How to ‘leverage’ your way to success this year
Archimedes said, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” The famous Greek mathematician was illustrating the power of leverage and you can use this power in your business. But instead of just one lever, you have several within your reach, and if you don’t use all of them, you aren’t moving your business as far or as fast as you can. The two “levers” I want to discuss here are: Other people, and Other people’s money. The great thing about doing business today, is that you can leverage other people and their money much more easily than ever before. That’s because you can use the online world as the tool to “grab” and move your levers. Leveraging other people I want to break this down into two big categories: Leveraging other people’s muscle, and Leveraging other people’s brains. By leveraging other people’s muscle, I mean finding people to do tasks you can’t do or don’t want to do. Some of these are sporadic jobs, and I’ll use logo design as an example. I’m sure that by now you know that you can connect with good designers through one of the freelance websites or specialty graphic design sites. Finding outside “muscle” to do this work for you is great and highly recommended, but today I want to focus more on offloading regular, daily, nitty-gritty tasks to one or more virtual assistants. Think of the repetitive tasks you do or the repetitive tasks you would like to do but always put off. Systemize these and then start your search for a virtual assistant. You can find a U.S.-based virtual assistant, or you can hook up with an off-shore VA. Although many of us have experienced nightmares when trying to work with an offshore customer service rep, there are many skills offshore VAs excel at. If you find a good Indian or Filipino VA, for example, the lower wage rate will allow you to pay for some tasks that aren’t cost effective at U.S. pay rates. The second area of leveraging other people is leveraging their knowledge and experience (brains). Coaches, mentors, and mastermind groups are great ways to benefit from the knowledge of others. YEC (Young Entrepreneur Council), Founder Society, and SCORE are good online places to begin your search for a mentor. Mastermind groups spring up all the time. They are often offshoots of courses or other special interests. Sometimes they can be organized as a private Facebook group. They are great because they also serve as accountability and encouragement groups. Connecting with a mentor, coach, or mastermind group can pay benefits beyond what you might imagine. It takes a lot of energy to push a business forward and if we are always depending on the “charge” stored in our own “batteries,” we can soon run out of energy. We need one or more outside sources of energy to give us the spark to keep going. Other people’s money Everything we’ve talking about here is a kind “muscle.” We’ve talked about heavy lifting muscle (getting tasks done) and mental muscle. Now we’re talking about financial muscle. It’s a simple fact that it takes a significant investment for a business to muscle its way into a leadership position. Without the financial resources to...
read moreOnline holiday sales beat estimates: What it means for you
Normally, it’s not a good thing when your financial prediction is off by about $1 billion; that’s how much Adobe Analytics’ holiday online shopping spend prediction missed the mark for the 2017 holiday shopping season. But in this case, Adobe’s miscue is online sellers’ windfall because actual online receipts outpaced Adobe’s estimate by almost $1 billion. In early November, Adobe predicted online sales of $107.4 billion; the actual figure hit $108.2 billion. Perhaps the most important figure in Adobe’s final analysis is that 52 percent of the holiday online traffic to retail websites came via mobile devices! Although we don’t know the exact nature of the mobile devices, I suspect tablet use is becoming an increasingly big share of what we classify as “mobile traffic.” If your observations are anything like mine, you are seeing more and more users rely on their tablets as a primary gateway to the online world. And, of course, we know that smartphones continue to be our constant companions. The lesson here is one we started to stress a couple of years ago: design your website for mobile first! Be sure that your site performs on smartphones; if it looks good on a smartphone, it will be fine on a tablet. Further, if you’re depending on a plugin or even a responsive template to automatically make your legacy site “mobile friendly,” double check your type faces, colors, and site structure to make sure they work on a small screen. Have friends and family members put your mobile site through its paces. If you are in a retail industry, can your customers do everything they might want to do via your mobile device? Can they easily accomplish these things or do they have to navigate multiple pages? I believe that one of the reasons mobile holiday online traffic outpaced legacy computer traffic is that many retailers are finally taking the move to mobile seriously. However, I also believe that we still have a lot of store and restaurant owners who are dragging their feet. Tip: If you own a restaurant, connect your website to some of the third-party services that provide home delivery and reservation services. If you don’t embrace the move to multi-channel sales, you will soon be left in the virtual dust as your competitors optimize their online presence....
read moreHow to fill your tanks to propel you through your day
Are you a morning person? I don’t think there’s any doubt that productive mornings are a recurring theme among the most successful individuals, so I always like to read recommendations about ways to squeeze the most productivity out of my mornings. That’s why Benjamin P. Hardy’s Medium article, 8 Things Every Person Should Do before 8 a.m., caught my attention. Hardy outlined his morning routine and it included one item I found especially interesting: Get inspired. Frankly, I don’t believe that inspiration is one of the things most people typically seek in the early morning hours. However, the more I considered his idea, the more I appreciated its importance. Inspiration is what fills our tanks. If you insist on operating without inspiration, every task you do can become brutally oppressive work. If you watch one of the physically exhaustive reality shows, like Survivor, you’ll often hear contestants say that they are doing it for their children, or their spouses. Their inspiration is the desire to set a good example or provide for their families. A guy on the National Geographic show, Life Below Zero – it follows the daily lives of people who live above the Arctic Circle in Alaska – once simply said, “Everyday I have to do something that benefits my wife and family.” We might discuss whether or not that qualifies as inspiration, but if you heard the tone of his voice, I think you would agree that it was. Yet inspiration can come in a wide range of forms, among them: Inspirational quotes, Biographies, Works of art, The desire for material gain, and An encouraging word from a friend, family member, or respected colleague, such as a coach or mentor. This list is far from exhaustive. I’m sure you’ve experienced all of these at different times in your life and you probably have some others that you would add to my short list. The danger is that “inspiration” is an intangible asset. Organizing your morning with a to-do list is tangible. Downloading the latest, greatest productivity apps is tangible. Discovering the sources of your greatest inspiration is more personal. But if we overlook this important human need, our lives – both personal and professional – become devoid of meaning. The biggest question we face as humans is the “why” question. Why are we here? What is our purpose? When you’re being powered by “inspiration” that question, starts to take care of itself. You have things that you know you must achieve. Sometimes when we are inspired by the greatness of others there is something inside ourselves that tells us that we can do it too. Sometimes being inspired by the beauty of art will flip a switch inside us that empowers us to strive for perfection and completion. Physics tell us that there’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. Energy from an outside power source is always required to keep a machine running. For the human machine, that outside energy source is inspiration. Grab some inspiration every morning so you can power your way through your...
read moreOuch! Only 1/3 of sales time is spent selling! How to fix the problem
What if you owned an auto repair garage and your mechanics only spent about 1/3 of their working hours actually fixing cars for your customers? It would be an intolerable situation, wouldn’t it? That’s essentially what a Hubspot survey discovered when it inquired about the ways sales professionals spend their time. On average, they devote only 34 percent of the time to actually selling. Here’s the breakdown the Hubspot survey revealed: When presented with information like this, one of the first things a leader needs to do is ask the question, “Which of these tasks can be systemized, farmed out, or automated?” Consider the impact to your bottom line if you could increase the percentage of time sales professionals spend selling by 25 to 50 percent? Let me give you one quick example. Our average sales pro spends 12 percent of the work day scheduling meetings. However, with apps – many free, such as Calendly – scheduling meetings with customers and prospects can be automated. I don’t think it’s too outrageous to suggest that adopting an app to handle some of the meeting scheduling could cut that 12 percent by as much as one half. Prospecting is often ripe for systemization, which can then be turned over to a virtual assistant. For example, I know someone who is targeting sales to health clubs. He has developed a system to search Facebook to identify his best prospects and it usually reveals their contact information as well. An overseas virtual assistant is able to “work” his system, pull together lists of prospects, and make the initial contact with them. Thanks to the good work that Hubspot did with sales professionals, we have this snapshot of how sales professionals spend their time and many of you can use it as a basis to examine your own salesforce. However, a similar survey could be conducted for virtually any job within your organization. Make this year a time to rethink or eliminate the ancillary tasks that suck the productivity out of your organization. If early indications are good, this should be a profitable year for many businesses, therefore it should be a good year to invest on automation and experiment with virtual assistants and other...
read moreCan you balance these two opposing requirements for business success?
Are you a fan of the KISS – keep it simple, stupid – approach to life and business? I love it when situations, challenges, or problems can be boiled down to the proverbial brass tacks and as I was recently reading an article written by AP and USA Today small business writer, Rhonda Abrams, I think she hit on two principles that are yardsticks for measuring your ability to achieve notable success in your business. Or if you’re a prospective entrepreneur, if you can’t operate within these two principles, you might want to consider a different career path or strategy. Her article was headlined 7 rules for small biz growth and the two rules I want to highlight are these: Take care of your bread-and-butter business first, and Don’t bet all your money on one horse. These two business principles are multifaceted and as you can easily see, they pull you in opposite directions. The first point I want you to consider is your ability to hold two opposing goals in your mind and operate on both of them at the same time. You might quickly jump to the conclusion that, yes, you can pursue both your core business and expanding into different areas at the same time, but I urge you to think a little more deeply. Will you end up merely going through the motions on one while your heart is fully invested in the other? I’ve heard a lot of people I respect say something to the effect that you can’t have more than one priority and I also know that our productivity goes way down when we multi-task. Further, experts like Shep Hyken will tell you horror stories about companies that drifted out of their “lane.” This is all to say that finding and “training” another “horse” to ride – to use Abrams’ language – is not easy: But it’s necessary. As I’ve wrote elsewhere on these pages, I think we’re in a special economic era right now and the surveys prove it. Small business optimism is at an all-time high. A growing economy combined with tax reform should keep the optimism high for the medium term. This means that the coming months are the ideal time to place a few bets on other horses. These pro-business growth conditions, when they are gone, might not come back for a long time. Let’s discuss some ways you can find other horses to ride: Expand your customer list. If you’re overly dependent on a handful of legacy customers, get creative about adding names to your list. Expanding your geographic reach is, of course, one way to do this. If you’re hyper local, go statewide; if you’re statewide, go national; if you’re national, go global; if you’re local, go ecommerce; or if you’re soley ecommerce, devise a brick-and-mortar strategy. Also, some of the following points can expand your customer base. Acquire a related company. Perhaps the easiest way to expand into a neighboring state is to buy a company there. This acquisition can be a company like yours, a supplier, or a related industry. Amazon’s profits come from its web services, not its retail sales. I believe that as they developed their fantastic ecommerce system they realized that they had created an incredible Internet infrastructure, so why not...
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