The art of self-manipulation in business
My business coaching clients tend to think I’m joking when I tell them they need to learn how to manipulate themselves better. (more…)
Why writing is important
Hey non-writer! I see you. Hiding behind your retweets and regrams. Sweating over your social media updates. Rushing out emails quick smart, with nary a re-read in sight. (more…)
How to minimise your risk in business: part two
{Psst! This article is part two of a two-part series. Click here to read the first one.}
Too many business owners take one large, entirely unnecessary risk in their businesses. In the heady rush of creative inspiration, without realising it they forget who they’re creating for. (more…)
How to minimise your risk in business: part one
There’s one big thing that far too many business owners do that’s hugely risky – and one simple tweak that not only cuts business risk substantially, but also has serious potential to significantly increase your profits.
Less risk, more money? You heard me. Read on.
Here be me
The popular idea that you can publish a website, get a professional email address and then sit back and wait for your ideal clients to find you is part of the mythology that makes up the internet. And why wouldn’t it be? Aside from your website, it doesn’t require much from you outside of counting your cash.
And isn’t that the dream we’ve all been sold? Make money while you sleep. Take your laptop on holidays. Hell, relocate to the Bahamas, Bhutan, or Bali and join the worldwide tribe of digital nomads, intrepidly heading to where no laptop has ever been?
I’d love to tell you that this is all possible with a $3000 website and a backpack, but my integrity won’t let me. In theory, it is possible, but there’s a bit (a lot) more to it than picking an exotic destination.
This coveted lifestyle is built on things like regular social media marketing and email marketing, community building, pitching and outreach, and asking people to buy.
So say you’ve got all that down pat: you’re doing regular, consistent marketing and methodically growing your community. And you want to earn more money, so what do you do?
The risk of creative isolation
One of the biggest risks I consistently see business owners making is to nut out their latest offering or launch in isolation. Typically, the person is struck with inspiration: “This is what my clients need! I know exactly what I’m going to do!” The excitement is palatable, the feeling is hugely motivating and the owner retreats to their creation cave to nut it out by themselves.
This is one of the biggest risks you can take in business.
Time and again, I’ve seen owners emerge from their caves for the big reveal: the group email gets sent, the new offering is promoted on social media, and … not much. Oftentimes, the response is so lackluster that the owner becomes disgruntled, annoyed or depressed and retreats, sometimes vowing to never again do X.
The difference between wants and needs
One of the biggest mistakes I made when I began my business was to focus on what I perceived as the needs of my target market rather than listening to their wants.
When we start a business or create an offering to cater to a particular want, we’re making life hard for ourselves. First, because we’re oftentimes making assumptions on behalf of our market – we think we know what they’re struggling with, we believe we have the solution and we feel that this is their biggest problem. Second, selling to a need is far harder than selling to a want.
Think about grudge purchases such as electricity, toilet paper, milk and bread. There’s no doubt that we need these things, but we don’t enjoy purchasing them – we haggle over the cost, we begrudge the money we’re paying and we don’t enjoy the process of purchasing.
Now think about something you do enjoy purchasing. I love buying books, theatre tickets, greeting cards, massages, airplane tickets. Many of these things are far more expensive than typical grudge purchases and I certainly don’t need them. But I don’t resent paying for them – in fact, I’m feeling damn fine when I hand over my money. The buying experience is a pleasure. That’s the difference between selling to a want rather than a need.
Becoming part of your community
To lower your risk in business, the first step is to become part of your community: the group of people you’ve identified that you’d most like to work with. You may have identified these ideal clients because: they’ve gone through struggles that you’ve also gone through; you share a similar attitude or perspective; you come from the same or a similar industry; or you have shared experienced.
Whatever the reason – you need to intimately understand the mentality of your ideal clients if you’re to reach them.
The good news is that it’s easier than ever before to do this. In fact, it’s one of the lesser-recognised strengths of social media. While countless marketers talk about the reach of social media, its no or low-cost, and the scale of its numbers, far fewer talk about the ready-made market research opportunities available, if only you looked.
Facebook groups are a great source of information. A quick search should reveal many groups that have established around the particular problems that your business seeks to solve or the solutions that it offers. Good quality Facebook groups are intimate and generous-spirited, composed of individuals who can give you direct insight into the problems and challenges you’re seeking to solve.
Oftentimes, you don’t even have to ask any questions let alone set up a formal poll or survey – people are already talking about the issues that your business addresses. The best skills you can cultivate here are listening and discerning.
Listening enables you to take note of the nuances of the conversation including the particular turns of phrase and words used by people, underlying attitudes. You may even find people talking about your business or your competitors.
Discerning is necessary to help you bridge the gaps in the conversations, to see whether certain individuals are likely speaking for the group or renegades. Discerning enables you to spot opportunities, understand the deeper desires and fears of your target market and the best case scenarios they may describe.
Opening up your creative process
Once you’re clearer on the psychology of your ideal clients and the current debates and conversations that are relevant to your business, the savvy operator opens up their creative process.
The difference between an artist and a business owner or entrepreneur is the creative process: the artist creates art and then seeks an audience for it; the owner or entrepreneur finds an audience or community that they wish to serve and creates for it.
Part two of this series looks at practical steps for reducing your risk in business by opening up your creative process.
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Identity in work
Do you love what you do? Are you compelled to do it, almost like you have no other choice? Then it’s likely that you identify with your work and business far more than most.
I’ve worked exclusively with people who love what they do and identify strongly with their work since starting my business in 2008. I’ve worked with people who become self-employed not because they want to earn a million dollars and enjoy luxury homes on every continent, but because they are compelled to do what they love.
But when the pursuit of your life’s purpose turns into self-employment, and especially when you’re doing highly interpersonal work (such as health or healing), where a keen rapport with clients is essential, then it becomes hard to separate our identity from our work.
Which is fine. Until it becomes a problem.
Rites of passage
“You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth,” says Khalil Gibran, “for to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.”
Pursuing a profession is a rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood. Never before has it been so easy to create your own business, to become a free-range consultant or freelancer, small business owner or project manager. Nowadays, it’s typical to cycle through numerous jobs across different industries, pursue a variety of different higher education, travel far more widely than our grandparents would dare to dream of, and try on different identities as we settle into our skin.
Our sense of self, or identity, is mostly composed of multiple external indicators which form an internalised view of who we are. Our job or career is crucial to this, even when we define ourselves against it – as someone not interested in building a career. When self-employed, our work becomes an even larger piece of the identity puzzle.
Over-identifying with your work
The question “what do you do?” can cause massive angst – we may believe we’re wasting our potential, we may not identify with our jobs, we may have a rich and active social life apart from work, we may be taking a career break to parent full-time. This simple question can provoke uneasiness – surely we are far more than the sum of our job?
For those working in self-employment, particularly freelancers without an office, we are frequently met with misunderstanding, confusion or the general sense that we are not serious with our work. This can be doubly confusing when the freelancer repeatedly wonders why their employed counterparts don’t hurry up and quit their jobs already so that they can enjoy the freedom, flexibility and creativity of self-employment.
Your identity in your actions
I’m increasingly fascinated by the role our identity plays in the actions we take. What we do with our time, how we prioritise our business – or not – the risks we take, how we juggle our competing responsibilities, our level of resilience and the joy and satisfaction (or lack of) that we derive from our business – much of this comes down to our sense of identity.
When we’ve received good advice and counsel and have the tools available (and most of us with internet access have business and marketing tools readily and freely available), what makes us act? Why do others defer, dither, procrastinate and oscillate? Why do some forge ahead and others lag behind? What makes some resilient and others less so?
Success in business is the sum of countless actions taken over time. To do so, we need to develop good habits. To create good habits, we need to have the appropriate identity. This can be simple: “I’m an action taker” to complex “I’m not ever going to make much money in my business because my mentor is far more talented and doesn’t make much.”
It’s extremely difficult to make significant changes to our behaviour if our self-belief opposes this. To make these changes enduring, we must also work at changing our perception of ourselves – not only what we are capable of – but as a person who has the everyday habits needed to get where we want to go.
Getting comfortable with failure
Failure is a byproduct of action; it’s unavoidable. Most of what we think of as failures in our business are actually just misaligned expectations: we expected an outcome that didn’t eventuate.
The problem with failure is that it often inhibits us from trying again. We tried, we failed, we internalise this and make it part of our identity narrative. I don’t need to tell you that this is a huge setback for success. We shrink into shadows of ourselves – scared to act, seeking safe and predictable situations, curtailing our dreams and suffocating our potentiality.
The flip side of this is not lack of failure – that’s fantasy. The flip side of failure is resilience: where our past setbacks are viewed not as negative but as part of the vast richness of experience which makes up our story.
Recalibrating expectations
In the last five years, there’s been a surge of people starting their own businesses. Sole traders now make up the majority of Australian businesses.
And with this surge has come an accompanying growth in online business training and promises of money, freedom, creative self-expression and meaningful, purposeful work. We have created unrealistically high expectations of what self-employment involves.
When the promised land doesn’t eventuate, it’s easy to internalise our perceived failure and see ourselves as the problem rather than the dominant narrative. In the pursuit of the hallowed “six figure income”, we may work at the expense of free time, family and friends, sleep, creativity and weekends.
Life away from work
Work is not the whole story. Especially if we are a beautiful little business of one or have a small team, it’s imperative that our emotional wellbeing is as buoyant as possible as this directly impacts on our business’s bottom line.
To thrive at work requires a rich life away from work: strong, supportive relationships, full weekends, time alone, plenty of sleep and, ideally, hobbies and interests that have little to do with work. Relationships outside of work mean that your sense of identity and self-esteem are far less dependent on your work and its outcomes.
A rich life outside of work could be your business insurance policy. Learning to thrive through failures and setbacks builds your emotional resilience – imperative for a long career. An active life away from work is vital to your work.
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