Is it time to get a real J.O.B?
I’d like to talk about something that is just plain pissing me off these days. I’m just plain fed up with the way new women business owners are literally killing themselves to make money fast because they are afraid to ask for loans, use credit cards or even get part-time jobs in order to fund the first few years of their passionate ventures. You need to have some money in order to start a business. And as we’ve all learned the hard way, desperation just isn’t client attractive.
I’d like to explain something that is incredibly important, but not often openly talked about. Building a full-time comfortable income from a service business takes time. Why? Five reasons.
1. First, you have to build the know, like and trust factor with your clients before they are willing to buy large packages from you. This requires an organic process of them getting to know you and going through your offerings over time.
2. Second, you need to build your own skill-set as a practitioner with every client that you bring on, which translates to extra learning over time.
3. Third, it is the combination of building your skill set as a practitioner and building relationships with clients that allows you to raise your prices – which takes time and practice.
4. Fourth, once you’ve built a client model, it takes time to round out your income with group programs, events, products and other lines of income.
5. Everyone needs to learn business, marketing, sales, and time management skills in order to grow a business. I have an MBA and have had business coaches (in plural) every year since I started my company. Every time you hit a new level in your business, you need some guidance to help you get through it and move to the next place. Every person’s learning curve is different in this process. For some of you, this will come naturally. For others, you’ll need some time with it.
6. You are going to meet and wrestle with your “Bears”. I like to say that growing a business is like walking through a forest and meeting unfriendly bears. These bears represent your fears, limiting beliefs, anxieties, irritations. You’ll wrestle with one “Bear” and then you’ll walk for a while until you meet another. These wrestling matches continue for your whole career. And some of the matches are longer than others. It might take you six months of wrestling before you decide to go to your first networking event. I know a woman who wrestled with her Bear of “not being good enough” for an entire year. You have to honor the time that it takes for you to work through things. Building a business is the best personal transformation tool there is -but unfortunately it doesn’t follow a time-line.
Now don’t get me wrong – it isn’t going to take you light years to attract clients or to raise your prices. In fact, with the right processes and systems, you’ll get clients right away. But it could take six months, 12 months or 2 years before you have enough clients at rates high enough that you can create a comfortable full-time income. And on top of it all, you are going to need to invest in your business. You’ll probably want to hire a business coach, buy some new technical equipment, take some business classes, build a website, order business cards, pay for a newsletter service and the like.
Yet, so many of you out there are trying to live on your income without getting any outside help during your first 2-3 years of business and you are blaming yourself for not “being good enough” to make it happen! Please stop that right now.
Let’s look at how most businesses start. First they get a loan from a bank. Or they get money from friends and family. Or they get investors, venture capital, angel investors, etc. You wouldn’t think twice if your best friend was raising money to open a store. Yet I see so many coaches, health professionals, interior designers, and other service professionals trying to start and run businesses without any outside money or savings to live on. Here are some of the results:
1. They don’t have the money to invest in proper business training, so they create business foundations that are based on getting clients through chance. Many of these business owners struggled greatly when the recession hit because they didn’t have any real business skills to go out and get clients. Their rocky foundations also do not allow them to grow larger. Their businesses therefore stay stuck at one income level.
2. They work themselves to the bone with client after client because they never really had the time or ability to look at their business from a CEO’s perspective. They never took the time to hire or properly train staff and junior practitioners.
3. They are constantly living month to month and worrying about money because there has never been a cushion of income. That cushion of income allows you to stop every now and then, take some risks, invest in learning and new ventures – these are things that fuel growth and take you out of the month to month scenario.
4. They are in a large amount of debt that they have no way of paying off. These business owners put everything on credit cards during their first years of business and they just can’t seem to get ahead enough to pay it all off.
Whether you are new or seasoned business owner out there, know that it takes money to earn money. And you may need an extra steam of income to get by in your first couple of years. Don’t feel ashamed about it. I worked full time as a marketing consultant during my first year of my first business. And then in my third year, while I restructured the business and needed some more free time, I became a professor of business at a local university. The trick is to find something that doesn’t suck your soul and your time. That way you can still build your passionate business, without feeling totally panicked about money all the time.
Here are some more suggestions to fund your business:
1. Get a job. Part- Time, Full-time – whatever. Just make sure there is enough free time both mentally and physically to allow you to build your business at night and on the weekends.
2. Get a loan from friends and family. Just make sure the pay-off plan is in writing. Then equip yourself with the business skills you need to build your business and pay off that loan.
3. Sell Stuff. Sell it on consignment, sell it on ebay, wherever you could earn some extra cash to fund your business.
4. Get a bank loan. Banks do fund small business loans, you’ll just need to sit with your banker to see if your business is a fit.
5. Get an interest free credit card use the debt to pay for business classes or business expenses that you know are going to pay off for you. Here’s the trick – only purchase business related items on this card that you know will bring you more money within the 12 month period so that you can pay the card off. Consider this a line of credit, like from a bank. It’s not bad debt, it is good debt. Frankly, I couldn’t have built my business to where it is today without using credit cards. I’ll be explaining more about good debt in another article.
I hope that this has brought some relief to those of you who are out there struggling with trying to come up with a full-time income from your business. As a note, I don’t mean to say that all of you should go out and get jobs, but I do know that when I got my job in my first year of business – it was like the whole world was lifted from my shoulders. My business immediately flourished and I filled my practice within 8 months (I was lucky enough to find a flexible position). And for those of you that could just use a couple extra thousand a month – perhaps a loan or a credit card will help fund the investment to get the business skills you need so that you can earn that extra money.
