Small Business Buying, Building and Selling

When you want to get better at something, there’s a big difference between tracking your own personal performance and exposing your strengths and weaknesses to your peers openly and publicly. That’s why all business owners should make a habit of exposing all the details of their operations to their colleagues. Why? Because no one runs their best race, plays their best game, or builds their best business behind closed doors. The pressure, the crowd, the feedback, and most importantly the competition always makes us better.

Granted, if you’re like me, your toughest competition is yourself and no one demands more of you than you. However, that’s not the point. The point is if you’re good at what you do you should share that publicly with others for 2 reasons:

1. It will force you to be great.
2. It will help others who have potentially helped you.

Now what do I mean by exposing yourself to the public? Do whatever you have to to make your ideas, best practices, and systems public. For instance:

1. Give a speech.
2. Do training for your colleagues
3. Write a white paper on something for which you are an expert and pass it out to everyone you know who knows more than you.
4. Write a blog.

You get the point. If you can’t receive feedback and criticism (maybe even praise if you really are good) than it’s not good enough. You have to be able to fail for this to be effective.

Let me give you an example of what I’m doing (in addition to this blog) and how it’s helped make me better.

Recently I’ve partnered up with my previous employer – a software company that provides niche software for my business – to host a training seminar for other businesses in the industry. The training is about a month away however knowing that I’ll have to expose my business and also provide value for all of those in attendance has put some pressure on me to produce something great. So this is what I did:

1. Reviewed my biggest headaches. – Quite simply these are personnel and cashflow problems. Sound familiar?
2. Reviewed my biggest goals. – Increase profits and limit the business’ dependence on me.
3. Reviewed my plan for dealing with those headaches and goals. – Determine areas of weakness through efficient analysis of business benchmarks and then come up with a list of ways to improve each area of weakness.
4. Developed a “system” for continually monitoring and improving my headaches and goals so it can be taught to others. – This is the hardest yet most important part. If I can’t break down my game plan into an easily taught system my business will never run without me.

Number 4 is really the only one that needs further explanation. My “system” was actually quite simple once I sat down for a few hours and thought it all through. It basically started with the big picture of my business – which just so happens to be the same big picture for every business – Brad Sugars’ Business Chassis as he teaches about in The Business Coach. He breaks down the 5 parts of every business that determine the profit of that business. You NEED to know these 5 numbers in your business to know where you’re doing well and where you’re lacking. The next step was to figure out how to use the software to determine those 5 numbers. Finally, I organized some ideas and suggestions on how to improve those numbers for each department in my business. My goal isn’t to provide all the answers on how to make each area better, but to help business owners understand how to find the areas of weakness so that they can then use their own knowledge, experience, and skills to make the most effective improvements.

Now the question that’s bugging me is why didn’t I come up with this game plan 18 months ago when I bought the business? I have no idea. It really only took me a few hours to plan out and it will certainly help guide my business (and hopefully others) in the future. Though I will never know the answer to that question, I do know that I finally took the time to lay out this detailed, systematic, and repeatable game plan because I was forced to prove to others that I am indeed an expert at my business.

The point of this blog is not to explain exactly what my training will encompass, but to encourage you to step out and take a risk by exposing your business acumen to the world and trying on the label “expert” for a few days to see if you can live up to it.

To your success as an expert, Bryan

Here’s a little irony for you. I’ve been subscribed to mailing lists for Perry Marshall and Jim Edwards for years. I’d listened in on free webinars, I downloaded free e-books, I had Perry send me his “Biggest Myths in Sales” CD and I listened to that. I had even watched a few online videos by the great Yanik Silver. Yet until last week (precisely 3 days ago) I just didn’t get it. I still thought that unless I had a book, CD, DVD, video or something else to sell, I couldn’t do anything. So I just kept listening to these experts to glean information so that when I did have my first e-book I’d be ready.

The reality of it is, any website where you have visitors (or you take the time to learn how to get visitors) can make money by referring your visitors to other sites. Here’s the easiest way to think about it. In this blog and many others that I’ve read online people recommend books. I looooooove to read and so do so often. Since few people enjoy reading non-fiction as much as I do I’m often recommending resources to people and this blog will do a lot of that. So here’s where affiliate marketing comes in – If instead of just telling people to go check out “Billionaire in Training” by Brad Sugars because it rocks, I sign up FOR FREE as an affiliate to Amazon and offer a nice convenient link to Billionaire In Trainingby Brad Sugars, if someone follows that link and buys the book I get a commission (between 4-10% with Amazon).

The customer pays the EXACT same amount and it’s a lot cheaper for Amazon than most forms of marketing so it’s a win-win-win. Customer gets the book at the best price, I get a commission, Amazon generated a sale with “cheap” marketing.

The beauty of affiliates, is you can do this with almost anything on the internet these days. If you’re a guy and need some help picking up chicks, check out Learn The Secrets Of Women And Dating by David DeAngelo. If you’re a woman and need to Save Your Relationship then go there. I’ve seen this information for basketball coaching and ball-handling videos (I signed up for both since I’m a basketball coach and ball-handling nut), job-interview secrets (great e-book), car wheels and parts, and basically anything else you can think of. I sign up for free lists with my Hotmail account all the time (I would never use a “real” email address) because even the free information most of these experts give away is valuable (and since I’m of the impression I can learn something from everyone I encounter why wouldn’t I?).

Here’s the point. If you have a blog or any website online and you have consistent traffic, why wouldn’t you try a little affiliate marketing?

Let’s make it simple. If you have a blog and you EVER recommend books, consider this:
1. Go to Amazon’s Affiliate Website
2. Sign up for a free account.
3. Put in convenient links for your readers to Amazon for any books you mention.

You’re now an affiliate marketer and have actually provided a great free service to all of your readers. Are there really any negatives to that?

To your success, Bryan

When I started business “consulting” at the ripe old age of 20 with no actual business ownership and management experience, I ran into a few problems. My job was to implement a new software system that would significantly change the work flow of a business. In that process I would have to recommend ways to handle leads, in-bound and out-bound calls, inventory, receivables, and offer suggestions on what management reports to run. I learned that to get buy-in it was necessary to explain WHY they needed to do all of this. No matter how much I knew or how many businesses I helped, a 21 year old wasn’t ever going to get much respect right away. So I learned a quick way to build rapport is to use “experts” to make some suggestions instead of me just making them. In other words I learned to use books to backup my expertise and build instant credibility. I furthered that credibility by publishing articles in trade magazines when I was 22… But that’s a different story.

So after years of reading books on real estate, investing, business building, sales, marketing, and psychology here are the ones that offer the BEST advice for wealth building in the order of importance.

1. Billionaire In Trainingby Brad Sugars: If you don’t know this guy then you need to. He retired with $10 million in the bank at age 26 for a few years. Then got bored and launched what is now the largest business coaching business in the world, Action Coach International. Now at age 34 he’s been involved in over 50 businesses and is using the formula in this book to become a very young billionaire. The best book of its kind.
2. Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flatby Michael Masterson: Masterson’s approach is a bit different than Sugar’s which is why I liked it. Masterson talks in detail about starting and growing a business step-by-step, whereas Brad says don’t waste your time starting one, just buy one. Regardless, Masterson has turned himself into a hundred millionaire and retired for the first time at age 39. He provides some excellent tools particularly his insights into marketing and back-end sales.
3. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About Itby Michael Gerber: One of the best business books ever according to Inc. magazine. Gerber breaks down the reason most businesses fail to the owners misunderstandings about business. The greatest misunderstanding – that because I’m a good plumber, electrician, accountant, lawyer, etc. I’m gonna be great at running a business that will allow me to use my sweet skills.
4. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differentlyby Marcus Buckingham: After interviewing 80,000 managers in 20,000 different organizations over 20 years Buckingham has broken down the best way to measure employee productivity and happiness to 12 simple questions. If 12 is too many he even gives you ways to shorten that list depending on your goals. If you EVER plan on doing a performance review or have employees, read this book.
5. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companiesby Jim Collins and Jerry Porras: The greatest lesson I took away from this book was that Gerber and Sugars are right. Even the greatest businesses over the last 100 years were founded to be great businesses from the start NOT to provide a great product. That’s a VERY important distinction. Sorry to dissapoint all those high-ranked business schools that say you need the product first.
6. The Millionaire Mindby Thomas Stanley: This book is a compilation of data from survey’s answered by over 1300 millionaire’s. Some of his findings are quite interesting. The most important 2 were that the number 1 thing millionaire’s attribute to their success is “Being honest with all people.” The second is that most millionaires were at or below average according to our fine education system. They were mostly college dropouts , C students, and averaged less than 1000 on their SAT’s.

Though I’ve read Robert Allen’s Nothing Down for the 90sand Hagstrom’s The Warren Buffett Way and Peter Lynch’s Beating the Street along with dozens of other books and online services related to real estate and investing, I have very purposely left those out. I’m not saying they’re poor books, because they are all VERY good (Robert Allen inspired me to buy my first rental property at 21) – however, as Brad Sugars points out in “Billionaire in Training” you don’t climb the capital ladder (i.e. real estate and stocks/securities) until you’ve climbed the cash flow ladder. In other words, until you have cashflow to backup your real estate investments and securities in case of trouble, you’re wasting your time with those. I know in the instance of both my real estate investments and stocks/mutual funds I NEEDED cashflow (from my job) to cover them.

To your success, Bryan