Chris Cooper's Blog, page 142

Why I Hung Up On My Mentor

When you pay $50,000 per year for mentoring, you usually want to get the most out of every phone call. But I’ve cut the last two calls with my mentor short.

After 45 minutes, I said, “That’s it. I’m good.” and we ended the call. Because I had enough to take action…and no more.

The longer you have a mentor, the better you get at being mentored.

When I hired my first mentor, I was definitely in the Founder Phase. I had owned my gym for nearly four years. I expected him to give me a marketing silver bullet; instead, he gave me the Roles and Tasks exercise. It took us months to get that done. Then we moved onto the staff playbook…

Now gym owners get more accomplished in 8 weeks of the Incubatorthan I did in over a year with my first mentor. And it’s simply because you’re better students than I was (well, maybe the templates help a bit.)

My second mentor basically stopped taking my calls. I hammered him so hard on the minutae that I really didn’t get the “big stuff” done. I think I wanted him to do the work FOR me. Or maybe I was using the little details as an excuse to avoid the big, hard work.

My third mentor was a lot different. Instead of piling ideas on me, we spent most of our time discarding ideas. We trimmed my buffet of opportunities down to 3, and then applied the Kingmaker equation to each: Was this idea worth my Effective Hourly Rate? If not, I didn’t do it. And when we decided, I hung up and got to work right away.

When I visited Jason Atkins at 360Insights, a billion-dollar company in the incentives industry, he told me he uses the same strategy when he attends seminars. Atkins pays for the seminar and books a hotel for the weekend. But he plans to stay in the seminar ONLY until he learns one new thing. Then he folds up his laptop and returns to his hotel room to work on the new strategy.

Others at the same seminar might learn more. But NOBODY takes more action. And you already know the punchline: education without action is meaningless.

Ryan Holiday is helping me out with my next book, “Founder | Farmer | Tinker | Thief”. Our phone calls cost $1500 each. They’re worth it. And even on the very first call, I hung up after 45 minutes because my action list was already becoming too long. I had a choice: to spend 15 minutes making small talk, or to spend 15 minutes taking inspired action. So I hung up.

Last night, I was on the phone with Ann Maynard, the editor of the new book. Ann’s brilliant, encouraging and I learn a lot on every call. But after only TWENTY MINUTES, I knew my next steps, so I ended the call and spent 40 minutes taking inspired action.

The meter doesn’t stop, of course. I don’t get a partial refund for not taking the full hour. What I get is a window for optimized work.

I’m in the Tinker Phase. I don’t need more ideas. I don’t need inspiration anymore. I need clarity.

If I can achieve clarity in 45 minutes–or 20, or even 5–then I’ve already gotten tremendous value from the call. Back to the desk, back to work!

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How To Have Hard Conversations

I hate confrontation.

 

I build things up to be too big in my mind. I’m a “people-pleaser”, and I want everyone to like me. And I know that arguments usually distract me from doing the REAL work; I can’t resist them when they happen, so I try to avoid them.

 

But as I grew from Founder to Farmer to Tinker, hard conversations became more important. And they just got harder.

 

As the Founder of a gym business, firing a client was very hard. There were hundreds of dollars at stake, which was big money back then. But more important, I worried about the client’s reaction: how would she feel? How would she react? What would she say in my gym? What would she tell people on Facebook?

 

In the Farmer phase, I had to start managing staff. That meant evaluations, and correcting their actions, and even firing a couple. Those conversations were harder by an order of magnitude: decisions affected the staff person and their families, and sometimes my clients, too.

 

And in Tinker phase, every conversation set the precedent for the company, hundreds of clients, and dozens of staff. Most decisions were held with tens of thousands of dollars in the balance; some literally had hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting in the balance. And some were more important than any amount of money.

 

My new mentor, Marcy, was chosen precisely to help me with leadership. And leadership means having hard conversations. On our first call, Marcy told me:

 

“Chris, sometimes you’re being tactful. But sometimes you’re just hiding.”

 

And it’s true. Sometimes I DO avoid tough conversations and tell myself to “cool off for a bit” or “phrase this politely.” Both are wise…but not when they’re avoidance techniques.

 

Thanks to years of experience, dozens of hard conversations, and Marcy, I’ve learned a lot about hard conversations. Here are some things to keep in mind for context before you start:

Anticipation is always worse than the event.
Every tough conversation you have is just practice for a tough conversation in the future, when the stakes will be higher.
People aren’t really paying much attention to you. You might be staying up all night worrying about “The Big Talk”, but they probably aren’t.
The greatest gift you can give the other person is clarity. Respect them enough to say what you mean.

 

Here are my action steps:

Hold the conversation at the highest possible level of the communication hierarchy. Face-to-face is best. If that’s not possible because of geography, use a video call. If that’s not possible, call them on the phone. Email is poor for having hard conversations, because it’s very hard to read intent into the written word. And text isn’t an option at all.
Be sure, but act quickly. Get the facts. But be aware of procrastination strategies like “I need more information” or opinion-gathering. This isn’t a democracy.
Avoid emotional language. “I feel like…” or “I think you should…” completely dampens your message, says “I’m unsure.”
If you’re talking to a staff member, client or friend you’d like to keep around, work through this next step. If you’re going to end your relationship, skip to #5.

Let them release their emotion first. Picture their anger, frustration, or sadness as a big black balloon that’s floating between your faces. You can’t really see each other while that balloon is there, so let the air out of it–slowly.

Get right to the heart of their concern by asking a pointed question: “So you’re worried about this rate increase?” Then let them vent out all of their emotions.

When the balloon is a little deflated, poke it again. You want it completely empty. “You’re concerned you won’t be able to afford the gym anymore?”

You might have to poke it a third time. Only when the emotional content of their speech is gone can you begin working on a solution. This was outlined in Chris Voss’ excellent book, “Never Split The Difference.”
Then lay out your case clearly. “More words don’t make people feel better”, Seth Godin wrote in “This is Marketing“. If you’re breaking up with them, start the conversation with “We’re breaking up.”

If you’re removing them as a client, say “I’m so sorry this isn’t working out. We do our best to please every client, but we’re just not a good fit.”

If you’re firing them as a staff person, say so. Don’t do them the disservice of hiding behind stock language like “we’re going another direction.” Tell them: “I can’t have you coaching anymore, because you haven’t corrected X and Y.”
Give them a cool down period. “I’d like you to take a day or two before you respond. Think about what we’ve said. Then, if you want to talk some more, we can set up a phone call. In the meantime, I promise to be discrete about this conversation and trust you’ll do the same.”

 

There’s a lot more to it, and nothing beats practice. You’ll get better as you go. Luckily, you can practice on your loved ones, or your staff (we made a deck of cards called the “TwoBrain Scenario Deck” for this precise purpose.) You’ll feel funny asking others to role-play with you, but it’s worth practicing, and practicing on neutral parties will save you painful and expensive practice in real life.

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The HHH Model for Solving Problems

“First with the head, then with the heart, then with the hands” is more than our motto at TwoBrain. It’s a tactic.

 

Problems are solved in three steps:

Deciding the right thing to do
Deciding the right way to do it
Doing the right thing.

 

First with the head, then with the heart, then with the hands.

 

First, the head. Making decisions in business means the objective review of data. In the CrossFit world, there’s no centrally-held database of prices or retention or–well, anything. So we’ve carefully built our own from the thousands of gym owners who have filled out our Gym Checkup, and the 500 currently under our mentorship umbrella. We can say, with certainty, what an owner should be charging for a group class in their city, and how much an owner can safely raise rates to reach that number. We know what keeps members longer, and we can also predict what your ad spend must be to recruit new members. We have the largest data set in the industry.

That’s what “First with the head” means: making the right decision through objective consideration of facts.

 

But knowing the right answer is only half of the decision-making process.

 

When I was a new affiliate owner, I was spammed mercilessly by a “consultant” in the CrossFit space. His emails were so bad that I thought, “If this is what I have to do to succeed in CrossFit, then I don’t want to be an affiliate anymore.” Luckily, I was sure there had to be another way. Back then, when failure was a very real possibility, I took some small comfort knowing that I’d never humiliate my clients, or trap them into contracts they didn’t want, or sell them on some bait-and-switch Trojan horse. I think most gym owners share the same values. We got into this to help people. Sometimes, when we’re desperate, we make mistakes. But we ultimately want to be proud of ourselves and our gyms, and that means doing things the right way.

 

“…then with the heart” means doing business in a caring way. Success doesn’t have to come at the price of your soul.

 

But the hardest part of anything is taking action. An object at rest stays at rest until moved by an external force. Many owners keep their grandfathered rates even though they understand their mistake. They keep their discounts even when they can’t afford to pay a coach to cover the 7pm class and miss their kids’ bedtimes. They KNOW the answer, and they care plenty. But they still don’t move, because it’s really easy to say:

“Tomorrow.”

 

Just like our clients do.

 

And that’s what mentorship is all about: helping you make informed decisions; deliver those decisions in a caring way; and taking action.

 

How would you like to end 2019–the way you’re ending 2018? I hope it’s better. Heck, I hope you end 2019 on a Perfect Day, proud of your generosity and beaming from success. Don’t be scared to make moves, and when it’s time to make a tough choice, follow the same template I do:

 

“First with the head, then with the heart, then with the hands.”

 

Here’s Jay Williams talking at the 2017 Summit on Taking Action. Can’t see the video below? Click here.

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Give The Gift That Matters Most

My hope is that you are not reading this email. I hope that you are wrapping presents, decorating a tree, or preparing a delicious meal for the family.

 

I hope that you are surrounding yourself with loved ones and taking a moment to be in the present and build some memories. What I hope the MOST for you is that you are taking a break from your inbox and from the daily grind. I want to wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday season.

 

But if for some reason, you are heading into the gym or the office or the gym-office, I wanted to share with you and revisit a topic I wrote about earlier this year.

 

When we are in the grind trying our hardest to grow our business and get new members, sometimes we lose sight of what really matters most.

 

A lot of the marketing gurus out there will often say:

“You need to build funnels and pump as many people into that funnel as you can. Gain more than you lose and you’ll end up on top.”

 

The underlying sentiment here is this: marketing is a numbers game.

 

But we at Two-Brain do not believe in this idea.

 

Instead of focusing on leads, how many came in, how do I get my cost per lead down, how can I spend less to get more – why don’t we focus on giving more. Give to your members that you already have.

 

Every day I talk to gym owners and they say, “I have 90% close rate, I have the best coaches in town, the problem is, I just need more leads, more people coming through the door.”

 

But my advice is to stop. Stop thinking of marketing as a numbers game. Stop thinking of people as numbers. Focus on the people- that’s the game for us at Two-Brain.

 

We are in the business of helping people. Give more to the people you have and they will stay forever. You don’t need more leads, you need to deliver results to your current members. That’s the greatest gift you can give them. If you can do that – consistently- THEN you are ready to market and grow.

 

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Love,

Mateo Lopez

Two-Brain Marketing Mentor

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KPIs

You manage what you measure. Key Performance Indicators let you know, at a glance, how your business is doing.

But there are dozens of KPIs to choose from. Which should you use, and when, to get a clear picture?

It depends on your place in the entrepreneurial lifecycle.

Take the test here to find out which phase of entrepreneurship you’re in. Then, read on:

 

In the Founder Phase, you want to keep it simple. The KPIs you need to measure are:

ARM – Average Revenue per Month (per member or client). In an average month, how much does your average client pay you?

If you’re on monthly billing, this is the total of all recurring billing plus any other purchases the client makes. To calculate, sum all of our service revenue and divide by the number of clients served.

For example, if you own a gym, ARM is the sum of all memberships, personal training, nutrition coaching or specialty programs you sell, divided by the number of clients you have.

If you own a therapy clinic, your ARM is the total revenue made from all modalities divided by the number of clients you saw (not the number of visits.)

If you own a dental office, your ARM is the total billable revenue divided by the number of patients you treated (not the number of appointments.)

ARM is a measure of your sales process.

In cases where your model includes some retail sales, like clothing or supplements, include your retail sales ONLY when your profit margin on retail products is over 33%. If your margin on t-shirts is 10%, don’t count t-shirt sales toward your ARM.

LEG – Length of Engagement, usually measured in months. How long does your average client stay with you?

LEG is a measure of your operational excellence. Many entrepreneurs can increase their profit fastest by focusing on LEG, which is why we work through operations first in the Incubator.

 

LTV – Lifetime Value of a client. What is the average new client worth to your business over their lifetime?

To determine LTV, multiply ARM x LEG. Knowing your LTV is critical before you start marketing, because you have to know whether to focus on gross headcount or quality leads. In most service businesses, the quality of your clients is far more important than the total number, so LTV tells you whether you’re ready to grow or not.

 

Fixed Costs – the expenses that recur every month without changing. For example, your rent doesn’t change (or at least it changes rarely, and follows a predictable schedule.) Your internet bill doesn’t change. Your heating or cooling bill might go up or down, but it never goes away, and rarely changes by more than 10%. These are your fixed costs: you know they’re going to be there every single month. And your job, as a Founder, is to minimize these fixed costs. To do that, you need to track them.

Profit – Revenue minus fixed costs. Your goal, in Founder Phase, is to reach the breakeven point and pay yourself at least $100 per week. That might mean you don’t declare a profit at all, but you’re not declaring a loss either. We call this “breakeven plus”.

In the Farmer Phase, we need to track a few more KPIs.

 

ARM, LEG, LTV, Fixed Costs and Profit are still tracked the same way. Fixed costs, especially, must be kept under constant surveillance, because the temptation to add equipment and space is huge for many entrepreneurs. It’s easy to confuse a larger business with a more successful business, but profit is the real scorecard. In the fitness industry, especially, many gym owners add space, equipment and staff, but find themselves making less money than before.

Here are the other KPIs to track in Farmer Phase:

Staff Pay – total staff costs should be 44% or less of your gross. We call this the 4/9 model, but other financial experts use different names. Greg Crabtree, author of Simple Numbers, calculates LER (labor efficiency ratio). But the rule is that every staff person should generate a multiple of what they’re paid. In the service industry, most of your staff will be client-facing, so they should generate at least 2.25x their pay. Looking at it from the other direction, that means they should be paid a maximum of 44% of the revenue they drive.

Leads – A headcount of newly-interested potential clients who are entering your funnel. An audience is the total number of people who saw your ad or were exposed to your brand; a lead took some action to indicate interest. They might have filled out a form on your site, or called your business, or booked an appointment, but they were more than passive observers.

Conversions – The number of potential clients (leads) who became actual clients by making a purchase. They haven’t converted until money has been exchanged.

 

When you reach Tinker Phase, your KPIs shift from business-specific to personal development. At this stage, you’re no longer working in the business, so you have staff to track and report KPIs. But you ARE working on yourself, and tracking the business’ KPIs will help you set long-term strategy too.

Your staff should prepare and report the above KPIs. As a review, they are:

ARM
LEG
LTV
Fixed Costs
Profit
Staff Pay
Leads
Conversions

You should personally track some new metrics:

EHR – your Effective Hourly Rate. You want to know how to leverage your time best, and EHR will help you determine where you’re spending time on low-value roles and tasks.

Days off – Yes, you need to rest. Your primary responsibilities in Tinker phase are cognitive: you need to train your brain and allow it to grow during rest periods. Like a muscle, your brain needs consistent training and time to super compensate.

Genius time – loosely defined as “time in flow state”. At this stage, your greatest value is to focus on the single role that grows your business. You must maximize the time spent in that role, and your focus during that time. We call the time spent in your “genius role” as your flow time. You can get our free guide to maximizing your flow time at www.twobrain.com/flow.

 

These are the KPIs that TwoBrain mentors record and track every month.

If you don’t know where you are, how can you get anywhere?

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The Martyrdom

“10:19pm. Leaving the shop. Missed my girls, but my morning clients will have clean floors. All about the hustle!”

“I don’t care if this business ever pays me. I love the community and I’ll fight like hell to keep it open!”

“A bunch of members quit when this new gym opened down the road. They’ve got daddy’s money and all the toys. But I’m just going to keep coaching my clients even better even if it means my wife has to go back to work.”

Scroll through the Instagram and Facebook pages of entrepreneurs for an hour today, and I guarantee you’ll find one of these. I know, because that’s where I found all three.

All came from excellent people who are changing their clients’ lives.

All came from people who had thousands of followers on Social Media.

All came from people who deserve better. All came from dads whose kids deserve to see them at bedtime. All came from husbands whose wives deserve to live without stressing over the grocery bill.

This has to stop.

Here are the myths that lead to martyrdom, and what to do about them:

No one can do it like I can. You *might* be the best hairdresser in your salon, but I doubt you’re the best cleaner. Or the best Instagrammer, best scheduler, best website builder, best writer or best bookkeeper. You’re definitely not the best at ALL of them, I promise. And there’s a way to pay them that doesn’t involve asking volunteer coaches to be volunteer cleaners.
There’s no money to pay myself. Yes there is. Your expenses will always expand to fill your revenues. If you pay yourself first, you’ll get paid.

I opened my first business on Monday, and had to get paid on Friday. I emptied the business bank account to do so, because there wasn’t an option: make money, or don’t eat. Not everyone has the luxury of absolute necessity, so they delay paying themselves. And then they get into the habit of working for free, and never start. Your business is not successful until it can support you. That’s its purpose.
Leaders eat last. A humble statement repeated by leaders who aren’t starving. The statement should really be, “Leaders Eat.”

Let’s say you’re flying to Australia. It’s a 20-hour flight, and the catering crew forgot to load the plane. One of the stewards finds a single sandwich in the fridge. Who gets it? I’d give it to the pilot, because if he goes hungry, the rest of us go into the ocean.

There is no glory, no sainthood, in depriving yourself while your coaches get paid.
I need to pay off all my debt before I take a paycheck. Also false. Cash flow is more important–especially at startup–than your annual balance sheet. When I had to buy my partners’ share of the debt in 2010, I called the bank and asked to consolidate my loans and spread them out over a longer time frame. I was ashamed and embarrassed and felt like a failure.

My loan officer said, “Oh, you’ve never taken a cash flow loan? Everybody does that.” My monthly payments went down, my stress level went way down, I stopped missing paychecks and I found some breathing room. Then I started building my business, and paid off the loan in 3 years instead of 10…but only when I had the money.

Sacrificing your pay to pay off a low-interest loan faster doesn’t hurt the bank. It just hurts you.
Everyone will forgive my exhaustion, bad temper and poverty because they’ll respect my hard work. This is the biggest lie I’ve ever told myself: that I’ll be respected, damn it, because I’m such a hard worker.

But my kids still missed me at bedtime.

My wife would rather have had me home, and not exhausted.

My clients would rather have hung around a successful person. The friends of martyrs, zealots and desperate people tend to get sucked into their bad luck.

Martyrs aren’t typically known for extravagant lifestyles. But nearly all of them share one luxury: their hardline actions don’t hurt anyone but themselves.

We’re all depending on you: your kids, your wife, your clients, other entrepreneurs and your community.

We don’t care if you ever get rich. But we want you to eat the damn sandwich.

You’re the skipper of this ship. No one remembers that the captain of the Titanic tried really hard, or knew how to fix the boiler, or swabbed his own decks. Everyone remembers him because he went down.

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Profitable Clinics: The New Model

The old way to run a profitable chiropractic or therapy clinic was the high-volume model.

In the high-volume model, each practitioner crams overlapping appointments into their schedule. They have three or more patients booked at once. One patient receives manual therapy while another is on the TENS machine, and a third sits fills out forms or waits. Big clinics follow this model. And it works.

But more and more clinicians tell us, “That’s not why we got into this business.”

A growing number of chiropractors, DPTs and physiotherapists are working through our Incubator program. Their goal is to build a real business out of their clinic without reverting to the high-volume model. Every clinic is different, but here are some of the options we mentor them through:

 

The prescriptive model.

The largest problem in most clinics is an unpredictable revenue stream. Most clients aren’t long-term, and you’re always dependent on variables beyond your control.

You’re the trusted expert. When you meet a client, they’re usually in crisis, and they’re counting on you to solve their painful problem.

Your duty is to tell them the best possible answer, and then set a timeframe for completion. But it’s not enough to say “Let’s meet for 5 weeks” or “This will take around 10 sessions” and then turn them loose. Instead, you need to schedule followups and change the client’s prescription based on their progress. “What do you want NOW?” is the most important question in any service business, and “What can I help you with next?” is a big one in therapy.
The stratified model.

Your clients need services beyond your primary one. Many successful clinicians add complementary revenue streams, like massage therapy, cryotherapy, infrared saunas, or even gym access…but which should you use? How do you determine what your clients actually NEED, and which will be the best use of your space? A mentor can guide you through the process to make the best decision.

And, most importantly, your clinic needs to make money without you there. That means diverse revenue streams. It means cash flow assets so you can take a vacation–or retire.
The subscription model.

Many clinicians now understand the value of a cash-based system, even if they aren’t sure how their clients will pay for it (they will, and we’ll tell you how.) But the TOP clinic owners are using the TwoBrain subscription model to stabilize their cash flows, and help their clients stop problems before they start. Why wait until a client is in crisis to see them again? A monthly rate and appointment will keep them out of trouble (and you, too.)
The group model.

When a client finishes their first intensive phase of treatment, what happens next? They might not need your personal attention…but they still need a way to buffer against recurring pain. That might mean group yoga classes, or coached fitness programs, or even a group stretching class. How do you build, price and promote these classes? How do you build them into your model? A mentor can tell you (and it’s really simple.)
The premium model.

Your current average client might not want a premium service. But some clients will. Are you offering more than triage and checkups?

What if a client could visit you every month to have their health evaluated? What if they had you read their blood tests every quarter; measure their body fat monthly; and check them for problems?

This service is so valuable that it’s almost our duty to offer it. But few do, because they fear their clients won’t pay for the value. Some clients will, if it’s available. A mentor will tell you how to build a premium service, and how to offer it in a way that lets you feel good.

 

Of course, most clinicians are also entrepreneurs. So we also cover staffing, client retention, sales, marketing, standard operating procedures, and all the rest in the Incubator. It’s a step-by-step, one-on-one mentoring process, and our clients work with mentors who own successful practices.

The high-volume model has been around for decades, and it works. But it’s not for everyone. If you’d like to talk with us about how to build a clinic that gives you financial freedom without a huge client load, book a call here.

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Achieving Work + Life Balance

By Anastasia Bennett, TwoBrain Mentor

Having a balance between work and home can be challenging. But like any challenge it can be rewarding if done successfully.

By learning how to prioritize balance you will become happier, healthier (both mentally and physically), and be more productive at work.

“Be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.” ~Max Ehrmann

As business owners who are always busy taking care of their staff, customers, sales, bills, family and so on, we forget what should be our number one priority: OURSELVES!

You can’t pour from an empty cup.

Look after yourself:

stay active

Keep exercising – whatever form that takes. Change it up if you need to keep it interesting; do yoga, go for a run, do some strength training or CrossFit classes.
Reduce stress and anxiety


eat healthy food

Eating healthy will give you more energy and make you feel better


get as much rest as you can

You can recover from distractions faster
It can prevent burnout
It can help with memory and improve your decision-making abilities

Accept help or Delegate

Instead of trying to do everything, reassess your strengths and weaknesses. Carry on with doing what you are good at and what you love to do and delegate or outsource other things that you ‘waste’ your time on. Think about what can you let go and delegate to your staff in order to give them an opportunity to grow. It will give them the chance to learn and help them to feel valued while having the added benefit of freeing yourself up to concentrate on your priorities.

Stop trying to do everything perfectly

Are you a perfectionist? If you are reading this, you probably are. Stop trying to get everything done perfectly; no one is going to give you an award for it. If it is taking too long to make it perfect maybe it’s one of those things you should delegate to someone who is better at it.

Start by making small changes

Don’t set yourself up for the failure from the start. Committing to huge changes immediately won’t do anything other than add more stress. You already know that success doesn’t happen overnight, but if you start looking after yourself and learn how to balance your work/life better you will be setting yourself up to be a massive success.

You might be asking yourself: “So what should I do now?”

Make a list of jobs you love doing and don’t enjoy doing (a “love/loathe list”)
Make a list of all your staff
What can you delegate and who will benefit (grow) by doing it?
Catch up with your staff one-on-one and ask them what their perfect day looks like. Do they want to learn more?
Through a process of delegation reduce  your workload by 3 hours per week
Commit those 3 hours to looking after yourself (however that looks – gym time, seeing a movie, going for a swim)
Book time in your calendar with “ME” time and don’t compromise on that
Commit to a new change for a month and reassess after that.

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Ideas, Tactics, Seminars, Mentorship: How To Do EVERYTHING

A mentor helps you build a plan and stick to it.

 

Entrepreneurship is cool now. Guys like Gary Vaynerchuk and Elon Musk make the dream accessible to the everyman.

 

That means there’s more information, more help, more ideas than ever before. Every single day, an entrepreneur can choose between 1000 new podcast episodes; 2000 blog posts; or hundreds of new videos on YouTube. Access to information is no longer the problem. Everyone has enough good ideas.

 

The new problem is overwhelm. We fail to take action because we’re paralyzed by too many opportunities.

 

We don’t see how each idea or tactic or habit fits into a larger plan, so we take a shotgun approach to improving our business.

 

And we don’t have filters for the sources of our information, so we trust that everything on the internet is true, even when we know it’s not. We WANT to believe.

 

A mentor’s role is to help you sort ideas–your own, or the great ones you found elsewhere–and build them into your plan. Then a mentor’s role is to help you stick to your plan, or shift it to match your strengths.

 

If you’re trying to build a plan without a mentor, this might help: a hierarchy of business knowledge and actions:

 

Let’s start at the bottom: the lowest value use of your time and attention.

 

We all love motivational memes about business, but unless they clearly say “Do this one thing right now”, they’re useless. And even if they DO say, “Take this specific action”, unless there’s a clear path to increased revenue, invest your time on something more valuable.

Don’t read rants. They’re just texturbation.

 

The next layer (ideas, tips, tactics and episodes) has value, but also carries a huge potential for overwhelm. At TwoBrain, we publish every day. Every single blog post, podcast episode and video carries an actionable idea. Every idea has been tested and proven to work. But no one can do them all. A mentor’s job is to help you identify where you’re strong and keep you focused on those tactics. A mentor who simply throws ideas at you isn’t helping (and is probably slowing you down.)

 

The next layer of value for your time and attention is peer support. Online groups, masterminds, chambers of commerce, and business mixers all have value. The best groups are curated for quality people and moderated for quality discussion. But it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between opinion and advice, and definitely impossible to spot outright lies. No one posts their burned dinner on Facebook, and no one shares their business failings either. We actually tell our Incubator clients to take a short Facebook fast, and only invite them to our private Facebook group in Growth phase, where peer support is more important. Any entrepreneurs’ group, online or in person, is only as good as its filters.

 

More valuable than peer support is actual education. Presumably, lectures and books and seminars are written by people who have actually been successful, and are willing to share their tactics. This layer is more valuable because of the higher-level filters: editors, publishers and “stages”, like TED talks. Presumably, someone who knows something is filtering out the bad ideas and noise. But many good business books would make a great blog post (there’s not much past the first chapter) and the filters are lower than ever. My advice is to read (or watch) until the expert becomes repetitive, and then move on. Even in a one-way educational monologue, you still have the choice to close the book or leave the auditorium.

 

The next layer is a two-way education: a dialogue. These are courses, seminars and workshops, where the hosts help the attendee apply the content to their specific challenges. I no longer run two-day seminars where I get up and lecture, because they don’t help. Instead, we run action-based Summits, where a speaker introduces a topic and then attendees apply it to their businesses on the spot. One of the best tactics I learned last year was to leave a seminar as soon as you learn one good thing, and spend the rest of the weekend in your hotel room working on that thing. Far more valuable than amassing ideas and then taking action on none.

 

Now, all of these things, put together, form a plan. To make an effective plan, you need some distance from your current situation. You need an objective eye. That’s where a mentor comes in: to identify what you REALLY need, and help you identify the best tactics to get there; the best support; and the best accountability.

 

For example, many new TwoBrain clients say, “I need more clients.”

Then they’ll cite an Instagram tactic they saw in a Facebook group.

But then they’ll say “I don’t have time to do it.”

So the mentor guides them through the work that will get them more time first. That’s part of the Incubator.

Then the mentor says, “Let’s determine how we’re going to spend your time.” That’s part of building an annual plan, which comes at the start of Growth phase. If the Instagram tactic will actually get them more clients, the mentor builds it into their plan.

From there, the mentor’s role is to help the entrepreneur fill their time with the best courses, support and tactics for them at that moment.

 

Do you see?

 

You can try to do all.the.things. Or you can invest your time and budget wisely: doing the right things, at the right time, to the exclusion of all the noise and overwhelm.

 

You can spend 2019 the same way you spent 2018: making guesses, trying to do everything, and feeling overwhelmed. Or you can get a mentor. This is what I realized in 2008, when I found my first mentor. And it’s why I have a mentor today. As you become more successful, the choices just get bigger.

 

Click here to talk with one of our team for free. We don’t invite everyone into our mentorship practice, but there’s only one way to find out if you’re a perfect fit.

The post Ideas, Tactics, Seminars, Mentorship: How To Do EVERYTHING appeared first on Two Brain.

How (And Why) To Thank Small Businesses

The industrial economy is over.

 

For many reasons, that’s a good thing. Heavy industry is a big polluter. Heavy industry relies on humans behaving like cogs in a wheel. Heavy industry suppresses the earning potential of the workforce. But heavy industry also provided good jobs, with health benefits and a way to stop working at age 65. As industrial jobs disappear, so do the securities they carried.

 

The only ones who can fill that vacuum–creating jobs, filling vacant buildings and pushing the economy forward–is entrepreneurs. Today, “Small-business Saturday”, is their day. Here’s why you should care.

 

64% of new jobs come from small business in the US. In Canada, 87.7% of new jobs come from small businesses. These trends are rising.
Your kid will probably work for a local entrepreneur, or become an entrepreneur themselves.
Local entrepreneurs give more to local charities.
Local entrepreneurs support other local entrepreneurs, creating a cascading effect.
Small businesses pay more in local taxes than you do.
Small business owners pay their staff far more than they pay themselves.
Small business pulls money INTO your city. Big business pulls it OUT.
Small business creates sixteen TIMES more patents than large business does. That means more innovation, more future security, and more jobs.

 

But the real reason: the local business owner has probably been up since 5am, getting ready to serve you. They’ll probably still be going after you’ve had your dinner. They probably make less than you–for now–and they’re probably wondering if they’ll still be open in twelve months. The city your kids will inherit, and the opportunities presented to them, depend on the success of your local small businesses.

 

Here’s how to support them:

Choose to support local service industries. I don’t say “buy local” because paying twice as much for milk doesn’t make sense to anyone. But signing up for local services, like gyms and dentists and lawyers, makes a huge difference. Franchisees are local too–you don’t have to stop visiting McDonald’s or Tim Horton’s–but corporate-owned stores like Starbucks pull money out of town.
Tip their staff REALLY well. One of the hardest parts of owning a business is creating meaningful careers for your staff. When people like their jobs and earn enough money, they stay. They keep their kids in local schools and local sports; drive better cars; keep their yards clean. Be nice to the front-line worker.
Decline their discounts. Most small-business owners will surrender a discount if you ask for one. Don’t. They’ll discount themselves to death, because they think they’re helping a friend. If you ask for a discount, you’re not being a friend; you’re taking advantage. I challenge you to go in the other direction and decline a discount when it’s offered.
Forgive their mistakes. Big companies screw up all the time, but they make their mistakes in other cities, and then teach their staff how to avoid making the same mistake in the future. Local entrepreneurs have to make all of their mistakes on local people. A personalized experience means you’re dealing with a person. And people screw up. But people can also make it up to you.
Tell your friends. Small businesses depend on referrals for growth.
Take them a coffee. They need it.

 

No one’s asking for charity here. Some businesses deserve to be successful, and some don’t. But there’s a lot on the line: if you don’t want your kids to be labeling boxes for Amazon or losing their jobs to China, you need to support the people who will keep them employed locally.

 

Thank you, thank you, to our customers and clients! We care about you, too.

The post How (And Why) To Thank Small Businesses appeared first on Two Brain.