Early in my career, I noticed I could always tell when I was making real progress. How? I’d find myself drinking a lot of cold coffee!

Don’t laugh. You probably do something similar. Maybe with tea. Either way it looks like this.

• You make a coffee and bring it to your desk.
• Then, because you’re so engaged with what you’re doing, you lose track of time.
• You grab your coffee and start to drink it, immediately noticing it’s no longer hot.
• So, you guzzle it down quickly and make another.
• If this happens again, you’re officially on a cold coffee productivity streak.

Your progress during these cold coffee streaks is off the charts.

Hot coffee work

Conversely, you can’t build a successful business when you’re doing hot coffee work. Hot coffee work doesn’t capture your imagination. It’s work that looks productive but isn’t. It’s work that drags on. It’s work that keeps you busy but ceases to inspire you. And importantly, it’s work that doesn’t stretch you. Remember, you can’t grow without stretching.

That’s why cold coffee work is essential!

How to know when you’re on the right track

You’ll notice that other people get excited when you tell them your plans. They’ll lean forward to listen to you. In many cases, they will want to get involved.

And you’ll find yourself with the same motivation, energy, optimism and passion that you had back when you started your business.

I recently shared some ideas about how to prepare when a major breakthrough comes your way. If you missed it, you can read it here: Seize the moment: Be prepared.

Today, I’m going to give you some proven ideas, to help you attract that major breakthrough you need.

It starts with 4 examples, based on breakthrough opportunities that small business owners often ask me about.

• Maybe you’d love an invitation to appear on the biggest TV show, program or podcast in your industry.
• It could be you want the endorsement of the person best-known and most respected by your prospective clients or customers.
• Perhaps you’d love to receive a new marketing strategy that increases your client base or customer base, by a thousand percent.
• And it might be that an introduction to an investor, who has the courage and finances to back you, is exactly what you want right now.

In fact, it could be any type of breakthrough that would lead to a life-changing improvement.

If you want to achieve that level of success, there are 2 business assets you need to develop.

1. Door building.
2. Success readiness.

Let me explain why those assets need your urgent attention, if you want something amazingly transformative to happen.

1. Door building

Breakthroughs don’t magically happen.

In order to achieve a massive breakthrough, you need to build yourself a door. A door, which your breakthrough opportunity can knock on.

Let’s take a look at what this means, based on those examples above.

• Are you ready to do what’s required to attract the attention, and earn the interest, of the producers of those TV shows, programs or podcasts?
• Are you ready to do what’s required to get yourself in front of the best known, most respected person in your industry. And when you have, are you ready to do what’s required, to earn their trust?
• Are you ready to do what’s required, to have a marketing strategy that’s powerful enough to drive a thousand percent increase in clients or customers?
• Are you ready to do what’s required to create a product or service that’s so valuable, wealthy investors will want to invest? And then, are you ready to do the work required to capture their attention?

So, that’s the door building preparation you need.

Now it’s time for success readiness.

2. Success readiness

This second step relates to the readiness, which turns the breakthrough opportunity into massive breakthrough results.

• So, you get the invitation to appear on that prime time TV show, program or podcast. But are you ready to get the media training required in advance, so you give a great account of yourself?
• You got the endorsement of the best-known and most respected person in your industry. But are you ready to put plans in place, in advance, so you can maximize the potential of this superpower endorsement?
• You just witnessed a one thousand percent increase in clients. But are you ready to build a scalable process, in advance, to handle or onboard that thousand percent client increase?
• You now have access to all the capital your business needs, thanks to that investor. But are you ready to study, in advance, how to grow a business with that spectacular level of funding?

What’s the lesson here?

• Breakthrough opportunities come to those who carefully plan for their opportunity in advance.
• Breakthrough success comes to those who are fully prepared, when their opportunity arrives.

It’s important to know that the breakthrough you’re wishing for, need not be a wish. It’s something you can make happen, with basic planning and preparation. I’ve done this countless times for my clients and for my own business.

You can do it, too.

Better still, after you make it happen just once, you’ll be able to repeat the process, and repeat the results.

I have a beautifully simple, yet powerful marketing tip to share with you today. It’s all about how you can spectacularly increase your sales, by making some tiny improvements.

Let’s go!

Though it was years ago, I vividly recall speaking with the owner of an office supplies company. I’m going to call him John. He was introduced to me after a talk I gave and said he had something he’d like to share with me.

He explained that for years, he’d been frantically trying to work out why his biggest competitor was doing so well. That’s because on the surface, they seemed very similar to John’s business. And yet they’d grown 5 times bigger than John’s business, serving the same marketplace.

Then he discovered their secret!

John hired a former employee of his successful competitor. He quickly discovered the root of their success. It wasn’t any one thing or tactic that made that competing business so successful. Instead, it was the cumulation of lots of little things. These little things compounded, just like compound interest. It resulted in an outstanding difference, which their customers adored and their prospects were attracted to.

It was also undetectable to the competition, including John.

John had been looking for a mountain and totally missed the many molehills, which made all the difference. With a large number of relatively small improvements, John was able to significantly increase his revenues and profits.

In short, if you create enough molehills, you end up with a mountain. By looking for small improvements to the way you look after your existing customers, and the way you attract new customers, you can achieve spectacular sales results.

The right time, and the perfect time, are not the same time.

But many small business owners are totally unaware of it.

And it screws up everything.

The right time

The right time to take action on improving your business is the moment you know there’s a problem. It’s an easy to identify moment. And it makes zero sense to allow a problem to persist; it only gets bigger, and costs you more in time and money to fix.

This means the right time is always, always, blindingly obvious.

However, even really smart business owners totally miss it.

Why?

Because they’re not actually looking for the right time. No. They’re looking for, and waiting for, the perfect time.

The perfect time is an expensive illusion

It’s an illusion, because it exists in an impossible to identify moment.

Think about it.

• If things are going great for your business, they might get even better. Now is not the perfect time.
• If things are ‘okay’ or even if things suck, then maybe they’ll pick-up. Now is not the perfect time.

So, when is the perfect time to improve your business?

You missed it. Because we can only ever know the perfect time, after it has passed. We identify it on reflection. It’s rear view mirror stuff.

That’s why the most successful businesspeople focus on the right time. It’s clear. It’s existential. We experience it. It’s in front of us.

In short, if you have an ongoing business problem, the right time to do something about it has passed. The next best time to do something about it is right now.

It has never been easier for you to research your competitors than it is today. In minutes, you can tell if someone is serious competition to your business or simply a dabbler.

For example.

• You can visit their website and tell instantly if it looks professional and up-to-date or not.
• Their site will also show you the range of services they offer and the guarantees they provide.
• In some cases, you can see what they charge and whether they offer payment terms, etc.
• You can also check their social media footprint and see if they are using it professionally and how large their social networks are.

Over the years I’ve worked with thousands of business owners. One of the things I see over and over again, is a tendency to underestimate the service offered by their competitors. This is a potentially fatal mistake.

Here are 2 of the main reasons why this happens.

1. Hard work and dedication

They work so hard on their own businesses and care so passionately about their own clients, that they can’t imagine their competitors being equally committed. In reality, the vast majority of business owners work their tail off and try extremely hard to keep their clients happy.

We need to avoid underestimating our competitors at all costs. It’s a mindset that can cause us to ease off the gas. To coast. And in doing so, we make it way too easy for our hard-working, professional competitors to eat our lunch!

2. Biased reporting

There are a lot of people out there, who will tell us what they think we want to hear. Others will tell us what they want us to believe. In either case, their reporting is not telling it like it is.

Here are a few examples.

• If you attract a new client, who was fired by one of your competitors for being impossible to work with, that new client will seldom tell you. Instead, they’ll often say they left because the service was lousy or another fake reason.
• Similarly, when you hire people who previously worked for one of your competitors, they’ll often trash-talk about them.
• Many business owners use the same suppliers as some of their competitors. If you ask a supplier how your competition are doing, you’ll often get negative reports. Don’t take too much notice. Remember, those who are unprofessional enough to share (or fabricate) news about their customers with you, are unprofessional enough to give fake feedback.

It’s worth taking feedback like the above with a large pinch of salt.

In short

If you’re going to assume anything about your competitors, assume they are hard-working professionals who are targeting your clients. That will stop any chance of complacency from creeping in.

Have you ever noticed how the major fast food restaurants seem to cluster in certain parts of your town or city? It happens for the same reason that theatres cluster on Broadway, New York, and the same reason that trading and financial services cluster in London’s Square Mile.

It’s not because they’re lonely.

It’s because they’re following a proven business strategy. A strategy that can work for your business, too.

Clusters create crowds

Once a location becomes well-known for a certain product or service, prospective customers looking for that ‘thing’ will head there.

This means a business moving into that location will open their doors on day one, knowing there will be crowds. Crowds they can potentially attract a subset of and convert into customers.

If that business is savvy, they will provide a uniquely valuable version of what the others offer. Something a section of the crowds desire, but can only get from them. This provides them with their very own corner of the market. It’s a strategy that works extremely well.

Before you assume this strategy is of little or no relevance to your business, think again.

Adapt. Then deploy

Look at the components behind that extremely successful strategy. When you do, you’ll discover something interesting and more importantly, potentially very useful to you and your business.

You’ll discover that you can adapt and deploy part of what makes that strategy work, into the online marketing of your own business.

How?

Be where your competitors are online. For example, be part of social media conversations around your industry. Join forums that are dedicated to your industry. Join Facebook Groups or LinkedIn Groups. You get the idea.

Offer something different from your competitors, which is uniquely valuable. So, when prospects find you, they can see you’re unlike the others.

Every single one of the prospects, who wants the unique value that only your service provides, can only get it from you. Do this correctly and you will have created your very own corner of the market.

Not sure where how to stand out in a meaningful way that works? Don’t worry. This will help you. And so will this.

Photo | Steve Johnson Pexels.com

Today, I’m going to show you how to have great business ideas and how to put them to work for your business. This includes a step-by-step guide that you can easily follow.

Think about it: Behind every successful business are a series of ideas. Great business ideas, which open up new opportunities or set the business on a more fruitful path.

The challenge with great ideas is that they often look like average ideas, until after they become hugely successful. As a result, most great ideas never see the light of they.

In fact, I bet you have a few tucked away right now, without even knowing it.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

How a great business idea was mocked

In 1985, The New York Times announced the death of laptop computers, in an articled entitled; “Whatever happened to the laptop computer?” They wondered why laptops never became popular (seriously). Here’s how one of the greatest business ideas in history, was openly mocked:

“[…] I.B.M. never legitimized the market with its much rumored ”Clamshell,” probably because the company realized that laptops are a small niche market, not a mass market.”

Erik Sandberg-Diment. New York Times 1985.

And when the electric light bulb was invented, most people said it would never become a mass market product. It was thought that there was no affordable way to get electricity to enough homes.

How to have great business ideas that win!

Business owners sometimes ask me what I think of an idea they have. The challenge here, is that it doesn’t matter what I think or what their friends think. Great business ideas are not anointed. If you want to know how good your idea is, you need to get it out there.

If you do, you will find it’s almost impossible to fail.

Really?

Yes, really!

It’s a win win thing.

• If it is a great business idea and it flies, you’ll have a success on your hands.
• If it flops, you’ll learn something. Something that you can invest in the next idea and greatly increase your chances of success.

Ironically, the only way to guarantee a business idea will fail, is to try and protect it from failure by locking it away.

It’s a lose lose thing.

• The idea you fail to ship can’t succeed.
• The idea you fail to ship can’t teach you anything new.

This not only insulates you from success, it also insulates you from learning and growing. This used to be a major problem for me when I started out in business. I was in my late 20’s and lacking in confidence. I’d sometimes have a great business idea, but I wouldn’t put the idea into action.

I knew I needed to do it. I also knew it couldn’t work if I didn’t ship the idea. But for me, putting an idea into action, even one I thought was great, felt way too risky.

Thankfully, I discovered a way forward, which I’m now going to share with you, step-by-step.

Here’s the business idea strategy, which worked for me

I’ve shared this strategy with countless people over the years and the results have been amazing. It’s actually really simple.

My breakthrough came when I figured out that the part of my mind responsible for putting ideas into action, was weak. It needed strengthening. I thought one way to do this, would be to treat it like a weak muscle. To make a weak muscle strong, you start off by working with very light weights. As the muscle grows, you slowly increase the weight you’re working with. Eventually, the muscle becomes strong.

Here’s how it worked

I started by acting on what I considered to be small ideas. Ideas that were unlikely to set the world on fire if they worked, but where there was relatively little downside if they failed.

• I’d get a business idea.
• Every time I put one of these ideas into play, I’d write it down in a journal, along with the results.
• With each new business idea in my journal, my idea muscles grew a little.
• I also noticed that even with these small ideas, my business was starting to see some very encouraging results. This further built my idea muscles!
• Pretty soon I found it easy to get great business ideas, big, meaningful ones, and ship them.
• Every day since I’ve eagerly looked for ways to get great business ideas to help me make opportunities or solve problems.
• And if they’re interesting, I always put them into play.

As the frequency and size of the ideas you act on increases, so does your ability to get great ideas. This is reflected in the development of your business.

And something else happens. Business in general becomes a lot more interesting. That’s because working on new business ideas, even small ones, is extremely invigorating. It causes you to think differently, meet new people and explore new opportunities.

Just remember to start with small ideas. Slowly build it up. And be sure to chronicle your results, so you can see the progress you’re making and also learn from the feedback.

In short: How do you get great business ideas? You put the small business ideas you already have into play. Each time you do, your ability to have great ideas and ship them increases.

Photo | Andrea Piacquadio.

The pace of change is accelerating faster than ever. This is creating a multitude of exciting opportunities for business owners. Including you.

Here are just a few of the opportunities you might want to explore.

New needs and wants are emerging. This means you now have masses of new prospective clients (or customers) you can serve. It also means you have the opportunity to offer more services or products to your existing clients.

New ways to access knowledge are at your fingertips… for free. With AI, you can get a detailed summary of every best-selling business book ever published. You can then question the summary, so it explains whatever parts of the book you’re most interested in learning from. As I write this in July 2024, that service is freely available from services like Google Gemini, Perplexity AI, ChatGPT and many others.

New and improved ways to work smarter are available to you. You can decrease stress whilst simultaneously increasing your productivity. That’s a huge win win.

New ways to sell your services are available to you, thanks to the newly-competitive payment provider sector. This makes it easier for clients to hire you or buy from you. Plus, it’s more profitable for your business, too.

New partnership possibilities are springing up. All this change brings almost unlimited potential for you to radically expand and improve your partnerships. Joint Venture opportunities are everywhere, just waiting for you.

It’s utterly exhilarating

I work with small business owners daily. Based on the results I’m seeing month after month, I firmly believe this is a golden age of opportunity for small business owners. I’ve never seen anything even vaguely like it, in almost 30-years of serving small business owners. It’s utterly exhilarating. Don’t let yourself miss out.

Photo by Fox on Pexels.com

When was the last time you tested different pricing models?

When was the last time you were contacted by a media outlet, for your professional opinion?

When was the last time you tested a new marketing tactic or strategy?

When was the last time you did something radically different from your competitors?

When was the last time you undertook detailed competitor research, so that you know what you’re actually competing against?

When was the last time you received a great referral from one of your customers?

When was the last time you updated your marketing materials?

When was the last time you took the lead in your industry?

When was the last time you took an idea that’s common and successful in a different industry, and applied it to your business?

When was the last time you seriously challenged one of your long-held business beliefs?

When was the last time you partnered with another business on a project?

When was the last time you updated your business goals and targets?

When was the last time you added a new product or service to your portfolio?

When was the last time you looked for new ways to solve problems, for your customers and prospective customers?

When was the last time you seriously asked yourself, if your business is growing as fast and as profitably as it could be?

When was the last time you saw a significant, sustained increase in profits, and what did you learn from it?

When it’s been too long

If it has been too long since you last did, or experienced, some of the above, now would be a great time to put that right.

Make a list. Then work your way through it. Some of these will be more challenging than others, but all of them are important enough to invest the effort required.