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Because Your Business Is An Adventure |
I was cruising along on Facebook today, when I saw an image similar to the one I’ve created here. I added the red “x” and the “IAMNOWHERE”, but otherwise, the image is essentially the same.
Before I added my embellishments, it summed up exactly how the entrepreneur’s journey can be. Afterwards, it cleared up in my own head where and whymy business has been stalling. Read more
I really wasn’t planning on talking about love this week. At least not on this blog. I mean, we’re all about taking action here, and getting stuff done, so hearts and flowers really isn’t meant for a space like this.
Well, usually. In this case, I’m making an exception, because as action-oriented entrepreneurs, I think we all need to practice a little self-love every now and then. Specifically, I’m thinking of that character that lurks inside you: your Nemesis, your Shadow Self.
Also known as your Inner Critic.
I’ve been slowing down the writing on this blog because I’ve been doing some exploration of my more “touchy-feely” emotions on my personal blog. This isn’t the place for that kind of work, thus, you’ve seen less content in recent weeks. That said, I firmly believe that the nature of business is such that the outer work is a mirror to the inner work. So for all the tough stuff I’ve been dealing with on my personal blog, it’s all creating some juicy, helpful stuff that I can use over here.
Today’s case in point: Recently, I shared deeply about my own experience in discovering and building a relationship with my Inner Critic (I call her “The Devil Inside Me“). I’ll also be sharing more on my direct sales blog, but for now, I want to tell you that this doesn’t have to be a painful, arduous experience. In fact, it was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Now that I’ve got a grip on my own Inner Critic, I’m still boggling at what’s been happening. Here’s a short list of what’s been going on just since Friday:
And that’s just since Friday, when I sat down to go through Andrea Patten’s Inner Critic to Inner Ally program. What I thought would be brain surgery wasn’t. It was easy-peasy, and wasn’t even a teensy bit painful! Here are the five steps that I took to finally tame The Devil Inside Me once and for all:
1. Name it and Claim it to Tame It. I learned that when I give my inner critic a name, I have a way to interact with her. I can talk to her like she’s a real person, instead of dehumanizing her. Without a name, without accepting her as truly a part of me, she became this dominatrix or inhuman machine that just ran things. Now, as a more personable character, I can converse with The Devil Inside Me and get to the root of the problems that are causing her to rear her head.
2. Give it a voice. I found that as The Devil Inside Me became more human, she was more fragile, with her own faults, flaws and weaknesses. She not only became easier to tame this way, but also became easier to relate to. What surprised me most about Andrea’s exercises was that they caused me to realize that The Devil Inside Me is actually pretty likeable, and the source of several of my more positive traits – like getting stuff done, and being able to get over tragedy and trauma when it happens in my life.
3. Let it be heard. It doesn’t matter if you name it and give it a voice if you choose to ignore it all the time. I had a habit of pretending that my inner critic didn’t exist. Trying to shove it into a corner, and keep it on mute. The more you try to ignore the elephant in the room, the worse the problem gets, they say. So I’m giving her time and space. Kind of like “scheduled worrying/kvetching/what-if-ing”. I give her time each day to have her say, so she doesn’t feel like the little kid that nobody every listens to.
4. Set boundaries. Like the little kid, however, I don’t have to do everything she says. I mentioned on my personal blog that I’m the Chief. She needs to follow me, not the other way around. Yes, sometimes she’s giving me useful information, but she’s the product of thousands of years of living in a fear-based paradigm. That’s a paradigm I am trying earnestly to shift to a paradigm of love.I can’t do that if all I ever hear is her voice. I’m setting boundaries and clear goals, then consulting her so that she has her say. Beyond that, I get to decide, not her.
5. Recognize the value. Your inner critic is actually a throwback mechanism in your brain to help keep you safe and stable. Sometimes she’s incredibly helpful. As I’ve mentioned, it’s her relentless pursuit of forward motion, not standing still, and getting stuff accomplished that has helped me to achieve as much as I have in my short time on this rock. She’s helped me not dwell on painful stuff like deaths, divorces, separations, my kid being away at camp for 25 months, rocky bumps in the marriage, etc. She’s also been instrumental in keeping me from celebrating some of my wins, so it’s up to me to seek the balance. Recognize that like any good friend, there are some things for which she’s very helpful, and other things I’m better off trusting to other people.
These five steps, while not always easy, are the key elements of taming your inner critic once and for all. If you’d like more in-depth help, Andrea and I worked out a way to help you while helping out an awesome cause at the same time. As I mentioned, for the past 2+ years, my oldest son has been living in residence at a wilderness camp for boys with emotional problems. Andrea has graciously agreed to give half the profits of her program to the camp when you use this link. I don’t make a dime off recommending this program to you. I feel so strongly about how her work has impacted me personally, that I’m proud and even a bit excited to share this with you in such a special way. If you think you’d like to tame your inner critic once and for all – and even turn it into your ally – you owe it to yourself to check it out.
You may remember a while back I made mention of my plot to convert all my newsletter lists to paid opt-in. It’s not an uncommon practice, although, the people I’ve seen do this usually offer some “gimmie” as a thinly-veiled attempt to collect your contact information (real address, etc.). Most often you see it as a “free” cd that they’ll send you, if you’ll pay the shipping.
Meh.
I’m all for monetizing your list, but I figured I’d just be up front about it. Pay me $10 once and you’re on the list for life. So I made a plan, and started roll out at the first of the year. Here’s a bit more detail about my “experiment” for those interested in what my results have been so far. Warning, this might get a little “techy” so if you’ve got questions, ask. I’m happy to ‘splain.
Hypothesis: Converting my existing lists to paid opt-in will increase list quality and responsiveness, as well as revenue per subscriber. Initial list size will likely dwindle by upwards of 10%, but overall list value will increase as list quality increases. Target 30% click through on 30% open rate, and average 10 new subscribers per month.
Essentially, my direct sales list has held steady in size for a few years, while the quality of the list has tanked a bit. Open rates were in the 15% range. Even when I adjusted open rates for the holidays, I was still looking at a meager 17% open rate. Me no likey. That’s a lot of work each week, developing content, writing, and marketing the posts to attract new subscribers, only to have people not open the message.
That tells me that it’s too easy for folks to get on the list, and not annoying enough for them to unsubscribe. Since I didn’t really have plans to increase my annoyance rate (which leads to spam complaints anyway), I figured creating a small barrier to entry would do a couple of things:
1. Cause people to think twice before signing up for another list they’ll never really read in the first place.
2. Generate a higher quality list of people who want to read/act on the content I’m creating.
3. Convert more high-quality readers into paying clients.
4. Generate revenue from new list members from the onset in a non-sleazy way.
Since I’m working hard this year to build a business founded on love, I made the decision to start one list at a time (to love myself!), and to increase the value of my content in the process (to love my clients). The idea being that if you’re willing to part with $10, I’m willing to make it well worth the investment.
In January, I rolled out this new program with my direct sales blog, and next month will launch the paid opt-in to my personal blog. In March, if all continues to go well, I’ll roll out the same idea here (you’ve been warned!).
Well, frankly, I know I can easily provide that kind of value to my list in a month’s time (in my experience, this is about how long a person will “tolerate” your email before unsubscribing). Presently, the $10 is a one-time-only subscription fee, but that may change in future years. I chose $10 because you can pick up a copy of the Direct Sales Classroom blog posts on your Kindle for $0.99/month right now. With their free trial, that comes out to about $11 per year. Because my newsletter offers a lot more value and additional content that you don’t find on the blog, I figured $10 would be a no-brainer. Plus, I could potentially capture the kindle readers to my own list, since my Kindle subscriber rate is increasing each quarter.
I started the year with an offer for one of my most popular direct sales training courses for $10 – and they’d get a complimentary subscription to the newsletter. I had already promised my existing subscribers free access to the live calls, which start in February, but for $10, they could get access to the downloads, plus get a head start on the program. A healthy number of folks took me up on that offer, and less than 2% of the list unsubscribed, most of which was due to the way MailChimp cleans what they call “hard bounces” (bad email addresses, etc.). Paid opt-ins will greatly reduce the number of bad email addresses on the list in the first place. We more than met the 10 new subscribers per month goal as well. By the end of January, we were averaging a 19.62 open rate, and of those, 30.2% were clicking on the links. With the last newsletter of the month nearly 34% of the folks that opened it, clicked through.
The decision to offer a special price on Direct Sales 101 was two-fold: one, to generate revenue while there was no opt-in form available to add new subscribers. I muddled around with trying to create a workaround for the MailChimp “paid list” feature – which uses Amazon to collect payments. That took longer than I wanted, so instead, I “integrated” the mailing list into the course through the magic of Wishlist Member. That way, when people paid for the course, they’d be automagically imported to the mailing list. That kept revenue flowing while I figured out the workaround behind the scenes. Once the workaround was complete, I could turn off the special offer and go direct to paid opt-in, which I did near the end of the month. Going forward, I now have the workaround in place, so I can use paypal to accept payments for my various MailChimp lists.
I’ve said before that you train people how to treat you. If you tolerate shoddy work, you’ll get shoddy work. Expect more to get more. That said, I’ve still got a ways to go before I tout these numbers as “solid” by any stretch of the imagination. As the month came to an end, I did away with the special offer for our best-selling program and launched the subscription page as a stand-alone item. Within minutes of posting the page, the first paid subscription came through. I confess, that was incredibly gratifying.
Time will tell if a stand-alone option will continue to produce results. For now, it’s working, and I’ll report back in a few months with updated results.
I’ve already “closed” the mailing list at my personal blog, and started the Beta test for The Pancake Principle – my new course about building a business founded in love. Now that I have the workaround for MailChimp, I can go direct to paid opt-in for the new list, as soon as I have the page finished and the links live. I want the list to be live before I launch the final version of The Pancake Principle.
In February, you’ll see me doing more how-to stuff here at Business Action Hero, as I ready to make the transition to a paid opt-in sometime during March. We’re also planning to launch a podcast series here before Spring, so look for lots of new goodies that will more than justify the $10 subscription fee. By the way, if you sign up now, you’ll avoid having to pay that $10, and still get all the lemony goodness. Just sayin’.
So there you have it. The jury’s still out on the final results, but for me, and the way I do business, it’s working so far. I wouldn’t recommend a paid opt-in if you don’t have the content to back it up, though. I still think a free opt-in tool is a powerful way to spread your message. At some point, however, when you’ve created “enough” content, you might consider the paid opt-in approach.
Back in September, I was in Atlanta for a conference, and had an opportunity to speak briefly to the audience.
In my time “on stage” I shared from the heart about how difficult 2011 had been for me, and yet, how changing my perspective was ultimately the one thing that could salvage my life and my business. I challenged everyone in the room to take a closer look at their motivations, and what their life/biz really meant to them.
It was met with rousing applause, and I toyed around with sharing my verbal “manifesto” publicly for a while after I came back home.
Ultimately, I shelved the idea, because I couldn’t figure out exactly the words I wanted to use.
Um, that would be my perfectionism kicking in. I didn’t want to share it until it was “ready.”
That is, until my friend Dave, a high school teacher, and would-be entrepreneur, wrote this post that riled me up enough to want to work it over again.
So here’s the gist of the “What If” speech I gave that date in Atlanta. It’s a work in progress, and ultimately, it will become something more robust, but for now, I just want to share these ideas with you. I’d love your input.
To say 2011 was a tough year would be an understatement for me.
It sucked in so many ways. In 2010, I stood here talking about the pain of the breakdown and the breakthrough. This year was also painful, but for different reasons:
I invested a lot into this year: time, energy, money. I also lost a lot this year: closed a business, laid off my assistant, launched multiple products that “failed” (meaning they didn’t make money, or go according to my “master plan”).
People were coming out of the wood work telling me what I was doing “wrong”, telling me what I “should” do, and I stopped trusting my own instincts for a good portion of the year, because I had shifted into survival mode.
Finally, as is wont to happen when you stop trusting yourself, there came a point where I started questioning everything.
I was hurting, and instead of taking time to heal, I was trying to play through the pain. Sometimes, pain is a signal that needs to be heeded.
So many of you are hurting in this exact same way, second-guessing yourself like I did. We ask all the wrong kinds of “what if” questions: the kind that roil our mindset and throw us completely off our track. Questions that don’t serve us, aren’t life giving, and, quite frankly, do more harm than good.
There’s a better way to approach being an entrepreneur. Better questions pave the way. Here’s a handful of the questions I jotted down to start asking myself, to kick start my new mindset and my better direction:
What if your greatest power was found in being who you really, truly are? That’s what I’ve spent the last 11 months exploring here at Business Action Hero. You can see what I’ve ventured into over at the new blog, and the work we’re doing on this new “TV” series thing. But this is just the beginning of the adventure for me. I’m finally feeling courageous enough to trust my gut again, and ask better questions to get better results. What about you? What are you doing to create the life and business to which you most aspire?
So in the midst of all the weird inspirations over the last 6 months, I was struck with the idea to create a web-based “TV” series.
Meaning, it looks and feels like a television program, and you watch it online.
Except I have no clue how to do that. I mean, I can script a play, and I know how to act (here’s an audition video – strong language warning!) and I can sit in front of a camera (I’ve done it dozens of times here). But there’s a distinct difference between filming “talking head” type videos in my kitchen, and doing a full-blown tv show.
There’s other people involved, for crying out lout.
I’ve got to rustle up actors, and a screenwriter (because I’m not going to try to tackle a script all by my lonesome), and camera gear (because my little webcam just won’t cut it, thanks), and people to run those cameras.
Now, I could take a cue from @edward_norton, whose last film “Newlyweds” cost just under $9k to shoot (and another $100k or so in post-production), but I’m not nearly as connected as Ed, nor do I have $100k just lying around to make it happen.
So what’s a girl to do?
Well, before we go there, let’s ask a more important question:
Thanks for asking! Actually, the short answer is I don’t want to make it. I feel compelled to make it. In fact, I’m not even sure if I can make it. But I’ve been inspired to give this thing a go.
For a long time, I’ve believed that a compelling drama is more like Shakespeare – where there are plenty of funny moments, and even the minor characters have complications. The characters aren’t two-dimensional, and it’s more like real life.
And, of course, I wanted to do something that would benefit entrepreneurs. I wanted to create something that would actually serve the world, not just “entertain” in some mindless, Hollywood drama kind of way.
I want to create partnerships: with artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, business owners, and of course the talented folks that actually make up the cast and crew of the show.
In short, I want to create a symbiotic edutainment ecosystem: one that lives and breathes and benefits everyone involved. Where the sponsors aren’t found in commercials, but as integral components to the story line itself. Where the viewers are actively involved in shaping the direction of the show – and even appearing on screen from time to time.
I’m no futurist, but to me, this is the direction that television needs to go. So-called reality television is nothing more than a modern-day game show, and the outcomes are often a known quantity.
I want to create something that blurs the lines between reality and television so much, that you’re not quite sure what’s real anymore – something that gets you caught up in it – and you actually become a part of the show.
You know how, in the movies, a phone number it’s always “555-xxxx” because if you call the number you’ll get an automated “this number’s not in service” kind of recording? They tried to use a “real number” in Bruce Almighty – and a lot of people tried calling it, wanting to talk to God.
Well, what if we could use real numbers and have real people on the other end – driving real commerce to real businesses, and engaging people in real conversations with real people?
Yeah. THAT. That’s just the tip of the iceberg with what I want to do with this project.
And it’s starting to take shape. Kinda scary cool.
Which brings us back to the original question:
Short answer: You learn. You study. You practice. And you put yourself “out there” and see what happens.
That’s what I did when I decided I wanted to record an album (I’ve done two now, working on my third). I learned how to build a synthesizer, play instruments, engineer the recording, mix the tracks, design the cover, and press the discs. And that’s a knowledge that can never be taken away from me, no matter how many discs or downloads I sell. And that knowledge is transferable to other people and situations. I learned about marketing my music, getting “gigs” and touring. All valuable stuff when you’re building a production company and getting your show into the hands of thousands of fans.
So I’m researching, asking people to point me in new directions. I’m creating a whole new academic pursuit for myself, as I learn what even goes into a screenplay (it’s not the same as a stage play, which is where I’m more familiar). I’m approaching musicians and learning about music licensing from the OTHER side of the microphone now.
And every step along the way, I’m pleading my ignorance and trusting people to not screw me over. Trusting that God’s going to point me in the right direction to talk to the right people and make the right decisions.
Without much of a net.
Wanna watch?
Every so often, I’ll be posting updates here on this crazy new journey. It’s a business, after all. We’ll explore the business elements of making this show happen – from crowdsourcing, to approaching “untouchables” and the like – I’ll be covering it here as we go. If you’re intrigued by the show, you can follow @iamthemechanic on twitter now, and see how it all unfolds. Actually, that account is for one of the characters in the show, just one of the interactive elements of the program.
I’m thrilled to be living in a time where technology makes this kind of creativity possible. I have no idea how it’s all going to turn out. This is me, crossing the threshold and trusting the journey with the friends I make along the way.
And I hope I get to include you among those fine folks.
What about you? What are you saying “I can’t” to – but only because you don’t know how? What would you do if you knew how? Why aren’t you doing it?
