What’s Hustling?

26th February 2019 By The Actionistas

HUSTLE – CREATE THE BUSINESS YOU WANT

Hustle = what you need to do to earn money

Calculated on factors such as debt levels and the weather, experts say that the period between January and Easter is officially the most depressing of the year. That doesn’t have to include us though! With headlines (Brexit) and research like this no wonder we all feel less motivated and business may be quieter. Instead we can use these early months to get the best advantage to move ahead and create the scalable business we need. I am still waiting, during another mild winter, for the 40 days of snow and ice forecast last year by many. Stop. Right. There. You decide the reality of your day and waiting around for forecasts should not be on anyone’s business agenda.

I love quotes from top motivational speakers and there are some of our favourites peppered through some helpful pointers to help you get what you planned:

(1) Are you limiting yourself?

As a small business or sole trader there are only so many hours a day and you can only work 18 hours a day for so long before you drop. Are you using your time wisely? Are you working, but not making a profit?

Now is the time to examine why.

I have met many business owners who fill their time with meetings and actions because they like to be busy. What is that time achieving? Take your networking for example. Calculate how many sales you have made as a result of networking and then measure that against the time and expenses involved in those meetings. Is it worth it? If it is lifting your spirits and you are returning because you feel pumped up and enthused then absolutely continue as its great for your well being, but, as with all activity, measure it. If it’s taking up loads of time and has a mainly social benefit then revise the time you devote to it – your business needs you to make sales as well as being in a good place mentally. Its all about making smart choices over how you spend your time.

Are you doing “stuff” at the expense of spending time on your own business? Are you worried about taking a day to plan for your business? If so, you are putting a ceiling on your own income because every business needs to be planned so you know what action to take. Yes, we mean here, planning daily and executing ON your business – not just doing the stuff you need to do IN your business.

As Zig Ziglar says, “You were born to win, but to be a winner you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.”

(2) Focus

So whilst others are lamenting you can stop sitting moping and do something. Don’t be a whinge pants, you have control over your own life and how it pans out. Spend some time on your business and think about what you want to do and achieve in the next year and plan 2 or 3 steps to make it happen.

As Tony Robbins (and many others) says, “Where focus goes, energy flows.”

(3) Set your goals

To reach a target you need to know and understand what that target is. An athlete can’t run and win a race if they don’t know where the finish line is. Saying “I want to make more money” is not going to be enough. How much? By when?

Set the goals you want to achieve in the next 12 months and work out how you are going to achieve them. So, if you want to make £30,000 a month

– what will you sell?

– how much do you need to sell

(4) Is your business scalable?

If you want to build a business empire is what you are doing now scalable? If you are currently a sole trader delivering a one to one service how are you going to multiply yourself? Is the business going to revolve around you day in day out or be able and capable of being delivered via others?

Think about factors such as

– how you can transfer what you do to enable others to replicate it?

– processes which will automate aspects of what you do – it also will make things easier and more efficient

– creating something that you can deliver “one to many”?

As Wayne Dyer says, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

(5) Get your pricing house in order

Business is NOT about being busy. Success is not measured by the fact that you work 12 hours a day. Business is about making money, so start by being really clear about your pricing.

You sell to make a profit, taking into account what it costs you to sell/produce what you sell. At its simplest if something costs you £1 and you sell it for only £1 or less, then you won’t make a profit. Base your prices realistically, based on factors such as

your buyer profile – get feedback/input and listen to what they say
your market – know what your competitors are doing
understanding what it costs you to sell/deliver

It not about having the lowest prices either – make sure your buyers know your value. As Warren Buffett says, make sure your buyers know “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

Make this your year.

Blog Ideas

30th October 2018 By The Actionistas

What Am I Going To Blog About?

Face It!

It can be difficult to come up with a topic for a blog when you know you should sit and write one. You have it scheduled in your diary and you pitch up in front of your PC with a blank screen and a blank mind. At other times you may have lots of ideas for blogs but not be in a position to write anything. You need to capture these moments of inspiration and store them for later. It doesn’t matter how you do it, but try to keep them all in the same place because the one that you actually wrote down, possibly on the back of a receipt, will be the gem that you can’t find.

It Made Sense Last Week!

Try not to use ‘shorthand’ when you do this. Get down as much of what you want to write about as you can. Deciphering ‘Etsy 4 biz’ may work if your thought was ‘Etsy is a fast growing platform and demonstrates the rise of the side hustle business owners and growth of self employed’, but a less obvious message may make little or no sense several days later.

Musing Around Morrison’s

You may (or not) wonder what prompted this topic. It was a rare visit to the supermarket (who doesn’t shop online for all of the boring stuff?) as my photographer husband had a commission for a kitchen knife range, so he wanted fresh food that was as near to perfect as he can get I didn’t really want to go, because on these trips he’ll select three mushrooms from a box of hundreds and looks at every punnet of strawberries to identify the three or four with the ‘best formed’ fruit. By that I mean that each punnet may have a single strawberry that he wants to use. Repeat for tomatoes, aubergines, limes and just about anything else and you have the idea that the visit is a wander around for me while he obsesses about colour and skin quality.

The Lost Blogs

In our trolley was a shopping list and I lifted it out to drop it into a bin, but it fluttered over and I saw the word ‘Blog topics – must write up’ followed by a couple of short notes. This was someone’s moment of mental gold, discarded in a wire basket on wheels as, presumably, they were too busy putting groceries into the car to remember their inspiration moment.

I Hope It Found Its’ Owner

I felt obligated to take the scrap of paper to customer services. I had to explain that it was important to someone and they may telephone on the off-chance. I hope it got back to its’ owner.

Thinking

18th October 2018 By The Actionistas

FIXING YOUR BUSINESS FROM THE OUTSIDE IN?

Starting and running a business is hard work – it takes time and commitment and there will always be challenges to face.

I’ve always considered myself blessed. I am in business with someone who totally gets the way I think and understands what I have in mind (even when I’m not sure I do) and also brings a totally different perspective to the table. We do have the same basic personality type but we often look at things very differently and, over the many years, we have both come to know and love each other’s strengths and weaknesses so we work with and around them. We also help each other to value and nurture those “gut feelings” that every entrepreneur has, which was really helpful to build trust and confidence in those ideas and feelings during our very early days in business. Ethically we have the same view.

Not everybody has this.

Subjective

For many owners of start-ups and established smaller businesses life can be very isolating – everything begins and ends with you. It becomes too subjective. You are the centre of the business and make every strategic decision, which is even harder when you’re tired or having a bad day. Let’s face it, none of us operate at our best when we’re overworked or feeling stressed.

The fact that you are so intrinsically a part of the business means that it is really difficult to even acknowledge that there is an issue/problem or big cloud building, let alone be able to deal with it. You’ll know that something is “not quite right” but having the time to delve further may seem like a luxury as you work to get sales in and meet existing orders. Even if you do try to tackle the issue (fitting it in around everything else) it may seem more difficult to pick your way through the problem. Often it’s easier to get on with things than to stop and open that box of issues and delve right in – we’ve all been there.

Objective

Ironically, this is exactly the point that you do need to spend time on it and this is when sharing it with someone who is not part of the business, who can view it objectively, is vital.

Making the decision to take the time out to discuss your concerns with a business professional will enable you to share their experiences and take advantage of having a totally new perspective.

Of course it’s not that you can’t tackle it alone but it’s about making it easier on yourself and your business. After all, why get lost trying to find your way when someone can help you out by letting you see a map? It’s about speed and perspective and you can lose weeks wrestling with something that an experienced adviser will have seen before and know a fix for. Why wouldn’t you want to access that help?

Early Mornings

16th October 2018 By The Actionistas

Productivity

Toni and I meet up every Friday and plan, discuss and generally work on our business for about 4 hours solid. We break this up into separate hours across the time spent together with a walk, lunch and often some coffee and cake. On Friday last it got me thinking how, very often, an hour is more productive in business than a whole day. I often get up well before 6.00 AM and will spend my first waking hour enjoying the day break through my office window. To me it’s always a renewed chance to do something different. It’s a new clean day to make an impact, to try something to make things better or tackle something in a new way.

Equally I know we all feel that on most days we need to sit in front of our computers, at our desks and focus solidly on our business and what it does rather than dream up ideas or make improvements. Being there in body doesn’t mean you are productive and often deciding that today you will spend just one or two hours on your business to improve things and do nothing else in terms of the real business you offer to clients will have a massive impact on our thoughts.

Stuff you can do in that lovely alone time

I am a self-confessed planner and short action list maker (1-3 things to do today and that’s it)and over the years I have been able to use simple tools to great effect. Setting a timer or online app to ping at the end of an hour set aside for one task is liberating. It could be grunt work like invoicing or admin, if you do this yourself, or creative work like sales copy or blogging. The main thing is whatever you decide to do is done in one hour, so it could be a massive task broken down into a manageable hour’s worth like say 10 invoices to chase or send or 2 x 350 word blogs or scheduling Social Media for 5 days or more.

Virtual Assistants

It’s a successful habit which adds up. Just one hour devoted to your business improvements for example will spark off ideas to get you more business, save time or work less on some of the more routine aspects of your business processes. This morning, my ‘Golden Hour’ was spent reading through my VA’s notes on various projects and providing feedback and ideas so when he starts work across the world in a different time zone he is not waiting for me. This practice has made both of us a lot more efficient but we did not get there immediately when we started working together. It’s grown and developed and it’s time well spent as he is a very fast worker who requires minimal comments to give brilliant results, but he does need input and I have to make sure I am fully focused so he gets the best instructions and I get the best results.

This also got me thinking about how I use an hour. When I am consulting I know exactly what I can do in an hour for a client and equally understand how tiring an hour of solid focus is. It’s much harder when I calculate what someone else does with their hour. I might tell my VA that a complex form is about an hour’s work and it could actually take 3 and I might take a day to set up a WordPress Site and install all I need on it and he will take half that time. I have learned to ask them what time it might take them as the answer often surprises me!

How do you use your time?

I also sometimes struggle when things are very busy and I cannot see where the hour can be found. Normally this means getting help in other places, watching less TV or getting up earlier before the noise of the day. That first hour of the new day for me is the most energising start. Whatever else the day has to offer if I can keep that first hour to myself I know I have achieved what I need and it puts into perspective any time spent later where I have less control over how it is spent.

So, big question now is when and what for are you going to take your Golden Hour today? Let us know in the box below, or get in touch on Social Media using the buttons on this page. We would love to hear from you.

Social Media as a Customer Magnet

2nd October 2018 By The Actionistas

SOCIAL MEDIA BUILDS GREAT CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

If you are operating a business online and haven’t yet considered throwing your hat into the social media ring, you are really missing out – Facebook and Twitter in particular have become extremely useful tools for helping brands and customers connect on a whole new level. While running a Facebook page or a Twitter account on behalf of your business, brand or range of services may seem daunting, it needn’t be – there’s a whole host of reasons why you should really throw yourself into it, and while some of the management and posting can take time out of your day, the long term benefits are huge. For professionals wanting to reach larger businesses, connecting on LinkedIn is ideal and we will be covering how and why to do this over the coming months.

Reach and Engage

In terms of marketing, you’ll be able to reach and engage with people who actively ‘like’ or ‘follow’ your brand – meaning that they will not only see any advertising or news you post, but they will also be able to pass your posts onto their friends and family to maximise engagement. Some say that social media is the new word of mouth – and the way people engage with companies and brands on Facebook and Twitter more or less allows your fans to do all the marketing legwork for you!

Appear Proactive

Beyond this, something as simple as a Twitter account can put your company across as a reliable, proactive source of knowledge and services – you can actively help customers in broad view of the rest of the internet public, and the more passion you put into delivering a great service via social media will impact upon how well you are perceived by your peers. Offering proactive, worthwhile support to those who need you – when they need you – is the name of the game – and with social media, you really have nothing to hide, as you can do it in full view of millions of potential new customers.

Social media is still revolutionising brand culture, marketing and customer engagement – and there has never been a better time to start getting involved!

Need some help and still convinced it’s just messing about and no business will come from it? Join us on our FREE marketing webinars and social media.