I’ve often heard business described as a three legged stool, leave out one leg and sitting on the stool will cause you to topple over at best and constantly struggle to maintain your balance at worst, which is exhausting and eventually you will fall over anyway.

These three legs are:

• Finances
• Clients
• Marketing

In this post I’m dealing with the Clients leg of the stool.

This might seem a bit of a doh! type question, yet when I ask my coaching clients to describe their ideal clients they often have trouble doing just that.  Often the phrase I hear most is “Everybody who wants what I have to offer”. 

Going further into their mindset I enquire where they will find them and this is where they hit their first wall.  Again often the first response is “Anywhere I can get them” and when I ask how that is going they usually reply that it is very tough for them. 

For many of them advertising is an expense that they can’t afford as much as they feel they need it and it feels like a vicious circle finding the money to pay for advertising, which will draw in some clients to cover those costs spent on advertising.

Asking why they are casting their net so wide they often reply that in this climate they can’t afford to leave anybody out, yet when we look at the types of advertising they have to engage in they often realise that it is so generic that most people just ignore it, including their ideal clients and then feel that they are wasting their time.

Unfortunately most of them are wasting their advertising budget too.

Getting specific with the types of people your service is suitable for is the very first step in finding your ideal client.  The more specific you become the smaller the market is, but the type of client you are sending your message out to will hear it loud and clear and those that you are not targeting will simply ignore it.

One of the best ways I have used to work out who my ideal clients are is to do up a client profile. 

When I do this I get very, very specific with the details:

• who they are – often helps to give them a name
  
• their ages
• education level
  
• income level
• types of areas they live in
• their worries
• their triumphs
• their hobbies
• the types of employment or business they have. 

There are lots and lots more details that can be added to this depending on the type of client profile you need.  The more details you have the easier it is to weed out non-ideal clients.

For instance if you are targeting women who love expensive jewellery and you have a client profile with a low income and high debt, then this is not an ideal client.  However women with high incomes would be potential ideal clients.

As one client of mine discovered once she specified who they were, with a little bit of tweaking she could target another specific client with small changes to the message and then have two very specific, but different types of clients both buying the same product from her.

  Having learnt over the last few years that I can do a little for a lot of slightly interested people or a lot more for a few keen people I chose the latter.  Which are you doing?

So you’ve set up in business.  Now what?  Well depending on your personality you will either cut your own path or you will run yourself ragged following all the rules and regulations that are out there.  More than likely you will fall somewhere in between those two ranges, like most business owners.

• I’m a believer that the boundaries, guidelines, etiquette or rules are very stretchable and not at all rigid. 
• It is often by breaking them that we learn just which ones are only guidelines and which are rigid. 
• We all change as we learn and develop new skills and it is with that learning that we also push past the boundaries we originally found ourselves in.

Sometimes those boundaries are simply our attitude to things instead of actions.  Although, major change only occurs when our attitude changes and it leads to behavioural changes.

Nelson Mandela

Forty years ago he was considered a terrorist, now he is considered a world leader.  It took pushing the boundaries of our thinking and to do it collectively for the change to come about.  It was a fairly slow process as he spent twenty six years in prison.

Breaking the rules is OK

Now take business guides, etiquette, rules and regulations.  How rigidly do you stick to those rules and how many of them do you break and for what reason?  I’m not advocating breaking the law in anything, simply pushing the boundaries on what others say is and is not okay.

• for some there is a dress code that must be stuck to,
• a managerial hierarchy that has just always been that way,
• a customer service code that other companies have always used.

Stepping outside them can be a frightening prospect, especially if you are new to self-employment and everyone else is following those rules.

Yet entrepreneurs are known for risk taking, trying new things that others only dream they had thought of first.  They often break well established rules in a bid to go the extra mile because they can see past the rules to the possibilities instead of the punishments for breaking them.

At first they are considered mavericks, risk-takers and in the past they were to be observed but not copied (until it was well established that what they did worked).

Famous Mavericks

Look at some of them now, Richard Branson is well respected worldwide for doing it his own way.  Seth Godin spoke his mind and has a huge following, Gary Vanyerchuk went against the established way of doing things and people flock to watch his TV station daily.

While we can struggle to maintain the boundaries or etiquettes of the various norms, it can be a worrying path to travel.  The worry of the consequences of breaking one of them can be a burden for some business owners.    For some staying within those boundaries is very comforting, for others it can be stifling.

Have there been times when breaking guidelines or etiquette have helped your business?  Is there a particular guideline or etiquette that you would not break even if it would help your business?

I have had many jobs down through the years.  All through the eighties and nineties when many people were finding it difficult to either get or hold onto a job I found it relatively easy because I treated it professionally.  I was for real!

• I had skills in more than one area of employment and job searched in them all
• I was prepared for the interview in advance, I practiced what type of questions I was likely to be asked
• I presented and interviewed well and could think on my feet when thrown an awkward question
• I let my personality shine through without being cocky or shy
• I interviewed them as much as they interviewed me (and ended some interviews early)

I’ve also been self-employed down through the years, although for a lot of people some of the types of self-employment might not have been considered proper self-employment.  I’ve had some people tell me “That’s not real work, it’s just pin-money” although I was earning up to ten times as much being self-employed than employed for the same amount of hours worked.

As a single mother with two small children I struggled to balance it all.  At first I found that I had no time for the children (or myself), or I was not concentrating in work because I was thinking about my children.  I see-sawed through guilt, anger and self-doubt regularly.  Most mothers go through this when they first return to work .

For me becoming self-employed was the perfect answer to all of that.  I only gave up working in paid employment when being self-employed was bringing in more income than my paid employment.

I have heard Mums in business say that they often have a problem balancing it all.  I know a lot of people will give out that Dads in business are just as responsible, but the fact is when our children are sick it is the mother who sacrifices her work life to look after the children eighty percent of the time.  The result is our work life suffers and so does our self esteem.

When this happens we are often accused of not taking it all seriously.  I’ve been a self employed party plan manager where recruiting an active team was part of my job description.  I was really successful at it.  The main reason was I promoted party plan as Mums business, a work from home business that offered a work life balance, where Mums could work around their children.

From the start I treated the whole thing as a serious business and after a couple of hiccups I had a strategy in place to cover just about every eventuality that might arise.  When my children got sick I had a childminder that I could trust to mind them for the couple of hours that I had to work.  When my car broke down I had a couple of taxi-drivers on retainer to get me to my parties.

Very quickly I organised my work according to a schedule I had set out and only worked those hours.  I presented professional yet fun and educational parties and was often asked to do repeat parties for hostesses, year on year.  If something came up and I couldn’t cover a party I had someone just as professional trained to step in and fill the breach.

  I looked for opportunities to network with my target market (although I didn’t call it networking).  I attended training events where I got to brain-storm with other party planner and swap ideas and tips.  When I trained as a manager and had my own team I demanded the same high standards from them that I demanded from myself.

I treated my earnings as proper earnings. I kept accounts from the start.  This is the one big area I’ve seen many work at home women fall down.  They treat the money they earn as “pin-money”, something to pay for the extras, the treats they want to provide for their families instead of proper earnings that are taxable.

I didn’t realise at the time that I had a marketing and business plan in place, to me it was simply a set of goals I wanted to reach, when I reached one I concentrated on the next one.  I passed this on to my team too.  I used goals as a recruiting tool as well as a training tool with my team.

The one thing I’ve brought to each type of employment, be it paid employment or self-employment is treating it like the real thing. I’ve never played at business, I’ve always been for real.  Are you?

As a business coach and trainer I’ve combined the same strategies and skills and can now help other mums in business to balance it all without losing themselves all the while being in business for real.

You generally have a positive mindset, you see the good, the possibilities in things, you achieve (most of ) your goals and overall you are happy.   Your business is ticking along or growing and life is good.

Great!

How often have you encountered something difficult and after trying to give it a go for a while you give up, maybe for a while or maybe for good?  You don’t like to go back and think of those things because then you are slipping into negativity and you are a positive person.

Far too often we are told to “keep it positive”, yet if we don’t have some negativity in our lives we are living very unbalanced lives and are either denying what is happening to us or simply ignoring the negative stuff – which will keep floating back to the surface to be dealt with again and again until we DO deal with it.

It might not be the exact same thing occurring over and over, but I’m sure you’ve said to yourself at times “why do I Keep on doing that?!” and wondered how to make the changes.

There are three simple little changes we can implement into our mindset that helps us to move our negativity into positivity and the results we can get can be magical.

1. Impossibe

How often have you said that something is impossible, only to find that someone else finds it entirely possible?  How did they do that?

First thing they did was change the word:

I’m Possible

By doing this they have told themselves at an unconscious level that they have the possibility to do whatever they previously thought undo-able and then they set about doing it.

2. Can’t

My older children used to hate to hear my reply to that when they said it, as my answer has always been:

“Take the T off that and what have you got”, now with my youngest child I also say “Let’s see how we Can“

Again it is a subtle mindset move that tells us unconsciously to look for ways to make this thing work for us.  It might not be perfect, but it gets the ball rolling and our problem solving abilities kicked into high-gear.

Often we are astounded that we hadn’t thought of the answers before when they seem so obvious now.

3. Too Hard.

As busy people we often under-estimate our abilities.  We see something and we think “I can never do something like that, it’s far too hard”.  There are many, many cliches out there to reply to that one, my favourite being:

Q. How do you eat an elephant? – A. Easy! One bite at a time.

By seeing a difficult task as the complete task we can overwhelm ourselves and hit obstacles often.  When we break difficult tasks down into smaller chunks and bite-size pieces we can often work out how to solve that particular part of the problem, which then helps make the next bite-sized chunk easier to manage.

The plus from that is we feel great for having solved part of the puzzle.  Our mindset changes to looking for solutions to the next piece and the next until we have it completed.

It all happens with your mindset first!  The moves are easy! The results are magical!

It’s really three simple steps: 1, 2, 3,  that lead to what can seem like magical results.  What steps do you need to take to make your 1, 2, 3, work for your business?

Anybody who has read Napoleon Hill’s book Think And Grow Rich will be familiar with the phrase:

“Drill an inch wide and a mile deep”

Yet how many new business owners stick with that principle?  When we set up in business we often have so much to do that in that process itself that our attention is pretty scattered.

Once up and running as a business owner, especially a SME or sole trader you are all things to everyone: customer service, accounts department, order picker, delivery person, sales person, managing director to name just a few.

So it is little wonder sometimes that in the midst of all that  we forget the quote above.

The reasoning behind it is we are (sorry ladies) only able to be competent at one thing at a time.

That does not take from the fact that over time we can learn to be competent at many tasks so that they become inbuilt habits, we become good at skimming through them.

The problem with skimming is our mind is always on the next task instead of the one we are currently doing, so we don’t give it our best attention.

To test this, go do a task you normally do well and notice how you’ve managed to cut some corners with it from when you first started doing it.

In business starting out we want to attract as many new clients as possible to ensure that our business grows, so we skim.

Skimming in itself is not a bad thing, it can give us exposure to niches we had not considered before, however for sustained growth drilling is a better approach.

Despite the warnings to stick with one type of client, or one type of expertise, we agree to take on clients that might not be the best fit for what we are selling, afterall a client is a client and clients bring in business.

Then we have the unenviable task of fulfilling that expectation, often to the detriment of our business growth.  We begin to fear the loss of that client and that we won’t get the clients we actually want, so get caught in a self-perpetuating circle.

Over time our business is going in a direction we had not planned on.

When I first became a coach I wanted to help everyone instead of picking a niche and I couldn’t figure out why despite my offer being good, I had such a poor response to it.  People wanted help with specific problems and not all of them felt I could help them at the level they required because my offer was too general.

How does a business get back to drilling?

• Start to market specifically to the niches that you only want to do business with instead of marketing generally.
  
• Stop taking on business from clients that are not in your niche.
• Network with other businesses in your niche.
• Develop joint ventures with businesses that can expose you to your target market.

A client of mine who wanted to break into a particular niche within her area of expertise but didn’t know how to, with coaching, came up the the idea of forming a joint venture with another business owner who had access to those clients but in a different type of business, each now refers business to each other.

Since I’ve concentrated on particular niches I get a much better response to my offers.  Over time as they grow I will expand on the niches I cover.

As a new party planner in a previous business years ago, I had knew one way only to market when I started out: get hostesses to hold house parties and I concentrated on that.

I became really good at it and from that branched out to hosting pub parties, to having catalogue parties and to recruiting other women to become party planners.

Each was a new step in building my business, it was the drilling down on each niche that made my business grow.  When I struck oil from the first drill, I bore a new hole and drilled again.

Over time I covered a wider level of clients who had developed a deep loyalty to my service, who returned again and again, helping me grow my business, rather than a once-off client who bought once and didn’t return.

I have done the same in my coaching business and have become very good in certain niches, each new one requires the drilling down and each new hole skims a wider audience.

How has drilling or skimming helped you in your business?  What have you learned from either that has changed the way you do business?

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You are a business owner and are busy running your business to (hopefully) the best of your ability.  You do up a To-Do list and then try to stick to it as best you can.

However there are days when you go over the things you managed to get done and the things you simply did not get time to do, so you re-allocate those uncompleted tasks to another day.

How does not completing those tasks make you feel?

I know I used to get a sense of dread when I was going over my to-do list at the end of the day, once I implemented it, instead of just writing one and ignoring it altogether, because I knew I wouldn’t have everything on it completed, which would lead to a sense of failure.

Then I learnt to write a realistic to-do list and make each task a manageable one so that I wasn’t dreading doing it, even if it was one that I didn’t particularly like doing.  I also learnt to slot the particularly horrible tasks between two really nice ones, almost like a building up a reward system.

Many people have written on the subject of time management and to-do lists so I’m not going to yak on about them again, you can do a Google search to find relevant blog posts to get their messages.

Instead I want to ask you about your focus.

Where are you directing your focus?  Remember we get what we focus on most.

How is it serving you?  Most importantly, what is letting it drift in the wrong direction costing you in your business…and your home life?

How many extra potential clients have you not currently got because you allowed your focus to drift to something else and didn’t manage to get back to that particular task?

How much revenue has that not brought into your business as a result of losing your focus for what seemed like only a few minutes?

How much extra pressure are you now feeling to get done those tasks that you might and most probably would have completed if you had kept your focus on the particular task you had allocated to that time?

Have you now got to take time away from your family and friends in an effort to just catch up because you changed your priorities after you’d made your to-do list and focused on something else?

Uncomfortable questions, aren’t they?

“The money is in the list” is a favourite saying of most internet marketers.  It can also be applied to a to-do list as well.  For when we make a list and write it down we then prioritise for a reason.

Sticking to that list until it is completed not only gives a great sense of personal and professional satisfaction, it frees us up to be switch to another task that will help our business grow.

Sticking to that list will also better enable us to switch off our business focus and switch on our home-life focus.

Avoid having to ask yourself those uncomfortable questions by sticking to the list and fixing your focus to the tasks in the order you set them out.

Where have you found that your floppy focus has cost you?  What steps have you taken to correct that?  More importantly, having fixed your focus, now, how do you feel?

I’ve been reminded recently by quite a few small business owners that they felt that they didn’t really feel like they had much choice about becoming self-employed and also reminded that some of them still resent what they consider their options being limited, due to no fault of their own.

They find they are struggling to make a serious go of building a viable business and feel totally out of their depth with what they consider to be very little practical supports for them.  The ones that are there, from their perspective, are extremely limited or out of their price range and they are really struggling.

So what makes someone who would prefer to be an employee become a business owner? Well there are many reasons and I’m sure you will know some people who fit into these descriptions, do add others that I have omitted from this list:

They’ve been made redundant – or worse just let go with no redundancy package at all – and can’t get employment in their current field of expertise.  They feel the pressure to do something as they still have a family to feed, a mortgage to pay along with the other commitments they made while they were still in paid employment with a rosy future ahead.

They have been told that the company they currently work in is downsizing, their position will be outsourced in future and it has been suggested that they apply for the consultancy position as a self-employed person.  This happened to many tradesmen in the building boom, many of whom had serious problems getting support when the downturn came.

They have gone to college, got the degree, sometimes a post-graduate degree and can’t get a job in their field of expertise. They have difficulty even getting an internship in their area as the competition for these is so great.  They know they have the skills, what they are lacking is a matching amount of experience.

They have switched careers, trained in a new one because they saw the downturn coming and decided to take action, re-train so as to be employable when it hit, only to find they are in the same boat as the college graduates, top heavy in knowledge, yet lacking in experience.

The one thing all of these people have in common is a reluctance for where they currently are in their careers.  This very reluctance is putting all sorts of obstacles in their way.  What they don’t seem to realise is that a simple shift in mindset could make all the difference to how they not only run their business, but how much more they would enjoy being self-employed.

We all have choices to make, on a daily basis and how we view them, then act upon them affects our results.   Okay, so the job has gone down the Swanee and you are up the creek without a paddle, so use your hands to move instead of waving them about in the air.  Become pro-active.

Setting up in business reluctantly and then whinging and moaning about how hard things are is not being pro-active.  Putting your hands in the air when you come across a few obstacles and sighing in defeat is not being pro-active either.

I know it can sound trite to say have an attitude of gratitude, yet it really does work once you practice it.  Yes it is difficult, now, but consider how much more difficult it would be with nothing to get out of bed for every morning.  Keep at it, put your very best efforts into it instead of just enough to make it work and you will start to see the results you want.  Find the positives about being self employed instead of the negatives.

Be willing to ask for help in areas other than the conventional ones, you’ve already stepped outside your comfort zone by becoming self-employed, now step a little further and ask for help from those who have been there and done it already.  Find out what they did when they said to themselves: “you might as well quit…!” but didn’t.

What do you say to yourself when you hit a wall or it all seems a little too much?  Please share them here, let’s see if we can build up a good motivational list for everyone to use on their bad days.

We all see the adverts on television and some of them we can recite from memory, often including the tone of voice too.  I’m sure many of you remember the Ronseal adverts.  Y’know, the one where the man was wood staining his front door and stated that it said on the tin it would be rain proof in thirty minutes and lo and behold, thirty minutes later the door was rain proof, just in time for the rain that started.  Then he said “Ronseal! – It does exactly what it says on the tin!”

From that one advert came a whole series of them and today most people can recite those adverts off while getting the accent, tone of voice and actions correct, down to the very last detail. 

That is now know as The Ronseal Factor, where you deliver what you promised you would to your customers.  If you say you will ring them back within thirty minutes, then you ring them back within thirty minutes.

If you say you will deliver their order by three pm on Thursday afternoon then your delivery vehicle is pulling up outside their premises by three pm on Thursday at the very latest.

If you say you will provide an after-hours service for them, then there is someone always available after-hours to help them when they need it.

The one thing that The Ronseal Factor does is seal a bond of trust between the provider and their client.  They know that they can trust them to deliver as promised, that they live up to that promise.

If you don’t currently have it, how do you get it?

Put yourself in the shoes of your clients, if you were a client in your business would you like to be treated the way you treat them?  Now that you have that image, how can you improve on your service?

• Be clear and consise with your clients so that they know exactly what to expect from you.

– Any new client I see is sent an email with the points discussed so that they know exactly what they agreed to, along with what they can expect from me and also what they will be expected to do too.

• Change the way you deal with your clients in your business.  Stop making promises that you know you can’t keep.

• Stop using the excuse that “everybody else is doing it, so we can too” to cut back on customer service or after sales care.

• Start to do a little more than is currently expected by your clients.  Show them that you can and do deliver on your promises, sometimes will an unexpected bonus too.

• If they are used to getting an order in late, make sure that it is on time and give a little bit extra as an apology for the previous order being late.

Ask your clients how you can improve your service to them and start to implement some of the changes.

There are lots of ways to get The Ronseal Factor, it is usually different from business to business.  I’ve only given a few to get you thinking about them.  Please share your suggestions below.

The Ronseal Factor – does your business have it?

“I wanna be a (insert your own wanna here) so much”.  This is a phrase I hear quite a lot in my line of work.   My reply to that is always “So what is stopping you?” At this point there usually comes a stream of excuses..ahem..reasons as to why they are not being what they want to be.

I was listening to the song So You Wanna Be A Boxer from the movie Bugsy Malone earlier and it pretty much sums it all up wonderfully:

Whatever it is you want to be in life, especially in business have you got what it takes?

In business, as in life there are always going to be people who are naturally good at what they do with very little effort and others who have to work really, really hard to make it look easy.

Both parties have IT -  what it takes to be good at what they do.

Do you quit when the going gets tough because it is harder work than you anticipated, really proving that you don’t have IT?

Or even worse start to cut corners on the standards you used to provide instead and hope that nobody really notices and blame the economic circumstances?

Do you dread the competition taking your market share and spend unnecessary time devising ways to keep them at bay instead of ways to keep your client base loyal?

Is your business one of those that doesn’t think they really need to do a lot because you’ve pretty much been there, done that and know most of it already?

Do you do the necessary training to be the best that you can, despite the hard work that is involved in getting there?

Do you keep up-skilling to stay at the top of your game, to ensure that you maintain your postion?

Do you go that extra mile and provide more than what your clients expect because you want to be the best there is?

Do you put in the extra hours when times are tough because that is what it takes to maintain the position you are in?

Do you seek out the help and advice of your mentors or coach when you come across a problem that you can’t solve on your own?

How do you know that your business has IT?  What do you do to maintain your position in your market?  Who do you do your sparring with to keep your skills, your mental attitude and your business practices honed so that the next time you enter your particular boxing ring you are the one throwing the knock out punch, not the one with the glass jaw?

We all have in us the potential to be the most successful business person we can be, yet many people don’t even consider this to be an option in their lives.  For those that do there are many that will not succeed at it.  In this post I’ll go through five of the main blocks that people encounter when building a successful business.

That Is Not What I See For My Business

Often when a business is going round & round in the same circles without progressing & the people in charge look for help, the advice they get doesn’t sit well with them.  It means changing behaviours that the business owners don’t like & they will often trot out the line above as a reason not to change. It’s a well know fact that humans dislike change, yet it is something that we are constantly doing, without being aware of it. Every time we think a new thought, we change, when we learn something new, we change.  For a business to grow & be brilliant the owners have to step out of their comfort zones, implement the changes necessary to move forward.

I’m Not Qualified Enough/I Don’t Have The Skills

This is still a huge block that many business people use as a way of not growing a business.  The unfortunate truth in today’s society is there is no excuse to not upskill or hire somebody, even temporarily, with the skills that are lacking.  Often business people only see one part of the problem, a lack of a certain skillset, then they see the cost of acquiring those skills, then they stop.  Sometimes it is because they feel they have to do it all themselves or other times it is because they don’t see the value to be gained in bringing in someone with the skills they are lacking – to that business’s detriment.

I Can’t Afford It

For any business to grow investment is required, of time & money.  There are a lot upfront costs that a lot of businesses deem absolutely necessary to starting a business some of which realistically could be left until the business is more established.  There are also other costs are overlooked that should not be.  When somebody says they can’t afford to pay for something it is usually a case that they can & that this particular something is lower down in their list of priorities so gets discounted.  Or it can be a case of the value for what they are getting isn’t obvious so the business owner yet.  The problem with that is they miss out on opportunities that  can’t be regained.

I Don’t Have The Time

We all get the exact same twenty-four hours in the day, every day that we are alive.  Some people use it to their best advantage & squeeze as much into it as they possibly can.  Other’s waste a lot of their time by prioritising the wrong things & seem to be constantly chasing their tail to get tasks done.  A simple way to overcome that is to set a time-diary where you have all of your day mapped out for the whole of your working day & to stick with it until you get into the habit of managing your time effectively.  If it is a case of really having too much to do, then it is a case of learning to delegate the less important things to somebody else to do, freeing up the time for the really important tasks.

I Can’t Say No, I Might Lose Them

Every business has great customers, good customers & bad customers.  Many business owners specially when they are new businesses feel that they have to accept every bit of business that comes their way. This can often be counter-productive as a bad customer can take up more time, effort & money than the revenue or value they bring into the business, taking from the time you could have spent with great or good customers.  It is sometimes better to say to such customer that you can’t at this time do business with them.  You can even refer them on to your competition who might turn out to be a perfect fit for them.

There are many other blocks that businesses have to overcome to be successful, these are only five of them.  Please comment below if you have one that isn’t listed above & share it, it could be just what a business owner needs to know.