Do you feel the Urgency to become an Entrepreneur now?
The number #1 reason to become an entrepreneur right now in the 21st century is because the world has changed irrevocably. The twin waves of globalization and technology are changing the economic and employment landscape for every profession.
You will not escape. This is already happening.
In Yuval Noah Harari’s fabulous book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he says:
“The global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. Much like the Late Roman Empire, it is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests. Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers and managers are called to join the empire. They must ponder whether to answer the imperial call or to remain loyal to their state and their people. More and more choose the empire.”
If you are a person who has business ideas in your head, you can become an entrepreneur right now and avoid being ‘left behind’ by “the empire.’ To visualize the rapidly changing world, think back to the past twenty years on earth and the impact the iPhone, Amazon and Facebook have had on business and culture. Now think forward to consider where we will be twenty years from now. If you think the ‘rise of the empire’ is unlikely to affect you and the way you live your life, you are missing your opportunities as an entrepreneur.
The dangers of waiting to start your business
Both globalization and technology help you start a global business, and reach out to a global audience of potential customers and clients from anywhere in the world. This reality is incredibly liberating and exciting for anyone who has dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur. You are free to get started on the work you want to do.
If you wait, you may face a situation where you are scrambling to start your own business because you have run out of options. If globalization and technology, replace more traditional jobs and transform your local labor market, you may find your ability to get the kind of challenging and valuable work you seek is no longer available. There is no issue with starting a business at any point in your life. But it’s more fun to do it when you are feeling comfortable about your future, and you can make good decisions based on your own timetable.
Waiting to start your business also puts you up against issues you may not understand. You may face increasing competition as more global markets develop, tighter financial markets as lenders become more selective, restrictive legislation from overzealous lawmakers, and personal inertia from the debilitating effects of your own procrastination.
But if from the beginning, you think of globalization and technology as resources you can use, you can rapidly move forward on your plan to start your own business and live your life dream.
Globalization as a resource you can use
If you are thinking about your business ideas and trying to get started, you likely feel compelled to deliver value to the marketplace through a product or service you know people want or need. Just like big businesses that must make decisions supporting the goals of shareholders who are based all over the world and expecting economic gains, you have to make decisions to satisfy your own hopes, dreams and economic plans.
To deliver your product or service to the global marketplace, you may end up hiring, for example, a Latvia-based graphic designer to create your logo, just as a big company moves an entire factory offshore to make parts for their product. The process is efficient and straightforward. Once you look at the best offers you receive for a project, the quality of the test work and prior reviews, are you going to look at the person’s location to determine whether or not to give her the job? Maybe some of you will, but it’s possible many of you will not. You’ll participate directly in the global economy by hiring the most qualified, accessible person you could find.
This type of decision-making is happening right now all over the world. You may even be directly affected if your work has been impacted by offshoring or outsourcing. As difficult as cutting jobs is for a business, managers look at what’s best for their company.
The value of global competition
As an entrepreneur, you may find yourself in the same position. But in the long-run being forced to compete on a global scale is typically beneficial to the work force. What would be the quality of the NBA brand if the league did not recruit the best players from around the world? Do we as fans, as an audience and customers really want to miss out on seeing the best in the world play the game? And do we want to miss out on becoming the best in the world through our exposure to the best competition?
In business as in basketball, competing with the best can only make you better by compelling you to improve your skills to keep pace with your competition.
Or get out of the game.
Although the reality is competition can force you out of a particular organization that does not necessarily mean you are completely out of an industry. Many tech companies were started by people who were not necessarily the most successful where they were, but could not get their ideas taken seriously until they went out on their own. You can find an angle for your product or service that creates its own market and finds its own customers in the marketplace. The experience, although painful in the short-term, will ultimately be a huge boost for you if you stay with your plans.
Technology as your primary tool
And you do not only get better on the basis of your personal skill. Your ability to use technology to your advantage is a major factor in success and the other major driver of changes in the new economy. As a rising entrepreneur, you can employ technology tools to support your business in every area from accounting, to design and email management and marketing. The new technologies allow you to produce high quality work at a fraction of the price the work used to cost. This is called reducing barriers to entry. You can enter into the global entrepreneurial workforce by using technology to ensure your product can compete.
Technology is even more certain to take direct aim at employment by humans. Technologists are all over the world. Every company must compete with bright minds in Russia, India and South Korea who can severely disrupt a business enterprise overnight. This fear does not only apply to hackers or pirates. All over the world bright minds are engaged in developing new software and innovative ideas designed to disrupt the functioning of traditional business. Since the Internet is global and most people have access to its possibilities, there is no reason to believe the technology will stop at anyone’s border.
We adapt to technology (not the other way around)
Lately some people are getting a little concerned about the influence of companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. In less than twenty years, these companies have fundamentally changed the way we shop, communicate and decide where to eat. Those companies were built with rules set only by the people who built them. And we are adapting to how they are making the world.
As an entrepreneur who uses these online platforms, you have to approach your business decisions on their terms. In medieval times when ‘ancient you’ was farming a plot of land, a new landlord could come by and tell you now submit to his demands or face dire consequences. If you did not have a Knight or some other defender to help you, you were forced to do as you were told or lose your land, or at worst be killed. You effectively had to play along to get along.
The same is true today of technology’s key consumer-facing Internet platforms. In today’s world, if you do not behave on Amazon or Facebook as required, you will lose access to the site, which may mean the end of your business or your social life. Most people are not willing to take that risk. Although it’s technically possible for a new company to rise up tomorrow and replace the big names on the Internet, you have to manage your business in the world you see before you today. You will both have access to a global market through the mega online platforms, and you can lose access just as easily. Your goal is to hang on while remaining true to your vision for your company.
Your business or your job
As globalization and technology define our world, opportunities for continued employment are dependent on these twin pillars that are out of your control or the control of governments. Most people will have to try and get into a job without any hope of staying in the position for a long time. At the same time, millions of jobs go unfilled because the education system, and popular thought, cannot adapt quickly enough to the changing demands of the job market. If the teachers are not trained, the students will not be either.
Where does that leave you?
If you have a business idea in your head, you should be feeling it’s time to take that idea into the global marketplace. Globalization and technology are already here and the world economy is changing right now. The global GDP, or gross domestic product is currently valued at the $78 trillion, with a T, mark. You can take your business idea – your product or service – and deliver it to the market and take your part of that soon-to-be $100 trillion dollar pie.
But you have to get started. The time to become an entrepreneur is now when the field is wide open, your product or service idea is needed, and the available tools and resources provide access to the global marketplace.
Do you feel the urgency?
Struggling with how to get started? Download my book Life Dream: Seven Universal Moves to Get the Life You Want through Entrepreneurship.
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Are you a businessperson or an entrepreneur?
People often ask the question:
What is the difference between a businessperson and an entrepreneur?
Some would say the businessperson is the blue suited MBA with a briefcase, process workflows, five-year strategic plans and a corporate AMEX card.
The entrepreneur is the disheveled garage dweller testing concept after concept in a bubble of failed experiments and idea frustrations.
Others would say difference only depends on where you are in the process. If you are bringing a product or service to market, you will transform from one image to the other…from entrepreneur to businessperson.
The entrepreneur is often considered the idea person. You are an entrepreneur if you create a product or service idea that you want to place in the marketplace. When entrepreneurs get started, they have to think of the business aspects of their idea. After all, it’s not possible to put the product or service into the market unless you think about the specific business activities you need to do.
A businessperson is often seen as the manager with the numbers, holding meetings about strategy, and dealing with taxes and lawyers. The business is the entity built after the entrepreneur’s idea is commercialized.
When you start a business, the entrepreneur often has to do everything. There is no divide between the two titles – businessperson or entrepreneur – when you get started, especially if you are bootstrapping which is the practice of paying all your own bills without external financing.
Over time, perhaps as you professionalize your business, or you open multiple businesses, you transform into the more familiar business image that Wall Street loves.
If you start a business, based on your idea, you are both an entrepreneur and a businessperson.
An entrepreneur is often defined as: a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.
A businessperson is defined as: a person who works in business or commerce, especially at an executive level.
If you did not start the business, but you work for it in a management role, you are the businessperson.
You can call yourself an entrepreneur if you take the business idea and turn it into a company that delivers products or services to the marketplace. You eventually hire businesspeople to run the operations, administration, production, distribution and marketing for you. As you continue to develop ideas and create new opportunities for your product or service, you remain the entrepreneur.
That’s the achievement you want to be able to be the entrepreneur hiring businesspeople to help you run your business. At that point you have the life dream you wanted to achieve when you got started.
What do you need to make it happen?
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Rising Entrepreneurs: Is Advertising Worth the Cost?
How to Measure Your ROI when Making Marketing Decisions
Big Words vs. Your Business Numbers: Bad advice and wild declarations could be preventing you from maximizing opportunities for your business. Here is a straightforward process for determining, for yourself, whether you are making or losing money from your marketing decisions.
Do you listen to – just about everybody – as you try and build your business? Are you wondering who is right and who is wrong about spending ideas like buying advertising on Facebook or managing your own website?
How should you decide what to do?
One option is to decide based only on numbers – the actual profit – you could make from your decision. Even if your business has no customers or profits, you can be disciplined about evaluating every decision along economic lines. Make your calculations against a long-term vision for your business. You do not have to worry about making money tomorrow, only about making money.
When you hear someone say a particular business decision is “expensive,” you have to determine, for yourself, if the statement is true. The word ‘expensive’ is relative to your own costs and profit goals.
You have to do your own assessment. Taking someone else’s statement at face value may be costing you your opportunity to be successful with your business plans. If you are a rising entrepreneur, you may be missing an approach for directly making money if you take advice without knowing your own numbers.
What is expensive to You as CEO?
Entrepreneurs must understand whether or not your business spend is making you money – or you may soon go broke. When you spend money on your business, you have to learn how to measure the return you are getting from your investment. Another person’s declaration of what is or is not expensive should have no effect on you, if you truly understand how you make money.
You must be able to calculate your ROI – return on investment – for your spend. An ROI greater than 100% is the minimum goal. You want to earn back every penny you put in, and more. But the question is: 100% of what measure? The calculation of ROI is relative to your objectives.
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Your Business Must Make Sales
Most entrepreneurs have something to sell – either products or services or both – into the global marketplace. You offer solutions to problems, conveniences, value, opportunities, short cuts and other benefits to consumers who want or need what you have to offer.
You want your business sales to return greater than 100% of the cost you pay to run the business. For example, authors want to receive more than 100% of costs returned as royalties from book sales.
To determine if the spend is getting a return consider: how you earn revenue, the timeframe when you will recover costs, and who you expect to eventually receive the payment from.
To illustrate, we will use the example of purchasing advertising from Facebook or Google to promote your business. When you make the decision to purchase advertising do you expect to eventually sell to people who see your ad, click on it, or convert by taking a specific action?
These are the factors you must consider – where is the revenue eventually going to come from?
To determine your parameters for calculating your return, ask yourself a few questions: Why are you buying ads? What do you expect the ads to do for your business?
If you cannot answer those questions with exactness, meaning exact dollar figures, you may be pursuing a blind advertising strategy for your product or service.
Entrepreneurs buy advertising to reach an audience. Facebook or Google advertising allows you to target people who may be interested in your ad because they fit a specific demographic or interest group connected to your product or service. For example, if you write thriller books, you can target all the thriller fans who have claimed the interest on a digital platform.
To Calculate ROI on Advertising:
Set-up your Ad
This example will focus on calculating your ROI for advertising spend only. You will not find the information on how to do a Facebook ad or use Google Adwords. If you want information on technical features such as creating or placing your ad, tweaking the ad, or writing better copy, put a note in comments to request a future article.
When setting up your ad, you will want a measure of performance. For example, people create an ad to prompt a Call-To-Action (CTA) – an activity they want the ad viewer to do. The CTA is aimed at fueling an end goal for your business. You are then able to measure performance based on how many people do what you want them to do.
The value of the return starts with your reason for creating the ad.
Let’s use the following illustrative example: You have a brand new product that no one has heard about, but you are interested in targeting potential customers who may be interested. You can create an ad campaign with ads that have a CTA to click to enter an e-mail address and receive an incentive from you such as an introductory product supplement or important research information related to your new product.
For this campaign, two measures are important – how many people click the ad, and how many people enter their e-mail address to receive the incentive.
Calculate your expected profit from selling the new product
To apply real numbers to the calculation of your return, you must determine your expected profit. If, as a result of the advertising campaign, you were able to sell the product to everyone who executed the CTA, what would you earn from each sale?
More generally, determine how you expect to drive sales through the money you are spending. If you set up a website, buy supplies, take a competitor to lunch, attend a conference – how are you creating sales for your business? The same thought process must be applied to your advertising.
Once you know the potential profit you expect to receive, you can determine the return you need to achieve it.
What is the expected profit from the sale of the product?
Know Your Costs for Each Outcome
In our advertising example, you must know the ad spend for each successful CTA by a potential customer.
One note: This article is only about recovering your cost for specific spend such as advertising, and not all the other potential costs you can have when creating your product or service. For this example, this calculation does not include the costs for creating, producing or distributing your product or service, the cost of your time, materials, outsourcing, or web services. The actual total cost of the product or service includes more than advertising spend or another targeted expense. But we are not going to consider the ROI on your entire production and distribution process.
The purpose of this article is to help you weed out facts from hubris when listening to third party advice about your business decisions. You have to know your own numbers to avoid having people persuade you to take action that may be against your best interests.
With your advertising expenses, you should know exactly how much money is being spent, which means you can track the value of that spend directly to your results.
Tracking Your Results
Using our earlier example for digital advertising, you must decide which result statistic matches your overall strategy.
From earlier, if you decided on measuring how many people click on the ad, and how many people enter an email address, you have the important statistics you want to analyze. The people who enter their e-mail are conversions.
You want to pick one of these measures to track against the money you are spending.
Conversions are the number of people who acted on your CTA – such as those who entered an email address or went to your website. For many advertisers, the number of conversions is the statistic that matters.
You will have to decide which measure optimizes returns for your marketing strategy. How are you going to continue to motivate customers – with great products, added value, more information or other incentives?
Based on this overall plan, you must set your goal for the ads. What is the connection between your marketing and the potential for a sale?
For example, an author may give away one free book in a series, in the hope the potential customer will buy the next book in the series. Perfumers give away free samples in the hope you will buy the whole bottle. Cruise ships throw in the drink package to tempt you to take the cruise. When was the last time you got through Costco without sampling a new food or drink?
Make the connection. This goal is speculative. You have no idea if someone will eventually end up buying your book or perfume or food. Nor do you know if they bought the product or service only because of the advertising. You’re guessing based on past performance, research, habits for people in your industry and other concepts. Maybe you can clearly see a bump in sales after you advertise. But there are no guarantees. You will want to generate enough ongoing interest to keep the new customer engaged on some level.
Calculate Your Return
Go back to the expected profit and our advertising example. If you assume that your advertising will lead a customer to buy your product, perhaps within one year, you want the expected cost per conversion to be less than the expected profit per customer.
To calculate the return, divide the total amount spent and total number of conversions (number of successful CTAs or email addresses received). This will give you the cost-per-conversion. Then you can assess the value of your marketing.
For example, if your expected profit on each sale is $2.09, and cost-per-conversion is below $2.09 you can feel good about earning the money back. If it’s above $2.09, you may need to tweak the ads or target audience to try and get that amount down.
You should always know your expected profit from your product, and the cost-per-conversion so that you can automatically see if you have the potential to earn more money than you are spending on your ads.
Ideally, you want to minimize the cost-per-conversion number as much as possible. You really only want to pay $0.01 (one cent or less) per conversion. [This means if you were spending $10 a day on advertising, you would need 1,000 conversions a day, which would be awesome, but you see the challenge].
The key is to understand what each conversion means to you. When you look at your overall campaign, focus on the number you originally determined to use as the basis for a return. If cost-per-click is not a factor for you, do not bother tracking the number. Only worry about the number you want to use to track performance. Other numbers remain interesting to your overall results, but not important to determining your return.
If you set an ROI number based on conversions you only have to worry that conversions are performing. Do not get obsessed with clicks if your conversions are delivering.
To determine your long-term prospects for earning your money back, you can also track how many products you would have to sell to break even. For example, based on the above numbers, if after one month, you have 500 people on your e-mail list, but no sales, you need to sell at least 144 products to earn your ad money back. [Note the math: Spending $10 a day for 30 days = $300, potential profit is $2.09, $300/$2.09 = 143.54 – rounded up).
You can envision selling 144 products over the next year, so the prospects still look good. But if after a year of the same monthly spend and you still have no sales, you would need to sell 1,723 products to break even. Now you may be a little worried.
However, if you have 6,000 e-mails on your list you can work on marketing to your list and try and earn the money by promoting the next product to your existing ‘warm’ leads. You can think of new incentives and ideas to show your customers the value you have to offer and how you can help them find satisfying solutions.
Be Wary of Big Talkers Making Pronouncements
The next time you hear someone say “Advertising is expensive,” remember to do your own math. You have to determine “by what measure?” and then apply the measure to your business.
Using our ongoing example again, if next year, cost-per-conversion goes from $2.09 to $4.09, and you receive fewer conversions with the same ads, then you can agree ads are getting too expensive for your business model. But you cannot know exactly what your risk is until you have run your own numbers.
You must decide:
Why you are creating the ads?
What you want to achieve through the ads?
Which product or service you plan to sell and what is potential profit?
Decide on your own definition of “expensive.”
If you have an opportunity to reach an audience, and good marketing ideas, do not let the moment pass you by because someone else has found the prospect daunting. Pursue your own advertising strategy based on the options that work for your business.
–$–
Case Lane founded Ready Entrepreneur to help people who struggle to get the information they need to start a business and fulfill their lifestyle dreams. Ready Entrepreneur works with aspiring entrepreneurs, wantrepreneurs and rising entrepreneurs who are frustrated, confused by the technology solutions but thirsty for the information they need to grow the business. Case shows you how to access the resources you have to tactically develop a business that can be competitive in the global market and deliver market share, profit and cash flow. Please feel free to visit her blog to find unique articles and resources that support this vision.
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Can Entrepreneurship be Taught?
Who are the entrepreneurs in the world, the people who start businesses? Could it be the most clever or the hustler or the cheapskate or the visionary or the lucky or the hardest working or the liar or the cheater or the privileged or anyone who isn’t you?
Or is it really just the people who had an idea and decided to see if they can put it into fruition?
And if it is those people then is that not a gift in itself, or can entrepreneurship taught?
Whether or not the answer to the question is ‘yes,’ entrepreneurship is being taught at schools everywhere and in business school programs. People believe you can learn how to be an independent businessperson and start your own business. But if you read the biographies and autobiographies of famous business owners, you will almost certainly come to realize that none of them took any special courses in how to be an entrepreneur.
They had an idea. And put the idea into action. They took risks, used persistence, ignored naysayers and defied the odds to keep going when others told them to stop. Can those behaviors be taught?
The answer is still ‘yes.’
The answer is ‘yes’ because one way to understand how to do something is to see what others do and emulate them. If the ‘secret sauce’ for successful entrepreneurship is not giving up on your business idea, people can be taught the concept that perseverance is a key to being a successful entrepreneur.
For people who want to start their own business, many simply do not know how it’s done. There is an information gap when it comes to explaining what it really takes to get a business going. Even the books about entrepreneurs do not really give you the details. A book may say an entrepreneur started with ‘nothing,’ but then suddenly the person is able to buy a storefront – how did that happen?
Or the person has one, two or ten friends who are on their exact same wavelength and work with them day and night to get the business going – where does one meet such people?
Or there are favorable laws that can be exploited in a particular jurisdiction or a relative who left behind an old truck and a recipe or an observation that triggered a bright idea.
When successful people write their own stories, you get the version they want to tell you that is a little bit entertaining, maybe glamorous, and always an idea about how they want to be viewed by others. You do not get the whole story. The blanks need to be filled in.
Typically, ‘the blanks’ the boring part is all about the work required in the average day for a rising entrepreneur. From the beginning of a business idea you must figure out how to bring the idea to market. Often you will try and fail to bring the idea to market and you will have to change your approach. If you begin with no money, you may have to work all day at a paying job for someone else and then work on your business all evening and weekends. That kind of effort rarely makes for dynamic page-turning in a biography.
The rising entrepreneur may have to approach people who can help advance the business. You may contact people every day and never receive a response. People may be short with you, bored with talking to you or tell you your idea is ‘stupid.’ You hang up and call someone else. Successful people are unlikely to want to recall those rejections either.
You might have to attend meetings where someone will only speak to you for five minutes, after you spend five days getting ready to meet them. You may make a presentation where the person asks a question you never thought of and then thinks you’re an idiot because you cannot answer it. You go to the bank and ask for a loan and get turned down because that lender, that day, did not like your idea. You move on to the next bank, the next day.
You will not go out partying with friends, you will not drink, do drugs or smoke. You will not take vacation or go to the movies. If you have a car you will use it for the business. You will eat, because you need food for nutrition, but you will not see the insides of any fancy restaurants. Possibly for years.
If you are on your own you will do these things while maintaining your housework, laundry, and other mundane household chores so that you remain a civilized person operating at a level of dignity.
If you are an entrepreneur, or even an entrepreneur-in-training, you will keep doing this until your business is a success.
Is managing this life until you are successful an academic skill or possible only if you have certain personality traits?
You have to be tough…with yourself. You have to have an iron self-discipline and will to forsake all the ‘normal’ rituals of everyday life in favor of building your business. This attitude applies even if you have children and a spouse. You have to convince them that changing your daily life now to concentrate on building a business is worth the effort for everyone.
You have to be able to shut out whining and complaining and wishing. You cannot set a deadline. For example to declare, ‘if the business if the is not viable by Jan. 1 we’ll do something else.’ Because setting a deadline could set you up to lose. Or worse, quit just before the business turns the corner. Instead from the beginning, you must decide you will build a successful business and that’s it. You will put your effort into creating the business you want or die trying.
A deadline will emerge on its own because you will find yourself determined to be successful to satisfy all those who may be counting on you to make it big…or to fail.
But if you are the kind of person who gives up, who believes you can in fact end your quest for entrepreneurship, then no amount of courses or books or lessons will help you. You can be told you must keep on going until you have a successful business, but you cannot be taught the personality traits needed to be that person.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, a person who runs your own business and manages your own lifestyle based on individual enterprise – you must be realistic about how you run your life.
Walk away from the daily ritual of a so-called ‘normal’ life, and set your sights on building your business dream. This is what you are being told, not taught.
Now it’s up to you go ahead and implement on that vision.
Additional Resources for Wantrepreneurs
Free Video Training
Check out free training for wantrepreneurs if you would like help to get started.
Check out: free video training series for wantrepreneurs. This training is for those of you who have always wanted to start a business, but need to find the confidence, time and money to get started.
Money Management Tips
Facing money challenges? Download my book: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear
For Amazon (Kindle): https://www.amazon.com/Better-Plan-Building-Nothing-Financial-ebook/dp/B06W5GXLP1/
For iBooks (Apple products): https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/better-plan-real-life-guide-to-building-wealth-from/id1222099554
For Smashwords (all formats): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/705684
Want to discuss the content of this blog or other ideas? Send me an email to: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
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What is Lifestyle Freedom?
When people toss around a term like ‘lifestyle freedom,’ I have to ask: What do you mean?
When you think about the term ‘lifestyle freedom’ do you have a definition in mind?
Or more likely, a vision.
Some people equate the term strictly with being wealthy. The ability to do what you want in life, whenever you want, when you want because you have more money than you could spend in a lifetime. If you want a mega-mansion, you buy one. If you want a fancy car, you buy one. And so on. To some people lifestyle freedom is all about the bling.
But I picture lifestyle freedom a little more simplistically. Don’t get me wrong. The bling is great. But it takes time to go shopping for the right mega-mansion, and to test drive all those cars.
Sometimes what you are really after is not all those toys. What you want is more flexibility with your time.
Yes, your time.
Lifestyle Freedom is getting control of your time.
When I worked in organizations, corporations or bureaucracies, my colleagues were always lamenting the things they could not do. For example, attend a child’s sports event because it was scheduled for the late afternoon and there was no way they could make the commute on time. Or go to the doctor on a day’s notice because you want to get something checked out. Or shop on a Tuesday afternoon when no one is around and you can avoid the crowds and the over-filled parking lot.
Or vacation – imagine vacationing off-season so you are not caught with everyone else traveling at the same time, and paying holiday prices.
That’s Lifestyle Freedom.
Lifestyle freedom is also about how you manage your day. Some people work better in the early morning hours, and would love to be in the office at that time, and then leave earlier. Others prefer to work late into the night. But neither can make the adjustment because of the requirement for ‘face time.’
I hate ‘face time.’ That’s the idea that you have to be seen in the office, preferably between 9 am and 5 pm. Your actual results don’t count. Your production is not a factor. Your contribution in terms of efficiency and creativity is not measured. Only that people, the right people, see you between 9 and 5. How many people are suffering through long drives, crowded elevators, boring water cooler conversations and interminable meetings only because of the need for ‘face time.’
Face time is one of the great scourges of the corporate world, but it persists because it is a key factor in the judgment of others. If you and another person are considered ‘equally qualified,’ the one who is ‘known’ will get the promotion because people feel more comfortable with the familiar face. In fact, you may only be considered equally qualified because the ‘known’ one has been around. That person may not have done any actual work. Maybe they played tennis all day. But they played with the right people, so they get the promotion, you don’t.
Is it worth your adult life to continue showing up for a company with those values?
Never having to put up with that scenario again is…lifestyle freedom.
During the year-end holidays, people are scrambling, from Thanksgiving on, to buy gifts, decorate their house, prepare for visitors, and cook, and have no flexible time to do any of it. The most festive time of the year turns into a stressful nightmare of fighting crowds, and juggling schedules. Online shopping has alleviated some of these issues, but you still need time to go online and find everything you’re looking for.
Imagine if you had all day, every day during the four weeks leading up to the holidays, to work on your personal celebratory activities. That’s lifestyle freedom.
When you start a family, you are propelled into near crisis over your daycare options. It’s such a difficult decision for parents to make to decide if it’s ‘worth it,’ to hire a nanny or use daycare for a child, or give up a salary and have one caregiver stay home. The fact people have to make these decisions based on financial resources, and not on how they want to raise their child is crushing for working families.
What you want is to be able to have your children whenever you’re ready, and decide on care as a personal preference.
That’s lifestyle freedom.
How do you Achieve Lifestyle Freedom?
If you have ever felt the inkling to become an entrepreneur, maybe it’s because you want these examples of lifestyle freedom. If you have business ideas in your head and think it may be time to start your own business, now is the time to do it.
Unprecedented advances in globalization and technology have shrunk the marketplace to make all markets accessible to the average person. Tech tools, many of them free, enable laptop entrepreneurs to create from their backyard and enter the marketplace at any point. If you really want to achieve lifestyle freedom by getting away from the difficult and awkward situations that hold you back, and having the flexibility to make your own decisions, entrepreneurship is your ticket.
When you begin thinking as an entrepreneur, CEO of your own business, you will be automatically shaping your lifestyle to fit your plans. You will set-up the business around the activities you do for yourself and your family. Initially you may trade-off more peripheral activities like a distant acquaintance’s birthday party so you can work on your business, but over time you will be able to get back to everything you really want to do.
The key is to make the decision upfront to be an entrepreneur in pursuit of lifestyle freedom. If you make the changes now, within a couple of years, you could be in a position to attend every event you want to attend, plan your shopping and holidays as you see fit, and take those vacations when the timing suits you, and not someone, or a corporation’s agenda.
If you are really one of those independent people who have been thinking, and thinking, and thinking about branching out on your own, you are not alone. But the idea of achieving lifestyle freedom is easier to think about than to do. Many people bail out of making the effort to actually live the life because they are afraid.
People make up excuses like they do not have enough time to work on a business, or money, or confidence, or their business idea will not stick. None of these excuses is true because you have not yet tried to establish the business. At this point you have no idea what will work and what will not.
If you are a thinking entrepreneur, with business ideas in your head, and a dream of lifestyle freedom, begin by actually starting your business. You achieve lifestyle freedom when you set out on the road to entrepreneurship because you begin designing a life that meets all your goals.
Try it now, you will not be disappointed.
Additional Resources for Wantrepreneurs
Free Video Training
Check out free training for wantrepreneurs if you would like help to get started.
Check out: free video training series for wantrepreneurs. This training is for those of you who have always wanted to start a business, but need to find the confidence, time and money to get started.
Money Management Tips
Facing money challenges? Download my book: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear
For Amazon (Kindle): https://www.amazon.com/Better-Plan-Building-Nothing-Financial-ebook/dp/B06W5GXLP1/
For iBooks (Apple products): https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/better-plan-real-life-guide-to-building-wealth-from/id1222099554
For Smashwords (all formats): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/705684
Want to discuss the content of this blog or other ideas? Send me an email to: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
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Start Your Business Around Your 9-to-5 Job
Some of you have asked, ‘how do I balance becoming an entrepreneur while still keeping up my 9-to-5 job?’ For the answer, I go back to a basic question: What are you trying to achieve with your life?
Do you want to live your dream lifestyle before your life ends? If the answer is yes, you have to begin to change the way you use your time so you can focus on creating the business.
We are going to assume you cannot leave your job. That is, you have dependents or other responsibilities relying on you to provide steady income. But you know you can reach an even more reliable income if you were an entrepreneur running your own enterprise.
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So you go into this process with the desire to start your own business. You want to be an entrepreneur and you know you will have to make changes to accomplish your goals.
Next, recognize how much time you have available to work on your business. You say your job is 9-to-5 – that means you are working just over 2,000 hours a year (probably less).
How many hours does that leave you to work on your business each year?
Almost 7,000. (*Check the math at the end if you don’t believe it)
That’s right, you have more than three times as many hours to work on your business, compared to the time you’re spending at your job. So what was that you were saying about working around your day job?
The question you should really be asking is: how do I convert the time I’m using for other activities to work on my business?
#1 – Decide what you want to do with the time you find
First, decide what you want to do with your time. This is critical. If you start looking for time before deciding what you are going to do with it, you could end up wasting the minutes you have available. You need to identify the activities you will be doing to start your business. Imagine you are not going to your job and you have all the time in the world every day to work on your business, where would you start?
If you do not have a business idea: Spend the time researching possible products or services you could be providing to the marketplace.
If you have a business idea: Spend the time researching how you will turn your idea into a business, and map out every activity you need to do to get the business open.
If you already have a struggling business: Spend the time re-assessing how to take advantage of the assets you have already built, and research options for growing your business.
Once you have decided what you want to do with your time, you will begin trading off activities that do not add value to your life for those that will get you to your dream lifestyle.
#2 – Start looking for time/activity trade-offs
You really have to decide what is more important to you.
To start your business, you need time to work on your business, and to find the time you have to trade-off from other activities you do. If you are serious about reaching lifestyle freedom, you have to be prepared to make these changes in your life now.
If you have dependents who will not alleviate you from your financial responsibilities, that is you are keeping your day job to pay the bills, then they should give you back some time.
Remember you are working on getting to lifestyle freedom. Once you’ve achieved it, you will have all the time in the world to do everything you want to do.
To trade-off your time, you should be honest and prepared. If you are in a family where the term ‘family is everything,’ means giving up on yourself for appearances sake, you should have a serious discussion with your dependents.
Begin by envisioning your dream lifestyle together. Maybe they feel like you do. The work grind and answering to others is not the world you want to stay in forever. Get your family to see the value of taking time now to step away from all the false obligations of attending every event – and focus on moving you forward on your dreams. You can do this precisely because ‘family is everything.’ You want more time with them, more freedom to do what you would like to do, and more stability and security in your professional life.
This is can be a very difficult step because we are programmed to believe that we must be ‘social.’ But outside of once-in-a-lifetime activities like weddings (okay some will be twice) where you wish to share the joy of someone you care about; and funerals where you wish to pay your last respects, there are few events that you absolutely must attend. Of course people will have special birthdays or graduations, but often the event is another party with the same set of people, engaged in the same set of conversation, drinking and eating.
You must make a stand for your own life vision, and turn them down.
When you pitch to your dependents that you need time, you should begin with your plan to achieve lifestyle freedom. Short-term pain for long-term gain. The conversation does not start “I’m not going to Aunt Martha’s birthday party because I might want to look at some stuff about starting a business.” The conversation is “I set aside time today to do research on my product offering. I’m skipping Aunt Martha’s birthday party (and no, it’s not her 100th).
By the way, if you think this is ‘mean,’ remember you are the one dreaming of a new lifestyle. Does that lifestyle look like the one you are in now? Or are you in Tahiti during Aunt Martha’s next birthday? Think about it. How many more of Aunt Martha’s birthday parties are you going to attend when you are a millionaire entrepreneur?
You can also look at replacing some of the dependent or friend-related time taking activities with more efficient practices. Maybe you go to the mall every weekend because that’s when you spend time together. But you can do all your shopping online, and have products delivered. Use the time you would normally be driving to the mall, looking for parking and fighting crowds to spend time together. And use the time you would normally be wandering around the mall to work on your business.
Engage your dependents, in the business planning. Kids love to surf the Internet. Let them be involved in doing research especially to look at your potential market and the competitive environment.
Here’s something to ask the kids: go on Instagram, search #[add the name of your product or service]; and tell me all the marketing and social media buzz you see related to my idea or something like this. You can do this for every variation of your product or service, the industry, market, and every social media platform – should keep everyone busy for a while.
You do not have to do this every weekend. You can replace going to the mall, twice a month, and make those Saturday afternoons lifestyle dream time. Make sure everyone has articulated what the lifestyle dream looks like to them so that they know exactly why they are doing the work.
You can also trade-off time at work. If you work in an organization where your time for lunch and breaks is your own, you can do research, make calls, take meetings and prepare documents related to your business during free time you have available at work.
For the same reason that you are not going to attend every family event, you do not have to attend every work excuse to socialize. If your colleagues go to lunch every day to gossip, once or twice a week you can say you have something else to do, and go and find a quiet corner to work on your business.
You should not have any trouble deciding what to do with your time, because you should have mapped out your plan of activities — every step needed to build the business — ahead of time. See #1. You can select one or two activities to work on during the workday or in the evenings and weekends.
You can also change your activities during your commuting time. If you are not driving, you have plenty of options to do business-related activities on the train or bus. If you are driving, you can focus your listening time on audiobooks, podcasts or radio programs focused on your area of business. If you are car-pooling and have no control over the listening devices, you can canvas your carpool friends about your business ideas. If the product or service is not for them, assign them the task to ask other people who may be your potential customers what they think of the idea.
If you think your colleagues will ridicule you for trying to start a business on the side, or ‘rat you out’ to the boss, then you may be forced to sit there and listen to their nonsense talk, which is even more of a reason to get out of that job and get into your own business.
You must always remember why you are doing the work of creating an independent business. If you keep looking for excuses that you cannot find time, or your day job is getting in the way, you must ask yourself how badly you want to be an entrepreneur living life on your own terms.
The real issue here is taking the time you have to repurpose the non-productive hours of your day towards building your business. First, you start by knowing exactly what you want to be doing. Second, you identify where you can make trade-offs with your dependents, friends and your work colleagues.
#3 – Use the time to create your business
You will be thanking yourself as you push yourself closer and closer to your dream lifestyle. Take all the time you have found or created with more efficient practices, and focus on getting where you really want to go.
You know you are going to make changes to reach your dream lifestyle. So make changes now on the road to getting there. You’ll be happy that you did.
*Here’s the math: You have 24 hours in a day for 365 or 366 days that equals 8,760 or 8,784. You work 9-to-5 that’s 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks of the year or 2,080 hours. That assumes you never take a holiday or a personal day. There are 10 statutory federal holidays, and most people get at least 10 personal days. So that’s another 160 hours you are not working. Bringing your total to less than 2,000.
More Resources for Rising Entrepreneurs
Learn to Find Time, Money and Overcome Obstacles
If you would like some help in getting started, click this link to check out free video training series for wantrepreneurs. This training is for those of you who have always wanted to start a business but need to find the confidence, time and money to get started.
Learn money management tips for all situations
Facing money challenges? Download my book: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear
For Amazon (Kindle): click here
For iBooks (Apple products): click here
For Smashwords (all formats): click here
Jump-Start Yourself
Are you struggling with the idea of starting your own business because you’re afraid it’s too much work?
What kind of work do you think running a business involves? Many people say they want to achieve lifestyle freedom by becoming an entrepreneur running their own business. But fear the road to getting there is filled with endless days and nights of toil. So many believe they do not have the time to dedicate to that kind of work right now. People will say they are already overwhelmed with their job, personal responsibilities and every day life.
Are you one of those people? If you are you have the wrong idea about entrepreneurship.
The road to business success is not about hard work.
A ditch digger works hard, especially in hot temperatures. If you are required to dig a six foot deep, one mile long ditch with a hand-held shovel – that would be hard work. The work gets even harder if you have an overseer, or poor tools (a spoon not a shovel) or a bad attitude (constantly dropping your tool to complain about the job). Under those types of conditions, the work will not be accomplished. The ditch will not be dug. The project is over before it started.
As an entrepreneur who wants to achieve lifestyle freedom by starting your own business – you need to make the work efficient and consistent. Not hard. That is the difference.
Efficient
You can be efficient on your road to lifestyle freedom by: researching the activities you need to do to start your business; making a plan for completing the activities, and implementing the completion of the work with deadlines.
If you show up and you do activities that are actually related to your goals – you will achieve your business dreams. And the work is not hard, because you are finally doing work you love that provides real directly value to you. Even if the individual tasks are annoying, you know that every single ounce of effort you put in is returned directly to you. That fact transforms the work from laborious ditch-digging for someone else to reaching closer and closer to your personal lifestyle objectives.
The key to correctly being efficient is to map out the activities you need to do to start your business and systematically go through all the steps to get it done.
Do not do a traditional business plan. By that we mean the 100-page document about market analysis and management structure and financial planning that many people think is the first step to starting a business. If you find in the lifestory or any great and successful business person the line: ‘first I wrote a business plan,’ please let me know. The traditional business plan is a time-wasting distraction unless you require, absolutely require, the assistance of a third party who demands a business plan. The business plan is for other people.
Planning the business is for you.
That’s the alternative? Start your business. If a third party wants to know what the business is – start the business. The best evidence you can provide about the viability of your business idea is an active, functioning business. If you start the business you prove you can get it done. And you will be further ahead than the 99% of people who claim they want to start a business, but never do.
Consistent
If you took 15 minutes a day, every day, to complete a task you need to do to create your business, you will begin to see the business forming. You can do one task after another for as long as it takes to get your business launched.
You don’t have to do all the activities at once. You don’t have to do them all in a week. But you do have to do them all consistently. Systematically move through your list and let it lead you directly into creating your business. As your business grows, you can outsource activities to third parties to complete. But as a first step you can complete your activities every day until the business is ready to go.
But you have to do the work – efficiently and consistently:
You have to identify the activities
Map out the activities
Implement the activities
Doing the work is about willpower. That’s a tough word. Willpower means the “control exerted to do something.” Think about that – the control exerted.
What are you trying to control? Are you thinking the idea should be the opposite? Shouldn’t you be trying to unleash your inner entrepreneur?
Yes! But to do that you have to control the impulse to do nothing. You are trying to control the impulse to make up excuses, sit and watch videos, have another beer, go to a party (but it’s X’s birthday party…again).
Unfortunately, more often than not, nothing (or the thing you always do) wins.
Willpower is in your mind. You have to fight the thoughts in your mind that are telling you to do nothing. You can overcome these impulses by having a plan you know you can put into place every day to move your business idea forward.
Remind yourself the road you want to take to building your lifestyle dream is not the hard road. The hard road is a horrible life of drudgery doing a job you hate, and taking orders from people you do not like or respect. That’s the hard road.
You would think it would be easy to convince your brain to go along with your business building plans. After all you can envision your better future. That part is easy. You probably envision it all the time. The dream house. The luxury car. The vacations on the most exotic beaches in the world. You know exactly what the dream looks like. If that part is so quick to come to mind. Why is the road to get there a mirage?
You are probably thinking…because it takes work. How much work? Certainly not as much as digging a ditch to nowhere.
Create your business. Set aside the time to do the activities needed to start your business and do it. You do not need any kind of secret super-human powers to accomplish hard work. Don’t try to do everything at once. Identify the activities. Work on a bit each day. You will wake up one morning with your entrepreneurial dream firing on all cylinders as your life reality.
You need to jump-start yourself on the power of your unwavering desire to live your dream lifestyle.
That’s the road you should be walking on right now.
Additional Resources for Wantrepreneurs
Free Training for Rising Entrepreneurs
Get help to start your business plans. Check out this link: free video training series for wantrepreneurs. This training is for those of you who have always wanted to start a business but need to find the confidence, time and money to get started.
Financial Guidance E-book
Facing money challenges? Working and saving is still a real road to wealth. Download this straightforward financial guide: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear.
For Amazon (Kindle): click here
For iBooks (Apple products): click here
For Smashwords (all formats): click here
Want to discuss the content of this blog or other ideas? Send me an email to: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
Prepare to be a Business Owner
The word “preparation” means the action or process of making ready or being made ready for use or consideration.
If you are thinking about starting your own business, where do you stand on your preparation for the job? Have you “made yourself ready” to be the CEO of your own corporation?
Mental preparation
Making yourself ready is first about your confidence and belief in yourself. You can be prepared to launch your business and make it successful if you first convince yourself it’s possible. Focus on you in the your preparation. You may have many people around your life who are trying to convince you that starting a business is not a good idea. You do not need to focus on their comments, you only need to focus on your own reaction.
Own your attitude towards business success by preparing yourself to be a CEO. What do CEOs do? They read – about their business, industry and the market they will be participating in. Even if you think you have no time to get into the details of your business, start by taking the time to read and learn more about the world you think you want to live in. Before you know it, you may just find yourself spending time on actually launching the business.
Physical preparation
In the last post I covered getting prepared by finding the tools you need to encourage you to work on your business everyday. Whether this is a good notebook or a reliable pen or the notes app on your phone, you need the items near you at all times to avoid excuses around why you did not get the work done.
Taking the first step to obtain the basic tools you need will put you in a business planning and launch frame of mind. If you designate the tools, and an area to work in for your business, you can spend time in your corner every day working on the plan you have to make your lifestyle dreams come true.
Start with this simple step and let it jumpstart you into your dream business.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FOR WANTREPRENEURS
Financial eBook
Facing money challenges? Working and saving is still a real road to wealth. Download this straightforward financial guide: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear.
For Amazon (Kindle): click here
For iBooks (Apple products): click here
For Smashwords (all formats): click here
Ten Essential Tools to Help You Get Started as an Entrepreneur
When you begin planning your business. You may be focused on your business idea, plan, set-up and launch date. But how do you do your focusing? Are you putting the ideas in the notes feature on your phone or scribbling thoughts on to a piece of paper? And where are those pieces of paper anyway?
Revving up your entrepreneurial engine also means getting organized to be comfortable and efficient when you are working on your business. One of the best ways to get started is to have a core set of tools around you to access whenever you are ready to take action.
For Planning
Planner
Planners have become essential tools for many people who are trying to stay organized with their thoughts and business launch. A good planner not only contains pages for the days of the week but also spaces to write down your thoughts and ideas. Planners vary in size from palm-sized or fit for a three-ring binder.
Many people use the planner in two distinct ways:
One time – Sit (or lie) down and document your entire strategic plan for starting your business. Think about your overall goals and how you want to implement them.
Every day – Once you have put down your big picture in the planner, you can use it every day to keep yourself on track. Always refer back to your overall goals. As a business owner, you will also be changing and updating your plan. Do not be afraid to stray or radically change the ideas you set-up the first time. Business moves quickly and ideas are always subject to change.
Blanket
Think of a soft piece of fabric you can drape around you to give comfort as you plot through your plans for your business.
When you’re curling up to put your planner ideas onto paper, you probably need a cozy blanket to keep you tightly wound to the task. Even if you live in a warm climate, you may be working in the air-conditioning, or at night in cool wind. A blanket provides a layer of security to support your deep thinking.
For Ideas
Notebook
We all carry mobile phones, but when it comes to that quick idea popping into our head, many people still prefer to just write it down. Same goes for taking notes at a conference or lecture hall, paper is everywhere. Use a good notebook to gather points for your business plans. You can include notes from webinars and speakers, courses you are taking, interviews, site visits, and all other activity related to getting your business off the ground.
From the hundreds (probably thousands) of different notebooks available, find a favorite and buy multiples at a time. You’re going to need them.
Pens
Do you have a pen? Unless you work in an office, finding a pen does seem to be a bit of a struggle. But when you are doing your planning or preparing for your business you need to have a good stack of pens around for all those notes. You should leave a pen inside your planner, and another in your notebook, and do not let them disappear. Find some hiding spots for your favorite types of pens. You want to be ready as soon as the ideas hit you.
Pencil Bags (for lack of a better word)
We know you are not in grade school anymore, but you’ll need somewhere to keep your extra pens, or pencils, or markers or highlighters you may be using for your business. You do not want to be searching for a pen when your million-dollar idea hits you. You want to be able to write it down immediately.
A colorful bag will be easy to spot around the house and can be kept full with your favorite business related items. Bags with wrist straps or other attachable pieces help make sure it does not go astray.
For Nourishment
Water Bottle
When you are sitting for hours putting ideas together for your business, you should stay hydrated. A good, big water bottle prevents you from getting distracted by constant trips to the refrigerator. Keep the bottle filled in the fridge, to have the water cold and ready to go when you start to work.
Coffee or tea mug
For the caffeine aficionados, pick a favorite business work coffee or tea mug and stick with it. One efficiency killer for rising entrepreneurs is to spend any part of your day searching for a mug for your coffee. Have your mugs organized and ready to go and you will be moving along much faster with your business ideas.
Food containers
If you are really organized you can double (or triple or quadruple) cook and save your food in containers that can be heated later. Double cooking means cooking twice as much food for twice as many, or more meals. This saves you the time of cooking every day, freeing up oodles of time to work on your business.
For Advice
If you are one of those budding entrepreneurs who is surrounded by people who do not understand what you are doing, take solace in your access to endless spoken information from experts.
Audiobooks
Listening to someone impart wisdom is a time-honored tradition dating back to the beginning of humanity. Today all the information is available an unlimited number of times to everybody. If you do not have time to sit and read a book (but try to make the time), you can always listen to the content while doing other things, especially commuting by car or public transit or standing in line, anywhere.
Grab one of those lists of ‘100 business books billionaires recommend’ (or similar) and get started.
Podcasts
For more recent information on just about every topic you can think of, you can check out the myriad offering of podcasts. You can listen to general advice about starting a business and entrepreneurship, or even more specific information about your industry, product or service. You can effectively spend hours a day listening in on great conversations that will help you move your business forward.
Use these 10 essential tools to facilitate your planning, set-up and running of your new business. Every entrepreneur should always be ready to go, and with these essential starter products you know you can focus on the tasks at hand.
Additional Resources for Wantrepreneurs
Free Training for Rising Entrepreneurs
Get help to start your business plans. Check out this link: free video training series for wantrepreneurs. This training is for those of you who have always wanted to start a business but need to find the confidence, time and money to get started.
Facing money challenges? Working and saving is still a real road to wealth. Download this straightforward financial guide: A Better Plan: Spend to Live, Save to Wealth: A Real Life Guide to Building Wealth from Nothing and Living a Life Without Financial Fear.
For Amazon (Kindle): click here
For iBooks (Apple products): click here
For Smashwords (all formats): click here
For more information about becoming an entrepreneur, visit my website, https://www.readyentrepreneur.com.
Want to discuss the content of this blog or other ideas? Send me an email to: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
Ten Eclipse-Inspired Reminders to Use in Your Business
Just when you may have thought the eclipse was an excuse to have a few hours off, take a second look at how the event in its totality brought home some important reminders for anyone running a business.
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- Humans are curious
On August 21, 2017, millions of people stopped what they were doing to look at the sky. Way back in the day, humans had to experience the eclipse without receiving a weeks long primer from the 24-hour news cycle. This year everyone knew what to do. They purchased the correct solar viewing glasses, found a spot to relax and let their minds be overtaken by the cosmic spectacle.
When building and running your business, remember this curiosity factor. If you do something original, or even the same, create a unique edge to it that will drive interested people to your website or storefront. Looky-loos slowing down on the freeway to gawk at an accident may be annoying when you are trying to get home. But this aspect of human nature can propel you to the top of your industry if you use the behavior correctly.
Action: make the uniqueness of your product or service for your ideal customer
- Shared experiences are emboldening
In an era when the collective is fading fast, and niches are rising up to create riches for those who know how to serve them, a shared experience is a rare and valued moment. While the Super Bowl or World Cup can still drive millions of people to watch the same screen at the same time, few other events have that kind of drawing power. The eclipse pulled people out of their homes to go to parks, science museums, conservatories, and even news station parking lots to watch a rare event together.
Creating a community around your business is one of the fastest ways to increase interest and build your brand. People who enjoy your product or service may band together to discuss or share their experience with it. They may want to be connected to other users in an ongoing way. You can establish and facilitate these groups and effectively maintain your brands’ followers through social media. A few excited, rabid fans will be more valuable for a longer period of time than thousands of indifferent followers on a social media platform.
Action: create a niche community in social media or at your website that serves your customers’ interest in your product or service
- Image sharing is domination
People are becoming increasingly more focused on visual imagery. Photo and video sharing services are rising fast on social media. Everyone with mobile phones in their hands is also carrying a camera. The ability to show an experience to millions at a time provides people with their daily approbation, a sense of belonging and even superiority. While some may lament the ‘drive for likes’ that dominates the average social media user’s day, others can recognize how the activity is part of our human sense of survival of the fittest.
If your product or service can be incorporated into a person’s day, it will likely find its way into social media photos and videos. People will feel compelled to join the sharing if they see you or someone they know doing it first.
Action: if you use social media, incorporate the images of your product or service, preferably in use, into your photo and video feeds.
- Cheap products can be reused
One of the hottest products to purchase in the last few weeks was solar eclipse glasses. In a time where everything is digital and quality means expensive, these pieces of cardboard selling for less than $2 each were specifically designed to prevent retinal damage from the sun’s rays. For such a cheap product, the glasses sounded awfully official, with designations such as ISO and CE certified (whatever that means), and assorted numbers associated to the solar filters. The product sold out everywhere. How could the product be so inexpensive? My guess is overseas sourcing, that is the materials and labor to make them came from inexpensive labor markets.
Solar eclipse glasses were a reminder that physical products have a place and can be made to deliver on their promise. If you are creating a product for your business, imagine how you can source the right combination of materials and scientific and manufacturing guarantees to make it valuable to your average consumer.
Action: when creating a product, look at sourcing for the long-term using the certified inexpensive materials that provide a valuable benefit.
- Destination travel is a party
To be in the direct path of ‘totality’ for the eclipse, millions traveled to a band of cities across the United States. They packed cars and RVs with beer, wine and snacks and set off with family and friends to pick a spot where they could sit for three hours and watch cosmic forces in action. This was a vacation with a purpose and everyone who made the trip needed an array of goods to support their viewing party.
If you have a business that supports travel, especially specific purpose destination travel, you have an opportunity to capitalize on the moment by tying your product or service to the travel reason. Think about how your product or service is essential to the travel reason, and how you can best serve customers who are looking for exactly the value you deliver to make their trip perfect.
Action: determine whether your product or service has a travel angle that can showcase your value to vacationers.
- People want explanations
Preparing to watch the eclipse generated thousands of questions from millions of people. Many still do not believe they received a solid response, especially in the partial eclipse areas where the sky did not go dark. Eclipse Day put organizations such as NASA and the American Astronomical society, as well as all of the new media at the forefront of providing information. Some delivered, many did not.
If you have a product or service built around delivering information to customers, you are in a field already providing value. People are constantly searching for more information about pretty much every thing they can think of. Search drives a huge portion of activity on the Internet, and the aggregation of information is a major factor in business success.
Action: think about the information your business can provide in your industry or field of interest. You may have a built in market of people who are looking for exactly the value you deliver.
- Scheduled events can work
In the on-demand, replay world, people are used to picking up on an event whenever they are ready to experience it. But when an event is scheduled for only a specific time, and there is no replay, people will flock to it for the chance to be a part of it. Despite a post-industrial, digital bent towards loose commitments, a scheduled event can take precedence, if it has the perceived value a person seeks (like a shared experience or a great photo opportunity).
In your business, you may be able to schedule exciting events that make customers drop all other activities to be part of the fun. Whether these are digital moments or ‘pop-ups’ in the physical world, the sense of timing tied to scheduled events is what makes it important in the first place.
Action: develop a must attend event for your customers that cannot be recorded or replayed.
- Lost productivity can strengthen teams
A few economists enjoyed predicting how much money businesses would lose during the eclipse hours. The number was of course in the millions. But what were employees doing while they stared out the window, probably chatting with their colleagues, maybe even introducing themselves to people they did not know. Fretting about losing may prompt you to miss out on what you are gaining, a whole new level of camaraderie in your team.
If your business needed a team boost, the eclipse viewing was an inexpensive (hand out glasses for all) way to leverage a global event for your own benefit. The viewing did not last all day, so anything that needed to be done could have happened at some point. But with those few free hours, you had a chance to change the dynamic of your team, possibly forever.
Action: the next time a collective event threatens to distract your employees, use the opportunity to encourage conversation and interaction with colleagues. A stealth team-building event may have a lot more lasting value than playing building games.
- Science is fun
Accepting the idea of an impending total eclipse of the sun meant you had to believe what the scientists were telling you. Few people have the equipment to measure the rotation of the earth, moon and sun. Most people rise every day expecting the sun to be able to send all its rays to the earth. For the few hours when it cannot, science has your attention.
If you have a business with a science connection, think about the need humans have to embrace science when it affects them directly. A total blackout of the sun hits home with every human and animal (and probably plant) on earth. Your business may not be as dramatic, but if you are selling a product or providing a service that helps people, consider how the science involved may spark additional interest in the value you are seeking to provide.
Action: use science facts to support the value your product or service purports to deliver.
- A reoccurring theme has reoccurring value (welcome back, Bonnie Tyler)
If you are a 80s music fan you probably enjoyed the resurrection of Bonnie Tyler on Eclipse Day. The 80s pop star’s hit song “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” enjoyed a YouTube surge, and she was all over the news seen still performing the song for the occasion. (The song was written by Jim Steinman). Besides the wonderful pop culture optics the news reports provided, the story was a reminder of how a product tied to a reoccurring theme can enjoy multiple rebirths.
If your business or service is not obviously tied to events or practices, like weddings, birthdays and eclipses, try and figure out if you have a theme. You have the ability to re-launch your product over and over again, if you can tie it to another ‘happening’ out in the world. The value of an ever-regenerating product cannot be measured. Each new launch brings new publicity, promotional opportunities and revenue.
Action: find the reoccurring nature of your product or service that can be used to re-launch, boost or promote your business again and again.
Remember…
A successful entrepreneur pays attention to how events in the world may affect a business enterprise. If you were one of the millions in the path of the total eclipse of the sun on Monday August 21, 2017, you may have been caught up in the spectacle and missed the business lessons magnified by the event. Hopefully these ten reminders will help you think about where to place your attention the next time a mass collective event takes place.
Want to discuss the content of this blog or other ideas? Send me an email to: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
