Entrepreneurial Passion, Problems, & Desires
March 8, 2010
Here’s a really short video I did for you today, just before starting 3 1/2 days with Ali Brown, James Roche, and my fellow Millionaire Protegee Club members in Marina Del Ray. Think about this for YOUR biz!
Why You Aren’t Making It As An Entrepreneur
February 16, 2010
Do you think of yourself as an entrepreneur? Is it your intention to make enough money to live off your own business? Most of the self-employed folks I know answer yes to both of these questions. Yet, many of them also go on to say that they aren’t really profitable enough to support themselves on their entrepreneurial earnings. This is sad to me, because I know, absolutely, that it’s possible to do.
An entrepreneur needs three things to make money. Here they are:
1. A workable, solid business plan.
2. An effective, targeted marketing strategy.
3. A willingness to do the personal growth required of successful entrepreneurs.
A few days ago, I was on a group Mastermind call, listening as we started with a quick update from everyone. I was shocked! Over half the people on the call admitted that their e-newsletter was late, they had not posted to their blog in quite a while, or they had never gotten around to setting up basic social media accounts. This particular group of people are serious entrepreneurs. They have invested a substantial amount of money to participate in coaching and Mastermind groups over the past year or so. Most of them have created products and services that sell nicely. All of them are smart and full of new ideas.
So what is going on that these entrepreneurs are not paying attention to the very basics that keep their businesses up and running? I honestly believe that they’ve fallen into two traps.
1. They have poor time management skills, and they allow ‘everything else’ to get in the way of taking care of the basics.
2. They’ve come to feel that doing the basics is boring, not cutting edge or new, and therefore not really necessary for their businesses.
They are WRONG! It takes consistent action and focus to build a profitable business, and that means consistently attending to the basic building blocks. If you are someone who needs to built a list of potential clients (and who isn’t?) you need to make sure that your basic structure is in place and gets acted upon just like clockwork. None of these excuses are valid!
1. I was on vacation. (Do it before you leave)
2. It’s boring to do. (Hand it off to an assistant if you can’t tolerate doing the basic, routine things.
3. I don’t have anything to say. (Really? Then why would any potential new customer be interested in talking with you?)
4. I just can’t get around to it. (Yes, you can…schedule it and make sure nothing else steps on the time you need to keep your basics going.)
Paying attention to the basic building blocks of your business is just the same as paying attention to the basic maintenance of your car or your home. You can’t expect your car to run if you fail to rotate the tires, do oil changes, and replace the brakes now and then. If you ignore these things, one day when you least expect it, your car will come to a screeching halt right in the middle of the highway. It’s the very same for your business….ignoring the basics silently and slowly erodes your client base. One fine day it will hit you that your client subscriber list is smaller, your programs and services are not selling at the rate you are used to, and you haven’t talked to a potential new client in over two weeks. At that point, it’s too late. You will have put yourself back to the “I’m building my business up” stage. And it will be harder and take longer the second time around.
Think about it this way – building blocks are the basic clothing for your business. You wouldn’t walk out the door without clothing, you wouldn’t send your kids to school without their basic tools, and you wouldn’t try to bake a cake without the basic ingredients. So don’t try to build your business by ignoring the basics. Commit yourself to the building blocks, and you will become successful and stay that way for as long as you want. You will, in fact, make it as an entrepreneur.
Matching Your Target Market – A Lesson From Mexican Entrepreneurs
February 16, 2010
How to reach your peeps is just about always on my mind – it comes with the territory of being a marketing therapist. So here I was, two days ago, lounging around on the public beach in Puerto Vallarta. And I ended up, no big surprise, watching the vendors who sell up and down the beach. It is a great case study of how to figure out what to sell to a specific target market.
In the space of two hours we were visited by quite a number of beach vendors. Here’s a list of the items we were offered:
Cooked skewered shrimp, topped off by one of the limes hooked onto a separate skewer.
Heavy blankets in various colors that could be used on the beach or as a rug at home.
Brightly colored large pitchers that looked like ceramic but were actually wood.
Toys and gum from a basket.
Tuba-tuba, which is a chilled coconut drink served into a cup from a huge hollowed out double gourd.
Lace shawls.
All sorts of jewelry – silver, shells, beaded.
Elaborately carved cold fresh fruit, your choice, from a head-balanced platter.
Music from a 3-group band, complete with voice and instruments (including a bass fiddle)
Music from a two-person steel band percussion group, a 4-foot long instrument that unfolded and sat on a table, complete with sound system (battery operated).
Sunglasses
Bracelets hand-woven with your name on it
Straw hats
Large silver and mother of pearl fish which are jointed throughout the body so that the fish “swim” when wiggled.
I’m not quite sure this is everything, but the list covers most of the vendors we saw drifting by.
OK, let’s say that your job is to be a beach vendor on a warm Mexican beach. Some of your potential customers will be sitting in chairs under palapas, some will be already sitting in restaurants along the beach. Your job is to sell as much as you can from what you are offering. Can you name the top two things to sell? Can you name the bottom two things to sell? Remember that your target market is beach goers, some of whom are foreign, some of whom are locals, all of whom are on the beach, and some of whom are eating or drinking in restaurants. What are your picks for the two best things to sell to this market, and the two worst things?
Keep in mind, too, that you have to carry what you sell, walking in the sand, up and down the beach for miles and hours a day.
My two picks for the worst? The brightly colored large pitchers, which look like ceramic but are made of wood. They are awkward to carry, the vendor can’t actually carry more than about 4 at a time, and who on the beach wants one of these pitchers right then? Even if a potential customer was not on the beach, the pitchers are too large to easily carry home if you are a foreigner, and more than likely the locals don’t even use them as they don’t hold liquid. I think the guy who chose to sell the pitchers needs a few marketing lessons!
My second choice for the worst to sell, although a close race, is the steel band percussion. The instrument was huge to carry (requiring both persons) up and down the sand, hard to set up, and had to be hauled along with a fold-out table and the battery-operated sound system. That’s a lot to set up and take down for just one song, even if you had good luck selling the music to a lot of people. Plus, many people besides the one person who paid for the music can hear it, so you aren’t exactly going to sell music to the next person, are you? And frankly, most beach goers are busy sleeping, reading, riding the waves, or walking up and down the beach…..they don’t really have hearing live music on their minds.
My two choices for the best things to sell? Straw hats, because lots of beachgoers get to the beach thinking they won’t need a hat. But when they get there, they realize they do! The hats are relatively light to carry (I saw one vendor with a stack of about 50 straw hats on his head). As I watched him sell to someone on the sand, I realized he also had an upsell! He took leather braided bands out of his pocket and offered to add one to the hat for just a few more pesos. Smart guy – beach goers need hats, and they didn’t wear him out to carry.
My second choice for the best thing to sell is the cold, fresh fruit. It both gives a beach person something to eat and quenches thirst. It’s colorful and appetizing, and very noticable since most of the fresh fruit vendors carry the trays on their heads. It’s not expensive, it’s healthy, and even the kids seemed to like it. It’s probably one of the easiest things to carry on the beach, and the tray actually gives the vendor a little shade as he walks.
The point to this is that there are many things to consider when you are deciding what and how to sell to your target market. You do have to consider the pound of flesh it takes out of you, the costs you have in obtaining the product, and, of course, what you believe your market will want.
This doesn’t apply to the beach vendors as much as it does to you, but one way to quit guessing what your market wants is to ask them! Use a brief survey, talk to a subset of your prospects now and then, keep your ear to the ground. You’ll be more apt to design something that is wanted and needed than if you just put something on your back and start walking.
(c) Sue Painter
Add Fun To Your Entrepreneurial Endeavors
January 24, 2010
Lately I’ve run across more than one budding entrepreneur who makes building a business out to be nothing but serious and a lot of 
hard work. I’ve been pondering this a lot. Our energy follows our thoughts. When we hold only serious energy toward anything, it BECOMES hard to us. We fulfill our own expectations. We start believing that there is too much to do, too much to learn, and that we are overwhelmed. Here are just a few examples I’ve run across in the past months:
- It’s no fun to pay attention to weekly income and expenses.
- It’s no fun to carve out the time needed to work on my business, not in it.
The truth is, your business will flourish the more you weave fun into it. When we look forward to learning something new rather than thinking it will be overwhelmingly difficult, we create energy toward our own success. When we hold our work lightly, it feels much less burdensome and hard. We end up with a more positive energy toward the things we have to do. We all know this, but when it comes to our work we sometimes tend to forget it. We think we have to labor at our work, or keep it separate from our fun.
Dread has no place in your life as an entrepreneur. You didn’t set yourself up to be the boss of you just to feel dread toward your work, did you? 
One way to handle feeling too burdened or overwhelmed is to make sure you inject some fun and things you truly enjoy into your business. Tiny pleasures or large ones, they all help you succeed in your work.
Here’s just a small example. I’ve always loved the color turquoise, so to inject a little bit of fun into the work of updating one of my websites, I used it and asked Facebook friends what color to pair it with. I ended up with a dynamic combo of my fav turquoise paired with peach. I love it, and I had fun I had pulling it together. (You can check out the result at suepainter.com.) How fun it was to read the other day that turquoise has been named “color of the year.”
Often I encourage my clients to plan personal retreats to work out their stuck places and to work on their business planning. These are fun despite being productive. Go where you’ve been wanting to go, or return to a place you enjoy. Not only does the prospect of a trip create a welcoming energy, you are so easily able to work on your business rather than in it, getting away from the day-to-day routine. Go by yourself, or pair up with another entrepreneur who also wants to hammer out some work. You can weave breaks into your day, walk on the beach, get a nice dinner, shop. But for the most part, you are giving yourself uninterrupted time to invest in your business. Don’t sabotage yourself by making this a family vacation, either. It’s not – it’s for YOU.
You can also form a small Mastermind group with people you truly enjoy, and meet by phone or in person to help each other with business issues. Make it fun – meet over a good bottle of wine, take a walk, whatever you enjoy. For a while last year, I did this with another entrepreneur by meeting her to water walk and swim together. We’d do that, then get into the warm therapy pool and stretch both our bodies and our views of our businesses.
Do you have staff or employees in your business? In nice weather, try meeting outdoors with a picnic lunch. Just think about ways to bring joy and pleasure into your endeavor. You’ll benefit both in your spirit and your bottom line. Think easy-peasy, not hard. Think mastery, not failure. Think simple steps, not big overwhelming project. You didn’t put yourself in business to feel fearful, down or out. You put yourself in business to serve others and create a world of work that meets your income and lifestyle wishes. Fun will help you get there, even in small doses!
(c) Sue Painter
How To Market Your Product To Women
January 23, 2010
The latest market research yet again points out that women make the majority (about 70%) of purchase decisions for consumer goods. Women are also the fastest growing global market, meaning that even outside the United States women are gaining purchasing clout. So, if you have a business that markets to women it would be good to know about how they make purchasing decisions and how they think about the products and services they use.
Not long ago, an article by Michael Silverstein for the Wall Street Journal posited that most consumer goods and services are developed by men. These men consult with other men to develop products and the marketing for those products. Whether you are male or female, take into consideration a few things about how women buy and watch your sales to women improve.
- Women buy based on the emotional appeal of a product or service. While men do this, too, men are more apt to get into a certain purchasing habit and stay there, not looking around so much for what is new and appealing in the market. Women like to feel good about what they purchase, and will buy on emotional appeal more than on habit.
- Women aren’t so impressed with a company’s decision to cut price when sales drop. We worry about whether the quality of the product has dropped, thinking that something we have previously bought might now be second rate. We notice a drop in product quality (thinner material or less give in the fit).
- Women shop more than men (big surprise, I know). What this does is make us far more aware of what’s selling well, what’s bombing, and where prices have changed. We have a better sense of the market because we are in it more, especially online.
- Women like to know what’s new. If a company makes tiny little changes to their product rather than truly producing something more innovative and easier to use, women are not impressed. We have a great ability to review a product and immediately see what will work or not work before even laying hands on the item. (Again, we shop and compare online.)
- We like to give something that says “I love you.” We look for that more than something practical. Research shows that women say love is important in their lives, second only to time.
- We like color and look for products to give us flair. Men will more often use black and white. While we like the flair and excitement of color and style, men buy based on function, durability, and price.
- Women talk about what they buy. This is a critical factor to remember when marketing to women. We share information personally and online about our likes and dislikes. We connect with other women over our purchases. Research shows that a pleased woman customer will impact at least nine other women to buy from you. This is amazing reach! Word of mouth marketing works with women.
- We like products and services that save time. Cumbersome packaging and hard to use products don’t get the nod.
While these points hold true for any industry, women complain in particular about financial services that are aimed toward the male of the house (even when the woman is the major bread winner), health care services (we don’t like the endless waits) and durable goods (we don’t like that a good portion don’t do what they say they will do). Keeping these facts in mind can help you create and sale to women more successfully than many companies do.
(c) Sue Painter
Is It Time To Tear Your Business Apart?
December 17, 2009
Change is uncomfortable and scary for most of us. Although we have varying levels of tolerance to change and risk, all of us have 
some point where we avoid these things. I’ve been a risk taker most of my life – I love exploration and adventure, and I know that my willingness to try new things, or do old things in a new way, has brought me much delight and success.
Still, like everyone else, I have my limits. So it was with a great deal of fear, dread, trepidation and tears that I let Bill drive me to a hospital early Monday morning, where in a few short hours my left knee would be amputated out of my leg, and if things went well a new knee would be put in. There was a chance that my knee was so injured that a new knee would not work. So I had to let the haze of anesthesia settled over me, not knowing what I would wake up to. Honestly, this was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my life.
Both in business and personal life, there comes time when we need to tear things apart, blow things up, be destructive. And the truth is that we do not know what the outcome will be at these times. What we do know is that the current situation and the road we are on is not working. Plain and simple, we need to stop.
I’ve put together a road map that will help you to know when it’s time to tear things apart, and how best to prepare for it. Here are some of the rules of the road we are on that simply won’t take us where we want to go.
- We tend to fear completely deconstructing things so much that we stay on the wrong road far too long.
- The longer we stay on the wrong road, the more we lessen our chances of a good outcome once we’ve finally torn things up.
- We spend too much time, energy, and resources trying to make the road we’ve been on work. We make ridiculous accommodations that do not serve us, and we engage in more wishful and magical thinking. Denial gains super-sized strength from our fears.
- We assign fear to those around us, assuming they will dislike what will happen when things are torn completely apart, and using that as an excuse for keeping ourselves on the wrong road.
In both our personal and business worlds, however, we can ruin ourselves and our opportunities to have what we desire by refusing the “blow it up, tear it up, deconstruct it” path. Our secret ambitions or dreams for ourselves languish. The outward signs of “living wrong” can include anger, bitterness, depression, constant excuses, wishful thinking (if only), blame, totally buying in to beliefs and stories we tell ourselves about why we can’t do something, being cynical, jealousy, and dishonesty with ourselves and others. Ugh!
No matter what “it” is, force yourself to have the curiosity and honesty to consider what might happen after deconstructing what you have right now. Don’t just list the “bad” things you immediately think about. List all the possibilities you can think of, too. Energy follows thought, so keep yourself on the possibility side of the list as much as you can. Rule number one? You don’t have enough foresight and knowledge to deconstruct something alone. Get help, give it time and attention, and move through the steps without continuing to tell yourself how scary or wrong it is once you’ve made up your mind.
- Consider the alternatives with at least three people.
- Find the very best people to help you.
- Make sure you like the way they approach things and their energy.
- Enroll your significant others – friends, business partners, family members, support staff.
- Ask these people to tell you their own fears about the deconstruction. This helps clear the air and prevent sabotage.
- Set up a timetable for when you will end the old and what all the steps are for the new.
- Make it as easy as you can on yourself. Clear the calendar of other demands. Whatever else you do, hire it done or stop it for a few days. Maybe you get someone to shop, cook, and clean for a few weeks so that’s totally off your mind.
- Gather up your courage, quit listening to the “backtalk” from yourself and others, and take one step.
- Keep going through your steps with determination, even when you begin to doubt or run into an unexpected hurdle.
- Remind yourself that what you have been doing DOES NOT WORK and that you are now creating a new order of things. You are not reaching for perfection, you’re reaching toward a solution that will actually get you what you want.
- Be honest to yourself and others when you have “doubt days” – get it out of yourself to prevent self-sabotage.
- Once a day, look at the big picture. Remind yourself that the road you have been on DOES NOT WORK. Give yourself credit for each step along the way.
- Work diligently on the new road. Don’t go back and wonder if you’ve done the right thing. Whatever you are doing, it’s probably more right than the wrong thing you were doing.
As I write this, I’m in a rehab hospital learning how to use my new knee. Yes, I did get one! It’s been painful and hard, and it’s easy to fall into doubt that I’ll ever get the pain to stop or that I will be able to bend my knee very well. Like everyone else who goes through this, I’ve had my few days of “hitting the wall” and wondering why in the world I ever did this to myself. But my surgeon is expert at his craft and at reminding me where this can take me. My teachers and friends remind me of the truth about how things were just a short week ago. My new “knee friends” share every setback and success with me over meals and in the hallways. And the hospital staff support me completely, from helping me get a shower to making sure my pain medications are delivered right on time. I’m off the road that was getting me nowhere, and would have never gotten me where I want to go. This road is “more right” than the road I was on.
No matter how big it is in your business or personal life, have the courage to say aloud “this road is over.” You might find out that tearing something up is actually the way to create what you’ve always wanted.
(c) Sue Painter
Why Retreats For Entrepreneurs Help To Build Business Success
December 2, 2009
Entrepreneurs are “on” just about all the time. We’re the business owners who juggle more than one role in the business. We often wake up with new ideas swimming in our heads. We see possibilities where others don’t. In fact, we often have too many ideas for our own good! It’s widely known that solo professionals and entrepreneurs suffer from what is called “bright shiny object syndrome” – that is, we have so many ideas that it it sometimes hard to keep our focus on the one we’re working on right now.
Most of us are busy not only within our business, but also have roles in family and community, as well. As our business begins to take off, we have less of the quiet time we need to work “on” the business rather than “in” the business. And, because we expend a high degree of energy, we need respite. In fact, where we get our new ideas and renew our energy is often while we are on retreat.
My formula for fantastic business success is to regularly pull myself away from my business. This stretches me in several ways.
- It forces me to train employees and trust them to run day-to-day operations while I am away.
- It forces me to clear my calendar and budget for personal business retreat time.
- It helps me keep my own ego out of the business and put my attention on the present and future possibilities.
- It forces me to change my daily environment, literally getting a fresh perspective for myself and my business.
In fact, one mark of an entrepreneur who thinks too small is one who insists he cannot get away from his own business. This a sure sign of overwhelm, fatigue, and over-control. Here are five tips for how to do quarterly business retreats that will refuel you and your business.
- Decide what is really nurturing for you, and select accordingly. Your body and spirit may need anything from physical exertion to sunshine.
- Stay within your budget. Retreat centers range from free (monasteries) to the ultimate luxurious destination. Don’t stress yourself more by going into debt.
- Plan far ahead. Clear your calendar 3 to 4 months ahead of time. This gives you plenty of time to make travel arrangements and a bit of time put away some money. It also gives you something to look forward to, a time you know you’ll rest.
- Put away the guilty feelings. It is a gift to model self-care and nurturing to those you care for.
- Enter and come back lightly. Schedule a lighter day before you go and when you come back. You’ll reap more benefits if you are not pressed to the last minute before you leave, and have a day to acclimate when you return.
Think about your work style and take what you need with you. A few pads of paper, pencils or pens, a computer, a list of ideas you’ve had and need to assess, a list of problem areas you need to think clearly about should all be in your briefcase. Because I work on computer, I will only go places where I can get Internet access. Which, these days, is just about anywhere!
Make your retreat a combination of rest, daydreaming, good food, activity, and work time. Your mind will clear and you will gain instant focus on things that have been bugging you as your mind, body, emotions, and spirit relax and renew. Things that seem truly frustrating and unending will suddenly become clear. You’ll find yourself making decisions you’ve wallowed on about and wondering why you thought it was so hard!
I recommend quarterly retreats, a week at a time. At the least, get away for 4 days. Stay away from e-mail and the phone as much as you can, and at the most check it only once a day. Take a break from social media, too. Your business issues will lessen and juicy new possibilities will flow. You’ll get back home enthused and renewed, and that alone boosts your business success.
(c) Sue Painter
How To Build Your Business By Interviewing Like A Pro, Part Two
November 17, 2009
There are five key steps to interviewing like a pro. Here they are, in the order you will more than likely move through the steps.
- Know your goal.
- Pick gigs based on your goal.
- Prep the call.
- Answer questions briefly but strategically.
- Follow up diligently.
If you follow each step, you’ll find yourself quickly and easily handing interviews and benefitting from them in more ways than one. Each step helps ensure that your interview will be of benefit to the person interviewing you and to your business. Any time a solo professional can take an action with a double benefit, it’s sure to be a winner!
Step One – Know Your Goal
Just as with anything else you do in business, being interviewed takes your time away from other things you could be doing. You won’t be getting paid, but you still do want a return on your investment of time and sharing of your expertise. Setting a goal for each interview you decide to give will help you get a return.
Ask yourself why you want to do this particular interview, and what you would like to get out of it. There are at least five ways to benefit, and you can probably hit two of them with each interview. The first goal is to build visibility for your business. Think about where and how much the interview will be publicized, the likely size of the listeners or audience, and how much introduction you are likely to receive.
Gaining credibility is a second goal. No one is going to ask you to be interviewed if they think you have nothing of value to offer their listeners or audience. Just by doing the interview, you gain credibility. It’s a good idea to keep a list of all the places you’ve done interviews, and add this to your media page. Reporters and others who are always looking for guests will be impressed that you’ve interviews and will be grateful to find someone who knows the ropes. Just like many other things in the business world, doing interviews can create its own energy. Word spreads that you are both interesting and willing, and you will get more opportunities once you break the ice.
A third goal for doing interviews is to build your list of prospects. Especially if you are an Internet-based business (or have an Internet-based component to your business) constantly building your list is a key concern for you. For Internet businesses, a list of potential customers is the goose that lays the golden egg. For businesses that are not Internet-based, their database of contacts and prospects is also important.
How does interviewing help you build your list? Many times, the person interviewing you will require people who want to listen in on the call or radio show to register ahead of time, even if the call is free. The interviewer may be building his own list using this strategy. He may need to know roughly how many people to expect on a telephone interview so that he can reserve enough phone lines through his conference call provider. He may want to collect information about the industry his listeners are coming from. Whatever the reason, there is often an opportunity to share this information and build your own list, too. If you do this, make sure that when a prospect registers for the event she is told that registering means she will receive the call-in access information and that she will receive a free subscription to your own electronic newsletter (e-zine). Make sure that you operate within the Federal laws regarding e-mails and SPAM.
Even if the person interviewing you doesn’t require a registration to listen in on the event, you can still build your list right on the call. Make sure that your bio includes information about your website’s URL. Include a statement something like, “Be sure to go to my website and subscribe to my e-zine, for you’ll receive valuable marketing tips several times a month.”
Product development is the fourth goal you can meet by doing interviews. Once the interview is done, there will likely be a recording of it. Viola! You have a product, a half-hour or hour-long interview about a particular topic that you can give away as an MP3 file, burn to a CD and sell, or have transcribed and make part of a product bundle. Interviewing is a quick and easy way to build up a library of low-cost products that can create a passive income stream for you. Make sure that you agree ahead of time that you will get to share the audio file of the interview with the person who interviews you. The majority of times, this is understood at the outset – that both of you can use that resource in any way you want. Having the file is useful, for you can create audio clips from it to use in advertising or presentations along with using it as a product to give away or sell.
Finally, you may have a goal to make a special offer to the audience during an interview. Most hosts will be more than willing to take a brief time during the interview to let you offer something special to their listeners. This helps the host become known as someone who offers special deals or surprises, which in turn builds their audience. For you, it can be a way to test out a new product or service with an audience, or to raise some quick cash by offering one of your services with a special add-on for the same price. To make special offers effective, limit the time it is available (usually that day or 24 hours only) and/or the quantity offered. Build a special link in your website for this special offer, and announce it on the call, leading the audience to browse to your website, purchase the offer, and perhaps browse the rest of your website, too.
Stay tuned for Part Three of this article, coming your way soon!
(c) Sue Painter
How To Create Money And A Life You Really Want
November 15, 2009
A few months ago, over on my blog at www.suepainter.com, I began to tell the story of a new client who was out of work, scared, and confused. You can read Part One of his story and you’ll see how he had nothing but the desire to get out of his fear. We set up low-cost and simple actions designed to get him on a path of discovery and out of the hole he was in.
Two months later, amazing things have happened! Part Two of his story clearly shows how he manifested a small monthly income – not enough yet, but far better than unemployed and at zero. If he and I add it up, in just two months he’s created just under $6,000. He created the opportunity to travel and meet other budding entrepreneurs. He found a program that gives him a shot at his dream trip to Africa. How did he do it?
- He didn’t tell himself he couldn’t.
- He faithfully carried out the daily practices we decided on.
- He told his story to friends, family, and business contacts, stating the opportunities he is looking for.
- He invested in himself (with coaching) rather than telling himself he couldn’t afford it.
None of these are hard, but they do require faithful, consistent action – even when we don’t know where that action is leading. It requires, too, that when we get off the path and mess up, we forgive ourselves and get right back on again. Has this man done his daily practices every single day? No – but he has done them most of the time, and he has had the discipline to get himself going again when he gets off. He also has the honesty to say he’s off and ask for encouragement to get going again.
The rewards he is getting are far greater than the money he has created. He is beginning to see that despite his own fears, the talk he hears from others about how bad things are, and the uncertainty of life he still has huge impact by his beliefs and actions. He is learning that he actually can create money and a life he really wants. We all can, if we will.
(c) Sue Painter
How To Tell If You Really Want Your Dream Biz
November 10, 2009
As a marketing therapist, one of my jobs is to help the people I work with discover the inner blocks that keep them from going where they say they want to go. Sometimes, we SAY we really, really, really want to create a certain business or achieve something new in our existing business, yet it never seems to happen. When this happens, there is sure to be a block or two lurking within. Once you know how to step back and listen to what you are saying to yourself, you will easily be able to identify these blocks.
A conversation with someone I had a few weeks ago is a good example. “Betty” is a small biz owner who created an online business, working diligently to create a website and some products to sell. The business didn’t succeed, so Betty, who needed income, decided to create a second business that provides services to other small business owners. She has been pretty successful at business number two, making a living but not a lot of extra money. She tells me that her true dream is to “re-establish her first business and make it successful.” I took a quick peek at the website of the defunct business and talked to Betty, and in less than half an hour found that the story she told herself effectively and completely blocked her from what she said she “really really really” wanted to do. Here’s the key – Betty’s inner talk did not at all match what she was willing to do on the outside. For every way out of the maze of “not doing what she really wants to do” she had at least two reasons why she couldn’t do it.
- Betty holds unrealistic expectations. Her stated goal was to go from zero income to $50K in the “dream” business in one year’s time. But, Betty had no written business model for her dream business, despite having worked on it for over a year. She had done no marketing research and insisted that for her market there was no way to do market research.
- Betty stated that she had time available to work on refreshing her dream business. But, when I set out a plan to create new interest and a new launch by the first of the year she quickly told me that her existing second business kept her too busy and that with the upcoming holidays she couldn’t possibly even think of starting until after the first of the year. When there is resistance to action that would make your dream actually come true, you know you’ve got an inner block.
- Betty’s big, major “you can’t get past this problem” excuse is that she has to support herself with the second business she created, so how could she possibly ever have the time and money to work on her “dream” biz? Here’s the thing – there is ALWAYS a path forward. If you find yourself, like Betty, dissing every single option then you know you aren’t willing to put your money where your mouth is. Betty could have sold her second business, but her answer back was that she could “never sell her clients to someone else as that would not be ethical.” Truth is, people sell service businesses and client lists all the time and within her own industry it’s done frequently. Betty could have outsourced the work of her second business by creating contract staff to handle that work while she worked on the “dream biz.” Her response – no, her profit margin wouldn’t be high enough and “other people” might not take care of her clients well enough. Betty could have decided to rachet up her second business, double the income, save most of that for a year or two, then close that business and have a cushion to work on the dream biz. Betty felt like that would take too long. For every potential way around her inner roadblocks she had a reason it would not work.
- When I challenged Betty to tell me what she could do rather than what she could not do, she finally was stumped. She had to face that she was not really willing to go work on her dream biz because she was unwilling to say yes to any possibility. But to save face, she switched tactics and started talking about how she “really was searching for answers and was afraid that I felt she was argumentative.” It doesn’t matter what I think, what matters is what she will do. But since I had challenged her own inner blocks she decided to give me one, and then use THAT as an excuse not to move forward – how could she work with someone who felt she was argumentative? (A label she gave herself, by the way.)
It’s a shame that Betty has convinced herself that there is no way to move forward. Her idea for her “dream biz” has merit, and she has spent time and money to create it. In fact, even what she had done became an excuse for not moving forward. Betty felt that she had already spent so much time and money on her website and a re-do of her site that she just could not justify spending more cash.
How Betty keeps her story alive (her story being that she really, really, really wants her dream biz) is to constantly ask for advice but then constantly fail to change a single belief or action. To Betty, she can’t move forward because she just can’t find the “right match” for someone to work with – conveniently blaming a potential advisor rather than herself. Betty has an answer for everything except the most important question. That question is “how can I have my dream biz?” Until Betty quits blocking every potential possibility, the truth is that she doesn’t really want her dream biz, she just wants to hold it and point to it and tell the world how tough and unfair it is that she can’t have it. There is ALWAYS a way forward when the mind and heart are open. When they are not, dream businesses don’t happen.
(c) Sue Painter