Imagine watching your business plummet – over night – from $20,000 a month – to $1,000?

That’s what happened to “Matt” in 2008 when his business was hit hard by the financial meltdown.

Ouch.

So Matt resolved to never be caught unprepared again. Security was important to him and being too dependent on any one business just wasn’t very secure. Or so he concluded…

While rebuilding the first business, he entered a second, unrelated business.

All would be fine, except that from the two businesses Matt is currently in, he’s earning less than half of what he earned pre-2008.

And it’s taking him 12 – 14 hours a day to do it!

“Why did you go into business # 2?” I asked.

“Because I don’t ever want to have all my eggs in one basket again,” he said.

In Business # 2, Matt offers two services. One he loves and the other he hates. The one he loves, is a small part of the business. The one he hates takes up most of his time and energy. And has him working with clients he doesn’t really want.

“Why don’t you get more of the clients you love and drop the service you don’t really want to offer?” I asked.

“Because I don’t know if there are more of them out there. And if they are, I don’t know how to find them.”

And so Matt finds himself overworked, stressed and frustrated. He knows he’s capable of much more. He’s stuck.

“Matt,” I said, “Take this as the tough love I mean it to be, please. In 2008 you learned the wrong lesson. You came away believing that the way to have security is to have more than one business.

“But the truth is, before the crash, you were doing well because everyone was doing well. And when everything crashed, you were stuck because you hadn’t developed the most important of all business skills: The ability to attract your ideal clients in a consistent, predictable, systematic way.

“If you can’t build a consistent flow of clients in one business, you’re not going to be able to build it in two businesses. And that’s why today you’re working so hard – and have so little to show for it.”

Until you’ve built a consistent flow of customers for one product or service, you shouldn’t diversify to another. Why not? Because the process is the same, no matter your business. And if you don’t have the skill to do it here, you don’t have the skill to do it there.

Does this ring true? Share your experiences below.

Yesterday, on a Q&A call for my private coaching clients, one member, “Frank,” mentioned that he’d finally began using an email marketing system.

“That’s great,” I said. “But is that the critical 10% for you at this time?”

In the world of the Alchemist Entrepreneur, we strike at the roots where everyone is hacking at the leaves. We focus intensely on the few things that will give you a big result, fastest.

Now, Frank is still testing his message with his market. He still needs to have more one-on-one conversations with the people he wants as clients. After he’s made more sales face-to-face, he’ll be ready to systematize and automate his marketing.

Our brains, and the world around us, are wired to confuse us. To fog up our lenses so we take one wrong turn after another. To get us working hard on everything besides the critical 10% that makes you look brilliant 90% of the time.

This is why it’s so important to work with a mentor and to be part of a community of people on a similar path to your own.

Look back at your week so far. Have you been working hard, with focus, on the critical 10% that rapidly brings you more clients, income and life choice? Or, do you need a bit of help?

Early next week you’ll have the opportunity to apply for one of the approximately five free “Consistent Flow of Customers” strategy sessions that I’ll be offering in March. Watch your inbox for details.

Oh, and I’d love to hear your reactions to this in the comment section below.

Dov Gordon

Back when I was clueless, I spent lots of time doing big things that got me nowhere.

Don’t know if you heard of Larry Huston. He used to be SVP of Knowledge and Innovation at a little company called Procter and Gamble. $80+ billion in annual sales.  Larry developed the famous open innovation model that everyone wanted to imitate.

I was the founder and sole employee of The Gordon Group.  (Annual sales not public.  But we’ve always trailed P&G.)  My most important responsibility was finding clients.  And I was failing miserably.

“Well, you need a bigger list,” I said to myself. “And teleseminars are a good way to grow a list.”

Larry had recently left P&G to open his own consulting firm.  Got him on the phone and he agreed to do a teleseminar with this young guy from Israel he had never met or heard of.

Next. Where would the audience come from?

I called my way into the head of strategy for TheMarker magazine, Israel’s answer to Forbes or Fortune.  I schlepped to Tel Aviv to meet with them and sell my brilliant idea: “I’ll bring you exclusive interviews with leading business luminaries. You publish the interview and mention my upcoming teleseminar in the byline with a link.  Win – win – win.”

I don’t recall how many people joined the call.  But it doesn’t matter.  It was a great call. But it did NOTHING  for my business.

Little did I realize that I was perfecting the Castles on Quicksand Method of Marketing: Working like a dog on projects that – even if successful – would do nothing for ME.  Everyone would admire what I did and go home, leaving me to watch it all sink into nothing.

Are you building Castles on Quicksand?  If yes, I have just two things to say to you:

1.  Stop.

2.  Request a free “Consistent Flow of Customers”  strategy session with me.

Yes, there’s hope.  You just need to take the first step.

Dov Gordon

He threw down the phone.  Leaned back in his office chair and put his feet up on the desk. Seeing his scruffy shoes and stretched socks he threw his feet back to the floor in disgust.

“We were very impressed with your proposal,” they had said, “but we decided to go with the others.”

We were very impressed with your proposal, but we decided to go with the others. He mimicked.  We were very impressed with your proposal, but we decided to go with the others.  We were very impressed with your proposal, but we decided to go with the others.

Gaaaaad.  He was tired of hearing that.

He left his office.  Down the stairs.  Out the door.  Took a left turn to the park and soon he was lying on the grass looking up at the thick foliage of an enormous tree.  He wondered just what kind of tree it was.

His fiftieth birthday was coming up in three weeks. Oh how the years had flown by.  During many of them, he made excuses for himself.  “You’re young.  You’re still learning.  You’ll yet make your impact.”

But that wouldn’t cut it anymore.  FIFTY!  My Gaaaaaaaaaaad.  And what have I accomplished?!

Not that he’d been a complete failure. He’d had his weeks or months of impressive success.  But it never felt planned.  It never felt like he had really made anything happen.  No.  It was always a struggle.  It’s one thing to wrestle when you’re confident that you know what you’re doing.  It’s quite another thing to wrestle when you can see neither your opponent, nor the edge of the ring.  You’re groping, pushing and pulling, you end the day exhausted from long hours of doing.  But what did you actually do?

After an hour he got up.  Brushed off the dead grass.  He had decided. He would stop.  He would not continue doing what he had always done.

He was frightened by the prospect of stopping.  It’s not like he had cash saved up or anything. But for the first time he felt more frightened by the thought of continuing as he had.  Of suffering one more day  living in fear and kowtowing to worries.  He didn’t yet know the right way, but he had made up his mind.  He was going to give himself the time he needed to figure it out once and for all.

That was the day he walked off the carrousel.

And he never looked back.

——-

Over the past weeks I’ve been talking with more and more people reaching their fiftieth – but not their potential.

Each month I give away a handful of free “Build A Steady Stream of Customers” strategy sessions.  If you’re hitting the big number and you’re ready to step off the carrousel, you get priority this month.

So if you’re a small business entrepreneur and you need to figure out how to create a steady, predictable flow of ideal customers and clients, click here to schedule your session.

Dov

Kids don’t need umbrellas.  Or boots.  Getting drenched by rain and mud is a small price to pay for the thrill of exploration and learning something new.

We adults prefer umbrellas, cars or just staying home.  Rain and mud is uncomfortable.

But at the end of the day, you need to figure this business thing out for yourself. You can read all the books, take all the courses, hire all the consultants and coaches.  But until you get wet and dirty, you’re not going anywhere.

This wisdom finally settled permanently on me after my first product launch.

I went through the process of setting it up over several months.  There were delays.  Unforeseen expenses.  Some made promises they didn’t keep.  There was embarrassment.  And ultimately, launch sales were a very small fraction of what I had hoped for.

But AFTER the launch, I was able to look back.  For the first time I could see the full picture of what’s involved in building a product and selling it online.

Suddenly I could see the wisdom in advice others had given me. Before the launch I was not mature enough to appreciate their suggestion.  Or I didn’t see how it applied.

People say, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

That’s not really how it works.

The teacher is there all along.  But the student isn’t listening.

The most important, timeless secret of business success is DO SOMETHING. Everything you do, every step you take, even when it feels like an embarrassing punch in the gut, is a step forward.  Because everything you do gives you perspective and wisdom.

At the end of the day, you are the tightest bottleneck.  Your business grows when you do.

So stop wavering.  Don’t worry about getting it right.  Care only to take the very next step.

Walk through that muddy puddle and see what it feels like.

You’ll clean up later.

—-

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And then leave your thoughts below.

“Don’t worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition.” — Abraham Lincoln

We all have moments of clarity amidst spells of confusion.

Like when lighting flashes across a dark and stormy plain, you’ve got only a brief moment to take in the full picture and burn it into your mind – or you’ll soon be groping around the dark again.

If your business is growing, you need to make frequent decisions that will affect its nature and direction.

And if your business isn’t growing as you hoped, the confusion is all the more oppressive.

How to catch that lightning bolt and make it stay.

It’s amazing when you think about it: Most people don’t know what they really want out of life.  And so they go this way and that.  Their scattered and random actions don’t add up.

A smaller number do know what they want to HAVE in life.  Sometimes – not always – this tells them what to DO.  Which is a pretty good place to be.

You’ll achieve more knowing what you want to have, but it’s not enough.   It comes and goes.  And it’s often accompanied by moments of severe doubt.  You question whether this or that is really what you want.

And it’s not unusual that success comes hand-in-hand with that empty feeling of “OK, here I am. Now what?”

There’s another approach that gives you constant clarity.

The other approach begins with who you want to BE.  Who do you really, really want to BE?

If you’re unclear, confused and you don’t know what to do, look again at the kind of person you want to BE.

Do you want to be someone who feels pulled this way and that by the people in your life, or do you want to be someone who can set clear priorities and has the discipline to follow through?

Be that way today.  Do what such a person would do in the situation you are in.

How do you want to behave in the face of great uncertainty?  Do you want to be thrown off kilter, or do you want to go into your deep reserves of confidence and take it one day at a time?

Be that way today.  Do what such a person would do.

Do you want to be frantically trying to keep a table full of plates spinning, or do you want to be pursuing excellence in a focused slice of life?

Be that way today.

Do you want to be another spectator alongside the parade, or do you want to be boy who isn’t afraid to say “The emperor has no clothes!”

Be that way today.

Do you want to be worried that there won’t be enough, or do you want to be someone who feels and exudes the confidence that there’s more than enough.

Be that way today.

Do you want to be someone who moves his business this way and that to satisfy your varied interests, curiosity and talents – and to avoid decisions – or do you want to be someone who makes difficult choices and then uses his interests, curiosity and talents to place one brick upon the next until your castle is built?

When you have a clear picture of who you want to BE, you’re never at a lost for what to DO.

You can BE what you want right now, even if it takes some time to HAVE what you want.

Your Next Action Step:

Get a pen and paper, get away from distractions and and answer this one question:

Who do you want to be?

For now, write out five or six qualities you most want to own.  Get that image of how you want to BE crystal clear and you’ll never be at a loss of what to do.  The more you act like that person, the more you’ll BE him.  And it’ll just be a matter of time before you have what he has.

And that’s really what you want, isn’t it?

Many people work 10, 12 or even 14 hour days because they don’t want to work hard.  Long hours may be exhausting, but it is also the easy way out.

Real hard work is done at the bottleneck.  And the tightest bottleneck in your business is… you.  And the tightest bottleneck in you… is in your head.  It’s the stories you tell yourself, the nonsense like “I don’t have any time!” and “We don’t have a choice” and “But my business is different” and “Our market is changing too fast to have a strategy” and “You just can’t find good people out there..” and so on.

Let’s distinguish between labor and work.  Digging ditches is labor.  Allow me to suggest that fourteen hours in the office is also labor. Real work, the hard work that will change your business and your life, is the work you do on yourself.  And it’s different for each of us.

Your hard work might be something as simple as getting in and out of bed on time. It might be planning your year, quarter, month, week and day.

Hard work for you might be to talk less.  To listen to what the people around you are actually saying; to notice how they are feeling.

Your hard work might be to slow down – so you can finally speed up.  It might be to turn off your phone so you can work for 90 minutes without interruption.  It might be checking your email twice a day instead of twice a minute.  It may be to bite your tongue and take a deep breath when you-know-who is at it again. To stop complaining and start appreciating; to play a game of chess with your son or read a book to your daughter.

Your hard work may be – believe it or not – to work less.  To step back.  To listen.  To enjoy.  To let go.  To give up those delusions of control you imagine you have, or imagine you need.

If your job is knowledge work, your hard work isn’t physical labor.  It’s discipline and focus; it’s mental work.

Shut your computer and go for a walk.  Put down the newspaper and pick up a good biography. Become genuinely interested in a competing point of view and hear it out until you understand the other side.  You may not be swayed, but you will learn and grow from it.

Identify what wastes your time and figure out how to stop it or minimize it.

Perhaps you need to say “no” to other people’s best intentions. Or to exercise.  Eat a fruit instead of a chocolate bar or a cheese Danish. Get out to a park or a coffee shop with a notepad and pencil, away from phones and internet.

Give up perfectionism. It keeps you from excellence in the small number of areas where you are truly gifted.

Maybe you need to listen to that inner voice. It knows when you do what you do because you are concerned about what others will think.  It knows when you redouble your efforts in the wrong direction because you think you have no choice – at the expense of following your calling.  It knows when fear is your fuel.  And it knows that you will make a profound and lasting impact when you switch your fuel to love.

Slow down and set up systems so you can reduce your labor. Then work even harder.  On yourself.

A life of leisure isn’t what you want so stop acting as if it were. You, a body and a soul, want a life of growth, of purpose, of contribution.  Let’s stop deluding ourselves.  We need to stop striving for the mythical existence fed to us by those whose interests are not our own.

The only way to get there is by working hard on ourselves. It hurts.  Oh yes, it hurts.  But it is also a great pleasure. Exercise hurts.  It also feels great.

Indulgence is no match for the lasting pleasure of discipline and growth; of catching yourself in the act of telling a good and convincing story – to yourself – and changing direction.  It is awareness; noticing when that story you tell yourself is one you wouldn’t accept from your own children or employees.  Yet, from yourself you swallow them whole.

Real hard work – and the truly smart work – is about knowing thyself.

I will step off this soapbox now.  I am reminded that I’ve got work to do…

Over the past months I’ve seen several entrepreneurs trying to squeeze into the old, worn pants they know, but which no longer fit. However, unlike the kid who’s ashamed of his appearance, these entrepreneurs think they look dashing.

Customers don’t want to embarrass him, so they quietly go elsewhere. His employees try to tell him, but he knows better, so they shrug and go back to work.

“My employees don’t see the full picture. If they had to juggle all the competing priorities the way I have to, they would stop complaining.  They should focus on doing their jobs and let me do mine.”

And so the waist gets tighter and the cuffs further from the shoes.

He adds suspenders, elastic or even duct tape.  Anything but a change.

It’s true that your employees don’t see the full picture the way you do. And they don’t have the same pressures and responsibilities you have. But they do see you and your behavior with a clarity you may lack.

If you find that you’re always super busy, feel pulled in a million directions, fighting one crisis after another, you’re not wearing the right size pants.

I remember coaching a small business owner who continued to fall back on “the pants” he knew so well: moving sacks of cloth from here to there.  He should have never have been doing such insignificant work.

But when it came to doing what would grow his business, make it fun and give him the personal freedom he deserved and badly wanted, he was murky. My job was to help make those tasks just as clear; to help him find and wear a new pair of pants that make him look and feel good.

What are the symptoms? How do you know if it’s time?

- If you have a frequent feeling of being pulled in a thousand directions and you’re unable to invest big chunks of time in high value work.

- If you’re unable to find or keep good employees.

- If you have difficulty attracting a steady flow of customers who want your products because they see you as distinct and better in some way.

It’s a part of growing: We all need a change from time to time.