My journey – Page 2 – Michele Christensen

3 Tips for Keeping Your Personal Tasks from Ruining Your Business

One of the best things about working from home is that you can take care of chores and personal tasks whenever you want, even while you are working. One of the worst things about working from home is that you can can take care of chores and personal tasks whenever you want, even while you are working. 🙂

Having no clear boundaries between work and personal tasks can mean that the two tend to blur, and this can be great until it begins to cause problems. Sometimes it gets really hard to leave personal tasks undone and focus on the business. After all, if you are home all day why isn’t the house perfect, the papers filed, the fridge stocked, the mail sorted, the calls made, etc.?

I’ve found that if I don’t watch it, that my personal tasks can start to erode away valuable time spent on my business which can be detrimental. I’ve found a few ways to keep the personal tasks from expanding too much, and so I have 3 tips for you that will help keep those annoying personal tasks at bay so you can focus on your business.

Create systems for things that pile up and nag you. For me, the worst offender is the mail. For an unknown reason, we get huge amounts of mail that needs to be dealt with. I did all the recommended steps to cut down on the mail, and still it regularly piled up. What I finally did was designate the first 15 minutes of every day to deal with the mail. Finally, this has gotten the accumulation down and keeps in check over the long haul. If your nagging, piled up task is laundry then find a way to fix it – designate a day, do a load every morning, send it out or go to a laundromat for a big session monthly. If it’s yard work, do some every day to wake up when the afternoon lull hits, hire someone to do it, or take an afternoon every other week. The point is, create some system for whatever your worst offender is so that it doesn’t nag you anymore.
Designate time to crank out personal chores. Trying to do chores in small bits of time leftover from other activities often doesn’t work. You need time to get into something and finish it. If you only have 2 minutes, that rules out most tasks you could even thing about doing because it’s not enough time. If you start with half an hour, that’s enough time to not only start but finish many household tasks. I set aside some time right after lunch every day and just crank through the top few pressing things I need to do.
Find your mental and physical productivity times. When are you at your best mentally? How about physically? Schedule tasks in a way that takes advantage of these times. If you’re a night owl, can you arrange you schedule to get some turbo-charged time late at night? If you have loads of energy for physical tasks in the morning, use that time to get them done.

I used to think that having a successful work-at-home business was only about being a good business person. Now I know you have to manage your personal life well too.

How do you keep your personal life from ruining your business? Share your tips in the comments.

People to avoid

I was out socially during a recent weekend, and found myself talking business with some people that I didn’t know well. One of them was a very negative, naysayer, “can’t be done” kind of guy. He was the kind of person who feels like nothing in his life is in his control – whatever happens in his life happens to him not ever because of anything he did.

Because I’m so passionate and excited about my business and I love the people I work with, I got very excited to be able to talk business with new people. The more I described all the good things that come from my business, the more negative he got.

He also had a way of thinking that is like nails on a chalkboard to me – he made up his mind before having any data, and no amount of evidence to the contrary would sway him.

Later, I realized I wasted a lot of energy trying to share my excitement with him. He’s negative and has no sense of being responsible for his own life. He has no interest in learning new things or expanding what he knows of the world. In short, he was a fool in this respect and I wasted my time, energy and enthusiasm on him.

I can’t go back and get a do-ever on this one, but I resolved right then and there to be done with having this kind of conversation with this kind of person. It left me drained and frustrated, and left him no more informed than he had been before.

Sometimes, when you have a mission you want to share it with the world. I know it takes almost nothing to get me talking about work. The thing is, not all conversations serve us or the person we are talking to. In this case, neither of us got anything out of it.

Your time and energy are precious resources and the source of all you business success. Use these resources well even when you are not working. They are very limited, and you can’t get them back. Don’t waste any time or energy on any activity that doesn’t provide a return of some sort. The next time I feel myself being frustrated instead of feeling connected in a conversation I’ll stop the interaction.

What kind of people drain you? How do you know when to leave a conversation? What kind of limits do you set in this area?

Sales lessons from a hard exercise

In my last post, I mentioned that I had been to a live training earlier this month with Adam Urbanski called Overnight Authority. I learned so much there that I have several posts lined up and this is the next in the series.

One night of the workshop we had a bonus session that included a sales exercise. A big part of what I learned at the workshop is that sales is what makes a business. All the other things you do serve only to make sales possible and/or more likely. Sales is a real challenge to many solopreneurs because we love what we do and really want to help people. We’d do it for free if we could! But the truth is, without a sale you can’t help anyone. All of the greatness you have to offer is wasted if nobody buys it.

In the first part of the evening, we learned some of Adam’s techniques on consultative selling which is a way of conducting the sales process as a consultation not as a hard sell. Then, we did the next logical thing which is to pair up and try to sell each other something! Gulp. The thing was, this was not a role playing exercise this was for real! If you sold something, you had to deliver and the other person had to pay. There were also no requirement that what you sold had to be something you already offer or even something in your business.

What was hard for me is that when I have a one-on-one sales conversation I go in prepared. I’ve asked a few questions already and have looked at the person’s website. I also have all of my own material – prices, terms, etc in front of me for easy reference. In this conversation, I was totally unprepared! I have to say, I really didn’t want to do this exercise but I had already entrusted Adam with my time and investment so I trusted him here as well.

Here are 3 big lessons I learned from that exercise. Just for the record, I’ve already shared everything with the other people mentioned because it was a learning exercise.

If your prospect says you don’t understand don’t argue! When I was the prospect, my seller argued with me in this manner and all it did was make me dig in even further and argue back even harder. It completely shut off any possibility of us getting to an understanding. It felt condescending and frustrating, especially when the answer I got was way off base from what I wanted to communicate. At this point, my thinking is that if your prospect says you don’t understand, the only logical answer is something like “Can you help me to understand better?”
When you are selling, don’t be too attached to making a sale. I’ve heard several sales professionals say something like “Be committed to helping them make a decision, but not what that decision is.” This feels really good to me and I try to do it. When I was the seller, I felt close to making a sale at one point and got a little too over-eager and started spewing words out. When I was the prospect, I sensed this from my seller and it made me not want to buy anything that might be offered.
Finally, don’t be afraid to wing it! If someone is sitting in front of you with a problem that you can solve and they want to hire you, find a way to make it work. Lots of people in the room made sales that night of things that didn’t even exist when the exercise began. Create a package on the spot or do something unconventional. Don’t let a chance to serve someone else get away because you don’t have a package that fits.

What is your favorite piece of sales wisdom? How did you learn it? Tell me about it in the comments.

My top ten takeaways from The Overnight Authority Live Event

Last week, I attended a training given by Adam Urbanski called The Overnight Authority Live Event. It was an intense, demanding 3 days but I learned a lot. Not only were there strategies and tactics, but there was a lot of new ways of thinking presented which was the most helpful part for me. By “new ways of thinking,” I don’t really mean mindset, which is also important, but a new way of looking at how you do business that is focused on accomplishing important things quickly. I have lots more to share from the event and in fact have a few blog posts lined up already, but for today I’ll wet your appetite with just my top ten takeaways from the event:

Spend less time creating things to sell and more time selling them.
If something doesn’t work or sell well the first time around, instead of scrapping it and starting fresh, see if you can try again and tweak what you did. This is a shift for me because although I live by “test and revise,” I think I’ve been too quick to say something didn’t work and needed to be scrapped.
Don’t be afraid to wing it. If there’s a customer in front of you that wants to buy something you don’t currently sell but can provide, find a way to make a deal.
Don’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t ask you’ll always get a “no,” if you ask you may get a yes or a no but the worst possible outcome is that they say no.
Don’t think first of cutting prices, think first of how to deliver more value so you can charge the price you want.
Having something for sale is useless unless people need it and know they need it.
Connect regularly with successful business owners and continue your own development.
If you refuse to stop you cannot fail.
There’s a lot of things that a lot of experts will tell you that you “have to” do. They are not always right.
Don’t let fear of looking stupid or fear of what other people might think stop you or even influence you.

What’s your favorite idea here? How did you learn it? Tell me about it in the comments.

How to use local networking to build your business

(Update: The live call is over, but the recording is available at the links below. Click the link to grab your free recording!)

One of my core business philosophies is to test and revise. I try something I think will work, measure how well it works and revise my plan after that. I did the same with a full year of local, in-person networking and decided it wasn’t worth it and I focused on the internet to build my business.

Another one of my core philosophies is to always be learning. I tend to change my mind a lot because I’m dedicated to truth, not consistency. What I’ve recently learned is that I didn’t network nearly as well as I thought I did.

During the course of my networking year, I met over 200 people (keeping track was part of my measurement process). I sent every one a personalized follow up email, met a few for coffee and offered some of my free material to people who seemed interested. I’m outgoing and curious, so conversation comes naturally to me and I read a lot of “how to network” articles. I thought I was doing great because I was doing so much more than almost everyone I met. Of the 200+ people I met, only a few followed up with me and only a few even acknowledged my personalized email.

At the end of that year, I decided that networking wasn’t worth it because although it was great fun it wasn’t generating business for me. I only generated a small amount of business from my efforts, and when you consider that each of the 2-5 events per month I attended was about a 5 hour investment the math just didn’t work out.

Fast forward to this year, and what I’ve learned is that I didn’t have the right knowledge or strategy going into my networking efforts. To fix this for myself and help you learn as well, I’ve asked sales and networking expert Don Talbert to teach networking skills for my community on a free teleseminar. Don is the founder of the Centurion Group, and after he built his own successful business using networking he began to teach this skill to others. I’ve had many interactions with him both in groups and one-on-one conversations and he really knows his stuff! I’ve learned so much just getting ready for this call that I cannot wait to see what he teaches on the call!

If you’ve tried local networking but haven’t found success, please join me on this call – you’ll leave with strategies and tactics you can use right away. As a bonus, he’ll also be sharing the best way to make sure you are the most disliked person in the room. I’m a little nervous about this one – I hope I didn’t do whatever this is!

Reserve your spot here!

How to evaluate an adviser you may hire

I was talking to someone I know recently who is thinking of starting a solopreneur business. When I mentioned I could help with this, his replied that the only way he would take advice from me, or anyone, is to know exactly, in detail, how much money I had made in my business. His thinking was that if I had made X dollars then I have something that he could replicate.

There’s a few problems with this response. First, let me state that I admire anyone who checks out a coach or adviser before hiring them. It’s really important to make sure the person knows their field before you trust them. Anyone can appoint themselves guru, expert, etc. so title alone won’t tell you anything.

The first problem with this is personal boundaries. While I understand the logic of asking the question, I would not reveal something like this in detail. I think it’s great when business coaches share their successes in general terms like 6 figures or multiple 6 figures, but that’s as far as I would go. It simply feels icky to me to have to reveal so much personal data in order to win a client.

The second problem with this is that it ignores how long the person has been in business. If I had answered this question within the first 6 months of my business, the figure would not have been very impressive. That didn’t mean that I wasn’t already helping people. I had 10+ years in business in a variety of settings before I ever started my business, so from the onset I was able to offer something valuable.

The third problem is that there isn’t one business model to work from. Just because I have success with mine doesn’t mean someone else, in a different kind of business, could replicate it.

The fourth problem is the difference between revenue and profit. Revenue is all the money that comes into a business, where profit is what is left after paying expenses. If I said I made 1 Million dollars in revenue or sales, that sounds impressive but what if I spent 2 Million bringing that in? That’s pretty dismal.

The last problem using this to check out an adviser is that you have no way of knowing if the person is telling the truth. Anything can be fabricated, even tax returns or account data. The person who asked me this question already knows me well enough to know I wouldn’t lie, but how could you have this knowledge of someone you just met?

So, having established that asking for detailed personal financial information is not the way to evaluate an adviser the next question is what is the right way?

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Know enough about what you are seeking advice on to have a conversation about it. The same way you do your research on a new car before setting foot in the showroom, do your homework here as well. Learn what pitfalls to ask about, and learn some best practices so if you hear something different you know enough to ask about it.

Look for testimonials or ask for references. This is proof that they’ve already gotten results for people.

Look for long-term consistency such as a blog or newsletter. Almost anyone can look good in one conversation but to publish solid information over an extended period of time is a strong indicator that the person has a depth of knowledge and experience to share.

How do you check out someone you are thinking of hiring? Tell me about it in the comments.

Keeping your work at home solopreneur business running

When you work for someone else, there’s a lot of support to get your work done. You have a phone system, computer help desk, human resources, a work space and reference material. When you have a solopreneur business, you need to meet all these needs on your own. One of the biggest places I see a problem in this area is business owners who don’t have adequate computer support. When you work from home, your computer is a huge part of your business and without it you may not be able to function.

What does it look like to have adequate computer support for your work-at-home solopreneur business? Here’s a few ideas:

You have regular backups that run automatically and are stored off-site. Your backup needs to be adequate to get you up and running quickly in the event of a hard drive crash or other disaster, meaning you have to be able to restore your programs and settings as well as your data. Using a manual process may be fine to start, but as soon as you are able get an automated system in place that runs backups automatically. You’re already stretched to the max just running your business, do you need one more annoying thing to think about? How hard will you kick yourself when you let this go and and lose a bunch of data because of it? Store your backups off site so that they are safe in the event of a fire, flood or natural disaster.
Have a plan to fix your computer before you need it. Know who to call or where to go. If you computer crashes, you’ll be frantic enough without calling all over town trying to find the right person to fix it. In that situation, you won’t have the luxury of properly vetting anyone to fix your computer.
If you are able, have a backup plan so you can keep working while your computer is down. This might mean you are able to switch to someone else’s computer or work somewhere else with a secure internet connection. Again, this is something to figure out before you need it. Scrambling in desperation is not a fun place to be and doesn’t position you to make great decisions.

You may be wondering how I learned all this. I had a computer problem last week, and no thanks to me all this was in place already. My husband is an absolute computer genius, and does a great job maintaining all the electronics in the house. Somehow, I had downloaded some sort of virus that was making my computer slower and slower until it wouldn’t function. Thanks to having all this in place, I was able to work on his computer until he fixed the problem. On top of all the regular tasks of running a business, I had a newsletter to get out so it would have a big problem if I wasn’t able to work. The entire experience, and the relative ease of taking care of it hammered home just how important all this is for running a business from home.

What would happen if your computer crashed? Tell me about it in the comments.

Be productive in spite of the experts

Image of mail in the sunrise — Email in the morning

I admit it, I’m a productivity junkie! I devour information on the subject – books, magazines, newsletters, blogs, etc. – I want it all. Apparently, I’m not alone – there’s a running joke in the productivity communities I frequent about procrastinating by studying how to be more productive.

I’m also a big fan of the scientific method and use it in my daily life all the time. I’ll read about something interesting, test it and decide if it works for me. My personal productivity and time and task management are no different. I’ve got an ever-changing system to keep it all together.

One of the rules I hear most often from experts on productivity is that nobody should check email first thing in the morning. The idea behind this is that it is reactionary – you open your email and start handling whatever is there regardless of how it fits into your business success plan. Once you get into your email, it can be hard to get out. By the time you get to the bottom, more messages have arrived. “Just a peek” turns into hours. A quick question and response leads to a live chat. These long email firestomping sessions rarely lead to anything profitable and they take you out of the driver’s seat for your day. I’m sure you’ve experienced being sidetracked by email – I know I have.

Many experts say you should start your day with something other than email. That something could be an activity you decided on yesterday, your current profit-making project, whatever you find most difficult, what your morning energy level dictates or any other intentionally-chosen project you decide on. It makes a lot of sense, given how easy it is to get sucked into the email rabbit hole. However, this is one area where I don’t follow the experts’ advice

I have a list of things I do first thing every day and email is one of them. I love getting my daily business “housekeeping” out of the way and having a clean slate going into whatever I do next. I like having an empty inbox going into my day so I can spot any urgent messages more easily. It’s great to know that at least once a day, my email inbox is at zero messages and I’m no more than one work session away from zero again.

I think one of the reasons this works for me is that I have a process for handling my email and a specific end point which is an empty inbox. Once I process all the messages that I had as of a certain time, I’m done until tomorrow except for urgent messages.

So what’s the point of my telling you this? First, by all means read what experts have to say but then test and assess for yourself. What works for most people may not work for you. Second, I wanted to give you an alternative to what you might read elsewhere about handling your email.

How do you handle email? When in the day do you look at your inbox? Do you ever buck the advice of experts in this area or others? Tell me about it in the comments.

Save time when scheduling

(Update: 10/9/13: Several items in this post have changed since I originally wrote it. I still use and love Timetrade, but it’s now offered on a freemium model and the pricing is different than I describe. It also integrates with iCal now and they’ve added a lot more features. The general reasons I love this tool are still the same.)

If you work by appointment, you know that scheduling can be tough! In the early days of my business, someone would request an appointment and I’d send them 3 or so choices. Then, I’d have to hold those choices open until I heard back from them. If another client wanted to schedule, I’d have to come up with a set of different choices for that client or put them on hold until I heard from the first client. In the meantime, client number 2 has to put his or her appointment setting on hold until they hear from me. What a mess!

I’m so much happier with my scheduling process now that I use an automated scheduling tool. What is an automated scheduling tool? It allows anyone to whom I’ve given a link to self-schedule their appointment at a time when they know I’m available. I get great feedback on my scheduling process and I can’t even guess at how much time it’s saved me and the people looking to schedule with me.

There are several choices for an automated scheduling tool, and the one I use is Timetrade (timetrade.com). After a free trial, it’s about $30 per year and well worth it. Once you sign up, you link Timetrade to your Outlook or Google calendar and set up some rules for appointments such as the days and times you will accept appointments. Timetrade will then offer appointments that follow your rules and are not already taken by another appointment. Visitors do not see what you are doing when you aren’t available.

I work in 15-, 30- and 60-minute sessions by phone or Skype, so each of these choices has its own scheduling page (called “activities” in Timetrade). If a person has purchased a bundle of 30-minute sessions, I give them the pages where they can schedule a 30-minute call or Skype session. Because of the way the system is set up, the visitor can only schedule a 30-minute session which leads to fewer mistakes and rescheduled appointments.

Another great use for an automated scheduler is to avoid playing phone tag! People are so busy and a lot of productive people I know don’t answer their phone whenever it rings to it can be really hard to connect. If I want to talk to someone, I send them to a page where we can schedule a quick phone call at a time that works best for both of us.

There are other great scheduling tools available, so look for the one that will work best for you. The one feature that was non-negotiable for me was using a tool that eliminates back-and-forth. One scheduling tool I tried requires visitors to send you two options of when they want to meet. You then have to get the email, review it and pick one before the appointment is confirmed. This defeats one of the main purposes of using a scheduling tool. I much prefer that my clients and callers can book and confirm an appointment on the spot. Timetrade also sends a confirmation email without requiring your visitor to have an account.

Timetrade is just one of 32 resources I share in my Solopreneur Success Rolodex. Grab your own copy by clicking here and save yourself some headaches!

Should solopreneurs say yes to every opportunity?

Strategy helps solopreneurs choose events wisely — Think strategically when choosing which events to attend for your solopreneur business

I was with a friend over the weekend, and she mentioned an event that she was going to and thought I’d be interested in attending as well. She had told me about it a few years ago and I checked it out and decided it wasn’t for me at this time. When I told her so, she was absolutely stunned! Here she was, presenting me with what seemed like a golden opportunity and I was turning it down. Her thinking was that my business must be at capacity or otherwise I’d be going, but that wasn’t my reason.

The reason I wasn’t going comes down to the #1 thing business owners must have to succeed: strategy. Strategy is everything in a business. It means that everything you do is intentional and has a purpose that contributes to your success. For live events, strategy doesn’t mean going to any and every event that is open to you and hoping that it will help. Strategy means having a specific aim in mind for attending events, and a specific type of person you want to meet. To show how having a strategy guides decision making, I’ll tell you why I turned this event down.

For my business strategy, if I’m going to an event to meet potential clients then the event audience should have some correlation to what I do. There should be something about the event that attracts people who have or want their own solopreneur business. The event my friend invited me to was more or less a random assortment of the public. There was no attraction specifically for the people I feel most called to serve, solopreneurs.

The second factor that led to my decision is that this event required 5 to 8 hours on a Saturday plus prep time. This is a massive chunk of time to spend in an untargeted manner. There was also no guarantee you’d actually get any time in front of anyone. The event is run in a very free-form manner, and people may or may not enter your room when you give a talk and they can come and go as they please during the talk. This isn’t conducive to sharing anything of value with anyone.

The final factor to consider is that I live in the Los Angeles area, and there are dozens of events every week. I haven’t even begun to attend all the events I could that would possibly have people interested in what I do. Until I’ve made a considerable showing at those events, it simply doesn’t make sense to go to an event filled with random people.

It’s easy to pulled off course if you don’t have pre-set goals and strategy. Having those in mind helps guide your decisions and give you something to measure your success.

Have you set your goals for the year and your strategy for achieving them? Tell me about it in the comments – I’d love to hear how strategy helps you or if it doesn’t. If you don’t have a strategy yet, let’s talk and start setting one up. Click here to schedule a call with me.