The Biggest Mistake Business Owners Make

January 7, 2009 By

What is The Biggest, Huge-est, Most GIGANTIC Mistake Business Owners Make?

  • It’s not about having an inferior product or too much competition.
  • It’s not having too little capital
  • It’s not having some wacky idea that no one wants and then trying to get every friend relative and innocent passerby to “drink the kool-aid”.
  • It’s not having a great idea that people don’t “get” or a great idea that’s ahead of it’s time.
  • It has nothing to do with how smart or creative you are.
  • It’s not starting a business with absolutely no clue how to sell (although that’s a biggie and if selling is a problem for you check out www.ReluctantSales.com )
  • It’s not any of the dozens of personal and professional challenges most self employed entrepreneurial types struggle with.

The Biggest, Huge-est, Most GIGANTIC Mistake Business Owners Make is simply this:

Trying to do everything. Not knowing how to delegate. Not having systems in place so that other people can do the things you are not good at. Spending precious time on tasks and projects that could be delegated instead of focusing your energy on what you do best and on what brings in the money.

When you try to do everything in your business you are bound to fail. Even the smallest business is a ravenous, many headed serpent that one person can never hope to keep fed.

Note: Even though a key concept of NLP is that “there is no failure only feedback”. In Business, the “feedback” of less money coming in than going out or of the owner rushing around from dawn until the “wee hours” can only go on for so long until something has to change. Either

  • the business ceases to exist due to lack of money or
  • the business owner gets totally exhausted, burned out or sick or
  • the business owner finally wakes up and does something different.

We also have a saying in NLP: “The most flexible communicator controls the system.” As the owner of a business (even if you are a Reiki master if you are working with clients you are a business owner), it is your communication to yourself, your clients and the people who work in and with your business that must lead and control the direction of your enterprise…(beam me up Scotty! I just wanted to help people!)

Here’s the catch 22!

When you are starting a business on a shoestring and a prayer, how do you get the kind of help that can enable you to grow your business if you have no extra wads of cash laying around?

You need the help to grow your business but you can’t pay for the help until your business grows! Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place! (In NLP We call it a “double bind”)

Can i share a personal example?

Last year. September of 2007 this idea hit me really hard between the eyes and it wasn’t pretty. For 25 years I’ve been self employed and always struggling. In retrospect I was close to major success and breakthroughs several times but I literally got worn out and burned out to the point where I just couldn’t personally sustain things and then it would all fall apart. Then I would give up in disgust and go start a different business from scratch and make the same mistake all over again.

July of 2007 I taught my first full blown NLP practitioner certification training to a small group of students. It was great! I loved teaching the class. I loved sharing the powerful life changing concepts of NLP and Hypnosis and  Time Line Therapy™ but the gargantuan effort of preparing for the class, creating workbooks, cd sets and ordering all the other supplies and finding a place to have the training and getting the students in the seats and all the registration procedures and then correcting the exams and creating certifications and sending them out and then preparing the Master Practitioner level program and teaching that one weekend a month in addition to performing and booking all my own gigs and cleaning my house and seeing private clients and going to networking meetings and taking courses on how to do all this stuff better…

left me…

totally…

and…

completely…

exhausted…

and while I was so busy doing all of that stuff. I didn’t always have time to keep an eye on the bottom line and so all of a sudden even though I was working my brains out…I was out of cash flow….oops! :o (

Does any of this ring a bell with any of you out there? Are you getting the picture? Can you grasp my concept here?

I mean you can have all the Modern Jedi Mind Mastery training in the world, but if you try to run a business, any business, all by yourself you will eventually crash and burn….

Yup. I know what I’m tawking about…uh huh and it ain’t pretty…

Now, there is no failure. There really is only feedback and so we “passionate ones” pick our selves up off the ground and dust our selves off and start asking ourselves some really good (if hard) questions.

Like “What is the weakest link in my business?”

“Oh… Shit.

It’s………………

…………………………………………….ME!”

Now stay with me here because I will get you to a powerful solution and it’s going to solve a bunch of your challenges all at once.

So last year, I started a master mind group. Michael Guerin and Rob Bronson were the charter members and we began meeting every Monday just to run ideas by each other and to challenge and support each other and to learn with each other and to help each other see the stuff that we were too close to see in our own businesses.

And it made a huge difference. It was the first time in 25 years that I wasn’t alone trying to figure stuff out. I had a team.

For example: At one point Rob Bronson “pushed” me kicking and whining and complaining to move all of my websites to GoDaddy.com and saved me $6,000 per year. At one point I pushed Michael Guerin repeatedly until he fired his web designer and started taking charge of his online marketing. Mike and I “pushed” Rob Bronson to get his butt out of a really negative situation in his life and business and on and on and on…

So at some point you must form your own Jedi Council or Master Mind Group.

This was so cool that I started inviting some other people to join us and one of them was this amazing woman named Julie Braun, she calls herself the  “Marketing Guru”. www.juliebraundesign.com

Julie was doing huge, major, multiple  marketing projects on a scale that made my head spin. She was doing events and PR and entire marketing campaigns for small to medium sized businesses. She was providing services that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But she wasn’t working with Fortune 500 budgets. She was affordable. How did she do it?

It turns out that years ago Julie mastered the art of engaging INTERNS. UNPAID INTERNS.

Now these are not slaves. These are not college kids who come to your business to do all the yucky work like filing and photo copying (you just may have to pay for that kind of stuff. Do not even think about doing that crap yourself. You can’t afford it any more).

Julie was setting up specific projects, real honest to goodness projects and allowing students to truly get hands on experience. So she was able to do often times 10 times the work that she would be able to do alone.

She had learned a way to not only leverage her knowledge and expertise but her time and resources in a way that enabled her to Work “on” her business as well as “in” her business. Her only investment was her time and attention and she developed exactly the skills working with interns that all of us entrepreneurs MUST develop any way if we want our businesses to succeed. The ability to delegate intelligently. The ability to manage other people. The ability to lead. The ability to generate and incorporate intelligent feedback.

All without a huge financial risk putting pressure on your learning curve.

I got so inspired by that I immediately found a Yale student who wanted to learn NLP, he ended up editing my first year’s NLP training audio series.  He got to expand his knowledge base and I got a project accomplished that I just didn’t have time to do. That was my “big toe in the water experience”

Now over the years, Julie has really fine tuned all of the details and concepts of using unpaid interns in her business to the point where it was just obvious she had to share the goods with those of us who were struggling with this whole “solopreneur” thing.

So Last summer she and her business partner Michelle Demers www.totalbusinessfitness.com created SuperInterns.com it’s what I call a “Turbo Booster Zoooom  course” designed to get you up and running with unpaid interns fast.

To be honest, I signed up for the first one but because I was too “burned” out from teaching my 2nd NLP training and some personal stuff going on in my life, I never got to class. BUT they recorded every call and I finished the course later while driving in the car. My point is you can learn this no matter how busy you are.

(BTW Michelle met Julie in a different Mastermind group – are you getting that you need to “mastermind”?)

The Super Interns Crash Course will be offered again in a few weeks and if you are in business for yourself (or if your employer doesn’t have the budget to hire the help you need to do your job right) THIS IS REQUIRED. You owe it to yourself to take this.

This is:
“Save Your Business (And Possibly Your Sanity) 101″

Are you with me on this? I know we all have the attention spans of 2 year olds these days but this is vital so PAY ATTENTION:

Whether you take the course or not this is so important that you MUST at the very least know about it. I could not live with myself if I didn’t share this information with you. It’s that important to your success and sanity.

So I’ve invited Julie and Michelle to share their stories with me on a telephone call next Wednesday, January 14th from noon to 1:00 PM eastern time.To Register Click Here

They are also doing an informational call of their own that evening, January 14th at 7:00 pm eastern time. to Register Click Here

  • The Call at Noon will be me interviewing them (you will also be able to ask questions).
  • The call in the evening is totally their show. So you have some choices.

The calls are free and whichever one you can make, it will be well worth your while to take an hour to find out how you can get some relief from the grind of being the sole practitioner or sole proprietor or solopreneur. It could save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars and possibly enable you to truly catapult your business to the moon. It’s also one very creative way to move forward even in spite of the dire economic forecast and the worst economy in 100 years.

It is also of interest if you have college age kids or know some college students of any age because many colleges require internships precisely because the right internship could make all the difference in whether your children get a dull, low paying, soul crushing job right out of school because they have no experience in the “real world” or get to work closely with the CEO of a growing international company.

I sat down one day and figured out that I need about 10 interns in my business right now.

so if you know anyone who is interested in or is actively studying these or related fields:

  • Arts Management
  • Internet Marketing
  • Psychology, NLP, Hypnosis, Personal Transformation and Change
  • Music,Theater, Storytelling
  • Graphic Design
  • Direct Marketing
  • Sales Skills
  • General Business
  • Health and Healing
  • Peak Performance

Call me! 203-495-8808 or e-mail me at mark [at] markshepard.com

Registration page for 12 to 1 pm call –
“How to Get Free Help for Your Business” hosted by Mark Shepard Click Here

Registration page for the 7 to 8 pm call – “Unpaid Interns to the Rescue!”
(Super Interns general call) Click Here

Just for registering for either/both calls you’ll get a free ebook “251 Great Internship Projects!” .

If You already “get” that you need the course you can click here to: Register for the Super Interns Crash Course: How To Put Unpaid Interns To Work For Your Business – early bird special ends Friday 1/9!

BTW when you do decide to take the course, be sure to mention my name and you will get $50 bucks off of the already too cheap price of the course.

Please leave a comment below and share this with as many people as you can

Thanks!

Mark

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How To Start An NLP / Hypnosis Practice – Part 1

September 2, 2008 By

One of my NLP / Hypnosis students recently asked me for a step by step process or guide to building an NLP / hypnosis practice from scratch with no business experience.

Since I built my own practice from the ground up…several times…I thought I would share some of the pitfalls to avoid as well as some of the things that really worked well.

So here goes…starting with

My Number One Mistake in starting my hypnotherapy practice?

Paying a lot for a Yellow Pages ad that didn’t work.

I took out a pretty big ad in the Yellow Pages. BIG MISTAKE. I am still paying for that ad 5 years later! Did I get phone calls? Yes. did I get clients? A few. But they were not the kind of clients who understood the value of what I was offering. Mostly I got price shoppers. Ultimately the ad did not pay for itself much less create a profit. The problem with a yellow pages ad is that it’s in there for a year. There is no way to tweak it or change it. so if you put in ad in there that doesn’t pull, you are stuck with it.

In order to build a practice fast you do have to advertise. But here are some lessons I learned.

  1. Get a business phone line. It comes with a free business listing under Hypnosis or Hypnotherapy. That adds legitimacy to your business and conveys the message that you don’t need to advertise with a display ad because you are that good. Just be sure to resist the Yellow Pages sales pitch!
  2. The best places to advertise Smoking Cessation and Weight Loss for me was a local free paper that got delivered to everyone in specific, targeted communities. Choose a paper that goes to an affluent community! You need a pool of people who have enough money to pay for your services out of pocket. Once you have decided on the paper that fits your demographics a business card sized ad run week in and week out will work. It’s usually the cheapest. In my experience I found that it took at least 3 weeks before I got my first call. I also discovered that the calls slowed down or stopped between Thanksgiving and New Years. But the ad was being seen. The ad needs to be simple and focused on what you will do for your prospect not on you. I have a number of examples of ads I’ve used successfully. Let me know if you want to see them and I’ll find a way to post them on line. the other good thing about the local paper is that if it runs for three weeks with no responses, then you can change it. Big lesson: Change only one thing at a time. Keep track of your responses!
  3. One of the best places I’ve found over the years to advertise is Natural Awakenings Magazine. There is very likely one near you. It’s a free publication that are targeted to health conscious people. I find there may be less smokers reading this but this magazine is always available where people have nothing else to do. waiting rooms, or restaurants. Often when I’m eating alone I’ll grab this to read while I wait for my food. Thousands of other people do it too and you have their complete attention. (attention is extremely rare these days) I run my ad every single month and that qualifies me for a big discount. They also have a special section in the back for practitioners. That is where I would start. For less than $100 per month you can get the word out to a group of people who are more open to alternative health practices than the general public.
  4. Speaking of Natural Awakenings Magazine, one major practice building tip that costs only some time and a phone call is to call each of the other practitioners in the magazine and introduce yourself. Offer to buy them a cup of coffee so that you can get to know their business better in order to refer people to them. Make it all about them. If you sincerely want to learn about them, they will want to learn about you too. The more people you get to know the easier it will be to receive referrals. But you have to prime the pump.
  5. Go on line and search out holistic directories. Most of these are free or very cheap. Sign up! Usually there is an opportunity to up load your picture and your areas of specialty. These take a while to pay off but usually they are quite well optimized for the search engines.
  6. Business Networking Meetings and Chamber of Commerce groups: I found business networking meetings to be a big challenge at first. At the typical chamber of commerce group I would say “I’m a hypnotherapist” and people would go out of their way to avoid me for fear that I would “hypnotize them and make them quack like a duck.” So I started calling myself an NLP Practitioner and that was better received. Some people’s eyes would glaze over when I explained that NLP stood for Neuro Linguistic Programming. But business folks were more curious about NLP. If they had heard of it before, it was usually in conjunction with Tony Robbins and NLP sales techniques which business people liked.I have over the years had great success helping business owners get out of their own way and typically can help them double their income in a very short period of time. The point is, when with a business group you need to address their needs. They ALL want to make more money, spend more time with their family and deal with the grinding stress and uncertainty of being in business. Address those issues each time you introduce yourself and you will get clients. Now I basically say this at a business networking meeting: “Hi, My name is Mark Shepard and I help business people double their incomes…guaranteed.” Because of my past experience (one client quadrupled his income) I can say that with utter conviction.

    You might want to say, Hi, my name is ___________ and I help people stop smoking, lose weight and increase their incomes.” the point is you want to keep it short and focused on the benefit to them. No one cares at that point about your certifications or experience. They assume you have that stuff. They want to try on the idea that you can help them.

  7. You need a simple website. At some point soon you need to learn about key words and search engine optimization, google ad words or you are going to have to find someone who can help you with that. WARNING! WARNING! There are tons of “web designers” who you will meet at business networking events who have no idea how to create a web site that actually sells your services. Many of them can make a pretty site but have no idea how to get you traffic. I have heard so many heartbreaking stories of new businesses spending a huge amount of money for a website that then does nothing. Luckily for me I didn’t have any money left after my yellow pages ad fiasco so I had to learn how to design my own simple web pages with microsoft front page. There are now a lot of even easier better ways to do that. I’m very impressed by GoDaddy.com and their “website tonight” program that anyone can use to create a simple site. This is an area that I could write a book about…So if you ahve any specific questions let me know. I can also refer you to some people who “get it” and can make a major difference in jump starting your practice building.
  8. Business cards. Your business card must do more than be pretty and have your name on it. It must sell what you do for your clients very clearly communicated. If you have to have your address on it put your contact info on the back. I lime using my business cards to make a special offer and invite prospects to my website. Warning! I have seen business people get really obsessive over their business card. This is something most people will throw away! I constantly tweak and tune my business card using Microsoft Publisher. then I just get a couple hundred of them printed at a time. If you want to see some of mine let me know and I’ll put up a pdf with some of the examples I’ve had success with over the years.
  9. Your e-mail signature. In pretty much all e-mail programs you cna have an outgoing signature. You should have a short description of what you do and the website people can go to in order to find out more.
  10. All of the above have very little to do with actually practicing hypnosis or NLP. The best thing you can do to build your practice is to practice. By that I mean, get out there and get some experience actually working with real people. One way I got people to at least consider giving me a try was by offering a free 1 hour consult. I used this time to learn more about them and to demonstrate a few of the fast NLP techniques that would enable them to experience immediate results. Most signed up for my BreakThrough Sessions. The ones that didn’t at least enabled me to practice my presentation and to learn more about their business and how I could help them.

So those are a few thoughts to start with. Building a hypnosis or NLP practice from scratch is a challenge. If it was the easiest thing in the world to do everyone would be doing it! The process of building your practice is one of the deepest and most truly transforming experiences you will ever have. You ahve to walk your talk. You will be tested. You will learn more than you ever learned in your hypnosis training or your NLP training.

I found that I had extremely unrealistic expectations of how long it would take to get it started. Luckily I was still doing a lot of school performances as a musician and storyteller. so I had some other streams of income. I found that private sessions were quite easy to work into my existing schedule.

In the beginning I charged $150 per hour. I got such tremendous results with many of my clients that it became clear to me that what I was offering had an extremely high value. One client increased his income from $25,000 to $190,000. I only worked with him for a total of 10 hours. Not a bad return on his investment. A number of my weight loss clients loss dramatic amounts of weight easily. Smokers typically were done in a single session. At this point I charge $500 per hour. I work with fewer people but the quality of the clients and the results we get has risen exponentially.

So the major piece of advice I have about starting your NLP / Hypnosis practice is this.

it’s a practice. It is a continual learning process. You will make what look like mistakes at the time. but remember, there are no mistakes there is no failure. There is only feedback.

The best thing I ever did to build my practice and long term income took me five years of struggle to discover…I’ll share that next time.

thanks for checking this out

Mark Shepard, NLPT
Certified Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP, Hypnosis
Certified Master Trainer of Time Line Therapy(tm) Techniques

www.NLPRapidChange.com
www.ModernJedi.com

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