Fatal Business Mistakes

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

Avoid Killing Your Business by Evading or Correcting these Mistakes!

The entrepreneurial dream is a dream that is not limited to any country, place or person. It knows no geographic, ideological or ethnic boundaries. It is an urge that strikes deep into the hearts and spirits of men and women alike that have a vision, desire and courage to be in business for themselves. Why? Probably because of the opportunity to generate seemingly unlimited amounts of income based upon their own skills, cunning and knowledge. To operate as their own boss and to not have to operate within the structure of someone elses making. More importantly, it could be because of a vision, idea or product that they feel can add incredible value to the lives of thousands. Finally, but not less important, it is the desire for freedom, income and sometimes even fame that drives many to the world of being in business. In these times, more people than ever before have struck out on their own to take on the challenge of business ownership. In a world of uncertain economics and insecure job markets, the best security a person can have is being accountable to themselves. Every day, more people join the ranks of small businesses as partners, associates, contractors and staff members. If you share in this dream, know it is real and the rewards are big- but so is the risk. If your idea or service bombs, you are left battled and bruised on the roadside watching the world go by. Yet in my 28+ years in business, the mistakes that businesses make are less about the idea and more about things that are not so obvious, but can be down-right deadly. In this report, I will do my best to give you the most deadly mistakes that businesses make and how to prevent them. By the way, these mistakes are equal opportunity business killers its just that the smaller businesses may not have the deep pockets to recover. I have worked with Fortune 500 companies, sole proprietors, franchisors, and small and large businesses in over 15 countries and can tell you that size makes little difference when it comes to these fatal errors. The good news is that the solution to most of them is the same: Education. Know your enemy, study its weaknesses and strengths - and head it off at the pass. The Fatal Business Mistakes fall primarily into these 7 categories: 1. Not being able to SELL 2. Inability to BUILD and DRIVE a TEAM 3. Not BEING ABLE TO TEACH others how to lead 4. LACK OF SYSTEMS 5. LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY 6. NO CODE of HONOUR, MISSION or VALUES 7. Allowing THE LITTLE VOICE or self-chatter in your head to rule the day

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

This list will come back to haunt you in those moments when you are facing challenges and obstacles. Just remember that a problem can only persist if there is something unknown. This list is designed to take the demons out of the shadows so you know them and can easily slay them.

1. Assuming It Will Sell Itself I have had thousands of people tell me about their brilliant idea for a product or service that would be completely irresistible in the market. Blair, I swear this product will just sell itself, they claim. I just need People then feel justified in spending all their time focused on the product instead of sales and marketing. Many of these businesses go broke because they hold onto the myth that the products or services will sell themselves. They believe that once one key person finds out, it will become a viral success or they tell themselves if they get just 1% of the market, theyll be swimming in cash. I hate to dash your hopes, but the odds of that happening without you selling are slim to none. The #1 skill for anyone in business is the ability to actually SELL. For some people, selling is a dirty word. Its beneath them. Its the realm of used car salespeople or door-to-door hawkers. The reality is that sales equals income. If selling is distasteful to you Get over it! Whether you are in business alone or the CEO of a publicly listed company, your job is to sell your concepts, ideas, and products to a very crowded, jaded and skeptical market. You have to be able to clearly communicate the benefits of doing business with you. You also have to find a way to cut through the noise in your industry, and stand out and be heard. Thinking the product or service will sell itself without a strong selling effort on your part is an exercise in denial.

2. Not Taking the Time to Learn how to Sell or Thinking Selling is Below You Many times, newbies into the world of entrepreneurship are refugees from the corporate world. A world where they had resources, a chain of command, and authority. Selling was something either taken for granted or relegated to the sales force not something you had to do yourself. So many fledgling entrepreneurs bury themselves in their inbox or in organising their office, or perfecting their logos/forms/processes before they even have any clients. Too often, its a keepbusy procrastination tactic. I hear a lot of people say, I want to be a business owner not a salesperson. I can tell you that the roadside is littered with the lost dreams and hopes of people who thought they were great business owners, but didnt or couldnt sell. But, seldom will you find a great salesperson along that roadside. They always know how to generate income in any economy. In 28 years of business, I have never stopped learning how to sell better. Never stopped practicing, drilling, role playing or studying. Neither has my team. One of the main reasons companies hire our

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

SalesPartners is because they want a coach to keep them accountable to their sales goals. Selling is a learned trait. You dont have to be born with it; you just have to learn it.

3. Wrong Reasons for Starting a Business Whenever I mentor or coach folks with their businesses, I ask them WHY they started their business. The answers are always interesting. Granted money is a big motivator, but there are plenty of days in your own business where there is no money and the prospects for income look bleak. What is your motivation then? Some say they dont want to be a slave working for someone else. Fair enough. But slavery is not relegated to employer-employee relationships. When you are working for your business rather than your business working for you, income is scarce and you have no choice that too is slavery. Or, how about these reasons: My Dad was a business owner; I inherited it; my friends said it was a good idea; I wanted to have more time for my family; or I hated my job. The most successful businesses I have seen have a mission something they want to do in the market that makes a difference. They want to be able to make a statement about who they are and what they do: They want to create a legacy. This same drive is also the essence of branding. What promise will you make to the world and deliver? Overnight delivery? Satisfaction guaranteed? For our SalesPartner franchise owners around the world, the mission is to Improve the quality of life for everyone through transformation of the marketplace. There needs to be a fire inside that will take you past those times when the going gets tough.

4. Leveraging and Overextending Too Soon Visions of grandeur are great, but trying to leverage your business too soon can be fatal. Trying to launch a franchise before you have a successful prototype can get you in serious trouble. There are several levels of growth to any business. When we work with businesses, it is clear whether they are: Emerging; in chaos; stable; abundant; or in a power position. Replication before stability is like trying to build a house in the middle of an active earthquake!! Attempting to raise money for a half-baked, unproven idea is not out of the question if you have the business experience or team to pull it off, but for the average person that is stretching too far, too soon. If you have a vision of multiple locations, get one stable and cash flowing first. By opening that second and third location, you have just multiplied any unresolved problems that you had with the first one. Overextending yourself financially too soon kills countless businesses daily. Overextending yourself, your time, and your resources can also take a toll on your family, your health and the rest of your life.

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

5. Abdicating Core Responsibilities Too Soon Boy, wouldnt it be great if you could just sit by the beach sipping Mai Tais while other people do all the work? Its a great dream, but its also foolish to think you can start a business and not be involved. There is a huge difference between delegating, empowering, and abdicating. Many new business owners who dislike sales want to bring someone on to do it for them immediately. Not a bad move, but that does not mean that the business owners dont sell too! As a business owner, it is critical to learn how to sell, market and to even teach others how to sell. You, the business owner, may not be the best in your organisation at the business function, but you still need to have a feel for it, a hand in it. If you are going to give direction to others you best know what you are talking about. If you are foggy about accounting LEARN the BASICS. Abdicating accountability to numbers and stats to an accountant, bookkeeper or CFO does not absolve you from being financially literate. You can also spend a fortune on marketing consultants and companies who will promise you the moon, but at the end of the day, you know your business better than anyone else. You know your message the best. Those folks can help you, but not do it for you. A business must also have an effective method of training its own people. Very few businesses know how to teach so they are always looking for good people. There are plenty of good people, but lots of bad or nonexistent training. Our SalesPartners provide a very valuable service in the area of sales training and team building. SalesPartners tailor and then deliver core training for the specific needs of their clients- which is always significantly less costly and more effective than continually searching for good people.

6. Thinking You Can Do it on Your Own A big mistake is thinking you can build an enterprise by yourself. All businesses need advisors, mentors and teams to be successful. We are taught in school to do things on our own. Not to cooperate. No wonder so many fail in business! Business is a team sport. I dont know about you, but I am not smart enough to do it myself, nor do I want to be. In my book the ABCs of Building a Business Team that Wins, there are simple formulas to take ordinary people and turn them into awesome teams. One of the limiting thoughts that prevent team formation is: When I make more money, I can hire a team. Wrong! With that thought, that day may never come. Teams are not always compensated with wages. Teams are not always employees. They are advisors, partners, joint ventures, franchisees people who believe in you and your mission. You are not Superman-or-woman so dont try to be. Odds are, youll fail.

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

7. Operating in Isolation There are some who are legends in their own minds. They think they know the market, know what it wants, know how to deliver it without being IN it. Theyre building a better mousetrap without ever having seen a mouse. Sorry. Thats not the way it works. My partner calls them sky pilots. Those folks who sit holed up behind their computers figuring out the market without getting out there and TALKING to people. In these days, you have to make live contact with people to understand where they are, what they need and how you can truly help them. Become part of the market. Know your market better than anyone else and TALK TO LOTS OF PEOPLE ALL THE TIME. One of my mentors calls it REACH. The size and success of your business is a function of the size of your reach. Its not necessarily how many people you can reach, its who you can reach that makes a difference. More as, when you touch them, does it matter? Do they learn from or act on what you share?

8. Not making the Shift from Creation to Management Its one thing to create great ideas. Its another to manage a process of delivering it. Many entrepreneurs are continually creating because they are good at finding and solving problems. The problem is that cycle is endless. There are countless opportunities to solve problems; but to monetise your solutions, you have to also create and manage a process to deliver it. Take my business for example I teach people how to sell. I created a proven sales training process, which we then passed on to our SalesPartners so that our training would be accessible to businesses around the world. We created a process to train our SalesPartners in how to train business professionals. Once a process is created, someone has to enforce it. In our business, thats my partner Kelly. Kelly continually MANAGES the process and make sure it is executed properly again and again that people are trained on it the right way so they can generate consistent results. This is a very different skill set than creating the process. In my business, I know that I am stronger in creation than I am in managing. That is why my partner and I are such a good fit. He loves to manage the processes and make them hum. A creator is forever changing the process, which is like over-pruning a tree. You will kill it. This also requires the willingness to accept your strengths and your weaknesses- and let others with the strengths you lack lead around you.

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

9. Accepting that Training is Essential Do you want explosive growth in your business? In John Maxwells The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You, John shares that the Law of Explosive growth is predicated on teaching others how to lead. Most organisations that get off to a rousing start sputter because there are no training systems in place. As the business grows, it must find a way of replicating and transferring the knowledge gained to the next generation of team members. Without this training, the original bread winners are trapped doing what they do. What happens when you land that big account and now you need more bodies to get it done? Are you going to throw them to the wolves and watch them struggle and fail or develop a training system that gets them up to speed quickly, dependably and in a way where they feel like they are positioned to succeed and win? And by the way, training is not show and tell. Training is immersion in the physical, mental and emotional aspects of the job; whether it is sales, accounting, marketing or customer service. It must be replicable. You might feel like you dont have time to train someone else, especially at this level of immersion. You just need the work done. But, to grow your business, you have to make the time. To be a great leader, you must also be a great teacher. SalesPartners can help you design and facilitate that training so that your vision and your processes become the core of your company culture.

10. Ignoring the Personal Development Side of Business Its not personal. Its just business. Riii---iiight. Probably the biggest mistake of all in business is ignoring the fact that business is an emotional contact sport. What takes most people out of the game is the emotional stress, worry, panic, frustration and fatigue that comes with building a business. I learned many years ago that the toughest sale of all is selling myself to myself. It is mastering the Little Voice in my head that doubts, sabotages and erodes my confidence. When your mood level is high, you see opportunities in every obstacle. When your mood level is down, every molehill looks like a mountain and even the smallest problems seem insurmountable. To produce consistent results in your business, you have to be able to control your thoughts and feelings. When youre down, how do you get your mood level high again? In the early days of my business, I wasnt that emotionally strong. I sought approval of others, second-guessed myself, and beat myself up on a regular basis. I hated feeling stressed out all the time, so I sought great teachers and coaches that I still use to this day to teach me the skills of managing my thoughts, beliefs and emotions. Every personal development course I ever did, automatically increased my selling ability. Why?

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

Because the toughest sell of all is between my own ears. Your Little Voice can be your biggest enemy or greatest ally. But, if you are unconscious about it, it will rule you and sabotage your best efforts. What most people fail to grasp is the gut wrenching, teeth gnashing, laying-in-bed-fretting roller coaster that comes with having a business. Business IS a personal development workshop that you can never walk away from but the better you master yourself and your team, the more money you will make.

11. Under Capitalisation and Poor Money Management I could write a whole book here about insufficient capital, unrealistic forecasting and poor budgeting habits of the typical start up and growth mode business. The inability to raise capital comes from two things: 1) The inability to sell and 2) poor money habits. If you cannot show a command of these two areas, no one will trust you with the ability to generate profit. Managing money should be simple: Earn more, spend less. But, many people are either focused on sales only and ignore their costs, or do everything to conserve money and strangle their sales and marketing efforts. Being a spend-thrift or over-spending will kill your business. Weekly accountability to numbers and good discipline will allow help manage costs while allowing for growth. It is important to take risks to generate business, but forecasting with no budget is a disaster. Putting your future in debt without a solid plan and financial controls is like giving your teenager a credit card with no limits. Your exuberance as a business builder may cloud your better judgment. Remember, when emotion is high, intelligence runs low. If you have bad money habits personally, they will reflect in your business. Any financial issues that you have when you have no money, will get worse once money starts flowing in. Sales does NOT cure financial incompetence.

12. Ignoring Margins and Profit Many businesses do not need more sales. More sales will actually kill them. This may sound contradictory to number 11 above, but, the fact is that they need more profit margin on what they are already selling, not more sales. One of our SalesPartners franchisees had an account looking for help to help increase sales. We asked to look into some of the clients numbers for a better understanding of the business. What we found was that more sales would make him go broke faster. He was buying product to sell at 85% of the price he was selling it at. After a bit of overhead, every sale was digging his grave deeper! Every transaction should contribute to a healthy profit. Doing too much for free or on the hope for more business is devastating. Be able to track every dollar earned to the bottom line.

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

13. Not knowing your Product or Your Customer The market is always talking to you. You have to listen. Many is the business owner who had an idea that they knew would kill the market But they went broke anyway. Do not be arrogant. Look at the trends. The market is always changing. Twenty years ago, the fax machine was a must-have piece of office equipment. Would you want to be selling fax machines today? What problems does your product REALLY solve? Maybe its something you did not foresee. What does your customer REALLY want? Its not what you want to sell them. Its not even the features of your solution. In our business, its not the sales training that people want theyre looking for sales and business growth. Sales training is just the means to the end. Its like that old story about drill bits. A customer walks into a hardware store and the sales clerk is explaining every feature of their fancy drills. The customer is overwhelmed. He didnt come in for a drill. He doesnt care about the speed of the drill or the metal alloys used in the drill bit. He just wants a hole. Help your customers understand how to get what they want and youll be successful.

14. Poor Accountability: Financially and Behaviourally I remember a wildly successful trucking company that was growing so fast that they ignored #11. Their accounts receivables were high, collections low and the need for cash high. Without strong accountability, they decided to delay the paying of their payroll taxes for a few weeks to free up cash. A few weeks led to months. The government can wait right? WRONG. That company went down in a very big and ugly way. Using money that belongs to someone else can be like a drug. Well pay it back later. But later doesnt happen because you become used to having access to the extra cash that belongs to the tax man, vendors, employees, etc. Financially, emotionally and psychically this devastates many business owners to the point that bankruptcy is the only solution. If the money isnt yours dont touch it without agreement. Also, every person in sales must be accountable to their numbers. How many calls will they make? How many appointments? How many presentations? These numbers must be reviewed each week as part of holding everyone accountable. The power of a team is huge when managed properly. Managing means measuring. No measurement no improvement. If you need help creating a system of accountability that will work for your business, our SalesPartners can help. Theyll create a system to bring your team together. Theyll hold your team responsible to your Code of Honour and help hold everyone, including you, accountable to your numbers.

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

15. No Clear Selling and Marketing Cycle to Generates Steady New Business Its amazing that many businesses do not really know where most of their money comes from. Your business has a selling cycle, whether you know it, or not. If you are hoping that business will continue to come rolling through the door, you are cruising for a bruising. Analyse where all your sales come from, starting from origin to the final close. What is the pattern? Focus on that cycle and refine it until it hums. Dont fall into the common trap that is a big mistake for most businesses: Wasting a lot of time and money trying different marketing strategies, selling strategies and pursuing tangents that some OTHER guys used that seemed to work for them. If you have any business at all, you got it through a series of processes. Identify them and maximise them first. Our SalesPartners do an excellent job in helping clients do this properly. They help businesses scoop up the millions of dollars that are still sitting on the table. I can tell you that I have personally thrown more money away than I care to think in my career to marketing and PR companies that I abdicated my marketing to. They were not bad people. They simply set out to create new strategies to generate business for me rather than looking at what already worked and maximising that. And, I was too impatient to stick to the knitting and follow the process that attracted customers to my business. In the end the process is the process. Once identified and calibrated, you can improve each step of the process. One of my team members said it well: Marketing for many is like an old hand operated water pump. You pump like crazy and nothing happens at first. Then it starts to gurgle, trickle and ultimately a flow of water comes out. The problem is that it takes you a lot of energy to get it flowing. That is like a marketing strategy that says: Sell, sell, sell! Business starts flowing. You relax a bit to fulfil and rest and what happens? The water flows for a little while, trickles and stops. Now what? Start pumping again. Thats a bad formula. Stick a solar powered automatic pump on that thing so you have a steady stream of income.

16. Thinking Momentum will Carry You One of the differences between a good business owner and a rookie salesperson is that when a salesperson makes a couple of big sales, what do they do? Celebrate (thats good) and take a break (thats not good). Remember our pump analogy? Momentum can be an excuse for not doing anything. The formula for momentum is velocity times mass. That means velocity must be maintained and the amount of effort going in must be steady. If you back off, so do the results. A good owner keeps systems moving. You use wins to raise the bar to more wins. Yes you celebrate. But celebration doesnt mean taking your foot off the accelerator.

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

17. Being too People Dependent Instead of System Dependent The late Dr. Edwards Deming was the guru of quality control in the late 20th century. His point was clear. A business must have systems and processes that allow people to do good work without hampering their progress. If a problem arises, typically its a system problem not a people problem. The most overlooked system in business today is training. Its having systems that teach people how to be competent and good at what they do. That is why SalesPartners are so busy. Whenever you see lots of employee turnover its usually because of the lack of good systems. People are expected to be superhuman or special. If I hear the words one more time, I cant find good people. I will scream! Most people are good. The systems are the problem. Sometimes you are too close to your own business and need an external resource to help you identify what can be systematised. Our SalesPartners are experts at helping develop and incorporate systems into businesses.

18. Hoping Instead of Goal Setting and Planning Many wide eyed entrepreneurs go into business hoping for the best. That is a horrible business plan. Clear goals pull you toward your dreams and desired outcomes. You have to become a compulsive goal setter not just a problem solver. What do you want to deal with more: Goals or problems? The Little Voice Mastery Champion Level Goal Setting Program steps you into the right goals with the right process to get what you want. Do plans always go according to plan? No. But the process of creating a plan clears your head of the doubts, concerns, and surprises that can trip you up later when you are already invested in the game. I am not a big planner. But I am a big goal setter. Following a proper goal setting process will yield a simple plan. Do I always get my goals? No. But it keeps me in motion and directed. The path to every goal allows you to correct and get bigger, whether you achieve the goals, or not.

19. Solving Problems by Working Harder If you have been in business for a while You will find the solution to most challenges is NOT working harder. That is a revolutionary concept for many people, just like it was for me. Working harder at solving a problem that you have been working on for some time becomes defeating, frustrating and forms bad habits. Many business owners have burnt themselves out and even quit because of hard work that got them nowhere.

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

That is why you must have advisors, a team, and be willing to take new risks in areas that are challenging you and to find new pathways that are more elegant, easy and lucrative. Sometimes its a 180 degree shift in direction that solves the problem. The way to get out of a hole is to simply stop digging!! If you need someone from the outside of your organisation to help you look at new ways to deal with the same seemingly unsolvable problem, SalesPartners can give you a fresh pair of eyes. Based on working with many business clients across a wide spectrum of markets and industries, they have been exposed to a variety of business systems and solutions that can benefit your business, too.

20. Ignoring the Power of Reach, Association and Connection Ralph Waldo Emerson said, Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. I believe he did a huge disservice to entrepreneurs who came after him. Waiting for the phone to ring, blindly sending thousands of emails, hoping that someone sees your ad and finds you is a sure road to ruin. No matter how big or small you are, there are always those out there who you can connect with, associate with, joint venture with, or simply talk to that can open a world of resources, capital and ideas that you can never predict. Certainly you will never experience it if you dont reach out to the world and ask. As I once heard If you dont ask the answer is already NO!

21. No Code Every great team, business, culture, army or family has one thing in common: A set of rules. I call it a Code of Honour. Its a set of rules that sets the behavioural standards of the team itself. The Ten Commandments is a Code. The Constitution is a Code. Many organisations have great products and great people, but they implode from within. The intellectual capital and energy is wasted because the team itself either operates at half capacity or is dysfunctional altogether. It doesnt matter how good your competition is, if your own team cannot get it together. This happens because in the desire to create open and free thinking environments, nobody wants to create rules that restrict. But, in the absence of rules, people make up their own. Not good or bad just different. This is a giant problem and a sad one to see great ideas and talents go to waste because people are going off in different directions. Examples of good Code of Honour rules are: Never abandon a team-mate in need, communicate direct about problems, dont blame others or justify behaviour, and celebrate all wins. The Code of Honour is a set of behavioural rules that determine the habitat that you and your team members all live in. One Code does not serve all people. But it must serve your business, your mission and

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes

Fatal Business Mistakes

your values. The size your company can successfully grow to as an organisation is directly related to your ability to enforce your rules. So there you have it. Youve read the 21 fatal mistakes to avoid with tips on how to avoid them. Here is the good and bad news. The bad news is that you will probably make some of those mistakes anyway. But the good news is that now you might be able to avoid many of these mistakes, or at least correct course quickly.

Be awesome!

Blair

2011 XCEL Holdings LLC, Blair Singer, SalesPartners Worldwide 2 May 2011 Fatal Mistakes