Rounding off the Get Real four-part series is the talk on trusting the laws of success. A common occurrence that often keeps many businesses from reaching their success is doubt. Entrepreneurs may often feel a slight fear and even have that shaky decision process where they feel inadequate about pushing through something. They might even feel hopeless, thinking that the business seems pointless just because nothing is happening. While there might be times like this, know that there are equally as many reasons why you still need to push. Motivate yourself as you learn the five seeds you need to plant within you to grow personally as well as growing your business.
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Get Real: Plant Seeds
We are in the middle of a four-part series on getting real. Why fight to be a business owner when it’s conceivably easier to get up and go to a job every day? We always do this the month before Digital Footprint, making sure that everybody reading this episode knows the power and the importance of Digital Footprint. I want to drop the nugget of the people on the stage. We are doing a Facebook training for the people who can afford the middle package or the bigger package, like a little VIP talk from two people who run websites driven by Facebook at a high level.
Let me give you an example of what is a high level. One of the two teachers heads up our Facebook division. We have about twenty different sites driven by Facebook. Half a dozen of them make more than $25,000 a month. One of them is over $100,000 a month in which we get to split these revenues with our website partners. One of them is almost $400,000 a month. One of the two teachers is going to teach the concepts of how he is building those websites to generate that type of revenue.
Management leadership means you have to manage people, products, and money. Click To Tweet
The second teacher is one of the five people that run the President of the United States’ Facebook page. He did the Facebook page before he became president and he’s still doing that Facebook page. It doesn’t matter what your political beliefs are. Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, wouldn’t you want to know what the skill sets are of the person who was responsible for the growth of a Facebook page for the president? Wouldn’t you want to know what they’re doing to maintain the integrity and the growth of that Facebook page?
The teachers who teach from our stage in Digital Footprint are absolutely the best in the world at what they do. We have teachers who are going to come in and teach on how you get a business from the US to the global. We have teachers coming in and teach on how you take a product from zero and sell it for $10 million in two and a half years. The guy doing that teaching is only 28 years old, Ryan Moran. We have teachers coming in from everywhere to teach people at Digital Footprint exactly what the fastest growing companies are doing now.
Episode 268, Get Real, Trust the Laws of Success. In episode 265, I talked about the five phases that every person that makes money has been in every single position they’ve ever held. If you’re a dish washer at a restaurant, you went through the excitement phase, the education phase, the reality phase, the doubt phase, and the clarity phase. If you’re still there washing dishes, you went right from the doubt phase to the clarity phase. If you were a dish washer and you went into the doubt phase and you realize this isn’t for me, then you left and didn’t get to the clarity phase. I’m talking in episode 268 about those entrepreneurs who are about to go into the doubt phase or they want to get out of the doubt phase. They know they need to be a business owner but they need that little push of why they should stay a business owner.
There is only one way to market test - go sell something. Click To Tweet
If you think someday you might need this push, remember Episode 268. If you know any entrepreneur who might need a push, a motivation, an emotional uplift, any reasoning of why not to leave business ownership to go get a safe job, which is an oxymoron, please forward them this episode. If we’re all farmers and we plant corn seeds, what’s going to come up? Assuming it rains, corn. If we plant seeds of corn, is it possible that hay or squash will come up? It’s impossible. If you plant seeds of corn in the ground that is cultivatable and it gets watered, it’s not below freezing, it’s in a climate, it’s the proper temperature, then, you will get corn. Let’s shift this. I’m going to be semi-sarcastic. If I go into my backyard and I removed the grass and all I have is dirt and I sprinkle on another batch of Kentucky bluegrass seeds, is it possible in any way, shape, or form that pumpkins are going to grow? No. I’m going to get more Kentucky bluegrass.
If you are an entrepreneur or a leader in any capacity, I want to tell you there are five seeds that you need to plant inside of yourself that will guarantee successful entrepreneurship. They will guarantee successful division growth in your company. They will guarantee growth to the exact same way if you plant corn seeds, you get corn. If you plant grass seeds, you get grass. You cannot plant the five seeds I’m about to tell you and cultivate the seeds and not get a successful business. Seed number one, the management seed,(IP) Intellectual Property (information, wisdom). As the leader of your company, you are the manager. You must understand the fundamental principles of business. They’re not the same as fundamental principles of teaching, becoming a plumber. They’re not the same. Just like you must study certain courses and have certain mentorship to be a good plumber, you must have certain courses to be a good manager.
I’m going to give you two examples. As a potential business owner, you’ve never started a business and you don’t have a day job. If you have a day job and you haven’t started the business, your brain is polluted. You see the world in a very specific way and because you have never branched out, you used your own money to build something that the world only counts on you for success, you can’t understand business ownership. You can’t claim that you do if you’ve never owned a business. With that in mind, I want to prepare the people who are about to leave the job to go become a business owner. I’ll give you two phenomenal examples. If you just go collect IP, wisdom, discernment through two specific books, How to Win Friends & Influence People by Carnegie and The Psychology of Selling by Tracy, if you grabbed those two books, you’re going to get the beginning underpinning of what it takes to be a good manager.
Management leadership means you have to manage people. You have to manage the product and you have to manage money. Managers manage three things: people, products, and money. The books How To Win Friends And Influence People and The Psychology of Selling teach how to manage all three in a way that I’ve never seen any other books do. That’s why those books were written. The first seed you need to sow is management. These are called the five M’s of a successful business. The first M is management. You must plant the right seeds. I would start with How to Win Friends & Influence People. I would then cultivate with The Psychology of Selling. I would then cultivate with Think and Grow Rich. I would then cultivate with The Five Love Languages. I would cultivate with Your Personality Tree. You can simply google the best business books in the area you think you need cultivation and you’ll be a better manager or read my episodes and the books I recommend.
M number two is for money. Most people’s immediate reaction is, “I don’t have any money.” Use what you’ve learned in How to Win Friends & Influence People and The Psychology of Selling. Go befriend someone, maybe a banker or a family member, and sell them on lending your idea of money. First M is management. Get the books, plant the seeds, and cultivate the seeds. Second M is money, go get it. Money is a magnet to true value. If you have a great idea and a great product and has true value, money will suck to it. You just got to open your mouth and ask people for it. What do you say? How do I approach somebody for money? I don’t know. Read the books, How to Win Friends And Influence People and The Psychology of Selling and they will tell you.
The third M, sow the seed of a market. If you have a great idea, you’ve got a good product, you’ve got some money. You have to prove that there is a market for this product. There is only one way to market test now, go sell something. Don’t go and pull 500 people and ask if they buy it. Here’s what you do. You build a web page, you build a Facebook ad. You get a Google pay-per-click campaign with the money you borrowed and you go sell a product you haven’t even built yet. You set the delivery at four to six weeks. You see if you get orders. If you get a ton of orders, go make the product. If you don’t get a ton of orders, give them their money back. That’s market testing. Take no other market testing than any other coach consulting or book tells you. Throw all that worked before 2005 down the toilet.
What works now because of the liquidity of the internet is you sell it first, then you build the product. I don’t have a single product, not one since 2010, that we had sold in our company where I built the product first then tried to sell it. I sold so many products that didn’t sell. I sold a couple and gave their money back. I started a monthly digital program, I sold it, and found out that I overcommitted. I gave everybody their money back and said, “Sorry, keep all the benefits.” I sell first, I get proof of concept, then I build the product. That’s market testing, the third M. If you sow that seed, it always comes up a yes or no that there’s a market there. If it never comes up, then I’m not sure. If you plant corn, corn comes up. If you plant the seed of market testing, you get a yes good market or a no good market, and away you go.
The fourth, M model. You plant the seeds of a working model. A great book is called The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. When it comes to building a working model around your product that is proven to have a good market, you don’t get good at moving that product, you get done. You don’t get good at customer service, you get done. You don’t get good at coming out with your next product, you get done. In 25 years we have never become good at any one product. By the time we thought we were amazing at a product, it was time to come out with another product. It’s called an S-curve.
If you haven’t heard my very first podcast on S-curves, out of 205 authors in one agency, I became the author of the year. I was then asked to partner with many great authors and other business books because I took six months to write ten pages perfectly on the incredible concept of what is an S-curve. When it comes to working models, don’t get good at something, get done. If you don’t know what an S-curve is, please go to podcast number one and listen to my very first podcast. If you have not heard my older podcasts, if you have not heard one through 26, those podcasts were so planned out and so expressly built to first, under-gird and stabilize. Second, build the 2×4’s in the walls around a business home.
Third, put the roof on to secure it can never get wet or damp. Then fourth, put the bricks around it so that no big bad wolf could ever blow your business down. If you have not heard the first 26 episodes of this podcast, please do not read another one sequentially of these newer ones. Go back to one through 26. It might not even be a bad idea to join the club. I don’t know how many people have told me, “Ken, I have heard every one of your podcasts at least twice. I’m on round three. I’m always start from number one.”
If you plant a corn, corn comes up. Likewise, if you plant the seed of market testing, then you get either a good market or a bad market. Click To Tweet
Model is an incredible business term. The key to business models is don’t get good moving the model, get done. Five, messaging. If you plant seeds of messaging, messaging is not marketing. It’s not advertising. It’s messaging. Here’s the key to messaging, you can’t plant this seed and get anything but positive growth and positive sales. You shout from the rooftop on three platforms at all times. I’m going to put messaging and seed planting in Income Stores terms. Income Store has messaged through Google search. We’ve built continual pages on IncomeStore.com so that we come up in Google search for proper terms for people to find us.
We do Facebook ads, Google pay-per-click, radio, direct mail, and speaking on people’s stages. We do about twelve things on an annual basis but we scream from the mountain tops on three of them. We message from the mountain tops on the three platforms at the same time. We monitor them closely. As
soon as we see one of the three is slipping, we go into the other eight or nine and see if any of those eight or nine are growing as becoming a better platform for our messaging.
Seed number one, if you’re not sure of exactly how to go about management of IP, please dig into my previous podcast called Success Wheel. As a side note, S-curves and Success Wheel are two of the top ten most downloaded podcasts of my 260 podcasts. Management can be summarized with the podcast success wheel, money. Seed number two, if you use what you learned in How to Win Friends and Influence People and The Psychology of Selling, going out and getting money will be an absolute breeze. It’ll be a snap. You cannot go out properly, ask for money, and get rejected 100% of the time. It’s impossible. In the market, you cannot plant the seeds of marketing by selling first. Seeing if you take in some orders and getting a yes or no answer. You can’t plant the seed in the market and get something else.
Find out, do you have a market? You don’t want to waste two years thinking you have a market. Then the model. Once you have successfully sold a product, you’ve got to build a working model. You’ve got to sell it, fulfill it, and have customer service. Just start and get done. Don’t get good at it, just get it done. Then finally, messaging. Once you know you’re selling something, find out how it is moving. Are you selling it on Amazon? Are you selling it in the Google Search bar? Are you selling it on Facebook? Listen to some of my older podcasts, especially 62 through 72. In that ten-part series where it has a rocket ship on an infographic, I dropped ten to twelve different platforms you can message on somewhere in there. This is Trust the Laws of Success. If you plant corn seeds, you will get corn. If you plant the five M’s, you will get a successful business.
Links Mentioned:
- Digital Footprint
- How to Win Friends & Influence People
- The Psychology of Selling by Tracy
- Think and Grow Rich
- The Five Love Languages
- Your Personality Tree
- The E-Myth
- IncomeStore.com
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