Category: New Business Development

One of my buddies
told me
she had the knowledge
to start her own business
due to her years
of being an executive
in a Fortune 500 sized
business.

All business experience
can help
but starting or even running
a small business
isn’t like
helping to run
a big business.

In a small business,
EVERY job
is your job,
EVERY decision
is your decision,
and you touch
EVERY customer.

If you don’t complete tasks,
nothing gets done.

You might find
these differences to be terrible
and/or absolutely awesome.

Seth Godin
shares

“Fewer meetings,
fewer resources,
fewer constraints.

The biggest advantage
that a small business has
is that the owner
can look customers in the eye.
And vice versa.

Instead of
policies, groupthink
and leverage,
the way forward
for a small business
might be the very thing
that fueled you
in the start:
find out what people need
and help them get it.
Right away.”

Don’t expect
to run your small business
the same way
you help run a big business.

When I ask a question
in a writer group,
I will often add
this request
– “I’d like to know
your personal experience
with this problem.”

And then I will
look for specific examples.

Because opinions,
f*ck,
everyone has them
and most of them
aren’t based on sh*t.

Heck, I know folks
who think the world is flat
who share their insights
on how to fight COVID.

Or they’ve never published
a book
and they’re telling me
how I should increase
my book sales.

Opinions are useless.
Expertise is, in contrast,
priceless.

Seth Godin
shares

“There’s a huge gulf
between earned expertise
and strong opinion.

Knowing what others
who have come before
have done
(and having successfully
done it yourself)
is demonstrably
more effective
than simply acting
as if your opinion matters.”

You might have noticed
that, here on client k,
I tend to give a personal example
and THEN direct you
to another resource,
an expert.

If your source of information
can’t, at the minimum,
do that,
find another source of information.

Don’t base business decisions
on opinions.

One of my buddies,
a skilled business developer,
once worked
at a company
that didn’t value women.

The company
deliberately
set up roadblocks
that prohibited women
from advancing.

One of the (many) roadblocks
was they wouldn’t share
key yet confidential news
with female associates.

My buddy couldn’t succeed
by playing
by those rules.

So she cheated.

She made friends
with the executive assistant
to the company’s President.
My buddy not only
received the information.
She received it FIRST.
And she acted upon
that information.

Eventually,
she got tired
of figuring out ways
to ‘cheat’ the system
and she left
to start a rival company.
She created her own system,
somewhere people like her
had a chance of winning.

Seth Godin
shares

“Sophisticated competitors,
the ones who really want to win,
understand that
cheating destroys
the very thing they set out to do.
Because once
cheating is normalized,
the winner is the person
who had the guts
to cheat the most
and destroy the system,
not the one
who deserved to win.”

Sometimes
those who supposedly ‘deserve’
to win
don’t truly warrant that success.
Sometimes the system deserves
to be destroyed.

And sometimes
it is easier
to create
an entirely new system.

Before I go into business
or any other partnership
with someone,
I like to ask them
who their heroes are.

This might seem
like a silly question
but it communicates
so many of their values.

Of all the people
living or dead,
that person appeals to them
the most.

They want to be like
that person.

They admire
her or his achievements.

But they also find that person’s faults
(and everyone has faults)
‘acceptable.’
That likely means
they find those faults acceptable
in themselves.

When you find out
who their heroes are,
ask yourself
if you would like that hero
to be on YOUR team.

If the answer is no,
investigate more
before asking
that person
to be on your team.

Today,
a newer writer posted
she had worked
on her 50,000 word romance novel
for five years
and
she refuses to sell it
for $3.99.

Then she is unlikely
to secure any sales
because that’s the reader expectation
for a story that length.

The reader doesn’t care
that the writer took 30 times longer
than other writers
to complete the story.

The reader only cares
about how long it will take her
to read the story
and how much enjoyment
she’ll derive from it.

Seth Godin
shares

“A $200 bottle of wine
costs almost exactly
as much to make
as a $35 bottle of wine.

The cost of something
is largely irrelevant,
people are paying attention
to its value.

Your customers don’t care
what it took for you
to make something.
They care about
what it does for them.”

Price based on value,
not on your effort
or the time it took you
to finalize the product/service.

There’s a phrase
often used
in business
– Feed The Strong.

That means
we should invest
in projects or products or services
that are successful.
It is often easier
to make something
already successful
more successful
than it is
to make a failure
successful.

This applies to us
also.
It is easier
to make our strengths
stronger
than it is
to make our weaknesses
strengths.

Seth Godin
shares

“People don’t
hire you,
buy from you
or
recommend you
because you’re
indifferently average
and well rounded.

They do it
because you’re exceptional
at something.

What if you
invested the energy
to be even more exceptional
at it?”

Consider
making your strengths
stronger
and then partnering
with someone
or putting in systems
to offset
your weaknesses.

One of the (many) things
I like about
using a pen name (a brand)
is it puts emotional distance
between myself
and whatever happens
with the pen name.

I didn’t receive
a bad review.
The pen name
received a bad review.
I didn’t have
a story rejected.
The pen name
had a story rejected.

But that isn’t the truth
either.

The pen name
didn’t receive
a bad review.
The BOOK
received a bad review.
The pen name
didn’t have a story rejected.
The STORY
was rejected.

My activities,
the pen name’s activities
don’t represent
all of me.
Those are merely my actions.

Seth Godin
shares

“They didn’t reject you.

They rejected an application.
They rejected a business plan.
They rejected a piece of paper.

They don’t know you.”

YOU can’t be rejected.
Ever.
Because no one knows
all of you.
They only know parts.

We all like to think
we prefer the freedom
to make
our own decisions,
to weigh what is right or wrong
for our own selves.

That’s bullsh*t thinking
for most of us,
especially in dangerous situations
like the pandemic
we’re currently living through.

We don’t want to
make more decisions.
We have an
overwhelming number
of decisions
to make already.

And we don’t want to have
sole responsibility
for the lives,
for the health
of our loved ones.

We want to be told
the right thing
to do.

We also want
that message to be consistent
throughout the leadership levels
so we don’t have to decide
who to listen to.

That’s WAY less stressful.
We might grumble,
we might fight it,
but many of us
prefer that.

As business builders,
we’re a level of leadership
our employees, partners,
customers, others
look to
for guidance,
to tell them
what to do.

Telling employees and customers
something like
they have to wear masks
to enter our buildings
WILL prompt grumblings
but the majority of people
will quietly find that comforting.

Don’t be afraid
to tell them
what to do,
especially in these stressful times.

Building a business
that involves
selling our time
is often one
of the easiest ventures
to start
and
to make profitable.

You’re an accountant.
Instead of working as an employee,
you sell blocks of your time
to several entities.

You’re a plumber.
You charge customers
a fee
each time you’re called
into their home or business.

There are issues
with this business model.

Seth Godin
shares

“When you sell
your time,
you’re giving away
your ability
to be a thoughtful,
productivity-improving
professional.”

It also limits growth.
You only have so much time
in a day.
You either have to hire
more people
and charge more
to cover your slice
of the revenue
or you stop growing.

There are many innovative ways
to transition
from selling your time
to selling your expertise.

You’re an accountant
and you take a portion
of each tax refund
or
you sell software
that allows people
to file their own taxes
or keep their own books
or
you write a book
on accounting ‘secrets’
and collect a portion
of those sales
or…or…or…

You can do both
– sell your time
for a quicker profit
AND
build products/services
that aren’t tied to time
for growth.

You aren’t limited
to one or the other.

COVID-19,
when no counter-actions are taken,
spreads exponentially.
The daily infection number
a week from now
will be much higher
than the daily infection number
today.

I can count on that happening.
I can plan my business
around that occurring.

Because it is science.
And science doesn’t care
what we believe
or think
or wish to happen.

As Seth Godin
shares

“Beliefs are powerful.
They’re personal.
They can have a significant impact
on the way
we engage with ourselves
and others.

But results are
universal and concrete,
and no matter how much
we’d like them to go away,
there they are.”

As a business builder,
I prefer to rely
on science.
Science is predictable.
Science helps me
forecast and plan
for the future.

What science can you apply
to your business?