MBA2166 Why Business is Simple But Not Easy

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the $1 RMBA show. Because a better business begins with you. 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 why business is simple but not easy. Many people, as they start and grow and scale their business, they get overwhelmed, they get confused, they start feeling like man, business is complicated. There's so many things to think about, many things to do, there's so many things to keep track of and this causes a lot of stress and discomfort in your day to day life. As a business owner, one of the things I like to do to solve all that stress is to remind myself that business is simple, but it's not easy. And I'll explain what that means in today's lesson. For me, the opposite of easy is challenging. It's going to require some effort. It's going to require a bit of time and a bit of risk too. Risking my time working out things to figure out what's gonna work and what's not in my business. It's gonna take some hard work and therefore it's not easy. But the reality is that business is actually not complicated because business is all about helping other human beings with a product or service. And humans essentially are pretty simple creatures. I'll explain how you can break down your own business to simple steps. So you can just focus on what matters and understand that, hey, accomplishing these steps are going to take some hard work, it's going to take some time, it's not going to be easy, but it doesn't have to be complicated or stressful. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When the flu is keeping you up at night, don't try to tough it out. Knock out your flu symptoms with Nyquil Intense Flu. You got this. It provides powerful relief of your flu symptoms so you can sleep well through the night. Nyquil Intense Flu. The nighttime sniffling, aching, aching fever. Best sleep with a flu medicine. Use as directed. Keep out of reach of children. Let's start with simplifying business. Any business, big, small, A product A service, retail, wholesale, B2B B2C. It doesn't matter. Every single business is essentially three things. It's three steps, three phases. That's all that matters. I know this sounds really over simplistic, but this is the reality and I'm just going to give it to you so that you can just see how this is applicable to your own business and remind yourself of this when you get overwhelmed. And to make things even easier in today's lesson as an example, we're going to use a very simple business we all can relate to. And that's a pizzeria, a local pizzeria where you can dine in or you can take out. We are all familiar with that because we've all been to a pizzeria, most of us, and what they offer and how they offer is pretty simple. So the three steps of any business transaction is attract, convert and deliver. You have to attract people to your product or service. You have to then say, hey, go ahead and buy my product and services. The convert part, where they go from being interested to being a buyer. And then you have to deliver on that product or service and make sure they get what they pay for. That's business. Okay, that's it. So if we go to the last part of this three part system, which is deliver, this is all about the product. So most people know in order for you to have a business on your hands, you have to have some sort of product, some sort of service. You're giving something in exchange for money. What is that thing? That's Your product, you might be selling toothbrushes or you might be selling consulting services, or you might be selling lawn care services or a software or a course, it doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, your transaction is delivering this product to the customer. Now, I'm going to stop here for a moment because a lot of people do not talk about this in business, online, on social media. And it's something that I have found in my over 20 years of entrepreneurial experience has made my life a lot easier. The better your product, the better the service, the easier your business is. Remember I said that business is simple but not easy? Well, easy is a scale, right? Challenging is a scale. Some businesses are incredibly challenging, like trying to launch rockets into space. SpaceX. Right? That business is so challenging to make sure it's a viable business. But you know what is not so challenging? The most delicious pizza ever made offered to a hungry customer. It's so easy to sell that. Okay, so my point is, is that the best thing you can do to increase the likelihood of success of your business is to create an incredible product that's irresistible to the right audience. This synergy between product and audience is so important because you're not going to cater to everybody. Even a simple pizzeria won't cater to everybody. They might have to be a little bit more expensive than Domino's or Pizza Hut so that they can have this incredible exist pizza with fresh organic ingredients. And that's okay. But the point is, is that for a certain audience, for a certain demographic of customer, this pizza is incredible. Now, for somebody who's incredibly price sensitive and is not a foodie and doesn't really care about the difference between delicious organic sauce versus sauce that's been in a can for 12 months and it's the cheapest sauce that you can find because you're buying it by bulk. They're going to go and buy Domino's, right? They're not really interested in this. They don't value this kind of pizza and this product is not for them. And that's okay. What we're trying to do here is create the perfect product for a particular audience. This will solve 95% of all your troubles in business if you can get that perfect product market fit where your product fits the market, that audience perfectly. And by the way, you don't just hit this like a home run right out the gate. Sometimes it takes some experimentation to find out who your audience is and how to refine your product to suit that audience. I've done that over the years with my software, Webinar Ninja, for us, we didn't really target a specific audience. We just were a webinar software. And we kind of got away with it because webinar software was quite popular back in 2014, and there was very, very low competition. But then we started to refine our audience and refine our messaging and refining our product to fit the audience we want to attract and who we can really serve. And that's coaches and creators. And this is all to say that when I actually deliver my product, when somebody actually buys Webinar Ninja or signs up for a free trial, if they're the right audience, my product is perfect for them and they're in love. And this makes everything so much easier. Well, let's back up to the second step, which is convert. If I'm trying to sell a product to somebody who doesn't understand the value, who doesn't really understand even the problem it solves, they're not even experiencing this problem. They're not going to buy. They're just not going to see why they should spend their money. This is why the perfect product for the perfect audience matters. Because when I sell to coaches and creators that don't want to fuff around with a bunch of pieces of software and try to make it work, and they just want a reliable, high quality webinar experience, they're going to love it. It's so easy for me to sell it because all I have to do is just show the product, demo it on a webinar or in a video or in an email, and they're like, okay, I'm sold. I don't need any more convincing. So converting is easy. Let's back up to the first step. To be able to attract. This is marketing, right? I gotta market this product to get people's awareness that I exist in the world, what we do, who we're for. And even in the marketing step, when I talk about, hey, we're a webinar software for coaches and creators, and I know exactly who I'm serving. Coaches and creators that see this ad, see this marketing, are gonna say, that's me. Is this product for me? Let me check it out. It's so much easier for me to focus my message and my targeting Once I know who I'm trying to serve, who's my perfect audience for my product, I don't have to spend money and energy and time trying to market to everybody. So let's go back to the pizzeria example. Okay, I own a pizzeria on the corner of my neighborhood. Like every business, I probably have competition. I probably have other pizzerias I'm competing with. But I specialize in authentic Italian Neapolitan pizza that's authentically delicious and a place that you wouldn't mind bringing your family or a loved one to. That's my product. I now have to attract people and convert them. So being a physical business, I probably will get foot traffic because people are going to be aware of my existence in the neighborhood. But I'll also want to make some other marketing efforts, some ads. Maybe I'll be in your local newspaper or I'm advertising with flyers, or I'll do a Groupon or something like that, right? Where I just get people's attention. Now, with a pizzeria, how do you convert people into customers? Well, it's usually when they get to your website to check out the kinds of food you have, your menu. Most people will evaluate, hey, what is this place all about? Before they make a reservation or decide to go for dinner there. And if I know my audience and I know they'd love this product, I'm talking about this product in a way that would be attractive to them. Maybe some of my customers have been to Italy and had Neapolitan pizza. So maybe on my website would say, come to my pizzeria. You'll feel like you stepped in Naples and are enjoying an authentic Italian pizza. The way I describe each pizza, the ingredients, where we source these ingredients, this is going to attract the customer that values this stuff. Like, hey, oh. They get their flour from just a couple of, you know, kilometers from where I live, not that far a farm. They get their cheese from the same area. The sauce is handmade and is a special recipe that's passed down from the owner's grandmother. Wow, this sounds incredible. This is not Domino's. Then they're converted. They come to the pizzeria or they order a pizza. My job now is to deliver the experience they're expecting that's perfect for my audience, give them that delicious experience with my food, whether it's dining in or delivery or pickup. At that point, they're enjoying my pizza, and they're so thankful they decided to come here and they discovered you. They start posting online, sharing it with friends, telling each other, hey, we should come here for your birthday. That's coming up next month. This is what a powerful delivery of product to the right audience can do. And it's all just three steps. That's business. It's pretty simple. But to pull this all off. It's a challenge. It's not easy. It's going to take some hard work to do the marketing, to craft the copy, to convert them, to create an incredible experience and a product so that we deliver and put smiles on faces. This is where you go to work every day. But what you have to do is actually simple. Don't fool yourself, don't delude yourself and think, hey, this is complicated and it's a mystery. It's not a mystery. Business is one of the oldest people professions of all time. Commerce. And even though we have tools and technology and people are more savvy these days, it's essentially the same thing. It hasn't changed much. 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. To wrap up today's lesson, I want to remind us all that, hey, it's okay to be overwhelmed, but we have to get grounded when we get overwhelmed. When we feel like we're out of control, we got to get in control and we got to remind ourselves, hey, this is basically what business is. These three steps. Where is my business lacking? Where is it getting slowed down? Maybe you have a great product, but you don't have enough traffic, you don't have enough attraction, right? You're not attracting enough people to see your product. And maybe you need to work on marketing. A lot of businesses I found I'd say 50 to 60% of the businesses I have worked with or know about or have coached, they have a marketing problem. They just don't invest enough time and money in marketing. Here's the thing, if you have a great product, amazing, you did a fantastic job. Now you just gotta crack the code of bringing customers to your product. You have to just build out your marketing system to track them and to sell them, which is the convert part. Most people's products are pretty much like an auto sale. It's not an active sales process. It's just writing great copy like on the menu or on your sales page or in your email notifications or email correspondence or sequences in your email marketing system. Most people these days don't have to get on a phone call or sell somebody in person. With my software product webinar Ninja, the sales process is really self service. They sign up for a trial and they see for themselves if they want to use this product or not. It does its selling for me so it's actually easier now, right? So once you really understand, okay, I gotta just bring in more customers. Even if you have to buy these customers attention with ads, that's okay if the math works out like hey every time I spend $500 I make a thousand dollars in sales. You have a winning formula. So break it down to the fundamentals. Look at your business and say hey, why am I not getting the results I want? Where can I improve? What part of this system attract convert deliver which is marketing sales product? Which part of those three parts do I need to improve? Do I need to put more effort? I need to strategize a little bit and kind of make it my focus for the next two, three, six months so that the engine of my whole business just goes into overdrive and delivers results. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. Hope today's lesson helped a bit, put you at ease and put some perspective on things on your business, on the way things actually are. If you love today's lesson and you want more, hit subscribe or follow. That way you get access to over 2,000 business lessons in our archives. Go ahead and do that on your favorite podcast app, hit follow right now or subscribe whatever it says so you get access to our archives. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes we get caught up working in our business and on our business. The difference is on our business is designing the system that's going to serve you. In your business is actually implementing the things that the system needs, the actual tasks. The beauty of being a business owner is that you don't have to work in your business. You can hire people, you can outsource. You can use software to have this implemented for you. Your job is to work on the business and make the decisions that will help move it forward. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. I'll see you. Take care. The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to made it happen and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu Jack WelchMBA to learn more. 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