Microbusiness Mentor

You have probably heard sayings about how successful people have mentors and coaches and are members of mastermind (MM) groups.

But I wonder – just as coaches and mentors should come with a label that says “results may vary!” (or even “results not typical” like those infomercial program fine print at the bottom of the screen) – mastermind groups vary in quality and effectiveness as well.

Mastermind groups are often misunderstood and not created optimally – as I have learned from personal experience!

The people who are selected for masterminds must be at a comparable caliber of business achievement with slight deviations in business result. Members should have similar drive and goal standards. If these pieces are missing, the mastermind will not work to the members’ benefit. It’s a bit like playing tennis – you improve when you play with someone slightly better or much better than you – not someone who is a beginner, even if you are a beginner.

If you are a pro and you want to help others, then you can be a great mentor or coach. If you are a beginner, you want to learn from people who have done what you want to do, so you do not have to make the same mistakes!

In the past when I have been in similar groups I was often one who had already created a successful business, and other members were at the step of creating one or still figuring out what their business idea was. Even if I was looking to start a new business, I want to be amongst people who are starting their 2nd or 3rd of even 5th business – not 1st.

As a result, I found the meetings informative (I can always learn something from others) – but not truly educational for me to move forward in a meaningful way. When I have to pay money for it, then it becomes a waste of my hard earned dollars. Even if I didn’t have to pay for it, I do not want to waste precious time!

Another factor of a mastermind group is the facilitator’s skills. There are some who do not know how to run a mastermind group, and they appear to let the meeting wander in whatever direction the members move the meeting. Again, if this is the set-up of the mastermind (“we are here for creative brainstorming, so we are going to let ourselves wander and see where the conversation takes us”), then this is expected. On the other hand, I doubt that time-limited entrepreneurs like myself will have the patience to attend a meeting we thought had a clear agenda with defined goals, and we show up for a meeting where anything goes.

This is one of the reasons why I create mastermind groups with a specific “revenue achievement” pre-requisite. It is not so much about the dollar amount, as the amount of skill, drive, experience, and resourcefulness behind that revenue achievement. Someone who has a $500 a month business is at a different level than someone who has built a $5000 a month business, or someone who has taken a $5000 a month business to a $50,000 a month business.

If you have been a MM member – what makes the group work? What makes the group not work?

If you haven’t been a MM members – what would make you want to join one?

Image by Rodolfo Clix

I’m in the process of entering a new market and am writing a book in the niche relating to leadership development and having it commercially published, rather than self-published as part of my initial marketing strategy. This is an extremely resource/time intensive approach. But at least I get help on the marketing of the marketing approach – the publisher will play a part in promoting the book.

I have self-published books and ebooks as part of my offerings and marketing. This gives me greater control over time and format, but again, find this to be extremely time and resource demanding, especially when I am solely responsible for marketing the marketing approach itself – I have to market the ebooks/books!

Of course, I also have blogs. For small business entrepreneurship, I write in blogs like this one. I also keep blogs in other topical areas like healthcare and mental health. I also participate in many social network discussion groups, and many of my responses are the length of small articles.

So you can see how quickly all these writing activities suck up my time!

How do you efficiently build up a content-driven web presence when you feel like you have no time left?

1) You can re-purpose your content. This article you are reading started out as a discussion on another website.

This is a great way to save time and build your credibility online – but it can only work IF and ONLY IF the content is aligned with your audience expectations on your site. For example, if I talked about this on my mental health website, I would confuse my readers.

If you find that you cannot re-purpose a lot of what you share online for your blog that is meant to also build your online presence, then you need to ask yourself why you are spending so much time on diverging activities. Is it time to evaluate how you spend your time?

2) if you find that you have gained good visibility doing what you have done, to the point where you are turning away more business than you can handle – then keep doing what you are doing because it works!

There is no reason to “blog just because everyone and their grandma are blogging”. I used to blog prolifically, and I am talking about a dozen blogs. I even ran my own blog network. But it was time consuming, and I did not have a sound strategy of how I was going to generate returns on the time i was investing in writing. Now I barely / rarely blog – and when I do finally add a post – it is in my currently active areas of interest, like this one.

3) That said, my blogs collectively earn enough to pay the bills on a monthly basis, so I haven’t axed ALL of my blogs yet.

Again, if something is working for you and you don’t have to keep working at it to get it working for you – then you do not necessarily have to get rid of it unless you feel it is distracting your personal brand.

Of course, you can also keep a blog for personal reasons. I started my mental health website in 1998 when I was suffering from clinical depression. I no longer suffer from clinical depression but I keep this website because it is dear to me, and its presence continues to help a lot of people.

There are many ways to become efficient at writing as a strategy for branding yourself, but that is only the first step. Once you wrote it, you then have to still market your brand strategically.

What this means is that you need to be very careful about using written material as your marketing – and whether these end up requiring you to market your marketing if the marketing material happens to also be one of your products.

David Troy tells us how entrepreneurship really works, and I am especially pleased at how he strips down the phenomenal successes of mega celebrity entrepreneurs (Gates, Branson, Buffet) into the reality and the hype!

This also explains a few paradoxes that I have observed in my own entrepreneurship path, for example:

I take risks – yet I see myself as risk-averse.

OK, quitting a $100,000+ job without a solid Plan B is taking a risk. This was what I did in 2004, when I could not sit back and watch the industry I worked in (pharmaceuticals) conduct itself in questionable business practices.

Not having a completely written out business plan is a big risk. Not having customers already lined up (well… I wasn’t sure WHEN I would be quitting, or even IF I would be quitting, to be fair) – that is a big risk.

Yet I had taken a calculated risk, by saving up enough money where if I made absolutely nothing for 365 days, our financial position would not be dramatically affected. We’d be delayed a bit – we were saving up to buy a house and this was during the astronomically priced housing bubble years – but our lifestyle would not be affected much.

I dislike the uncertainty of not knowing what the future holds – yet I love the freedom to design my own future.

I can’t say that I have gotten used to the revenue flux, especially when I drive a lot of the changes in this flux, by restructuring my business model and testing entry to markets, etc.

Not to mention my stubbornness to expect to generate a 6-figure revenue by working no more than 10-20 hours a week so I do not miss out on my son’s newborn – now toddler – years. I made a 6-figure business by working 40+ hours a week – but can I do it in half – less than half – that amount of work time?

Yes, I face uncertainty as an entrepreneur, but I am also responsible for deliberately creating “controlled adversity” for myself.

Maybe it’s because I keep thinking that I can be like a microorganism (I was a microbiology undergraduate major in college) – if I push my limits and plunk myself into a hostile environment – I might just pick up a few plasmids (skills, adaptations) that allow me to grow where and when others cannot.

I learn from the best – yet I am the person who makes it happen with my personal best.

I have worked with many business coaches and have enough “data points” to know this:

If you want to make incredible things happen – you’d better learn from the best – people who have skills or insights that you need to make incredible things happen with your talents…. But this is not enough!

I know so many people who boast about investing a ton of money in their own education and professional development, like that says something about their results. It does say something about their commitment to learning and improving themselves – and this is all.

(Then I begin to wonder if they are using learning as a procrastination device against actually doing.)

Your results is what speaks for your ability to make incredible things happen using the tools, skills, insights you’ve gained.

I have had 4 different coaches using diverse coaching approaches who have worked with me and told me that the results I have demonstrated ranked in the upper 1-5% of their clients’ results.

I thought maybe I was “just lucky” after the 1st or 2nd time. But now I think it’s less mystical than that – I simply DO things with what I had learned.

If these coaches’ clients all DO things at the level that I had done, they may very well experience just as much – maybe even more – results and success as I had experienced.

What entrepreneurship “paradoxes” have you seen along your journey?

Do you ever end the year knowing that you want to explore a particular “theme” on your journey (whether this be personal, professional, or entrepreneurial) for the new year?

This year my personal / professional / entrepreneurial “theme” seemed to be “struggling and stressing”. I made the decision earlier this year to raise my young son full time, rather than hiring a nanny (we’d interviewed 6 or 7 nannies before I came to my decision) resuming my regular business activities and working the way I used to work before I became a parent.

Since my decision I’d been struggling to shift the way I “used to” work (i.e. 12+hrs a day doing something relating to my businesses) to how I now have to/want to work (i.e. working in 5 min increments and maybe 30-90 minutes during child’s nap or after child goes to bed).

I was stressing out from this struggling!

For the new year, I’d like my theme to be “going with the flow!”

I want to produce at least the same – or better – business results of this year, but at half the stress level.

(In a separate article I’ll share some of my lessons learned for producing the 6-figure business result I produced this year.)

Image by Ivan Prole

As much as buzz may generate hype around “secrets” of high performance, I have found that best practices that help you gain visibility as “The Person to Watch” is more about discipline in action than the divulging of any secret.

Ask yourself how much you:

Track Timelines and Deadlines.

I know that you may work with projects that are lengthy and have long vesting cycles, but this doesn’t mean that timelines don’t exist or that deadlines may constantly shift downstream. Some professionals brand themselves with a promise to respond to phone calls and emails within 24 hours. If this is too demanding for those of you who travel a lot or have personal priorities that aren’t conducive to a tight turnaround time. You can adjust your personal response time accordingly, but do hold yourself accountable to a turnaround time.

When I used to work in the pharmaceutical industry and had a 10-state territory within the western United States, I used to make an effort to respond to calls and emails within 36 hours. Now that I’m raising a child and have less control of time and schedules, I have to develop realistic expectations of what deadlines or timelines I may adhere to.

Focus on Fruitful Interactions.

Too often we seek out those we feel comfortable with, rather than those who may challenge us and take our skills and personal development to the next level…. that means we have to be willing tofeel a little uncomfortable at least at the beginning. This goes for clients, customers, coaches, and any collaborative or co-creative relationships we cultivate in our lives. Getting used to being uncomfortable is a mental muscle that we can train. The more often we practice building bridges with those who may at first brush us off or communicate in a way that we’re not immediately used to, the better we become at crossing that barrier. This also makes us a more valuable, marketable collaborator in the big scheme of our professional journey. Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page claimed to intensely dislike each other at first – but they didn’t let their discomfort around each other blind them to the fact that their intellectual jousting could lead them to co-create a game-changer – like Google, Inc.

Ask More Questions.

Those of us who are in the business of being experts can get trapped into the dangerous mindset of thinking that we know everything, or must act like we know everything. The know-it-all is an exhausting act, and often unpersuasive. The funny thing is that the more questions we ask and the better we become at listening, the more people think we know and the smarter people think we are.

I’ve found that the main requirement to asking more questions is to have an opening in my awareness that there is a lot that I don’t know, and that I will not fully grasp another person’s view unless I ask him or her. One of the benefits of assuming a position of “wonder” and asking more questions is that I can put my performance-ego on the backseat, relax, and enjoy learning about what the other person thinks.

Now more than ever, companies want high performers working for them, and clients want high performers working with them. Framing or re-framing our mindset around time, growth-based relationships, and listening requires consistency in action (discipline). You may find that delivering high performance may be as philosophically simple as “chop wood, bring water”.

Image by John Hughes (Germany)