GOALS

I'm going to kick things off by talking about goals. Goals are something which many business coaches will talk about however I believe my goals too is very different. The reason for that is because I want you to understand the theory which sits behind goals, why we have them and how specific we've got to be with our goals in order to be able to have the opportunity to achieve them.

My goals tool is based on a book called Think and Growth Rich by Napoleon Hill (if you buy this book get the 21^st Century Edition). If you haven't read it already, I thoroughly recommend you do read it.

There is another book based on Think and Grow Rich called The Secret. In my opinion The Secret doesn’t do Think and Grow Rich justice. The secret is talked about 120 times in Think and Grow Rich, but they never tell you what ‘the secret’ is.

In short, I'm going to reveal to you what the secret is.

PASSION vs AOB

I want you to just take a moment, and ask yourself one very simple question:

“How much time am I spending in my business, doing what I love?”

The reason why I ask that, is that most people see their day to day lives in terms of doing admin and other activities within their business, as running their business. And, actually, where we deliver the most value to our customers is when we're spending time delivering our products and services to our customers.

What I mean by that is those activities are hopefully what we are most passionate about. What I tend to see is that many business owners and entrepreneurs, spend very little time delivering and doing the thing which they're passionate about within their business. Consequently this means they are spending a majority of their time doing the any other business.

Ultimately spending too much time on AOB leads to their business failing or struggling as a result. It is the thing that we are most passionate about which is the thing that generates income for ourselves.

4 STAGES OF LEARNING

I'm sure that many of you drive cars. Have you ever done a 10 or 15 or 20 minute journey and ended up at your destination and never really quite understood or remembered how or why you got there?

What I'm going to talk about is the four different stages of learning and introduce to you a concept of how a similar sort of experience often happens with business owners, like you, in their day-to-day lives.

I am also going to explain why we should make sure that it doesn't happen because it can be quite damaging to a business.

AUTOPILOT ENGAGED

I'm going to talk to you about the four stages of learning and hopefully this will give you a bit of an insight into your day to day activities and the things that you do on autopilot that are holding you back. I am going to break out of that mindset and get you more self-aware around what you're doing within your business.

THE GOLF PRO

I’ve talked about how to set goals, and what sorts of things constitute goals.

One of the things which I said about having a specific goal, say for example generating ten new clients over the course of the next three months. Let’s assume that this could create £10,000 recurring revenue per month.

One of the most common set of questions I get asked is:

“How do you know how much do you charge for your products? How do you package it up so that it appears attractive to the client? And how do you explain the value proposition?”

In order to explain this, the best thing that I could possibly do is just tell you a client case study who I delivered a consultation to at the start of last year. The case study I'm about to tell you about, literally, took about as long as this recollection took. He only used up ten minutes of his allotted time, despite the fact that he had booked an hour with me.

PRODUCT ARCHITECTURE

So many business owners just focus on a single core product. Imagine this scenario for a second; whatever market sector that your business is in, or the type of business or whatever product you sell. If it's quite expensive and at the moment it’s sat in a warehouse. It’s a big warehouse. Then a little door opens up at the bottom of this warehouse and somebody walks in through the door. They look up at your core product and it's expensive, they don't understand the features, the benefits or the outcomes that your product is going to deliver.

The first thing they're going to do is just turn around and walk straight back out of that door.

As a consequence of the age that we live in nowadays that most businesses and most markets are very saturated. 25 years ago pre-internet age there were 468,000 businesses in the UK. Now in 2017 there are 5.6 million small businesses in the UK. Every industry, and market is totally saturated with 10 times the amount of competition.

TEN TIMES THE COMPETITION

You will feel like there's plenty of opportunity that the internet has created for you in terms of getting your products out there to a broader audience. But, don't forget there's also 10 times as many businesses out there doing the same exactly the same thing as you.

You've got to find a way of cutting through the noise that's out there in your marketplace and attracting clients to you rather than just putting your core products out there and thinking that everybody's going to buy it. That just doesn't happen in this day and age despite the fact that it should be easier due to the global marketplace we have available to us online.

PRICING, PACKAGING AND VALUE PROPOSITION

I suppose this is really about my background, but I find that telling my story is a really good way of demonstrating how I've progressed over the last 16 years around creating growth within the various businesses that I've been involved with. In particular, I spent 10 years running a web design, graphics agency, and we used to do all sorts of fun stuff around brochure design, branding, logo design, building website's landing pages, and eCommerce websites for clients.

Over the course of the 10 years, that's when I had the contact with the broadest number of different business owners. It gave me a really good feeling for a) how my customers worked, and b) how I interacted with my clients, and how there are specific, strategic decisions that we made in order to generate growth within our business.

I'm going to tell you about some of the various different products that we had within our core business and how we created more time for ourselves through honing those products.

3 COMMON PRICING MISTAKES

How do you know how much to charge for your products and services?

We don’t get taught about pricing products and services at school or university. How often do you walk into a shop to buy something, from a packet of crisps up to a brand new BMW, and never challenge the price?

If you do challenge the price, it's because it's too expensive and, rarely, you'll come out saying, gosh that was cheap.

There are three common pricing mistakes, which people make in business, and I'm going to walk you through now. You will undoubtedly find that you are making at least one of these common pricing mistakes. I will show you how to stop making these three pricing mistakes so that you'll feel comfortable and confident about charging whatever you feel is the right amount to charge for your products and services.

A great case study of one of my consultation clients. We managed to take her business from being very seasonal with incredibly busy periods followed by very sparse periods.

We managed to achieve:

1. Increasing her rates by 50%
2. Migrating clients onto a pay monthly scheme
3. Removed repeat sales cycles

Many business owners focus on instant gratification of the sale and forget about how much a customer is worth to them if you include support contracts. Using a very simple example I explain why £1,000 is more valuable than £10,000 and how you can use a couple of simple tools to build recurring revenue in your business.

Sometimes we simply get to busy for our own good, and look to fill order books into the future rather than deal with the bottleneck and capacity issue we are currently experiencing.

The issue is that most business owners don't set a "capacity goal" from the get go, and then never adjust when they get too busy.

By setting a capacity constraint, when the bucket is full, we top it up with more expensive clients.

4 simple principles of marketing:

1. Identify your target market
2. Where to they hang out?
3. Go to them
4. Regularly and often with the same consistent message.

When we dream of big business and see other people whom we consider to be more successful than ourselves we dream that we can be at the same level as them when we launch. 

However, you need to remember there are no overnight success stories.

The Social Ladder explains how to achieve "unicorn" status in entrepreneurship land in a simple and effective manner.

This lecture explains how the Internet has broken marketing and how we need to base our marketing strategies around 4 simple principles of:

• Conversations
• Coffee
• Conversions
• Loyal Customers

Thus creating word of mouth and "pull" marketing.

I asked 70 university students to explain to me their idea that was going to change the world and how they would take it to market. It was a struggle! But I managed to explain how to carry out market research in three easy steps:

1. The initial pitch - is anyone interested in this?
2. What's the entry level price point a majority would be willing to pay for the product?
3. Now introduce pain through a story - how much would people pay?

The answers were stark:

1. 50 out of 70 said yes, good idea!
2. 20 people would pay up to £50 for the product.
3. With the pain and story 10 people would pay £2,000 for the product.

Struggling to sell, this is a very simple sales framework to take into your next sales meeting.

Guaranteed increase in conversion rates.

Signup forms are incredibly powerful at the end of a sales conversation when you finally come to ask for a commitment from a prospect.

You can also use them to upsell and cross sell.

Many people have a todolist of things and activities they need to do but these are difficult to manage because you end up switching from one task to the next.

The Default Diary is a neat was of pre-programming your diary so you have specific "themes" of activities to do at specific time blocks throughout the week.

This lecture demonstrates how to implement the default diary and get the most out of it.

OUTRODUCTION

We've gone through a journey together. I've taught you, not about the quick-wins in business, but I've taught you and worked with you on the core fundamental business principles.

Sometimes we need to be reminded to keep things simple because, by keeping things simple, it creates more time for us. It makes your products and services easier for your customers to understand.

Hopefully the Fearless Business Course will have given you more confidence to charge more for your products and services that you offer those customers.

CUSTOMERS COME FIRST

This is about giving your customers ultimate value, not about making money for yourself. The more value you deliver to your customers the better off you're going be in the long run. After all business is ALL about the “long game”.

The second thing that I hoped that is now ingrained in you, is the power of habit-forming activities.

Going back through these various different videos and tools; the key thing to remember is about how you take this newly found knowledge forward and implement it within your business.

TAKE YOUR TIME

Like I said, if you have just sat here and watched the 20 videos back to back, that's probably not going be very helpful in the long run. Right now you ARE going to be feeling overwhelmed. How am I going to implement all this in my business when I’m so busy?

I want you to take a deep breath, take a step backwards, and then just plan to watch one video a week or one video a month, recap, and work out how you're going to implement this video or this tool or this tip, within your day to day working life. Apply some discipline to it. Slow down. Everybody is on this, we've got to have quick wins; we’ve got to create a six figure income now; success is easy and just around the corner; all of this sort of useless self-talk.

If we go slow and steady, we are going to win the race. It's really really important to follow this instruction: watch one video, or take on board one tool at a time and master it before moving onto the next one. That's really really important. If you've watched all these videos back to back, you probably missed the point and you've probably wasted your time.

Take the time to take stock and work out how you're going to implement it within your business.

BE OPEN MINDED

The final thing that I wanted you to work on during the course was about opening your mind. What I mean by this is being open to the opportunity for change within your business. Rather than getting stuck and doing business the same old way; now your eyes have been opened to potential new opportunities that you can start to implement within your business.

These opportunities are based around pricing or productivity or how you manage your time, or any number of different tools which I've shown you during the Fearless Business Course.

The key thing as well is that you are a human being. You will eventually return to your default and start to sink back into your old habits. You must be self-aware. Now that I've told you that that is going to happen at some point, it's up to you, it's your responsibility to be mindful of when you sink.

WHEN YOU SINK

When you find yourself sinking, re-engage your brain, come back and revisit the Fearless Business Course, and remind yourself about the simple principles of business and making sure that you're still on track.

Keep an open mind with your business moving forward through successes and failures - which you will have. You will have both failures and successes. The key to success is how you behave when you fail, because ultimately, when you fail, and fail often, you are learning, and it's that learning experience which is going shift your mindset the most.

The only way to fail and improve from it is failing with an open mind, and seeing other opportunities that are available to you.

CLOSING REMARKS

I truly hope you've enjoyed my course. There has been a huge amount of thought and energy into creating the Fearless Business Course.

My best piece of advice for you right now is just to get out there, enjoy your business, treat it like a game, and JFDI the fuck out of your business because, quite frankly, life is too short for you to be messing around, stressed, and worried, and not making enough money.

There's plenty of opportunity out there, you've got to do a lot of activity, trial and error, get out there, play the game, and create the opportunity that you want to create for yourself.

Every time you watch a video, you see something different in it, a different message. So, what I would like to do is to invite you to go back to the goals video and watch it again, and once you've done that, head on over to the Online Business Startup Facebook group, and share your goals with everyone:

https://facebook.com/groups/OnlineBizStartup