TES 004 - How to Bring Your Product or Business to Life

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there. I'm Mel Abraham, the author of the Entrepreneur's Solution and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy, where we teach you how to design a business and create a life, a life of financial freedom and peace of mind. And welcome to this next episode of the Entrepreneur Solution show. And after a brief introduction, I want to come back and talk about the three phases of business life. I know in a previous episode we touched on the five keys to mastering your business. Well, this is the process process that I go through when I'm going to launch a business or launch a new product or a new service. And we'll constantly come back to this process. So I'm going to take you through the three phases of think up, get up and reach up when we come back after this brief introduction. So stay tuned. See you back here soon.

Welcome to the Entrepreneur Solution where highly successful entrepreneur Mel Abraham becomes your entrepreneurial mentor. Here, Mel Mel reveals his business building strategies and even gets a chance to answer your questions. Mel Abraham, a CPA by education, but an entrepreneur by exhilaration and a true believer in the entrepreneurial way of life. It's through entrepreneurship that we create community, support society and live our dreams.

It's where possibility meets reality again and you can have the life and lifestyle you want. One of freedom and peace of mind. Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution where it's time for you to be bold, dream big and live life your way.

Hey there. Welcome back. I'm Mel Abraham, the author of the Entrepreneur's Solution and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy. And welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution show. This show has been amazing. The comments that we're getting, the feedback that we're getting. So we're going to keep going, we're going to keep building. We want to be your entrepreneurial mentor to kind of, to kind of be there to guide you and make this year and the rest of the years of your life changed forever and that use entrepreneurship as A vehicle. And so in this show, as I said, I want to talk about the three phases of business life and what it takes to build a business. This is the process that we go through. And I'm going to introduce you to the process and then we'll dig deeper into each of the aspects of the process. And there's three phases to it. It's basically the think up. What, you know, the. And the think up phase of it. The second phase is the get up, it's the starting of it. And the third phase is the reach up, the scaling and the growing of it. And so those are the three phases. And there's steps in each of them that we're going to take you through. But there's an overarching basis and foundation in which all of these things ought to be made. And I want you to think about this. And if we're going to go through this, here's something I would invite you to do. Get yourself a journal.

Or a notebook or a pen and paper or something. And as we work through some of these episodes and some of these sessions, take notes. Take notes not from just what I might say and some of the concepts and some of the principles, but take notes as to how it applies in your life, how it applies in what you're trying to do. How does it apply to making your dreams a reality? How does it apply to scale those dreams to. To epic proportions? What does it take? And if you need to, you stop it. Pause for a moment, reflect on what I'm saying. Write it down. Take the time to do that. So that's why in many of these episodes, I'm going to give you takeaways, I'm going to give you exercises. I'm going to ask you to do things just like the assessment that we did in a previous episode, to reflect and think about things. Most of the really successful entrepreneurs that I've worked with, that I've seen and talked to and interviewed, most of them journal or do something like they're constantly thinking, they're constantly reflecting. Their mind is always, always going. But they're constantly. But then they're documenting it. Now, it may be ideas, it may be thoughts, it may be philosophies. I'm constantly journaling. I carry my journal around all the time. I'm constantly writing in it. When I'm reading something and something comes up, I'll write in it. So I'm constantly documenting it and I go back to it from time to time and reread the notes to revisit Some of the things, some of the things you may write may come into fruition years down the road, but the key is that you got it down, you got it written on. In fact, I have a really good friend of mine from Australia, he's a mentor, he's a colleague, I call him, he's my Australian brother. And he talks about how he has actually been on planes flying and he takes the disposable bags in the back seat. When he doesn't have something to write on, something comes to his head and he jots it down on that. But the point is that he's constantly working, he's constantly thinking about things and trying to document and build. And so I invite you to take that approach and see how it works for you. It may be awkward at first, it may be strange because you're not used to writing and reflecting, but through the exercise of doing, it will make it easier and you'll see results like crazy because all of a sudden it leads to different things. And there's, there's something that happens when you actually put pen to paper versus even typing on a keyboard and doing that, but literally picking up a pen and writing it down, there's something that happens, something magical that happens. And so that's what I invite you. Call it your entrepreneur solution Journal. Get it out. Keep it with you every time we go through a process. Now, if you're listening to the podcast and driving, don't get the journal out. You can do it when you get home. Alright, so let's move, move forward into that. Now, assuming that you got yourself a journal or you got yourself a piece of paper and pen and you're ready to go. So here's the thing. Before you get into this process or the three phases of business life, before you even.

Think about launching a product, launching a service, launching a business, the one thing that I need, that I invite you and I urge you actually to really think about seriously and get clarity on, get specificity on it, to really dial it in. Is this concept of the customer promise? What is the customer promise? You know, we are looking at things and many times we go, well, I'm creating a product, but what's the promise, the visceral promise of life transformation? How is their life going to be different? Because they've worked with you, because they bought your products, because they've had you do service for them? What is it about their life that's going to shift and change? Because that's where we need to be, that's where we need to understand it, that's where we need to really drill it down and dial it in to a point that we can succinctly say it and have it generate emotion, not only in the customer, but in you first. Because if it doesn't viscerally create emotion in you, it'll never create emotion in your customer or in your team or in your vendors. They can't get behind it because you truly are not behind it. It's intellectually that you're behind it, but you're not emotionally and passionately behind it. Remember we talked about this concept of value? Value? Yeah. It starts with product, but then you add to it purpose, passion and promise. And so that's what we need to do is get that. Get that as the ground level. The ground level, that's the playing field we're playing at. We're not playing at a commodity level. We're trying to create something that is aspirational, that's shifting and changing people's lives. And when you take it from that level now, we can create something that starts to move and capture the eyes, the hearts, the minds of your market and your audience. So assuming that you've got that in place and we've got the customer promise in place, then we need to look at the phases and we go through these three phases. One is the think up phase, the second phase is the get up phase, and the third is the reach up phase. And each of them have three stages to them and we'll go through each of that. So let's start with a think up phase to begin with. The very first stage of the think up phase. Decide, decide. This is one of the most important things for you to do. And you know, some of this is mindset stuff, philosophy stuff, culture stuff that really is impactful. So we want to take this and really, really take this seriously. What is the decision you want to make? Do you really want to be an entrepreneur? Because it may not be suited. Not. I believe. I know that there's studies out there say, you know, not everyone's cut out to be an entrepreneur. And I kind of, I disagree with that. I said people can be entrepreneurs. They may be different types of entrepreneurs. I think everyone has the ability to be entrepreneur. Do they have the desire? Do they have the fortitude? Do they have the perseverance? Not so much. Not everyone. It's not made for everyone. But that starts with a decision. Do you want to be an entrepreneur? Do you want to really put that forward? Do you want to sell this product? Why? You know, what kind of Things are you going to do? What's the timeline? What obstacles? This is one of the key elements. At the very first place, if you're going to go in and dabble, there's plenty of dabblers in the world and they get nowhere. I know that I'm being somewhat direct, and I don't mean to be flippant, and I certainly don't mean to be insulting, but we're talking about building a life. Remember, this concept of business is about creating community, supporting society, and living your dreams. And if we're going to live dreams, let's live them epically. Let's create big dreams. Let's make a decision and move forward with that decision. So the very first level is decide. There's a lot that goes into that. We're going to talk about that in a later episode where we're going to dig deeper in each of these stages. The second stage is the concept of ideation. Now, this is typically not the problem for entrepreneurs or many business owners because they got ideas flying around all the time. In fact, I call it the entrepreneur's cursor. You'll hear me talk about what I call the hummingbird syndrome. You know, we've got plenty of ideas and we'll start plenty of ideas if we're not careful, and we never finish them.

And many times we start and we don't even know if the ideas are good ideas. We just kind of go. So it's important for us to really think about this and evaluate the ideas. I'm sure if we're sitting here right now, if I asked you how many ideas you have in your head, I'm guessing that there's more than one. You've got all kinds of ideas that you want to do, kinds of products you might want to launch, services you might want to offer, but we can't do it all at once. So the question is not which one, but which one first? And now some. We might say we're not going to do it, so we need to. In this stage, this is where we evaluate the various ideas. We start to focus and select some of the things that we're going to do or the keys that we're going to do. We're going to talk, we're going to consider how we're going to create value in the value creation model, we're going to consider what marketplace we're going to serve and. And then we might have to rethink and redesign based upon market feedback. So this is the ideation stage, where we're thinking it through. Remember, this is all in the think up phase of business. And then once we've made the decision and we've gone through that process and we've gone through the ideation process, now we go into what's called the modeling process. This is where we start to create our model. And this goes back to that we talked about in a prior episode. This concept of creating value. Remember, your business model isn't about how you make money. It's not a revenue model. Revenue model is just one little aspect of it. Your business model is really how you create. How do you deliver value? It's how you create value. It's how you capture value. In other words, how you package it, it's how you campaign it, how you deliver it, and it's how you cultivate value as a cultural element within your organization and in the marketplace, the perception of value. So when we talk about model, we're talking about how is this value exchange coming about in all aspects of the business at a holistic level. Remember, it's not just customer centric. We need to ask ourselves, how are we creating value to not only our customers, but to our team, to our team, our staff, our employees, our contractors, how are we creating value? And when I talk about this, it's, it's beyond a paycheck because we're going to compensate them for their time and their services and their work. But do we create any value beyond that? And then how do we create value for ourselves, the business owner, the entrepreneur, the investor, how do we create value for them? Answer these questions up front. So before we ever start to really invest a lot of money or invest a lot of time, a lot of resources into launching a product or service or launching a new business or a new business division, we've gone through a lot of process to do this. Now this and this process that we're talking about, this whole three phases of business life is the process that I use. And when you see it all work out, this is how we minimize the downside and maximize the upside. Remember the analyst model that we talked about in a prior episode? The business, the whole purpose of business is minimize the downside. Maximize, maximize the upside. This process forces you to do it. And that's what that does, is it raises the probability of success and it raises the level of success. Nothing is a guarantee, but it certainly changes the dynamics and shifts things into your favor. So once we've done the think up stage, we then need to go to the next phase of this business life. The three phases, second phase is called the get up stage. This is where we, we're literally starting it. We're going to move forward and start the business. So we've gone through the thinking about it. Now we're going to start to get some action in place to start really moving forward. And the first stage of the get up phase is plan. It's when we start thinking about things like the business plan.

And we'll talk about business plans and my philosophy on business plans and that type of thing. But we're going to look at what our offering is, we're going to look at what the market are. We're going to analyze and pick apart, you know, where the sales might come from, how we might sell it, the kinds of people that we might need or the people that we're going to work with, the financial aspects of what we do. I mean, if we've got a great idea but no one wants to pay for it, it's just that it's a great idea, it's a hobby more than anything else because no one's going to pay for it. It's not commercially valuable, it's not commercially viable. And so we want to make sure that the financials make sense and then we'll start to document it in the context of potentially a plan. Now, that plan may be just for you, the process for you. It might be for investors, it might be for a bank. It depends on what level of business you're trying to create and where you are and what stage of work it is. And so once we get through the first stage of phase two of the get up, the get up phase, we then can move to the next, the next stage of the next stage is the structure. This is where we start to think about how do I structure my business? You know, everything from.

Entity selection, do I want to be a corporation, LLC or trust or nonprofit? So entity selection, but also about risk assessment. What risk exposure do I have, how do I put things in buckets and asset classification. So we make sure that we align, eliminate and reduce the risk to us personally as business owners and as entrepreneurs and try to reduce that exposure.

What are the different things that come into play with respect to the business operations? In fact, remember we said that business is to create community, support society and live your dreams. So how does this structure integrate with your life vision?

Life vision. Because if what you're creating doesn't integrate with the kind of life you're trying to create, then it's going to cause a lot of incongruence, a lot of friction. A lot of tension, a lot of stress, and you're going to feel consumed by the business, by the idea, by the product. And so we need to make sure that however you structure things, you structure it with your life vision in mind. Remember this concept of work life balance, I think is a myth and that all choices, all decisions that we make, though they may be in a business context, our life decisions, and we need to build that structure around that. And then once we've dealt with this second stage of phase two, we can then move to the next stage and the last stage of phase two, which is the finance stage. Now, some business, many businesses aren't going to need financing, so you may move right through this pretty quickly. But others might, you might need to buy assets, you might need to buy real estate, you might need to buy equipment, computers. So how are we going to get it financed? And we'll talk about some needs and access and source and how it affects equity. Do you bring in investors? Do you not bring in investors? We can talk about all of those elements, but at some point we need to think about how do we finance the plan and the structure that we're putting in place to do that. So that would complete phase two, the get up phase. The get up phase, which is really about planning, it's about structure and it's about finance. And from there we then move to this final phase. The final phase is the reach up phase. This is where we scale, this is where we grow, this is where we build it. Now that we've got it off the ground, we've got lift off. So now we got it off the ground, we're going to launch it. So the very first stage is this launch. And so now what we're doing is it's accelerating.

In a growth sense. Whatever your service, your product, your business is, now we're doing the things and putting things in place to accelerate that growth, to create the growth. Now this is an area where, when we get to this phase and we're trying to scale the business, because the next stage of phase three is to truly scale the business. And when we, and this is a challenge for many businesses, many businesses fall into what I call growth purgatory. Okay? There's a point where you're not, you're not small enough to be considered, you're too big to be considered a small business, but you're too small to be considered a big business. And we're in purgatory. And we're not sure do we make the decision to really scale and break out of that ceiling or do we stay where we're at. And that's a. It becomes a personal decision, a professional decision, a lifestyle decision, depending on what it is you want to do. But it needs to be a decision nonetheless and then you need to move forward. And one of the challenges for many, many entrepreneurs, including myself, I've had the challenge at times is this concept of delegation. At some point we're going to have to let go of certain things that we can't do and we're going to need to think about accountability and responsibility and putting systems in place and moving outside of it to allow it to take life, to allow it to continue to grow and to scale beyond us if we choose to do so and do that. So that's the scale stage, the second stage of phase three in ReachUp, then the last stage, which I call the exit exit stage of phase three. Now every business will have what I call an exit. A time where you, the developer, the creator, the product, the service, the business, the entrepreneur is going to exit the business. And there's a variety of different ways to do it. But here's the key behind this. The late, great Stephen Covey talked about start with the end in mind, begin with the end in mind. And that advice is so important to consider because many times entrepreneurs, they get an idea and they don't go through these, they don't go through these phases, they don't go through the process, they don't go through all the stages and they just run full fledged with their idea, excited and passionate about the idea and they start to build something. All of a sudden they get to a point where they're wrestling with a monster that they can't figure out how it got so out of control. It's because they didn't go through a process, they didn't go through a system, they didn't go through this. And as you sit here and go through this, think about this not as well. You know, Mel's giving us some concepts. This is a checklist. This is the process that you need to go through where you literally are creating a checklist and saying, check, check, I got this, I got this, I got this. That's what's going to allow you to do this. But one of the keys is to understand and begin with the end in mind. I made this mistake in my career. I was a cpa, I still am a cpa. And I started to build my practice, I started to build my reputation, I built a national reputation. And people were calling me, the phone was ringing. Off the hook. I was doing, you know, financial consulting and strategic planning and building, working with entrepreneurs and mentoring entrepreneurs. I was valuing businesses. I was testifying in court about values and financial matters and buying and selling business. I was doing all of that. But the challenge was they were always calling me. I didn't build it in a way that allowed me to step away from it. So when I moved away from it for whether it was a vacation or what have you, in fact an a couple of times you'll hear these stories. At some point, you know, I got injured and I was out of service for a while. Well, see when that happens, when that happens, everything stops. And I didn't consciously design it that way, it just happened that way because I was. Maybe it was ego based. When I first started develop it, I was trying to build my business. But the challenge with that is I had nothing if I wasn't there. That's okay. Many of us are going to build businesses around our name and that's okay as long as we're conscious about it and intentional about it. I'm intentional about it. Now. I still do my consulting under Mel Abraham, but I now know what I'm creating and I create it differently. And I know that at some point if I step away from it, it goes away. But I've structured my life, one of the stages in phase two, I've structured things in a way that it still feeds my life because I began with the end in mind and so understand what it is you want to do with this business or this product or this service. Over time now it may change, but at least you start with something. And you don't just get, you know, you don't get on a boat, on a river where you don't know where the river's going, you don't know how bad the current is, you don't have any oars to steer and you don't even have a life preserver. So I'd rather you choose a destination, choose a journey, choose a path. And if we need to shift and change paths, we can rather than allow the path to be chosen for you. And so that's the reach up stage, launch, launch, scale and exit. So if we think about this whole concept of the three phases of business life, think up is about deciding, it's about ideation, it's about model. And then the getup is about planning, it's about structuring, it's about financing. And reach up is about the launch, the scaling and the exit. But all of this again is Driven by customer promise. The customer promise. And that's one of the key takeaways I want to give you from this session. As we close the session, I'm going to go deeper into each of these elements and we'll keep digging deeper and deeper as we do this. You're going to find that the way the Entrepreneur Solutions show is structured, it's layered. So I'm going to give you a piece, allow you to digest it, and then we'll go a little bit deeper, and then I'm going to answer questions relative to that. So if you have questions or comments or anything, go ahead and go to askmelnow.com and you can leave me a voicemail, you can leave me a message directly from your computer. You can leave me a question. If it's a question, it may end up on a future show answering those questions. I've got a few already that, that I need to answer. In fact, the comments and the questions that have been coming in, phenomenal, keep them coming. I love that. That's one way for me to serve you as your entrepreneurial mentor. But here's what I want you to do for this, this session, this episode. Your takeaway here is I want you to focus on the customer promise. I invite you to do that, to really drill it down, to drill it down to a point where you are creating a succinct but emotionally compelling promise for your customer. And if it's not emotional for you, it'll never be emotional for your customer. Think about this. Let's look at Zappos. And I know I've used them as an example, but they're a phenomenal company with a phenomenal leader, Tony Hsieh. And their customer promise is all over their boxes. It's talked about. And if you ask anyone that's ever done business with Zappos, most everyone is going to say, delivering happiness. Delivering happiness. Two words, not even a complete sentence. Delivering happiness. But that is their customer promise. It's clear. It's emotional, it's visceral. The people that work there, the team, the core, the executives, the vendors, know that their primary promise is to deliver happiness. It's not to deliver shoes, it's not to deliver clothes. It's not to have the fastest delivery, it's not to have the biggest variety. It's not to have the lowest pricing. It's about delivering happiness. And so I want you to take the time in your journal and think about your product, your service you're offering. Think about your customers, the audience that you want to serve at the level you want to serve them. Think about the aspirational, transformational elements of your product or service and create a succinct, emotionally compelling customer promise. Create it, write it down, digest it, think about it for a couple days, see if it still feels the same. Try it on, try it out with some of your customers. Ask your customers what they feel they get out of this, beyond the product or service, how has it shift or change, change their business. And so that's the piece we drill down in some of my live events, much deeper into this. We call it the Global Purpose statement. But here I want you to focus on the customer promise. Here's what I'd actually like you to do is in the comments below or on the voicemail line@askmailnow.com once you come up with your customer promise, leave it, post it, Let us see it, let us support it, let us celebrate the customer promise. And let's allow it to grow. Let's allow it to take root. So I'd love to hear from you about your customer promises. I'd love to hear from you if you've got if you got questions. Again, it's askmelnow.com and for any of the takeaways here for this show, make sure that you can go to melabraham.com session004 to download any of the takeaways. And if you enjoy this session, make sure that you subscribe if you haven't already. So you're notified of the next the next episode and might as well share it with a friend. Share it with a friend. Give them the gift of bringing their dreams out of the darkness to create an epic journey through entrepreneurship. Again, until we get a chance to see each other in the next session, the next episode. May your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant. Thanks. See you soon.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you subscribe so you get access to all of Mel's business and success tips. And if you liked this episode, share it with a friend. If you have a specific business or success question, you can ask it at www.askmelnow.com. remember, it's all about being bold, dreaming big, and living life your way. Because the world needs you. Until the next episode, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant.

And that's it for this episode of Building your Money Machine, where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people. Because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright, and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.