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Q&A with Mike & Donna

just answer questions about anything that Mike said in his introduction or anything about the survival trap. Do you recommend getting out of the getting involved in the Mnuchin of the of the entrepreneur who does everything and does not hire and get the trap of Pay the money? Do yourself. Your time is worth something. You know. I think the mistake, almost everyone does. They say I've had enough. I'm gonna hire someone and have them do it all. And then we sit and we watch from the first day right there, Better than sliced bread. They're doing it then with a week within a week, right? God, they kind of suck. They're not doing, I want to do. And then we start taking the responsibility back ourselves. And inevitably, I see entrepreneurs say I'm exhausted. Higher doesn't work fire. And again, this cycle, the trick is picking. And we'll talk about when it comes. System ization, actually tomorrow. But the trick is identified all the tasks you do now And what is the easiest for you to delegate...

? The reason we started the easiest is we need to build your confidence that someone else can do it and do it reliably and you take that piece and they start doing it. Then you give him another piece and you start building by taking away the easiest. Most people say I'm overwhelmed with this and they get rid of overwhelmed. That's the mistake. It comes back to you. Take the easiest partner. Sign that out. Coming in from way dio Krista's. I don't seem to be able to turn an inquiry into a yes very well. It's a challenge to effectively communicate with potential clients efficiently enough to earn their confidence. The only clients I do get are those that have been referred to me and already have trusted my services as a result of the referral. So the question is, how does she? Yeah, but I can t talk. Yeah, they say there's no like and trust and I talked about that earlier. There's another level that they haven't told us yet. It's coming to be riel, No, like trust and try. It's a sampling effect because there's so many people that we can communicate with now via social media and so forth. It's easy to get access to anybody. How we're gonna separate ourselves out is by giving a sample because once we have a trusted, even experience with someone, it's been positive we'll do it again. Now the key is it's got to be a example. Are sampling you without the risk of cost out, the risk of it not working or consequence. So how can you give a little piece of what you do away for the customer so they can experience it and not have any risk associated with that? You figure that out and we're gonna figure that out for each of our businesses. But you figured that out. You give him the little sample or taste. You have a leg up over everyone else. You could get the yes much faster. And there's something that I would like to add to that, which is my talked a little bit about this earlier, and we're going to talk more about this coming up. But if you have a need a niche and you know who your ideal client is, then you you can learn more and more about them. And if you know what they want and what they need and what language they speak. In other words, how do they talk about their issues and their problems. So if you're using a lot of jargon from your industry and your customers don't talk that way. You're not connecting with them. So if you can learn the language of your customers and really cut to the heart of what they want in need, then you can speak to that and that's going to hit them right here. They're going to say, Oh, Jane, she totally understands me. She gets it, I'm going to hire her So that's a big piece of it as well. Bill Clinton was a master summarizing this, he said. I feel your pain. Feel your pain. That was it. The customers have to know that we recognize their pain. We understand that challenges air facing. Then they have a conference, we can fix it. And he was just waiting for an opportunity to do. Is Bill Clinton got doctors? Sabrina is asking online. I guess Dr Sabrina is actually on early stage on print. Entrepreneur Mike. When is the best time for an entrepreneur to begin the pumpkin plan? Can a start up be enjoying the pumpkin plan? And if so, what would be the first step for a startup versus a business that is more established, so the best time it starts once you have some clients, some people say I have no clients. Start pumpkin planning. The question is, who is the ideal client? It is appropriate to start your business and to initially try all different clients. Inevitably, who we thought would be our ideal client isn't often. We think it's someone just like us. They the same problems I had when I had my child there, just like me. But you may find out No, it's a whole different set of people you never considered so initially. Get as many clients as you can. Anybody is a good client in the very beginning stages. I think the break point is usually around $100,000 in revenue, because often when you approach, that number is typically when you need to start hiring people, you can't handle all yourself anymore. Typically, that's the point where you got start evaluating your best customers and start focusing on your best customers from our live audience stage. Okay, well, Levante, via the online brute camp, is asking talking about frequency earlier on The question is, what can he's walking mike say about would be a good strategy to replace this frequency of face to face time if you work remotely through the Web. These questions eso I do this for my own business, and we can all do this. And, you know, if I had Internet access set up, which I didn't, I would even show you demonstration. We are losing what's called tactile experience. Tackle experiences where and I shook hands earlier, and we high five earlier, where you have physical touch and eye contact like we're experiencing this in the studio tackle experience wins over trust much faster than non tactile experience, but there's different variations of non tactile. The least community is written text video performance a lot better in building related report with people than text does. If you can't meet with people face to face, go on video, use Google hangouts, and I got an expert here walking through it, You Skype. And here's the one thing I did in my business has changed a lot. I do a lot of public speaking. I go all over the country and now all over the world. There was a major client in India that wanted to consider me, but they've never seen me speak before. They saw some speaking videos but didn't have the report. I set up a dedicated page that gave why I think my speech would be relevant to their community. And I did a video just to them. I spoke to camera. I spoke, You know, it's a custom video for about two minutes long run explaining why I think I'm a fit for them. It blew their mind. I was the first speaker that ever did a custom video for them. Very simple. So if you can't meet with clients face to face stark individuals have a little Webcam Samson lighting at your home computer. Film yourself and talk to the camera just like you're talking to them. One on one. It gives you a leap or step up above written communication. We have a question coming from online. I'm rummy. This is concerning those in the earlier days of the business, and he asks, What about the early days of your company before selecting your good customers? You have toe have customers without sales, there's no business. In my case, I am taking business to customers. Any suggestion on how to generate sales in those early days. You know, I'm just gonna bide my time until I give a good answer. When you have no customers, the big risk for the first customer comes on board. Is do you have any experience? Have you worked with someone like him before? And if you say no, I've never done this before the first conference. Like I'm sorry, I'm gonna look for someone else. The key to getting a customer is having a customer. Often you got to give a piece of yourself away in the very beginning. If you got to give that big discount and probably do, it's okay for the first customer. If you got to give it away for free, sometimes of the first customer, if you can afford to, that's okay because one of the first customer has an experience with you when that second person that you're considering it prospecting your prospecting them, you can now point back that first customer you got to give a little piece away. Now another thing is is like Well, who do I target? I have no customers like who's the first person I should pursue? If you don't know. Half to to go after. Look at your own life history. You may not be the perfect client for yourself, but you do know yourself better than anyone else. So who are people that have similar experiences? You made me currently. Or maybe as you look back, you rewind your life as certain stage in your life. You went through experience. What were you like now? Target customers who are just like you or like you. Now I'm not saying that is going to be ideal customer. I, ironically, probably won't be. But this place to start and we start speaking that community that people around that might start hearing about you start getting traction and don't be paralyzed by Theo. Overwhelming thought that I don't know who to target and how do I make a decision. Sometimes you just have to maybe even throw a darted a dart board and say I'm going to start here because very quickly you will start to get feedback from your market. And there are lots of stories about companies that started in one place and ended up somewhere else. But the only way you end up somewhere else is if you start getting out there and people know about you. Procter and Gamble? Yeah. Corporate 1,000,000, billion? 70 billion? I don't know. It's billions of dollars. Start out by making candles. No one wanted them. They start making. So there was some interest in what they found was unique about there. So they're trying to help. The women was there. Soap floated. It was the first float so ever floated. Well, the military had application because a lot of guys you don't get a nice shower on your team or your jumping in a river. And if the soap sinks, you're done. They started finding their ideal customer cause they kind of fell their way into it. And then the U. S government started buying all their soap. They just started. That's the key. Start with someone. And if they're not ideal, that's okay. Allow them to kind directly to the ideal group. Okay, well, the last question actually comes from Chris. He's already after question this morning when maybe a she Apologies. Chris, how can you not focus on your weaknesses when you're solo and your weaknesses selling yourself well in your services? That's a great question, because It's really it's human nature to focus on your weaknesses. But think about how you feel when you focus on that. I mean, what what your energy like when you're thinking about all the things that are wrong and what happens is when you are focusing on your weaknesses, you have very low energy, and it's very hard to think clearly. Debbie said it earlier, when she's anxious and upset about something. It's very hard to be creative and think clearly, However, how do you feel when you focus on your strength? You feel good and it's much easier to improve on your strength. And we have actually have an exercise that we do with clients right in the beginning of an engagement where we have them list their strengths and their weaknesses, and we talk about, you know, where's your energy when you're doing this? But the result is when we say to them, you know, tell us five out of this list. Both columns tells five areas that you would like to improve on in the next six months. Almost inevitably, every single one comes from the weakness column. However, what we found is if you pick a strength, something that you're good at that will build on itself. The energy that that gets created because you're feeling good about it and you kind of get on a roll will spread out to everything else that you dio. So find that one thing that you're good at and the thing that your that is a weakness. The best thing to do is find somebody to help you with it. Don't try to do it yourself or change. It's one of building that, you know, when I hear someone say I can't sell myself by half to What I'm hearing is there's only one way to sell yourself, and we often say we'll ever know Sells himself this way. I'm week at it. I have to do it this way. That's the mistake. How can you sell yourself into your strength? So if your cell is going out and going face to face and networking like crazy and that's how you think people sell and that's what you're not good at. Don't sell that way. Do a video, or maybe you don't do any video and you send letters to people and say, I hate presenting myself. I'm so uncomfortable with myself, and that's why send letters. There is a strength for all of us. But strength is never in copying what's working for others. It's in exploiting what works for us and then applying it to the circumstance. Great kind of a question, kind of a common. It sounds to me like you're saying that there's a bunch of different types of seeds that we have to consider not only the seed that we have planted on Go look for the different kinds of seeds and, um, the ordinary seeds can never become a giant feet. You could never create a giant pumpkin from an ordinary seat. Yeah, I am saying every person this room is so extremely gift that something and inevitably were pushing aside, saying Well, but this is how the world operates and we're trying to comply. Screw world, Be yourself. Exploit yourself in applies to sales. It applies to the services we deliver. It applies to everything. In the second we say I am gifted at something and we know what it is. Then all these elements that other people are doing their way, we can now do it are gifted way, and we will accept everyone. I've never seen it, not work. I do see this question coming in over and over again. I can't do it and they're saying, because every knows, does it this way. Don't comply with the way it's done. Break the rules way We wanted Teoh actually give you an opportunity to talk to everyone online and everyone here in the studio audience about the notes that we have of the pumpkin plan on your website and give everybody that that website would like to let you just talk. T o on Mike McCalla. It's dot com If you go to Michael Callow, it's dot com backslash creativelive. Now I know Mike McCalla, which is not easy to spell. But if you go on Google and type in Mike, Mick and my C H, you'll find go there and then back slash creativelive. I've prepared free notes, so everything we're going over here, the notes have been already created for you, so you don't have to take them all down. You can download him. I got free additional videos and content that I've produced that's going to be outside of what we're doing here. That's all free for free. And yes, you'll even get my newsletter, which is includes the latest tips I learned as I go about it and share amount. And yes, you can unsubscribe if you want to, but you don't want because it's good stuff has just been really, really enjoying the content. So far, we've had ah, lot of feedback. People just saying, Wow, I can't wait to get more of this. Everybody wants more, More, more. But there's something that someone brought up to our attention and we wanted to give you a great big, creative live happy birthday way. We heard it was your birthday. You? Yes. Yeah, my birthday. In the little funny thing, it's kind of personal. My So I have face time and I face time with my wife every day and morning. And so my wife's like, Hey, I want to wish you happy birthday. So I wasn't naked, but I pretended I did. I had my, uh, pants and no shirt on, so I angled it like this. I said, Hey, I'm wearing my birthday suit. She had my three Children all They're going Happy birthday. And then there was screaming, going. So it was a very awkward birthday morning. That's thinking songs in order later in the day. But way you want to hear? I know everybody is just dying to know what we have coming up. When we come back from the break, we're gonna have to go on about a 15 minute break. But before we dio, we'd love to hear from you guys what we have in store for us. Well, we're dines and lead us through a really cool exercise about what's called alignment. Businesses that succeed are the soul mate of the entrepreneur who found if you could make your business, your soul mate will grow explosively. Most people go in entrepreneurship trying to make money. How do you make more money? No. How do you make your business more of your soul mate? And that's the foundation for making more money and more success. And that's what we're doing. We come back. Awesome. Great. We want to share with you some of the comments for hearing online. That air Terrific. Amanita London says I logged on in the vain hope that this was not gonna be a very good and I could go back to work. I'm hooked already creatively Oh, 3 18 Media says. I love when the chatter like this means we're all listening and taking in the info. And finally, Purple Day says, Wow, these two together has done so much great info already love watching both of them chime in and help way. It's been great. People are really loving it. Some there really loving other course. This morning. I think they particularly love Bill Clinton making an appearance that he will come again. I was gonna say I'm going to see any more guests. And of course, now we got lots of birthday wishes. Come, thanks, guys.