By Michael Kline
In our last article, we talked about the great
American Dream – Whether that is to create your own empire, open a
neighborhood shop, or build a consultancy from a spare bedroom, most of
us have had some desire to be our own boss. We discussed the popular
reasons for starting out on your own such are creating income, personal
freedom, self-expression, autonomy and creating wealth.
If you missed
part in, you can catch up at www.intus.life/articles. If you read the
last article, you should have decided by now if your goal is to own a
business or to own a job – you understand the difference between being
self-employed, and working for your own company. You understand
something about creating equity in the business. You understand how that
might influence your growth and exit strategies. Having an
intellectual understanding of your business purpose, however, does not
mean that it makes sense to you in your gut or your heart. It may be
time to listen to your gut and/or your heart, so how do you have a
conversation with your gut and heart without getting yourself locked up?
I thought you would never ask!
Emotions first occur in our body. It
makes sense that when you think of something that really bothers you,
you feel it in your stomach first – maybe it’s public speaking, or
heights, or conflict with a boss who scheduled you for an unexpected
meeting, or spiders. Whatever it is, most of us have something that we
feel in our body, an instant before our mind has a chance to give it any
meaning. Feelings are the meaning we attach to the emotions that hit
our bodies. This suffering is optional. We choose to give these meaning,
based on our paradigm – which I define as our point of view with
baggage. We all have our own perception of how things are and how things
“should” be. We each have a long personal history with a lot of
evidence that supports our position that public speaking is deadly –
worse than spiders, which are scary, but not as bad as bosses. I tell
you all this, because now that you recognize that emotions occur in the
body, I invite you to listen to your gut – it is not just a figure of
speech, but a common sense, practical thing to do, given that your gut
knows the truth about what you should do with major decisions in your
life. Sometimes our heart and mind is at odds with our gut, but most of
us when talking about business decisions, let our heads do most of the
thinking and ignore the heart and gut. It is time to call a whole-body
meeting.
I have been lucky enough to assist on Jack Canfield’s team
at his International success retreats. This month we had over 300
students, representing 32 counties and every imaginable profession,
economic, political and religious persuasion. One of my jobs is to host
private sessions with participants who get blocked with emotional or
physical issues. It was a very busy and productive week for all
involved. Working one on one with successful people from all walks of
life, we discovered and rediscovered the power of finding resources such
as strength, wisdom and answers from within ourselves. With the right
methods, including some Canfield methodology as well as techniques I
learned from the RIM Institute, we can strip away years of frustration,
financial blocks, strongly held beliefs and assumptions to heal
emotional and physical pain and reveal clarity and freedom to move
forward on life’s most important goals. Even people with years of
therapy under their belt, often find new paths to releasing ideas they
thought were a permanent part of their identity. In truth, it does not
matter whether we are talking about money, business, personal
relationships or health, the blocks and beliefs that keep us back in
one, often limits us in many areas of our life.
Like most
decisions, business decisions should involve the mind along with the
heart and gut. To learn more about how we actually facilitate a literal
conversation with the mind, heart and gut, visit www.intus.life/rim.
Michael
Kline is a Certified RIM Facilitator and Canfield Success Trainer for
personal and group transformation. You can reach him through his website
www.intus.life, or e-mail, mike@intus.life.
Showing posts with label business advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business advice. Show all posts
Do You Own a Job or a Business?
Reprint from the Conway Daily Sun March 10,2009
by Michael Kline
There was a time in your past when you were the best employee for someone else. Eventually you grew weary of answering to someone who wasn’t even as good as you, and you spent your unhappy days making money for them! It was time to be your own boss.
So now you proudly declare that you work for yourself. You are your business! If it wasn’t for you, there wouldn’t even be a business! Since most small businesses fail, and you’re still at it after all this time, you must be doing something right! Is that a reasonable assumption? Well, are you succeeding at what you originally wanted? Or just succeeding at not failing? Are you making more money than you would be paid working for someone else? That is, can your business afford to pay you what you’re really worth for the time and talent you put into it? Are you working more hours than you should for the money you take home? Do you give yourself the benefits, retirement, security and paid vacations you could have as an employee? Are you building equity in your business that you can sell one day when you want to retire or move on? The big final summary question is this: You probably started a business with the goal of attaining the personal and financial freedom only business ownership can provide. Do you have personal and financial freedom? Do you have the time to do what you want, with whom you want, when you want and the money to do it?
If you answered yes to the above questions, stop reading and contact me! If you said no to any of the above questions, let’s talk about how a business becomes all that for its owner. The primary difference is the business owner reaping the most rewards is not just self-employed. They separate their own identity from that of their business. They spend more time working on their business, not in their business. If you spend all your time doing the tactical work your business does, (working in your business) who is doing the strategic work (working on your business)? Right, no one. One of the best examples of this is any fast food chain. How much time does the owner spend behind the counter or in the kitchen? Do they care any less? Does the quality or predictability of service change when the owner is there or away? Of course not. Do they sit at home counting money? Well of course, but that’s not all they do; they work hard, but they work on their business, not in their business. We spend five months a year away from our stores in N. Conway. Do we have good staff? You bet we do, but so do you! If you have to be at your store, what do I and every chain store know that you don’t? Why do the big name stores at the outlet malls run with managers not owners, and those managers make more money than most independent store owners? By the way, this is true for professional services, too, not just restaurants and retailers.
So if you accept that you own a job that you can’t quit, has low pay, long hours, no benefits and you may be working for an idiot, what do you do about it? How do you transition to owning a business that works for you instead of the other way around? Due to the limits of what we can cover in one article, I’ll just throw out one place to start. Make an organizational chart for every position in your company – even if you are only 2 or 3 people, make the chart with a box for every position – janitor, deliveries, receiving, bookkeeping, sales, service, receptionist, manager, sales manager, quality control manager, etc. Even if your name goes in almost all the boxes, the point is to define the responsibilities and work toward replacing yourself in as many boxes as possible as quickly as possible. This will cause you to create systems that work if you are to have others replace you. It becomes about the work, not the person doing the work. This will also requrie a combination of delegating responsibility to others as well as growing your business to justify hiring people to fill some of the boxes. Suddenly, growing your business is more important, isn’t it?! The goal for you and everyone on the chart is to replace yourself – that’s the only way to move out of the boxes you want to leave behind and spend more time in the boxes you like. As long as you’re always planning to grow, you will always have many more boxes than you have staff. Your staff has the job of building helping other people; to build them up take their job instead of protecting their turf and keeping coworkers down. Imagine the power in that attitude shift alone!
Your job is to spend more time working on your business and less time working in your business. Most owners need to properly delegate(with detailed goals, procedures, resources and authority), limit interruptions (email and social media can be a big time thief) and set deadlines for yourself and others (meet those deadlines). Most importantly, establish top priorities and without sealing your kid's Ritalin, stay focused.
Recommended reading - many of the lessons discussed here are covered in Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth Revisited. For help in applying the ideas to your real life business, contact me for a free consultation.
Our next article will discuss priorities and getting company-wide alignment to focus on your top priority.
by Michael Kline
There was a time in your past when you were the best employee for someone else. Eventually you grew weary of answering to someone who wasn’t even as good as you, and you spent your unhappy days making money for them! It was time to be your own boss.
So now you proudly declare that you work for yourself. You are your business! If it wasn’t for you, there wouldn’t even be a business! Since most small businesses fail, and you’re still at it after all this time, you must be doing something right! Is that a reasonable assumption? Well, are you succeeding at what you originally wanted? Or just succeeding at not failing? Are you making more money than you would be paid working for someone else? That is, can your business afford to pay you what you’re really worth for the time and talent you put into it? Are you working more hours than you should for the money you take home? Do you give yourself the benefits, retirement, security and paid vacations you could have as an employee? Are you building equity in your business that you can sell one day when you want to retire or move on? The big final summary question is this: You probably started a business with the goal of attaining the personal and financial freedom only business ownership can provide. Do you have personal and financial freedom? Do you have the time to do what you want, with whom you want, when you want and the money to do it?
If you answered yes to the above questions, stop reading and contact me! If you said no to any of the above questions, let’s talk about how a business becomes all that for its owner. The primary difference is the business owner reaping the most rewards is not just self-employed. They separate their own identity from that of their business. They spend more time working on their business, not in their business. If you spend all your time doing the tactical work your business does, (working in your business) who is doing the strategic work (working on your business)? Right, no one. One of the best examples of this is any fast food chain. How much time does the owner spend behind the counter or in the kitchen? Do they care any less? Does the quality or predictability of service change when the owner is there or away? Of course not. Do they sit at home counting money? Well of course, but that’s not all they do; they work hard, but they work on their business, not in their business. We spend five months a year away from our stores in N. Conway. Do we have good staff? You bet we do, but so do you! If you have to be at your store, what do I and every chain store know that you don’t? Why do the big name stores at the outlet malls run with managers not owners, and those managers make more money than most independent store owners? By the way, this is true for professional services, too, not just restaurants and retailers.
So if you accept that you own a job that you can’t quit, has low pay, long hours, no benefits and you may be working for an idiot, what do you do about it? How do you transition to owning a business that works for you instead of the other way around? Due to the limits of what we can cover in one article, I’ll just throw out one place to start. Make an organizational chart for every position in your company – even if you are only 2 or 3 people, make the chart with a box for every position – janitor, deliveries, receiving, bookkeeping, sales, service, receptionist, manager, sales manager, quality control manager, etc. Even if your name goes in almost all the boxes, the point is to define the responsibilities and work toward replacing yourself in as many boxes as possible as quickly as possible. This will cause you to create systems that work if you are to have others replace you. It becomes about the work, not the person doing the work. This will also requrie a combination of delegating responsibility to others as well as growing your business to justify hiring people to fill some of the boxes. Suddenly, growing your business is more important, isn’t it?! The goal for you and everyone on the chart is to replace yourself – that’s the only way to move out of the boxes you want to leave behind and spend more time in the boxes you like. As long as you’re always planning to grow, you will always have many more boxes than you have staff. Your staff has the job of building helping other people; to build them up take their job instead of protecting their turf and keeping coworkers down. Imagine the power in that attitude shift alone!
Your job is to spend more time working on your business and less time working in your business. Most owners need to properly delegate(with detailed goals, procedures, resources and authority), limit interruptions (email and social media can be a big time thief) and set deadlines for yourself and others (meet those deadlines). Most importantly, establish top priorities and without sealing your kid's Ritalin, stay focused.
Recommended reading - many of the lessons discussed here are covered in Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth Revisited. For help in applying the ideas to your real life business, contact me for a free consultation.
Our next article will discuss priorities and getting company-wide alignment to focus on your top priority.
Increase Sales from Inside Your Business
by Michael Kline
Increasing retail sales is often within the power of the retailer. Let’s simplify what contributes to total sales. You have traffic, some of whom will buy and you have an average sale price. Your traffic X the closing ratio X average sale = total sales. So it’s simple – you only have three things to work on.
This article is not about how to get more traffic - let’s focus on what’s free, easy and immediate - selling more to the traffic you already have. A certain percentage of your traffic will make a purchase – this is your “closing ratio”. What do you consider an acceptable percentage? What was your closing ratio when times were better? What about on different days of the week or when different employees are working? By the way, this is an interesting evaluation of employee productivity and sales skills. It’s been proven that just tracking your closing ratio will result in an increase in sales. When I was doing business to business sales, I used to track 100 calls to set 10 appointments and close one sale. Tracking allowed me to notice when something was going awry or if I discovered something that worked better. It later helped me manage my own sales staff and identify where they needed support. Different businesses of course have very different standards. Let’s talk about more ways to increase the closing ratio.
Are you using a greeting that represents the best first impression of your business? “Can I help you?” is no longer acceptable. Does your staff use what you established to be the most effective script for each type of customer (regular, first timer, just browsing)? You want every customer to know you’re ready to serve, yet be comfortable. Think like a food server who is attentive yet invisible. The point is there is a best practices method of selling for every business. If your business is lodging, you track your conversion rate and average room rate, but how do you increase the conversions, the average stay and revenue? If you cold-call on businesses, what’s the difference between you and the stellar performer? If you’re in retail products or services, some are consistently better than others – why is that? How do you become the better one?
Have you and your staff received formal sales training recently? Selling is not about slamming a sale; it’s about satisfying a customer with a solution. You need to be proficient at interpreting the customers’ desires and hold a high level of expertise on your products. Making a sale is the reward for being able to help the customer. Formal sales training on a regular basis dramatically improves closing ratios.
Now that we’re helping more people buy, can we increase the average sale? No, it’s still not about squeezing the customer for more money. It’s about making sure the customer has the most thorough solution. Hear this report from a major travel company - most people who book low-priced rooms on their Hawaiian vacation packages upgrade on arrival once they get jealous of the ocean front people. The travel agent that sells the package only gets a commission on the low priced room. What upgrades does your customer really want? Not everyone wants to save money – in fact, it’s easily argued that people want more for their money and are spending money on better products having realized they no longer want to waste money on inferior items and experiences. Offer accessories that improve the experience or solution you’re providing.
How do you get it all done? Systems make everything run more smoothly. Do you have a sales system? Perhaps your product is sold slowly through a series of appointments. Perhaps your product simply requires time for a customer to make a choice. How do you keep the interest alive during this time? What follow-up steps do you take and what systems do you have in place to make sure no one falls through the cracks? Think this isn’t a problem? Just think about the last time you called an office for a quote and never heard back from them at all?! It happens at great companies. It happens at mine and it happens at yours.
All this tracking can make you crazy unless you have a system for every step of the sales/service process. That means a best-practices system for everything from greeting to needs analysis to presentations to closing and handling objections to follow-up after the sale.
Now do the math – if you increase your closing ratio and even had a modest average ticket gain, what would that amount to in dollars for you? If you have room for improvement in your company – retail, wholesale, hospitality, travel, insurance, business to business, you could benefit greatly by reviewing or developing a sales system.
It all sounds complicated, so contact me for help with all the above!
Increasing retail sales is often within the power of the retailer. Let’s simplify what contributes to total sales. You have traffic, some of whom will buy and you have an average sale price. Your traffic X the closing ratio X average sale = total sales. So it’s simple – you only have three things to work on.
This article is not about how to get more traffic - let’s focus on what’s free, easy and immediate - selling more to the traffic you already have. A certain percentage of your traffic will make a purchase – this is your “closing ratio”. What do you consider an acceptable percentage? What was your closing ratio when times were better? What about on different days of the week or when different employees are working? By the way, this is an interesting evaluation of employee productivity and sales skills. It’s been proven that just tracking your closing ratio will result in an increase in sales. When I was doing business to business sales, I used to track 100 calls to set 10 appointments and close one sale. Tracking allowed me to notice when something was going awry or if I discovered something that worked better. It later helped me manage my own sales staff and identify where they needed support. Different businesses of course have very different standards. Let’s talk about more ways to increase the closing ratio.
Are you using a greeting that represents the best first impression of your business? “Can I help you?” is no longer acceptable. Does your staff use what you established to be the most effective script for each type of customer (regular, first timer, just browsing)? You want every customer to know you’re ready to serve, yet be comfortable. Think like a food server who is attentive yet invisible. The point is there is a best practices method of selling for every business. If your business is lodging, you track your conversion rate and average room rate, but how do you increase the conversions, the average stay and revenue? If you cold-call on businesses, what’s the difference between you and the stellar performer? If you’re in retail products or services, some are consistently better than others – why is that? How do you become the better one?
Have you and your staff received formal sales training recently? Selling is not about slamming a sale; it’s about satisfying a customer with a solution. You need to be proficient at interpreting the customers’ desires and hold a high level of expertise on your products. Making a sale is the reward for being able to help the customer. Formal sales training on a regular basis dramatically improves closing ratios.
Now that we’re helping more people buy, can we increase the average sale? No, it’s still not about squeezing the customer for more money. It’s about making sure the customer has the most thorough solution. Hear this report from a major travel company - most people who book low-priced rooms on their Hawaiian vacation packages upgrade on arrival once they get jealous of the ocean front people. The travel agent that sells the package only gets a commission on the low priced room. What upgrades does your customer really want? Not everyone wants to save money – in fact, it’s easily argued that people want more for their money and are spending money on better products having realized they no longer want to waste money on inferior items and experiences. Offer accessories that improve the experience or solution you’re providing.
How do you get it all done? Systems make everything run more smoothly. Do you have a sales system? Perhaps your product is sold slowly through a series of appointments. Perhaps your product simply requires time for a customer to make a choice. How do you keep the interest alive during this time? What follow-up steps do you take and what systems do you have in place to make sure no one falls through the cracks? Think this isn’t a problem? Just think about the last time you called an office for a quote and never heard back from them at all?! It happens at great companies. It happens at mine and it happens at yours.
All this tracking can make you crazy unless you have a system for every step of the sales/service process. That means a best-practices system for everything from greeting to needs analysis to presentations to closing and handling objections to follow-up after the sale.
Now do the math – if you increase your closing ratio and even had a modest average ticket gain, what would that amount to in dollars for you? If you have room for improvement in your company – retail, wholesale, hospitality, travel, insurance, business to business, you could benefit greatly by reviewing or developing a sales system.
It all sounds complicated, so contact me for help with all the above!
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