What are your building block to success?

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What is stopping you today from achieving what you set out to achieve?

No time? No customers? No money? Theses are the usual go-to excuses when I challenge my clients. Let’s be honest we can all think of excuses of why we aren’t achieving the success we so desperately want. If you want it bad enough, if you want to succeed to prove to yourself or to others that you can do it then the excuses will soon fall by the wayside.

Having no time is an easy excuse to diminish – it’s purely about better time management. That can be covered in a different blog. Having no money can be a tricky one but there are lots of things you can be doing that are either free or cheap to access.

No customers? Then lets look at why that might be. You have a website and it’s attracting some traffic, you are active on Facebook, you just don’t understand why you aren’t getting the sales you need for your business to grow.

Take a step back and look at the process through the customers eye’s. How are you driving traffic to your website? Are you advertising it in the best way you can to your target audience. Don’t let the word advertising (or marketing for that matter) scare you, you are probably doing it without realising – it might just need to be refined. Your ideal customer isn’t going to find you – you need to find them.

Once they have found you, how simple have you made the sales process for them? Do you have alternative payment options available for example? Try to think of all the possible reasons that customers might not be completing a sale with you.

Is your customer service consistent? Do you have a process in place – inconsistent customer service is a big block to being successful. One wrong review can hugely damage your business. You want your ideal customer to have a smooth transaction with you, receive some great customer service and then they are much more likely to refer you to friends and family.

Blocks to success are usually down to a lack of knowledge or belief or missing skills. Skills can be learnt or you can outsource that part of your business, beliefs can be re-written and knowledge can be also be learnt.

I ask you again, what is the block that is stopping you on your road to success today?

What are you worth?

How much are you worth?

Have you ever openly discussed your salary with a group of people? For some reason this is a topic that keep closely guarded and only divulge in confidence to those closest. Is there a fear that you will be judged for what you earn?

One of the hardest decisions you’ll have to make when starting out on your own is how much you want to charge people for your time and services. I’m guessing you will be swaying between wanting to offer discounts and freebies to get your brand recognised and needing to earn a decent living.

The additional problem is that everyone is out for a bargain nowadays, but the truth is that people will pay for quality every time. If you buy a curtain rail from the bargain basement shop and it breaks you wouldn’t be surprised and you’d wished you’d had spent more more on a better quality one. The same principle applies to your business. If you know that you are offering a quality product or service then you must charge accordingly.

So back to the earlier question…yes you will be judged by how much you charge. If your prices are premium then a premium service is expected, are you sure that you can match up to your high end competitors? Go in with your prices at the lower end and you risk people assuming that your product isn’t going to be of a high standard.

So how do you know how much you are worth? I did a workshop with Marketing Jumpleads who gave me this useful insight into working our how much you could be charging for your time. (http://www.marketingjumpleads.com/) You could always work backwards from what you want to earn. Take what you want to earn in a year. Work out how many hours a week you want to work, multiply that by how many weeks you want to work. Use that figure to divide the the amount you wanted to earn and that gives you a baseline figure from which to work from. But remember that all of those hours you won’t actually be productive in so you may have to add a bit onto your new hourly rate!

So how much are you underpaying yourself right now?