Fail Fast

One thing I learned last year in my million-dollar diamond mastermind program that was priceless was to learn how to fail fast. This idea requires some explaining and an open mind!

The crux of it is that many entrepreneurs procrastinate when it comes to implementing changes in their businesses because they are afraid to fail or afraid of what people will think.

A great example in my own business occurred while I was in the program last year. It took me a while to get around to writing my “Living Fearlessly” binder, which was my first attempt at productizing what I learned in my neuroscience program about how our brains process fear. I found my emotions around “putting myself out there” quite interesting: it was scary to think I might be rejected and the product might not sell. So I would delay finishing the product.

It’s no coincidence that most people stay stuck in jobs because they are too afraid to make the entrepreneurial leap. It’s no coincidence that many entrepreneurs don’t get away from hours for dollars to packaged, leveraged systems because it requires putting yourself out there in a new way. It’s no coincidence that most entrepreneurs stay stuck at a relatively low revenue level because they don’t learn how to systematize their business, which requires giving up some control, which is scary.

So how do you fail fast?

1. Know it’s OK to fail in the first place.

In the last 18 months, I’ve created nearly a dozen products. Two have been real winners, one has been a real flop, and a few are just too much trouble to market. Before I did them, I had no idea what would work, what would sell, and what would flop. I had to fail fast on a few to find the nuggets of gold in the winners.

2. Don’t wait until it’s perfect.

I am sure that there are typos in every one of my products and on my web pages too. I am also sure that typos will turn some people off. But as long as they don’t impact my client’s results or get me in trouble with the government, I’m going to continue delivering imperfect products with typos. Being perfect can delay entry into the marketplace and increase the price I have to charge my clients.

3. Give yourself permission to fail.

So what if no one bought your last idea, and you thought it was going to be bigger than pet rocks. It’s not the end of the world. Your family still loves you. In a month, your clients won’t remember. Your business will go on. We tend to catastrophize what will happen, but it hardly ever comes true.

4. Take massive action.

Success is a numbers game. The more things you try, the more successes you will have. It’s as simple as that. Get out there, and get out there fast. When you fail, get out there again, fast, with something else. There’s no time for wallowing in past failures when you are an entrepreneur! You have to keep moving.

Failing fast is one of the best lessons I learned last year. So if you’ve been waiting to try something, stick your foot out, lean forward, and get in motion.

Show Me the Margins

Many entrepreneurs I’m currently working with are anxious to hit the golden $100,000 mark this year.  Others are interested in growing their revenues steadily and incrementally.   Still others are focused on lowering costs, raising profits from that side of the equation.

All of these approaches are well and good to help you keep more of what you make, but there are far more options to grow your take-home dollars besides raising revenue and lowering costs.

Here are six more ways to get more profit out of your business.

1. Change your revenue mix.

If you offer more than one service, chances are one service or product is more profitable than another one that you offer.  If possible, look at ways you can increase sales of the more profitable service while reducing sales on the less profitable services.  When you do, you’ll instantly have more take home money than you do now.

2. Change your price.

Interestingly, increasing your price doesn’t always generate more revenue.

Rather than increasing your price, you might be able to actually lower your price, increase your volume, and make more overall revenue.  This technique is more effective for product sales than service sales, but you never know until you try it.  Experiment with this on a test basis to see whether lowering your price generates more profits for you.

If you’re working too hard with long hours, your price may be too low.  Raise your price to adjust demand, and you’ll be able to stop working so hard but still have just as much revenue coming in.

3. Change your customers.

If you have lots of different customers from varying industries and sizes of businesses, it might be fun for you but also exhausting.  The more different your customers are, the harder it will be for you to get up to speed to serve them well.

To increase your profits, attract a very similar customer over and over again.  For example, all lawyers or all hypnotists.  You’ll be better able to serve them because you already know their business and industry and the common problems they all have.  You’ll also become an expert and it will be easier to market to your new niche.

4. Change your volume.

If you’re constantly struggling to cover your overhead or reach your revenue goals, you might have a volume problem.  This means you’ll need to market more to get more customers or sell to existing customers and increase your revenue per client.

5. Change your measures.

Be sure your accounting system is delivering the type of reports you need in order to track your revenues, your costs, and your margins for each service, each product, and even each customer.  That’s the only way you’ll have the detailed information you need to act in a fiscally responsible way and fine-tune your business profits.

6. Change your mind.

If you haven’t taken a look at where you are now and where you want to be so that you can have a plan to bridge the gap, then you might be in denial about your business.  Taking action will get you out of “dream” mode where you might be wishing your take home pay was higher and into reality mode where you can make it happen.  Take action by planning and executing your plan, one change at a time.

Those six ideas will “show you the margins” and help you find some more summer income in your business.

The Missing Ingredient in Your Marketing That Will Make All the Difference

In school, during both my undergraduate courses and my MBA classes, I took Marketing 101, or something close to that. I learned the four P’s: product, price, place, and promotion. I aced the class.

When I started my first business at age 13, I ran an ad and was able to get clients. It was no big deal.  When I wanted to earn some part-time money during college doing bookkeeping (before I passed my CPA exam), I answered an ad and found clients. It was no big deal. When I started a part-time photography studio in the 1980s, I sent out press releases and direct mail and got clients. It was no big deal. I was doing all of this on the side while I had full time jobs paying the rent and everything else.

But when I got laid off in the 1990s and needed clients in order to go out on my own and pay my own rent, something in me snapped. I was scared to death. I suddenly had no idea how to get started getting clients. I could have run an ad, but I didn’t. I could have sent out direct mail, but I didn’t.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know the nuts and bolts of marketing. I did.

It was that there was an ingredient to marketing that was missing for me. The problem with marketing is that you can take all of the Marketing 101 classes in the world, but still be lousy at marketing and not have enough clients as a result.

The problem is that there is an ingredient missing they don’t teach you in school, and that’s confidence.

What made marketing harder in the 1990s for me were three things:

1. It was important. My business now had to pay the rent. I had to live off of my own self-employment for the first time in my life. This is pretty scary to most people.
2. I was selling myself. I was no longer selling bookkeeping, photography, or horseback riding lessons. It was personal. When they rejected my business, they rejected me.
3. I had the know-how, but I didn’t have the mindset. I lacked the level of confidence I needed.

As an entrepreneur, here’s where you need to be completely honest with yourself. Ask yourself how much of your marketing challenges are:

1. From lack of hard skills. Do you have no idea where to begin, really? You don’t know what networking is, you don’t know how to hire a webmaster, and you don’t know how to get your business cards done? This requires a Marketing 101 class.
2. From lack of implementation. Do you know you need to go to networking meetings but you don’t? Do you know you need to send out direct mail, but don’t? Do you know you need a web site, but haven’t updated it? This requires a Marketing and Mindset 101 course. You need a mindset shift along with what to do. You need a boost in confidence and a support system that will help you change your reluctance to market.

Here’s a great example of what you need in #2: A regular marketing course will give advice such as “You need to have a follow-up system.” A marketing course with mindset coaching will give advice like, “You might feel like you are bugging them if you follow up. Here’s how to get around that.”

It’s not easy to develop the confidence to sell yourself. It’s tough. Even after 16 years of self-employment for me, rejection hurts. Losing the prospect is painful. Criticism aches. Returns are bummers. Even unsubscribes sting. But life and business go on, and you learn to deal with it in a constructive and businesslike manner. Most importantly, you can’t let it throw off your rhythm.  You have to implement; you have to execute.

You’re unlikely to get rich in this economy with just the hard skills of marketing. Having the right marketing mindset, with confidence, is the missing ingredient that will make you incredibly wealthy.

Meet a Millionaire Team Player

I don’t know about you, but I listen closely when Kiyla Fenell has something to say. She’s already had not one, not two, but THREE 7-figure businesses in the medical field (plus a few 6-figures businesses), and she’s quite young (she has a 4-year-old daughter). She’s a million-dollar business-making machine, and she knows she can replicate her success over and over again any time she wants to.

“I’m not nervous at starting a business. I know I can follow the plan,” says Kiyla.

Kiyla has a healthy respect for plans and systems. She was exposed to entrepreneurship as a teen working in her father’s franchises. One was a Subway, and Kiyla can still recount how many ounces of lettuce and onion to put on each sandwich and how to fold the napkins around the sandwich.

She took what she learned about systems and designed them in her own businesses. She wrote a script for a sales call in one business. “I knew I would sell one of four.” Much of business, and especially sales “is a numbers game,” says Kiyla. “I knew how many leads I needed to get every day to make my revenue goals. Then you just execute.”

It wasn’t always easy or comfortable. Kiyla remembers women screaming at her to “Get a real job” when she went door to door for one business.

But that is one of Kiyla’s biggest success tips. “I made good business decisions even when I didn’t want to.” If an employee is dragging the entire team down and the holidays are approaching, Kiyla didn’t wait until after the holidays. Once she discovered what was best for the business, she did it immediately. She didn’t worry about what other people would think.

“If I had no outside factors applied to the decision, what decision would I make,” Kiyla explained. “You have to stop traveling down the wrong road and correct it quickly. The net effect is you move ahead rapidly.”

Kiyla was making cold calls – those things we dread as adults – when she was 16. Her bed was her desk. She would call big companies to ask if she could deliver Subway sandwiches to them for lunch. At the ripe old age of 20, she was demonstrating vacuum cleaners door to door. But she admits she hated selling M&M boxes in middle school.

When Kiyla was very young, an elderly man, Paul McIntyre, sat her down and said, “I’m going to teach you how to build an empire.” Kiyla had the good sense to listen to Mr. McIntyre as well as several other “amazing mentors.” As a teen, she just knew that she “was going to do something big with my life,” recounts Kiyla.

Here are a few other tidbits of success for those of you who strive to accomplish 6- and 7-figure success in your business:

1. Develop good discipline, good habits, and stick with your values.
2. Treat staff and patients (customers) fairly and honestly.
3. Don’t feel like you have to win at anyone else’s expense.
4. Reward those who help you.
5. Work in your strong areas, not your weak areas. Study up in your weak areas. By the time you become a millionaire, you won’t have any weak areas.
6. Live a little below your means while you are building your business.
7. Go for long-term success and make decisions that support that. Do not go for flash success.
8. Help your staff be successful.
9. Play the same game over and over again to be successful – with systems, habits, and discipline.
10. Develop immunity to fads, gimmicks, and impulse purchases.

Kiyla’s current project is helping people streamline their staffing and hire their dream team in 3 days. And, of course, she has a system for that.

Check her and her system out here, and know that since Kiyla and I were in the same Mastermind group last year, that I have an affiliate relationship with her. (Since I am a CPA, that entitles you to give me a call and consult with me should you want further advice about purchasing any of her products.) http://bit.ly/kiyla

7 Tips to Boost Your Business Revenue in 2011

If you’re ready to have your best year ever no matter what (as my coach Lisa Nichols say), then your first step is to plan to do something different. Here are 7 things to consider doing differently in 2011 that will help take you to the next level:

1. Move from reactive to proactive. Work on fine-tuning your marketing plan so that your results improve at each step of the way: Getting people in the door or in your funnel, qualifying leads, the selling process, improving the number of people who buy from you, and customer retention. If you don’t have a plan, then the first place to start is to get one, even if it’s not perfect or not complete. You can always improve, and my coach Ali Brown says when you take the first step, even if it’s a baby one, you’ve made a tremendous amount of progress toward your goal rather than if you just stood still in inertia.
2. Look at one part of your marketing and make a small improvement. Readers tell me they like my newsletter, and I plan to make some improvements to the format over the next few weeks. That’s one example of a really small change that I can make in my marketing that will improve it for my readers.
3. Systematize something that’s worked in the past and repeat it. No need to reinvent the wheel if you’ve found the magic formula. Do the magic formula over and over again, perhaps more often, and you’ll increase your results. For example, if you’re good at convincing people to buy from you once you have them on the phone, find out how to get more qualified prospects on the phone with you.
4. Listen to your clients and roll out a new service offering that they are asking for. A huge part of the battle for getting new clients is getting people to trust you. Why not leverage the people who already trust you – your current clients – and serve them in a new way. Increasing your revenue per client is a great way to help your clients even more and to boost you bottom line at the same time.
5. Hone your skill. We spend a lot of time working on our core competency – the service we deliver to clients – and getting better at it. Why not get better at a marketing skill? This could include working on your public speaking skills, writing skills, selling skills, negotiation skills, and a host of other skills that will help you become more effective at representing yourself to potential prospects. Sometimes we forget marketing is a skill we can learn just like math – especially those of us who are reluctant marketers.
6. Measure. How do you know something is working unless you measure it? Add procedures to measure your marketing effectiveness at each step in the process; then you can begin to see where you need improvements. These include numbers such as conversion ratios, sales per client, and return on marketing campaign. When you do this you’ll naturally be able to improve your return on investment for your marketing dollars.
7. Celebrate. Stop for a second when you reach a goal and celebrate all the hard work you did that paid off and got you there. Give yourself a reward, practice gratitude for what you received, and then set your next goal.

Which one of these tips speaks to you the most? Mark your calendar right now to take one step toward working this tip into your business so you can envision a brighter 2011.