Recession Busting Secret Number 7

Decide Where You’re Going and Set Clearly Defined, Time Limited Goals to Get There

It’s my observation there are two types of business owners and entrepreneurs; merry-go-round and elevator entrepreneurs.  Merry-go-round entrepreneurs go round and round and round and round the same motions, over and over and over and over again (see how mundane it is), getting nowhere but dizzy (and a bit sick)and certainly not making any forward progress.

These are business owners who arrive in their shops, offices, garages, salons etc. with no clear idea of what they’ll do that day and just ‘see what happens’.

On the other hand, elevator entrepreneurs are constantly finding the fastest, easiest ways to ‘jump’ to the next level. Always testing, always trying something new, always tweaking, and never giving up.

These are the ones that get to their businesses every day (if they’re not at their home office busy working on attracting new clients and looking after current clients) with a rock-solid clear plan of what they want to achieve that day, that week, that month and that year and what skills they need to get there.

Both types require work, but one type gets to a whole different destination to the other. The difference in the ultimate destination is quite simple setting clear, time defined goals.

Here’s an example…If I told you there was a million pounds sat waiting for you on an island in Hawaii and all you had to do was go find it within 48 hours and you could have it, could you do it?

There are over 100 islands in Hawaii…It’ be quite difficult wouldn’t it?

If I now told you which island it was on, would that make it easier? Of course it would, but still nigh on impossible as the island I’ve put the money on is the Big Island which has 4,000 odd square miles.

If I now told you which road it was on and which house it was at, could you find it? Getting easier right…

If I told you where to book airplane tickets, which airport to leave from, which airport to go to, how to get a car, and gave you a GPS system and the exact address of the house where the money was, could you now find it? Of course…Of course…

And exactly the same principles apply to your journey with your business from where you are now, to where you want to be.

You must know exactly where you want to get to and then simply work backwards identifying each step you need to take along the way.

Setting clearly defined, time limited goals is the ultimate secret to beating recession and achieving all the success you want from your business and your life.

Time for Me to Shut Up

Ok, that brings us to the end of this ride. Please unbuckle your seat belt, stand up, step to the left and get going.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the secrets I’ve shared with you as much as I’ve enjoyed writing about them.

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Recession Busting Secret Number 5

How to Have All Your Overheads Paid for on the 1^st Day of the Month Before You Serve One Client

Out of all my recession proofing secrets, this is probably the fastest way to bring rapid stability to your business and give you such an enormous advantage over your competition they simply will not know what ‘hit them’.

I first realised its power while doing a 5km run on a tread mill at my local gym about 5 years ago. I was on the last 1km, pushing hard and trying to keep my mind off my puffing and panting by thinking about how to help my clients.  I’d renewed my membership that day and ‘plumped’ for the joint membership of £64 per month (which was clearly good value as a single membership was £44 and my fiancée had wanted to join).

My membership number was 2,343 and I’d asked the chap if that was the number of members they had. His response was ‘No, some of those have expired, we have around 1,700.’

Ok…back to the treadmill…

I did some quick maths in my head. £44 times 1,700. Um, that’s £74,800 a month. Even if 50% are joint membership that’s still £64,600…Per month…Every month, even before anyone has been to the gym!

But what really got my attention was whenever I’d been in the gym (and I had until recently been going twice a day), there were never more than about 15 people in there!

I finished my run red faced and sweating, stumbled over to the gym manager, legs like lead and asked him:

Of your active members, how many actually use the gym?

Did the active members that didn’t use the gym complain about the money they’d paid but not used?

His answers were as I expected. Only about 20% of members used the gym, and they’d only had 2 people ask for their unused gym money back in 18 months!

That means the model they use can sail through even the most severe of recessions. Plus their stable cash flow means they can easily allocate big ‘chunk of change’ to go find affluent new members and spend a lot of money to get them! Had they been reliant on single transactions, not knowing how they were going to do from one month to the next would have left them needing to be frugal about spending money.

You can and SHOULD use this model in your business immediately. A percentage of your clients will happily pay you a certain amount of money every month, automatically billed via direct debit or credit card in return for two things:

a) Getting more value than they pay. If they automatically bill for say £50 a month, give them a little more in ‘monthly money’ to spend with you e.g. £60. You’ll still make more!

b) Treat them as VIPs’… Have a range of V.I.P ‘bragging’ benefits e.g. fast booking, dedicated booking number, free gifts, member lounge, and member parking…

Even at just 100 members to a program like this you’ve banked £5,000.00 a month before you’ve completed one treatment. Plus, member clients will very often outspend their ‘monthly money’ because once they’re in your shop, on your website or whatever if they buy products for £25 it feels like they’ve only spent £25 (as the automatic billing happened in the background)…

Can you see what a dramatic difference this can make to your businesses profitability, stability and ability to weather hard times?

The key is to adapt the strategy to formulate a win-win for you and for your clients. And there is ALWAYS a way to do it!

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