GET RICH & LIVE FREE WITH JOIN UP DOTS

Zuzana Dobro is today's guest joining us on the Steve Jobs inspired Join Up Dots business podcast. She is a lady who really has travelled the world, experiencing not just culture but I imagine terrible weather, and returned with a plan As she says "I am Slovakian, born in the former Czechoslovakia. As a kid, I was told I'd never be able to leave my country and see the world or have the freedom to be whoever I wanted to be. After the Iron Curtain came down, I moved to England, speaking very little English with only £200 in my pocket. I gradually made my way through working in the creative industry and got an offer to join a big corporation. I had my "dream job" as an interaction and UX designer, but still, something felt odd... I had this unstoppable desire to fulfil my childhood dream to travel around the world, so I quit the "security", travelled solo for 2 years, and even backpacked to Antarctica. How The Dots Joined Up For Zuzana After my trip, I merged my passion for adventure travel and human evolution with my design and creative problem-solving Expertise, and I embarked on the journey of entrepreneurship. I've created The WHO Method to help entrepreneurs, coaches, authors, experts and agencies to get to know their customers deeply and to avoid the pitfalls of attracting the wrong people. As she goes on to say "Many Entrepreneurs struggle in their business until they discover how crucial it is to have crystal-clear audience targeting, which means to run a company that is aligned with a dream customer. Another missing part is understanding that the wants and desires of your customers will change because people's values shift. So how do people use THE WHO method to maximise marketing and customer attraction? And does she still find that no matter how well she gets to know her own customer she is still surprised Well let's find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots, with the one and only Zuzana Dobro Show Highlights During the show we discussed such weighty topics with Zuzana Dobro such as: How the ability to learn different languages has really helped her to understand peoples mentality and desires across the world. When you launch a product to market to your customer, you have to start with your "Who" first and foremost. Why you have to be careful about trying to create perfection in your business at the beginning...just get something out there. And lastly….. Zuzana shares the internal truth of her life and the simplicity of it is so astonishing to everyone....or it should be!

Todays show is a harrowing story, that shows how through one terrible incident a persons life can spiral out of control, until hitting rock bottom and fighting their way back. When our guest today was just fourteen, she was raped, she lost her virginity and her life changed forever. Unable to make sense of what had happened to her, still a very young girl, she turned to drugs, quit school four times, and became very promiscuous. At age 16, she fell pregnant with a child that she was unable to keep, and feel deeper from the path that could have show itself at anytime. After the abortion, she got involved with prostitution and at the age of 18 gave birth to her son. Now at that time, she made a decision to start fighting back and to make a difference in her and her own sons life. She went back to school, graduated via a program for single moms, received scholarships and awards, until after attending university for 5 years, and became a high school math and English teacher. Where she worked for 3.5 years, teaching in a small town, until and we will discuss this on the show, she made what seems a bizarre decision and quit to move back to her hometown, where she returned to prostitution and drugs because the money was better. Her self-esteem was in tatters. Sucidical thoughts running through her days, and an accident where she nearly lost her right leg. If that sounds to depressing to consider, she was just about to enter into the worst time of her life was during this period. Her son moved out when he turned 19 and didn't speak to her for three years. She ended up smoking crack for ten months during this time and then it happened. She nearly died when her appendix burst, and realized she didn't want to die without saying "good-bye" to her son. As she says "I had already started to turn my life around about two years before this event occurred, and so when I finally re-connected with my son, my life always back on track. Re-uniting with Julian changed my life in a very positive way. I decided to pursue a writing career. I now own a business, Wording Well, and am an author. I live a clean life, and spend a lot of it helping others. My books are in my local library, and my business is thriving. I'm living proof that a person can hit rock bottom and rise to the top despite all odds against them. My son is proud of me again, too. :)" So lets take her on the journey of her life again, as we show everyone of you, that life is a series of choices good and bad, and we can all improve our lives by simply deciding to do so. It's with great delight that I get to bring onto Join Up Dots, the one and only Lorraine Reguly

Beating Your Competitors in business is actually one of the easiest things you can do. Most people get fearful of who they are up against when starting a new business, and quite often will pivot and dilute their offering. This is a huge mistake as competition is actually a great thing, especially when operating online. You see most of these people who are out there doing what you want to do have solved a lot of the issues already. They have gone through the daily grind and trial and error phase to find out what works. So in this episode we take a look at hacking the competition and beating your competitors by putting your own spin onto what is already working. Ready? Well lets start. Step One: Start Looking At What Your Competitors Are Doing There are a million questions that you should be asking when building your business and most of them have been answered already. Start Googling your business idea, and start jotting down the url of your competitors that keep on appearing whenever you search. Take a look at the colour schemes, their images, their menu bar, their offerings, and make detailed notes on everything. Do they deal with customers directly? Are their systems automated with chatbots and autoresponders? What are their downloads that they offer? Do they get you onto an email marketing system? How are they going out of their way to make their offer clear and precise and easy to find on their site. Beating Your Competitors is about doing what they do better than they do it themselves so take detailed notes and then try to improve on them all. Step Two: Make A List Of How Long They Have Been In Business By Domain Checking One of the things that we like to do when working out a way of beating your competitors is find out the long players. What we mean by this is do some digging around to see which of the businesses that you are up against have been around for the longest You can zip over to https://websiteseochecker.com/and place in the URL of the company that you are checking and find instantly a ton of very useful information. For example if you placed Join Up Dots into the URL checker, you will see the age listed, the domain authority, the backlinks...everything you need in one simple search. So why do we do this when working on finding ways to start beating your competitors? Quite simply, if someone has been in business for a long time, they should be making money, in profit and being efficient with customer acquisition. Otherwise why go to the expense to keep things up online. We always want to get a list of companies five years and older to really start digging around for the gold. Step Three: Beating Your Competitors Means Understanding Your Customers It is always amazing to us when we ask our clients "Who are your ideal customers"? and we get a loose answer of "Men, over 40, with a steady job" How can this really tell us anything that can be useful for our business? Remember, your business is going all out to start beating your customers so the more intelligence that we can have in regard to who is buying the better. Remember the list of well established businesses that we have written the URL of on our list? Well if you haven't then its time to go back and do the work again, but if you have we now want to take those URLS and start mining Google for the good stuff it will tell us. We need to go over to Google Trends and start clicking around to see what type of traffic our competitors are getting. We can find out what sex, where they live, what age they are, what are their interests, almost everything we need to start building a detailed profile. The same can be said for joining FaceBook Groups, and seeing what questions are being asked by people and clicking through onto their profiles to see details about them. Are there consistent questions and similar profiles asking those questions? Yeah, we are sure there will be and you will want to make as many notes about these people as you can. That is how you start beating your competitors quicker than ever. Step Four: Compare Your Competitors Offers With Your Real Life Intelligence Now you have a detailed pack of information, of real life data, how does this compare to what your competitors are doing. When you look at their offerings, does there seem to be a synergy as to what you now know and what they are selling? Quite often a business will get itself into a position of power and then rest on it's laurels forgetting what got it there in the first place. That is a bad idea and one of the key rules to beating your competitors is knowing what they are doing and staying in front of them. So now is the time to up the anti, and really add another one or two elements to everything that they offer. If they are taking 48 hours to deliver, can you half that time? If they are offering a package of items to groom your beloved pooch, can you add additional items and still get it to the customer faster. When you think of the power of Amazon, it is mainly down to the ease of buying and the quickness of getting those items. There isn't much more to their business model, but they know that they have this part nailed down and can beat most other businesses easily. Step Five: Beating Your Competitors Means Ease As we just discussed, Amazon has dominated the world by the customer ease factor. We all know it will only take minutes to find something we want, buy it, and then sit back and wait for it to be delivered. Never has that been more important than nowadays, so how do you make things easy for your customer to find understand and buy. If you are selling a product how do you make the customer journey through your website as easy as possible to navigate. This is one thing that online businesses are really bad at. Signposting their offers to increase conversions. Get your friends to try to buy from you, and if they cant do it quickly then make the changes. Ask them to tell you within 3 seconds what your underlining offering is, that brings everything together...for example Join Up Dots is Business Made Easy. So if we haven't brought that element into everything we do then we are failing in our overall branding. Ease is king to the success of your business and beating your competitors will come down to this as much as anything else.

Introducing Getting Bored With Your Business Getting bored with your business is something that everyone has to deal with over time. You start a business full of passion to achieve, change your life or simply make oodles of cash. It's exciting times for sure. You come home from work and can't wait to turn on the laptop, check your emails, and discover todays progress. But what do you do when you have been doing the same thing for years, and that excitement is gone? Well that is what we are going to discuss in todays podcast focusing in on "Getting Bored With Your Business". Step One Be Aware Of Your Feelings And Ask Why? Most things in life and business can be nipped in the bud in the early stages of development. That is most certainly the case with boredom, and the feeling of getting stale within your business. Our first tip is to start noticing how you are feeling, and really focus in on trying to find the meaning behind those feelings. Could it be that you have a nagging doubt that this isn't the business for you, and your inner spirit is trying to tell you? Could it be that you have actually achieved what you set out to do, and now it's maintenance time? This is a common stage that many entrepreneurs go through when they finally get to where they hoped to get to. They are start-up people, visionaries, activators, call them what you want, but they like to make new things happen, and not to be doing the same day in day out. So why are you getting bored with your business? Those feelings are a great clue as to potential pivoting times. Step Two Be Realistic That The Grind Is Part Of The Game Nowadays you can see people everywhere showing you how wonderful their lives are, and what fun they are getting up to. But there is a backstory that you have to delve into, to truly understand how they got there, and that's the grind. The day in day out, turning up, doing their best when they didn't want to do it type of grind. Think about professional sportsmen and women at the highest levels of their games. We all see them winning Wimbledon, or the FA Cup in soccer and think "Wow, i would love to be doing what they are doing!" But we don't ever really consider the years and years of sacrifice that has gone into those highest moments of sporting achievement. We don't think of the tennis player travelling on their own to another tournament in another town. Spending nights on their own in hotel rooms, whilst they struggle with jet lag. We don't think of the terrible bars and pubs whenever nobody was listening, or actually turning up to listen, for famous bands and artists. We just consider their headline performance at Glastonbury and feel envious to their achievements. Get real people. If you are getting bored with your business, you have to accept and relish the drudgery and commitment that it takes. You have to say to yourself "I'm not getting bored with my business, this is where success is truly made" Behind the scenes, when nobody is looking at you, or actually cares what you are doing. Step Three Stop Getting Bored With Your Business By Delegating Once again, everybody will be dealing with things in their business that are boring to deal with. It could be sending out invoices to new and existing clients. It could be dealing with your tax returns, and accounting for your business. All businesses will have parts to them that are really boring, and aren't in your skill set, so think about delegating. Can you hire someone to do these for you whilst you focus on the things that bring value into your business? The fun things that play to your strengths and make the biggest impact on your bottom line? There are companies around the world offering freelancers who are looking to work for people like you. As someone said to me once "It might be a boring job to you, but it could change someone else's life." Getting bored with your business is as much losing track of where you sit within the business as everything else. Step Four Understand What Really Makes A Difference To Your Customer All businesses need customers, whether they are online automated sales, or one to one clients. It doesn't matter, without customers buying your products and services your business will be dead in the water. So it's our jobs as entrepreneurs to think long and hard about what our customers want and then continue to improve upon it. And that is where most people start getting bored with your business, they forget the creative side of things that was so prevalent at the start of their business. When it was fledging enterprise focused on getting the foundations correct and making that first sale, its all we do everyday. Does the customers want this? How can i position it so they can find it easier? Creative, blue-sky thinking that makes things happen until we start making money and then give up on the improvements. So if you are getting bored with your business, imagine its a new business again and review, tweak and make more cash than ever. I promise you the excitement will start to come back into your very quickly.

Lee LeFever is todays guest joining us on the Steve Jobs inspired Join Up Dots business podcast. He has a belief similar to us at Join Up Dots, whereby he believes that more often than not big enough is good enough when it comes to online business. He's inspiring entrepreneurs to rethink business success and design businesses to be intentionally small, scalable, and focused on a healthy quality of life. As he says "I'm fortunate that doing something I love has become my career. In 2003, I founded Common Craft, which is recognized worldwide as starting the "explainer movie" movement, and it has employed me as a media maker ever since. More than anything, I am a writer. Sometimes my words become scripts for Common Craft videos, chapters in a book or issues of a newsletter. Other times, they're used for mediocre attempts at humor in text messages. I wield my words with great care and benefit from having my wife, Sachi, as my editor. How The Dots Joined Up For Lee Most people consider me personable and easy-going. I smile a lot, maybe too much. My natural setting is optimistic and generally happy, with a side of anxiety. If we met in person, I would ask you a lot of questions. I try to live my life with great intention and a focus on quality. To me, this means remaining in control of my time and being willing to take risks and accept trade-offs in order to craft the life I want. Isnt that what everyone wants in life and in business. Get away from the ego driven, how big is it all movement, and focus on building a business that supports the life that you love. So did he start with this mantra to life, or was it the same as most of us, when the monster we create starts squeezing the life out of the reasons we wanted to build it in the first place? And what would be the simplest way of creating this in our lives? Focus on the business or the life that we want to lead? Well let's find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots with the one and only Lee LeFever

Introducing Nola Crystals Nola Crystals is the main focus for todays Join Up Dots business coaching podcast episode. This is a brand new business recently started by a listener of Join Up Dots, which is going to do very well for itself. The reason as you will hear on the show is mainly it has started, and also it is providing something that people already want and buy in numbers. This is always a great business to get into, where you can already see others having success in your field. So without further ado, lets begin with Nola Crystals and also answering a few other questions too. Question One - Nola Crystals Review Hey David! Let's start with how quickly "Join Up Dots" can work. One very small example in my life: Last Friday I watched a film about Steve Jobs (I love him) Saturday: I simply typed in "Steve jobs" into Apple podcasts. All I wanted to listen to was inspirational information from the genius himself Saturday: I found your podcast Saturday - Monday (today): I'm eight episodes deep into your show and I've learned so much VALUABLE information that I didn't know in relation to tips I could apply to my own business that I've started last month I typed "VALUABLE" in all caps because the common denominator I have heard from you and Steve Jobs (amongst other sources) is that value is key in relation to your customers So, over the course of a few days I've joined up the dots and I'm already richer in knowledge so thank you! It would mean the world to me if you would head over to my website and tell me what you think. I won't tell you anything about the business because I'd like to see from an average consumers point of view what their first impression is and if they can navigate the website with ease and get to a "money page" in "one click." I started the business the first week of October this year. I've had two sales and started SEO the beginning of October. I understand SEO is a longer process. Thanks David! Ps: I'm typing this whilst on a treadmill so if there are any spelling mistakes let's just blame the treadmill and not me! :) Question Two - Does Confidence Make A Difference David, loving the show. I have a question for you, which i think I am picking up through your content. It seems to me that online success comes as much from your own confidence and belief than the business itself? Would this be true, as I think if it is, i have discovered potentially what might be going wrong with my ventures. I dont think that i truly believe in myself enough, so keep on pivoting to start something new? Thanks for your answer if you have the time and all the best for your future plans Paul Samuels, St George Utah Question Three - Passion or Boring Business? Hi David, i would love you to do a show on finding ideas for businesses as this is something that i struggle with. Do you think that a boring business, functional but needed is better than one that fills the passion zone that people talk about. Jim Rhapsody Question Four - Should I Start A Podcast Hi Join Up Dots...What would be your advice for starting a podcast nowadays. It seems that everyone has a podcast. Celebrities have podcasts. Celebrities have audiences. Do you think that you can start one in 2021 and still get an audience that I can monetize as successfully as you have? Melanie Ferrell, Ashton-in-Makerfield

Introducing Internet Mastery With Ian Pribyl Ian Pribyl is the internet master is the discussion of the day with , who is todays guest joining us on the Steve Jobs inspired Join Up Dots podcast. He is a man who quite simply has mastered and can fully explain how to start cracking it online. The reason I know this? Well he was recently on the show and so good was he that i thought "Lets go again" and get him on the show once more. As we heard on the last show he recently published a book called From Nothing which breaks down the mystery of making a living online. It was born out of being in an industry full of scammers who were cleaning out consumers' life savings under the promise of "getting rich quick" I created FIMP to empower online business seekers and save them from having to purchase any more "make money online" products. FIMP teaches everything a person needs to know — from absolutely zero knowledge to building a successful, profitable internet business. Now with a history that started a a bartender, and meandered through a series of sales and customer service roles he has taken what works offline and detailed it brilliantly as an online resource. Get your idea, do your market research, define the product the list goes on and on. So is it possible to start a business and get it up and running without any of the problems that people struggle with? Well let's find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots with the one and only Ian Pribyl Show Highlights During the show we discussed such deep subjects with Ian Pribyl such as: Why so many people struggle with the negative dialogue that runs in peoples mind keeping them stuck in their position. Ian talks about why we should be able to find data to discover the profitability of a new business idea before launching. Why it is so much easier to earn a lot of money online instead of a small amount...as long as you have the value and the belief. And lastly….. Why Sausage dogs and their welfare could be an amazing little business to enter into for any listener across the world.

Introducing Priyanka Gupta Priyanka Gupta is todays guest on the Steve Jobs inspired Join Up Dots business podcast. She is a lady from a small town in Uttar Pradesh, North India, who was once a software engineer by education, and also once an investment banker. But now she is a writer, solo traveller, and art lover and also the founder and editor-in-chief of On My Canvas — a personal growth and travel blog. Now the key to this lady is her story is about breaking boundaries in conventional India to follow her passion. As she says "I was neither a writer(blogger) nor an avid traveller until 2016. In my small hometown, education and work opportunities are limited. To make a good career, I left my home to study in Rajasthan, a desert state of India. The year was 2003, and I was just 15. How The Dots Joined Up For Priyanka In Rajasthan, I prepared to compete in a national-level exam which guarantees a merit-based course in the best engineering institute of India - The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). I studied hard for three years and scored an all-India rank of 78, out of half a million students who competed in the exam. In 2006, I joined the Computer Science and Engineering B.Tech course in IIT Delhi. I graduated in 2010. Then I worked in software and investment banking jobs and lived around India in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, and Bangalore. Throughout my corporate career, I never enjoyed my work. Mostly I was fixing the nuts and bolts of old software or was making the rich richer. Now I could have worked harder to develop the skills to get more innovation-centered jobs, but I didn't like the work related to computer science. Why did I study it then? Because for a girl from a small patriarchal town, IIT and CS were the only way to opportunities. (A lot of Indians first become engineers and then figure out what they want to do.) The disappointment from my professional life bled into my personal life, too. I was mostly morose. And that is the perfect place to start todays episode. So why do few people really give their passions ago, when the story of others following their dreams are all around them? And would todays guest have moments still when she thinks "ok, this is a sticky time. Should i go back and get a job? It would be easier" Well let's find out as we bring onto the show to join up dots with the one and only Priyanka Gupta Show Highlights During todays show we discussed such weighty subjects with Priyanka Gupta: Priyanka talks openly about her belief that there was no going back once she decided that she was going to be a writer and traveller. Why you don't have to lose the skills that you have developed throughout jobs that you perhaps were eager to escape from. We discuss the path to finding the dream business, and why more often than not the dream doesn't come to you until much later. and lastly....... Priyanka reveals the steps that she took to get her first teaching position in Chile, after first taking the leap.

What Are Backlinks? What are backlinks and why they are so important for an online business is one of the main questions that we get asked. Followed on by "How do i get backlinks to my business?" i suppose. So in this podcast episode we will focus on the key elements that make a great backlink, and why for most online businesses they should form part of your monthly strategy. Lets start with explaining in the simplest terms what a backlink is as the success of your business could depend on them. The Simplest Concept For Understanding Backlinks Imagine that you have been given a balloon by a friend to blow up for a birthday party. You take the balloon with all the enthusiasm you can muster and start to blow with all your might. No matter what you do the balloon won't inflate more than a fraction. It stays lifeless and limp in your hand, whilst you are red faced and defeated by the effort. Well when we start building an online business our fledgling enterprise is just like that balloon. It wont be getting much traffic, sales, customers, eyes whatever, as it will be bouncing along the Google ranks two inches off the floor. Now imagine you got a hundred other businesses to blow into your balloon. Suddenly you have momentum and your business will gain from the SEO boost that they have given you. You take off because those other sites have linked to you, and through that link Google says "Ok. these other sites think this business is worth talking about...lets push it up the rankings" Its the backlinks or inlinks that have made all the difference. Or said in another way, every time someone links your URL to theirs, your balloon will start to rise and reap the rewards. What Types of Backlinks are Valuable? Now back in the day this question would never have been worth answering as it was a numbers game. Get as many people linking to your business and it's game on. So business owners would ignore building quality backlinks into their strategies, and instead went to as many spammy sites as they can. Whenever you could leave a comment or review where there was a chance to add their URL, people would bash out as many as they could and do very well. However, Google started thinking about their definition of "what are backlinks" and decided that it should be all about relevance and authority. Now we are getting into the nuts and bolts building a backlink strategy and there is no getting away from the fact that Google are right. By looking at how established a website is, by scoring it from 1 - 100 you are well on your way to only having to get a few top quality backlinks to make a big difference to your success. Lets give you an example to make things easier. Trait #1: Authority Sites Are The One To Go For At the time of writing this article Join Up Dots has a domain authority of around 49 from a possible 100, which for a podcast is pretty good. The BBC has a domain authority of 95, almost a perfect score. So it would make sense that we should try to get a programme, article or radio show to do a piece on podcasting whilst mentioning us as a reputable source of information. They are saying to the world "Join Up Dots are highly recommended" and Google takes notice of the powerful backlink they have given us. So when you are sitting thinking What are backlinks, then you have to think reputable, high ranking businesses, that add to my authority. Don't go spammy and aim for quantity, instead be strategic and work on approaching other top sites for potential linking opportunities Why Are Backlinks Important? Now by this time you should have understood why understanding in links or incoming links as they are also called is very important for your success. They are a big tick in the box from other peoples businesses that they want to tell the world about your own through their businesses. But we can go deeper than this and tell you why some backlinks can actually harm your business, whilst others are amazingly important. So we already mentioned the authority sites, and why they should be aimed for whenever possible. But what if that site keeps on linking to you? Trait #2: New Links Are Better Than From The Same Site Time And Time Again Imagine when you are working on your what are backlinks to my business strategy, you try to get the BBC to keep on linking to you? That would be amazing as they are high in the rankings and have super powerful linking potential. Well you will see that this can cause the initial boost of SEO power that you gained to get less and less important for you. In fact the more you get from the same website the worse it is for you. It is better to aim for a few, more than loads of backlinks, no matter what the site is. Even if your mate works for the perfect business and is part of the editorial team....don't abuse that connection. Think what one of my pages would be great to gain a boost for and stick to that only. Trait #3: Your Target Keyword Should Be In The Anchor Text Once again, lets picture the fact that you are building content on Indoor Fireworks and you approach a company for a linking opportunity. They say yes to you, and then on their page link to your website with the words "Fireworks" instead. You are still getting the link back to your business so what would be the issue with them omitting this one word? Dependant on the amount of traffic and the winnable aspect of that traffic that mistake could well be fine. However more often than not, you will have done your keyword research and found the keyword "Fireworks" is highly competitive and needs a huge push to get to the top of the ranks. Whilst indoor fireworks, with less traffic and competition could be the winner you should be aiming for. Try to get the right keywords in your backlinks from other people as the more you get the more you will rise to the top of the Google rankings for those hard to win words. Sit down, work out where the buying customer is heading to find people like you, and analyse the search times. Grasping the power of anchor text, when you are working on your business can really take the effort away from everything I promise you. Trait #4: If The Backlink Isn't Relevant To Your Business Then What's The point? We could go on about this all day for sure, but you have to get into the head of Google and understand what Googles prime business model is to understand "What are backlinks?" Googles business model is nothing much more than bringing the greatest, most accurate information to us when we want it. They dont want us to be spending hours searching for "Dog Training" when everything we type in brings back results about Cats and Mice. They want reputable, accurate, honest, trustworthy information to appear to make us stay longer on Google (which means more money for them). Therefore, by getting you business linked to by a site that has nothing to do with your own you would be better off to have a clean up. Spend sometime going through your links and pruning them by contacting the relevant owner or webmaster and asking for changes and removals to be made to the content. Once again this is an ongoing business and should be looked at every few months to maintain the authority and relevance of your own site. Dont be let down by what other people are doing. Keep it clean, mean and make sure backlinks are doing what they should be doing for your business. Giving you a huge boost in ranking, traffic and of course sales, and isnt that you want after all?

Introducing Scaling A Business Scaling a business is what everybody talk about across the world. You can dip into any podcast, blog, or business radio show and someone will be talking about scaling a business But in this podcast episode we start with discussing whether this is actually a requirement of every business. Is it better to sometimes stay small, and not scale your business at all? Well, we will find out as we go, and like all things we do in Join Up Dots we will leave it up to you to decide what route is best for you. Ready, then lets proceed in with the first steps you need to take when deciding if scaling a business is right for you. What Is Scaling A Business Actually? In its simplest form, scaling a business is having the right processes in place to cope with an increased level of sales, whilst maintaining the equilibrium of your business. Ok, lets make it even simpler for you to get your head around. Imagine that you are a one person business owner who has started a side hustle business that is now at the tipping point. You have built the foundations to your new business, done the work, and now you are getting a trickle of customers into your life. Do you increase that trickle of customers into a torrent of customers? A tsunami of eager to buy customers would be great for your bottom line, and that is how do you cope with that increase? Well certainly you can hire more staff, but that will of course take away some of your profits and bring a level of hassle that having staff will always bring to your business. Perhaps you dont want to be dealing with training, sickness, unexplained absentees when you actually started your business to give you a freedom type liftsyle. Well then if that is the case, you will need to build in systems and processes that can help you deal with the sales influx without it taking a toll on your personal health. That is scaling a business in a nutshell. It's allowing for more sales, more customers, more profit whilst operating lean, smart and the way that you want your business to run. Sound good, or a monster? Why Perhaps You Dont Want To Scale A Business Many business decide that they dont want to get into a scaling a business and quite happy the way things are. You might have a Personal Brand type business, whereby you are expected to be part of the process. Take the host of Join Up Dots for example, who is front and centre of everything he does throughout his business. Does he want to have hundreds of one to one clients leaving him with no time to live the life that he wants? Or does he decide that instead of personal interaction he is more than happy to create courses and content that can be sold time and time again. Well we can tell you that a blended approach works well for sure, and if the sales of the pre-recorded content exceed the one to one then its decision time. But we can also tell you that he knows that the true value is by working with people hand in hand to get them the results that they want. So once again, what are your personal values as to how your business operates and its important to keep to theses. Step One To Business Scaling - Identify Your Personal And Business Values Throughout your business you will have core values that you should without a doubt stick firm too. Some people call this a mission statement, but you have to go deeper than that to create a blueprint of what a business needs to give you, For example, do you want to have the ability of switching off the business and going on long vacations when you want them? Free from distraction and beeps and notifications every five minutes? Well if you do, then you definitely need to bring in processes or staff to help you do this without letting down potential or long standing customers. What if your business supply is selling more to existing customers than new ones? How would you operate in that regard, added to the fact that you would like to take long no interrupted vacations? Get detailed and start looking at all the possible situations that could be keeping you in your current position financially and freedom wise. Get uber detailed, and dont expect this to just come flowing out of you like magic, as more often than not this will take time. Every time you come up with an idea that hadn't occurred to you when thinking about scaling a business jot it down quickly before it disappears again. Step Two To Scaling A Business - Automate What You Can As Much As Possible Now that you have your list of situations that might derail you getting your business into six figures and beyond its re-engineering time. You need to go through your list and look at what you have written, and start working backwards to find solutions to your problems. For example, you might have thought about customers contacting you when you are in the bath, bed, or away on vacation. What do you need to do to make this no longer a problem that you need to deal with? Should you simply place a sequence of automated responses in place that will direct your customer to the right sales page or product? Perhaps your business is a high-end concierge type of operation, when scaling a business definitely needs personal help and assistance twenty four hours a day. Then the auto response may not be for you, and a team of virtual assistants scatted around with the world working at different times is the key. You need to know your business and your customers requirements inside out and start making plans to automate or delegate whenever possible, whilst maintaining the quality of your connection. Step Three - Commit To Growth Everything that we are talking about here is long term, professional business thinking and not to be done on a whim. You know the kind of things, when you hear them on a podcast and then think "Ooh i better be doing this is guess" Bad idea on all levels. You have to truly want to be focused on scaling a business as if you haven't planned to do this from the start then you will encounter pain in the transition. You will need to break a lot of things, and then rebuild stronger and that isn't easy for sure. So ask yourself and keep on asking yourself "Why do i want to grow and scale my business?" Is this an ego metric whereby you feel that you aren't a success as you only need ten clients per year, and spend most of your time walking the dog, or sitting in pubs. We refer you back to earlier in the content whereby you have to define your personal values as to what you want to get out of your business. If you are perfectly happy with where you are financially and lifestyle wise then keep thing as they are and ignore the scaling a business urge. However if that isn't you set it as your major goal and focus of the next few months and i promise you you will never look back. Step Four - Never Stop Asking Are You Doing Enough For The Customer? Many business make the mistake of getting to a certain point and then resting on their laurels. Remember Blockbusters and its massive decline when streaming came into force. Most kids nowadays cant imagine why anyone would have driven to the video stores, spent ages choosing a film, only to then watch it, rewind it and then drive it back to the store. Yeah, even for me who was well versed in the back and forth of video consumption wonders why we put up with it. But put up with it we did, until we didn't have to. The same is with your business, are you operating like you always have done and aren't interested in changing as it has always worked well for you. Well i can promise you that when it comes to businesses and organisations who are amazing at scaling a business the key element to them is their willingness to change. You need to be keeping one eye on the consumer, one eye on the market place and one eye on the changing tides of technology otherwise scaling a business wont be required anymore. You simply wont have a business to scale as that ship has sailed, and it has taken all your customers with it too. Thanks for reading or listening to the Join Up Dots podcast giving you the first four steps to scaling a business. Remember everything takes time, but having a plan in front of you is so much easier than simply trying to make things up as you go along.