in an earlier post, a coach’s job is to save you from yourself while optimizing your potential for success. How ’bout we call it tough love? And I’ll call this the end of today’s post. More therapy to come next Tuesday.  (Come on… you know you want it.)

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SMARTSTART Your Business Therapy (part 1)

Sometimes I’m a business coach. I say “sometimes” because it’s not the only way I spend my time for money. In the thousands of hours I’ve occupied that role, I’ve noticed a thing or two I feel compelled to bring to your attention.

First, a good coach does not tell you what to do. That’s not really what you’re paying for. And, if that were to be the only thing your coach did for you, you would have wasted your money. Your business won’t make any great shifts and neither will you.

When you hire me, the SMARTSTART Coach, to work with you, you receive business ideas you don’t already have and likely wouldn’t come up with on your own. I’ll share perspectives you cannot see and help you create opportunities to produce results you otherwise would not produce. But I’m not going to tell you what to do.

Instead, I’m going to ask you the hard questions that take you to your own truth. The truth about who you are, what you’re capable of, and what you really want.  (Chances are your truth is going to be very different from mine anyway and I want to keep our relationship honest.)

Then I’m going to do my best to keep you from getting in your own way while (lovingly) insisting you face your reality and either defend or redefine the critical decisions that will make or break your business.

Rambling aimlessly won’t be tolerated. You’ll learn how to ruthlessly hone your thinking. When I’m done with you, you’ll be able to describe what your product does and who buys it in one sentence. In a second sentence you’ll be able to state exactly why someone buys your product. And you’ll have hard evidence to prove it.

Expect it to take more than one session to work this out. It’s hard, hard work. But, if you don’t have solid answers to these questions, nothing you do will move your business forward. Nothing. Your marketing will be one big disconnect. That’s what’s holding most entrepreneurs back right now. Not a tough economy. Not a lack of capital. Not a lack of time. Simply, not knowing.

Most entrepreneurs are reactive which keeps them bogged down by details; the successful ones are proactive and are always looking at the big picture. Start drafting your big picture now. Next post, we’ll dive even deeper. I promise.

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How to SMARTSTART Your Pricing

Today we ran the final timing rehearsal for the SMARTSTART Pricing Clinic to work out any kinks before heading into the studio to produce the official recording. (So hold your ears for the first 30 seconds because we learned we need to adjust the sound levels on the intro/extro.)

Since many find pricing a challenge, we thought we'd invite you *backstage* to hear the pre-production rehearsal so you can learn more about this very important subject. (When it's finished and released to market, this course and companion workbook will cost $395.) 

SMARTSTART Clinics are educational sessions only (i.e., no selling occurs during the event). So, if you would like to learn more about pricing, here are the topics we covered:

1) the critical parts of the pricing process
2) where pricing fits in your marketing mix
3) why you need to stop telling yourself low-rate lies
4) why pricing too low is a real problem for your business
5) 10 things you must do before setting your price
6) what to avoid when pricing information products, coaching programs and professional services

Click here to listen to the training for free. Click here to purchase the eBook The SMARTSTART Guide to Pricing ($39.95) referenced in the clinic.

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SMARTSTART Your Entrepreneurial Balance Sheet

The story of your business is told on the balance sheet — an equally useful tool for monitoring the state of your entrepreneurial soul for which you are also accountable. Reporting the assets, liabilities, and equity held at a given point in time (or at different time intervals) can help you better understand the means available to you for creating future profits, life satisfaction and happiness.

Most entrepreneurs move quickly, often without thinking of the cost and consequences of their decisions and actions to themselves and others. This is the fast track to “anorexia of the soul“, a fate worse than any financial failure that might result from this behaviour.

The balance sheet is where you see the effect of your past decisions. It’s a snapshot for monitoring the health of your business and its impact on your life.

Financial literacy is rare in new small business owners and online entrepreneurs — very few come to SMARTSTART understanding the mechanics of the balance sheet. (Accounting is not the favourite subject of entrepreneurs.) We ease them into it by introducing a few simple exercises to bring the conceptual ideas home. You can try them out for your business and life situation too.

We start by showing them how to use common balance sheet principles to document their  entrepreneurial journey. This exercise is particularly helpful when feeling disconnected from yourself or from your business — a situation that occurs when you are:

1. overly focused on presenting yourself as a brand,
2. trying to create a public persona, and
3. polishing an image of yourself that’s more surface than substance.

Such behaviour is toxic for you and your business. It gets in the way of the real job of an entrepreneur, which is figuring out who you are, what you stand for, and what value you offer. Defining the business is your most important entrepreneurial work. Be very specific about how it serves your wants and needs as its owner. The point is to be the master of your business, not a perpetual slave to it.

It’s important to your future success that you start disciplining yourself to think about all aspects of your business in terms of assets and liabilities. This will guide your future decision making more effectively.

Try creating your first entrepreneurial balance sheet right now. Take a fresh sheet of paper (or open your favourite journal to a blank page) and draw a line down the centre. On the left side, you’ll record your assets; on the right, your liabilities for each of the following categories:

1. self (skills/knowledge you have are assets; skills/knowledge you need but lack are liabilities)
2. market (opportunities are assets; obstacles are liabilities)
3. attributes (attributes that serve your vision and authentic self are assets; attributes that don’t are liabilities)
4. relationships (be honest here — some alliances, advisors. team and family members are assets; many are liabilities)
5. time (productive activities are assets; non-productive habits and distractions are liabilities).

Study your balance sheets religiously — the real picture of your path to success is reflected in the equity. (Equity is what’s left when you subtract liabilities from your assets.)

Being solely focused on striving to please the market and presenting the brand you think will sell only leads to a growing sense of disconnection from the self. In most cases, your public persona is not who you really are. Pretending to be someone you’re not and selling what you don’t believe in or in a way that isn’t congruent with your true self is a road to ruin.

The anorexic entrepreneur, obsessed with achieving success, pursues it with the passion of a spiritual quest, believing it is a lifestyle choice. Unable to recognize when success has arrived, it remains forever elusive often resulting in financial and emotional bankruptcy. Don’t let that be the story told on your balance sheet.

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SMARTSTART Your Business Literacy

As a coach, I often see smart, creative and well-educated people ignore the essential requirements for building a successful business. Generally, it's because they've allowed themselves to be convinced an online business is different. And of course, it isn't. A web site is not a business.

Online entrepreneurs are a special breed. They transcend any traditional image you may have of a small business owner. Their brains operate differently.

They harness passion and work tirelessly to spin it into something resembling life's golden ticket.

They have an indescribable power to garner the enthusiasm of people wanting to experience their shared vision. They'll pay almost any price to get there faster. Even if that price is failure.

And failure is the price almost all web-based business owners experience. Only 1% of the web sites they build will ever make any money. Because they chased too many bright, shiny objects and pursued the wrong things, in the wrong way, at the wrong time.

What online business owners need is a place where they can learn how to build a strong business foundation and marketing machine that drives their entrepreneurial vision and subsequent products and services into the marketplace. That's what we offer.

By design, SMARTSTART peels away years of ineffective thinking and behaviour. It helps online entrepreneurs build their dreams on a solid foundation with appropriate interior scaffolding. Our students learn to focus on contemporary business issues, not just the flavour-of-the-month that is internet marketing today.

They learn how to communicate, operate, and apply business intelligence to everything they do.

They learn how to let go of bad habits and scale new heights of personal and professional effectiveness.

They learn where to find practical and low-cost resources to help them and how to use reliable tools to measure success patterns.

They learn how to produce results and choose purposeful actions that build self reliance.

Most importantly, they learn to build a business first before building a web site. (And yes, we teach them how to build a web site that works too.)

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SMARTSTART Your Business Intelligence

In essence, SMARTSTART is the distillation of my business and entrepreneurial experiences, observations, insights and conclusions acquired through my work as a professional management consultant over the last 30 years. To date, I've spent some 60,000+ gloriously happy hours studying and working with clients of all sizes and descriptions and coaching people on the fundamentals of business success.

I've had the privilege of working with established business leaders, new and seasoned entrepreneurs, creative folks (writers, artists, designers, innovators), scientists and engineers, olympians and armchair athletes, key influencers and radical thinkers, and even the men, women and children next door.

People from 12 to 65 with big dreams and and a wide variety of business ideas come to SMARTSTART to learn how to bring them to life. And, more often than not, they also want to know how to best go about turning them into sustainable income and media-worthy success stories.

Every one of them teaches me a few lessons along the way too. Because we are all students really. Learning is a lifetime process.

The quest for knowledge binds us on a spiritual level. We don't work to live; we live to work. But we don't want to waste time and money chasing non-productive paths so there is a compelling need to put some intelligence into our effort. The poet, Rumi, has this to say about that:

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.

You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid, and it doesn't move from outside to inside through the conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you moving out.

The reason SMARTSTART isn't for everyone is we take you far beyond book learning and show you how to tap into your soul, how to make work your spiritual practice, how to move from being a person who is a slave to work to one who is a master of his or her own destiny. Not everyone is prepared to handle the responsibility that comes with that. But, if you think you are, we can help you find your path and share your voice.

Come along for the ride?

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