282. The 5 Business Mistakes I Wish I'd Fixed Sooner

Speaker A: Welcome to the Productive Insights podcast where you can learn how to systemize, automate and scale your business via the Internet. To, uh, access previous episodes and useful productivity tips, go to www.productiveinsights.com. now here's your host, Ash Roy.

Speaker B: There are five mistakes that, uh, destroy service based businesses. And it happens consistently. Over the last 12, I've interviewed some of the world's brightest minds, like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki. I've had a membership program where I've worked with consultants and I've found the same set of problems happening over and over again. And in this video, I'm going to share with you what can derail your business and how you can avoid it. For example, a lot of businesses are focused on generating revenue and that is the kiss of death unless you focus on what matters more. And we'll talk about that soon. So grab a coffee and, and let's go for a walk. When I first started, everything was new. I, uh, just finished my cpa. I'd done an mba, I'd done the whole corporate thing, and I was feeling freedom. I also wanted to learn. And so I decided that I would learn as much as I possibly could. But then I got hooked on learning. One of the biggest mistakes I've made and I've seen creators make inside my membership program is they confuse movement with progress. You see, when you do a lot of learning and you consume a lot of content, there is this feeling of forward movement and it's pretty exhilarating. But when it comes to making progress, you've got to implement what you learn. So something I learned to do was to try and change the ratio of my content consumption and content creation from 10 is to 1 where I was consuming 10 times as much content as I was creating it to a ratio of one to one. So if I consumed content for an hour, then I would focus at least an hour on creating content. So if I was to start again, one thing I would do is change my content consumption and content creation ratio from 10 to 1 down to 1 is to 1. Okay, so my second big mistake was not coming up with an offer early enough. I was really scared to launch a product. I didn't want to look stupid. I didn't want to burn my brand. I didn't want to upset my audience. But sometimes you can be too careful. The way you come up with great products is by putting them out into the world, launching and iterating. The idea of saying, I'm going to learn that one more thing that can be a real Trap. And I'm ashamed to say this, but it took me a good couple of years before I actually launched my first product. So my advice to you is create an offer as quickly as you possibly can. That's what I would do if I was starting again today. And you don't have to have the whole world buy your offer. You only need to get 10 people to buy and ask them why they bought or if they don't buy, ask them why they didn't buy. But this is how you learn from the market and you iterate your offer until it solves a real problem that your customer wants to solve. If you'd like to learn more about this whole process, it's part of a nine step business growth framework and I'll link to it in the description below. No opt in required. But if you do want to get access to the free email course, I will link to that in the description below as well. Okay, the third mistake was getting obsessed with revenue. I got to say, I see a lot of bro marketers out there talking about million dollar this, million dollar that. But if you're not profitable, revenue is a meaningless number. You have to be profitable to be able to stay in business. Focus on building a profitable business from the get go. And even more important than profit is cash flow. If you don't have enough cash flow, then chances are, uh, you're not going to be around in the next reporting period to be able to even claim your profit. So my recommendation would be focus on cash flow first, profit second, and revenue third. The next lesson I learned was don't try and scale too early. When I first started, I was really excited. I wanted to make millions of dollars by the first month. But the truth is, it takes time to build a great business. And more importantly, it takes time to build a great product. Now there is an argument to be made for throwing money at the problem and getting that escape velocity by investing a lot of dollars in marketing. But I think the risk of doing that is you create a really crappy product. And when you throw marketing dollars at the problem, you're putting lipstick on a pig. As they say here in Australia, you're not solving the problem, you're just shoving a poor quality product down your audience's throats. And the minute you take the marketing dollars off it, the product absolutely crashes. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in his second act, the first thing he did was get rid of about 70% of the product lines. And people thought he was insane. But his view was that if the products are great. The rest will take care of itself. At that time, Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy. And today at the time of this recording, Apple is worth about $4.2 trillion. So clearly that worked. Credit where credit's due. Tim Cook has certainly done a great job in terms of building the supply chain and taking Apple to the next level. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak together, putting the foundations of great quality business practices. So my advice would be focus on creating products that deliver great user experiences and are very profitable right from the beginning. If you have to throw marketing dollars at what you consider to be a business problem, then chances are there's an issue with your product. But if your product is great, it should fly off the shelves, literally or digitally. So the fifth mistake I made is I didn't get to know people that were a little bit ahead of me. Soon enough we can learn so much from mentors who are further down the track. They can save us so many missed opportunities and unnecessary dead ends. So if I was to do it again, I would get myself to speaking events and go there as an attendee and try and meet with the speakers, find a way to connect with them. Um, I would organize in person meetups, particularly today when people seem to value the in person connection that much more. And I would make sure I was inviting people that were a few steps ahead of me to these in person meetups. You don't have to have Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki as friends to be successful. You just need to have people who are a little bit further forward than you are and you'll be surprised at what you learn. If you don't meet with people further down the path, then you don't know what you don't know and, and that can really hurt you and your business growth. Now if you found this video useful, you should definitely check out this video, which goes into more detail about some of the things we've discussed. I'll also add a link in the description below. So that's it for me today. I hope you found these five lessons useful. If you did, please leave a comment below, uh, letting me know which one you found most useful and I'll see you in the next one. Ciao for now. Cheers.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Productive Insights podcast. You can find all the links in the show notes below this episode on productiveinsights.com you can also ask questions in the comment section that Ash personally answers. How can Ash, uh, help you today?