MBA1617 How Saying “No” Can Make Your Business More Profitable + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, 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. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse co. Or you can win it for free. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 NBA Show. Your daily business breakfast burrito. Great business lessons and advice wrapped up and delivered to you on the daily in 10 to 15 minutes every single day. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's lesson you will learn how saying no can make your business more profitable. No is one of the most powerful words in business. Many people think that saying yes is what makes you successful. Saying yes to every opportunity that you can. And that may be true when you're just getting started, but once your business is rolling, you just simply cannot say yes to everything. It's going to hurt your business. And I'm not just saying saying yes or no externally for opportunities, or we're talking about internally as well within your team. The thing that a lot of people don't realize is that when you say yes to something, you automatically say no to other things. If I say yes to going to the movies tonight and I grab two tickets to go to the cinema, I automatically say no to any other option for tonight's plans. Now it's just the movies in your personal life. But in business, not all opportunities are created equal and time is your biggest asset. So in today's lesson, I'm going to show you not only how no internally and externally in your business can help grow your business, make more money and be more profitable, but how to do it, how to actually understand how to implement this. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. One of the concepts in business that I learned early on that really has helped me is the idea of opportunity costs. Whenever you spend time, energy, or money on one thing, you automatically are not allowing yourself to do the same for something else. Opportunity cost basically says that there's a cost for relinquishing the opportunity, saying, hey, I'm going to spend my time doing this and therefore I can't do other things. What's the cost involved here? If the cost is less than the thing you're actually doing, that's great. But the point here is that if you don't say no to things, you'll never actually maximize your opportunity. If you say yes to everything, you automatically just fill up your time and your budget with the first thing that's offered to you, the first thing that you can do, not allowing for any other opportunities besides the idea of opportunity costs. There's a reason why yes is so easy and no is so hard. No takes effort. No takes a little bit of oomph inside of you. It requires discipline. Also, yes doesn't require any creativity or energy afterwards. Let me give you an example. Let's say, for example, you want to remain profitable in your business, but one of your managers is asking you to increase a budget. Somewhere in your business, they want to spend a little bit extra money in a department, and that's going to eat into your profits, okay? If they can't directly prove to you how that investment, how that money is going to directly improve your revenue and directly improve your profits. So it's seen as an investment, not just a cost, then saying yes is going to be detrimental for your business. You really need to evaluate in that moment, is saying yes better than saying no? And by the way, a lot of people think a no ends there. No. If I say no to that opportunity. If I say no, I am unable to give you the extra funding for that area. I need you to figure out a different way to make that happen to achieve the goals you're looking for. This allows your teammates to get more creative, to get more innovative. Okay, I don't have the budget, but maybe I can get to that goal in some other way. Maybe I can be a little bit more creative or a little bit more imaginative on how I can tackle this. Constriction breeds creativity, and it's good for you to tell your team no sometimes. And of course, sometimes you're going to say yes. But the point here is that they get that feeling that, okay, sometimes I'm just not going to get everything handed to me. I need to work through it. I need to find other ways and avenues to get it done. Let me give a practical example from my own experience when saying no really helps and really allows you to make more money. A couple years back, I got asked to speak at a conference, and it was a great opportunity. And normally I like to say yes to speaking opportunities. I like speaking on stage. I like going to conferences and meeting people. And the audience was a good match for my audience. They would be my potential customer. Not all of them, but a good number of them. The thing is that this conference would take about five to six days out of my schedule because of the travel and making sure I'm preparing. The conference requires you to be there the whole time, so you can, you know, be a part of the audience and help people out. And that's all good and dandy, but I had to evaluate, hey, is five, six days out of my calendar worth what I'm gonna get out of this conference for me and my business, yes. It's always good to give back, and you need to keep that in mind. But I had a really tight quarter that quarter, and I was like, I need to spend more time on the business and help my team out. I said no to the opportunity, knowing that I can't really feel a very strong reason in terms of an roi. A couple weeks later, I got asked to speak at a different conference that was actually the same exact dates, except the conference was shorter and I only required to be there for Two days. It'd be impossible for me to go to both of them because of the timing, but this one was like two days only. And the audience was even more of a better fit for my, my talk and my content. It was a larger conference and the conference fell exactly on the weekend and it was closer to me. So the travel time and everything would not be that bad. So I would not miss any time for my team and I got a better opportunity for my business. So glad I said no to the first conference because otherwise I wouldn't be able to say yes to this one. Now you might be saying, or you just got lucky, you know, you just got another opportunity that was better that you waited for. How would you know that in advance? But the point here is that that opportunity was only available because I was willing to say no. I was willing to say no to something that would never be an option for me if I just said yes to everything. And in fact, that conference brought in more customers than any other conference I ever spoke at. So it really helped us really profit and say a direct ROI to that appearance at that conference. Many times when you're marketing in your business, you want to try different things. You want to experiment, but sometimes you're going to come across strategies or tactics that just don't feel like you. It doesn't feel like your brand, it doesn't feel like what you're trying to achieve, doesn't feel like the type of marketing you want to do to attract the kind of customers you want. But you know, it works for other businesses. You know that this strategy converts quote unquote. You can say yes and get short term gains, but it'll hurt your business in the long run. You're going to pigeonhole yourself into a brand that, that you never wanted to be. And unfortunately in the long term, it's gonna affect the way you feel about your business and it's just gonna directly make you feel like, I don't wanna really keep going, I don't wanna keep growing. And this is a snowball effect. Once you say yes to one thing, it's easy to say yes to another. And basically, because you don't do the hard things sometimes and say no, we're not gonna do that because that's just not our style. That's really over the line in terms of our branding. You pay the price later. And by the way, branding is not just about things you do, it's about things you don't do. A lot of people join our community or sign up for our software Webinar Ninja because we don't do certain things. They actually enjoy the fact that, hey, you're not like that. I remember I was on holiday in Japan and we were staying at a ryokan, which is a traditional type of accommodation in Japan. And yes, it's a great experience, a traditional experience, but one of the things I loved about it was just the hospitality. And even though this is not brand, this is more like culture. But they made the choice to constantly make you feel like, hey, we value you as a customer. They didn't upsell me left and right. They didn't charge me extra for little things. And even though I paid a good dollar amount for each night, I was happy to pay it because it just gave me this sense of I was treated with respect. It felt like I wasn't a customer. I was like a guest. Yeah, they could have made more money in the short term where they charged me for this or charged me for that. But I'm going to come back over and over to that ryokan because I really enjoyed the experience and I appreciated the way they treated me and I resonate with their brand. No is a very powerful word. Saying no to certain things, not doing things will help your business. But I gotta warn you, it's not easy, especially the beginning, to start saying no. It feels like you're kind of sacrificing or you're throwing away something valuable. I know this because my parents immigrated from Egypt to America. I grew up in an immigrant family. And as immigrants, and you grow up in that environment, you don't take anything for granted. You don't throw away food, you don't waste things. You get hand me downs from your siblings. The idea of saying no to something that's being presented to you seems a little bit counterintuitive. I know that I had to unlearn that and realize that, hey, sometimes no is the best answer and will help not only me and my business, but the profitability of my business. You only have a limited amount of resources, and I mean time, money, energy. As a small business, you need to make sure that you use these resources wisely. You don't just spend them by saying yes to everything. You're selective, you're careful, and you make sure when you do say yes, it's the best option, it's the best way to go. And you're not going to know off the bat. You're going to experiment, but you got to be willing to say no and yes and take a few losses and a few lumps. But over time, because you're willing to say no, you will refine that skill.

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If you want to learn more about how to say no to improve your business, improve your profitability, I highly, highly, highly recommend the book essentialism by Greg McKeown, one of my favorite books of all time. Essentially in Essentialism he says if you're doing all these other things and just saying yes to everything, you really can't be great at something. You really can't do great at something in your business, in your life. And it's stressful and it's really tiring. You want to make sure that you're energized when you do whatever you do, and by saying no, you conserve yourself for what really matters. Thank you so much for listening. Today's episode's not over though, because it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride and the winner is Ayla Bag. Ayla says this is one of the greatest shows. Five stars. I absolutely love this podcast. It's very well organized, amazing production and a wide range of topics. I'm listening to it as a part of my daily routine when I go for a cycle. I benefit a lot from all the topics on the show and look forward to new episodes. Thanks Ayla bank for that great review. Your mission is to email me at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the free ride to ezcourse, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course, a $500 value over at EasyCourse Co if you want to win a free ride. If you want to win a $500 course on how to build your own online course, go ahead and leave us an iTunes rating interview right now and you enter our weekly random draw. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. And once you leave us a review, you enter the draw automatically for each week until you win. Thanks so much in advance for that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you say yes to everything, especially on your calendar, and your calendar is totally booked, you don't leave any wiggle room for any contingencies, for any emergencies, for any issues, any errands you got to run. It really makes work really stressful. You gotta have some buffer. You gotta have 20% of your time where you're really not scheduled and you're able to kind of have there just in case. This is where no is. So powerful. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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