40 Lessons Learned From Running My Business Rasing the Barr Weekly Memo: Issue 138

This week’s reflection point: Almost five years ago I wrote and shared my original Lessons Learned From Running My Business article, which included 40 lessons that have become quite popular among our readers. Since then, I have added 40 additional lessons, which I mentioned and have made available in this article. In the spirit of learning and sharing, here are 40 additional lessons learned:

1. I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the smartest clients in the world. I don’t take my role for granted in helping them increase their success and I also recognize the great gift I got of learning from some of the best minds out there.
2. I love challenging myself to create best practices and insights that I may share with my clients in various formats. The challenge is to quickly come up with topics within my areas of expertise or questions I was recently asked and to immediately be able to address these with several insights and recommendations. When I originally started doing this, three such insights were within my immediate comfort range. Over time, this number increased dramatically and this article is a great example of this technique.
3. One of the greatest compliments you may offer your clients is that of referring business to them.
4. Enthusiasm is contagious. When you share it with your clients they become enthusiastic and look forward to you contacting them.
5. Each day I enjoy reviewing my 3 biggest successes (personal and business) for the day and my 3 planned successes for the next day.
6. When a client shares their successes with me, I rejoice in their achievements and let it be the perfect trigger to ask them for a testimonial and referrals.
7. Create a library of checklists to share with your clients. 3 steps for this and 11 steps for that. Your clients will love you for doing this.
8. I constantly ask myself whether we are complacent and too comfortable with our success or whether we constantly reinvent ourselves.
9. Identify what are the hot discussion topics of your target audience and create powerful and provocative content around it.
10. Create one profound goal per week with several action plan items to support it. Now go execute one at a time.
11. We all have our treasure of content we have created over the years. Learn to repurpose it, which will reduce your labor intensity of creating content from scratch and allow an older piece to come back to life.
12. Review any of the bullet points within your content and make each become its own unique piece of content.
13. One of my favorite questions I ask myself and my clients: “fast forward a year or two from now, what does remarkable success look like and what needs to happen to get there?”
14. During my speeches, I have two three primary objectives: Deliver amazing value to the audience, be able to stay in touch with as many of them as possible, and have fun!
15. If your destination is important figure out a way to get there.
16. I have an amazing team and could not do what I do without their great talent. It’s something I leverage daily.
17. Build and store your content and your community on your own platforms supported by your trusted Internet partner. Otherwise, you may lose complete control. For example, if you built your content and community on Facebook, most of your posts have stopped reaching them since Facebook changed their rules and algorithm.
18. Find opportunities to connect with new and existing clients especially around their areas of interest and what is top of mind for them.
19. Collect and digitally catalog examples, stories, statistics and facts that you may use in your speeches and content creation to substantiate your points and make them interesting. Make sure you create an easy way to search and retrieve these.
20. Create a system that enables you to systematically stay in touch with your existing and prospective clients and provide them with ongoing value.
21. I have to admit that I often wonder about those SEO spammers. If they were that good at SEO, why then do they spam us and not use SEO to promote their own business? We need to walk our talk.
22. Here is a question I ask my team and myself: “what will you do differently this week?”
23. I am often saturated with great ideas to improve my business. I have come to realize that when I have several great ideas to execute the order rarely makes a difference. I just need to pick one and go for it.
24. Routines are at the heart of success. I do my best to eliminate the negative while making sure to routinize the positive and ones that have the biggest potential impact.
25. Just because it shows up in digital ink does not mean it is true. I am very selective whom I choose to listen to and take advice from.
26. I greatly enjoy meeting new people who have created great successes and impact others. I enjoy working my list of who to contact next.
27. Not sure what to write about? Read the headlines, listen to questions your clients are asking you or ask them to share their top issues with you. You should never run out of content ideas.
28. Another profound impact for our clients is to lead and take them into the future.
29. I learned that scarcity often increase interest and impulse buying.
30. By the age of 65, Peter Drucker has published 1/3 of his books, which means that his best work was published afterwards. This is an inspiring legacy I would love to follow.
31. One of my favorite questions to ask a new client is whether they have the courage to do what it takes to be successful. Remarkable conversations often ensue.
32. Looking at tasks that are important and we repeat doing call for systemization of such.
33. Imagine where we would be without the awesome power of evolution. Tweets become articles, which become booklets, which become books, which become workshops, which become your body of work and intellectual property.
34. Not all clients are created equally. If you want to grow and enjoy your business, get the right clients.
35. If you want to dramatically improve your personal and business success, hang out with extraordinary people.
36. Did you know that when you demonstrate success your buyers are afraid of being rejected by you?
37. When they read, hear or watch your content, do they say “wow” or “I never thought about it this way” and take notes or do they say “so what?” Develop the former.
38. Success takes hard work because it requires the discipline to execute, the elimination of distractions and the removal of the superfluous.
39. Let me see your calendar and I can immediately tell you how successful you are. Schedule your success!
40. Rather than worry where the next sale is coming from why not determine the ones to contact to provide value and help improve their lives and businesses. It’s all about our mindset.

This week’s tip: Start creating insights and recommendations to share with your clients while focusing on increasing the numbers consistently and rapidly. The outcomes are mindboggling.