MBA911 How To Keep Business Simple

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You need to make sure that you're actually creating something or offering something that they want. This is so important. We created a course called five Steps to Idea Validation to make sure you nail your business idea best of all. This course is absolutely free. You can enroll over@100mba.net get started right now in the seven part video course. Again, that's 100mba.net. In today's episode, you will learn how to keep business simple. When things get complicated in your business, that's when trouble creeps in. When you overthink things, when you over complicate things, you make it very difficult not only for yourself, but for your customers. Do you have too many options when it comes to your offerings? Are there too many ways to buy what you're offering or too many Places to go. Do you have too many people doing the same thing in your business? This is often due to overcomplication. And the best businesses I found, and in my own experience, are simple businesses, businesses that keep it simple. I'm going to share with you the golden principles of keeping your business simple so you have less headaches, less expenses, and less confusion for you and your customer. I use these principles every day and I remind myself, because it's easy for complications to start creeping in. We try to get fancy, we try to get, you know, slick, and it just causes us more problems. Let's put a stop to that right now. Let's keep it simple. Let's get down to business. Often when I'm planning a new project or a new feature in our software, Webinar Ninja, or right now when we're revamping all our courses inside of the hundred dollar mba, I often remind myself to kiss. And that's an acronym for keep it simple Stupid. Now, I don't mean to call myself or anybody out there stupid, but it's a bold reminder that to keep things simple, anytime you're about to do something in your business, whether it's hire somebody new, whether it's to sell a new product or a new service, or setting prices for that matter, ask yourself, what's the simplest way to do this? It's always best to keep things simple and to start simple. For example, when we started Webinar Ninja, we only had one plan and one price. No tiers, no monthly, no annual. It was just one price. And this really helped us because we didn't overcomplicate things. We just had one price and we focused on building a great product and getting people attracted to what we have to offer. When we started to iterate and improve the product and some costs came involved and we had to maybe add more tiers, it was easy to do that because we had a simple base. And sometimes we'll go a little overboard and we'll bring it back a little bit, say, okay, there's too much complication here. Let's try to simplify it. Keeping things simple allows you to just focus on what's important, your product or service. So that's principle number one. You're keeping it simple so you can focus on what's important, your product. When you simplify all the details or the aspects of your business, it makes things easier. Principle number two is if I don't get it, they won't get it. Let me give you an example to explain this principle. Let's say I'm working on some headlines or a headline to my homepage, to my website. If I try to get fancy or try to be cute and write something and I have to think about it for a moment or I don't totally get it immediately, you better believe that my customers will really have a hard time understanding it.

Because.

Because it's not simple, it's not straightforward. I mean, you know your business more than anybody else, so somebody who's new to your business is definitely not going to get it. So if you don't get it, they won't get it. So you want to keep it as simple as possible. This is especially important when you're communicating a concept or you're making a first impression on your homepage. You're really telling people, hey, this is what I'm all about. This is what I have to offer you. This is why I can help you. And if you can't communicate that clearly, you're going to be in big trouble and they're going to bounce, they're going to leave that website. And this is not the time to get fancy. This is not the time to get cute or philosophical. It's time for you to get direct and simple. A lot of people get distracted by all the details. You're like, oh, I want a video background on my homepage. I want some animations to happen. Keep it simple. Most of the time those are distractions, and they don't really emphasize what you're trying to do or what you're trying to convey to your customer. It doesn't really lend itself to what you're trying to do. A simple white page with some black text can do wonders. If I'm selling a course on how to play the piano, for example, it's not time for me to be cute on my homepage and say, you know, channel your inner Billy Joel and play the greatest hits with ease. Too long, too complicated. Maybe some people don't know who Billy Joel is. It's possible. It's the Internet. It's an international community. Instead, you're looking for something simple, direct. Again. What are you trying to accomplish here? What are people coming to your website for? They want to learn how to play the piano. They want to learn how to play their favorite song. So what? Learn how to play your favorite songs in 30 days. Boom. Keep it simple. Principle number three, paying for something, whether it's a service or a software, may save your business if it simplifies the way you do things. Let's go back to the course example. If you're looking to build a course, there's a lot of technical knowledge you're going to need to have in order to build your own, you know, online course platform. Whether using plugins with WordPress or making it yourself, that's going to take a whole lot of time and it can take forever for you to launch your course. Instead, you can pay for a system to allow you to deliver these courses and sell them tomorrow. For example, my buddy Spencer Fry has a online course platform and membership platform called podia p o d I a.com and for a very reasonable monthly fee, you can start selling courses online. You don't have to get a freelancer to code anything. You don't have to mess with WordPress plugins. You don't have to fiddle with the design, which will take you hours and days and weeks of your time if you decide to do it yourself. And sometimes doing it yourself is not going to cost you so much less than getting a service to do for you or a product like Podia in this example. So a product or service can save you a ton of time and keep things simple for you. Well, also keep things simple for your customers. If they're buying a course online and there's some issues they're having with checkout or maybe a course they can't see, you can contact their customer support and they can help you out. If you're doing this yourself, you are the customer support. You're going to have to figure out what's going on. Technically, headaches. Keep it simple. Principle number four, don't outsource if you don't have to. This is kind of the opposite of this one, but I'm talking about actually things that you can do easily, whether it's writing a blog post or conducting a webinar or doing your social media. Sometimes people immediately say, I got to hire somebody for that. And it gets really complicated because you have to teach them your voice. You have to make sure they're paid on time. You're going to make sure that they understand your culture and what you're trying to do with your business at the start. If you can do it, just do it yourself and cultivate that communication skill. I especially advocate you should do this with blog posting. You should be writing your own blog post at the start and for the first few years at least, so you can start cultivating your voice as an entrepreneur. If you could do it, you should try to do it. It may take a bit of time, but it's going to be your own voice and you're going to be building skills and you're going to be getting the work done and you're going to be saving a ton of cash. Number five, Keep it simple with finances. Make sure you have some sort of accounting software. We use Xerox E R O. Xero.com is great to know what's coming in, what's coming out, and to make sure you're making a profit every month. That's the bottom line. Make sure you're making more than you're spending. The more expenses you have, the more complicated your business becomes. The more people you hire, the more expenses you have in terms of services that you use. It gets more and more complicated, so keep it as lean as possible. The less you have to keep track of, the better. I want you to do an exercise right now. Look at everything you're spending on your business right now. Look at all your expenses. If you don't have a list, make a list right now in Excel or in sheets and Google sheets and look at everything you spend on every single month, whether it's rent, employees, services, inventory, whatever it is. Write it all down, write all the prices and take a hard look and find out what you can cut, how you can simplify your expenses to make your finances simpler. Often our revenue is one or two or three sources and not that many. So it's easy to track revenue. But expenses? Let's keep it simple. Let's not have it all over the place. I know this is easier said than done when you have a larger business, but you could still make an effort to cut it down and keep it simple.

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To wrap up today's lesson. When you keep your business simple, you have a competitive advantage. You can move a lot quicker, you can make decisions quicker, you have a lot less on the line, and you create less problems for yourself. When things are confusing for you and your customers. You're constantly clarifying yourself. You're constantly using, you know, answering emails or customer support tickets that don't need answering. What's the difference between this plan and that plan? What's the difference between this and that? What do you mean by when you say play like Billy Joel? You get the point. If you do anything at all after listening to this episode, I want you to do this. Get a piece of paper, get a post it note and write kiss. Keep it simple, stupid, and paste it on your monitor, your computer, or wherever you work. And remind yourself to keep things simple whenever you're making decisions. I hope that helped. I hope you love today's episode. I sure love delivering it. I love these daily episodes. These are fantastic. I'm so glad we went back to daily. If you haven't heard, we are a daily podcast again. We were weekly for a year, but we're back to daily the way we started out. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss any episodes. And while you're at it, leave us a rating and review. By leaving us a rating and review, you help other people learn more about the show, and you enter our weekly random draw to win a free ride to one of our courses. We're giving away Easy Course, which is a $500 course, to somebody who leaves a rating and review. Do that now, and you can get free access to easy course, a $500 value. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. The best businesses I've run in my life are the simple ones, the ones that are not complicated, the ones that don't have so many, you know, variables. The ones that could just focus on delivering great products and services and great content to my customers. When I can just focus on my craft and allow that stuff, the good stuff that I'm offering, work for me rather than me try to juggle all these balls in the air. It makes for a much more simpler, relaxed, stress free environment. So I encourage you to keep it simple. All right, I'll check you in the next episode tomorrow where I share the biggest challenges I had in 2017 and we give away a free ride. Since it's Free Ride Friday, I'll check you then. Take care.

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