I see a lot of painful attempts at building a successful business. They make me wince, because business success — while there’s an entire industry (unfortunately, MY industry) devoted to complicated it for us — is actually fairly SIMPLE. I didn’t say EASY. Being your own boss, with all of its freedom and potential, is the hardest work you’ll ever love.
But, it CAN be simple. Stay on the right track by avoiding these three specific, straight-forward ways you can doom your business to failure.
You Can Do Nothing
You can do nothing to market yourself. This “business sin” is more likely an issue of insecurity or arrogance rather than flat out laziness. Insecurity shows up like this, “I don’t want to push myself on them.” or “They know what I do, and if they want to buy from me, they will. I don’t want to bang them over the head with it.” Arrogance leads business owners to feel like their work is so outstanding or that they are so educated, or they are so much better than their competitors, that they “shouldn’t have to” market.
Listen. Your products won’t sell themselves. Flat out, doesn’t happen. (If this were true, the companies using this “slogan” wouldn’t be spending so much time roping you into selling for them.) Your services won’t sell themselves. And, no matter how incredible you are at what you do, it is your CHIEF responsibility to market and sell your work. Most of my private clients are “experts.” They are helpers, highly empathetic, smart, educated… and — many times — sales resistant. To YOU, I remind you of the obvious: The better you get at SELLING your “help,” the more people you get to help, the more good you get to do. Just sayin’.
You Can Do Too Much
Watching business owners do nothing is painful. But, watching business owners hustling around doing too much — all leaving them feeling busy, broke and bummed? FAR more painful for me. Infinitely more painful for me.
And yet, this is where I find many, many business owners. Every day they’re hustlin’. Breathlessly, they’re going through life, wondering where their next paycheck and client is coming from. Staying busy with networking, facebooking, speaking, and “launching” this and that. Frantically, they “do business” in a rush… “hoping” that something “pays off soon.” They add “areas of expertise” and reduce their prices. They re-brand, often. They show up, everywhere. They take calls, all of them.
This is agonizing for me to see, because I have ALWAYS valued effort and hard work. Working, and working hard, for what you want is NOBLE… in my humble opinion. Here’s the TRUTH: I wish that being a good (and giving) person and working harder than your peers and doing MORE than you were doing yesterday would lead to financial success in your business. But wishing it doesn’t make it so. You don’t get what you deserve in business. You get what you deliberately create, orchestrate, and implement. But, being deliberate requires that you slow down, do less, and FOCUS more. (See more about the financial benefit to focus in this 2009 blog post.)
Doing TOO MUCH is just as failure-worthy as doing nothing, but frankly — it’s more heart breaking.
You Can Ignore Numbers
Finally, you can doom your business to failure by ignoring the numbers. You can lose weight without a scale, but you’d better be measuring SOMETHING. Inches, calories, carbs, fat grams, something. In business, you need to look your income squarely in the face — every week. EVERY THING YOU DO TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS should be held accountable for producing a specific result. Only then can you start tweaking your plan, saving yourself time and adding zeros to your bank deposits.
Measure what matters — in numbers. Income. Hours. Proposals out. # of sales conversations. # of new leads. Open rates. Conversion rates.
Ignore these numbers at your OWN peril. (Because let’s face it… the numbers we MOST dread looking at are the ones that need our attention the most!)
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Have additional sure-fire ways to doom your business? Feel free to share below! =) Sometimes the best way to get where we want to go is to recognize the dead end roads that threaten to keep us longer than we wanted to stay. =)
