Category Archives: Basics

The High Cost of Free

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Once upon a time, there was a business owner (let’s call him Allen).  Now Allen  was sure that he was a smart operator.  He watched his costs very closely.  He never spent a penny if he could find a way to get the product or service for free.

He justified this by citing the poor economy and the fierceness of the competition.  He actually got excited when he was able to find another free service.

Allen only went to networking events that were free (or he went as someone else’s guest when they paid for it.)  He educated himself by taking advantage of the no-cost introductory seminars, or the free webinars and teleseminars.  He subscribed to newsletters (as long as they were free).

He would tag along when several colleagues were going out to lunch with a visiting expert and spend the time getting advice for his business.  If the expert offered a complimentary consultation, he jumped on it.  Of course, he never actually bought the expert’s products or services.  He didn’t think he needed to.  After all, he was a smart guy and he could figure out the rest of it on his own.  Besides, he really couldn’t afford to pay simply for information.

Allen would also surf the internet, read the free articles, and glean what advice he could from them.  He would read lots of different advice and piece them together to get more information than the authors intended to share.

Of course, lots of time the advice was contradictory.  And other times it didn’t apply to his business.  And still more times he was stymied because he knew what to do, but he couldn’t find out how to do it.

Over time, he grew more and more frustrated because his business was trending downward.  He kept trying to apply what he could learn from the internet, but it didn’t seem to help much.  And he discovered that he was growing resentful of his competition who seemed to be doing much better than he was.

Finally, he went to a free speech given at a local Chamber of Commerce meeting.  There, the speaker talked about the high cost of “free”.  He shared how the time and effort that was required to discover what worked and what didn’t for a particular business (usually by trial and error) cost more in time, wasted effort, frustration, and lost sales than if the owner had simply paid for knowledge and advice.

The speaker went on to give contrasting examples.  One example was as if the speaker had been shadowing Allen for two years and taking notes.  The contrasting example was Annie A. who realized that she could spend years trying to learn what she needed to know on her own, or she could pay people with expertise and have them share their own hard-earned wisdom (learned over the years from mistakes and effort) and short-cut the process.

Allen was astounded to learn that while Annie had been in business for herself the same amount of time as Allen, she was ten times more successful (and profitable.)

Allen had an epiphany during that talk.  As he listened, he quit listening for the “tidbits” and “nuggets” that he could glean from it.  He realized the speaker wasn’t going to give away all the secrets to business success in a 45 minute talk.  (And he thought, “how could he?  How do you distill a lifetime of learning and experience into 5 easy-to-implement steps that anyone can do?”)  And Allen realized that he had been going about it all wrong.

Allen had been spending his business life loading up on the appetizers and neglecting the main course.  No wonder his business was dying of malnutrition.

At that moment, Allen resolved to start being more like Annie and find experts who could help him turn his business around.  He would still take advantage of their free session… but this time he would use it to make sure the expert was a good fit for him to work with… instead of pumping for all he could get without paying.

And, true to his new understanding, Allen did just that.  And his results?  Well, they started to look more like Annie’s results.  But that’s a story for another day.
 
Have you experienced the High Cost of Free, yet?  When you are ready for someone to advise you on the next steps for YOUR business – whether in the area of marketing, operations, staff management, personal roadblocks to success, or overall business strategy – contact me.  We can set up a free strategy session and determine what’s best for you.

Resistance is Futile…NOT!

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Recently, I have noticed a lot of people with a lot of resistance… not resistance to me but resistance to their own goals.


Now, the truth is, most people don’t consciously recognize their own resistance. As a result, they don’t acknowledge that they have it. Thus, it becomes a silent saboteur to their success.


There is a lot we could say about resistance, but I am most interested in helping you recognize when you have it and then how to deal with it.


The first thing to realize is that resistance is not, in and of itself, bad. It is usually a part of the non-conscious mind doing its best to ensure your survival.


That is not to say that it is right… just that it thinks it is right.


I have a particular one come up periodically — whenever I am about to tell one of my goals or dreams to someone else. It is very hard for me to do because that part of my brain warns me that it is an unsafe practice. This is because in my childhood and adolescence any articulation of dreams or goals was either ridiculed as impractical or the enthusiasms of a fool. It didn’t take long for my brain to learn that sharing dreams and goals was not in my best interest.


If I was still in the same environment, it would be right. But I am not. And so, what was once a useful survival skill (survival as in coping successfully with the environment) now is a misguided effort that blocks achieving those goals.


Because I am aware of this issue, I can deal with it when it surfaces and make a rational choice about whether or not it is useful in the specific situation.


So, how do you recognize if you have your own internal resistance to one of your goals?


The fastest way to recognize internal resistance (which leads to self-sabotaging behavior if ignored) is to listen for the “yeah, buts”. What are “yeah, buts”? When you say, “I intend to ____” do you hear a little voice in your head that says, “Yeah, but….” and then has a reason why you shouldn’t do [whatever it was you intended to do]?


Sometimes it isn’t so much the actual words, but is a feeling… maybe in your gut… maybe somewhere else. Maybe a headache or a “pain in the neck” or a “pain in the a..”.


In my own example above, it would be a serious feeling of vulnerability… like I was facing someone with a knife pointed at me as I prepared to tell them my intended goal. There is no mistaking that my “survival system” is feeling threatened.
(By the way, for some other situations, I hear a voice (my parents’ voice or my own?) in my head actually saying words… sometimes they may even start out saying, “yeah, but…”.)


Next time, I want to talk about how to deal with that internal resistance once you have identified it. In the meantime, practice looking for it, recognizing it, and then identifying how it manifests in your system. For “bonus points”, identify where it has been holding you back in your life.


Your turn. How does internal resistance feel to you? Use the comments and share your story with us.

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What Does Success Mean to You?

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Today’s post comes courtesy of a guest blogger, Susan Henderson (www.susanhenderson.com). I have been following Susan’s newsletter “The Successful Dilettante” for a couple of years. If you like this post, I would encourage you to check out Susan’s website and sign up for her newsletter.

Is it Time to Re-examine Your Concept of Success?

In writing or speaking about success so many self help experts and gurus will tell you that if you just do exactly what successful people are doing then you will also have success.

As if it is a given that borrowing someone else’s concept of success is the best way for you to attain success.

In fact, I am a long time subscriber to an e-newsletter from a success coach I greatly admire and as I was preparing my notes and thoughts to write this article his latest issue dropped into my inbox and, lo and behold, his main article was based on this premise of success: “Success is the predictable result of doing the things that others have done to create or achieve the results we want in our lives.” It’s his belief that success is based on learnable skills and tasks. And he goes on to say that “as long as we live in a predictable, orderly universe, success is basically an engineering problem.” I mean no disrespect to this gentleman and although there were many points in this article that I agree with, this wasn’t one of them. Holy Moly – What a left-brained concept!

While I agree that practice makes perfect, I don’t agree that one size fits all when it comes to defining or even achieving success. Many people think success is a goal to be achieved somewhere out there in the future and is usually attached to fame and/or fortune. I believe success is an ongoing process and is congruent with doing what you love. Dare I say it – success could actually be considered an emotion we would all like to feel. It is personal and only you can define what success means to you.

So how do you define success for yourself? The best method I’ve learned came from my beloved mentor coach (from afar), the late, great Thomas Leonard. Several years ago, I attended a teleseminar where he shared a process in defining what is most important to you.

The first step is to choose an area of your life where you most want to define success and complete this sentence:
I know how successful I am by how [fill in the blank here].

The wording is important because it not only clarifies how you define success but, more importantly, how you know you are being successful at any given time. It’s a place to check in. You will want to tinker with your success definitions until they evoke a strong feeling response; and, possibly a tingle or shiver through your body.

Come up with at least three definitions, but ideally you will create a success statement for each of the areas of your life that matter to you. Here are some examples from my own life from what I value most:

Creativity: I know how successful I am by how delighted I feel when I am using my creativity.

Independence: I know how successful I am when I wake up and know that the pace and place of my day are totally determined by me.

Nature: I know how successful I am by how my connection with nature nurtures me.

I think you will be surprised by how quickly success begets success when you are armed with your own clear concepts of what it looks like and feels like for you.

With loving kindness,

Susan

So, how do you define success?  Use the Comments box below and share your story.

A Simple Way to Grow Your Busines

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Want a simple way to grow your business? You do? Are you sure? You are?

Okay. If you want to grow your business, then grow personally.

I know. You were hoping for a gimmick. A quick fix that would skyrocket your business and put you on top with no pain, little effort, and no thinking required on your part.

Me too. The trouble is, those things don’t really work –sustainably– in the real world. They are great for scams and for Ponzi schemes. (And haven’t we had enough of those already?)

This idea of growing personally in order to grow your business is deceptively simple. Like an iceberg, there is a lot more here than meets the eye. In fact, there is so much here, we couldn’t begin to cover it all in one newsletter article. (But, no, that isn’t a threat that we will devote endless issues to it, either. :-) )

One of my mentors (Adam Urbansky) says, “You can only grow your business as fast as you can grow personally.”

And I can attest that this is true. My own business is completely intertwined with my personal growth. I have never grown so much as since I went into business for myself. And it hasn’t stopped. Also, I see it all the time in other people’s businesses. I have watched businesses fail because the owners refused to grow in their personal lives. My own brother’s forays into business are case studies in it.

I suspect that this is a significant component behind the oft-quoted statistics of the high failure rate of small businesses.

Business and the economic climate is changing around us all the time… ever faster and faster. As a result, what used to work in business, isn’t as effective as it once was. In order just to stay in place, we have to change and grow… and then grow some more.

I can state with certainty that your business volume, your customer mix, and your profit margins are not the same as they were only a year or two ago. Maybe they went up. Maybe they went down (the predominant experience for most businesses.) Either way, have you kept doing the same things you did two or three years ago or have you changed them? How’s that working for you?

And what if we want to get ahead… if we want to grow our business? Then we need to grow even more.

For most of us, this is not something we want to hear. We are wired to be comfortable and to stay in that comfort zone. Growth, especially personal growth, is uncomfortable. It is challenging.

The trouble is, change is not optional. Our business is going to grow or decline whether we want it to or not. And both of those directions create challenges. And neither is in our comfort zone.

Sure, there are a few adrenaline junkies who seek out challenge… they are noteworthy because they are the exception. The rest of us are couch potatoes who want to simply watch our favorite shows and not be bothered. And please keep things just the same.

When I was a project manager, I would remind team members and customers of a saying that I borrowed from my fiction-writing days –one of the formulas for plot. That saying? “Every solution carries the seeds of new problems.”

And it is true in life just as it is for good fiction (because fiction is a mirror of life.) I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear that saying I always get a picture of weeds shooting up in the lawn of life. That’s how many of us think of problems… weeds to be dealt with.

How are you going to address those problems? Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Now, you may not have created the problem, but it exists in your business. Further, your business didn’t have a process and thinking in place to handle it. (How did I know? If you had, you wouldn’t have the problem in your business. It would have been dealt with when the problem first sprouted.)

So, how do we solve these problems? By growing.

Since I started the lawn and weed metaphor, allow me to continue it. Did you know that a healthy lawn that is being tended (mowed, proper water, good soil) will overcome weeds on it’s own? That’s right, no need for weedkiller, pulling weeds, or other drastic measures. It does this because the grass grows… and as it grows, it crowds out the weeds.

Just like the grass, as you tend yourself and your own personal growth, you will find that you naturally overcome the weeds (problems). And you know what? Just like we are discovering about organic gardens, this ongoing personal growth is the BEST thing you can do for your business, because it is sustainable… year after year.

The gains you achieve from your personal growth continue to be applied to your business, even as the economy changes. And, unlike the gimmicks, they continue to work, even if you change your business, even if the economy goes up or down, even if your competitor moves in next door to you (either physically or virtually.)

Got a good growth story?  Or maybe you are looking for “weed-killer”?  Share with us in the comments.

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Turn Your Mission Into a Business

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I have a workshop called Turn Your Mission Into a Business. The end result is the discovery of a business that you can do… doing things you love to do… in a way that makes money for you. (If this sounds like something you might be interested in, pop on over to the website.)  In the course of working with a participant, I said some things that I think you might find useful, as well.

Remember to keep the end in mind… a business that you love, that you love to do, and that will make you money (at a level that you find acceptable… whatever your definition of that is — which may change over time.) If you aren’t already loving what you do to make money (at least 70 percent of the time… higher is better), then you aren’t there, yet.

One of the reasons for finding/describing your business in terms of how it relates to your mission, is that your mission energizes you. There are plenty of things in a job and in business that drain you and drag at you. When your job or business is generally in alignment with your mission, the energy can transfer from the one and provide the impetus to help you get through the parts that drain and drag.

Are there parts of a business (or even a job, for that matter) that you won’t enjoy? Yes, certainly. Almost all small, startup business owners have to do almost everything related to the business, at the first. And, down the road, the goal is to be able to farm out all the parts that you don’t want to do, keeping the fun parts for yourself. Part of this process (of finding a business that aligns with your mission) is to help you figure out in advance what the fun parts are so you aren’t outsourcing 90 percent of the business… because some of the leftover will be administrative stuff, not the fun stuff. (And if you find the administrative stuff fun, then open a business just doing administrative stuff.)

Another side benefit of turning your mission into a business is that your mission statement is already written (almost). Since the business will be a subset of your personal mission (life purpose, aim in life, calling, whatever words you choose to call it), the business mission and statement will be a subset, as well. (Check out the article Do You Have a Mission Statement? on one of my websites for more about mission statements and what they can do for your business.)

Have you found your mission? Is your business a subset of your mission? Tell us about it (use the comments box.)

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