Got a big, cool project you want to get started on but you just don’t seem to find the time?

Maybe you want to:

• Create a new program in to response to something your customers have been asking about for years
• Redo your website
• Learn about social media and start using it in your marketing
• Write a book

Most entrepreneurial types have at least one big, cool project in the works.

But life keeps interfering, right? You need to:

• Take care of your clients and customers (that’s what you get paid for)
• Buy more toner for your printer
• Pay your quarterly taxes
• Check out the funny noise your car engine keeps making

And these are all important things to take care of. You can’t ignore them.

As a result the new eCourse you’ve been dreaming of doing keeps getting pushed back. And back and back.

Then I got an idea from an unexpected source: watching my toddler son learn to walk.

Business Lessons from a Toddler

Have you ever watched a toddler learn to walk?

Then you know how watching a one-year old taking his first steps is alternatively hilarious and terrifying.

Hilarious because they look like tiny Frankensteins stomping and lurching across the floor; terrifying because they tend to fall down—hard—and not always on well-padded bottoms.

You may notice however that no matter how many times toddlers fall they don’t give up on walking. They may cry and fuss but give them an hour or so and they’re back at it.

And I can’t think of too many adults who watch a toddler fall down and say,

“You’re doing it all wrong! You’re not suppose to fall. You’ll never get it right!”

“Walking is really hard and it sucks when you fall down. Why don’t you just stick with crawling. You can still get around.”

Of course not! I know I was cheering my son’s every step:

“Good job! Alright! You almost did it. OK, now one step and grab my hand! There you go, hooray!”

Followed by lots of hugs and a chaser of milk and cookies.

We adults could learn a thing or two from the average toddler.

Which is where baby steps come in.

What are Baby Steps?

A baby step is an action that is so small and seemingly insignificant that you’ll do it because it doesn’t bring up resistance.

But at the same time it advances your progress towards a goal.

How to Use Baby Steps to Accomplish Big, Cool Projects

I’ve been experimenting with using baby steps to get my own projects.

For example, one of my latest big, cool projects has been to write an ebook about creating information products. I’ve been talking about this book for years. Writing a book is a very exciting idea and it scares the crap out of me.

A number of people suggested I get started by “writing an outline for your book.” Unfortunately, when one part of my brain says “time to get started on that outline,” another part of my brain says, “right after I clean the kitchen.”

Clearly the conventional approach wasn’t working for me.

Here’s how I used baby steps to get going with the book project.

Step 1: Come up with a few ridiculously small actions that will produce forward motion.

When I say “ridiculously small,” I mean exactly that.

So these were the baby steps I came up with to get started with a book outline:

1. Buy index cards (use to record outline topics)
2. Buy rubber bands so I could group stacks of cards
3. Buy some fat markers to write on the cards
4. Ask my husband if we could move a folding table into a spare bedroom so I could have a big surface on which to work with my cards

Of all of these steps, #4 was the biggest since it involved making a request. Still notice I didn’t say “move the folding table into the spare bedroom.” That is a bigger step that I might not have done.

In my experience, if I’m not taking action, the step is still too big.

Step 2. After you’ve taken one or more baby steps, reward yourself

Yup, when I bought index cards, markers, and rubber bands, I told my friends, my husband, and my coach. I popped some popcorn, stretched out on the couch and watched a movie.

Step 3. Take a break

Work on all the familiar stuff that you need to do.

How long a break? Sometimes a day is enough, sometimes you may need a week.

I know I need a little recovery time if there’s fear and tenderness around doing the project.  I say “fear and tenderness” because if there wasn’t you’d have completed the project a long time ago, right?

It’s important to be kind with yourself here. Remember yelling at a toddler because they’re not learning to walk fast enough would be considered cruel by most people, not to mention ineffective.

Step 4. Repeat Steps 1 through 3.

The Magic of Baby Steps

After you’ve done enough baby steps you’ll notice something really cool:  that you’re making progress and building some momentum. Each little step is accumulating and giving you a sense of real accomplishment.

You may also notice that your resistance is lessening. Suddenly you’re finding the time in your day to work on your project.

Bottom Line

Baby steps are not a be all and end all to getting intimidating projects done. You need to give yourself some time and space to get going. And baby steps tend to work best when the hardest part of your project is getting started.

On the other hand, in my experience, the projects most worth doing seem to be the ones that are hardest to start.

If you have a worthy project that you just keep putting off, say a little about what you’re working on. Maybe we can come up with some baby steps to help you get going.

In the early days of the Internet I remember a lot of companies would take all their print material and “dump” it into their web pages.

This was considered having a web site.

Eventually we learned that if you wanted a website that actually did something for your business…like make money…you had to make your website easy for customers to use.

This was a big adjustment for a lot of businesses. You had to think differently about how your products and services showed up on the Internet.

Now an even bigger shift is occurring: making it easy for people to use your programs, products and services on their smart phones.

And I think this shift is going to be very challenging for a lot of businesses.

When you’re creating content for a desktop or laptop computer, you have a lot of space to work with. For example, you can turn a print book into a pdf version and now you have an ebook.

Now you can still distribute your pdf ebook to be read on a SmartPhone but I wonder, how effective will your ebook be?

I’ve been using my iPhone to read books and articles with mixed results.

In the case of fiction, I’ve been very happy using iPhone’s Kindle app.

In the case of non-fiction, especially when there are a lot of diagrams and graphics, I get frustrated and go back to using my MacBook.

I think there’s huge potential for creating effective content that informs and teaches and works well in the world of itsy bitsy screens. And huge rewards for businesses that want to go this route.

Curious, does your business produce and sell information products and have you taken any steps towards creating products for the mobile world?

Share your thoughts on the blog

Once upon a time there was a bookkeeper who wanted to make a contribution and needed to make a profit.

She was very, very good at what she did and once someone became a client they remained a client.

But it seemed to the bookkeeper that it took a very long time to get new clients. Not that there weren’t a lot of people out there
the bookkeeper knew she could help. She saw lots of business owners who were struggling to get organized during tax season, who didn’t know which customers owed them money, and who spent hours trying to find receipts so they could get their computer repaired under warranty. The bookkeeper would think, “if they just knew about me and how good I am, I bet some of those people would hire me.”
Read the rest of this entry »

The day after an ezine goes out, my first priority is to check and make sure the ezine actually got sent. This usually isn’t an issue but it never hurts to check.

Next I like to see if there are any comments because I like reader comments especially when someone makes a good observation or asks a good questions.

Comment #1 was from a reader who unsubscribed saying “Small biz owners are tired of BS. Keep it short, concise, and to the point.”

The last ezine was chattier and more personal than most because sometimes I try too hard not offend anyone and in my opinion, my writing comes off as bland and timid.

Reading comment #1 made me wonder if I erred on the side of (T)oo (M)uch (I)nformation.

But comments #2, 3, and 4 were very positive “thank you for sharing your journey” one reader wrote. “How do you turn around negative unconscious thoughts?” another reader wrote.

Those positive comments not only made me feel better, they confirmed my decision to relax and stop trying so hard.

Plus it makes writing a lot more enjoyable.

I’m curious, do you write? And if yes, on a scale of 1 to 10 with “1″ = no personality and “10″ being your written is clearly, distinctly you and only you, how would you rate yourself?

What do you think?

I don’t know about you but selling and persuasion usually feel about as easy as putting my cat, Inky, into his crate to take him to the vet. And I used to like sales about as Inky liked trips to the vet.

It seems like my task is to try to get someone who doesn’t want t talk to me to buy something they don’t want in the first place.

And yet we know three facts that should make selling relatively easy:

1. People seek things that make them feel good- they like being entertained, they enjoy pleasurable things like good food and drink, they want to have fun.
2. People also seek things that will make unpleasant, painful situations go away.
3. People actually like to buy when they believe what they’re buying will help them get #1 or #2

Assuming you offer a product or service that does #1 or #2 and there are some buyers out there who would like to buy your particular flavor, why is it so hard to sell?

What Makes Sales Difficult?

There are two things that make sales difficult:

#1 You don’t have the right systems and strategies set up to make it easy to sell
#2. You have beliefs you’re not aware of that are working against you.

Most entrepreneurs tend to focus on #1 because the vast majority of training sales solutions and programs focus on the setting up structures, systems, and strategies. Plus, when we implement a strategy or system, we know we’ve gotten something tangible accomplished. It’s easy to point to your to do list and say “I made 25 phone calls yesterday and sent 10 postcards to prospects.”

In my experience, however, implementing these programs without supportive beliefs can be a long, painful, and expensive road. If you stick with it as a very few do, you will eventually succeed through brute force effort. And your beliefs will shift as well but it’s always amazing how many successful people out there still harbor beliefs like “I was just lucky and at the right place at the right time.” or “I’m really an impostor and one day someone will find out.”

The less popular approach but easier way is to put your focus on shifting your beliefs.

Why Shifting your Beliefs is So Important

At the beginning of the year, I made a transition in my business from focusing on developing my brand and strategy to implementing. For me this has always been where I screw up. Why? From a very early age, I was raised to believe a was “special” … an airy fairy creative type who couldn’t deal with the rough and tumble real world.

My only hope was to find protectors who would take care of the harsh realities for me so I could remain in my crystalline fairy world sipping nectar and spinning delicate little fairy thingys.

And this belief that I was “hopeless at sales” has resided way way in the back of my mind for years. In my subconscious if you will.

My conscious mind loves getting stuff done and I could set goals and objectives all I wanted but as long as my subconscious held the belief “hopeless at sales” my efforts weren’t going to go well.

Beating the Soundtrack Playing in My Subconscious

In my case, I began to pay attention to what was keeping me from taking action to get into the world and reach out to people who might want to buy my services.

I mean, if you had a little voice in the back of your mind continually tuned 24/7 to “hopeless at sales” how eager would you be to step out?

So rather than launch a heavy-duty sales and marketing strategy that I wasn’t going to follow through with I’ve been putting more effort into erasing the “hopeless at sales” tape and recording the “I offer something awesome that people can’t wait to buy.”

Whether or not my approach is the best way is open to argument: several people I respect have told me I’m just being chicken and using this as an excuse to avoid “getting out there.” Maybe they’re right or partly right.

I DO know that jumping with both feet into “getting out there” without putting major effort into upgrading my beliefs is not going to get me the results I want. Been there, done that, got a bunch of Tshirts and don’t want anymore.

And I also know the belief shifts are working because the success I’m experiencing so far this year feels like success I can fully own because its based on decisions 100% of me made rather than decisions made by my conscious mind because it looked and sounded good but I spent most of my time trying to talk myself into believing it was the right way to go.

The second reason I know things are improving is because I’m losing my dread of failure and seeing failure as a situation in which I don’t get the outcomes I thought I wanted. Instead I’m getting an opportunity to get something better than I even knew possible. And the less fear I have of failure the more I want to get out and do stuff to see what happens.

Selling Vet Trips to the Cat

BTW shifting my beliefs has also made it easier to get Inky into his crate. When I believed “He’s going to fight me every inch of the way and I might as well get this over with as fast as possible,” my tendency was to corner the cat, try to grab him and stuff him into the crate. Not a fun process for me or the cat and the cat developed an uncanny talent for disappearing the moment he saw his crate. Instead I’ve decide I’m going to make the experience as pleasant as possible for us both. This requires me to sit with the cat for a while so he feels safe. Someone else brings up the crate and we back him in as gently as possible.

The cat still does NOT like being in his crate nor does he like trips to the vet but I no longer dread vet visits and I believe the cat at least likes the time I spend cuddling him.

This isn’t my usual “tips” or “how to” article and I’m curious what you’re thoughts are. Have you spent much time “upgrading” your beliefs? Has it worked? Have you done something different that has worked? Use the comments section to share your experience.

I hope the subject heading got your attention.

When a mentor said this to me a couple years ago he got my attention all right, in fact I was royally pissed.

Actually what he said was this: “Until you have products you what I consider a have a successful practice…nothing wrong with a successful practice…but you do not have a business.”

I argued, “Look at everything I’ve accomplished. Look at everything I’ve learned. I actually made a profit last year. The IRS certainly thinks I have a business!”

“Those are all amazing accomplishments,” my mentor said “but if, God forbid, you got hit by a bus and couldn’t do any work for six months or longer what would happen to your business?”

“I’m the business,” I replied, “If I can’t work there is no business.”

Exactly.

A Practice Begins and Ends with You

Even if you have an amazing assistant. Even if you have clients who love you and sing your praises: no you, no business.

One year later, two years later, there isn’t even a vapor trail.

Now for a lot of people, this is completely cool. You may be reading this article and thinking “Hey its enough that I take good care of  my clients and my business pays the bills for me and my family.”

You have a successful practice and that is something to be very proud of.

And the success of your practice depends entirely on your ability to
show up and be present. If you can’t show up, there is no business.

My dad was a dentist for over 40 years. He was a very good at his work and his patients adored him. When he retired he sold his practice to another dentist.

When my dad is at the grocery store or running errands people still come up to him and tell him how much they appreciated him and that they miss having him as their dentist.

I’m always impressed by the warm feelings my dad’s former patients still express to him. You can’t buy that kind of good will.

But the practice itself winked out of existence when my dad took his name off the door. Any special processes my dad knew, the things he said to calm nervous patients, the skills and knowledge he honed over the years; that’s all gone.

It’s About Influence and Making a Difference

This is not to belittle my dad’s accomplishments. He taught me a lot about working hard and with integrity. I’m proud of my dad.

At the same time, when I close shop for my business, in addition to having contributed to my clients success, I want to have products: books, classes, software, and tools that hundreds of thousands of  people can use and benefit from my skills and knowledge.

When you create products, your business no longer depends on you because in a sense, you have replicated yourself. You’ve duplicated what made your business yours. The reason you got customers to begin with.

With products you can influence thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people. That’s a LOT bigger than what any practice can do.

Not that the Money isn’t Nice too

Most small business owners are attracted to creating information products because they love the idea of earning passive income from multiple sources.

It’s a great reason to sell products. Not such a great reason for creating products.

Seriously. If you’re into products primarily because you want multiple streams of revenue, I’ve got one word for you: Affiliates.

Sell other people’s products and make commission.

It’s easy. Most of the e-commerce products I use: my web host, my email and list management, and my shopping cart all pay me a percentage when people find them through me.

And I’m an affiliate for several businesses whose programs I’ve used and gotten good results from including Amazon.com.

Again, remember, your own products will outlive you, affiliate products will not.

Bottom Line

Having a successful practice is huge accomplishment and you can make
a huge difference–as long as you’re around.

If you want a profitable business whose influence goes well beyond
the clients and customers you serve: then you want to create and
sell information products.

It’s the best way I know to take what you know and make money making
a difference in the world.

In his latest post, Designing Teen-targeted websites, Jakob Nielsen talks about making sure websites are easy to skim and written at the sixth-grade level. Not so much because teenagers don’t read, they do, but because most teenagers don’t have very strong reading skills.

I’d argue the same even if you’re writing for intelligent, technically savvy adults.

When people are online, they’re impatient and looking for solutions and answers. This means

• Short paragraphs
• Bullet Points
• Use Headings to create an outline of your information

If you want people to engage with what you’re saying, the easier your words are to read, the more likely people will get what you’re saying and respond.

Are You Willing to Not Be Liked to Grow Your Business?

A friend of mine once told me “if you’re not pissing people off, you’re probably not stretching yourself enough.”

This is so true and I also find it comforting because I like being liked by people and this is often in perfect conflict (I use the word “perfect” with more than a little irony) with how much I value authenticity and being true to myself.

For this week’s post, I created a video in which I tell a true story of how I pushed back at my parents and got what I really wanted by being persistent and using some creativity.

Enjoy the video!

Sometimes You’ve Got to Break the Rules

I remember taking a class a few years ago in which the instructor told us the United States is a great place for entrepreneurs because our culture offers more allowance for failure than many other cultures.

Hearing this I thought “That may be true but failure is still pretty fucking painful even here in the United States.”

As an entrepreneur I see failure addressed in two ways:

1. An almost perverse delight when a “Golden Boy” falls in a big, messy public way. For example, the media has been loving former software billionaire John McAffee who has seemingly gone off the deep end hiding out in the jungles of Belize doing drugs, hoarding weapons, and accusing the Belize government of aiding Islamist terrorists.
2. Completely forgetting the failure when the “Golden Boy” bounces back and has a success. Steve Jobs and Apple are a great example.There was a time when it was an annual ritual to publish an article if not an entire issue about “What will it take to save Apple?” But when Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, that dark time was a blip on the radar compared to the amazing string of hits Apple put out once Jobs was back as CEO: the imac, ipod, iphone, and ipad not to mention iTunes and Apples stores.

So there are two extremes:

1. Failure is like watching a traffic accident and looking for mangled bodies and blood.
2. Failure is glossed over like a dark family secret…especially if the person who failed has a great comeback.

Neither way is very helpful for me as an entrepreneur who wants to make her business into something really big and beautiful. It’s like if I do fail, it’s going to be really painful and everyone is going to look at me with pity, glee, or a mixture of both. And my only hope is to come back with a big success that will hopefully make everyone forget how I failed.

Does this make me want to take more risks and fail? Especially in a really public way? FUCK NO!!

What I find myself longing for is for more small business owners and entrepreneurs to talk about how they experience failure in an honest, open way. I was going to say experience failure in a “graceful way” but in my case I already censor myself so much I need fewer rules not more!

So in the spirit of “walking my talk” I’m going to share what feels like my biggest shortcoming. Typically I’d wait a while, like ten years or so, for the pain to get manageable to write about. However, I have no right to criticize other business owners as “wimps” if I’m not willing to do it myself.

Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can’t Teach

I’m pretty critical of the empty claims I see a lot of businesses making in their marketing which makes it really painful for me being the teacher who teaches what she, herself can’t do.

Case in point:

Being an Expert for Creating Successful Information Products

I genuinely love creating content and creating information products. Over the last decade I’ve created and launched quite a few programs and products through my business, Highly Contagious Marketing.

I wish I wish I could tell people to look at what I did as an example of how they, themselves can create information products that express who they are and what they stand for as business owners. And I especially wish I could be an example of how to earn a lot of passive revenue selling information products.

The truth is that while I very much enjoyed creating all the products I created and creating the content I created, I don’t think I’ve earned even $1,000 through the sales of my products.

And upstairs in my attic are about $2,500 in books I self-published and recapped maybe $400 in my investment.

Being an Example of Having and Generating Obscene Amounts of Money in My Business

I’m very blessed to be married to a man who is in a field that pays well.

If it were me by myself or me being a single mom, there would be no way in Hell that I could have been in business for nearly a decade earning what I’ve been earning.

The one year in which I earned a genuinely decent amount of money, $36,000 was when I was working as a practitioner for the guy who was my coach.

So I have yet to prove that I am a business owner who has been financially successful on her own momentum. This isn’t to say that the work I’ve done over the years hasn’t been a contribution, I know I’ve helped a lot of business owners in a variety of ways. But there’s something really special and beautiful about creating a successful, profitable BUSINESS without requiring someone else to bankroll your success.

Part of me longs for this and part of me wonders if it’s truly possible.

Going back to the “teacher who can’t” it’s embarrassing to be teaching the “Create Your Mojo Money Box” and telling participants how to have more prosperity and abundance in 2013 when I, myself, currently have less than $1,000 in my business checking account and I’m really not sure how I’m going to pay for my website and cover February expenses.

Although there’s always savings to dip into, I spent over $12,ooo on business coaching in 2011 and 2012 and it is truly painful to contemplate spending more and not feeling 100% certain that the success I keep promising my husband “is going to happen next month” is actually going to occur.

It’s Not Time to Give Up

I DO pay attention to my intuition and I’ve never gotten the message to close the business and get a “real job.” If that was the message, that’s what I would do.

But I do wonder “what’s it going to take” to create the traction needed to have a  sustainable revenue stream coming in through my business.

There was a time in my life, when I was a miserable corporate drudge when the problems I’m writing about would have been the types of problems I would have dreamed about having.

But as someone who is somewhere in the cave where you can no longer see the light from where you entered and cannot yet see the light from the end, I go back and forth between gratitude where where I’m at and a sense of deep sadness at the prospect that the cave’s end may mean ending my adventure as an entrepreneur if only for a short time.

I wish I was outside the cave’s exit and I could dispense some comforting words of wisdom to people who are in the same place.

But all I can say right now is “I know where you’re at and I know how it feels because I’m right here with you and although I believe things will work out for the best, at the time when they do it may not feel that way.

You just met another business owner and hit it off right away.

They offer a product or service your business really needs and they want and need something you sell.

There’s just one issue: they tell you cash flow is really tight at the moment and they’re wondering if you would be open to doing a trade: you deliver your product and service in exchange for getting what they would normally sell.

There’s a lot about the arrangement that makes sense to you and yet you find yourself questioning whether you really want to go down the barter road.

Once Upon a Time I Was a Big Advocate for Barter

When I was just getting my business up and running I thought bartering products and services with other business owners was a great idea.

It seemed to me that cash flow was often an issue for small businesses and yet, we small business owners offered an abundance of talent, energy, resources, and other things I saw value in. I thought there was a lot of exciting potential for using barter to build my business and to contribute to other business owners.

Over Time My View Has Shifted

As I gained experience as a business owner my view about barter has shifted quite a bit.

The main reason is because of the meaning money has in our culture.

In our culture how we spend money represents what we really value and what our real priorities are. The way we spend our time is equally revealing when it comes to what we really value.

I’m not attaching any judgements here by the way. It’s easy to get defensive about how we choose to spend our time and money.

But if you just look at how someone spends his or her time and money you will learn a lot about what is most important to them. Another thing I notice is we as human beings still value the same things our hunter gatherer ancestors valued.

• We prefer things that reward us now rather than later.
• We want to feel attractive and sexy and believe we look that way to others.
• We want to look successful and important.
• We don’t like to spend money on things if we feel unsure of getting something something in return.
• We don’t want to work too hard to get what we want.
• We want things that bring us pleasure (fun, enjoyment, entertainment)
• We don’t want things that are painful (boring, embarrassing, hurtful)

Again, no judgement here. This is simply what I observe in myself and in other people.

I like to look at what people choose and what people do rather than what they say because, again, choices and behavior tell us what others really value.

My concern when it comes to barter is that often when someone wants to barter it isn’t so much that they don’t have any money. It’s that they may not see value in what I’m offering and that suggests to me that barter isn’t the right choice.

In addition, when someone wants to barter for my services what does this say about:

1. How I value my contribution?
2. How well am I communicating the value of my work to others?

In both cases, what this tells me is I’m not fully appreciating the value of what I offer AND I’m not doing a very good job communicating the value of what I offer in my marketing.

So When DOES Bartering Make Sense

One of my first coaches once said to me “I only barter my services when it feels really right.”

This is probably the best advice I ever got on whether or not to accept a barter deal although for most of us it’s not very specific or easy to implement. Let’s define what the “right” barter situation could be for a small business owner.

1. I really desire the product or service the other business is offering in trade and can use it right now.
2. It feels like a fair trade between what I’m giving and getting.
3. I know what I require for the barter to work.
4. The other person can deliver what I require.
5. We have a clear agreement in place around terms of the exchange.
6. A mutual commitment to discuss any questions or concerns in a respectful, non-blaming way.

The listed points are examples. Use the criteria that work best for your particular situation.

A Word About Agreements

I prefer a simple, written agreement that covers:

• What you’re both delivering (for example, 3 one-hour training sessions for 2 hours of bookkeeping services)
• The monetary value of what you’re both delivering.
• The length of the agreement (example, “this agreement is good for three months ending 3/31/13).
• Any requirements or assumptions or other things that can be “gotchas” if you don’t make them clear up front.
• If one or both of you can’t deliver what you agreed to, you can end the agreement.

“No” is Always a Choice

You may notice there’s nothing here about the actual financial situation of the other business owner. This is because in my experience it’s too easy to get into assumptions about what the other person is or is not capable of (“but they own a time share in Hawaii and they obviously have money!”)

Whether you think they can pay cash in this situation is irrelevant. Clearly the other party in this situation feels they cannot and for them, this is the truth from which they are coming.

This is about you making a choice about proceeding with a barter agreement.

If you don’t feel good about doing a barter for any reason you can say “No, bartering isn’t going to work in this situation.” You don’t need to say anything more than that.

And remember the other person can still buy your product or service.

Bottom Line

On the surface, bartering seems like a great, straight-forward way for two cash-challenged businesses to get needed products and services. However, the emotional meanings people give to money, barter agreements often don’t work out and can end badly for one or both parties.

If a barter situation comes up that looks good to you, consider it! Just make sure you go into the situation knowing it’s really right for you and your business.