Why do many small businesses owners struggle to make any or enough money? These days especially, it seems every single small business owner is complaining that they do not have any money. However, they don’t want to do anything to help alleviate that pain. I am witnessing this all too often right now.
It could be that they do not have any goals for the future such as wanting to be a six or seven figure earner. Many small business owners, for some reason, just want to run their business and make just enough money to get by and pay their bills. Yet, it is these types of small business owners that find themselves overly stressed when it comes to money. They keep complaining that they don’t have the money to do anything. Yet, when you offer them an opportunity to help them make money, the do not take it. I know this sounds stupid, but it is a fact! How many of you know someone that I just described? Everyone probably knows at least one person. These types of small business owners are not visionaries, and unless they change their businesses are the one’s most likely to fail.
Why Do You Want To Become an Entrepreneur?
Most successful entrepreneurs are visionaries. They like to explore the meaning of certain things and do something that changes the world in someway. This is the motivating behavior that drives every entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are people that learn by doing and explore with a voracious appetite. Entrepreneurs are people who cannot stand the status quo and will go against it every chance they get. If you cannot go with the status quo, then you understand one of the main reasons people choose becoming an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurs are supposed to be visionaries. They’re strengths are supposed to be in innovative thinking — envisioning — several years into the future.
I am definitely a strategic visionary, and the assessment from the High5Test confirms it. I am not a big fan of these types of assessments, but I did one for the hell of it. I found out that my top strength is being Strategic from the High5Test.
What happens, when you’re always several steps in the future, is that you’re never focused on today.
You’re saying things like, “This is going to make a lot of money (insert large amount).” However, you aren’t making anything, because you’re living in the future and haven’t done anything yet
Let me share the story of Dr J CPR (check them out on the internet if interested) located in Miami, FL.
At the beginning of the year of 2019, he contacted us about wanting to build a website for his CPR certification business. He wanted this to be an online learning marketplace to offer CPR certification. Immediately after we built the website, he calls us and asked why he had no sales. I told him, we haven’t done a marketing program since we just launched the website. For some reason he thought that sales would be rolling in the second the website went live. Another naive business mistake.
A competitor of his CPR Certification Miami, is doing everything right to make money. They were spending money on ads, doing email marketing, and even created a sales funnel giving away a free e-book to get people to opt into their mailing list.
Dr J CPR on the other hand did not want to spend any money on advertising. He kept complaining that he had no money to do any actual advertising, content marketing, email marketing, etc. Well, guess what? He’s closed, not completely. He’s doing it part time.
He kept saying he had a good product at a good price and said he was going to make millions.
His competitor CPR Certification Miami is obviously still open and thriving. I see their ads all over the internet and also receive their emails constantly.
This is a perfect case study in business failure.
Why? Because the owners are living in the future; making money in their minds, not in reality. They’re spending what they don’t have. This is typical behavior of spending more than you make. Of living beyond your means.
How to stop or solve this:
Simple. You need to live in the present, have a vision for the future, and develop a plan to make money helping you achieve that vision.
- Set a goal that you want to make $1 million dollars in one year. (Yes it can be doable with the right mindset.) To be a successful entrepreneur, you need the right mindset
- Realize that you still need to spend money, like advertising, in order to make money.
- Organize your expertise into content that you can sell as information products. Everyone has an area of expertise that they can share to others. What is your area of expertise?
- Create a website that demonstrates your expertise and to let people know you are open for business.
- Create a sales funnel with upsells that promotes that piece of information content.
- Build an affiliate army to promote to take the risk off of you of promoting what you offer.
- Peter Drucker famously stated, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Evaluate cost to make money and to run the business against revenue earned.
- Make the necessary adjustments.
Most important, you need to build your passive income. To achieve financial freedom, all you need is for your passive income to be greater than your total expenses.
The business like the one above is an example what happens when you fail to plan. Instead, businesses buy this and that “thing,” envisioning that it will make them lots of money. The problem is that if you spend all your time and money in the future, you’ll never make enough money now!
Time To Meet With Nick
Nick Roy has been involved in marketing and website design since 1999. He has been a business owner since 2008 where he grew his first agency, GMM Creative, to 7 figures in five years before a bad acquisition brought that to a halt. That combination of success and failure provides Nick with a unique perspective to share with clients on what it takes to succeed as a small business owner. While he currently holds an MBA from Hawaii Pacific University, he is primarily self-taught when it comes to website design and online marketing. He is also an instructor of social media marketing for Wynmore Academy. Click here to set up a time to talk with Nick about your business goals.