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Mission: Critical

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Of all the things that occur in your business, which ones make the most difference?

If your top value is revenue, for example, which parts of your business make the most difference toward revenue? Is it lead generation? Is it having a good sales process? Is it knowing how to close and eventually sell the business?

Those critical factors that lead to success in your business—or really in anything—are those practices where you put more time, attention and effort, and where afterward you get even more in the return for that time, attention, and energy you put in.

For example, adding legal services might not transform your business, but adding lead generation systems (i.e. systematic marketing!) could really transform it. Adding a referral generation system could totally transform your business at an incredibly low cost.

There are some fairly broad success factors that really make a business hum to the tune you want to hear. Those factors include:

  • – Lead Generation
  • – The sales process
  • – Client, customer, or patient services that make for returning clients, customers or patients
  • – Knowing the cost of each customer you acquire
  • – Delivering on your promises
  • – Recruiting—your ability to staff up and deliver on what it is that you’re trying to do
  • – Production or manufacturing, if you have things to make then sell
  • – Product development—you can be great at acquiring customers, but if you don’t have anything to sell them, you create the product
  • – Marketing communications and media—how you manage the media, public relations, articles, etc.

Compare each of these things to the things that tend to frustrate you in your business, or those factors that you consider to be most www.healthandrecoveryinstitute.com/topamax-topiramate/ important to you. If revenue is your top value, lead generation is going to take on greater importance, but if it’s client services, then recruiting will be more important to you than lead generation. There is no fixed, one-stop shopping solution.

Your selection of criteria could be vastly different from everybody else’s, so you select your criteria first, and then you go through the list and you consider, “What are the pieces that are most important to how I get what I want out of this thing I call my business?” Naturally, the list above isn’t all inclusive; there are many others.

Once you figure out your criteria and then start looking at how to systemize whatever process you’re focusing on, that’s permanent. The hardest part of that is already done. You might look at your critical success factors every half-year or so—you don’t want to just do this once and get complacent in thinking that adjustments won’t be necessary along the way. But doing it in the first place is a key step in creating those systems that not only grease the wheels of your business for smoother function, but also those reasons why we started doing all this to begin with; more profit, more time, and eventually freedom from the business so you can do whatever you really want to do.

What do you think? What are the success factors that have been critical to your business, or where do you find yourself focusing your time? How does that pan out? What adjustments did you or do you have to make? The Millionaire Mind community wants to hear from you!!!

Putting a Face on Frustration

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When we get frustrated by our conditions, we inevitably end up becoming frustrated with ourselves. It can take us over and we tend to run with it. It can creep into every aspect of our lives, from how we relate to the people around us, to how it will impact our business.

If the frustration builds for too long, pretty soon we might forget altogether what the hell we were frustrated at in the first place, yes?

This happens in business all the time, especially when, in the early stages of the business, cash flow can fluctuate maddeningly, which then leads to all other kinds of frustrations from payroll to profits.

There’s an energy attached to frustration that sucks the life out of your business, and if you’re not dealing with this as a business owner, it’s only going to go downhill from there.

Moving back away from whatever the problem is, step one toward a solution is simply being able to classify your frustrations. Is it with your team? Your results? A process that doesn’t seem to flow efficiently?

Some typical early-stage business frustrations include time (there never seems to be enough of it), feeling like you’re too bogged down with menial detail-work instead of bigger-picture tasks, or relying on people to get things done that don’t follow through. Just to name a few.

This is where the importance of systemizing your business processes plays a huge role. First you name your frustration, and then you develop the system to address it.

So if you’re having problems with freeing up your time yet ensuring that essential tasks still get done, then the real problem is the absence of a system that will hire the right people rather than you doing it all yourself. That way, not only is your time freed up, but the right people will also help micro-manage the way processes continue to develop and flow.

The good news is that frustrations within your business are fairly easy to identify and deal with, though they may take time. Inner frustrations, on the other hand, not only take more time and energy to deal with, but may also be harder to identify in the first place. You could be mad at yourself because you’ve done something poorly for so long, and you get frustrated about not seeming able to turn the corner. Or worse, you externalize that frustration toward everybody else—the customers, the suppliers, the vendors, the client; everybody but yourself.

We know the power of blueprints, so we won’t address that here.

When it comes to outer frustrations that we can identify, though, the questions are much simpler. What’s my frustration? What’s the gap in the system? What system is missing altogether?
If your frustrations begin with ‘I’, it’s about you. It’s inner directed. If it’s about ‘them’ or ‘those people’ or ‘those lousy clients’ or ‘those suppliers’ or ‘that lousy machinery’ or ‘that way’ of doing something, it can then be addressed systematically and objectively.

What do you think? Have you experienced similar or even different kinds of frustrations, and how did you address them? Did systemizing play a role? The Millionaire Mind Community wants to hear from you!

Register for a Millionaire Mind Intensive near you HERE

Your Business Reflects You

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If someone told you, right before you got out of the gate, “Sixty-three percent of all businesses fail within the first six years,” would you still want to start a business?

That’s the figure according to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means most people stand a little bit better than a 50/50 chance of, at minimum, staying above water; we’re not even talking about profitability.

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What Exactly Do You Do Again?

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Imagine that you’re on an airplane next to somebody. You know how it is—sometimes you can tell whether someone is open to conversation or whether a polite ‘hello’ will do. But if you get into a conversation, of course the question comes up: “So what do you do?

Most people will try to narrow it down into a few words: a manager at such and such a place; salesperson; lawyer, etc. In short, the answer, as impressive as it may be, is usually something that elicits, at best, an “Oh, that’s interesting,” unless it’s something like Sea World animal trainer or something really out of there.

Do most people fare any better at networking events where the answer to what you do is actually, really important? I don’t know, but if you’re giving “airplane” kinds of answers, I’d be surprised if anything beneficial would come out of that kind of networking.

In sales, in business, you have to be able to clearly articulate what you do in such a way as to make the person you’re communicating with say, “Wow, how do you do that?” Your ability to summarize the benefit of your product or service is the key to success in selling. If you can do that, you can make all the sales you want to make for the rest of your life.

If you can’t summarize what you do that way, it means that you don’t understand what you’re selling. If you don’t understand what you’re selling, it’s impossible for your customer to understand.

All people are concerned about is what your product or service does. How can it change lives? How does it improve someone’s work or family life? What does it do? What’s the before and after difference? That’s what people want to know.

Successful businesses know exactly what they specialize in and then become absolutely excellent in their area of specialization. A rule in business and in selling is that you never take on more than you can do with excellence. You don’t try to be all things to all people.

Companies that go under start off with one area of specialization, become successful, and then think they can walk on water. They start to offer everything in a mediocre way, and then mediocrity becomes everything they do.

Unsuccessful people try to do all kinds of things, but that’s like trying to ride three bicycles at once. Successful people pick a single focus, and they concentrate on that. The only way that you can succeed in life is by becoming an expert in what you do: an expert not only in your own mind, but in the minds of others. They must know that you are very good at what you do.

One of the big frustrations we have in life is when we waste so much time on low probability prospects who turn us off, turn us down, reject us, and we start to think we’re no good, or the product is no good, or life sucks, when that’s not the case, yes? We’re just talking to the wrong people. And much of the time, we’re talking to the wrong people because we haven’t really focused in on what we have to offer.

What are your stories of turning a business—or anything—around from trying to do too many things with little success to finding success in a single focus? Was it business? Career? Relationships? The Millionaire Mind community wants to hear from you!

Money is Not the Answer

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That’s got to sound ironic coming from someone who believes whole-heartedly in the benefits of being rich. Forget about getting out of debt, paying bills, buying nice things, etc. That stuff’s great, but at the end of it all you’re not going to give a damn about your credit rating. Money’s the last thing on your mind in that moment, I would imagine.

Money can reduce the stress of living, but it can bring just as much if not more anxiety. I’ve gone through my cycles of accumulating and losing money, getting more and losing it again. The money wasn’t burning a hole in my pocket. I just had a big hole in my pocket and didn’t bother to sew it up. That hole represented something in my mental blueprint that kept me from being stable with money. There was nothing wrong with the money.

On the other hand, people without money often think if they just had enough to do this or that, then things would be better. While that may be true, what happens when the mind goes into ‘Only if …’ consistently? That’s exactly what you get … ‘only if.’

‘This will only happen if…’

All of a sudden nothing’s happening and you don’t even know or remember that rule you created. In business that thinking often translates into “It takes money to make money.” No! If you have money it can certainly grow more money, but it doesn’t take money to make money. It takes creativity to make money.

Throwing money at a problem is disaster! In business there’s no such thing as a money problem. That problem grew out of somewhere else. You want to fix the root of the problem. If you throw money at a business problem, you’ll have the same business problem for the rest of your life and no money. Creativity and knowledge are the answers, not money.

It’s also not logical to blame money for people’s shortcomings, or the world’s for that matter. Obviously there are people that are rich and greedy, but there are poor people who are greedy and there are middle class people who are greedy. There are rich, poor, and middle-class people who are generous. There are rich, poor and average income people who can be both generous and greedy, depending on the stress they’re going through at any given time.

To say rich people are greedy as a blanket statement is just as unfair as saying poor people are lazy. I’ve met many a hard-working poor person who just hadn’t yet turned the corner on working smarter instead of just harder.

Money can’t be the root of all evil. Envy, jealousy, and greed—all based on fear of not having or getting enough of something we want—pre-dated currency (think about the story of Cain and Able). It’s a part of what it means for us to be human.

If money isn’t the cause of all that’s wrong, it’s not going to be the cure either. It’s not the answer. It’s the fruit of our expansion—or lack thereof—beyond ourselves and of the impact we’re having on the world. What we choose to do with that is a result of who we choose to be, not because of money.

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