Vision, Strengths, and Passion in Small Business: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today we’re going to talk about whether you should be in business and if you’re actually in the right business. Scary, I know, but it’s better to face these things head-on rather than try to ignore them and wake up in a few years broke and miserable!

First, I want to summarise a very quick point about internet opportunism versus a real business. If you’re a person who’s running round looking for the next get rich quick scheme, forget about it. It doesn’t exist and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is just plain lying. There’s only one way to build a successful internet business, the exact same way as you build a successful bricks and mortar business out on the street. If you’re running from affiliate program to affiliate program, trying to find the right product, launching multiple different websites that you lose interest in you’re not creating anything sustainable. Read on for the fix.

There are three important considerations when starting a new business. Before you start a venture you should ask yourself how it fits with your vision, strengths, and passion. Rich Shrefren’s ‘The Missing Chapter‘ goes into more detail about these but I wanted to lay them out quickly for you.

Vision
Vision is the view you have for your business in the future and when it’s finished. If you don’t have a clear picture of what you want your business to be like in 1, 5, 10 years time, how will you ever improve your business? Your business will simply drift from one goal to another and you really have no hope of making it as great as we both know is possible.

You should have an image in your mind of what your finished business will look like. How will it be decorated? How many stores will you have? How many employees and what will they be doing? Once you have this picture in your mind, write it down. This is your business’ story as talked about in the E-Myth. Does you business have a compelling story?

Strengths
It’s time to look long and hard at yourself. What strengths do you have? What weaknesses do you have? Is your business aligned with your strengths and are you working on improving or finding other people to cover your weaknesses? Your strengths are built into you from a young age and you’ve been developing them all your life. So it makes sense to align your business with your strengths for it to be as successful as possible.

Rich uses the example of his friend being a professional tennis player while he is very good at poker. If either of them is playing for money against each other, they’ll want to play the game that they’re best at. Business is another game, so choose the game that you know you can win at.

Passion
We all have things that we are passionate about and no, you can’t say making money. Your business should be something that you feel passionate about, with a vision that compels you to get up each morning and do your best. Without this passion, with money as your only drive, you will find yourself unmotivated and hating your business. You spend most of your day working, so make sure you’re working at something you enjoy.

For example, I love helping and growing businesses. I love talking about business, I love finding out about how other peoples businesses work. And are you in trouble if you ask me for business advice, you’ll never shut me up! This makes me happy, this gets out of bed in the morning, and this is why my business works.

Too many people nowadays are goal obsessed. They set all these goals and when they reach them wonder why they’re still not happy. Happiness and fulfilment is something that should happen every day in your life, not just when you achieve a goal. If the only time I was going to be happy was when I made a million dollars, what a miserable life I would lead!

Connecting your business vision with your strengths and passion is the way to create a sustainable, expandable business that will be fulfilling everyday.

One of the most important marketing activities for your small business can be it’s web site design and the content you fill it with. A well designed web site with great content can make or break your business on the internet. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to get right, but if you do, the benefits will be amazing.

All over the internet you can see substandard small business web sites. As part of the small business person’s ‘do-it-yourself’ mindset, we tend to find a lot of homemade web sites that don’t sell their business. The money they save by doing it themselves can be costing them a 1000 times that in sales. A good web site can seem expensive when you first start out, but it really it’s worth its weight in sales.

Think of it as the sales brochure you have to use with every customer for the next two years! So when you shudder at paying a few thousand euros on a web site, think about how much you spend on a print run.

Now another major stumbling block of small business owners is hiring the right web designer. It’s a minefield out there but with some careful research the right person for the job can be found. However, once you have a web designer to make your web site look pretty, the next step is content. Content makes or breaks your web site and needs to be perfectly written to sell to your visitors.

If small business owners didn’t like paying for the web site design, paying for the content didn’t even cross their mind. The content and flow of your web site is just as important, if not more, than having a professional design. The attention span of your average internet user is about 2 seconds at this point. So get their attention and hold on to it for dear life!

So when it comes to your small business web site, get the design and content right if you want to have sales. A few simple changes can make all the difference to your web site’s performance. I do a free web site analysis and so do a lot of other people, so you really have no excuse not to start on the path of web site success.

Before you launch a website you need to make sure you have your web strategy right. I’m not talking about having your website perfect. I’m talking about having your strategy in place for how you plan to make your website a success. The strategy may change over time but you need to know how you’ll make money and why customers will buy from you.

I’m currently working on a project that involves a paid subscription model. The website has been around a while and we know the website is popular already, but it’s not as popular as we thought. So to make sure we get all our ducks in a row first, we’ve delayed moving to the paid model for another two months.

It was a hard decision to make considering we were about to get a nice cash influx, but it’s the right decision. In the long run, the new strategy will make us a lot more money and create a sustainable business in the future.

The moral of the story, don’t underestimate your strategy. Get it right first time and life will be a lot easier.

I recently started working with a client in a very competitive industry. As I started to examine the competition, I realised something amazing: all the competitors were the same! Every single one of their websites had exactly the same links, the same boring information, and they were promoting on the same competitive advantage.

If your business markets itself like everyone else, how does it plan to get business? The answer seems to be luck. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t sleep very well at night if my entire business’ future rested on luck to attract customers.

The world is changing, business is changing, and you need to be changing too. Gone are the days when you can just throw out some marketing and hope it sticks. And soon doing the same marketing as your competitors will sink you as well.

It’s time to make a plan, it’s time to make your marketing different, it’s time to make your website stand out!

To be successful on the internet is not unlike being successful with a business or store in the real world. The only thing that has changed is the technology and the scale. The problem is most people don’t realise that and think because of the technology and scale, they can skip all the normal business practices that got them this far. People chant the mantra, “if you build a website, they will come!”

Sorry, but this is the first lie of the internet. If you build a website, no-one will look at it except your friends and family, and maybe the people receiving your business cards.

So how do you make your website effective? You integrate it with your business and most importantly your marketing plan. But you also need to think outside the box and create a unique marketing tool for your business. All your competitors have websites, so what makes your website different? Your business is different, why isn’t your website?

In business improvement, like most things in life, I believe that the correct mindset comes before the correct techniques. I could have made a website that was all about Internet Marketing, or Search Engine Optimisation, but there are already enough of those on the internet and they’re obviously not benefiting enough people.

That’s why, when I talk about becoming successful on the internet, I talk about growing your internet business. It’s about bringing all the different components of your website and business together into an ultimate marketing tool.

So if you’re truly committed to improving your business on the internet, keep reading. If you were looking for another get rich quick scheme that didn’t require any effort on your part, this obviously wasn’t the place for you.

When you’re starting a business, you obviously want to try and get everything right. Between building the right structures, creating plans, and doing the actual work, it can be easy to get that sinking feeling.

It helps to realise that building a business is a process. And part of that process is the continuous improvement that I’ve been going on and on about. Hence, when you start your business, you don’t always have to get everything right. The important thing is you get it out into the market place to see if it floats.

I’m not saying it’s ok to do crap work, but just to be aware that perfection takes time. Michael Jordan didn’t walk out onto the court the first time he played and instantly become the greatest basketball player in history. He practiced, improved, practiced, improved, over and over until he reached his level of greatness. And then he practiced some more!

So don’t let the feeling of overwhelm hold you back. Get started, get improving, and just start the process.

When your business starts to take off you need to have a strategy to deal with the growth. Many entrepreneurs start to get tied down with the technical work of the business rather than planning and controlling the growth of the company. When you create a business, you are creating a system that should be able to run without your input. You need to put systems in place so other people can take over the technical work while you grow your business.

So as you start to get more customers, remember to focus time on writing down the systems you use to deal with them. When you’ve designed that job, you give it to someone else and go to work on other aspects of your business. Imagine how much you could grow your business if you focused on marketing and finding customers all the time. This should be your first goal. Then as you grow more, you find other people to take care of this role as well.

Your final goal is to be able to sit on a beach in Hawaii sipping piña coladas while your business functions without you. The obvious dream of every business owner, but you have to work smarter than most to obtain this goal.

Over the last few weeks I’ve managed to meet quite a few people that can help my business through networking. Not just new clients but also people who I can add to my team when I need them. It’s exceptionally easy here in Madrid considering the small nature of the English speaking community but it can work anywhere.

So when you’re out and about, talk about what you do and listen to what other people do. Who knows when a graphic designer or marketing guru might pop up on your doorstep. Also remember to help others in their networking. When we all help each other by matching skills to needs, everyone benefits. And with the popularity of social networking websites now, your possible skill-base just expanded around the globe.

I’ve been re-reading “The E-Myth Revisited” over the weekend so I thought this would be a good time to talk about business development. Basically, business development is your business. Every business is in either two phases: it is either growing or dying.

Not hard to work out which group you want to be in. To keep growing you have to always be improving, always be looking for ways to make your business better.

The best way to do this is dedicate some time each day to business development. It’s time to start working ‘on’ your business, rather than ‘in’ your business. I’ll go into this in a bit more detail but your first step is realising you need to improve, and not get too buried in the day to day work of your business.

I’d always known about the need to start creating your business team and had actually done it in past ventures with good results. However it was taken to a whole other level yesterday when I met with a graphic designer for my website.

Her ideas where fantastic and the way she looked at my business was just so different to my point of view. I’ve never been a very visual person, I like things that look pretty, but as long as it’s not ugly I’m happy. But the things she showed me where just so elegant I was amazed. It took pretty and made it beautiful, sleek, and sophisticated. She’s coming back with ideas for my design today so hopefully, in a short while, you’ll see the difference it’ll make to my website.

Another example came from a lunch I had with a business friend. We like to catch up and share ideas about how we’re approaching problems, etc. He’s just started working with a retired marketer/graphic designer and the things she was producing were excellent. I guess we’re both quite technical people so the difference these visually creative people are making just blows my mind.

So start forming your team. Look in the right places and it can be less expensive than you think while adding incredible benefits.