What you end up doing with what I am about to tell you could have a great bearing on your ultimate future as a Lone Wolf business operator.
I can't over emphasize this point. I hope you pay close attention and get the message clearly.
Undertaking a solo business is like placing yourself in the pilot's seat of a commercial airliner. Your customer's pay to climb aboard and have you fly them to wherever it is you've advertised.
You, and you alone are responsible for the passenger's happiness, comfort, safety, and ultimately arriving at the pre-arranged destination.
But you must remember you are going solo. You have no flight attendants to assist you with the passengers, no co-pilot to spell you at the controls, no navigator, no mechanic, no weatherman, and no air traffic controller to advise you of approaching aircraft (competitors).
Because you have no immediate crew to help you, you must figure out a way to leverage your personal time and effort so that all the essential and routine operations of the flight are handled on queue, professionally and smoothly just as if the full crew were intact. But you can't physically do everything that an entire crew needs to do. If you choose to ignore any one of the crew's responsibilities, you do so at the peril of the whole flight.
Therefore, you would be well advised to employ technology that will fly the plane for you. It is available. You can run everything almost on autopilot so that your time is freed up to concentrate on what you're there for. And what is that?
Lone Wolf business is all about packaging your knowledge, skills, experience, training, and passion into information that is shared (for a price) with others that want to know what you know, want to do what you can do (or have done), or want to learn what you can teach them.
Remember, the soul of your business is the unique information you have to share. This is the heart or core of what you're all about. I've said it many times: you are the business!
It stands to reason, then, that this is the portion of your business that only you can address. This is the essence of what your customers are paying you for. All the other "incidentals" required to keep your business running smoothly are in support of and auxiliary to your own unique personal information and how it is developed, packaged and sold.
If you're not spending the bulk of your business time nurturing, enhancing, developing, pumping up, increasing, and improving your information, it's likely you're misappropriating your business resources (time and energy.)
When you sit in the pilot's seat there are always a thousand diversions that can occupy your business day like flashing lights, blinking signs, gauges that warn of danger, and switches that could be flipped. If you insist on personally attending to each one, you will have no time for the development of your core competency.
You may have heard this sage advise from another successful solo operator: "Don't waste your time working in your business . . . spend it working on your business." Think very seriously about what that means.
Automate as much of the daily operation as you possibly can. Take advantage of the technology available to you via the Internet to leverage yourself and your time, capital, physical effort, and personal productivity.
Spend time on doing research in your niche, on learning about your competitors and their desires, and on the subject of your personal and business passion. Come up with ways to make your information products better, more appealing to your customers, and more valuable for the money. Develop new backend products and services that your customers want.
All of these pursuits add value to your business, endear your customers to you personally, position you as the expert in the field, and elevate your business above your competitors because you are unique, an authority, and understanding of your client's wants.
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Post#115 |
