Osborne’s big mistake was to introduce a new piece of technology before it was available for purchase.  Tech buyers will immediately cease to buy an older model and wait for the newer one once the word gets out…if you don’t have it ready to sell, your sales plummet.  This became such a famous case study that it is still known today as the Osborne Effect.

It is always wise to forego advertising a new model until the model actually exists for purchase?  It depends on your industry.  The movie industry always advertises new movies before they are released, looking to drive up the buzz and make big hits at the box office on opening day.  But that’s a different biz model, because they’ve typically already squeezed sales out of the previous releases long before the new movie is out.  (Think Harry Potter or James Bond.)

Generally, though, if you sell a product (jewelry, luggage, clothing, air conditioners, etc.) you don’t want to get stuck with a lot of existing inventory because you have started to market a “new, improved” version of the same thing.  And you don’t want your sales of existing inventory to tank when word gets out that in a few months the “new, improved” version will be available.  A few months can be a long time to wait for cash flow!

Think about your own products and be aware of the Osborne Effect.  Plan wisely for releases of newer “models” of what you sell, and don’t create a thirsty crowd if you don’t have something to sell them.  Osborne eventually declared bankruptcy.  You and I can learn from his mistake.

A few weeks ago I was listening to a potential client voice her concerns that her accounting firm was not “changing to meet the times.”  She wanted her other two partners to get enthusiastic about a new specialty for the firm – adding on accounting services specifically for the elderly and the adult children who often end up having to manage their parent’s finances from another state.  She has quite a bit of passion about this idea and feels that the demographics support it.  She wanted to hire me to help them come up with a new website and 12-month marketing plan for this new part of the business.

After just a bit of questioning, I found that the other two partners didn’t support it.  Older than she, they were nearing retirement and felt they had enough work and enough money.  They were past the point in their careers where they wanted to build something new.  This fact threw new questions into the pot.  Would the woman push forward, putting her own time and money into the effort with only luke-warm support from the rest of the firm’s partners?  Would she break off from the firm and establish an entirely new business?  If she did that, did she have the money to both establish a new firm and build a new service at thet same time?  Would she do some of her old work to give her financial footing, and only work to establish the “geriatric” accounting services part time?  Was she positioned well in her personal life to take on breaking away?  Could she bring the other partners around to her point of view?

While she was impatient to “get started” I was not!  The mindset and marketing required to make such a new endeavor pay off would be very different if she went out on her own as opposed to remaining part of the existing firm, which had been together for many years.  My experience is that creating and implementing a marketing plan means that the basics are already in place.  Otherwise, it’s too easy to spend time and money only to decide that you must go off in a slightly different direction because of the shifting ground of your business and personal life.

My focus for working with the person became helping her envision how her idea might best work, the structure it would take to support it, assessing if she had the personal and professional ground in place (she was recently divorced, had just lost a parent, and had been ill for months with mono).  After that ground is firm, we can build a kick-butt marketing plan.  But you gotta answer the deeper questions first.  Otherwise, you’re going to waste your entrepreneurial energy.  And that’s a precious thing to waste!

As we were drifting away from “seeking cedar” as we called it, I started thinking about how much we have to be willing to grow, in our own unique way, to create the fully alive life and work we crave.  The work I do with others about their business often becomes about their personal life, too.  Why?  Because we can’t develop into the entrepreneurs we want to be without changing those parts of ourselves that hold us to the normal, everyday life.  As solo business owners we have to be adaptable, just like this “seeking cedar” tree.  We have to reach for the nutrients we need even if it means growing away from the shore that has supported us, or looking a little different than others who work for themselves.  In fact, the more we know ourselves, the more we know our uniqueness, which is, after all, what others buy from us.  Just like this tree, we have to stand out to be noticed.  If we insist on blending in, we make it much more difficult for people to find us and want our services.

Here’s a quick exercise you can try that will help you understand how much you are willing to stretch to build your business.  Get into a quiet spot for about 15 minutes with a pad and pencil (or your laptop if you consider that a thing of the past, LOL).  Ask yourself:

• What two things stop me from being all I truly can be in my life and my work?
• Am I the one stopping myself from removing these two things, or is it someone else?
• Am I willing to stretch myself to change or remove these two things?
• What will I gain by stretching in this way?
• What’s the worst thing that might happen?  And what happens after the worst thing has happened?
• What’s the best thing that might happen?  And what comes after that?

You can use these questions whenever you are scared of an opportunity that presents itself in your business.  They will help you to see what you should do, what actions or thoughts will serve you the most in building your business.  Just don’t be surprised when you realize that stretching to be the entrepreneur you can be also stretches your personal life.  It’s a hand-in-glove proposition – when you stretch one, you stretch the other.  You can die in place when you’ve been pushed or shoved, or you can become a seeking cedar and stretch into a brand new space.

I’m convinced that we are now in the pioneer days for marketing.  If I’ve read one article about how push marketing doesn’t work anymore and that it is now all about building relationships with the consumer, I’ve read twenty.  And every time I read one I shake my head and wonder why no one writes that this is back to marketing’s pioneer days.  We now have “Pioneer Marketing.”  It’s what our forebears did in every single city and town, and what the best and wisest businesses still do.

Pioneer Marketing (I think I just coined a new term) has one main tenet, and that tenet is infallible.  It works every time because it is based on a law of human nature.  What’s the law?  “People respond positively and in a timely manner when they are treated with respect, courtesy, honesty, and in a way that has their best interests at heart.”  That one law, rigidly adhered to, will win out every time.  Your attention may be diverted by aggressive and shiny marketing for a while, but in the end you will go where that law of human nature is adhered to.

Simply put, our prospects and existing customers don’t want to be sold into a product or service that serves the seller and doesn’t serve the buyer.  They are tired of push marketing coupled with shoddy goods and lacking customer service.  And this is one huge reason that you, as an entrepreneur, have it over the big guys.  The big guys have used push marketing, shoddy goods, and lacking customer service for so long that they are scrambling right now to turn huge, bloated, bureaucratic businesses around to save their sales.  Meanwhile, you and I can “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” meeting and forming relationships with our prospects, selling our expertise, servicing our customers, and making the transaction into a win-win rather than a win-lose.  We have memorable and recognizable faces.  Large, bloated businesses give you a new and usually non-caring face every time you walk in their door or buy from them online.

Family-owned businesses, solo professionals, and entrepreneurs can step up and capture market share right now.  Most of us have a familiar face to our prospects and customers.  Many of the big guys don’t, and now that they realize that, they are all about “relationship marketing,” thinking they have discovered a whole new world.  It isn’t a whole new world at all, it’s the world that many small business owners never left, the one that our pioneer forebears lived in.  Everyone knew the business owners up and down the street and how they treated customers.  Everyone knew who to avoid and who to buy from.  Business was good or bad depending on the business owner’s savvy and her ability to form and keep relationships.  Reputation was everything, and was based on something real, not something manipulated by copious marketing.

People respond to Pioneer Marketing because it is in our human nature.  We are wired for relationships. On the frontier, relationships and trust in others meant survival.  In the marketplace, it means survival for you, the business owner.  And it is coupled with a sense of trust and satisfaction in our customers, as well.

You don’t have to put on a pioneer costume or grow a mustache to use Pioneer Marketing.  Just plaster that one law of human nature up where you can see it, and build your business from that place.  Let your marketing, advertising, customer service, and sales be aligned with that law.  Couple that with good business skills, and you are good to go.  The next time you hear about the new “relationship marketing” just smile.  You are already there.  So hip, so pioneer.  That’s you!

1. No one in your organization has a clear mission of responsibility for creating and running a constant marketing system.
2. Marketing falls to the back of the list after client services, bookkeeping, scheduling, errands, and dusting the office.
3. Networking in the community and on the Internet is catch-as-catch-can and is handed off to the least busiest person.
4. You have no idea how many new customers you have gained in the last 30, 60, or 90 days.
5. You have no idea how many customers you haven’t heard from in the last 30, 60, or 90 days.
6. You don’t really like to market, think it is hard to do, and believe that great customer service alone will do the trick.
7. Your marketing system consists of trying to upsell existing clients when they are in (think about the hair salon syndrome….you can’t get out of there without running the gauntlet of hair product, make-up, and spa service suggestions every single time you are there).

If even one of these hits home, you are in the wish, hope, and pray mode and you need to get out of it, fast!  Consider your business as a three legged stool, the three legs being marketing, customer service, and expertise.  Each of the three legs is completely dependent on the other two, as the stool won’t work without them all.

• Your expertise is what you do, your magic, your passionate purpose.
• Your customer service is all the things you develop and carry out to ensure your customers get 5-star treatment, including how you take care of displeasure and disappointment when it occurs.
• Your marketing is a planned, ongoing, automated system that feeds you a constant flow of potential new customers.

Each leg of the stool is key, and each is as important as the other.  If you have sawed off a leg by your disinterest, busyness, or avoidance, I suggest you wish, hope, and pray before you sit yourself on the stool.  You may balance for a little while, but in the end you’ll be on the ground.  And that’s one place no entrepreneur wants to be.

• A good number of people will have a thought something like “I better put this away, I don’t want to lose this money.”
• Fewer people will get a thought that goes “this is a gift, truly found money.  How should I use this, what can I do?”

If your thought was about keeping the money safe, I’ll wager that you think of money as potential loss rather than potential gain.  And that mindset isn’t going to help you create a business where money automatically comes in and goes out, just like the tide.  You can’t stop the tide.  If you constantly try, you still get the inevitable but you are much more miserable over it than if you just let that tide go out and enjoy watching it as it goes.  Same with money!

The other day I had someone contact me who was interested, she said, in coaching for her small business.  Actually, she had two businesses, had them both for several years.  The very first statement out of her mouth was not about her businesses but about her money.  “I make less than $100 a month with these businesses,” she said.  She didn’t tell me about her businesses, ask me how I might help her, or what she hoped to gain in working with me.  Instead, she came at me from a place of lack, focusing on what she doesn’t have.  That lack is fear-based, contracted energy.  Behind it is a poor-me mentality.  That creates a constant story of lack, a negative energy.  It literally “pulls” others toward that lack.  While we didn’t get far in talking about working together, she right away let me know she had little money and probably could not afford to work with me.  Underneath that statement was a subtle pull on me, to join her in her financial lack by cutting a deal to work with her for less money, or to sit there and spend an hour of my time for free while she talked about her financial lack rather than asking me how I could help her go where she wanted to go.  Then, we both could lack and she would have a “community of lack” going.  Do you see?  Very subtle, but very powerful.  Watch for that from others, and don’t let that energy go to work on you.

Let’s think about this solopreneur who has two businesses that are both several years old and who makes about $100 a month from both of them together.  Does she need to be more profitable?  Obviously, yes.  She probably needs to focus down on one of the businesses, build that to an ongoing profit, and then bring the second business on-line.  She may need to ditch one — I don’t know her well enough to say.  I do know, though, that it doesn’t work to approach me about working with you and ask me first thing what I charge.  The money isn’t the issue.  The issue is what would this $100 a month entrepreneur GAIN in working with me (or someone else) rather than what she would LOSE.  If I can’t get her to focus on the gain, she won’t engage in what I suggest to her.  She’ll be thinking about that money she’s losing by paying me (or someone else) rather than what she is GETTING in the process.

There are a lot of reasons why many solopreneurs and small business owners are not profitable.  Many lack knowledge about the basic tools of business.  These things are skills that one can easily get through classes, reading, having a mentor or a coach, or going to workshops. The bigger barrier to making money is your own mind set about money.  If you focus on how little you have it will absolutely never grow.  If, instead, you focus on what you can gain with the money you have (no matter how little or large that amount) you will be OK.

Here’s what I wrote to this woman. “You know, it’s never about the money, it’s about what will happen if you do NOT change and learn to invest in building your business.  When people e-mail me and ask only what it costs to hire me, I know they are trying to decide only on cost.  The wiser decision is based on value or what it will cost them if they keep on the road they are on.  See, it would benefit you to know more about what we might do for those three months, but instead of asking me that, or asking when we might talk about it, I see that you are asking only what it will cost you, not what you will gain.  So there you have a little bit of coaching for free.  If you change to put your attention on gain rather than loss, you will begin to shift your thinking and your business from cost to benefit, both for yourself and for those you wish to serve.”

If you are not profitable through lack of focus, bad planning, or lack of business skills you can fix it.  It takes risk, self-honesty, willingness to feel a little uncomfortable as you learn new skills and behaviors.  It takes faith!  But the biggest thing it takes is shifting your mind set from lack to gain.  Or, from a poverty mentality to an abundant mentality.  Or, from fear to love.  Not only will you benefit, but those you serve will benefit.  This week, practice not leading with money questions.  Practice focusing on what you gain rather than what you lose.  It will shift your mind set, and in time it will shift your bank account, too!

I just spent over $200 on Magellan’s travel supplies website.  Why?

1. I got their new spring/summer catalog in the mail.  Magellan’s used a direct mail piece, their timing was right (I have several trips coming up), and the catalog renewed my TOMA (top of mind awareness) about Magellan’s.  The key here?  Timing! I regularly receive Magellan’s catalog and usually throw it out without looking.  But I’m excited about upcoming travel, and I needed to refresh a few things.  LESSON LEARNED: Keeping in touch with your customers over time is critical, even if they haven’t bought from you in a while.
2. A notice on the catalog’s front cover offered free shipping on orders over $100.  I figured almost any order would come to that amount, and free shipping saves me money.  A deadline on the free shipping (May 9th) spurred me to take action now rather than lose the catalog on my desk.  LESSON LEARNED:  Make your special offers time-limited, with a relatively short time frame.

Let’s look at what I ordered and my reason for each purchase.

• Spill-proof pouch – because the last time I was on a plane one of my face care products leaked out into my cosmetic bag.  This pouch SOLVES A PROBLEM.
• Electronics travel case – I didn’t go looking for this item, but I saw it browsing the catalog.  I’m thinking “Hmm, I’m sure tired of all my various chargers and USB cables getting into a big knot at the bottom of my briefcase, so maybe I’ll try this.”  This purchase SOLVES A PROBLEM and was a win for Magellan’s because of 1)  A GOOD IDEA and 2) SUGGESTED SELLING.
• Personalized luggage strap – This is actually a gift for my husband.  His luggage looks similar to many, and more than once he’s picked up someone else’s at the airport.  The strap WORKS AS A GIFT and helps SOLVE SOMEONE ELSE’S  PROBLEM.
• Extra-large mesh pack-it cube – These things are hard to find in large sizes, so Magellan’s gets a star for carrying them.  They allow me to pack clothing inside my rolling duffel luggage and quickly pull out what I need without digging around.  If I get stopped for inspection, I can easily pull these out without re-shuffling and wrinkling my clothing.  I’ve used 2 gallon kitchen zipper bags, but the zippers don’t hold up to being open and closed over and over again, and the 2 gallon size is now hard to find.  These mesh cubes SOLVE A PROBLEM but also GIVE ME A FEELING OF LUXURY.  I get to graduate from packing my clothes in baggies. 
• Blackberry pouch – When I’m sight-seeing I try not to carry a purse, but I often need my phone and camera with me, and my pants usually have no pockets.  This handy little pouch hangs around the neck and will hold both my Blackberry and my small camera.  Perfect!  Again, solves a problem and makes something easier for me.
• Walkstool – One of the downsides of having a new knee is that it’s still hard for me to stand on concrete for very long without pain.  This innovative product offers a sturdy, foldable instant stool but weighs very little, and can hang off a belt, a backpack, a purse, or my shoulder.  Next time I think I better not go on a walking tour because we’ll stand and listen to a guide for 15 minutes, I’ll be able to go and know I can sit when I need to.  HUGE problem solved for me and a solution I can live with (not too heavy or too bulky, small and easy to pack).
• Inflatable neck pillow – I use one on planes, and foolishly over inflated mine a few trips ago.  POW!  It burst at 30,000 feet and that was the end of that!  I’ve looked around in airports but balked at paying $30.00.  Magellan’s had one on sale for $12.99.  What sold me?  REASONABLE PRICING and PROBLEM SOLVED.

As you can see, I’m a buyer who will spend for solving problems.  I also respond to suggested selling and to the feeling of having something a little fancier for myself.  But these are not the only reasons Magellan’s got $200 from me.  They are smart in how they set up their web site, too.

1. Their website is easy to maneuver and loads quickly.
2. They offer customer reviews of their products, which talked me into the stool and the Blackberry pouch.
3. Their page for each item tells me immediately that the item is in stock.  (One of my pet peeves is ordering online only to find that the item isn’t due in for 30 days or so.)
4. Their page for each item offers more pictures than the catalog, allowing me to “look” at items in detail.
5. Their check-out process is easy.

Take a look at what you’ve spent money on and list the reasons why you bought.  You can then look at what you offer to others and think about whether your offers are attractive for those same reasons.  If they are not, tweak them and your sales copy, and see if your sales improve.  I bet they will!

(c) Sue Painter

In fact, “seeing” myself playing a piano piece or “practicing in my mind” as I then called it is one of the first ways I learned that I could make things happen.  An early-bird piano student (I started when I was 7), I somehow realized that I could read the music and then re-play it in my head, and “watch” as my hands played the piece.  In today’s world (7 was a long time ago, ha!) we call it visioning.  Visioning is a key precursor to manifesting what we want to do with our life.  And it’s a very handy little tool to have.  I’ve used it in all sorts of ways.

• Learning music for piano, flute, and guitar for recitals and concerts
• Teaching myself how to do proofs in geometry
• Remembering positioning, draping, and treatment routines for neuromuscular therapy treatments when I took my national boards
• Seeing myself walking again after back surgery as a child
• Finding the exact piece of furniture I wanted for a room in my home
• Speaking to large groups successfully
• Finding the perfect office space for my business

There’s more (ask my husband about my “finding” the perfect car on Ebay for a song), but you get the point.  Visioning leads to manifesting, and manifesting is a critical skill to have as an entrepreneur.  I’m not saying that one doesn’t have to put the time in to get what one wants, but you can work with the flow of things and get there a lot faster than working against the flow.  And working in the flow means having a clear vision, a picture if you will, of what you want to create in and around you as you work.

Here, then, are three ways to make things happen.  You can use them to accelerate your income, build your business faster, get clear about the products and services you want to offer, and even find the perfect office space!

1. Step one is to find about 15 minutes of totally quiet, alone time for yourself.  Get some paper and a pen, sit or lay down, and close your eyes.  Ask yourself “how exactly do I see my business?”  And then wait until words or pictures form in your mind.  Follow them, make them fuller.  If you see yourself in an office, look around and get a detailed look.  How much of the time are you there?  Are there other staff members?  What are you wearing?  Where is this office located?  Do you see people there?  Make whatever pictures come to you as full as you possibly can.  If you’re traveling in the pictures that come to you, ask where, how much you travel, who you are with, what you do when you get there.  No matter how outlandish the pictures or words are that come to you, let them become detailed and full, and follow where they lead.  Jot down anything you think you won’t remember about the words or pictures.  Keep at it until you have a full vision of the things you want to manifest in your business.
2. Make a vision board.  You can do this any way you like.  I sometimes use large poster board, sometimes just a sheet of paper.  Either way, go to Google images and search for pictures that represent what you want to make happen.  Get the pictures out of your mind and into the world.  Print them, stick them onto your vision board, and put it where you can see it often.  Your eye will go to it many times during the day, and your brain and your energy will lock on to the visions you put there.  Soon enough, you’ll begin to see your way to each one of those pictures.  Your energy will be so full of what you want to manifest that you literally will begin to pull the thing toward you.  I’ve had completely doubtful clients do vision boards in my workshops, only to call me up six months later and report that every single thing on their board was “magically” accomplished or found.  No, it isn’t magic.  It’s putting your energy and intention toward what you see in your mind’s eye, and have helped to make real by creating your vision board.
3. Share the vision board you made with your family, friends, and team members.  If you want to put even more thrust into your vision, take the time to share what you are going to make happen by showing your vision board around.  You’re not asking for help, you’re just saying what you are going for to those you spend the most time around.  You’re creating a wider, broader energy for what you want, even if you don’t think anyone will actually do something to help you.  The fact is, you just never know.  One person might mention something in passing to another person, who happens to be just the person you are looking for to help make something happen.  Sharing your vision deepens your own commitment to it, too.  It helps you lose the “oh, I don’t know if this will actually happen” self-doubt that seems to always be lurking underneath us.  Just make your board, share it with a few people, and go about your business.  You don’t even need lengthy explanations – let the pictures speak for themselves.

The thing about envisioning is that it will become a habit for you if you do it consistently.  You’ll find yourself stopping for a few seconds to envision even little things in your life – the perfect dinner one night, exactly how you want to look and speak in front of a group.  Learning how to open yourself to the inner knowing, the vision inside yourself, is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself and your business.  Set aside visioning time once a week for the next six weeks, and notice how your life and your work begins to change.

(c)  Sue Painter

Guess what?  Neither  neuroscience or marketing research backs this up!  I remember one of the first things I heard from Ali Brown a few years ago, and I’ve now heard it repeated by several other top Internet marketers.  “The confused mind doesn’t buy.”  Ali applies this to several situations.  She’ll say, for instance, that if your prospect isn’t crystal clear about exactly what next to do to place an order on your website, you will lose the sale.  But she also means it when she works with you in creating what you offer.  “Don’t make it too complicated, keep it simple and streamlined,” she’ll say.  “The confused mind doesn’t buy.”

Sometimes this is tough to take for a solopreneur who is good at many things.  Those types of people tend to fight narrowing down their target market like tigers fighting over the last piece of carrion.  But the truth is, if you say you are good at everything, you do make people wonder what, indeed, you are best at.  It’s wise to narrowly focus, knowing something very well and sticking to offering products and services around that thing.  Later on, when you’ve met your market and built credibility, you can add another target or create another offer.

Professor Sheena Iyengar, who teaches at Columbia Business School, has been studying the science of decision for years.  If you want to pick her brain on this topic, get a copy of her newest book, The Art of Choosing.  She first discovered that children were happier when they were given only one toy to play with rather than a wide choice.  Over time,  she came to understand that what matters to us is the number of options we have when we make a decision, not just the options themselves.

Another researcher, a professor at Princeton, discovered that after about five to nine items our ability to choose becomes too complicated.  This is one reason I teach my business clients to limit packages to three offers for their customers.  We can easily wrap our minds around three.  If you are a wedding planner, for instance, and you offer a bridge and groom 3 main types of packages, they will choose one and go happily on, perhaps asking you to customize one of the packages a little bit for them.  But if you offer that same couple 27 packages, it becomes too complicated and overwhelming.  They may well walk away, trying to decide.  And BAM! Someone comes along with a simplified version of what you offered, they sigh in relief, and pick one – from the smarter wedding planner.

Here’s my best advice to solopreneurs who are wondering about how to showcase what they offer.

• Keep your offers very simple and clear.  If you have several different categories of products and services, label them very differently.
• Offer no more than 3 options of any one category.  You can always charge more for customizing one package if that is requested.
• Keep your payment plans simple.  Depending on the price point of what you offer, provide options for a single payment and perhaps a two-pay or three-pay installment over one or two months.  Keep in mind that you want to collect your money before your product or service is entirely consumed, however.
• Use a matrix (a chart) to show what options are included in each package.  People can then see at a quick glance what they are purchasing, and what is not included.  It makes choosing easier.

Keeping your selections simple also goes for how you offer your products and services, but that’s a topic for another day.  Don’t overwhelm your potential customers, and don’t overwhelm yourself, either.  You will make more money in less time, and you will also have more satisfied customers.  It’s a win-win all the way around!  Less choice = more sales.  Strange, isn’t it?

(c) Sue Painter