Social media really is the place of nightmares sometimes isn’t it?
Karen with her perfect makeup showing you her simple ‘contour look’ in just 3 steps. Susan with her perfect organic, gluten free, wheat free, dairy free baby purées. Janet telling everyone all the bad ingredients in formula and how breast is best.
I don’t mind all that stuff but I like to see some realness within it. Because otherwise it creates false expectations and makes people feel crap. And being so passionate about mental health as I am, it makes me a little protective of the mumma’s still working through how to navigate the mental load.
So want to feel better?
Here you go:
Sometimes I catch one of the babies going for the cat bowl. I know she is going to lick it but I I pretend not to see. I keep cutting my carrots trying to get dinner sorted. We look at each later with a silent agreement that we will not talk about the ‘thing’ ever again.
Sometimes stuff I work on fails. Sometimes I make mistakes (big ones) Sometimes I don’t know what to do and get stuck. Sometimes I get tired of being the boss and having to make all the decisions.
Sometimes I don’t want to be around my family or talk to my husband. Most days I’ll sit in the car for an extra 10 minutes by myself before I go in to get the babies from daycare and mindlessly scroll social media just to be by myself.
Pretty much all the time I don’t wear makeup, I certainly couldn’t show you my 3 step look. I wear black tights and a baggy t-shirt every day. I can’t even call it active wear. More like survival wear.
Sometimes my husband asks me why I have a look on my face like I want to kill him and it’s because there he is, floating off to work not understanding for one second the true mental load that mother’s deal with on a daily basis.
So if you’re ever on social media and see some thing that makes you feel ‘less than’ remember me.
The mum that let her kid lick the cat bowl to buy an extra couple of minutes of silence.
But you know something pretty cool?
Within all of that, I’ve been able to run a successful business that actually doesn’t suck my energy and instead lights me up (most of the time) I would say one of the key factors to doing this is in my CTP Method and this is what I teach members of the Business Jump Family.
The CTP Method is all about low Cost, low Time high Profit. I am not saying it will be like that straight out the gate however at the very least we want that as your end goal so no matter what life throws at you your business can keep running as you deal with life.
There are 3 instrumental elements you need to get right from the start to ensure you monetise your business the right way to help you avoid burn out and I am going to share them with you:
Step #1 – How to Find Your Purpose and Know Your Why
Your WHY is something that connects and resonates with you at your core. Our WHY is that thing that makes us cranky when we feel like we aren’t achieving it, and that thing that makes us smile for no reason when we are walking down the street because it feels so good when we are nailing it.
It is the reason that drives you to do what you do.
For most of us reading this, our WHY will be some type of the following:
- We want to spend more time with our children instead of having to go to work.
- We want to be the decider of how we spend our days and not be trapped by our jobs.
- We want something that is just for us, besides the kids and our families.
- We want to do something we are passionate about, that brings us joy every day.
- We want to be able to travel around the world at the drop of a hat without having to ask anyone for permission.
- We want to be in control of when we work and how much we earn.
It could even be all of them. It is for me.
As a mum and an entrepreneur, I want to be in complete control of my life. I don’t want to have to sell my life in a job working for someone else.
I want to decide when I will spend time with my children and when I will work and I know for me, it really boils down to needing freedom in my life. If we can determine our WHY, we can use it to get us through the tough times, past the times where we have NFI and feel like giving up, past the times we stuff up and want to crawl into a hole because what I know for sure, is all these things are normal within business.
But, a lot of people don’t know that so they give up when the going gets tough. Not realising that maybe they were so close and that success could have been just around the corner. Your WHY is your all-consuming, life-altering question to seek and answer.
Ok, so let’s move onto our purpose.
Your purpose is a little different. Your purpose is the action you take using your WHY to push you along. When you find your purpose, it is what delivers complete and utter fulfilment in your life as a result.
It is what you were put on this earth to do. It involves going out into the world and taking action. It usually involves using your skills and natural born talents to help others. It is when every cell in your body knows that without a doubt you are living in your purpose.
When I started Business Jump four years ago, I had no idea at all that I was on a path to finding my purpose. I didn’t even know what ‘purpose’ was.
At that stage, I had sold an existing business, I enjoyed the process and I had the skills and expertise to do it again, so I did.
In hindsight, that feeling of ‘enjoying’ the process and the whole experience of helping another mum into an online business was a sign, it was a little breadcrumb in a trail of breadcrumbs I was unwittingly following that was leading me to Business Jump and living within my purpose.
About 6-months into Business Jump, I realised, holy shit.
This is so much more than just creating online businesses for people. I realised that my purpose was to help and empower other mums to start an online business so they too can find the same fulfilment and freedom as I have found with my business.
The realisation came to me when I was being mentored by Joel Brown, from Addicted to Success who has a hugely successful website with over millions of followers.
The best advice he gave to me, which I would love to pass on to you is, when making decisions, ask yourself, is it aligned with my Why, Vision and my Purpose?
Since that advice, I have been living in my purpose and decisions are easy if I muster the courage to stay true to myself.
Suffering from PND when my littlest was a baby taught me how to live in the moment, how to use fear and pain as a catalyst to live my best life, it taught me how to connect and relate to others and it taught me that I was so passionate about not wasting a single day not being as happy as I possibly could. It gave me a story to share and skills to learn so I could help others.
Being fired from my job gave me the fire in my belly I needed to never be at the mercy of a boss again, and instead to take my fate into my own hands. It pushed me to start an online business and I have never looked back.
With hindsight, I can see now, that all roads lead me to my purpose.
But I had no clue at the time.
And, that is the most magical part. You might be thinking Nat, I’m not into this woo-woo purpose crap, get to the part where I can learn how to make money, but the very fact that you are reading this now, is a breadcrumb in your path to finding your purpose, whether you realise it or not.
Living in your purpose doesn’t mean you have to be changing the world, or doing big massive, extreme things like saving people or that you need a story of PND or being fired like me and you may not have the faintest idea what it could be right now and that is totally fine but don’t wait for it to pop up, keep trying things and it will eventually reveal itself.
When you align your WHY and purpose within an online business it enables everything to flow much easier and effortlessly which means you’ll monetise your business and grow the revenue faster.
Step #2 – Work Within Your Natural Abilities and Strengths and Use Them To Create The Path of the Least Resistance
Step #2 – Work Within Your Natural Abilities and Strengths and Use Them To Create The Path of the Least ResistanceAt Business Jump when we are working with clients we have a very simple but hugely effective formula we like to use to find and monetise business ideas.
What are looking for here is to flow with the current down the river as opposed to swimming against the stream.
So we deep drive into our clients natural strengths, their personality traits and their existing skills, passions, life experience or expertise when you use this as a foundation for your business as opposed to starting something that you are completely unfamiliar with it allows you to pick it up much faster, you’re able to make real connections and impact because it is authentic to you.
When you’re working within your natural traits and energy levels it means you’re more than likely going to be receiving energy rather than expanding it and this means you’ll think faster and clearer, it means when you only have an hour to work you’ll get three hours of work done in that time, it means things won’t feel as daunting and overwhelming.
For example if you’re an introvert networking face to face and social media could drain your energy super fast meaning it takes you a day or few to restore but if you’re an extrovert going to a network event may be a great way to recharge your energy.
Step #3 – How to Monetise Your Business Idea with the Right Income Stream/s So You Can Build a Business Around Your Life.
The honest truth is that the process to growing a business is not that hard, but a lot of us make it harder than it needs to be.
It really comes down to keeping things simple and taking consistent and repetitive action and being aware of what worked and what didn’t and then scaling once we figured out what works.
In order to do this, we need to be working on the profit-producing areas of the business for around 80% of our time, this essentially means the sales and marketing side.
A lot the time it is easy to get stuck in the non-profit producing areas like admin, logistics, accounting and when we are working in those areas our businesses aren’t growing.
To give you a major advantage, choosing the right business model can help hugely. We want to choose one that we can automate to do most of the heavy lifting for us, then we can consider outsourcing the boring stuff. This puts us front and centre to work on strategy and growth without our time getting spread too thin across too many channels and therefore diluting our results and slowing our growth.
- Keep things simple
- Find out what your strengths are
- Take consistent and repetitive action
- Define where your results come from
- Drop what doesn’t work and scale what does
- Always be working on absorbing yourself with outsourcing and automation
- Always focus on profit-producing areas of your business first
- Sell one to many instead of one to one
So, let’s look at the two most common income formats:
#1 Create and Manufacture Your Own Product
In a nutshell, this is the process:
- Research viability of potential products
- Design product and variations of that product
- Source manufacturer, materials, pricing etc
- Pay money up front to start production, approve samples and make changes
- Approve final production and pay remaining amount to the manufacturer
- Import or get products delivered to your house, pay for duty, gst and delivery costs
- Sort out inventory
- House products at warehouse (or somewhere else)
- Start the selling/advertising/promoting process
- Reorder stock and repeat steps 1 – 8
- Attend to customer service enquiries/issues/etc.
Phew, it is a lot, right? And between each point is sandwiched a million other little details.
Step 9 is a whole new massive sequence in it’s own right. The standard markup on your products will be around 100%.
So if your end price is $10, you want to be selling it for $20.
Once sold, you take $10 to reinvest into a replacement product and you are left with $10, less the funds that are needed for promoting/advertising and running the business.
A final consideration is whether you are purchasing from an Australian supplier or paying USD. If USD, you’ll be weathering further profit cuts with the dire exchange rates.
#2 Sell Someone Else’s Products (wholesaling)
In my opinion, this is the most trodden path. You skip some of the big steps outlined in Option 1 but you still have a lot of work to do housing and dispatching the products and growing an audience for your biz.
You will have to pay for products up front, and they might not even sell. Or in order to sell them you need to discount them. Not fun.
Something that I see very often is suppliers who also retail the product putting on big sales resulting in your customers buying from them instead of you.
Profit for wholesaling generally works on a 90% - 110% markup, as outlined above.
With the two options outlined above, there is just way too much work and risk for my liking.
What if you spend loads of money buying products and they don’t sell? Where are you going to keep them all? What happens if you start getting 50 or 100 orders a day or a week? Sure, it would be awesome but think about the time required to pack all those orders. It makes scaling a business very hard.
So, I want to introduce income streams that utilise passive income or allow us to create once, but sell an infinite amount of times over, such as:
Digital Downloads – templates, planners, e-books, patterns, photos etc.
e-Courses – perfect for those who have knowledge, information or skills they want to sell
Affiliates – promote other peoples products and make a commission per sale.
Serviced based – with the right outsourcing and automation strategy.
