6. Make a simple business
If it’s simple you spend less time producing and more time marketing and improving your product. If you can’t explain your business to someone else in less than 60 seconds, it’s too complex. Simplify it. Do less, specialise and earn more. My business is so simple, we compare credit cards, home loans or savings accounts. That’s it. We just spend all of our time marketing it and improving the product. My previous business was a very smart business, it needed smart people. But, I think I prefer the simple business these days. How do you make a simple business in your niche? Just do the core, really, really well.
7. Meetings, emails, telephones, instant messenger and Facebook are trying to kill your business
If you want to be part of the crowd, using the aforementioned tools is a surefire way to make that happen. I have taken active steps to kill these distractions in the business.
Four practical tips to dealing with these items of distraction:
- Meetings kill productivity. Avoid meetings at all costs. Meet only if you are going to make a decision. Meetings sap away time which you could use to be productive and make money. I personally only have two meetings per week and they are a maximum of 20 minutes each. Set your meeting times for unusual time increments and start them at unusual hours like 10:17am to ensure you finish your meeting quickly.
- Emails and telephones are poison. Only open your emails twice per day. If anyone in your organisation has responded to an email faster than one hour, they are spending too much time reading and waiting for the next email. That is just communicating, its not actually getting work done. Read your emails twice a day, preferably on your iPhone while you are commuting. Emails are time poison. At Hive Empire, we don’t have telephones. There is no need. We don’t even have business cards. Email us to communicate and we will reply in a timely manner. Nothing is really that urgent.
- Instant messenger. This is the perfect tool to collaborate with when you are working with people overseas and we have several overseas team members. But most of the time there aren’t many things that couldn’t be done over email. Email helps you think out your ideas and formulate them into a productive communication. Instant messenger is a distraction and kills people’s ability to focus and deliver productive work. When you get distracted from your work you essentially lose money. Kill the instant messenger and you will see an increase in profits.
- Facebook and Twitter are productivity hell. The walled garden of Facebook is the ultimate time killer. Ever noticed how often someone updates their Facebook or Twitter status? This number of updates is inversely proportionate to their profitability. Kill your Facebook account and only read the Twitter updates from your business colleagues when you are waiting for someone or something to happen. In actual fact, if you want to be even more ruthless with your time management, kill your Twitter as well. No piece of information is really that important that you won’t eventually find out.
8. Great things come to great businesses
You can tell how great your business is going to be by how relevant the current business headlines are to you. If you have nothing to do with it, you’re in the wrong market. If the news is relevant, you are going to be a great business because your market is newsworthy and there is growth potential.
I prefer big markets as opposed to small ones in Australia. The small ones aren’t big enough to sustain many businesses, unlike in the US where niche markets are really large. I used to work in niche markets with small customer bases, there was little scale and little profit. If you are a niche business in Australia you have to go global to expand. Be courageous and challenge a big market in Australia. You will be surprised as to what happens. We started our home loan comparison site during a credit crisis, mortgage broker meltdown and credit licensing. It didn’t bother us because we know it’s a long haul and it’s a big market, so all we need is a slice to be profitable.
9. Say no
This time around I’ve learnt to say no to things I don’t want and not grin and bear it. It comes with confidence and experience. Play it slow when you are unsure and wait for a better option.
Here is how to say no without actually saying no:
- Price. Put the price up so high that you would be okay to do it if you were paid that obscene amount of money.
- Refer. Give the work to someone else. You would be amazed as to how referring things can come back to you in spades.
- Say nothing. Don’t respond to someone who is trying to open a dialogue with you, because you know they are going to ask you to do something you don’t want to do. Ignoring people is rude, but not opening a dialogue to a broadcast request is different.
10. Be persistant
In my previous business my Joker card was that I was persistant. I literally just stuck it out and kept picking up the phone. This time I’m the same and I know it’s what makes me win.
The most important times to be persistent are:
- A customer turns you down. If a customer won’t do business with you, wait. That person will leave the business and you can do business with the new person.
- You don’t have enough business. Keep marketing and selling. Someone will buy eventually if you have something worthwhile to sell. Pick up the phone and dial your most important prospect.
- You don’t have any good staff. Fire someone and hire someone else. Why wait, just do it. It’s not really that bad, stop putting it off and start realising your business potential.
- Too much office politics. Fire the politician, no matter how good they are.
- You don’t make enough profit in your business. Stop doing unprofitable things and do more profitable ones. Isolate the profitable things and transition to just doing that, and that only.
- You don’t have enough time. Stop doing things which take up a lot of time and deliver little output. If you only had one hour in a day to do all of your work, what would you do and what would you not do? Outsource the things which are mindless and repetitive and just do the really profitable things all day.
