Avsnitt
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Take this seriously and you will save yourself time, money, and bottles and bottles of TUMS (stress ulcers!). Your credibility with your clients starts before you ever talk with them. It starts with your marketing materials. It starts with what they've hear about you. And then it continues with how you interact with them.
We'll get into not only best practices today, but also the common mistakes that most amateur entrepreneurs and business people make—all while they're honestly trying to do the right thing for their client.
Save yourself those ulcers and take a listen.
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Today we have an inside look into a consulting call with some of my students. These are people who have decided real, honest, direct feedback is better than failing in their businesses.
You'll hear stories of success and failure, stories of how people have grown overtime, and a story or two that might shock you.
Ultimately, this issue of being able to model success before having all the mindset shifts necessary to produce it is a big one.People get this wrong all the time. They stop modeling too soon. They believe they don't need to. They delude themselves into thinking they know a better way—all before they've even mastered basics.
Listen in!
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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I will be the first person to tell you that money management doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve had to learn a lot of hacks to make my brain work with it.
The first thing you’ve got to do with your money is pretend 10% of it doesn’t exist. Most people don’t have the underlying discipline to leave money alone. This is not money that has a purpose. This is leverage you have over money itself. This is money to let you know that you control the money, it doesn’t control you.
Eventually you may put the money into property or low risk stocks, but still pretending it doesn’t exist. This isn’t savings, this isn’t anything. This is leverage you have over money and it teaches you that you have the discipline to control your own money.
I did seminars with Russ Yarnell who used to tear up $100 bills just to show that he didn’t have an emotional connection to it.
It’s so important to get control of your money.
When you’re panicked you can fight, flee, or freeze. People do this with money all the time because they have a huge amount of emotions about money.
You don’t want emotional connections with money.Also, you want to be in conversations with an accountant or an attorney as a business owner. The different ways you can organize your business may cost or save you tons of money when it comes to taxes and there’s no way to know which is best without talking to someone who really knows what they’re talking about.
You want to be a step ahead of your money and how money works in your business.
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How can you get more satisfied customers and raving fans of your product or service? Well that's easy: set their expectations with your marketing and advertising so that you deliver and over-deliver on what they actually expect.
Even if you were the best person for the job—in the world—customers that come in with unrealistic or overinflated expectations will not be satisfied and they'll go shopping somewhere else. Some of the biggest sources of discontent among customers are "surprise" charges.
Being clear (or as clear as you can) about your pricing is one huge way you can make customers into fans. Even if your service or product is expensive, people won't feel cheated when you're honest with them—big concept huh?
Another area that's important for the person who asked this question is setting expectations of the outcomes. For example: if customers expect to be "cured" with one visit to the chiropractor, they'll be sorely disappointed and they'll blame it on the chiropractor!
These are just a few of the things we'll get into today! Let's get it started.
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Events and seminars are a remarkably valuable service to provide for your current and potential clients. When you teach useful material you quickly build a know-like-trust factor with people—so they're more likely to buy from you.
So we agree that seminars and events are worth it, but when to plan and how to advertise?
I use 6 months as the rule to begin advertising with a 3-touch-point minimum in that time frame (so that means I've done the planning in advance...). You can build the content while people are signing up, but you've got to have a venue locked down before you start telling people to buy plane tickets.We'll get into all of that and more today on The Business Survival Guide.
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Even though "productivity tips" and "how to stop procrastination" is covered exhaustively, I keep getting requests to cover it. There certainly are steps you can take, but the most important thing to do is to break your pattern of becoming overwhelmed. That's what we're going to talk about so you can sit back and think about some of the things you may be subconsciously doing that are getting in the way of your success. We sabotage ourselves by falling into the same old habit cycles over and over. Let's get into it!
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Want more customers this year? There's a specific way you can craft your messaging to be ultra effective and the beginning of the year is the perfect time to start your planning.
Our question today is "How do I get more customers in the door in 2017?" The question comes from John Vurpillat who I personally know is doing great work.
We're going to address it in 2 ways. First the fundamentals of what brings customers in the door in the first place. And second, I'll get your gears spinning with the ways your customers are spending their year so you can optimize your advertising and marketing to match their behaviors. Should be a fun show!
(I want this show to be valuable for you. If something is challenging for you, it's a problem a lot of people are facing. Submit a question to the show here.)
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Last week we hosted a conference call instead of recording the podcast because of technical difficulties (go subscribe so you'll know if that happens again). Today we're going over some of the questions that came up on that call.
One of the questions that came up on the call was: “How can I increase my revenue by 200% next year?”
There are a couple of things you need to do to work toward's doubling your revenue in 2017. This podcast gets into tracking marketing and advertising, lead magnets, and what's the best way to think about Facebook from a small business standpoint.
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Leadership issues have truly morphed. Here is a start on the new landscape...
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Question: In businesses where employees frequently call in sick and everyone else has to pick up the slack, what can managers and other employees do to fix the culture?
Bluntly, the employees who are not the problem are best off pretending the problem doesn't exist. That's in their best interest. They can of course use social pressure to try and change things but that can go sideways quickly.
Managers need to do the fundamentals well: documenting, being direct, and so on. But in this episode we'll get into the number one thing that will stop employees from behaving in this way. It's not what you'd think.
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Rely too heavily on word of mouth? Do you get results, but struggle to get clients?
We'll get into why it's so important to learn to advertise, why word of mouth isn't always your friend, and how being embarrassed actually led me into an excellent consulting relationship that changed my business in ways I didn't expect.
Great listener question from Tracy in today's episode:
My biggest challenge is definitely not having the belief in myself to advertise. I always shy away from social media (I am actually trying to master Facebook as I answer this) and there is a self-doubt that always holds me back. I have taken two of your courses, and many others. that When I leave said courses, I actually believe I can use the approaches taught to expand my business, but when I get home, it all disappears. I always seem to fall back into the same old routine. Word of mouth was always my biggest promotor, but five years ago, I moved regions and it has been very difficult not knowing anyone and finding new clients. My clients succeed when I work with them, however, I just struggle to get them.
We talk a lot about the foundations you need in advertising. I recommend How To Write A Good Advertisement by Victor Schwab to get the fundamentals.
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I think that there are two different types of thinkers in this world, folks. I think there are performers and I think that there are actually teachers. Teachers can perform but they can also really see what's going on with other people—and selling is really becoming a fabulous decision teacher.
In sales, we talk about all kinds of ridiculous concepts—that almost always make the sales professional focus on their own performance. This is a total catastrophe and it is absolutely the wrong way to think. So I'm going to give you a little recipe today that helps you to grasp how real geniuses focus on sales.
Real sales geniuses are extremely compulsive about being focused on other people. They are problem solvers for other people.
You need to have the sense of security that allows you to know that you are, overall, mostly liked or that you accept yourself so you can just walk in and really be interested in what they want and need—and really feel that you are the facilitator of getting them what they needed or wanted in the first place.
With that attitude your outcome of having the maximum number of people, who need what you're selling, choose to buy, is most likely going to happen from that point of view. This of course also limits returns and it limits problems later.
So as you review this podcast you are going to be hearing an outline that begins with curiosity about them, begins with amplifying their own already perceived wants and needs.
I look forward to visiting with you again in the next edition of the podcast.
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Have a question you need answered? Submit a question for the podcast.
There's no way to manage time. It's going. You can't stop it. The real issue is that when you're working for yourself sometimes you "just don't feel like it." Imagine a 3 year old pouting—sometimes that really how we act once we become our own bosses... except we're acting out against ourselves.
So what you really see as an entrepreneur is an incredible need to manage your mood. It's easy to identify in others, but hard to accept ourselves.
The good news is it really doesn't have to be so bad. We're running our own business, we're living the life we want to live, shouldn't we be able to enjoy it? Yes! Let's get into it.
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Sibling rivalry, spousal jealousy, overprotective people—we'll get into all of that today. It's time to look at the parts of running a business that most people sweep under the rug. It's a big mess, but we'll get into it today and really dive in if people submit a lot more questions about it.
We've talked about people wanting all of their relationships to be "nice" and neat in their business life. But what about their personal life
Setting boundaries early is great to talk about, but most people can't implement them because they don't first set outcomes. How do they expect to set boundaries that make sense before they know the goals they're trying to achieve?
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I’ve been doing this a long time. Running my own businesses, helping other people grow to million dollar businesses, and seeing people make the same mistakes over and over.
If you’re smart, you can learn from the mistakes of others. And those mistakes are exactly what we’re going to talk about in this the second episode of both the podcast and the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp.
Go to TheBusinessSurvivalGuide.com to submit a challenge you’re having with your business and, if you really spell it out, it might make it onto a future episode of the show!
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Take a moment and think about your future. Imagine the life you want to live and imagine the successful business (or businesses) you’ll create. This episode is part of our Entrepreneurial Bootcamp series. It’s designed to equip you with mantras that will help you install the beliefs that lead toward success as an entrepreneur.
Your core beliefs need to be aligned with success or they’ll take you down the wrong path. So listen to the episode and then go to TheBusinessSurvivalGuide.com to download the PDF of the mantras. Print them out and put them everywhere!
In future episodes I’ll be answering your questions directly. Go to TheBusinessSurvivalGuide.com to submit your question. Or find me on Facebook or anywhere as AskScottMcFall.
