5 Fast Tips For Aspiring Business Owners

Hi, I’m Nicola Cairncross. Welcome to my podcast. This is where we talk about entrepreneurship, digital marketing, being a digital nomad and much, much more. I really hope you enjoy the show. Hey, well, welcome everyone. It’s Nicola Cairncross here and welcome back to the channel.

I just wanted to let you know about an email I just received that wound me up rather a lot. I get emails all the time, so I’ve subscribed to many, many mailing lists and this one really just made me see red and I thought I’d come on and tell you about it. It was basically the top five tips for aspiring business owners and it was from one of the big magazines like entrepreneur magazine or business magazine I can’t remember exactly one of the big one word magazines and they were talking such a load of absolute bollocks I had to just come on and set the record straight. So my top five tips for aspiring business owners of which there’s going to be a lot of people aspiring to be business owners over the next few years are as follows. These are from 28 years experience of being a self-employed business owner. First one is don’t take any notice of anything printed online by big, big business magazines, because they really are run by people who don’t know how to run a business, and they’re also got loads of reporters who don’t know how to run a business. Reporters are generally freelance, and being freelance is not being a business owner.

You go through various levels of evolution as a business owner. You start out as freelance and then you evolve to perhaps hiring someone or developing a system, and as soon as you start doing that, then you’re becoming a business owner, because the business does not depend on you to run it. And as soon as you get to that stage, then you’re really starting to take yourself into the realm of where your business has got a value in and of itself, and not just if you’re around. And that is the ultimate goal for any business owner, because that’s how you get out of the business. Your exit strategy is always going to be to sell it on, ideally to someone who’s either going to run it themselves or to a bigger business who wants to bolt in your customers revenue stream into their own business.

So don’t take any notice of the people who don’t know what they’re talking about. So who should you take notice of? Well, I would say my next tip is to go and get a mentor as quickly as possible. Go and find someone who is successfully doing what you want to do. And if you can’t find anyone who’s successfully doing what you want to do, that does not mean that the scene is wide open for you to go storming in and make fortune. It generally means that it’s either a not profitable niche or it’s something that a lot of people have tried and not made work for some reason. So try and find someone who’s in and a related business in the industry that you’re thinking of going into and telling me your idea.

So many people are terrified to share their ideas with anyone because they think they’re going to nick it. And let me tell you there are. There is no shortage of good ideas in the world. The real, real tricky bit is the execution. So if you give a successful business owner your idea and ask them for their opinion, they are very unlikely to do it themselves and take it and run with it. They might say you know, let’s go into business, let’s go into partnership. They think it’s a really brilliant idea, but they are not going to nick your idea.

So find yourself a mentor. Why would anyone mentor you? Because it’s so unusual to see someone with a spark of life in their eyes that actually wants to do something for themselves. It’s. You know, whenever anyone asks me for advice, you know you can’t shut me up. You know I’ll give free advice until I run out of breath or until the bar shuts one of the two. I just wanted to let you know that there are mentors out there waiting for you to go and find them and they will help you for free, for love, for joy, paying it forward, whatever you want to call it. Don’t be afraid to ask people to help you and you will find the right mentor eventually. They might not be a lifetime mentor. You might go through a series of mentors, like I have, but you move on to the next one when it’s when the time’s right, and then they start mentoring someone else.

My next tip would be think business to consumer rather than business to business. It’s a whole lot harder to sell things to business people and that’s why I’ve made my lifetime’s work doing and doing it the hard way. I was amazed how different it was selling a business to consumer book. I’ve just written a book called the Foodies Guide to the Marni, and the Marni is a little part of Greece that I’ve been going to for 30 years and the book just sold so much more effortlessly than any business books. In fact, I think I sold more in the first week of that one than I’ve sold on any of my business books in their first week.

So try and think of something that your average consumer wants rather than having to sell to a business owner, because they’re a lot more cynical, they’re a lot more resistant, in spite of the fact that it’s tax deductible any expenses in their business. It’s still a lot harder to sell to a business than it is to sell to a consumer, and it’s easier to get in front of a lot of them as well. Which leads me on to my next point, which is to get in front of a hungry crowd. If you want to make a fortune or even make a decent living, you have to get in front of a large enough hungry crowd of your ideal potential future customers, and it makes life so much easier. I can’t tell you. So think about where you’re going to get in front of a hungry crowd. There’s all social media platforms. That’s why there are great places to sell things, but you just have to be inventive and creative and come up with a way of building trust on social media and then driving people to a sales page or an offer or something like that, where they can just buy your thing. Let’s not make it over complicated. Start with the simplest route to the sale and then, only if it’s not working, do you then think about how many putting other steps in front, because it means you haven’t built trust enough yet. Sell a business to consumer, find a hungry crowd, think about how you can get in front of them and finally, my last tip is to make an irresistible offer with a no risk guarantee for the consumer. You want them to feel completely comfortable that if they don’t like what they’ve just bought, they can send it back. They can give it back, they can get a refund.

I once bought two t-shirts I think there was bitcoin by the dick t-shirts. The orange was wrong. It looked like it was brown rather than orange, so you’ve probably seen me wearing it on these videos. I wanted to send it back because the orange wasn’t as bright as I was expecting, and they did a really cool thing. They said no, just keep the t-shirts, we’ll send you a refund, because obviously it was going to cost them a couple of quid to each to give me a refund in terms of what it had cost them and it really made for very good customer service and I would certainly not hesitate to buy other t-shirts from them again. I was disappointed. I wanted really bright bitcoin orange.

Anyway, the point is make an irresistible offer with a risk-free guarantee. You’ll create the most number of customers if you do it like that. I think that was Dan Kennedy that used to talk about that a lot about taking all the risk off of the customer and putting it onto you. With my businesses, it’s a bit different when it comes to the website build, but when it comes to the membership area, where I mentor people through my membership site at Clicks and Leeds Academy, I always give 30-day guarantee. So if people join the site, come along to a couple of the calls on the Thursday afternoons, go through some of the training videos In fact, there’s a five-day challenge in there, so they can actually go through a lot of the material in five days and then, if they don’t like it after that and they come to a couple of the calls, they will definitely get a 30-day refund. And the people who ask for refunds hasn’t happened to me for a long, long time, but it’s usually people who actually don’t want to do the work, rather than people who don’t think the training is good. So, yeah, take all the risk off your customer.

Make an irresistible offer. Make an offer to as many members of a hungry crowd as you possibly can. Work out how you’re going to get in front of them. Make it business to consumer, not business to business. Get yourself a mentor and don’t take any notice of the old rubbish that these magazines put out online, because they don’t really know what they’re talking about, because they’re not business people. Hope that helps. See you later. You’ve been listening to Nicklea Cairncross on the Clicks and Leads podcast. We’ve got loads of great resources, so why don’t you come over to clicksandleadscom and download a few for yourself? It might help you with your business. And, of course, if you like the idea of working with me, don’t hesitate to book yourself into my diary or check out your options on the options page.

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