Scary Business Owner Mistakes That Should Frighten You
October 6th, 2021 // 3:41 pm @ Scott Manning
I have quoted the famous Earl Nightingale here before. As reminder, he is the one who said if you want to be successful and you don’t know how just look around at what everyone else is doing and do the opposite.
This is such a simple concept and yet a tried and true principle for every aspect of life. You look around and everyone is obsessed with social media… don’t follow. Everyone gets caught up in judging everyone else… don’t indulge. Everyone is looking for an easy button shortcut to success… don’t fall.
You have decided to be an Entrepreneur. I call that a controller of your own destiny (though anyone has that choice). Still, the greatest mode of making it happen is through business ownership.
When you think about it you have to be able to define, “what is your business?” and also “what do you own?”
You can own a lot of things. And with each of the comes one common factor, responsibility. There are no guarantees based on yesterday’s work about tomorrow’s gain. You have to show up again if you want to win again.
There should be a pride that comes with ownership of everything in life and also in your business.
We are going to talk about what exactly you “own” in your business and there is a lot more than you might think. There are likely assets that you have that could very well be underutilized and not performing up to their potential simply because you aren’t aware of them or looking at them from an ownership perspective.
We’ll relate these back to the four factors to sustainable success and the scary mistakes some business owner make.
The majority of business owners and entrepreneurs go about each of these four all wrong. It all has to do with being shortsighted and seeking instant gratification instead of valuing quality and building a profitable sustainable business.
Let’s take them in the order we laid them out last week.
Most business owners’ idea of acquiring new customers is all about volume. The more the better. And by any means necessary.
The fact is not all customers are created equal and while you have a whole lot of control over that, you simply don’t want them all.
Doing the opposite means not chasing cheap and easy but attracting high value and high quality customers based on knowing your ideal customer in the first place.
If you really want to understand your business then you have to understand your customer. If you really want to understand your customer you have to understand your business.
These two things go hand in hand. Most business owners stay confused forever about the most basic things like why their customers even buy from them. And they do very little to accentuate and take control over why people buy from them.
For my Doctors, I know why they come to me, therefore I can write specifically to that mindset – while all others are chasing the opposite. That’s why we resonate so well with the doctors that we do.
We call them the Entrepreneurial Doctors for short, though that’s just one descriptive word of who these amazing and complex people are where the mutual choice between the two of us is deliberate. But one thing is clear as soon as they ‘enter’ they know they belong. I am for them. They are where they should be.
Do you know…
“Who” is your customer?
“Why” are they your customer?
“What” is your business about?
“How” are you connecting the three together?
The next concept around keeping existing customers is even more obviously opposed by the mass generalist business owner that doesn’t fully appreciate, respect, and understand that the greatest asset in their business is not the money made but instead the people it came from.
Most view ‘customers’ as a nuisance, an inconvenience. It’s just the wrong way to look at it if you are building a real business that places the value on the customer.
I view, and challenge you, to do the same. You must see everything as an investment. Look at what the implication of trying to cheapen your customer experience, products, services, membership, and anything else.
Others don’t get this. They think of transactions alone as a singular concept.
My challenge for you is to know…
How much do you have to invest to grow a customer into a high value customer?
What are you doing to keep, nurture, and retain your customers?
As I pointed out the bridge between to two of these is your process, approach, experience, and system, which is the absolute most important keyword of them all, for selling.
Here’s what the short-sighted businesses do…
Nothing on purpose.
Everything is left up to the whim of what their prospects decide. Or at best case they are beating prospects up trying to coerce them to buy.
Everything most business owners learned about selling it absolutely and completely backwards. It’s the hard and unpredictable way and it can work but not with the best customers and not with customers that stay long term.
The harder you have to work at ‘getting someone’s money’ the worse that customer will be for you.
Instead, what you want to be working hard at becoming more obviously the right choice for them and getting them aligned with you by having everything you do with your selling experience beginning with you aligning with them first.
Here’s the opposite of what everyone else does in their business that you want to do – you want to be treating your selling system as the most cherished and holy grail of an asset in your business that there is.
The more refined, predictable, and consistent this asset performs the more valuable everything else will be. You can have all the marketing and best customers on the planet but with an inept sales system you won’t have anything, at least for long.
Your customers will never be worth more to you than your selling experience creates and is responsible for.
And finally, we come back to our fourth core pillar: looking for new opportunity.
Point blank what others do that is the opposite of success is they get distracted by the lowest value priorities and projects that just don’t move the needle.
I see it all the time, even people you would think are smart, they get wooed by others and are chasing things that take away from their core business. Then eventually they realize, usually far after the fact and the damage has been done, that they have gone backwards or at best case now split revenue across other things still at the same level of their business but with diminishing profits because resources have been stretched.
Ask yourself this question…
Where are you investing your resources in time, effort, people, money, and most of all focus on right now? How does that rank, align, support, tie in with the three core principles?
Where do you find yourself getting distracted or bored with your business that could become a liability?
Ponder these and know that you have to have more discipline to be better than the ‘majority’ of others who do not take true ownership of their business because they do not take true ownership of the outcomes within their business.
This brings us back to where we started and the biggest difference of the successful and the unsuccessful business owners and that’s the ones that create their own reality where they dictate the outcomes or those who throw up theirs hands and allow all the outsides forces decide their fate.
That’s a frightening thought… which brings us to the month of scary things that you have to combat in the world of your business and the business of your world. Stay tuned for more terror-defeating tips and horror-defying tricks.
Category : Blog
