Edmonton Business Coach | 10 Hard Truths About Business
Welcome back to Inspired Method, your Edmonton business coach YouTube Channel. Today were going to I’m going to share with you with some 10 hard truths from your Edmonton business coach.
All right. Smack some truths into you. You’re going to be surprised by some of them, but they’re really like good rules to live by. So my name’s Karen’s, my husband Trevor, and I’m going to share first with you a quote from Jim Collins. Again, he’s an author of six books and he says, those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets or technology or competition or products. It is one thing about all others. The ability to get and keep enough of the right people.
And Industry Canada says that 15% of businesses fail in year one, 30% fail by year two and 50% by year five. Wow. When we hit your six man, it’s going to be, it’s going to be your race, right? Passed one of those. So that’s cool. So if you’re thinking about starting a small business, there are some hard truths that you need to know before you get started from the Edmonton business coach.
And we’re not going to sugar coat it. These are not coming from us. This is coming from the industry. Oh, small business. We, you know, things that we’ve found to be true, things that our business partner is found to be true and other businesses beyond even our local area. These are just those common hard truths. So go ahead. Share number one.
Hard Truths About Business Begin
Alright Karen. Hard truth number one. Owning a business means that you can’t work whenever you like. Ooh, that’s a hard pill to swallow, isn’t it?
Yeah. So you, what you’re saying, Edmonton business coach, is that you need to schedule that work in and work a little bit more than you think a lot more than you think. It’s not going to be the laptop, laptop, lifestyle and the beach. Four hour work week. Nice things are myths. Yeah. Complete miss complete fallacy. It’s a farce. It’s a lie.
And also thinking that you can work whenever you want to work because it’s just not true. Yeah, right. You know the, a lot of people when they’re working for somebody else, they think that, oh man, if I was the boss I’m sure knew and work till two and head on rest of the day and played golf. Right? Yeah. That’s just not going to happen when your business over. No.
So hard truth number two, you’ll get rich quick. You will not get rich quick. That’s hard. Truth number two, you will not be getting rich within your first year, two years, five years. It’s going to take awhile.
What do you say? Well that, yeah, that’s true Edmonton business coach. That there’s, there are a lot of costs in the beginning as well, but you may not be ready to pay then you just didn’t expect. Or are you just hiring costs? Every time you want to grow bigger, you’ve got to have more people on your team. So now it takes a system and it’s a process and definitely it takes a few years.
Yeah, it takes time. There’s, there’s a reason that getting rich quick takes so long because there’s a lot of things involved in business and when you’re an employee, you don’t know. You don’t see all the costs that are associated with doing business. So when you see the boss and see how much they bill per hour, like, oh my gosh, they’re billing this much per hour. You don’t see all the other stuff that you have to pay for. And that in a lot of cases, they’re not taking a paycheck because they’re paying for all the other expenses plus your wages.
Yeah. So just think about that before you go ahead and jump on the entrepreneur train. Yeah.
Here’s hard truth number three. You don’t answer to one boss. You answer too many bosses and every client is a boss. Yeah. Every single client is a boss. Your employees are kind of your boss.
All the suppliers that you need to pay and other things, they’re your boss. The CRA is your boss. There are so many other levels of responsibility that come into play when you start your own business that you you know, we start out thinking, oh, I’m going to have so much time freedom and financial freedom and I’m going to be able to do what I want when I want. I can tell you as an Edmonton business coach, that is just not reality. It just doesn’t happen.
Eventually yes, you’re going to have less responsibility because you have created systems, processes and have people in place to take care of those things and those processes and do the jobs that you used to do. But in the beginning it’s up to you.
More Hard Truths About Business
Yup. Okay. Hard truth number four. Your target customer isn’t everyone. Yeah.
We get this one a lot way off. Yeah. What else? And it comes up. You asking an Edmonton business coach client, Hey, who’s your ideal and likely buyer? And the answer is everyone, everyone is mine. Everyone loves my sauce. Everyone who needs my widget, everyone needs that way. Was all in the blank. Right?
Most business owners are just getting started. They are naive to think that everybody needs or wants their product, which just isn’t true. Even if it’s something that everybody can use, it doesn’t mean everybody is going to use it. And that is going to be an easy sale. And the reason for that is there are so many different options available, right? If you’re the only one of that type in your, like the Unicorn, the business world, and you’ve got one thing that everybody needs, nobody else has, has anything close to it. Yeah.
It’s going to be easy for you to sell that thing. Let’s see. If you’re the only one who was able to sell sliced bread, you’d be the only one selling that thing. Right? but that’s not the case with 99.999% of businesses.
There’s somebody else out there who has a similar product or competing product or exactly the same product or service. And you’re going to have to fight for every single sale. I tell our Edmonton business coach clients that, you’ve got to come up with your ideal and likely smallest and viable market in order to win.
This brings us to the Edmonton business coach, hard truth number five, 75% of employees steal.
So look around the room. That’s right. Look to the left of you, look to the right of you. Some three quarters of the people in your office are more than likely stealing something, whether it’s office supplies, stealing time, or can be outright embezzlement, you know, stealing funds.
Yeah, no setting up. If they’re the only person doing the accounting in your business and they’re the ones responsible for receiving money from suppliers and billing and invoicing and all that sort of stuff, and you’ve only got one person and no checks and balances, I would take some time and go through and give a call to each one of those wholesalers or subcontractors that you are paying every month and I bet ya at least one of them will be that person who’s doing your accounting and bookkeeping.
So yeah, 75% of employees are stealing from the business place. So the paranoid survive when it comes to business.
All right, Edmonton business coach what’s the next one? Hard truth number six. If you don’t have a repeatable weekly schedule, you will never have time for you. What do you say about that Karen?
Not Wasting a lot of time when you don’t know what you’re going to do from one moment or one task to the next. You’re just trying to figure it out and you kind of get, get pulled in all different directions. If you have things done on the schedule, you stick to it, then you actually accomplish a lot more or you get into the momentum of it and your, your mindset is there. Just that repeatable weekly schedule is kind of like the holy grail of business.
Yeah. It, it really is. Jocko Willink. He’s was a former navy seal and he has this quote that we use often. There’s discipline brings freedom, discipline brings freedom or there’s freedom and discipline, however it says. Yeah. and it’s true when you do the discipline work of doing the regular scheduled stuff that you gotta do when you have time for everything that you have to do during the week, meeting with clients, you know, meeting with staff, you taking care of your bookkeeping, marketing and all of these things.
If you have a time for doing it all, you’ll get it all done. It’s when you don’t have a scheduled slot for work time meeting with finds time, family time, fitness time. We don’t have schedules for that. It’s when things go off the rails and you don’t get any of those things done and at least the way that you should and you fall behind because it’s not scheduled. We tell our Edmonton business coach clients, if you can just embrace that schedule, then you’ll, you’ll have a higher chance of being successful. That’s true.
Well what’s hard truth number seven, Edmonton business coach?
You will be taken advantage of by some customers. Oh, that one was so true. Ouch. Yeah, it hurts. And for us it’s actually difficult because we offer the first month free, pretty much, or a dollar for marketing. And some people like they know they’re not gonna be able to afford it or are, they just don’t do the work. And you just feel like you’ve been taken advantage of a little bit. Maybe you give, like we give, give, give and I mean looking outside of our businesses, we’ll, do you have some examples?
Yeah, absolutely. There’s going to be people, like if you have a really great no brainer offer aware, it’s first month free or you have a free, you know, book or a free something or other free consultation for your business, there’s going to be some people who will take that free thing and move on. They won’t become your customer. Right? then there’s also going to be other people like the majority. There’s going to be more than enough people who embrace the whole plan that you have for them.
And one thing that I learned doing research and coming up to starting this business was amateurs look at the front end and professionals look at the backend. So if you are, you know, offended that someone is going to you know, utilize your free offer and just take that free offer and it hurts your feelings, just chalk it up to in marketing costs, there’s a cost to doing business as it cost for marketing and sales.
And for every person that you know, takes that free offer and doesn’t proceed, even if you have one or two that do proceed with that full offer, you’re going to more than more than make your money back on that. And it’s just a matter of numbers. It’s a, it’s an accounting thing that you can figure out pretty easily if you can. Whatever you, the cost is to acquire a customer, you can pay as much as the lifetime value of that customer.
So if one customer lifetime value is $10,000, you can afford to pay up to $10,000 to acquire one customer. So don’t worry about, you know, a little giveaway that you have or some kind of a, a loss leader or a, a self liquidating offer. Don’t freak out about that. Think about the lifetime of that customer. And that’s, that’s how you’re going to mean.
So how do you recoup that cost or are you just chalking up to experience if it costs you that much and basically you get nothing out of it? Or is it because of referrals, Edmonton business coach?
It’s a numbers game. It’s a numbers game, right? So let’s take for instance, I’m, let’s say you, for one of our clients, he’s a CPA. He gives away two hours of time plus a book. Okay? So two hours of his time, that $300 plus a book cause another $30. So $330 it cost him for that initial free consultation. If he doesn’t close that deal, it’s $330 he is out. If he does close that deal, he’s looking at $36,000 in fees and anywhere between 18,030 $6,000 a year in fees plus however long that client stays on, which is more than one year.
So it’s like I said, it doesn’t matter about that. You know, the one person or the two people who come in and take the book and run off. It’s about acquiring that long-term customer. Okay? So that’s, that’s how you have to look at it and it’s gonna suck. And there’s gonna be people who want to return things that not returnable. Just, just let it go. Just let it go. Say, okay, sure. You got it.
Final Three Hard Truths About Business
So what is hard truth number eight, Edmonton business coach? What you do isn’t special.
Yeah. You’re not that special. Sorry. Yeah, you’re not that special. You’ve got to think about it. There’s got to be, if there’s one of you doing whatever that is, baking electrical, plumbing you know, dermatology, you’re any one of those things. There’s more people doing just that thing. So when you have to be thinking about is what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it, that’s different than the other people doing that offering, right?
You got to make something, make a wow experience for your customers so that you have people who want to take you on. And then people who will refer you toddlers. Right?
So a hard truth number nine, you can’t do everything. You can’t do everything, right. No. You don’t have no time. Maybe you don’t know how. Well, a lot of people who start businesses start to, because they’re really good at what they do.
So we’ll call it usually carpentry or something of that nature. They’re really good at it. Or cooking, baking, you know, I come up with very few examples, but you get the idea usually are really good technicians, really good at doing the thing, and then when they get into business, they realize that there’s a whole lot of other things that they got to do, and so they have to do the sales. They’ve got to do the marketing, and they got to do the bookkeeping, the accounting, and do the work and the hiring and the firing and the ordering of materials and on and on and on.
You can’t do it all right. You have to get people in place to be able to help you. Like an Edmonton business coach. Yeah. Right. You just have to, there’s, there’s no two ways around it. Unless you never ever want a day off and you always want to be living hand to mouth, then you should never grow and never hire more people to help you, but we know that’s not the case. Right? Right.
So hard truth number 10 is it’s going to be hard. It’s not going to be easy. I think this like it should be like so common sense, but people get the starry eyed look when anything entrepreneurial, anything entrepreneur, it’s not easy unless you have $1 million in the bank waiting to supply you for every need that you have. Money’s going to be one of the biggest things. Resources, time. You know, your money, your time, and then having the team and having those leads come in some.
Yeah, all those things. Entrepreneurism is hard. It’s not easy. You want to get started, awesome. Go for it, but just know that it’s not going to be easy. Whatever lies you’ve heard online that it’s super simple. You can start a business and then within six months you’re, we’re bringing in six figures and you’re living laptop, lifestyle, drinking mai tai’s on the beach every morning.
That is not going to happen. No. I know people who have won the lottery and they’re struggling in their business because why? Cash flow? They don’t have the systems in place in order to help them do win, and they won the lottery.
And most of all, I think besides a lottery, most people give up before they even see the fruits. Yeah, right. They give up because only, or they switched to something else thinking, oh, this is going to be the easy way to go.
Yeah. Oh, you should pick your favorite. Yes. Go with it. Yeah, exactly. Don’t, don’t chase that shiny object. Don’t chase that Unicorn. It’s a way for a certain failure. Yep. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been fun. We are inspired method. You’re Edmonton business coach.
I’m Trevor and this is Karen, and if you guys liked it, then please give us a thumbs up. Give us some comments down below.