Preneur Marketing Blog – Pete Williams | Author Entrepreneur

“I don’t know Eben Pagan”

“Nor have I been in the same room as him”

BUT

I have taken his Altitude Training… and it blew my mind !!!

http://www.altitudeprogram.com/CD470/

I seriously believe this was THE best marketing program released in the past 46 months and think EVERY business owner should take this training.

SO…

Please invest some time and watch the video he has made available:

The video covers everything from how to manage your time… to how to target niches and identify good product opportunities… to what to look for in employees and how to make sure they’re STARS.

I can’t recommend it enough

http://www.altitudeprogram.com/CD470/

NOW…

Let’s ‘cut the crap’, Eben is obviously giving this video away as part of the launch of the ‘home study version’ of the seminar.

So, when you watch the video and decide that you want to get a copy of the course and buy through the links above I will get a commission.

AND…

in exchange for that commission I am going to personally send you

A COPY OF MY COMPLETE PUBLICITY COURSE (all the CDs and workbooks sold at RenegadePublicist.com)

BECAUSE…

1. I want to make the ‘Altitude Course’ offer unbelievably compelling because I think every business owner should get it

2. The ONLY thing, and I mean ONLY thing that Eben’s course doesn’t cover is publicity.

OK…

I’ve written enough – go and check out the video he’s made available now:

http://www.altitudeprogram.com/CD470/

Speak soon,

Pete

Whether you run a traditional bricks and mortar business or an outsource focused web-based business, one of the biggest challenges we face is documenting the process and procedures needed to run the business.

So much intellectual property inevitably gets stored in the individual teams heads…. which not only results in you keeping an ineffective employee on the payroll because they ‘know too much’… but what happens when a new member joins the team and needs to learn the processes and procedures? Someone inevitably has to take time away from ‘bottom line value’ tasks to walk the newbie through typically ‘basic’ processes.

No matter how big or small your business is you will be faced with this problem on some level.

David Jenyns (The other guy who sold the MCG) gave me one of the most impactful pieces of advice I’ve received this year. See Dave runs some very successful internet-based info-marketing businesses and has implemented an office wiki of sorts to combat this problem. We’ve since implemented these in all my offices/teams and the results have been beyond my expectations.

Unlike a ‘traditional wiki’ where everyone chips in and contributes to the entire documentation, we’ve encouraged every team member to create short ’screen capture videos’ covering each of the individual tasks/processes/procedures that make up a persons role.

These videos cover everything from ‘how to create a new proposal’ to ‘how to set up an email account for a new team member’ and even ‘how to change a products price in our various online stores’

So not only does this mean that all the ‘procedural IP’ is now stored, backed up and out of the teams heads… but as the team grows people can learn from (and always refer back to) the office wiki. People learn so much better by simply watching what needs to be done, as opposed to reading and interpreting from a dry procedures manual. And as we grow our interstate offices (or outsource more), we can simply send links to the videos stored on our intranet to those team-members.

Plus this style of office-wiki is cheaper, faster and easier to create then traditional procedure manual – we simply got each person to list all the ‘tasks’ they go through on a given week, and then ‘the next time’ they preformed one of those tasks they put on their headphones, hit record and captured a video of them performing. It was that simple.

We might even throw a little Infiniti-Emmy party.

Here are a few software suggestions for creating your screen-capture videos:
CamStudio – Free Windows based program.
Camtasia – Paid Windows based program
ScreenFlow – Mac based program

And just for kicks, here is the Wikipedia definition of a Corporate Wiki:
“A corporate wiki is a wiki used in a corporate (or organisational) context, especially to enhance internal knowledge sharing. Wikis are increasingly used internally by companies and public sector organizations, some as prominent as Adobe Systems, Intel, Microsoft and the FBI. Depending on the size of a corporation, they may add to or replace centrally-managed content management systems. Their decentralised nature allows them, in theory, to disseminate needed information across an organization faster and cheaper than a centrally controlled knowledge repository”

One of the best pieces of dating advice I ever received was this: “Picture your ideal partner, work out what THEY would want in a partner… and become THAT person”

This process of getting what you want by first becoming what others want, recently clicked with me again… but this time in a marketing sense when I was reviewing audio’s from Eben Pagan’s Altitude Program.

In one of the sessions, Eben talks about the importance of creating a customer avatar to help define your niche.

Now, the term avatar traditionally refers to a ‘computer user’s representation of himself/herself or alter ego, and used in computer games or on internet forums and other communities’… BUT in the context of what Eben was talking about, your customers avatar is simply a ‘representation of your typical customer’ ..

A possible customer avatar for RetailSecrets.com.au is - Mary is 43 years old and runs a retail clothing store in a small town. She has two young kids in school and although the store is doing well and covering all the bills, it’s not meeting the goals she knows she deserves. Every month she has to spend more $$ in marketing to get people to come through the doors, is open minded about taking advice and learning… and is actively looking for the tools to grow her business & increase referrals.

Now, by creating (& even naming your customers avatar) you can imagine you are speaking directly with that person when creating your marketing material. This really strengthens the ‘messages to market match’, ensures your communications are more personal, which in-turn increases conversions, and it also helps you define your niche and really engage your prospects.

But do you want to know the real trick in all this? (this is where I get all voodoo and tie it back to the dating advice)

The secret is to create the customer avatar and not only work out what products and services they want, “but work out what sort of business they would want to deal with.. and become that business.”

In this day and age, people don’t simply buy a product … they interact with a business. Creating the right product is only step 1, creating the right brand is how you win.

p.s. Also, if you are on his list, you would have just received an email from my good mate Ed Dale. As he mentioned in his email, given the economic times there is a recent interview with Warren Buffett that is a MUST WATCH.

You NEED to understand what is really going on in the economic world. Make no mistake – there are issues – BUT- The same technology that we use to market our wares can be used to create fear and panic like we have never seen in history.

My business partner in the whole “MCG Sports Memorabilia” thing, the great Bruce Hultgren, produces a stella e-zine entitled ‘Daily Life Tips’… and the other day he wrote about setting and achieving your goals, in a way I’ve never really heard articulated so well before.

He spoke about ‘The Cumulative Affect’ and it blew my mind…

As Bruce wrote…

If I wanted to change my body shape (which I do) in the next 12 months – then I will have to do something over and over for a time in order to see results – agreed?

Then of course – revisit it regularly to stay in focus and on target.

See, one of the biggest things that stops any of us achieving a goal is that we look at it was one big result… not a series of cumulative actions. Which is all it actually is.

It’s this focus on actions rather then goals (which is also the principle of David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which I will write about in a future post), that allow us to get started and see progress, which stimulates motivation and instills habits.

Instead of looking at a project or goal as a result, try looking at it as a series of small cumulative actions… and if you do those ‘simple’ actions over and over again, the result will take care of itself.

I was having a discussion with my partners at Infiniti Telecommunications today, about when we first started to employ staff, and how the hardest thing I found was learning to deal, justify and live with the whole ‘throwing stones in glass houses’ side of management.

Now, I am the first to admit that historically I am far from being the Michael Phelps of time management, or keeping promises relating to “to-dos”; although that has all started to change:

Nor am I historically the best at a number of things that my team are employed to do (this includes ‘behaviors’, as well as ’skills & tasks’) … and this was my conundrum; “How do I have a go at an employee for not doing something, that I know I don’t do myself”

I had a real issue with this – I can’t *yell* at Suzie for not remembering to do ABC, when I forgot to do ABC when I previously did that task…. How do I deal with Tony for making that mistake, when I often made the same mistake before he was hired to take that task away from me ?

My ‘well-meaning’ mums words of “don’t berate someone for doing something that you do yourself etc etc” kept haunting me. I felt that i was always standing in my ‘entrepreneurial glass boardroom, throwing stones at my team”

But then I realized something… something very obvious, and from the outside (now) looks very basic:

“That’s why they are here… They are employed to do the things I either didn’t have the time to do or didn’t have the skills to execute at the required level“

Most business owners only (consciously) think their employees are there to offer leverage. Leverage in the form of being able to now serve two customers at once. Leverage in the form of being able to have stock being dispatched, while at the same time making the next sales pitch etc etc – Typically, business owners look at employing staff in the same way Tom Hanks did in Multiplicty.

But, when I really got and understood that my staff are their to ” competently fill the gaps”, I was able to *justify* to myself that it’s more then OK for me to sometimes expect more from an employee than myself – especially when it’s relating to a task I openly acknowledged I was not sufficient in and thus hired for.

And, it’s the lesson that; “you hire staff to be better then you” that’s been one of the biggest hurdles I have faced in my entrepreneurial journey.. and it’s such a big hurdle so many entrepreneurs face – The willingness to “let go, acknowledge that you don’t have to be perfect and the ONLY way to grow your business is to hire others and that those people are there to not only do tasks you don’t have time to do, but do the tasks you are not good at.