🎯 Work Smart Wednesday - November 22, 2023
What order I usually prioritise tasks in a new business, charging less creates a vicious cycle, and a quote on order
Work Smart Wednesday
👋 Hey there!
Here is your weekly dose of Work Smart Wednesday
In these emails I will share with you 3 things to help you work smarter in 3 minutes or less. That leaves you with 10,077 more minutes to conquer your goals this week
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1. ▲ The business hierarchy of needs
I have a very clear order of what to focus on when I start a new business.
After years of starting businesses, and many more years of helping others to start and grow their businesses, I have identified a pattern. An order of operations.
I like to call it the business hierarchy of needs. Adapted from Maslow’s original.
You can do all the right things, but the right things in the wrong order still won’t get you anywhere
What is the order?
Sales
You must focus on creating cash. Without cash, your business doesn’t exist.
Profit
Now you have sales, you need to create stability. Stability requires profit so you can sustain yourself long term. Now you have a proven business with sales, you can focus on turning those sales into profit.
Order
Congratulations, you are achieving profit and have the first signs of stability. Now we must create efficiency. We need to maximise our ability to generate profit efficiently and sustainably. Changes (and competitors!) are coming.
Impact
You are strong and stable. Things run smoothly. You find yourself with free time AND money. Time to create transformation. We can now turn our attention to creating meaningful impact. Start with our immediate circle and our own teams and build from there.
Legacy
Reaching this point is a rare achievement. You have built a real business and you have helped many. Time to create permanence. We now consider how to ensure the longevity of the organisation and our impact over generations. Safeguarding and successful handovers become key.
Many people get caught up in the future and neglect the present. I know that until I have decent sales, I have absolutely no business trying to maximise efficiency by building things like extensive analytics or elaborate CRM systems.
Often, you need to do seemingly inefficient tasks in order to generate your first sales and kickstart the momentum you require to build a real business. As I mentioned last week, as you scale your priorities shift.
I work with clients to go through these stages in this order. I currently have clients at each of these stages.
Yes, we can work as few as 10-20 hours per week from the very beginning, but what we spend those hours doing is key.
What stage are you at?
2. 💸 What causes you to charge less
Summary: Charging low prices creates a vicious cycle - it attracts bad clients which then keeps you trapped in the low-prices cycle. Having bad clients is more damaging to you than having no clients at all. Fire your bad clients. Charge your worth, or you will encourage bad clients.
DEPTH:
It is easy to get caught in a trap of charging low prices. That trap can be very difficult to escape from.
Not all clients are created equal. The customer is not always right. Bad clients exist.
Having bad clients is more damaging to you than having no clients at all.
I once had a client who would email me at all times of the day and would get mad if I didn’t respond within an hour. And you know what, that was my fault. I built that expectation and I allowed it to continue for too long.
I changed things, and now I have a very respectful relationship with all of my clients. I would genuinely consider most of my active clients to be some of the best people I have had the fortune of meeting. I now only work with people I consider to be good people.
Unfortunately, not everybody has this situation.
I often work with business owners to break this vicious cycle of low prices. The first two steps often feel scary but are absolutely necessary: we need to fire our bad clients, and we need to make our offer more appealing to good clients.
Think of the worst clients you have had in your business. What do they have in common?
Often, the worst clients are those that have paid the least. They may be the people who beat you down to a low price, or those that you dropped the price for.
When people push for a low price, it is for one of two reasons: they cannot afford to pay you properly or they don’t value you and your offer. Both are terrible for you.
If they cannot afford to pay you properly, they NEED your thing to work. Usually, they need it to work quickly or everything comes crashing down around them. They are usually busy and distracted, which leads to them not completing their parts of the process effectively or on time. These people become extremely high maintenance, they ask questions all the time and try to extract every iota of value from you, while simultaneously making it harder for you to deliver any value at all. This is draining. This causes you to divert valuable time and resources to serving a client with low potential.
If they do not value you and your offer, they simply don’t give a damn about you. They are likely disrespectful, and equally high maintenance. They have unreasonably high expectations and unreasonably low understanding. This causes you to loose self-esteem which erodes both you and your business.
The solution?
Be willing to fire clients. Hold firm to your prices. Charge your worth.
Good clients not only don’t mind paying proper prices, they actively seek out the suppliers charging proper prices. They know that the best suppliers know their worth and charge proper prices.
It can be difficult at first to fire clients and charge your worth, but I promise it gets easier. You just need to start.
What bad client are you going to fire today?
3. 💡 Quote I'm pondering
“Doing the right thing at the wrong time is like using the right key in the wrong lock”
Click here to share this quote on Twitter
The order of operations is MUCH more important than people realise.
Over the last few issues I have highlighted a few ways that I use to make sure I am doing the right things in the right order.
Doing the right thing at the right time poorly is still more valuable than doing the wrong thing at the wrong time absolutely perfectly.
That's it! I can't wait to hear what you think. What did you find most useful? What do you want more or less of? Reply to this email now and let me know
Also, if you have anything interesting to share, I want to know about it😊
Have a great week,
John
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