My Advice is to Stop Working

Okay, you're a small business mogul and you want to be successful. That's awesome. Here's my advice: stop working.

And that's going to seem really antithetical to you. Stop working? Who in the Hell has time for that? I mean, it's all of your hard work and sweat equity that has brought you to where you are today. Won't it be the same for you tomorrow?

No, it shouldn't, and to explain why, I'm going to evoke two classic texts in business management: Gerber's The E-Myth Series and Ferriss' The Four-Hour Work Week. A great bunch of books, especially if you want to learn the secret about being successful. 

Here's their secrets, boiled down to a single idea: stop working.

No, I'm serious.

When it comes to Gerber, he's a big proponent of franchises.  Businesses in a box. You buy the box and you buy the systems, the solutions, the capabilities, to deliver a product that's all marketed for you by somebody else. Stop developing this crap on your own - stop working! You buy the box, you open it up, you learn a little about it yourself and hire good people to follow the instructions. What more revenue? Scale your franchise. It's like instant coffee. Add more hot water and coffee-crystals and you're ready to go.

When it comes to Ferriss, his big idea is to stop working, yes, by allowing the Internet (and its minions) to do work for you, to use automation and the reach of the Internet to reach tens of thousands of potential customers while you reap the benefits in a hammock beachside (if the cover art is anything to be believed).

Like anything, I like to think real life is somewhere between two extremes and I feel that Gerber and Ferriss' ideas represent two extremes on the same theme. One says "buy the box, manage it, and scale it" while the other says "set up a box that you forget about and churns out money". They both have great ideas that reflect what real success in business is all about.

Real success in business isn't money. It's time. It's even more precious than money.

Look at what you're doing. If you're slaving away 40, 50, 60 ... 80 hours a week on your small business, you're throwing a lot of your time at a problem; your returns are diminishing with every passing hour.

• Your systems and processes may be too antiquated to allow for automation and you and your staff must do everything by hand;
  

• You may be too labor dependent - more scale means more people - and it takes much more capital to hire human labor and maintain it than to purchase automation (which could be depreciated over time);
  

• You may be too dependent on physical assets - electronic or data assets scale immediately with very small incremental costs, like, doing more business onground in a retail store vs doing more business across a website ... it's infinitely cheaper to scale a website or make an app to allow for more volume of sales than it is to lease another retail space for 15 years;
  

• You may be poor at delegation and insist on doing everything yourself which prohibits your ability to scale; one person to do it all! That's your motto!
  

• Your business may absolutely be a job. Hell, it may even be just a hobby and not a business. It couldn't survive if you weren't around. Take a look at your operation: if you weren't there, could anything get done? If you weren't there, would your product be made or your service delivered? If you answered no, you have a job, my friend, not a business, and if your job isn't profitable, you're doing it for funzies. It's just a hobby because it's not anything you could sell to somebody else - you have no exit strategy.

So if real success in business is time then the advice I must give you is to stop working. What? Wait ... you can't? Hey, I get it, but that's what technology is for, silly. This is what tech is really good at. Automating.

Applying technology attempts to reduce the impact of labor on a business model and to allow a firm to scale without additional incremental investment. It's about working smarter than harder. 

So how about if you create a new metric for yourself? Hours Spent Working. That number should go down while your Quarterly Gross Revenue numbers should go up. Right? Because that's what businesses do? They make money while you're not there. 

Stop working!

R

The Impending Implosion of the Tech Bubble

Well it turns out that the crazy valuations for tech stocks are finally undergoing a correction. Finally! 

Amazingly, and I know you're probably shocked, the thousands of little tech companies that have been surviving off of the teats of their angel investors are beginning to starve! The poor little mongrels.

Investors, it seems, would like a return on their capital rather than supporting wacky business ideas that couldn't possibly work in the real world. The end result is that we're on the edge of another mass extinction event - a great implosion - that'll take out a bunch of tiny tech players thinking they could Get Big Fast before now. 

What? You say this sounds familiar? Well it is; to me, it smells like Teen Spirit, or rather, the late 1990's. At the edge of the Internet mania that would eventually pop the tech bubble.

Okay, you're a small business owner, what do you have to know about this next die off?

1. You've put your small business capabilities and intellectual property assets at risk if you've invested a lot of time and energy in a dinky, no-name Internet company. If it's not a proven brand, they won't survive the coming apocalypse; they'll either die or be acquired.
   

2. You need to consider relocating those assets and capabilities to a brand that'll survive the impending extinction event, and probably sooner than later.

Now would be a good time to consider this problem rather than waiting for the implosion to happen, when you don't have any more options.

R

Websites are Referral Generators

Okay kids: let me ask you a question.

You're a small business owner.

Why do you have a website?

Show of hands? Anyone?

If you answered:

• "Well, duh, you're supposed to have one," that was a good try but not exactly what we're looking for.
  

• "Visibility!", you might shout, and I'd say that's close but not really the right answer.
  

• "Because everyone else has one," and I'd have to wrinkle up my face a bit and choose somebody else.
  

• "Customer expectation," I'd have to nod my head in agreement but politely suggest that's not really a part of today's lesson.

So let me restate the question. The question is: why, do you, as a business owner, have a website? You have one because it's a referral / lead generator. And it is the only reason why you have one.

A website is an always-on machine whose sole purpose in life is to connect you to existing and potential customers. That's it. That's the whole enchilada. That's all a website is supposed to do. Everything you do with a website is all about generating more leads.

Okay, now answer honestly: 

1. Do you know what percentage of your sales leads comes from your website?
   

2. Are you familiar with the frequency of those leads?
   

3. Do you know your Average Customer Lifetime Value (ACLV)?

Let's review your answers.

If you don't know how your website contributes to your overall leads channel, why do you even own one? How can you measure its success or impact on your business? How do you justify the expense, the time (for things like blogging and social networking engagements), the benefit to your existing client relationships, what's it doing for you? 

If you don't know if lead frequency is increasing or decreasing, then you don't know how your website content is interacting with search engines or with social media. If it's not improving, or, you're not even aware of it, why don't you just go save yourself some money and throw the website away? Oh, right, going back to your earlier response, sure, everyone's got one, but here's the truth: nobody even knows your website exists because those competitors who do understand these numbers are ranked higher than you in the search engines.

If you don't know how much a lead earns you (your ACLV, the average gross revenue one customer will earn your company), then you have no understanding of the value of that lead. Thus you have no understanding of how to compare the cost of your website hosting and SEO expenses to your actual revenue plan.

Dude, you're being out-positioned, nobody sees you, and that emptiness you feel right now is that cold hard truth rotting in your bones. You have no idea how your website contributes to your company's success. Why even have one?

Want to change? Here's a couple of very simple ideas that you could do, right now, to take control of this situation and manage your website:

• Start tracking the number and frequency of your sales leads from your website.
  

• Develop an ACLV.
  

• At the end of your company's fiscal year, multiply the number of sales leads you landed by the ACLV value. Compare that benefit to the expenses you're paying for the website.

Then respond! Take action! Make incremental improvements to the website, re-design it, talk to someone (like, you know, a technology consultant) about how it could better serve you, or heck, just take it down. Nobody cares anyway (you certainly don't) and it's not earning you any money, so why have one?

R