Can You Really Describe Your Ultimate Target Market?
February 7, 2010
One of the real “rookie” mistakes made by new entrepreneurs is to completely fail to know her target market. This is something that is very easy to spot. A few of the signs are:
- Her business is not thriving, meaning she needs more customers and she is not financially successful.
- When asked who she works with, she replies “Oh, I work with just about anyone.”
- If asked to thoroughly and completely describe her target market, she is flustered and can’t give more than a sentence.
The “Oh, I work with just about anyone” response is one I’ve heard from both new and not-so-new entrepreneurs many times. So many times, in fact, that it now drives me a little nuts. When someone says that, they are setting no boundaries for who they work with, which is a deadly thing. Let me ask the “just about anyone” entrepreneurs these questions:
1. Does it matter to you if a customer stiffs you?
2. Are you open 24/7?
3. If you were, for instance, a seller of curtains and blinds, would you drive 400 miles to sell a set of blinds to someone?
Of course, the answer to each of these is almost always NO! And that’s a good, thing, because that entrepreneur has just started on a path of better describing her target market. Her target market are people who have the money to pay for her products or services, she works with those who contact her during specific days and hours of business, and she has a limited geographical area in which to sell her blinds. This isn’t a complete description of her target market, but it is a start.
You can picture the creation of your target market as setting fences and gates around a specific group of people with whom you really want to work. You might not be as blatantly obvious about it as the gatekeepers are at hot night clubs, where one must stand outside on the sidewalk and get personally picked to go inside, but that is one very good example of a business who is very picky about who they want to serve.
I’ve learned about finding your niche and describing your target market from 3 or 4 of my coaches and mentors, but the one who made me work the hardest to describe my market, hands down, was Suzanne Falter-Barnes. She has a very long list of questions that one must answer to get through one of her platform building classes. The first time I saw that fat list of questions I just about fainted. In fact, the document she proposed I fill out to describe my market was 17 pages long! Still, Suzanne knows her stuff and I was there to learn, so I plowed into the questions. At the end, I felt like I’d invented something akin to a kid’s secret playmate. I started getting actual pictures of how my target market person looked, how she dressed, what she spent her money on, and more. I got so familiar with her in that 17 pages of ruthless questioning that I decided I knew her well enough to name her, for Pete’s sake! And that is what I strongly suggest you do, too.
My suggestion is to sit down with your computer or a piece of paper and describe a “sample” person from your target market as if she (or he) is a character in a book you are writing, and it’s up to you to fill your reader’s head with a detailed, specific, colorful image of the character you are writing about. Describe age, education, the kind of work she does, where she lives, her likes and dislikes – anything you can think of that will add to the picture in your head. This may lead you to dig around on the web for demographic or other information.
Spend quality time here, for it pays off in the end. Ask yourself (with pen and paper or keyboard nearby) “who is the most perfect customer for me?” If you have a hard time doing that, prime the pump by listing the characteristics of your most favorite or best customer so far. From there, dream on. Who would be delightful to work with? Who would you dread working with? What characteristics drive you crazy? Who have you worked with who bugs you so much you hope she never calls you again? You get the picture – and that’s whole point. For here is a secret about financially successful entrepreneurs:
Those who describe and visualize their target market well have started the process of manifesting exactly that type of customer for themselves. You now have a vision of who you want to attract, in detail. Put that right on your business vision board and keep it in your mind’s eye, for who you focus on tends to come your way.
Having this vision and description on hand also makes it easier to walk away from business that isn’t right for you, doesn’t truly interest you, and has a downside to it. (The downside being that while you are spending time with uninteresting client A, you cannot very well be also working with or running into very interesting and exciting client B. This is called “opportunity cost.”) Realize that it actually COSTS YOU to work with the wrong customer, for you are giving up the opportunity to work with who is just right for you.
Taking the time to dream up your ideal target market person makes finding that type of person much easier. You now know where to focus your efforts. If you are spending a lot of time and money networking in a group of direct marketers, and these are not your target market, it’s time to make a change. Pull your time and money from the wrong group, and go find the right group. You’ll find more and better business in the new group and waste less of your precious time.
When you are creating marketing plans, writing sales copy, or pulling together a presentation you’ll be able to keep your secret target market person right with you, writing to them. There will be less agony over creating these things.
And finally, when you have the opportunity to build a relationship with a potential customer, you will be much more at ease because, after all, you will pretty much feel as if you know that person in a way. You’ll be confident that you’ve spent time with someone who has a much higher chance of needing what you offer. This will shorten your sales cycle and make you more money faster. I don’t know of any entrepreneur who doesn’t want that!
So, get that blank paper or computer screen and get going. Breath some life into your target market, and you’ll breath new life into your business, as well. It’s a win-win for every entrepreneur.
(c) Sue Painter
Who Is In Your Entrepreneurial Community?
February 6, 2010
For the past few years now I’ve experimented with just about every method of coaching and mentoring that is available to solo professional and entrepreneurs. All of them have their pros and cons. But one thing that I’ve come to know for sure is that if you are in your own business, you need a great community of like-minded entrepreneurs around you. Why?
- Running your own business is a solitary endeavor. Decisions are up to you and you alone. You need the perspective of other business owners to round out your own thoughts. The perspective of your employees (if you have any) isn’t the same thing.
- Your own energy waxes and wanes. I’m not talking about the moon or hormones, either. The best business owners know that their own energy has to attract others to them – good staff, great customers, good deals for rents or whatever else. And it is very hard to keep your own energy up where it needs to be without sometimes drawing from the good energy of others.
- Time inevitably puts you in the box. What do I mean by this? When you created your business you did it to put forward a new, not previously done type of business. You felt what you had to offer was unique and special. In other words, you were out of the box. But as time rocks on, your own thinking gets boxed in by the very dailiness of what you do, by your own fatigue, and by the fact that others will emulate you. To keep on re-creating a business that continually pleases and serves your customers, you need to keep yourself out of the box.
- Your ideas, although they are great, can be sharpened and improved by your entrepreneurial community. Simply put, multiple heads are better than one. Here’s a quick example of this. In one of my own communities, a woman had a deal with a book publisher for her very first book. But she was balking about what the publisher wanted to title the book, taking issue with both the main title and the tagline. She brought it up in our next get together, only to find that her adamant opinion was not shared by a single one of us! We all though the title was good and that, furthermore, the publisher knew what would sell much more than the author did. As I pointed out, the author is the subject matter expert but her publisher is the marketing and sales expert for her book. All but one of the entire community basically told her to suck it up. And after she listened to us, she did! She ended up coming all the way back around to what the publisher had suggested, with only a very minor one-word change. Which leads me to my next point about the benefit of being in an entrepreneurial community….
- It helps you get your own ego out of the way, and think about what you offer from your customer’s point of view. Believe you me, you will ONLY be successful if you offer what your customers want and need, not what you in all your wisdom think they need.
I could probably come up with a few more good reasons, but I think you, smart as you are, get the point. It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a community to foster a solo business. I cannot even begin to list for you all that I have learned from constantly participating in my own communities. I’ve gotten both wonderful, gentle, loving support and a sharp kick in the pants….and both have been beneficial to me. It will be the same for you.
I’m excited to tell you that I’m forming a new community for solo business owners that will offer these benefits ( and more) in just about a month. I’m calling it Private Matters because I’m creating a group to which you can bring your most private thoughts and worries. These deeply affect your business, they matter. So….in a nutshell….Private Matters. It will be small, full of sharp thinkers and dedicated solo business owners, and it will change you and your business in ways that you can only dream of. If you feel you are a good match for Private Matters, you can e-mail me and I’ll make sure you get the application and information.
Meanwhile, keep your business focused on who you serve, what those people need, and how you can best offer products and services that meet those needs. And remember to reach out for community regularly. Both you and your customers will benefit.
(c) Sue Painter
Does Your Business Suffer From Perfection Syndrome?
January 28, 2010
Perfectionism will kill your business. The goal that you have as a solo professional is to provide a service that solves the problem your customer has. If you do that, you’ll succeed. Notice that I don’t say you have to PERFECTLY solve your customer’s problem. In fact, if you push for a perfect solution you run the risk of putting your customer off, because you will begin to nit pick at tiny little things you are offering, and you’ll lose focus on the big picture.
This thing about perfectionism is controversial to talk about. We are taught to find the “perfect solution” to our customers’ problems. But here’s the thing, and it’s important to remember. Life changes for that customer almost daily. The customer herself can’t really articulate a “perfect” solution. She may think she can, but once her “perfect solution” is in place, things will change and she’ll find that she needs to tweak it a little bit over time.
The big truth is that there IS no ongoing, perfect solution for your own business or for your customer’s business, either. You plan a resolution to an issue and execute it, and after that you see what worked and what didn’t work. You change it around the edges a little bit and go again. Finding what works for yourself or for a customer is not a straight line. It’s a curving line, sometimes curling back on itself, sometimes meandering where you never dreamed it will go. To hold that as true and faithfully watch when changes are needed is the best practice for a solo professional. It’s the best practice for larger businesses, too, but they often become too inflexible and stodgy to execute in that way.
Here are two big problems I see with solo professionals who are trying to establish a business that makes enough money to be viable.
1. Fear of making mistakes, which manifests as failure to take timely action.
2. Trying to decide everything by logic rather than feeling into what might be best for their business or their customer’s business.
I’d much rather see a solo professional try something and fail, and then learn from what went wrong, than to be paralyzed from the fear of failure. Almost all successful business owners have made mistakes, and there’s no sin it in. The sin is in burying the mistake and failing to look at it closely so that one learns. I literally have to re-train a good portion of the clients I work with to actually tell me when something goes wrong! We get into this practice of trying to hide our mistakes, which doesn’t help us in the end.
Additionally, there is a great benefit to using your feeling sense to help make decisions for yourself and your customers. You might also think of this as using your intuitive sense of things rather than depending solely on logic. You can ask yourself a question, close your eyes, and get a gut feel or sense of the best answer. The more you practice this, the better you will get. It is a great addition (and sometimes a replacement) for deciding only by logic alone. In fact, most of the millionaire entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed over the past years tell me that when the chips are down and it’s decision-making time, they trust their gut. Not the figures, but the gut. That’s a great confirmation of using your feeling sense to help you made decisions. Sometimes things will not seem logical at all, but you have a strong sense it is the right path to take.
The truth is that there IS no perfection in this life, so trying to run our businesses from that place will never work. That is the wisdom that successful solo professionals have come to know. the next time you feel yourself fearful over making a business decision, take a breath, check your gut, and move forward. You’ll find that you will do better in the end than waiting for perfection to come.
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
Three Ways To Boost Your Income This Month
January 12, 2010
The new year is off and running already! Is your business off and running, too? I don’t know many business owners who would say no to making more income right now – before the end of this month. Here are three ways to boost your income, and if you implement even one of them, you’ll have extra money to show for it.
1. Increase the number of clients or customers you have. This means letting folks who are new to you and your business know about you and the problems you solve. How can you do this quickly and efficiently?
- Ask existing customers for referrals
- Find a business networking group you’ve not been to before and attend
- Send out an e-newsletter and ask recipients to forward it to one person who might benefit from your services
- Ask friends and family to specifically mention your business to one person this week
- Post helpful resources and advice to your social media accounts
- Revamp any existing paid advertising and look for a higher return on investment
- Partner with an aligned business to advertise or do a quick special promotion
2. Increase the average transaction value for existing customers or clients. This means that you offer more value and get a greater price than you are currently getting from your customers. Here are a few ways to do this:
- Raise your rates
- Bundle several of your products or services together and offer them at a special price
- Create a VIP customer category and charge for access to VIP status
- Offer an add-on to your existing product or service. For instance, if you sell jewelry offer a color consultation (for an additional price) with each jewelry consultation or purchase.
3. Increase the frequency of repurchase by existing customers. This means that you devise options designed to encourage customers to come in more often (or order more often).
- Let customers know the benefit of increased services (massage therapy more often than once a month actually boosts the immune system, for instance).
- Package services for frequent buyers. Personal trainers, for instance, might offer a special rate for those who purchase a quarter’s worth of training three times a week.
- Let customers know about new inventory as it arrives to encourage more frequent visits to a retail shop.
- Point out that more frequent services can lead to faster results
The point is that boosting your income quickly doesn’t take months of agonizing over how to do it. Pick one of the three options that you feel will work best for you and get started right now to implement one or more strategies for it. Income doesn’t increase when we THINK about what we might do, income increases when we actually IMPLEMENT something new.
When clients come to me wanting to increase their income quickly they usually are holding that wish as something that is hard to do, scary, or impossible. One of the secrets to boosting your income is to change your own attitude about how easy it is to make more money. If you take action, it happens. If you worry about how you are going to take action then nothing happens and you continue on the gerbil wheel of “how can I do this?”
Do you want to make more money this month? Go look at yourself in a mirror, smile, and declare out loud “I”m off right now to make a bunch more money this month.” It’s pretty tough to do something you don’t believe you can do, so quit thinking you can’t and start telling yourself you can. The how-to’s are right here for you. Pick one, work on it, and let me know how much more money you have in your pocket at the end of this month. 
(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
Are You The Block That Keeps Your Business From Succeeding?
November 5, 2009
To make your business profitable, you must have two critical things in place. The first is a business model that adds up. In other words, what you offer and how you offer it will generate the amount of money you need, minus all your expenses. Your business plan and projected financial statements prove that your plan will take you where you want to go.
The second critical thing you must have is a creative marketing strategy that is comprehensive and hits your target market. As Ali Brown and many others have said, you can be the best at what you do in the whole wide world, but if you can’t market yourself you will go broke. You have to master marketing even more than you master your expertise.
If you have these two in place and you are faithfully working them, wonderful things are sure to happen. And when they don’t happen, a third thing is coming into play, something I often see in the bright, capable solo professionals I work with. That third thing is you – the resistances, denials, limiting beliefs and energetic blocks you hold that keep you from fully implementing your biz model and your marketing strategy. These are the inner blocks that are keeping you from being profitable. In other words, if it isn’t a bad business plan or a weak marketing strategy, the problem is right within you!
I often tell budding entrepreneurs and solo professionals that the best way to engage in a rigorous path of self-growth is to open your own business. It will push every button you have, and challenge you to develop yourself both personally and in business skills. It takes a courageous combination of inner work and outer work (skill building) to support fantastic success in business.
A mathematician might say that my formula for success is P + BP + MS + RIB = DCT. That translates to passion plus business planning, plus marketing strategy plus removing inner blocks equals dreams come true. It is a formula that works every time. Find the weak link, fix it, and you are on your way.
Solo professionals must have a true passion for what they offer. Working on your own requires high energy, so if you are not enthusiastic about what you do, forget about it! You will more than likely burn out before you get where you want to go. So, that P in the formula is critical.
However, you can’t build a business on passion alone – you have to know and work your business plan. What is your model of doing business? How much income is it realistic to think you will generate? How do you measure that? What is your overhead, or operating cost? If you don’t watch the money in and money out, your overhead costs can go out the roof very quickly.
Marketing strategy is the formula’s next part. Are your actions gaining you top of mind awareness with your target market? Are you getting a return on investment with marketing, publicity, events, social media, and advertising? A plan will keep you on track, marketing in a consistent manner rather than piecemeal.
If you have those pieces done well and in place and your business is not creating DCT (dreams come true) then the place to look is RIB (removing inner blocks). Blocks show up in dozens of ways, but the bottom line is fear. Fear is behind every excuse and every failure to implement. Fear creates dark and murky underplaces, which show up as resistance, avoidance, passivity, or denial. How do these show up? Here are a few things to check.
1) Look at your to-do list, and put a star beside anything that has been on your list longer than a week. You are avoiding the starred items, and that’s a good sign of an inner block.
2) Look at your calendar and find the last time you carved out at least two days for a personal retreat. Never? Three months or longer? You have an inner block about working on your business versus in your business. There’s probably also a block about control and delegating.
There are dozens of others ways to look for blocks. The point is, a willingness to look combined with a willingness to change will serve you over and over again, both in business and personal life. I have a great deal of respect for solo professionals who are willing to do that. They grow both inside and out, and they take off in their businesses.
(c) Sue Painter
Four Great Ways To Keep Your Business On Track
October 29, 2009
Solo professionals need a strong vision of where they’re headed and an internal warning system that tells them when they are getting off their game. Here are four ways to make sure you are keeping on track.
1. Take a look at your to-do list. Put a star by anything that has been on that list for more than two weeks, and look at those starred items with an eagle eye. Chances are, you are procrastinating on those items. Take the starred items and list them out on a separate sheet of paper, and out beside each one note what the very next step is to move that item forward. Now, either schedule it in your calendar for THIS week, or hand it off to an assistant. Often, entrepreneurs procrastinate because they are unsure how to proceed. If that’s the issue, call a friend, talk to your Mastermind group, put it on your coaching agenda – take an action that will get you out of “not knowing how.”
If you get into the habit of regularly scanning your to-do list and noticing what hangs on there for several weeks or more, you’ll develop the strong habit of pushing yourself out of procrastination.
2. Get yourself a timer. As you sit down to work on the task at hand, set the timer for half an hour and pledge to work ONLY on that task, with no interruptions. I often tell my clients that the world actually can live without them for 30 minutes at a time! Don’t check e-mail, answer the phone, Tweet about what you are doing. Stay right on task until the timer goes off. Using a timer to create concentrated periods of work teaches you focus. Entrepreneurs are well-known for having “bright shiny object syndrome” (also called fuzzy focus.) The more you train yourself to focus for short bursts of time, the more productive you will be.
3. Remind yourself of your big vision at least once a day, and tell someone else at least once a week. It’s easy to get discouraged when obstacles get in the way, and discouragement can lead to self-doubt. Regularly reminding yourself that you are doing your business for an important reason, and that you have every capability to succeed is critical. And about once a week, it’s good to hear that from someone else who is a supporter. Creating the habit of keeping your vision in the top of your mind fosters a strong faith in yourself and what you’re doing. It drives self-doubt out the door.
4. Get yourself into a Mastermind group, meet regularly, and don’t skip. You didn’t decide to be in business for yourself to play small, did you? Developing a strong relationship with other solo business owners who can encourage and support you creates a habit of thinking big. And that’s what you want to be doing, thinking big, thinking out of the box, thinking in ways that most people don’t think. A good Mastermind group will both encourage and challenge you to get out of your comfort zone, keeping you from thinking too small about yourself and your business. It’s a safe place to test out your most outrageous business ideas and get help in shaping those into reality. Develop the habit of thinking big and out of the box! It will help ensure that your business flourishes.
Using these four systems fosters four good habits that keep you right on track. And in the end, those habits lead directly to a better bottom line.
(c) Sue Painter
How Putting Off Planning Costs You $$
October 25, 2009
Something I often encounter from budding entrepreneurs is strong resistance to spending the time and money to slow down, sit down, and seriously dig into their financial situation and future planning. Two people I worked with not long ago give me great examples of the high cost of putting off “taking a good look” at how things are and could be.
Entrepreneur Number One (we’ll call her Melinda) has been in business a few years now but finds herself unwilling to face the new skills she needs to learn in order to handle the big growth that could come her way. Eventually, the pain of not looking became stronger than the pain to look, so Melinda booked a day with me, fearful though she was. One of the costs of her waiting was that her energy, enthusiasm, and belief in her business success had flatlined. Melinda had taken on some debt to grow her business, but then because she felt guilty about the debt and didn’t really want to face it, she’d failed to keep up her bookkeeping and had no idea where she was in terms of sales, expenses, and accounts receivable. Her guilt drove her to describe herself as “in debt and making no money.” Yet she really didn’t know if that were true or not. As we talked about this, her emotions came to the surface and she realized that constantly telling herself that she was in debt and a failure had drained her faith in herself – a far greater cost than actual financial debt. Melinda needed to step up and act like the successful entrepreneur she is. In her case, that means getting a weekly cash flow statement from her bookkeeper, keeping her pulse on her true operating costs, and letting go of trying to do everything herself in a wrong-headed effort to save money. As we developed a comprehensive list of business systems that Melinda will put in place, she came up with an idea that not only would save her own staff production time, it could easily be a product that she could sell to others in her industry. This one idea will more than reimburse Melinda for the day she spent with me – and more to the point, with sales to others she can probably erase at least half of her debt. Melinda paid dearly for putting off this day – in energy, self-doubt, overhead that was increasing because it wasn’t being watched, production time for her staff, and a missed opportunity to sell to others.
Entrepreneur Number Two (we’ll call her Amy) mentioned to me that she had been wanting to go on a personal retreat to do business planning for a long time. “How long,” I wondered out loud to her. “Six months, at least,” she replied. Amy’s willingness to let everything else come first before she took personal time for herself and her business came close to costing her the chance to more than double her income. It’s not what you will SPEND on your personal retreat, it’s how much it costs you to remain in the same place and fail to take action for moving ahead. Amy tole me that she wants to hit six figures in a year. She has the capability to do that, but not if she doesn’t change her mindset and her business model quickly and drastically. For instance, one reason she has put off going for a 3 day personal retreat is that she doesn’t want to lose work that in essence pays her about $25 per hour. But during her “business makeover” retreat time, she can easily generate ideas and plans that pull her up to an average hourly fee of $100. Until she plans it, that higher hourly fee won’t happen, and neither will her six figure income. It COSTS MONEY to stay stuck. Doing what you have always been doing is only going to get you the very same result you are getting now. So, if you want a different result in your business, take the time for that personal retreat. Set your goals, make your plans, and get on down the road. Your bank account will thank you in the end!
(c) Sue Painter
3 Reasons Solopreneurs Must Have a Support Team Now!
September 20, 2009
My hat is off to my friend Milana Leshinsky for her comprehensive list of ALL the functions necessary in a successful Internet-based business. I have my own list of functions, but her list is more comprehensive and useful – and makes me realize why, even with staff, I feel stretched a little thin sometimes.
Look, here’s the thing. Whether you are Internet-based or not, if you play cheap and small you will not play at all. Maybe I’ll write a marketing rap song….. dum da dumdum da, dum da dumdum da….
If you play small, you won’t play at all….
If you wanna fall, just play small….
You won’t make the leap if you play too cheap…
You can’t do it all, it’ll keep you broke and small.
OK, so much for my rap ability. 
But here’s the deal – I talk to solopreneurs every single week who really need to FOCUS on their businesses. And instead, they believe in scarcity for themselves and they are determined to stay stuck in fuzzy focus. They are exhausted, overextended, and spend hours trying to carry out every single business function themselves. This takes too much time, asks for skills they don’t have, and gives them poorly executed pieces of the business. Fixing it later costs more money and time than doing it correctly and well the first time. So if you are a solopreneur get out of your fuzzy focus and manage your business functions. Manage, not execute!
So here’s the 3 reasons……
- You are a solopreneur, but that doesn’t mean you work alone. To make it, you’ll need to manage others.
- You need to focus consistently and constantly on the very top priorities for your business. Literally, you cannot do that if you insist on doing everything yourself.
- The “do it myself” mentality means that you are buying into scarcity thinking, and you cannot build a highly financially successful business when you are stuck in the belief that money is scarce.
Think about it…..if you are unwilling to invest in yourself and your business, why would a customer be willing to invest in you?
Want to know ALL the business functions you have to manage? It’s a pretty impressive list. Stay tuned for the next post, and you’ll get a list that combines my list and Milana’s – and my thanks to her, again, for sharing her comprehensive list.
(c) Sue Painter