From “In a Fog” to “Looking Toward the Horizon Line”
When I started my business, everything was pretty foggy. Visibility was nil.
Each day, each month, each blog post, each launch was an effort to simply cross the short distance between what I could see and step carefully into the space I couldn’t see.
Fog alters our perception of reality. When I’m driving through fog, I’m hyper-alert. I’m sitting straight up in my seat, both hands on the wheel, craning for every additional inch of visibility I can get. Things feel like they’re happening fast–unexpected–even though I’m driving much, much slower.
Each moment is an opportunity to make a decision that could have incredible consequences. It’s nerve-racking. In business, it’s also thrilling.
As time goes on, the fog begins to lift. You can see more road ahead of you. You can anticipate the effects of your actions at longer and longer intervals.
The nerves are eased… and the thrill can be harder to find.
Just in the last 18 months, I’ve gone from planning 3-4 months out to planning 12-24 months out. I have mixed feelings about this, and I suspect you might, as well.
The first set of feelings is relief and confidence. I can sit back, relax a little. For the most part, I know what’s coming. Not only do I feel pretty confident about the actions I’ll be taking but I feel pretty confident about their effects. I can anticipate my workload, my revenue, and my expenses.
The second set of feelings include things like terror and vulnerability. I’m on the open road and I’m looking toward the horizon line. I can see far ahead of me but I also feel exposed and unsure.
Put another way, it’s like the boats currently occupying the Columbia River outside my office window. It’s salmon season and there are tiny fishing boats everywhere. They strike a stark contrast to the container ships that anchor waiting for clearance to proceed to Portland.
The tiny fishing boats can steer quickly and react immediately if necessary. The container ships… not so much. Their fog horns bellow out and say “get out of my way!” not because they are so powerful but because they just don’t have the ability to change course.
While I love the confidence & sense of relief that comes from being able to steer my business looking at a clear horizon line, there is a certain amount of terror that comes from not having that hyper-alert, turn-on-a-dime ability.
One of the growing pains of microbusiness is navigating this change in visibility, from guiding your business through a fog to looking toward the horizon line. You’re worried that you don’t know enough, can’t anticipate enough to look that far out.
Counterintuitive though it might be, it seems easier–even more productive–to keep operating like you’re in the fog of beginning. Hyper-alert, ready to react to anything unexpected. Thrilled.
But…
You can’t lead your business where you want it to go if you keep operating in a fog.
It’s a challenge to look further ahead, to gaze out toward the horizon line. But it’s so worth it.
Chris Guillebeau recently put it like this:
Don’t get me wrong: when you’re beginning, the little things matter. Running a mile is a big deal if you’ve never done it before.
But later, when it becomes a regular thing to lace up and hit the neighborhood for a 4-miler, and the whole time you’re thinking about other things and there’s no challenge … that’s when you’ve got to make a change.
It’s time to sign up for that marathon—before you’re ready. It’s time to say, you know, I’ve been thinking about this thing for a while. Maybe instead of thinking about it, I should do something about it.
Or maybe I’m already doing it, but my vision has been too small.
Can you see what’s on the horizon for a year or two from now? Maybe not. But maybe you could if you tried. Maybe you could challenge yourself to lead your business to a new destination.
Maybe not. You won’t know until you start looking toward the horizon line.
***
You’re ready to lead your business instead of follow the jet stream. You’re ready for more confidence, more revenue, and a greater impact in the world. It’s time for 10ThousandFeet.
Work with me over the next 4 months to create a business model that serves you & your customers, a conversation that nourishes your goals, and a plan to leverage your skills, strengths, and passions. Registration is now open.
— Megan Cain, creator of The Creative Vegetable Gardener
Sell the End Result, Not the Service (or Product, or Program)
People aren’t looking for your service (or your product, or your program). They’re looking for results.
Your customers want to change the way they feel. They want to adjust the way they act. They have goals, they have desires, they have dreams.
All too often, businesses position their offers around the “what” of what they’re offering instead of the “why” people would actually go looking for it in the first place. Further compounding this problem, is that business models are built around “whats” instead of “whys.”
Instead of considering the best ways to achieve the desired end result for you and your customer, many business owners build models that are based on how a particular service or product has always been delivered. There’s a status quo web design model, a status quo life coach model, a status quo jewelry model.
When was the last time status quo got you the results you wanted?
You can build a business model that is focused on results, different from the rest of the marketplace, and more effective for your customers. But to do that, you need to start by making sure your core product or service is positioned function-first.
Here are 3 easy ways to reposition your offers around why your customers are actually looking to buy in the first place.
1) Lead with value, not the name of your product or service.
Your product isn’t the selling point, so why make it your headline?
If your service helps people feel better about their bodies, lead with that. If your product helps make a brand more memorable, put that front & center. If your program, helps people feel more confident about the business decisions they make and, consequently make more money, make that the star.
2) Make good use of “before & after.”
Just because you’re not Extreme Makeover doesn’t mean your product can’t benefit from some before & after swagger.
It might be as simple as listing a feature that implies the “before,” as this Bang Buster headband from Lululemon does. Or it might involve turning your customers’ before into a bullet point list that exudes empathy and an equally empathetic list of bullets that describe the “after” your customers have in mind.
3) Use visuals that allow your customers to see themselves getting the results they want.
Great visual merchandising helps customers see themselves actually owning, using, and loving a product. That’s why you prefer flipping through an Ikea catalog to browsing Amazon. While this might be standard practice for physical products, it’s also extremely useful for services and programs.
Maybe you use beautiful photos of happy mamas. Or images of curvy bodies successfully practicing yoga.
Instead of just focusing on you, let your customers see themselves achieving the results they want.
Side note: Stocksy has become my go-to source of non-stocky stock images.
I mostly pointed to sales page examples in this post (click the links above to see the examples) but positioning must be woven through all parts of your business–from the Most Valued Customer you seek to engage to your brand identity to your regular email communication. Dive deeper into the businesses I highlighted here and you’ll see a results-centered culture at the heart of everything they do.
Remember, your product is important to you but it’s results your customers are after. Click to tweet. Make how life will be different–whether in big ways or small–the focus of how your engage your customers and you’re sure to get bigger, better results for yourself.
***
You’re ready to lead your business instead of follow the jet stream. You’re ready for more confidence, more revenue, and a greater impact in the world. It’s time for 10ThousandFeet.
Work with me over the next 4 months to create a business model that serves you & your customers, a conversation that nourishes your goals, and a plan to leverage your skills, strengths, and passions. Registration is now open.
— Laura Whitman, co-founder, Red Balloon Relations
Are you losing profit to “soft costs?”
Part of understanding the way your business works is understanding the costs associated with the way it generates revenue. For a low overhead business–most online or service-based businesses are–costs can be an afterthought.
How much does it cost to hop on Skype with a client? How much does it cost to produce an ebook or a teleclass? Beyond initial investments in design or tools, there is little monetary cost and almost none in terms of distribution or production.
But it’s a mistake to discount the softer costs of this work.
What are soft costs?
They’re the costs that can’t be measured in money. Soft costs could be felt in time, energy, or reputation.
Soft costs are the ones that eat away at your lifestyle, your relationships, and your personal satisfaction.
While the work you produce might be profitable financially, is it profitable energetically? Relationally? Temporally?
In 10ThousandFeet, we work to make sure each business is investing in creating products and services that are profitable across the board. We measure all the costs. We consider whether revenue streams are really worth the soft costs they demand.
Can you reduce the soft costs of your current revenue streams?
Soft costs often add up when a revenue stream demands you to exercise one of your (or your business’s) weaknesses instead of leveraging one of your strengths. That happens when you try to create a service that doesn’t fit the way you like to work or when you create a product that’s popular but not suited to your creation style.
Where are you losing profit to soft costs based on your business’s weaknesses or working style?
Soft costs also accrue when you make a decision that’s either out of integrity or out of alignment with your brand or big idea. It doesn’t even have to be a “bad” decision, it could just be unexpected or a little confusing for your customer base.
Where have you incurred soft costs due to decisions or directions you’ve taken in your business?
Sure, you want to optimize the bottom line just don’t forget the soft costs in your calculations.
What You Need to Know Before You Read Anything Else on “Marketing”
Everyone wants more marketing (read: promotional) ideas. As a blogger and strategist, it would be far easier for me to get clicks (and dollars) if I focused on how to get your big idea in front of more eyeballs.
But more often than not, when I sit down with a client, promotion is not the problem. She’s doing all the “right” things but it’s making little impact on her bottom line. And more importantly, it’s not impacting the people she wants to serve. That’s a lot of effort to pour into something that’s not putting anything back in her financial or emotional bank accounts.
Instead of focusing on promotional techniques, we check into her business model.
- Is it set up to harness her strengths and the way her organization works best?
- Is it compatible with the way her Most Valued Clients want to be served?
- Does it address the whole customer and the way s/he naturally evolves?
- Does it take into account the ebb & flow of the conversation the business & its customers participate in?
So, stop for a moment and check in with me here: Is promotion the problem? Or do you need a better model?
Your business model is the way your business creates value (solutions for customers’ needs or desires), delivers value (how those solutions get into the hands of your customers), and exchange value (how your business receives value in return for the value your business provides). I’ve written before on how to quantify this for your own business and how to consider whether the model you’ve got actually works.
But I’d like to take this idea to another level and talk about “social business models.” As I see it, a social business model is one that not only demonstrates how your business creates, delivers, and exchanges value but does so in a way that is tailor-made to the strengths of you (or your organization) and your customer and leverages the way you naturally relate to each other to facilitate co-creation.
It’s not enough to build a model that “works” in terms of numbers. If your business model isn’t built in a way that works for you and your customer, you’ll expend an enormous amount of energy trying to achieve ill-conceived goals.
As Jonathan Fields recently put it in a post on “Upstream Alignment Metrics“–fancy phrase, important subject:
Does the product, business and mode of delivery that customers are telling you they value enough to pay you to create align with the fiber of your being, your sense of meaning, fulfillment, your maker’s modus operandi and ideal life?
There’s a better way.
When your business model works–when it’s social, you’ll be able to count on your own personal strengths and less on your ability to “power through.” You’ll spend less time spastically promoting your business and more time attracting the right people. You’ll have work days that flow instead of feeling like your potential each day is less-than-fulfilled.
But perhaps the best part is that when you develop a business model that is social, you gain an incredibly powerful new team member for your business: your customer. Instead of making decisions in a vacuum, you can weigh each decision against the point-of-view of your customer. You’ll know what products you need to develop and when, you’ll know better how to price them, and you’ll have a more holistic, integrated approach to the way you serve your customers.
Let’s all take a collective sigh of relief: you can stop searching for the killer promotional technique. You can stop worrying if you’re doing “marketing” right.
Instead, you can make your model work for you.
When your business model is social, it:
- Grows from the understanding of your customer as a living, breathing, evolving human being.
- Understands your market as a conversation in which you participate but don’t control.
- Puts the function of what you offer first, well before format or price-point.
- Allows you to work in a way that makes you feel most masterful and puts your customer at ease.
- Involves your customer, whether directly or indirectly, in all decisions.
Customers are evolving human beings.
Customers’ questions change. Their needs change. Their desires change. Some businesses solve this by providing high-end, bespoke services. Others develop broad product suites of specialized solutions. Still others develop a single product that incorporates feature add-ons until the cows come home.
Which speaks to your strengths? How do your customers like to be served?
Your target market is a target conversation.
Customers control the conversation, not businesses. Your model can have the flexibility to adapt to the conversation as it changes.
Where do your strengths line up with the current conversation? How can your customers guide its evolution?
People want holes, not drills.
At least that’s what David Ogilvy said, and I couldn’t agree more. Building your model function-first means that each product evolves from a perceived need (or set of needs) your customers have. Forget trying to build out your model to some previously established set of offers.
What kind of “holes” are your customers asking for? Which “holes” is your business uniquely equipped to make?
When you operate masterfully, your customers feel at ease.
Part of operating masterfully is knowing how your business operates best. Not every business specializes in customer service. Not every business values customized services. Not every business speaks to the masses and draws a crowd.
When do you feel most masterful? When do your customers feel most at ease?
Your customers can guide your every decision.
Most entrepreneurs don’t suffer from a lack of ideas or a misunderstanding of tactics. They have difficulty making decisions between a whole lot of things that seem really good. Customers can help you make better, more confident decisions.
Does your model have a system in place to consider the customer’s perspective? Are you listening?
Remember, promotion probably isn’t the problem. If your model isn’t working for you, your business won’t ever feel like it’s working to begin with. Today, stop and consider whether your business is set up to work to your strengths, make your customer feel at ease, and bring you both together to make things flow.
How to Put ‘The Perspective Map’ to Good Use
The Perspective Map has been a tool I’ve been using with clients for years. We’ve had great success applying their findings to marketing campaigns, messaging, sales pages, and product development. I personally have used it to develop the ideas and marketing behind products & programs like The Art of Earning, The Art of Growth, and 10ThousandFeet.
It’s no surprise then that it’s my go-to tool. And I hope it will become yours.
Now that you have this tool, I want to give you three practical ways to use it. (And if you haven’t gotten The Perspective Map yet, you can grab it here.)
The Perspective Map gives you a way to record your observations and inferences about how your customers see their current need or desire. Once you’ve got it all figured out, here’s how you can apply it immediately:
1) Identify their current situation.
Customers and prospects desperately want to know that you “get them.” Part of this is being able to communicate that you understand where they’re at, right now. You see their struggle. You hear their questions. You share their desires.
Whether you’re a life coach, a web developer, or a jewelry designer, you want to be able to say to your customers, “I see you.” Take what you’ve recorded in the Say, Do, Think, and Feel boxes and use it to say exactly that on your sales pages or product descriptions.
Try using phrases like, “You want to…” or “You feel like…”
Don’t be afraid to get specific and describe their circumstances with details. Don’t be afraid that the details you’ve come up with don’t apply to some customers. Even details that are a little off help others see themselves in the circumstances you’re describing.
Lisa Claudia Briggs, a 10ThousandFeet alumna, used The Perspective Map to create a brilliant description of her Most Valued Client’s current situation. She works with women who feel things deeply and want to lose all kinds of weight. She writes of the women she works with:
- You consistently bump up against relationships that drain you, and feel as if you are giving (and giving) without getting much back.
- You find it hard to express what you want or be heard in relationships.
- You turn to food or other addictive patterns to soothe yourself when relationships let you down.
It’s not about preying on pain but it is often about acknowledging it. It can also be about acknowledging frustration, inconvenience, or unmet desire. Any way you slice it, identifying your customer’s current situation is a great way for them to feel seen and understood.
2) Discover your client’s core motivators & values.
Take a look at your Map again. What values or motivating factors are your customers hinting at? Maybe they want to be seen as more professional. Maybe they want to feel beautiful. Maybe they want to feel free from outside expectations.
Drill down until you can identify what is driving them to find solutions.
You can use these motivating factors in your content strategy, in your branding, and in your messaging. Your product spread should emphasize these values and motivators.
An example of this in my own business is my emphasis on “impact.” My Most Valued Customers want to make a good living and build successful businesses, yes. But they also want to feel like they are positively impacting the world, their communities, their customers, and their families. Making an impact is their motivating factor. It’s why they wake up every morning and it’s why they’ve built their businesses.
Everything I do or create reflects that motivating factor, making it easier for prospects to align with whatever strategy, tactic, or idea I’m sharing that day.
3) Pinpoint the results they’re looking for.
The flip side of describing your customers’ current circumstances is pinpointing the future they’re aiming for. In other words, you need to know the results they’re looking for.
Catch that? The important results are the ones your customers are looking for, not the results you think your product or service provides. Don’t get me wrong, I know those are awesome results but if they’re not lined up with what your customers are looking for then your customers won’t feel drawn to buying your product.
Often, knowing and communicating the results customers are looking for is difficult for my clients. Again, we break out The Perspective Map. This time, instead of looking for the “now,” we look for the “then.” We pull out the pieces of information that tell us what customers are trying to accomplish, what they really value, and what they just want to be easier.
Brigitte Lyons, PR & media strategist, does a great job of this when describing her services. She could list “learn how to perfect your pitch” or “identify your key media message” as results since those are indeed results of her service. But instead, she goes for the big results her clients are looking for–that she also provides through her service:
- Clients and customers clamoring for your work.
- Event organizers paying you to speak to large groups.
- Journalists and bloggers and TV producers emailing you for quotes, photos and features.
If we’re brainstorming product ideas, we use this information to create a list of results this product needs to accomplish for them. If we’re brainstorming for a sales page, we turn this information into a hypothesis and a bullet point list of outcomes. If we’re brainstorming for marketing & outreach, we turn a specific result into an optin incentive, an ad, or a video idea.
Your turn.
Whenever I’m feeling stuck about or trying to evaluate a business idea, I pull out The Perspective Map. That means I’m constantly coming back to you, my customer, and co-creating with you at every step of my business’s marketing, sales, or product evolution. So the next you think, “How’d she know I needed that?” You’ll know.
The Myth of Solo Entrepreneurship: A New Relationship with “The Hustle”
This is a topic that’s been on my mind for months. It’s time to call bull crap on solo entrepreneurship.
There’s no such thing. Business doesn’t happen in a bubble.
And hustling isn’t the path to a sustainable business. Hustle plays a part–I’ll get to that–but if your “success” is built squarely on the shoulders of your own hard work, you haven’t created a business, you’ve created a prison.
This post is in three parts:
- Why solo entrepreneurship is a myth
- What you need to do to transcend this myth
- And when hustle and nose-to-the-grindstone work really pays off
Why solo entrepreneurship is a myth
Solo entrepreneurship isn’t a myth because people are lying to you. It’s a myth because it’s not the whole truth. It’s out of context.
The context is that, in the Social Era, work doesn’t look like it used to. Value doesn’t even look like it used to. Instead work and value creation happen in and through the network. Co-creation is standard, relationship is capital, innovation is vocation.
Working “solo” is possible only because we’re working together. And because we have new ways of working together. When you concentrate on the “me-ness” of your work, you forget the “us-ness” of how we got here. Click to tweet.
When you’re fixated on the “solopreneurship” shiny object, instead of asking for help, delegating to the crowd, or just flat-out hiring the right people, you berate yourself and try to work harder.
Those that appear to be doing it on their own, those who appear to shine the light on themselves, are actually running organizations. Those organizations are loose, fluid, and largely motivated by social purpose, but they are organizations nonetheless. It’s worth bearing in mind.
These people also see their microbusinesses as lean & mean, not small. They might not even identify with the term “mircobusiness” because the vision they have for their impact is downright big. They see “micro” as a way to do more, not get by with less.
Efficiency is the name of the game, not sweat equity.
Finally, these entrepreneurs don’t equate themselves with their businesses. They are building something that will outlast them, reach people that they couldn’t reach on their own, and something that–gasp–has value outside the individual work that they do or the products they create. It’s a tricky thing this shift from seeing personality and individual strengths as an asset and not the product in and of itself. But it’s an important shift.
So while “solopreneurship” isn’t the only realm where hustle is the name of the game, it’s hard not to run a business where you are the sole idea generator, sole investor, and sole executive without an overwhelming amount of hustle. And that’s just not sustainable. It’s time to see your business and its team for its full breadth and depth.
What you need to do to transcend this myth
It isn’t that Founder’s Mojo, as Charlie Gilkey calls it, isn’t sustainable. It’s that your business will grow–and probably already has–beyond its ability to sustain itself solely on your mojo.
“Founder’s mojo is like an electric generator that can move around in a business. That generator can power anything within the business; in fact, it has powered everything in the business.
But there are only so many things the generator can power at once. As a business grows, there are more things that need juice than the generator can power simultaneously.”
— Charlie Gilkey
So where do you put your effort and attention to transcend this and allow your business to grow? Put your effort and attention where your unique skills, talents, strengths, and passions are. Identify your Onlyness and use it.
The beauty is that, when you put your effort and attention into only the things that make you feel alive, masterful, and purpose-driven, it ceases to feel like much effort at all. You can move quickly from burnout (i.e. trying to use your Mojo or hustle to force things to work) to flow (i.e. getting more out of every ounce of energy you invest).
What systems do you need to have in place to make this happen? Here are my basics (this is largely what we cover during 10ThousandFeet which begins again in September):
- A Social Business Model that is built to the strengths of both you and your customers and leverages the way you naturally relate to each other to facilitate co-creation
- A clear Perspective on the world through your customers’ eyes that inspires your messaging, marketing, and product development (get the FREE Perspective Map tool here)
- A system for Delegation to key contractors or employees and a rallying cry to motivate them
- A Communication strategy that keeps your customers and prospects in the loop and moving toward your shared vision
These systems largely organize themselves around a message that, as Nilofer Merchant puts it, frees “work” from jobs. If you can distribute the work required to reach your goal to as broad of a base as possible, there’s less of you required to reach your goal.
‘When a clear purpose is coupled with shared power, people can self-organize to reach a goal. In essence, Social Era organizations will finally act flat (and quite often this leads to speed) because they will actually be flat. The artifice of who is in or out of the organization will be less important than what work needs to get done by what talent and with what motivation.”
— Nilofer Merchant, 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era
Look at Anna Guest-Jelley of Curvy Yoga. Her business is built around a rallying cry that motivates her community to work for her. Her goal is to bring the power of yoga to every body. It’s a message that’s easy to understand and easy for her community to act on. It also motivates her team and guides her decision-making. A rallying cry like that creates opportunities without an overwhelming amount of hustle.
MailChimp is another great example. When they went freemium in 2009 with 100k users, their customer base grew exponentially to 1.2 million by 2012. While they employ marketers and pay for advertising, this growth was largely fueled by how excited their users are to talk about the service. Their belief that email marketing should be fun means they’re a fun referral to give. Beyond that, their commitment to continually bettering their platform means that they also motivate me based on excellence. Not only do I refer you all to them but I regularly teach how to use their service better.
Anna, MailChimp, and I need less effort to run our businesses because we understand how to leverage our message & strengths, the power of the network to take a role in “work,” and the importance of taking a real position of leadership in the world that you’ve created through your business.
When hustle and nose-to-the-grindstone work really pays off
After my last post on Playing a Different Money Game, Kelly Dahl wrote me with a question that was on many of your minds:
You mentioned that you aren’t “hustling” as much any more. Implicit in the way you mention this is that you did hustle, a lot, to get to the place you are today. How much hustle do you think is really necessary? I struggle so much with the hustle part. I’m not sure if I just need a swift kick in the ass to get over myself, or if I can hustle in my own way and still continue to build my business.
I stopped hustling constantly when my message became so clear, my purpose so organizing, and my process so reproducible that others were able to “work” on my behalf whether they were part of my organization or not. I didn’t need to spread the word about the You Economy because You did it for me. I didn’t need to prove the value of my process because others demonstrated that value for me.
I hustle–and I use the word the way my softball coaches used it–when I know where I’m going. I hustle to right field, home plate, or the pitcher’s mound. But I’m no long distance runner. I don’t hustle for fun.
For instance, I spent some time “hustling” this weekend when the spirit moved me enough to finish a new list incentive. I hustled a little more when I decided to go all in and start running Facebook more strategically from a Page instead of my profile. I hustled to finish The Art of Growth last year.
I generally don’t hustle for interviews. The requests come naturally because of the work I do and the message I espouse. I generally don’t hustle for sales. I’m direct and have learned how to communicate the value of what I do pretty clearly. I generally don’t hustle social media. If I’m inspired, I post and interact. In each of these cases, I lead with my strengths and passions so that the work feels more like play.
Hustle is an important of the growth of any business, though, as Kelly said. If you’re looking for specific ideas of where hustle will make the most difference in the early stages of a business, check out this post by Paul Graham.
As I was growing my business, I put hustle into exploring my message, clarifying my purpose, and systematizing my process. I spoke, I listened, I experimented, I tested. I had coffee conversations. I made beautiful mistakes by moving fast and furiously. But all that hustle led to having a message that others are excited to spread, a purpose others are excited to work toward, and a process that gets the job done over and over again. If the hustle you’re investing into your business supports similar goals, I say keep up the good work. If the hustle you’re expending on your business is scattershot, it’s time to reevaluate.
In the end, all this means my business is yours, not mine. It’s your excitement that makes the difference, not mine. I’m not a solo entrepreneur and this isn’t a business of one. It’s a business of tens of thousands. And no amount of hustle can overcome the power of those numbers.