Any time you look at one of your idols:
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- Tony Robbins
- Warren Buffet
- Elon Musk
- Eric Thomas
- Mark Cuban
- Tai Lopez, etc
…you can easily see the stoic, mature business minds they’ve acquired after years of failure.
You can just feel it. You can see it in their eyes.
It’s like watching the ending scene of a war movie when the warrior is standing there victorious after the most excruciating battle of their existence.
Why?
There are certain lessons a book can’t teach you, lessons you don’t learn in college and lessons you don’t gain my attending a webinar or downloading a course.
I’ve written thousands of pieces of content at this point in my career. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’ve read several pieces of my content before.
Out of all of those pieces, however, this one is likely the most important piece.
These are lessons that I’ve learned only through failure and experience. Let me know if you’ve learned some of the same lessons or if you can relate.
1) Use Thresholds to Make Better Decisions
As many of you know, one of the statements I hate the most in entrepreneurship is “if this works, we’d be willing to spend a lot more on this.”
It’s such an immature and naive statement that all of us have let slip out of our mouth at some point.
Obviously if something works, you’re likely to dump more resources into what is working. But, if it were that easy, EVERYONE would do it.
What I encourage you to do in lieu of making those assumptions/decisions, is to set thresholds on all of your marketing and business efforts. Contingencies that allow you to make calculated decisions when X happens.
I thrive on thresholds because it sets clear expectations in my own head and the heads of those associated with any given project or business endeavor. Right? And to take it further, I usually put ranges on those thresholds for conservative and aggressive.
For example: In an advertising campaign I may say something like “once we conservatively achieve a 2.5% CTR and a 1.25% conversion rate, we will do X. But if we aggressively hit a 5% CTR and a 3% conversion rate, we will do Y.” It’s simple and it’s smart.
I do the same thing with hiring, with business development, networking, strategic planning, and all elements of marketing [content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, etc.] I urge you to adopt this approach to decision making.
2) Don’t Get Busy, Focus on What’s Important
I am stunned with the amount of entrepreneurs and SMB owners who have the mental complex of “we just have so much going on right now.”
…at all times.
Yet, they aren’t hitting the goals they want to be hitting.
We get it. You run a business.
You’re busy—but logic will show you that on one hand you are SUPER busy (marketing, advertising, networking, hiring, etc.) and on the other hand, you aren’t hitting your goals and objectives.
So, either you suck at the things you are doing, or you are filling your schedule with things that don’t matter.
Recently, I told The Modern Marketer community that “things can feel important without actually being important.” When you are sitting down for that meeting, it feels really important. In hindsight, it was probably the biggest waste of your time that day.
That’s why I can help a client launch a new brand and within 90-120 days, they are outselling brands in the same niche who have been around for years. Because in 120 days, we focused on what was important for the bottom line and growth of the business.
And the funny thing about focusing on what’s important, is that all of a sudden it gives you the breathing room to test things out and focus on other initiatives as well. WHOA! What a concept!
Challange: I encourage you to cut 5 things out of your schedule this week and fill them with 1 thing that is very important. Watch what happens.
3) Get desperate and stay desperate in marketing and business. ‘Good enough isn’t the vision.’
We just aren’t DESPERATE enough for the things we think and say we want in life and business.
There are two principles that I follow to keep my mind and heart desperate in business:
1) You are already in pain so you might as well gain something from it. A bad business move, an unsuccessful campaign, an unfortunate life situation, and so on. Those are all painful things. Getting stagnant or not pursuing something greater than your current situation, however, is giving into your pain instead of gaining something from it.
2) If you are already here, you can always go farther. This is something that I tell people who think they have made it already and start to get comfortable. Like really? You are 25-40 years old and have a decently successful business and you think that was it? That’s the difference between a successful business owner and Bill Gates. He didn’t stop at 1 million (or whatever you think your number is.) He didn’t stop at 5 employees and hitting cashflow positive. He knew if he was already where he was, he could go farther.
So, get desperate.
Realize that even your vision is greater than you. Don’t get selfish about your vision. If your vision only includes you getting a Ferrari, Jet Skis and 2 homes, then that’s not truly a vision. That’s a tunnel that leads to an unfulfilled life.
Business isn’t so we can hit numbers and go home. It’s so we can impact the lives of others and leave a legacy of change, growth, peace and hope.
Get DESPERATE.
4) Treat Business Like a Marriage. This is a covenant there is no Plan B.
The longer I simultaneously grow a business while being married, the more I apply the laws of marriage to my business. From communication, to building each other up, to our covenant, to the different seasons of the relationship and beyond.
99.9% of it applies to business as a principle.
Everywhere you see businesses declining, failing, owners and execs falling out of love with the business, trying to start new things, waiting on that next strategy to save their business and all other attributes of the average SMB owner.
But it happens a lot in business and marketing.
This is a covenant. There is no plan B. You can’t hit a certain revenue mark and then hide behind your brand.
You can’t have a few failed marketing campaigns and quit. You can’t keep to yourself and not trust others to do their job correctly. There are so many analogies I could make between a marriage and a business.
Your business is your second spouse (well, first spouse for those of you who aren’t married yet) and you need relentlessly pursuit what’s best for the relationship between you and your business.
Always evaluating.
Always refining.
Always getting better.
5) Act Like a Human. Nothing is more nurturing than a conversation.
I have so many relationships that could have easily been missed if I would have just fired off an email, sent a social message, or ignored someone all together. They are good relationships though because I picked up that phone, or I went out for that coffee.
They are good relationships because there is nothing more nurturing than a conversation.
Be tactical with with your relationships:
- If you have an ecommerce shop, call 5 customers a day for the next week and just watch what happens after just one week.
- If you are a technology company, get your team together and call the last 50-100 people that downloaded your app and thank them and tell them about new things you are coming out with.
- If you are a manufacturer, invite your customers/distributors to a “roundtable” or “mastermind” where you show the process of what is happening and get their input first hand of how to make the product/process/experience better.
- If you are a service based business, pick one customer per quarter and give them a free FULL service. For example, if you sell home decor, pick one customer per month and re-do their entire living room with 10 of your products. Yea, it’s an investment, but document it and watch what happens.
You could be creating relationships, collecting reviews, getting new product/service ideas, refining your business, getting referrals, and so much more.
If you just had a conversation.
Stop telling Hubspot, Marketo, Infusionsoft, Salesforce or whatever CRM that you use how to interact and automate your relationships. There is a time and place for everything, and sometimes you have to initiate the nurturing without software.
As Richard Branson Says, “Screw business as usual.”
I encourage you to take calculated risks. Nothing great comes from staying comfortable.
Take a chance on that new hire. Take a chance that Adwords or Facebook PPC campaign. Take a chance on inbound marketing. Take a chance on that new product line. Take a chance by opening that new location.
The key is calculating the risk.
It’s going to be a risk any way you look at it. That’s not the point. The point is to calculate it, discover the way it would actually work and execute. How do you know what the limit of your growth is if you don’t push the limit?
Nine times out of ten, the greatest risk factor in every situation is actually our execution and consistency. There is a HUGE risk that we won’t end up following through, we will lose steam or we will give 80% instead of 120%. Don’t get it twisted.
Everything around you. Everything you see, was built by someone no smarter than you and I (paraphrasing Steve Jobs) and if you can understand that your effort is 80% of the risk… then you’d probably take those risks to build something great too.
So today, execute on that item you’ve shoved on the back burner for weeks and months. Because of the risk. Fear it and do it anyways.