The Work From Anywhere Podcast

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Today we’re going to talk about a subject that is very important. It is the deadliest beginner trap you can have when starting a business: your own mind. I’m going to tell you, very specifically, how your mind gets in your way when you’re starting a business for the very first time.

I have a saying in my programs: “the map doesn’t appear until the car starts moving.” Most people approach business when they’re first starting out like a cross-country road trip. They plan their trip ahead of time, they print out directions, and they want to make sure everything is perfect before they get started. They then get in the driver seat and start thinking about what could go wrong along the way, like “what if there’s a traffic jam in Kansas? Shouldn’t we figure that out before we leave?” Their friend in the passenger seat, or rather, their friend who already has a business, says “what are you, crazy?”

Even though the driver has a map, they don’t know what the full journey is going to look like. Their mind can’t quiet down, and it’s not their fault; it’s just that they’ve never been through a process like this before. The process of entrepreneurship is one where the plan you started out with isn’t going to get you where you want to go. When you start, your mind will go crazy with “what ifs.” In business, you need to have faith that the outcome will happen if you put your foot on the accelerator and keep going.

To summarize:

1.      Solve one problem at a time. Focus on the one right in front of you and don’t even worry about the other problems. You’re going to go insane if you try to solve future problems.

2.      “What ifs” will paralyze you forever. Wait until “what ifs” happen, and then solve them.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur (or take a road trip from New York to LA), you need to have faith. Some things will go wrong, some things will go right, and you just take it all as it comes.

To learn more about overcoming mental barriers in entrepreneurship, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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I had a conversation with a client this week about renegotiating my fee. I had gotten so busy that I didn’t have much time to service this client, so I had the difficult task of telling him I had to double my rates and do less work for him. He said that he’d rather not pay more, but that he will anyway.

So, how can you double your prices, cut your work in half, and have the client be okay with it?

Make yourself valuable. If you are priced at the bottom of the market, established business owners are going to think that you’re not going to have enough time to service them because you have too many other clients. It also shows that you don’t have enough confidence in yourself. You’re going to attract budget-conscious shoppers instead of results-oriented buyers.

The first step to positioning yourself this way is to become the very best in the world at what you do. That sounds hard, and yes, it is really hard to be the best in the world at one thing. If you want to be the best in the world at digital marketing, that will be extremely difficult. However, it’s not so hard to be the best at the intersection of two things. What about digital marketing for dog trainers? You’re going to have to work hard, but if you hustle and you’re committed, you can absolutely master a niche in a year or two.

Step two is to charge higher prices by price anchoring your services. When you’re talking to those dog trainers, don’t talk about all the steps that you’re going to do for them. Talk about the return on investment. Don’t show them costs, show them what your services will do for their business.

The third step is what my friend calls “positive indifference.” This means that when you are talking to a client, you are unattached to whether or not they decide to go with you. You act as their adviser, tell them what you think the best solution is, and act indifferent towards them working with you. The easiest way to do this is to have so much demand for your services that you can’t possibly take on all clients.

To learn more about becoming the best in the world in a niche, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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This is the final installment of the eighteen lessons that I learned in 2018. Let’s finish up so that we can keep doing the things that worked and stop doing the things that didn’t last year.

15.  Mastery is everything. Most people never become masters, because mastery is kind of boring. Mastery is about repetition of the fundamentals every day; doing the easy stuff perfectly over and over again. A lot of the time in this internet marketing world, people are out there looking for the latest “hack” that’s going to make everything come together, but marketing is just about fundamentals.

16.  Teaching is the best way to learn. If you can’t teach something to someone else, you probably don’t understand how it works. Form a weekly group and take turns teaching content to each other.

17.  Stories are your best way to communicate. They are the best way to market and to form a relationship with somebody. That’s why sales webinars, ads, and more often use stories. One of the easiest ways to write copy for a Facebook ad is to just tell a story. Another lesson that this has taught me is that people love conflict. I’ve seen people in a market that is so saturated come out and be polarizing, and everyone just eats it up. People also love to pick sides and form a team.

18.  People don’t care about your success. You have to be in it for you. Chances are your parents, spouse, etc. only care that you make enough money to pay your bills. If you’re trying to build an empire as an entrepreneur, no one’s going to care about it as much as you. Sooner or later, it will become more about your team and customers. Once you get to that point in entrepreneurship, it’s going to become much easier to keep pushing.

Those were the eighteen biggest lessons I learned in 2018. See you in the next episode.

To get a full hour-long training on how to conduct your own annual review, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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Today I’m going to continue covering the eighteen lessons that I learned in 2018 that helped me grow a business to $100,000 per month in revenue.

9.      Most people are managers of their lives instead of CEOs. They worry only about the day-to-day instead of making strategic decisions. Some management duties in your life could include paying bills, going to work, buying groceries, and other day-to-day things that don’t have a huge impact on the direction that your life is heading in. Be the CEO and create a strategy for your life. Choose where to invest your time and resources and cut out unnecessary things.

10.  If you want a change in life, hire someone to produce it. This keeps you accountable and gets the job done. This previous year, I finally hired a personal trainer. I wanted to get in really good shape, and I knew that I couldn’t do it on my own because I had been going to the gym previously but wasn’t making much process. If your business isn’t growing, hire a business coach or join a course.

11.  Say yes to things, then figure out how to get the courage to get them done. If I’m scared of something, I’ll commit to it while putting my fear aside for a second, and then figure out how to get it done. If you’re scared to take on a new client because you don’t know if you can handle it, just say yes.

12.  Life is boring without community. If you want to accomplish great things in life, create a community around everything you’re passionate about or that you’re working towards. It’s a lot easier to give up if there’s nobody around.

13.  Giving up alcohol. This one is controversial, because people think I’m telling them they need to do it. I decided to give up alcohol to be healthier mentally and physically and to focus on long-term vision in my life.

14.  Growth is in the poles, or polar opposites. You need to attack what you are afraid of. If you’re not making progress in one area of your life, it’s probably because you’re scared of polarity in that area. You must surrender to what you’re afraid of.

Be sure to check out the next episode where I finish telling you the lessons I learned in 2018.

To learn more about growing an online business like I did last year, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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If you listened to the last episode, you know that I’m covering the eighteen lessons that I learned in 2018 than can help you grow your business in 2019. I covered one through four last time, so let’s pick up where we left off:

5.      The difference between rich people and poor people is how they spend their free time. We touched on this last time, but you must spend the majority of your free time on production rather than consumption. Producers make money and consumers spend it.

6.      People pleasing is the enemy of progress. The textbook of a leadership class I took said “agreeableness is not an indicator of success.” This is a scientific fact. If you rank high on agreeableness, you have a lower chance of success in life. It means you are more worried about what people think about you than getting what you want. Become okay with being disliked.

7.      You have to resist the pull back to normal. Once you start to breakout and have some success, the people around you are going to pull you down in subtle ways. We’re biologically wired to want to be the same as the people around us. Pull yourself up instead of resisting that urge to be pulled back down.

8.      It’s normal to feel like everything is going to fall apart, but no matter what, you cannot have a plan B; you have to burn the ships. This causes you to go all-in and commit to the outcome that you set out to achieve. The market only values excellence, so if you only half-ass something, nobody is going to give you any money.

That’s all for today. See you in the next episode when I continue the lessons I learned in 2018.

To learn more about growing an online business like I did last year, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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At the beginning of every year, I like to make a list of lessons I learned in the previous year. I go back, look at my goals from the previous year, see if I hit those goals or not, think about if I want to still go after the ones I didn’t hit, and set new goals for the year.

I also acknowledge the good things that happened in the previous year. It’s easy to look back at a year and feel like it just flew by, but once I actually review what happened throughout the year, the progress becomes really clear. I usually make a lot more progress than I thought.

In 2018, I worked a lot on my business, visited three countries outside the US, I took an acting class and performed two scenes, grew a new business from start-up that will generate over $1,000,000 this year, and more. I’ve also seen hundreds of people in my program start businesses, allowing me to see what works for people and what doesn’t.

I’m going to cover some of the eighteen lessons I learned in 2018 today, and more in the next episode. Let’s begin:

1.     Growth is about leadership. If you’re looking to grow a business where you help people solve problems, your job is to become a leader.

2.     Distractions are systematic. If you need to shift your attention to production instead of consumption, you have to remove anything that’s going to distract you.

3.     Saying “this is what I signed up for.” For example, if I come up short and lose money on ads, I don’t get too stressed. I just say, “this is what I signed up for.” It makes me move past the difficulty and focus on the next step. 

4.     You are entitled to your work, not the spoils of your work. The world doesn’t owe you anything, your work doesn’t owe you anything, and you should do your work for work’s sake. That doesn’t mean to do busy work that doesn’t produce results, but it means do the things that produce results and have faith that they will pay off. 

Tune in to the next episode to hear more of the lessons I learned in 2018!

To learn more about growing an online business like I did last year, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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One of the biggest mistakes beginners make in business is they think it’s all about their idea. They spend months building a product or service, launch, and nobody wants what they have to offer. The solution I have to that is you actually need to sell your thing before you create it.

Say that you have a Facebook ad agency. You don’t sell leads to clients, you sell solutions to problems. If you don’t understand what the problems of your market are, no one is going to listen to you. You need to offer what the market wants, not what you think you should give them.

The first thing to do is go to Google and search for information about your competitors. Chances are, they’ve already done a lot of research and know how to speak to the market. Write down the key phrases they use, figure out what offers they’re making, and see what’s going on in the niche.

Next, go to Amazon and look up books in your niche. Look at the reviews of these books and see what people are complaining about. You can figure out what the gaps are in the market by reading these comments. The next step is to go to Reddit and see if there is a conversation going on around your market. Then you can go to YouTube and see the comments there.

I create a Word document that has all the phrases that my market is using, their complaints about the market, and their desired outcome. By the time I’m done with it, I know enough to send an email to experts and ask them for an interview to learn more.

After these conversations, you’re going to start to notice trends. With all this knowledge, you can put together an offer that’s irresistible and gives the market exactly what it wants. You can put this together in an email, send it out to a big list of business owners in the market, and offer to have a phone call with them. They’re going to be interested in talking with you because you have what they want.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it not. You can deep dive into a niche within a couple of hours, and by the end of the week, you can be an expert in that niche.

If you want to learn to build a Facebook ad agency that you can run from anywhere in the world, visit https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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This is the time of year when most people phone it in. They essentially take everything from the beginning of November until January 1 off from work. They might go into the office and do some work or work on their business a little bit, but they decide that because it’s the holidays they’re not going to go out and sell.

The thing is, the people who are crushing it are selling every single day. They don’t care about the holidays. They’re pushing even harder in these months to gear up for the next year. Let’s talk about how I made $4,688 on Christmas Day.

Reason #1 is because my lead generation systems are on 24/7/365. At all hours of every single day, I have offers to solve problems in exchange for money getting in front of my market. You need to figure out how to get people to come to your business, and just by doing that, you’re going to be able to make your product better. I compete on volume, and you should too.

Reason #2 is that I made it easy for people to give me money. So many people have businesses where if their customer wanted to give them money today, there would be no easy way for their customer to do that. If I look up your business and I don’t know how to either schedule a call with you or pay you money directly, you’re screwing yourself.

Reason #3 is that I did take off Christmas Day, but I didn’t take the holidays off. I have been working very hard all month because of momentum. Momentum is such a powerful force, and once you start to build momentum in your business, it’s like a snowball rolling downhill that gets bigger and bigger. If you stop working completely, it’s like you’re stopping that snowball and all of its momentum. If you need a break, it’s much easier to just cut way back on hours and keep pushing that snowball a little bit every single day.

The results we get in our business are largely the result of things we did a couple of weeks, months, or even years ago. Often, things don’t pay off right away. If you do these three things, you can make a lot of money on Christmas Day.

To learn more about making money every day of the year, go to https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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Most people, when they have a goal, they go out there and try to accomplish it and it starts to get hard. If you’re not used to pushing on something until it turns into the results that you want, then you might say “I chose the wrong opportunity.”

There are a million reasons that you can give yourself to change opportunities. Here’s what I want you to do instead: keep pushing and either have a breakdown or a breakthrough.

Think about trying to lift a certain amount of weight on the bench press at the gym. Your friend is yelling “you can do it” in your face. You’re going to fail and your friend’s going to spot you, or you’re going to lift more weight than you thought you could. You can see in this scenario that either outcome is fine.

The wrong move would be getting off the bench press. This is what most people do in business. They start pushing, say that it’s too heavy, and go to a different weight machine. They say “this weight machine looks great. I’m going to be successful at this, because the problem before was that it was the bench press.” The exact same thing will happen again, and they’ll keep moving to different machines until they have a breakdown and realize that the weight machines aren’t the problem, it’s the person.

I teach how to start digital marketing business to people who have to choose a niche and then become an expert in it. The same thing happens. They go into a niche but say that it’s too hard and switch. It happens again and again because they don’t realize that it’s not the market that’s the problem, it’s their attitude towards business. If you push through and solve the difficult problems in the market, you will be rewarded more than you ever imaged. 

You’re not going to get anywhere extraordinary in life without having breakdowns. They show you that you need to push beyond your limits to achieve what you want in life. What you want is not attainable as a person who gives up when it’s too hard.

To learn more about strategizing for your life and business, go to https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast

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Routine usually keeps us productive, but when you break out of that routine, it can get a little harder. When you try do something new, like starting a business, it’s going to be even more difficult. You’re going to encounter much more resistance and you might find yourself putting off those things you promised yourself you would do.

Here’s what I do to solve this problem. At the end of every week on Sunday night, I have a goal-setting session with my friend. We have a shared spreadsheet with my name on one side and his on the other, and we list our tasks for the week. It’s really easy on Sunday nights to think about where you want to go in your business and the actions you have to take to get there.

The hard part about this is on Friday night when you still haven’t done what you said, it turns into doing it when you don’t want to do it anymore. It’s easy to write them down when we’re excited about the week, but after the week wears us down, we don’t want to do them anymore.

To overcome this, my friend and I put money on the line every week and the deadline is the end of Sunday. This week we put down about $120. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s enough to make it hurt. Since there’s a consequence for me not doing what I said I was going to do, it pushes me to complete that task. 

These goals need to be specific, measurable, timely, and you should break them down into small pieces. This doesn’t let you cheat yourself if you didn’t complete every piece of it, lets you remember everything that you need to do, and you get satisfaction every time you mark a task as completed. Additionally, if you’re only focused on business, you’re going to burn yourself out. There are other things in life you need to do to take care of yourself that you also might have resistance to.

The difference between success and failure is what you do in those moments when you have a choice. When you think it will be inconsequential to put something off until next week, and do that over and over again throughout the years, it makes a really big difference.

If you’d like to learn more about how to get stuff done even when you’re travelling, go to https://www.christianmartin.org/podcast