You Are Worth More Than You Do

Claim the deeper value of your business in order to boost profits.

A curious thing happens in the way of growing businesses. As an entrepreneur you are called to stretch yourself into many new roles. In turn, this stretching action over time has the ability to grow the entrepreneur personally–as who they then must BE in order to continue doing the tasks and work of growing a profitable business continues to evolve.

This process over time has a funny little side effect. Many entrepreneurs do not see or realize the deeper value they begin to hold for their customers and clients along the way. Their knowledge around the service and products they offer becomes greater and more personal because the familiarity of what they provide, be it a service or product, becomes second nature.

This ability to be the go-to person, the center of influence, or the one who knows about a particular industry holds great value and offers many small business and solo service providers a whole new level of profit generating options that may be overseen from when they initially started their businesses.

Turning this added value into new streams of income can be as simple as offering mentoring, coaching or support to current clients and customers. The ability to be a trusted guide who can offer support around helping clients and customers achieve the results your service or product offers is often one of the easiest ways to add new income into a business through private mentoring, group experiences or ongoing support in a membership style program. Providing a like minded community of people all wanting to achieve the same or similar results is the true essence of building a following or tribe.

From the point of the business owner, it is easy to give away this supportive information because there is a disconnect to the real value that it continues to create for people just entering in the process of change and transformation of the problem your business solves.

Stepping back and taking an objective look at what you, the business owner, are often finding yourself speaking about, offering and/or recommending as support and resources, gives a clue to what people are really getting from additional value—the ability to tackle change with the support of someone they know, like, and trust.

Discovering how to add more value by showing up more as a trusted advisor can be the best and most profitable new offer a business can create to continue to enrich the lives of their clients and customers.

Here are 3 simple steps to creating new streams of income based on the real value you already offer:

1. Take a poll of current colleagues, clients and customers and ask what specifically do they appreciate about your service or product in the form of how it helps them (hint it will be something that has helped them get results). Then ask which of your offering has helped them the most. (This might surprise you)
2. From the results of this information explore how you can increase the value points you uncover into additional programs or services you can offer your clients.
3. Now create a plan to up-sell clients and customers these additional opportunities for more support and/or mentoring to achieve the results they desire with your help, either one-to-one or within a group or membership program.

Do you want more help uncovering your own personal profit path?

Allow Wendy to work with you to explore the opportunities within your own brilliance that can create new revenue streams by tapping into what you know, not just what you do.

© Wendy Burge | Radiant Edge Consulting Ltd

If you wish to use this article in your own ezine or blog include this footer:
Wendy Burge, “The Radiant Biz Coach,” mentors extraordinary women and men entrepreneurs to claim their value and voice of true service as a way to build an aligned platform for their businesses. Known for blending heart-centered sales, Internet marketing and business application with spiritual principles, Wendy delivers simple ways for entrepreneurs to create influence and affluence in their lives. Learn more about her at www.radiantedgeconsulting.com and get your own copy of Wendy’s Radiant Marketing Kit that addresses the 5 Marketing Myths Service Providers Struggle With and How to Change This

Road trip’n on the journey of life!

I was traveling the beginning of October down in the US to see my family. My oldest cousin is slowing losing his battle to cancer and I decided to clear my schedule and go be with him before I lose the opportunity to do so. It was an emotional trip between a deep outpouring of love mixed with laughter and stories down memory lane about our crazy families and upbringing in Arizona.

My heart has been somber this week since I got home. This trip reminded me that life is not a race but a journey. I think we get so caught up in the expectations of being successful in business, being a celebrity in social media, and creating abundant lifestyles that, honestly, when faced with the mortality of who we really are, fragile lives here for a short while, we must not take our daily experiences for granted.

There is a wonderful Buddha saying that states, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, build a fire ~ after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, build a fire.” You see, the actions of our daily lives rarely change but our perceptions of these actions do. Gratitude and appreciation play a blessed role in reminding us that it’s within the experience we gather the wisdom, not the end goal or result.

My cousin and our family did not sit around and calculate how much money we have made in our lives or all the accolades we had achieved, although he was a decorated highway patrol police officer turn pastor for the past 15 years. We spoke about silly family stories, insightful dynamics about our family musings and about the future of our own children. My conclusion is that we are here merely to leave the world a bit better because we were in it for a period of time to master our lives and teach our lessons.

That is why I am on the career and business path that I am, because I feel that my sole purpose to help people align their worth and values with their message through a business is essential in creating a ripple effect of change. My work consists of bringing clarity and confidence from the fear of who am I to do, say or be this person that leaves a message of great hope for others…who are we all not to!

Most of us are fighting for our fears and losing as we believe they are the truth. The problem is they keep many of us a little too safe as they are often false – let go of the fight to be right that a fear is truth – this is a huge worthiness issue. You are here to experience and expand the life of those who cross your path, lessons are everywhere to help us grow into this.

Today do one thing that scares you in your business. Pick up the phone and make that follow up call, send that email to book that prospect, or create that invoice and request payment on an outstanding account. These actions are just actions that will have you thriving.Take that action that will help you grow not flounder.

Radiant Blessings,

Wendy

The Fine Art of Networking

Getting out of our offices, stepping back from our computers and taking time to engage with other business owners is important to growing our businesses. Business owners enjoy growing their business circles of colleagues that they can build for referral and joint venture opportunities.

Networking is a form of physical marketing because you actually have to show up and have something relevant to say. It requires a clear presence and understanding of what exactly the objective is to go spend a few hours among other business owners within your community.

There is a misunderstanding about networking that I want to clear up right away.

Networking is not about “hunting and gathering” for clients.

Networking is an opportunity for you to search for qualified leaders, potential joint venture partners, and referral resources to help you leverage your business’ visibility through creditable resources.

Yes, some of these people may become clients. However, the overall intention of networking is to build a strong support team of people that get to know you and your business and want to see you grow it by a variety of means like referrals and potential opportunities.

People are more incline to help each other when the relationship is not one sided. No one wants to be sold to, and attending networking events does not mean you put on your salesy hat and ramble on about your business.

The reason for networking is to find quality businesses, services and products that align with you and the values your clients hold. This is also a way to help you build exposure to other people’s client lists (database) by being able to offer value to their followers in some way. Leveraging this way is effective for building quality databases.

While out networking begin to see your business in collaboration with others by asking yourself these questions:

• What other businesses would be great referral partners for you (businesses your clients could find value in knowing about)?
• What other business owners or services compliment what you do and offer?
• What do they offer that you can be a referral partner for them (how you can add value to their clients)?
• How can you create new business opportunities with another service such as a joint presentation or workshop to expand both of your businesses exposure?

It is important to keep in mind that networking isn’t just about getting the next client. It is about seeing opportunities where you may be able to provide greater value.

Additionally, when at networking events, giving testimonies, announcing your upcoming events, or just giving thanks for the nice people you have met in the room is also part of the objective of networking. Gratitude goes a long way in business.

Being gracious in the front of a room full of like minded business owners will quickly put you on the radar as a business owner to get to know and support.

©2015 Wendy Burge | www.RadiantEdgeConsulting.com

How to Eat a Marketing Elephant

A big challenge for small businesses is often having the time to stay on top of their marketing; the planning, prep time, and implementation. Marketing can be the white elephant in a business that needs to be addressed because it has the largest impact on the growth of the business. However, like the old saying goes, to eat an elephant you take one bite at a time. So, how do you eat a “marketing elephant”? By breaking it down into bite-size pieces to allow for more efficient and effective marketing strategies without overwhelm.

The following steps will help you capture, tame, and maintain the marketing elephant in your business.

Bite 1. Commit to the end goal

What kind of growth do you want to achieve over a calendar year within your business? Your objective will directly impact how and why you are developing a marketing plan. If you are in a start-up phase it may be as simple as acquiring a certain number of new clients, addition of client resources and services, and a specific dollar figure that gets you up and running. If you have been in business for a while, your goals may focus on higher profit margins, positioning yourself as an expert within your industry, and leveraging your time more effectively. Understanding your goals also allows you to track and monitor how effective your marketing is in helping you reach them.

Bite 2. Break it into quarters

Once you know what you want, it’s just a matter of working backwards at making it happen. Take a 12 month wall calendar and break it into quarters; within each quarter work on a specific goal. If you want to increase your client volume early in the year, then over a 90-day period all your marketing focus can be on targeting this goal with special incentives, offers, and referral programs. Maybe you want an infusion of cash in your business at specific times of a year because your work is seasonal. Determining which quarter to focus your marketing in order to do this is now defined and, again, all efforts are then focused on making profits grow during a specific period of time. Working this way also allows you to be flexible and able to insert special announcements or last minute sales to increase your quarterly profits. Whatever your goal, you now have more power in making it happen when you take each quarter to develop, launch, and track your marketing efforts.

Bite 3. Map out notable events, holidays, and specials

Mapping out when to schedule events and sales promotions proves to be more effective when you plan ahead what you will need to create a ‘rolling’ campaign for an annual or semi-annual event. Furthermore, every quarter is filled with all kinds of marketing opportunities which you can take advantage of. The most obvious are seasonal holidays where marketing can be easily tied into the collective consciousness of the season. However, what if there are special events or days that are relevant to your industry? You can now build them into your marketing campaigns to help support your overall objective. Let’s say you have a chiropractic office and you know that in September the profession celebrates it’s ‘birthday’. This can create a great educational opportunity, as well as, a profitable one if leveraged as a special birthday savings to patients that schedule appointments on that day. Great days to honour for your business would be business opening anniversaries, owner or employee birthdays, special days important to your industry, and current or annual events that happen in your community. Have fun and get creative when it comes to making your marketing map!

Bite 4. Build in multiple contact channels

Knowing what kind of marketing campaign you are going to host and when it will occur over a quarter, now maximizes your marketing prep time. Instead of rushing last minute to pull something together, you can plan out a series of email, direct mailers, and phone or social network announcements ahead of time. This is where saving time and money becomes possible because you now have time working on your side. Email marketing can be programmed ahead of time to automatically go out on specific times and dates which can co-ordinate your social media marketing which also has applications that can schedule postings, too. Don’t forget to use direct mail, while a lost art, it still has a great impact when selected to be sent to targeted people on your list. Leveraging time like this allows you to create more ways to get your message across effectively–instead of a one-time hit at the last minute. Furthermore, the more ways you can reach people and stand out in their busy lives the more success you will have with your campaigns.

© 2015 Wendy Burge | www.RadiantEdgeConsulting.com

Drafting a Lifestyle Business Blueprint for Success

Nowadays, following a passion to help people by turning services into lifestyle businesses really only needs a computer with Internet access to make it happen. This has opened up new opportunities for solo-professionals, service providers, and even product-based businesses to work ‘virtually’– leveraged by help from the Internet. The value of this model has been the freedom to allow more people to look at the option of becoming a small business entrepreneur and to step into the ownership role without having to develop huge strategy planning, funding from banks or the expense of having employees. The basis of this business model is focused on the lifestyle-flexibility being built into the structure so the enjoyment of our lives can still be experienced and aligned with our work styles.

Although this has been a true gift by offering more people the opportunity to run their own businesses without all the costly over-head, a lifestyle business model must be adopted to set the benchmark for obtaining constant growth and profitability with the focus on flexibility and the desire for helping others.

The best strategy in designing a custom fit blueprint and structure to create a lifestyle business model is to build a bridge between personal happiness and professional success with strategies to support three primary areas to the overall business structure.

Market Position
It is common practice, initially; we will cater to the needs of our clients. As with any venture there is an excitement to see a profitable transaction as quickly as possible after start-up. While it is important to offer good client and customer services, it can also be taxing on a small business to adapt to each specific need of our clients. Additionally, it makes it difficult to clearly direct the right clients to our door if there is no clear distinction as to what makes our business different if we are not targeting our client’s specific problems then addressing them with our solutions. This approach attracts the right kind of clients, those ready and willing to use our services, because every offer provided supports the success and happiness of our clients.

System Leverage
The largest challenge is to not get easily overwhelmed by the amount of operational and administration duties necessary in maintaining your businesses. We spend more time working on our businesses than in it. Developing systemized plans which create an “office bible” or standard checklist of tasks performed becomes critical for a number of reasons. First, it creates consistency in the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly actions necessary to operate business and provides the best client experience. Second, it provides insight into areas where delegation of a task would better be served by outsourcing it to a virtual team member or employee. Third, this allows us to focus more on higher pay-off and profitable activities in our businesses – which we usually prefer to do anyway.

Systematizing a lifestyle business further provides long-term business strategies by leveraging web-base software, marketing automation tools, and social media allows a more flexible “built to go” business that can be operated from home or on travel without a lot of complication or disruption.

Money Making Activities
Traditionally, most people were employees before they stepped into the world of business ownership. It’s common to have a salary component which meant there was consistency in income on a biweekly basis. Unfortunately, this comfortable flow of money coming in takes strategy to “turn on” again when we go into business for ourselves. This reality hits home when there are only 24 hours in a day in which to handle all aspects of the administration and operation, including networking, serving clients, and making continued sales. Focusing on higher pay-off money making tasks is essential to turning on your money tap.

Selling a service on a client to client basis may be beneficial at first, but it’s virtually impossible to generate high revenues that way. Let’s say that you are a massage therapist or specialized service provider where time is a factor in the transaction with the client. Assessing how to develop packages, cross-promotions, and ‘up-sells’ will leverage more money in the time you have with clients. Additionally, it may be that your services or products can be repackaged and sold as information products or digital training courses reaching a larger audience online.

The focus on money making activities falls into the idea of a ‘marketing funnel’ as well because it gives us the ability to capitalize on creating better service offers and products to meet the needs of our clients at various levels of investment.

If your lifestyle based business is starting to become “the job you never wanted”, then it’s time to take action and hire a business and marketing coach to restructure your business for success.

Where are those ideal clients anyways?

Your passion to help people was the fuel that fanned the flames of starting your own business. Then, finding the ideal clients to work with was the next step in making this whole process successful. Right?

If it was that simple then why are you struggling to find those elusive ideal clients?

Maybe you believe that it’s a specific demographic or type of person. You spend a ton of time trying to identify who would be the best client for your business by meeting with everyone, and to no avail. Countless networking events, free talks and putting yourself out there has not panned out.

Truth be told, many heart-centered service professionals spend a lot of time networking, seeking, and hunting with very little return.

Why is this?

Honestly, because many still believe they can help everyone with their services so they are targeting…everyone! And not serving anyone.

The inability to find clients has nothing to do with the fact that they’re not available.

The reality is it’s ineffective marketing.

Because they are trying to share too much about their process and take on too many of the prospects’ problems when they meet them, they are not clearly helping people understand the results or outcome they will get by working with them.

Instead of sounding confident in the ability to help, more times than not, they slip into language that describes the process of what they do, how it works and why they passionately believe it will help everyone! Ouch!

Let me tell you this…accommodation will shut down your business very quickly when you try to over-deliver in conversations about how your process demonstrates the value of the work you do.

People can’t hear us if we speak in text book terms, profession lingo or generalities about how our services can benefit everyone. They don’t see how it can help them.

Are you beginning to get the point?

This doesn’t give people enough information about how we can help them specifically. They have no way to qualify themselves, or someone they know.

Know the symptoms of their pain.

If you want to stand out and get noticed in a saturated market, let people know you get them by being the solution to the most pressing top-of-mind problem or concern they face and you know how to solve.

Target problems by offering solutions. People will identify quickly if you’re able to help them or someone they know who has this issue.

The key here is not to offer them what YOU want them to want, but what THEY really want.

For example, most women are not walking around wishing they were “more of who they really are.” They may not even know what it is they want to become. Instead, they may be wondering why their relationship with their partner is losing its passion and are worried that if it continues their marriage will end.

In order to reach the clients who will pay, start with their symptom pain. Market first to what people want (relief from their immediate pain or problem), and then, once they are in your world, deliver what they need (the deeper transformation).

So where are these elusive ideal clients hanging out?

Well, they are everywhere. We just have to learn how to meet them where they are at in their lives. (I have yet to meet a person without a problem that someone’s services can’t help.)

Our ideal clients are all around us. The problem is they often can’t hear us. Get clear, get concise, and get speaking in a problem solution format as to what you help people solve.

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Want to learn my system to clarify your solutions so people can hear you?

I am offering my exclusive online 8 week bootcamp, Clients and Cash Flow Infusion, starting in July where we go step-by-step to help you create your expertise business! Just in time for the fall.

Click here for more information!

How to get paid for what you know, not just what you do!

What’s the simplest, most confident way to charge what you are really worth and actually get clients to pay you for it?

Answer: Position Your Knowledge for Greater Value

In this day of easy internet access to information it may seem like everyone is an expert and there is no room in the market for one more bit of health, relationship or money advice.

Because we have a flood of expert information online, many people who are selling their services as coaches, consultants, and healers struggle to grow their businesses because they can’t determine what additional value they could create that is original in content and beneficial to people that is not already out there.

And, for many of these service professionals really wanting to find that radiant edge in their business, they down-play, dismiss, and create monkey chatter conversation in their minds with statements like, “Who am I to share this information, anyway?

Overlooking our own value is the greatest money block in our businesses and keeps many people under earning.

When service professionals don’t believe that what they are providing has expanded value, they look outside of themselves for their confidence and approval—they can actually lose credibility at this point as they seek to find the source of what more. Often by attaining more training, certification or additional modalities, service professionals will, at times, cite this as the real value in their ability to serve their clients most effectively.

Let’s be clear about this. Yes, as a billable service I am sure they’re an incredible investment to their clients. But consider this point – what exactly are we doing for our clients, specifically?

Guaranteed, it’s not only the coaching session, meal plan, or money strategy, or that they paid for more information specifically. They are buying our core value—our individual essence they are attracted too. They are investing in your ability to connect with them, validate their struggles, and then create supportive roles either through accountability or implementation mentoring.

Your incredible ability to discern their problem based on your experience, offer relevant and timely or efficient knowledge on how to solve their issue, and become the trusted guide they have been seeking that can relate to them, their values, and their struggles, holds immense value as we have the ability to connect to their souls.

You become the mirror in which they see themselves and what is possible with your help. And, often unconditionally, when they are a right fit for you—an ideal client.

What is it then that you are able to help solve for people?

Get this clear in your mind and you can easily position your expertise.

Write out the benefits and outcome/results of working with you, so that you yourself are clear about how you help people, really.
Even more important is to identify how they feel in a before and after snap shot. How are people different after working with you?

It’s not just that, “I want to help people…”. Specifically, how do you want to leave people feeling? Consider all those times your clients come back and remark about this as you have helped them feel more secure, confident, empowered or celebrated, maybe as simple as finally feeling capable.

Being able to communicate this kind of connection will transform your business.

Design your offers to provide specific outcomes. Create your system of how you do this and you have now branded your service with even more value—literally doing what you innately have been doing.

Clarity is the key to establishing your foundation for rapid growth.

Make it clear to people what it is that you can do for them and more importantly how they can feel once they have achieved their transformation with your help.

Don’t build your confidence from your clients – they build it from you!

© 2015 Wendy Burge | http://www.RadiantEdgeConsulting.com

Why Transforming the Service Experiences in Your Business is Good Business

When you started your business who told you how to set up your business? Did you learn from a business book or program, invest in a business coach, or go to a management seminar in your industry?

In my experience, most service based business owners didn’t do any of those things initially. Their beginnings went more like this: get the certification or training, open up shop, and look for clients. It sounds relatively simple. No big business plans. No huge investment to get started outside of certification and training costs; which really, most would pay for personally just to know about the topic; so, regardless if they made a lot of money from it or not, they would gladly hand that money over without a second thought again.

This is part of the problem we have in most soft service professions and heart-centered services.

You gladly invested in learning your skills, but really, there have been few places to really learn how to set up your business for the kind of work you offer – transformation. Furthermore, because you are interested in your learning, the need to make money from the training actually takes back seat to the actual help it offers to people.

So what happens instead?

Often it is your own industry who told you what to charge and why you could charge no more than that. Sounds like fish bowl teachings. Rightfully so, there are some industries that are held to governing ethics boards, but, to this point, there are no governing bodies that I know of that said, “Oh, only energy workers can charge X dollars for this service.” And yet, most of us are just guessing at what our clients will actually pay based on fishbowl industry standards.

Now here is the thing – people will pay for things that they find value in.

So, let me ask you this: how many times has a client said to you, “I would have paid double for your help. I love what you do and it has helped me so much!”

Hello! Your client just said they would have paid you double, and yet you still refuse to charge more for your services. Why?

I will tell you why I believe this is the case, because few people have yet to discover an actual way to quantify their soft, intangible service, that is limited to an hourly set time dictated by our own industries, into a full-on transformational experience .

Yet, when you begin to look at what really happens within those sessions with clients, they come to you for more than just your tools, which is whatever way you deliver your service. They come to you because of the potential of transforming the issues they have with your help using your tools and your expertise. The disconnect in our structure for building our businesses is that traditionally we were taught, and adopted from our employee mentality, that people only value time. It is our belief that our value is only worth a set amount of time, so we must charge for our time to deliver the value of the service. This practice and belief is crippling most soft service businesses.

Truth be told, people value results!

They value the possibility of something better than what they are currently experiencing.

So, if you are able to offer results that hold great value, your time is better used to really take account of the experiences your clients get with you, from your expertise, and through your services tools.

And this is where one of the secrets to creating a transformation service based business thrives over others – its ability to build sustainability beyond selling tools. The act of service is not charitable nor is it indentured. Instead it is a form of structured LEADERSHIP, GUIDANCE, and SUPPORT when working with transformation. By no means can these be expressed solely in an hourly rate job. These characteristics developed over time and through experience.

In order to build a thriving business we must consider how to transform our service experience from the value it delivers, not necessarily the time it takes to deliver it. Because in the end, why is one person’s time charged out more than another if there is still the same amount of minutes within a set period of time? Experience and expertise.

Spring is my favourite time of the year!

I always feel more energized, like I have finally come out of winter hibernation. Well, that, and the fact that my birthday is at the end of March. With that there is a sense of renewal as if all that was left undone from the previous year can be evaluated and either completed and/or discarded.

I am happy to say that I have dumped those things I had sitting there taking up physical space and mental clutter in my life and business. I have gotten back to basics and really streamlining how I can work more effectively.

The topic of transformation keeps showing up in this process too. In that it is something I love creating with the work I do, how I help people, and in many cases, how I am doing both in my business. A project to help me transform my ability to work with more people has finally come to completion this month and I could not be happier. As an element of transformative service work requires leadership, guidance and mentoring, I am able to do so much more of this now by launching my new Clients and Cash Flow Infusion 8-week Bootcamp – online training and coaching program.

This really was a labour of love and a way to transform my teaching and coaching experience in a more leveraged and accessible option for a lot of people. With a busy month ahead in April, filled with my second art show as an exhibitor, numerous speaking events and my regular rounds of networking, having this new way to stay connected and coaching with my clients is allowing me to enhance the experiences we collaborate in creating together to attain their results.

Spots are available for this new program so if you are ready to transform your service business to really claim your expertise, increase your income and create a leveraged way of attracting clients into your service, please contact me to speak and see if this new coaching opportunity would be a good fit for you.

8 Secret Ingredients to Success Nobody Talks About!

Successful entrepreneurs all share a keen understanding that self-determination and self-discipline are two key ingredients for making success happen. However, there are lesser known or possibly under-estimated factors which are in play in attaining success as well.

As simple as they appear to be, these 8-points are essential because they are more about the beliefs and thoughts we possess about ourselves.

1. You must DECIDE that you are ready to accept all that is within your power and all that is beyond your understanding the moment you chose to step off into entrepreneurial journey. It requires you to have faith knowing you are now on a path of purpose to serve others with the gifts and love you possess.

2. Don’t get caught up in the title of your occupation. If it is what you love to do, then STAKE YOUR CLAIM to do it. This clarity is critical. Nothing can draw you off course once you have made the decision to fully, own your gifts out-right!  No matter what problems, big or small, you encounter along the way, they’ll end up becoming the uncharted opportunities to your success-all because YOU DECIDED to step into your BEING.

3. AWARENESS happens in stages.We all know hind-sight is 20/20. This fact is very important to take into account. Initially on this entrepreneurial journey, we judge our capabilities by the success of those who have gone before us. Thoughts like “I don’t know how to…” or “Who am I to…” must be seen as growth opportunities–not hindrances in your experience.

4. It is critical to not make decisions from where you are but, from WHERE YOU WANT TO BE! Learn from the successful people you want to model after. Then, hold that vision of what success looks like to you and fully understand you will learn what you must in time-each step leading to the next. Consider the saying “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” Then, move into that space of intentional living.

5. Grow your SELF WORTH by investing in yourself. The critical factor here is WHAT YOU BELIEVE ABOUT YOUR SELF is what others will sense. It is important not only to grow your business but also your understanding of who you are in the process. Stay curious about your thoughts and fears. Address them with a coach, mentor, or adviser because when you stop growing personally your inner thoughts stagnate and your business will stop growing and hit a plateau.

6. Mastering your INNER GAME opens the hidden doors inside your mind about your own fears, anxieties, and other unknown beliefs that may be counter-intuitive to your success. Remove the lynch pins to your growth. The best and most successful entrepreneurs spend thousands-up to hundreds-of-thousands of dollars a year working with “mindset” mentors to help them stay clear and focused while they address any internal blocks. It is not unheard of to have their businesses leap forward rapidly in profitable success and growth once they clear these invisible obstacles.

7. Creating a clear path of SELF AWARENESS also allows you to play at a bigger level. Success is never on sale! There are times when investing in your business-spending money and making larger decisions and strategic moves-will require your full-out faith about yourself and your capabilities. If you have self-doubts-like your fears raising their case against your better judgement then you will not be able to move into that space of conscious creation and service.

8. BELIEFS are expanded by the people we surround ourselves with. Entrepreneurial spirit DOES NOT exist in everyone! We are a different, fearless breed! It is essential to acknowledge the importance of those people within our environments who have similar understandings and belief systems as ours. The well-known and well-respected personal development expert, Jim Rohn states, “You are the average of the 5 people you hang around.”

There are many “crabs in the bucket” that would just as easily pull you down with them at the slightest “trip” you make (and most of us definitely may fall a few times along our paths) so identify your real supporters to help you mentally get up again when that time comes. By upgrading your supportive relationships your momentum stays in stride whether you trip or soar. Authentic support embraces you whole heartily along your entrepreneurial journey!