Thinking In Straight Lines To Grow Your Business

You don’t have to have an advanced math degree to know that the shortest distance between any two points is typically a straight line. I bet you didn’t know that this little Pythagorean throwback also applies to growing your business too. In today’s post I’m going to challenge you to start thinking in straight lines when it comes to figuring out what to do next or how you’re going to grow.

First we have to break down what I mean when I’m challenging you to think in straight lines for your business.

Thinking in straight lines is to always be looking for the shortest actionable distance between where you are at any given moment and where you want to be. It means working out the next immediate thing you can actually do right then to get closer to a desired outcome based on your immediate constraints, access to resources, clutter on your calendar, and even emotional capacity.

The shortest distance between any two points is a straight line.

Need more clients? What can you do right now to proactively have real conversations with people who might be willing or able to buy from you?

Not getting the engagement you want on social? What are you doing right now to interact with people online? It’s more than listing where you’re showing up. Who are you mixing it up with in the hand-to-hand-combat that is leaving comments, feedback, etc?

Wondering why you’re website is getting the traffic you hoped it would even with all the SEO ninja tactics you put in place? What are you doing to give people a compelling reason to show up? Is your content/creative consistent enough? Good enough?

When you’re building a business it can be disarmingly easy to fill up your todo list and calendar with things that will keep you busy. The question I want you to ask yourself is - which one of those things/activities/tasks are going to push you closer to an outcome that you actually care about? Which ones are the straightest lines to getting you in front of the people that really need you? That would buy from you?

Easier said than done right? Everything feels like it’s important!

I get it.

But, you can only “fake it” as a business owner for so long. You can only be building, learning, and tinkering with your website for so long. Every moment that passes where you aren’t in direct service of solving the problems you started the business to solve is just time, money, and personal bandwidth burned away.

You don’t have a business unless you’re serving your customers. If you never help anyone then you just have a business operations hobby, which is cool don’t get me wrong but it’s not a business. So, what can you do to start thinking in straight lines? I have some tips to help.

1. Relax. Building a business is a marathon not a sprint. Well it’s really a combination of marathons and sprints but the idea is that trying to get everything done all the time will just burn you out. This leads me into my second tip, start setting better goals.

2. Use the GROW method to set your goals. This works for everything from building your website, creating a repeatable sales process, and even for the work that doesn’t scale (which is sometimes the most important work). Grow stands for:

G - Set a goal that has a clear and easily identifiable end point. Think I want to run the next 5k, not I want to run more.

R - What's your reality look like right now? What are the issues, the challenges, how far are you away from your goal?

O - There are going to be obstacles. Some you can anticipate and some you can't. Work on the options you have for overcoming the obstacles you can see to increase your chances of working through the ones you can't.

W - What are the small actions you will have to take everyday to make your way forward? Through the obstacles, the time constraints, and everything else you have to deal with on your way to your goal.

3. Now that you are relaxed and have some new goals, get focused in on the results. Laser focused. Every choice you make in your business will result in some kind of outcome - some are big and important and others not so much. Thinking in terms of potential outcomes will help you better prioritize how and where you spend your time so that the next actions you take are the ones that really matter.

4. Put sticky notes up everywhere that read - 80/20. Then every time you walk by them remind yourself that with anything that you do, 80% of the results come from 20% of the actions. This will help you mitigate the pull of needing to learn just a little more, tinker with your design just a little more, and edit that next blog post just a little more. That “little more” is leading you down the path of diminishing marginal returns. Let’s avoid that.

5. Be decisive, but not over active. Things aren’t always going to go your way. You can’t control what the decisions that your customers, audience, or stakeholders make. That’s ok. Being accountable is healthy because when things don’t go your way you’ll be able to learn from them and adjust. Snap reactions and the urge to instantly change everything because you got one less than ideal outcome is the quickest way to lose the trust of your market.

6. Understand, truly and intrinsically, that building a business will take hard work. You are going to have to put real time and energy into building a business. There are no shortcuts, sales funnels, or platforms that will do it for you. You have to show up everyday so spend less time planning, thinking, and talking about what you’re going to do and just do it. Feel free to visit last week’s post for a little inspiration from the internet’s best friend, Mr. Shia LaBeouf.

Oh, and never forget that the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line.

10 Things Every Business Owner Can Relate To

In all the hustle and craziness that comes with building a business, sometimes it’s nice to know that you’re not the only one who feels some (or all) of these ways.

1. When that first cup of coffee hits… Most of the feels happen on a Monday morning.

2. After a meeting that was a complete waste of everyone’s time…

3. When someone asks you for something that’s a little out of your comfort zone…

4. How you leave that after-work networking event…

5. When everything in the project changes right before it’s supposed to be delivered…

6. The face when an idea/instructions/action plan is bad but you have to go along with it…

7. How a great coach or mentor makes you feel on a rough day…

8. How you decide who’s responsible for those mismanaged expectations…

9. How you feel when the website you’ve been working on for weeks actually works…

10. That gif you keep on file when the procrastination is a little too real…

SUPER BONUS GIF

11. What it actually feels like waking up and getting to do something you love everyday…



Small Business Marketing Mini Series Part 3: Build Your Marketing Plan

So far we’ve covered communicating clearly, adding value, and the importance of taking your brand seriously. Now it’s time to put all that together and organize it in a way that builds traction and awareness for your business. We’re going to build your marketing plan.

Set Measurable Objectives

“We’re going to kill it!” is a great rallying cry for your business but, as a business goal it’s useless. You are a business owner with limited funds, and you should not waste those funds on efforts that might feel good but aren’t targeting a clear, measurable outcome.

Some examples of worthless (generic) goals:

• Grow my business

• Get more likes on social posts

• Make a Facebook page for my business

• Run ads on the radio

Can you tell why those aren’t good goals? Growing your business is good, but what does that mean? Be specific. Building a Facebook page for your business is an operational requirement, but what’s the goal behind it, what should it be doing for you? Let’s look at some goals that are better constructed.

Examples:

• Increase repeat sales by 15%

• Increase new sales during the month of June

• Improve customer service

• Capture five hesitant customers

• Position yourself as a leader in basket weaving

Do you see some differences between the two groups of goals? The outcomes are pretty specific. Increasing repeat sales by 15% speaks to improved customer retention. Increasing new sales during a key month as compared to the same month last year is something you can measure. If you have a customer dissatisfaction problem, improving customer service is an important goal that should yield very clear feedback. Know what you want to accomplish first, then start building strategies to get there.

Build Plans Around $ Goals

While branding is a very important concern, whenever possible, build your marketing plans around financial goals. Why else would you do it? Even if the direct outcome is not a sale, the indirect outcome should be. For example, increasing new customers could require doing some work with current customers, encouraging them to send business your way by making them super happy. You might not be getting them to spend more money immediately, but in five happy people can each send you three qualified leads, you’re looking at more income.

The same is true for all their goals: your brand should communicate feelings and ideas that support someone’s willingness to do business with you. Your positioning as an expert or leader or artisan should encourage a customer to choose you instead of the other guy. Ultimately none of it is immeasurable or nebulous or strictly feel-good stuff. It’s supposed to get you sales.

Know Your Resources

When you go it alone, your time is at a premium and should not be used as freely as wet naps at a wings bar. Know how much time you need to dedicate to production or client work to bring in revenue, then decide how much time you will need to spend on marketing in order to bring in business.

Some marketing methods, such as using social media, have a low initial cost, but require sustained and substantial investment of time over the long haul to maximize effectiveness. Running radio or TV ad campaign local stations can do a lot of the work for you, in terms of getting people to pick up the phone or visit your site, but to have any measurable effect it’s going to require quite a bit of money. Before you start writing your marketing plan, just make sure you know which of your resources will be easier to spare.

As you plan, create systems for tracking what you spend and how it affects sales, to determine the cost of recruiting a new customer. A pay per click campaign on Google may have cost you $700 and felt like a success because of how many clicks you got. However if it only resulted in 10 sales, averaging 20 bucks each, you spent $70 per customer, and made back only 20 bucks per sale.

Track where your sales come from is much as possible, and constantly test for effectiveness. If the new business is costing you money to bring in and not paying for itself, you’re using the wrong tools or attracting the wrong customers.

Develop Strategies

Once you’ve done the research to determine how best to reach her customers, figured out what you’d like to accomplish, and know how much time and money you can commit to your efforts, then you can start thinking about strategies to help you reach those goals.

To increase repeat sales for example, focus on strategies that reward loyalty and repeat business through discounts or other bonuses. To increase new sales, make existing customers happy (this should not cost you extra) and make sure you reward them for sending you referrals. To grow business that’s just a start up, build a tight community of customers who are engaged in your success and wants to see you grow. If you’re trying to capture customers were on the fence, hard-sell tactics won’t work, so your strategy should focus on creating a dialogue that will lead you to ways of overcoming their resistance. Positioning yourself as a leader in the industry? Be a problem solver and bring other people together for idea jams.

For most businesses, you might want to accomplish most or all of the above, and if that’s the case, your strategies and methods should overlap in ways that are mutually supportive for all the goals. If all you want is a one-time sale, all you get from the customer is their money. If you want to grow affinity and loyalty and an army of marketers working on your behalf, rely on strategies that offer something positive rather than manipulating your customers.

Select Your Tools

With all the factors that go into deciding where to spend your marketing money, what your goals should be, and how to motivate your customers, it should be clear by now that your method should be the last thing you choose. Unless, that is, you want to spend your capital tailoring your campaign to a specific channel, and learn about the cost of doing business backwards the hard way.

Final Thoughts

This was a big mini series and we didn’t even scratch the service of marketing as a function of your business. There are also tons of tools, resources, other sites, and podcasts that are devoted to sharing the latest and greatest with you and the best part is it’s always evolving. Whatever the cool marketing tools are the day you find this post the meat and potatoes of this mini series still stands. You need to figure out what your market cares about, where their attention is going, how they like to be communicated with, and engaged authentically.

Small Business Marketing Mini Series Part 2: Personal Branding Mindset

You may never have had aspirations of becoming a poster guy or gal for anything, and yet, here you are, the face of a business. The great freedom in being a solopreneur is that you are never asked to represent someone else’s image or brand, regardless of how suited it is to your personality. However, you are in a position to have others judge the quality of your offerings and content by their interactions with you. You are now both a business and a media company.

If you conduct most of your business online, be conscious that you stand to be recognized anywhere in the world. You’re fighting for as much attention as you can possibly grab in a world where the average engagement per post is less than a few seconds across all the major platforms. If your business is limited to one geographic area, think twice about going to the grocery store in your pajamas. Your customers don’t want to see you this way, and to some extent, you will always have to be “on.” You never know who will bump into you next.

When your business is just you, even small decisions regarding behavior or appearance can affect your bottom line. This can be very frustrating because everyone needs to let their hair down once in a while. While no one expects you to be anything more or less than human, consider your public behavior carefully, and, depending on the business you’re in, consider the repercussions of different actions. If you are a wedding singer for hire, don’t expect much work if you get drunk at a reception even as a guest. If you are a freelance writer, no one will think twice about seeing you at a bar, but if you post inappropriate, inflammatory, or ignorant content on your blog, potential customers will have doubts about your ability to divorce your less than savory personality traits from the work they might hire you to do.

The good news is, if you are an adult going into business for yourself, you’re probably mature enough to know that what you consider private behavior can impact your public business, and that not being a jackass in public is generally good practice regardless of your employment status.

Authenticity vs. TMI

People are reassured when they know they are dealing with people. Think of the frustration of navigating an automated phone system when all you want to do is ask someone a simple question and get a straightforward answer. Whatever channels you use to communicate with prospective and existing customers, because of the nature of solopreneurship, you don’t want to be a cold, automated, quasi-robotic presence. If they’re looking to connect with you, they want to feel like humans dealing with humans. Depending on your brand, the depth of non-business information you share will vary, but humor, positivity, and helpfulness are always appropriate.

In the world that seems far bigger than ever before, people crave authenticity and relationships. An increase in community supported agriculture, for example, is about more than just sustainable eating. It speaks to a desire for community building, and for feeling as though we are part of something.

Solopreneurs have an advantage in this business environment because they can offer unscripted interactions, and the assurance that in a business so small and personal, the customers needs will really be handled with care. Nomatter your business, and especially if you are providing a service, your brand should communicate that reassurance in some way. You have the ability to transform the transaction into something that becomes an act of helping, of fulfilling a need, or even friendship.

Fake It ‘Til You Make It

No one has to know you’re not a billionaire (yet). Your image is always going to be a projection to some extent, and it’s OK to give reality some time to catch up. As a product creator or service provider, your job is partly to inspire confidence in your offering and what it will do for your customers. No one likes to feel like a guinea pig.

Make sure that whatever you do, you do well, and that you can deliver on what you promise. You don’t have to be dishonest and suggest your client list is already very long, but count everything relevant as your body of work. Be able to demonstrate why you’re confident in your offering, and don’t use desperation as a client recruitment tool. If your customers feel as though they’re doing you a favor by doing business with you, you won’t get much respect, much money, or the kind of work you want to be doing.

Project confidence even if you have only one client right now. Be honest when asked about your business, but focus on your skills and the work you believe is ahead of you. Don’t treat your clients as practice cases, and don’t let them believe that they are doing you service. By doing consistently good work and focusing only on the kinds of products or projects that will advance your business, you are more likely to achieve the position you’re going for.

This post was more about mindset than it was about any kind of personal brand strategy and it was deliberate. The platforms are always going to change. How we share and consume content is always going to change. What’s not going to change? The fact that you still need to be able to show up as you in your business every day. And, that’s what it means to build a real brand for yourself. Building a brand that doesn’t just try to force people through the know, like, and trust curve but encourages them to stay and hang out there for a while.

Small Business Marketing Mini Series: It's time to get serious about your marketing!

If you’ve taken the time to develop a business you’re passionate about, truly good at, and well prepared to deliver, you may as well throw in the towel if you’re not planning on doing a little self promotion. This post kicks off a multi part mini series on all things marketing for your small business. I’ll be talking about personal branding, how to position your small business so it stands out, and offering a few things to think about as you start to audit how you’re vying for the attention of your target audience both online and in real life.

Whether you are a long-time or aspiring solopreneur, you already know there is no one else to do the things that need to be done. Even though some minor tasks can be outsourced, you are the primary representative of your brand and need to be wholeheartedly engaged in tooting your own horn. No one else is going to do it for you as well as you can.

Reasons to not make marketing yourself an afterthought:

• Your competitors are fighting for the awareness, attention, and money of your potential customers

• If prospects are seeking your business, if you’re not marketing it, they won’t find you

• Marketing yourself forces you to get real clear about your message so that your core offering is well-defined and targeted at the right people

A lot of solopreneurs begin with a small idea that grows into a business plan before they know it. That’s part of the fun of entrepreneurship. Because so many of them become business people with no prior design, they’re unaware of what they don’t know. There are plenty of great in-depth titles on marketing, but good basic principles are always worth reviewing. Here are a few:

1. How many Ps are there?

If you read through a marketing textbook published within the last 15 years or so, you’ll likely find that marketing rests on at least four Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. These are the major factors to consider when promoting your product. The product itself is key, of course. If it sucks, no marketing can save it. How you price it, how you bring it to your customers, and how you promote it are all equally important and must work in concert to deliver the message you want.

Of course this list of four has been augmented many times, and most marketers are ready to give you their interpretations. Here is ours: People is often added as the fifth P, and it’s absolutely crucial to remember for solopreneurs. In this case, the People is you. Get the other four right and mess up the People part, well, it was nice that you showed up. You may not be the product, but you have become the vessel for your brand message and experience.

Our addition to the list is Presence. The marketing landscape has been irrevocably reshaped by an increasingly social web. Customers expect brands to be social and attentive. They expect you to show up, listen, and, more importantly, respond. You have to address complaints, offer solutions, and high five your adoring fans over victories big and small. Even if you’re good at broadcasting your message and selling your stuff, that’s no longer enough. This one P holds a lot of power, so ignore it at your own peril.

2. It’s Product, Not Slogan

A common mistake of eager novice marketers is to wow their audience with wit and pizazz. You hire someone to design a kickass logo and spend all night coming up with the perfect tagline to stick under your sign. It’s probably clever. Pithy. But does it say anything about your product? Does it communicate clearly what you do? More importantly, does it sell your product?

When learning how best to market your product or service, get real clear on what makes it awesome and why someone should care. Know what its features are, and what the benefits or outcomes are of its use. Your marketing is a chance to promise something great that only you know how to deliver. Know what that is and let that drive your messaging, the design of your logo, and how you talk about the product. Yes, it needs to sound good, but it also needs to be convincing and demonstrative. If you can’t find a way to come up with that message about your product, revise the product, and then come back to your marketing.

3. Don’t Guess the Answers, Do Your Homework

If your resources are limited, you don’t want to waste them with efforts that won’t bring you customers. It’s bad marketing, and it’s definitely bad finance.

It’s easy to assume that because something is working for another business, it will work just as well for you. Marketing, just like anything else, is subject to trends. You might think that you need to be on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but are they really the best way to reach your audience? If your solo business involves sending readers to the elderly and retired, you might want to spend your marketing funds on channels that lead to that audience. However, if your strategy involves appealing to the children and caregivers of the elderly and retired, your approach would differ there.

Know who the decision-maker is in the process that will lead to a business transaction with you. Understand what motivates the decision-maker. Understand where and how that decision maker can be reached. Then, and only then, start thinking about how to spend time and money reaching that person.  You might think a billboard on a major highway will get you the most bang for your buck, but the greatest ROI is almost invariably reached when your message is well targeted, relevant, and placed in the right medium.

4. If You’re Not Enchanting, You’re Doing It Wrong

If you haven’t read Guy Kawasaki’s  excellent Enchantment, go out and buy or borrow it today. The old school thinking behind most marketing is that your goal should always be a sale. The school of thought that drives the world’s best marketers teaches that your goal is to create evangelists for your business. It’s the difference between a potentially satisfying one night stand and finding a lifelong partner in love.

Much of your work as a solopreneur  will be dedicated to finding prospects, vetting them as leads, and converting them into customers.That work becomes considerably easier over time if you take the extra step to make the customer fall in love with you. Go the extra mile, offer a kindness without expecting anything in return, and, most importantly, offer them a really amazing product.

Apple computers, which is, incidentally, Kawasaki’s former employer, struggled in its competition with Microsoft, Dell, and other companies, nearly going out of business. But even during its toughest times, Apple users were known for their near rabid devotion to the product. The company has rebounded nicely, becoming incredibly profitable, and despite having a comparably small market share, still capturing the most lucrative piece of the pie. Its users are still evangelists for the product, eagerly explaining its benefits and features to anyone who will listen. Why is that? What made it so enchanting?

Adding value.

Other companies made MP3 players before Apple. But only Apple rolled out an attractive, easy-to-use device alongside an online music store to support it. The iPhone might not be the most advanced smartphone on the market, but as an application platform, it continues to outpace others–thanks to understanding that it’s not just what the hardware can do that matters, it’s what the user can do with the software.

You may point out that the iTunes store and the application store are still making money for Apple, and that’s true. However, connecting the user to a supply chain of the very stuff that makes the devices fun to use, was not the standard operating procedure for electronics manufacturers. Now, every smart phone connects to its own application marketplace, because the average user expects what was once unusual and extremely valuable.

Applying this concept on a smaller scale is not difficult, and can be even more powerful for a solopreneur. Let’s say your business is a traveling lemonade stand. How could you add value in a way that enchants customers and keeps them coming back and gets them to tell others about you? Bring a free delivery to a construction crew doing road work in the middle of July to thank them for fixing a giant pothole, and give them reusable cups that are good for a free refill the next time they come to your stand. Offer a free workshop in the park on making the perfect pitcher of lemonade, and a free T-shirt to the 10-year-old whose concoction wins the blind taste test.

For every kind of business, there are lots of ways you can add value. Even a small gesture can feel like a lot to a customer who didn’t expect anything special. If what you do solves a problem, or helps build a community around your product or service, the enchantment is multiplied.

Remember, going from prospect to lead to customer is something all businesses shoot for. Doing the extra work to create an evangelist will have lifetime dividends and yield better marketing ROI than any advertising you can hire someone to do.

Ok, so this takes us to the end of Part 1 of this mini series. My goal was to give you a crash course on what marketing really is, how to frame what you’re doing right now for success, and where you might be able to leverage what you’re already doing for better positioning.

Tomorrow we are going to be talking about putting a little more elbow grease into your personal brand.

Stay Tuned!

Craft Better Value Propositions

Today I want to talk about Value Propositions. This is something that often doesn’t get the attention it deserves from most of business owners I talk to every day. It’s one of those exercises that everyone knows they should do but figure they can just wing it if push ever really came to shove.

I disagree.

When you’re sharing your value proposition you are literally communicating to your audience (or market) the reason they should buy from you. You are providing the answer to the discomfort or tension they are experiencing in their lives. Why wait to articulate that and potentially end up just talking yourself in circles until you lose the customer? Or worse, miss the opportunity to really serve someone.

My goal is to get you to understand that your value propositions is not something you should be winging and that it’s worth the time and effort to craft a message that will really mean something to your audience.

If you’re planning on building a business the lasts then you need to be clear that:

• A value proposition is a message that’s more than features or benefits, it’s about letting your potential customers know that they can trust you to deliver what you’re promising in a way that will help them solve their problems.

• Your value proposition sets the foundation for how you communicate with your market or audience and should get people thinking about what you do beyond just looking for the lowest cost option.

• It’s literally the reason people will work with you instead of your competitors or try to find a comparable substitute.

• It also helps to keep all your marketing and sales stuff on message. Nothing worse than thinking you’re doing an awesome job on social only to find out that people have no idea what it is you actually do.

So today we’re going to talk a bit more about what a value proposition is, why it’s important and once you come up with it - how to work it into the rest of your business.

What is value proposition?

A value proposition is a clear statement that explains how your offering solves your customer’s problems or makes their lives better. It tells your ideal customer why they should buy from you, how you’re different, and the benefits they can expect. And no, it’s definitely not just your slogan.

There are three big components in a value proposition.

• What you do

• What’s the benefit or transformation you’re promising (why should they care)

• What makes you unique or different.

Getting this right means you’ve clearly identified a solution to a problem, why you and, shown your commitment to service.

What it’s NOT is a slogan or positioning statement. If your value proposition says “we’re the best”, “we have the best”, or “We’re number 1” in whatever your offer is then it’s definitely NOT a value proposition.

Why is important that you have yours clearly articulated?

If you aren’t speaking directly to your target customer in a way that mirrors how they authentically speak or like to consume information then it doesn’t matter how much good you do, no one will be able to connect with you.

Being clear about the value you provide also allows you to be specific about the value you promise. The more specific the better. What are the quantifiable and unquantifiable benefits that your customer will experience after they engage with you? How will their life be transformed? Explaining this helps your target market build a confidence in your offer because you can clearly express some kind of measurable or marked change.

People have small attention spans, when they’re evaluating options they are constantly scanning for information that they can instantly apply to their lives. They’re literally conducting gut level cost/benefit analysis to see whether or not they feel like you’ll be able to solve the problem they have. Too wordy, to theoretical, to much fluff makes it hard for them to picture how you can help their life in a real and meaningful way...or at least in a way that makes sense for them to trade their dollars for your potential value.

How to identify or clearly articulate your value proposition?

A few sentences followed by or supported by a few bullet points. That’s it. Crafting a decent value proposition starts with a brain dump of sorts and it happens in three acts.

Act 1. Listing out all the benefits of your offer.

The more specific the better. Are you making a process easier? How much time are you saving? How much money are you saving? Can you quantify the opportunity engaging with your offer brings to people? This can kind of be viewed as an exploration of the opportunity costs someone will incur by not interacting with you. Take time with this, you should feel exhausted by the end. Literally try to squeeze every direct and indirect benefit you can think of out of this list.

Act 2. Link the benefits to a value offer.

Now that you have an extensive list of how awesome your offer it is think about why people should care. Connect these benefits to the real problem that it solves in a way that makes it easy for your customer to almost imagine how better their life will be after having interacted with you.

Act 3. Differentiate.

Make who you’re talking to as clear as possible, what you’re offering and why you’re different. Why should someone trust you to solve their problem over the possible alternatives.

Weaving your value proposition into all the parts of your business?

You’ve taken the time to craft the perfect value proposition, now what? Since your value proposition is the foundation of your sales and marketing efforts it’s time to audit your copy and content. Do your blogs, landing pages, Facebook Ads, etc clearly reflect what you do and who you do it for? You just finished putting the work into identifying who your ideal customer is you know how they like to be communicated with, what interests them and what they care about. You’ll be able to craft graphics and longer form sales copy that really speaks to them. Not only that but all your content and copy can finally be focused on serving someone specific, not everyone.

It should also be reinforced everywhere you show up on line. Your value proposition is the shorthand for why people should engage with you. Having it everywhere online (all your social profiles for example) and aligning your actions with it will help people better connect with you and build credibility. It definitely helps shorten the whole know like and trust curve.

Conclusion:

Taking your value proposition seriously is important if you plan on building a successful business. If you’re counting on really connecting with people then you need to give them something to hold on to that’s more than a catchphrase or a slogan. Your customers are also really busy, early on in the relationship you can’t expect a potential customer to take time out their day to really dig into who you are, what you do, and the content you produce. That’s a luxury that you earn by after you’ve convinced them that you’re worth investing in.

Looking for inspiration? Here are a few links to sites that have collected some great value propositions:

Growth Funnel - https://www.growthfunnel.io/15-great-value-proposition-examples-and-how-to-create-one-for-your-company/

Wordstream - https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/04/27/value-proposition-examples

Hubspot - https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/write-value-proposition

10 Ways To Grow Your Business In 2019 #GlowUp

As this is going up it’s the last day of 2018. Being the last day of the year means I’m competing for your attention in a sea of business/entrepreneurial posts trying to tell you how to make 2019 your best year ever, how to set resolutions you keep, and trends to watch in the business world in 2019. That’s all well and good but I had a different idea. I wanted to share ten actions you can take right now to move the needle in your business. I like this idea way more than another how to set goals motivational type post because even if you find this post in August of 2021 you’ll still be able to take some action and get some results.

So, let’s just jump right into it!

1. Monday Morning Quarterback.

Even if you’re a team of one right now you should still carve out time early in the week (EVERY WEEK) to set the tone for the days to come. You can use that time to identify challenges in the business, flush out a content editorial calendar, and plan on when you’re going to do the work you need to grow. It’s also a great time to review the goals you set the week before. Did you hit them? Why or why not? What can you learn from the data you’ve collected in the last week?

2. Connect with a customer or someone in your audience. It’s not a secret that people do business, and keep doing business, with people the know, like, and trust.

Reaching out to check in with someone, answering a question, or responding to a social post are all opportunities for you to build real relationships with people. There’s no trick or hack here. In order to show people that you care, you have to actually care. It’s a long tail strategy but one that will leave everyone happier than just some flash sale content you spam out to everyone.

3. Create something.

I’m definitely not a fan of “Field of Dreams’ing” it when it comes to building a business but you should be creating content on a regular basis. Blog posts, podcasts, and video like Facebook Live or Youtube give people an opportunity to engage with you. You’re giving them a reason to pay attention to you because you’re offering them something of value in exchange for their attention. Creating content regularly is also great for being found online, Google really likes sites that update regularly with information that answers your audience’s questions.

4. Ask for a referral.

There’s never a bad time to reach out to your best customers and share how awesome it is to serve them. Asking for referrals gives your customers the opportunity to be the hero because that introduction will gives them the chance to solve the problems of the people they care about. Plus, it’s a great litmus test for the value you’re providing in asking people to share you and your business with the people the care about.

5. To quote the Little Mermaid, “I want to be where the people are..”. (No shame in my Disney Fan Game.)

Networking for the sake of networking or worse trying to cold sell in person is not a good business development strategy. But, putting yourself in environments that allow people to get to know you and create opportunities for you to be a resource/connector/giver is always great business development karma. Building your credibility and visibility in your community will help you shorten the time it takes for people to get to know, like, and trust you. It will help establish you as a leader in your market and help make it easier for people to refer new customers to you. Plus, your social reach absolutely amplifies after people see how awesome you are in real life. In most communities you’ll find Chamber of Commerce’s, Young Professional Organizations, and even BNI (Business Networking International) groups hosting events monthly, if not weekly. So no excuses!

6. Check in on your competitors.

Careful with this though because if you don’t set some ground rules you’ll end up in a comparative blackhole wasting time and feeling worse than when you started. This is very much an exercise in researching what people are doing and not what they are saying. Maybe you’re curious about someone’s social strategy so you look at their posting frequency, platforms, engagement, etc. Then, use that data to either compare to your own efforts and results or others in the market. Maybe you evaluate the types of content they are producing and the results that content is yielding. You can do this for social, offerings, and possibly even market share depending on the industry/market you’re in. I hate that I have to say this but make sure you’re using this data to help differentiate you and that you’re not just biting someone else’s style.

7. Get lean.

Profit is more than just growing top line revenue or getting more dollars in the door. It’s about using the resources you have as effectively as possible. Costs have a tendency to creep up on you without you really “feeling” it, I know this from personal experience. For example, take a look at all the subscription services you use in your business. Feel free to use your bank statement as your guide. Take a hard look at all of them and decide if you really need all of those services. I did that this month and cut three non-essential subscriptions. I wasn’t using them enough to justify the expense and one of them I wasn’t using at all. I bought it wishfully thinking I’d use it. There’s never a bad time to do a quick audit of your expenses to see where you might be able to save a few dollars in the weeks and months to come. Your profit margin or ad budget will thank you for it.

8. Create something new for your current customers.

If people are buying from you it means you’re solving a problem or providing a value they’re willing and able to spend money on. I challenge you to find an adjacent issue that you can offer that would benefit the people already buying from you. This isn’t just an upsell, it should be an offer that solves a real problem. Adding new products or services to your mix will allow you to deepen the relationships you have with the people you serve and ensure that they stay with you for the long haul.

9. Audit your data.

This can be a hard pill to swallow for some because it means taking a look at what you’ve been doing all year long. It means looking at what you’ve been doing in your business without the little rationalizing voice chiming in to protect your ego. Spot check a customer, take a hard look at what your cost to acquisition is in your marketing, be honest about the amount of time you’re spending on sales, or any other activity that you do to move the needle in your business. The idea here is to look for patterns and to decide what’s working and what’s not. Blindly throwing more money or hours into an activity that’s not getting you the results you’re hoping for is not good strategy at all.

10. Talk to the media.

In most communities there are a handful of traditional media channels that cover small business issues. Find out who those people are and reach out. You can offer yourself as a resource to them in their potential future stories or suggest a story of your own. Heck, in my community they even showcase small business owners with an interview every Monday. Making friends with a few local journalists gives you an opportunity to build social capital/credibility, create content, and benefit from the leverage of that media’s reach - all in exchange for your expertise. This might not happen right away but taking the time to build real relationships with people is always a great investment of your time.

This list isn’t a be all end all for business growth nor is it a recipe to follow. I’m hoping it spurs you out of inaction when you’re feeling a little lost or a little down on your business. If you happen to be reading this as we head into 2019 then great, maybe there’s an idea you liked and you can run with it. If not, no worries because there’s never a bad time to try something new or get a little introspective in your business. Just as long as you take some action, ideally a little bit everyday, and work towards some incremental improvement I’m happy.

It's Time To Put Your Cash To Work

There’s something that is instantly gratifying about being paid in cash - something kind of primal about it. There’s immediate feedback that the work you’ve just done for someone has been validated and that you now have 100% of the revenue you were promised in exchange for that value. Oh, and there’s also the fact that you now have just a little more of that sweet sweet medium of exchange to use to help you get the things you need for yourself and your business.

Cash really is king (or queen).

Even as a consultant I get excited when someone extends the offer to satisfy an invoice in cash for the work that I’ve done. It’s quick, clean, and final. I know that I’ve finished the job I was hired to do and I can move on to the next one. No worries about making phone calls, waiting on the mail, or dealing with people’s excuses for non payment.

Now, if you’re reading this odds are you know exactly what I’m talking about - regardless of the type of work that you do. It’s not always sunshine and rainbows though when it comes to dealing in cash. I’ve had quite a bit of experience coaching people in cash heavy businesses and can’t wait to share some of the lessons I’ve taught to them about how to not only make the most of it but protect you as you grow your business.

My first question has to do with what you are doing with the cash you have already?

Is it taped to the back of the toilet, in a sock drawer, or stashed in shoebox somewhere? Better yet is it non-existent because, like me sometimes, you succumb to your impulse shopping urges. (Hey even business coaches get weak from time to time!) If any of those describe you then someone should slap you on the hand, in a firm voice say “NO!”.

First thing you need to do is remove the temptation to spend and reinforce the cash that’s coming in and flowing out of your business. Now I know most of you who have hidden stashes will argue that it’s in a really good secret hiding spot. Even still, in the event of a flood, fire, natural disaster, curious house pet, or really good house party you might be exposing yourself to unnecessary risk.

Find your favorite banking institution, one you are comfortable with, and deposit! If you already have an account somewhere let’s start to use it. When you physically separate yourself or add an extra step in accessing your funds it’s been proven to help your cash management efforts. I’ll explain a little more deeper into this piece but you should have an emergency account, an account for bills, payroll, and general operation spending. I know this sounds like a lot but seeing everything working independently is a real key to keeping your business running lean and mean regardless of industry.

Next is a budget.

There are a ton of downloadable spreadsheets and websites you can use to help you with your budget if you don’t have one already. Don’t tell me that you do mental math and you always have an idea of what’s coming in and and what’s going out. I’m calling you out! When you leave things up to be mentally tallied you also are subjecting your finances to your internal rationalizations. What I mean by that is you are convincing yourself that it’s OK to spend a little extra here or there when you really shouldn't be. I’m a big fan of Quickbooks but if you feel like your too small or don’t have the time to learn something new then a spreadsheet works just fine - there are free templates everywhere. This is not just something you do once and forget about it or it tape on the wall only to eventually go blind to it.

You can’t be afraid to get a handle on your business’s finances. So we don’t even have to call it a budget. We can call it a spending plan!

A spending plan starts just like you think a budget might. You’re going to map out all the places your cash goes throughout the month. I want you to start by thinking about all your fixed expenses first: rent, equipment payments, internet, insurance, health care etc. Then work on variable stuff: office supplies, lunch meeting, fuel, electric bills, etc. At the very end I want you to create a space where you are saving between 5% and 15% of every pay event - we’re trying to bank at least part of your profit here.

So after all the traditional budgeting is done - I want you to look at what you have in front of you and make a plan for that spending. Start by breaking out a calendar and visually identifying when you might need to have cash for during the month. This can be for recurring stuff as well as payments you need to make for upcoming events, like conferences, you want to attend. writing the dates that you know you need to have cash for. It’s good to know what you have to SAVE for but it’s even better to anticipate what you are going to SPEND on. You don’t have to be afraid to spend money in your business. It’s all part of the game, especially for things like Facebook Ads, or other marketing, where it’s not clear what the real ROI might be. For those savings though you should set up a separate bank accounts I’m a big fan of divide and conquer - when you create different bank accounts for different goals or purposes it helps actually reach them because you can see real progress.

Here’s a real example. If in your entire business career you deal solely in cash do you think financial institutions will know you exists. Do you think they would be willing to extend credit to you? Probably not. Not only do you not show any kind of assets to back up the risk they would be taking on you, you haven’t showed them that you can be a credible or positive risk. When your paying bills you should be linking them to a bank account so that you can start to build activity and a reputation for being a good credit risk. As you grow you will potentially need that credit and financial history for borrowing/investment in more employees, more inventory, a new building, or just more stuff to help you deliver more value. If you don’t have the history it will be almost impossible to get anyone to lend or at least lend at any kind of competitive rate.

Without going into too much detail on this one, taxes are another issue (I have to save some of the good stuff for subsequent posts). Once you have your foundation tools in place you need to start working to protect yourself from an audit or unnecessary heat from the IRS. The easiest way to do that is pay your quarterlies. Paying something into the tax system on a quarterly basis not only lessons the blow come April (and December) but in the event of an overpayment or loss in the business, reduction of basis, you get a refund. What it also does is keep your business activities honest in the eyes of the government. When you are proactive and report properly you are less likely to draw the attention of an audit. Which again is good on so many levels.

I’ve given a bit of advice here but I’m going to offer some real tips in bullets below to give you a direction to start looking for resources that can help you - and that are free.

• Quickbooks or any means of actually keeping track of your money - seriously take a look and budget. One caveat though is that you have to be HONEST! If you’re not honest when you start then any feedback this system gives you will be bogus. So I don’t care if you think you are in terrible financial shape, don’t mask it.

• Start at least a checking account. Now there’s no need right away to go open 47 bank accounts. If you don’t have one for work yet go get one. Then from that account you can distribute your pay however you see fit. The benefit is that you have a running tally of what you’ve made for your own accounting’s sake.

• Set some real goals. What do you want to do in 3 months, 6 months, and a year out? What about 3 years out? Write them out and revisit them regularly. Having goals creates an anchor to taking your money situation seriously. If it’s a new car or a new place you’ll never get there if you aren’t thinking about it.

• Deal with your payments, invoices, and revenue right away!! The longer you leave that cash laying around the harder it will be to put away. The goal here is to avoid having to think about where the next rent check or even meal is coming from.

• Automate as much as you can. Set up monthly withdrawals from account to be deposited into your specific business accounts. Even your bills should be set on autopilot when necessary. The more you automate the less you’ll think about it and the better you will save.

I know there was nothing revolutionary here but I hope that I at least got you to thinking about your own situations. In upcoming posts I plan to talk more about the different budgets you can try to employ and actually give a little more instruction on how to get it done. For now, let’s tackle mindset, get you putting cash somewhere safe, and start thinking about how you’re going to keep track of it.

Recession Fears Or Not, Keep Taking Action In Your Business

Why do I keep seeing posts and articles scaring people into being nervous about the state of the economy? Just because the stock market is over reacting right now, doesn’t mean you have to worry about your business. Unless it’s publicly traded, then maybe worry for about a second then pull it together. It frustrates me to see vague headlines from so-called experts and political pundits announcing that a recession is on the way... at some point. I’m calling you out MSNBC! Because of course it will, that’s how business cycles literally work.

Our market, like almost every market in the world, is built on the premise that economies expand and contract over time, it’s literally macroeconomics 101. It kind of grinds my gears that the media is giving business owners an excuse for poor performance in the event their revenues, or impact, or engagement fall short of the goals they set for themselves. You might not be able to control whether someone buys from you or not, but you can control the actions you take in your pursuit of growth.

So to combat all the recession talk and pessimism this post is all about why it’s a great environment for small businesses and why doubling down on your efforts is a very worthwhile investment.

First off, you have to let go of waiting for the perfect time to take action. There will be never be the best time. So get over that right out of the gate. It sounds cliche but it’s true, don’t worry about perfect when it comes to doing things in your business. I’d much rather take an imperfect cold sales email that you sent to hundreds of businesses then wasting months trying to perfect an email and have never sent it. One of those things has a better chance at creating value for you and your customers, can you guess which? Think about the time and investment it takes to take something from good to perfect. Is the time investment worth the additional and very marginal gain? Probably not. So get good and then get out there! You can adjust and improve on the fly and it’s part of the learning process.

1. Small businesses are overly concerned with consumer demand.

The consumer demand I’m talking about here is what owners and entrepreneurs talk about when they all congregate - on a macro level. It’s the fuel for excuses around why no one is buying there stuff. They say things like, “Oh I heard consumer demand/confidence was down and that’s why I people aren’t going out to eat as much this time of year.” That’s a lazy, nonsense excuse. What small businesses, you, should be concerned about is your target demographics and what you’re doing to make sure your providing the best possible experience for people. What is your community doing? What are your local customers doing? Are you doing the best you can to get in front of your best customers? Don’t let all the noise of national economic concerns keep you from reaching out.

2. Money is still cheap!

If you have relatively good credit funding is getting easier and easier to get your hands on. That is a beautiful thing! Banks are willing to lend and borrowing rates are still low. So even if your business is a little slow it might be a good time to invest in you and upgrade your brand. You don’t want to start from behind on the permission-to-spend bandwagon when the media announces that everything’s going to be ok and that the stock market isn’t going to just disappear. So it’s a great time to get some extra working capital and add to that plant, equipment, capital, and especially marketing and branding. Your spending should be in service of the experience and value you create, not just because you want new things.

3. People have needs and problems regardless of the economy.

If you have a business that is filling a real need then regardless of what’s happening in the financial markets you need to keep moving. Odds are if you see a problem that needs solving so will other businesses that may have a little extra liquidity and the willingness to try capture a little extra market share. As long as your value proposition, your story, and your message, reaches people and you are passionate about the problem you are solving - it makes you a strong contender.

4. Spending still happens.

In tougher/weaker economies consumers might pull back on larger more extravagant purchases but spending still happens. Consumers will spend on the “little luxuries” that help keep them happy on the day to day. Make your product/service a part of that culture - become part of your consumers day. Think soaps, food, and even clothes. Consumers might skip the tropical cruise vacation but they won’t skimp on making sure the time they take for themselves to enjoy a shower is the best it possibly can be. Nor will they stop trying to find ways to make their lives easier. Regardless of what’s happening in the economy people will always pay for two things - to not be uncomfortable and convenience. Why? Because what they’re really buying is time and that’s always valuable. No one wants to not enjoy the time they get to spend not working on their own grind and convenience effectively buys more time.

Don’t let broad based economic indicators slow you down. In order for you to get your idea going you need to take action. So realistically evaluate your situation, your needs, your plan, and your customers and start creating. Focus on bringing that minimum viable experience to market and building from there. You might surprise yourself and everyone else at the entrepreneurial watercooler because you provided people with something they wanted in spite of the economy and what the news says.

Get Your Customers To Choose You (Again And Again)

If you’ve spent any time trying to work out your business’s strategy you’ve probably come across a few resources. Probably more than a few, the internet is littered with all kinds of business building nonsense. Thank your lucky holiday stars you ended up here because there’s no quality standard on what someone can call “business strategy” these days. So before you download someone’s (who maybe isn’t super qualified to offer anyone any advice because they’ve never done anything ever when it comes to growing a business) free 87 page growth strategy guide, carve out a few minutes to make your way through this post.

Ohh, I’m feeling a kind of way already. I like it.

When it comes to moving the levers in your business there are the old favorites like the SWOT analysis, that no one really knows what to do with after you fill it out, and then there are frameworks like Porter’s 5 Forces Model. These frameworks are designed to help you organize your thoughts around what’s happening in your business and helping to illustrate why people should care. Something like Porter’s model is an amazing tool but it should be one piece of how you are evaluating what your business' strategy and subsequent hunt for competitive advantage will look like. Oh, and we can’t forget the most important business building faux pas, these tools aren’t going to tell you what you need to do next in your business...most of the time.

One resource that I really like and I’m guessing you haven’t seen is Mintzberg's Emergent Strategy framework. If you are a recent MBA graduate or have taken one of Mintzberg’s courses you will of course be one of the select few who have had the opportunity to dive into one of my favorite approaches. And if that description isn’t you like 99% of the world's population, you are in for a treat!

Mintzberg is responsible for Emergent Strategy. He’s the guy that made it cool to think about business decisions from a human perspective. He coined this way to think about business that weighed getting to the heart of why people make the decisions they do over time. I made reference to him and Emergent Strategy way back in the day, somewhere in the middle of 2016 and I wanted to break it down a bit more with this post. Took a few years but we’re full circle.

Emergent Strategy approaches strategy from a very human point perspective.

I love it because makes one really simple thing the contextual heart of deciding what to do next in your business. At the end of the day businesses succeed because people are choosing to engage with them. Sounds almost too simple but let’s break it down. Consumer’s choose how to spend their money for lots of reasons. Sometimes it’s price driven and sometimes it’s not. It can be about values, mission, and the intentions guiding how your consumer makes their decisions over time.

Did you solve their problem and are they coming back every time they needed that problem solved again. If you’re a restaurant, for example, are they coming back week after week to try something new on your menu? This way of thinking frames the choices your consumers make in terms of the outcomes desired/achieved. Notice I said outcomes and not goals because you need to think about your business in terms of the resources you have available to allocate to try to create an environment for success. As a business owner you should be all about doing the best thing you can and about making it easy for people to get that value from you - the latter is an outcome.

Figuring out what makes people tick fills lifetimes of work for the professionals in the fields of behavioral economics, psychology, strategy, etc. You don’t have that kind of time in your business. Let’s see if we can fast track your development of a systematic approach to making choices and getting human-people to identify the important choices to make when it comes to buying from you. Here are 5 things you can do now that will get you thinking like an Emergent Strategist:

1. Strategic Planning - Planning is not the be all and end all of business growth.

There are a four other points below this one that support Mintzberg’s framework. Planning is important because you have to take stock of the resources, capital, equipment, and people you have (or will need) in making your business work. Planning also means you need to be thinking about how your rivals are going to react to whatever you do in your market. Anticipating possible outcomes will help you get the most out of your resources!

2. Manipulation and Strategic Ploys.

Emergent Strategy is a more holistic approach and that means there’s a lot more grey area because people are not cut and dry (or rational). What can you do to better position yourself ahead of your competition? Nothing like good ole tricannery and manipulation! Kidding, maybe. Please, don’t be unethical here. But, you can use information to disrupt, dissuade or even discourage customers from engaging with competitors because they’d be making an inferior choice. That’s literally a big part of what marketing does. Slinging proverbial mud probably isn’t the best approach but communicating your value or worth over your competition’s is what you want. It’s all about triggering that FOMO.

3. Work on your patterns!

Remember building a business is about making good choices. Even if you are an organization of one, that doesn’t mean you are absolved from cultivating good organizational behavior. What are you doing every day to push your business forward? This is everything from your work routines and daily systems all the way to making the big risky choices. When you are on the clock, everything you should be working on should be in an effort to move your business forward.

4. Positioning.

In order for your business to work you have to have a really good understanding of the market or industry you belong to. This is where something like Porter’s 5 Forces comes in handy because through Porter’s model you’ll be able to figure out how you can best differentiate and offer value in your market. You will get to being profitable when you are offering something so awesome that your customers never use a competitor again. This is also a great place to be thinking about your core competencies and how you really differ from everyone else in your market space. Tastes, expectations, and a customer’s willingness to pay all change over time so make sure you are constantly checking in on your competitors and your market.

5. Perspective.

Perspective directly relates to the culture you are building in your business. Again this counts for you even if you are a one person show. What’s the environment you are building? Are you consistent with how you engage with customers? Your online presence? Do you encourage risk taking or innovation? These things shape culture and help you to build perspective. Remember, people are a big part of this strategy and how they perceive your brand counts just as much as them enjoying your products or services. Get your customers on board with how you do business!

Thinking in broader terms - in more humanistic terms is one of my favorite ways to approach to growing a business. Analysis and deciding on how to best allocate resources are important but anticipating the reactions of your competitors and the people you want to engage with shouldn’t be pushed to the end of your to do list. The world of business is kind of like the wild west at the moment. The internet makes it free to start a business but the other side of the coin is that anyone can do it. There are also lots of resources and tools and no one “right” way to find success. Don’t get stuck on just one way and take advantage of all of the resources that are available to help you move the needle in your business. Just maybe not that 87 free guide from someone who’s never done anything..just saying, check your sources.

3 Pillars For Saving A Failing Business

Helping businesses do epic things is pretty great most of the time. Most of the time I get to enter the picture right when a business is hitting an exciting inflection point. It can look like anything from helping a business owner apply for (and get) funding for an expansion, to launching a brand new product line, and even helping businesses chart new courses for their next fiscal years. It’s the really exciting kind of change and the fun kind of tough decisions to tackle.

Unfortunately though this post isn’t going to be about the fun stuff.  

Every once and awhile, what I do is less than great. It’s less than great because the real world doesn’t work like a Disney Movie. There’s not always a happy ending. These are the times when I really want to help someone but they waited too long to ask for help or they were too stubborn to admit that they needed help. A stubborn business owner will reach out, tell me I’m their last hope, have zero resources left, and expect me to give them some kind of magic business growth bullet to save their business. And, we can’t forget that (most of the time, not always) this down on their luck business owner is blaming everything from market conditions to their past employees on why they landed in their current situation. It’s never their fault and they always already know everything.

When entrepreneurs are at their most desperate are the times I really wish I had something like that to give to their ailing business. I wish I had a cheat code I could just hand them on an Inspector Gadget style self-destructing note that, once entered, will instantly turn things around for them. I’d want to give them an instant solution because by the time a business reaches that point of no return some real learning and authentic growth has happened for a few of those entrepreneurs. In losing their businesses a few people find real clarity and learn a lot about what it takes to really run a business, instead of just playing wantrepreneur like they had been up to that point.

But I don’t have a cheat code or magic bullet to turn around failing businesses. What I do have are a few foundational business building pillars that business owners can apply to get back to basics and hopefully build their way out of their current hole. If you, or someone you know, is heading this way the thing they’ll need most is time. So, hopefully there’s still a little runway left.

Let’s get into the pillars.

Pillar 1 - Yes, your mission matters. We’re about to lace up and hit the starting line, stay with me it’ll make sense I promise.

Building a business is a lot like running a race. I’m not a runner so visualizing the challenge of running a 5k is more than scary enough for me. If you plan on finishing that race you probably need to do a little more than just showing up the day of and waiting around until it starts. If you plan on running that race successfully you have to think about lots of things. Everything from the fuel you put into your body, to the dedicated training (even if it is the Couch To 5k app), and the sneakers you’re wearing on race day. There are lots of variables and there’s lots of work that goes into getting ready for race day. The funny thing is that even though you and I are completely different people, have different reasons for running that race, have different expectations, different life circumstances, and have different plans for what we’re going to do after we finish (mine probably involves finding a burger and beer) we have one very important thing in common. Every decision that we make is in service of making sure we do our best come race day. Don’t roll your eyes just yet. This isn’t you’re normal running a marathon is a business analogy. One of the most common challenges I see when a failing business owner comes to me for help is that they aren’t making decisions that consistently map to the mission of their business. They’re guessing or using some internal judgement of the day for what they think is right when they make a decision in the business. Most of the time it’s because they don’t have a clearly articulated mission and so they just wing the decisions they need to make every day. It’s the same as showing up to race having done literally nothing. If everyday you have nothing to help you focus how you spend your time, what you should be spending your money on, what values you stand for, how you communicate with people, and what you want your customers to really experience when they interact with you then you’re just showing up to the race in jeans and boat shoes. Every decision made in a business MUST be in service of that business’s mission. The mission of a business is its reason for being and without it they’re just playing entrepreneur. Here’s where you can get more info on creating awesome mission statements.

Pillar 2 - Building a business means building real relationships.

Someone who’s complaining that their business isn’t growing is most likely citing the cause as not enough customers. That’s not super helpful insight though as you can probably guess. So let’s break that premise down a bit. The most common reasons that a business doesn’t have enough customers boils down to to main themes: bad product/service or obscurity. Let’s tackle obscurity here and save bad product/service for a later pillar.

When I say obscurity what I mean is that the business owner is not doing enough to take the time to really get to know their audience, community, target market, or however else you’d categorize the people you want to buy your stuff. There’s no relationship being built. Why would anyone trust that you can help them or support them in exchange for their hard earned dollars?  These are also the business owners that tell me that they have social pages, websites, review sites, etc. and are too busy to do anything with them. Or worse, all they only post are mini commercials for their stuff. For every post. No one wants to see that just like no one really wants to watch those Facebook Live streams of people trying to QVC their multi-level marketing clothing, charcoal toothpaste, or fitness shakes. Beating obscurity is going to take them showing up a lot more than they are comfortable with and in ways that deliver real value to people - yes, entertainment counts as value. They need to take building a robust content calendar seriously and here are some of my favorite ways to help people jump start their brand engagement.

1. Look for podcasts to pitch to as a guest. I probably don’t have to tell you that podcasts are huge right now. I’m also guessing that you or any business owner are know lots about the value you’re the business brings to the world. Everyone loves a good subject matter expert. There are millions of podcasts and I’m willing to bet that with a little search enginuity one can put together a list of podcasts still trying to find momentum to offer up guest services too. It’s a win win. They get content and the business owner gets exposure, and also content.   

2. Facebook Live is an awesome place to play right now. This platform allows you to just show up, share a message, and go. It’s an opportunity for a business owner to connect in real time with people and allow their community to peek behind the curtain in the business. I’m a huge fan of live but like any content that’s really valuable, a little prep work goes a long way.

3. Don’t sleep on in person networking. Every week in communities all over the world are professional networking events you can attend. From local BNI chapters, to Chamber of Commerce events, and even Young Professional events, they’re all great places to meet new people. Notice I said meet, not sell. Managing your expectations is critical in situations like this and the primary goal should be to just meet people. Sure, a sale might happen down the line but it’s after someone has the opportunity to get to know/like/trust you/the business owner. And remember, the name of the game is beating obscurity here.

4. Blog/Podcast/Video - Content is still king going into 2019. The modern customer consumes for lots of reasons and one of the biggest ones is that they feel that their values align with a business’s values. The best way to connect an audience or target market to a business is by communicating directly to them. I’m not saying you have to do all three, I mean if you can it’s better because there are more platform options, but you do have to do something. A business has to give people a reason to interact with them and it often starts with the simple consumption of some piece of content. A business owner that shares their message, teaches, entertains, and stands for something will always have the advantage over a competitor that doesn’t. Consumers are looking for the story just as much as they are looking for the solution or even the right price.

Pillar 3 - There’s always more work to do.

It takes a lot of work to build a business. Not just a lot of work but a lot of hours, a lot of sacrifice, and a big emotional investment. One of the toughest things I have to do sometimes is look a business owner in the face and tell them that they’re not working enough. People get defensive but my intention is not to attack them personally, it’s to show them that there are consequences for the choices they make. It can be tough to tell someone to put more of themselves into their business when they are coming from place of feeling like they’ve already made a tremendous investment and haven’t seen any kind of return. What’s worse is that most people don’t track the effectiveness of their marketing, sales, and the dollars they spend so when it’s time to do more work they struggle with deciding what to do next. Unfortunately all work is not created equal when it comes to generating positive outcomes for a business. I’m not in the business of telling people how to live their lives but if they are serious about saving their business or turning it around, their business is going to demand more of them. More creating of content, more networking, creating more opportunities for sales, etc. Often when resource constraints are at their tightest means the easiest (in concept) thing to allocate is the business owner’s time. As business owners we can’t control what our customers do after we ask for the sale or post something on social. What we can control is how many proposals get sent out, how many posts get created, how much feedback we try to solicit, and how many people the business owner chooses to interact with. It takes time.

Going back to Pillar 2 it also means doing the work to honestly assess a business’s offerings. If the market is not responding to a business there’s a good chance that there’s no product/market fit. It takes time to go back to the drawing board and really look at the assumptions that were used when that business was born. It’s going to take asking a lot of hard questions, things like:

1. How big is the actual market for the good or service?

2. Is it a need vs. a want vs. a novelty?

3. Why would/should anyone care about your offering?

4. How mature is the market? Are there cheaper substitutes? Too much of a learning curve?

5. Do people understand the business’s mission? If yes, go back to question 3.

Iterating doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom but it does have to happen fast if a business is in trouble. The quicker a business owner can get over their ego, roll up their sleeves, and commit to getting to work the better the odds of success become. My recommendation is to try to figure out which levers lead most effectively to generating revenue and leaning hard on that work, try not to Wolf of Wall Street though.

The saddest part of what I do is seeing people give up on themselves. I get it though. In their business’s most critical time they finally find the courage to reach out and instead of giving them an easy button I have to tell them to double down. Sometimes people don’t have the stomach for that or they’re just too beat up to go on. There’s no shame in having tried though which is easier to say from behind a keyboard I know. As business owners we tie up so much of our identities in our businesses. It’s hard to seperate the entrepreneur from the business which is why I try my best to teach people that failures (or successes) are just outcomes. What happens in a business is the output of an equation whose variables include the choices made around mission, community, and the work that’s done. Sometimes people make less than great choices because they’re operating from less than great assumptions and less than great information - that doesn’t mean they’re less than great people. So, if you know someone who’s struggling in their business and they haven’t reached out to anyone yet think about sending this post their way and maybe there’s an idea here that helps kickstart a new and positive inflection point for them.

Or, at the very least softens the blow of having to close the doors. Plus there’s no rule that says you can’t try again.

5 Things To Think About When Starting A Business

Happy Monday!

I get asked a lot of questions about starting a new business. I love it because as soon as I hear someone’s inflection start to shift to a question-asking pitch, the professor switch flips on in my brain. I can’t help it. It’s like a Pavlovian Response...minus the drool. Ok, maybe a little drool. That’s only because I get excited for people when you with start to express your entrepreneurial tendencies.

Today I want to cover the first critical steps to getting your business idea out of your brain and into the real world.

This post is my response when you ask me what you should do FIRST when thinking about starting a business. It’s not an all inclusive answer, just the literal first things you should do. Ideally I would’ve got to you before you started soliciting advice from the near infinite places online spouting business growing advice. This would literally be the conversation I would have with someone over an adult beverage at the bar after they found out what I do.

If you did start Google’ing then you’ve probably seen that some entrepreneurs, coaches, and consultants wave their fingers in the air and proclaim that you work as hard (and as fast) as you can on getting to your Minimum Viable Product out the door. Then once you’re bought in on that idea these “experts” proceed to do a not-great job of explaining what a Minimum Viable Product is because they are only vaguely familiar with the LEAN Startup Model. (Fun fact: The LEAN idea came from Toyota factories in Japan in the 1980’s. It was designed to smooth out processes and reduce waste on auto manufacturing lines. Sorry, I thought it was fun.)  

Can’t iterate if you don’t ship, right?!

While I agree with that I tend to shy away from fancy startup buzzwords and break things down into actionable chunks that you can put into practice without needing a crash course in the Lean Startup Model. This post is about doing something today to move the needle on your business idea….today.

Ok so below are the literal first things you should do if you’re planning on giving your business a fair shake. A few these may seem administrative in nature and by extension not as sexy as other things on your to-do list but they are important. You need a solid foundation before you build literally anything and going through the motions here will force you to really think through how you want to be branded, viewed, and even how you’re going to deliver on your value proposition.  

1. There is no such thing as the perfect business name.

Seriously, I can’t tell you how many chats I’ve had over coffee where there was no forward progress being made in starting a business because of a naming issue. My advice is to pick something simple, something you like, and something that can translate to a domain name pretty easily. Then pull the trigger. Clear over clever always wins. Even come up with a few options because after you settle on a name or two you’re going to need to try to pick up your domain name. If your business name changes, after you have give your company a name, over time that’s fine, you can always add domains or run your business under a different name than your company. “Doing Business As” accounts are easy to fill out and your bank will still cash the checks - which is the important part. Also, it’s really easy to forward lots of domains to a single site so don’t worry about wondering if your audience or customers will be able to find you after a while.  

2. Get separate bank accounts ASAP.

If you think you don’t need a separate account for your business because you haven’t made any money you’re wrong. I’m willing to bet that the business you are starting is planning on making money. It can get really tricky to keep business money and personal money separate when you are a solopreneur or brand new business. The IRS doesn’t care how big or small you are, they will always find a way to get their cut. While you can get your accounts (PayPal included) set up with your personal Social Security Number you would be better off applying for an EIN number. That’s the tax identification number you’ll assign to your business name. Applying for the EIN, Employer Identification Number, is easy and you get the results right there online through the IRS website.

3. Work on your Minimum Viable Audience. (This is a big big big topic so here’s the high level overview.)

Up to this step you have an idea for a business, you have a name (even if it’s going to change) and you have set up a separate account. Now is the time to start working on your audience. Start building your little piece of the interweb because that’s where most people are going to look for you. Defining your audience, creating content, and developing relationships with your audience is critical to building relationships with people. It’s not going to happen overnight so the key here is to be as consistent as possible with what/how you share and the value you deliver to people.

Most of the time people don’t really know what they want or what to expect from you. In developing your audience you will get to know their pains and how you can better deliver value to them - in turn building a better product out of the gate. Another benefit to building an audience is that you will have a group of people to share your business journey with. They can’t buy if they don’t know that you exist and they won’t buy if they don’t know, like, and trust you. The trick here is that there is no perfect number for the audience. You don’t have to wait until you have an email list with thousands of people on it. Just get a few people involved in a conversation and leverage the places you already interact online. My recommendation for you is to think about your content distribution like a tree. Your website is your trunk and in the beginning pick one or two branches to really invest in - think Facebook and Instagram. You’re going to want to go where people already are and create/share content with the goal of getting people to care enough to follow you back to your site to learn more.

4. “Perfect is the enemy of good” - Voltaire.

Your business is brand new and your audience and stakeholders know that. You can’t know what works and what doesn’t if you don’t have a feedback loop. You get to having a feedback loop by actually selling something. So start (trying to) selling. Call it a Beta, give away a few for free, or just let people know it’s Version 1.0. How ever you want to handle getting your work into the hands of the people that need it is good enough - just make sure it ships! This is definitely going to take some dedicated business development work because you are making and selling first and then asking questions later. If audience development is your inbound marketing, working on your sales game is your outbound marketing. You can also start interviewing if you’re really stuck wondering how to solve the problem you’ve identified. The challenge with interviewing is that you won’t know what people actually want or get really honest answers until you ask them to take their wallets out and buy right then and there. This step has a lot of potential for decision/analysis paralysis. Up until know you are playing business. Selling something crosses the threshold of actually putting your work on the line and delivering. So don’t dwell over perfect and just get something out in the world.

4 Continued. Keep iterating and keep selling.

As you start to build a community around your brand and your work there will be more opportunities to get your stuff in the hands of people that need it. Work on building momentum and work on asking lots of questions for more feedback.

5. Get your paperwork and documentation in shape.

This may or may not happen right away, it really depends on how fast or slow you grow. When you are starting a business there are a lot of things that can pull your attention away from building a business. My advice is to focus on doing just enough business development to communicate your business’s value and to get something to market so that you get to your first payments or sales. Once you start to get a few paying customers in the door you can parlay those funds to deal with all the application and license fees your city or town will need for you to do business where you live. Check your City or Town Halls for sure but most likely you will eventually need a business certificate or permits to operate your business. After you officially exist in the eyes of the government you can go on and work on getting the appropriate insurances, etc. My approach is to get your business making money first and use that money to grow and cover the costs of being a business. It’s a little “building the plane while it’s flying” but validation is better than sunk costs in my book.

I need to reiterate that these are not the only things you should be doing when you’re starting a business. I’ve glossed over a ton but like I said, if we were having a drink at a bar and you asked me what you should be doing - this is where I’d tell you start. This list is also a great test to see if you’re as serious as you think you are when it comes to building a business. While few in number things like taking the time to build even a minimum viable website and brand presence can take some real time. If you’re really ready to try to build a business then it’s time to roll up your sleeves, solve a real problem, tell some good stories, and see if you can get someone to pay you to help them through a transformation.

Why Being Nice To Your Coworkers Is Good For Business

“Who do you want to be? It's a simple question, and whether you know it or not, you're answering it every day through your actions. This one question will define your professional success more than any other, because how you show up and treat people means everything. Either you lift people up by respecting them, making them feel valued, appreciated and heard, or you hold people down by making them feel small, insulted, disregarded or excluded. And who you choose to be means everything.”

Incivility affects your business's bottom line. How? Because how you treat the people you work with and the customers you serve impacts how they interact with you. At the very least incivility demotivates the people around you, makes it hard for them to buy into why they should be working with you and, at worst it turns people way. Incivility could literally be the single biggest driver that is sinking your business. In this TED Talk you’ll see that it literally pays to be kind in your business.

My favorite part of the video is there’s empirical data that supports that nice guys (and gals) don’t finish last. It’s the leaders and business owners that demonstrate civility consistently who prove to be the most impactful leaders in their organizations. I absolutely love this! It’s not about how well your sales funnel works, the colors you choose, or any other tactic; it’s about how you treat people that matters most when it comes to finding success. This even applies for the entrepreneurs and side-hustlers who are a team of one right now.

This week I challenge you to find some inspiration from the most successful CEOs that were mentioned in this TED Talk. Can you find ways to better the culture in which you work, be kinder to the people you serve, or even strive to bring someone up?

Do you lift people up or hold them down? Based on research, Christine Porath shares the costs of incivility and how civility pays. She explains how incivility is a bug—it’s contagious and we become carriers of it just by being around it. Christine reveals the true power of civility and how our little actions matter.

How To Find The Right Price For Your New Program Or Course Offering

Today I’m going to help you think through how to price your online course, group coaching, or program so that it actually sells.

Let’s start with a scenario:

You’ve spend a big chunk of timing brainstorming, outlining, creating, filming, editing and producing content for an experience you hope to walk your ideal customer through. You’ve done the research, had the customer interviews, set up the platform and have even started to share bits and pieces of your content to start to create awareness around what you’re doing. But, you’re still stuck. You haven’t really launched yet.

Why?

You’re not sure what to charge or the price the internet is telling you to charge feels out of reach for your ideal customers.

You’re worried.

Worried that you put all this time into a transformation you hope to walk people, who need your help, through won’t convert because your price is to high...or too low. You’d be ready for launch if only you found a price you felt was fair, reasonable, worth the time you put into the creation of this course and, won’t scare people away.

You go back to the warm embrace of internet research only to find there’s no real road map for pricing that matches the specialness of the experience that you’ve built. Sure there are pricing tricks and tactics for optimizing online sales but none of them really fit for you. There are no hard and fast rules that dictate "X" number of modules times "Y" number videos equals $"Z". You look to find comparable experiences only to find that prices for courses, programs and coaching swing wildly to virtually nothing to decent used car prices.

And now you’re here. Good! I’m going to help.

Here’s how you can think your way through going from flustered to selling. It’s a framework that helps you think through three very real cost concepts. It will also help you frame the value the work that you’ve done and reinforce the value you’re delivering in exchange for the dollars you’re getting.

The first thing to think through is opportunity cost.

The simple definition of opportunity cost is that it’s the cost of giving up something to gain something. When you’re thinking about the transformation you’re helping people through I challenge you to think of the capital R Real Costs that your ideal customer will continue to incur if they choose not to work with you. The more specific the better. Think about all the things you can actually quantify and how they impact people’s real lives. If you’re saving people time, money, helping them achieve something, work through a personal issue then, what does that mean for them in terms of the things your ideal customers really care about? Here’s an example: If your course is designed to teach someone something that will help them move their business forward faster what does that mean for that customer. Sure generic promises of more money and not wasting time sounds great but you need to go deeper and get specific. You need to do the work to really understand what’s motivating your ideal customer and why they even decided to start that business in the first place.

Here are examples of other questions to think through. Can you quantify time in dollars? Can you quantify what your ideal customer could do with the money instead of spending it on your experience? Can you draw inferences from readily available statistics from places like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census.gov, etc relating to consumption trends? Can you reinforce the missed opportunity for your ideal customer in terms of wasting too much time and missing an opportunity because they chose not to invest in you? Can you frame the intangible benefits of working with you that will help your ideal customer achieve success, however they choose to measure it, in a way that makes working with you the smartest alternative? Your ideal customer is giving up their dollars to get your experience, can you frame why that exchange is worth working with you over literally anything else they could be doing with that money?

The second thing I want you to think through are your ideal customer’s sunk costs.

This one can sometimes be a little easier to quantify. It’s the costs of time, money, and/or emotional energy already spent on trying different things to address an issue. If someone in your target market has tried other things to help them achieve their goals that haven't worked, read books, spent time trying to "figure it out" on their own but, constantly come back to the same feelings then you need to talk about it. There might be hard costs associated with using other professionals, medical costs, technology costs, etc that you can estimate for people before they get to you. You might not be able to exactly identify every single cost someone has incurred before they get engage with you which is why your narrative and communicating authentically and emotionally will be important. Going back to our business course example you might be able to identify the sunk costs of inaction for that ideal customer. Time that’s gone by that your ideal customer can’t get back. Staying with time it could the time associated with just being stuck in an endless learning and content consumption loop - how many hours of Gary Vaynerchuk have they watched and are still failing to launch? The ideal customer here may have already tried to hire a coach or invested in other programs or courses. These are all things you can build into the reasons why interacting with you will help your ideal customer actually solve their problem this time.

The last cost concept I want you to think about are the comparative costs.

This one will require you to do a little research and really stretch your understanding of the kinds of substitutes that exist for your offering. From the perspective of your ideal customer there are almost an endless amount of available substitutes they can engage with. Everyone in every market has competition and that competition is also vying for the discretionary dollars of your target market. Your goal is to figure out where you stack and if possible position yourself in a way that makes you the better choice among your competitors. That might mean you’re a little cheaper, your solution walks your ideal customer through a transformation a little faster, or the resources your offering are comparatively a little more robust. I want you to think about comparative costs like bumpers in a bowling alley. They’re there to make sure that even the worst of balls thrown don’t end up in the gutter and missing all the pins. These bumpers will help you avoid pricing too high or too low. Using our business course example again, what real substitutes could someone buy to get a comparable experience? Are there books? Low cost courses on giant e-learning platforms? Similar practitioners with similar offers (possibly with more digital clout than you)? Digital tools that offer the same kind of promise? Free services like SCORE or other incubators that offer resources? Are there national averages or studies from reputable places that can quantify the value of working with someone like you one on one? What about more traditional professionals like attorneys and CPA’s also offering business advice? How do you stack up against the Tai Lopez’s of the internet business growth hacking world? These are all questions that you need to ask because it will help you assess the wants, needs, and the willingness and ability for people to consume your stuff in that market. Don’t forget to think outside the box too. The ideal customer in this example could also be thinking that opening a brick and mortar location will solve their problems so you might need to factor in the real costs of opening a physical location against what you’re trying to help them achieve. See, it can definitely end up being a bit of rabbit hole.

Don’t get lost though you’re almost there.

At the end of this process you’ll have notes and thoughts shooting in all kinds of directions. Ultimately what you choose to charge is up to you but, it should fall somewhere in between or close to what people are already willing and able to pay, what they’d expect to find out in the world, and a bargain compared to the cost of not working with you. To wrap this up with our business course let’s just do a simple accounting of what super basic research might yield:

Opportunity Cost - Years of trial and error, lost customers, less time with family, sinking savings into a slow growing business, forgone interest if just invested that money in a CD, etc.

Sunk Costs - Failed previous coaches, purchased sales management software that didn’t work, books, curated mastermind group, other ecourses, etc.

Comparative Costs - Business Attorney, CPA, Free SCORE, other courses, similar coaches, related coaches/consulting promising same results, etc.

Summary - Your business course promises to cut the growth time in half over using other professionals and shorten the learning curve for your business. Pricing might be somewhere between the cost of spending the same time working with a traditional professional service provider using average hourly rates to get a baseline to the upper ends of what the internet business gurus are charging. Here’s where knowing the ins and outs of your ideal customer really matters in terms of where they are in their lives, where they are in their business journey, and, the real value you’re providing when it comes to getting close to figuring out what they’d be willing and able to spend.

The goal is that you have to use all three of these to tell a complete story and position your offer in the best possible pricing light. Depending on your offering and your target market this process could be really easy or really challenging. That won’t slow you down because at the end you’ll not only have a price that you believe in, you’ll have a price you can justify. Regardless of the words that come out of people’s mouths when it comes to spending or what the news says about the economy; it’s a tried and true fact that people will always spend money on the things they believe are worth it. Seriously, in economics it’s all those conversations around inferior goods, normal goods, and price elasticity of demand. I’m saving you from having to flip through old text books or watch Microeconomics YouTube videos because the moral of the story is that your prices are communicating that you’re the best option to help them achieve their goals.

2 Steps To Better Accountability In Your Business

Accountability is one of those things that as an entrepreneur, side hustler, and business builder you hear/read a ton about.

It’s almost impossible to flip through an your favorite business podcasts, blogs and even trade publications and not see something about accountability.

And for good reason!

There are probably hundreds of thousands of businesses that never get a fair shake because their founders couldn’t figure out how to keep themselves accountable.

Accountability lore is littered with bits and nuggets of productivity and business building science but, it’s something that you still struggle with. You read, research and consume everything you can so that you can hopefully do the things you said you would. It’s not always easy to get the work out of your head and into the hands and hearts of the people that need it the most.

Sound like you? A little bit? It’s definitely something I struggle with from time to time.

By the end of this post you will have two simple guidelines to follow to help keep you and your business running the way you want. This is not going to be one of those posts that tells you to put sticky notes on your mirrors and to announce your intentions to the universe.

Why?

Because it’s easy to ignore (or rationalize away) a note you posted and even easier to dismiss the universe because the universe is not someone (something?) that you interact intimately with on a daily basis.

When everything is going well in your business you don’t have to think about accountability. You are hitting the milestones you set for yourself, making progress on the goals you set for the business and you may even have repeat customers. It’s when things go a little unplanned, when your launch isn’t as big as you thought or when suddenly you have more competitors that you realized that you have to really lean on keeping yourself accountable as an entrepreneur.

It’s easy to walk away when things get hard. It’s easy to blame any number of externalities if your audience didn’t “get” what you were trying to put in front of them. What’s tough is picking your head up and looking around. What’s tough as an entrepreneur is figuring out how to hold yourself accountable.

Here’s the first step in holding yourself accountable:

1. Give up control.

When you, the person, are the business it’s easy to wake up everyday and change the rules a little bit. It’s harder to do that when you create and establish a business that has it’s own, well communicated, values, mission and strategy for growth. I know it might sound arbitrary if you are a solopreneur or part of a really early stage joint venture but stay with me. When you are out in the world talking to people and engaging with them online, part of what they see is the business that you are representing. Authenticity really starts to take hold when you, the person, mirror what you’re telling the people you interact with what is important to your business. Armed with the knowledge that most people decide to do business with those that they know, like and trust, how you align who you are personally deciding to do each day with what your business claims you do creates a nice feedback loop. Actions always speak louder than words - unless their written words online..then it’s an action, may be. This is not openly telling the universe to hold you accountable. Giving up control forces you to keep yourself accountable because every decision you make is going to be measured against your claims of the business and scored by everyone you interact with.

Just thinking about that dynamic gives me the accounta-goosebumps.

The second rule I’m adapting from my friends in the Lean Startup scene.

2. Validated Learning.

Your business is probably going to change as time passes. Your customers tastes and expectations will change. The technology you choose will change. Your business model might even change. All that is ok and necessary for you to keep your business relevant in the eyes of the people you are trying to serve. Validated learning is important here because it’s a concept that gives you permission to create hypotheses about what’s going on the world around you, take little risks, plan experiments and apply what you learn for the betterment of your business. Validated learning acts as mini booster shots for your accountabilities immune system. It does this because every time an opportunity comes up to apply something you learn in your business you have a choice. You can choose to make the change, that’s holding yourself accountable, or you can choose to do nothing and continue to run your business with systems, processes or products that don’t work so well.

If you are serious about building a better business and earning better profits why wouldn’t you apply the things you learn?! When you build validated learning into your business you are essentially tricking yourself into holding you accountable. It’s a beautiful thing!

These are two very real things you can start to do right now that will force you to take better actions in your business. I’m pretty sure no one likes to be micromanaged but if it’s your business that is micromanaging you it might be ok and validated learning takes the choices almost right out of your hands. So figure out how to structure your first few ideas to test and get (even more) clear on what your business stands for and get to work!

Avoid These 7 New Business Mistakes

The cost of entry when it comes to starting a new business is literally zero. Well, plus or minus some time and elbow grease I guess. But, it honestly doesn’t even take that long to get your business online and set up. It costs nothing to get an email address from Google that you can then use to sign up for Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and a handful of other platforms. Places like Canva make design super easy, aren’t intimidating, and are also free. You don’t even need a website anymore with how robust and connected a well built Facebook Business Page can be. 

What does that mean? It means you can start a business at any time from anywhere. 

So, when that next brilliant idea strikes should you just jump right int? 

No. 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here so I wanted to ease into it with a punch list of reasons why you should take a pause and some time to really think through your new (or rebranded) business idea. Especially, if you’re expecting to build a lasting business. 

Here’s my list of reasons you should take some time to really think through your new business:

1. Your branding matters. Just because you can slam some text over an image doesn’t mean that you’re communicating your message clearly and effectively. 

2. Just because you can post whatever you want, whenever you want doesn’t mean it’s going to inspire people to pay attention to you. If you can’t get them to pay attention you won’t ever be able to inspire them to take action. 

3. Have you actually thought about your business model? It’s great to post pictures and to try to market your stuff but do you even know if your target market wants what you’re thinking of offering? 

4. Did you take any time in deciding if there was even a market? There’s lots of advice out there that purports that if you scratch your own itch then you’ll have a successful business. Sounds great, often flawed if you don’t think through the value proposition. 

5. A sustainable business needs a cohesive mission. Whether your offerings are unique, clever, useful, a value-adding thing, or any other descriptive marketing buzzword it won’t matter if you aren’t communicating consistent messages. Engagement is a cognitively taxing endeavor for would-be consumers. If you constantly change your messaging (like a restaurant constantly changing a menu) people will ultimately decide that the work isn’t worth the value-exchange anymore. 

6. Building a business takes work. Real life isn’t a Kevin Costner movie and “if you build it they will come” is a bad business model. 

7. Paying for a bunch of software isn’t going magically do the work for you. The same goes for any “partners” or help you may or may not have. Managing expectations has to have a real priority so making sure everyone is on the same page is huge. Setting goals, managing schedules, and planning content so that it serves a purpose (and your audience) should not be taken lightly. 

I could go on but I think you get the idea here. I’m all for acting quickly when it comes to filling a need in a market and building a business. But, that action has to come from a place of strategically thinking through the problem you’re solving or the opportunity your seizing. Just working on something for the sake of working on it is not just unsustainable, it’s a recipe for an unsuccessful business. Plus, it’s really hard to change your Facebook Business Page name if you decide that what you initially decided doesn’t mesh with the rest of your branding once you actually flush it out. 

Save time by taking a little extra time to think it through - then go nuts. 
 

Nail Down Your Business Plan And Elevator Pitch Now!

Business plans and crafting pitches are a few of my favorite things to talk about. When executed well they are tools that can really support you as you’re working to grow your business. Your plan acts as a bit of a roadmap and your pitch, how you’re getting down the road. I also really like to talk about them because they’re so amorphic. Depending on who you’re presenting to, the presentation style, organization of information, and even some of the business details can change dramatically. 

I know, I’m weird because I think all that uncertainty is really fun. You, dear business builder, shouldn’t be scared though. Because at the end of the day the least common denominator of every business plan is just answering the “how” and “what” questions in your business and your pitch answers the “why”. Here’s an analogy I like to use - your business is like an arcade machine. In the sea of classic arcade games, skee ball lanes, and pinball machines your job is to be entertaining enough to get someone to wander over to you and then engaging enough for you to get them to put their quarters in. Then, once they pay all you have to do is deliver on the experience you promised. 

That’s it! 

So in this post, I’m going to give you two quick frameworks. One to help you nail down a simple business plan and the second framework is a crash course in perfecting your pitch. 

Let’s get into the business planning. 

Now, this framework is designed to help you rough sketch your business plan. Knowing that different audiences will need to see different things in different formats means you’ll need a foundation to draw from. That’s where my 5 Minute Business Plan comes in. It’s designed to help you get refocused on the days that have you wondering if what you are doing actually matters. (You don’t even have to be an entrepreneur to understand that feeling.) Forcing yourself to do something like this every once and a while helps to keep you connected to what you are doing - more than just reading your mission statement over again. It can also help to reveal any changes in how you feel about what you’re doing or if the needs of your market have changed since you’ve started. This can lead to a pivot in your service/product outcome and can keep you relevant. 

This business plan is only five questions long and ideally should have you only thinking about a minute or two for each question. You aren’t trying to create some be-all-end-all plan you are connecting to how what you are doing now matters. My advice is to just copy and paste these questions and then do some free writing for the answers. After you are done you can take those answers and match them against your current list of business activities or mission that you have. If the new answers are different from what you’ve been doing, you know that you have some more exploring to do. 

1. Who are you, what’s your story, and why should I be interested in what you are doing? (Think Mission and Values.)

2. What is the problem you are solving? What are the real pain points for people you are addressing? How is your solution better than your competitors? (Do you know if competitors actually exist?) 

3. What is your solution? How do you bring that solution to the market? What are your factors of production and distribution? How are you organized or structured? 

4. How are you financed? Where do your sales come from? What do your cash flows look like? Are you P/L profitable but don’t have enough cash to pay fixed expenses - if so why? Is your margin high enough to cover expenses? What is your burnout rate? 

5. How are you attracting people to you? How are they hearing about who you are and what you do? Where does your engagement come from? What is your platform or Do you have a platform? Are you tracking your marketing efforts for efficiency?  

If you find your answers changing over time that’s ok - just make sure you are monitoring those changes. Changes that foster an environment for growth are great! I think it’s really important to write these out every once and awhile. Thinking about them is good but you won’t be able to track how your thoughts about your business change because our thoughts are always so fluid. Plus, it’s good to have a standard foundation to build future plans from. Also, in terms of economic players, people, in general, are amazing at rationalizing and you won’t be able to get any real information from the stories you tell yourself on a daily basis about your business. 

One down. One to go. 

Now we’re getting into the pitch framework. 

First I wanted to talk briefly about how important your 90 Second Elevator Pitch is for everyday life. This is not just a skill to have refined but a resource you should have at the ready and it won’t matter where you are: networking events, social events, family events or even professional events. Whenever you meet someone new one of the questions you are probably always going to get asked is “What do you do?” Are you prepared for that answer? As a business builder, how are you going to possibly create enough impact with that person that they might actually want to continue to engage with you? Which can include buying from you, collaborating with you, or referring to you? 

The web and social media make great support tools but you have to be able to confidently convey your mission, values, and efficacy face to face at some point in the transaction - or at least face to video screen. So here is a framework to ensure that your elevator pitch is effective, entertaining, and ideally profitable. 

1. Practice. Developing a pitch takes work.

There is no getting around that. You may know how great you or your products are but you need to be able to tell other people that in a succinct way. Rehearsals, rewrites, and even peer reviews are a great way to sharpen your pitch. Remember most of the time you are going to be talking to your stakeholders and not banks or venture capitalists. So make sure the language you choose is appropriate for the right audience. You should definitely have a few versions so that you can always land right where your listeners are. Practice also means you will have a basic core of information that you know you are constantly giving out each time you present. This makes it easier for people to remember, refer, and talk about you later because it’s the same type of story each time. 

2. Identify the pain points your product or services addresses early on.

Odds are your audience won’t have a lot of time or even interest if you start droning on about how special or unique your process is - worse off how great it will be for them if they try it. So avoid that by asking about an experience that anyone can relate to, the more uncomfortable and universal the better. Don’t be afraid to ask a few well-prepared questions to get a handle on your current landscape. You can get creative here as long as you tie it back to how what you do addresses either the feelings of a situation you described or the problem itself. 

3. Identify what makes you unique (read: better than the rest) and positioned as the best solution to those pain points in the second tip.

This will also give you the opportunity to expand on the needs you satisfy in your market as well as the scale of that market. You should also be mentioning the types of clients/customers you serve as well as how you bring your solution to market. You have to remember though this pitch isn’t really about you. It’s about getting those around you invested in what you do - dropping emotional and even rational anchors on those listening in. 

4. Really avoid filler, buzzwords, and truisms.

Truisms happen when you get too invested and believe your own marketing and hype. That might work for you but your listener might not consider those things entirely true at all or even share the same point of view - think about the last time you heard a financial advisor speak about something with absolute certainty...Yeah, odds are those were personalized truisms based on some nugget of information that might have been factual at the start but by the time you hear the pitch that information was mutilated and has been taken astray. As for filler and buzzwords, they are never good. You want to craft your pitch as though you were talking to a 6-year-old. Not because people aren’t smart but because you want to make sure that all of your audience understands you and what you do. All that extra stuff carries a chance of making people feel left out and distracting from your actual message. 

5. Calls to action are great and hard unreasonable closes are the opposite of great.

When deciding what your calls to action are going to be you really have to think about your goals. Are you looking for referrals, for someone not to throw away your business card, or just information and an introduction? All those things mean you have to build trust in a very short amount of time. Unless you are on the TV show Shark Tank you probably won’t be asking for an instantly massive hard close or sale. Remember you are talking to people and they are the ones who will ultimately decide whether you have proven yourself enough to be engaged with. Be very careful with how you ask someone to take action. If you say you are going to follow up, you better follow up! 

There you have it. 

I know that this post was a bit long and dense but it had to be done. These two concepts are really two sides of the same business development coin. You can’t sell if you aren’t really connected to what you do. My challenge to you is to try to use each of these frameworks earnestly and trust that process will make you a more focused business builder on the other side. 
 

Looking to Innovate or Figure Out What's Possible? Start Here.

It’s always awesome to listen to a physicist talk about not just what’s possible but what’s attainable when it comes to bringing new ideas to life. Vittorio Loreto definitely gives you a lot to think about and even though it’s through the lens of S.T.E.M. the concepts are absolutely applicable to business and entrepreneurial endeavors. 

With this post, I want to throw down the proverbial gauntlet and challenge you to experience this TED Talk and then apply its framework to what you’re building. Can you create value in a new and interesting way for the people that you serve by thinking about what’s adjacently possible?

Just in case you need a little more before investing 16 minutes of your time to grow here’s this TED Talk’s abstract:

“Where do great ideas come from?" Starting with this question in mind, Vittorio Loreto takes us on a journey to explore a possible mathematical scheme that explains the birth of the new. Learn more about the "adjacent possible" -- the crossroads of what's actual and what's possible -- and how studying the math that drives it could explain how we create new ideas.”

#MondayMotivation

Decoding "Work + Luck = Success" To Help You Grow Your Business

I’m keeping the math-centric posts rolling as this week we’re blowing up one of my favorite generic business adages…

 WORK + LUCK = SUCCESS

In this post we are going to factor this formula down to its most basic components so that you can actually assess where you are today in your business and create a plan to grow.

If you’ve been following me for a while you probably know that I’m not a fan of buzzwords or generic business cliches because they don’t do anything to actually help you grow. Sure, you might be able to impress people at parties this summer by dropping two-dollar Lean Six Sigma abbreviations and generically quoting how important creating systems are to growing a business but, when it’s just you facing the white light of your monitor what are you actually doing to grow? 

Either not much or the wrong kind of work I’m guessing. 

I’m here to help you cut the B.S., take an honest assessment and start doing work that matters. “Working harder” probably isn’t the answer and throwing yourself a pity party by blaming someone else’s success purely on luck isn’t doing anything to improve where you are today. 

So let’s get into it. 

In the first round of factoring, I want to break each of the three components into either a more meaningful function or a clear definition. When we do that to WORK + LUCK = SUCCESS we get: 

WORK = Skills X Activity 

LUCK = The condition of creating excessive or unexpected value or return. 

SUCCESS = The achievement of some desired goal or outcomes. 

We can do better than this though and drill down another level. 

You know that working in your business is a function of your ability to do something and the actions you take every day. That work doesn’t help you achieve your goals unless you’re doing it directly in the service of the people you’re trying to help. So we need to add an extra variable, and then you can factor that down a little more by breaking out that work function as follows: 

WORK = Skills X Activity >> (Customers + (Skills X Action)) 

Now ontop LUCK. I’m not satisfied with the traditional definition because it doesn’t really paint an accurate picture of the stuff that you can do every day to help your business grow. So let’s massage that definition a bit by asking a question. How do you create conditions that would yield unexpected returns or value? You do that by showing up. Gary Vaynerchuk has a great analogy about “at bats”. To paraphrase, you’re not going to get good enough to hit a home run if you don’t step up to the plate as many times as you possibly can. So LUCK is about showing up consistently and in frequencies that are higher than you’re probably comfortable doing right now. Well, what does showing up mean? It means creating more opportunities for people to find you, engage with you, learn from you, get to know you and trust you. When you do more of that you’re more likely to see more people buy more from you. (Six Flags: More Flags. More Fun.)

LUCK = f(# of times you show up), where f( ) notation represents that it’s a function of the number of times you show up. 

Lastly is SUCCESS. This can mean almost anything to anyone. It really comes down to honestly and authentically understanding what drives you and your what your goals are. Success can be about serving a certain number of customers, hitting a revenue target or even growing enough to hire your first employee. The trick to measuring success is to quantify the outcomes. You can also think about success as a nested function meaning that your success might be the function of a whole bunch of quantifiable goals, benchmarks, and outcomes. 

It might look something like (but not limited to): 

SUCCESS = Specific Goals + Desired Outcomes

We just did a lot of factoring. Let’s put it all together. 

WORK + LUCK = SUCCESS

Really looks like, 

(Customers + (Skills X Action)) + f(showing up) = Specific Goals + Desired Outcomes

My factored out expression looks way more realistic to manage than the cliche adage. With my expression you can look at your business and decide where you need a little more support and focus directly on those parts. 

Neet more customers? Think about where they are coming from, your branding and how you’re showing up. 

Not delivering the results you promised? Think about investing more time into developing skills and knowledge. 

Working 100 hours per week and you aren’t seeing any growth? Think about the kinds of work you’re doing and how that work directly impacts the specific goals you’ve set for yourself. 
I could keep going but I think you get the idea. With this new expression you can create a real plan to not only get better but to track your progress. It also strips away all your excuses because it makes you responsible for everything that happens in your business. It makes it really hard to blame some hard to understand mystic concept of cosmic luck when things aren’t going your way. Are there going to be circumstances where probability plays a big role in an opportunity? Sure. But you can’t control that. What you can control is how often and how real you show up everyday and with that the probability of some unlikely probabilistic circumstance finding its way to you. 

Now that you have this it’s time to take a hard look at your business. Try assessing the work you’re doing against this simple expression. Try to tighten up how you’re measuring the work you’re doing as well as how you’re measuring the results. Then, start making your own luck. 
 

How To Price Your Product Using Weber's Law

It’s time to talk about a business concept that is literally the melding of science and art. It’s a concept that was brought to life by 19th-century physiologists and psychologists and one that you interact with on a daily basis. I’m talking about Weber’s Law. Weber’s Law, also known as Weber-Fechner Law is a law that helps us understand, or quantify rather, the perception of changes in a given stimulus. The law states that the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable, barely perceivable, is actually a constant ratio of the original stimulus. 

Expressed as a function it looks like: 

ΔI/I = k

That’s the change in the stimulus over the initial stimulus and the k signifies that this proportion is a constant regardless of the size of the changes in stimulus or initial stimulus. 

Woah, woah, woah here…

I promised you science and art and all I’ve done so far is geek out about a law that illustrates how people perceive changes is things and stuff. The things and stuff that I’m most interested in talking to you about today are how consumers, your customers even, perceive changes in price. 

Weber’s Law is relatively easy to understand as it’s just saying that when initial values are small it’s easier to perceive small changes in them and to tell those two things apart. When things get bigger like prices, weights, numbers of things, it’s harder to perceive the same small change. So, for example, it’s easier to perceive the difference between two goods that have a $5 difference when one of the goods are $10 and the other is $15. Not hard to see that one costs over 30% more than the other. Well, what about that same $5 change when the goods are $95 and $100. It’s still a $5 change but the perception of that change can be a little harder to feel. That $5 change represents only a 5% change. 

When you understand how people are likely to perceive a change in price you can better position yourself within a crowded market or better still figure out how to start thinking about how you should be pricing your products or services. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to drop one of my favorite phrases when I teach my undergrad Econ class, all else equal. To keep this conversation easy to follow I don’t want to talk about people’s changing tastes and expectations, their propensities to consume, price elasticities of demand, etc. The only thing I want to talk about is how you can apply Weber’s Law to your business right now. 

If you’ve spent any time researching how to build a business on the internet or how to market you’ve likely come across the adage that you should price based on the value you’re delivering and that you should do your best to charge a premium. The premium is a helpful consumer behavior trigger and signal because it shows that if they buy from you they’re on the hook for their experience and if you’re charging a lot it’s because you know what the heck you’re talking about. If you haven’t seen anything like that before, well, it’s pretty standard advice and it’s advice that I plan on kicking up a notch or two with the help of my friend, Weber’s Law. 

Let’s start by setting some pretty common thresholds. These are price barriers or tiers that people seem to use as anchors when they’re deciding whether or not they should buy. To be clear I don’t have rigorously tested empirical data here I’m just leaning on my experiences working with hundreds of business owners of the years and the resources I have access to as a serial adjunct business professor. 

The tiers are as follows: 

1. $20 and under
2. $21 to $99
3. $100 to $499 
4. $500 +

A relatively small change within each of these items would be almost imperceptible to people that are willing or able to consume your goods or services. For example, Hulu and Netflix have crept up in prices over the years. When the changes happen they are usually in an increment of a few dollars or so. When those price changes are coming, the media does a great job of sensationalizing those changes but when all that media fades those businesses not only retain their customers but they grow. Why?! Because of the perceived value, because of the promise of original content and because the perception of the actual price change isn’t big enough to change most people’s behavior. Wow, I (f*cking) love science! 

Think about it, we chalk up price increases over time as normal. Sure, a part of that will be inflationary pressures on the standards we need and use daily but price levels overall are creeping up and the sizes of goods (bags of chips, candy bars, etc.) are going down because companies know they can change little bits over time and those changes won’t be the thing that alters consumer behavior. 

So how can you apply Weber’s Law to your business? Well first off, take a look at your current pricing. There’s no reason you can’t float your way up to the top of any of the tiers I’ve outlined. Sure you might have to flex your rationalizing muscles a bit and yes you may lose a few customers but, overall your business will benefit as most people won’t have a problem with incremental increases over time. 

What this also means is that you have an opportunity to segment your offerings. Creating experiences that align at the top ends of each of these tiers will communicate that your customers will expect different levels of quality, service, access, materials etc. That’s a good thing! I’m not advocating that you use this as a way to pull the wool over the eyes of the people that choose to spend their money on you. What I am saying is that you can manage expectations and create an environment where your customers know what to expect and are confident that they will get the value you promised them at each of these tiers. 

As a student of the internet, I can honestly say that I’ve fallen victim to the pricing trap having spent money on courses in the $500+ tier thinking they would be the answer to all my problems only to find that in reality, I bought a bunch of poorly made slides repackaging commonly slung information. They may have got my business once but they won’t again. You don’t want to build a business like that. In fact, it’s flat out unsustainable. If you plan on sticking around in your business and are playing the long game you need to build a devoted base of loyal customers and followers. You do that by delivering value every day. 

Sorry, I know I got a little ranty just now but it’s because I know that, as Spiderman’s Uncle Ben is quoted to say, with great power comes great responsibility. 

Ok to sum up what we have here: 

• Relative small change in small dollar good or service will be perceptible and have a chance to change buyer behavior. 
• Relative small change in big dollar good or service is borderline imperceptible. 
• Relative big change in small dollar good or service will most likely change buyer behavior. 
• Relative big change in big dollar good or service will be perceptible. 

Don’t forget that these changes can be increases or decreases. A good sale is only good if it’s enough to motivate buyers to engage which means it needs to be perceptible. Sales are great for generating revenue in the short term, turning over inventory, or just a little attention grab. 

Now get out there and start charging what you're worth! 

Oh and if you want to see a really awesome (nerdy) math video on Weber's Law then you should definitely check out this video from the Numberphile Channel on YouTube.