Three Simple Ways To Create Authority
It can be said that there are two schools of thought in sales about how clients would like to be treated. 1. Clients want options. 2. Clients want to be told what to do. A savvy business person will recognize that some clients will prefer options and others will want to be told what to do. This is the basis to understanding that one size does not fit all. There is something in common when it comes to both types of clients. The likelihood of your recommendation or recommendations being taken by a client is dependent on your authority. It’s helpful to remind ourselves how strong authority can be over people. If you ever doubt it for a second take a look at a classroom, camp, team sport or any group of children with an adult around. The adult has automatic authority derived from their position, from their age and from the structure of the program around them. This authority is immediately understood and for the most part accepted by the children. As adults, in a lot of ways we are just bigger kids. We too respond when we are faced with authority. If you want people to follow what you recommend then it’s incredibly important to establish authority. It is an important ingredient in your overall credibility when you’re working with someone as a consultant. Here are there simple ways: Get something recorded. Whether it’s a podcast, video, tv spot, or published in a newspaper, magazine or blog, it’s incredible important to have yourself recorded. This will generate immediate and lasting authority. Get a testimonial. There may be nothing more powerful than another human being acknowledging your authority in your field. If you don’t’ have a testimonial, do non paid-work for someone and go get it in lieu of payment. Get public on platforms that are focused on your subject matter. Today there are a million ways to engage with people all over the country and the world. Find something that works for you and start to develop an extended network of people that trust and respect your opinion on your subject matter expertise. If you’re interested in having questions answered just like this, then check out our live Q&A sessions recorded in our free facebook community. You can access a recording of our most recent live Q&A on our podcast, here! We strongly believe in creating a space where everyone in business can be successful. Where all of the resources, wisdom and insight needed for business owners and entrepreneurs is at your fingertips. Where experts all over the world can share their experiences and celebrate their knowledge. If you’d like to join us in our vision of building out this dream, join us in our free facebook group here!
Ready, Aim, Clients!
In our most recent podcast, we were joined by our good friend, Steve Frey. Steve’s built a career working alongside business owners and operates both a retail and wholesale distribution model in two of his businesses. Steve has a mantra he lives by and we strongly agree with People. Process. Product. Too often today, people and business owners start with product. Steve was noted as comparing it to “Ready, Fire, Aim!” Probably not the greatest recipe for success. The reality is, if we want great success in our roles and our businesses, we need to keep product to the end and we need to put people first. By starting with our clients first we aren’t pushing a product. What we’re pushing is to better understand our audience, and our audiences needs. Even more importantly it allows our clients to share about themselves and feel connected to us. Connection and relationships is everything in business. Look no further than Peloton. What a fantastic example of connection. You can buy exercise bikes and treadmills for 40-70% less than the Peloton brand. However, nobody in the exercise machine space has built a better connection with their audience than Peloton and it allows them to charge an absurdly high price point for the same exact style of product easily available for much less. If you’re still doubtful about how impactful this is, go speak to someone who has a Peloton. Do they have a group they ride with? Chances are, yes. Do they have a coach or two they absolutely love? For sure, they do. Would they ever leave Peloton for another community? What other community, they’d ask you back. The common thread here is simple. Connection between people. The very best way we can build a connection with people is by putting our clients first. If you’re in business and you’re struggling to scale, looking for ideas on how to get past a plateau, or just getting started, you can take a look at whether you’re creating a connection with your clients and ask yourself am I putting my clients first? To listen to more of the podcast with Steve Frey, check it out here! To gain access to our own community where we provide additional insight, resources and access to professionals like Steve don’t forget to check out our free, private Facebook group Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. You can join our movement to create the very best space for business owners, entrepreneurs and service based professionals, right here!
Cat In The Hat Syndrome
You likely know the book and can even picture the drawing. The cat is riding a unicycle, it’s got a cane, it’s juggling plates, a goldfish in a bowl, all sorts of things are flying in the air. Thing 1 and 2 are crashing around the cat and the house is an absolute mess. A lot of times it can feel like this especially when we’re juggling multiple projects. We already know multi-tasking as a means of achieving success only gives us the perception of productivity and instead of helping actually hurts our efforts. How do we go from the Cat In The Hat to the spotless house at the end of the book. We’ll let you in on a little hint, it’s not magic, it’s about self-management and project management. Here are a couple of tips to help you get back on track to a less chaotic environment when you’re juggling multiple projects. Always prioritize and focus on tasks that will help you make progress on the priority. This is especially difficult when we are in the weeds. If you’re too much in the weeds, step away for a while to allow your unconscious mind to work through the issue or get an outsider to help you identify the best way to achieve your near term goals and power through the work in front of you. Capability and capacity are both important. You’ll always be capable of doing what’s in front of you, but will you have the capacity to do it? At times we will struggle with certain activities. Be prepared to pivot and change your focus to something else when you’re struggling. You’ll find, for example, some activities you can crush in the morning and feel like you’re walking through quicksand if you do them in the afternoon. Life isn’t simple and linear. We will often deal with multiple projects and conflicting priorities. Learning to manage to these beyond the ineffective multi-task will make a small change today seriously compound over time to amazing results. For more conversation around project management check out our most recent podcast with HennepX co-founder, Drew DiAlberto. You can listen in here. If you’re looking for even more great content around time management head on over to our private, free facebook group the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab where other professionals like Drew and ourselves offer you free, incredible content, daily! You can join us here!
3 Ways to Embrace Change
Change is always happening. When we really look hard at our lives, our businesses, our relationships, nothing ever stops changing. We are constantly shifting, adapting and transforming. You’d think with all of that non stop change happening it wouldn’t be so hard. Change is hard though because we all know that change carries uncertainty and discomfort. There are times when resisting change can make sense. In practice, we don’t want to constantly shift away from our driving principles, mission statement, values or vision. This constant causes confusion from our clients, prospects and business partners. It makes them uncomfortable, it makes them nervous and it creates additional uncertainty (which they already have enough of, if you ask them). Other times, change is absolutely necessary. We find that the models, the behaviors, the way we handled ourselves and our business in the past has changed and hopefully, evolved. Taking it a step further – as our environment changes, so too must we, after all, it’s not the strongest, smartest or fastest who are most likely to survive; the best survivors are the most adaptable. Here are 3 tips to embrace change: 1. Focus on the positive opportunities change brings. Every change is a new burgeoning opportunity for you and your business. Stop focusing on the challenge and focus on what the future can hold. Focusing on the future possibilities the change can bring will help you bring the best mindset to changes. 2. Changes forces you to take a more objective look at your behavior and models. It’s easy to get rigid. Process and routines are incredibly powerful tools, but to be too stuck in our ways, makes us predictable and vulnerable to risk. Embracing change will help you and your business continue to grow and protect you against risk. 3. Think back to a starting point. In our minds we can always look back to the start of our journey, whether it’s personal, relationship oriented or business related. Where were you at the start of the journey? Would you still want to be there today? More often than not we only notice the large changes in our lives and this is where discomfort kicks in. It’d be a tremendous loss to fail to see how the smaller changes have added up and helped us evolve. When we look back to where we started it brings into focus all of the compounding of those little changes. This perspective can help you better embrace change. Bonus! – If you’re just getting started on something. Write down some objective measurable thoughts about where you are today. Think about what are your current strengths and weaknesses as you’re getting started. Save the thoughts and take a look at them in 6 months. You’ll be shocked at how much the small changes have helped you continue growing your strengths and/or reduce your weaknesses. For more around the topic of change you can check out our most recent podcast here. To get access to more great content like this please join our free facebook community where we offer great tips, insights and resources to entrepreneurs and service based professionals. If what you’ve read has been helpful, don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter! JB and The Doctor
The Power in Storytelling
A lot of times in business and in life we over complicate things. We try to innovate and build a better mousetrap, and, often there is a better mousetrap that can be built. People, however, haven’t evolved that much since our earliest ancestors. You can go back thousands of years to drawings on a cave wall and realize something pretty awesome. People like to tell stories and listen to stories. We are story-driven. Think of sports and entertainment. The best rivalries, the best individuals, the best movies the best series. They have one distinct thing in common. Great stories. Think about the media. What sells? Stories do. It’s why the news has become so sensationalized. Information alone doesn’t catch our attention, but you give that information a fresh shower, wrap it up in some nice clothes and all of a sudden you’ll catch people’s attention when it walks across the street in front of them. Why then aren’t we perfecting the art of storytelling? Why do I hear, and I hear it all the time, pitches and presentations and entrepreneurs talking about their business and forgetting the story? I don’t believe there is a better mousetrap than the story. The story is the world’s greatest honeypot. So instead of focusing on getting better at what we already know is the greatest mousetrap we put a lot of our attention on unimportant and ineffective ways of trying to innovate something that really doesn’t require innovation at all. If you want to stand out in business and you want to really become an effective communicator you need to become an absolute monster at telling a good story. You don’t need a lot of stories to tell. Just some good ones. A good story, like a good joke will get passed around to more and more people. If it’s your story, think about how your sphere of influence can take off and go viral. I can promise it won’t happen because your information is great. It’ll happen because the story you wrap around your information is. A great question to ask yourself. Have I perfected even a single story about my business? If the answer is no, you might want to take a listen to what else we have to say about storytelling and presentations. We covered this in our most recent podcast and it’s the theme of the week in our absolutely FREE private facebook community. You can access both here and here! -JB
Growing Our Businesses
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison There are any number of ways to grow a business. There are some of the most common that we see put to use today: Social media Networking Affiliate Events – promotional & educational Advertising Funnels Client referrals Wholesale A lot of times we get caught up in trying to do too many different strategies at once. The challenge of course is if we put our focus on too many areas, it will never be sharp in any given area. Like our messaging, it’s important to keep our focus tight. I’m not suggesting that you only focus on one area for growth in your business, I am suggesting that you consider that at any given time, you should be HYPER focused on one of these growth strategies until it is more self-sustaining. For a lot of us, we lose that focus before we see a lot of traction gained. It’s what makes Thomas Edison’s quote so relevant. As in anything, if we are consistent, we will see results. Want to grow a business through social media? Start doing what social media influencers do. Post every day, create content and engagement, build online relationships and one day you will have a business built through social media and you will be a social media influencer. If you want to achieve the most growth in your business, identify the business growth model you are most comfortable with and be incredibly focused and intentional on it. When I moved to South Florida my network consisted of my sister – in the medical field and my cousin and her husband, I didn’t even know what she did at the time I moved here. Essentially ZERO. I took it on myself to start networking. I turned down almost no events or opportunities to meet people. My very first piece of business ultimately came from the very first networking event I attended in Florida. That connection today continues to be a valued friend and business partner and has led to multiple pieces of business. For over 2 years I spent countless hours, mornings, lunches and evenings networking and meeting as many professionals that helped serve my market as I could. I dedicated myself to always showing up and always booking 1 on 1s with the people I met networking. I soon began to see my business grow and from there I was able to start to put my focus on other areas of business growth. Today, the focus on networking has paid incredible dividends and given my business a foundation that allows me to focus on other growth vehicles, such as client referrals and social media. Keep in mind that I did not stop my networking, I’ve just put some of my focus from there to other areas of my business to allow for greater, scalable growth. Remember if we’re not growing, we’re shrinking! On our most recent podcast Doc and I talked about personal growth. Just like the story above, personal growth and business growth operate under the same principles. You’re either growing or you’re shrinking. To hear what we had to say about our personal growth you can check out the podcast here! To join us and other incredible professionals to achieve our ultimate vision – providing a community with all of the resources to make you successful in business, you can access our free content in our Facebook community here!
FEAR AND VULNERABILITY
Fear gets a bad reputation. For years, especially among men, there has been a belief that we shouldn’t feel fear. Men should be brave, bold, and courageous. As young men, boys were taught that fear is a trait of the weak and indicates softness. Fortunately, as men, we’ve been witness to a tremendous amount of woman empowerment, a great progress for us as a society, with plenty of room for further growth. With this empowerment has come a rise of candid vulnerability and the strength that results from this. This movement has opened many eyes to the power of vulnerability and authenticity. To embrace vulnerability is to embrace fear. This is the opposite of what so many were taught and exposed to over the years. After all, vulnerable does mean ‘open to attack,’ and all of us would feel at least some measure of fear if we felt threatened. This shift in our culture has made one thing abundantly clear. Fear as a bad emotion, a negative emotion is an outdated belief that needs to go. Fear, like all emotions is a powerful force we can harness. Fear after all is neither good nor bad, it is a natural response to stimuli. We can all admit that we at our most basic have a flight or fight mechanism. Fear then is a purely natural and precautionary emotion that helps ensure our survival. How do we harness fear then? How do we, instead of minimizing or attaching negative attributes to the emotion, take something we all naturally have and use it to accomplish great things? A fantastic example of this was on display in our most recent podcast with Susan Block. Susan expertly tackled a topic any of us could find highly sensitive and by making herself vulnerable showed us how any of us can use this as a platform to change our lives, for the positive. This podcast had tremendous lessons. About fear, about vulnerability, about using life’s circumstances to define your life, not allowing the circumstances to be the defining factor. If you haven’t listened in yet we highly encourage you to check it out here! To connect with Susan and other great professionals you can join us in our free, private facebook group here!
What keeps you up at night?
Every business owner knows the feeling. The tossing, the turning. Your brain won’t stop. There’s a problem, an issue, some sort of pain point that is gnawing at your belly and driving your anxiety through the roof! Sound familiar? Of course it does. Whether you have something right this moment you’re wrestling with or had a challenge in the past we have all worked through adversity in our businesses. One of the unstated truths about the things that keep us up at night – they can all be distilled down to risk. A business will never operate without risk. We can never be risk free in any aspect of our lives and certainly not in our businesses. Good leaders and entrepreneurs will make risk – adjusted decisions. They’ll try to figure out what level of comfort they have for risk as well as their ability to manage to that risk. Risk always comes down not just to tolerance levels, but also to capacity. Can I afford to take the risk, even if I’m comfortable with it. A risk that could put your business out of business for example, you may be comfortable with taking, but your business does not likely have the capacity to take that level of risk! Many times business owners will gamble with risk unknowingly. This is where companies like People First and Barbara Flynn can provide you with an understanding of the risks you have not managed and are not aware of. Very often, it’s the things we don’t know we don’t know that get us in the most trouble. During our most recent podcast we asked Barbara how she helps clients identify risks here’s what she had to say. “One of the things I always ask, what keeps you up at night?” That starts questions and {…} opens up possibilities.” – Barbara Flynn Barbara identifies some key principals here by asking this question. Right off the bat, she allows the business owner (always the foremost expert in their own business) to consider what risks they are most concerned with, and it also allows them to ask Barbara what risks other business owners are concerned about. This is one of my personal favorite questions to uncover needs. It’s an open ended question, forces the other party to listen and also open up and become vulnerable. It’s a fantastic opening for any consultant focused on risk mitigating strategies to create some insight into a business owners major paint points. So….what keeps you up at night? We’d love to hear from you! For more of the podcast you can listen here. To join our private facebook group and gain access to some of our free private content and interact with wonderful professionals like Barbara you can join us here!
Deadlining
Who say’s 5 G is all the rage, 4G is here to stay! On our most recent podcast we interviewed Nicole Golemi of Alison South Marketing and talked about one of core beliefs in the Be RICH mindset, helping others.
Givers Give & Givers Get (G.G.G.G.) Whoop Whoop!
Who say’s 5 G is all the rage, 4G is here to stay! On our most recent podcast we interviewed Nicole Golemi of Alison South Marketing and talked about one of core beliefs in the Be RICH mindset, helping others.