When you are starting your own online business, learning the ropes and perhaps invest in some training or coaching from an “expert” – there are 3 things that THEY will typically not tell you…
1. Growing Your Online Business Is Messy
Building a business is NEVER clean, straightforward or without setbacks. In fact, you can expect to have an ongoing series of challenges and if you are not, then chances are you are not making progress
The first thing any entrepreneur must be able to deal with uncertainty. You will have uncertainty over who your customer is, how best to reach them, what they will pay for and how much and how to grow your business when you reach one level of success.
Certainly you can learn from others, limit your uncertainty and test to help keep your risk in check, but you can’t expect 100% certainty – or even 75% certainty in most cases is unrealistic, instead you must be willing to use the knowledge you have and try new things, pivot based on feedback and keep plugging forward despite ongoing uncertainty in your business
In addition to this uncertainty, things will fail…look at these as learning points or as stepping stones on your way to the top. The quicker you can learn what isn’t working, but sooner you can get to what DOES work
2. There Is Very Little Balance
Everyone would love it if there was some magical business where you could work when you want, where you want and spend half your time on vacation, partying or having fun with friends and family.
That business does not exist – at least it doesn’t as you build your business.
Your new online business will take every last ounce of your energy and every last minute of your day IF you want it to succeed and succeed quickly.
Business works because of massive action, speed, momentum – all required to build the force that will allow you to dominate your market and be top-of-mind to your high-spending clients
That said, there are certainly some things you can build into your business that will help you have more balance, here are 3 of them:
- Build once, sell forever – I’m less of a fan of businesses that exchange straight time/effort for dollars (professionals, consultants, teachers, trainers, speakers, etc…all fall into that camp). While you can make a nice living exchanging time for money, you can’t scale into a truly leveraged enterprise which limits your growth potential and eats up all of your time
- Leverage partners – I also see many online businesses go crazy building their content creation and advertising efforts without leveraging the strength of an ecosystem of partners. Would you rather blow your brains out spending days generating content or thousands of dollars to get 1000 leads OR would you rather spend an hour securing a partner who will bring you those 1000 leads without an ounce of extra effort on your part? Think about how you can leverage partnerships, JV’s and affiliates in your business
- Systems and Automation – Right from the time you start your business, you want to begin to document and teach systems for a) launching new products b) creating new content c) researching markets and communicating with that market d) writing ads and sales letters, e) lead generation and conversion, etc… You do all of this so it is repeatable and can be scaled out once you hit on a successful method. Striking a balance between real-time, one-on-one or one-to-many engagements with your market and automated engagements (Ex email autoresponder sequences and ongoing product launches) allows you to optimize both conversions while giving you back some time to further scale your business
3. Action Trumps All Else
Don’t ever listen to someone who favors theory, learning, planning over action. Sure, it’s smart to continually learn and plan, but the ratio should favor action to learning/planning in any business. If you find yourself spending more than 50% of your time learning and planning (or doing anything but taking action on your business) then you will not be effective in generating momentum and profits in your online business
Despite these online business realities, if you are at a point in your life where the risk and pain associated with NOT starting your own business is greater than the challenges that face you as an entrepreneur, then you are ready to jump in and give it everything you’ve got.
Face the realities above full-on, the benefits of building wealth and value through starting your own business far outweigh the challenges and now that you see some of the main challenges, you will be better prepared than ever to overcome them on your journey to being a successful entrepreneur.
