I’ve known people with large email lists, sometimes with literally thousands of people on it, who weren’t making enough money through the list to even pay for groceries.
It certainly sounds like a broken business, right?
For the nearly 20 years I’ve been doing this work with business owners, I’ve seen really consistently that so many people think that if their business isn’t generating enough money, that something is broken, either in the business, or themselves. Or both.
We’re all such tender beings, aren’t we? I want to assure you that it’s rarely the truth that something is broken. And I’ll explain about the large email list problem further below.
This weekend at my ecovillage a bunch of us were out digging garden beds. None of us was harvesting. Similar to the baby plants that hadn’t yet produced anything, your business probably just needs to develop and grow a bit more before you can harvest what you’re hoping for.
The way development works is that if a plant, or a person, or a business, doesn’t get what it needs to grow, the development can be stunted in dangerous ways. If a plant needs sun, or rain, and it’s stuck in shade, and dried out, it won’t grow.
This is why businesses that have been around for awhile, months or sometimes even years, can still be in the first stage of business development, what we at Heart of Business call “Creation.”
The vast majority of folks are stuck, without knowing it, in the first stage.
A lot of people try to jump start their businesses with big, fancy efforts such as list-building, creating information products, or writing a book. These strategies are about amplifying and accelerating what works.
Unfortunately, they are often applied prematurely in ways that can be really expensive, distract you, and actually harm the business.
If you don’t have the basics in place, you’ll be amplifying something that doesn’t work as a business, like someone I knew who had 10,000+ people on an email list, but almost zero money was coming in. Plus, because they were the wrong people for his business, they couldn’t be turned into clients.
Strange, eh? But totally true. You can have a lot of something, even a lot of people. But if you have the wrong ingredients, your business still won’t work.
I’ll be getting into the four ingredients in more detail over the next weeks, but let’s name them.
The four ingredients that business need first to grow into and through the first stage of business development.
1. How to say what you do. [The large email list problem]
And not just say it, but to say it in a concise way, that doesn’t bore people or scare them off. So the people you can help best will respond, “Ooh, that’s me!” or “Hey, I know someone who should talk to you!”
Without this piece in place, almost everything else is wasted time. Imagine planting in one spot, and then watering twenty feet away. That’s what’s happening in your business when you have this wrong- wasting a lot of a precious resource, your time and energy, and no new growth.
This was the big problem for the folks with thousands of people on emails lists who weren’t buying anything. They had this undefined, or wrong. So painful!
2. Clarity on what you’re selling (and how to price it).
Sometimes what you’re offering, or how you’re offering it, is actually a big problem. People want to buy from you, but because they are confused, or overwhelmed or put off by the “what” of what you’re selling, even those who would be perfect clients end up not buying.
3. How to hold an effective sales conversation.
There’s a lot to say here, but I’ll just suffice with the perhaps obvious point that if you have someone interested, and you bore them, or otherwise can’t show them, with compassion and without manipulation, how you can help them, you won’t get clients. And you won’t get paid.
4. How (and when) to ask for referrals.
Many people ask how to get many more clients. There are some key strategies to expand your reach in significant ways, but the core of it, the basic skills needed, are just asking for referrals. The simple of act of knowing how, and when, to ask for referrals can change your business radically within a few days or weeks.
With these four ingredients in place your business starts to grow! You get clients, you make money, and you feel good about it. What’s more, the further development of your business starts to make sense.
Ask yourself
How strong are you with these four ingredients?
Let yourself feel some relief that you aren’t broken, that the business isn’t broken. You just need some organic compost, water and sunlight, and your business can start to grow and develop, just like it wants to.
How does your heart feel now?
p.s. Wondering what your business is needing?
You might want to start by taking a free assessment of where your business is in the stages of development. Plus, you’ll get a personal response from us!
3 Responses
As a ten-year business owner with crazy yo-yo success, and now a current student in this exact program, Foundations 1, I will verify absolutely that Mark and the team at Heart of Business do exactly what he said.
Through this program, I have been led to breathe, take stock, allow things to be OK as they are so I can really look at what I am doing here – WHY I’m doing all this work, from my heart; what I actually do offer, in language that can be heard, understood and received without defensiveness, and how to clinch the deal so the person who’s interested steps up and says, “Yep. Here’s a check, here’s my trust, let’s do this.”
I came to the program because I was frustrated with feeling like I was trying to win at a game I just didn’t care about…I cared about my work, deeply – but I just couldn’t keep trying to convince myself that I cared enough about the money to keep putting myself out there when I wasn’t making the money I needed to live on.
And yet – I couldn’t quit my work. That was inconceivable.
That conflicted space just about did me in. Especially because I teach about, and help people with, getting themselves out of that conflicted space, so the internal noise also carried the killer vibe of – If your own stuff were any good, you’d be able to do it for yourself.
This is the agonizing, impossible space that the Heart of Business is helping me love my way out of. Thank you, Mark et al.
This is a great program, thank you so much Teresa for sharing it! I’ll be sure to share this to many of my business friends in need of this. Keep up the hard work!
These are some great tips. It is also important to be available on all the channels (web, mobile, etc.) to market your business efficiently. This improves your overall credibility and your business is usually rated higher than business with little on no existence online. If tech knowledge is a weakness, you can use headless CMS for websites and BaaS products for mobile app backends.