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Episode 094:
If I Was A… Yoga Teacher

Dom Goucher:    Hi, everyone, and welcome to another fine episode of PreneurCast with me, Dom Goucher, and him, Pete Williams.

Pete Williams:    Howdy, howdy.

Dom:                   Hey, hey. Sounding wide awake, bright and bushy tailed there, Mr. Williams.

Pete:                   Absolutely. Daylight savings has kicked in and there’s been some slight changes to the time zones, obviously. But all very good and ready to kick in with another episode of PreneurCast.

Dom:                   Yeah, I’d like to say something about it being that crazy time of year with the clocks changing this, that and the other. But really, it makes absolutely no difference to me whatsoever. I’ve so many people in so many different countries, it’s always going to be crazy. Let’s just live with it now.

Pete:                   The joys of living on the coast of Spain and being a global, digital media producer.

Dom:                   Indeed, indeed.

Pete:                   The trials and tribulations.

Dom:                   Do you know what? I was actually interviewed. It was a point of interest recently that I was interviewed. We’ll talk about it when it comes out. But I was interviewed recently for another podcast.

Pete:                   Wow.

Dom:                   Because somebody was interested in the fact that I was in fact a digital nomad. Not so much from the media production side of things, but just for being somebody who does what I do, but in a little fishing village on the coast of Spain.

Pete:                   Very cool. I hadn’t heard about that one. You’re off dancing on other shows and leaving me here by myself, two-timer.

Dom:                   I was going to tell you, as they say.

Pete:                   I found out like this.

Dom:                   Yeah, you see? It’s not just you that gets called in to do interviews. It’s me as well.

Pete:                   I love it. I’m very excited, very proud.

Dom:                   Yeah, yeah, I’ll have a little rider under the show notes. Available for weddings and bar mitzvahs, and podcast interviews. So what have you been up to then?

Pete:                   I was going to say, speaking of pimping ourselves out in a weird kind of way, I’ve just been working a little bit over the last couple of months with the team at 1-800-REPAIRS and 1-800-CLEANING [sic] which is a new start-up here in Australia that’s doing lead generation for people in the repairs and cleaning industry.

They look like they’re going to be doing some really cool stuff there. But as part of their add-on bonus and support for their clients, we actually did a mini 7 Levers course all around how to double the profit of your business if you’re in this repair or cleaning and tradesman-type industry.

That’s been really cool working over there at the start of the year. They’re just about to launch that and get that going full speed ahead. Very excited to be helping those tradies, and cleaners, and repair shops people help grow their business. I’m sure some of them are now coming across and listening to the podcast too.

If you’ve come from that little world, welcome to the show from Dom and I. But yes, that’s been really cool doing that customized training just for that community. So if you are a tradesperson, or a cleaner, or something like, in Australia, definitely go and check out 1-800-REPAIRS and 1-800-CLEANING.

Those guys are doing some very cool stuff, and can be a great source of traffic and also somewhat opt-ins for you, depending how your 7 Levers funnel works. These guys are a great plugin to help drive some prequalified traffic to your business, which is perfect.

Dom:                   Indeed, indeed. In fact in the general 7 Levers course, we talk about having prequalified traffic if you can get it. Not every industry has these sites available. So yeah, that’s a great business model those guys have got. And yeah, we did enjoy just making a completely specific version of the 7 Levers of Business course just for them.

So that was quite a nice little project to do there. We enjoyed that. So, a shout-out to those guys. And yeah, welcome to anybody who’s just joined us on the podcast if you’re new, for whatever reason. Welcome, and hopefully, you’ll stick with us. On the specifics idea, Pete, I’ve got a little kind of a test for you again.

Every now and then, we do these episodes of ‘If I Was A…’ this, that or the other. We’ve done a few recently. And I’ve got one. I’m going to pull this one. No warning, no planning. I’m going to pull this one. Completely left field you and see how we get on.

Because people do this to us when we talk about 7 Levers. We regularly get people come to us and say, “The 7 Levers doesn’t apply to everything and it doesn’t apply to my business,” or whatever. Usually, between us, we can come up with lots of different ideas in fact for the ways that the 7 Levers apply. And that’s how this ‘If I Was A…’ series popped up. So I’m going to put you to the test.

Pete:                   Okay.

Dom:                   What about if I was, and no jokes, a yoga teacher or a yoga instructor?

Pete:                   The first thing that pops into my mind is you in spandex, which is not good.

Dom:                   I really did hope you weren’t going to go there. But it was, I do know you too well and it was a false hope. Oh, well. So what do you think? Do you need any more information or do you think you can pop something out?

Pete:                   Well, I actually almost became a yoga instructor back at university. That’s a bit of a strange, random topic. But when I first started racing triathlons, I used to do yoga once a week to build up the flexibility. I was going so often that I actually enrolled for a yoga teaching course one weekend.

But then a race came up, so I canned the course and went and raced. But that’s a completely random, irrelevant point. It doesn’t really help anybody out there listening. Let’s work through the 7 Levers as we usually do on these ‘If I Was A…’ calls and give, hopefully, people some seeds of ideas of how they should be going about growing their business.

Whether they are a yoga studio or something completely different, the whole idea is to start thinking through yourself, if you were a yoga studio, how would you try and grow these 7 Levers and double the profit of the yoga studio? The whole idea is you swipe and deploy both ways.

You can look at other businesses and work out what you would do there. You can help see those creative thoughts that you can then apply to your business. But hopefully, again, most importantly before we dive down that rabbit hole, is if you do have a business right now, I’m assuming if you are listening to the PreneurCast show you have a business, these 7 Levers are so important.

These are the only seven things that you should really be focusing on when you it comes to generating profit in your business. They’re the seven drivers of profit. So if you’re not habitually going through this, whether it’s one week on one Lever, the next week on the next, and continually rotating through that in a seven-week cycle.

Or you do it at a grander scale. Or you do whatever, a seven-month cycle. If you’ve got an online-based business where you’re selling information products online, then you could be doing this whole 7 Levers thing on a week. It only takes a couple of hours to set up an AdWords campaign to drive traffic or a Facebook campaign.

You could be doing and implementing a different thing on each of these Levers every week. So one day a week. You could very literally be putting some very powerful leverage systems in place to skyrocket the profits of a web-based business because it’s just all systemized and rinse and repeatable.

It’s not having to worry about staff turning up and learning the sales scripts and stuff like that. But let’s get into it. Let’s talk about what we’d do and how we’d grow a yoga studio if that’s what you’re trying to mold these 7 Levers for. So traffic, traffic’s the first one.

Pete:                   There’s some default stuff that everyone should be testing if they are a “local business”. That, I guess, seems to be the hot word of the minute in this internet marketing space. That if you are a business that has a retail front, so to speak, and you service a local community, you are a local business.

So things like AdWords, with a geographical target, is definitely worth testing. Because you know that most people to your studio are going to live within a 10-mile radius or a five-kilometer radius. You can do the AdWords campaign around that. Definitely Google Local for sure.

They’re the Google Maps stuff to actually show yourself on the map when people do search for “yoga studio Santa Monica” or “yoga studio Fremantle,” whatever it might be. You want to have your studio appear in that geographical region on the map. That’s really, really important to make sure you, again, link that to your website.

Add all the details to really enhance your listing there. They’re two of the very much low-lying, must-do fruit. I also think there’s a lot of associations and accreditations in that yoga space. A lot of directories about health and wellness.

So the type of person who’s going to go to yoga is going to be someone who is interested in this whole wellness space, for want of a better term. So having your studio listed in as many of these online directories as possible, not to online SEO directories.

If people who understand SEO or the history of SEO, when you hear “online directories,” you might go thinking Yahoo! Directories and Best of the Web. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about actual directories that people visit and look at.

MindBodyGreen for example, is a great website that I do enjoy, US-based though, about health and wellness. They have a directory of services on there. If you’re in that area, you could list your studio on MindBodyGreen’s website to get some traffic and some awareness that way. That’s the kind of stuff that I’d be doing for a very high-level perspective around traffic generation for your yoga studio.

Dom:                   Cool. Now I’m just going to use a little bit of insider knowledge here. One of the things that not everybody knows about, depending on where they met you or where they’ve come across you from; one of the things you’re really, really, really good at is actually offline promotion and promoting a business through traditional means and offline means.

A lot of the stuff that people will come across, if anybody tries to do anything to promote their business now, they’re being hammered and hammered, and hammered, to go online and do pay for advertising. Go here. Go here. Go here. And yet there’s so much opportunity still with the offline stuff.

Is there any kind of, somebody might say, it might even be obvious. But is there anything really basic, really straight-forward and offline that you might go to do the traffic? I know we’re dwelling on traffic here and I don’t want to dwell on one of all seven.

Pete:                   Yeah, I think there’s plenty of stuff. Again, some pretty obvious stuff is like a sign right in front of your studio. Like actually say what it is and make an offer of something that will get the opt-in which we can talk about in a moment. But yeah, a sign right in front of your little studio’s important. Also, understanding your target market.

This is something that I was dealing with quite a lot last week with a couple of consulting clients, getting really clear on who the target markets are, who is that person and what do they do. Because in this scenario as a yoga studio, in certain Lululemon and Lorna Jane-type, female demographic-based yoga studio, yoga pants, yoga clothing-type attire, these retail stores that are in the big malls, they often have notice boards.

You could go and put some flyers, or some business cards, or some promotional material on their notice board. So when people do go into Lululemon to buy their yoga pants, they can— and they quite often do, stop and look at these notice boards to see where this is happening.

And if you have a good enough offer and a good spin on your marketing and your leads in, your opt-ins, then you’re going to get people into the studio. I’ve seen letterbox shops work really well. I’ve seen them work exceptionally poorly as well. You can do a letterbox shop within a region.

But the problem with that is it’s more of a scattered kind of approach. You’re not targeting your exact target market. You’re going to be hitting people who are in their 70s and 80s, as well as people that are family and people who are overweight who have no interest in yoga and stuff like that. You want to try and get targeted.

So stuff like scattered letterbox drops don’t work overly well. In the area where we used to live before we moved out to the ‘burbs recently for when Eli  was born and to be closer to Fleur’s family; we lived in an inner-city suburb here in Melbourne, in Elwood. There was a laundromat because lot of people don’t have laundries at home in the area we lived.

A very nice, well-to-do area, but just for whatever reason, laundries are kind of still quite popular. And they had a huge notice board there as well. There was quite regularly pins-up, notices for yoga studios and massage. Because the demographic was 20-something, executive couples, that does appeal.

The yoga appeals to that demographics. So reaching people when they’re doing that and they’re washing their yoga pants, for example, and they’re sitting there looking around. It’s a perfect demographic to have that pull-off notice pin board about some offer and things like that as well.

Dom:                   Cool. Just to bridge us to the next Lever which is opt-ins. Getting people to take that step from just looking at stuff to actually doing something so you can reach them. One of the things I like in what you said there was to understand the market.

Understand your target audience and then find out where they might be going. And your example was a clothing store. And another example, certainly of I think one that is another opportunity is for example, the health food stores themselves.

Pete:                   Absolutely.

Dom:                   You identify these people as being interested in wellbeing, so a health food store is another place that you could look to advertise. But this really does bridge us to the opt-in because what you put on your flyer is crucial, right?

Pete:                   Yeah. Something I’d also say too is depending on how you want to position your yoga studio, is going for places to get referrals. To give you an example, back in The Athlete’s Foot retail shoe days of my previous life, we aligned ourselves exceptionally well with doctors and orthopedics and podiatrists to get a lot referrals into the store because of the training we do for our staff.

I didn’t own the stores. I was mainly kind of quite high up in the management stuff. But in that scenario, what we do with training is all about pronation and control, and the foot creation, and the shoe creation. So, we were seen very much in our local areas where we had the stores as the educated shoe reseller.

Obviously, if someone goes in to get some orthotics or is just needing some adjustment stuff done, they’d refer them to us to get shoes that would support what they’d just done. So that was really quite important. That was a great referral system.

So in yoga, yoga can be very rewarding, so to speak, from a health perspective. Align yourselves, as you said, with those types of health food stores. Naturopaths, massage studios, I was going to use the word parlors, but I think that has a bit of a different connotation.

Dom:                   I wouldn’t know what you mean.

Pete:                   Even doctors, if you find the right doctors. Advertising and promoting in those areas is again a great way to start generating some of that traffic and referral-based traffic as well.

Dom:                   I like it. I really do. You could segment what you do with a doctor’s surgery. You’re not just looking for people from the exercise point of view, you could look at it from a stress management thing for example. You could position it as an opportunity there.

Pete:                   Yeah. The next thing that’s blindly obvious to me unfortunately I didn’t say anything is there’s a yoga studio here in Melbourne that aligns itself with our triathlon squad. They sponsor the triathlon squad, which generates exposure and leads for them, which is another great way to align yourself with healthy people who want to live that “better lifestyle.”

Dom:                   Excellent. I definitely think we’ve dealt with the traffic aspect there. If you can, there’s plenty of ideas there not just if you’re a yoga studio, but if you’re basically any kind of business. There’s a huge bunch of tips there. So I think it’s the latter things where we’re really going to add some value here. Can we get back to this, to what you put on the flyer to get that opt-in, to get people to take that first step?

Pete:                   Yeah. The beautiful thing is that in the same pitch for trade exchanges that we’ve spoken about quite a lot on the show before, and I recommend every business check out trade exchanges in that episode we spoke about. But what is your additional cost for having another person in the class?

This is a thing that people have to be doing, what is your additional cost of dealing with and taking on another new client for the very first time? And for the vast majority of yoga studios, there is no additional cost. You have spare room for another person, another towel, another body in the back of the study while you’re doing your class that is already happening.

So there’s no direct cost associated with having another body. If you’re doing, for example, let’s say car repair. You’re a mechanic. To fix another car, you do have a direct cost. You have the wages directly somewhat associated with doing that car because that person can’t do or fix another car at the same time.

You have some oil. You do have some direct costs to fix that other car or service that other car. Whereas, with a yoga studio, if you have 20 people already paying for the class, you as the instructor don’t have to do anything extra for that 21st person.

They just sit there and go through the routine in the same scenario like group personal training. The benefit of that is that your cost for a free trial or your cost to offer a free trial is zero. There is no additional cost. So that is the perfect, one of the best ways you can entice that opt-in, is the offer you make on those flyers and in all your marketing material to get that opt-in is for someone to come and try a yoga class.

In retail, this was about getting them to try on a pair of shoes and just experience the shoes in the store. In this scenario, we’re actually going to experience the results. It’s been quite termed as “results in advance.” So you’re giving the person an experience and some level of results before, in advance of them having to spend or commit to anything at all.

And that is a great way. A free trial of food in the supermarket has direct cost against it. Whereas, this doesn’t. So to me, if you can figure out what your cost of a free trial or your cost of a new person experiencing your offering, and the lower it is, the more chance you can use that as your opt-in. And in this scenario, it is an absolute no-brainer to get people to come in and do a free trial.

Dom:                   I like it. As you say, that is a great opportunity for anybody once they know what that cost of that free trial is to them. But in this particular instance, the actual cost, as you say, is pretty much, unless somebody can tell us different, zero. And so, it’s an ideal situation to go for that as an opt-in.

Pete:                   And you can do that. You can facilitate this free trial in a number of different ways. You can just have people come to any old class and just be that third wheel, or that 24th wheel, or the next person in the class. That’s an easy way to do the opt-ins. They experience what the classes are like.

Another way that I’ve seen work exceptionally well that has some direct costs against it is intro nights. So rather than having people come to any old class, every week, every two weeks, once a month, depending on how you want to structure it and how you want to market it and promote it, you have an intro night or a free trial night.

So, on the first Monday of every month or every second Monday night from 6:00 to 7:00 is your free trial night. Everyone in that class are first-timers with you. The benefit of that— or actually, before I go to the benefit, the down side of that, that is a direct cost. You have time of yours that has an opportunity of cost against it because you’re not getting any revenue against that time.

It’s not like it’s just an additional body in an existing class. It’s all about newbies which isn’t as cost-effective. However, the benefit is the way you conduct the class. The language you use. The future pacing you talk about is all to entice people to commit and go to the next level, and get that conversion.

This is saying that here’s an opt-in. You get people to come to that free class and use it as a conversion mechanism. A very much stronger conversion mechanism than just being in an existing class because as I said, you can future pace the whole lesson. “Next time you come, next week we’ll extend on this particular session, this particular move. This is the stuff we do here.”

Maybe you do Bikram, you do normal yoga, you do stretching. Maybe you can have that class where you cover the three or four different types of yoga classes that you actually offer throughout the week. So everyone gets a bit of it. It’s just like that sampler. It’s that taste test-type scenario.

Someone doesn’t have to make a commitment saying, “I want to come and try Bikram,” or “I want to do normal yoga,” or “I want to come to the stretching class,” or whatever it might be. That could be a great way to allow people to sample everything and push them into one conversion and commitment-type offering on an ongoing basis.

Dom:                   Yeah, whether you run a specific class or whether you just include them, maybe that comes down to the amount of traffic, the amount of new people that approach you and whether it’s worthwhile doing it.

Pete:                   Absolutely.

Dom:                   But I do like the point that if you can focus these people into an area, like a specific class for example, then you can focus everything that you do on that next Lever which is conversion. Once they’ve opted in, once they’ve chosen to take a sample class which is the opt-in that we’re after in this particular sequence, then the conversion is to get them to either come to the next class or to get them to pay some kind of membership, maybe a block booking or something.

If you can focus yourself, focus everything that you do on that group of people that you want to convert, that’s great. But you said something there and every time you say, every time you talk about this one topic, I start scribbling notes. Because I’m trying to find the definitive kind of approach for this.

And it’s future pacing because I’m fascinated by this concept, this conversion technique. You talk about it whenever we talk about the 7 Levers and we talk about conversion and other areas as well as the 7 Levers. You talk about future pacing. And you gave some examples, but could you just kind of break that out?

Now we’re, I’m going to say we’re in the conversion Lever now. You’re having a conversation with somebody or you’re at the front of the class. Whether it’s a one to one or you’re in a class situation. You’re talking to people. So could you give an example or talk a little bit about this idea of future pacing what you say?

Pete:                   Sure. There’s a few different definitions of it. Let me kind of talk about it in the way I see it. To me, it’s a mixture of NLP: neuro-linguistic programming, which is I think where the term first really gained traction. Mixed with what I consider an Influence factor from Cialdini, which is commitment and consistency.

The way I see it and the way we use it in our businesses and our sales staff is it’s an assumptive conversion pattern. What you’re doing is you’re assuming that the outcome is going to happen. Not trying to convince the client or the prospect to make a choice, you’re trying to convince them to be consistent with the conversion.

Most sales people go into a conversation and a conversion discussion around putting all these arguments together about their making a decision now. So it’s all about today. “Here’s what the thing you need to do. At the end of this conversation, you need to make a decision.”

That’s where the person’s thought process is all about, “I’ve got to make a yes or no decision in 10 minutes.” That’s the way the conversation is led. Consciously, you don’t say at the start of the meeting, “Okay, Bob. I’ve got 45 minutes to present to you and I need a yes answer at the end of it.”

That’s not what you do, of course. But that’s the tradition of a sales meeting kind of agenda. Whereas, with future pacing, you’re kind of ignoring the decision making process, making the assumption that of course they’re going to stay around and do what you need them to do. And you’re talking them through that, what it’s going to be like.

So rather than saying, “If you decide to commit to us tonight and at the end of today’s session we’re going to talk about different offers of how we can help you with your yoga or in your weight loss through yoga, ” you’re saying, “Next week when you come, we’re going to be doing this.”

And then in three weeks’ time, this is going to be the result you’re going to get. You make the assumption that it’s going to go and happen. And in the phone system game, it’s not about saying, “This is the phone system. Do you want to buy it or not?” It’s, “So what’s your timing? When do you want it installed? Okay, next Thursday.

If you want it installed next Thursday, we should probably book you in for Tuesday to do a data collection. So our technicians can come out, understand how the system needs to work and be programmed. That way on Friday, it can be done. How does that sound?” You’re assuming it’s going to happen and you’re working backwards from this assumption of what the process will be. How it will actually happen.

It’s a different way to look at and communicate, and frame in the context. It all comes down to the act of framing and context, which was one of the biggest themes for the first 20 or 30 episodes of the podcast. It was all about framing and context. And that is an important thing. That is how you frame something.

If you frame it as if it’s going to happen, it’s an assumptive, you’re just future pacing it like it’s just going to happen in the future; there’s no questions around that. There’s no decision to be made. That changes the context of the conversation and then the outcome as well.

Dom:                   I really don’t want to massively oversimplify this because I think it’s a really powerful technique. But what I get, the common thread through what you were saying there and also from what I’ve picked up from our conversations, it can be as simple and as subtle as changing the way you talk from saying things, like “if you sign up” to “when you sign up.”

Pete:                   Absolutely, yeah.

Dom:                   It can really be that simple. Just talking to people.

Pete:                   I wouldn’t even say “when you sign up” necessarily. I would be more, “this is what’s going to happen.” I’m very particular around this, but “signing up” as a word is still a decision. It’s still an action that needs to be decided upon.

Whereas, “we’re going to come out next Thursday afternoon and get started,” or, “I’ll see you next Friday for the class,” there’s no decision to be made. It’s just that’s what’s going to happen.

Dom:                   So it’s even stepping over that when and into, as you say, the assumption that they’ve already decided that they’re going to do it. And even talking as if they’ve already done it.

Pete:                   Yeah, absolutely.

Dom:                   All right. Cool. So our next lever after conversions.

Pete:                   Is items per sale. This is an interesting one because with a yoga studio, what you’re selling is access to a class, generally. And a lot of people, what other items can you sell someone when you’re offering them a service? I know plenty of yoga studios and massage services where they have a little retail area where you can sell BPA-free drink bottles.

You can sell yoga mats and clearly. Exercise bands, even to the point where you can start doing some bonus products. Get some particular vitamins or some holistic green vital greens or an athletic greens-type product. And you can buy a few and have them available to complement the core business.

And I think that’s something that can work really well for a yoga studio. People come in and they get their mental stimulation or mental cleansing through the yoga and the stretching. And they walk out as well every week with something off the shelf like a Vital Greens or some supplement-type thing that can help them nourish their cells as well. And I think that’s an easy items per sale-type of step, to get people to buy that complementary things.

Maybe you can create your own info products. You can easily create a meditation CD. Find some royalty-free music tracks that work really well with meditation. And then just voice your coaching over it. One of the things we used to do at the end of every yoga session was like a 10-minute meditation at the end of it.

So we were doing 50 minutes or so of yoga poses and the downward dog, and various things. Then we do a 10-minute meditation session where she would guide the session, put the music on and then guide us through the thought process and maybe the sayings we’d go through.

They could easily prerecord it and have a series of audio CDs on meditation that you can sell. Have people say, “Monday’s your yoga class, but don’t forget to meditate on Thursday. Here’s a CD for $10.” And get that additional people buying those type of items to support them at home beyond their in-house, in-class yoga.

Dom:                   Love it, love it. You completely left-fielded me with that one. I thought you were going to stick to the really ordinary stuff because you mentioned Lululemon earlier. And they’re a really big kind of yoga sports, outfit retail chain. It’s pretty popular in the US. I thought you were going to stick to that.

So no, that, the audio CD and how simple really. Guided meditation, yes, it’s a skill. It’s important. You need to know what you’re doing and saying. But the implementation of it, as you say, royalty-free music for the background and your voice over the top. Bank. Done. Absolutely brilliant.

Pete:                   They could call you up on Skype and give you a meditation lesson over Skype. Record it and there’s a CD done.

Dom:                   Absolutely.

Pete:                   There you go, Dom. There’s a new business model for you, meditation CD creation.

Dom:                   There you go folks. Just drop me a line through PreneurMedia.tv. I’ll help you build your meditation CD to sell to members of your yoga studio. No problem. But yeah, because of the nature of the activity. I did a little bit of looking around yoga. My partner’s into yoga. And it always seems there’s always another thing to have. It’s supposed to be this simple thing.

You have your mat and that’s it. But no, apparently you have to have something to go on top of your mat. And then you need special gloves for the mat and special socks for the mat. And blocks and straps and bag for your mat. Don’t forget bag for your mat. It’s very important to have a bag for your mat. And then—

Pete:                   Did you get your extra large drink bottle?

Dom:                   Of course, and so on. So yeah, there’s all these opportunities to get these things in that even just sticking to the real core exercise process, even without adding all these extra kind of specialist items. The pure basics if you’ve got a beginner and you have a particular mat that you recommend, if you can get a deal on getting that mat.

If you can get a deal on supplying that mat to them, just put a small profit on selling that mat, then they walk in with nothing, they walk out with a mat. You increase your items per sale.

Pete:                   My suggestion, I’ll be going to places like Alibaba.com which is a great online resource for accessing products wholesale from the manufacturers across Asia. I’ve done this in various small projects. You can source mats directly from manufacturing and buy 10 or 20 much, much cheaper than you can even from a local distributor.

Then you retail that as an option as well. If you’re anyone doing this retail stuff, check out Alibaba.com. It’s a great resource to get products and services you can complement and supplement to increase this items per sale Lever.

Dom:                   Brilliant. One word of warning, anyone going on Alibaba.com, and that is make sure you set a time limit and then stop because it’s worse than anybody. It really is. You can get lost down that rabbit hole for weeks.

Pete:                   If you’re an entrepreneur and you like to come up with new business ideas and product ideas, yeah, be very, very careful because it’s very easy to get excited by an idea of importing athletic sporting tape and selling it on Bartercard to sporting clubs.

Dom:                   That sounds like the voice of experience. Okay let’s jump onto the next Lever.

Pete:                   Absolutely. Average item value, now this is again, an easy one. Just up your prices by 10%. This is the really cool thing with yoga and this particular example. Quite often, the demographic of someone who has yoga is generally, and I’m generalizing here, folks, so no e-mails; but generally, is that executive single or executive couple-type scenario with good disposable income.

So being a premium yoga studio is a good thing. It’s very kind of counterintuitive because yoga’s meant to be a bit free spirit, do-it-on-the beach scenario. But you can easily have premium yoga studios where you supply the mats, hypothetically. So the stuff you sell as complementary items is not yoga mats.

You have that there, but your extra in terms of qualifications. You’ve gone to that extra yoga school in the middle of Africa or some weird area that you’re qualified now. Then if you are that extra special yoga teacher, you can charge more. It’s like anything in business, any type of industry.

If you are the expert, the perceived expert, if you write articles for places like MindBodyGreen and these different magazines, outlets and publications, you are seen as an expert. That way you can charge a price that is a customs associated justified by that positioning.

And it’s really important to get your positioning right because that not only can help your lead generation if you are doing marketing well; it also helps your positioning to which justifies this increase in pricing.

Dom:                   Absolutely. And every time we talk about this Lever, the one thing we talk about is positioning, about building your authority in a space. There’s lots of really general tips for doing that. You covered most of the biggies which are things like writing for the publications, making sure people are aware of your certifications, your experience, any specialist knowledge or courses that you’ve been on. You could even do it by association. You could invite people in more well-known or more qualified to the yoga studio to give specialist courses.

Pete:                   Brilliant idea.

Dom:                   I learned from the master. But yeah, there’s lots of opportunity. And again, it is all within the ethos of the yoga, the mindset of the yoga thing. But I like the point that you made that in our local area, the demographic of the yoga school isn’t exactly young affluent couples. It’s more slightly affluent retirees.

Pete:                   As well, absolutely.

Dom:                   We’ve got a lot of expats. But it’s still that idea. There is a certain level of affluence involved in it in certain areas. So there’s necessarily no stigma against making yourself a little bit higher rate, if it were. If it suits. But it has to be, if it suits obviously. But mixed in with all the other Levers, maybe it doesn’t matter so much. We are only after 10% on each Lever.

And some can make up for others if you don’t feel that you really can put that price up. Usually, there’s scope to go up a little bit in all of them. And some of them there’s lots of scope and lots of range. So you win some, you lose some. But it’s only 10%, which isn’t really that much on the average yoga lesson charge really, is it?

Pete:                   No, not really. And if you funnel it right, it’s a dollar here or there.

Dom:                   Yeah, exactly. But it makes a huge difference with the cumulative effect of the 7 Levers as we always talk about. Just that one 10% down the stack can end up with a double of the products.

Pete:                   Yeah, absolutely.

Dom:                   So we move on to the next Lever.

Pete:                   Yeah, so the sixth Lever is all about transactions per period. How many times do you get that person to come back to your class? Obviously, you don’t want them coming once. You want them coming every single week. Now, a very obvious one is memberships.

You get people to go on some type of continuity program. You say, “It’s $20 a lesson.” Or, “If you want to sign up for our membership, it’s only $17 a lesson and we bill your credit card for X amount every single month. You pay $60 a month and you get to come to four classes. So you get one for free.” Or some variation of that math that works for you and your studio.

But that gets people on that commitment and consistency, on that continuity revenue. They are getting charged automatically every single month just like a gym membership. You’re applying that gym membership philosophy to your yoga studio. And there’s absolutely no reason why that does not work in so many studios around the world.

Dom:                   And that’s back to that point you made earlier about the cost to you per client. It’s a great opportunity to offer that one class free if the cost to you of having one extra person in the class is bordering on zero.

Pete:                   Yeah. All the other things we’ve spoken about before in 7 Levers-related episodes here on the podcast, is things like a 10-session card. Somebody doesn’t want to commit to continuity where they’re forced to get charged every month on their credit card, they can buy 12 classes for the price of 10.

You get people to prepay for 10 classes or 12 classes, and however you want to do those numbers. That way, you have presold this consistency and increased those transactions or sessions per client by prepaying it. And you often find that, this is the funny thing, the majority of people who buy that gift vouchers, won’t use it and redeem the whole thing.

But if you find that the average person only ever comes to seven lessons, well trying to charge them for buy nine, get 12. You actually now have two additional sessions of revenue from that client that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten on average. So that kind of stuff is really important to look at in doing these numbers.

Dom:                   Just to recycle an idea, because we like to reuse and not overdo the effort. My point earlier about inviting a special instructor, even if you have somebody who is fully paid-up for the year, paid for every possible lesson; if you invite a special guest, you’ve got an extra session you can sell one more ticket to.

Pete:                   Yeah, it’s a premium-type scenario.

Dom:                   So above and beyond the memberships you’re already taking in, if you run special events, you’ve got another opportunity to just up the number of times that person transacts with you, again only by 10%.

Pete:                   An interesting thing that I’ve seen done exceptionally well indirectly is that some good family friends of Fleur and I, Sarah who Fleur’s best friend who used to live with us, she and her mom go to Bali I think twice a year for a yoga weekend or a yoga retreat. Sarah doesn’t go to yoga at all throughout the year, she goes twice a year to this retreat.

Now obviously, that’s done in Bali. She flies into this place that does it and that’s all good and well for her. But think about if you’re out running a yoga studio and you’ve got yoga devotees coming all the time, why can’t you coordinate, go to a local travel agent and say, “I want to coordinate this trip to this yoga retreat, and sell it and promote it to our members of the yoga studio.

We do like a group trip like twice a year. I want you to organize it, Mr. Travel Agent. You get your commission, but I want to get some commission out of this myself. I want a premium.” You could absolutely do that. There’s plenty of travel agents these days, particularly with the issues of online.

They would jump over you hand and fist to be able to coordinate that trip. You don’t have any logistic management in this. You say to the travel agent, “I want to promote this to my community. I’ll do the promotions through our newsletter and flyers and handouts and e-mails.” They’ll come to you to organize the trip.

You coordinate all the logistics of it. And then at the end of the day, if you get 28 people, you get $200 per head. So add $200 to the cost to these people. These people now are going to a yoga retreat overseas. It’s an additional experience building on what you just spoke about then, Dom. But you didn’t have to do any coordination of it.

Dom:                   Brilliant. And they still see you as, you get the added—

Pete:                   Kudos.

Dom:                   Yeah, kudos from that. Because you organized it. Even though the travel agent organized it, people will perceive you as the organizer, the initiator, the person who had the idea, the person who facilitated it. And that will give you some amazing buy-in from your community. Plus, you’re genuinely adding value.

If it’s another experience, if it’s a wider experience for the group, you’re genuinely adding value. And you’re just getting that little bit extra revenue. That’s a great idea Pete. I like that.

Steve:                  And this is the sort of stuff I love working with businesses on, is putting this stuff in place. It’s exciting to come up with an idea and go, “let’s facilitate and frame this up.” The easy way to frame that is, “we’re going to do this retreat. And to make it easy for you, members of my yoga studio, to save you from having to do the logistics myself, I’ve found a local travel agent who’s going to take all the headache and logistics away from you so you can have your mind clear, ready for the trip.”

You position it like the travel agent’s doing them a favor. It’s just a beautiful little great marketing story you can have there. It’s a great way to really build that bond with your clients to get that commitment and consistency, but also, it’s that additional revenue source from that client in that calendar year. And that stuff is amazing.

Dom:                   Fantastic. Well, we’ve done quite a lot on this topic. I really thought I was going to stretch you on this and you’ve just coasted it. So let’s wrap this show with the seventh Lever.

Pete:                   The margins, yes.

Dom:                   I’m getting there.

Pete:                   This is the interesting thing. Margins, in this sort of business, they are tougher. I’m going to be completely transparent. They are tougher to get. There’s not a lot of input cost to facilitate a yoga class. It’s not like manufacturing a product or retailing a product where you have costs and you’re adding a mark-up to it. With a general studio, all you’ve got is rent. You’ve got wages.

You may have a heating bill if you’re doing Bikram yoga. So there’s not a lot of costs against it. Things like going to Alibaba as we spoke about and buying these additional items, these additional on-sale items, having your little retail store, so to speak, from Alibaba rather than an Australian supplier, or a local supplier, or a branded supplier, is going to help your margins.

Increasing your price helps your margins. So margins in some instances and industries are a little bit harder to pull. But again, rather than having to do that Lever by that 10%, maybe you can do some creative stuff with your rent and your leases and your costs with Alibaba. And maybe you’ve got to get an extra 5% on your margins.

Then, you shuffle that extra bit around on the other Levers and you pull the other six Levers by 11% instead of 10%, give or take the math. And that’s the beautiful thing. It doesn’t have to be 10% on every lever. It just has to be that ideally 10% across it. You can just juggle some up and down to get that math working for you so you at least double the profit of your business in your little yoga studio very, very quickly.

Dom:                   Sure. I mean your margins, it’s not just about flat-out how much kind of profit there is in every person. As you say, you’ve got your fixed costs to keep an eye on. You’ve also got the effectiveness of your time or your staff’s time if you have people. How many people are you teaching in a class, for example, versus how much you’re paying.

Pete:                   There you go.

Dom:                   As I learn from the master. I learn from the master. See, I told you I take notes. But yeah, there are opportunities to improve the effectiveness of your business. That’s the bigger message here in the margins Lever. It’s not just a flat-out profit on the object you sell, the service or the goods or whatever you sell.

It’s the whole effectiveness of your business. Especially as it’s yoga and it’s a lifestyle thing, maybe it’s not all about their money. Maybe it’s about how effectively you’re using your time so that you can still make the same amount of money but work less.

Pete:                   Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dom:                   There you go. And on that deep and thought-provoking idea, I think we should wrap up for this week.

Pete:                   Sounds good. That was a great session. A great idea. I love doing this on the fly thinking and planning around the 7 Levers and then the implementation comes after the fact. It’s a lot of fun working with clients to do that stuff.

Dom:                   I know you do. And you have yet again impressed me, sir, because I really did pull that one out of the bag on you live as we do on this show. And you came up with some great ideas. We did it together. But yeah, the 7 Levers is a great thing and it’s a great theory. And it’s a great idea that we talk about. And we talk about it regularly.

But the reality of it, I think, is the most rewarding thing for us is to see people see these ideas and implement them and to maybe even work with them as we’ve done with them in our masterminds; to see these improvements happen and get the feedback from our coaching client, the mastermind groups and things like that. It’s just great to see it made real and to see people improve their businesses through these ideas.

Pete:                   Absolutely. A lot of the feedback, the iTunes feedback and the e-mails that come through, the comments on various things that we do and e-mails through PreneurMarketing.com. It’s great to hear about people who do take action on this stuff, so please keep that feedback coming because it’s really, really fun.

Dom:                   Yeah. I’ll shorten that rapport to: folks, if you want to get in touch with us, PreneurMedia.tv is the place where all our podcasts live. You can download them, listen to them, read the transcripts, leave us a comment, get all the show notes, and everything on that site. Or, if you have enjoyed what we’ve talked about, please leave us an iTunes rating and a comment. We’d love to get those as well. And with that, I’ll see you all soon.

Pete:                  Ciao!

Episode 093:
Conversation with Heather Smith

Dom Goucher:    Hello everyone, and welcome to this edition of PreneurCast with me, Dom Goucher. And welcome back to him, Pete Williams.

Pete Williams:    How are you, buddy?

Dom:                   Good, good, good. Great to have you back with us.

Pete:                   Good to be back. It’s been a little bit chaotic with the new baby and stuff like that. A lot of fun, but a little chaotic. But all good.

Dom:                   You have however, been holding up your end of the deal. Even though you weren’t on the show because you have been out and about doing your usual opportunity seeking, and your content creation activities, you managed to get an interview with another author, right?

Pete:                   Yeah. Another Wiley author who published one original book, which is kind of cool as well. It was a bit of a slight alumni feel to it as well, which is always good.

Dom:                   Cool. I’m really interested in this book because it sounds like it’s right up my street. You spoke very recently with Heather Smith who’s the author of Learn Small Business Start-Up in 7 Days. Now I love that title because that, to me, sounds just like one of those thing that I say, which is JFDI [just (expletive) do it]. This idea of cover the whole thing in seven days sounds like it’s right up my street.

Pete:                   I do like the number seven- 7 Levers, of course.

Dom:                   There’s that too. There’s something to that.

Pete:                   I said this to Heather [Smith] in the interview that everyone’s about to hear in a moment, that I actually found the book quite a bit different to what I expected. Heather’s a bookkeeper and accountant by trade. I’m actually doing a lot of conversations now.

Where we’re in the process with our Simply Headsets and e-com businesses to move everything away from our current platform and accounting systems to Magento Enterprise, which is a $15,000 a year e-commerce platform. That’s just for the license, let alone the development and stuff like that. But when you’re doing three or four million dollars in revenue, it’s fine.

And also moving that all across to Xero. Xero is a new online, cloud-based accounting software similar to Mint and MYOB and that sort of stuff. She’s a Xero accountant and specialist. So we’ve been working a little bit together via e-mail and some questions, getting advice from her too, which is really cool. Off the back of this interviewing, actually engaging with her in some business aspects too.

Dom:                   Cool. One thing that I got from the blurb of the book- another thing that really resonates, certainly with me, which is a little quote that Heather gives. I’m presuming this is something that came out in the conversation, but she says that, “Million-dollar, multinational microbusinesses can operate out of cosy home offices. Digital nomads outsource business operations while traveling the world.” Does that sound like anybody we know?

Pete:                   That’s the whole idea. The thing I really loved about her book, which definitely ties into that quote; and this is what I said to her and she laughed and had context as we speak; but it’s a very bland business development book because it’s written by an accountant.

And what I mean by that is she goes through the stuff you have to be across and be aware of that most business start-up books forget to include because it’s not sexy, and it’s not hypey. She talks about things like the finances and getting advice, and how to actually establish a business in a legal sense but also in a concept sense. One of the first things she covers is this whole topic of, are you ready to start a business?

And this is something that I think a lot of people really need to consider. We go quite a bit into that in the conversation with Heather, about are you ready to start a business. What is the purpose of your business and being clear on that. Because if you’re not clear on why and are you ready, then your business is not going to be successful.

Unfortunately, we say that quite a bit. I know you and I have talked about that a bit in various conversations, Dom, that a lot of people who “start a business” aren’t really ready to actually start a business. They would have been better off just getting a different job.

Dom:                   Absolutely. That’s almost the ultimate- just because you can, doesn’t mean you should, isn’t it?

Pete:                   Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. So it’s a really cool conversation that we have. The good thing about the book is that it’s basically laid out over seven days. The whole idea is that every day, you get a better understanding of a certain section of things you need to develop, control, understand, educate yourself on, be aware of, around starting a small business.

Dom:                   Cool. Well, that said, let’s get right into your conversation with Heather Smith and find out more about Learn Small Business Start-Up in 7 Days.

[Pete's conversation with Heather starts]

Pete:                   Heather, thanks for joining us.

Heather Smith:   Thank you so much, Pete, for having me on your show. I’m so grateful for being invited onto the show. And hello to all the listeners out there listening in.

Pete:                   Awesome. Well, good to have you. Now the book, Learn Small Business Start-Up in 7 Days, very intriguing title, which I do like. We’ll obviously talk quite a bit about it throughout the show. But we might as well start to give people some context about it all. So how’d the book come to be? What is it meant to be? Who is it meant to help? What’s the story there?

Heather:              Well, if we start with the intriguing title, as I was writing it, you’re always monitoring what you’re writing, and I actually spotted that some man in the UK wrote a book with the exact same title. Can you believe it? As I was writing this, we were basically published at the same time. But his went down a completely different path to mine. My book comes from, I’m an accountant and I go in and help businesses to start up.

I work with lots of start-ups. I work with innovation centers and mentoring through the universities. And many times the start-up, in that phase, can’t afford everything. They’re so busy doing what they do. And I would go into the business and not everything was done that needed- probably legally, probably to cover all aspects to be done.

Of course, no one I dealt with was like that, but maybe other people I’ve worked with. What I did was, I said, okay, I’ll pull all of my experience, all of my knowledge, all of the reality that I see out there, into a book so it fills in all of those questions, and answers all of those questions for someone running a business.

And I know that in the initial stages of running a business, for myself, I was just reading everything, getting anything I could get my hands on that made sense. I was reading through it. So I think it’s a really realistic guide. It’s real stories of real businesses and what they’re doing, and what actually works out there.

So I think you’re wise to see, okay, what is doing well? And this is very much what’s doing well, what works, what jigsaw pieces do we need to fill in. You can kind of go through the book with a pen and go, okay I’ve got that ticked, go on to the next bit.

Pete:                   I think this is really good. We kind of spoke about this together earlier, that I actually enjoyed that the book was written by an accountant because it was bland. And I mean that in the most lovingly way. Let me try and justify that comment. A lot of start-up books, so to speak, they focus so much on the blue sky and the marketing, and finding the customer, and all that sort of stuff.

It is obviously part of the journey, but that is really the second phase of a business. To actually start a business, which is what a lot of these people are talking about and teaching, you have to be concerned with the finances and the people, and the launching of the business, and all that “mundane stuff”.

But I really like that that’s what this book’s all about. It’s giving people that easy to read- it’s not bland in terms of the way it’s read, but the topics are a little bit more that way. And I actually applaud that. If that makes sense. So don’t take that as an insult, I actually mean that as an absolute compliment.

Heather:              Thank you. No, I completely get where you’re coming from. I dealt with this one person who started a business and launched a marketing campaign, and hit 2,000 letterboxes saying, “I can do all this work for you, all this gardening work for you.” Well, no one ever heard from him for four months because he just got so much work. He went under in that he couldn’t manage anything.

He couldn’t keep on top of anything because he over-marketed himself and then he didn’t have all the bases behind him. And the same goes again- you always hear of these poor businesses that get on like a TV program, some of the TV programs to promote business, which is fantastic. But you need to have the capacity to serve before you go down that route of marketing them.

It’s important to know that there is a market out there, but make sure you have the capacity to serve before you market them. Make sure you have all those insurances, etcetera, in place before you start selling something that you’re going to lose livelihood over if something goes wrong.

Pete:                   Yeah, and I don’t think it’s meant to scare people, “Here’s all the stuff you have to do.” But you have to be aware of it, because so many people just aren’t. You don’t want to not start your business because of some of these things. You still want to keep moving forward, but you’ve just got to be aware of what you need to cover off at some stage, and in certain stages of your business.

So many people don’t really think about that. One of the things I really found surprising and again, applaud and really enjoyed, is the whole idea is you tackle one topic a day for seven days. And we’ll talk about that a bit more, but the first thing you talk about is, are you ready to start a business?

It’s very refreshing to see that in a book. Because you may find some people actually read that first chapter and go, “You know what, I’m not ready,” put the book down and walk away. That in itself is a very good thing to do for a lot of people. There are people that I consult with and see at events that I speak at; I get on a conversation with them, “Why are you starting this business?

What’s the purpose of the business? How does this fit in with your lifestyle goals?” They just haven’t really thought through the implications of owning a business. They just see this beautiful, shiny Mark Zuckerberg story and go, “Yeah, cool. I’m going to go and start Facebook. But in reality, they aren’t going to go and code for 15 hours a day like Mark did for the first two years of Facebook. It’s refreshing to see that.

Heather:              Absolutely, yes. Thank you. In that section, I very much say, doing what you’re doing currently in your own position, what can you build upon to start learning a job? I know that when I wanted to go into business, I was actually working for a training institute. So what I did was I grabbed ever training manual from that institute and took them home.

Every evening, I spent three hours working through it- be it web design, be it advanced Excel, which I use frequently doing what I do in consulting, be it managing people. So if you’re in an organization and they’re offering training and you think that that can benefit you when you start your job, jump on it. Just constantly build and see where you go.

I know that you started very young in your own business, Pete. But for myself, I spent two years going, “I want to start a business, I want to start a business,” but not knowing what to do about it. Just really thinking about it and reading about it. So yeah, very much for that person who wants to work through it themselves.

Pete:                   I think for a lot of people, they aren’t ready. They’re better off just getting a different career rather than starting a business. The results they want from a business, they’ll actually more likely achieve by getting a different career. And it sounds very strange for a business blog and a business podcast.

It’s like saying, realistically, this might not be for you. It might not be your journey. If you want to be able to have your weekends and spend time with your family, and get holiday pay, but just have a better salary and a bit more enjoyment during your day, you’re probably going to get that by getting a different job, not by going and trying to start up a business.

Heather:              Yes, definitely. Say goodbye to holiday pay!

Pete:                   Particularly if it’s your first go at the rodeo, you’re going to struggle. It’s just inevitable. If you read books like this and listen to podcasts, it’s going to be easier for you and more chance of success. But it isn’t all roses and butterflies.

Heather:              No, it definitely isn’t. I don’t think that people sometimes are a aware of how long every small-business owner is actually working. Sometimes they just see the successes. They just see them when they’re speaking on stage, and they go, “Wow, that’s exciting and that’s glamorous.” But we both know a lot of hours went to get to that position.

Pete:                   Yeah, absolutely. I was on the phone with my business partner until 9PM last night. I left the office at 5:30, called him on my cell phone to start a conversation, didn’t get off until 9 o’clock at night.

And this business has been running for eight years. This is like a mid-week conversation that happened for three and half hours. That’s what needs to happen in business sometimes.

Heather:              Yes, absolutely.

Pete:                   Let’s actually go towards more roses and butterflies, and then stay away from the manure that we’ve been talking about. The whole idea of the book is that you go through a section or a chapter a day for seven days, and it gives you that solid grounding framework and context about the seven or so different key areas of a business that you need to be across and understand, before you go and start it up. Is that a fair assessment?

Heather:              Yes. Some of them, obviously, will perhaps take longer. Just meeting with a lawyer is going to take longer than a seven-day period. But it’s really sort of sectionalizing it. It falls into a series. There’s an ‘In Seven Days’ series.

It slots nicely into an ‘In Seven Days’ series of books out there. But while you’re maybe dealing with your accountant and dealing with a lawyer, you may also start thinking about your marketing as well. So I think it’s really compartmentalizing what you need to do.

I’ve worked out, it takes about two and half hours to really, in detail, go through what you need to do each particular day. But you could sit there and just go through getting all of those conversations going and started, and getting through them.

Pete:                   Yeah, that’s my take. If you are going to start this business, use this almost as like a seven-day positive constraint. What I mean by that is go, “After-hours for the next seven days, I’m going to spend two and half hours on each one of these things.

I’m not going to necessarily have that conversation with a lawyer in this seven-day period, but I’m going to read and learn about the professional advice chapter and get my understanding and context right. So then next week, I’ll go off and actually implement these things and make those phone calls, and set those appointments.

And if you can’t get through those seven days of two, two and a half hours a night of doing the “mundane” stuff, and I’m not saying it in a bad way, that almost establishes itself that you’re not ready for a business.

Heather:              Absolutely. Almost definitely.

Pete:                   If you can’t stick to that.

Heather:              You and I, and probably many of your listeners know that technically awesome, sensational people who are wonderful at designing logos or building things, and they want to go into business on their own, but you can kind of see you don’t have that self-discipline to actually do it. You are technically great at what you do, but all the other aspects, you’re going to be able to monitor them. And being an employee may be a lot easier.

Pete:                   Yeah, there’s a huge difference between mechanics and marketing. And I put it down like, running a business is obviously more than just marketing, but to me that is definitely the cornerstone of a business. You go through an apprenticeship and you learn the tools, as you said.

You learn to become a great graphic designer, or a great mechanic, or a great barista or whatever it might be. You know the mechanics of the job. That is completely different to what it takes to run a successful business. As a business owner, the mechanics and the tools are probably only about 15% of what you need to spend your time on.

And this is the big gap that people just don’t really get or see. They kind of get the tools, and then they see the people on stage living the lifestyle, playing golf and being interviewed on TV. They miss that six, seven-year journey in between.

Heather:              Yeah, absolutely. The 4-Hour Workweek dream out there.

Pete:                   Yeah. I know Tim and what he preaches and stuff is absolutely possible, but there’s a lot in between that. He touches on in the book that when he started BrainQUICKEN, he was working ridiculous hours; the plaque on his wall saying business hours finish at 5PM.

But it was only after a couple of years of doing that knuckle-grinding work when he got the realization he was able to make those changes. Because there was at least some momentum and system in place that he could leverage into a four-hour workweek.

Heather:              Absolutely. I go through his books with a pencil. I go through every page and make sure I’m doing everything he’s saying. He’s got a lot of information there in his books definitely, to go through.

Pete:                   It’s probably a bad segue, but Tim’s great on social media and Web 2.0. This is a really cool story about how you actually got the book deal, which I thought, well, I’d love to talk about. A poor bridge, but we’ll use it anyway.

Heather:              I’m prolific on Twitter and LinkedIn, and Facebook. As I think about things or I as I come across things, I will share them via social media and via blogging. What happened was I actually got an e-mail from Wiley Business, who I believe you’ve written for in the past.

They said, “Would you like to come and write a book for us?” I think I was actually in Sydney at the time, and many, many people probably called the police as they heard me scream. I couldn’t believe that I got an e-mail asking me. Who does that? Who gets an e-mail asking them to actually write a book for them?

They actually spotted me via social media channels and said “Can you pull a book together?” So I went ahead and pulled the book together. Are you interested in me going through the writing process?

Pete:                   Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to talk about that as well, for sure.

Heather:              The writing process for me, I very much integrate with social media. I’ve done several writing courses with Valerie Khoo’s writing center, which I know that you’ve spoken with Valerie before.

Pete:                   Author of Power Stories.

Heather:              Yes. Valerie, author of Power Stories. It’s now called the Australian Writers’ Centre. It was the Sydney Writers’ Centre when she did the interview with you. And that just solidified and gave me so much confidence in what I was doing. How I do it is I sit at my desk and I work through what I’m going to write about.

But every sentence that I construct, I actually throw out onto Twitter or out into LinkedIn. That way, I’m enriching what I’m writing because people actually come back and comment on it. They disagree with it, which is fantastic because it gets me to go off in a tangent.

Or they come back and they add further character or color to what I’m writing about. And I’ll do that. I’ll typically go for like a 350 to 500-word segment at a time and identify that, and write that through Twitter and LinkedIn, pull that together. And essentially you have that little blog post there which is 350 to 500 words.

And I’ll typically then post it up on Flying Solo, or News.com, or My Business, or some of those sites out there. At the end of the day, you have all of these little 500-word articles, which I got a sort of patchwork quilt and quilted them all together into a book. So it was actually a very easy writing process.

What you’re doing is actually promoting what your knowledge is as you’re writing it, and generating this interest in what you’re doing. And hopefully, credibility in what you’re doing. I would literally come home from a client and go, wow, I learned this at this client today. And throw it out there and see what I could get back from the world out there.

Pete:                   And that was obviously a very good process because you’re getting a lot of interaction and people getting that involvement in the book that they’re going to go and invest in that at the same time as well, which is very cool.

Heather:              Absolutely. Yeah, it was a book written on social media- the bland book written on social media. But yes.

Pete:                   I’ve tainted it now, haven’t I, with that word?

Heather:              No, that’s fine. Look, I understand it’s operational. And I understand that that’s what it is, but that’s what I do.

Pete:                   It’s important that people actually get that. Because I think this is the thing. People so often overlook that and just think, “Oh, that’ll take care of itself. If I make enough revenue and make enough sales, that stuff will just somehow magically take care of itself.” And it just doesn’t. But you have to be across it.

You have to be aware of what’s required from— bits and pieces. And things like you’re saying. One of the things that I talk about quite a bit is things like, who cares about your logo on stationery? That sort of stuff is just ridiculous. That does not sell a client, having pretty stationary. It’s irrelevant in that scenario.

Heather:              You’re about to get lots of e-mails from graphic designers! But yes.

Pete:                   I’ve said it before. To me, branding should be a byproduct. If you look at some of the companies we have: Simply Headsets, Discount Conference Phones. Simply Headsets is a multimillion-dollar business we have that does e-commerce products. The logo is terrible. And we’ll admit the logo is terrible, but that doesn’t stop people buying from us.

And if we had a better logo, it wouldn’t increase conversion rates. So it’s just, why do stuff that’s not actually going to affect profit? Because at the end of the day, business is about profit, and if you can’t tie a direct thing between what you’re about to do and how it’s going to increase profit, don’t do it. It’s completely pointless.

Heather:              Absolutely. Going back to what you were talking about before in that, now that you’re running the business, everything that you do in the business, even if you outsource it- even if you outsource it to an incredible accountant, or an incredible lawyer, or an incredible graphics designer, or someone overseas, which all of that works for you.

At no stage can you abdicate responsibility for what you’re doing. The accountant gets you to sign off on all of those documents. He doesn’t sign that your tax reports are correct, you sign them off. And if they’re not correct, you’re in trouble not him, as with everything else.

So that’s something. Because I know that some people just say I don’t care about my accounts, just do it and I will pay you as much money as possible. It doesn’t work like that.

Pete:                   I couldn’t agree more. And people can read into that what they will, but I couldn’t agree more.

Heather:              Yes. You can’t abdicate the responsibility and you have to understand what’s going on in your own accounts, and your own legal side, and your own insurance. And I know that you’ve probably got an exciting insurance section, but I count it out. Look, I’m an accountant and I’m risk-adverse.

But I currently have 20 separate insurances at the moment. Which sounds unbelievably insane, but it’s just you go through all the individual things you need for a business. It’s incredible.

Pete:                   So let me talk about the accounting side of stuff. Something that you’ve obviously got experience when you’re consulting is things like Xero and similar software. I’d love to touch on that. It’s a bit separate to the book, but the whole cloud-based accountant stuff.

I think for a lot of people listening, the way stuff’s going these days is really cool. We’re starting to migrate some of our smaller business units to Xero, which I’m a big fan of. Do you want to talk about Xero and your experience and the benefits? Because I think people will get some real benefit out of that.

Heather:              Absolutely. I’m not sure if you’re aware of my next book coming out.

Pete:                   No. It’s on Xero, isn’t it?

Heather:              My next book coming out is Xero for Dummies. So the black and yellow titles.

Pete:                   Nice, Dummy series. Awesome.

Heather:              Yes. I’ve actually got four Xero books coming out. I’m publishing five books this year. How insane is that? And four of them are on Xero. So yes, I’m all across Xero. Let me talk about that. For people who are unaware of Xero, it’s completely cloud-based system. You don’t need to have anything on your desktop.

You can go anywhere, log into a browser, completely secure logins just as you would bank. If you’re prepared to log into a bank, you should be prepared to log into Xero. You can access it on your iPhone and iPad. The major difference, initially what you’ll find is what you do is you hook up your bank feed to Xero.

Pete:                   This is awesome.

Heather:              Yeah. You hook up your bank feed, your credit card feed, your PayPal feed, and eventually all different online gateway feeds will be able to hook up. And so, your transactions flow through into Xero. You no longer have to do any of that data entry. I run two separate businesses.

I have a desktop one that I do manually enter the data into. Xero saves me now about 90% of the time in just the data entry. You still need to code it. However, what you do is it learns how you regularly code something. It sees that when you go to this parking place, that’s parking and you coded it like that before, so it suggests it as parking.

I kind of liken it to a Space Invaders game. You wake up in the morning and you have two lines on the two columns. On one side, you have all the bank feeds that came in last night. On the other side, it has all the suggestions. And you just go through it. It has a little okay button in the middle and you go, “Okay, okay, okay.”

And of course, if there’s something a bit more complicated, you have to dive in and access that and put some further information into that. You have that side of it, but then what’s great about it is your tax accountant, or your business advisor, or your bookkeeper can log in, if you’ve given them permission, from wherever they are.

They can log into the system and they can do your books for you. Your tax accountant can go in and do your taxes directly into Xero. So you never have any of this sending your data file across e-mail for him to do it and then sending it back. He does it directly into Xero, makes all the adjustments directly into Xero.

Literally, it is up to date within about 48 hours all the time. It’s kind of waiting on bank feeds, etcetera, to come in, but it’s just up to date all the time. So the information is really reliable. Taking that one step further, what it has is something that is a published API, which is a published application programming interface, which is the fancy term for it.

That is a key that allows you to unlock the Xero- sort of the behind-the-scenes Xero. What you can do is, if you have an e-based store, you can link your e-based store directly with Xero, and all of the transactions can flow through and fill out relevant fields that you kind of do a field-matching thing, and fill out the fields into Xero. There are lots and lots of products that will integrate with Xero in that way.

So Xero, you consider to be a back-end accountant solution: doing your finances, doing your BAS, doing your company taxes. But then, if you need to manage inventory, if you have project management happening, you come in and you connect these different systems in.

And there’s another thing if you’re in fact based anywhere in the world, have a look at OneSaas. What that is, is for anyone who hasn’t built a direct add-on connection into Xero, it unlocks many hundreds of other applications that will then feed into Xero, such as your MailChimp, your SalesForce, your CRM products.

So someone goes on to eBay and all of a sudden, within seconds, you have all their contact information in your Xero database if you want it, which is just massive, massive time saver, massive data-entry saver. Totally integrated, seamless systems, and life’s a lot easier.

Pete:                   That’s fantastic. Just awesome. Our telco business, we have SAP B1, which is obviously a behemoth of accounting and management software. But some of the smaller e-commerce subdivisions, we are moving those across to Xero because it’s just so much smoother, and because we have some of our team in the Philippines who do some of the data entry when it comes to entering in AP invoices from our suppliers.

With Xero, you can obviously limit access as well. So the team in the Philippines can’t see any of the actual accounting or bank records, or anything like that. All they have the ability to do is go in and actually enter invoices into the system.

So then the invoices are sitting there, you have your bank feeds automatically, and you as a manager or your accounts person just goes in once a week, or once a day, and just goes yeah, that payment to Supplier A for $1500 matches the invoice. You hit okay. Bang, there, you’re done. There’s your reconciliation done. It’s absolutely brilliant.

Heather:              Unbelievable. And going back to that, there are systems out there like Shoeboxed, like Receipt Bank and Invitbox but you actually send all your source documents to and they scan them and they extract all the data automatically for you. So if you don’t have a backup in the Philippines, it extracts all the data and feeds it directly into Xero for you again.

Pete:                   Let me ask you this question, because I do use Shoeboxed but limited a little bit. For just literally paper receipts that you receive at the store. Could, as a business, send their actual AP invoices from a supplier to Shoeboxed?

Heather:              Yes. That is one that you can do. I think there’s another one called Invite. I’ll think of the name while we’re talking. But yes, you should be able to and put that in. But there is another one. I think it’s called Invitbox.

Pete:                   So you could literally just outsource and automate your entire basic data-entry side of accounting anyway.

Heather:              Yeah, Invitbox. I think you have show notes so I’ll make sure I get the correct name and put it in there. But what it does is you actually set up an e-mail address. So rather than your invoice from Telstra or from whomever it’s coming from, go to you, it actually goes directly to this service and it extracts the data and just feeds it directly into your system. So, quite amazing, the time savings involved with that and the detail coming through.

But again, it’s about you can’t abdicate responsibility. You need to keep monitoring what they’re doing and that it suits your requirements. I know with some of them, some time; I think there’s one, and I won’t mention it, but one doesn’t bring across invoice numbers. So for some of us, that’s a bit of a concern. It’s not pulling up the invoice numbers.

You need to go, does this suit my requirements? Is this doing what I do? But yeah, massive time saver. It gives the small person running; as you probably are aware, businesses can run out of a garage but they can be massive at what they’re actually able to do with this sort of software, with a fast internet connection. It’s just incredible.

Pete:                   It’s absolutely amazing. And this is what, I guess, you do besides, obviously, writing 20 books in a year, which is insane its own right. But again, using leverage: you’re producing a book, but at the same time producing social media marketing content and blogging content.

So you’re using that leveraged approach to content creation as well, which I love. You obviously do this sort of consulting work at your primary business, is that correct?

Heather:              Yeah, that pays the bills, unfortunately. That pays the bills. Book writing doesn’t necessarily pay the bills.

Pete:                   It is quite strange when in Australia that the government make more money in GST revenue than you do as an author in royalties for a book. It’s quite absurd.

Heather:              Yes, absolutely. But again, for me, what I did was I extracted myself from a lot of volunteering roles and said, “If I do this, this is going to help a lot of people.” And that’s what I did. So it was kind of like, no, I can’t volunteer, I can’t volunteer. You know how mums get caught up in volunteering.

Pete:                   Absolutely. Good ol’ PTA.

Heather:              Exactly. So I said okay. And look, as I’m sure you probably get people contact you and say this made a massive difference to my life. That’s really gratifying.

Pete:                   Absolutely. That’s why we do the podcasts and our blog. Our businesses do very, very well, but for me this is my chance of talking about my experiences and learnings and hopefully help other people get to where I’m at. So I completely understand.

In terms of the book, and Xero and thing, we spoke earlier and we worked out a way to have a really cool thing for listeners. Do you want to sort of run through how that works?

Heather:              Well, I am happy to offer a prize giveaway on your show, if you’re able to do that. Happy to offer a signed copy of this book, which is Learn Small Business Start-Up in 7 Days, and my next book, which is Xero for Dummies, but that’s when it’s published, and an invitation to an online, live question-and-answer session where you can ask me whatever you would like. So that’s a prize giveaway that you can choose.

Pete:                   Let’s do something like this. Anybody who has an experience around any of these, have used Xero to success, they’ve obviously heard this and implemented some stuff, or anything around that sort of automation for their accounts and starting up, and the blandness of start-up they’ve learned and taken away.

They can e-mail support [at] preneurgroup [dot] com with a little case study and things like that. Just e-mail support [at] preneurgroup [dot] com. We’ll pick some entries and go from there.

Heather:              Fantastic, fantastic. And if listeners want to purchase a Xero subscription through me, if they mention this podcast, I’m happy to offer them a free basic setup. The specifications for that are on my website, which is HeatherSmithSmallBusiness.com/Xero. So, you probably don’t want me to go through the specifics, but happy to offer them. If they sign up to Xero through me, happy to offer them a free basic setup.

Pete:                   Awesome. And Xero is spelled X-E-R-O. Obviously, the good ol’ links will be in the show notes and stuff like that.

Heather:              I always do the- what’s that, Deal or No Deal? No Deal! X!

Pete:                   The cross they do.

Heather:              To really get it for people, because I think even my publishers were going, it’s a Z? No, no, no, it’s an X.

Pete:                   It’s X. The good ol’ Web 2.0 names and stuff like that, which you talk about in your book as well.

Heather:              Yes. Yes, I do in detail. Yes.

Pete:                   Well, let me ask you the usual question that we finish off with at the end of every conversation we have here. What’s been the one question that I haven’t asked you, that I should have?

Heather:              Okay, because I’ve just listened to, I think, all of your podcasts over the last week.

Pete:                   So you’ve come prepared?

Heather:              I’ve come prepared.

Pete:                   Damn it!

Heather:              I was thinking initially I should go with- do you listen to Pierce Morgan?

Pete:                   Yeah, a little bit.

Heather:              And he always goes, have you ever truly been in love? So no, I won’t go with that question. But as you’ve just had a new baby in your life, congratulations on that.

Pete:                   Thank you, very much.

Heather:              I wasn’t sure whether listening to it, whether it would still be new or not. Can you run a business around children? So that, I thought would be a good topic to end on.

Pete:                   That is an answer— I would like the answer to as well. The little fellow, Eli is only six weeks old, or seven weeks old now as we record this. The first three or four weeks, my answer would have been absolutely not. I was absolutely shocked with what was the lifestyle change.

I think as most parents know, you can’t really prepare for it. And I was very arrogant about thinking I’d be able to deal with it and it was very much a shock. But now, I’m sort of getting to that routine. But I would love to hear some expert advice on this.

Heather:              Alright. I think that you absolutely can run a business around children. I think you have to go with the flow of it, and the time involved, etcetera. But what’s going to happen, and what’s going to amaze you, is the amount of new people who are going to come into your life and in the different elements that he goes through; and that he’ll go through kindergarten and preschool and school.

I have a friend who’s formed a massive company with another guy at, how about this, one of them was standing on one side of the bouncy castle supervising the kids while the other guy was standing on the other side. Standing there at a kid’s party talking, and so they formed a business over holding up this bouncy castle.

So I think that children invite a massive amount of new people into your life, which can be really interesting. And you have some really interesting— I’m trying not to sound slimy, snaky person, but really interesting network and opportunities from having children. Children also teach you, as you’ve said before, patience. They teach you unbelievably good negotiating skills.

You wait ‘til what they’ll convince you to part with from your pocket. I, myself try, my kids are now teenagers; but from a very young age, I tried to incorporate them in the business. Getting them to do tasks, even as simple as putting a stamp on an envelope.

I frequently talked to them about- like someone who perhaps owes me money and is refusing to pay, something like that. I talk to them about those sorts of scenarios so they have an awareness of what’s actually going on in the reality of business, rather than put it down into textbooks.

But saying all of that, I think you have to then still keep a professional appearance. If you have an important meeting with a fashion designer, and you’re taking some of your clothes along to him, don’t turn up there with your baby. Sort out some babysitting arrangement.

Don’t do that, because that will just crush you and they won’t have that same respect for you. However, I’ve had very wealthy, well-to-do businesses ring me up and say look, “Can you come and help us? But we’ll be breastfeeding. Do you have a problem with that?” Now, I don’t have a problem with that and I very much tell people I’m a mom running this business.

So, it will attract a certain demographic of people. And for me, that’s completely fine. I actually find a lot of men running businesses love to help women. Like men perhaps higher up the chain, love to help women in business. I don’t know whether that sounds sexist or not.

But they really applaud the fact that I say— I no longer say it, but it used to be I work school hours. And they applaud that. So I think very definitely you can fit it in, that it’s going to open up lots of different opportunities for you. Just embrace them and work with them.

Pete:                   Yeah. Could not agree more. But in terms of the negotiations tactic, I’m going to try crying and throwing a tantrum in the next board meeting and see how that goes.

Heather:              Yes, but if you turn up with your baby, if you need to convince a woman to do anything, she’ll say, of course I will. Of course I will! What a cute baby!

Pete:                   Exactly. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Heather. The book is out now, is that right?

Heather:              Yes, it’s out in book stores at the moment. It’s a real book! Everyone goes, is it a real book? Yes, it’s a real book, Learn Small Business Start-Up in 7 Days.

Pete:                   Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time. Appreciated all the advice. And definitely guys, check out Xero as an option for your business. And if you are going to go that way, definitely take up Heather’s offer to help get the basic setup at no cost, because it’s an absolute no-brainer. So thank you very much, and talk to you soon.

Heather:             Thank you very much. Cheers. Appreciate it.

Episode 092:
Core Business

Dom Goucher:    Hi everyone, and welcome to this edition of PreneurCast with me, Dom Goucher. Just me this week because I’m going to do another one of my Foundation episodes. This week, I want to talk to you about core business. Now, this is not core business in the same way that Pete and I have discussed core versus mechanics before.

If you want to know what core versus mechanics is about, there’s an episode that I’ll link to in the show notes. But very quickly, core versus mechanics- one of our concepts is this idea that you should focus on the thing that adds the most value to your business. That’s the core of your business.

You should be getting other people to do the mechanics, the day-to-day things that you don’t add particular value to. What I wanted to talk to you about this week is actually focusing on the jobs that you take on, the clients that you take on, and the work that you do for those clients, or the products that you produce, the service that you sell, whatever it might be.

And you focus on the thing that is your core business. This is kind of a variant on one of those things that I’ve been saying for some time now, which is just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. A lot of us out there are multi-skilled people, we come from a wide and varied background.

I certainly do. My history has taken in a lot of different things- from my time at Xerox as a Solutions Consultant. I’ve also worked for a printing company. I’ve worked for software companies. I’ve been a teacher and trainer. I now run this digital media company producing digital training materials.

So, I have a wide background and a huge range of skills, but it puts me in a very difficult position- possibly one of the most uncomfortable positions that a business person can be in. And that is the position of being asked to do something that you can do, but you really shouldn’t. And this is that phrase, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

This is where that applies. Let me tell you a story, and this is probably one of the most difficult things that I’ve ever been through. Very recently, a very, very good friend of mine- somebody that I’ve known for many years, we used to work together- so somebody who really knows me and knows my capabilities came to me and said, ” I have this situation and I need this thing doing.

I need somebody to take on this role to provide this service to my company.” It was something that I am more than capable of, but it was to do with document production, digital document production, document design, publication, that kind of stuff. That is part of my background.

It’s something that I’ve done in the past, and that’s why my friend came to me. But this was a role they wanted somebody to take on, this was a service they wanted to provide. And it was a cornerstone to their business. It was a huge part of their marketing activities. And while I could do it, it wasn’t my core business.

My core business is producing online digital training materials for people, specifically video based training courses. That’s why my company specializing in. We chose to specialize on that, and I’ll come back to the reasons why we chose to specialize in a minute. But we chose to specialize on that.

And so, I agonized over this decision. I shouldn’t have agonized over it, by the way, it should have been a clear cut decision. I should have gone back to my friend immediately and said, “No, I’m sorry, that is not my core business.” But I got sucked into this thing. There’s lots of reasons you can get sucked into this situation.

One of them is because you can. You say to somebody, “Of course, I can do that.” One of the reasons is because you think you need the money- you need to take that next client. So you take that job on because you can do the job. Or you may be in a situation like I was where it was a friend.

A friend comes to you and says, “Can you do this? Can you or your team fulfill this need for me?” But it is a very dangerous situation, because it’s not your core business. And this job was not my core business. I spent some time talking this through to my friend and trying to find a way that I could do it, that my team could help him out.

But in the end, I went back to them and I said, “I’m sorry, this is not my core business and I would be doing you disservice by taking this job on. Because while I can do it, it’s not what I do every day. Therefore, it’s not good for me, and it’s not good for you.”

Now, that was a really, really difficult situation for me. It was a pretty good contract to take. From a money point of view, it was a great opportunity. It was something I could definitely do. So there was that aspect to it. But also, it was my friend who I really, really wanted to help out.

But both from the position of authenticity, and giving my friend the best advice I could, but also the best decision for my business was to turn down that job. Now, why am I saying this? Why is it important to focus just on core business? The thing that you decide you want to do, and narrow that down, really narrow it down.

Well, there’s quite a few reasons. And the first, probably the most important one, is going back to something you may have heard many times in your life, which is “Jack of all trades, master of none”. We are becoming a world of potential generalists.

The ability to learn any subject is becoming easier and easier, and easier. But the willingness to master a subject is actually diminishing. And it will be, in my opinion, the people who master a subject, master a skill that will stand out. Now, it doesn’t have to be an actual skill.

It could be mastering a body of knowledge, becoming an expert in a body of knowledge. But, it could just be as simple as becoming a tradesperson- going through the traditional models of apprenticeship, journeyman, and working through to master of a trade.

But the more of a master of trade you are, the easier it is for you to do that thing. If you keep taking jobs that are not core business, you’re diluting that skill base. You’re moving away from your core competencies. So it will take you longer to do the job.

It will be harder for you to do the job. It will be harder for you to manage somebody else doing the job- if you take onboard the things that Pete and I talk about a lot, like outsourcing work. If you don’t fully understand a job, then it’s hard to outsource it.

But what’s worse is that if you’re only doing this job as a one off because you just took it on, it’s really difficult to actually build your own team up to support it. It’s much more cost-effective to build a team to support your core business. Yes, you could take the job and outsource it, and a lot of people do do that.

A lot of people do set themselves up to manage work for other people, to become a facilitator. Now, if that’s your business that’s fine. Go ahead. But if you don’t want to be a facilitator, if you actually want to run a business product, or core business services, then you need to focus.

Because otherwise, you’re diluting the expertise that you’re building up. You’re diluting the effectiveness of your team. And you’re introducing all kinds of difficulties. For example, stress. If you don’t know how to do a job, or it’s not something that you’ve done time and time, and time again, then you’re introducing stress.

Because the less you know about a job, the harder it is, for example, to cost that job. The jobs that we do— my company produces these digital training courses. And I have a rate sheet. If you ask me for a price, I can literally tell you a way to calculate how much that job will cost you before you start producing the product.

You can literally cost out the job for my company to produce it yourself if you want, or I can give you an estimate very, very confidently, within a high degree of accuracy, because I have a lot of experience of producing this material. I know what it takes. I know how long it takes. I know the skills it takes. I know everything about what we do.

I have become a subject matter expert on producing digital training courses and all their supporting materials. So when a client comes to me, I can confidently answer. Now, that is really, really important from a client management point of view that you’re confident when you respond to the client.

But what’s worse is if you don’t know how to cost the job. Then you could underprice the job. You could underestimate the amount of effort that it takes, because you just don’t know. Or, you could agonize and start doing really complex calculations, and start trying to estimate it out and put yourself under a lot of stress.

Now, what some people do in this is situation is that they procrastinate. They don’t respond directly to the client. They say, “Oh, I’ll get back to you with a price.” Now, that’s not really a good way to deal with a client. And again, you should just come clean. You should just say it’s not my core business.

And similarly, on the stress front, you have the stress of delivering. Let’s say you take that job on. Let’s say you cost that job. Let’s say you win the contract. You’ve then got to deliver. If it’s a one-off that you took because it was somebody putting money on the table, then you have got a really difficult situation.

You may only make a few dollars, or a small margin, because you end up having to outsource the whole job to somebody. So was it worth the stress of bringing on a new contractor, and the managing the person, building the relationship with them, just for one job and a few dollars, or a small margin?

Probably not. You’ve got a massive management overhead whenever you bring a new person into the team. Better to use your existing team, with existing skills. One of the reasons to stick to core business. But also, if you try and deliver in-house, you’ll try and live up to the quality levels that you produce with all of your business, all your core product range.

So if you randomly take on this new person, this new client, you’re representing your business to them. And if you’re not producing your core product, then you’re not necessarily going to do it as well. You’re putting yourself under pressure to perform, and perform in an area you don’t have core expertise, you’re not a master of.

So these are reasons not to take on work that is not in your core business. But the real one for me, the most important one, and Pete and I have talked about this in the past, is this idea of mastery. Because the more that you do something, the more a body of evidence you have that you can do it, both externally and internally.

You build up skills. You build up systems. The more you do a particular task, the more confidence you get. The easier it becomes. The more likely you are to, if it’s such a thing, to achieve a flow state when you’re producing it due to, again, the fact of it being easier, so it’s less stress.

And the more of a body of evidence that you have that you can do this, that you’ve done this a number of times for a number of clients, the more chance you’ve got that you can get testimonials- good testimonials, increasingly more impressive testimonials and examples of what you do.

Then you can put your prices up. So we’re heading back into the 7 Levers. That lever that people find the most difficult, which is put your prices up. Well, this is a way to put your prices up. Interestingly, by doing less, by focusing the work that you do into a specialist topic, you can put your prices up.

Because if you look at any specialist anywhere in the world, the one thing that makes a specialist stand out is that they charge more than a generalist. So don’t be afraid to focus your product or service offering. Become specialists. And also, the marketing becomes easier if you’re a specialist because you’re marketing to a smaller group of people.

You can use more focused language, which is something that again, Pete and I talk about. When you’re marketing to people, you should use their language. If you are marketing generally, you can’t use industry-specific or topic-specific language to resonate with your audience.

Whereas, if you can focus on a group of people, like for example, again, with my company. I can talk about information products, which is the name for what we produce. We produce information products. I can talk to people about the things that they understand like delivering video-based content, delivering transcripts, delivering eBooks, delivering audio versions, organizing the content, giving a structure to the course.

I can talk about delivering the content via a membership or secure access site. All these things are things that in that industry, people know about. They know that they need it. They know how it works. They know what these words mean. Or they’ve at least been told that that’s what they know, and that’s what they’re looking for.

So I can easily target my service to those people. If I was to market myself as a generalist, as a general video editor, or a general audio editor, then I can’t pick out a specific audience. Anybody from any industry anywhere could come to me wanting anything doing.

That, again, would dilute my skill base, makes my life very, very difficult. So that expertise, that mastery, has all of these knock-on effects. But the other one, and just to focus on this for a little bit, is that idea of your team, of the skills of your team and your skills, because if you just focus into a small set tasks, based upon one core product, it’s really easy to standardize the processes.

Really, really easy to standardize the processes. Far easier than if you have 17 clients with 17 different kinds of jobs. Even if it’s regular work, even if you have regular contracts with 17 clients, that’s still 17 processes if they’re doing 17 different jobs. That’s an awful lot of work to produce standard process documentation.

No matter how you slice it, no matter how clever you get— and Pete and I, in our Profit Hacks course, talk a lot of different ways that you can optimize process creation and descriptions, and things like that. And training your team and communicating.

But no matter how you slice it, if you’ve got 17 clients with 17 processes, that’s a lot of work. Whereas, if you have 17 clients but they all want basically the same kind of product, that’s really easy. That’s one process. And whether you work on your own, or you work with a team of people in your office, or spread around the world- a team of outsourcers, these things will make a huge difference.

So focusing on that core business, deciding what that core business is, is really, really important. And something that I mentioned briefly in that little piece there was about the marketing, because once you focus on a particular kind of product in a particular market, or a particular business, or a particular service, the marketing becomes easier and it becomes more focused.

You can talk to the people directly. You can produce a better product which gets you, not only more testimonials, but you’ll also get more referrals. Because it’s easier to ask for referrals. And it’s easier to get better qualified clients via referrals, which is one of those things.

A lot of my past problems when I’ve had clients come to me and I’ve had to say, “I’m sorry, that’s not core business,” is because it’s a misunderstanding via a referral. Somebody has said to somebody, “Yeah, I know a guy who does video,” or, “Yeah, I know a guy that edits audio files.” Let’s just look at how we handle this situation.

Hopefully you’ve got a clear idea of why you want to focus. But rather than just leave you with a problem, I want to give you some solutions. So, let’s look at how we can handle the situation. The first way, and it’s a great way that I came across from a guy called Michael Port who wrote a book that we’ve talked about quite a few times called Book Yourself Solid.

Michael Port talked about always having a referral. And by that, he means if there’s something that you potentially could get asked for, or get asked for regularly but is not your core business, if you know somebody who can deliver that service, get in touch with them. Build a relationship with them.

And be aware of what their core business is, what their ideal client is. And if you come across somebody who approaches you for the service, make that referral. You don’t necessarily have to get anything back for it. You don’t necessarily have to get any kind of a commission for passing on that lead.

Just make sure you have a referral because it gives goodwill to the person that approached you. It gives goodwill to that other service provider. And those two things will come back to you. Either that client will return to you when they do have what is your core business and that they need from you, or you may get referrals from that other provider.

If they don’t provide the service that you provide, they may get approached for that service and they may give you a referral. So always be aware of people that can provide complementary services, or services that are just outside your field and outside your core business.

That’s one way of gently letting people down, which probably the biggest worry, I think, anybody listening to this has. If somebody approaches you, how do you let them go without upsetting them? How do you avoid just saying, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t want your business,” which is not a positive way.

Having this other person as a referral, or having this other service provider as a referral, is a great way. But the other reference I have on this is another book that we talk about, a book by a guy called John Warrillow, which is called Built to Sell. The idea behind Built to Sell is about creating a business that can be sold.

It’s an anecdotal book. It’s a great story to be read. It’s a great perspective on business structure and organizing a business. But there’s a core message in that book, and that is about choosing your core business and turning down work that is not core business, and managing that.

I do strongly recommend that- if this, what I’m talking about now, resonates with you- that you go and read up on that. And I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. So you can go to Audible. It’s a great book to get from Audible. And don’t forget, if you go to AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast, then you can get a free trial which includes one download of any book.

So if you haven’t tried Audible.com already, you could try Built to Sell by John Warrillow on Audible. He talks about this exact thing. One of the reasons that he talks about it is in context of being able to sell your business. But he talks about all the things that I’ve talked about.

He’s talked about standardizing the processes. He’s talked about managing your team around a focused set of processes. He talks about the ease of describing the product, the ease of describing and marketing things, ease of communicating and managing clients, etcetera, etcetera. So that’s a big, big section in there that I really would recommend that you read.

But for you, as a business owner, once you’ve decided what is core business, what you’re good at and you want to do more of, then here’s a couple of ways, just to finish off today, that you can focus on that core business, that you can help yourself focus on the core business. And the first step for me is to make your marketing messages clear.

This is something that I’ve mentioned indirectly before. Pete and I have talked about this. There’s a guy out there, a copywriter called John Carlton. I saw John speak once at a conference, and he made the entire room stop. There was an eerie silence because he said something that was so unbelievable, so counterintuitive, that literally everybody stopped and paid attention to him.

But it is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever seen in any kind of marketing context. And it is that the best value you can give to a potential client is to convince them they don’t need you. Now that sounds a bit odd. But just to explain that and give it some context, what he went on to explain was that you don’t want to attract people that don’t really need what you do.

You don’t want to attract people that don’t need your product. Those are problem clients. They’re either going to want a refund, or they’re going to be unhappy with the service that you provide, or you’re going to struggle to deliver and to delight that client.

Whereas, if upfront you’re absolutely clear about what you deliver, what your rates are, what you charge, how your service is laid out, the thing that they’re going to receive, and what you don’t do and the kind of jobs you don’t want, then you’re clear.

Possibly before they even pick up the phone or send you an e-mail, or fill out an inquiry form on your website. So if, like myself, you’re clear- we build information products. We don’t do little video edits. Yes, we can manage your podcast for you. No, we don’t edit audio files on a one-off basis. We do big project with people.

We will take over. We can manage it for you. That’s what we do. We provide a premium service. If anybody’s seen some of the demonstrations of the things that Pete and I talked about during the Profit Hacks launch- things like the video production sequence, the podcast production sequence- they come from my company.

That idea of the mind map to video, where you just produce a mind map and an audio track, that comes from my company. That’s what we do. But it’s a premium service, and we’re quite open about that. We have no problem telling people about that and pricing it accordingly. And that means that if somebody comes to me, they’re aware that that’s what they’re coming for.

It helps me, it reduces the number of speculative inquiries about small video editing that we get. It doesn’t completely get rid of it, but it just gives me something. But that’s what I’m saying, make your marketing messages clear. Make it clear what you do. Help people to understand that you are the right person for job that they want doing.

And that will help you probably more than anything else. As I said earlier, another thing is that the more that you do, the more work you choose to do in that core business, the more work you’ll get like it, because you have a bigger body of work that is evidence of what you do.

Your testimonials will be based around that kind of work, and your referrals will come from people you did that work for. So you’re just building up- the more you do, the more you’ll get. It’s really that simple. If you keep doing little silly jobs for people, then that person will refer you to their friend who wants a little silly job doing. And that’s the inverse- that creates the inverse problem.

The more you do, the more you get. Focus on the jobs for the core business, you’ll get more of those. And the final one is to mix those two points together, which is be clear on the business you want, be clear on the kind of work that you do, and then go to your past clients that you’ve done that work for and ask them for referrals of that kind.

Educate your client, give them the education- I don’t mean that patronizing. I just mean be clear that you are looking for more clients of this kind. So for me, I would go back to my past clients that I have produced information products for and say to them, “If anybody looks at your information product and says, ‘Wow, that’s really cool.

That’s really high quality and I’m really impressed by the way that it was produced and delivered,’ would you please tell them I did it? Would you please give them my contact details and let them know this is what I do?” That’s it. It’s that simple. Or, I go to them and I say, “I don’t suppose you know anybody who would want a similar product.

Do you know anybody who’s thinking of producing an information product in the next few months?” Because if you’re going to do this, most people plan it out. And I just say, “Do you know anybody who’s talked to you,” because it’s a big networking thing that goes on in my industry.

And I just say, “Do you know anybody? Have you talked to anybody? Did anybody mention it to you? Would you mind giving my details to them, if you think that they’re a good fit based upon the experience that you had, based upon the way that we worked together? Because you as my client know how I work and know the kind of things that I’m capable of.

If you think that they’re a good fit, could you give me their details?” That’s it. And those three tips will help you stay focused on your core business, along with having somebody to refer back to, to refer an unwanted client to, to just keep that good will. That’s my foundation for this week.

And it’s a big one, because I would like to make sure that you, if at all possible, can avoid the kind of pain that I went through by having to tell a very good friend of mine that I can’t do it because it’s not core business. But also, I would like you to be able to focus and grow your business by focusing your efforts on the things that give you the best return, which is back to core versus mechanics.

But specifically, focusing on the jobs and the clients that it’s easiest for you to deliver your best work to. As usual, as it’s just me, this is a slightly shorter show. Pete will be back with us soon. But in the meantime, I would ask if you’ve enjoyed this show or if you’re enjoying this series, or if there’s anything that you want to feedback about PreneurCast, please do.

We love to get your comments through all the different ways you can get a hold of us. If you are enjoying PreneurCast and you think that it’s valuable, the most important thing to us and to our potential audience, is an iTunes review. If you can go to the iTunes Store and put a hopefully positive review in there, that really helps us spread the word.

It helps other people find out about PreneurCast and get the value that you’re getting from these episodes. You can also communicate to us through PreneurMedia.tv, our website that manages this podcast and our other publications. There’s comments below the podcast.

Every time there’s one released, there’s comment available there. Also, that’s where you’ll find the transcripts and the show notes so that you can click on and follow the links to everything that we’ve talked about in the shows. There’s also a little audio comment box available on PreneurMedia.tv.

Or you can reach us through preneurcast [at] preneurgroup [dot] com. So any one of those ways. Do give us feedback. Let us know what you think. Let us know how you’re implementing the things that we talk about and how it’s helping you grow your business and becoming more effective. See you soon.

Episode 091:
If I Was A… Tradie

Pete Williams:    Hi honey, I’m home! I am back.

Dom Goucher:    It’s such a delightful sound. Even with the little birdie tweets in the background, just to herald the return of Mr. Pete Williams.

Pete:                   Yes, it’s been a long time between episodes for me, unfortunately or fortunately. There’s been some amazing stuff happening in the last few weeks. So thank you very much for holding the fort down so professionally. But yes, I am back and ready to jump back into what is 2013′s first podcast for me.

Dom:                   Yeah, not quite as planned really was it?

Pete:                   No, no, we had plans to change this year’s podcasts up to be every two weeks as opposed to weekly, just with a few other projects and other things we were working on this year. So we are only six weeks in, but that means there’s been three episodes that I’ve missed. But that’s all good. We survived. The listeners survived. And we’re back at it again, which is very exciting.

Dom:                   It’s cool. And I think it’s a testament to your ability to ride with change and to adapt. And also the strength of your systems that given the change in your life that a new baby has brought, you’re back on track in such a relatively short period of time.

Pete:                   Yeah. He’s a month old tomorrow as of time of recording. And it’s been a crazy month. It’s been a little bit different to what I expected, which is good and bad. He’s definitely already teaching me patience, which is a good thing. I think I’m going to learn a lot from this little fellow. But no, it’s been good. It’s been a little crazy the first couple of weeks.

He wasn’t eating overly well, so that kind of put a little bit of stress on Fleur and I, just probably a little bit of undue stress. We probably over-analyzed things a little bit in hindsight. But I think that’s pretty common for first-time parents. But he’s all good now. He’s putting on weight and he’s a lot of fun, so it’s very exciting.

But I think I’m pretty much back into a new routine now. Obviously, babies can change quite a bit and throw our routines out. But Fleur, I have to say, is absolutely amazing. So it’s been very handy to have an amazing person by my side to give me that ability to get back into the work routine relatively quickly, which is exciting.

Dom:                   Excellent. Well on behalf of everyone, all of the listeners and the Preneur Community, just officially say congratulations to you and your lovely wife.

Pete:                   Thank you very much.

Dom:                   And you’re back. Do you want to dive straight in and pick a topic?

Pete:                   before I do, I just want touch on your comment. I’ve been absolutely amazed, and Fleur has as well, with the response from the community. It’s been insane. Like the amount of e-mails and tweets, and advice and suggestions we’ve had has been absolutely fantastic.

So everyone who’s replied to e-mails who’ve been sent out newsletters, Noise Reduction newsletters and all that stuff; we’ve had a whole bunch of replies from people just giving us tips on what to do and apps to download, and books to buy, and things like that. It’s been amazing so thank you very much to each and every one of you who took the time to e-mail and tweet and send messages like that.

So they’ve been very much appreciated. But yeah, in terms of topics, I thought we could dive in and continue on our If I Was A… series. I really enjoyed the episode that we did late last year and I think this year we can start doing it a little bit more regularly in the show.

Revisit the whole 7 Levers framework, which is the foundation or a big core of the podcast here. And it’s a way for us to continually, hopefully, spark people’s ideas and give them seeds of inspiration around different ways to apply the 7 Levers in different industries. I thought today we could talk about tradespeople. Carpenters, woodworkers, plumbers, gardeners.

Those trades service businesses. But I really want to reinforce, like we do at the start of any of these episodes, that if you’re not a tradie, if you’re an online marketer, if you’re an affiliate marketer, if you’re a retail-store owner, still listen through this episode and think about how you can swipe and deploy the ideas and suggestions that we cover for a 7 Levers framework as a tradie.

See how you could apply it to your business. Because where most people will grow as entrepreneurs in two sides of that coin is when they look at swipe and deploy. And one is, when is when you start putting your thinking cap on and forcing yourself to think creatively about how you can apply other ideas to your business and start building that gap, it makes you start thinking on your own feet.

So when other ideas come up, you can easily and more effectively see how you can apply that to your business. And that is a huge leap for an entrepreneur. You’re no longer stuck following the guru, so to speak, and doing exactly as they say.

When you can make that jump to start thinking on your own and going through the process of looking at swipe and deploy, or listening to things like this and going, how can I mold this to my business, is one huge thing.

Also, the other side of the coin is what I touched on then as well, which is just the whole thinking just looking at other ways and trying to come up with your own ideas, and not following someone else’s system.

I think that’s really important. So I do really encourage everyone to listen through these and think about if you were a tradie, how would you apply this. Look at it from that perspective, but also see how you can apply these examples to your current projects.

Dom:                   Yeah. We were talking about this just recently, this whole series came about because wherever we go, whenever we talk to people and we talk about the 7 Levers framework, people will come up and say, “But how does that apply to me?” We’re really picking as many and varied groups of people as we can to come up with these ideas and show you how that they can apply to you and your industry and your business.

But it is really, really important that you do what we’re doing. We’re mining our creativity or using our experience and things we’ve seen people do. Or we’re applying things that we know work across the board. But there are examples everywhere, everyday that you can see and you can use. Pete, you say swipe and deploy, swipe and deploy.

And not everybody really necessarily understands that. But it’s just a simple practice, as you say, of looking around and seeing what other people are doing and applying that to your business. And it doesn’t matter that they’re not in your industry. In fact sometimes, it’s better that they’re not.

Because very often there’s a technique out there that’s tried, true and even worn-thin that has never been done in your industry, but it’s wearing thin somewhere else. We talk about this in the internet world in marketing online and this idea of autoresponders.

The systems that you can set up where you can set up a series of e-mails and when somebody subscribes to your e-mail list, the system just e-mails them on a regular basis or an irregular basis by the way. You can set it up to do it randomly or whatever.

But it personalizes the e-mail to them. Well in the (inverted commas because you hate the phrase) “internet marketing” space, everybody — I know if somebody’s written me an e-mail or if it is an autoresponder. It’s obvious to me and it’s obvious to most people who operate in these circles.

But people who operate in these circles are such a tiny percentage of the world population versus however many people out there that you could possibly be sending these e-mails to, that it’s impressive to 99.99% of the population of the world if they get an e-mail with their name in it.

And it’s just simple little things like that. Just because it’s worn out in another industry doesn’t mean it won’t work for yours. Similarly, if it is working in another industry or another business, there’s a real chance it’s going to work for you too. So always be on the lookout for these opportunities, right?

Pete:                   Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dom:                   Let’s dive in. I’m going to use the proper terminology for my host, if I was a tradie, how would the 7 Levers apply to me?

Pete:                   We can just start by banging through a whole bunch of ideas and thinking about how this applies. Let’s look at tradesmen. Traffic, like anybody, for them is going to be first-time inquiries to their business and service. There’s a whole range of different opportunities for a trades person to advertise their services and get that first-time inquiry.

AdWords and online marketing is, I think, one of the greatest ROIs wise any business can have when it comes to traffic generation. And the really cool thing with AdWords, as a lot of people know and some don’t, is that you can target a specific geographical area. This is a really cool thing for a tradesman.

Obviously, if you are an e-commerce, store you can advertise anywhere that the couriers or the postal service deliver. That’s pretty straightforward. But with a service business, if you’re based in Los Angeles, you don’t want to necessarily advertise in Santa Monica or in San Diego. Or if you’re in Melbourne, you don’t want to advertise in Ballarat.

You want to make sure it’s in a certain radius of where you are willing to drive to do the work. So what you can do with AdWords is say I want to advertise my plumbing services. And you choose all of the different keywords around plumbing, plumbers, pipe fixing, etcetera. And say I want my ad to show to people if they are within a 10-mile or 20-kilometer radius of my home.

That’s as far as I want to drive for the work I do. So you can get very targeted with your advertising, which is hugely successful because there’s less wastage. It also gives you the ability with less wastage to pay more for the advertisement because the cost per opt-in or the cost per conversion that we’ll get to in a moment should be the same.

The less wastage you have and the more you can pay for the lead. This means you can say I’m going to pay a lot more for my ad to display at number one in this geographical radius because I know that there’s not going to be any noise or wastage in that advertising from a geographical perspective, which is hugely beneficial. So I think that’s—

Dom:                   I’m sorry. Can I ask you a question about that?

Pete:                   Yeah, sure.

Dom:                   Because I mean that in itself is amazing to me. The first time I found out about the geo-targeting stuff I was like, wow, that’s awesome. But can actually you run an advert that has its content targeted to the area that you’re talking about and is that a good idea?

Pete:                   So you’re asking if the words in the advert itself have…

Dom:                   Yeah.

Pete:                   You can in a couple of different ways. And I don’t want to get too complicated and too deep in here. Mike Rhodes of WebSavvy is probably the best guy to direct those questions to if anyone wants to know a bit more about AdWords. But what you can do is a couple of different things.

If you have your AdWords account linked in with your Google Places account, which is something I’ll talk about in depth in a moment, what it can do is then put location-based stuff in the advert to a certain extent, which can achieve some of that.

The other side of the coin is you can then, if you wanted to, create a number of different ad groups. So if you want to service different suburbs, you can get really granular as well and say this A group is only a 5-kilometer radius, and that way you can put in the word, for example, ‘Hollywood area plumbing.’

And any of the different keywords around anywhere in Hollywood, it just shows that. So you get really granular in the size of the groups and the actual words you put in the adverts to be very specific to those suburbs or areas. That’s a couple of ways I can think of off the top of my head to achieve those results.

Dom:                   Cool. It was more of a ‘can you do it’ rather than ‘how you would do it.’

Pete:                   Fair enough.

Dom:                   But it’s cool that the power is there that you can do it. And even just knowing that you can do that, I think, will maybe turn somebody on to AdWords that probably hadn’t thought about it before, because they didn’t see it was relevant necessarily to their service.

Pete:                   Yeah, because I think a lot of people when they hear about AdWords, if they’re not in that world, they think I don’t advertise my business on the internet to everybody. They don’t realize that you can get targeted to geographical areas. So it’s based on where the person is literally sitting when they are searching for your business.

But the next thing is that extension I spoke about: Google Places or Google Maps or Google Local, depending on where you look and what they’re calling it. Basically, that’s the map service of Google. I think everyone here has used Google to search for a location-based service. It might be ‘chemist Sunshine,’ or in this case, ‘landscaper New York City,’ which is probably an oxymoron because there are probably not many actual places in New York City you can do landscaping.

Dom:                   I wasn’t going to say that.

Pete:                   But people get the example. What happens is you’ll see in the results page of Google, a map with all the listings of locations and people who have little pins on the map saying this person’s based here, this person’s based here. Well, I think again, people are using that a lot more for searching for location-based services and products.

Obviously, having your business listed in Google Places is a huge one that everyone should do. It’s completely free, very easy to do. So it’s something someone should also check out as well.

Dom:                   That’s really important for people when they’re searching on their mobiles, isn’t it?

Pete:                   Absolutely. Yeah, that’s definitely a huge one.

Dom:                   That’s a huge amount of traffic that goes to that Google Local is people looking for things when they’re out and about, depending on the type of business. I think that’s quite relevant, right?

Pete:                   There’s a great service with some guys in Australia that I know and work with. They have 1-800 repairs and 1-800 cleaning. What their service is designed to do is they’ll go and do all the lead-generation stuff or the noise generation at least.

They advertise their services like, if you want a tradesman call 1-800 repairs and we’ll find you someone.” So they’ll go ahead and do all that due diligence. And then what they’ll do if you’re a trades person subscribed to their service, they’ll turn around to you and say, “Hey, Johnny.

We had an inquiry today for someone who can do some landscaping,” or “can fix your stairs that are broken,” or “the plumbing. Are you interested in that lead to quote?” And they’ll say yes and they’ll pay for the lead. What this is this is a business and a service. There’s plenty of them all around the world that will go out and get you qualified leads so the traffic generation’s done for you.

You can almost argue, depending on how you want to make your funnel, that that’s almost an opt-in as well. They can do it for you for a set fee, you just pay for the lead. It’s a sensational service, paying for leads and not having to worry about all that noise generation. Those services are definitely worth checking out as well is that lead generation companies that will just charge you for qualified lead generation.

Dom:                   That’s really powerful because that goes back to something we talked about on a previous episode about marketing a product. If you had a product you wanted to sell, would you start out, try to make your own shop just to sell your product, or would you go to another shop that’s already got the chain and distribution and everything there.

This is a similar thing, isn’t it? These guys at 1-800 repairs and 1-800 cleaning, they’re investing their money in huge advertising campaigns in the infrastructure to handle the calls and qualify and everything. So by the time the lead gets to you, it’s already qualified as you said, but it’s that other thing.

They’re out there in front of everybody, whatever they’re doing to market this thing, and generate the traffic. I would say it would save you a fortune because I don’t think you could reach the same level as an individual trades person that they can reach by applying all that effort to it.

Pete:                   Yeah. Like the AdWords, the places and services these guys have, I think, is for the lowest-hanging fruit that everyone should be doing. There are plenty of other ideas and ways to advertise your business as a tradesman to get the traffic, but I don’t want to labor the point too much. I wanted to just start this out.

Dom:                   There I go focusing on traffic like everybody else always does.

Pete:                   Well, it’s an important part of the function. If you don’t have any traffic, you can’t have any opt-ins or conversions or items per sale, or anything down that funnel. So it is the first thing you need to focus on. But it is only one of the seven areas that do drive the profit of your business.

So the next thing is opt-ins. And it comes down to a number of different ways that you can argue about opt-ins. If you’re running an AdWords campaign or even a Google Places campaign to a certain extent and you’re getting that traffic to come to your website, and the opt-in is always on calling up and saying, “Hey, Billy Bob can you come out and quote on doing some roof restoration for me?”

That’s your opt-in, seeing your marketing, responding to it by calling up and allowing you to come out and quote. For those scenarios, if you have a website, you want to be very clear about the objective, which is someone’s either A) pick up the phone and request a free quote or B) someone filling out an online form on the website at least saying, “This is my name.

This is my area. This is what I want to have done. Can you come and quote for me?” You want to make it very clear with very clear calls to action on these things. If you’re doing Yellow Pages advertising, again, it’s really important that it’s all benefit-driven with calls to action.

And realistically, as a traffic generation, to go back for a moment, Yellow Pages can still work, people. Don’t believe the hype. It can still work if you do it properly because there’s less noise in there because everyone’s dropping like flies. So if you’re in there, there’s definitely a huge part of every target market of people still going to Yellow Pages.

If you’re a trades person wanting to target a more mature demographic, by the way, the boom is in those demographic who don’t all use the internet, has the most disposable income going around these days. So it’s not a bad idea to work out where they are and how to get in front of them, and Yellow Pages is one of those ways.

You want to make sure that you have a clear understanding and a clear process of getting that opt-in. Getting people to willingly get you to come out and quote. And whether that is quoting over the phone, or going out and doing a live quote, that is the whole opt-in angle around that which you’ve got to be very clear on.

Dom:                   So I mean a clear call to action is one way to increase opt-ins. And it literally is a statement like ‘call this number,’ and ‘request a quote,’ which we’ve said before in the past and in various situations and in the consulting that we’ve done. The first thing we do if we look at someone’s website is say, what is the goal of this page?

What’s the goal of the website? What is an opt-in for you? And if it’s a phone call, then we strongly suggest that you put the phone number in big letters at the top of the page and write ‘phone is for’ and then tell them what to do.

Pete:                   Absolutely. The IT company that we use in our office for the telco business and the e-comm businesses; we’re in the process of implementing, I think it’s about a $45,000 new server. I was in the office last night with them until about 11:00 getting a lot of that stuff sorted out. But I had to make a phone call to them during the week and didn’t have any of their details handy.

So I went to their website. And their phone number is below the fold on the Contact Us page in size 12 font. That’s just infuriating that you’re going to make me click three times to contact you. I want to do business with you guys and they had the contract.

But even if I was a first-time prospect that stumbled across their website and wanted to make contact with them, I’d find it frustrating. I’ve got to spend 45 additional seconds, three clicks to figure out how to contact you. Isn’t the whole purpose of your website to get leads to call you? They didn’t have a quote request or any sort of form anywhere else on their website.

So clearly, the objective of that website was to get leads to call, but the way they do that was hidden. It’s moronic. It’s like saying I’m going to open a retail store and hide the cash register in the back corner behind all the muumuus. You can’t find it. It’s just ridiculous.

Dom:                   Well, absolutely. Although, when we were over in Florida we saw a retail store, a very well-known brand of clothing and finding the way in was a challenge. That was fascinating. But yeah, this is it. It is that thing. And when you talk there about the older more mature people, well there’s a group, they’re kind of bunched into groups.

There’s the people who have disposable income because they haven’t found the internet, and therefore they haven’t found eBay and things like that yet. There’s the gang that use things like Yellow Pages out of that. But then there’s the ‘just got online.’ So they got online.

My mom is in this crowd— they’ve mastered Google, they type it in, and then they sit there and stare at the screen because they literally don’t know what to do next. But if your website had the phone number, then they’d feel so much more comfortable and they’d pick you. It’s that simple. It’s these little things. And in the services industry, I think it’s more important than anywhere else.

Pete:                   So let’s not labor the opt-in point. There are plenty of other ways we’ve spoken of.

Dom:                   Surely.

Pete:                   We need to go on because there are another five levers we need to chat about and we want to make sure we can fit that into the episode. But there’s plenty of other times we’ve spoken about opt-ins and stuff on the show. The next one is conversions. Getting that person who has received that quote to buy from you.

This is a huge growth opportunity for almost every trades person I’ve ever worked with in my life. So many people come out with their old school notebook; they jot down their notes. Use that paper where you write it down on the back of the paper, it gives you a carbon copy. They rip it out and give that to you as a quote.

It’s just this handwritten thing of what the quote’s going to be for the work. And it’s what everyone else does. There’s nothing that sets you apart. One of the things that we did very early on in our telco business, which by any token you can argue that it’s a service-based business. We sell phone systems but we don’t manufacture them.

We just come in and fundamentally charge the client a fee for us to install it, program it, train them, support them. So you could very much argue it’s a service-based business. One of the very first things we did when we started to really explode that business around Australia was purely based on our quoting and our proposals.

All our competitors were doing black and white proposals with the client’s name, a list of all the parts, one line saying installation, and then a big black figure at the bottom which people had to pay. We came in, being non-phone system people that sell with a technical background, and did beautiful four or five-page proposals with big photos of the handsets, bullet points of what happens on the installation process, the benefits they’re going to get.

When we listed out what they got from a phone system perspective, we didn’t mention that it was an ATA4 card with a BRI7. We were saying stuff like it is a phone system equipped for four lines. It has the ability to have up to 12 handsets plugged into the system. We’re supplying you with six handsets with big photos. We made it very clear, easy and not scary for the prospect and the client.

And I think a lot of our tradespeople have that ability still in their industry to go in there with a nice, professional polo shirt on and take your shoes off at the front door and do a very nice presentation. And if you’re going out and doing those quotes to get that work, which most people have to do, you’re doing it in a much more professional and respectful manner.

And I think that, for everyone I’ve worked with and spoken to, have applied even just like a two or three-page very clear proposal. You can do that so well these days on iPad. You can have your iPad with you on the job and do it all on an iPad. There’s plenty of quotations services and plug-ins and tools that can do this quoting stuff for you very easily.

You can make a much more professional presentation. You can e-mail it from your iPad straightaway. Things like that can do a much better job in just increasing your conversion rate from opt-ins and quotes to customers by 10 fold not just 10%.

Dom:                   Absolutely. And that’s the thing. This kind of technology now, it’s not expensive. It’s not super mega customized or anything. It’s literally, if you have an iPad, go on the App Store and download the invoicing, quotation, whatever it is software. It’s going to be cheap and it’s away you go.

Pete:                   Absolutely.

Dom:                   And you’ll stand out. And standing out is what matters these days, right?

Pete:                   Yeah, and it is. It’s about standing out and being different and showing that you care. So there’s some very easy ways. Learning how to sell is something that we preach quite a bit on here. But so many trades persons, and this is a part of the problem with the industry; you go into a three-year apprenticeship and you come out, and you’re a mechanic or you’re a plumber or you’re a roof tiler or you’re a painter.

You have this skill set which is fantastic to do the trade, to do the mechanics. But you have no core business skills. Part of this you have to learn how to sell. Because at the end of the day, turning a prospect and an opt-in into a client through that conversion process is selling. You have to be able to go in there and future pace that conversation.

You have to go in there and work out what the objections are going to be and how serious they are. And part of this from the opt-ins scenario is over the phone, work out how serious this person is about renovating their house, doing that extension, landscaping that backyard.

Because you don’t want to go out there and be doing more and more quotes for more and more people who are just getting an idea and a feel and not in that buying cycle. So learning how to sell can give you that skill set.

Dom:                   Good tip, good tip. I don’t suppose there’s any one particular book or something that you could recommend people might what to look at to get an overview or an idea?

Pete:                   Spin Selling’s a great one. I think Influence by Cialdini is worth a read as well when you read it with the context of, I want to learn how I can apply this to selling. W.O.M.B.A.T. Selling’s another great one. There’s plenty of— Tom Hopkins’ stuff is historically in real estate.

But some of those basic fundamental stuff can still apply if you get that context. And I really do think it’s an ever growing and ever learning process of learning how to sell and learning how to communicate. You want to continually be doing that all the time.

Dom:                   You did make a good point that people are technically proficient at their craft or their trade when they’ve done their study and they’ve finished their apprenticeship, but so few people have this other training, the business level training. It’s very rarely part of what you’re taught to do.

I think more modern teaching is going that way now. People are taught the business. But anybody that’s already there now and in one of these businesses maybe doesn’t have that as part of their skill. They’ve maybe just kind of worked their way through it. So just taking that time to study these techniques can make a huge difference.

Pete:                   The business stuff is getting taught more, but it’s more about the debits and credits and the books side, the technical side of the business again, not the marketing side of the business, which is interesting. Moving on to the next lever. Let’s say for example, items per sale as the next one.

With this, people get very confused from a trades person perspective as well. How do I increase my items per sale because I’m doing a service? I’m charging for a service, so I can’t do two services. Well, there’s a number of ways you can look at doing increasing items per sale.

And one of them is doing your service and working out what supplementary products and services you can sell. So obviously, if you’re a landscaper it’s pretty easy to say, well I’ll come out and do your landscaping and your gardening, but let me try and sell you some plants as well. That’s an obvious way to increase the items per sale and per transactions for a trades person.

Again obviously, if you’re a roof tiler, there are ways if you want to extend your product line, start offering things like insulation in the roof and other supportive solutions. But what I suggest and talk most about when I consult with tradespeople and owners of franchises and businesses in that trade space, is looking at doing some unique things.

So rather than trying to increase your items per individual sale, look at doing bundle sales where you are pre-selling saying, “You can buy this service today for $300, or for $500 you can buy a coupon book that gets you 10 hours of my time.”

Now this job is going to take up six of those hours, but then you have four hours at a much more cost-effective solution for me to come back and do something more for you later or do something additional at the house. We can landscape your backyard, but we’ll also landscape your front yard a little bit,” and pre-selling that.

A friend of mine, and a client to a certain extent, had a business here in Australia who was doing that. They were a trades-based business. What they were doing there, their core focus was selling almost like coupon books of time, and if it were gone, pre-purchase almost like a maintenance contract or an insurance policy that would say you can pre-buy four hours of their time.

They will come out for an hour every time and that’s covered. You use one of those coupon things. I thought that was a very intelligent way and a very cool way for a service-based business to not only sell gift cards and gift vouchers because he found that the redemption quite a bit, the up-sell rate made it worth it.

But the redemption rate made it even more worth it because so many people didn’t go and redeem the rest of those coupons or the rest of that time they had pre-purchased. And obviously, it expired. It elapsed. And he kept the money and didn’t have to provide the service. But the client had that peace of mind.

They were buying peace of mind knowing that they wouldn’t have to pay for issues in the future if they had it. Everyone does that with insurance. Personally, I know in the telco space and a lot of other IT scenarios, people pay maintenance contracts where you pay a fee every single month beyond that.

So people are buying the service, installation of the product, whatever it might be, and also paying continually for maintenance and support around that, which a lot of other tradespeople can be doing. You can sell them landscaping and then also sell them three follow-up visits just to make sure it’s all there, and mow the lawn, or whatever it might be.

Dom:                   Cool. Cool.

Pete:                   Awesome. So which lever should we do next, mate? Should we do item value?

Dom:                   Yeah. I know what you’re going to say, so I’m interested to see if it’s anything different this time.

Pete:                   Besides just up your prices?

Dom:                   Yeah.

Pete:                   Well, upping your prices is one thing, but going in the way you’re going into your business right now. The way you’re going in and quoting right now. The way you’re going and doing and delivering your service right now. Looking and presenting the way you are. For a lot of tradesmen, upping your price is not a way to go because so many people buy on price because everybody looks the same.

But if you’re going in there with a more professional portfolio, a more professional quote, a more professional conversation, presentation, the way you look when you go and do that quote, 10% increase in prices can easily be justified. And clients will pay it all day long if you stand out as more professional, as more trusted, as more diligent, as more qualified, which you can easily do in your presentation during the traffic, the opt-in and the conversion phases.

A 10% increase can be justified without doing anything else except for just presenting better. So I do really believe in that. The other option as well is offering premium solutions. I’ve seen this work. It depends on the industry. But you can say, “I have an apprentice or a junior team member who can do what you want at this price. Or you can get one of our senior technicians or our senior service providers or our senior roofers or our senior plumbers to do the job and pay a 10% premium for their time.”

Give the client the choice. Some people will go, “Oh, look, it should be fine, it’s a simple job. I’ll pay for the apprentice. Not a problem.” So you can charge different rates. So you charge a premium. You don’t charge a discount for your apprentice. You charge a normal rate for the early people, the juniors; but you pay a premium for the senior people. Definitely one way of doing it which works exceptionally well.

Dom:                   I like that. Hairdressers do that all the time.

Pete:                   Yeah.

Dom:                   Would you like the senior stylist?

Pete:                   Yeah. And the whole swipe-and-deploy scenario here is it works in so many different scenarios. Again, financial planners, hairdressers. Even in that massage and sports physio space they do that as well. They have different people who charge more even within the same business. So you can offer that service as well.

But you can then also offer in your quoting, premium solutions. You can say, “We can do it with this grade material at this price,” or for this grade of material, you’ll do it at this price. You offer two options in your quotes. You show the benefits of why the premium service is worth looking at. You make it so powerful in the way you present that pricing that it makes sense to go with the premium.

To pay that extra 10% for all the different benefits and additions. So there are some easy ways that you can start charging more for your services and getting more revenue in the door per client, which what that particular lever is all about increasing. Because again remember what we’re trying to do across all these 7 Levers is just increase each one by 10%.

If you go and do AdWords advertising in your business right now, most likely for most businesses that I’ve worked with, who are just getting started or growing and even some senior businesses, you can get a 10% increase with just one quick three-hour implementation of AdWords.

By changing up your proposals which might take you a day or two to put together, a template and maybe outsource it to get it designed, that will increase your opt-ins and your conversions by 10%. All we’re looking for is very small increments of increases that when they all add up at the end of the day, will double the profit of your business.

Dom:                   Absolutely. Just one thing to come back to that increasing your prices, the inverse of increase your prices is the thing that we’re basically allergic to and we say to everybody, which is don’t automatically offer a discount.

And one of the things that you said there about the apprentice or the lower-grade technician can come in and do that job is a way of dealing with people who do ask for a discount. Or do ask for you to lower your price.

Pete:                   Yeah. Absolutely.

Dom:                   This is just a good tip. I do want to just bring that one up.

Pete:                   Cool. Awesome. So we’ve got traffic, opt-ins, conversions, items per sale, item value. The next one on our list as part of the 7 Levers is transactions per period. This is the amount of time people come and use your services over and over again. Again, depending on how your funnel works and what lever you want to put where and how you want to pull it, you could argue that some subscription service is an items per sale option versus a transactions per period.

You could say, depending on how you want to pull this, that I’m going to sell a subscription to people. If I’m going to come back and mow their lawn and landscape their garden every month for the next 12 months, then it’s a contract. And you could argue that is now 12 transactions. And this all comes down to how you want to mold the levers to your business.

This is a key high-level thing that was spoken about before in overview, 7 Levers episode here on PreneurCast. So you could argue that that is definitely one way of doing it. Obviously, follow-up marketing is a simple way of doing this. Postcard marketing, follow-up marketing.

A great idea you could be doing is if you are a landscaper or if you are a painter or if you’re a roofer, somebody that does something visual to a client’s property, for example, if you’re in that trade area; what you could be doing is standing at the front of the house as you leave, at the end of the job, taking a photo of how good the lawn and the house looks.

You know that that lawn is going to grow and it’s just inevitable that the weeds are going to get in there and things are going to change. What you can do is that 45, 60 days, 90 days later, using a service like Send Out Cards, send that client a photo of their house saying, “Hey Julie, thanks so much for letting us do your work last month.

It was such a pleasure. I’m glad the house came out looking like it does on the front of this postcard. If you ever just want us to come back and continue to maintain it and make it look like this all the time, just give us a call. We’ve got a 10% discount or a bonus for you,” whatever it might be. Very simple, non-threatening piece of marketing.

And someone walks out to their letter box, grabs that postcard out of the front of their letter box, looks at that photo and goes, “Damn, that house looks awesome,” turns around and starts to walk back into their house and realize that the weeds have grown. That the lawn’s there that’s getting a bit out of control now because they haven’t had time to maintain it, they’re going to go, “I want that look again.

I want that feeling again and that pride of having the best house on the street,” and they’ll call you straightaway. So that follow-up marketing is very important. Work out the service you offer, when is it time that it should be checked up. Dentists do this. I got a phone call this week from my dentist who I had some fillings and some stuff done.

They called me this week saying it’s time for a check-up. Do you want to book that in? Now I wouldn’t have practically called them if they didn’t call me but I said yes, let’s book it in. So if you practically follow these people up with postcard marketing or phone calls, whatever it might be, you will absolutely unequivocally get a 10% increase in conversion rate.

You just have to ask yourself the question, what is the next thing I can sell this client? Is it an additional service, a subsidiary service, or the same service again? So if you’re a painter, you can come back and sell them a different paint. We can come back and do your kitchen. We did the outside of your house last time.

Landscaping one is obvious. Plumbing’s a bit harder. Or electrical services are a bit harder. Maybe you can come in and do someone’s job to fix the power going to the air conditioner. That’s the job you’ve done as an electrician. When someone’s Googled you. Found your website. Called you up. You’ve gone and proposed really well. You’ve got the job.

You fixed their electrical work. You can follow up with an audit. You can say, “We’re doing an audit this quarter where we come in and check all your electricals to make sure there’s no chance of fire or anything like that as an idea. Working out what is that solution you can have.”

And that is what you need to go and market in some automated fashion whether it is diarized or an autoresponder through an e-mail service, or done through Send Out Cards at a particular date; working at some automated sequence to sell them again. So many tradespeople do a job and ignore that client and that prospect.

Dom:                   Yeah and it is. It’s all about this idea, really, transactions per period is most people go, they do whatever they were asked to do and they go away. You want to try and increase the number of times you do work for that client. Now you mentioned hairdressers and dentists and things like that.

One of the things that we said before in the 7 Levers and one of the most simple things is certainly for anybody who’s got any kind of things that they can return and do again for clients and that check list you just gave there. What is the next thing you could provide to them?

Is it the same service? Is it an auxiliary service? If you think your way through that, be ready when you complete the job to say would you like to book another whatever. A hairdresser will say, just before you leave, Would you like to book your next appointment?”

What’s wrong with a landscape gardener saying, “Would you like to book me to come back in six months and do a tidy up? Would you like me to do a winter tidy or a spring tidy?” You can do it there and then before you leave.

Pete:                   Yeah and I think someone like a computer repair company should be doing this as well. That’s a service-based solution. You can definitely class yourself as a trades person to a certain extent under that umbrella.

If you’re going to fix someone, you restore their hard drive or you do something for the computer, it’s an easy sale to say every three months let me come back for an hour and I’ll defrag and clean up your computer, and delete the trash and delete the old temp files, and make sure your computer’s running to get a little bit more life out of it. That’s an obvious and very easy up-sell.

You can be doing that stuff in an autoresponder series with not scaremonger marketing, that’s definitely not the term to use, but saying, e-mailing a newsletter every month saying, be aware of viruses this month. Or have you thought about defragging? Or have you thought about cleaning up your temp files or backing up?

Every month, you market to your list and your community and your past clients different things that you can do as a service. And then for a computer repair person, there’s plenty of things that you can be doing and setting up on a regular basis for your clients.

Dom:                   Absolutely.

Pete:                   And this brings us to the last lever which is margins. For a lot of tradespeople, their first reaction is, I can’t really affect my margins without increasing my product because I’m selling my labor. And absolutely, that is a concern. Now having the more apprentices and juniors on your team, which is where you pay their wage low and you sell their time high, is one way of increasing margins to be the slave labor to a certain extent.

But it’s one way of tweaking your margins. But very few, very few tradespeople who don’t on some level need some goods. Painters need paint. Concrete coverers need the chemicals to cover the concrete. Every trades person at some level needs their goods and services. Cleaners need chemicals obviously.

And one of the best things I’ve seen and I’ve spoken of this before on the podcast that can absolutely work for tradespeople if they look at it the right way and do it the right way is some sort of trade exchange. Like for example, Bartercard. You go and sell your excess time. So Friday afternoon, rather than knocking off at 3:30 and going to the pub, you do an extra hour and a half of work for a Bartercard client.

It’s time you wouldn’t have otherwise spent. You would have been spending it doing nothing because you weren’t flat out busy. You do that extra couple of jobs a week for Bartercard money. So it’s ‘additional business’ or free revenue, if you want to look at it that way like we spoke about and explained in a lot more context on that particular episode of the show.

You go out there and you do that extra business. You get the extra $200 of worth of trade that week. And then you look for a supplier of chemicals, or whatever goods you use for inputs for your service, and you spend that trade dollars there. You spend that $200 over there on that chemical.

So that’s $200 cash you would have to have spent that came in from the job on Wednesday at Julie’s house stays in your pocket, and the chemicals that you bought is being bought with that additional hour and a half time that you wouldn’t have otherwise had because you would have been at the pub because you didn’t have any cash work.

Bartercard got you that additional work. That’s $200 cash is now back in your pocket that you can spend on the family. It’s your $200 cash. It’s not your supplier’s. The supplier has taken Bartercard that extra time. And that is an absolute, unquestionable difference to the margins and bottom line of your business. So many people don’t think and consider Bartercard particularly in a service business as a very smart way to increase your margins very effectively.

Dom:                   Nice one. Like it. There’s lots of other things. Just consider for one second you don’t have consumables. I can’t believe it, but just in case. There’s always going to be something that you have purchase as a business expense. And there’s an opportunity in the Bartercard model to go and get that thing with the Bartercard trading model.

So yeah, using that down time or dead time or time you don’t have clients to build up your Bartercard balance is awesome. But it could be something as simple as having better business cards printed through a printer on Bartercard.

Pete:                   Yeah, absolutely.

Dom:                   That’s a business expense. Maybe it’s even having your vehicle serviced.

Pete:                   Any direct cost you have because that margins thing, as you’re saying there, Dom, is not just about direct margins; it’s also about overall profitability of the business.

Dom:                   That’s it. Yeah. Because so many people don’t see that as the bigger picture and it’s really important when we talk about this. And when we talk about the kind of foundational stuff of the 7 Levers, the margin isn’t just what your literal your margin on the sale that like if you were selling an item you would put an amount over the cost of the item.

It’s that overall profitability and effectiveness of your business, which you can address in a number of ways, which can include training your team. If you have got apprentices, improving their skill level can improve their efficiency and that is a profit center in your business. It’s improving your margins.

Pete:                   Yeah. And I had another idea around margins that I’ve completely forgotten. Oh, hang on, it’s come back to me. It’s all right. It’s come back. It’s definitely a good idea if it comes back. That’s my theory. If you forget it, it’s not a good idea. So it must be a good idea, guys, so take some notes. This is something we did in at the service side of our telco.

We have a lot of service work done around the country. So we have our technicians driving all across various cities around Australia doing service work. And one way we made everything more efficient, which at the end of the day directly affects the margins and the gross profitability of that person for the day, is we made sure we grouped our jobs by area and location.

For example, our technicians go to the north on Mondays, south on Tuesdays, east on Wednesdays, west on Thursdays. Now this has changed slightly, I don’t know exactly what days, the tech team manages all of that. But what that means is we’re no longer having all of this wastage time and costs for one technician to drive from one side of the city in the morning to a job on the north or vice versa.

Or if you’re a trades person, doing quoting on a Friday. So you hypothetically do northern suburbs Monday, southern suburbs Tuesday, east Wednesday, west Thursday, and then Friday is your quoting day. If you can structure your days a bit more effectively and efficiently, you get huge economies of scale. You can get more work done in that particular day, which at the end of the day means more profits for your business.

Dom:                   I love that. I remember you told me when we talked about this at another topic and you pointed that out, I thought that’s so logical. But it’s just great because especially the smaller businesses, you hear these people and you go to the pub at night and you’re like, “Man I had this one in the north this morning and then I was in the south this afternoon,” and so on.

And just it’s easy to get caught up in that and keep doing it. But if you can group these things together or look for other similar efficiencies in your business, especially if you’re having to move around or if you don’t deal with a particular type of thing. Yeah, that’s another way to address margins.

Pete:                   Yeah, absolutely. Those are seven different ways that people in that trade or service-based business can increase their profits. And hopefully, if you’re in a different niche, you start thinking about how you can apply some of these, what you’re doing and how that can affect your 7 Levers and increase the profitability of your business.

Dom:                   Absolutely. And just to reiterate, the 7 Levers is all about the seven areas of the business where if you just increase each one by 10%, you can double your profitability. That can be as simple as one more client inquiry a week, one more client converting to a sale per week, 10% more sale of goods or services, 10% more margin at the end of the business. Those little tiny changes all add up.

Pete:                   Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dom:                   Cool. Some great tips today. Yeah, I love doing these and I love seeing you respond to them when somebody comes in with a left-field inquiry. And you just pull it out and you change things around, and you come up with these new ideas.

You talk about stuff that you’re also doing in your real world businesses. Even though they’re like big, small or whatever. And we bring it all together. Yeah, another great episode and another great 7 Levers tips, in this case, for tradespeople.

Pete:                   Fantastic. Shall we wrap this week’s episode up? We’ll put a nice little bow on it and we’ll say thank you everyone again for listening to this show, and all the comments and support we get on iTunes. So please, if you do enjoy the show and have got something that you can value out of this, whether it’s more revenue, more time, more enjoyment out of your business, please let us know by going to iTunes and thanking us with a comment.

That is exactly how we want. We’re not charging people for the time we do here. It’s all about our ego and helping people with their businesses, so please give us a bit of a stroke by going to iTunes and leaving a comment.

Dom:                   Yeah, and if you’re enjoying these If I Was A… episodes, tell us first of all, if you’re in one of these businesses and we’ve helped you out. That would be great to know. But also, if you’ve got an idea for one that you’d like us to do. Another place you can go to, to leave the comment is PreneurMedia.tv, our website where all the episodes are stored.

You can get them there as well as on iTunes. You can download them or listen to them online, and you can leave the comment under each episode along with looking for the show notes with all the links to the things we talk about. Lots of ways to get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you. Love your feedback. And we’ll see you all next week.

Pete:                  See you guys!

Episode 090:
Investing in Yourself and Your Team

Dom Goucher:    Hi, and welcome to this episode of PreneurCast with me, Dom Goucher. Again, Pete, my co-host and partner in crime is still away looking after his new family. Thank you all for your kind words wishing them well. I’m going to be continuing my series on Foundations to get you heading in the right direction for the year. And this week I’m going to talk about investing in yourself and your team.

So, we’ve kind of covered this issue before in a previous episode. But in the online marketing space, people seem to have no problem investing in courses — courses about traffic, courses about conversion, courses about making videos, courses about copywriting — this, that and the other. But they do seem to have a problem investing directly in themselves and their team — certainly from a learning and personal growth point of view.

It’s not so bad in the offline world, but in both cases, as more and more people turn to entrepreneurialism, especially online where this promise of easy wealth seems to be escalating. As a way to achieve their dreams, there are potentially more people out there who have bypassed more traditional routes of going through the ranks and learning the ropes and learning about business.

And therefore they’re starting businesses without a full set of knowledge. Now we did talk about this in our show called Lazy Marketing. But at the bottom of it, to kind of summarize that show — marketing is marketing and business is business. Very little has changed in a couple of hundred years. And so you owe it to yourself to understand at least the basics of those topics. And that’s just one example of where you can invest in yourself and your knowledge and your skills to the benefit of you and your business.

Because the truth is, whether you’re an employee, or an employer, or a solo entrepreneur, you don’t just owe it to yourself. You need to invest in yourself to ensure your growth and the growth of your business. Whoever you are, your knowledge and your ability to apply that knowledge is your single most valuable asset in the modern economy and modern business. And similarly, the knowledge and skills of your team are a valuable asset too.

Now, I’m going to come back to the team issue. Let’s just focus on you as an individual right now. Now, we recently produced a course — Pete and I recently released a course in partnership with Rich Schefren, called Profit Hacks. And hopefully you’ve heard about it. But Profit Hacks is the antithesis — and there goes my big word for the day — it’s the antithesis of this rush of silver bullet courses that have been coming out since the dawn of time.

Seriously, there have always been ‘get rich quick’ courses, even before the internet. We’re just seeing more of them now. And thanks to the internet — or no thanks at all, we’re just seeing new versions of things. We’re seeing traffic this, instant that over the last few years.

And in Profit Hacks, we focused on improving effectiveness — your effectiveness and the effectiveness of your team. And yes, there were a bunch of quick wins in that course and they were based upon how Pete and I get through all our work in our businesses. Pete especially, who runs like five real-world businesses before he even started online activities. But there’s also a bunch of foundational stuff in that course about making your business and you more efficient.

Now, it’s in your best interest to develop your skills in whatever area you identify as the core of your business. We talked about Core vs. Mechanics in a couple of shows. And anything I talk about, by the way, I’m going to put links to those shows in the show notes. And so you can go back and listen in more detail. So I’m just going to skim over these topics.

We talked about identifying the core areas of your business. The areas where you have the most leverage — where your efforts get you the most results and the biggest return on investment. So it is in your best interest to develop your skills in those core areas. And in the other areas where there is what we might call mechanical areas, that’s where you need to start developing the skills of your team. Whether it’s hiring people with skills or training team members with those skills.

Over time you’ll identify team members that have the potential to complete more and more complex tasks, freeing you up to concentrate on more core tasks. I talked about this in a roundabout way in the last episode when I went over this idea.

That if you want to earn $25 per hour or more, you should be looking for places where you can pay someone less than $25 per hour. So you can spend all your available hours just working on stuff that is worth that $25 per hour. It’s the core principle of outsourcing or delegation, depending on how your business is setup.

Now, scaling up on core skills is the starting point. And let’s look at sort of those core skills. Let’s look at where you could scale up some of the more obvious areas. You could start looking at — and again, we mentioned this in our Lazy Marketing episode. You could look at reading business books — just one more business book a week.

Do you read one business book a week? You know, I do. Pete certainly does. Crikey, Pete probably reads two or three with his audiobook habit. Or go on a business course. Or get a business coach. But just scale up on the basic core tenets of business. It doesn’t have to be advanced business — just the basic, to make sure you’ve covered the basics.

Similarly, with marketing, look at different concepts behind marketing and branding and things like that. And I don’t mean go running off looking for how to market on Facebook, or how to market on Twitter, or how to market on YouTube. Yes, by all means — and in relation to a framework or some other, look into those sources of traffic.

But the core principles of marketing are the core principles of marketing. They’ve got nothing to do with the specifics of YouTube or Twitter. It’s actually the other way around. What people will tell you about marketing on Twitter or that people will tell you about marketing on YouTube — 90% of that is going to be the basic principles of marketing, which people overlook.

Now, if you want some ideas about business books and marketing books you can invest in and read, we talked in a previous show — one of the very early shows, actually, about Pete’s book list. The books that made the rounds of his bookshelf, the books that he rereads, the books that he recommends to most people. And that’s a great place to start. And you’ll recognize a lot of the authors on there that we talk about regularly throughout the show.

We also talked a couple shows back about Approaching a Mentor. A mentor is a great way to get business coaching of sorts. Learning from an expert, learning from somebody who has already achieved the skills, and exhibits the skills that you want to get for yourself.

We also talked a long time ago about Masterminds. About grouping together with other people who are similar to yourself — or they’re entrepreneurs or business owners, and just exchanging ideas and getting a bit of accountability. That’s another great way of scaling up and picking up tips and knowledge.

Another area — and again, this was what I talked about in the previous show in this series — is time management. There’s a lot you can do about time management, project management to make yourself more efficient. And there’s a huge section of the Profit Hacks course was around making yourself more efficient.

But there are some basic skills that you can also enhance in yourself to make yourself more efficient. One of the best skills I ever started to learn was speed reading. Being able to scan text and get high levels of retention from that text. So it’s not just about reading at speed, but it’s also about note-taking and getting the most out of the information that you’re consuming wherever it is — whether it’s online or in a book, or whatever it is.

Another thing that is an excellent skill to have if you produce a lot of content is typing skills. I have developed my typing skill over time. I used to be a hunt and peck typist. And trust me, it’s painful to watch a hunt and peck typist once you can actually type. I’m not a touch typist by any stretch of the imagination, but I can type with at least three of the four fingers on both hands which has improved my typing speed to no end.

And again, just responding to e-mails. There’s lots of tricks that Pete and I can teach you with extra software you can add to your computer to really speed things up. You could dictate, you could do this, you could do that. But at the end of the day, typing is actually a big part of what we do every day. If it’s a big part of what you do, you owe it to yourself to enhance the skill.

A more general note about using computers is really learning about the software that you use. Making sure you’re using that software. Or making sure you’re aware of the software that can help you, first and foremost. Second, that you’re aware of what it can do.

I remember I’ve had Evernote installed on my machine now for over three years. It’s only in the last, say, six months that I’ve really used it — that I’ve really learned what it can do to help me out. And I’ve really started to use it. That software was installed — I read an article about it and so I said, ooh, this is great! Ooh! And I installed it. But I didn’t learn how to use it. I didn’t spend the time to learn how to use it.

There’s lots of software that we use every day. Even if all you use in your day to day business is something like Gmail. Pete and I love Gmail. Gmail’s an incredibly powerful tool with all of its labels and its rules for automatically filtering and sorting information for you. There’s so much to learn about that.

I don’t mean go off and learn loads and spend hours learning how to use something like, say, Photoshop. It’s highly unlikely that most of us need to know how to use that software. Because usually, it’s probably cheaper and more efficient for us to outsource the creation of graphics.

But certainly, tools — organizational tools or day to day business tools — it’s definitely worth learning how to use them more efficiently. And learning about the tools that will make us more efficient.

Another thing that is a big part of online business, certainly, but a lot of business, is copywriting. Now, copywriting is one of those skills. I did mention a raft copywriting courses at the beginning of the show.

But copywriting actually is a very, very, very important skill. The better a writer you are, the better a speaker you are, the better communicator you are, the more efficient you are at producing any kind of content. Whether it’s an e-mail in response to a customer inquiry or whether it’s an entire series of e-mails that you put into your autoresponder so that your system is set up and ready to roll for the next customer who joins your list.

Copywriting is a phenomenally powerful, useful skill. And there’s great courses and books. Because, again, like business skills and marketing skills, copywriting has been around for many, many, many years. There are books that come from the 1920s that modern copywriters still rely on. And again, go back and have a look at Pete’s book list for some of those recommendations.

And leading on from copywriting is speaking. That’s another great skill. Public speaking is a great thing that you can scale up on — a great area to investigate. Whether you plan to stand up on stage, or you just want to speak more eloquently at meetings.

Or whether you want to present yourself and your business better on video, which is obviously a very popular thing and something that I’m experienced in. Or, you want to produce podcasts like Pete and I. Then getting comfortable speaking — public speaking, or just reading things out in a more fluid manner — is a great skill to have.

Another skill that is becoming more and more popular and is really coming into the public eye at the moment, but again one of those things that’s overlooked by a lot of people, is coaching and consulting. Coaching is kind of a misunderstood, not understood concept. And consulting is something that some people run away from.

But coaching in its simplest form — if you already manage a team of people, having the skills to be able to work with that team of people and bring them to their fullest potential is incredibly valuable to your business. You can create an entire business on coaching, as many people are doing now. Just like they’ve done in the past on — in consulting. But coaching is an incredibly powerful, useful skill in business.

So there’s just a quick few ideas of areas, of skills you may not have thought about. But that will really improve the efficiency as your efficiency in whatever aspect you’re in business. Whether you’re an employee, an employer, or business owner, solo entrepreneur — all those things will make a huge difference to your efficiency.

A huge point and something that Pete and I have talked around a lot; you may have picked up on this through our little chats between myself and Pete. One of the most important things that you can do to improve your own efficiency is to look after for your personal health.

Now, I spoke in this valuing in Valuing Your Time show last week. I spoke about making sure that you take time for yourself and your family. And that’s exactly what Pete’s doing right now. But it is vital that you look after yourself, that you stay healthy. Because one of the biggest problems for, as I termed it last show, ‘knowledge workers,’ is that we are using our brains.

We’re not using our bodies. We can really become quite sedentary and it can sneak up on you. That you don’t have the energy to complete the task. You don’t have the focus. And energy and focus comes from fitness, physical fitness. So I strongly recommend that you take time and learn about just basic nutrition and health, and look after yourself.

I’ve just given you a huge list of things that you can go away and do. And so, what I’ve given you there is a problem. How do you fit it all in? Well, that’s why we learn about time management and project management, which I recommended earlier in the episode you really should look into and learn a little bit about.

Of course, there’s all the other tips that Pete and I come up with. Things like listening to audiobooks on Audible.com. Don’t forget — you can get a free trial of Audible.com, which includes a free book. Any of the books from Pete’s reading list, for example, you can get on Audible.

If you go to AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast, you can sign up for a free trial for Audible. Wholly recommend that. That’s how I get through so many books, just putting them on my iPod and then going and doing some exercise. So I’m doing two things at once, which is great.

Another way that you could invest in yourself — and this is again something that’s quite easily overlooked — is investing in your environment, your working environment. And the first way that you can invest in that working environment is to invest in the equipment that you spend all day with. One of the things that people overlook in their equipment is the chair that they sit at and the desk that they sit at.

Something that’s become very popular in certain circles are standing desks — desks that you stand at. There’s a lot of studies, scientific studies that say that standing is better for you than sitting for long periods of time, and at least alternating between the two. There are desks out there that you can get now that are motorized that you can raise up when you want to stand and you can lower back down when you want to sit. So you can choose to alternate.

But it’s definitely worth looking at. If you do sit for long periods of time, then you really should consider investing in a proper chair to give you proper support. Using a chair out of your kitchen is fine for now, but really it should be high on your list as something to invest in. Otherwise, you will, again, cause yourself health difficulties.

And something I’ve mentioned in kind of asides again, as we’ve gone through, one of the things that made a huge difference in my productivity, for an incredibly small investment of money, was a second monitor. A second screen that plugs into my main computer that I have at the side so that I can have more information available to me.

Anyone that deals with information has to do analysis of information or collation of information, or just planning. Being able to spread that information out across a wider area, just like you would if you were using a regular table, can make a huge difference to your productivity.

And I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t say get a Mac. Because, as you know, Pete and I both genuinely believe they are the best tool for certain kinds of business and content producing. But I’m going to leave it at that.

So that was a kind of a long segment about investing in yourself and different ways you can invest in yourself, look after yourself, and basically create some personal growth. But the other part of this episode is about investing in your team. Most people see investing in your team as training them.

The most common response Pete and I get when we talk about training your team goes like this. I wish I could do Pete’s voice, because Pete does this best. Because all we hear is, what happens if I train my team members and then they leave? And Pete’s response and my response is always the same, which is, what happens if you don’t train your team members and they stay?

Put simply, the more skilled and effective your team, the faster they can work and the less management they need. But the inverse is also true. Unskilled and untrained workers are a drain on your time, effort and energy. They take more time, effort and energy to manage. So you owe it to yourself to train your team.

Also, if your business is delivering services, the more your team can get done, the more of those services you can sell. The more advanced skills that they have, the higher price you can charge for more exclusive products. So, again, you owe it to yourself to train your team.

Now, Pete and I have possibly a different view on hiring a team. Because Pete and I both agree that it is better and more cost effective to hire for attitude and train for skill. If you go out and you try and hire people with the skills you want, one, it’s going to be difficult to find somebody with all the skills you want. And two, it’s going to be expensive. The more advanced skill set these people have, the more they’re going to charge.

It’s that simple. And there are times when you want a one-off job, what Pete and I call out-tasking. If you want a one-off job, fine. Go look for somebody with the exact skill you need, and go and pay them the going rate. Because you’re going to have that job done once, and you want it done well. Something like a logo design, or a one-off website design, or something like that.

But if you’re going to want somebody to work for you as an outsourcer, someone that’s going to become part of your regular team, then you’re looking for somebody with the right attitude. The right attitude towards work, the right attention to detail, and those basic skills. And you can train them to do things like maintain your website, edit and produce your podcast and upload it to the blog, etcetera.

One of the things you can do when scaling up your team is to start simple with a double win. This is something that I do a lot, which is that I get my team members to watch courses that I’m interested in. This does two things, because I get them to summarize it for me. The first thing is it gives them a new perspective, some new knowledge on something. But also, it saves me the time of watching the course and synthesizing it into notes.

I get my team to produce the notes, and I go through the notes. If I find something that I think I really need to see the entire of this video, or listen to the entire of this audio, fine. I know where to go. I know exactly which video to go to, and I can go and watch that one video or that group of videos. But this saves me a phenomenal amount of time and also skills up my team.

The other thing that we recommend is that you ask your team. You ask your team what skills they feel they need, what training they feel they need, or what they would like to learn about. Because if somebody’s interested in something, that’s a great opportunity to give them a skill. And to build some rapport and build some team spirit within your team. Now, of course, all of this presupposes that you have a team.

If you don’t have a team or if you’ve never outsourced anything, then the best investment you can make in yourself is to start doing that. Don’t go crazy and hire a full-time personal assistant tomorrow morning. In fact, we recommend you don’t hire a full-time anything to start with. This is a really important point. You need to start small and simple. That’s really the biggest tip we can give you.

Although there are a lot more tips and tricks from myself and Pete — the master of outsourcing in our outsourcing episodes. But you need to think about a small, simple task that you can easily define that you can then find someone to carry out for you. And work your way up. You’re looking for one-off tasks, simple things that need doing that either you don’t have the skill or the time to do.

And go and find someone to do those things. Like I said in a previous Foundations episode about valuing your time, if you want to earn that $25 per hour or whatever it is that you value your time at — because you need to value your time, then make sure you are only doing $25-per-hour tasks.

In fact, the best way to do that is to find someone else to do the other tasks that you need to get done for less than $25 per hour. Either by delegating them to an existing team member, or outsourcing them. It’s this idea that every hour that you spend needs to be focused on the core of your business — that core versus mechanics. It needs to be focused on the thing that earns you the most money or has the most direct effect on the profit of your business.

So if you’re doing things that you could pay somebody $10 an hour, then you can focus another hour on making $25. So even if that’s all that happens — you pay somebody $10 an hour, you earn another $25 an hour — you’re still $15 better off. It’s quite possible that job gets done quicker. And it certainly is one less menial thing or low-grade thing that you’re no longer doing and have to worry about.

You see, doing this is one of the best investments you can make in yourself. Having a team is one of the best investments you can make in yourself. You will find that the more you invest in your team — whether investing directly in creating a team if you don’t have one right now, or investing in improving the skills of your existing team, the more time you have to invest in yourself.

The more resources you have to invest in yourself to focus on the core tasks of your business, or to learn new skills — some of those skills I’ve already gone through in the beginning of this episode. Or just to have more free time. It’s a very, very simple idea, but it does bear thinking about.

As I said, if you invest in the skills of your team, they require less management, which requires less effort on your part. It also means that they can take on more tasks, which means that they can take those tasks from you, which gives you that time back to either invest it directly in your business doing more of the high-dollar per hour tasks, or doing more of the core tasks that improve your business. Or you can just have more free time and invest that in growing your skill base.

As I said about growing your skill base, every improvement you make in your abilities will directly improve your business. So, this episode, like the others in the series, was shorter than usual. But I’ve covered a huge number of ideas — both for investing in yourself and investing in your team to improve the efficiency and profitability of your business.

Hopefully, this was food for thought and the series has given you a few action items to set you on the road to a more profitable business this year. As I said, covered a lot of information and a lot of it, we’ve already covered in far more detail in previous episodes. I’ll put a bunch of links in the show notes to those previous shows and anything else I talk about, as we always do for every episode so that you can go back and listen to all the shows where Pete and I talk about this stuff in more detail.

Thank you for listening, as always. And, as always, we would love your feedback. We love the feedback from the Preneur Community. We do read and listen to everything. We take it on board and we include it in the shows. Or we will respond directly, as anyone who has contacted us will know.

Do let us know what you think of the show. Whether you are a new listener or a long-time member of the Preneur Community, we want to hear from you. You can visit PreneurMedia.tv to leave a comment on any of the shows. You can also see and listen to every past episode. You can read the show notes there and also find transcripts and other resources.

If you do enjoy the show, then we ask you to pop over to the iTunes Store. And give us a rating and a comment. That helps us spread the word, reach more people and help them improve their business. See you in the next episode.

Episode 089:
Valuing Your Time

Dom Goucher:    Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of PreneurCast. I hope you didn’t miss us too much now that we’re at an every other week frequency. It’s another show with just me. Pete is still away. And I’m going to be continuing my series on Foundations to get you heading in the right direction for this year. This week I’m going to be talking about valuing your time, which is a slightly different take on time management.

As you may have noticed, this little series is a little shorter episodes, mainly because there’s just one of me. But hopefully, they’re packed with action items and things that make you think so you can use the time between the shows to go away and implement some of this stuff. Now, big news, congratulations to Pete and his lovely wife Fleur. Their baby was born this week.

Again, Pete is still away for a little while longer, but he’ll be back with us soon. So on to our main topic for this week, which is valuing your time. Time is a resource just like any business resource. But time is an absolutely and definitely finite resource. We only have a certain amount of it. I spent a bit of time over the Christmas break, kind of going over some of Brian Tracy’s material.

I talked about Brian Tracy in last week’s show. And one of the things Brian Tracy talks about in his time management material is first of all, that we don’t get any more time. We only have a certain amount and it is perishable. If you don’t use it, it’s gone. So we have to be careful how we use our time.

So as I said in the introduction, this is a new take on time management that I want to talk to you about, which is looking at time as a resource just like staff or any other business asset. And looking at the importance of how you use your time. One of the other things that Brian Tracy and many, many, many, many other people who talk about time management say is you can’t actually manage time.

You can only manage how you use it and what you do with it. And that’s really, really important. So you need to make sure you’re using your time effectively and make sure you’re getting a return on your investment. I’m going to break the episode down into two parts really. First of all, it’s about using your time effectively.

And the second is about getting a return on your investment, which may mean being paid accordingly for your time. We raise it in the 7 Levers of Business in terms of if you are trading time for money, then you should make sure you’re trading the right amount. But very few people actually really review how much they’re being paid and how much they are paying.

So I’m going to look at that towards the end of the show. But first things first, I said you can’t manage time. You can only manage what you do with it. And this is something again, over the Christmas break that somebody, a friend of mine, flagged to me. And I’ve started to do this because it’s a very, very powerful exercise.

As we always say, you can’t manage what you don’t measure or what we measure gets managed, whichever way around you want to look at it. One of the things I suggest everybody does, if you don’t already do this, is to track your time. Track how you’re using your time throughout your day. And track it in 15-minute windows.

Now if you don’t use any other time management, time control system then 15-minute windows is a reasonably frequent block of time to see what you’re doing. Just start the day, get a lined pad, write the time out in 15-minute intervals, or write it out every four lines in an hour interval if you want to save yourself some time setting the sheet up.

Keep that pad with you and whatever it is that you’re doing, starting at the beginning of your work day if you want to just track your work time. But I would track from when you get up to when you go to bed for a couple of days. Just track every 15 minutes and what you do. If you’re distracted, if you’re looking on Amazon, or reading the funny comics, or on Facebook, or watching TV, or whatever it is, just track what you do.

What most of you will find is that one, you get distracted quite a lot. I know it’s something that I found on occasion that I was getting distracted quite a lot. And two, it will highlight to you where your time is being spent, what kind of tasks. In the past, Pete and I have talked about core versus mechanics.

Tasks in your business where only you can do them; and they are tasks that are moving your business forward, driving profits, increasing effectiveness, etcetera, etcetera. They are core tasks. Tasks that someone else could do or that aren’t moving your business forward or driving your profits, those are most likely to be mechanical tasks.

Now some of those tasks that are important in your business: building clients, dealing with support e-mails, etcetera, they are important to your business, but they can be done by somebody else. They’re not necessarily core tasks to you. They may be core to the business, but they’re not core to you.

Tracking everything by 15 minutes gives you a reasonably granular look at your day. It gives you a reasonably detailed look at what you’re doing and what you have done. And it’s quite important to be granular because most of us can pass an hour and only remember doing one particular thing. I was writing an article, or I was making notes for that video, or I was writing up a proposal for that client, whatever it might be.

But if you’re tracking it at 15 minutes, you might realize that you weren’t just doing that for the whole hour. That’s why we go for the slightly more granular tracking. And so when you’ve got your list of these tasks, look at it against the idea of core versus mechanics.

Look to see how much of your time is spent on core activities, because one of the things that you’ll hear a lot is this idea of the 80-20 rule. This idea that 20% of the things that you do in any given day go towards 80% of your profits or 80% of your results. And this rule appears everywhere and people talk about it a lot.

But it’s that 20% of things that you do, that core activity that you do, that will make the difference to your business. You need to be on the lookout for that. There’s a couple of ways of keeping an eye on this that are maybe a little bit easier than the 15-minute tracking if you’re not bothered about that. One of them is something Pete found actually from a guy called David Seah.

I won’t bother trying to spell that or say that again and insult the guy by saying his name wrong. I’ll put a link in the show notes. But he has a great series of tracking documents that you can just print out. One of those could be used for tracking core versus mechanics. He calls it high-value to low-value tasks.

And he gets you to score the task against how much value there is and then gets you to track how much time you spend on those tasks. So that’s another way to track this information. But whatever you do, just keep an eye for a couple of days on how you spend your time. Another way to break this down is to look at the tasks before you start.

Look at how important they are and whether they need to be done, whether you need to do them, or whether they even need to be done at all. One of the things I talked about last week in terms of determination versus discipline was this idea that the biggest waste of time and energy is to perfectly complete a task that did not even need doing.

These are one of the greatest ways to save time and organize your time better is to look for those tasks. A great model again from Brian Tracy is this idea of the ABCDE [Method] model. And the way that he breaks down his tasks, anything that he’s been given to do is to have an A task and a B task.

The A tasks are the things that need to be done now, that you need to do as soon as possible, that will make the biggest impact on your business. The B tasks are pretty much everything else. Things that will wait a little bit longer that you can do later. He sometimes classifies those as A’s are urgent and important and B’s are important but not urgent.

C class tasks, in this case he uses C for could do. They are things that you could do, but you don’t really need to. So if you don’t do them, nothing will particularly go wrong. That’s things like having a chat with somebody, for example. Going out for lunch, etcetera. D tasks are tasks you can delegate. And if you find a D task, then you should do everything you can to get rid of that task and give it to somebody else.

E tasks are tasks to eliminate. Those are the ones you really need to look out for. Do they even need doing? Do you actually really need to read that funny post on Facebook? Do you need to read that article in that magazine? Do you need to read that advert? Do you need to go look for something online, etcetera.

So if you start your day by looking at your A, B, C, D, E task breakdown and then allocate those tasks, Brian Tracy also says you should always finish your A tasks first. Start with your A tasks and finish those first. Never start on a B task until you’ve done your A tasks.

If you start your day with your A, B, C, D, E categorization, and then track your day against A) whether you did those tasks, or B) how you spent your time in those 15 minute blocks just to see if there’s places where you’re getting distracted, you’re not focusing, and so on and so on.

Now I know people that will go through this exercise and one of two things will happen. The first and very common thing is that as you go through your day, you started your day with so many tasks and you categorize them A, B, C, D, E, but new tasks arrive. And one of the ways that I certainly deal with new tasks, and a lot of people do that, is that they have a notepad open.

That might be a text file, which is something I think Pete uses. But I actually use a physical piece of paper, a notepad on my desk. Anything that comes in that is going to distract me, that is going to require my attention at some point, a new task or whatever it might be; I write it down.

I write it down so it doesn’t get lost, but I also write it down because there’s no way I’m going to do it there and then. I’m not going to let it interrupt me and stop me from completing my A task. I’m going to write it down, and then when I take my next break when the A task is complete, that’s when I look at that list. And I usually will just add that list into my task management system which at the moment is Evernote.

Pete, as you know, uses OmniFocus on the Mac. But Evernote is rocking it for me at the moment. I make a note in my Evernote and scratch it off my paper list. And I carry on with my day until I get around to that task having allocated and prioritized it, if necessary.

So that’s the first thing that happens to people is that they have this new task problem. What do I do? A new task comes in and interrupts me. Well, just make a note and carry on. If anybody has ever tried meditation, it’s a little bit like the advice that they give you with meditation.

When a thought appears to you, you acknowledge it and then you let it pass. You don’t examine it. So that’s getting a little bit deep into another topic, but it’s a really powerful technique. Having this piece of paper, having somewhere you write down the things that other people have asked you to do.

And obviously, if you’re finding that you’re distracted throughout the day, you need to do things like turn off notifications. Turn off your e-mail. Things like that, things that we’ve talked about many, many, many times. But the other thing that a lot of people find is that they master this idea of prioritizing their tasks.

They use whatever prioritizing system they want, whether it’s the A, B, C, D, E, whether they use their OmniFocus, whether they use Getting Things Done, whatever they use. And they find that they are super efficient and they’re not getting distracted. But they get to the end of the day and they’re just not clearing their task list.

And that is where really valuing your time comes in. Because if you properly value your time, then you choose more carefully the things that you do with it and how you use it. So the first way is to find more time in the day. To make more time is to be really, really brutal about delegation and elimination. Look for those tasks you definitely need to do, definitely don’t need to do.

Look for the ones that nobody needs to do and look for the ones you need to delegate and get those out. But if you really do have too many tasks to do in a time that you have, and one of the reasons for this could be that you have a day job and you’re trying to start up a business, which is a very common situation.

Or, and I talked again about this briefly in the previous show, you’re self-employed, but you never seem to find the time to do those tasks like marketing, prospecting for new clients, generating marketing materials, whatever it might be. If the basics of your business take up the majority of your day, getting those extra tasks done can be quite difficult.

Let’s look at some ways of making more time for you to do things. The first one and this is something that I’ve been experimenting with in this New Year, has been to go to bed a little bit earlier and get up a little bit earlier. The reason for that is that I work best in the morning. That’s something I’m going to talk to you about in a minute.

But some people work better in the evenings. You need to find that out. But let’s look at going to bed earlier and getting up earlier. Me, I become less and less effective as the day wears on. By say 10:00 at night, not that I want to be working at 10:00 at night, but it would be unwise, as they say, for me to handle heavy machinery after 10:00 at night.

It’s actually quite easy for me to go to bed a little bit earlier and wake up maybe an hour earlier each day, and go through, have my breakfast. Do some exercises. And then before I would normally start work, I have maybe an extra hour. And suddenly, I have an extra hour in the day.

And I have an extra hour when actually, there’s no one around. There’s no one expecting me to be online. There’s no one expecting phone calls. There’s no one expecting anything. This is a great time to create content. I know a lot of people that are starting to do this and are finding it’s really helpful. Finding this time, when no one else is around, to create content.

Sometimes, this creates problems. One of them is that if you have a busy morning schedule, especially if it’s to go say, get ready and go to your day job, or go and just get to the office, then sometimes what happens is that schedule expands to fill the time that you’ve just created. So you create an extra half an hour or extra hour in the day in the morning and yet you still end up doing the same things.

One way to address that is to deal with some of those tasks the night before. One thing that I do is that I make sure that everything for the next day is ready the night before. That’s a task that I can do in an evening. It’s not a particularly difficult task making sure that my clothing for my exercise routine is out, my trainers are ready.

Making sure I’ve got my audiobook loaded on my iPod ready to go. Things like that. Those are things that you can just while an evening away doing and making sure they’re in place so that when you get up, you can get up and get on. So that addresses that issue.

Another issue is this idea of people who say, because one of the standard pieces of advice for focus, getting things done, is when you get in the office or wherever first thing in the morning, don’t start your e-mail. Don’t open your e-mail as the first thing you do. And a lot of people will say, “But it’s my job.

I’m expected to do that. There are customer support issues,” blah, blah, blah, dah, dah, dah. Okay. You’re expected to get in or to do whatever it is at a certain time. If you are ready to go an hour before that time, no one’s expecting you to do that thing until that time. So you have this extra hour.

And that ‘read your e-mail first thing in the morning’ was something that I was very, very guilty of. It was the first thing I did. I was really terrible, I would do it before breakfast because I have an internet connection at home and I don’t even need to go into the office. I can fire up my iPad or fire up whatever it is, and I can see my e-mail.

But it really messes your head up to look at your e-mail first thing in the morning. So if there’s some big task that you’re trying to achieve, this extra hour, and really, really allocating it and saying look, this is my time is a great way to deal with that and still feel like you’re meeting your responsibilities in your business.

The other thing, I kind of talked about this as I started that point was, to find out what your optimum time is to do things, because if you do things at the optimum time then you’re more efficient. You’re more focused and you can get them done quicker and easier. You’ll find you’ll get more done.

My time in the morning is my most effective time. I get two or three times the amount of work done in the morning than I do throughout the rest of day. Because no matter how disciplined you are and no matter what you do, once everybody else starts work around you or once everybody else wakes up around you, there’s going to be interruptions and distractions.

You’re going to have to go out and see clients. You’re going to have to make phone calls, respond to e-mails and things like that. So this time outside of that time can be your most effective time. But you need to find out which it is. Some people are night owls. I have a number of clients in Australia who work into the middle of the night. That’s their time.

They like to do it, which is fine for me because it means I can talk to them at a reasonable hour of my day because they’re still awake. I personally can’t do it. If I stay up too late, that’s it. I become useless at that point and I also become useless the next day. And I’ve found over time that getting up early is the time for me. But find out when that time is for you and then allocate your work to those time slots.

And as I also said, prepare ahead of time. If the things you need to do a task are there ready when you’re ready to do that task, you’re using that time only to do the task, not to prepare for it. One of the great times to prepare to do something is the night before. Making sure that all of your notes are up to date.

If you’re going to record a video, for example, or a podcast, then the night before is a great time to just go over your notes for that video, or go over your script, go over the notes for the podcast. Maybe even review support e-mails that you’re going to have to answer in the morning if that’s what you’re going to do.

Or look through forums and mark up the posts that you’re going to respond to and make notes. Things like that. Just get it all ready ahead of time so that you can apply that focus. Now this is something that comes back to something that Pete and I have talked about a lot, which is the idea of core focus time or critical focus time depending on when you want to talk about.

We call it core focus time because it’s focusing on those core tasks, the things that are going to move your business forward. But one of the things that doesn’t always get talked about is how you actually get the tasks lined up, get ready so that you’re using that time most effectively. The idea behind core focus time is that you allocate blocks of 25 minutes and you work solidly on a task.

One of the things I know a lot of people have done when they first start doing this is they spend the first 25 minutes getting ready to do the task. Well, that’s not a good use of core focus time. If you have one hour in the morning before everything else that you think that you’re going to motor through a bunch of forum posts for example, then the best thing you can do to make that time effective is the night before, line up those forum posts.

Make a note of links to the forum post in a text document or in Evernote, or something like that, so you can literally just crank down them. Click on the link. Go to it and answer it. Maybe even think about what your answer might be or the key bullet points of what you want to respond with.

So when you wake up in the morning and you’re fresh and you’re ready to go, you can just crank down that list. You can get 20 or 30 forum posts out in an hour blocking your time out that way. But if you were to use your core focus time to find those posts in the first place, well, then you could spend an hour and find three.

Some of you may have come across Pete’s method of dealing with this which is that he actually outsources the finding of those posts and the building of a set of links to them to his team. And they send him an e-mail. He literally just opens the e-mail and cranks down it that way, which is another way of preparing ahead of time, getting somebody else to do the preparation for you.

But that can definitely make more time for you. Anything like that, either do it outside of your optimum time like the night before, or get somebody else to do that prep for you. And one of the things that it’s really, really, really important to do in terms of handling your time, working with your time more effectively, is that you need to schedule down time.

In the last show, I talked about determination versus discipline. And I talked about the dark side of determination which can cause burn out because you are working and working and working because you can. And very often you don’t feel it until it hits you and then you’ve worked too much for too long without enough rest because you can’t keep going.

You have all the energy. You do feel like you can go on forever and one day, you will just stop. And so it’s really important. And this is more so for people in industries that we call knowledge working. So people that are working to create information products, people who are designers, people who depend upon what’s in their head to get their job done, which is becoming more and more common these days as a job.

Because it’s easy to spot when your body’s tired, but it’s not so easy to spot when your brain is tired. And your brain needs serious recovery time. It uses up a phenomenal amount of energy from your body and uses that energy up almost invisibly. You don’t notice it. You don’t feel it. It doesn’t make you feel hungry. It can make you feel slightly tired and slightly blurry, but it’s not something that lots of people are aware of and notice.

One way to handle that down time and make sure you take it because you need it, is to put it in your calendar 90 days out. Some people say you should take four days every 90 days, and I would agree. I would agree that you do need some extended breaks. I have a policy personally of stopping on Friday afternoon and not doing anything on Friday afternoon, all day Saturday until Sunday afternoon.

So I’m effectively taking two whole days off. And I find that works for me and keeps me refreshed and keeps me going. But even at that, I still need to take extended breaks. One of the best ways to make sure that you take that break, whether it’s an extra day or whether it is just a long weekend or even just a complete weekend if you’re even struggling with that, is to put it in your calendar 90 days out.

Ninety days from now, marking your calendar, I’m taking a break. Because if it’s 90 days out there is absolutely nothing that can get in the way or needs to get in the way. There’s nothing at all that you can’t adjust with 90 days warning.

So clients come to you and say “hey, I need this doing, when are you free?” You can easily say, not then. It’s that simple. Just so that’s the top tip, put it in your calendar 90 days from now that you’re going to take some time off. And when you do take that time off, take the time off.

Again, 90 days is enough time for everybody to cope with the idea that you’re not going to respond to your e-mail on a Sunday afternoon as some of you do. Ninety days is enough warning for everybody that you’re not going to answer the telephone. That you’re not going to be online. And do that thing where you spend time with everything switched off.

And if you have a family, then spend that time with your family. Spend three or four days just all the time with them. As I said briefly in the last show, this idea of it’s about the quality of time you spend at work and the quantity of time you spend at home. And this idea of taking downtime will make sure that the quality of your time at work is maximized because you can focus easily.

You’ve rested and your brain is fresh. And also, you know that at some point in the near future, you will be spending a large quantity of time either looking after yourself or spending time with your family because you’ve blocked it out and booked it in.

I said the show was going to be in two parts. And that was the first part, which is all about how you deal with your time. How you even make more time as it were effectively with all those different techniques. And there’s something in there for everybody I think. So do let me know how you get on with those ideas and if anything particularly works.

Or let me know in the comments if you have any techniques or ideas that work for you that are different to what I have said, because everybody I think will find that valuable. Because everybody’s world is different and not everything works for everybody. The second part of the show is really is about valuing your time, assigning a value to your time.

And I know this is almost like the Brian Tracy show, but he really does make a lot of sense, this guy. One of the other things that he says is in terms of valuing your time and assigning a value to your time, is that if you want to earn $25 per hour in whatever work you do, find the things that you don’t need to do that you can pay someone else to do for less than $25 an hour.

Because that leaves you time to concentrate more on the things you can do and earn $25 an hour for. A little bit complicated, but that’s just another way of saying outsource mechanics or delegate tasks. But he assigns a monetary value to it and it really is a great perspective because it’s true.

If you look at every task that you do and you assign a monetary value to it, you can say we charge a client this much money for this work. So if I spend eight hours a day doing that work, we are making the maximum amount for my time. But if you say, “I spend one hour a day doing that work, $25 an hour worth of work.

I spend maybe three hours doing paperwork, and two hours doing something else,” and then so on and so on; well, if you’re spending all that time doing all those other tasks, one, nobody’s out there generating that maximum revenue. And you’re absolutely not and neither is anybody else.

Whereas, if you were out there eight hours a day, if you could get the work, eight hours a day at $25 an hour, then you should be making enough money to pay somebody less than that to do those other tasks. Now a lot of people say, “Oh, I’ll do that. I’ll pay somebody when I’m successful, when I’ve made it.”

Well, you will find yourself in a very limiting loop if you do that. You will find yourself doing the paperwork instead of doing the work. You’ll find yourself doing the mechanics instead of doing the core. And so start small by all means, but look for an opportunity to do this.

Start with something silly like maybe it’s not actually work-related. Usually it is. Usually it’s something like pay a part-time bookkeeper which is a great way to get started. Or pay someone to do some of your admin work part-time. Batch it up. Make notes about the systems and processes that need to be followed to do that thing. Maybe it’s just invoicing clients. Invoicing clients is really important.

Well, a lot of small businesses do it. A lot of small services businesses don’t invoice their clients in a timely manner because they’re too busy doing the core business. But the invoicing needs doing for cash flow. So give somebody a few dollars a week to do your paperwork for you, to do your invoicing. To print out the invoices, stick them in an envelope and stick them in the post. Or PDF them up and e-mail them.

If you want more free time, then look at tasks like dry cleaning or laundry or gardening. There are services that will do all those things for you for a very reasonable fee. But Pete and I are great proponents of outsourcing in all ways. But I do think this idea of however much per hour you want to earn, $25 or more or less, if you’re not doing the work because you’re doing work that has less value, you can’t do the work to earn the money you want to earn.

It’s that simple. So think that one through. Once you’ve got that one, then we can flip that on its head. As we say, if you’re in a service industry, then you charge for your time. And in the 7 Levers, we say one of the easiest ways to increase your profit is to put your prices up. But a lot of people have a problem with valuing their time or putting a value on their time.

And so in the context of the previous point, if what you do or what you can do, your specialist knowledge, will save someone some time, then work out how much time potentially and what that time might be worth to that person. Make sure that you judge appropriately.

So if you provide a service to people who should be earning $25 per hour and you save them an hour, you can charge them anything up to $25 for the work that you do because you’re giving them back the ability to earn that $25. That really is the idea behind consulting by the way. Consulting is the ultimate high-priced or high-value service.

Pete and I charge a lot of money per hour for our consulting. But in one hour, we can tell you things that can save you days or even weeks of research or trial and error. And sometimes, even years of experience we bring in to answer these questions. So investing in us as consultants saves you a lot of time and also, it saves you lost opportunity.

Because if you’re not doing those things, if you’re not doing those $25 or more activities because you’re busy researching and going through exercises trial and error, etcetera, etcetera; if you’re doing the other things, then you’re not running your business.

As consultants, we can save you a huge amount of time and give you back all those opportunities that you would lose by focusing on these other tasks. So we can charge a lot of money per hour for our time. So when you market your services to people, be sure to keep that in mind.

This is, as we say, the ‘what we will do for you’ bit of the sales pitch because by saving that person time, you’re giving them back the opportunity to earn money. Just keep that in mind. So, those are two perspectives about valuing your time. Both in making yourself more effective in your use of time, which is a slightly different take on time management because we can’t manage time, we can only manage how we use it.

The first part was about being more effective with your time and second of all, was in genuinely valuing your time. Whether it’s from how much you delegate out and what return you get on that and therefore return on investment or how much you charge if you’re a service-based individual or a service based business.

How much you charge for your time and your services based upon how much time you’re saving people. So hopefully, that was another thought-provoking episode for you. As I said, please do leave us comments in either on PreneurMedia.tv where all the show notes will be. All the links to things I’ve talked about and the transcripts and of video and replays are all available on PreneurMedia.tv for every episode of PreneurCast.

And also, and we certainly would like you to, go to iTunes and leave us a comment and a rating if you like the show on iTunes. We would very much appreciate it. We do enjoy your feedback. So that’s it for this episode. In next week’s episode, continuing this idea of foundational ideas to carry on and start your year with, I’m going to talk about investing in yourself and your team. See you in the next episode.

Episode 088:
Determination vs Discipline

Dom Goucher:    Hi everyone, and welcome to the first PreneurCast of 2013. This is Dom Goucher and you will probably notice that I’m missing something this show. Pete, my co-host, or as he would say, my partner in crime, is taking a break. At the end of last year we told you that we’d be going to every other week for the podcast.

But with the imminent arrival of his new family, Pete and I decided that he should take some time off to spend with his family and get ready for the birth of his baby. So, Pete’s taking a break. It’s just me for a few shows. And, I’m going to kind of work on a thread for these shows.

I’m going to do a series of shows on foundational principles, things to get you thinking in the right direction and boost your productivity and your profits this year by giving you a good start to the year. This week, I want to talk about something that came from a Platinum Group.

The Platinum Group is something that I’m going to be talking about soon because we’re going to be opening it to the public, but only for a limited time. So, listen out for that announcement. But, a member of our Platinum Group raised a topic of determination versus discipline. So, that’s the topic for this show.

But before I talk about all that, let’s just talk a little bit about Pete and his time off. I’m a big fan as well, Pete’s a fan of Dan Kennedy and everything that he does. But another person that Pete put me onto was a guy called Brian Tracy, who I wholeheartedly recommend that you listen to.

Brian does a phenomenal body of work, both books and courses. And he covers all kinds of topics from business to marketing, and time management. One of the things that he said is that it’s important that when you are at work, that you focus on the quality of the time that you spend at work.

But when you’re at home, it’s important to focus on the quantity of time that you spend. So, just bear that in mind. We’re going to come back to that in another show in this series where I’m going to talk to you about time management, valuing your time.

When Pete and I talked about the podcast and moving forward this year, and we talked about him taking some time off, that was because he wanted to spend a quantity of time at home. Not just focusing himself while he was at home, but actually just allocating a lot more time to his home life, just for this period.

And when he is at work, and he’s with other businesses, he’s going to focus his time on the quality of his work, so that he gets more done in less time, which is something we should all take to heart. So I just thought I’d point that out at the beginning of the year.

Let’s get back and get onto my main topic, and that is determination versus discipline. Let’s look at those two words in the traditional sense, as I think most people would understand them. The first word is determination, and determination is really one of these things. You see it as this boundless energy that you see.

Sometimes you have it, sometimes other people have it. The energy to see a goal and go for it, to overcome all obstacles, to forge ahead, to not be knocked down or held back. And, quite fittingly, anybody who knows Pete will have seen this in action. This is how Pete is. Pete has phenomenal determination.

For all of his working life, he’s exhibited this. But discipline is slightly different. Discipline is traditionally this idea of doing things you know you should when you don’t really feel like it. Things like taking breaks from work. Things like setting up systems. Things like studying and growing your knowledge.

Or just things like regularly putting in a content, like an article on your blog, a podcast, or a video. Or sticking with it to finish a product and get it launched. All those things go under the heading of something that our friend Ed [Dale] talks about, which is always be shipping, regularly putting out content.

It’s a really important thing if you are into the online marketing space and you’re trying to build an audience. This regularity is very important. But discipline is important in all areas of business, and in all kinds of business.

Now, the mixture of these two things, determination and discipline, is often called willpower. That thing where you know you should do it, and you actually get on and do it. There’s a lot that’s been written and talked about willpower. In fact, Pete recommended a book recently to me on that topic- just coincidently.

It’s a book called Willpower, and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes, because it’s not really what I’m talking about today. What I want to talk to you about is more about focusing and optimizing the determination, the energy that you have, through discipline. Making your determination more effective, if you will.

You see, I’ve got a bit of a downer on determination in its rawest form. I think there is a bit of a dark side to it. Don’t get me wrong, determination is valuable. You should keep on keeping on. You should go the extra mile for your business. Don’t be put off. You should see problems and failures as a learning experiences, rather than deterrents.

But, determination alone isn’t enough for me. Even willpower is easily subverted and because determination and willpower can sometimes cause you problems. For example, determination is a huge cause of burnout. Eventually, you run out of energy. Eventually, you get tired. Eventually, you get burnt out.

That’s why you need discipline to make the most of your determination. Something else from Brian Tracy I mentioned at the beginning of the show, something else from Brian Tracy that he said, and this is so, so true. This is very close to something that I say very often.

Brian Tracy said, “There is no bigger waste of energy than perfectly completing a task that didn’t need doing.” Now, think about that in the context of determination. If you are super-mega-determined you are going to overcome all obstacles and you put all of your effort into something, but that thing didn’t really need doing, it really wasn’t a core task in your business.

It really wasn’t going to make a huge difference to your bottom line, then that was a complete waste of your energy and time. So yes, discipline is about doing things when you don’t feel like it and being consistent with those things. But it’s more subtle than that. There’s more to it than that.

Because if you use discipline, then you can focus your determination to get much more effect from it. And actually, some people say that discipline takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of thinking, but it doesn’t. Ironically, the more that you apply discipline, the less energy it takes.

Because discipline is about standing back and thinking smarter, not harder. It’s about taking notes and making systems for the processes in your business as you go along. If you take those notes, you make those systems, as an example, then the next time you come to do that task, you’ll have a series of steps to follow.

And the next time, if this task becomes a mechanical task, well- you can delegate or outsource that task. You’re saving energy all the time by having the discipline to take those notes and make those systems, for example. And discipline, again, is made easier by those systems and by frameworks.

Frameworks- Pete and I talk about all the time- frameworks are methodologies, systems, steps, processes for you to evaluate what you’re doing. It’s a way of saying what should I be focusing on? What do I do next? But why am I doing it? The 7 Levers of Business, for example, is a framework that we talk about regularly.

It’s a really important framework. Yes, we talk about that if you look at these 7 Levers of your business, seven areas of the business where you can make an improvement- and there are 7 Levers of every business- and if you make a 10% improvement of each one, at the end of the sequence, you could literally double the profitability of your business.

But it’s not just about that. It’s about the fact that there are these seven areas, and that you regularly focus on one area. So few people do it- these determined people, these people with all this energy. And I imagine the audience right now is right down the middle 50/50.

That you have people that are determined and have lots of energy, and then you have people that might be quite determined but really don’t have all that much energy. So hopefully, I’m speaking to two different groups of people, but you’ll both get something from what I’m saying. With a framework, you can focus your energy- whatever energy you have.

Whether you have boundless energy, or you have limited energy, with a framework and a bit of discipline to stick to the framework- instead of chasing the next silver bullet, or instead of focusing all your energy on one part of your business, by using the 7 Levers framework, you can step through your business improving each area, which give you a much more consistent growth of the business.

It’s a much more sustainable thing. The example we always use in the 7 Levers is that most people focus on the first lever, or the first few levers. The first lever is traffic, and most people try and improve their traffic. But to double your volume of traffic takes a lot of energy, or a lot of resources- usually a lot of money. You can pay for a lot more advertising.

But there’s a limit to the response on advertising, so you then have to find new advertising platforms. And to double the traffic wouldn’t necessarily double your profit. You might get twice as many people to your website, or twice as many people through the door of the store, but actually that could cause you problems.

Because you’re just focusing on that, you’re not paying any attention to the back-end. You’re not paying any attention to how you get those people to opt in, the processes in your store to get people to actually experience merchandise. Or how you convert, how you get people to actually buy things.

So, you might put all that energy and effort into getting more people in the door, or getting more people to see your website, but nothing’s happening with those people. It’s wasted effort. It’s wasted time, energy, resources. So, a framework is a great way of disciplining yourself to not just focus on one thing and to go and look at all the different areas in a particular system, or in your business.

Similarly, by using a framework and saying I’m looking at traffic this week, or this month, or I’m looking at opt-ins, or I’m looking at conversion, it also stops you from reacting to the next silver bullet that you might see. You might meet someone and they say, “Hey, I’m doing Facebook advertising and it’s awesome! I’m getting lots of traffic!” Well, that’s fine if you want traffic, if traffic is what you’re working on.

But just going and getting the course on Facebook traffic and taking up a week of your time watching the course, and making the adverts, and testing things out, and paying for all of this just to get more traffic- well, that may not actually be where the biggest win is in your business.

Again, discipline of focus and discipline of following a framework will help you. Now, by the way, I’m not against Facebook traffic. Facebook traffic is awesome, but it’s only awesome if you have the discipline to evaluate if it’s good for you, whether it’s awesome for you.

Same with print advertising, same with any technique that we talk about. You need these frameworks and you need the discipline. Because otherwise, determination is just like having all the money in the world. If you’ve got all the energy in the world, off you go and you will do everything. But, you won’t do it focused.

Somebody with a little bit of time, and a little bit of energy can very often, eventually exceed the successes of somebody with boundless determination and energy, just by focusing their time. And this is really important. Because I think there are people out there that maybe have a full-time job and they’re trying to set up a business.

Or they are self-employed and they can’t really find the time to do promotional activities for a business- to grow their business by promoting it, by doing more client communication. So, with a bit of determination, you’re still working hard, you’re still turning in doing the hours.

But with a bit of focus and discipline, you’ll allocate those hours a little bit better. And we’ll talk a little bit- in the next show, we’re going to talk about time management. Another kind of discipline is also constantly looking for the core and the mechanic tasks in everything you do. Core and mechanics is, again, another key concept of things Pete and I talk about.

When you look for the core and mechanics tasks, then you can find the things that you can delegate or outsource. When you find those mechanical tasks and they’re documented, and you have the processes in place, you can delegate them to someone else, or you can outsource them to someone else so you can do more of the core work.

So again, that energy that you have, whether you have boundless determination and energy, or a small amount of energy and a small amount of spare time, by focusing on the core task, by disciplining yourself to focus on those core tasks, then you’re using that energy to its best effect.

On a complete flip to that, by the way, whether you have boundless energy and determination or you have limited energy, discipline is also about taking breaks- taking time to live your life. And this is something that is emphasized by the absence of Pete on this call, but it is something that I want to make sure that everybody this year puts a little thought to.

And again, that’s why the next show is about time management and valuing your time, because I’ve got a little bit of a different slant on that for you coming up. But, we all know that we should take time. We all know that we should take breaks. But in fact, ironically, that is one of those things that is probably the least adhered to.

It’s probably the thing that people do least, that think about least, that actually put systems and processes in place for least, is taking breaks. But, without taking those breaks, that’s when burnout happens. No matter how determined you are, no matter how much energy you have, at some point, you will burn out.

So, discipline is planning in and taking those breaks. Because otherwise, determination alone would have you do it all yourself. Think about what I’ve just talked about. I’ve just talked about the different areas of your business, and about core versus mechanics, and taking breaks.

Well, determination alone will tell you, “I can do it all myself! I can work all hours of the day and night! I don’t need that much sleep.” Just because you can. Right now, maybe you do have that energy. But as it’s the first show of the year, I think it’s about time I say one of my favorite phrases, which is just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

And that is really, really important. Just because right now you have all this energy and determination, you will keep going. Don’t push yourself to break. Don’t push yourself to burn out. Take time off. Look for the core and mechanics tasks. Look for things that you can get other people to do. And make sure that your energy is being directed and focused.

In other words, for those of you that have this determination, this energy, look for places where your determination is actually leading you down the wrong path. I just want to go back to that thing that I said at the beginning, that I heard from Brian Tracy, which is that there is no bigger waste of energy than perfectly completing a task that didn’t need doing. And that really does bear repeating and thinking about.

So, I applaud your energy- those of you out there that have energy and determination to keep going, that work all of those hours of the day and night. I really do. But at the same time, I feel for those who have less energy, that have a full day that may be starting a family, or have a family already and have got all of these pulls on their time, and they have to use their time carefully.

Those two ends of the spectrum. But either way, without that focusing aid of discipline, potentially you’re going into a “spray and pray” situation, where your efforts are diluted because they’re spread across a bunch of areas and tasks. Some of which, you may not even need to be doing. And for those of you who maybe are missing Pete, here’s a metaphor from triathlons.

Determination will get you started. Saying yes, I am going to do a triathlon. It’s my goal. I’m going to do it. It will even get you to the race. I’m going to turn up. I’m definitely going to attend. I’m booking my ticket. I’m going. I’m going to go to wherever the race starts. I’m going to go.

But, without the discipline of going to the training sessions, of focusing your efforts on improving your stamina, identifying those holes in your technique and improving those, determination alone is highly unlikely to get you over the finish line. Even somebody who has successfully competed in a triathlon before will tell you, it doesn’t mean they can stop training.

It doesn’t mean they can stop looking for those issues of technique and to keep improving their stamina. They don’t do it just because they want a better time next year. They do it because they actually want to finish, because they know that’s what it takes. And by the way, as Pete will tell you, it’s just as important- the breaks that you take when you’re training for a triathlon, as the training that you do.

So, perhaps a little bit shorter show than you’re used to, and definitely one person down this week. Pete will be back soon. But, I’m going to continue this series over the next couple of shows. Next week, I’m going to talk to you about valuing your time, which is a slightly different take on time management- because there’s lots of people talk about time management.

Hopefully, there’s food for thought in this week’s show. Don’t forget, we are spreading the shows out two weeks apart now, because we have a lot of other commitments. Thank you for listening and look forward to catching up with you on the comments- either on PreneurMedia.tv, where you can download the show.

Listen to it online, read the show notes, see all the links about all the things that talk to, and leave us a comment. Please do. Either below the show, or in the little audio comment pop-up that’s on the side of the site. Or, in iTunes. We love your iTunes comments, and we really appreciate, if you do like the show, you leaving us a comment on iTunes.

It let’s other people know about the show, and helps us kind of appear in the iTunes rankings. And thank you to everyone who’s done that so far. And, I’ll see you all in the next show.