The "1 Deadly Sin" Small Business Owners Must Avoid

Have you ever wondered what mistake in promoting a business, or what you might be making without knowing you're making?

So this will be unlike any of the past mistakes. This must be a mindset.

Miss mistake or something along the lines of, you know, you've built everything right, but you're wondering what else might or might not do doing Am I missing any opportunities that could allow me to really get the best out of my marketing.

Hello, everyone, and join me on this episode of the virtual entrepreneur.

I am your host Herbert instant and welcome to the virtual entrepreneur if you're new to this podcast, a very warm welcome. This is the go to podcast for entrepreneurs who see their businesses as a vehicle for change. And on our last episode we had an interview with Miguel, and it was quite a very insightful interview into helping you, you know, take your skills and really jump into the opportunity so that you can grow your business if you didn't get a chance to listen to that episode, I want you to stop what you're doing, go back and listen to that episode, linear finish come back we'll still be here.

You can also find the notes to that episode at Herbert marketing help.com Now, we publish new episodes every single day but we we have trouble keeping up with our notes because sometimes it's a, it's a lot more to to to to keep up with all this content coming up but they do come up at Herbert magnetic help.com So just go check out there and they should be there. Aside from that, that is h e r b e r t marketing help.com You can also ask us questions down there as well as what episodes.

You want me to go and research, and bring this content out to you. Now. In today's episode, I want to focus on one powerful mistake that we do that really really really destroys and stops us from scaling our businesses. It really made it really forces our business to become our jobs, right, the one mistakes that keep our businesses that keeps us prisoners in our business and make our business, our job, and that is investing in our business, whether it's investing in our business marketing or whether it's investing in business growth, or whether it's investing in the people in the, in, in our business and that could mean investing in the founders, right.

So, there is entrepreneurs who would go into the business, but sometimes they would have this misconception where they do not have to keep learning, to keep growing, right, and what this ultimately means is you're going into a business right you're starting to generate revenue, but you're using the knowledge that you know about being an employee to try and run a business, which requires that you become a founder, a CEO, you know, an executive who makes decisions that, you know, are in the best interest of the business, where as an employee you made decisions that were in the best interest of the customer of the boss.

When you see you and the founder, you make decisions that are in the best interest. The survival of the business because it does the business really depends on that right. And so when you go into this world of business and you have this mindset of an employee and you do not invest in yourself, there's only so much you can grow and what happens is you end up doing the best of your ability, your ability to build something that will give you a job to build yourself a job, right where you are your own boss and you're your own employee, right, the job where you are the business.

And as any entrepreneurs who have been in the business. The long while they'll tell you you know, if you are the business then you don't have a business you have a job that is keeping you there because if you are sick for a week you will not generate any revenue.

And if you, if there's any problems, right, if you want to take a holiday your business stops generating for your revenue and that is a job, and that is the biggest problem for a lot of entrepreneurs, and that, you know, a lot of small businesses because I think it's easy to start generating revenue, but there's a barrier there there's a mindset barrier that we have to overcome. Just like an athlete has a mindset barrier that they have to push, so they can reach the peak performance right, it's not enough to just train hard, right you can train as hard as you want, but there's a barrier that you have to overcome in your mind, if you really want to go over to the next step.

And I think in some words you could use grant words, the 10 acts rule, right, to to name that barrier but there are other names you could use as well as in, but thinking bigger but really the goal here is using the right mindset for the right problem-solving right when you're an employee, the problems you have to solve a very narrow, they're very focused on one particular area. Whereas when you're in a business there's so many more problems as revenue is finance, and believe it or not, those are two different things is marketing, the sales Believe or not, those are two different things.

There's customer services, as well as customer fulfilment, as well as customer acquisition, as well as lead generation this so much elements that business, right. And while sales is the most important part that you know really gives the business they live in Jumpstarters and it becomes a lifeboat that keeps us alive.

All these are the important parts are really important in and without them. The whole thing comes collapsing right sales is like the heart pumping blood in your body was very, very important to keep pumping that blood, you know, you take out them the rest of the body to support the heart everything just collapses on its own weight. Right. And so there are people who are very good at generating revenue streams, right, putting this funnels together and they can generate a tonne of revenue, but because they don't have business processes in place, it collapses on itself, as well. So, but that's a good problem because you can fix that right.

Once you have that you can fix it. And so what I wanted to talk today, to us, is this mistake of not investing in ourselves, right. And the reason why we do this is because we think we know it, you know, we did the starting point, we did something to get us started, and we think we understand and we can keep going and that's a big mistake. That's a really big, powerful mistake, right.

And then the next thing is the consequences of this mistake is we make judgments based on how we think and feel and not based in the interest of in growing a business right. For example, if you want to grow a business into a 10 1520 people business. You build it differently than if you want to grow a business for 2345 person, business, Right. And the also the terminology becomes different. For example, a 50 people business.

That is supposed to be an enterprise to scale up to, you know, 1000 people business into 1000 employees is actually a small business, it's considered small, because it's having 50 People means it's easy at its infancy. Right. Whereas, a 10 people business. If it has two employees could be considered small, or if it has nine employees, will it be considered big, so really this terminologies and variations, start coming into play, right, because everything becomes relative, because the business has its own version, growth, natural growth, right, and so our mindset becomes the limiting barrier. Right.

Just like in our galaxy we have the, the asteroid belt, right, so our mindset becomes this barrier that stops, our businesses from growing because if they try if they, if it tries to grow too fast. There isn't enough systems in place to support that. Right. All the decisions are made to protect or to keep the employees, or, you know, to please the founder, but not so much the business and that becomes a problem.

So, one of the things to do here is to invest in, you know, getting the right mindset, right, so that you are now stopping.

You must have, you know, overcoming that employee mentality or boss mentality into a co founder mentality right into somebody who can actually champion the cause for the business, as well as lead a team, not necessarily, you know, not necessarily employee a team but leading to achieving those objectives because a lot of businesses really, they change one of the main metrics that they use to identify success, you know, as well as key, key goals that they want to achieve along the way.

And so all these things become very, very important, creating company culture. All these elements becomes very, very important because you now have a new mindset of growing the business as a whole, as opposed to essentially just having a business that has a job where you must be there, right and then you have a process, you put in place processes that allow other people, other employees to be able to replace you in some places, right, for example, lead generation process that could allow you to have to employ people to do the lead generation in your business right sales cold calling you can employ people to do that for you so you can focus on delivering and doing other things right, but that can only happen if you have processes that are, that forces that allows the new employees to do things in the best interest of business because when left to their own discretion.

People will make very very poor judgement, and not to sound negative or anything. Look at the stage at which we live in very few people are very good at making good judgement, but as you build a business, the judgement that is in the best interest of the business must be formulated it's not just something that's going to happen, you must create, you know those key environments, the values that you can uphold and you need to create systems and standards that every new employee should follow to guide them. One example that I heard was, if you look at all the ads all the campaigns, advertising campaigns from Apple, they always use one person with a computer.

One person, a computer, why one person, right, so that fits up into their value, whereas if you look Microsoft they always use. So if he, if you look at PC, they always use people right instead of one person they use people right teachers, you know, other people working in different areas of life. Right. And so you need to consider those two differences there because they're communicating to the value, and if you live with this.

If you leave people to their, to their own discretion. You may find that they've been using the wrong colours in your branding, to me, doing whatever they think is cool and pretty, beautiful and really neglecting you know, the key areas of the business, right, and you need that consistency in order to grow without consistency.

The growth is almost near impossible. Right. I mean, it'll just, just be contradictory messages and all these things, these are the things, right. So you want to be able to put systems, as well as invest in the mindset of the founders and CEOs, as well as the other things in the business like you know systems, People to scale right invest in training. So, if you've already made a mistake, training becomes the next option either coaching or just found men, finding mentors and investment education so that you can build a system and put them in place.

Right, and preventing this from happening is making sure that, you know, every new employee that comes in has a manual for what they have to do they understand exactly what they have to do, how they have to do it while you may leave some room for people to put in their own flavour, but they can put in their own flavour within a certain context right within a certain boundary where right.

So for example, if they need to write an article, or if they need to, to create photos or, or if they need to write a message, then there may be specific key phrases that they need to use in the message that guides and sets the tone for the messaging, and that's, and those are really key things because if you give those people. It allows and it shapes the way the business communicates to its employees and to the other people outside as well so it allows for a lot of growth. So in terms of tools, of how could you, what tools could you use for this, you know, to help you get results faster, easier and more efficiently.

It's really that investing in the necessary skills. So invest in skills that will allow you to get more revenue, and investing later on in skills that will allow you to train people and have people be able to do all of the tasks that you don't want to do so you can focus on the bigger picture of growing your business. So those will be the tools really training. So, sales trainings or also, you know, Investing in tools that will allow you to leverage, time and energy that your employees energy as effectively as possible, so you can grow.

So that is it for this episode I hope you got a tonne of value there I just downloaded all these things that I've been learning about business on to you and I hope you have that and that will help you in your business. Again the notes can be found at Herbet marketing help.com If you have any questions, just go to Howard magazine help.com Or email me at Herbert at contact at habits market at habit marketing hub calm, so that is contact at h AR ve RT marketing help.com Other than that, I will talk to you on our next episode of the virtual entrepreneur, and as always,

have a wonderful evening.