The Riff Raff Podcast

I will bet quite a bit of money that if you ask any business owner what their number one struggle is, 98% will answer the same damn thing.

Sales.

And if you are a solopreneur, you're not only the entire production team, communications team and admin assistant, you're also the whole sales force. That's a lot of hats and most people only have one head.

Today during Ballsy Women In Business, we talked about sales. The experience you don't realize you have and the experience you don't realize the person in front of you has had. Both are very important to your bottom line.

We touched on that tricky limbic brain and how the wrong messaging or rushing the sales cycle can trigger that fight or flight response faster than you can say used car salesman.

If you're in a position where selling is your hairshirt, then this might be the podcast for you. Sympathy will always sit between shit and syphilis in the dictionary, but we've all been there and are happy to give a little to the fellow entrepreneurs making their way through the sales cycle.

Remember: you're selling to solve a clients' problem not shiest them. So buck up and get out there!

Entrepreneurship can be challenging for anyone. For women? Sometimes you need other women to get a better understanding of what you might be going through. Carrie Green, founder of the Female Entrepreneurs Association, has developed a community that women can find business resources, emotional support and the ability to take action for your business that you might otherwise struggle with.

I stumbled upon the FEA when looking for local business building groups for women. I started to learn about FEA because of my own group Ballsy and wanted to learn all I could to make it successful. Carrie Green offers workshops, webinars, online resources and community forums. It was the opportunity to take the goal setting workshop if you bought She Means Business that gave me the experience the FEA truly provides.

Take a listen and learn how She Means Business might just be the book you need to kick your fears over, your business in to high gear and your life in to reality you've dreamed of.

People can get caught up in the myths and legends surrounding entrepreneurship. We see Oprah and Richard and Steve and Arianna and all the fancy folks and figure that will be us in a year.

Nope. Nope it won't. Downer right?

But wait! All of these people have something else in common - education. Continuous learning. Determination. Smart teams. Processes. All the behind the scenes stuff that we don't know about until we start looking. While we might think it's the present day business gurus like Tony and Simon and Gary who have cornered the market on success, they're actually standing on the shoulders of giants like Peter F. Drucker. Haven't heard of him? You need to.

This week on WWW, I'm sharing the wise words from Druckers' famous book, "Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Practices and Principles." If you plan to be an entrepreneur and haven't read it yet, get it. I wish I had when I started and am so glad I have now.

Knowledge is power peeps ;) And we all need more of that.

What is there to not love about Monday's? New ideas. New week. New opportunities.

Oh that's right. Your boss sucks. And they suck the fun out of Monday's.

My boss is awesome and that's because I'm the boss. In this episode of Entrepreneurial Entrails, I chat about saying yes to change, putting the fun parts of you (don't be dirty) in to your business and making Monday's suck a whole lot less than they do right now.

Have you ever wanted to attend a conference or event but the cost didn't work for you? Either what you would get out of the conference wasn't worth the price or your budget just wouldn't allow it? Consider volunetworking.

Just about every large scale event you can think of depends on volunteers. Hiring staff to man all the areas of an event makes the budget near impossible to maintain and takes away from other things you could be offering. I guarantee you that event organizers are interested in getting free help. But the difference? How you treat the experience.

If you decide to reach out and create an opportunity, make the most of it. Be willing to go the extra mile if needed. Somebody else cancelled? Pick up the slack. Don't have your own business cards? Make sure you collect from everyone you meet and then connect on LinkedIn with a personal message that includes how you met. Make sure that you keep your social media posts professional and to a minimum. Check in at the location, a quick "it's great to be here" and a photo. Maybe one or two during the day while on a break. Add the event to the project section of your LinkedIn profile. And follow up with the organizers after thanking them for the experience!

There's a lot more ways to make an event work for you but the best is to remember to provide value to the organizers!

We can all have some challenges when it comes to personal development. For example - if we don't think we need to work on it at all. If we think it's too touchy feely. Or girly. Or a waste of time. Or all of the above. To be honest - that's kind of where my mind usually goes.

But in the spirit of going outside my comfort zone, I went with an author that I've grown to know and respect through watching her TED talks, chats with Oprah and Chase Jarvis and the general community consensus that she's awesome.

Brene Brown is a Phd and researcher in to a lot of the touchy feely stuff that most touchy feely people won't even touch: shame, vulnerability and fear. Those are topics that don't inspire a lot of warm feelings but they are also the ones we need to deal with to get ahead in our business.

I jumped in to The Gifts of Imperfection and really enjoyed it. Even had some aha moments that made me glad I got over myself and my narrow views of personal development. If you want to dip your toe in to the PD world, this research backed, fact driven, personal narrative just might having you jumping in to the self help pond with both feet.

Winning is about negotiation versus capitulation. You may or may not agree with that but the truth of the matter is this: at the end of the day, what are you trying to accomplish?

Part of setting up a win/win in business is having a clear idea of what your goal is going in to the negotiation. If you are wishy washy, it comes across. In your ask, your body language and your spoken language. Those are the times where knowing the sneaky shit of the win/win would save you aloooooot of trouble.

Today the focus was on obstacles to our goals and how we overcome them. We roundtabled and came up with quite a list of obstacles and avoidance techniques we all have used at one time or another while working on our business.

1. Cooking and domestic duties

2. Paralysis by analysis - overplanning and getting too caught up in detail to move forward.

3. Social media

4. Office chatter

5. Dabbling in a variety of goals vs picking a few goals and focusing

6. Busy brain

7. Excuses - shifting blame to outside interruptions (darn kids)

8. Fear of success / Imposter Syndrome

9. Negative influences.

One of the chief ways we all agreed we overcome these obstacles is by recognizing them for what they are in the first place. If you are heading to a go-to stress reliever / time waster (such as FB ;) ) then seeing that for what it is helps to put boundaries around the time spent. That was another solution - scheduling time to plan. Scheduling time for office chatter. Scheduling time for social media. If you put it in your calendar and see it as a reward for getting work done, it might help you overcome the urge to delay the work you need to do.

Biggest of all, I think, is recognizing that goal setting and the work to achieving those goals, is hard work. It might be considered another thing on your to-do list which is already long enough. Here was a suggestion I got from the Carrie Green work I've been doing:

Write out ALLLLL your goals. Big. Little. Audacious. And then choose 5 to achieve over the year. Yup: 5. Why? Because once you write out the five, you're going to add action items to the goals and the people who can help you reach the goal. That, my friends, is doable vs overwhelming.

In the meanwhile, as Oprah says, know that we are rooting for your rise! That Ballsy is a group to grow your business with and know that you aren't alone in the face of challenges. If Oprah can admit to being afraid and using a team to succeed, so can we!

Thank you everybody for a great conversation and learning opportunity. You all inspire me to continue to rise :)

Celebrities can create some interesting opportunities for themselves but it's not all easy peasy. They fall in to some traps where they might rely on their name to push a crappy product just for the sake of pushing a product. (Kardashian's anyone?)Or they aren't taken seriously even though the product IS worthwhile because they're a celebrity. That isn't fair either. Then there are the celebrities that fall in to the 3rd group where they decide to do things their way to promote a great product and won't go for the shameless exploitation.

Paul Newman was that guy. A celebrity who happened to have a great idea for a high quality salad dressing but who initially refused to use his celebrity to make it happen. He believed enough in the product to try and make it on quality alone. Reality proved to be more of a challenge than movies and he eventually had to resort to a bit of shameless exploitation in order to get his product out.

The game changer? He didn't do it for himself. He didn't do it to add to his bank account. He was willing to put his face and name on a product for one reason: kids. The altruistic and philanthropic focus of helping kids dealing with life threatening illness go to camp and forget about being a sick kid for a time. If there's any good reason to go for shameless exploitation, then his Hole in the Wall Gang camps would be it.

This was a great read and provided some insight in to a celebrity that has left a legacy far beyond his movie roles. For any business owner, you'll find inspiration and ideas in this book to help you stick to your vision and deliver a product worthy of your name and, if you choose, face.

A little while ago I was searching for the hashtag #cancer on Instagram. It was that time of year and I wanted to see what conversations and images people were sharing. What came up? A lot of crap. A lot of unrelated, trivial, full on crap that should never have come up at all. And it made me angry.

Why angry? Well, I take communications seriously. For many personal reasons, I take cancer seriously too. When I see someone abusing the tag purely to drive traffic to their pitiful content, my inner crankypants comes out in a big way.

Why share this? Because if you are trying to drive engagement with your audience or get new followers, you might be tempted to try this nasty troll trick not realizing the damage you're doing. To your business, your reputation and your online profile. Or if you do realize it's a troll thing to do that and are doing it anyway, I'm here to tell you to stop. It sucks. It's rude. It's going to bite you in the butt.

Here's a few tips and tricks for using tags the right way and some choice words for those of you choosing the troll way ;)