MBA1917 How to Improve Any Aspect Of Your Business + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, welcome to the $100 helping you take on your biggest business challenges 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Fridays we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away our automated Webinar challenge over@webinarninja.com AWC our 30 day course on how to automate your leads and sales and grow your business on autopilot. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday. Just like today, we announced the winner at the end of the episode. Tune in for that. Can't wait to announce this week's winner. In today's episode you will learn how to improve any aspect of your business. As entrepreneurs, we go at it day in and day out and sometimes we look at our business and we're saying man, I wish we could be better at this. Or we're struggling with that. It might be not getting enough traffic to your website. It may not be your sales conversions. Maybe your customer service needs improvement. Maybe you're looking to get bigger clients. You know what is wrong, you know what you want, but you kind of just struggle going about improving it. This is very common in entrepreneurship. Because we're so busy doing the work, we don't stop and evaluate our business and have a game plan or come up with a game plan to improve different areas that we're not happy with. So in today's episode, I'm going to break down how to attack this problem. How to make sure you can isolate different areas in your business that you want to improve and actually improve them. See measurable results that you're proud of. Can't wait to get into this one. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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In my 20 years of entrepreneurship, one of the things I learned over the years is that business is really a mental game. If you can master your philosophy, your mental strength, your ability to overcome challenges day in and day out, you will succeed. We have to recognize this. We can't just think that business or success in life is all about just working hard and hustling and just going at it. You can't work hard on the wrong things. You're not going to get results. You can't have the wrong mindset or philosophy behind your actions. It's going to lead you down the wrong path. So we're going to start with that. Okay? Anytime you see something in your business you do not like that you want to improve. Let's take for example, marketing. Like you are not happy with your business's marketing. You're not getting enough traffic to your website, you're not getting enough leads so that you can get enough sales. Let's just take that example and run with it. In today's episode, many of us, when we have a problem in our business, we're just really conscious of the fact that we're frustrated, really frustrated with this problem. Why is this working? What's going on. And as achievers, as hard workers, sometimes we default to pointing the finger. This is this person's fault. This is this person's fault. It's the economy's fault, it's the market's fault. That's just the way things are this time of year. We do what's called the blame game, okay? You will never solve anything in your business. You'll never improve anything in your business if you do this. I'm saying this out of experience, okay? Because I did that. I used to blame so many people, so many things, and nothing improved, okay? Until one day I realized I need to take responsibility. I need to say, it's my responsibility for this to work, to fix this problem, okay? It doesn't matter who caused this problem. It's my responsibility. This is a huge mind shift, okay? This alone will change your business. When anything's going wrong in your business, instead of thinking about why is it going wrong, whose fault it is, the first thought should be, this is my responsibility. I need to be responsible. I need to own this problem. This is my problem. I need to solve it by owning it, by taking responsibility, you are empowering yourself to come up with a solution. I know this sounds a little bit subtle, but it's incredibly powerful. I want to make the distinction. Being responsible doesn't mean it's your fault, okay? There could be other factors involved, but by being responsible, you're saying, I own the responsibility of the problem and the solution. Let's make something happen. So the first thing I do when I want to improve something is I say, okay, it's my responsibility to solve. No one's going to solve this but me. I'm the owner of this problem. Now, when I say solve this problem, I'm not talking about doing all the work. I'm talking about I need to own this problem. This is a problem that needs to be solved. I might need to get some help outside. I might need to get my team to work on the solution. But the point here is that it's not going to move forward, it's not going to improve unless I own it and take action and take initiative to move forward and get closer to a solution. So number one is take responsibility for what you don't like. Number two, sometimes business and in life is actually quite simple. Simple does not mean easy, but it means it's not complicated. If you don't like something, change it. That simple. If you don't like the way you're marketing, change the way you're marketing. If you don't like the way your suppliers are treating you. Change your suppliers, change it. It's not going to get better if you continue to do the same thing. That's just the facts. Okay? So if you don't like something, that's step two, change it. You have to commit to changing what you're doing. Hey, this is not working. You have to do something different, okay? You have to try something different. You have to experiment with something new. Now, the reason why this is so powerful is because you're committing to action. When you say you don't like something, change it. That means changing means I'm going to take action and do something about it. I'm not going to dwell on it. I'm not going to say woe to me. I'm not going to say, let's wait and see. No, we already know this is not working. We already know this is a problem. We already took responsibility to this problem, and now we're saying we don't like it. So we have to change it. Not only do you have to change it for your own sake so you're successful as an entrepreneur and that your business is successful, but for everybody involved, all your teammates, your customers, everybody that is a stakeholder in your business is going to benefit from this change. So you owe it to everybody to do something about it. Now, step three is what can I do to change it? We're going a little deeper now. So what we do is we listen and we brainstorm. What are all the things I can do to change what I'm doing to get a different result? So say, for example, I'm like, I don't like the way we're marketing. We're not getting enough leads, not enough sales. We're gonna use this example. What am I doing right now? Well, let's say you're running Twitter ads, and that's not working for you. You're not getting the traffic you're looking for. Well, let's examine the Twitter ad. Who are we targeting with this Twitter ad? Maybe we should target different audiences. Maybe we should, instead of doing Twitter ads, do YouTube ads. Maybe we need to change the call to action. Maybe we need to change send them on our website, change the landing page, change the copy. Maybe instead of trying to just go straight to the sale, we get them to just opt in with their email with some sort of freemium or downloadable, and then we nurture them on email marketing. The point here is that we're going to make a whole list of different things that we can do to change what we're doing something different. And by the way, you don't have to do this alone. If you have a team do this in a group setting, have the team own the problem with you. Say, hey, we have this problem, let's solve it together. Why are you paying all these people to just sit there and take orders? No, they can come up with solutions, too. Go ahead and brainstorm. Write down all the things that you can do. The next step is, we have this list of things that we can do to improve the situation. Let's earmark the ones. Let's put a tick or a star next to the ones that we feel like will make the biggest impact in improving what we're trying to improve. What is the one thing on this list that if we did it, it'll probably make the most impact? What about the second most impactful thing? Third most impactful? This gives me a sense of, you know, okay, not all actions are created equal. What are some things I can do? After you've earmarked the impactful tasks, take a look at what is the most simple task that I can implement right now that will make an impact. I like to start with at least just one implementation and take action as soon as possible. Why? Because momentum is powerful. You're in this cycle right now where you own the problem. You identify the problem. You, you committed to changing it. You came up with all ideas to change it. You've ordered the ones or you highlighted the ones that can make the most impact. Now let's choose something that we can do right now. Implement right now. The easiest one to implement. Well, I can change the sales copy on my sales pages. I can get a freelance copywriter, and I can get them to audit it, and they can give me an alternate version, and I can do an a B test. That's something I can do in action in one day. Why is this important? Because you're gonna feel a whole lot better once you start solving the problem. Once you start doing things to get better, you're going to start feeling empowered, you're going to get excited. You're not going to get down on yourself when you see, oh, things are not doing so well, not as good as I want it to be. You're going to realize, wait a minute, I'm doing something about it. I took action yesterday, I'm taking action today. I'm doing things to get me closer to where I want to be. So choose the one that's impactful that I can implement immediately. You could still do the other impactful ones. But start with something that can give you momentum. The next thing I would do is I would choose the one that would make the biggest impact. Maybe this task is going to take you three weeks to do. But what I like to do is I take this big impactful task and I say, okay, let's break this down into weeks. Let's break it down to days. What are the things I have to do to get this task done? And this gives me micro goals. It gives me some stepping stones, some milestones to go through so that I can know that, hey, I'm getting closer and closer to really improving this area. That's annoying me, that's making me feel bad about how I am as an entrepreneur. It's going to make me succeed because I'm taking action in a big, impactful way. This is like you wanting a six pack and understanding that you're going to have to do some sit ups every day. You're going to have to do some crunches, you're going to do an ab workout and every time you roll out your mat and do your ab workout, you know that you are getting closer and closer to that six pack that you want. So you're getting inspired every time you do it. Guys, I got more on today's topic. But before that, let me give love.

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The last step in improving any part of your business is to track. You've got to find a way to track your results. This is why it's important for you to know your baseline, to know where you're at before you start improving things. So if you don't like your marketing, write down all your numbers. How many leads are you getting every month? How much traffic are you getting every month? How many sales are converting? What's your conversion rate? Know all your numbers. So you know, okay, this is where I'm starting. This is just an example for marketing. Okay? But you can apply this to any aspect of your business. And as you implement your solutions, your impactful solutions. You can start seeing hey, are leads going up? Is traffic going up? What about our conversion rates? This allows you to see the impact your actions are taking in different areas. So if you improve the sales copy on the site, then you're looking at the conversion rate. Is the conversion rate going up? If you change the channel of where you're marketing, maybe you're going to get more traffic now. So take a look so you can track your results. Why? Because it's like what Peter Drucker says. What gets measured gets managed. It also helps propel you to keep moving forward. It motivates you. The numbers don't lie. They show you that you are improving, that you are on the right track or if you need to make a few changes. The last piece of advice I want to say is when you have a business and you have a team, whether it's small team like two or three people, or you have a team of 300, it doesn't matter if you have a team. Include your team in this process. I mentioned this before, but I want to emphasize that you want everybody to own this task, to own this challenge. Why? Because you have a limited amount of will, you have a limited amount of energy and creativity. You're just one person. But if you multiply that energy, that creativity that will by the number of people that are in your team, you have that much power, you have that much velocity to move you forward and solve this issue. Plus, it's a whole lot more fun to celebrate together as a team when you accomplish your goal. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. An episode like Monday's episode where I do a must read episode. A book review on Mark Cuban's book How to Win at the Sport of Business. There's so many great takeaways I want to share with you from that book about how to deal with competition, how to start your business with no capital. Mark Cuban's Golden Rules of Business. Can't wait to get into that on Monday. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Today's episode is not over though, because it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is TomTom Popov3. That's the handle on Apple Podcasts. TomTom Popov3 is from Taiwan and writes in and says Taiwan 1015 stars. Love the show. You've helped me learn so much thanks for all the hard work and teaching. All the best to you and yours. Cheers. Well, thanks TomTom, for that great review. You are our Free Ride Friday winner. You won a free ride to the Automated Webinar challenge over@webinarninja.com AWC, our 30 day course on how to get your leads, get your sales in an automated fashion. It retails for $99, but TomTom just won it for free. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday, like today to see if you won. It's that simple. Thanks so much in advance for doing that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the hardest things in business, of course, is solving problems. But you can simplify it for yourself if you break it down into steps into action items. Just like I did today. When it comes to tackling an area of your business you're not happy with. Everything in business and life, for the most part, has a solution. You got this and we're here with you along the way. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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