MBA1027 How to Put The Spark Back Into Your Business + Free Ride Friday!

Hey everybody. Today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away Easy Course, our 30 day course on how to build an online course in 30 days. It's a $500 course over at EasyCourse Co, but today somebody's going to win it for free. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw on Fridays. Tune in on Fridays to see if you won, just like on today's episode. All right, let's jump right into it. Hey. Oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, offering insights on the things that matter to your business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's lesson, you will learn how to put the spark back in your business. Often, if you've been running a business for some time, you could start to lose a little interest. It starts to get a little mundane and it's just not as exciting as it used to be. Your relationship with your business is just like any other relationship. How do you reignite that passion for your business at any given time? How do you make sure that when you wake up in the morning, you're excited to get to work just like you did in the early days? That's what you'll learn in today's lesson. I'm going to give you three clear choices, three strategies to put that spark back into the business. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is brought to you by Long Tail Pro, a step by step system to help you quickly discover thousands of profitable, easy to rank keywords for almost any niche. Visit longtailpro.commba and use coupon code MBA for a free trial and 30% off your subscription forever. Again, that's longtailpro.commba use code MBA when you start a business. It's exciting, it's new, it's sexy, and the stakes are high. So your energy levels are really high because you know there's a lot on the line. But after a few months that kind of fades away, especially if you start doing well, where you get to a point of sustainability, where you're able to pay all our expenses, pay yourself a good salary and a little bit left over. And what happens is you get comfortable. You kind of just get content with the status quo and the way things are. But what happens is it doesn't make for a great and exciting work environment. You're kind of just going through the motions. And that's kind of hard because you can't stop the business because, hey, it's paying your bills and it's paying your lifestyle. So what do you do? Well, let's take a look. What happens at the start of your business. It's exciting because there's risk involved, because there's a new challenge. You're learning new things. So every day is really exciting. Well, we're going to do that for your existing business. We're going to insert that excitement in your business. And I'm gonna give you three strategies, three methods of doing this. And you can use these over and over. You can recycle them. I've done them plenty of times in our businesses. And this really works. So let me give you strategy number one. You need a new challenge. Sometimes in your business, you need to challenge yourself as an entrepreneur. Anytime you put yourself at the risk of failure, it pushes you to work hard and to get up in the morning excited for the challenge. So what we're gonna do is that we're gonna manufacture that new challenge. So whatever your business is, you don't have to change it. You don't have to start a new business. But you can offer a new feature or offer a whole new product in your product line. If you're in software, this is probably the easiest industry to do this, because you can always think of a new feature to improve your product. And that in itself is a product in itself or a new business, a mini business in itself, because it's a little project that you can work on. And it has the same steps as launching a business. And you get the same buzz and excitement of launching that new product or feature as you approach the finish line. But this is applicable even if you're not in software. Let's say, for example, you sell content. You sell an online course. Maybe it's time to refresh that course, revamp it. Maybe it's time to supplement it with some bonus lessons, or maybe it's time for you to create a whole new course, but the advanced version of that content. So you did 101. Now it's time for 102. Now, a little warning. Some of us are going to Be a bit scared to do this. Why? Because whatever your product or service is, if it's doing well, if you're selling and making a profit, you might feel like, man, I don't want to mess with it. Well, if you feel that way, remember, if you don't grow, if you don't innovate in your industry, it's just a matter of time before you become irrelevant. Your competition will swallow you whole. So you need to keep on innovating and improving. And we're not saying throw away everything that you've done. We're saying add onto it, improve upon it. So taking on the project of introducing a new product or feature or a new and improved version of your offering, that's a great challenge. You wake up in the morning, you have your to do list, you have your planning phase, you have your implementation phase, you have your launch strategy for this new product or service, and it's kind of in some way more fun than launching the business in the first place because you have a little less risk on the table, and you have a whole lot of credibility with your customers. For us at Web under Ninja, things never get boring, because every month we're working on a new little project, a new little feature, a new little improvement. And sometimes the improvement is not an actual feature in itself. Sometimes we dedicate a month to improving the speed of the actual app, improving the reliability and the quality and the experience. And one way to measure that, to kind of say, hey, we hit the finish line, is to survey your audience and say, hey, we're going to work on this. In this month, we're going to improve the software. In 30 days, we're going to release these improvements. We want you to tell us if you see the improvement and if you're benefiting from it. So it doesn't have to be an actual feature. Sometimes it just needs to be a challenge. Which leads me to the next strategy, a challenge you can take on, a new challenge in your business. You don't have to launch a product or even improve upon the products you have. But you might say, in the next three months, I want to take our customer service to the next level. I want us to be known for our incredible customer service. I want our customer service rating to go from 91% to 97% in terms of satisfaction rating. There's your goal, there's your challenge. How are you going to get there? We need a plan. We need an execution strategy. We need to go, go and implement that strategy every single day. This will reinvigorate You, I highly recommend any kind of goal or any kind of challenge that you can measure, like a metric like customer service or a sales goal. We want to increase revenue in the next three months by x percent, or we want to increase mrr or we want a lower churn, or we just want more users or more customers in general. Find a metric you can measure and. And make it the challenge for the next three months. Ask yourself, how do we get to that end goal? Reverse engineer it. What are the things we need to do to hit that target? If it's a sales goal, what are we doing for marketing? What are we doing for sales? How many actual new leads are we getting and how well are we converting on those leads? This is gonna take you to another place. This is gonna take you to. Okay, we really need to buckle down. Things are starting to look interesting already. Now, if you want to make your goal even more interesting, put a reward at the end of it. And I would do an individual reward as well as a team reward. So reward your team. Say, hey, the goal for us is to hit, you know, this percentage of satisfaction for customer service. If we hit this goal, everybody on the team is going to celebrate this by having this incentive. This could be, you know, a bonus, a party, gifts, whatever it is, but also have an individual goal because you're the leader of the team. You're the one who is starting this initiative, and you need some sort of external motivation sometimes. And it could be something simple, like, if we hit this goal, I'm going to put $500 aside and have a weekend away and just spend that weekend catching up on my reading and sipping a nice drink by the pool. You're not buying yourself a new car, but it's enough of a reward for you to be like, wow, that seems like a nice time to spend a weekend. I know you're probably firing up your Groupon app right now as I'm saying this, but you see, you're reinvigorating your energy towards something in your business to put that spark back. We still have one more strategy. Strategy number three. And before I cover that one, I want to pause for a moment and just say to you, hey, there's nothing wrong with you or your business if things get mundane. Sometimes if you've gotten to the point where things are getting mundane, you should pat yourself on the back. That means things are safe and sound. Things are reliable. They're predictable. You're not in this fight or flight reflex mode where you're fighting for your life. So for a lot of people where you're at is the dream. You really have done a good job. But you need to reinvigorate yourself as much as possible. This is part of being an entrepreneur. Finding new challenges, finding new ways to improve, and finding ways to motivate yourself. We got one more strategy. Strategy number three to put that spark back into your business. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. One of the first things you got to do when you start a business is acquire a business address. You need it to register your business. You need it to open up a business bank account. You even need it to register for email marketing. Yes, you need an address on the bottom of your email marketing newsletters. But if you work from home, like a lot of us do, you don't want to put your home address and have your customers show up to your door. And you don't want to spend the extra money every single month on having a business office. This is where Earth ClassMail comes in. They hook you up with a swanky business address, and all the mail that gets sent there gets scanned and uploaded to your account in the cloud. That means you never have to check physical mail ever again. You could see it anywhere, anytime, from your phone or your laptop. Pretty cool. So cool. We signed up. We absolutely love it. And we've been using Earth ClassMail for over a year now. And Earth ClassMail wants to hook you up with a free month so you can get started with your business address. Just go to earthclassmail.com mbamonth and use coupon code MBAMONTH. Again, that's earthclassmail.com MBAMONTH coupon code MBAMONTH. All right, strategy number three is to take on a content challenge. Every business can benefit from some great content to market their business to add value to others and show people that, hey, I have something that you need, something that I can offer, and it's your way to build trust with your audience. This could be going serious and hardcore on your blog, dedicating yourself to writing some epic posts every week. This could be starting a podcast, for example, or starting a YouTube channel and publishing videos regularly. These are big challenges. These are things that are going to force you to be consistent and really have a strategy behind it. And what I love about content challenges is that you have many choices, whether you like to write or you like to speak or like being on camera. It also allows you to be very creative, and being creative allows you to get excited. It's also a way for you to express yourself when maybe you didn't have that chance before when you're trying to build the business on top of that, it's going to help your business grow. Content is king when it comes to this day and age of the Internet and modern technology. People are looking for new articles, new podcast episodes, new videos that will help them in your marketplace, in whatever you specialize in. If you sell board games on your website, you could start a podcast about the history behind every different board game. Where did Monopoly come from? Or Clue for that matter? That's some exciting stuff that's gonna allow you to be creative and get up every morning looking forward to working on your business. Well, there you have it, guys. Three strategies to put that spark back into your business. Number one, a new product, a new feature improving upon your offering. Number two, a new challenge improving your existing customer service sales goals. Take on a new challenge in your business. And number three, a content challenge, a content project. You can improve upon what you have with your current blog or launch something completely new like a podcast or a video channel on YouTube or you can even write a book. With the tools and the technology out today with self publishing, there is no excuse. Alright, that wraps up today's lesson. But today's episode's not over because it's free. Riot Friday. I gotta give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course. This month is our course on how to build an online course in 30 days. We sell it over at EasyCourse Co for $500. But today somebody's gonna win it for free. And we do this every Friday, by the way. All you gotta do is leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is. Garrett HJP all the way from the UK. Garrett says great business lessons. 5 stars. Really useful snippets to help you along your day. Brilliant, Short and sweet. We love it. Garrett, thank you so much for leaving us an itunes rating and review. You're our free our Friday winner. So email me@omar mba.net so I can hook you up with the free ride. If you too want to be a winner, just leave us an itunes rating and review. And when you give us a review, you enter the draw for every week until you win. It's our way to say thank you for showing us some love. Alright, thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I know I've said this before, but business in a lot of ways. Is a mental game. You gotta have a really good command on what goes on in your brain. Sometimes you're gonna have to pump yourself up, motivate yourself, give yourself new challenges so you can reinvigorate yourself and shift into a new gear. Things are just not always gonna be exciting. It's your responsibility to find the excitement and make it happen for you and your business. All right, I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.