There are explanations and there are excuses. Although some small business owners often use them interchangeably, they have very different meanings.

When you consciously understand the difference, it can transform your business, just as it transformed my own business. I explain how in a moment.

First, here’s a very simple look at the difference between explanations and excuses.

• Explanations explain why or offer reasons.
• Excuses deny responsibility.

Here are a couple of common examples.

Explanations and excuses

The small business owner who says there aren’t enough hours in the day, for them to correct a business problem, is not giving an explanation. They’re making an excuse. They have enough time. They get the same 24 hours every day as the most successful people in their industry. By believing that they don’t have enough time, they’re excusing themselves from making the improvements required, for their business to operate effectively. At least until they discover a time machine.

Maybe the most common type of excuse in business, is the famous chicken and egg scenario. This excuse is used when someone wants to avoid making a decision. A decision where there’s risk involved.

For example, ‘I can’t hire my first employee until I’m making enough money, but I’ll never make enough money until I hire someone’.

Because they unconsciously want to avoid making a decision, they choose to believe that there is no way out. This approach to decision making is toxic, because we place a very low ceiling on our potential, if we dodge the major decisions. All of which come with an element of risk. That’s why you have never, and will never, hear a successful business owner described as a poor decision maker.

Excuses and explanations feel similar

I’ve found that business owners don’t intentionally make excuses. They almost always believe they’re giving an explanation. This was certainly how it was for me! I used to believe that my excuses (I had lots) were actually reasonable explanations. It was only after I learned the difference between excuses and explanations, that I was able to correct things. As a direct result, I was then free to start making better decisions.

Take some time to look at explanations you have made (to yourself or others) regarding your business. Look closely for explanations, which could be excuses in disguise. This includes the chicken and egg / time machine kind of examples I gave earlier.

By making yourself consciously aware of the difference between explanations and excuses, you’ll find it easier to make better decisions. It certainly worked wonders for me and my business.

More importantly, I hope it does the same for you and your business, my friend.

There’s a powerful little thought experiment I often use, to help business owners make smart decisions in reasonable time. I thought you may find it useful, so here it is.

I’d like you to use your imagination for a few minutes and consider the following.

• Picture a business, which offers a unique blend of services, rather than the same range of services as it’s competitors.
• Picture a business, which dedicates time every week, to the improvement of at least one key area of their operation.
• Picture a business, which has a dedicated customer retention program, so it seldom loses a client or customer.
• Picture a business, which uses professional, highly effective marketing strategies, so it attracts the best clients or customers.

Here’s the kicker: Now, imagine what would happen if that business moved into your area, targeting your clients and your future clients.

Do it first

Before something like that happens to you, I have a suggestion. Do it first! Take action on every item on that list and watch your business grow like never before.

Most business owners wait until their business is under a sudden, unexpected threat, before they seriously improve their game. As a direct result, their business achieves a tiny fraction of its true potential. All because they waited for something negative to happen, before they took action. That’s the price you pay for being reactive rather than proactive.

• Sometimes a super smart, agile competitor comes to town and takes a chunk of their market share.
• Other times, a business owner will lose a major client and see their revenues suddenly drop dramatically.

In either case, the business owner is forced to improve as a reaction to a problem. They no longer control the situation. They no longer have control of the time line. They’re forced into defensive mode. It’s about surviving.

In short: Don’t wait for that threat to arrive. And it surely will, because it always does. Instead, do it first. Be the threat.

Choose to become the proactive, uniquely valuable, constantly improving, professional threat to your marketplace.

It’s a smart strategy in any economy. But today, with so many providers hunkering down and waiting for things to improve, the door is wide open to you. For now.

A lot of service providers offer free initial consultations as a way to attract new clients. However, it’s one of the most dangerous things they can do.

Here are just 3 of the major problems caused by free consultations.

1. Free consultations make you look desperate

By giving your time away for free, you give the impression that you’re sat in a quiet office, with no clients. And nothing to do.

You’re literally (not figuratively) placing zero value on your time. That’s a very negative image to create in the mind of your prospective clients.

It paints all the wrong pictures. It damages your reputation, because looking desperate isn’t a good look! As such, it totally devalues your services. It also acts as a warning sign to genuine prospective clients, who will not hire what looks like a failing service provider.

It’s a toxic soup. Pure poison.

2. Free consultations attract time wasters like a magnet

Whilst high quality prospective clients are put off by needy looking service providers, free consultations are super-attractive to freebie hunters. These never-to-be clients flock to them.

Freebie hunters are time wasters who refuse to pay for professional help. Instead, they sign up for everything they can get for free, then try and do it themselves.

It looks something like this:

• The freebie hunter searches the internet for service providers who offer free consultations.
• They then contact the provider and request a free consultation, pretending to be a prospective client.
• They know the service provider will try and impress them with their knowledge.
• So, they ask for advice on their specific problems.

Don’t become a target for freebie hunters. Just don’t. Seriously.

3. Free consultations trap you in a dangerous cycle

Giving your time away for free to strangers can’t solve your marketing problems. It will simply guarantee that you stay stuck. That’s because it locks you inside a negative cycle.

The cycle looks something like this:

1. You need more, paying clients.
2. So, you offer free initial consultations, placing zero value on your time.
3. This makes you look needy (at best).
4. Any genuine prospective clients who see this are presented with a desperate looking image, which damages your reputation.
5. This obviously repels the exact clients you want (and need) to attract.
6. And this is on top of whatever your previous marketing problem was, which led you to giving your time away.
7. You remain stuck.
8. So, it’s back to step 1 again.

Thankfully, there are proven ways to make your business succeed. Strategies that attract the right clients or customers. Strategies that are perfect for you and what you want to achieve. This is where you need to focus. Anything else is unsustainable, totally avoidable and less than you deserve.

Every single one of your prospective clients or customers has one thing in common. Can you guess what it is? You probably won’t be expecting my answer.

Here it is:

They can all, easily afford your products or services! All of them. Every. Single. One.

Here’s what really stops people buying from you.

1. You’re attracting enquiries from the wrong people.
2. You haven’t given them a powerful enough reason to buy from you or hire you.
3. They don’t trust you enough, so they don’t believe your message.

Let’s look at these 3 challenges in a little more detail. Plus, how to overcome them and make massively more sales.

Let’s go!

1. You’re attracting enquiries from the wrong people

No matter how amazing your products are. No matter how outstanding your services are. You’ll never achieve the results you want, if you’re talking to the wrong people.

Allow me to explain.

Let’s say you provide a premium quality service, which rightly has a premium price tag. If so, you’re wasting your time marketing to the bargain hunters crowd.

Yes, very occasionally you may be able to change someone’s world view. However, you’re far more likely to sell your premium services, if you market to those who already value premium service.

The key phrase here is: Market to the dissatisfied, NOT the disinterested.

In other words, using the above example you’d market your premium service to those who are unhappy with their current situation… and who value a premium service.

It’s never (ever) about the money. It’s always true that your prospective customers can afford your products or services.

And here’s why.

If someone genuinely can’t afford what you offer, they were never a prospective customer in the first place! Think about it. For someone to be a prospective customer, they need to have the ability to pay you.

So, identify who your ideal prospective customer is. Then, make that select group of great people the sole focus of all your marketing. The alternative is to do what most failing business owners do, and try to be all things to all people. That approach can’t work. It will drive you nuts and lose you a fortune.

2. You haven’t given them a powerful enough reason to take action

This one is huge. No. It’s bigger than that!

We need to start here by looking at motivation. The word motivation comes from a fusion of the words: motive and action.

When the motive (or reason) is powerful enough, we take action. By contrast, most small business marketing is weak. It’s generic. It’s predictable. It’s needy. And as you’d expect, it lacks the motivational power that’s essential, to inspire people to make purchasing decisions.

So, why do so many businesses rely on weak marketing that fails to generate the results they need? Having transformed the marketing results of business owners since 1995, here’s what I’ve found. And it’s something I see examples of pretty-much every working day of my life.

It’s the business owner’s attitude to marketing. They’ll happily pay an expert to style their hair, but they’ll willingly risk their financial future with lousy, DIY marketing.

They honestly believe that dabbling with their future is safer, than hiring an expert to do things correctly. They tend not to admit it publicly, because in many cases they don’t admit it to themselves. In conversation, you find that this happens when the business owner still operates and makes decisions, from an employee mindset. They see risk in all the wrong places. Unaware that the riskiest thing a business owner can do, is avoid expert help when it’s clearly needed.

Tip: Read this – I just received a very angry email. And I have to share it with you.

However, this is great news if you want your business to thrive.

Really, Jim? Why?

I’m glad you asked!

It’s because you can massively outperform all (or the vast majority) of your competitors, simply by being professional enough to invest in expert help. It’s the easiest win in business. And your competitors haven’t figured it out (yet).

3. They don’t trust you, so they don’t believe your message

Here’s the thing: For your marketing messages to work, people need to believe them. They need to trust you enough, to accept that what you’re telling them is true.

Sadly, many sales are lost this way, even though the marketing message is completely true and honest. The provider really is as good as they say. Maybe even better then they say in their marketing.

So, why does this happen… and more importantly my friend, what can you do about it?

Trust is lost when there’s a disconnect between.

• What the marketing message says.
• And how the prospective client feels.

Here are just 2 very common examples, to explain the point.

• Promising an expert service, yet charging average fees. Your prospective clients have been told since they were kids, that when something sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. So they don’t believe it. ‘High quality’ and ‘cheap fees’ are opposite ends of the spectrum. Putting them together creates massive doubt in what you’re saying.
• Promising a professional service, yet having an amateur image. It’s like a restaurant serving a delicious meal, but on a dirty plate! Low quality logos, DIY branding, poorly designed websites, amateur marketing copy etc, totally destroy trust. And it does so literally (not figuratively) in seconds. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. You lost the sale or client enquiry needlessly. And you won’t even know.

If you notice anything that could cause a stranger to get a negative impression of your business, fix it. And fix it today. It’s that important!

Why?

Because while it’s broken it’s losing you money and opportunities. While it’s broken, the lifeblood of your business is broken. And to ignore it is like ignoring black smoke bellowing from the back of your car, hoping the car will ‘just get better’. When in reality that car will just grind to a halt.

Summing up

Those 3 examples of why people don’t buy from you are easy wins. They’re easy, because with the correct approach, they can easily and quickly be overcome, allowing you to blow the lid off your potential.

What you mustn’t do, is carry on as you are and expect things to ‘just improve’. You’d think that goes without saying, right? Yet time and again, we see small businesses that still face ongoing struggles, years and years after they started.

Here’s just one example, from an email I received.

The guy who wrote to me is in his late 60’s. He’s worked hard all his life. He told me that he’d never made any “real money” and that he kept waiting for things to improve. With some expert help, he could have quit working decades ago and been very comfortable now. However, he explained that he still needs to work in order to pay the bills. It’s heartbreaking, because it’s completely avoidable.

Moving forward

As Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In business we simply say, “more of the same leads to more of the same”.

If your business is on the right track to get you where we want to be, more of the same is exactly what you need. If you’re frustrated with your progress and want something better, then you need to improve things. And those 3 areas are a pretty good place to start.