Categories
Show

MBA585 Is Being Better Enough? How to Compete in a Competitive Market

MBA585

Often, entrepreneurs enter a market where there already is an established player, the go-to resource for whatever niche they’re in. How are you going to compete with them if they already have taken a huge slice of the pie? Is having a better product or service good enough or do you have to have other things in place to compete and win customers over? Let’s listen to this episode to learn more! Hit play!

SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE PODCASTS

Stitcher | Spotify Podcast Feed How To Subscribe

Give us a Rating & Review

Today’s Sponsors:

flw5ocid

Front Front is a powerful inbox management tool for teams. Assign emails to team mates, add comments to collaborate internally, send reminders for people to follow-up and so much more cool features! Checkout frontapp.com/mba for a free 30-day trial!

Web Hosting with Unlimited Disk Space, Bandwidth and 24/7 Technical Support. All $100 MBA listeners get 30% off hosting! Just visit hostgator.com/mba30!

Categories
Show

MBA584 The Easiest Way To Know How To Improve Your Product

MBA584

Here’s some news for all business owners out there. You are the expert when is comes to your business and how best to use your products and services. That’s for sure! The other news is, you are not the best when it comes to improving your products or services. It’s really hard for any business owner to know what a customer really thinks. In this episode, we’re giving you an exercise that we’ve done in our own business to make sure that our business is getting better and better over time. The more your product or service is improved, the more sales you can bring in and most importantly keep the customers you currently have. So let’s help each other right now! First, press play!

SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE PODCASTS

Stitcher | Spotify Podcast Feed How To Subscribe

Give us a Rating & Review

Today’s Sponsors:

Web Hosting with Unlimited Disk Space, Bandwidth and 24/7 Technical Support. All $100 MBA listeners get 30% off hosting! Just visit hostgator.com/mba30!

Categories
Entrepreneurship Uncategorized

Balancing Business and Personal Life

The life of an entrepreneur can be very different from that of someone with a more traditional career. For most people, the line between work and personal life ranges from sharply defined (often by a clock) to being somewhat fuzzy, depending on the work. For entrepreneurs, however, there’s almost no line at all. Being prepared for this unique situation is crucial not only to the stability of your personal life, but to the success of your business.

For the exact same reasons you wouldn’t launch a company without a business plan, it would be folly to launch one without knowing how to integrate that business into your life in a positive way. This means approaching your personal life with the same mindfulness and forethought you apply to your work. It means making sure that you’re mentally and emotionally equipped for the challenge. It means taking the time, and the effort, to tend two gardens.

The Challenge

When you first go into business independently, it can seem overwhelming. It is overwhelming. The entirety of the responsibility is on you. Most people never experience that kind of power over their own destiny, and it can be a little much. It can tempt a person to sacrifice more than is healthy in order to ensure the best outcome. Worst of all for loved ones, it can make you not just stressed, but absent.

Sacrificing your personal life for your business, no matter how successful it becomes, constitutes a net loss. You chose entrepreneurship for the freedom it offers, the freedom to build a life of your choosing. Enslaving yourself to your work is the opposite of freedom, and worse, it can cost you the relationships that make life worth living. A concentrated effort has to be made to avoid paying too high a price for “success,” if you can even use that term to describe something that detracts from your overall happiness.

I think the best way to do this is not to try to separate work from life, but to integrate them as much as possible. I have a special advantage in this regard: my business partner also happens to be my partner in life, which means that what pulls me toward business doesn’t always pull me away from her. It’s a nice situation, but it’s a fairly uncommon one. Most will have to find a way to keep the two worlds from drifting apart- and keep one from devouring the other.

Strategic Balancing

The first step is to keep your loved ones “in the loop.” Rather than trying to compartmentalize, invite them to share in your journey. The truth is that they’re on it with you no matter what, so trying to shield them from it is futile. Talk to them. Share the experience with them. Tell them what’s going on, and solicit their opinions and insights, even if they’re not experts in your field. Trust them with intimate knowledge of your daily struggles.

This isn’t being whiny or simply “venting.” This is asking someone to share the emotional burden of entrepreneurship with you- not because you want to burden them, but because it brings (and keeps) you closer. As much as possible, make your business something you experience together.

It’s also important to put that burden down from time to time. Working endlessly without breaks or rest may fulfill someone’s idea of being hardworking and motivated, but it’s a sure bet that that someone lacks a healthy personal life. From my perspective, workaholism isn’t a mark of greater professionalism, or the point of pride some seem to think it is. It’s a slippery slope that can be as destructive as other compulsive “isms” that quickly become their own purpose while everything else falls apart.

While it may be impossible to completely cut yourself off from emergencies or other unexpected situations, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that you can make time for yourself that doesn’t involve work. These can be weekends, vacations, or certain hours of the day; in fact, it should be all of those. There’s no amount of work you can do in your downtime that will be worth the long-term cost to your health and relationships. It may seem in a given moment that doing that extra hour or extra week’s worth will be worth it, but a driver whose foot is permanently on the throttle will eventually crash.

Talking about work and taking time off may seem like obvious steps, but as is so often the case, it’s the execution people struggle with. Being communicative and fostering your relationships doesn’t come naturally to everyone, myself included. Balancing work and life isn’t something you can do on the fly. It’s something you choose to do, actively, or choose passively to let fall by the wayside.

Success Through Preparation

To ensure a healthy work/life balance, there are steps you can and should take early on to lay the groundwork. The first is to “sell” your lifestyle choice to the people in your life. This is especially crucial at the beginning. In the same way you have to establish credibility and sincerity with customers, it’s your job to make your loved ones understand why you’re taking this path, how it will benefit all concerned, and what they can expect.

Just as you’d pitch a money-making idea to investors, you’ve got to justify the emotional investment required of your family and friends. Anything else would be frankly unfair. Doing this is also invaluable to you; it can help you to articulate your own motivations, goals, and put your idea in the context of the bigger picture. If you can’t justify your choice to your family, you probably haven’t fully justified it to yourself.

Next, schedule your personal life with the same forethought and care that you would your business. Reserve equally important places in your calendar for personal obligations (anniversaries, parties, unbearable high-school theater productions) as for meetings and product development. For this, I highly recommend using Google calendar, which allows you to not only keep integrated business and personal calendars, but can also allow you to mutually share your calendar with loved ones to avoid conflicts.

Good for Life = Good for Business

Doing what’s necessary to maintain a healthy personal life isn’t something that comes at a cost to your business. It helps your business succeed. A balanced, healthy, happy person does a far better job of running a business in the long term than an overworked, unhappy crank. Keeping emotionally fit is just as much a requirement as keeping abreast of industry trends or staying proficient in tech. It’s just as important to meditate or take your fiancé to dinner as it is to produce content or analyze revenue.

By seeing a healthy personal life as a component of your business, you can more easily discard the backward notion that spending time and energy on yourself is somehow counterproductive to your work. Ensuring a good balance between work and everything else is not only a smart move, it’s key to any healthy definition of success. No, money can’t buy happiness, but it sure doesn’t hurt- unless you let it.

Categories
Show

MBA583 Must Read: The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow

MBA583

This book will surely give you a different perspective when it comes to membership business models with recurring charges. It highlights the huge benefits of having a business with this fee structure and shows you how you can apply this business model regardless of what kind of business you currently have. You might think that there’s no way your business is ever going to be offering membership and recurring fees. Well, this book has the answers for you so let’s get started!

SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE PODCASTS

Stitcher | Spotify Podcast Feed How To Subscribe

Give us a Rating & Review

Today’s Sponsors:

flw5ocid

Front Front is a powerful inbox management tool for teams. Assign emails to team mates, add comments to collaborate internally, send reminders for people to follow-up and so much more cool features! Checkout frontapp.com/mba for a free 30-day trial!

Web Hosting with Unlimited Disk Space, Bandwidth and 24/7 Technical Support. All $100 MBA listeners get 30% off hosting! Just visit hostgator.com/mba30!

Show Links:

Get the book on Amazon! The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow

Visit the author’s website!

Categories
Show

MBA582 Q&A Weekends: Is blogging dead in this age of video marketing?

MBA582

No doubt video marketing has become huge and people are trying to get on it as much as possible. We all can consume information through a video very quickly that’s why it’s the fastest medium nowadays. Does this mean that blogging is dead? Today, Omar is going to tell you why it’s not dead. Plus, he’s going to tell you why right now is a great time to get into blogging! Ready for the revelation? Press play!

SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE PODCASTS

Stitcher | Spotify Podcast Feed How To Subscribe

Give us a Rating & Review

Today’s Sponsors:

Web Hosting with Unlimited Disk Space, Bandwidth and 24/7 Technical Support. All $100 MBA listeners get 30% off hosting! Just visit hostgator.com/mba30!

Show Links:

How To Self-Promote Without Looking Like Donald Trump

Categories
Show

MBA581 Q&A Weekends: Is it better to use single opt-in for email marketing?

MBA581

You know the drill. When you sign up for something with your email address, the standard process is to confirm the subscription by going into your email and confirming that you actually did sign-up. This is really helpful if you want each and every opt-in to be coming from a real person that really wants to be on your list. However, with single opt-ins, people don’t have to do that. They just sign up to your list right away with one single click. In this episode, we’ll share with you the advantage and disadvantage of each type of opt-in, plus we’ll help you choose which one will work best for your conversion! Let’s get to it! Hit play!

SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE PODCASTS

Stitcher | Spotify Podcast Feed How To Subscribe

Give us a Rating & Review

Today’s Sponsors:

Earth Class Mail

Earth Class Mail moves your snail mail into the cloud. You can get all your mails scanned and accessible online 24/7. Start receiving all your business correspondence at one of our prestigious addresses. Visit earthclassmail.com/mbamonth and use coupon code MBAMONTH to get your first month of service for free on any plan!

Plated No time to decide what to cook and how to cook it?
Plated is here to show you that cooking meals is easy and fun with no meal planning and shopping time needed!
Go to Plated.com/MBA to get your first Plated box plus a free dinner for 2 with your first delivery!

Categories
Show

MBA580 Do Contests Work For Marketing Your Business? Plus Free Ride Friday!

MBA580

Running a contest can be a great way to market your business. But just how effective is it? Do you have to give away a really big prize and how can you make sure that it’s successful? In this episode, we’re going to share with you some advice and the tools that you can use to run contests easily and successfully! And…are you this week’s winner? Listen up!

SUBSCRIBE ON APPLE PODCASTS

Stitcher | Spotify Podcast Feed How To Subscribe

Give us a Rating & Review

Today’s Sponsors:

Web Hosting with Unlimited Disk Space, Bandwidth and 24/7 Technical Support. All $100 MBA listeners get 30% off hosting! Just visit hostgator.com/mba30!

Show Links:

KingSumo

ContestCapture

Woobox

Online Random Picker