A couple of years ago I was exposed to Rich Schefren during the very first Internet marketing launch he did. I had never heard of the guy before, but suddenly a lot of people I had heard of and respected were recommending him, so I paid some attention.
Rich went mainstream in the Internet marketing world thanks to the success of the Internet Business Manifesto report. To be completely honest, and this really is testament to the power of a strong lead free resource, if it wasn’t for the Manifesto, I would have stopped paying attention. Instead, I went on to join Rich’s Business Growth System, paying him almost $5,000 over the next 12 months.
Every New Business Lacks Momentum
One of the key lessons I learned, and this particularly came from listening in to the questions asked from other student’s of Rich during the live coaching calls with him, was that all businesses suffer from a lack of momentum when they start up. The psychology needed to deal with a lack of momentum in your business is different to what you need to do when your business has momentum, and it’s critical you understand the difference.
If right now you are having difficulty attracting new customers, or even just building a list or getting people to visit your website or blog, then you lack momentum. Momentum is the foundation that allows you to grow your business to the point where you can set up systems to separate yourself from the business.
Without momentum you don’t have cash flow and without cash flow you can’t afford to hire people, or outsource or purchase software that will help your business become more automated. In this situation, if you have no start-up capital to spend, you find yourself doing all the work.
Not only are you required to deliver the product or service you offer, you need to get out there and attract new customers by testing different marketing campaigns. Of course once you attract a customer, then your energy becomes divided, as you need to market less and start delivering. Unfortunately once you make this change, you get cash flow, but since you are no longer focused on marketing, your stream of new customers dries up. Once the current jobs are done, you have to get out and market again.
If you’re constantly in the stop and start loop between finding new customers and delivering to current customers, then you know what it’s like to feel too busy one day, and then struggling the next. You either have too much work and you’re flat out servicing, or your desperate for new leads. There is no happy medium where you have just enough work to be busy, just enough cash flow to keep growing and just enough new customers knocking on your door.
Do You Know Your Strengths?
One of the common problems I see my students face is a lack of strong vision. When you aren’t sure who your target market is, when you don’t know what your unique positioning is, when you’re not clear about what distinct problem you solve or need you meet, then momentum will be difficult to obtain.
Without clarity of purpose, then you send mixed messages and deliver sub-par outcomes. Being the best at one thing, a specialist, a maven in your market, is always the path to maximum profitability. You get the customers who you can best serve. Your customers get the best solution and everything lines up nicely.
What I really liked about Rich’s Business Growth System was his focus on having entrepreneurs find their strengths as a means to move towards a positioning strategy that leads to you dominating. If momentum starts with you, the clearer you are about what you personally need to do and what you should offer to the world, the better.
Once you’ve determined where your core personal points of leverage are (what you are good at and should focus on), everything else unfolds naturally. Most small business grow on the back of a very active entrepreneur attempting to do everything, including what he or she is not good at. This naturally leads to friction, as some parts of the business accelerate much faster than others, resulting in a lag in overall results.
When your largest business constraint is you, figuring out what part of you should be focused on and developed into a core strength, is critical.
In my case, blogging is what I teach and is the foundation of everything I do. The act of blogging, of studying and teaching blogging, serves to strengthen my “blogging muscle”. It’s a strong reinforcing cycle that allows me to constantly innovate and have the “technology” (the knowledge) that leads to me dominating my market.
Look For The Root Cause
If you’re lacking momentum then there’s very likely a mindset issue holding you back.
The reality, from a tactical stand point is that you haven’t taken the action steps necessary to build momentum (do keyword research, set up a PPC campaign, create a blog and landing page, etc), but the underlying reason why you don’t implement the tactical steps is because you lack a strategy to follow.
The strategy is the Roadplan, the Blueprint or the Masterplan (yes, these are the names of my free reports), which gives you the underlying psychology behind the decisions you are going to make that lead to actions you are going to take.
However, and this really is the key, behind the strategy is the mindset you have. Without the mindset you won’t be in a position to develop the strategy. You might “get” how something works, but you will block yourself from executing it correctly.
Everything comes back to how you think. Mindset is the real power and if you’re a devout reader of this blog, then you know what the key is to developing the right mindset:
- Establish awareness so you know what is possible
- Execute so you gain real experience to solidify the awareness you have gained as fact (at least fact in your world)
See this for more: How To Find The Courage To Change By Raising Your Awareness
In other words, discover what you don’t know you need to know, turn it into something you know you need to know, study the bits you do need to know because you have to do it, and then put into action what you just learned.
Right now there’s a very good chance you are oblivious to even knowing what is holding you back from gaining momentum. Until you at least become aware of your problem, you will continually make mistakes or not get results and may be clueless as to why nothing seems to work for you.
Taking a course strong in strategy and mindset, like Rich’s Business Growth System, is exceptionally useful for what I’m talking about now. It doesn’t focus so much on the “shiny objects” part of growing business – in other words the techniques – it looks at the big picture.
Techniques are everywhere and most of them work if they have the right mechanic using them. They can be exciting because they show steps you can take that leads to a result, and they are vital for building a business, however they are rarely the root cause of your lack of momentum. Chances are you don’t need to know how to do more techniques right now, you just need to know they exist.
What’s really important is you learn how you personally fit into your business framework. Discover your strengths, become aware of what things need to be completed based on the business you are building, then find your place in the machine, and start building it. That is the key to building sustainable momentum.
Good luck!
Yaro Starak
Entrepreneur
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