The Business Survival Guide: Your Small Business, Marketing, Human Behavior, and Motivation Questions Answered

Learn big money mistakes to avoid and how to prevent theft in your business.

Here with Shannon today! Talking about her work as an accounting analyst and chief finance officer and what she’s seen in record keeping and also dealing with employees.

BIGGEST MISTAKE

The biggest mistake people make is not doing things in a timely manner and then they hurry along at the end and put things in the wrong places. People are generally very stressed.

How to handle it differently. Each day: identify the 3-5 most important things done first.

NEXT MISTAKE

The next mistake is misclassifying expenses by the business owner or an employee. If something, like a piece of equipment has a long life it needs to be amortized, not expensed, for example.

Some people may do this intentionally. That’s fraud, and Shannon says she sees most of these people get caught. People lost their jobs and some had jail time.

Let's get into it

GET YOUR FINANCE QUESTIONS ANSWERED

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.

What do you need help with in your marketing? What problems are you facing? What's your next big challenge?

Click here to Submit A Question for the Podcast.

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 in 2017? 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% in 2017?” 

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.

When you start out as a business owner or consultant, you're excited about any work or any client that comes your way. We've all been there—and most of us eventually learn better.

We've all at least regretted working with a client, and at worst the wrong client has caused bad lasting effects. The same goes for employees. The wrong hire can be a disaster.

Let's get into what today's landscape looks like, see how bad clients behave, and learn the steps you can take right now to avoid massive failure.

What's your business's biggest challenge?

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.

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Limited Time Pre-Release (85% off) access to the digital Intensive Entrepreneurship Bootcamp is now available. Please request an invite. Only 100 seats available. Learn the skills and mindsets that will dramatically improve your business success and quality of your personal life.

Free Giveaway for business owners: William Norton's "Primary Objective," A novel and guide to Neuro-linguistic programing that educates and entertains to drive home the teaching. 

"Primary Objective" can be read broadly by business leaders as an introduction to neuro-linguistic programming before they join an NLP course to learn the concepts in full. The concepts in this book will lead you to think differently about the way you talk to your employees and the way you structure negotiations and other important business interactions—including sales.

Rely too heavily on word of mouth? Do you get results, but struggle to get clients?

We'll get into why it's so important to learn to advertise, why word of mouth isn't always your friend, and how being embarrassed actually led me into an excellent consulting relationship that changed my business in ways I didn't expect.

Submit your questions at http://TheBusinessSurvivalGuide.com

Great listener question from Tracy in today's episode:
My biggest challenge is definitely not having the belief in myself to advertise. I always shy away from social media (I am actually trying to master Facebook as I answer this) and there is a self-doubt that always holds me back. I have taken two of your courses, and many others. that When I leave said courses, I actually believe I can use the approaches taught to expand my business, but when I get home, it all disappears. I always seem to fall back into the same old routine. Word of mouth was always my biggest promotor, but five years ago, I moved regions and it has been very difficult not knowing anyone and finding new clients. My clients succeed when I work with them, however, I just struggle to get them.

We talk a lot about the foundations you need in advertising. I recommend How To Write A Good Advertisement by Victor Schwab to get the fundamentals.

This show runs on your questions. Submit your questions at http://TheBusinessSurvivalGuide.com