Sometimes, the very thing you’re doing to grow your business is what’s holding it back. For instance, I’ve worked with entrepreneurs who have 3 websites, 2 blogs they maintain, 2 newsletters, and a comical 30-second introduction…. all because they’ve gotten more and more complicated. Complicated in business — in almost every instance — slows profit to a crawl.
I understand how this happens. Every guru has a new solution to sell you. And, let’s face it…. sometimes nothing you’re doing is “knocking it out of the park” and so you begin to stack your strategies, adding one more to the mix as you go. After all, can’t afford to see a huge drop in business, because — the reality is — you never really saw the huge BUMP in business you were hoping to see. And so, your business becomes a complicated mess, hard to maintain, harder to explain and — if you’re like many business owners I know — it’s leading you to an early grave. You’re overworked and underpaid.
Are you willing to strip your business back to its most simple form? Are you willing to dramatically simplify your business so that you have something that is dependable and profitable? Your path to profit is linked with your willingness to be simple, uncomplicated.
*** These next few paragraphs may offend some. I have a point to this. Please read the note at the bottom of this post for my intentions. ***
Simplicity as a business principle has ALWAYS worked, but today — in 2015 — the world has gotten so friggin’ complicated, we’re CRAVING simplicity. Think about it. EVERYTHING is complicated today. Take this question: Are you white or black? The leader of the NAACP was white. Or was she? I mean, here we are, intelligent adults, looking at pictures of her –a woman with my skin tone when she was younger — and still a conversation drones on about her “real race.”*** Seriously? Since when did people “change races” mid-life?
Here’s another: Are you a boy or a girl? Bruce Jenner. First, we see him with nail polish… now a boob job and new wardrobe. Amid all the complicated issues of life, we are now — again, as intelligent adults — legislating and discussing (as an actual news item) whether or not a baby born with a penis and testicles and no female genitalia is — actually a boy?***
How about the U.S. tax code? That sucker has 73,000 pages in it. Seventy-three THOUSAND pages… of tax codes that you and I must somehow, miraculously know and adhere to.
We’ve become addicted to the complication of what should be so simple. As Woody Guthrie said, “ANY FOOL can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.”
The market will reward you for being simple.
Here are some things you can and should simplify in your business:
- Your answer to the question, “What do you do?”
- Your outbound marketing initiatives and the steps you have in place to measure their effectiveness.
- Your referral process.
- Your internal marketing.
- Your systems… especially if you have employees.
- Your employee accountability process.
- Your sales funnels.
- Your core business goals.
- Your measurement data — what you measure and how often.
- Your menu of options — or what people can pay you for.
There’s more you can simplify, of course. And if you don’t know where to start, ask yourself WHAT ISN’T BEING DONE CONSISTENTLY? I would be willing to bet that if something isn’t being done consistently in your business, something about it needs to be simplified.
What is simple, gets done.
*** As an aside, I don’t care if that woman was white or black, or black and felt white, or white and felt black. I have no feelings about this at all. As for Bruce, to each his own. What he does with his own body is up to him… and while i’m considering one of my own, I certainly don’t begrudge him his boob job. =) My point in using these two examples is to show that the most basic of questions is now becoming complicated. Society wants what it has the least of… In today’s times, it’s SIMPLICITY.
