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The Business of YOU… Why Now is the Time to Get Serious!

January 2, 2013 by Chris 35 Comments

the business of you

If you’ve not thought properly about investing in the business of you recently, now would be a great time to start doing so. It’s about having a renewed focus on what you’re doing business wise, and the way that you’re going about building a sustainable, future-proof business.

Along with year-long and even further afield goals and aspirations, I generally plan my business movements approximately 3-months in advance. Sometimes a little longer, but not much. Everything I do is built on top of my 90-Day Intent Planner mindset, where I focus my goals based around three key elements – sales and marketing, legacy and impact, and finally my own self development. 

This is the exact 90-day framework for goal setting (and getting!) that I coach and oversee inside of my coaching groups and programs. Why? It works. That simple.

I believe that every year going forward can and will be the year of building a strong personal brand for yourself, your business and most importantly… those that you serve.

I’ve been saying it for almost a decade at the time of writing – people want to do business with people. Not big brands, or huge companies. Because of this human need, or requirement, we have to plan for the future of our businesses and understand that building our businesses around our personal brands (and vice versa) is a good way to move forward in today’s business climate.

Which leads me to the most important part of building the business of you… relationships.

Build Higher Quality Relationships

I can honestly say that since 2009, when I became properly active online, I’ve made more ‘worthwhile’ friends that I did in the decade before. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I’ve even made a few friends that I know I will remain friends with for the rest of my life!

The business world runs on relationships. People you want to do business with – sell to, market to, those that you need to work for you, and help you on your mission, towards entrepreneurial success.  These are the relationships that make the difference. 

These are the people that’ll say nice things about you, and talk about your products, services, online content, etc. They’ll do favors for you, and make things happen for you – sometimes for monetary gain, but most of the time, just for the hell of it – because they believe in you.

These relationships help build the collection of people that you need to succeed in today’s business world, more than anything else. 

Build Your Community

Marketing star, Seth Godin believes that a tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another… a leader, and an idea.

Boom! There you have it.

If you check out the 1,000 True Fans post over at The Technium blog, you’ll see that the author, Kevin Kelly reports that, and I quote from that article directly, “A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce…”.

Enough said.

Build your tribe.

Build Your Platform

In my book, Rise of the Youpreneur, I talk a lot about content creation and marketing and social media, in regards to building an online brand and then embracing the opportunities that come along thereafter. This is a long-game approach to successfully building the business of you.

Almost every business owner that I’ve coached and helped through this focus as an entrepreneur has seen massive gains, and in a plethora of ways, when it comes to building their personal brand, such as:

Increase in social media followers, and the engagement from those followers.

Email’s coming from people that I’ve NEVER heard from before, asking questions about their businesses and how they can help them.

An increase in coaching clients, strategy calls, product sales, service inquiries… you name it!

I truly believe that the stepping stones I’ve put in place in the last few years alone (even though I’ve been at this for much longer!) are already paying off and will continue to do so. 

But here’s the thing, I’ve been building businesses since 2004. It’s only since 2012, when I really started to focus on the personal branding element of my life and career, ultimately investing in the business of Chris, that everything became much easier. And more profitable! 

The future is bright. Because, the business of you is the future!

The ‘New Business’ Manifesto

October 4, 2012 by Chris 50 Comments

New Business Manifesto

Throughout the course of a normal week, I’ll receive hundreds of questions from small business owners and startup entrepreneurs on the subject of starting and growing companies in today’s incredibly fast moving business world.

A lot of the time they are via our Facebook Community, and I’ll reply there directly. Sometimes its on Twitter, and some times via email. Bottom line: I freakin’ love hearing from you – regardless of how you reach out. So, please don’t stop!

One thing that I really love is the fact that the large majority of these messages come in from people that have already taken and finished my free training course, the ‘New Business’ Bootcamp, giving them a great kickstart in the process!

But, growing a business in today’s market is not just about learning how to blog, podcast, how to utilize online video, or work with virtual assistants (to name a few of the subjects tackled in the bootcamp). It’s also just as important to have the right mindset, than it is to have the skills!

We need to encapsulate EVERYTHING that we should ALL be about, in regards to changing the way we startup, market and build our businesses in today’s economy, so I bring to you, the ‘New Business’ Manifesto!

…

READ POST

Get Smart – 3 Things Entrepreneurs Should Hand Over to the Experts!

April 28, 2012 by Chris 45 Comments

Entrepreneurs: Leave it to the Pro'sAs entrepreneurs we have a thousand ideas a minute and not enough hours in the day to think about ’em!

If you’re just starting out, bootstrapping, growing – you’re no doubt doing long hours and tiring yourself out. That’s okay. It’s expected. A lot of the time you ARE the only one that can take care of a certain task, or project. However, a lot of the time there are certain tasks that you shouldn’t even be thinking about getting involved with (unless you’re an expert in that particular subject).

Today, I thought it might be good to look into this a little more.

Here are my ‘Top 3 Things’ that Remarkable Entrepreneurs should certainly leave to the people that do them every day for a living. By having this type of ‘Delegation Mindset’ we can a) work a few less hours, and b) genuinely get better quality work output.

When you’re done reading, I’d love to hear what else you think startup business owners shouldn’t be attempting themselves, instead delegating to the pro’s.

#1 – Any type of Graphic Design or Web Design / Development

Here’s a true story, involving… me… 3-odd years ago when I started to play around online for the first time, I decided that I could buy a customizable WordPress blog theme, spend a few hours tweaking it to the way I wanted it to look and then go live with my first blog post.

FACT – Business owners are, 9/10 times, perfectionists. 

That afternoon turned into the evening, which turned into the wee hours of the night. It was 4am by the time I had finished ‘tweaking’ everything and the blog I was trying to set-up still didn’t look the way I wanted it to. I was tired, frustrated and overall, I felt deflated about the whole thing.

The next day I sent it onto a Web Development guy that I knew in Manila, telling him what I wanted and even attached a couple of sketches I had put together in regards to the way I wanted the homepage to look. Just 6-hours later I had my blog online and looking exactly the way I wanted it to!

This story will no doubt ring home with a lot of other entrepreneurs that might read this post. The moral of the story – get the professionals to rock out great looking logos, business cards, flyers and websites – whilst you focus on the income generating tasks, such as writing sales copy for your website landing page, or spending time with your number one client on the golf course! 

#2 – SEO and ‘Online Marketing’ Tasks

This is probably one of the toughest topics I had getting to grips with when I started getting active online, in regards to promoting and marketing my business on the internet. That has changed a lot over time, obviously, as I have become a lot more knowledgeable on the subject by reading a ton of books, trail and error and asking as many questions (to those that ‘know’) as possible!

As someone who came from a very traditional, brick ‘n mortar business background (and who’s largest company, presently, is still very much in that category), I struggled with understanding SEO concepts. I soon learned that marketing a business online is a lot, LOT different to marketing one in the ‘real’, offline world.

From day one, I paid someone else to do it for me. Someone that had experience and understood Google and how ‘ranking’ worked, etc. And it paid off – for sure. Nowadays even though I’m a little more involved with the general strategies that we implement online, I still pay other people to do it for me, and I know one thing for sure…

If I had’ve even attempted to do this type of work myself when I was starting out, it would have been a complete disaster.

SUGGESTED LISTENING: Check out Episode 42 of the VBL Podcast with marketing professional David Meerman Scott for some of the most up-to-date marketing ideas and concepts for small business available anywhere online. David is a genius at this stuff!

#3 – Everyday, Repetitive Tasks

Being who I am, and doing what I do – this one is kind of a no-brainer.

Call it ‘working with a virtual assistant‘, or ‘outsourcing‘, or whatever you like – offloading the types of tasks that bog you down everyday as a hard working, ball-busting startup entrepreneur is just plain, good business strategy.

Whether you have to do a ton of online research; frequently have to update your social media channels; handle boring, repetitive book-keeping tasks; update your website content regularly; handle your calendar (note – I am terrible at this, and would be lost without my personal assistant doing it for me!); reply to boat-load of daily email inquiries or simply have to transcribe audio or video files, delegating work to other people, nowadays, as simple as 1, 2, 3.

Off-loading these types of everyday ‘busy tasks’, as I call them, is a great way to leverage your time, allowing yourself to get more done, with less effort and really focus on growing your business. At first that might mean spending more time on marketing concepts, or packaging ideas for your launch product. Down the road it could mean that you have more time to spend on putting processes in place for your growing empire.

Either way, working with VA’s and other types of professionals, people that do this stuff for a living everyday, is great business sense and you’ll enjoy the benefits of it, I’m sure.

That about wraps up my ‘quickie list’. Although, like I said, I’d love to hear from you on any other types of tasks, projects or processes that you feel startup entrepreneurs should simply hand over to the people ‘that know’, instead of attempting to do it all themselves.

Comment below, and lets see if we can get a bit of a conversation going!

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