Invest for success
Some people expect something for nothing in their businesses.
Others realise that success comes from investment in appropriate resources.
Let me elaborate…
There are many coaches and consultants who struggle to earn £30,000 (US$47,000) a year, and can’t get enough clients willing to pay their hourly rate. Many of the ones I talk with don’t pay a coach or consultant themselves.
And if they do use a coach, they sometimes aren’t willing to pay a coach that charges significantly more per hour than they do.
Equally there are many business owners that want to succeed but baulk at paying to promote their businesses.
After making a lot of mistakes, I’ve found what has worked for me over the years…
1. I have paid well for good advice.
There’s a marketing consultant in the States called Dan Kennedy.
Several years ago he was charging $7,800 for a day’s consulting in his home.
I contacted him to book a day with him.
He couldn’t fit me in for 3 months.
I asked if I could pay the $7,800, get an hour with him on the phone in the coming weeks, then spend an hour less when I came to meet with him.
He agreed.
The advice he gave me in that first hour was so helpful that I felt I had got $7,800 of value already.
The (almost) full day later with him would simply be a bonus.
Here’s a photo of me with Dan…
I have told this story to many people.
A number of them said they’d never pay $7,800 for consulting.
It was too much money.
But I wasn’t concerned with the amount.
I was only concerned with the impact on my bottom line. The main topic of conversation with Dan was my then new CD set called The Effort-Free Life System. His advice was one of a number of investments I made to enable me to generate $3m in gross sales revenue for this one product.
Dan now charges $18,000 a day, and smart business owners continue to engage him.
2. I have paid well for advertising and promotion.
When I started my mail order business, LifeTools – which sold personal development products – I started by spending £50 ($75) for small display ads.
Here’s one of my first ads, top left…
Over the next several years I booked bigger and bigger ads.
Each ad was coded so I could work out how many enquiries and how much profit I was making from each ad. In the example above you can see that the address is Dept I2: this was the second ad I booked in a magazine called i-to-i.)
For every £ or $ I invested I was getting 2-10 times this back in gross profit within a month or 2.
So I happily moved to full-page colour ads, then multiple full-page colour ads in the same publication. I paid thousands of pounds/dollars for an ad in Men’s Health, like this one for a ‘speed reading’-type course called PhotoReading. It looks like an article, it’s heavy on text – and it worked like gangbusters…
When I started my business I had some direct competitors.
While my ads got bigger, the size of their ads stayed the same.
Perhaps they were stuck as a result of a limiting mindset.
Eventually these businesses disappeared completely.
I was happy to pay thousands of pounds/dollars for a page because my core sales spreadsheet showed that the risk of me losing money on it was very low.
It was an almost surefire investment.
Other people who enquired about my strategies saw the amount I was paying for one ad and freaked out.
Your takeaways…
Getting paid-for advice
- Work out how much you are spending on coaches/consultants/mentors
- Determine the Return On Investment on each of them in terms of money and time invested by you
- If you can’t work out an ROI, create systems to help you create an ROI over time. Or get rid of these consultants, and use ones who can help you prove their worth to you and your business
- Spend more on consultants that give you the most bang per buck
Advertising and promotion
- Find out what is working
- Do more of what works
- Stop doing what doesn’t!
- See where you are limiting yourself and your business and thinking small – and consider thinking bigger, and being more ambitious with your vision and how you’ll get there
Let me know how you get on!
