Being self-employed and building your confidence can be tough. It’s much tougher than you expected when you took the leap and customers are more demanding than you thought.
It’s much harder to get noticed than you thought too, right? Everyone’s trying to sell you something by making you feel you’re getting it wrong if you don’t use their service or buy their thing.
You don’t know if you’re making the right decisions. You’re so busy working in the business, you struggle to find time to work on it…And on and on the list goes, because ultimately the buck stops with you!
In a nutshell, you can easily become stressed and overworked, get stuck in a rut and wonder how you’re ever going to get it all sorted. Now, at this stage, wouldn’t it be lovely if I could say to you: ‘Well, don’t worry: if you do all these things, this will all get sorted and you’ll become much happier and more successful’? Well, of course, but it isn’t as easy as that!
But what I can say is: Don’t worry, if you do all the things in the rest of this blog, you’ll certainly feel more confident that you’re doing the right things, you’ll get more helpful feedback, and you’ll definitely become happier and more successful, step by step, if you keep doing them. Guaranteed.
Ok: sounds great: but what’s the deal?
The first thing to tell you is that there are some simple
common-sense rules that govern everything, and, if you stick to these, you’ll definitely be more confident (and, over time, happier and more successful).
These are called ‘principles’.
We have always found that, if our principles were right, the area over which they were applied did not matter. Size is only a matter of the multiplication table.
Finding Your Principles
Principles are like lighthouses: they govern direction, and they do not change!
We talk about these principles in much more detail in our sessions at the BIPC in Exeter called: ‘The 4 Vital Principles of Business Success’, check out the Eventbrite page for more info. If you haven’t booked on it yet, please make sure you do: it’s a 3-hour session and there’s no charge to attend (and it’s not often you hear that!).
Anyway: back to principles: we will outline the 4 Vital Principles in a minute, but, before we do, there are a couple of other things you need to know.
If we agree that principles are rules of common-sense that it makes sense to abide by, then the key question may well be:
I’m already busy, how on earth can I fit this in and make the changes I need in my business?
And, of course, principles apply to this question as well.
Firstly: the principle of systems: systems make things work consistently and continually (just ask any engineer).
I can hear you saying already: ‘Well, what systems?’ –‘Sounds too complicated, I’m just a small business!’.
So, to put your mind at rest, I’m suggesting small systems of common sense. More in a minute.
Building confidence when you are self-employed...Small Steps
The second principle is that of ‘small steps’: small steps in the right direction repeated over time produce huge results: everyone’s busy, so large steps are usually impossible, and anyway, large steps often end up with you falling flat on your face.
Small steps applied continually is the key. After all, a small step in the right direction is far better than a large step in any other direction!
So, thus far we have:
- Principles
- Applied through simple systems
- In small steps
And I hope that sounds hopeful and is already giving you confidence. It isn’t scary and it is achievable.
In fact, we suggest that all the material we teach in this training course (The 4 Vital Principles of Business Success) can be applied in
roughly 10 minutes a day, and we set out a simple system to help you do this.
Anyway, back to the point, I can hear you saying.
‘What principles, systems and small steps do I actually need to get working on in these 10 minutes a day, to give myself more
confidence and help me to grow my business?’
So, here is a brief summary of these 4 vital principles, for you to work on, one at a time, putting in place systems in small steps.
Building confidence when you are self-employed:
4 Vital Common Sense Principles
Common Sense Principle One:
Your customer doesn’t care about your business; they care about their own needs.
What does this mean in practice?
This means that if you want to benefit from loyal customers and business growth through reputation and referral, you need to change the
purpose of your business from:
My business is there to serve me and make profits.
To:
My business is there to do something so well that customers love me, want to come back to me and tell all their friends about me.
Seems like a pointless idea?
Well, all your processes and actions will stem from your business purpose. So, if your business purpose is inward looking, so will your
processes be: and this can be very dangerous in these days of empowered customers, social media and online unfiltered reviews.
Do you remember the story of Ratner’s the jewellers?
Instead, your processes need to all be outward looking: about doing something so well that customers love you, want to come back to you
and tell all their friends about you.
With no exceptions.
You really need to have this clear in your mind, embed this into the heart of all your processes and ensure that anyone working for or with
you is clear on what this is and how important it is to your business.
This is your compass: your start point for everything you do in business.
Common Sense Principle Two:
Your customer doesn’t care about your business; they care about their own needs.
What does this mean in practice?
This means that if you want to benefit from loyal customers and business growth through reputation and referral, you need to change the
purpose of your business from:
My business is there to serve me and make profits.
To:
My business is there to do something so well that customers love me, want to come back to me and tell all their friends about me.
Seems like a pointless idea?
Well, all your processes and actions will stem from your business purpose. So, if your business purpose is inward looking, so will your
processes be: and this can be very dangerous in these days of empowered customers, social media and online unfiltered reviews.
Do you remember the story of Ratner’s the jewellers?
Instead, your processes need to all be outward looking: about doing something so well that customers love you, want to come back to you
and tell all their friends about you.
With no exceptions.
You really need to have this clear in your mind, embed this into the heart of all your processes and ensure that anyone working for or with
you is clear on what this is and how important it is to your business.
This is your compass: your start point for everything you do in business.
Common sense principle two: your customer takes physical actions (like buying or not buying your stuff) because they have emotional needs.
For example:
A customer doesn’t go to a pub to have a meal (they can do this cheaper and easier at home): they go to have an experience: and this calls for very different attitude, training and processes.
So you need to look at your customer journeys (i.e. every step of their interaction with you) and determine what are the most important
emotional needs of your customer at each step.
A very big job…but if you take it step by step, put simple
systems in place one by one, you can easily nail it over time.
Common Sense Principle Three
Common sense principle three: you can’t solve a problem until you understand a problem fully.
So: if you need to assess the customers’ emotional needs at every step and work out what steps you need to take to keep improving, then you
need to gather feedback … properly!
Aaaaargh! Customer feedback!
Don’t we just hate those unfiltered Google reviews! Don’t we just hate it when customers don’t tell us what’s wrong but instead moan about
us to others! Don’t we just hate the fact that customers never really tell us what they think!!!
And, of course, you’re right: and the reason they don’t tell you (and tell Google, TripAdvisor and the like instead), or they just don’t
come back to you, is because you’re not asking them properly.
Most feedback systems are generic, off the shelf, quick fix systems. They don’t engage the customer. They don’t encourage helpful feedback.
They don’t allow you to solve any problems before the world knows about them.
In simple terms: they don’t work!
But it’s worse than that: not only do they not work, but often they are unhelpful, annoying and destructive.
We suggest that there are far better ways of gathering and using feedback, that we cover in our training course: ‘The 4 Vital Principles
of Business Success’.
Common Sense Principle Four
If you want to get continual improvement, you must have some continual improvement systems.
The key here is: by the inch it’s a cinch but by the yard it’s hard!
Yet so few small businesses have simple, effective continuous improvement systems in place … and then they wonder why they get
bogged down and can’t see the wood from the trees.
We recommend three simple systems to start off with:
Proper professional, simple, feedback systems (as discussed above): to identify, step by step the areas for you to work on.
Weekly planning: to allow you to plan and schedule the step-by-step actions needed in 10 minutes a day.
‘Go the extra inch’ accountability and improvement systems built into every process: so this all becomes a continual program on improvement.
So there you have it: some key principles and actions to ensure you get more confidence and peace of mind, secure in the knowledge that
you’re doing the right things.
And I repeat my promise at the beginning:
If you do all the things in this blog, you’ll certainly feel more confident that you’re doing the right things, you’ll get more helpful feedback, and you’ll definitely become happier and more successful, step by step, if you keep doing them’
All these ideas are explored in depth in our interactive training session: ‘The 4 Vital Principles of Success’. Please contact bipc@librariesunlimited.org.uk
to find out more and book your place on our next course.
This blog was written by Guy Arnold, Founder of the ‘Slow Selling’ movement and expert on Customer Loyalty, Reputation and Referral
systems. For more information, you can contact him at guy@slow-selling.co
