MBA1946 The 5 Biggest Lessons I Learned In 2021

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar RBA Show. As you know, entrepreneurship can be lonely. There's no reason to do it alone. That's why we deliver 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 in today's lesson you will learn the five biggest lessons I learned in 2021. In today's episode, I'm going to be open, transparent about the big challenges that I had to overcome, the things I've learned along the way in this past year. From a business Point of view, 2021 has been one of the most challenging years of my life for several reasons. I'll share in today's episode, but with challenges you learn a ton. And I want to pass on what I've learned along the way so that you can learn from my own experiences, from my own challenges, from my own struggles. Because that's the whole point of this podcast. To deliver lessons that are practical that you can use in your own. And to be totally honest, it was pretty hard for me to prepare for today's episode because I had to relive a lot of the things I learned. The hard way. But it's time and energy well spent to deliver today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big.

It feels good to Geico 2021. What a doozy. Every year, I like to recap and really reflect on the things I've learned in the past year and. And today I want to share with you the five big lessons I learned in business that I just simply have to share. Like, it's my duty as somebody who runs this podcast to share these learnings because they were very profound for me. As I was going through them and even looking back at it, I was like, man, that was a tough lesson to learn. So let's begin with number one. The first lesson I want to share with you that I've learned in 2021 is that nothing lasts forever. Whether you're having a surge in your business and things are going well, you're getting a lot of sales, which we had because of COVID and all that kind of stuff with our webinar software, or things are not going so well where things are slow, or you're having troubles with your team and it's a little bit weird and awkward. Whether times are good or bad, nothing lasts forever. There will be a time when that period will be over. It could be soon, it could be not so soon. But one thing's for sure is it doesn't last forever. And this is really important to remember, because when I went through both the ups and downs in my business this year, anytime you are planning for the future of your business, where you're investing money into a new project, where you're thinking about hiring new team members, whether you're doing well or not doing so well, you gotta remember, even if you know things are going up, that won't necessarily go on forever. So budget accordingly. Same thing. When things are not going so well, it won't last forever. So you gotta make sure you're ready to back bounce back. And one of the things I learned, the hard lesson is all that matters in entrepreneurship is that you're in business. As long as you're working, as long as you're serving customers, as long as you're, you know, continuing to be in existence, you're in the game. You have a chance to win. That's the goal. Just to keep it going, to keep trying to grow, because you know you're gonna go up and down, but the trend over time will go up as you grow. That's the goal, right? And one day, if you decide to sell your business, you've buil built a great piece of equity, a great company that somebody else can take over, knowing that, you need to also communicate this to your team, right? Especially when things are not going so well, you gotta be like, hey, we're in a rough patch right now. Things are a little bit hard. We're stressed. We're working long hours. But this is not gonna last forever. We're gonna get through this. We're almost there. And this is something that I kept in mind when we were, you know, before a launch or after a launch, when we were trying to kind of make sure everything's working is. We might be busy, we might be stressed, we might be a little bit overworked, but this is just short term. Okay? We'll have time to recover very soon. Lesson number one, nothing lasts forever. Lesson number two, how you hire will make or break your business. I've learned in my career, not only in 2021, that you can make a hire, one hire that can significantly impact your business for good. It can make your business grow. It can add expertise to your team. It can help the whole team grow. It can help team morale. It can just add new energy. And the value you get from that one hire can be exponential. But the opposite is just as true. And this is where it gets dangerous. Making a bad hire on your team can cost you more than just, you know, the wasted salary of that hire. If they've worked there for six months or something like that, it can actually cause more, more damage. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage because of the type of work they've done, the opportunity costs of them not doing the work properly, having to redo their work, the damage they might cause to your brand or your business or your reputation because of how they pulled off their job. Basically, when you add somebody to your team, when you hire somebody, you're entrusting your business's reputation in their hands because they represent the company, whether they're front Facing or not, whether they're writing code or answering customer service tickets or writing, you know, sales copy, they become an extension of you. Especially if you're the face of the brand, like, as the leader of the company. People are not going to think of that single employee when they have a bad experience. They're going to think of you or your business, and they're going to tell other people about you and your business, how unsatisfied they are. So through this process of making a couple of really great hires and a few not so great hires that cost the company a lot of money to set us back a little bit from having the accelerated growth that we were planning, is simply this. When you're hiring a team member, it has to be a hell yeah. Okay? It can't be a lukewarm yes, it can be. Let's see and find out. Let's hire them and see how it works out. It's gotta be like, you can't believe this person fell in your lap. This person is perfect for your team, perfect for your business, perfect for your needs. There should be no question marks. Anytime I made a great hire, it was exactly like that. It's a hell, yeah. There's no question marks. Perfect cultural fit. I know what they're capable of. I know they're, you know, positives. I know they're negatives, and I can live with them or we can train them up. But anytime I made a hire that cost the company money and didn't work out is when I had question marks where I was kind of like, you know what? We're having a hard time hiring for this position. Let's hire them, see what happens. Let's play this out, and we'll figure out if they're a good fit on the job. This never pans out. Okay? So when it comes to hiring, hell yeah or nothing. Lesson number two, your customers love you more than you think. One of the things I've learned in business in general, but specifically in 2021, and I'll tell you why, is most of the feedback that we actually hear that get to us, that we see on Twitter or we see in customer support or just kind of gets to our desk, so to speak, are people getting feedback or are upset. This is called the vocal minority. Why is this? Well, it's because people that are happy with their product or service, that are content, that actually think it was a good value and are enjoying what you delivered or are delivering, are too busy enjoying your product or service. Right. They're too busy getting on with it, we only make time to complain. Most people don't make time to praise. And this is called the non vocal majority. And because we don't hear from our majority of customers that are happy, we sometimes forget how much our customers love us and how good of a job you're doing until you ask them. Okay, so this year in 2021, we did a survey with our customers. We did customer interviews more than we usually do, and we opened up inquiries for those who wanted to join a new product that we're launching called Course Ninja. And in that process, hundreds of amazing customers of ours wrote in and applied and expressed how much they love our product and how they use it and why they use it and why they're so excited about this new product. And that, hey, I love what you do with Webinar Ninja. I can't wait to see what you come up with this product. It's a no brainer for me. And it was kind of like a bucket of cold water was splashed right in our faces. We're like, wow, okay, we believe in our product, we love it. But this is amazing to hear that people just absolutely love us. And we realize, wow, we don't know this information because we don't ask. And often we need to ask people for their feedback, even their positive feedback. So we are now making it a habit to get that feedback, ask for, review, use, and get people to share their experiences of how they use our product so we can learn a little bit more about our use cases. But you might be sitting right now and be totally unaware how much your customers love your product because you just simply don't ask. You don't send out surveys, you don't do interviews. And you might have a skewed or undervalued understanding of what your product or service provides for your customers. And that's not a good place to be. That means you're working with faulty information. You are building and creating and improving a business based on information that's incorrect. There's nothing worse than a company changing something that the customers love. For example, we run a monthly members webinar at Webinar Ninja and it was like the number one thing people loved. And we were thinking, oh, I wonder if people love this thing, maybe we should not do it as often. But nearly 80% of our customers say, this is one of our favorite things about your product. Even if we don't watch live, we're there for the recording number four. And this one's a big one. Many people struggle with sales. They feel like they're not getting enough sales, they're not making enough revenue, they don't have enough customers. And one of the big reasons they're struggling with this is because they're not giving themselves more opportunities to make a sale. Let me explain. Let's say a 15 year old kid is trying to earn some extra cash and is willing to mow people's lawns for that extra cash. Will this get to have more sales, more revenue? If they asked 10 homeowners if they wanted to mow their lawn, or 50 homeowners, logically we would say 50, right? You get more chances at bat, more chances to get a yes. If 1 out of 10 people say yes, that means if I ask 50 people, then I get 5 yeses, literally 5xing revenue, 5xing sales. For some reason, as small business owners, as online business owners, we forget this lesson. You gotta give yourself more chances at bat. You got to go after the sale or give yourself a chance to make a sale more often. This could mean for you lowering your barrier of entry. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use what's called a value ladder. And that means you sell products or services at different levels. You're not going to make a ton of money at the lower side of the ladder because maybe, let's say for example, your entry level product, if you're an information business, if you're a coach or a teacher or trainer, is a book and the book is $10. Or maybe it's an online course, a mini course for $9. You're not going to make a lot of money there, but you're allowing yourself to get more chances to talk to people, people that are interested, people that are willing to buy. If you sell something for $9, for example, your next tier in the ladder might be a $300 course and then from there $1,000 mastermind, and from there a $3,000 VIP event. The point here is, is that most businesses just sell the $3,000 product or the $300 product or the thousand dollar product. You need to create more chances for you to make money, more chances for you to talk to a customer that's interested. You can even go even lower than a $10 product and offer something for free, like a small webinar, a workshop, an online course. If you are in the software world, you can do like what we did, we now have a free plan. This allows you to get more people through the door, giving you more chances to make a sale.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, but forget about it, and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

So I shared my first four lessons that I learned in 2021. Here's number five. And you've heard this over and over again, and I've heard this over and over again, but until I actually did it, I didn't get it. So I encourage you to do it. And what is it? It's raised prices. I basically didn't change the pricing for Webinar Ninja for over five years. We almost had the same. And before our recent price change, we only changed it twice. So we changed it once in Inception, right? We set the price, and then we changed it two years later. That's it in the course of seven years. And what I realized is that I was really, really undervaluing our product and service. I looked out in the marketplace, I looked out at our competitors. I looked at the other options out there. We were way underpriced, comp to what other people were charging. If I raised my prices, I would still be competitive and still be even less expensive than some of our competitors. And yet we were a superior product. We improved a whole lot more than some of these other products. We've been around for longer, so we had more chances to improve. And one of the things I learned when I did raise prices is that it's really hard for you to serve your customers when you have low prices.

Why?

Because you have to work so hard. There's so much pressure to bring in more and more customers and serve all these customers to be able to make enough revenue to keep growing and serve your current customers. Right. You also have to make even more to bring in new customers for marketing. Right? You got to spend some money on marketing. But when you raise prices, you give yourself a little wiggle room, give yourself a little breathing room so that you can focus on building a better product. And overall, you make more revenue, even if it means you're not bringing in more customers. For example, if you price your product at $100 and you had 100 customers a month, you'd be making $10,000 a month. But what if you price your product $200, but instead of getting 100 customers, you got 70 customers significantly lower? Right? That's a drop. But when you do the Math, you've made $14,000 that month. That's $4,000 more, 40% more, even though you got less customers, but because you raised prices significantly, you bring in more revenue, a little bit more breathing room for your business, bit of a margin so that you can continue to grow at a better rate. The other thing I realized is after talking to my customers, doing a lot of research, working with experts, the willingness to pay for a product that solves a big pain point is quite large. You'll be surprised that customers don't really care too much. And of course, we're generalizing here, but they don't care too much between a price that's 49 or 79 or even 99. It all kind of lives under the hundred dollar range, kind of lives in the same place in their brain. But for you, it makes a huge difference. But for the customer, as long as it actually does what it says it's going to do, it's worth it. So if you haven't reevaluated your prices or raised your prices in the last couple years, definitely, definitely look into it. Guys, Those are the five big lessons I learned in 2021. Let's review them real quick. Lesson number one, nothing lasts forever, so plan accordingly. Hiring will make or break your business. Who you hire, how you hire. Always go for hell yeah or no. Your customers love you more than you think. You gotta ask them for feedback because the silent majority often don't voice their opinions. Number four, increase your chances to make a sale. And number five, raise your crisis. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 OMBIE show. Hope me sharing a little bit of my wounds and the things we went through this year and how we overcame them and the lessons I learned along the way will encourage you to take these lessons and apply them in your business in 2022. Speaking of the future, tomorrow we'll be talking about when to secure funding for your business. Whether you're looking for investors or VC capital or even debt financing. When is the time to start considering this? We get into that, into tomorrow's episode. So make sure you hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app so you can get that episode automatically. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the things I love about being an entrepreneur is that it forces you to become better. It forces you to learn because you're always learning. There's always something to learn every single year I'm in business. And when you learn, you grow, right? And it just, it just allows me to really be thankful that I have a profession, I have a career that allows me to become better and better every single year. It's one of the huge benefits of being an entrepreneur. You actually become better as a person, become better as a professional. As painful as it can be sometimes, this journey we're all on in entrepreneurship is definitely one that is full of surprises, is exciting and is a real privilege to. To get to take part in. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode for Art Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico. You could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.