Each week in my Create Your Laptop Life® membership, I answer any and all business and marketing questions directly from my members in a live Q&A coaching session.

In today’s episode, I tackle four business questions directly from my community.

I’ll cover…

– Why Businesses Fail
– My Biggest Mistake in Business
– What to Do When You Feel Unqualified
– What to Do When a Client Says They Don’t Have Money

Have more questions about running or starting your own business?

Check out https://cyllnetwork.com for information on my private membership community, Create Your Laptop Life®, and get all your questions answered directly by me each week, along with so much more.

Video Transcript

I think there’s a lot of reasons that businesses fail, but if I had to narrow it down to the top, I think it’s that they don’t understand what their customers want.

People get obsessed with building products and offer and services and you’re like, oh, this will be cool, this would be cool, but they forget that they really need to be attaching themselves to an audience, not so much a product or an offer. And I think the businesses that get it right, they attach themselves to the people and the customers that they serve and they are committed to serving them even if it’s not with a product that they have now.

Those businesses seem to outlast all the trends and all the fads.

I think my biggest mistake was… So in August of 2016, I was already to join the Inner Circle mastermind, Russell Brunson’s mastermind for $25,000 and I chickened out.

What proceeded after that was I had several months of building this particular product. At the time it was a subscription. It was a membership community.

And it was $97 a month and I thought it was broken and I thought it was broken because I didn’t have a mentor.

I didn’t have the right information and because I was just living in my own little world and I see this happen again and again.

I actually closed the membership thinking that it was a failure because I had a hundred people joining a month and I had maybe 10 to 20 people quitting after each month and I thought that was bad.

Little did I know that it’s actually quite normal that out of a hundred people joining maybe 10 will stick around and so I had it completely backward because they didn’t have an outside perspective.

I closed that program and it ended up costing me… I don’t even know how much money because I had to re-jig it and yes, I recovered and made a new program and it was awesome, but I just think about what would have happened if I had just gotten some outside advice and counsel and been like, is this normal? Is this okay? I probably would have done things very, very differently.

When people say, I’m not qualified or I don’t feel ready, I just say, get over yourself. Get over yourself because you will never be ready.

In fact, the only thing that makes you ready is doing it. Everybody wants to be so prepared. It’s Baloney. It’s, it’s bullshit.

It’s so hard when people say that they’re unqualified because yeah, some people are legitimately unqualified to do something. Right, and you’ve got a whole industry of coaches and stuff where like, oh, you know, I’ll run a coaching business and they’ve never actually run a business before.

So I get that. I get that, but most people who have that true imposter syndrome are just waiting for some external validation that’s never going to happen.

Because it only happens in the actual act of doing what you’re afraid of doing.

It’s like you’re never prepared to be a parent. So what’s the preparation? What do you do? You have a baby and then you learn how to be a parent.

And I just think it all boils down to people who are obsessed with perfection or obsessed with image, they just can’t handle the idea of falling and making mistakes and it all boils down to a fear of failure.

And you’ll never get over it until you fail and do it anyway. So don’t wait to feel good about it. It just, it won’t happen. Just do it anyway.

If a client tells you they don’t have money, I would say maybe 10 percent of the time they don’t actually have the money, but 90 percent of the time you’ve just done a poor job of communicating your value.

And I always use this example, right?

I always use the example of if somebody said to me, hey, I have a Mercedes, it’s 50 grand. I wouldn’t buy it just because I don’t see the value in spending that much money in a car.

But if somebody said, hey, I got a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard on South Beach and it’s actually, it’s worth like $10 million, but I’ll give it to you for $50,000.

I’d go sell my first born kid, right? I would do anything to get $50,000 to pay for that house because the perceived value is so high.

And so if a customer says, I can’t afford you, you have not created enough desire, enough belief and enough value for them to actually fork over the money, because if you did, they’d fork over the money. It’s very, very few people who actually can’t afford it.