The Business Survival Guide

Take this seriously and you will save yourself time, money, and bottles and bottles of TUMS (stress ulcers!). Your credibility with your clients starts before you ever talk with them. It starts with your marketing materials. It starts with what they've hear about you. And then it continues with how you interact with them.

We'll get into not only best practices today, but also the common mistakes that most amateur entrepreneurs and business people make—all while they're honestly trying to do the right thing for their client.

Save yourself those ulcers and take a listen.

Today we have an inside look into a consulting call with some of my students. These are people who have decided real, honest, direct feedback is better than failing in their businesses.
You'll hear stories of success and failure, stories of how people have grown overtime, and a story or two that might shock you.
Ultimately, this issue of being able to model success before having all the mindset shifts necessary to produce it is a big one.

People get this wrong all the time. They stop modeling too soon. They believe they don't need to. They delude themselves into thinking they know a better way—all before they've even mastered basics.

Listen in!

I will be the first person to tell you that money management doesn’t come naturally to me. I’ve had to learn a lot of hacks to make my brain work with it.

The first thing you’ve got to do with your money is pretend 10% of it doesn’t exist. Most people don’t have the underlying discipline to leave money alone. This is not money that has a purpose. This is leverage you have over money itself. This is money to let you know that you control the money, it doesn’t control you.

Eventually you may put the money into property or low risk stocks, but still pretending it doesn’t exist. This isn’t savings, this isn’t anything. This is leverage you have over money and it teaches you that you have the discipline to control your own money.

I did seminars with Russ Yarnell who used to tear up $100 bills just to show that he didn’t have an emotional connection to it.

It’s so important to get control of your money.

When you’re panicked you can fight, flee, or freeze. People do this with money all the time because they have a huge amount of emotions about money.
You don’t want emotional connections with money.

Also, you want to be in conversations with an accountant or an attorney as a business owner. The different ways you can organize your business may cost or save you tons of money when it comes to taxes and there’s no way to know which is best without talking to someone who really knows what they’re talking about.

You want to be a step ahead of your money and how money works in your business.

How can you get more satisfied customers and raving fans of your product or service? Well that's easy: set their expectations with your marketing and advertising so that you deliver and over-deliver on what they actually expect.

Even if you were the best person for the job—in the world—customers that come in with unrealistic or overinflated expectations will not be satisfied and they'll go shopping somewhere else. Some of the biggest sources of discontent among customers are "surprise" charges.

Being clear (or as clear as you can) about your pricing is one huge way you can make customers into fans. Even if your service or product is expensive, people won't feel cheated when you're honest with them—big concept huh?

Another area that's important for the person who asked this question is setting expectations of the outcomes. For example: if customers expect to be "cured" with one visit to the chiropractor, they'll be sorely disappointed and they'll blame it on the chiropractor!

These are just a few of the things we'll get into today! Let's get it started.

Events and seminars are a remarkably valuable service to provide for your current and potential clients. When you teach useful material you quickly build a know-like-trust factor with people—so they're more likely to buy from you.

So we agree that seminars and events are worth it, but when to plan and how to advertise?
I use 6 months as the rule to begin advertising with a 3-touch-point minimum in that time frame (so that means I've done the planning in advance...). You can build the content while people are signing up, but you've got to have a venue locked down before you start telling people to buy plane tickets.

We'll get into all of that and more today on The Business Survival Guide.

Even though "productivity tips" and "how to stop procrastination" is covered exhaustively, I keep getting requests to cover it. There certainly are steps you can take, but the most important thing to do is to break your pattern of becoming overwhelmed. That's what we're going to talk about so you can sit back and think about some of the things you may be subconsciously doing that are getting in the way of your success. We sabotage ourselves by falling into the same old habit cycles over and over. Let's get into it!

Want more customers this year? There's a specific way you can craft your messaging to be ultra effective and the beginning of the year is the perfect time to start your planning.

Our question today is "How do I get more customers in the door in 2017?" The question comes from John Vurpillat who I personally know is doing great work.

We're going to address it in 2 ways. First the fundamentals of what brings customers in the door in the first place. And second, I'll get your gears spinning with the ways your customers are spending their year so you can optimize your advertising and marketing to match their behaviors. Should be a fun show!

(I want this show to be valuable for you. If something is challenging for you, it's a problem a lot of people are facing. Submit a question to the show here.)

Last week we hosted a conference call instead of recording the podcast because of technical difficulties (go subscribe so you'll know if that happens again). Today we're going over some of the questions that came up on that call.

One of the questions that came up on the call was: “How can I increase my revenue by 200% next year?”

There are a couple of things you need to do to work toward's doubling your revenue in 2017. This podcast gets into tracking marketing and advertising, lead magnets, and what's the best way to think about Facebook from a small business standpoint.

Leadership issues have truly morphed. Here is a start on the new landscape...

Question: In businesses where employees frequently call in sick and everyone else has to pick up the slack, what can managers and other employees do to fix the culture?

Bluntly, the employees who are not the problem are best off pretending the problem doesn't exist. That's in their best interest. They can of course use social pressure to try and change things but that can go sideways quickly.

Managers need to do the fundamentals well: documenting, being direct, and so on. But in this episode we'll get into the number one thing that will stop employees from behaving in this way. It's not what you'd think.