When someone asks you, “What do you do for a living?” you might reply that you are an accountant, attorney, consultant, carpet cleaner, financial planner, or a provider of whatever types of services you sell. Yet if you run your own business, you are not in the accounting, legal, consulting, carpet cleaning or financial planning business. Rather, you are in the business of running a business that happens to sell those types of services and related products to people for a profit.
Too often, the reason why businesses fail is because the business owner prefers to do the day-to-day activities of servicing his clients to the detriment of running a business. Many service professionals hate the concept of business development or rainmaking. They don’t want to be out there getting clients. They want to be working with clients.
Unfortunately, this mindset can only lead to frustration and chaos. You will never know where your next client will come from nor what your business will look like in a year or five years. You might dream big, wishing that you will suddenly get your big break and clients will flood your doors, but you don’t actually have a plan to make that happen.
In fact, when you look at your business objectively, you don’t really own your business. It owns you. What you’ve really created for yourself is a very demanding job that barely pays well given the number of hours you work. You must work to make money and if you stop working, your income ceases.
Developing a Marketing Mindset
Nothing happens until a sale is made. Selling is the process of getting prospects to exchange dollars for your products and services. Without selling, you have no income.
Marketing is the process of profitably finding and attracting qualified prospects to your business. I say profitably because most small business owners see marketing as an expense they have to do because everyone else is doing it, but they have no idea why their marketing doesn’t work as well as it should or even how well it is working. They know they have to get clients somehow, but they just aren’t sure what to do.
Rather than thinking of yourself as a consultant or lawyer or accountant, you must change your mindset and see yourself as operating a business that happens to market certain types of services. Developing a marketing mindset is the number one key factor to business success.
Putting an Effective Marketing System into Place
One of the reasons people like to buy franchises is because they already have effective business systems in place. How often do you hear of a McDonald’s going out of business? Not too often. That is because McDonald’s has spent years working out all the problems in their processes until they have a virtually no-fail business operation.
Yet few small businesses take the time to work out a system for running their business seamlessly and efficiently. They take on any client who comes their way, do things differently for each client, hope that client is satisfied, and then send them on their merry way. They have no idea how to continue to attract similar types of clients. They don’t have a systematized way to handle client work. And they don’t have a way to follow up with past clients for testimonials, referrals and repeat business.
The main reason they don’t take the time to put together and test efficient systems is because they believe it takes too much work. Who has time for that when they are struggling to keep their clients happy and pay the bills at the end of the month? Yet a bit of planning goes a long way.
If you can cut down your time spent working on client projects because you handle them the same way each time and are more efficient – and you ensure your clients walk away from you happy – wouldn’t that justify putting in that initial time spent creating your system? If it took you a few hours to create but you reaped the benefits of greater efficiency and time management for the life of your business, isn’t that worth it?
How To Get Different Results
The biggest mistake that holds service providers back is looking to what everyone else is doing and trying to copy them. If the guy next door gets a new sign or brochure, you want one. If you see he’s running ads in a particular newspaper, you run some too. If he puts up a new website, you start working on yours.
You structure your business just like your competitors, set up similar operations, and market yourselves similarly – and yet you expect different results from what they are getting! You’ve probably heard the definition of insanity – doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result.
If you really want to get different results, you have to do things radically different. But what if you don’t want to “reinvent the wheel”? Well, that wheel is the hamster wheel you work in every day in hopes that you will eventually get different results. Do you really want to stay trapped in the wheel?
You will only be able to take your business to a new level when you start looking at it differently. Study successful companies outside your profession or industry and look at what they do differently. What makes them successful? Then, apply those techniques to your business.
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