So, you are thinking of starting an online business and have all the feels about how it is going to pan out.
It’s a mix of sheer fear and absolute excitement about all the things you could do without being trapped in a 9-5, right?
More time with your children, escaping peak hour traffic, being in charge of your income, traveling the world….
You go into research mode because that’s what you’re meant to do when starting a business. You join a few business Facebook groups (make sure you’ve joined mine too!), but are feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the people talking business stuff. You continue lurking and read some troubling posts that make you question whether an online business is really for you.
These posts say things like:
‘Winning! I was up until 3am packing orders.’
Or
‘300 of these handmade babies done and dusted, only took me three 12 hour days to do it.’
Or
‘I am having a 25% off sale but no one has purchased from me. I made 5 sales and broke even!’
Or
‘Why is the minimum order from suppliers so high? I don’t have $1000s to buy stock but I need stock to sell.’
Or
‘My customer emailed me at 4am today demanding to know where their order was. They emailed me again at 6am demanding an update or they want a refund. It seems the courier has lost the order.’
Or
‘I feel like such a shit mum because my kids are at my feet while I try to get orders out. But I have no choice, I have to do it otherwise my customers will get pissed.’
Or
‘I haven’t been able to sell my stock, even when I had a 50% off sale, I am actually losing money!!’
You catch yourself thinking ‘WTAF? Is this how business is meant to be?’
Um, no!
A business designed correctly should afford you a life of all the kinds of things you dream about, like being able to take the kids on travelling adventures or waking up in the morning and instead of having to iron stuff for work you can take a moment to truly absorb the beauty of the morning and be present in the moment.
Yes, of course there is hard work. Your business will demand mental strength from you and there will be fails (and falls) along the way. But as you go along, business should become easier, not harder. We don’t need to wear our struggle like a badge, competing to see who has worked the most hours or stayed up the latest.
Not. My. Kind. Of. Fun.
It should not be a new trap, where you work longer and harder than you did in your full-time job, for less money and on an indefinite basis.
It should not bust your balls on a daily basis forever and a day.
It should not fill you with dread when you think about your to-do list and make you want to crawl back into bed.
Business if done smartly, should afford you a life where you can spend more time with your kids, travel around the world working on your laptop, earning an uncapped income, being able to down tools and go to your little one’s daycare Easter parade, have the freedom to pick your kids up from school and do whatever the hell you want, when you want.
Business should give you immense fulfillment, so much so that it makes you want to drive down the freeway with your music blaring, screaming, ‘I did it, I freaking did it!!!’ It should give you all the warm feels when you take a moment to absorb what you have achieved and created.
So, how is it that so many of us end up working more for less, totally burned out and thinking ‘FFS’ way too many times a day?
Because we miss a few key ingredients right at the start.
If you want to build an online business that truly affords you a life of freedom and profit, there are a few factors to get sorted before you do anything else. It’s not rocket science, but miss them and you’ll be signing yourself up for a business that has you working longer and harder than ever before.
Choose the right business model
I teach all my clients about the power of automation and that not all business models are equal in terms of what they require from you to be successful. With the beauty of hindsight, my mind is blown by how common it is to jump into a business model where we trade money for our time. I totally did this too. It just seems like the done thing right? Selling a physical product or a one on one service are both massively time-consuming and will bring you the least amount of profit.
Our time is our most valuable asset, yet in a lot of cases when we break down what it actually takes to run a business some are giving it away for $5 $15, $20 per hour?
Who wants that? Not me.
If a business requires you to be physically present in order to make a sale, it is not going to afford you freedom in your life. How does that translate? It means you aren’t going to be able to spend as much time as you thought with your little ones, nor will you be able to go on holidays with ease.
If a business makes a sale and requires a significant amount of your time to process, pick and pack, dispatch and deliver that order, it is not going to easily allow you time away from it.
If you onboard a new client and then have to do all of the fulfillment yourself, it will take your attention away from growing your business, and as a result, that business is not going to be able to scale and profit quickly.
So, instead of trading time for money, trade value and as we show our Business Jump clients, leverage off automation, outsourcing and systemising so sales can come 24/7 and you can work and live your life.
I am not saying it is an overnight thing, work still needs to be done, but if you work on all the right places while outsourcing or automating the rest, your business will grow exponentially.
Passive income is not a dirty word
You can never know how hard it is to make one sale until you’ve spent months of blood, sweat and tears trying to encourage that fucker to come out of your checkout.
So, let’s get smart about this.
Instead of focusing on getting one sale from one customer, focus on getting multiple sales from one customer.
Do you see how you’d leverage your time in that scenario? Instead of 1:1’ing it, change your mindset to creating multiple sales for the same amount of your time. One unit of your time, for many continuing sales, all hitting your Paypal account each month.
It’s called a recurring income stream. It sounds awesome doesn’t it? Trust me, that’s because it is. I set the majority of my clients up on a recurring income stream, and even though my business is mostly service-based, I still have recurring income in the various income streams I employ and if you have skills or knoweledge I can help you wrap that into an online serviced based business too.
For example, this is what I woke up to this morning…
What was I doing for the previous 12 hours? I signed off working at 3pm to pick up the kids, came home did bath, dinner and bed and then watched three back to back episodes of The Blacklist with my husband on Netflix.
Let’s put this into perspective for a moment.
Say you decided to sell physical products. When I did this, I sold products with an RRP from $9.95 to $59.95 and I profited from a dollar or two, to about $10 – $15 per product. Your expenses for a physical product will generally eat up about 75% of your profit and then you will have tax, miscellaneous expenses and advertising on top. Also, you can imagine what happens if you decide to discount your product for a sale, as many people do when they are launching. Ever seen the ‘Opening sale, 25% off’ advertising some businesses do?
What the? They are likely losing money straight out of the gate!
And, let’s not forget the time involved to get that physical product to checkout and the fact that once you have sold that one product to a customer, you have to find a completely new customer to sell your next product to.
So, let’s flip that to the recurring model. Yes, monthly payments start off low, around the $9.95 mark and most start with a free trial but that’s only short term. Some of the best services out there start off with a free version of their product. It’s a highly used strategy to capture and impress your lead, and make the conversion to a paid plan easier.
The goal is to increase your fee as the value you can provide increases. Remember how we said trade value for money, not time? Your time stays the same but your value increases.
Learn how to jump the queue
One of the smartest things you can do is find out what worked for other people and skew it into your own unique strategy so it works for you too.
Tony Robbins says this all the time, and if it is good enough for him, I am listening and paying attention.
Join Facebook groups, like mine, join masterminds, go to networking events, build a team of business besties and listen to and observe what other people are doing. Consider their wins and fails and work out how you can make it happen in your business. Most importantly you’ll have back up on the days where it all feels like it is going to shit.
Because, the honest truth is, success in business does not come on a silver platter. There are tough days, and tougher days. But when you have a tribe of like-minded business owners all on the same path who get it, you’ll be able to download and they will remind you that tomorrow is a new day to try again.
This is specifically why I have created a Facebook group for my Business Jump family. It’s an incredibly supportive little community for clients of Business Jump to share what has worked for them, to support each other and to motivate each other to keep going.
Perfect doesn’t exist in reality
So often the struggle is internal. We create it in our minds and the monkey chatter sends us into a spin of false reality where we feel that everything must be perfect before we can take the next step.
Not true.
Most of the time it leads to analysis paralysis sending us down the rabbit hole of not being able to work out which way to move forward and we end up months down the track still not having taken action to live the life we want.
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So, let me ask you something…
If you weren’t afraid, what would you do? What actions would you be taking in order to design your life with freedom and profit?
It is totally fine not to know the answer, but here is the thing. It probably isn’t magically going to rock up on your doorstep one day and sing out, ‘I am here!’
By starting, even when we don’t 100% know, or when things aren’t 100% perfect we will create a breadcrumb of clues to follow so we can piece it all together.
There is no wrong path!
You work it out by doing it, seeing how it feels, and gaining clarity from it.
Stop worrying about ‘What might happen.’ or ‘What could go wrong.’ Just give it a try and see it as an opportunity to learn, grow and find your way. From being uncomfortable, we grow.
Take shortcuts
Every day in my life I take shortcuts so I can streamline my attention and energy on my business. I buy my coffee and usually I will buy breakfast and/or lunch. I choose to work instead of spending the time making these things.
The OCD mums will die when I reveal this but my fourth ‘spare’ room is lovingly known as the ‘washings bedroom’ and then the housekeeper puts it away.
I don’t clean my car. It goes to the car wash and while it gets cleaned, I work. I don’t even do that much cooking. I have an amazing home meal delivery service that delivers dinners for me that I literally take out of the fridge and microwave.
Why? Because in the same amount of time it takes to do these things I can work on my business and make thousands of dollars or set up a new system that grows my business and yields far greater results. I have made a very conscious decision on where to spend my time. Number 1 is family, number 2 is business. When I first started I wasn’t able to afford to do all that, but I worked up to it. Choose what matters most and let the rest go.
Finally…
In order to be able to sleep at night I need to say that all of the above is not going to give you the overnight success of an online business. You still need to put in the time, effort and energy but here is the thing…
Put that time and energy into the right parts of an online business. Work smarter, not harder and leverage off the blessing of automation and outsourcing.
Unearth a few simple, but hard to know until you know, key strategies and your business will absolutely give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of while affording you to live the life you want.
So, instead of thinking, ‘What if it all goes wrong?’ flip it, and think to yourself, ‘What if it all goes freaking amazing?’
