All articles written by: Gavin

9 Ways to Develop a Positive Mental Attitude

Positivity takes you places that negativity cannot.

When the pessimist says ‘it’s impossible’, the optimist is already giving it a try.

Positivity can bridge the gap of the unknown, the one negative people daren’t leap.

And more often than not, it is this gap that makes achievements impossible, not the challenge itself.

Your perception is your reality, and if you are positive enough to believe you can do something, more often than not, you probably can.

Positivity breeds confidence, charisma, inspiration, and ultimately success.

If you aim to avoid failing at one thing in life, let it be not losing your positive attitude. And all other failures will be overcome with the energy that positivity brings.

But maintaining positivity, especially in the face of adversity, isn’t always easy.

Negativity creeps its way into your life sometimes through the company you keep, through your own thoughts and fears, and through your self-esteem.

So when you see negativity rearing its ugly head, it’s time to take action and steer your mind back into the positive lane.

Here are a few techniques to help you adopt and maintain a positive mental attitude:

Surround Yourself with Positive People Only

Negativity is highly contagious. If you are constantly surrounded by people with negative mindsets, it will soon drag you down.

Spend time only with people that energise you. People that inspire you with their own optimism. And people who can keep your own mindset positive by maintaining a positive environment.

If you have negative people close to you, on your social media feeds, or at work – don’t waste any time in cutting them off and cleanse the company you keep. Life is too short to spend constantly counteracting negativity, and the drowning victim will pull you down with them.

Don’t Watch the News

No good news ever makes the news.

I haven’t read the headlines or watched/listened to the news in 5+ years.

Not only is the news a hotbed for negativity, it also fosters a spectator mindset – one where you become accustomed to watching things take place and not being able to control their outcome.

I’d rather be in the game, on the field, influencing the result, than standing in the crowd watching what happens. Wouldn’t you?

Resist Negative Thinking

We’re all guilty of it at one point or another – whether it be following a job interview, an important meeting, or when thinking about things that may or may not happen.

We think of the worst case scenario in a situation so we soften the blow for ourselves should the worst actually happen.

Resist these thoughts and focus on the positive potential of every particular situation or scenario – it’s much more enjoyable this way!

Think glass half full, not half empty.

Make your Goals Actionable

By this, I mean – break them down so you can see the micro-achievements you are making each day.

If you focus constantly on the long-term ‘end goal’, it can start to feel too far away and it can be hard to maintain your motivation – the same motivation you need to actually be able to achieve your end goal.

Take time to celebrate the small wins – they all add up to make the big wins eventually.

Use Negativity as an Opportunity to Test Your Resolve

Treat every adverse event or situation as a challenge.

A challenge to test your resolve, your determination, and your steel.

When you view problems as challenges to be overcome it’s much easier to break them down and tackle them aggressively and systematically – because you’ve just created a goal for yourself from the adversity, rather than dwelling on a problem.

Disconnect Fear from Failure

View failure itself in a positive light – you can often learn more from failing at something than you can succeeding.

Failure is a lesson, something to learn from, and something to bounce back from (creating a challenge out of adversity).

When you view failure like this, you remove the fear that’s often embedded within the thought of failure, and when you lose this fear, you become free. Free to take on more challenges and to live a more positive life.

Stay Fit and Healthy

Self esteem and self confidence can play a big role in your ability to maintain a positive mindset.

Think of it like a suit of armour to your positivity.

When you have extreme confidence within yourself, it’s hard not to feel positive, and it becomes even harder for the people around you to knock your positivity because, hey, whatever happens in this particular situation, you feel fit, healthy, and good about yourself – you’ll always walk away with this, no matter what the outcome of the situation you face.

Ignore the Nay-Sayers

Even if your immediate circle of friends and family are positive, you’ll still encounter nay-sayers and negative people in certain situations.

Often, it’s good to understand the translation of the nay-sayer’s language.

When they say ‘You can’t do that’ or ‘That’s impossible’ – what they really mean is ‘I couldn’t do that’ or ‘That looks way too hard for me to attempt, so I’ll try to dissuade you from doing it too’.

Point blank ignore the nay-sayers, they bring nothing useful to the table. Seems ignorant, and it probably is, but you need your positivity to build your bridge over the unknown – don’t let someone else take this bridge away.

Celebrate Life

An inspirational friend recently told me that the way he overcomes his adversity is with the cliche YOLO (You Only Live Once).

And it’s true.

Life is too short and too precious to spend worrying and drowning in negativity.

We’re all heading for the same destination, so why be scared of doing what you want to do in the short time you’re here?

Stay positive, do positive things, and your journey and experience in life will also be a positive one.

If you have any tips for maintaining a positive mental attitude, please share them in the comments below.

5 Cheap & Quick Ways to Build an Email List

Email marketing, without doubt, is THE most cost-effective way of promoting your online business.

If you build your own list from scratch, then the people on that list will already be familiar with your brand, they will have agreed to receive communication from you, and therefore they are one of the most receptive and potentially high-converting audiences you can hope to find.

Once you have an organically-built, large list, and you understand what information, deals, and products/services they want to see from you, then you’ve unlocked the door to some highly profitable sales.

Why?

Because beyond the subscription cost of your email marketing software, it’s free to promote to this audience. And that, teamed with their responsiveness and familiarity with your brand, means you have a low-cost, high-converting promotional channel – it’s the holy grail for almost all businesses.

But there’s a catch.

You can’t force your list growth.

You can encourage it, but you cannot force it.

When you start looking at purchasing email lists or using underhand tactics to get website visitors to unknowingly subscribe to your list, then you damage your conversion potential, you damage your brand, and you run the risk of getting blacklisted for spam.

One of the reasons email marketing is so effective is that your subscribers trust your brand – so much so that they decided to subscribe in the first instance.

Purchasing a list means that your brand will be alien to your audience, they have no awareness of you, or trust in you – so you’ll probably see a high level of unsubscribes and/or spam reports pretty quickly.

Forcing subscribes means that your subscriber list may be aware of your brand, but they didn’t agree to receive your emails – so whatever trust they had in your brand before will soon be lost when they realise you are contacting them without their consent.

So, the question is, how do you cheaply and quickly build your own list organically?

Well, there’s a few techniques – ones that have helped me and my businesses amass hundreds of thousands of genuine, engaged subscribers to our own lists – and I’ll share these with you here.

Have a Clear Subscription Motivation

Before you start thinking about driving traffic to your site to grab their email addresses, ensure your subscription offer is optimised.

By this I mean, understand your audience and what they are interested in, then build an offer (such as a free ebook, video, a free sample and so on) around those interests.

Give them something as a reward for entering their email address. Something they will see value in.

Gone are the days of ‘Sign Up Here for Our Free Newsletter’ offers.

Everyone’s inbox gets flooded with junk and promotional content each day, why would they want to receive even more of this?

Give them an offer they can’t refuse, and that really hones into their needs, and you’ll see maximum conversion of traffic from visitor to subscriber.

Make Your Subscription Offer Visible

Now you have your offer that visitors cannot refuse, you need to put it under their nose at every opportunity.

Make sure it’s visible on all pages by placing an opt-in form at the top of your sidebar or in your website header, introduce a pop-up (exit pop-ups are a great way to grab people before they leave your site, I use OptinMonster for mine), and incorporate opt-in options in other processes where an email address is already being entered (checkouts, sign-ins and so on) – they’re entering the information anyway, so to tick a box and receive your subscriber offer becomes even easier for these people.

Steal Other People’s Lists

This might sound like I’m going against what I said earlier about growing your list organically – but this is smart stealing.

Think of an offer you can provide that will interest potential partner sites.

Think of the highest-traffic sites in your industry or niche (not direct competition – think of sites that will actively want to work with you), then think of creating an offer that they would be interested in promoting to their own lists.

Maybe you can offer a freebie, a huge discount on your products or services, or provide some valuable information or resources to their subscriber base.

Then, do some outreach to these sites explaining that you would like to work with them to promote your offer to their subscriber list.

Angle along the lines of – it will make them look good for providing something valuable to their readership, and it benefits you too in terms of the traffic they send to your site from the mailer.

You could even offer affiliate commissions for sales referrals to your partner site, if you have an active program on your site, to incentivise them even more to run with it.

Then, before the mailer goes out, ensure your own list-building forms and offers are highly visible and if you have a sales channel or checkout, ensure you give people the opportunity to subscribe at this point also.

Then get your partner to run the mailer.

What you are effectively doing is not only boosting your immediate revenue and/or traffic through the mailer, but you’re taking your partner’s list, grabbing the ones on this list who are actively interested in your brand and your subscription offer, and storing them for future promotional mailers.

You’re effectively stealing your partner’s list, but with theirs and their subscriber’s consent.

Guest Blog

A guest blog is where you write a post for someone else’s blog.

Guest blogging is the perfect way to display your knowledge on a particular subject to a fresh audience.

So this marries well if you have a subscription offer such as a whitepaper or other information-based product – once you’ve proven your knowledge to your new audience, they are way more likely to subscribe in order to discover more from you.

Buzzsumo.com is a great tool for finding blogs around particular subjects, or you can simply Google for blogs in your industry.

When you have found the most popular ones, contact them and see if they allow guest blogging, and if so, put yourself forward.

Make sure you can put a link in there back to your website so people can easily see your subscription offer and sign-up.

Consider Solo Ads

If you have a well-optimised squeeze page, and an enticing subscription offer, you can source ‘solo ad’ suppliers and build your own list this way.

If you aren’t familiar with what solo ads are, basically, it is people with lists that will send out your offer to their list, and charge you a set rate per click.

So, rather like the list-stealing approach I mentioned earlier, this is an even quicker way to get a partnership set-up and drive traffic from someone else’s list, that may then subscribe to your list for you to then email directly.

The best way to find a solo ad is via the Solo Ad Testimonial group on Facebook.

Solo ads are particularly suited to the ‘Make Money Online’ and ‘Online Business’ domain, but there are solo ads for other niches – you just have to shop around and make sure that the solo ad provider has an audience/list that will be interested in your offer and likely to convert down the line.

Always check as many reviews on your chosen solo ad provider too – there’s a lot of solo ad providers with useless lists out there, so choose carefully. Ask them how they built their list initially, and what those people initially subscribed for (what subscription offer was used).

Following the above techniques will allow you to quickly and cheaply build your own email list – and combined with a consistent effort on longer-term traffic channels such as SEO – you will eventually see your list expand into a significant, high-converting audience.

If you have any list building tips of your own, please share them below.

Top 116 Success Quotes that will Motivate You

We  all need a little motivation every now and again.

So I’ve compiled a list of my 116 favourite motivational, success-related quotes.

If you’re feeling the pressure and you feel like giving-up, have a read through these to refresh your mindset, and remember – it’s always darkest before the dawn.

If you don’t give up, no matter how tough things get, persevere and you will achieve. The light will come, no matter how far away it seems.

Anyway, that’s enough motivation from me, here’s the list:

  1. When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds aren’t in your favour – Elon Musk
  2. Whatever you want to do, do it now. There are only so many tomorrows
  3. The best thing I ever did was believe in myself
  4. Today’s pain will be tomorrow’s strength
  5. To accomplish great things we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe
  6. If you give up at the first sign of struggle, you’re really not ready to be successful
  7. Have goals so big, you get uncomfortable telling small-minded people
  8. I can. I will. End of story
  9. Remember, the ones who said you couldn’t do it are watching
  10. If you can’t handle stress, then you can’t manage success
  11. When you know clearly what you want, you’ll wake up every morning excited about life
  12. Do what you love, and you will never have a problem with Monday
  13. You’re not meant to do what is easy, you’re meant to challenge yourself
  14. Just keep showing up when most people would quit
  15. There are no secrets to success, it is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure
  16. You may see me struggle, but you will never see me quit
  17. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone
  18. There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this World, those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed
  19. It’s never too late to become what you might have been
  20. Failure is part of the process, quitting is not
  21. The best way to succeed is to help others succeed, they will carry you to success
  22. 97% of the people who quit too soon are employed by the 3% who never gave up
  23. Stop chasing the money, and start chasing the passion
  24. 3 steps to success, set a goal, work like hell, stay consistent
  25. If you are going through hell, keep going
  26. Entrepreneur: Someone who jumps off a cliff and learns how to build a plane on the way down
  27. They won’t get it. Your path is your path, it’s only for you to understand
  28. I’m coming for everything they said I couldn’t have
  29. If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it
  30. You have to fight through the bad days to earn the best days in your life
  31. I will succeed, because I am willing to fail more times than you are willing to try
  32. When you realise you have nothing to lose, you’ll turn into a beast
  33. Don’t stop dreaming just because you had a nightmare
  34. If an expert says it cannot be done, get another expert
  35. Don’t get discouraged, it is often the last key that opens the lock
  36. The road to success is often a lonely one
  37. Don’t be afraid of being different. Be afraid of being the same as everyone else
  38. Surround yourself with people who are only going to lift you higher
  39. Build a life you won’t want to take a vacation from
  40. Ignore the noise, stay focused
  41. Life is about making an impact, not making an income
  42. You miss 100% of the shots you do not take
  43. I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed – Michael Jordan
  44. We become what we think about – Earl Nightingale
  45. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore, Dream, Discover – Mark Twain
  46. Life is 10% what happens to me, and 90% how I react to this
  47. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now
  48. 80% of success is showing up – Woody Allen
  49. I am not a product of my circumstances, I am a product of my decisions
  50. You can never cross the ocean until you have courage to lose sight of the shore – Christopher Columbus
  51. Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right – Henry Ford
  52. The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why – Mark Twain
  53. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it
  54. People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing.  That’s why we recommend it daily – Zig Ziglar
  55. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage
  56. There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing – Aristotle
  57. Ask and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you – Jesus
  58. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.  Live the life you have imagined
  59. When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, I used everything you gave me
  60. Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear
  61. We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light – Plato
  62. When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.  When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote down ‘happy’.  They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life – John Lennon
  63. Fall seven times and stand up eight
  64. When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us – Helen Keller
  65. Everything has beauty, but not everyone can see – Confucius
  66. How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world – Anne Frank
  67. When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be – Lao Tzu
  68. Happiness is not something readymade.  It comes from your own actions – Dalai Lama
  69. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on
  70. First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end – Aristotle
  71. If the wind will not serve, take to the oars
  72. You can’t fall if you don’t climb.  But there’s no joy in living your whole life on the ground
  73. Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears
  74. Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful
  75. I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do – Leonardo Da Vinci
  76. Limitations live only in our minds.  But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless
  77. What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do
  78. I didn’t fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong – Benjamin Franklin
  79. In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure – Bill Cosby
  80. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new – Albert Einstein
  81. It is not what you do for your children, but what you have taught them to do for themselves, that will make them successful human beings
  82. If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money
  83. Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs
  84. The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself–the invisible battles inside all of us–that’s where it’s at
  85. If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough – Oprah Winfrey
  86. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck – Dalai Lama
  87. You can’t use up creativity.  The more you use, the more you have
  88. Dream big and dare to fail
  89. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have
  90. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten – Tony Robbins
  91. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning
  92. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live
  93. You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try
  94. Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent
  95. Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be
  96. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it – Henry Ford
  97. It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years
  98. Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing – Benjamin Franklin
  99. Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, “I’m possible!”
  100. The only way to do great work is to love what you do – Steve Jobs
  101. Its hard to wait around for something you know might never happen; but its harder to give up when you know its everything you want
  102. One of the most important keys to Success is having the discipline to do what you know you should do, even when you don’t feel like doing it
  103. Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, or worn. It is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace & gratitude
  104. Don’t be afraid to stand for what you believe in, even if that means standing alone
  105. Forget all the reasons it won’t work and believe the one reason that it will
  106. I am thankful for all of those who said NO to me. Its because of them I’m doing it myself
  107. Life is short, live it. Love is rare, grab it. Anger is bad, dump it. Fear is awful, face it. Memories are sweet, cherish it
  108. When you say “It’s hard”, it actually means “I’m not strong enough to fight for it”. Stop saying its hard. Think positive!
  109. Life is like photography. You need the negatives to develop
  110. Self confidence is the most attractive quality a person can have. how can anyone see how awesome you are if you can’t see it yourself?
  111. We learn something from everyone who passes through our lives.. Some lessons are painful, some are painless.. but, all are priceless
  112. Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. it means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections
  113. Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending
  114. When the past calls, let it go to voicemail, believe me, it has nothing new to say
  115. Walk away from anything or anyone who takes away from your joy. Life is too short to put up with fools
  116. Life has two rules: #1 Never quit #2 Always remember rule # 1

I hope you have enjoyed these motivational quotes and take from them what you need to keep on the course to achieving your own dreams.

My favourite has to be the definition of an entrepreneur – as someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down. It signifies taking action, and learning/adapting as you go.

If you have any more to add, please use the comments below.

 

15 Ways for Small Business Owners to Improve Productivity

Progress.

It means different things to different business owners.

Increasing sales by 10% for one small business may mean massive progress, whereas for the next, it could mean failure in relation to their objectives.

But one thing is for certain, everyone wants to make progress in what they are doing.

Whether it be growing sales, building new revenue channels, or just getting day-to-day tasks completed.

And to make this progress, we must be productive. We must consistently work towards our goals in an efficient, effective manner.

But how do you achieve consistently strong productivity?

A restless night or distractions can often cause your productivity to nosedive, so how do you pick your productivity back up-to-speed so you can maintain progress towards your goals?

Here’s 15 ways to improve your productivity as a small business owner.

They are techniques I regularly employ as I juggle my responsibilities as a husband, father, CEO of Vitalife Group, my other businesses, property, this blog and my Udemy course.

The following techniques help me to maintain progress in all areas, and also to enjoy the journey – ensuring I have ample time to spend in my most important and enjoyable roles as husband and father.

Check and Respond to Emails Just Twice a Day (Maximum)

One of my biggest distractions is emails.

I’m normally working in a web browser on my laptop, with my email tabs for various accounts open constantly.

As soon as a new email drops in, it’s too tempting to come away from what I’m doing and check what it is!

Whilst I haven’t yet broken this habit of checking (I can’t ignore the anxiety of missing an urgent email – since almost all my communication with staff and other people is by this method), I have implemented the discipline to drop whatever it is into my ‘follow-ups’ folder (provided it isn’t absolutely urgent) and deal with my follow-ups for 1 hour at the end of each day.

This ensures that I can stay focused on what I’m working on, and am not constantly switching my attention to dealing with emails throughout the day.

When you allow your emails to take-over your day, you’ll reach the end of the day and not really feel like you have achieved anything – because you’ll have been flitting from micro-task to micro-task and not working towards your own, higher-level objectives for your business.

Not only do emails cause distraction and affect your immediate productivity, they also eventually lead you to lose motivation as you never get to feel the sense of achievement you gain when you complete a task or tick-off a to-do each day.

Let them wait for a reply. Your own objectives are more important.

Consistently Work Towards an Actionable To-Do List

To-Do lists allow you to direct your daily activities in-line with your higher-level business objectives.

They are effectively a bitesize, broken-down collection of micro-objectives that make up your longer-term business objectives.

Having a to-do list therefore not only guides you, daily, in the right direction, but it also helps to make longer-term objectives seem more achievable and maintains motivation as you work towards them since you can see real progress as you tick-off your to-dos.

I cover building actionable to-do lists from your higher-level objectives in my 4-week business course.

Ensuring to-dos are actionable, and breaking them down as much as possible, maximises productivity by allowing you to focus on each specific task involved in meeting an objective, rather than wandering towards a vague high-level goal.

Try Not to Multitask

As with emails, attempting to perform more than one task at once is not good for productivity or motivation.

Although, admittedly, multitasking is sometimes unavoidable (especially when you’re working from home and have a toddler placing toys on your lap asking you to play as you type – which is happening as I speak!), you should actively try to focus on just one task at a time.

This is called ‘monotasking’.

The best analogy I can give for this is when you attempt to download several large files at once.

If you just downloaded one file at a time, you would achieve 1, 2, or maybe 3 large downloads in a day. Whereas if you attempted to download 10 all at once, you wouldn’t achieve a single download in that day.

Your attention and productivity similarly has its own bandwidth – spread it too thin, and you won’t see any real achievements on a daily basis, which in-turn damages your motivation by never reaching a sense of achievement in that day.

But focus on just one task at a time, you might get several to-dos done in the day, which in-turn boosts motivation as you see tangible progress each day.

Don’t Procrastinate 

Jump in, and adapt.

If you sit thinking about a task for too long, you’ll never start it.

We’ve all got that to-do on our list that we’ve been putting-off because it’s either not enjoyable, too big, or you just don’t know where to begin with it.

You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can actually clear this from your list however, if you just make a start on it, and give it your full attention for the day.

I’m often the same with my blog posts. Each month my strategy is to build a list of blog titles for the coming month, and I then flesh my content out from these titles.

It’s easy to come up with the titles, making them engaging and relevant to my audience, but it’s harder to start typing the actual content. I have writer’s block, and don’t know where to begin. Partly out of wanting to achieve perfection and keep my content engaging, and partly from just not having my mind properly on the task and the topic.

The way I deal with this?

I just force myself to start typing.

More often than not, it will snowball from here. New ideas come to me as I type and focus my mind on each micro-topic in the post, and before I know it, I’m 2,000 words in and forcing myself to bring things to a close so it’s not too long-winded!

So just dive in, it doesn’t have to be perfect, you don’t even really need to know what you’re doing – adapt and learn as you go, and it will all come together faster than you think.

Stay Hydrated

If you aren’t properly hydrated, you lose concentration.

Water is the single most important resource for the human body, and when it becomes depleted, your performance can fall – both in a mental and a physical capacity.

I often rely on warm drinks like tea (matcha green tea, in particular – which is great for concentration) and decaffeinated coffee for my hydration, getting through 8-10 cups per day.

But it’s also great if you mix in some drinks of water and juice too.

Just stay away from the sugary, fizzy stuff and too much caffeine – these will have you ‘crashing’ later in the day and caffeine is a diuretic, which means it can dehydrate you if you have too much.

Delegate and Automate

Rely on staff and software to conduct day-to-day, repetitive activities so that you can focus your time and energy on value-adding activities only.

If you find the right staff and put people in the right roles, you shouldn’t have to spend too much time supervising their work – just ensure they remain motivated and interested in their role, and pay mind to their own personal objectives and interests, and they’ll do what you need them to do.

If possible, automation is the preference to delegation – if you can automate a business process then, aside from the initial investment in software or machinery, you should see ongoing cost savings from labour-intensive, alternative solutions. Plus, automation removes the possibility of human error in the process.

Either way, try to make your day-to-day activities redundant through delegation and automation, and you’ll see your productivity and business progress soar, as you start to focus on more value-adding activities.

I cover more about automation and delegation in the 4th week of my online business course.

Swerve Meetings that Don’t Align with your Objectives

Re-assess the meetings you have in your calendar. Do you really need to attend these?

If they don’t directly relate to your business objectives, cancel them.

Meetings are just as distracting as emails, except even more time consuming and therefore costly.

For me to have a face-to-face meeting with somebody, it HAS to present the possibility of something major, aligned with my business objectives – or it won’t happen. I value my time too much to spend it in meetings that are purely for the benefit of the other party, or that are not valuable enough to my business.

Don’t have meetings for meeting’s sake.

Get 8 Hours of Sleep a Night

Sleep deprivation can affect your decision-making abilities, and has a negative impact on your productivity and concentration.

Ensure you go to bed early enough, or sleep in long enough, to get 8 hours of rest each night.

And if this is totally impossible, find time to take a nap the following day to make the hours up.

Sleep gives your body and mind time to recover and repair. If you don’t give your body enough time to do this, your productivity, and eventually your health, will suffer.

Stay Fit, Healthy, and Active

Feeling good about yourself and being 100% fit and healthy has a huge impact on your productivity.

If you don’t have good health, you will be constantly hindered by illness and ailments, and it is impossible to maintain 100% productivity in this situation.

Staying fit, healthy, and active takes investment – in both time and energy. You need to plan meals, prepare fresh food, and take time to exercise and workout.

Granted, this steals time that you could otherwise spend on your business, but would you rather spend 20% of your time dedicated to staying fit and well so that you can maintain 100% productivity, or devote 100% of your time to your business alone, and only achieve 20% productivity due to illness and poor performance?

With full productivity and focus, you can achieve much more in a shorter period of time – so don’t worry about dedicating time to your health and wellness, your business will benefit from this too.

Eat Well and Supplement your Diet

Eating well and supplementing your diet where necessary, are just as important as exercise in terms of maintaining your health.

Wherever possible, try to eat fresh fruit and veg, and maintain a healthy balanced diet.

If you’re aware of any nutrients that you are lacking, then supplement them – to ensure your body has everything it needs to achieve optimal performance.

I personally take CoEnzyme Q10 for heart health, Magnesium Glycinate, a Probiotic for digestive health, Potassium for effective muscle function, and Omega 3,6,9 for my good fats.

Being the owner of www.vitalifehealth.com and www.lovehealthhatewaste.com helps when it comes to understanding what supplements you need to fill the gaps in your diet, but with a little research you’ll be able to figure out a supplement regime for yourself too.

Take Regular Breaks

Taking regular breaks, especially from your computer screen, helps maintain concentration and also allows you to recharge and come back with fresh ideas.

I often take this approach when blogging too. Leaving a post midway to do other things means that when I come back, I’ve usually had some other fresh ideas to include, and it allows me to read what I’ve already written with fresh eyes – so I can spot any changes that should be made.

Don’t be Afraid to Work Unconventional Hours

When you’re running your own small business, and especially if you also have a young family (like me), 9-5 hours go out of the window.

You may need to break-off in the middle of the day for a family event, for the gym or a run, or for a walk, to pick the kids up or drop them off at school, to take them swimming – whatever it may be.

In a typical day I get around 3 solid hours of work done early in a morning, then I’ve got other commitments that break my day up, so I typically only solidly work in 2 or 3 hour blocks, with gaps in-between for the gym, for family, for going for a walk, or anything else.

I probably average around 6-7 hours of work per day, but it’s all broken-down into chunks of 2-3 hours a time.

Provided you are 100% productive in the hours you’re working, you shouldn’t even need to work 9-5 each day to do what you have to do. And if you are working more than this, and the weekends, then you seriously have to address your productivity at work and your work-life balance.

Take a Holiday

Taking a break from work can give you completely fresh perspective and new ideas – and it also helps to recharge your battery, allowing you to come back with optimum productivity.

I’ve had my best business ideas whilst I’ve been on holiday, and I’ve come back with more motivation than when I went, because I have new, exciting things to experiment with.

Make Sure You’re Doing what you Love to do

Ultimately, make sure you’re still doing what you love.

I’m a huge supporter of following your dreams and only doing something that you have a true passion for. You spend the majority of your life working, so you might aswell spend it doing something you love, right?

The reason your productivity may be falling is because you are no longer enjoying what you are doing.

If this is the case, take a short break away from what you are doing and re-assess what you want to be doing.

If you can’t realign yourself within your current business to focus on your passion and the reason you first started your business, then don’t be afraid to admit that what you are doing is no longer enjoyable, and move-on.

Don’t become trapped doing something you hate – you’ll become depressed.

Break free. It may be painful in the short-term, both mentally and financially, but provided you know what your true passion is, and what you want to spend your time doing, then it will be much more rewarding in the long-term to focus on what you love to do.

Don’t Lose Sight of the Bigger Picture

Your business isn’t everything. Life has a wider scope than your business.

Make sure you dedicate enough time to family, friends, adventure, travelling, and leisure pursuits – these moments not only allow you to recharge, they also give fresh perspective and allow you to enjoy life as a whole – rather than constantly obsessing over your business.

Conclusion

Often, the things we think distract us from productivity are the very things that help to boost and maintain it.

Take frequent breaks from work, dedicate time to leisure and fitness activities, get plenty of rest, and don’t work silly hours.

Sure, you could work 6am-9pm 7 days a week on your business, and you might see positive results for a week or so. But this isn’t sustainable. You’ll burn-out faster than you think.

Don’t feel guilty for doing the things you love.

Having your own business brings with it freedom that those working a 9-5 do not share, but often it is the fear of guilt that ties small business owners into relinquishing this freedom, and they end-up working more hours than a regular employee, often for less reward.

It’s the guilt of not trying your best, not giving your business your all, and of what it could achieve if you dedicated 100% of your time and effort to your business alone.

Well, I’m here to tell you that its not quite as simple and linear as it seems.

Human emotion and mechanics are involved – and wherever these play a role, things are never completely straightforward.

Giving 100% of your time and effort to your business alone, does not generate as much growth or progress as it would if you gave 50-70% of your waking time to your business, and the rest to other things you love to do.

When you nourish your mind and body with the things it needs to maintain productivity, your business will also be rewarded in-turn.

Focus on yourself, feed your passions, and give your body what it needs – and the rest will take care of itself.

If you have any other tips for boosting productivity, please share them in the comments below.

12 Things that Keep Small Business Owners Awake at Night (and Why they Shouldn’t)

Sleep deprivation shouldn’t be a badge of honour for busy, stressed entrepreneurs.

It leads to reduced productivity, higher stress levels, and poor decisions.

So if you find yourself losing sleep over your small business, it’s a dangerous place to be, where a visious cycle can quickly and easily follow.

I always try to get at least 7 hours a night, preferably 8, sometimes accompanied by a short nap in the day too.

If I have less than this, I can’t function as effectively or as efficiently as I normally do. I’d rather spend an extra couple of hours in bed in the morning if I haven’t slept well, so I can operate at full pace when I get to my desk, than get up early regardless and burnout by 2pm.

Huge companies like Google are taking notice of the impact that sleep deprivation can have on productivity and combat this by offering employees ‘sleep pods’ in the workplace where they can take a nap to recharge.

But when stress is causing you to lose sleep, and you don’t have the opportunity to catch-up, it can be difficult.

In this post I assess the top 12 things that keep entrepreneurs and small business owners awake at night, and how you can change your perspective on these, and implement some tools and techniques, to stop them impacting your sleep.

Cashflow

One of the biggest challenges most small businesses face is cashflow management.

How do you ensure you have enough cash flowing into the business to meet wages, rent, and supplier payments?

With the dynamics and complexities of a fast-growing entrepreneurial business, it becomes less linear and straightforward to keep on-top of cashflow.

Sales are often hard to predict, and budgets need to be flexible to accommodate respective upturns and downturns from sales projections, and to capitalise on new growth opportunities.

Even the most adaptable forecasts (learn how to create adaptable forecasts for your business in my online business course) can be tested with almost daily changes from projections.

And this is why cashflow can often keep the small business owner up at night.

The best way that I’ve learned to combat fears over cashflow is:

1. Build and maintain flexible, simple cashflow projections (I show people how to build these in my 4-week business course) so that you can predict future cashflows and arrange finance in advance accordingly if necessary

2. Hold on to cash for as long as you can. Get paid as soon as possible from your customers and arrange long payment terms with suppliers

3. Don’t be afraid to take-on affordable finance to provide cashflow in times of shortfall. Provided you are profitable and can cover the cost of borrowing, then it’s a better option than running out of cash!

Profitability

You can struggle with cash but still be profitable – if you’re continually reinvesting in stock or capital equipment.

But if you’re struggling with cash and you’re unprofitable, then it can be a very difficult time.

Banks rarely lend to unprofitable businesses, and raising equity finance is equally difficult unless you have an exceptional management team and/or concept.

So unless you have more cash to pump in until it becomes profitable, then you’re going to be in trouble.

Sit down and figure out your top 4 overheads, then look at how these can be reduced. Cost cutting in all areas can have positive impact, but if you need to turn finances around quickly you need to focus on the big expenses for big impact.

Then look at how you can increase your gross margin, can you push suppliers for further discounts? Sell more profitable products or services?

When your business is as lean as possible, and you are maximising your gross margins, then you need to look at ways you can increase sales and scale with the same foundation of overheads so you can dilute these further and start to see a healthy net profit.

Look for new promotional channels and particularly focus on maximising customer order value with up-selling and cross-selling (I cover how to do this in my 4 week business course) – selling more to existing customers is often a more profitable strategy than seeking brand new customers.

Deadlines

Client deadlines, account filing deadlines, and regulatory deadlines – they all create pressure and can contribute to stress.

Try using a calendar, to-do lists, and collaborative working tools like Basecamp to plan ahead and ensure all deadlines are met, and where they cannot be met, appropriate communication is made before the deadline arrives.

In my 4 week business course I also cover how to produce and use to-do lists to help prioritise and organise tasks.

Employees

Fear of key employees leaving, sickness, staff shortages, conflict – there are plenty of ways that your employees can cause you stress and therefore sleepless nights.

It’s important, with employees, that you appreciate they aren’t just machines, they have their own needs, objectives, and dreams – and these won’t always necessarily marry with the objectives of your business.

You have to ensure your employees are in positions where they remain motivated and engaged, and that you are flexible when it comes to their own needs – whether it be flexible working hours, training and development, or even just leaving work early one afternoon for a family event. Help them to meet their objectives and they’ll help your business meet its objectives also.

Beyond showing flexibility, a desire to help them achieve their own objectives, and ensuring they are in the right role within the business, you can’t control much else.

Humans, by their nature, are unpredictable. They are driven by emotion and feeling, and there are many variables (both inside and outside of the workplace) that can affect these.

Don’t stress over things you cannot control – provide employees a flexible, fertile environment for them to flourish, and the rest is out of your control. Relax.

Sales

Research has shown sales growth to be one of the biggest causes of stress for small business owners.

We’re all trying to grow our sales – no business owner ever wants them to go the other way.

But stressing over growing your sales really isn’t necessary.

Growing a business isn’t an exact science, and it takes plenty of time and trial/error to achieve millions of pounds in sales.

Provided you are collecting data and analytics on every promotional channel you are using, and you are regularly analysing these statistics to tweak your promotional strategy to focus on the activities with the best response and highest return on investment, then worrying beyond this is completely irrational.

You should only be worried about sales growth if you are flying blind and are not collecting, processing, and applying data from each promotional avenue that you employ. Because then you’ll never truly know what is working and what isn’t, so you’ll never feel in control of your sales growth.

Install Google Analytics, use promotional codes uniquely assigned to each promotion you run, and continually analyse your results – and you should never feel worried about growing sales. Perhaps you’ll feel frustrated at times as you go through the trial and error stages of your promotional activity, but never worried.

Time Management

For small business owners, time is quite literally money. If you don’t manage your own, and employee’s, time effectively then it can prove costly.

And not always costly in the sense of an immediate financial cost, but also the opportunity cost of focusing your time on more valuable and rewarding activities.

This is something I personally had an issue with until most recently. I’d spend most of my days sat monitoring and dealing with emails, and not on value-adding activities or my own to-do lists.

This caused a distraction where I was ultimately prioritising the needs of the people emailing me, and not my own business needs.

Now, I only deal with emails in short bursts either once or twice per day. And if I receive an email that doesn’t align with my own business objectives or relating to the ongoing needs of my business, it gets ignored entirely.

It seems ignorant and somewhat selfish, but you have to prioritise your time according to your own business needs, or you’ll be constantly distracted and lose your direction.

Customer Satisfaction

It’s always important to ensure customer satisfaction – it’s this that will ultimately drive your business growth through referrals and repeat custom.

If you are having issues with your product or service, it’s important to deal with them quickly and aggressively so they do not negatively impact on your customer experience.

Then ensure you have the right customer service in-place to deal with any complaints. A complaint in itself doesn’t have to be a bad thing. View it as an opportunity to show-off your customer care and service.

Research has shown that customer loyalty is even stronger amongst customers that have experienced issues but had them dealt with by great customer service, than amongst customers that never experienced any negative issues with their product or service in the first instance.

So don’t stress about customer complaints, just ensure the underlying issue is dealt with going forwards, and that any complaints are dealt with swiftly and effectively.

Growth

Like with sales growth, overall company growth is often a worry for small business owners, especially those with other investors and shareholders to please.

How you adress this concern depends on the measurement of growth you are concerned about – it could be revenue growth, asset growth, customer growth, profit growth, or any other measure.

If it’s revenue growth that you have a concern about, you need to analyse your promotional channels and their performance, just as you would with sales growth issues. If it’s asset growth, you need to analyse your reinvestment strategy and the depreciation rates for your business assets, if it’s customer growth you need to look at promotional channels and also your customer retention and repeat order encouragement to ensure these are optimised, if it’s profit growth, you need to analyse both sales/promotional performance and your expenses in comparison to budgeted figures.

Again, though, analysis and computation/implementation of data will allow you to combat fear with rational results analysis and strategy revisals in order to maintain course towards your company growth projections.

And if you don’t meet projections even after constant and thorough analysis/application of data, then you’ve given it your best effort – not everything goes to plan. So, revise your growth projections so they remain realistic.

Technology

A concern for some business owners can be about the technology they use and whether it is outdated.

Technology investments, particularly in manufacturing operations and technologically-advanced businesses, can be substantial – so when the time comes to update, you need to either have good cash reserves or be in a position to take on funding.

Ignoring or putting-off technology investment can lead to falling behind the competition and operational inefficiencies that can hinder your growth and financial performance – so don’t neglect it.

Government Regulations

A particular concern for those operating in highly regulated industries or politically unstable Countries, is regulatory changes enforced by government.

Not only can meeting new regulations be costly, but they can also put you completely out of business, depending on their severity.

But the answer to preventing worry around this business risk is simple, just don’t worry – unless you are a large organisation with hefty political power that can lobby government to actively combat restrictive and unnecessary regulations, then you cannot control it.

Therefore worry is completely pointless and leads to no useful outcome.

Just stay aware of proposed regulatory changes and position your business well to adapt to them if they are enforced. That’s all you can do in this circumstance.

Economy

I get particularly frustrated when I read about economic concerns or predictions. Especially when they are negative (which they invariably are).

Economies are built on confidence. Give people confidence and they’ll invest, they’ll take risks, and they will create further employment.

But scare people with gloomy predictions and depressing forecasts, and their confidence will be knocked, so they will hold back on investment and taking risks.

Sometimes I feel the media and speculation are the foundations of a downturn, and not the downturn in itself (they at least accelerate and amplify the negative effects of a dowturn).

With the internet and increasingly free International trade, we all operate in a Global economy. Do you know how many variables there are that can affect the performance of a Global marketplace?

Too many to mention!

As humans we constantly want to give reason to fluctuations in economic performance, so we feel we can control it a little better. But the truth is, the economy is so big, and has so many variables, that we cannot control it – and there are bound to be periods of ups and downs. And whether these ups and downs are given real reasoning or not, we cannot control them.

So as a small business owner, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to control it either – so my advice is, don’t pay any mind to the things you cannot control. It’s a waste of time and energy, that would be better spent on the things we can control.

Recession or not, you’ll keep pushing your business and trying to grow – don’t let the speculation on economic performance or outlook change anything about that. It’s precisely this type of reaction that creates a downturn.

Ethics

Although not something I’ve heard mentioned elsewhere, if I personally wasn’t running an ethical business or one that was doing something positive for other people, I would question the whole purpose of my business.

In particular, if your business is having a negative impact on people or the environment like alcohol or oil, then this would keep me up at night.

For me, business has to have more purpose than just making money, and it has to deliver positive impact to others – otherwise, I don’t see the point in doing it.

Do good in your business, and you won’t have to worry about this one keeping you up at night!

And that rounds up my 12 things that keep small business owners awake at night, and why they shouldn’t!

If you know of any more, or would like to add to my suggestions on how to overcome the worry that that above 12 things can create, then please share in the comments below.

Why Running Your Own Business Could Be Killing You

Living with risk can carry a price.

Not just a financial one, but one that exacts itself on your body and mind.

Driving back from the gym one evening I experienced what I now know is a panic attack – though at the time I thought I was genuinely about to die.

Constant irrepressible thoughts of worry, increased heart rate, cold sweats, palpitations, and an overall fear of impending doom. It wasn’t the greatest experience in the World.

I had extensive tests on my heart – from ECGs to scans on my heart valves to ensure they were operating as they should. All clear.

I suspected it was a panic attack shortly after the episode, but I wanted to 100% rule out any potential of it being a physical issue.

The weird thing was, I didn’t actively feel stressed or worried that often. Yes, I have stress, though I felt like I managed it effectively – but this episode taught me otherwise.

I wanted to write this post so that I could help others that have experienced this terrible feeling – it really is quite horrifying when you’re in the moment, but if you can pinpoint its cause, you can beat it using some simple techniques that I now regularly employ.

Pinpoint the Cause of your Fear or Stress

For me, this was the hardest part – I wasn’t consciously worried or fearful of any one thing, at least not constantly anyway.

Of course, I had bursts of fear or worry when I thought about a particular concern in my business – like taking on debt to further fuel growth or managing cashflow, but I actively faced these issues aggressively and planned-out how and when the debt will be repaid and how cashflow would fare by creating financial forecasts.

This defeated fear and worry with rational perspective and planning – so I could put the emotions to rest.

After much thought, I managed to pinpoint what was causing my subconscious mind to worry – I realised that, as my company had grown, my daily thoughts and perspective had changed.

No longer was I focused on longer-term, exciting objectives that I’d set for the business, and on how we could develop and grow the business further, I had become sucked into day-to-day worry about cashflow, and my focus had switched to managing and attempting to control potential negative situations, rather than dealing with and compartmentalizing these so I could continue to focus on growth and the positive prospects for the business.

This might seem like I’m suggesting its a good idea to ignore issues in your business – it most definitely is not. But issues should be dealt with swiftly and aggressively, and should not consume your day-to-day thoughts – otherwise your longer-term vision becomes clouded and you don’t achieve the growth that you could if you focused daily on the positive prospects and growth projects.

What had happened was, I was dealing with the issues swiftly, but I had become trapped into dealing with even the most minute issues – which meant my entire day was consumed by problems (which weren’t actually that important, my OCD just amplified them as I attempted to achieve perfection with everything I handled).

I was also getting consumed by emails – I hated having anything in my ‘follow-ups’ folder, so I aimed to have this cleared each day where possible. Which meant I ended-up priorisiting other people’s priorities, and not my own.

Now, I let my follow-ups accumulate and only deal with them when I have a moment away from dealing with my own objectives and to-do lists, not the other way round.

I also ignore a lot more emails – which may sound a little ignorant, and I still feel bad for doing it – but I have to do it for my sanity. If the email doesn’t fit with my own priorities in the business, and isn’t important for the ongoing operation of the business, then it doesn’t go in my follow-ups.

Don’t Shy Away from Fearful Situations

It’s tempting, when you’ve experienced a panic attack or similar feeling of intense worry or fear to shy away from the activity or situation that caused its onset.

Don’t give in to this feeling.

If you do, you’ll be reinforcing the fear you first experienced, and when you do have to face that particular activity or situation again in future, then your fear will be amplified – because you’ll not only have the original fear, but you’ll have the fear of the onset of worry and feeling of intense fear – it’s a very vicious cycle.

You need to face it head-on and show your own mind that you aren’t afraid to go through the situation again. After all, that’s all you’re battling – your own mind.

So, whilst I was still trying to figure out the cause of my fear in the days that followed my original attack, I would feel the same sensation creeping up on me when I was either at the gym or on the way home – because my mind now associated this feeling with this activity, and started to develop a pattern.

But I still went to the gym the day  after the initial experience, then the day after that, and the day after that. I managed to keep a further full-blown attack at bay, but I could still feel it in the background waiting to take hold.

Breathing exercises and stretching allowed me to refocus and prevent it happening again – and I took this approach until I had figured out the root cause of the issue, and addressed this head-on too.

Now my fear and worry is gone, I can see it clearly, even in my subconscious mind, like I always have in my conscious mind – I see the fear for what it is, an irrational distraction, and it can no longer affect my day-to-day life.

With my day-to-day focus and vision back on the growth of my businesses, and on its positive prospects (with higher-level negative issues being dealt with aggressively, and lower-level negative issues delegated), my subconscious mind is now much clearer.

Conclusion

Ultimately, fear is a 90% irrational and 10% pointless emotion.

Meaning, most of the time, fear is unjustified and based on irrational thinking, and where fear IS justified, there is still no point to it – what you are fearful of, you will have to face with the emotion of fear present or not. So it doesn’t help with your situation.

Whilst it’s impossible, unless you are a robot, to completely remove an emotion like fear from your mind, it is possible to control it, and to counter any situation where fear is present with the argument that what you are experiencing is either irrational or totally pointless.

Ultimately, life is a journey where we all end up in the same situation – dead.

Depressing way of thinking, maybe. But this is what I use to anchor my mind when fear tries to take hold.

Whatever situation you face, whether it be losing your home, your savings, or anything else, it’s just an experience. It won’t kill you.

You are therefore still able to continue your life journey. And that’s all life is, a journey – there isn’t an end goal like complete financial security or this point of euphoria where you feel you have achieved everything you want to achieve and your life is complete. If you’re seeking this feeling, you’ll end up depressed – because it never arrives.

Another thing this way of thinking does is make you more comfortable with life’s only guarantee, that your journey will one day come to an end, and you’ll die. That’s guaranteed.

This makes the emotion of fear and worry even more pointless – it hinders your life journey and experience, but with the experience of fear or not, you’ll reach the same ending – so why ruin your journey? You’re heading in the same direction regardless.

So, thank you panic attacks, for making me an even more fearless, strong-minded entrepreneur, and for making me appreciate life’s journey even more.

I hope this post helps give some clarity to your emotions too, and please do share your own story in the comments below – I’d love to hear about it.

8 Business Tips you can Steal from Successful Startups

Business isn’t an exact science.

What works for one business may not work for the next, and it is often not the idea that makes a business successful but rather the execution.

So whilst it’s important to remain true to yourself and make your own course, it’s still sometimes helpful to see how other companies and entrepreneurs have made success – to help guide your journey in generally the right direction.

The following tips aren’t official quotes from the founders, they are what I have extracted from researching these businesses from startup to where they are today.

So have a read and take from them what you need, to help steer your business towards success.

Don’t Worry about the Competition – Facebook

Remember MySpace?

They were once the leading social media platform up to 2008 – now they have practically disappeared.

There will always be competition in your field, both direct and indirect, but if seeing the competition (and how much market share they own) puts you off pursuing a business idea or continuing to challenge them, then you could have missed an opportunity to surpass them at some point and be the market leader.

It’s one of the reasons I don’t watch Dragon’s Den. When I used to see this program, the Dragons would always ask the people pitching for investment whether what they are doing is unique, and whether they hold a patent.

Patent or not, nothing successful stays unique for long.

Plus, when you analyse each one of the Dragons’ own entrepreneurial journeys, none of them did anything distinctly unique – health clubs, restaurants, online retail, there’s nothing patentable that allowed them to make their fortune!

So don’t be fooled into thinking that you can’t compete unless you have something totally unique or patentable.

Yes, you need unique selling points, but the ultimate premise of your business model doesn’t have to be completely unique.

If Zuckerberg would have thrown in the towel after seeing how MySpace were dominating social media up to 2008, then he wouldn’t be on the Rich List in 2016.

Be aware of the competition, and figure out how you can make your offering more attractive than theirs, but don’t let their success and power put you off challenging them – you might just be surprised if you hit on their weaknesses.

Continually Innovate – HP

HP invests $3.6B each year into research and development – with the vast majority of their sales coming from new products.

This means, if HP didn’t continually innovate and invest in R&D then the business would quickly shrink.

HP is an extreme example of innovation – the markets in which they operate are very fickle ie consumers always want the latest gadgets, and very fast-changing.

Your market may also be similar. But even in less dynamic industries, innovation is still key to growth and success.

Many marketers talk about focusing on selling ‘evergreen’ products – products that will always be in demand, no matter the season or how long the product has been on the market.

But every product has a shelf life. Even the lifeblood of the World economy and something that has been in high demand consistently for decades, oil, has a finite lifespan – soon it will be overtaken by renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydro.

If the oil companies don’t pay attention to these market changes and concurrently invest in renewable energy provision, then when the switchover really gathers momentum, they will die. Demand for oil will nosedive, and so will their profits.

So, always keep an eye on the bigger picture and reinvest so that you are able to adapt to market and environmental changes.

Learn from Failure – Virgin Group

You can learn more from failure than you can success.

Richard Branson has seen some enormous successes in his entrepreneurial career, but he has also had his fair share of failure.

Virgin Cars, Virgin Brides, Virgin Cola, and many more Virgin businesses failed for various reasons.

But that didn’t stop the Group continually diversifying and entering new markets with the Virgin brand.

Provided you’re still alive, no matter how bad the failure you experience, you are here, and you are therefore able to pick yourself back up and try again.

In the moment, failure doesn’t feel good – I’ve felt this myself in some of my own ventures like Vitalife Cell Bank. And in the moment, you don’t really feel that much good can come from that situation.

But once the dust has settled and you’ve tied everything up with your failed venture, then comes the moment of reflection and the opportunity to realise how the experience you have just gone through can be used to better guide your other ventures.

What other option do you have? Give up? You still have your life to live – what will you spend it doing? Feeling sorry for yourself that things didn’t work out? No.

Wrap things up, give your failed venture closure, reflect on the reasons it failed, then start again with these lessons in-mind.

Provided you don’t keep making the same mistakes and you learn from your failures, if you persist and keep getting back up, the law of averages says you’ll find success eventually – just never give up.

Branson was fortunate in that he experienced wild success before his other business failures, so he knew the feeling of exhiliration that comes with being successful in business and I’m sure this taste for success was helpful when dealing with and recovering from later business failures.

For those that haven’t yet tasted success and know this experience so they can use it as motivation to try again, it takes even more grit and determination – but it carries the same principles, learn what caused you to fail last time and let this guide your approach differently the next time.

Diversify from your Core Stengths – Fujifilm

Once a humble photography start-up, now a multinational corporation operating in diverse industries from medical equipment to LCD televisions.

When traditional film photography rapidly declined with the advent of digital photography, Fujifilm and many other photography companies were faced with rapidly adapting to the new digital marketplace, or bankruptcy.

Many firms ended-up doing the latter, like the photography giant Kodak, but Fujifilm not only survived, they thrived following some drastic strategy changes.

Instead of becoming purely a digital photography business, they chose to diversify into brand new markets with their existing competencies and strengths.

They discovered that the technology and chemicals that they had been using to develop their photography film was also used in liquid crystal displays for computers and televisions, and that the process of getting the colours to stick to the film could also lend itself to cosmetics!

So they branched-out and entered these new markets, becoming widely diverse in terms of the industries in which they now operate, but very focused in terms of their core competencies and strengths.

Look for ways that your business competencies and strengths can be applied to other industries and businesses, and see if you can diversify in this manner also – to protect yourself from specific industry decline and environmental/market changes.

Be Adaptable – Vitalife Group

Vitalife switched their focus from full-price retail health products, to cut-price discount health products – following intense competition and pricing pressures.

Fast-moving consumer goods are things consumers buy regularly, and they therefore want the best possible price for their items.

With increasing online competition, margins became squeezed. The way Vitalife reacted was to create a sub-brand that focused purely on discount health products, in a way that didn’t damage margins further and allowed them to compete more effectively on price.

Their original health product site vitalifehealth.com also changed and focus was placed on delivering a greater level of value to customers that were seeking goods without potentially harmful ingredients that other ‘health shops’ would still offer customers.

This strategic change allowed Vitalife to grow sales and profitability in a time of increased competition – quite an achievement.

So when your market and environment places pressures on your business, be prepared to adapt in order to continue to grow and reach success.

Continually attempting to force products or services on a market that isn’t responding well to them, or to cave into price competition – paying disregard to the profitability of your model, are surefire ways to go out of business.

Have Long Term, High Level Vision – Tesla/Solar City

Elon Musk had a vision – to create a closed-loop, fully-renewable electric vehicle.

Not only did he envisage manufacturing the electric vehicle and overcoming all of the obstacles that the major car manufacturers faced in the production of electric vehicles, but he also had vision to provide the energy source for these electric vehicles, from solar energy.

To do this, he created 2 companies, Tesla Motors (to manufacture the vehicles) and Solar City (to provide the energy) – they have since announced acquisition of Solar City by Tesla, bringing Elon’s vision under one entity.

And this is way, way down the road in Elon’s entrepreneurial career – by this point he has already launched and sold several businesses for multi-million dollar figures, including PayPal.

But the vision to create a closed-loop electric vehicle existed way back in his student days where he fantasized about the concept – although at this point he didn’t have the resources at his disposal to make it reality. He stuck the concept in the back of his mind, making the other huge ventures he’s exited in-between appear a means to achieve the ultimate vision.

Whereas most would be content with 1% of the things Elon has achieved, he just keeps going – taking bigger and bigger risks, in order to achieve his overall, high-level vision.

Whilst there aren’t many people like Elon Musk in the World, it still highlights the importance of having a long-term, high-level vision – the sort of focus that would prevent you from retiring even when you have several million pounds banked, the focus that would drive you to take further risks even when you don’t need to, the focus that makes money a means to an end goal, not the end goal in itself.

Achieve this mindset and focus, and lose the emotional attachment you have to money, and that unlocks the door to unlimited success and the ability to fulfill your ultimate vision.

Focus on the Customer – Amazon

Everything Amazon does is from a customer perspective.

If you’ve ever made a complaint on an Amazon order, you’ll know how good their customer service is – they seem to throw financials out of the window and don’t hesitate to grant full refunds or replacement orders for the smallest of issues.

This shows that they are looking at the long-term, lifetime customer value and not the value attached to each individual transaction that a customer makes.

They want to keep customers happy at all costs – if they keep you happy and show exceptional service, you’ll buy from them again, and they will make the money back that they lost on the order with an issue, over the next few orders you make with them.

If you’ve ever sold on Amazon, you’ll see even more dedication to customer happiness. Sellers are faced with a set of strict metrics to meet in terms of delivery times, despatch times, customer responses, and cancellation rates. If sellers don’t meet these metrics, they are banned from selling on Amazon.

So, try not to be too short-sighted when it comes to pleasing customers. Focus on lifetime value, and retaining repeat custom, and let go of looking closely at the financials of each particular complaint.

Even if what you sell isn’t fast-moving and doesn’t attract a great deal of regular repeat custom by its very nature, word-of-mouth spreads fast, and if you show exceptional service then you’ll build a good name and encourage orders from the friends and family of existing customers.

Be Persistent – Disney

Think of Disney and you think Disneyland, cartoons, merchandise, films, Disney stores, and many more.

They are hugely successful, and known Worldwide.

But for the founder, Walt Disney, the story was more one of consistent struggle and cashflow dilemmas than of unbridled success.

He didn’t build the first Disneyland until just prior to his death, and before Disneyland his films and animations were often met with mixed reviews and varying levels of success – they borrowed millions of dollars, and faced bankruptcy several times.

But eventually, towards the end of Walt’s life, he began to see his consistent efforts and never-say-die attitude pay-off – seeing Disneyland become a huge success from the off, and other ventures begin to turn a healthy profit.

If he hadn’t smoked so heavily he may have had more time to enjoy the fruits of his labour!

But Walt’s story is inspiring nonetheless – a true visionary and a very persistent character, his legacy shows what can be achieved with this approach in business.

And that’s that!

Hopefully the above analyses provide some useful insight into how these business tips can be applied to your business and entrepreneurial journey.

If you’d like more guidance or want to learn more about starting your own business, then enroll in my 4-week business course over on Udemy today.

If you have witnessed a business successfully using certain concepts then please share them in the comments below.

5 Things you Should Know Before Starting your Own Business

So, you’re thinking of starting your own business.

Leaving a secure income for an entrepreneurial venture can be exciting and scary at the same time.

I’ve been through the process before, so I know about the mix of anxious emotions you are going through right now.

Fear not! I have a short guide that covers the five things you should know before you start your own business – giving your new venture the best chance of success and a heads-up on the common pitfalls when starting a small business.

When I left my job for my first full-time business venture, I’d already dabbled in various businesses throughout College and University, and I had built up the business I wanted to go full-time with whilst I was working a 9-5 – so I had experience and a little know-how, plus a revenue generating business to hop-over to and not have to wait until my business began to generate income.

This put many of my anxieties at ease when the time came to leave my 9-5, and I’d recommend building your business alongside a secure income if you have the opportunity to do so, it just removes that little bit of extra stress and allows you to test the feasibility of your business before you take the plunge.

That said, whatever route you choose to take, these 5 tips I’m about to show you will help you to hit the ground running and get your new business up-to-speed as quickly and as painless as possible.

So, here goes:

Understand your market and build your USP (Unique Selling Point) around it

Don’t be naive.

There will very likely be more established competition already out there serving your potential customers.

It won’t be easy to convince those customers to leave that established competitor and try your new, untested brand.

You need to offer customers something that meets their needs better than your competition.

So, you need to understand what is currently frustrating them about your competitors. Where are your competitors failing your potential customers?

Are they not offering additional products/services that customers find valuable? Are they offering poor after-sales or customer support? Does their current offering not quite meet customer needs properly?

Run surveys, read reviews, and scan forums/blogs to find what customers are saying about your competitors.

Find what is frustrating them, and you’ve found your usp, that you can enter the market with and fulfil customer needs better than anyone else.

And if you can’t find any obvious frustrations, then aim to serve customers even better than competitors currently do – can you be more competitive on price? Offer more attentive customer service? Or offer superior products/services?

It’s much easier to understand and communicate your unique selling points before you launch, rather than have to switch the direction of your business after launch to better serve the market demands.

So spend the time now researching what your usp will be and make sure that it offers true value to your audience.

Noone cares as much for your business as you do

Friends, family, employees, suppliers, advisors, customers, everyone!

Nobody cares about your business as much as you do. They just don’t have the emotional or financial investment that you have in your business, and they never will.

They will also never fully understand the pressures and situations you will face with your business.

Friends and family who have paid jobs will not understand the financial pressures and the need to take on debt or other finance to grow.

Entrepreneur friends will be too busy with their own business and pressures.

Employees, suppliers, and customers all have their own objectives, goals and pressures to be concerned with the pressures you face with your business.

You therefore need to learn how to cope with pressure on your own, and fast!

You also need to understand how to concurrently manage and satisfy various stakeholder objectives. If you focus purely on your own objectives, you’ll never achieve full productivity from employees, you’ll never achieve mutually rewarding relationships with suppliers, and you’ll not satisfy your customers properly.

Work towards your business objectives, but also be mindful of what the objectives are of those around you – the people who will help you to meet your business objectives.

Don’t be selfish. Help others, and they will help you.

Cashflow is king

Pay close attention to this from the outset.

Run out of cash, and your business no longer exists.

It’s important here to outline the difference between cash and profit.

Your business can have no cash but still show a profit – if you’re investing in stock or capital equipment for instance. So no cash doesn’t necessarily mean you are failing – it may mean you are reinvesting every penny to fuel profitability and growth.

But just be careful – you have to achieve a fine balance between short-term survival and long-term growth.

This was, and still is, the biggest challenge I face in my own businesses.

In one of my businesses, it never has cash in the bank! Every penny to date has been reinvested in capital equipment or software and stock, so the business has shown a profit for the last 6 years, but still doesn’t have a penny in the bank. But what it does have is over £310,000 in stock, assets, and property.

This is an extreme example of focusing purely on long-term growth and maintaining bare minimum finances in the short-term to survive. I know of entrepreneur friends that have done the opposite in their business, they have large cash reserves but barely any asset value – this doesn’t really interest me. I don’t see the point in cash unless you are doing something with it – holding cash in the bank for the sake of reducing your anxiety and having something to look at on your statement can hold you back in the long term.

Don’t be scared to reinvest it all, it will pay off in the long run. But make sure you keep enough back to pay the bills!

Do it for the love, not for the money

Money is great. Money motivates you to get out of bed and get to the office. But money does not motivate you whilst you’re in the midst of dealing with tricky situations, whilst replying to customer queries, or mucking-in and packing customer orders.

It motivates you to get to work, but doesn’t motivate you when you’re AT work. That comes from an intrinsic love and passion for what you are doing.

If you are doing something you love – beyond the financial benefit, your motivation will be much stronger and you’ll last longer than someone pursuing purely money.

Although my businesses have mostly been profitable from the outset, I only started to see significant returns and growth after several years of hard grind.

In those years of hustling and grinding for little reward, if I was in it purely for the cash, I would have given up and gone to get a job instead – heck, it seemed a lot easier and more financially rewarding and I did entertain the thought more than once.

But something else motivated me, I had a vision to build a multi-faceted brand that operates in health, wellness and ethical sectors – to deliver better health, wellbeing, and enjoyment to other people in as many ways as we can. And this is a vision that still drives what I do today.

If I didn’t have this longer-term goal, I’m certain I’d have given up long ago, way before the real growth and financial reward started to materialise.

It’s quite ironic. When you look at most billionaires, and you research their approach and mindset, there’s a lack of emotional attachment to money. They are more focused on a vision or high-level goal.

They won’t have achieved billionaire status by focusing on becoming a billionaire – because when they made their first million, they’d value the money too much to reinvest in high risk, high reward ventures, and their investments would be less bold and therefore present less reward – meaning they never reach billionaire level.

Lose your emotional attachment to money, and stay focused on the goals that truly motivate you. The money will follow.

If you want to grow fast, you need investment

Don’t expect to build a multi-million pound business in a couple of years with no investment.

I’m not saying it is impossible to achieve this, many have. But the number of people who haven’t, and have tried, are 1000 fold.

It’s unlikely you’ll grow that substantially, that quickly, without an initial injection of cash.

Imagine this. You set up a business with £200 seed capital, and you spend this on your website, incorporation, and so on – as though you were following my 4-week business set-up course.

You achieve your first £500 in advertising after a few weeks of promoting and populating your site with content. That repays your initial £200 investment and leaves £300 to reinvest. You then invest this money into physical stock to sell on your site. You work on 50% gross margin and you start to store the stock at home and pick/pack the goods yourself to minimise overheads.

Assuming you have total stock turnover every 4 weeks, that’s a £150 surplus after repayment of your initial investment in stock, and you can then invest £450 in stock for the following 4 weeks, and it starts to have a compounding effect throughout the year.

By the end of the year, you’ll have made a few thousand pounds. Which is great, but when you start to throw in overheads that come with growth like a warehouse and employees, that will soon disappear.

Add three 0’s onto the example figures above, and you’ll be making millions each year – and economies of scale will ensure that a good chunk of profit remains even after overheads are taken into account. But not many people will have £300,000 to invest in stock from the outset – so here’s where you need funding if you want to see fast growth.

This principle is highlighted in another exercise. Start with 1, and x2. Then times the result by 2, then that result by 2, and so on.

The growth as a %age remains the same each time – your figure is growing by 100%. But the actual figure, in the early stages, is only increasing by 1, then 2, then 4 and so on – small numbers. But get to 1,000,000 and times by 2, and you’ve just created another 1,000,000 – a substantial figure.

If you receive investment, it bumps you up the multiplication table and makes sustantial returns more accessible in a shorter period of time. Starting at 1, multiplying by 2, takes a long time to hit substantial numbers.

The same principle applies when you are building your business. So if you want to grow fast, be prepared to take on debt or give away equity to achieve investment.

And there you have it!

All of these tips come from my own experiences in business – they aren’t an exact science, and your experience in business may differ wildly. That’s part of the beauty of business, no one rule applies to all businesses!

But they should provide a good degree of guidance before you get your own small business underway and hopefully prepare you somewhat for what’s ahead.

If you already have your own small business and have your own tips to share on starting up, please drop your comments below. I would love to hear about your particular experience and advice.

Discover Your Passion, and the Money will Follow

Business is tough.

I’m not going to lie.

There are times that make you want to give up, or go back to a simple 9-5 job where you can leave your work behind when you leave for the day and not wake up in cold sweats during the night thinking about your business.

And if you don’t have the right motivation for your business, no doubt you WILL give up.

But, if your business is founded on your passion, something that you feel you were put on this Earth to do, then it’s much harder for you to throw in the towel. And it’s this level of persistence and focus that ultimately, eventually, brings success.

So, discover your passion, and you’ve just discovered what your business should be based around.

Often there is too much focus placed on making money when people follow business ideas – pursuing opportunities based purely on their expected or potential financial return.

This isn’t a sustainable approach.

Of course, money is important, it’s the lifeblood of your business – without cashflow, your business crashes, without profit, it slowly dies. So you need to ensure you get on the right side of cashflow and profit as early as possible.

But, if you’re bootstrapping your business ie you don’t have a great deal of cash to invest, then things take time. You have to invest a ton of time and effort into making your business work, and there will undoubtedly be tough times.

If you’re going through these tough times, and you have absolutely no intrinsic motivation for your business, just purely around the potential financial gains – chances are, you won’t even reach the point where you can enjoy those financial returns, because you’ll lose interest in the business and the constant grind of building a start-up with very little investment will take its toll on your optimism and the long-term vision of financial gain.

When you’re starting a business from next-to-nothing, you need to be sure that you are inspired by what your business is actually doing – financials aside.

Is your business making other people’s lives better?

Is it saving the planet?

Is it solving World hunger?

Okay, these are grandiose examples, but it highlights the type of non-financial goals and purpose that businesses can carry – and these are the ones that will keep you going, even if the financial rewards take a little longer than predicted.

This is what my 2nd course lecture covers in more detail – helping you to understand your passion(s) and then how to monetise these.

View the lecture preview in the video below, or enroll in my course over on Udemy today for the full version plus 27 other step-by-step videos on how to get your business up-and-running.

A Favour to Neil Patel

This morning I received an email from Neil Patel asking for a favour.

Neil has been a great inspiration to me throughout my journey of creating my 4-week business course, so I was happy to oblige with this short video review of him and his services.

https://youtu.be/_rwJjxetQ-o

If you haven’t already, head on over to neilpatel.com and subscribe – he delivers a wealth of information for startup businesses, and shows you how to deliver free traffic to your site.

Like me, what he teaches is relevant to a plethora of business models, so whatever your business is, you’ll find some value in the content he delivers.

I’m not an affiliate of Neil’s, just a fan – and I like to share things that I find valuable, with my readers, so it can help you too.

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