According to the Entrepreneur web site, the four critical errors to avoid when launching and growing your business in the first year:

1. Not choosing a well-defined niche
2. Not seeking help and support
3. Not collaborating with your competition
4. Being busy but not productive

Choosing a well-defined niche
So, apparently, the first problem that a lot of first-year businesses encounter, is not choosing a well-defined niche. By creating a niche, the author suggests, you get better at selling your service because you’re repeatedly pitching the same thing. This allows you to build up reviews and testimonials faster for the service you’re known for and as each project is similar, you can create templates, standard operating procedures (SOPs) and streamline your processes so you can complete work in less time.  He continues that the more you specialise, the more people that have a specific need will seek you out.

Fundamentally, however, I completely disagree that you need a niche to be successful for two reasons. Firstly, when I was looking for a business coach, I was approached by a number of potential candidates who specialise in coaching accountancy business owners. I spend my life on LinkedIn dodging them. Now there may be a bit of arrogance on my part, but I feel that I understand how to run an accountancy business; I did it in my previous life and I’m doing it now. Fundamentally, I didn’t want someone telling me to do the same thing I’d already done. I wanted an outside perspective; I want to know how things work in other businesses or sectors and how I can apply them to mine.

Secondly, when I started Cypher, a lot of people told me to niche, to become the accountant for estate agents or the accountant for recruiters and again, we purposely stayed away from that approach because one of the joys of my business is getting to work with so many different businesses, from different sectors, doing different things. It makes it more interesting but also as people find so many wonderful ways to make money, it allows us to learn from other businesses.

That said, I think we probably do niche a bit, but not on what someone does, rather on how they think. We only work with business owners that get it; that get what we want to deliver and want to join us on that journey. There’s plenty that don’t, and that’s great, but we only work with people that have a similar mindset. It’s quite a broad niche, but I think it’s enough to separate us from others.

We do work with businesses that niche, but if I was to highlight factors that sabotaged an early stage business, I don’t think niching would necessarily be in my top four.

Seeking help and support as a start-up business
The second point in the article, however, that business owners don’t seek help and support at the right time is definitely right up there. I found out myself that there are just so many things you don’t know when you start up.

Because I’d been helping small businesses for years, I thought I knew a lot about running a small business, but then in those first few weeks, as I sat at my own I realised I didn’t know very much at all. What has overwhelmed me in the two years we have been in business was how much support I got for free in those first few months. The small business community is overflowing with people willing to help other people out.

When you start a business, it’s because you’re generally very good at what you do; you’re a great plumber, or a great estate agent. But then suddenly you’re dealing with balance sheets and insurance and HR and marketing and Facebook profiles and it all comes at you on day one and you find you are very inexperienced in many of the aspects needed to run a business.

My advice was that I joined a networking group early on and generally in any group there is a bit of everything. If you want financial support, HR support, coaching or marketing, it’s all there and people are happy to offer one-to-ones and give you an hour’s free advice. Make sure you get advice from actual experts, but absolutely seek it out. People will offer it because it builds a relationship for down the line.

Collaborate with your competition
The third point in this list of problems for early stage businesses is not collaborating with your competition. We’ve talked about this on a few times on the Mind Your Business Podcast, but again, when I started Cypher, I was overwhelmed by how other accountancy businesses interacted with us in such a positive way. One of the most important things in businesses is relationships.

Now, I think day one might be a bit early to collaborate with the competition, unless – as we discussed in another podcast you are completing one of their products or services, and in general you should let your business grow a little bit before you start engaging the competition. A key element of being able to collaborate is having the utmost confidence in your business. Having belief in your products and services means you are more comfortable seeking others out, collaborating together and going after the bigger fish.

The sweet spot for collaborating with your competition is if you’re doing the same thing, but you’ve niched successfully to different marketplaces. For work that is slightly outside our comfort zone, we recommend other firms that, we know, will offer a great service and in return if they receive complex ‘Xero’ requests, they kick things over the fence to us. While we are competing in some areas there is enough to go around, making it a very lucrative co-opertition model.

Being busy but not productive
Finally, point four on the mistakes to avoid, is being busy, but not being productive. Busyness is often disguised as productivity, you feel good because you are doing something. It is vital that new business owners understand and appreciate the value of their own time. A trap that a lot of people fall into is not only do they not get the right support, but they also don’t outsource enough tasks at the right time.

You have something like a thousand minutes a day to do something with, so your mentality should be ‘what is the true value of my thousand minutes and how should I best spend them?’ Small business owners always have two or three jobs they won’t let go of and there are a number of ways we can all work smarter, not harder to give us back time and be more productive by doing the things that actually make a difference to our business.

On balance, the article on the Entrepreneur web site raised some valid points, highlighting some of the traps start up business owners fall into. First of all, not choosing a well-defined niche isn’t necessarily the death knell for your business, but having a niche can be a positive. Secondly, both Alan and I agree that not seeking help and support at the right time is definitely an issue that can be easily resolved. Thirdly, similarly to point two, seeking others out, even if you deem them competitors can be a good thing and collaboration is the way forward for so many businesses, and finally being busy, but not productive is 100% something that all business owners, not just early stages ones need to be aware and avoid.

The Cypher business is based around this ethos, there are numerous mentions of it throughout our business plan and it won’t surprise you to know that the first example I’ve got of working smarer not harder is through your finance function.

If your business finance function- the way that data gets into your accounts- isn’t automated; you’re not in the cloud and you’re not letting software and all of Google’s robots do their thing, then you are working harder not smarter.

If anything written in the next part of this blog looks or sounds like something you do when you are managing your bookkeeping then you need to stop, immediately, and Google Xero, or DEXT.

If a supplier sends you an invoice and you print it, if you print your sales invoices to then send to your customers, if your customers pay you by cheque or if someone sends you a bill and you have to then manually type information into another system, quite simply there’s a better way of doing it.

I could bore people for hours on this subject, but basically, if at any point something crosses your desk and you have to do something with it other than take a photo, then there is a quicker, smarter way of doing it. That’s the way modern, automated, cloud-based finance functions like Xero work.

We’ve got clients, literally brand new businesses, which have finance functions that are now far more advanced than businesses that have been going for 10 or 15 years because they’ve had no legacy system.

You can receive invoices via an email and Xero ingests that email, takes a snapshot of the PDF, harvests all the data; the date, the invoice number, the due date, how much VAT is on it, sucks out all of that information and puts it into your bookkeeping system. It takes an hour to set up and then you never have to manually enter another purchase invoice.

Xero allows you to create sales invoices with links embedded in them so that anyone can click a button and pay you by card, so you don’t have to take a payment over the phone and you don’t have to send a cheque or even a bank transfer. If you are a trade’s person you can set up an app, so when you finish a job, you push a button, the invoice is sent and the customer can pay you automatically.

And then you integrate a feed from your bank in to your bookkeeping system so all of your bills are harvested from your inbox. The only thing left then is when you spend money on a debit card, you use an app to take a photo of the receipts and then all the info- all the data- is extracted and goes straight into the system.

That’s how modern bookkeeping works. It doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for bookkeepers any more, robots aren’t taking our jobs, but rather the clever bookkeepers are using technology to allow them to service more customers. It’s a great example of people working smarter.

How many small business owners spend hours at the weekend doing their bookkeeping, manually inputting data? Think, if you could get that time back, what else could you be doing; golf, pilates, watching the kids football?

Imagine how powerful that time could be if you used it instead to stop and actually think about your business? It’s phenomenal and could fundamentally change the work-life balance of a business owner if they use automation properly.

Sticking with the automated data entry theme, if you are spending more time completing your timesheets than actually doing the work, there is also a smarter way of doing that.

Another example of smarter working is choosing between sending an email and picking up the phone. It may be a bit old school, but we have a rule in Cypher that is very simple; if you have spent more than two minutes writing an email and you are still on the first paragraph-maybe the contents of the email you are replying to or the topic you are discussing requires more time and thought- then bin the email and pick up the phone.

Taking time to clearly articulate your thoughts or position on a more complex matter, rather than getting caught in a flurry of emails is another simple example of working smarter not harder.

Staying with the technology theme, how many businesses find their sales teams are having too many conversations with prospects that just aren’t the right fit; they’re not necessarily timewasters but not the right target market?

To improve their conversation rate a client of ours uses an app called Zapier, which if you haven’t heard about it is like programmable robots on the internet, plus some other tools to help filter out the wrong type of client. They have spent some time understanding their target client and found they had a particular sweet spot. So now if someone visits their website, the tech can understand who this person is by scraping data from Companies House and various other places, so even before they have started a sales conversation they know whether or not they are dealing with the right type of business. Within about 30 seconds of someone landing on the website the bots have decided whether this is a suitable client, given them prices and pushed them into the automated sales funnel. That’s smart.

Rather than a business cliché, working smarter, not harder might instead become a philosophy. One of our core values at Cypher is that we are digital first. If you distil that down, it means that if we can let software or automation do the job we should, because this actually frees up more time for the human contact that our clients really value. No software can replicate that. Our clients don’t care if a computer puts their data into the system or human does. As long as it’s in there, so they can see it and we can have the conversation about it, that’s where they get the value out of our business.

I’m sure this is the same for millions of different types of businesses, so, if you can get software to deliver it and it doesn’t affect the service and it doesn’t affect the human aspect of your brand, then get the software to do it and let your humans do what the software can’t, which is looking after the people, actually talking to the customers.

Moving away from technology and automation, we have also talked a lot about time, on the podcast, how best to use it and how to work smarter in the time you have. As a small business owner, you could be CEO, bookkeeper, credit controller, sales rep and social media contact. To work smarter, the key is to try and do more of the things that actually improve your business. Working smarter means considering what you can get off plate, what can you outsource and what jobs are absolutely not yours to waste time with so instead you can be really productive.

Lastly, in my opinion, one of the smartest things you can do is switch your email off. Having your email browser on your phone is a massive distraction. The constant pinging will mean it takes you longer to focus and get back to the job in hand, which then takes longer. It also means you never switch off and find yourself answering emails at 11 o’clock at night, which means you can’t sleep because you are stressing about this client’s email.

Instead of work smarter not harder, I think the saying should be ‘think smart, work hard’. You still need to work hard in order for your businesses to thrive, but you should do the thinking first. Understand the drivers for your business where your time is best used and then work on how you can get technology or supporting businesses to take away the things that take time to free up your time to deliver more human capacity to your clients.

Belief is probably one of the most powerful human emotions. Cards on the table, I think it’s absolutely critical to the success of any business. We know that every entrepreneur or business leader across the world needs high levels of resilience, persistence, and drive, but at the heart of all of those characteristics is a belief that what they are doing is worthwhile.

But, while every business owner starts out with a huge amount of belief, as time goes on, maybe you didn’t have the instant success you expected, maybe you see competitors doing really well, either way it’s not working for you, you’re worn down and that belief has gone.

But if you don’t have belief in your business, who else will?

Beware the Imposter Syndrome
Imposter syndrome affects a huge amount of business owners. Typically, it’s characterised either by a loss of belief in one’s ability or a belief that we don’t deserve the success they’ve had, or a belief that their success isn’t sustainable.

An antidote to impostor syndrome is to get absolute clarity on the role you play for a business and what a successful outcome looks like for you and then using your emotions, your energy and your time to deliver that outcome. If you didn’t have high levels of belief at the start, you’ll get them because as you start to deliver it takes the focus off you and on to your desired outcome.

Next, take a look at your products and services. Are they good, are they great? How can you make them better? Focus on serving and if you believe you have something worth buying, you develop a confidence in your product and that is a position you can sell from.

Don’t catch ‘comparisonitis’
While everyone is comparing themselves to someone else, it breeds something we call ‘comparisonitis’. When you see how well someone else operates you might feel that, in comparison, you will never be as good as them. Social Media does a lot to portray a very positive side of any business and fuels this potentially crippling mindset. Maybe someone is boasting an amazing week; they’ve won five new clients this week and you haven’t. Or they are posting some great profits or a day out with staff. Remember, everyone has ups and downs and maybe about 75% of the stuff posted is a true reflection of reality.

Use more positive language
A lot of the language used in coaching conversations around imposter syndrome; around limiting beliefs, what’s holding people back and why they feel their business just isn’t good enough is typically very negative. It puts a lot of focus and energy into what’s wrong in order that business owners see that the reality is actually far more positive.

But if you are more positive from the start, you will have far more productive conversations. The next time you meet a prospective client, surely you going to have a better chance of securing a contract if you genuinely believe that your products and services are world-class or at least very good, versus not really being sure, but you really need the money and so you really need this deal.

If you have genuinely spent the time thinking about your products and services and believe that they’re really good, but certainly they are good enough for what your clients and prospective clients are looking for, then that puts you in a really powerful place. If you’re trying to sell effectively, you have to have that utmost confidence that what you’re doing is serving a purpose. Either you are fixing a problem or you are creating some value, but either way your customers have got to see that passion in you. It’s a big advantage a small business owner has over Tesco’s or other large businesses in the same space.

One of the best things any business owner can do is make themselves better. It is a process they can own and as they get better, they serve clients better, who tell more people, and as your reputation grows, it brings in more money. It’s a win, win. You don’t always have to be the best, but you have to be good enough. But as soon as you’ve got that confidence that what you are doing is really going to help your clients, it will really help.

Belief builds intent
Another big positive of believing in your products and services is the energy and industry you will bring to your business and your conversations, driven by the intent behind what you’re doing. That breeds confidence so when you explain your business, it gives you an air of authenticity.  It means that in any conversation, you’re coming from a position of strength. Yes, you’re listening to what somebody is looking for, but you know that you have spent time getting better and better at what you offer and people notice that, which removes purchase barriers and which, in the end, may make the extra difference between the deal coming to you or going somewhere else.

Competitors can bring you customers not steal them
Another key part of maintaining your belief is understanding who your competitors are and more importantly what they may be doing for your market place. For example, rather than worry about all the new digital accountancy firms setting up that look like Cypher, feel a bit like Cypher,  I found instead that it strengthened my belief that we were doing something right. While we used to try and show up better, bigger and bolder than all the other visions of a modern, digital accountancy firm, over time, I’ve realised that I actually want more businesses like that in the market place. With each new accountancy firm that sets up like Cypher, has the same ethos as Cypher, we move another step away from the old, traditional model of accountancy that we are all fighting against!

Whenever another modern accountancy firm takes on a new member of staff, we see this as a cause for celebration because it means there’s more demand for what we do. And that puts my belief right up. But to make that happen, you have to be secure in yourself, have belief in your core principles and have belief that your core product is good enough so you can interact with your competition in a more positive way.

Believe in your Forecast
I spend a huge amount of my time looking forwards with business owners. I ask them what this year looks like and what they want to achieve. Someone might say, ‘I want to do half a million…’ but I feel like shaking them and saying that I can see you don’t believe that. Or another way is to find a number that really excites a business owner. They say that is what they want but you can see that they don’t believe it and in the end they’ll get 50% or 60% of what they wanted.

And then, every now and again you see that something clicks. A business owner sets out his or her goals and commits. They have never been so focused or so determined to achieve something.

When you look at any successful business owner, an important part of their journey is the inbuilt belief that they will achieve the goals they set out to achieve.

If I consider the top 20% performing businesses that we work with, it’s not always the quality of their product that has brought their success rather it’s the belief of the business owner in the quality of their product.

As a cloud company, Xero continually invests in product development, regularly releasing updates and improvements for its customers. Like many businesses, they periodically review their pricing to ensure it reflects the value of the product as it evolves, while allowing them to invest in what’s next.

So from October 2021, Cypher clients will pay the following for their Xero plans:

Continued product development for UK customers

Since the last price increase in 2019, Xero has invested heavily in business critical areas such as cash flow, getting paid faster, automation and security. This year they’re focused on providing greater support for cash flow management and insight tools, and they’re working hard to ensure their software keeps us all one step ahead of any upcoming Government changes to compliance.

You can learn more here on Xero’s website.

All pricing is in GBP and excludes VAT.

It’s another step forward post lockdown and it represents just another rather hefty decision business owners will have to make.

A lot of businesses have been closed for a long time, now some are starting to reopen but in a slightly different way. Very few are operating in exactly the same way as they did before the first lockdown.

As a business, Cypher was already paperless and we use a lot of tech in our infrastructure but we have since become a completely remote business. Alan delivers his coaching sessions virtually, pizza restaurants have introduced takeaway only or meal boxes, meaning even core products may be very different to what people were selling at the start of 2020.

Can anyone, hand-on-heart, say that at the start of Lockdown in March 2020 they thought we wouldn’t be out of it by that summer? We spent a lot of time with clients dealing with the fallout of lockdown and helping them with cashflow forecasts and very few of those went past three months.

More than 12 months on, we are still, slowly, navigating the roadmap to recovery and after so long out of the office, away from core business activities, one of the biggest hurdles I foresee isn’t a lack of customers coming through the door, it’s getting back to a kind of work mentality.

As a business owner, you’ve got your feelings to manage around suddenly dealing with people and being in the business, but you may also have a team of people that rely on you for leadership who are going to be just as anxious, won’t remember how to use the new till system, won’t remember all the product ranges having been away so long.

Business owners need to be able to learn, unlearn and relearn
After nearly 18 months home working, we are preparing for another potentially disruptive move to longterm remote or hybrid working models and with absolutely no precedent, business owners need to be able to learn, unlearn and relearn different aspects of their business and that of their customers.

Some businesses that have remained open had to learn new models. Some that started in lockdown had to unlearn their business plan and go with a different one. Some will just have to re-learn what it’s like to be back in an office. All present different challenges. The pizza restaurant that started as takeaway only now has systems based around customers not being in the restaurant at all. You’re in, served, done! They have re-learned, or reimagined, their business and if they can keep that speed of service going, even when customers are eating in, then it gives them a point of difference to every other pizza restaurant.

Lockdown has been characterised by huge amounts of innovation and creativity, just like this. Lots of entrepreneurial ideas have come out and there could be another flurry of these ideas to come. Business is stronger, more resilient, as they do things that they weren’t doing 12 months ago. The opportunities are huge.

Undoubtedly, there are going to be winners and losers over the next two years. The winners, when you look back in five years, will be the people that took a deep breath at some point and did something different. That opportunity to pivot still presents itself to many business owners. The UK economy needs small business owners with strong leadership to see a way through, to take that big leap into the unknown.

The losers, if you’re wondering, will be the businesses that carried on doing exactly as they were, because there’s going to be a different world coming.

New business unlearning
Where the unlearn, relearn mindset really showed itself was in the new businesses owners we met throughout the last six months. There was a period in the first quarter of 2021 when high street banks were not opening new accounts. Where this might have stalled new business owners in the past, all these entrepreneurs have pivoted and gone to Tide, Starling or other on-line bank. Now they’re used to that new world of banking, where everything is done very quickly and easily on an app, why is anyone going to go back to a high street branch and fill out a hundred forms?

The learned behaviour that you went to Lloyd’s, Barclays or HSBC because they were proper banks has gone now and I think there is going to be a bit of that in every industry. There’s going to be the new way and the old way, and the old way is looking more and more old-fashioned.

The opportunity business owners have right now is to maximize their new business model. No-one can afford to continue in exactly the same way.  Business owners need to take stock, for those that have pivoted, understand why and then commit to it being the new way. Don’t slip back into old ways.

We talked on the Time Management Paradox podcast about how relatively short life and our opportunity in business is. I’m lucky that I get to see our client’s businesses when they are no more than a man or a woman with an idea. Then we see the million pound turnover, the new car, the new house and the happy life. But everyone starts at the same point, where their business is just an idea. The difference between the idea and the five-year success point is all about mindset. It’s not about talent. It’s not even particularly about hard work. It’s just about commitment to that end result and making it your focus. Successful business owners, if you ask them, are absolutely clear on what they are going to achieve and how they are going to do it, from the start of their idea, to five years down the line.

Another quite large area where small businesses can take heart in having a big edge on big business during the pandemic is in customer service. Have you tried to deal with a utilities company, a bank or any large organization where its customer support is normally dealt with by call centre? It was a disaster. At Cypher, we tried to deliver the same, if not better level of customer service throughout the pandemic. We have a lot less budget than those global brands and COVID has never once cropped up as an excuse for why we couldn’t speak to a customer.

We talked on one of our very first podcasts about the volume of consumers who are going to be more willing to deal with independent businesses. And I think a lot of that comes down to how independent businesses have navigated the same storm as these big businesses in a much more dignified and customer focused manner.

Good Customer Service is a super power for any businesses.  If you truly hold services as a top priority and genuinely try to improve every day, you will always be ahead.

Summary
During Covid a number of business owners had to unlearn their business plan and re-learn another one. Now they are learning how to thrive in a different business to the one they had a year ago.

Here are our top five tips how:

1. If you’ve pivoted or changed any aspect of your business during COVID, commit to it and keep going
2. Make customer service a super power of yours
3. Accept that you have to unlearn and relearn your business because it will be completely different from the one you started
4. Provide your teams with guidance and leadership in your new business
5. If you have one, find a way to get your business ideas out of your head and into existence

We describe ‘overwhelm’ as the feeling that you’re just not getting to it, whatever it may be. You’re starting to let people down, you’re letting yourself down and your performance is sub optimal. These frustrations start to flow into emotions that for entrepreneurs and business owners are really dangerous for creative thinking. They effectively kill it.

In my experience overwhelm often rears its head at about three o’clock in the morning. That’s the point where you wake up and then you can’t get back to sleep because all the things you haven’t done, or have to do the next day are on your mind. Sadly, a) you can’t deal with any of it at that point and b) You, know, you’ve got an issue, if you can’t get back to sleep because your mind is just on it.

Take back ownership of your time
The important first step is taking back ownership of the time you have. Usually we have around 17 waking hours a day and it is important to add real structure to this time. We discussed on the Time Management Paradox that a person often has four common roles to play in our lives that we describe as Professional, Personal, Family and Community.  They broadly cover work, family, exercise and any other activities you undertake and we all need to find time for each of them. The important thing is to recognise which role you are playing at any time and commit wholeheartedly to being present in that role for as long as it takes to get whatever it is you are doing done.

By slowing down and adding structure, you will start to see a difference.

Focus on one thing at a time
I talk to my team members about this a lot because they feel like we’ve got a lot on and they’re busy; well you can only ever do one thing at once. So when you are doing it, focus on that.

Prioritise
On your list of tasks there will be three or four, maybe five things that have to be done that day. The rest are urgent because of someone else, not because they’re for you. So prioritise your list and focus on the three or four key ones and get those done first. Some days you may not get past the third one, but if that was the level of work you committed to for that day then just getting to the third one and completing it will feel like a win.

Procrastination
Let’s talk about procrastination. It is a real time-killer but business owners procrastinate all the time. It feels like their busy because their fiddling around doing something they shouldn’t, because it’s easier than the tasks they’ve actually got to do. It’s easy to tell yourself you’re busy and therefore don’t have time or are unable to do the jobs you don’t want to do or make the hard decisions you need to make.

Is busy-ness just laziness?
The American coach, Steve Chandler describes busy-ness as laziness. This statement is clearly meant to create a reaction, to make you stop and take notice. Actually, his big point is if you’re busy its because you’re being lazy about clarifying what’s important, what you’re trying to do with your life or your business or what roles you’re playing because you’re not structuring yourself. Uou are lazy because you’re just running around creating havoc. You’re not distinguished of our thoughts and all of that muddledness and confusion is creating lower emotions, procrastination, stress, worry, anxiety and suboptimal performance all because you’re too lazy to bring some clarity to your life.

Choose productivity
A positive evolution of busy-ness is productivity. Being busy and being productive are often two very different things. With the right structures and priorities in place, being productive is a state of mind. You can choose to be busy or you can choose to be productive. Get clarity on what a productive day would be, commit to it, add in the necessary structure and you will achieve it. Being productive doesn’t just have to mean at work either, you can productive in your other roles, just by being present in them for long enough.

Summary
The feeling of overwhelm comes from a lack of control so take control back. You can’t create more time in your day, but you can learn to partner with time and use it more effectively. Add structure, agree parameters that block out key times and give clear indication of the roles you are playing at a certain time and stick with that role or that job long enough to achieve our priorities.

Ways to defeat overwhelm

1. Take back ownership of your time
2. Focus on one thing at a time
3. Prioritise the really important jobs
4. Stop Procrastinating
5. Understand the connection between busy-ness and laziness
6. Choose productivity

It might sound a little trite but my clients come to me to help them improve their business. Well, if I can’t do the right things in my business- if I can’t get my pricing and my cash flow right, then who am I to tell them what to do in theirs?

The big companies of this world, the Amazon’s and the Apple’s don’t give you anything for free. If you want that extra thing, you pay the extra money for it. I am happy that our pricing is bang on and that we charge for everything. It’s something I advise all our clients- and any other business to do.

I suspect throughout the pandemic, the majority of people have not increased their prices, but their cost base has gone up, so now it’s probably a good time to take a look and review your pricing.

On the Mind Your Business podcast, we always try and offer business owners some advice on the important decisions needed to run a successful business and our discussions around pricing mainly centred on:

• How to set your price at the right level
• How to convey the value of your offer to your customers
• The different ways you can price your business
• How much business owners give away for free

Cause and Effect
Often the root cause of a low pricing policy is not having the confidence and courage around the value of your service or your product. Alan and I discussed that one way to consider your pricing strategy is cause and effect. Ask yourself, how good is your service, or how good do you want it to be? If you link your pricing structure directly to service quality, then the higher the quality of the service, the easier it is to raise the price, especially if you can demonstrate greater value.

Work less for more
Most service businesses set their pricing based on units of time. in general, you can buy it by the hour, half-day, full day or longer depending on the job you want done. The problem is that there’s a finite amount of time that can be sold so business owners need to value their time. If you don’t, your customers aren’t going to either. You’ve got to attach a value to that time and then if something’s going to take an extra hour, then bill for it.

A note of caution here, what you should never do is do some additional work and then bill the client without ever talking about it. Too many businesses get ambushed by unexpected bills and it just kills relationships.

Of course, whether you sell time or another resource, the ideal scenario is to sell less but for more money. That way you can keep your service levels high and don’t spread yourself too thinly. A trap I find a lot of business owners fall into is that they start out offering a really high quality service, but their pricing is way too cheap. As they grow, they bring on more clients, who do business with them because of the quality service; the low price point is an added bonus. The problem comes when they try to scale up, but maintain the same level of service. They fill up their client bank but aren’t remunerating themselves enough so they end up with too many clients, without the resource to deal with them and so end up giving themselves too much to do. Eventually, this means the quality of service dips and clients start to leave. Eventually they become a bottom-of-the-barrel business because of their own good intentions.

Create additional services
If you’re worried that an increase in price will mean you lose some clients, well firstly this isn’t always a bad thing, knowing who you want to sell to is a key part of a business strategy, but secondly a way to maintain or increase a price point and maintain clients is to find something else you can sell to them-a kind of added extra- that gets them used to paying more.

Repricing for new customers
The other thing to do is to reprice new customers. You may have a legacy price for the clients that came on board at the start of your business, but as you grow, test the market and see what price point you should go to. Keep the older clients on their price plan if you must, but don’t be afraid to charge market rates as you evolve or as you develop offer a better service.

Should you put a price list on your web site?
A question that goes around a lot is whether a business should list its prices on its web site. Lots do, we currently don’t. Some feel it is important to be transparent with their pricing structure, others feel they should have a conversation about value first, before talking about price. I think both are valid.

In many service businesses, the delivery can be bespoke and only when you truly understand a client’s needs can you provide an accurate quote. There may be degrees of difficulty or specialisms or investment associated with the work and the price must reflect that. But there is also something in the boldness of saying, this is our price, it’s good value, we’d love to do business with you and this is what you pay for our service.

The downside of no available pricing is that prospective clients can enter your sales funnel, who are totally unsuitable for your business. You have lots of good conversations, you are a good fit, but when you discuss price you find that their budget won’t stretch. Often, you still take that client on, even at the wrong price. This is an example of where indicative pricing may help filter your prospects at the start of the buyer journey.

Your Mission Statement
A good mission statement defines your purpose as a business. The advantage of a strong mission statement is that you can communicate it through any interaction or touch point, which in turn can inspire customers to want to do business with you. Even better, if your mission statement conveys a high service quality, it can be reflected in your price.

How much do business owners give away for free?
We see this all too often, the leakages in small businesses caused by owners going above and beyond what the competition does. If you’re in trades or you sell a product then it happens marginally less because you can account for stock wastage but particularly in service businesses, because there is no real price for the extra thing you can haemorrhage revenue.

If you don’t have a price list that outlines all of the services you offer, clients won’t see the additional value in things you do, they just see it all as part of one big bundle. If you break your products or services down and are clear on what additional things cost, the client can make a choice. They may decline the additional service, to avoid the additional cost, but it removes the need for unnecessary stress – or lost revenue.

In summary
We discussed a lot about the psychology of pricing and why it’s almost certainly time for business owners to review theirs. Charging too little not only reduces your margin, but also jeopardizes the quality of what you’re doing. If you do decide to raise your price, consider adding an additional service, something your clients’ value to compensate for the increase in costs. We also talked about whether you should have prices on your website; whether you should be transparent, or discuss value first. My feeling is that indicative or minimum pricing can filter out the wrong type of client from your sales funnel right at the start.

The final point I discussed with Alan was using client feedback to set your pricing. Take your best five clients, ask them about the value they think they are getting from you and what they would be prepared to pay for it. If you charge £200 for something, but the clients would pay £350, then the next three times you meet potential new customers quote £350. You might find that your conversion rate stays the same, because then you’re finding your level. Then try the next three at £400. You will quickly find the point at which the market puts a price on your value and that’s where your pricing should be.

‘Soda Folk’ was founded in 2013 by entrepreneur Ken Graham when he moved from the US to the UK and realised he couldn’t buy his favourite fizzy drinks here. He started developing a Root Beer and Cream Soda in his friend’s craft beer brewery and hasn’t looked back.

It would be easy to take Ken’s recent success for granted. We have talked on previous pods about the skyscraper metaphor, where we only focus on the end result and gloss over the years of hard work of laying the foundations, and building a business – or skyscraper- up to the structure people see in the end. While Ken- and many others- are now enjoying the fruits of his labour – cherry, grape and blueberry muffin flavours of Soda Folk are available- there are so many more complex elements, working behind the scenes that an entrepreneur needs to get an idea off the ground.

At some point in any entrepreneur’s journey, self-motivation becomes an issue. The investment we make personally in our business idea is massive. The emotions required to go from investor to investor, or customer to customer, crystallizing our idea, positioning our offer again and again is incredibly important. Consciously, we worry whether the idea come to anything, will it be successful? Will the side-hustle get too big for our plans? As the person at the centre of any new business venture, we are the ones that have to keep going and going.  You had a huge amount of self-motivation at the start; the question is how do you maintain that level every day?

It’s not a binary thing; motivation ebbs and flows. Most entrepreneurs are inherently self-motivated, but it can be a lonely place running your own business and there are days when it’s hard; you’re tired, you’ve had knock backs, something’s gone wrong or you’re not moving as quick as you want. That’s when anyone’s self-motivation can dip and that’s when some helpful steps can help you deal with that downturn in self-motivation and get it back up to the levels you need to succeed. Alan and I discussed this topic and here are our hints!

You’ve lost that loving feeling
The first step is to understand which aspect of your business you have fallen out of love with. At the start we all have a positive connection, a strong emotion, or at least enthusiasm for our new venture, but sometimes we just lose that loving feeling. So, get clarity on what’s missing and try to re-introduce it. Get back in love with your business.

Find your purpose
Second is to re-connect to your purpose; why you started in the first place? What was your big idea and where are you with achieving that? Mission statements are clear statement of intent; the best ones bring your purpose to life. If you don’t have a mission statement, create one, they can be extremely motivating.

Knowing me, knowing you
Third, know and understanding yourself. Identify whatever motivated you at the start and ask yourself, ‘is that still motivating you now’? If you’re a big ideas person, then reconnect with that part of the business. If you are a nitty gritty-style finisher and you need someone else to bounce the big, bold ideas off find that person and have those conversations. You need to understand what you need to get going again.

Clarity of role
As you transition from start-up entrepreneur to CEO your role in the business will change. Generally you start a business because you’re really good at something and you enjoy doing it.  You spend your life learning what may be a very technical skill and by delivering it each day, over time you received greater rewards. That is very motivating.  But as your business grows, you take on different roles. Maybe you are thinking about the next 90 day plan, maybe you are doing less delivery and more strategic work, or just having more conversations to inspire and lead others, the intangible stuff. You are doing less of what you know and love and find yourself in unfamiliar territory. It means you have a harder time prioritising, daily tasks so you feel you achieve less while doing things way out of your comfort zone. To help, ask yourself ‘over the next six months, what would be the very best use of my time?’ It will help bring you clarity by demonstrating that if showed up brilliantly doing certain things, they would have the biggest impact on your business and that can be very motivating.

Eat your frog for breakfast
Most entrepreneurial folk are action orientated so you can get a massive snowball effect from completing a small, relatively easy task. Even if it is a rubbish job, ‘eat the frog’ for breakfast, and then you can go on and do more enjoyable things and build on that momentum. The first job the American military, require of active service men and women is to make their beds each morning. It is a simple concept that means before they even leave the dormitory they’ve had an easy win. It demonstrates this positive connection to action.

Give yourself time and permission to think
This takes a shift in mindset. When you’re working for someone else, when have you ever had time to just sit and think? Probably never! People are conditioned that when they’re at work, they need to be working and doing something leads to a result and a result keeps them going. But, as an entrepreneur, actually sitting there and just thinking is your job now. And that’s perfectly fine. Ignore your phone and your emails and give yourself permission just to sit and think.

Being a useful human being
It’s a very rough rule of thumb, but whenever a human being feels like they are being useful to someone else, they will feel motivated. So whenever I’m having a day where I’m not feeling a hundred percent, I pick up the phone and ring a client at random I find that speaking to another business owner, demonstrates that their problems are similar to my problems. Getting my teeth into helping them gives me that buzz back and keeps me motivated.

Start early
In his book, the Miracle Morning, Hal Elrod describes six great habits that business owner can adopt to transform their lives- all before 0800am. Needless to say it means a pretty early start, but Alan has tried it recently, joining the 5am club and says the difference has been phenomenal. Starting early means you can get more time to focus and achieve quick wins before breakfast.

As an entrepreneur, if you are struggling with self-motivation, we tried to outline a few simple steps on the Mind Your Business Podcast that can help to get your mojo back.

• Identify what it is about your business that you have fallen out of love with
• Reconnect with your purpose
• Create your mission statement
• Understand what motivates you
• Define your new role within the business
• Get clarity on what success in your new role looks like
• Give yourself space and permission to just think
• Make your bed, or eat your frog, first thing in the morning
• Reach out and have a conversation with someone else
• Be awesome

Remember, the longer you stay demotivated, the less productive you are and the further away from where you want to be you become. There are another 8 billion people on the planet and at any one time at least 40% could be having a worse day than you. So, choose to change, take a moment, get moving, get into action, do things, create some space to think, go for a walk and motivate yourself.

Or as Barney, from ‘How I met your mother’ would say, ‘don’t be de-motivated, be awesome instead.’

It has been interesting so see how quickly we have adopted these video conferencing platforms as the norm and, as Alan and I discussed it will be interesting to see how this practice evolves and how quickly elements of face to face meetings return later this summer.

Zoom has very quickly followed Google, Skype and Facebook, where the name of an application has become synonymous with the action of using it. But has this adoption been to the detriment of the art of conversation?

Actually, I think not!

What I noticed most about the world of virtual meetings was that firstly, I was having a lot more of them than I ever could face to face but, secondly they ran to time a lot more and I was getting a lot more action points from them. In short, my day is now more structured and I feel a lot more productive.

On the Time Management Paradox pod, we discussed that doing more of what drove a business forward and wasting less time on unnecessary and unregulated meetings was definitely a positive.

Zoomed Out
Overall, while I find the whole in, out, done, element of Zoom meetings really positive, I’ve also found them fundamentally more draining than in-person meetings. After a face-to-face meeting I would write up my notes for the client or the team and during that time I would decompress my brain. Now meetings are stacked back-to back, I decompress in one go at the end of the day, but by then my brain has gone, I am Zoomed out. I see the same impact on clients.

It could be the screen, it could be the volume, or that Zoom meetings are punchier, but I think everyone suffers serious Zoom fatigue from a day of video meetings. Alan likens it to a poker player after a long game. When we listen, properly, without the distractions of a coffee shop or a busy office, we are concentrating so much harder and our investment is deeper, which after 30 seconds of niceties at the start could last for anything up to a few hours.

It’s been interesting to see how quickly we have all adopted this technology and we discussed whether, in a Covid-free world, we would still conduct the majority of our conversations digitally or if ‘in person’ meetings would creep back in to our lives once we were able. For me the jury is still out. There may be industry biases, either way, and of course personal preferences will make a difference and not just because of on-going health fears. Some businesses – like Alan’s -thrive in this virtual world.

Time to thrive
As a business coach, Alan is a huge fan of virtual meetings. He finds it easier to help clients create the change they’re looking for during a series of Zoom meetings because he feels there is a deeper, longer investment in the conversations he has. Specifically, Zoom allows his clients to really focus on their objectives and desired outcomes.  Of course, this could be part of his evolution as a coach- as solution providers we all need to get better at this -but the focus provided by a Zoom meeting means that he gets to root causes, discovers options and identifies possible actions far quicker than when in person. The compound effect of carrying this on to the next coaching conversation means that the progress and the rate of change increases – dare I say it exponentially, and as business owners isn’t that what we are all looking for!?

I think this demonstrates that it’s not the fact that you’re sat next to someone that creates a worthwhile conversation. It’s the type of conversation you have, the investment you make it in it and the genuine focus on the outputs you generate. Whether you’re in the room or 300 miles away, nothing’s different. So I think now that people are used to it, it’s going to take time before we go back to how we were, and honestly we may never go all the way back.

Being productive was a key element for our Managing the Time Paradox podcast and with no lengthy commutes, a timely start and finish time means everyone gets more time back, but the bigger opportunity is that no-one is geographically barred from doing work with anybody else. If a series of Zoom calls is now the way we serve clients, then we can deliver this service wherever they are, whether that’s Manchester, Northern Ireland, San Francisco, Glasgow or Oxford, it makes no difference.

It will also be interesting to see what people’s new tolerance for drive time to a meeting is. Seriously, would you now drive for more than 30 minutes, if you could hop on a Zoom call instead?

The power of emotion
In any long-term business relationship, there is an undeniable human connection and emotional connection. It is an element of in person meetings one might expect to lose in a virtual space, but I think actually the opposite has been true. Conducting meetings with people at home, in their safe space, particularly during lockdowns 1.0 and 2.0 we have seen some serious emotions and emotional shifts, including anger and tears which demonstrated the level of investment being made by people in the meeting. So the accusation that you cannot get that level of emotion on a virtual call is simply untrue.

Better in person
That’s not to say that sometimes you feel you just need to be in the room. We have all seen the now infamous parish council Zoom meeting and the fabulous Jackie Weaver who had all the authority in the world. I wonder if that meeting was held face-to-face wherever half the people that we’re kicking off, shouting at her would have the balls to have done that. Conversely, the ease with which someone can be effectively thrown out of the meeting probably also had an influence on certain actions. My thoughts are that how dysfunctional must the meetings be in the first place to get to that point?

And we have all sat through Zoom meetings, professionally and personally, where people are muted, cameras don’t work, Wi-Fi is slow, or someone is sat too close to a camera so you only see half of their head. Thankfully that seems to be reserved for a certain age group, but in general of the thousands of meetings we have attended in the last 18 months, very few could have been better in person.

Every good conversation is 50% speaking, 50% listening.
I think we demonstrated on the Art of Conversation podcast that we are definitely pro-virtual conversations, but there is still a balance to find. We want to meet people, absolutely, but in this new world, the art of conversation has evolved, not disappeared. The paradigm has shifted; the Genie is out of the bottle but without loss of conversational impact.

Now I think there’s a linear relationship between the number of people on a Zoom meeting and the impact it can have. As you follow the curve of the imaginary graph, as the meeting attendees do up actually it is to the detriment of the meeting. But the business meeting with say one to five people is the sweet spot.

In summary, we talked a lot about the art of conversation, 2021 style. Alan and I dived in to what is different about a virtual conversation versus an in person one and I think we raised a number of positives for this new way of working.

Conversations are different now, but not in a bad way. If video calls enable you to structure your day better, have a greater number of more productive meetings, with clear outputs, if you are able to dive in, listen better, then your conversations are going to be better. It doesn’t matter whether they’re virtual or whether they’re in face-to-face.

Did you know that the average human being lives for around 4000 weeks, which equates to about 77 years.  Measuring life in weeks is a sobering thought.  Obviously there are even less weeks spent building up a business so to make the most of our time, we need to use it effectively.

Hands up, how many of us have attended a time management course? I know I have. We all want to get the most out of our time and many of us feel we are failing in this regard. As business owners-or frankly just adults – we are all busy. But how busy and does our busyness bring us the rewards we want?

It sounds like a Star Trek episode, but the title of this podcast, The Time Management Paradox is actually a philosophy of Alan’s that suggests we can’t manage time, time manages us. Rather you can partner with time and therefore, you can use it more effectively.

Understand your life roles
Step one to mastering time is to understand all the factors in your life and how they fit into four distinct roles. We describe them on the podcast as Professional, Personal, Family and Community.  They broadly cover work, family, exercise and any other activities you undertake.

Let’s be generous and say we sleep for eight hours, so we are awake for 16. Create your own pie chart and decide what percentage of your time you commit to each of these roles. Every day is different so it is unlikely to be four 25% splits. Now ask yourself are you happy with the result?

On the Podcast, I gave the example of when in corporate life I would always try to be home before five o’clock to bath my daughter. In general I managed it more often than not, but a lot of the time, while she was in the bath, I would be on my phone to the office or to a client. In this example my daughter didn’t have a fully present dad, the client wasn’t getting my full professional attention and I felt a lot of stress and anxiety as I was trying to do at least two things- and doing them both badly.

To manage time, we need to be present. To do this we need to understand which role we are playing and commit wholeheartedly to that role.  It is better to do something well for 30 minutes than do it half-ar$ed for two hours.

Create parameters for your work life balance
Putting in parameters, around your day or blocking out key times, doesn’t give you more time but it gives you clear markers as to when you are playing a certain role and when it stops to make time for  another role.

If you work in a team then they need to be on the same page. They need to understand that it is ok not to answer an email at eight o’clock at night. You can’t switch your email off 5.30pm but expect them to keep theirs on all night. Creating parameters is equally important when we are working from home. We have all seen children creep into Zoom meetings or had home schooling wreck a planning day. If you were in the office that wouldn’t happen  but so many of us are –and maybe always will be- working from home, so setting clear expectations with our family stakeholders is as important as doing so with colleagues, clients and employers.

Being productive
Let’s say you work 830 to 530 every weekday to free up evenings and weekends.  In those nine hours, whether you work alone or as part of a team you want to be as productive as you can. As Alan says, you want to play all out and do the high impact stuff.  In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey uses the concept of focusing on the ‘Big Rocks’ over the ‘Grit’.

I always think that a barrier to real productivity is the two or three jobs that a business owner won’t let go of. We all have them, mine is the bookkeeping for Cypher. I am probably the most expensive bookkeeper in the country.  In truth I have no business doing it and there will be a 100 tasks being done by business owners up and down the country that if they sat back and put an actual value on their time, and looked where they were spending it they wouldn’t do those jobs.

Prioritise
Here’s a useless bit of trivia: The word “priority” is derived from the Latin word prioritas (“fact or condition of being prior”), the word meant “the most important thing”, the “prior” thing or the thing with precedence.  When it was first coined, the word “priority” had no plural.  You could only have one priority.

At Cypher we use a diary system so we are able to set clear parameters and clear priorities for our time. We need to build in a level of flexibility as a degree of our work is responsive to client’s needs. We have set team times, meeting times, lunch breaks and triage times throughout the week to ensure we can focus on what’s important. Alan uses a simpler task list which is reviewed each day in order to set and achieve clear priorities. Whatever your method, it shouldn’t just focus on work-based tasks, include personal, family or community roles in your priority planning.

Lose your email
I could spend an entire Podcast episode and blog talking about the virtues of taking email off your phone. At Cypher a colleague manages all of our external emails and internally we use Slack to communicate. This means that when we are getting our heads down to prioritise a piece of work, we aren’t distracted by the ‘ping’ of a new message. it is life changing, believe me.

Summary
Time management is a paradox. Instead we should focus on partnering with time. We need to value it, especially as we can measure it in weeks, to try and make the most of the time we have for all of our important roles. The good news is that there are simple steps we can all take and behaviours we can  adapt to make sure we are present in any role long enough to achieve our priorities, whatever they are and make the most of the time we have left.

Ways to manage the time paradox

1. Understand your roles – Professional, Personal, Family, community
2. Be present for the amount of time you need to spend in a role to do it effectively
3. Manage your priorities- be clear on what you want to achieve for the day, week year
4. Always do the most important things that bring the most value to the business
5. Cut-out the time stealing jobs and delegate them to someone else
6. Say no more often

Take email off your phone