Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
It takes a very special person to be an entrepreneur. It requires a person to have a specific set of skills and characteristics. If you’ve been a business owner or entrepreneur for long, you’ll know how difficult it can be to focus on a project.
If you’re a true entrepreneur, you probably get new ideas all the time. Ideas that are difficult not to act on. It feels counter productive not to act on an instinctive idea that could be “the next big thing”.
But as you come to learn, starting new projects before you’ve finished the last can be detrimental. The other day I read an interesting piece on entrepreneurial traits and characteristics; here are 6 of the essentials:
1. Do What You Love
The chances are if you don’t thoroughly enjoy your business, it’s not going to be very successful. It’s hard to build a financially rewarding and satisfying business if you don’t enjoy it. Some starting out, they just don’t quite understand how important this is. If they come up with an idea that seems plausible, they’ll go ahead with it even if they’re not in love with the concept.
Many times these small ideas that you’re not too fond of turn into life consuming monsters that make you lose your happiness. I know financial rewards are why most people start businesses, but in the end it’s about a lot more than money. It’s about freedom, personal fulfillment, satisfaction and most importantly enjoyment.
2. Plan
Everyone knows planning is essential, but still business owners lack planning in several aspects of their business. Planning is essential because it makes you thoroughly analyze every element, every single aspect and division of your business.
I don’t like conventional business plans. I believe a business plan should say two things: what your goals are and how you’re going to achieve them, every step of the way, from A-Z.
3. Be Serious
If you’re building an online/home business, this especially applies to you. Take what you do seriously. You’re one of the fortunate few who have been able to start a business. Whether you’re starting from scratch equipped with the right knowledge or have a bunch of seed money; most individuals rarely if ever get the opportunity to start a business or simply don’t know how to.
Take everything you do seriously. Just because you’re not in a corporate office, it doesn’t mean you’re allowed to work in your boxer shorts all day with the TV on. That’s ridiculous. Don’t get side tracked, turn off all distractions. You’re the boss so its your job to oversee yourself and your job.
4. Cash Flow, Mind Your Own Business
Cash flow is what keeps your business running. Without it you can’t function. It allows you to buy products, pay for services, tools and market your stuff. Always pay very close attention to cash flow.
Figure out how much cash flow you need each month to keep your business afloat, pay your bills, yourself and grow it. You need to learn how to properly manage your money. Create a monthly balance sheet of income, expenses and assets.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
5. Put Customers First
Remember that saying the customer is always right? That’s bullshit when it comes to most businesses. If you have a bad customer who is consuming too much time and not spending enough money; by all means get rid of the customer in the most diplomatic way possible.
With that said, your customers should come first. If you treat your customers really well, give them free gifts, nurture them; they’ll become customers for life. Your customer service should be second to none and a top priority. Bad customer service is one of the most common reasons for losing business.
6. Get To Know Your Customers
If you’re a home business owner, consultant or coach; you have the unique ability of making a living off a small group of people. It means you can offer personal attention and interact with your customers. Repeat business is the best kind of business.
Getting to know your customers is the ultimate strategy of increasing repeat business. It’s a well known fact that customers don’t like calling a digital voice mail service only to be transferred seven times to get through to the right department.
If you have a small group of customers or clients, answer personal phone calls, get to know them, its your best shot at winning them over and driving repeat business. For further reading on getting to know your customers and building your business around a small group of fans, read “1000 Raving Fans” on how to make $100k/year from 500 people.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more entrepreneurial tips, tricks and secrets.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
TyronneRatcliff, December 19, 2012, 06:23
Keeping track of your expenses is an important part of doing business, great post Dave!
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Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
The post says if you don’t enjoy the business it won’t be successful, but how would you actually test that? Plenty of miserable founders have built profitable companies, and plenty of people who loved their idea folded within a year. Correlation isn’t the argument being made here.
We used to call this ‘passion selling’ back in the 90s and it wasn’t any more predictive then. Loving the product got people through the first bad month. It never explained who was still standing three years later.
On the cash flow point — from the company side, this is the piece that actually predicts who lasts. Not the enthusiasm, not the customer service instincts, just whether someone tracks what’s coming in against what’s going out before it becomes a crisis. I watched people with genuinely good products fold because nobody was doing the monthly balance sheet the post describes, and people with mediocre products survive because they were disciplined about exactly that.
‘The customer is always right is bullshit’ — fine, but then the post immediately says customers should come first. Pick one.
The ‘get rid of a bad customer diplomatically’ advice assumes you have enough other customers that losing one doesn’t matter. For anyone still building that base, that’s not a small caveat, it’s the whole game. Most people reading this are nowhere near having that luxury yet, and the post doesn’t say when you get there.
This tracks with what I saw building from a spare room. Year one, I did not have the luxury Hector’s describing — every difficult client got kept, because losing them meant losing a chunk of the pipeline I couldn’t replace yet. It was closer to year three before I could actually afford to fire a client and mean it. The cash flow section in the post is right that you need the monthly numbers in front of you, but it skips the part where, early on, the numbers themselves tell you to tolerate the bad customer a while longer, not cut them loose. Week three of actually trying the ‘customers first, except when they’re not worth it’ rule, I just didn’t have the leverage for the second half of that sentence yet.
The ‘know your customers deeply, build around a small group’ idea in step six is really describing what’s sometimes called a superfan or true-fan model in marketing writing — small, high-trust audience over broad reach. The interesting gap is that the research behind it is thinner than the popular version suggests; most of the citations trace back to one widely shared essay, not a body of study.
Steelmanning the other side for a second — even if the research is thin, a small, deeply known customer base is nearly impossible to compete away from you. A competitor can undercut your price. They can’t easily replicate years of you personally knowing what someone’s kid is allergic to.
Impossible to compete away over what time frame though? Ballpark years, not vibes.