Someone as sharp as you should have some #$%^ clients, right?

If you are in the process of starting your business, you've probably realized it's not as easy as you had hoped.  So why don't you have enough clients? 

We start a business with optimism and confidence.  Lots of people have done this – how hard can it be?

We get to work on all the trappings of business – the cards, the website, the logo, the EIN, the business card – and wait for all the cash to roll in.

Then, it starts.  The business becomes not fun.  It's all expenses and no income.  What the heck?

So we start looking for the reason.  It can't be us.  We are working our a$$es off – reading articles, getting trained, taking courses, hanging out with the old guys at SCORE (who by the way never actually started a business) – that can't be the problem.  It must be time.  It's probably time.

So we quit our jobs, thinking that will make it better.  But it's made it worse.  SO much more worse.  Because now we have all the time in the world, and it is still not happening.

So what to do?

Most of us start our businesses with the wrong tasks.  We start with setting up the stuff of business, without testing the most important part – do clients want to pay for what I'm offering?

What's needed is what those of us from the IT world call a proof of concept.  We need to start offering what we do and see if anyone wants it.

The most important part of doing this successfully this is credibility. 

Let's say I meet you at a networking event.  I'm not totally clear on what you do (because you aren't yet totally clear on what you do), but it sounds interesting, so I hang on to your card and check you out.

Except according to the internet, your business doesn't exist.

There's no website, or it's so full of stock photos and copy someone else has written that there's no soul to it.  Your Facebook business page has been filled full of meaningless articles written by the social media savvy millennial you hired to “handle social media” because you read a book saying you need to outsource stuff. Your personal page is full of your personal drama and bears no sign of you having experienced the transformation you are offering clients.

Imagine a brick and mortar store who pays a ton of money for advertising, bringing you in to the shop to browse.  When you get there, the shop doesn't have anything on the shelves and the windows aren't decorated.  You'd leave confused and conclude that they must not be serious about their business or must not be ready for customers.

Credibility.

Before you spend a dime on lead generation or appointment setting or inbound marketing or anything else, you must be crystal clear on who you are and what you do and it needs to be on your website, your LinkedIn profile, your business Facebook page (if you have one), and at least periodically referenced on your Twitter and IG accounts (if you have them). 

Marketing and sales are going to be the very last things you outsource.  No one can sell you as well as you.  Paying someone to try to do so is throwing away money.  And as a money coach for entrepreneurs I'm going to recommend you not do that.

If you notice at the big law, accounting, or consulting firms, the highest paid people are the partners, and they are the highest paid because they are the rainmakers – the ones who can bring in the clients.  These are your role models. 

If you are going to outsource initially, start with things in your personal life.  Hire someone to clean your house, use Instacart for groceries, buy prepped meals, have a neighbor mow the lawn.  No one cares who does these things.  They are invisible.

The same rule stands true for your business.  Outsource bookkeeping and other administrative tasks.  Find someone you can hand a stack of business cards to who will key them in your CRM.  Hire out the functions that are invisible to your clients.

The interaction with clients and potential clients is the most precious aspect of your business.  It's where the money comes from, it's where you will find a sounding board for the ideas you have, and it's where you will refine your pitch.

It's where you develop your credibility.

*Have you reviewed your internet presence to see if it represents you well?

Don't despair – get help from a seasoned entrepreneur who has been there.

Money. You need it. Your clients have it.  But you have to ask for it.  Awkward.  It's time for a money breakthrough that will allow you to raise your rates. 

In our IT consulting business we've gotten pretty good at raising our rates without losing our clients.  What are the secrets to our success?

1.  Don't be desperate.

If you have one client and they are your only client, you aren't really an entrepreneur yet – you are probably an employee who should be getting benefits.  By having multiple clients, you can survive without any one account, so if you do risk the relationship to ask for a raise and they never work with you again (unlikely, but it's the big fear), your business can weather the loss.

Having plenty of work puts you in the driver's seat.  You are in demand, and they are willing to work with you in terms of price.

2.  Build in the idea of an annual increase.

When we started our IT business, it said right in our contract that rates would go up by 7% every year.  So if a client was caught off guard when they came back 10 years later and we were unable to work for the same rate, we could reference that we had disclosed the increase right in the initial contract they signed.  This moves them from a place of righteous indignation (how dare you make a living) to chagrin (should have read the contract) and gets the two of you back on more even footing.

3. Anchoring.

Just because you said in your paperwork that the rates would go up each year by 7%, you don't have to increase by that much if the client is already at the top of the range or if you don't feel comfortable asking for that much.  But by disclosing what the rate should be and then telling them the lower rate you are willing to work for them for, you've anchored at the higher number, rather than your old, lowest rate.

I hope these tips help you when the time comes to raise rates in your business or side hustle.  If you'd like to hire me to support you in growing your business and dealing with the money drama, schedule a free introductory call and we'll talk.

Stock photo of Western woman off to save the world. 

The Dalai Lama said “the world will be saved by the Western woman”.  I'm not sure what his rationale was, but I tend to agree.

 The average middle aged white lady in the U.S. grew up at a time when we were told we could be anything we wanted to be.  We went to college, went into the corporate world, and had early success.  But most of us realized that much of the corporate world is very toxic, especially to someone who is an out of the box thinker.  Inside most companies, burnout, subtle discrimination in wages and promotions, and a lack of investment in the individual are common.

So when it comes time to have kids, it's easy to drop out if your family has the financial means to do so.  If your work experience always kind of sucked.  Our society is not set up to have both parents work full time the way some other countries are.  Plus a lot of moms had kids because they want to spend time with them and be the greatest influence on their lives, especially in the early years while their child was not yet in school full time. So it's easy to let the job go.

Once the kids are older and mom is ready to go back to work, she often finds there has been a steep penalty for stepping out of the corporate world for a few years.  Someone who was earning $80,000 before she left is worth $45,000 ten years late when she tries to come back.  While yes, she may have missed some changes in her field while she was out, she's now getting funneled into more administrative roles versus the more prestigious sales or project management roles she had before.

So maybe she decides to step out on her own and start her own business instead.  Working as an entrepreneur gives her the flexibility she needs to still be the on-call parent. 

But here's the thing no one will tell you about being an entrepreneur – it is REALLY hard.  It REALLY sucks, especially at first.

When you realize there's no longer a boss keeping you down, any failures must be yours.  It's hard not to take this personally.

Now I understand the scenario I'm outlining is not everyone's story.  Not all women feel uncomfortable inside corporate America.  Not all companies are the same. Not all women have children.  Not all women with children become the primary caregivers.  Not all women with children stop working.  Not all women who stop working have trouble getting hired back into their old roles.  Not all women start businesses.  Not all entrepreneurs face challenges initially. 

But a lot of people fit into at least a piece of this story.  And for those women, either depression or self-reflection is the next step.  Probably both.

 You see, when you can no longer blame the company or your boss for holding you back, you have to search harder for why things aren't working.  So you dive into learning sales and marketing.  You study business finance and bookkeeping.  You increase your product knowledge and tweak your packages.  You work harder and smarter and hire help and still, things don't go according to plan.

That's when you have three choices.  You quit (but then what?).  Or you limp along, making friends but not money and “playing business”.  Or you start to dive deep into self-reflection and learning.

And this is where we get on track to save the Western world.

Once you realize that most of the drama in your life is the result of unresolved childhood trauma, you get the therapy, counseling, or coaching you need to clear those issues.  You become more wise, more calm, and less reactive.

You start to understand that a lot of the perceived terrible things other people are doing to you are actually your projections – the problem is how you are perceiving the behavior and what you are making it mean, not the behavior itself. 

You start to study law of attraction to attract clients and money, and realize you could also attract peace and harmony in your relationships.  You start to realize that we are all interconnected and interdependent.  You may even realize that we are all one.

And so, the crisis of realizing you are your own biggest obstacle in life gives you the opportunity to heal yourself, and by healing yourself, to start to heal your little corner of the world.

If you are an upper middle class white woman in the U.S. who owns a business, you have the means and the time flexibility to do this work that many other people simply do not have.

So fellow entrepreneurs, my message to you about your business is that nothing has gone wrong.  You are right where you are supposed to be.  Get the support you need to shift your understanding of reality.

The world is waiting on you.

Are you ready to hire a coach to take your mind to the next level?

It's time to earn more.

Are you ready to earn more?  Yeah?  Heck yeah?  Well, it's time to understand what sets our value it the marketplace and how we can shift that.

 One of the advantages of being an entrepreneur is that you understand the labor market from the other side.  You are no longer just an employee, waiting for someone to offer you a job.  You are in the role of evaluating potential employees and deciding on their compensation.  Today, I'm going to give you an insider's view.

Think of the labor market in three main tiers – the “blue collar” labor, “white collar” labor, and those top executives and founders who run the organization.

In general, blue collar folks work with their bodies to manage other people's physical stuff.  So think of the sanitation worker picking up bags of trash and throwing them in the back of a truck.  There's not a lot of mental work or training required.  Because there are no special skills involved, this person is pretty much interchangeable with anyone else willing to do the work.  In our economy, those doing unskilled physical labor are generally the lowest paid people.

A way to move up within the blue collar world is to develop a skill through a training or certification program, an apprenticeship, or on the job training and experience.  If you start working as an assistant to a plumber and learn about plumbing, you have more skills and therefore are more in demand.  Your value goes up, and your pay should go up as well.  You should receive a pay raise from your boss as your experience and skills increase. 

The next tier up is white collar labor.  This is generally someone with a college degree who does their work with their mind.  The bottom level of this tier is unskilled white collar labor such as an intern or new hire with an unrelated degree to the work they are doing.  Often these people work for free (intern), but once they receive some on the job training they would move into a paid position.

Historically holding any college degree made you unique enough that education was a ticket from the difficult physical labor of the blue collar tier to an easier, air-conditioned job where you got to sit down and earn more money.  While this is still true for most people over the long haul, the larger number of college graduates in the market today has brought the perceived value of a degree down.  So it would not be unusual for someone with no specific job training included as part of their degree program to end up working as unskilled blue collar labor in the service industry, especially in a bad economy when jobs are scarce.  So the tiers I'm describing are somewhat fluid, and there are definitely exceptions.  For the most part, though, college degree holders do earn more over their careers than those without college degrees.

To start earning real money as a white collar worker, employees should look to add to their resumes.  An English major with a project management certification will probably earn more, move up more quickly, and find more jobs than an English major without this credential but with the same experience.  Any time an employee can distinguish themselves both through experience and through education they are likely to earn more.

The choice of what we study is important as well.  We are coached in our society to think about what we want to do and pursue that.  And while overall this is good advice (people generally don't last an entire career in a field they hate, and if they do it's not a nice way to go through life), if you are looking to get additional training to improve your career prospects, it would be worth your while to get an understanding of where the needs are in the market.  If you are equally interested in two options, chose the option that is in demand.

As I mentioned, blue collar workers generally manage and maintain other people's tangible stuff (cars, homes, boats yards).  White collar workers generally deal with other people's intangible stuff, such as businesses, projects, software, contracts, health, etc.  This is an example of the difference in classes that Ruby Payne mentions in her work.  Those who come from a lower class background may not have experience in thinking of intangibles as real and important, whereas those earning more often are focused on intangibles.  In order to move up financially, some acceptance of intangibles (bank accounts, the stock market, schedules) as if they were real is necessary to be successful in this world.

 So if someone is already a skilled white collar worker busy with the left-brain tasks of managing someone else's intangibles as if they were real, how can they earn more within that segment of society?

As previously discussed, developing unique and in demand experience or credentials is a good approach.  Another great approach is combining things.  For example, there may be many software developers, but a software developer who also really understands networking will bring a different dimension to discussions they are in.  An artist who can also manage people may end up running a gallery.  So moving up the ranks and getting education and expertise is fantastic, but eventually you will end up capped out.  To move beyond that level, you must become one of the best of the best, combine unique complimentary skill sets, or manage people (which is really a combining of skill sets).

 Another way to move up is to remove those things that are holding you back.  If you find yourself overlooked for promotions and dissatisfied with your work, there may be a “soft skills” problem.  If you are seen as good at your job but hard to work with, you will be passed over for promotions and first on the list for layoffs.

 These soft skills problems are difficult to see.  To the person with the problem, they do not have a problem – everyone else is the problem.  Often co-workers will work around the person and avoid the issue rather than confront what is going on.  We are raised to believe a person is who they are.  So if someone is a jerk and can't see they are a jerk, plus I believe jerks can't be changed, I'll just avoid the issue, never giving the jerk an opportunity to understand that they are a jerk.

Working with a third party, such as a career coach, a mindset coach, or a therapist may help you to see what prior to that conversation you could not see.  They may also help you address and move through the issue. 

Suspect you have a soft skills problem you can't see?  Contact me.  I can help you remove the blocks to earning more.

Super nerd confession – I'm a little bit of a prepper. 

 I love post-apocalyptic movies where our heroine breaks out of a dystopian society to do her own thing (she never loads the dishwasher or does laundry in these movies.  Never. Discuss.)

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what would happen if there were some major disaster and planning accordingly.

And I think some of that is AWESOME.  After all, being in favor of being unprepared is a hard case to make, especially now that we live in coastal Florida right where hurricanes are a real possibility.

But I think a disaster is not the only thing a true prepper should prepare for.

What if society doesn't collapse?  Or what if it sort of half collapses, but you still have to pay taxes and your mortgage and stuff?

So I would argue in addition for preparing for the end of the world as we know it, we have a responsibility to also prepare for the continuation of the world basically as we know it now.  It's less exciting, and there's less of an excuse to buy cool Zombie Apocalypse gear, but let's face it, most of the powers that be are going to use their considerable pull to keep things ticking along.

Which brings us to the topic of debt.

I have a feeling there are a lot of preppers out there who have bought their freeze-dried food, first aid supplies, and giant guns on credit with the assumption being that society will collapse and they won't ever have to pay for those toys.

Good luck with that.

 It's a lot more likely that those supplies will expire unused and the debt will stick around.  So I suggest, pay off the debt.

I would further suggest that financial preparedness is one of the highest forms of disaster preparedness. 

Paying off your debt means in the event of a disaster you are more resilient.  You can get by on a smaller salary.  You can last longer if you lose your job.

So yeah, sure, absolutely, learn skills, stash supplies, and plan out your bug out route. 

But also stash cash, pay off debt, and plan your “something crappy happened and I still have to pay bills” scenario as well.

Prepare for the end, but prepare for the continuation as well, as that's honestly the more likely outcome.

And may the odds be ever in your favor.  🙂

 The laptop lifestyle is great, but it takes a lot of work to make it work.

I have a friend who moves from network marketing company to network marketing company like a slightly crazy single girl going from bad boyfriend to bad boyfriend.  Each time she falls in love, she thinks this is the one.

Many of those companies are selling are incompatible highlights packaged together into what becomes essentially a lie.  They talk about all the money that can be made and how little you can work. Both of those things are true, but they are generally not true for the same person at the same time – at least not until that person has spent many many years working to build a base of customers who are buying and downline team members who are selling. 

A great joke that was repeated to me once I'd gotten into the top 2% of my network marketing company is that someone in my role should “dress like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog,” which is offensive in more than one way, but at least true in terms of the work ethic required to really be successful.  We did not mention this to the rank and file of the company who had not yet really committed to the cause.

Yes, absolutely, there are top people in network marketing companies who get big paychecks.  But many of them are using employee thinking against their potential recruits.  They show you a monthly paycheck for $10,000, and so you assume their claims of six figure income must be true.  But what you don't see is that the month after the $10,000 paycheck they may have received no paycheck at all, but instead a bill.  Depending upon how that person built their business, if they don't have a stable base of people actually selling the product beneath them, their income may fluctuate wildly.

When I was in the top 2% of a network marketing company driving a “free” car, there were months when my “team” production wasn't enough to cover the quota I had to make for the company to make my lease payment for me.  So instead of a paycheck, I received a bill for the lease payment on my “free” car.

And let me be clear, when we talk about “team” production, what that really meant was the wholesale packages the people I personally recruited purchased to start their businesses.  So if I got busy training my people or decided to take advantage of that flexibility that gets talked about so much, I didn't get paid that month.

Now yes, I did have team members who sold and recruited, so there were moments when the business did produce on its own.  But the truth is that if you bring people in with the promise of getting rich quick, they catch on quick and are gone.  The team I built was like a sandcastle, constantly having to be rebuilt due to the lack of a firm foundation.

 It's a shame that so many hustlers find their way into these organizations and that they go unchecked, because IN THEORY network marketing businesses are a great halfway point between being an employee and being a completely independent entrepreneur. So much of the branding (logo, cards, website, mission statement, product development) that soaks up so much of a company's start up capital and time is already done.  If you find a product you want to sell and the market is not saturated with other people selling it, why not take advantage of some economies of scale?

But the fact is if you've started one of these businesses and it didn't work out, the problem likely is not the company, the product, or your upline (although those are all important factors you should research before signing up).  The problem likely is that you have not taken the MASSIVE ACTION required to get the cargo plane off the ground.  And most likely your upline isn't going to be completely honest about how much work it took them to get going, because they don't want to overwhelm or discourage you.

While every now and then there is a unicorn who comes in with the correct energy, support network around them, or other magical juju to get them up and running fast, even those folks eventually hit a wall where they realize to grow beyond their original network is going to take time, money, and effort. 

This is the point where the drama usually comes out (if it has not already).  Something about the process of asking people not just to believe in us but to hand over their hard won cash just stirs up any insecurity a person might have.  And honestly, it is easier to walk away than to look at all that sh!t.

So if you've joined several network marketing companies and not had success, I'd suggest before you sign up for the next business you ask yourself

1) am I ok with this being a hobby and losing money/not making much money?

2) if not, am I willing to work my A$$ off more than 8 hours a day and more than 5 days a week in exchange for building something that is flexible and allows me to have repeat/residual business?

3)if my work ethic matches my ambitions, am I willing to work through the emotional “stuff” that this business brings to the surface? Is my upline going to give me the emotional support I need, or should I work with a therapist or coach?

If you can answer yes to those questions, I'd say go for it.  Just make sure you are learning about business finance and understanding whether or not your efforts are profitable.  Network marketing done right can be a great entrepreneurial and sales training ground.  But done wrong, it can clean out your bank accounts and mess up your relationships, including the one with yourself.