Business Without Stress (Building a stress-less business)

So today we’re going to talk about starting and managing stressless business. 

Business is a tool to achieve something

For me, business is first and foremost a tool and I hope that for each and every one of you, for both of you, it’s a tool. It’s not some end goal or end value, it’s not like something we’re doing it to do it, it’s not something that in and out, itself, it’s like sacred or something, it’s a tool to achieve something, it’s a tool to create something for yourself, it’s a tool to create something for the people around you, for your customers, for your employees, for everyone and for the community for the world like in what you’re generating, in what you’re producing and the value your business is creating. 

So if we’re looking at a business, from the perspective of it being a tool, then in my opinion, it’s very important that I’ll take a step backward, as long as we understand that something is a tool to get to a specific goal and the goal is to get to the goal is not to use the tool, then we have to actually decide or choose to use this specific tool. One of our presuppositions is, in an [inaudible 01:25] for me myself, as well, that there is always more than one way to get to a specific place, to get a specific goal.

So if I want to create amazing value to the world, if I want to have financial security or financial freedom for myself, if I want to create an amazing work environment then having a business is a tool, and there are other tools to achieve this goal, in my opinion, businesses is a great tool to get to those goals. But if for any reason, my business does not get me to those goals. If this business is ineffective in getting me there, then I don’t need a business. 

Start a business

So we’re going to discuss not just how to start a business, which is, I think one of the simplest things a person can do, simply take something and sell something to someone and you’re suddenly a business owner. How to construct? First we’ll talk about the mindset part of constructing a stressless business. And then in the second part, we’re going to actually focus on the necessary skills and how to implement them in your business and in your life to make sure that your business continues being as stress free as possible. Okay, so this is the main point. 

As you can see, like, personally, I can sit here in a business that’s generating seven figures in a month and still sit here with two people and talk about something because this is what I want to do and I believe it has value and I believe it has value for you guys, it has value for the people who watch us online and it has value for me. So I’m doing it and I, maybe a bit excited or stressed from the fact that I’m speaking in English or something like that, but I’m not stressed about the business. It’s not like I never have stress at all in the business. But I have rarely low levels of stress in the business. And most of the time, I have close to none and it’s because I built the business this way. And I wasn’t always this way. I had very stressful businesses in the past. And I’ll tell you a bit about it as we speak. 

So our plan for today is, first, we’re going to talk about the first decision each and every one of us must make if we want to make this business and the difference between choosing something and deciding something is choosing is like,

“I want to do this and maybe something else will happen,”

when I’m deciding something, it’s like killing out all the alternatives. I’m not going to settle for it. It’s a decision that I’m not going to back out from because I don’t know if you know that but research has shown that more than 75% of small business owners would have made more money if they would be hired to do the exact same job and if you’ll get paid more as an employee of a company, you will, of course, have less stress and probably it will be a better idea to do it unless you have a specific area that no one will ever hire you and maybe that’s problem to begin with. But we must have a decision to make this business something that is worthwhile, just starting a business makes no sense to me. 

Start with a small business

So then we’re going to discuss the two different phases of business development. I believe that starting a business and running a very small, very young business has, like, for example, it’s not necessarily measured in time, like years or something. But it’s in early stages of development and we’ll talk about later but requires a very different skill set than running a business that’s been running for a while and has been developed more.

This is why it’s so often that military generals and CEOs of big companies are retiring, starting their small businesses and suffering because they have the skills they have, basically everything it takes to run a big organization, they’re doing it very well but they lack the skills required to start a small business. And this is also the reason that many creative, intelligent, resourceful small business owners never take this step to make their business more stable, never take the steps to grow their business and actually enjoy the fruits of starting the business because they’re stuck in the early stages forever because they don’t develop the necessary skills in order to take their business to the second step. 

So we’re going to discuss the two different steps. And we’re going to discuss the core necessary skills to manage, to run and to be the owner of your business in both phases. After a quick break, I’m going to share with you my blood reading golden tips for sales, marketing, HR and investing, I hope we’ll be able to do everything. If not, we’ll start with sales, then we’ll do marketing, if we’ll have time, we’ll do HR and then if we’ll have time we’ll do investing and we’ll spend just as much time as we will have on each and every one of those and also will depend on your questions. And if you want to ask more, or get more examples and stuff like that. So let’s go. 

Run a stressless business

The first decision, in my opinion that we must make is that we will not suffer, we will not keep this business at every cost, we will keep this business only if it will be a stressless business. It’s a decision. It’s deciding that if a business requires me to be stressed, in order for it to work, in order for it to run then the business is not worth it. I’ll tell you a quick story. When I just started this business, the school for NLP.

So I used to teach all the classes myself, I used to teach like six classes a week. Then after I started, I realized that if I ever wanted to be free and everyone had any spare time, I had to get different teachers to teach as well. Then I was very fearful, right as I thought of myself. So many of my students wanted to come here so they could learn from me, personally. And many people ask if I’m personally teaching the courses before they sign up. 

So I was actually afraid that the business isn’t going to make it if I’m going to bring someone else to do it except for me. In the beginning I tried to do it intelligently. I found the most talented NLP teachers I knew at the time that hadn’t already been teaching in other schools or stuff like that. And I brought them into my classrooms. And I let them have like 15 to 45 minutes to talk in front of the classroom I used to teach because I wanted to see the feedback. And each and every one of them it doesn’t even matter how amazing he was or she was, he got really negative feedback. Because they said we wanted you to teach us.

Ao I had the idea, I had the belief that maybe it was because they are used to the way I am teaching and they already have this emotional connection with me. And this is why they can’t even accept teachers that I am 100% sure are amazing. But it was still a scary move. So I thought about quite some time but then I got to this decision

If bringing new teachers will make this business break so be it, let it break. Because I am not willing to be teaching all the time, I’m not willing to be stressed about my time all the time, I’m not willing to be stressed every time like someone in my family needs help, or I’m sick or something and I have to bring a replacement. I’m not willing to live this life of me teaching 30 hours a week while I’ll also have to manage the business and other 20, 30, 40 hours a week. I wasn’t willing to live this life. So I decided that whatever the price will be to this business, I’m not going to pay for it. If it’s going to break, it will break and this is a mindset that helped me make some of the key and most important decisions in the business because the number one thing that helps, that creates stress, we talked about it last week, both of you were here is that stress is another word for fear.

So every time we’re stressed about something in the business isn’t because we’re afraid. And the number one fear people have in their businesses that they’re afraid of negative feedback and they’re afraid that their business will fail something they have spent so much time and effort and energy in creating and starting will fail and realizing that no business can last forever and bad business is worse than having no business is something that can be very liberating in the fact that it can allow you to make better decisions, decisions to create the business you want and work hard sometimes to create the business you want. 

Actually, the first time I hired three teachers, I had 50% drop rates, 50% of the people who started the course asked for a refund. I had some major financial losses at that time. Still, it was fine, because the courses I was personally teaching had enough money coming in to cover it. But it was taking away my profits and not adding to it. So I did everything I could to fix the experience for as many people as I could. But over time, I did not give up, I said I will make it happen. To make a strong decision that we are not going to own and manage a stressful business, we’re simply not going to do it. And we’re going to do whatever it takes to make this business stress less or we’re going to not do it at all. 

Regarding this issue specifically, I believe that some business models, some types of businesses are more prone to stress. And so if you are with me in the decision that you don’t want to have stressful business, there are some fields that maybe you don’t want to get into in the first place.

For example, I wouldn’t have a health care center or something like that. Because then so many things are urgent all the time. If you can think about it, you can find businesses that are in fields where nothing is really bad, urgent, nothing will suddenly fall apart if you won’t deliver your services well or if you won’t answer the phone and stuff like that.

The first business I ever got to six figures of yearly income was an SEO agency, a digital marketing agency. I built it with a partner. And this business was, by definition way more stressful. We targeted small business owners who had cash flow issues because they were small business owners and small business owners in the beginning stages of their business usually have cash flow issues and they were paying us, it was before the time that Facebook advertising and stuff like that was very cheap and very affordable. 

SEO was one of the main ways to promote your website and to promote your business. So they will pay us money and they were trusting us to bring them customers that will sustain their business. Like if we would not bring them new customers, their business is going to be closed. They won’t have money, so I don’t know, pay rent or stuff like that in your business. Because, with very small businesses, the business’s money is the person’s money so they won’t have money to pay bills or stuff like that.

So they were very stressed, every time they had a few days that less people contacted them and stuff like that, they were definitely stressed and sometimes stuff doesn’t go right  and this is something we have to understand. Even if we’ll do our best, even if we’ll do the best we can, stuff doesn’t always go right. And if we want to make our chances to create a healthy stressless business, we might want to, ahead of time, choose a field or area of business, where if things go wrong, nothing terrible actually truly happens. And that’s something that’s very meaningful and will affect the quality of your life as a business owner, by a lot. 

I have had a few business opportunities in the past couple of years that I refused to, just because I knew that in this field, it’s very prone to be stressful. So it’s also a decision to choose to get into a field or an area not just because of the financial upside, not just because this is something I like doing, also thinking out to create it in a way that it’s less prone to stress and it’s stuff goes wrong, no one dies, no one’s enabled to pay his bills, no one’s get heart attack or something. So it’s a very important part of the decision. It’s like, when you’re going to dictate your quality of your life in your marriage then it’s very important how you manage your relationship. But it’s also very important to pick the right person, this is the way I see it. 

So the first key distinction we’re going to discuss today, after we decided that we’re going to run a stressless business, we are going to run a business, that’s not going to be prone to stress and it is going to be prone for stress, we will let it die and we’re not going to let [inaudible 17:15] us into a trap, so many business owners fall into.

Business development

So the first key distinction we have to get in line is that businesses and business owners have different levels and in different levels of business, the business requires different types of actions to actually develop itself. So many times we see it when experienced business owners or experienced business people are trying to give advice to people who just started their business and their advice is, I can’t have a better word, but it’s terrible. It’s terribly bad. 

When I was 22, I think I was just going on my second business just after we closed the marketing agency. And I was, maybe it was 23, I was dating someone that her father was a big CEO of a big company. And I know there were some ego issues there or something like that. And he really liked saying and showing off how much of a bigger person he was than me. And it was a great person. He was very kind, very nice and I am very thankful for him. But he had this minor issue.

So he always used to tell me how amazing it feels to be a CEO of a big company and how I should one day try it. Like so far he was refusing to. And when I was trying to ask him, several times, how would he describe a good CEO? What does he believe a good CEO has to do to make sure his business is running in a good manner that it’s actually successful? He gave me one very powerful answer that got me really confused. And his answer was that a good CEO needs to say yes to one good major decision in a year and 100 times he has to say no for other good decisions a year as well. 

And the way I was looking at it from a very, very young, very, very low level, in terms of business development. I’m very happy I was wise enough to understand, it will instantly kill myself business because in a very small business, in a very young business, in the business that is in a very low level of development, flexibility and creativity are a necessity, you have to constantly try to reinvent yourself until you find something that really works, you can’t go with something just because you decided it for an entire year because you’ll starve to death. So obviously, his [inaudible 20:27] wasn’t bad.

But it was incredibly bad for me. It was right for businesses that were in different levels, in different phases, then the phase, the level that my business was on, to begin with. And this is why we have to understand at what level, in what phase of business we actually are in and adjust our behaviors and adjust our strategies to match where we are because great business decisions under bad timing become terrible business decisions. So that would be very important. 

So I take business development and I have the word for it, undistinctive six different levels of business development. But today, we’re not going to go over all the six but we’re going to go over two main phases like the three first level and the three [inaudible 21:53] levels. Because every phase, every bigger phase has a lot in common. So most  small business owners will stay stuck on the first phase forever. This is something we have to understand.

And this is why so many businesses and so many small business owners are struggling to to get business or struggling to keep their business or struggling to maintain their business. They are in extreme stress, they are working very hard and they’re not making a lot of money. Because those are all characteristics of the first phase of business, not necessarily the stress part. But there are a lot of work parts that are, in fact, I think, unavoidable parts of the first phase. 

Long term thinking

So the second phase has different skills as we already covered. And I want us to go over the main skills that are required to run and manage second phase business, and then we’re going to go over the skills necessary to have first phase business and we’ll go in depth more about the first face because I assume it’s more relevant for most people. So the skills I’m actually going to go over now are very important skills, powerful skills, skills, you should definitely master, you should definitely have.

But if you’re just starting your business, if your business is not yet stable, if your business is not yet developed, then I would [inaudible 23:49] develop these skills to a later phase. And I would not be too reliant on those skills if I already have them to make me successful in my business. And I have this list of skills for most of you at least,  that have this list of skills as nice to have skills that I’m not going to focus on for the short term period. So the first one is long term thinking. Some people are natural, long term thinkers. They’re trying to think about what’s going to happen in 5, 10, 15, 20 years and basically in life, I believe it’s a good skill. It’s an important skill because this is the way we can plan and advance  toward major goals. 

But specifically when running a very young business, trying to think in detail to the long term makes absolutely no sense. Because usually, you don’t have enough knowledge, enough data about how everything is going to work out. So it’s simply a matter of spending way too much time, way too much effort instead of doing other things that are actually necessary and also the experience, the emotional experience of planning something and then abandoning this plan and watching this plan  like go south way is not working is just one more failure that I think business owners just shouldn’t face.

I think that in the beginning, worrying and taking care of the emotional sides of the business owner is incredibly important. I think it’s even more important than some of those skills and long term thinking is simply irrelevant, I would simply. The one key long term thinking you should probably have is the kind of business you want to have in the idea, like, I’m going to have stressless business. So that’s a long term thought, I’m going to have a high income business, I’m going to have something in which I’m going to help a lot of people. So this kind of long term thinking, very chunk up, very general speaking is amazing. It’s important, it’s motivating, but not trying to actually plan for the long term. 

Ability to hire leaders

The second skill is the ability to hire leaders and to train leaders and to work with leaders. In this specific area, I think many other business owners would disagree, I would say they are wrong and this is why they are still very small business owners themselves that many people are trying to find, people to cooperate with, people to build partnerships with as they’re starting their first business and I think it’s a big mistake. Not because it’s generally a bad idea, if you have someone and you want to start a business with him and you’re going to partner with him, to start with because you have an amazing relationship and your goals are aligned, then it’s not a terrible idea. Sometimes it’s a good idea, sometimes it’s not such a good idea, depending on the relationship.

But looking out to find people to partner with is generally speaking an awful idea. And looking for people to cooperate with and to have projects with is generally speaking a bad idea. Because generally speaking, there are other things that are way more important, 99% of those corporations are actually ending up to be entirely fruitless and  they end up to have nothing. 

I’ve heard a story about a friend of a friend of mine. So the friend of mine told me about it, his friend was a CEO of a developing startup company and they were doing really well and they were very known in their community. So he was getting tons of emails about people asking him to come for meetings or sit on a cup of coffee or to have a quick conversation to check out if there’s some sort of corporation they can do, to get something that’s in a project they can do together.

And in the beginning, he was doing it and then he found out that it’s spending a lot of his time. So he decided to try a new approach and he simply had an automated email saying something like, “Hey, thank you for your email. I would be very happy to meet with you and to make sure that we’re doing something that’s wonderful together and your idea sounds amazing. But we have  a new company policy. Before the meeting, all you have to do is send 1000 US dollars to this bank account as a deposit. Just make sure that you’re serious and if the project will be successful and it will actually make money. So the first $2,000 will be yours and then we’ll split it as you wish for the deposit.” What he told me that over three years, he got no money into this bank account at all. 

So that shows you the level of seriousness of most people when they’re starting new projects or when they’re looking for people. Usually it’s just the main need that is driving people to try to create a corporation is a need to feel more certain. They’re not sure of themselves. They’re afraid to move on in their business and so they want someone to hold their hand. And usually this is exactly not the type of person you want to have as your partner when you begin a business, you want to have someone with a lot of confidence, that is moving fast and has the ability to move things forward.

This is, I think, the number one, most important attribute if you are looking for a partner in business to begin with. Later on, it’s very important to learn to find leaders and to hire them and to train them. But in the beginning, you will simply, most of the time won’t be able to afford paying those people. So looking for amazing people is not the most important thing to do. You should look for amazing people but for amazing people, not necessarily leaders.

Financial expertise

Financial expertise. That’s important. But it’s not important when you’re just starting your business. When you’re just starting your business, your business plan, your financial plan should be incredibly simple. You should provide a product that should be profitable. And I’ll tell you something, if you’re just starting your business and you believe because you made a financial mistake and you believe that your products are profitable but it isn’t.

Usually, general speaking, it’s not the end of the world, if you’re able to sell something and to create a business around something that’s not very profitable, it’s marginally not profitable because you actually basically checked it, it sounds okay, but it isn’t. Usually it’s easily fixable. Usually you can bump up the price just a little bit, usually you can cut some costs just a little bit and make sure it is profitable. It’s not the most important thing to do when you’re just running a business. So financial expertise is not needed when you’re starting a business. But it’s very important later on. 

Thinking about clever and intelligent business strategy, long term, obviously, optimization. So many people in today’s world are so fixated upon optimization, making sure every single process is very optimized and every single detail of the marketing funnel is optimized and those things are incredibly important in the long term, they’re incredibly important to businesses. They’re incredibly non important when you’re just starting out.

Marketing of your business is important

When I was just starting out most of my businesses and I’m good at marketing, I wouldn’t spend too much time on optimizing my campaigns I usually had, therefore, relatively high marketing costs, like not relatively, to everyone relative to what I was able to achieve. But simply, I refuse to spend too much time and optimize the 2%, the 3%, the 5% of this marketing cost that I can save because this is not a lot of money when you’re just starting a business and you should be better off focusing on other things that are way more important. 

So it’s not like marketing is not important, it is like optimizing marketing is not important or optimizing the sales process, so many people when they’re just starting the business, they’re like, for example, doing the sales calls themselves and they’re having a specific standard and then trying to hire someone like their first ever employed, it’s going to do some sales and they’re working their butts off to try and make them sell just as if they were doing it. And in my opinion, it’s a huge mistake.

If someone can sell just like 50% of what you’re doing but it’s still profitable and you can continue to advance and you can continue to go on. You shouldn’t spend too much time on optimization. Of course you can like not do it enough. But then I wouldn’t call it like optimization. I’m calling it like fixing breakdowns, you should be fixing breakdowns, you shouldn’t try to optimize. If  you’re just starting a business and someone is telling you, I have an idea of how you can do X better. 

My best tip for you is…. I used to have a Google Drive document that was called the Great Idea document and whenever someone, be an employee or someone who was a client or family member said I have so many ideas that you can improve your business I would send him this document and I would tell him to write me  everything down. So I won’t forget it and I would never look at it. Not because those ideas are not good, not because there are not genuine ways to improve your business. But because this is not very important, it is not the most important thing, the most important things are the things that we’re going to discuss in the next slide. 

Organizational skills, in the beginning, so many people are asking themselves so many questions, what’s the right way to do it? should I hire someone to do this? Or should I hire someone to do that? Or should I have this outsourced? Should I have this thing in house? So many questions that are, again, could be important that in the end of the day, those questions and those skills and those expertise are the ones that are going to make a huge difference in your business.

And in my situation today, I was able to not change anything in my business and double my profits, just with very little things in financial, in training better leaders and in a bit of organization optimizations, on very little things. Because if I’m getting 2% here and 1% there and 3% there, I’m already 7% more in profit and that’s amazing, because it’s a lot of money. If you can optimize something by 3% and your total income is like 3000 a month, then 3% of the 3000 a month, this is the amount of time that is worth to invest in it. When it becomes bigger, when it becomes six figures, seven figures, then every single person becomes more worthwhile to work with. So that’s something to consider. 

Investing, basic ideas of investing are actually important for a very small business owner or business owner that just started and this is why we are going to talk a little bit about investing today. But in the more general sense and expertise in investing is something that’s simply not relevant. I believe that for most businesses today, you can start with no capital, close to no capital or very little money. The major thing you need to do is to invest your time, your effort, your energy. This is something that requires skill and expertise and it’s not the expertise in investing.

Mergers and acquisitions. We talked about that in a little bit and data analysis. Today, just like with optimizing, data analysis is like such a big trend. If you’re marketing online, then you can have all sorts of amazing software that can record your customers and what they’re doing in the landing page and will have crazy heat maps and where they’re pressing and like to do all sorts of AV testing, that’s great.

For small business, you can simply leave it aside. In my opinion, the number one, most important thing for a business owner in early stages of development, like a phase one business is being able to say no to all of this. Because some of you really like some of this stuff. Some of you are optimization geeks, some of your financial geeks, you like this stuff. So you tend to go too much into it. Simply saying no to this stuff. 

I had a client a few weeks ago and they were like, just getting into a very, very strong momentum in their business. And  they were telling me they had no time and they were very stressed. And they had no time to do some very, very important marketing related stuff that in my opinion were the most important things to do for them at this time. So I asked them, “What are they doing?” And they told me, they are spending a lot of time with their accountant about  finding [inaudible 39:30] or stuff like that. So I was telling them you have a permission for me to be [inaudible 39:36]. That’s a bad idea to [inaudible 39:40] some of it because then some of it you won’t get tax refund for. Maybe your accountant will be annoyed that you will and won’t file your taxes on time, you will have to pay a fine.

Businesses who pay some fines and businesses who are not getting tax refunds for everything may still survive if they’re doing the right things. And it’s not like a long term strategy to avoid managing tax and because other people, obviously avoiding meetings with their accountant, avoid handling those things and I’m not talking about this, of course, you should do it. But if for the short term, you should put something aside, then you can put all of those aside in the beginning to do the more important thing.

Planning about services, products and target audience

Let’s go over the necessary skills for phase one businesses. So the first three are basics. Basic planning like what’s my product? What’s my service? Whom are we going to sell it to? How am I going to sell it? How am I going to provide it? Very, very, very basic. How many or how much of my product or service can I sell? Very, very simple. This basic plan shouldn’t take you like, more than a few. I don’t know. 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour to make. That’s it. I also have a video about how to create a business plan if you want I’ll send you the link. Basic finances, basic finances go like this. I’ll teach you basic finances. Basic business finances, I don’t have a marker. So basic business finance, go like this, revenues or income.

This is the price of your service or your product, times the amount of times they’re going to sell this product or service. This is called gross revenues or income. So this is the price times amount. How much do you sell? So we should plan for, you should ask yourself, How much do I believe I can sell in a given month, in a given quarter, in a given year. Probably should start with a month. 

Then we have direct expenses, which are expenses that every single time you’re going to sell this product you have to pay. For example, if you have a pizza place, then you have the price of the pizza times the amount of slices or pizzas you’re going to sell. Then the direct expenses will be stuff like the materials, like the cheese, the tomato sauce, the olives, everything. Every single time you sell a pizza, you have to have the cost of the materials. If you’re selling products, then you have the cost of buying the product. If  I’m selling cell phones, then I have the cost of buying a cell phone. Then I have the sales and marketing cost. In today’s world, in the online marketing world, I believe it should be narrow and expensive.

Some businesses for example, if you actually have pizza, then maybe you’re like simply publishing and you have no idea what’s going on and then it’s not necessarily a direct expense. But I believe that for most small business owners today  and most people were actually watching this video online or for you, then you will do online marketing and in online marketing, you can actually very simply calculate how much it cost to bring one paying customer. 

So it’s very easy, sort of sales and marketing cost. So for example, if Facebook takes up a certain amount of money to give me one lead and I’m closing 20% and I’m taking this price times five and this is the price of the sales and marketing. If I have someone who is working for me in a sales position, then I also believe it’s the right way to do it. I like paying the minimum amount of money for simply working and everything else in commissions. So commissions for the salesperson can also be a direct expense. If he sells more than I’m paying him more, if he sells less than I’m paying him less and so it’s a direct expense for every single product I’m selling. So we have this and other direct, maybe we have like packaging, shiping. We’re starting with the shipping like that. So all of that stuff.

Everything that’s every single time of selling the product, I have to pay, it’s a direct expense. So this number should be positive. This [inaudible 45:54] should be positive. In a very small business, this is basically almost everything you got. 

When your business is growing, then you have more expenses, that are monthly expenses, for example, rent. If you’re paying for website hosting. If you’re paying for a lawyer or an accountant, whatever you’re doing that has to be paid, like payroll for employees that are not necessarily salespeople. If you’re paying for a marketing agency, some fixed fee so everything else should be here. And sometimes, usually, business owners, when they’re just starting out, are not too good at calculating this. And they have mistakes here.

And I would say, when you’re just starting out, it’s fine. If you’re just starting out, usually if this is positive, even if this is not calculated exactly the same way, when your business will grow and your sales will go up, you can be profitable anyway. And in the beginning, you’ll say to yourself, like I [inaudible 47:19], where the money is going, I should have made more money. This is very common, almost everybody has this problem. But you will still have enough money to survive and to keep on growing your business, then when your business is growing, you go more in depth, you can fix this, the problems here later, so only the basic finances are very important when you’re just beginning then. 

How to sell your products?

The number one most important skill for every single person who thinks about starting a business is sales. Being able to close the deal, to make a person pay for something,  we are going to have a bigger discussion about how to do it and some tips to be a better salesperson and how to create sales without generating stress. Because many people are trying so hard to make the sale that they’re creating bad deals with customers that will make them even more stressful.

So we want to avoid that and I’ll teach you how to do it. But sales is by far the most important skill for a salesperson. Most people believe that when they’re starting a business, they should start by marketing and only then start with sales. I believe this is not a good idea, I believe that you should first start with selling the product. If no one wants to buy it from you, when they know you, when they see you face to face or when you’re calling them on the phone, it will be incredibly hard to persuade them to buy using an online banner and online ad or some Amazon post sign or something.

So you first have to understand how you sell the product, this is the first test for your business that you can actually sell the product. And this is the most important skill. And this is also the thing that will help you get the money in the beginning to reinvest in your business. This is the number one most important skill. 

Marketing of the products

The second most important skill is marketing,, making sure to be able to get to a bigger scale, to get more people, to involve more people, to spread the message to the right people in the right way. So that you can get sales. This is also most important, the second most important thing and then HR. Being able to hire, so many businesses  are getting stuck because they can’t seem to hire the right people or can’t seem to put the right people in the right positions when they’re just starting.

Because when a business is just starting, when a business is very small, usually we have the tendency to give the person, one of two tendencies, or to give the person way too many things to do that are not related to each other and expect him to be just as skilled and just as amazing as we were at doing it. And it will always never work. The main question I always ask people in this position is, would you be as amazing as you are, do this job for this pay when you don’t own the business? And they would always say, no. Not for long, at least. So find the right people for the right job and we’ll talk about it later. 

This is very important. And it’s important to do it early on. Because the longer you train yourself to be the only one that’s working in your business, the more you create dependencies on yourself in your business. For most business owners, for most businesses today, a salesperson would be the first hire. Other businesses, someone who does administrative work will be the first hire but one of those two people should come on very, very, very early. How early? When you know you’re making sales and when you’re investing money or time or effort in marketing, you’re getting more sales. This way you can depend on if you leave some of the work that you’re doing to another person who does more marketing, more sales yourself, you’ll get more money. Or if you spend more money you will be able to give someone else to do more sales. 

The first hire is usually not net profitable. Usually, when you do everything by herself, you get more net profits than after you hire one person. But this is the gate to get to a bigger organization that will give you way more money and be way more profitable and manage itself, when you’re sick when you are out of the country or whatever you’re doing, another project. So it’s important. Then what we need is a ton of heart, a strong spirit, crazy persistence and a sip of muscle. Because let’s face it, it’s difficult, it’s hard, you have to do a lot of things that most people simply are not doing. Most businesses fail before they start, most people consider leaving their jobs and they never will because it’s too scary. They don’t know what they’re doing.

Most people when they are leaving their jobs or when they’re trying to start a new business, they bump into some hard things, they will have some bad criticism, they’ll face something and they’ll quit right away. This is like 99%. When the statistics say that like 50 to 60% of all businesses closed within one year. That’s not the right statistic. This is the statistic of businesses that actually went to the government, opened an official business and then closed it. So many people started a business by themselves and didn’t even bother to go to the authorities to do anything because they knew nothing was going to get out of it. So I believe like 99% of businesses closed in the first year because most people simply don’t do anything to even start a business and then half of them fail when trying. So all of this is like the psychological part. It’s very, very, very important. 

Hey, it’s Gal Tzhayek. Thank you for watching this video. If you liked it, please press the thumbs up button. And you can also subscribe to the channel. Make sure you get notified each and every time a new video is uploaded. I’d like to hear your questions and review in the comment section below. And I’ll see you in one of those new videos.