Welcome! You will see that the common theme throughout this site is my passion for helping everyday people become successful entrepreneurs. I hope that you will find my that my approach is down to earth. I don’t really go for gimmicks, and my followers don’t either. I like to use solid research principles to back up my work.
In March of last year, Hyk was nothing more than a mostly-empty storefront that was in the process of being converted from a t-shirt shop to an upscale outdoor retailer.
Ben Ferguson, owner of Hyk, and his team had more questions than answers:
Find out how Ben and his team coped with the transition, what they learned, if the story had a happy ending.
This single hour could give you the inspiration to take your business to a whole new level in 2019.
What
Converting Your Retail Experience for Success at the Estes Park Startup/Meetup
Who
Ben Ferguson, Owner of Hyk
When
Wednesday, February 6 from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM
Where
Coffee on the Rocks, 510 Moraine Ave, Estes Park.
This live, in-person talk will be delivered only once, so if you miss it, its gone.
I feel that each person should be able to take the skills and gifts that God has given him/her and use those to provide for his/her family. I am quite passionate about seeing small business owners succeed. I have dedicated a significant portion of my life over the past 12 years to being an entrepreneur and helping others pursue this path. For some it is quite easy. For others it is maddeningly frustrating. I have extreme empathy for those who are trying and have not yet reached the heights to which they are destined.
This is the first night of back-to-back presentations that I am scheduled to give on the week of August 26.
I will be presenting the findings of some of my research to a group of local business owners. This particular group is very intriguing, and I plan on writing an additional post on CSBERG in the near future.
I attended their event in June and was amazed at the energy in the room.
[guestpost]Troy and Taryn Mason write at intentionallyrefined.com. Intentionally Refined is a website dedicated to inspiring and encouraging you to improve you, improve your marriage, improve your relationships, and more. They do this by discussing: self-improvemnt / personal development, marriage and relationships, productivity, goal planning, health, and more.”[/guestpost]
I am an entrepreneur. In my business (I assume in your business as well) the environment is constantly changing.
There are constantly new things that we have to learn and implement. There are new strategies, new technologies, new ways of doing things.
We have to plan. We have to capitalize. We have to implement. We have to make it profitable.
I not only have the stress that comes with running the business and working on projects for clients, but I also have the stress of adapting the company to a constantly changing environment.
If you’re like me, you handle the stress really well. At least you feel like you handle it well. You manage all of the things I just mentioned. You get it all done. You’re a productivity machine.
But you know this comes at a cost. There’s only so much of you to go around, and when things get crazy at the office, the home life suffers. I neglect my wife and my kids.
I don’t intend to do it. I don’t want to do it. But I do it. Maybe I’m not as bad as some people are about it. But I’m not as good about it as I want to be.
It’s actually pretty easy to fall into the trap of neglecting the family. I mean, you’re working this hard for them right? They know you’re busy. They understand.
You want to give them a fulfilling life. You want to give them more than you had growing up. Those are great intentions, but when it really boils down to it, all they want is you.
They want to spend time with you. They want you to pay attention to them. Your spouse wants you to answer his / her two prevailing questions. (Shameless plug – On our blog you can read about his two prevailing questions here and her two prevailing questions here, or if you’d like to subscribe to our emails, you can click here).
I would never discourage you from working hard and growing your business. But I would encourage you to stop, just for a few minutes, and make time for them.
When you’re gone from this world, do you want them to say, “He built an awesome business!” or do you want them to say, “He was an awesome husband / dad. He loved me so much.”
Deep down, they want to say the latter. Take some time for them. Blow a day off from work once in a while. It will still be there waiting. Show them that they are more important than the business
See more from Troy and Taryn Mason at intentionallyrefined.com.
We all dream of having so much organic traffic coming to our site that list building becomes effortless.
Those of us who live in the real world, however, don’t have a bajillion hits of organic traffic each week. We’re willing to build our list any way we can.
Recently, I was talking with a member of my community, Jonathan Hill. He and his wife, Faith, run Fortified Health Club.
Jonathan told me of an amazing success he had with a tool which is a sister product to a service many of us have heard of in this community — LeadPages.
I won’t go into detail on that now, but I do want to talk about the tool Jonathan is using: LeadDigits.
LeadDigits is a premium product you can get when you choose one of the higher levels of service offered by LeadPages.
[shareable]A great way for public speakers to build a list! Completely automated.[/shareable]
Many of you have seen signs when you’re around town; “Text PIZZA to 47474 for a free slice and a drink”.
Jonathan put this very technique to use when Faith was delivering a talk at a local chiropractic clinic a few days ago.
[callout]Disclaimer: I don’t want you guys to get hung up on the audience size. What I want you to concentrate on is the conversion percentage.[/callout]
Let’s go to Jonathan now as he frames the scenario:
[guestpost]The talk was called ‘Toxic Beauty’ for a women’s event, and texting that phrase will get you a list of ingredients to always avoid in your cosmetics regime. Immediately after texting it, you will receive the list via email. — Jonathan Hill[/guestpost]
The step-by-step follows:
What blows me away is the conversion rate they received!
Of the 14 people in attendance in this room, 12 of them used texted the CLEARSKIN keyword to get the freebie Faith had offered.
For those of you keeping score at home that’s an 86% conversion rate!
[shareable]Read about this list building technique that garnered an 86% conversion rate![/shareable]
Imagine if you started doing this very same technique and began experimenting with it during your talks!
[callout]Try it right now! Text CLEARSKIN to 44222 to check out the user experience and to get the freebie![/callout]
If I understand the integration LeadDigits correctly, you can connect it to your existing email marketing system to do the delivery of the actual freebie.
It works just as if somebody were to opt in on the opt-in page of your site. I created a similar campaign for one of my clients several months ago, and we used InfusionSoft to do the delivery.
[reminder]What list-building hacks have worked for you? What ideas have NOT worked so well? Let’s get a conversation started![/reminder]
When I report on papers and articles that I have read keep in mind that we will always want to apply the test of generalizability. Often studies are performed in one location or in a small area with a relatively small number of people. Perhaps in a hospital in Maryland that employs 200 nurses.
Findings that are generalizable are quite powerful, and can provide true change in your organization.
Let’s say the study finds that nurses who work 8-hour shifts make fewer errors than nurses who work 12-hour shifts. For the research to be generalizable to the entire population of hospital nurses additional studies would have to show the same results in hospitals in Florida, New York, California, Prague, Milan, etc. Look for another post where I discuss the powerful facet of transferrability.
Before I go too much further I must first set the stage for you. I feel that I need to explain a few things about the culture here. If you have never worked in a sales organization much of what I will write will seem foreign. The individual salespeople in this organization are very entrepreneurial. They are paid on a 100% commission basis. With limited exceptions there are no full-time salaries to be had, so these individuals are focused on doing one thing and one thing only — selling.
Keep this in mind as it will be yet another dominant theme in my writing. If you were only paid to sell, what would you spend your time doing?
It happened again just this week. Someone reversed course on me. Didn’t do what they said they were going to do.
I had been running a phone campaign pretty heavily all week in an effort to book speaking gigs and workshops. I had a great conversation with one individual in particular. We connected on one of my workshop offerings, and the answer was, “Call me back tomorrow so we can book some dates.”
Now, I know. I know. A true salesperson never gets emotionally involved in the sale. I should do a better job of distancing myself, but I’m selling me, my dream, my message, so it is a little difficult not to get emotionally involved in the sale.
I did call back only to hear the dreaded, “no”. Something had come up, and he is not able to book me at all. Ever.
As many times as I have been through this, it still feels like a personal rejection. Like I’m getting dumped at the 7th grade dance.
Readers, when this happens to you, you must understand exactly where you are. For years, I did not understand what was at stake, and I did not know how to navigate this inner terrain.
When you meet with that instant of jarring defeat, there is only one thing you can do.
Years ago, before I was familiar with this part of the roller coaster, I would go straight to just feeling rejected. I was hurt, so I did something to nurse my wounds. This usually involved some type of “woe is me” catastrophizing or getting out of the house to run some errand that had suddenly become so important.
This week I did something much different — I got back on the horse. You see, for me, if I don’t pick up the phone and make that next dial, I have a great history of letting that loss, that rejection, become the defining moment of my day.
When I met with rejection in the past I used to go down this mental spiral of despair. It involved doubting my call, thinking I was misinterpreting my purpose, and waking to the fact that God was really trying to tell me that I just wasn’t cut out for this. Then I would spend the next few days not doing anything really productive in my business.
I can’t tell you how many times I did this.
Years later as I started studying individual performance for my doctoral degree I learned that there is a name for what I was doing. It is called emotion-based coping. It is classic avoidance behavior, and it is usually not a good thing.
After I had some time and some distance I was finally able to see just how damaging my behavior was to my long-term success. Now that I can see this — the accumulated effect of my emotion-based coping — it makes it much easier for me to pick up the phone to place that next call.
I have learned the valuable lesson of making a molehill out of a mountain. What could be something that derails your entire day can, instead, turn into just a momentary loss if you treat it right.
In sheer determination of NOT allowing my setback to ruin my day, I picked up the phone and dialed about half a dozen more prospects. I could feel the sting of rejection start to leave with the very first call.
By the end of call #4 I had spoken with someone who wanted me to send a proposal.
I did, and she booked a workshop!
Years ago I would have missed this win because I would be nursing my wound of rejection for the next several days.
When you fall, get back on the horse.
There those few lucky ones among us who are born knowing what they want to do in life. For the rest of us, we get to work out this puzzle like doing longhand division — it takes time.
All good books have an introduction. For the faith-based among us this introduction is your getting connected to your Creator. Ask Him why you are here. Ask Him why He created you. Don’t stop asking until you have an answer. Some people stick with this question for only a few hours until they get an answer. For others it may take years before they get an answer. Keep pressing. This is the best time you could possibly spend.
You can hear an answer in a number of ways. See if any of the following pertain to you:
For more on a faith-based approach to learning who you are, see It’s Your Call by Gary Barkalow. This is perhaps the single best book I have ever read on the topic of calling. You will also want to take a look at Wild At Heart by John Eldredge, in particular, chapters 1 through 3.
In upcoming articles I will unpack key milestones in chapters 1, 2 and 3.