Hello Troublemakers or those wanting to get a taste for making trouble and getting the most out of life. If you don’t ‘fit the mould’ or if you want to break out of your 9-5 job or if you already have a business and feel like it’s owning you, and not the other way around, then you have come to the right place because we are all about breaking out of your job, breaking out of your business and breaking into life.
These blogs are also captured as podcasts so please check those out and hear all of this stuff from my own mouth because it’s a lot more personal and I really want to get to know you, so show up there and show up at my free Troublemakers events and ask me questions, get the most out of it. I want to help you be successful, so get in touch and let’s do this.
Today I’m focusing on money because that’s one of the key ingredients of business and also one a lot of people get wrong.
A lot has to happen to make your business successful, but what I like to get everyone started on is that first business leap where we hatch an escape plan to break out of that job and do your first 100K.
I think the challenge with that kind of breakout really is mindset. Mindset is just so important because when you’re in a job, you have an external structure that is in control of you, and you pay for that, literally, the money that the business earns goes into providing that structure for you. Which is why so many people are excited about running their own business because when you aren’t paying most of your earning to the structure you have access to lots, lots more of it. So why would you work for a boss and get 20% of what you could be making on your own?
But that structure it’s also kind of addictive as well. You have a boss that’s standing over you telling you what to do or checking and signing off all your decisions so you don’t have to take responsibility for anything other than the bit that you do each day. So you put certainty externally and you get really used to that. So when it comes to you jumping out and launching your business for the first time, it can be incredibly scary, in some cases you can be paralysed, because there is no one telling you what to do, there is no system, there is no rulebook. You have to create the rules and most of the time, to get rapid success you have to break every rule that’s previously been put in front of you.
So that’s a challenge that startup business owners face, moving that certainty internally so you have that sense that you know what you doing and know what is driving you.
The minute we build that certainty from within, motivation will consistently start to build.
And that doesn’t mean that you don’t make mistakes and get things ‘wrong’. You will, but it’s about changing the meaning of what failure is, because in corporate, perfection is required and typically the system has already been created and the worker-bees follow that system to the letter because they need to be perfect. The more you can be a perfectionist, the more you skyrocket up the corporate ladder.
A small business is the opposite, so to move upward there we have to change the relationship that we have with perfectionism, because perfectionism is one of the biggest killers, especially for small business.
Becoming perfect in business will happen later, when you’re doing the $1 million to $10 million jump. Once you’ve got a system, once you understand your market, once you’ve got a team, that’s when perfectionism is required and often it’s your team that’s doing that part of the work more effectively than you.
When you’re doing that 0 to 100K jump, especially if you’ve been university educated and you’ve been in a job your entire life, you will be challenged to overcome that conditioned worker-bee mentality, you will need to adapt to not having anyone there to tell you what to do and overthrow that idea that if you don’t follow the rules then something bad will happen.
As entrepreneurs, we want to be disruptive and that’s why I created The Troublemakers, to adopt that troublemaker’s mindset to break our rules and challenge authority and challenge the way things have been done. When we do that we can think out of the box and we get really creative.
One of the biggest mindset challenges is how to develop that certainty from within and how to change our relationship to failure, because that’s what we have to do. We have to flip it and we have to stop being perfect. We have to be disruptive. We have to be creative. We have to break the rules and we have to innovate. So in the $0 to 100K jump, the last thing you want to do is be perfect.
And it’s hard to do. I see it all the time where I say to students of mine, ‘Go out and make a sales mess’, and they go, ‘Oh, we need to build this wonderful administration system and we need a perfect website, and perfect brochures.’ Yet they don’t even understand what the business is or who their customer is, and so what typically happens with a lot of people is that they go and invest enormous amounts of money. They go and spend $10 to $20K and in some cases, $50,000 on websites, brochures, all of the business cards, all of these flashy things, and they don’t even know what their product or service is. They don’t even know if their customer is even interested in this stuff.
So it’s time to ask. Are you spending big money on your business for:
- Office space
- Systems
- Databases
- Websites
- Administration
- Advertising
- Print Materials
- Accounting
Forget it. Put a line through all of it and ask; how can I get my business started without spending anything? Because when you have that mindset of creating an opportunity from scratch you start to create ways to get the same results without throwing money away, and that’s going to set you up and get your prepared so that when the money really starts coming in you are not wasting it on things that don’t count. You know where to look creatively and you’ve learned how to reinvest your money so your business grows and then jumps to the next level.
So I make a real point of teaching this. We start with a low budget and we kind of let go of our agenda. Sure, we’ve got a concept, but what we’re most interested in, especially in the early phases is, Who is our customer? What drives them? What keeps them up at night? What problems do they have and what have they done to resolve these problems?
So our job is to be able to solve these problems or help them solve those problems faster than they can do it themselves. So understanding them is so, so crucial.
So many business owners out there assume to know what the customers want without doing the research. That’s because what happens is you have already been on the journey and overcome the obstacles you are now selling. So it can be hard to sell to people who are not you right now. You use language that assumes people already know what you are talking about or you are talking about the problem in a way that suggests that someone is close to overcoming it themselves, which they might not be.
You have to go back to the beginning when you were a customer and look at the language you were using or identified with then. What about the solution was attractive? What would you have invested in at that point? That’s the stuff we’ve got to analyse.
So I believe that instead of spending time and money on all the business stuff, spend that time on working out your ideal customer. Who is that one customer that would refer? They might re-sign if its services, they might buy again if it’s products and refer their friends and family.
This is a person that we need to know. We need to understand them. We need to do a deep dive into their psychology, their values, and their belief systems. We might even provide our services for free to that one specific person so that we can do the research and get the deeper learnings that we need.
I think a lot of business owners are missing this and once we can get that information, then we can start to build the right ascension model in terms of products and services and start to use the language and put that on our website, on our brochures to be able to transform our logos in a way that is enticing, as well as looking at our positioning of products, promotion, price, and all of those different aspects.
So what I say to Troublemakers out there is let’s keep it simple. Instead of going out and investing all of this money, invest in yourself, in working on your mindset to become a leader. Invest in coaching, especially a coach that has been there and has done that, or is a specialist in your specific niche or area, that is so, so crucial.
Because other people out there are not interested in helping you get your business started, they will take your money, large amounts of it if they can on services and information that you are not ready for. And most of them will know that you will not see a return on that purchase, but they won’t tell you that. So it’s very important that you ask someone impartial for advice on what to spend money on because if you ask the web designer they are not going to say, just get a free template and do it yourself, they are going to tell you that websites are the most important thing ever and get you to go in for the highest package you can afford.
One of the things that I think is missing, especially in small business is support. It is very, very lonely and your friends and family are not going to understand what you are going through. So it’s really, really important if you’re a small business owner to have support and to have people that are outside of your environment, to hold you up to a higher level and keep you steady. Ideally you want to be looking to have people that are playing ten levels above you. That’s why I’ve always got coaches. Coaches that are ahead of the game, that are where I want to be, that are not emotionally connected and that help me rise up and pounce on opportunities and make decisions quickly.
The fact is you’re not going to be switched on 100 percent of the time. In fact, a lot of the time you’re going to be switched off. A lot of the time you’re going to be facing setbacks. You’re going to have failure in your face, and remember, we’re going to have the down periods, but the key is to be able to acknowledge those and to develop a strategy to get back into action as quickly as possible. So to do that you need to have a support system in place that understands you, and can support you from a mindset and strategy perspective to get you back into the game as fast as you possibly can.
If you look at a lot of medium-sized to large organization, they all have boards of advice and these boards sit above the business, outside of the business, and they give objective advice. Now, I’ve sat on so many different boards and in board meetings and basically it’s a coaching session. So when we take that working model and we look at small business and their workplace we can see they don’t have that support or that structure in place.
This is why I say, every small business needs to have a coach and you need to pay for that coaching service because it’s a commitment and an investment in moving your business forward.
A really great coach is going to act like a board, is going to give you objective advice, open up their network and resources and holds you to a business plan. It blows me away, so many businesses don’t have business plans, and if you don’t have a business plan, you’re planning to fail.
The number one thing I want to share with you guys is get the mindset right. Build that foundation and get support. Get a team around you that are going to support you and shield you from the challenges that are going to hold you back and make sure that you don’t waste your money on things that don’t work.
And when you start to get going you will notice all these things so now is a great time to do that audit on yourselves, before you’ve spent all that money, get your mindset right with the help of a coach and look at limiting decisions around money, limiting decisions around business, negative emotions, fear, guilt, hurt, sadness. Because these can be big, like the guilty receiving pattern, if you’ve got that going on, that will often mean that you’ll overcompensate when it comes to giving and you won’t be able to receive. And that shows up so much where people are working really, really hard and the revenue isn’t coming in because when they get it, they feel guilty, so they sabotage it. All of these things are often not taught in the business consulting world, yet they are so important.
A business will never outperform the psychology or skill level of the leaders.
So get out there and start building those relationships, spend the time and get to know your customers inside out. Make sure you have a vision for the long term, to be able to make a consistent and significant difference in the lives of your customers and eventually in the lives of your team that you start to build.
So catch you soon in the next disruption session everybody, take care.
Matt Catling