What is the biggest mistake people make when building their network

Okay, so you've obviously done this for a long, long time. Like you say you're now coaching people on how to do this. What would you say is the one biggest mistake that you see people make time and time and time again when they're looking to get out, launch the business and build a network?

How do you kind of like figure out this beginning bit? Like if people are making mistakes and stuff, like, what's the key thing to do? You need to have a balance between building long term relationships but also getting short term wins. My wife Liz, she thinks I'm crazy. Like our business is doing really well. Like revenue again, we're up about 40% on last year. Almost like things great. However, we're still in survival mode. You know, there's still every opportunity. If we hit three months where it was bad or something went wrong, we'd be in the shit and we'd be having to make big changes to survive. Like we still aren't in the position where we're not surviving. So the mistake that people make is one of two things. Number one, they're too short sighted to be able to see what can happen and the opportunity that's available to them long term. And the flip of that, they're too long sighted to actually start making those necessary small victories and wins that they need to survive. How I would address that is a lot of people in the beginning, they value their time too much. What I mean by that is they, they think, you know what, I'm not prepared to spend an extra 20 minutes with that person. I don't need to do that or I'm not going to go to the extra networking meeting or when you neglect those things, like that's what really starts to hinder you eventually. And I say that's the biggest thing. Like, you know, beggars can't be choosers, especially in the beginning. Don't be so short sighted that you're missing out on opportunities because there's opportunity in everything.

You're 100% right. You never know what the outcome of doing something so little would be. To tell a story of my own personal experience, when I first started out, I got invited to do a workshop for maybe six people from the local support group for businesses in the Scarborough area. I had to go out of my time to go and get there. You know, it was an evening where I could have been doing something with the wife and kids, but sorted it with Laura, went to it. Like six people turned up. It was good experience. But the offshore of that, further down the Line is so somebody at that meeting was a part of the local university and they had just been given a big grant to help businesses in the North Yorkshire area and they were looking for trainers to come and work at these workshops. And they put my name forward and I would never ever have eventually gone to that meeting with the university to get the job to then being offered a contract which set us up for the next 18 months while I was still finding the fee. That's really good advice. Not just for service accommodation, not just for any network marketers that may be watching or listening this back. Hospitality owners, any business owner, long term thinking with the short term wins to like you say, to keep you going.

Yeah, and I think there's a key thing, Mark, if I can just to add on to that. And this is what most people don't think about. Like a business has three parts. You have to find and attract people, your target market and solving their problems. You need to have a way to convert them so they buy the thing. Especially for these guys in the service industries, you know, it's the same as network marketing. Like network marketing is just a community game, just building a big community of people, a volunteer army. And in many ways that's what you're doing when you're an owner of a hotel, you know, you're dealing with big groups of people and you want them to keep coming back. Why do they come back? They come back because of the community. They come back because they love it. And community is key. The point is, right, the products in all of them pretty much the same. You know, Audi and Waitrose is a different price point. I'm pretty certain that it's pretty much the same product most of the time. And it doesn't have to be the right thing for everybody, but it has to be the right thing for a particular type of people. The target market. And when you address that community, so they like it, they feel comfortable, they enjoy the experience, it then becomes very easy to come back. And that works on back end with paying customers. That's front end as well. Because what we're doing as business owners is gone are the days of building a list, you know, like building an email list or just building a Facebook group or whatever. We have to invest our time into building an audience. And an audience is active, they're engaged. Rather than it just being me to them and them to me, it's these guys talking to each other. It's creating space so they can have discussions around topics. If I run a hotel in Scarborough, well, I'll tell you what if I create a things to do in Scarborough Facebook community well all of a sudden I'm becoming a go to expert in that local community and I've got all these different people that come to Scarborough asking questions well guess what if I'm answering their questions and then they go well where should we go and book our accommodation well you probably go to this place of course and what's going to happen all these people in this group they're going to say this person Johnny is such a nice guy he gives us all help and information it tells us where to ride the donkeys it tells us where the best ice cream is the best fish and chips and his hotel it's amazing it's really well priced right you get the idea it's community again it's that front end community which builds into the audience which then pushes more people more volume through into those systems. Hit you outside just let me know.