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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2283 Why You Are Not Getting Any Traction + Free Ride Friday
00:13:33
You’ve launched — but your business just can’t seem to get anywhere. Why? What makes some businesses grow steadily (or suddenly), while others just get stuck on the ol’ hamster wheel?
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- [00:02]
Lowe's Advertiser
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- [00:32]
Jim
And we're back folks. It looks like Jim from sales just got in from his client lunch and he's got receipts. His next meeting is in two minutes. The team is asking, can he get through his expenses in that time? He's going for it. Is that his phone? He's snapping a pic. He's texting around. Jim is fast, but this is unheard of. That's it. He's done it. It's unbelievable.
- [00:52]
Omar Zenhom
On ramp, expenses are faster than ever. Just submit them with a text. Switch your business to ramp.com. hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. Power to the people, business people, that is every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And today's lesson is Free ride Friday. On Freeride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away access to our $100 MBA live two day event. It's two days of training that is guaranteed to make you a better entrepreneur. I share with you the small little changes that I've made in my business and my career as an entrepreneur that has helped me make major strides in my business and in my life. From sales to market to mindset, we cover it all. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday. Like today, we announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode, you will learn why you're not getting any traction. So many of the people that I speak to in business that are starting their business, starting their product, their project, ask me this question. I'm trying so many things and yet it's not really moving the needle. I'm not making enough to really have a sustainable business and live the lifestyle I want. Is it the idea? Is it my product? Is it me? Well, in today's episode, we Dive in. And in most cases, I found it's actually one thing that contributes to this lack of traction, to this lack of growth and getting your business off the ground and making sure it's profitable enough to sustain your lifestyle. We're going to talk about in today's episode and, and how to avoid it so that your business does what it's supposed to do, grow. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. It can be incredibly frustrating when you're starting a business and you're working on it and you're spinning your wheels. You're trying every single thing, you're on every single social platform, you're posting daily, you're online 15 hours a day, and it feels like you're going nowhere. I've been there and it's incredibly frustrating. And I actually have spent a lot of time trying to understand why this happens because it's so common with a lot of entrepreneurs starting out a new project, a new business, a new product, whatever it might be. It's so hard to get to what's called escape velocity. This comes from, you know, space exploration or space travel. It's the minimum speed needed for free non propelled travel. Basically, you're escaping the gravitational influence of the earth. Once you reach escape velocity, it's so easy to travel because you're not being held back by gravity. And the same goes with any business or project. In the beginning, gravity is pulling you down. It's hard and it's not easy to see your business grow. But the interesting thing about escape velocity is that it's actually not a long length of space, meaning it's only 11.2km. The interesting thing is when a rocket goes into space and is in that gravitational pull, it's actually not that much of a distance to get out into space. But they have to really use a lot of focused energy so they can get to a speed which is 11.2 km per second and get out of that gravitational pull. Now why am I talking about this? Well, it's the same for business in the beginning. You really need focus energy so you can have what's called escape velocity and get out of that gravitational pull. And most of us, when we start something, we're not focused. We're trying to do everything at the same time. We're trying to be on Twitter and Facebook and start a YouTube channel and a podcast and be on TikTok and have a thriving blog. We're trying to do it all. And the problem is that we're spreading our energy Way too thin. And you're not going to get any velocity. Because what happens here is like, think of your energy and your content and your message as credits or units. And if you're spreading Your credits across 10, 15 different platforms, on those platforms, you're not really being seen. Versus imagine you focused on one thing, one place, one objective at a time, using all your credits at one place, you're gonna be seen. You're going to have traction. A lot of us, we don't understand the stages of business. Meaning when we start out, we can't be the same as people that have been in business for 10 years. I'll give you an example. I've been running my company, Webinar Ninja, for eight years plus now. We have a thriving blog. We have this podcast that helps us promote our brand. We have a YouTube channel, right? We have a thriving private community called Ninja Town. We have customer service special that you can talk to and get one on one help. We have a marketing team. We're advertising on paid ads. We're on social media, right? But we didn't start this way. Okay, this is where we are now. We focused on one thing at a time in the beginning. So at the start with Webinar Ninja, we just focused on the blog. We were like, we gotta have a great blog. And that's all we did. We focused on great content, on mastering understanding what the audience wants to hear and learn and providing that in our blog. And this is why over 40% of our sales comes from SEO, because we really focused on that in the beginning, built our blog, and we're talking about two and a half years of just making an amazing blog once we have established some credibility and we have escaped velocity when it comes to blogging. And it's getting us results and we're getting traction or moving forward, and we're getting results, and we're working and getting better and better and better and really perfecting that area. Then we move on. And then we're like, okay, let's keep this going. Let's see what we've learned from the blogging experiment for the last two and a half years. Can we turn that into a YouTube channel? Can we use those skills? Can we find great talent to take over that project? But what most people do is that they're trying to be everywhere. This does not work. Okay? So especially when you're starting out and you don't have any customers yet, your priority number one is to get customers. Now, a lot of us were really like, okay, I'm going To get customers by being on every social platform or being an influencer or building my personal brand. This is not horrible ideas. You know, I'm not poo pooing this idea, but this is something that happens in stages. In the beginning, your job is to get your first customer, then your second customer, your third customer and your fourth customer. You need to prove your product is actually something people want. You need to exchange value, meaning you gotta give your product in exchange for money, right? So get on some phone calls, find out how to make a sale, right? Make a sale, close some sales, talk to some people. So once you've able to secure a few sales and you've proven that your product is worth its money, right, and people actually want what you have now, you have some traction. Now you can use some of those success stories, some of those testimonials in your social media. And even in that stage, you need to really focus on where you're going to go and how you're going to add value to that platform. Where's your audience? Are they mostly on LinkedIn? Do they frequent Twitter? Maybe it's Facebook. Choose and go 100%. This allows you to really provide great content for that platform. So for example, if you are all in on Instagram, then, you know, maybe reels and videos and short form content is something that you can really perfect. This is what the platform is built for. By focusing on that, your content will reach and resonate with people in a stronger way. Versus you saying, I'm going to create one piece of content and try to, you know, slice it up and repurpose it across every single platform. That doesn't really work because not every platform is made for that content. So what you want to do here is understand that the way you get traction is to focus on each step, each stage of your business. Whether it's gaining your first customers, taking that velocity, taking that momentum and using it in your content. Whether it's your content marketing strategies saying, hey, I'm going to focus on, you know, creating a great blog or YouTube channel at the start and getting some success. The problem here is that a lot of people, they spread their self, Susan, and they never have any success in any particular platform. So get some wins, score some goals, have a way to say, hey, okay, this is actually going somewhere. It's actually helping my business. I'm seeing this convert to leads and traffic and I can start to tweak and improve it. And the thing that we don't talk about is in that process of reaching success on a particular platform on a particular project. We learn a lot of hard lessons. We learn a lot of things that work that don't work. We improve as a content creator, we improve as a provider of great information, and then we can take those successes and those learnings and those wins and translate them into another platform as we move on. Okay, but this doesn't really work if you're trying to, you know, juggle a million things at one time. So, again, if you want to reach that escape velocity, get traction in your business. And whatever you do, you need to focus. Just like a rocket ship has to use focus energy to get out of the gravitational pull, and then it becomes effortless because they don't have that gravity pulling it down right now. I'm not saying that there's no hard work once you get some traction, but it's a whole lot easier. The boulder is rolling down the hill rather than up the hill. And a lot of people underestimate success. Once you have success in a particular area in your business and you're able to monetize that and be able to see the rewards of that, there's a lot of things you can do with that. Whether it's your audience has grown. So now that audience can then, you know, start seeing you other places. So, for example, if you grow a podcast and your listeners are a thriving audience, and then you start going, you know, 100% in on YouTube after you get some traction with your podcast, then you can, you know, tell them, hey, we have a new YouTube channel. If you want to see me on video, go ahead and subscribe to that. So you can translate a lot of those successes once you have success. But if you're trying to do this all at the same time, you know, there's no success to move over to one place to another. So what we want to do here is when you're starting out, priority number one, of course, is make a sale. Make sure that you have customers that are exchanging money for goods, right, that you're actually. And that might mean making phone calls, that might mean meeting people in person, that might mean just getting one customer at a time. But you're going to learn a ton in the process.
- [11:35]
Jim
And we're back, folks. It looks like Jim from sales just got in from his client lunch, and he's got receipts. His next meeting is in two minutes. The team is asking, can he get through his expenses in that time? He's going for it. Is that his phone? He's snapping a pic. He's texting ramp. Jim is fast but this is unheard of. That's it. He's done it. It's unbelievable.
- [11:55]
Omar Zenhom
On ramp expenses are faster than ever. Just submit them with a text. Switch your business to ramp.com to wrap up today's episode. It's tempting to try to be everywhere at all times, but the thing that we have to remember is we have to compare ourselves to other people that are at the similar stage in our business. You know, if you're just starting out or you're in your first few months, those are the people that you want to look at that are having success in the last few months. Right. Or in that stage. Not the people that have been around for 10 years. They had that time where they had to work on focusing on what they do. They have customers. They have an audience now. You just can't leapfrog, right? You can't go from being a college student to a neurosurgeon overnight. Right. Like in any profession, there is a learning curve. You have to, you know, train. You have to have a chance to understand what it takes to be successful and see what works for you. That wraps up today's episode. But today's episode's over because we have Free Ride Friday. Of course it's Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is. 1127 Hank. That's the handle on Apple podcasts, Hank says. Actionable and educational info and easily digestible. 5 stars. Entrepreneur or not, we are all busy and always looking for the best and easiest way to achieve something. Omar showcases some of the brightest minds in entrepreneurship who genuinely sound like they live for offering golden nuggets. Think of it as your continued education and not just entrepreneurship. Learning about people and the simple fact that we all want to belong and find a common ground. Thanks, Hank for the amazing review. Your mission is to email me over@omar mba.net so we can hook you up with a free ride to the $100 MBA Live program. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app. That way you get access to over 2200 lessons in our archives over in our back catalog. And of course, if you loved today's episode, if you love the podcast and want to show some extra love, go ahead and share it on social. Let people know to go to 100-NBA.net so they can listen to the podcast as well. Before I go, I want to leave you with this I always say that entrepreneurship is one of the best personal development programs you can take part in because it forces you to become better. And one of the things that you have to get better at is discipline. To discipline yourself, to stay focused, to continue to do things even when you're not seeing results at first, just so that you can be consistent, you can grow, and you can get better. Every successful entrepreneur that I know personally has this trait. So stay focused and stay hungry. Thank you so much for listening to the Hunter Holmbie Show. I'll check you in Monday's episode. Until then, take care.
- [15:08]
Lowe's Advertiser
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- [15:30]
Omar Zenhom
Free your team from expense reports today. Switch your business to ramp.com.