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How Do I Start A Business?

How Do I Start A Business? Here is my answer to a "Can you give me a 10 minute call on How do I start a business" question, from a large group of coaches (and would-like-to-be-coaches). Maybe it'll help someone out here in the wild. Let me explain the process in six straightforward questions you must answer:

Starting a Business: The Positioning Element

1. Who will you help? Identify a target market.

2. What will you help them with? Financials? Strategy? Operations? What's your offer?

I think of this as "taking the client on a bus trip". You pick them up at Stop A. Where is that? And then you take them on a journey and drop them off at Stop B. Where is that located? How is that location/situation better than where you picked them up?

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Hit Your Target Audience by Making Specific Choices and Doing Your Research First.

3. What size of problem are you solving for them?

You can have a number, but it's best to have the client do the math and figure out how big the problem is. You can easily charge 5% of the size of the problem. Maybe 10%. Maybe more, if you have good reason to charge more. This is more formally known as “budget” (which is not “is the prospect breathing and has a dollar in their jeans?”). I have made videos and content on this concept, called “Monetizing The Problem”, for a decade.

Looking around and seeing "market rate" to figure out your pricing is a common and foolish idea that keeps people poor.

The Traffic and Conversion Element

4. How will you find your target client? Where are they?

5. How will you begin a conversation with them, and eventually sell your service? Map this out.

How Do I Start a Business: The Fulfillment Element

6. How will you deliver your service? How will you and the client know when you are done (dropped them off at Stop B)?

These are the basics. You get to choose. You get to choose your customers. You get to choose the problem you solve. You get to choose the size of problem you solve. You get to choose how much you charge. I believe you should choose a target market and a service that you enjoy talking about all day. That way you will be automatically enthusiastic. There must be an overlap between that and what people will pay for, or you will have a hobby and not a business. Many people make this mistake.

Many of your limiting beliefs will impact these choices. Since they are limiting beliefs, you are likely to be unconscious of them.

Final insight: you can outsource anything on the list.

>> Jason Kanigan is an agency growth expert. Book a consultation with him here <<

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Your Value Creates Your Business Size

Your value: where does it come from?

I'm speaking entirely in a business-rational point of view here: as a human being, you have infinite value independent of anything or anyone. In the marketplace, however, you do have a quantifiable value. So let us explore that.

Your Business Size As A Function Of Your Value

Your value is a direct function of the size of problem you choose to solve.

A couple of ways of approaching this are available to us. One, you could pick a high-priced offer. An example is a lawyer who keeps you away from a conviction and out of jail. You're going to be able to charge a high dollar figure for solving those problems...and you're also likely to be capped on the number of said projects you can handle at any time.

Two, you could pick a low-priced offer. The rub here is this offer is badly needed by masses of people, and you get to fulfill it over and over and over again. An example is a fast food lunch hamburger. Sure, the thing is only a dollar or two—but with your many locations you deliver the burger again and again over the noontime period.

Both can get you to big rational dollar totals, our indicator of marketplace value. One is not "better" than another; however, I will point out that a factor exists that makes one of these approaches better for you.

Money Tolerance. We've looked at this key "thermometer reading" before. And here it is again, this time secretly dictating the value you bring to the marketplace.

Money Tolerance and Business Growth

Say you're OK with the "let's feed 'em lunch" plan. Your money tolerance is low, eg. you believe $200 is "a lot of money".

This might be all right—if you can get yourself past the notion that a mountain of those $2 burgers delivered to hungry customers adds up to a mountain of cash.

But what if you can't?

The defense attorney is by default locked into a pretty decent money tolerance. Try as they might, $1500 or so is a kind of dumb minimum for taking on a straightforward case where the lawyer holds all the cards and the defendant has no idea what's going on. The lawyer has a better chance of creating more value in the marketplace and bringing home more for themselves, simply because of their money tolerance and the chunks of revenue per case.

burger fast food lunch your value low money tolerance low value

Photo by Foodie Factor from Pexels

The burger seller has to pump out a ton more orders to get to the same totals as the attorney can reach with just a few sales.

Again, with the right vision the burger seller can make up for and even well exceed the revenue totals of the lawyer. But they're starting with a handicap.

Your Unconscious Value Cap

The reason why I talk about these concepts is that most people—almost everyone—walk around in an unconscious daze. They have zero clue they're being pushed around, that their lives are being walled in and their daily experience manipulated, by limiting beliefs they don't know they have.

Pull these limiting beliefs out into the sunlight, and you can change your world.

I encourage you to explore the idea that your money tolerance is severely limiting the value you're bringing to and receiving from the marketplace, and thereby your business size...and that you could change all that. If you're happy with where you're at, leave it alone. But if you're not, be aware that you can deliberately shift those money tolerance goalposts. Choose a different size of problem to solve, or a higher frequency of solving it. And then watch the value rise and your business size increase.

>> Jason Kanigan is a business strategist. To book a consultation with Jason to discuss your marketplace value, business size and money tolerance, click here <<

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Money Tolerance And The Games We Play

Money Tolerance is a topic I'm surprised to find I haven't written much about here, given that it is such a central concept not only to the sales training I deliver but also to life. Your life.

If we look at the 80/20 Rule aka Pareto's Law, and apply it to your life, we find this: a small number of beliefs and their resulting decisions turn into the majority of what you experience in life.

The purpose of thinking is to stop thinking. The vast majority of our decisions are made on autopilot, drawing on what we've done before, consistency, identity. The maintenance of identity is key, whether you're conscious of this or not.

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Photo by Vladislav Reshetnyak from Pexels

The Consistency of Money Tolerance

Money Tolerance is a two-parter. It's a limiting belief to imagine as two goalposts: one lower, and one upper. The upper limit is easy to spot, at least when we're being truthful with ourselves (and we often are not). This is the number at which you start saying, "That's a lot of money".

This is a game we play. We play it first with ourselves, then with others.

You see, that number is a BS story. It's nonsense. One number isn't any bigger than another: compare your number to infinity. It's all a game. Why this number and not another? You probably heard your parents say it. "This washing machine is a lot of money." OK, $500 or $1000 gets locked into your mind as "a lot of money".

But it's not the same number for other people, and this is where many folks get stuck in the game they're playing.

"This car is a lot of money," Dad said about the Mercedes station wagon priced at $87,500 because he wanted the nice trim package. So for you, $1000 is peanuts; "a lot of money" starts at $80,000.

How This Key Limiting Belief Affects Your Sales Conversations

Different people are walking around with different money tolerance levels... but they don't know it.

So as a prospective customer, you can bump into somebody who has an extremely different belief in what the cost and value of what you offer as a business owner or salesperson represents.

If you grew up being imprinted upon that "$80,000 is a lot of money", but this prospect in front of you right now believes that "$500 is a lot of money"... can you predict what's going to happen?

That prospect is going to collapse. They're going to fall into themselves, because their belief doesn't support your price tag, and they're going to leave. They literally cannot stand being around the mere idea.

Take this in.

You can also use Money Tolerance as a qualifying tool: I certainly do.

I've explained for years how you choose your customers.

One of the levers you've got available to work with here is Money Tolerance. What if you were to use it to set a bar? So that only those people who already believed—were playing the game that the money number level of where you believe value begins is what they already agree with—were allowed past the velvet rope?

What if you only let people with a pricing-value belief matching your own see the offer?

A big part of positioning works this way. Consider Mercedes again. They're happy to give away whatever info is on their website to whoever wants to look: they know the vast majority of visitors are dreamers who will never qualify to buy. Only those who come into the dealership, and pass the test of answering some qualifying questions correctly, will get the chance to receive an offer to buy. Remember, those are the prospects who can stand there and participate with the idea of this investment as not being "too much money".

How can you take this concept to your own business and apply it?

>> Jason Kanigan is a business strategist and coach. If you're ready to book a session with Jason, click here <<