Month: July 2007

Welcome to buidling your own business. How do you feel? Are you excited? Are you nervous? Are you ready to be the next Wal-Mart? There is so much out there and now you have the opportunity to tap in to it. I’ve coached hundreds of people on how to build their own eCommerce Business; I’ve learned alot about the keys to success. One of the most important factors that all successful business owners have is not knowledge. It’s not money or advanced education. It’s not computer experience or programming and design strategy. The simple key to success with eCommerce, or anything, is self motivation!

As an entrepreneur, you are now your own boss. You’re completely in charge of what you do or don’t do everyday with your business. Some of you may be still working the JOB (just over broke) while getting this business started. That’s ok. Time Management and Goal Setting will be an important parts of your progress and future success.

Famous coach Lou Holtz once said:

If you’re bored with life – you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.

Why is this important? To me, goals are a self motivation indicator. If you don’t know where you want to go, you’ll probably never going to get there. If you don’t have the self motivation to stick with the task, how can you really expect success?
Making changes to enhance the quality of your life doesn’t need to be slow or difficult. Unfortunately most people are still struggling because they continue to rely on ineffective approaches. I’ve talked about time management tips before. Here are a few more suggestions. Write down one small action you’ve been putting off and answer the following questions:

1 What am I missing out on of importance by not doing this?

2 What will I gain most by doing this?

3 Why is it important to me to get this done?

4 How is not doing this inconsistent with who I really am?

Now pretend the task is already complete: Get a pen and paper and take 5 minutes to describe how you feel now that you have already finished the task you have been postponing. Act as if you’re already successful. In a previous post, I talked about the Moller Mission Statement. Here it is again as a reminder:

I am the best salesman at [put in your company name] with a 6 week average of over [specific amount of money] in sales. I am making [specific amount of money] per week which is helping me achieve and exceed my six month goal of [specific amount of money] by June 30, [year] and [specific amount of money] by Dec. 31, [year]. My keys to success have been confidence, focus, overcoming all fears, hard work, persistence, patience, and expecting to succeed, along with listening to the best, taking effective notes which I apply immediately, setting specific goals that I review daily, and focusing on getting 3 new sales per day, clients that need the products we are offering. I never worry about things I can’t change. I focus only on what I do have control over: attitude, knowledge, skills and work ethic. I’m happy to be running my business successfully and will continue to develop multiple streams of income. These multiple streams of income will help me achieve my life goal: [specific long term goal].

You will be surprised at how well this simple process works. Write out your goals in the form of actions, things you are already doing. Read your personalized mission statement frequently. Engrain it in your head and believe it. You’ll be surprised at how things just start happening. By reading your mission statement frequently, you’ll feel a boost of self-motivation that gets even better each time.

I recently finish reading “A Crash Course in Marketing” by David H. Bangs and Andi Anxman. Although it was written a few years ago and many of the concepts of eCommerce were out dated, there were really good marketing ideas presented that made me reflect on what I am (and am not) doing with my businesses at this point.

The book covered a lot of ground: from Setting Market Goals to Learning About Your Market to Interacting with Your Customers. As I read the book, I really felt guilty and almost depressed that I’m not doing more for my businesses. Goals, goals, goals – if I don’t write down what I want and need to accomplish, I will never achieve the highest levels of success with any of my businesses.

The authors talk about the 4 P’s of marketing: Product, Place, Price and Promotion. They take it a few steps further than that though. They also include these factors:

• Perception: how your products are perceived by you target market may be more important than any other single factor in marketing. Finding out what your market really thinks about your product is crucial; what you think doesn’t really matter if your target audience doesn’t like it.
• Positioning: how can you position your product or service in the minds of the consumers you are trying to reach? How does what you offer differ from your competitors? Do you even know who your real competitors are?
• Potential: a sure way to lose money is to plunge ahead and market a product without making sure there’s demand in the market. Don’t waist effort on duds. As a small business owner, you don’t have the luxury or financial means to toss a product out there hoping people will all of a sudden want it.
• Professional help: there’s a really good reason why smart business owners invest in expert advice from people that have been there and done that. Think of professional help as an investment in future profits.
• Planning: planning beats hoping and wishing for business success. You need two plans – a business plan and a marketing plan. The business plan helps identify broad opportunities. The marketing plan is the “plan of attack”, putting the goals in motion.
• Product Knowledge: If you don’t know your product (or service), how do you plan to sell it? I really liked this point because far too many times, clients want to sell what’s “hot” at that moment. So does everyone else! In order to avoid multiple learning curves, do something you have some knowledge about. Good presentations move product quickly. If you can’t tell a consumer why your product is good from them, why would they ever buy from you?
• Prioritizing: Marketing can be so overwhelming and complex. Setting priorities is so crucial to the success of your start-up business. You have to set priorities to assure progress toward a certain goal or objective. Some things have to be done before others: market (keyword) research, finding suppliers, setting up the business entity – things like this definitely come before the actual site will be live for all to see. Our main job as business owners is to make sure the important jobs are done first. For this reason, we set goals with timelines on when we want things done.

There were other things talked about but those are some that stuck out to me. As many of my clients have mentioned at one time or another, the feeling overwhelment happens to all of us. The concept of “Small Success leads to Big Success”, if believed in, will really take you to levels you never thought you could get. It’s because of that overwhelming feeling that I encourage clients to write down all the small things that are leading towards their big success. They can then go back and review the progress they’ve made, and their confidence and self-motivation will stay strong.

Probably the best thing I read in the whole book, the information I valued most, was the idea that marketing is an ongoing endeavor. There are always new things to try, experiments to test, and the results can be amazing. The future is bright as we implement what we learn.