I love listening to interviews with successful entrepreneurs.The nuggets and stories they share are like motivational crack. I can pop in a Mixergy or Mitch Joel interview on the way to a meeting and I’ll be bouncing off the walls once I get there!
Systemizing
When I started my marketing company, I thought I was doing a disservice to my clients if every piece of every project wasn’t customized. It didn’t seem right that things got easier and I was charging the same rate. I know, I know, stupid right? That’s the goal for most of us. But chances are your probably doing it in a part of your business as well and you just don’t realize it. Most entrepreneurs can step back and identify the line between busy and productive but what happens when you’re in the thick of it and the line gets blurry? Take the amount of time you spend per week. For new business owners spending 60 to 70 hours a week feels like a rite of passage to becoming a true entrepreneur. When I first brought on my business partner John, we easily put in 60+ hours a week. It was like a competition to spur us on. But that’s not a business, that’s not even a life! When we discovered that our model wasn’t scalable and we were doing the same things over and over that we could decide one once, establish a baseline and improve on from there, it blew our minds. We literally took six months off to focus on building systems for every part of our business. From accounting to sales to client management, we examined every part of our business through this new lense. We started with zero knowledge of systemizing but scraped up every piece of information we could to create them. And then while doing that something crazy happened. Our focus started shifting from working in the business to working on the business. If we did something new, we wrote it down. We stopped guessing what to do next because we had already recorded it and instead of reinventing the wheel, we improved on what we did the last time. The time it took to run our daily operations was literally cut in half. We were able to look at the big picture and immediately zoom in on different parts of the business with the perspectives we need to make the best decisions and zoom out again to see how those decisions affected each part of the business.Saying “No”
During college, I discovered one of the most ineffective ways of communicating known to mankind: Powerpoint. Professors would paste chunks of the textbook into PowerPoint slides with clipart and call it class. It drove me nuts! I tried to get the professors to talk about what might be a better way to communicate but that literally got me kicked out of class. I knew there had to be a better way to communicate through presentations and became obsessed trying to find it. Thankfully I stumbled onto Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte and several others presentation masters. I soaked up their strategies and immediately tried to apply my new-found skills! I offered it as a service and started creating presentations for local businesses. I was convinced that my passion would make up for my complete lack of design skills. WRONG! Even though my presentations were better than what most clients had, it was at that time I discovered what was to become my favorite book from Seth Godin, The Dip: The little book that teaches you when to quit. In it he talks about the dip that every entrepreneur goes through. You start at the exciting point at the top of the dip where everything is new and exciting. You’ve just begun a project, a business or a new skill which is smooth sailing on the downhill part of the dip. But then you continue up the other side. That’s the part that separates the pros from everyone else. If it’s not something you plan on focusing all of your time and energy at becoming the best at, it’s useless to make the climb up the other side. Before reading that I felt like a failure for quitting presentations but in hindsight I’m so glad I did!“Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.” ~Seth Godin, The Dip
The best way to start with a great idea and turn it into a mediocre service is to do too many things for too many people. If that stings a little, it’s time to take inventory of where your time is going and if each piece is essential to your objectives. BUT Saying no doesn’t have to feel like you are failing. Here’s why: It’s very simple to turn a “NO” into an opportunity. While in the process of discovering I needed to quit website design (another service I discovered wasn’t the best use of my time and talent), I didn’t just want to turn prospects away for coming to me to ask for a website. After all they were referred and deserved to be taken care of. So I decided to get a hold of every website designer and developer in my area and buy them coffee so I could have a quality list of people I could refer these prospects to. During that time, I met dozens of awesome designers and developers that were able to do a far better job than I could ever do. Instead of sending them on their way, I was able to update prospects on what I was currently offering refer them to services I wasn’t offering. This gave me leverage and helped build my brand. It not only made it easier to say no but many of those people to this day are some of my best referral sources!
