Categories
Planning & Management

Women Entrepreneurs Getting Back on Track, Part 1: Assessing the Cause

Life is a continuum – so change is inevitable. In the life of a female entrepreneur, then, this inevitability affects her not only personally, but also professionally. While some change results in higher profits and greater personal and professional satisfaction, other change may result in a situation that drains a business owner’s resources and leaves her feeling unsure about the best next step for her business and for herself. This shift also may result in another shift: a previously content and confident business owner, living as her ideal entrepreneurial type, transforms into an entrepreneurial type that simply doesn’t fit.

Based on professional market research of more than 3,500 women in business, this study shows that each type of business owner has a unique approach to running a business and therefore each one has a unique combination of needs. When a woman is living as her ideal entrepreneurial type, she feels satisfied, personally and professionally. This article outlines three of the main circumstances that may cause a woman previously living as her ideal type to transform into a less-than-ideal type – and provides advice for changing these circumstances so they can work their way back to ideal.

1.    The business started undercapitalized and acquired more debt than can comfortably be carried given current revenue levels. One reason companies acquire debt in the early years is that, although the entrepreneur had some money set aside, their business did not hit its revenue projections on time. The result: the cash ran out before the revenue kicked in. Some women who fall into this category are savvy businesswomen who had previously run large corporate budgets, and were confident and accurate in determining the costs of running the business. However, when they projected how quickly sales would occur and money would come in, they were overly optimistic. They struggle to add more customers, watching their cash reserve run out, ultimately having to decide whether or not to go into (more) debt to keep the business afloat. Many of them end up making that investment because they have hopes for the business and they feel confident it will be profitable eventually.

Advice: Business owners must look at two aspects of the business financials right away to assess whether or not their business model is going to be profitable enough to help them transform back into their ideal entrepreneurial type. She should ask herself:  Is it possible to make enough money with the existing model, and if so, what should she focus on immediately to create the best possible chance for the business to survive and thrive?

Entrepreneurs need to assess how much money they can realistically expect to come in, and how much is realistically going out. Revenue and expenses, when viewed together, paint a vivid picture of how successful the business will be. If an entrepreneur discovers that by the time her expenses go out (mortgage/rent, phone, Internet, groceries, doctor’s visits, etc.), she is barely squeaking by, she can manipulate her business model to increase her income. Whether she increases her hourly rates or increases the number of billable hours she works each week, she can create concrete plans for increasing her income – using real, solid numbers.

2.    Fluctuating business environments drove the profitability out of the business, and the business owner finds herself struggling with cash flow, revenues and/or business cost challenges. For example, a brilliant and successful entrepreneur who established a niche in marketing specialty products grew her business successfully until “me too” companies started chipping away at her market share. Increasing competition took away some of her business.

Advice: If a business owner believes that something outside of her control has caused her to shift into a less-than-ideal entrepreneurial type, she must adapt accordingly – while focusing on cash flow, and possibly reinvesting in the business to give it the jumpstart it needs. To accomplish all this, she must set goals and then create specific, step-by-step action plans for achieving each goal.

This owner of the specialty products marketing company began marketing existing products to new niche markets, and started diversifying into other fields via new divisions that were related to the initial niche. Entrepreneurs should keep in mind that momentum will build as they begin to achieve their goals. The key is to prepare to act by choosing the right focal points and then succeed in those specific areas.

3.    The business owner is moving in too many directions at once. In some cases, a female entrepreneur has been successfully running her business for some time, and she decides to branch out. Her ultimate vision encompasses multiple streams of income and she tries to activate them all at once. This approach can be counterproductive in the short-term because the lack of a singular focus can make it difficult for her target market to understand her business model. In cases such as these, it is not possible to build marketing and sales efforts for such diverse income streams simultaneously.

Advice: Every entrepreneur, especially one who is struggling because she is not living as her ideal type, should examine her business concept, and her business model to ensure that her company in its current state can make the profit she needs. This will help her nail down a specific focus for getting back into her ideal type. When considering business concept, entrepreneurs may want to develop a one-sentence “catch phrase” to respond when someone asks, “What does your business do for people?” The key is to highlight a singular line of work, plus exactly what benefits customers can expect from using the business. For example, a business coach may say, “In my business, we’re experts at helping business leaders be more effective, so they can make more money with less stress.” In this statement, she has said who she helps (it’s deliberately open-ended to include a variety of business leaders), and what she does for them (helps them make more money with less stress). When considering business model, entrepreneurs must determine whether their customers would want to buy their product or service in the form in which they’re selling it. Maybe a business was running smoothly for years with the same business concept and business model – but with changes in the economy, it is not as profitable. In cases like this, a business owner can assess whether she could make focused minor or moderate changes to her business model to offer her services or products in a way that makes sense, now.

Change happens, always. The way a woman business owner reacts and adapts to change defines whether her company will simply survive or begin to thrive. By following the above advice during three common sets of circumstances, female entrepreneurs will hold the power they need to live their ideal type – and to find personal and professional satisfaction.

About the Author:

Michele DeKinder-Smith is the founder of Jane out of the Box, an online resource dedicated to the women entrepreneur community. Discover more incredibly useful information for running a small business by taking the FREE Jane Types Assessment at Jane out of the Box. Offering networking and marketing opportunities, key resources and mentorship from successful women in business, Jane Out of the Box is online at www.janeoutofthebox.com.

Categories
People & Relationships

The 6 Perceptual Styles, What We Value and How We See the World: The Flow Person

Bill’s Perceptual Style is Flow. He perceives a world of unity and relationships in which every piece is connected to every other piece; a rich world where the parts fit together and support and nourish each other. He trusts in the flow of experience and believes what is important and necessary will emerge as a matter of course as it reflects the underlying harmony and cooperation inherent in the world. He knows the relationships he sees are not always obvious, especially to others, and that they reveal themselves only through his patient careful attention, and even then only slowly, in hints, intimations, and whispers.

Bill creates and sustains powerful but subtle relationships that form the glue of a community. He maintains the balance between the myriad elements of his world through constant attention and tending. His attention, while caring and supportive, is subtle and not readily apparent to those around him as he acts indirectly, behind the scenes, and outside the spotlight. Belonging is critical to him, but being the center of attention is not his style.

Moving smoothly and easily between daily events as his awareness emerges and recedes, Bill attends, in proper proportion, to events and people where connection and relationships require his attention. He builds connections steadily and patiently because he knows that relationships require time. He avoids pushing, demanding, or abrupt action because he trusts that what needs to be done will be done in its proper time.

Bill facilitates the development of an environment that is comfortable, one that fosters and encourages people. When his environment shifts away from cooperation, team building, and community, he quietly influences its realignment, putting his own personal needs aside if necessary. Bill has learned that taking care of himself is best done by taking care of the community within which he lives and works. While this is done with great care it is not passive, as he skillfully weaves a web of connections that binds those within his community closely to him.

Bill welcomes new events that support his traditions and values, and will adopt smoothly to change that he experiences as connected to the flow of his personal history. While he deeply distrusts arbitrary change, others often seek him out during times of upheaval because his skills are invaluable to restoring stability, coherence, and identity.

Bill uses his relational communities to gather and transmit informal information, after he has intuited what to pass on and what to withhold. He makes this determination through his understanding of what will most effectively and inconspicuously build alliances, promote participation, and instill commitment from people within his community. His information sharing is so careful and unobtrusive that others experience the connection within the community but are often unaware of his contribution to building it.

Bill often acts as a listening post to the members of his community without the need to give advice, pass judgment, or provide opinions. He will offer aid and assistance when asked but it takes the form of empathy and support rather than strategy and action plans. He encourages development and growth, and empathizes with those who are struggling. People respond to his personal engagement with them and the warmth and concern he shows them. Bill is rarely in a rush and always has time to interact with those who are troubled or just want to talk.

For Bill, the world is not a series of unrelated facts but a single whole full of patterns, impressions, and connections. He communicates his experience in stories that provide others with the necessary context but may alter or leave out factual points. His stories are a way to build personal connection and find common ground with others rather than a means to convey data and facts.

Bill is at his best smoothing the sharp edges of chaotic environments and erratic relationships. He builds a sense of cohesion within groups and creates a sense of group identity to which others willingly commit. He secures commitment to the community by thinking of others, making contact, doing favors, and staying in touch with all community members. It is important to him that outsiders accurately perceive community values, so he attends carefully to the image that his group projects and makes sure that it is consistent and appropriate.

His activities are ultimately focused on support and maintenance of his community. He is a keeper of community history and tradition and uses the history of the community to keep it grounded. He knows that understanding the past holds the key to providing continuity between the past, present, and future. He is the one who remembers everyone’s birthday, special occasions, and personal tidbits. He finds ways to stay in touch and often gives small meaningful gifts for no apparent special reason. These are his way of holding onto and building relationships and community.

About the Author:

Lynda-Ross Vega: A partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., Lynda-Ross specializes in helping entrepreneurs and coaches build dynamite teams and systems that WORK. She is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.ACIforCoaches.com.

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents: www.aciforcoaches.com

Categories
Sales & Marketing

7 Simple Secrets to Reducing Your Refunds

There are few things in life as deflating as refund requests can be.

You’ve spent weeks or months (or years in some cases) creating a product. You work so hard to market it and get into your ideal clients’ hands. And they buy! It’s so exciting when you make sales.

And then you get a request for a refund. Argh!

Luckily I have good news. There are things you can do to reduce your refund rate. And many of them won’t cost you a dime. I’m going to walk you through these 7 simple steps about simple tweaks you can make to your product to make it more valuable and easy follow-up strategies.

Let’s get started.

1. Put a Quick Start CD or report in the product. Information products can be overwhelming. You open up the product and you have all these CDs and DVDs transcripts and worksheets and you don’t know where to start. A Quick Start guide (either audio or written) can give people a place to begin and it can help them consume the material more easily.

If people are feeling overwhelmed, they may just decide they don’t have time to figure this out after all and pack it all up and return to you.

(And yes, you can still include this even if the product is all digital.)

2. Include a Welcome letter or extra gift (or both). Let’s go through the Welcome letter first. A Welcome letter should:

* Reassure them they made a good decision by purchasing your product

* Get them excited about digging in and using the product

Welcome letters can also give them additional information and resources, or it can double as your “Quick Start guide” and give them instructions on how they should get started. Either way, it should make them feel good about their investment. (This again can and should be included with digital products.)

Now let’s look at gifts. A gift can be small, just a little extra bonus. Maybe it’s a promotional item, such as a pen or a bookmark. Or it could be an extra bonus, maybe an additional unadvertised report. Whatever it is, it just adds to the value and helps make your ideal clients feel like you’re overdelivering on value.

3. Send them an extra, unadvertised bonus at a later time. With this one, instead of bundling the bonus in the product, save it and send it to them later. This accomplishes a couple of things — your ideal clients feel taken care of plus it gives you another opportunity to reach out and connect with them again. This is a good way to further build the relationship with your ideal clients so they don’t feel like they’re simply a “walking wallet.”

4. Call them to thank them for their purchase. Yes, you read that right. Pick up the phone and give them a quick welcome call.

This can be a very powerful strategy for a number of reasons. First off, almost no one does it in the Internet world so you’re really going to stand out. Second, it’s another way to overdeliver value to your customers. Third, it’s a way to connect with them so they know they’re more to you then simply a sale.

I can hear all of you saying “I don’t have time.” That’s fine, have someone on your team do it. It doesn’t have to be a long call, just a quick phone call to welcome them into your community and to see if they have any questions or need anything from you. That 5 minutes can go a long way to really communicating a high level of customer care.

5. Set up a welcome auto-responder series. I’m currently working with a client to create a very integrated 30-day follow up email campaign. You don’t have to do something that elaborate, but even 5 or 7 follow up emails to help your customers get started with your product can go a long way. These emails can:

* Reassure them they made a good decision by purchasing your product

* Give them some additional tips for using the product

* Tease them about what’s in the product, to get them excited about diving in and getting started (remember, people who actually go through your product are far less likely to return it)

* Ask them for a testimonial or encourage them to refer a friend

* Upsell them to the next level

6. Add in live calls with you. There was a time where you could sell an information product and get top dollar for it and not include any interaction with you. Those days are gone. If you want to sell an information product with no calls or support from you, the price needs to be lower and be prepared for higher returns. But if you add in a couple of training and/or Q&A and live coaching calls, then you can raise the price plus it will reduce your refund rate.

People want accountability (and having those calls does add a level of accountability because they’ll need to go through the program to keep up with the calls) and they also want to interact with you. The more you can give people what they want, they more likely they’ll become loyal customers and raving fans.

7. Follow up with snail mail. I’ve found mailing people a postcard or a newsletter is a great way to build and deepen the relationship with my customers. Again, you’re reaching out to them outside the online world, sending something physical and doing this after the sale. So it’s a great way to stay connected with your clients. Of all the tips I gave, this one is the most costly, but over the long run, it can really pay off in a big way.

Categories
Success Attitude

Through the Looking Glass: Your Beliefs May be Holding You Back from Success

I have had such a transformation in my business this year that’s in such contrast to the general way of thinking in terms of how businesses should be doing during an economic recession. One of the most important steps I took was looking inward at my beliefs that were holding me back and putting them under a magnifying glass.

Now, there are a lot of coaches and consultants and spiritual teachers and wonderful people who I love to support who talk about being mindful of our thoughts, and I can’t say enough about that. But sometimes I feel like it’s “woo woo” stuff and I just need to get back to work. But I realized that there were some pretty big beliefs that I was holding onto that were really keeping me from moving forward in my business.

Here’s one of them: I can’t take time to reevaluate my business or take my eye off the ball because my income will suffer. Here’s another one: I can’t take time off because my income will suffer. And another: I can’t say no to a client because that would be giving up on income.

Sound at all familiar? Now I invite you to really take a look at the beliefs you have that are keeping you from making changes in your business. Think about good ideas you’ve seen or what other successful people are doing, but when you think about doing it yourself you have a belief or resistance about it. Just investigate your thinking. And then allow yourself to do something outside your comfort zone to battle those beliefs head on.

If you can really dissect and understand where your thoughts are coming from and why you are having them, it will work wonders. It certainly made a huge difference for me.

I’ll give you one example. For years I saw people charging several thousands of dollars for the stuff that I was only charging several hundred dollars for. “How could they do that?” I’d ask myself. And you know how they could? Because they chose to do that! I had a belief that I couldn’t do that.

So one of the things I did was hire a coach to invest in training for a specific area of my business that I wanted to grow in. Paying someone a couple of thousand dollars for a couple of hours of her time completely pushed me out of my comfort zone. But within two weeks I made the money back, and even more important is that I shifted my consciousness around what I was worth. I believed my services were of high value to my clients and I upped my pricing, which was something I had never done before.

We all have beliefs about ourselves, positive and negative, that are holding us back from success. Take a hard look at yourself in the mirror, pinpoint the beliefs that are holding you back and confront them head on. Not only will you see a new person looking back at you in the mirror, you’ll open yourself up for business, personal and spiritual development.

About the Author:

Lisa Cherney is a Marketing Intuitive and President & Founder of Conscious Marketing™.  Lisa has helped thousands of business owners tap into their intuition and market their businesses from the ‘Inside Out’. For 15 years she worked at Fortune 500 companies and top advertising agencies.

Lisa tells her story in her co-authored book “Inspiration to Realization,” available at www.ConsciousMarketing.com. Conscious Marketing also offers workshops and coaching. Visit her website for more details or call 888-771-0156 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              888-771-0156      end_of_the_skype_highlighting.

Categories
Networking

Fear and Relationships: Two More Tips for Value Based Networking

Very often, fear is what keeps us from maximizing our contacts with other people. Human beings are full of fears: fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of looking ignorant or stupid, fear of hearing that four letter word: NO. So, what do we do? We procrastinate, we rationalize: “Oh, he’ll never agree to that, why bother asking, he’ll just say ‘no.’”

Don’t let fear keep you from asking. What you must remember is that the thing you should really be afraid of is missing an opportunity because you didn’t make the contact.

There is a story from Harvey Mackay that goes like this: In 1990 the then Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev announced plans to visit the United States. Everyone assumed he’d visit Washington, D.C. However, Rudy Perpich, the Governor of Minnesota, thought that perhaps Gorbachev might like to visit some other parts of the country. So he wrote him a letter. And he asked seventy Russian students on the campus at the University of Minnesota to write him letters as well telling him how great it would be for him to see the Heartland of the US.

Perpich asked for the visit, risked being turned down, and to everyone’s astonishment, he got what he wanted. For a day in June, Minnesota was able to welcome one of the most influential leaders in modern history.
Now this is a quote from Mackay’s book:

“The moral? Never say no for the other guy. Most people avoid risks their whole life by assuming the other guy is going to say no. …  All you have to do is ask. I guarantee you, if you get enough nos, you’re bound to get a few yeses. So don’t say no for anyone. You never know when you’ll create for yourself an opportunity of a lifetime.

Is your focus on short-term gain, or a long term relationship? If it’s the former, you’re going to have difficulty connecting with people because most folks can detect someone who has a motive or agenda. You must first establish acceptance and a friendship and you do this by taking a genuine interest in other people. Demonstrate through active listening (look it up if you’re not sure what that means) that you not only want to get to know them but you want to learn from them. Most people are flattered when someone asks their opinion on anything; people love to share their knowledge and opinions. And ask questions.

The sooner you find something you have in common with the other person, the sooner the connection will occur. It’s the common ground that gives you something to talk about with them and you need to be willing to invest the time and effort to uncover the things you may have in common.

About the Author:

The Balanced WorkLife Company is dedicated to helping the best get better while they enjoy the journey. Our programs give you access to tools and methodologies that allow you to break through the barriers and achieve your goals while also helping you enjoy a balance between and within your job, your career and your personal life. Whether you are a seasoned professional or just starting your career, the Balanced WorkLife Company can help you achieve your ultimate potential. To learn more, visit http://www.valuebasednetworking.com and download our free report “The 16 Most Common Networking Mistakes to Avoid,” which is jam-packed with information to help you develop and build long-lasting business and social relationships.