Finish One Thing At A Time To Succeed

This week has proven quite interesting in all areas of my work.  Like most entrepreneurs, I am a little ADD or ADHD or something like that.  My mind is always spinning at all hours of the day and night.  I got up at 3am this morning with ideas just pouring out.

I met two different business owners who had the exact same problem.  They had major projects somewhere between 70 and 80% complete and we already looking to the next project.  The problem was they weren't finishing the ones they already started.  Do you know anyone who has trouble finishing a project?

If this is you or someone you know, you might like to know why this happens.  To begin with we start projects for a couple of reasons.  One of them is to prove we can do it.  The problem here is that you don't actually need to finish the project to see that you can.  When this happens, you get bored, realizing that there is no question that you can finish, and you start looking elsewhere.

The problem I have with this is that you can't win until you finish.  This is true in life, racing and projects.  Imagine if you got on my flight to Dallas and we went 80% of the way and got on the PA and said "OK folks, you have seen that we made it this far, and we are sure you all believe we can make it the rest of the way so we are stopping in Austin so we can go do something else."  Crazy right?  And yet we do it every day.

Following through on a project or task until it is completed isn't easy. Anyone can enter the race, and many can run a lot of laps.  Only a few will finish, and only one will win.  

When these business owners come to me short on patience, money, time and focus while looking at the next project, it is easy to see why they are right where they are.

Imagine if I were a real estate investor and I kept buying property.  First I bought a condo, cleaned it up, got it ready to rent, and said "See, I can be a condo landlord" without ever actually renting it.  Then I went and bought a house, cleaned it up, got it ready to flip and said "See I can flip a house" without ever selling it.  I would go broke doing this, and this is exactly what I see business owner after business owner do over and over.

I must admit, I have done it too.

So what is the solution?  The simple solution is not to start a new project until the old project is truly complete.  Simple yes, obvious yes, easy, no.  If it were easy, everyone would do it.  

One of the keys to success is knowing what you want to do before you start, and then finishing it before you start something else.  I can't fly a jet while I am still racing a car.  Why do we try to start one business when the first one still isn't complete?

If you start, commit to finishing before moving on, and you will see your success sooner than you think possible.

Making Big Shifts To Move Forward

Every once in a while we hit a ceiling that we impose upon ourselves and don't even realize it.  Even after coaching people and training for years, someone pointed out I was doing it to myself.

I had been trimming down my business and fine tuning my focus over the past couple of years and still didn't seem to be making a lot of ground.  My book stalled out and I really lost a little motivation to re-do the cover and retile it because it was already selling a little bit.  I do need to get to that.

One of the first things I did to punch through my personal ceiling was to give up coaching business owners so I could focus solely on the marketing aspects of the business.  My coach pointed out that I was still way to broad and that I should focus on just one area.  This goes against all of my thoughts and efforts for my client in online marketing, or so I thought.

Right about the same time my wife started working in Real Estate and of course my business took over her online marketing campaign.  As one guy interestingly noted, "No one has figured out how to get listings online." and he is right.  Listings are the name of the game in Real Estate.  The science of selling a house of known quality is much better than helping people find their next home.  Buyers can look at 50 or 100 homes before buying if they even buy at all.  This was challenging to say the least.

Even ghost writing for my wife got a little sketchy since I didn't have a real estate license.  In order to correct this, I decided last fall to go back to school so I could take the test in California.  After I took the test and passed, I joined her as an agent at Keller-Williams.  The intent was to be part time and just help her out but it didn't take long for my coach and I to see that this was the niche I needed to focus on.

I have been buying and selling homes to live in and as investments for nearly 20 years, making money all along the way.  A couple of times only by sheer luck I might add.  It only made sense for me to combine my coaching, leadership, marketing, sales and real estate knowledge and tie it all up on one package.  As a Realtor, I use all of these skills and still get the freedom of self employment I enjoy.  If I need more money, I go work more.  The big difference is the checks take a lot longer in the real estate business.

On paper this might seem like a really big shift, and it hasn't been.  What it has been is the clear path to move through the ceiling I was creating for myself by staying to broad in my efforts, and not following my own advice on focus.

By focusing on a single area, I can already see a difference in my ability to get things done which should eventually lead to more income, and less work.  Isn't that what we all want?

Grow A Small Business By Doing Less

In today’s market, small business owners have more going on than ever.  If you have a small business you are probably wondering “What is going on?”  You probably feel like there are so many opportunities, that you can’t possibly handle them all, and if you don’t handle them, you might be wondering how you are going to stay in business.

I have a lot of friends and customers who feel just like you do.  After doing a lot of research to understand how some small businesses make it and others don’t, I found something.

Scott Bourquin in 68' Mustang GT

It is pretty typical for a business owner to fail once, twice or more before really hitting their stride.  I wondered why that was.  I know I fall into this category.  When I took over my dad’s little mail order auto parts business, I didn’t know anything about anything in business.  I knew I had parts for 67’ and 68’ Mustangs, and a couple of customers who owned 67’ and 68’ Mustangs. 

A Quick Start On The Internet

In todays market place, having a website that is easy to find is critical to your business success.  The bad news is there are over 1 million new websites being added to the internet every day.  These new websites are all after the same eyeballs and dollars that you are.  The yellow pages don’t work anymore and you’ve tried pay per click ads only to blow your budget and give up.  What is a business owner supposed to do?

The good news is that the search engines are making enough money and are starting to listen to complaints about fake or misleading advertising pages.  Google is starting to look closely at websites to make sure that there is a real business behind it.  Even the big domaineer sites are starting to add content that is almost worth reading. 

Resolutions for 2011

Closing out 2010, I had a conversation with a guy about starting his own business. He really wanted to do it but he just couldn't give up the security of working for somebody else. I explained to him that security is a mindset which is based on the confidence you have in your own environment. You can work for a big company or government and you put your trust in them that they will protect your environment and your job. When you give away that trust you are hoping to exchange it for security. This is a false confidence that you receive when you trade your time for money.

If you look at the current state of the economy you can see businesses failing right and left and government workers losing their jobs almost as quickly. Security in the sense of somebody else taking care of you is gone. The truth is it has never been there. It is only when you trust in yourself and invest in yourself that you continue to build your internal confidence so your security is unfazed by outside influences.

You should never let anyone else be responsible for your security blanket this is the easy way out and it never lasts. As we go into 2011 there are a few simple things that are very hard to do yet can make a huge difference in your life. Some might call the secrets, I just call them the obvious things that most people won't bother to do.

Do You Have A Story, Or Are You Just Living?

What Is Your Headline?

This week, I was researching the title of my next book.  I know now that the title of the first book, So, Now What? was not the headline to make the book fly off the shelves.  I know this because my royalty checks haven’t paid for the new Aston Martin or X5d just yet.   Most people that read So, Now What? only admitted to understanding the title after reading more than half the book.  With the help of Imal Wagner, I realized that a title of a book is nothing more than the headline for the story.  As I looked at all of the books that were on my shelf, one title stood out.  The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris.  All I could think was “What a great headline, what is mine going to be?”

How can thinking like a marksman help your business?

The entrepreneur’s paradox affects all of us. Have you ever said yes to doing something you probably shouldn't have and regretted it later? I've never met a business owner that had not, so just nod your head yes, then we can move on. We all see it in every business every day. Even the best businesses venture outside of their zone on occasion. If you are doing it to save a customer, that may be acceptable however you should try to avoid it because it isn't going to be cheap.

I like to pick on attorneys a little bit because I have a lot of great friends that are attorneys. If you crack open the Yellow Pages to the attorney section I bet you can find at least one attorney's office that has more than 10 fields or specialties of law listed. And yet all of them can tell you that the attorneys that make the most money practice one specialty. I have a friend that has a personal injury law firm, and at one time they ventured out of the bubble and brought in an attorney who was a specialist in a different area. That relationship lasted through one major case and the outside specialist moved on.

Find success by blazing your own trail through life

The most successful people in life are those that have decided to blaze their own trail.  The further into uncharted territory they go, the more likely they are to make it into the history books if they reach their goal.  A post office employee blazed new trails into a discipline of physics most of us can't understand, and everyone know his name, Albert Einstein.

Some people blaze trails in territory everyone thought they already knew.  Michael Dell if famous for his trail in the PC business.  The PC wasn't anything new, Mr. Dell just focused on a target of delivering it better and cheaper than anyone else.  After he hit that target, he kept adjusting the target and today the Dell website is filled with technology offerings.