Are you a Reluctant Entrepreneur?

There are many reasons why people start businesses, even small business coaches. Some have that entrepreneurial urge from the moment they’re born. They’re the ones selling sweets in the playground, honing their entrepreneurial skills right at the school gates. These probably make up less than one percent of business owners. The rest of us business owners are probably best described as reluctant entrepreneurs.

So why does this matter?

Well if you’ve been going a while you’ve probably learned how to market what your business does, or to put it another way, how to get customers. However if you’re just about to start your entrepreneurial journey then there’s a good probability that you’re in for a shock, in fact this shock kills quite a few small businesses.

You see, here’s what happens, you leave the business you’ve been working for (you may even take the database of their existing customers with you) and start by selling to friends, family and your existing contact circle. So initially it’s quite easy to get customers. However after a while you exhaust these, and suddenly you need to find a way to get more leads and convert them to customers, this is when the trouble starts.

You’ve got a problem, you need to learn how to get customers fast because if you don’t then there’s a good chance that sooner or later you’re going to go pop, and as they say, ‘another one bite the dust’. In fact this is incredibly common, more than 80% of small businesses go bust in their first 5 years.

I want you to stop for a moment and think about all the advertising you’ve seen over the past week?

How many of those actual ads can you name? Researchers estimate that over the past seven days, you have been exposed to as many as 117,000 ads based on national averages. So out of 117,000 ads, how many can you name?

If you’re fairly attentive, you may be able to come up with 3 or 4 specific ads… but I’ll bet that’s because you probably see those ads over and over… week in and week out. Let’s face the facts… repetition works. When you see any advertisement multiple times every day you’re bound to eventually begin to recall the ad. But now answer this question. What few ads you do remember, how many of their products or services have you bought?

Business owners today are led to believe that all they have to do to build a successful business is create some type of attention-grabbing form of marketing, repeat it ad infinitum and they will generate leads at will. Nothing could be further from the truth. The problem of course is that Coca Cola, Pepsi or the big car companies can afford to spend millions on those campaigns and not worry that much about the return they get on the campaign. How many small business owners do you know that can do that? None right.

Small business owners need to get a return out of every marketing dollar or pound they spend but they’re not trained to think this way. They’re told that they ‘need to build their Brand’ and that they need an online presence and that they need to be doing social media etc etc. All of which is fine to an extent but results in very few new customers. The problem is that even if you do all of these, you probably still won’t use the fundamentals of the marketing equation, which is key to getting people to take action. And don’t look to your accountant or graphic designer or web developer for the answers because they’re very unlikely to know.

This is where a small business coach comes in.

One who has been trained and steeped in the ways of ‘direct response’ marketing, who knows how to get a return out of every penny you spend and understands the fundamentals of the marketing equation.

So if you’re a reluctant entrepreneur, and you’re just starting out on your journey then have a look around www.johnolivant.com, have a look at the free business building resources that we provide, and if you’re really serious take the ten minute sales and marketing audit to find out where you are on your business owner’s journey.

Profile: John Olivant is a small business coach who specialises in helping local small businesses and Reluctant Entrepreneurs get their business to where they want it to be.