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!
Do You Have The Courage Of An Entrepreneur?
March 4, 2010
Years ago, I heard the statement “the fastest way to personal growth is to open your own business.” Thirteen years after opening my first business, I can promise that statement is true. Like many people who are self-employed, I came out of the corporate world, where I was used to having support staff, creative people around me to bounce ideas off of, and the big bosses over me to handle the heat. I also had janitorial staff to clean the office and technical support staff to handle an errant computer. When I left all that to open my own business, I soon discovered that my support staff, creative people, big bosses, janitorial staff and technical staff was the person I saw when I stared into my mirror.
My business was brand new and very small, one room in an office building. I had to handle everything, whether I was “trained” to handle it or not. I had to discover what I did well, what I enjoyed the most, what I hated to do, when I could afford to hire help, and what help I needed to hire first. I had to stretch and grow quickly. Fortunately, because I had solid experience in growing a business, the Touch Therapy Center (a massage clinic I own to this day) built itself quickly. Within the year, I could hire help for cleaning and laundry service. Next came a bookkeeper. Now, 13 years later, I manage the business while other staff do most of the therapeutic massage, I’m in a medical office building with multiple treatment rooms, and I have a practice manager to handle the front desk, errands, and most adminstrative tasks.
What I want to point out is the rocky path of personal growth it takes to get from year one to year thirteen, turning a profit the whole way. Here are some of the things I had to learn or consider:
- Watch my operating costs and bottom line – I had to remain profitable even if I was spending more money on getting help with cleaning, laundry service, and so forth. Watching my weekly financial statements was critical, or I could have worked myself crazy and not made a dime.
- Know myself well enough to figure out what I liked to do and was good at versus what I am not so good at and am not fond of doing. One of these in the massage business is laundry. I didn’t enjoy dragging home loads of sheets and spending my evenings sorting, washing, drying, and folding them. And I wasn’t particularly great at it, either. On the other hand, I’m very practiced and skillful at attracting clients. I didn’t need or want to pay anyone to handle marketing for me, other than getting help with a design for my business card. It was easy for me and saved me money to develop my own brochures and press releases.
- I had to find out about my willingness to take risk and how to handle the good and bad that came from that risk. Should I move into larger office space and increase my rent? If so, how much more business would I need to generate to remain at my same level of profit? Could I get larger space, spend more money, and at the same time make even more money? Could I negotiate new lease terms that were favorable to me?
Before long, I had a very busy practice and was ready to hire other staff. Now, I could draw on my past experience as an Executive Director and use my past hiring skills. This time, if I made a bad decision, it was mind and mine alone to deal with, for better or for worse.
And, after about 8 years, I had to make a decision about opening my second business, The Confident Marketer. Other entrepreneurs had been asking me for serveral years how I’d built my business, how I knew what to do when, how I got profitable. I found that I absolutely loved helping other self-employed people be successful. So, about 5 years ago, The Confident Marketer was born. And with it, a whole new level of personal growth and challenge was necessary. It’s one reason I keep myself always working with top coaches who can help me face up to the personal growth and new business skills I need to keep my business successful and innovative.
The point to my story is that it takes courage to be an entrepreneur. You have to be willing to find out what you don’t know, get help with those things you don’t do well, and become expert at a few things that are yours and yours alone. You have to be willing to step up to intimately knowing and watching your financials (something I find many new entrepreneurs don’t want to do). You have to make decisions using both the facts and figures AND your gut feelings — your intuitive skills. And when there is a problem, you have to be willing to meet it and work it through, taking time to consider whether and how much it affects your customer service and your bottom line.
All this takes a great deal of courage and a willingness to grow both personally and professionally. A great business takes three things – a solid biz plan, a creative and well-thought-out marketing plan, and a willingness to do engage in personal growth. And behind those three vital things is courage. Step right up, and see how quickly your business becomes unstoppable!
(c) Sue Painter
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
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
Could Your Business Withstand A Disaster?
January 18, 2010
The plight of the Haitian people and their country is on everyone’s mind. The images we see on the news are horrific, pulling at my heart. Literally, Haiti will have to rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. Even with massive aid from many countries, getting the country set up and the people well will take much time.
Disaster visits without warning and quickly. On a personal level, it could be unexpected illness or the death of someone dear. For your business, it might be flood, fire, or an employee who causes harm. Think about the small business owners in Haiti right now. If their business is in rubble they have no way to make money even if they could offer what their customers need most. If their business was left standing there is no security to protect it. Already, many shops have been looted for their goods. Some shop owners have simply opened their doors and emptied out their shop, giving away everything they have.
Your business will withstand disaster only to the extent that you have systems in place that you can lean on when something goes wrong without warning. While this isn’t a comprehensive list, here are your main concerns.
- Are your business’s assets insured? What would happen if a disaster caused you to lose your office or the equipment you need to carry out your business? You can either buy insurance or self insure, meaning that you have set aside money that could immediately be used to replace your lost equipment and get your doors open again.
- Do you have back-up systems in place, and do you use them regularly? Could you recreate your financial records easily? Are your customer records secure and backed up either physically or electronically?
- Have you thought about how to handle the sudden loss of a key employee? Do you have a comprehensive list of what that person does and how she does it? Do you have a way to get additional help quickly if you lose someone to illness or accident? The more you have your work systems documented in an operations manual, the quicker you can get up and running, back to making income.
- Have you planned how to handle your business if you become unable to work for a while? Is there someone who knows enough about what you do to step up and fill in until you can work again?
If you are a business owner who truly depends on the money you make, it is vital to have answers to these questions. What I see for many solo business owners is that even the slightest disaster shuts them down completely. These owners ARE their business. When they can’t work, there is no income at all. Even an illness like the flu effectively shuts them down. They’ve never thought about alternatives. Often, the loss of momentum creates a negative spiral that the solo business owner never recovers from. Their business just slowly winnows away.
One of my own businesses suffered a mini-disaster over the past few months, in fact. In early December I had major surgery that I knew would keep me away from the massage clinic I own. Plans were fully in place for my staff to take over my own work with clients. My practice manager was prepped and ready to take care of management and administrative work that I normally handle. My start date to come back to the clinic was set. My clients were all informed and taken care of. Well, while I was still in the hospital, the practice manager’s father was found to be terminally ill. She left town and even now has not returned to work. Four weeks after my surgery, I unexpectedly had to have a second surgery due to complications from the first, making it impossible for me to meet my return to work date. One staff member left unexpectedly. Suddenly, I was down to one hard-working staff member and what I could administratively handle by phone. The systems I’ve put in place for that business saved my bacon, and allowed us to continue to serve clients, make money, and handle at least the bare minimum of administrative work. While I used to chaff over the time it took to put operations manuals and back up plans in place, now I am very grateful that I had them.
Disaster don’t have to be as large as the Haitian earthquake to effectively shut your business down. If you want to recover quickly and continue to make money, get your plans and systems in place and review them at least once a year. Your bank account will show the results and your business will suffer far less than those with no planning at all.
(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
How To Craft Sales Offers That Work Easily and Often
December 4, 2009
You might recall the old saying “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” I’m not sure that holds true for everything, but I do know that it’s the truth when it comes to crafting your sales offer. Many different studies using split testing have proven that changing the marketing message changes the number of sales. So what’s the secret to crafting sales offers that work easily and often?
The biggest mistake that I see business owners make is trying to sell on logic rather than emotion. Logic tells but emotion sells. When people say they buy on logic they are almost always mistaken. We buy based on our emotions, and then we proceed to justify what we’ve just bought based on logic.
I saw a great example of this just recently when I was in Mexico with some friends. They have long held negative feelings about the many timeshare offers proffered along Mexico’s beaches, stating over and over again that they would absolutely never do a timeshare deal. For at least 4 years now they have visited Mexico’s beautiful beaches and attended numerous timeshare presentations, taking the free gifts offered but never biting on the presentation. But this time around, they bought! I was shocked at first, but then I began to apply what I know about sales offers to what happened with them. Why they bought then became crystal clear.
The couple attended a presentation and were asked a question they’d never been asked before. “How do you feel about the hotel you normally stay in when you are here?” That simple question unleashed a torrent of frustrations and complaints from the couple, who had seen their favorite hotel at the beach change from a great resort to an ill-maintained and understaffed property. The crowning blow was the outdoor hot tub, which had been broken the entire two weeks of their stay.
What did the sales agent’s question do? It brought up the couple’s emotions. All he did was sit and listen – and then he led the couple to a five-star, brand-new timeshare unit. Talking to them about the property’s seven-year maintenance program while he showed them brand-new pools, and gorgeous two-bedroom units with big closets and full kitchens, he only had to structure a price and payment schedule that met their financial circumstances to do the deal.
What I noticed, though, was that once our friends came back to the hotel to join us, they didn’t quite know how to explain what they’d done. After all, they’d adamantly told us for many years that no one in their right mind would purchase a timeshare. So, they started telling us all the logical reasons they bought, which to me was comical. This couple did not buy based on logic. They bought on emotion and then tried to justify with logic what they had done. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with buying a timeshare (or anything else) if that’s what one wants and what one can afford. The point is, this was an emotional purchase – and almost all purchases are exactly that.
A second mistake I see business owners make is related to the first. I so often see business owners talk about what they have to offer from a logical standpoint, trying to be professional and without emotion. It just won’t work! You want to make an offer that does one of two things. It either helps the person get what he is passionate about, or it solves what the person is in pain over. Simply, your offer must do one or the other. The most compelling offers do both. An example? Think of a parent whose child is sick. The parent is passionate in their love for their child, and is in a great deal of emotional pain that the child is hurting. Whatever that parent is offered that will feed their passion and cure their pain will be a winning offer!
Often, a business owner can talk about passion or pain from their own perspective, telling their own story and how they came to be offering what they do. “I once had an Internet business that made no money at all, and I was determined to figure out what I was not doing right. I’ve studied, gone to workshops, and spent hours changing things around. I can quickly and easily tell you what you need to know so that your website makes money, too.” That’s an example of a story that evokes pain.
A third mistake I see business owners make is creating vastly different copy (or script) for their offers depending on how the offer is made. But if you stop to think about it, you want to make your offers fit what the prospect wants or needs (their passion or pain) more than you want to change it around based on how you make your offer. If your sales copy “bones” are good, they will work no matter if you are selling one-on-one, from the platform, in a teleclass or teleseminar, or from an Internet sales page. You might change the length of the offer, but the sales copy can remain much the same. If you make the mistake of writing completely different copy for each type of sell, you run the risk of making the simple hard and losing sight of what your prospect’s passion or pain is. It’s important for all your sales methods to showcase a consistent message.
Here’s an easy way to get started writing (or speaking) sales copy. I owe this to John Carlton, who taught me this in a sales copy workshop. Begin by filling in the blanks of this sentence:
I help _____________ to do _________________ even though _______________________.
For example, I help solo professionals build six-figure businesses, even though they have been in business a while and not been profitable yet. Or, I help bald men grow more hair, even if they have been bald for a long time. Or, I help overweight women get fit, even though they may never have exercised before in their lives. The beauty of this sentence is that you already highlight what a prospect may have in his head as an objection, and take it away. Additionally, you begin to evoke emotion! Emotion sells, remember?
Sometimes I work with clients who insist they cannot find any emotional triggers that apply to the product or service they are offering. This tells me one of three things:
1) You don’t have something that is saleable.
2) You are looking at what you have to offer from the wrong angle, and need to change your perspective completely to come at it from the prospect’s point of view.
3) You need help in understanding what you offer and the problem it solves, quickly!
If you are using the right emotional triggers for what you have to offer, sales will move right along. You can check this by thinking about why your most recent customers bought. If they’ve done testimonials for you, review them and make a list of the underlying emotions . Change your sales copy to reflect these emotions and test it out – you will probably increase your sales! Remember to talk about the problem you solve in terms of passion or pain relief, and you are on your way to frequent and easy sales.
(c) Sue Painter