If you have any hope of one day earning a decent amount of money doing what you love, working with people you love then trust me when I tell you this… You need to work your tail to the fucking bone to achieve it!

I’m not talking about staying until 7pm or doing a few emails at night or talking to a client out of “work hours”. I’m talking about telling your girlfriend she comes second. I’m talking about telling your mates that business comes first. What I’m asking you to do is sit down and work out what your priorities are.

I get that you might have a girlfriend who you love, I get that you might have mates who want to see you. I even get that you have kids who are a demand on your time but they’re going to want to have cool shit for Christmas in December aren’t they? Exactly.

You don’t understand how important it is for you to work HARD. It pisses me off. People throw that phrase around like they have a single clue what it means. I have my phases where I’m far from productive but you will NEVER out-work me. Here’s an example of the last few days of my life:

Weekend: Writing proposals, preparing emails, decorating the office and setting that up so people can pay money to rent a desk from us. Sunday night: Gym at midnight, bed at 3am. Up at 8am Monday morning, smashing it all day, working, phone calls, setting stuff up, making shit happen building sites, planning stuff. 4am I was hoovering the office still banging away. 6am I get to bed. 10am I wake up getting back on it, not a yawn in sight. Why?

BECAUSE I FUCKING LOVE THIS!

There is no escaping it. I would do it anyway whether there was money there or not. I’m not suggesting you stay up until 6am every night. I’m telling you to do it when the time requires it. If you have a single SECOND of down time you should be emailing or calling anyone you can get your hands on begging, pleading to come in and demonstrate your work. Take on EVERYTHING you can get your hands on. LOVE the process of being busy, banging away, having deadlines.

Love the grind. Love the hustle. If you don’t, your business will die and you WILL fall out of love with your craft. I can absolutely promise you this because it’s happened to me.

If you don’t step up, I’m going to step up and steal your spot. We’re not in competition with each other in terms of products but we are in terms of small business customer’s wallets. I want that money and if you want it too, you are going to have to out-work me.

Kicking ass, all night long, you want success? – BRING IT ON!

It’s a strange little world us chaps at Advantix live in. We turn up at a client’s place, ask them about 50 questions, write down everything they say then vanish off into the night for the best part of 2 months. Suddenly, we resurrect ourselves from the Dungeon of Shoreham (that’s our offices) and rock up to the nerve racking meeting of glory.

Did we miss anything?

I can’t remember if the invoice request should include VAT or not?

Did we put the final change on the logo on all the pages?

How does it show up on the iPad?

That and a million other questions seem to run through our minds on the day of a big presentation. It’s not because we’re worried about whether we’ve built the system to spec or not. That’s never a question. The question is, did we write the specification correct in the first place.

Unlike with a website, or building a wall, you might take recommendations from your chosen expert but ultimately “you know best”. You know whether you want it 3ft high or 3.5ft high, just like you know whether you want the logo centred or aligned to the left. They are visual things, you can see them, touch them in some cases but at the very least you can draw it on a piece of paper.

What about Automating your business though? How do you draw that? It’s not a visual thing, it’s not about the design of the software, almost any competent designer could do that. It’s about the information you’re capturing, who it’s being sent to, are there too many automatic emails? are reminders being put somewhere your not looking?

In our case, it’s not you that writes the spec. It’s my job to work out what you need by asking you a specific set of thought out questions. If I do that bit right it’s plain sailing. My questions from earlier aren’t about whether we forgot to build something? – That worry comes from wondering if we asked the right questions. Thankfully these days, it’s usually all wonderful when we do our presentation and it’s usually wonderful a few months after that too.

I imagine it’s the same sort of feeling a skydiver gets 3 seconds after he’s jumped out the plane…

Did I pack my parachute properly?

What do our best customers do:

• Pay on time
• Reasonable with deadlines
• Don’t bitch about things
• Happy to set up a Direct Debit
• Don’t make us jump through hoops to win jobs (when we have an existing relationship)
• Enjoy the process of working with us

It’s worth knowing who your best customers are so you can try and find more of them.

• Pay late
• Constantly after a discount
• Don’t respect our time in terms of meetings and phone calls
• Present unrealistic deadlines for work
• Add stuff on at the end of the job
• Try to mess up procedure by not signing our agreements
• Don’t pay their monthly fees by Direct Debit when we ask them to

It’s far from conclusive but knowing some characteristics of your worst customers lets you know who to look for and avoid.

Last year, we did this for the first time and it was a great move. In late December 2010 I thought about all of the products we were going to be launching, the content we wanted to get out there, the events we wanted to put on and I wrote a list of every email I wanted to send and put them in a list like this:

January:

• 3rd: Happy New Year
• 12th: Blog post summary email
• 25th: Free PDF on Business Automation

Then, the same thing for February through to December. What I did next is go through and write all of these emails in one go then design them. This might sound like a ridiculous task; when I mention this to people I’m often looked at like I just suggested head butting glass. The 2 objections are these:

Objection 1: What the hell do I write about?

If you’re a service business, and you teach people anything at all just think about all of the things you’ve taught in the last few months with private clients, and make a massive list. Split it into smaller sections if you have to – email content doesn’t need to be that long.

Objection 2: When am I going to find the time?

You will never find time to do anything that doesn’t require survival. Instead you make the time.

I recommend going to Groupon, Living Social or KGB Deals; grabbing a business friend (not your girlfriend or wife unless she happens to be your business partner), and booking a 2 night stay anywhere that has self contained facilities. As long as it has a lounge and a restaurant it’s fine. Be prepared to work the entire weekend and don’t go with the intention of chilling out. When I go to these places I dial up the intensity so much, it’s borderline unhealthy. Just keep working non-stop.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I actually wrote the majority of my new book Automate Your Business during one of these weekends. I was averaging 10,000 words a day. Your emails should be about 200-300 words each. Don’t try telling me you can’t write 17 emails, at around 5000 words in the space of a weekend. That’s easy if you know your subject.

Schedule Them In Advance:

Using an online email marketing service like MailChimp, simply schedule all these emails at the the dates you’ll decide shortly. The help system within MailChimp is top notch and they offer great live chat support if you’re stuck. I’m a big advocate – it’s a great service. We’ve also written a great guide on Email Marketing and have created a video series to get you started. Find it at http://www.AdvantixGroup.com/emailmarketing

Little Email Marketing Tip: I always schedule my emails on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays at either mid-morning (10:30am) or mid-afternoon (3:00pm). Follow this advice if you want people to actually read your emails. Always use their first name in the subject line and include a subtle but decent reminder to buy things from you.

Once you do this, you can more or less relax for the entire year in terms of your marketing. Of course there will be things you hadn’t planned for which you’ll need to work on and factor in, but at least you know that if you did nothing else; you would have a decent marketing effort going out to your email list.

What I want you to do now is think about some of the content you can send out. Come up with some ideas on a sheet of paper then plan it out. Personally, I’d leave 4 spaces per month because you don’t really want to be doing more than 1 email a week. Obviously if you think that’s too much then scale it back. If you do nothing else, start with one every 3 weeks. It keeps it irregular and at odd times in the month. I know it sounds backwards but this will help people notice your emails.

Right now, spend a few moments thinking about the kind of content and emails you’d like to send to your list over the next 12 months. Start from wherever we are in the year and either run to the end of the year, or do the full 12 months. It’s up to you.

Enjoy

PS: As always, if you want some help, give me a call on 0800 644 0028 or email ads@advantixgroup.com and I’ll make some time to help you out.

It was beautifully said and the events today made me think about that scene.

A lot of lives were changed today. Startups now have a bigger personal allowance (helpful if your at that point), Millionnaires buying houses over £2,000,000 now have to pay a ridiculous 7% Stamp Duty, and the rules have changed on Stamp Duty avoidance. This has wiped out hundreds of businesses today in a split second.

Some people will be going to bed tonight with no job tomorrow, future in doubt, business plan out the window. Or will they.

The definition of an entrepreneur seems to have been diluted so much it’s hard to know what it really means anymore. My take on it is you run around life with a Jack Bauer type approach to business. You take a ‘by any means necessary’ approach to getting things done. To hell with the rules. 5pm is time to have breakfast not go home. Anyone who’s been affected by the changes today, I want you to remember something…

You are a business person. Businesspeople aren’t little bitches that let other people tell them how things are going to be. Business people don’t let other people set trends and make rules, they break them, dodge them, get round them or my personal favourite, barrel the fuck through them! You have a duty to yourself, to your family, your staff, your friends and most of all yourself to stand up for your beliefs, thoughts, ideas and go balls to the wall!

There is no turning back. I have no idea how old you are reading this but you have a certain number of years left on this planet and I don’t know about you, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste them by being someone’s little bitch and listening to someone else’s rules. It’s time to take 5 minutes for yourself, realise who you are, why you started your business and what you want when it’s all said and done. Where are you now? Where do you want to be? How long (in time) is that away? Draw a straight line between the two and head for it like it’s the light at the end of a runway.

If anything gets in your way, while your pummeling it down that runway of glory at 200mph, do me a favour. Don’t stop, don’t waiver. Stay strong and smash that fucker out the way and keep going!

You deserve this. Time to Bring It!

How long does it take to stop reading this post, answer the phone, read your email then send a text and get back into the flow of the post again? Apart from the added stress of jumping between so many different tasks, it’s not just the time it takes to do a task. What’s often not considered is the amount of time it takes from being in the flow doing one task, stop doing that, start doing something else, then get in the flow doing the new task. I call this ‘set up time’. The way to avoid this grey area of uselessness is to batch tasks together.

The idea of batching tasks together is nothing new, but here’s the gist of it. Think about all the things you do multiple times a day, group them all together and do them in one go. What about calling people back? Instead of letting your phone and inbox run your day, how about you run it instead? Try doing all phone calls at say 3pm and emails at set points throughout the day. Do things on your time, not everyone else’s. I’ll give you some examples of things I batch:

• Reading/responding to email (twice a day)
• Checking post (once every 3 weeks)
• Cooking (once every 2 weeks – yes really!)
• Phone calls (once a day)
• Invoicing (once a week)
• Cleaning (once a week I have a real clean up)
• Writing blog posts (once every 4 months)
• Running errands (every 3 days)
• Shooting videos (once every 4 months)

Do you get the idea? What I want you to do is have a think about all the different things you do in a day, week and month. Every single task. Then as I’ve done, put in brackets the frequency that you could do them. You’ll never shift your day to work like this immediately but pick the easiest to implement from your list and action it starting today.

Bookkeeping is one of the easiest things to outsource. If you use an online system like KashFlow then you shouldn’t really need to outsource the invoicing; but sending a virtual assistant (VA) an email saying “Invoice Matt Jones £300 for consultancy, due in 7 days from today” and firing it off is a lot easier than messing about in Microsoft Word making your invoices. Your job as business owner is to set these things up, not necessarily use them day in and day out. What about expenses? Just an idea, but how about keeping all your receipts in a box, then at the end of each week, take pictures with your phone and email them to your Virtual Assistant and tell them to input them into a system like KashFlow. All the details are on the invoice/receipt so there’s no explanation required on your part. It’s easy for them. At the end of the year, give your accountant your KashFlow login details and tell them to crack on. They’ll press 3 buttons and their calculations are done.

Benefits:

1. Your accounting bill is chopped in half
2. You’ll spend maybe £150 over the year in book keeping fees
3. You can access reports at any time by logging in and seeing the financial state of your business.

Three massive benefits! The biggest of course being your reduction in accounting fees. After all, why would you want to pay a qualified accountant  £100/hour to type up your receipts and add up your invoices? It’s a totally ludicrous allocation of your hard earned cash. As you become a bigger business, you want to try to keep scalable fees like accounting fees to a low amount. The more bookkeeping work they need to do the more expensive your fees will be.

A little story… I was in Tenerife enjoying a nice 4 week break from the day-to-day of business (yet it kept running as if I was there), and the phone rang while at dinner. It was the Police. They told me my apartment had been broken into and looked like the place had been robbed. I couldn’t help but feel relieved that my family hadn’t been butchered or something. I lost two TVs, two games consoles, two of our computers, a server and all my DVDs.

While the TV’s and games consoles being stolen were annoying, they were certainly replaceable. Our computers and the server weren’t. In any normal situation this would have destroyed my business. In our case, it didn’t make a single bit of difference.

Why?

Everything was stored online! Our accounts, our customer database, our contracts, our customer’s website files. All we needed to do was replace the computers when we got home, log back into those sites and we were back up and running again.

If I had everything stored at home physically on those computers, the whole business would have been screwed. I would have lost everything… including my mind.

Why am I telling you this?

The reason it didn’t matter is because all our systems are web-based. So what does it mean if something is web-based? (sometimes known as ‘web apps’) It simply means that it is software designed using web technology. In basic terms, it’s a big complicated website. The benefits of this are endless!

Need some convincing to use web-based systems as opposed to desktop software which you install on single computers?

Cheaper: Traditional software is more expensive to build, test, maintain, upgrade and install. Since competition in web technology is huge, it pushes the price down massively and there’s nothing to install, also saving distribution costs.

Faster to upgrade: Because of the lengthy testing procedures involved in traditional software you’d install, this delays the upgrading. Traditional software often has annual or bi-annual updates. However, since developers can test web-based software on the fly, the second it’s working, it’s live; so updates take minutes or hours, not months and years

Stored Offsite: The databases behind the software are backed up by an external hosting company, very often multiple times a day and are stored offsite. If there was a fire and your computer burned down, it crashed or someone stole it, you wouldn’t lose any of the data stored online. It’s by far the safest method of backups.

No Installing: There’s nothing to install. Because it essentially acts like a website, all you need is a computer and an Internet connection to log in. Everything else is already set up for you, and is the same wherever you are.

No IT Person: Unless you have a massive office and team, and need a full-time IT person anyway, you don’t really need one, which alone will save you at least £30,000 a year or £250 a month for a contract IT company.

Incentives: Running a successful web-based software business is among one of the most ideal business models ever. Regular monthly income in exchange for providing a service which costs next to nothing to maintain after it’s built and working. This means all the development team and business owner have to do all day is build new features on the back of suggestions from paying customers. The service usually only ever gets better and you pay a small monthly cost which is likely to stay the same.

I couldn’t run my business without web-based software and going forward 2, 3, 5, or even 10 years, it’s going to get harder and harder to manage without it. I spent roughly 3 months of my year abroad in 2010 and 2011 yet no-one ever noticed. I tell our key clients and have a meeting if we need one before I go away anywhere for a lengthy period of time. I can get away with this because there is a set of systems under me which manages 90% of the business. I can check on everything from wherever I want by just logging into our different web-based systems. Even if there isn’t desktop internet, most of the services I use have iPhone apps anyway. The more I travel the more I’m finding that there really isn’t very many occasions where you can’t find internet access.

If it isn’t obvious by now that I think web-based software should be the heart of your business, then I should give up writing. I recommend making a list of all your business processes, then finding web software to help you with organising those processes. If you want some help, I offer help to all my readers. Email me directly on ads@advantixgroup.com.

Whenever I offer any business advice in this area, it follows a very simple pattern: Discover all the problems you have (some you’ll know about, some you won’t), propose solutions and then put them into action. The problems are an essential starting point and cannot be ignored.

Our first ever Business Automation system came about almost by accident when I went into Sussex Academy of Music who were existing website clients at the time and started having a conversation about their online shop. I can’t really tell you how it happened but we spent the next 24 hours, all 3 of us making notes and thinking of ways to improve their business. I had no idea that this would become our first ever business automation system. When we eventually took a break, we had over 30 pages of notes. This served as the foundation for the system we would eventually build and work on for over 3 years.

This is one of the most important exercises you can do and I recommend you do this every 6 months or so. All we’re going to do is just start identifying problems within your business – thats it. Not necessarily to the extent of what we did with Sussex Academy of Music but if that’s what it takes – do it!

There aren’t any limits or guidelines so anything like ‘low sales’ to ‘Amy doesn’t file the invoices properly’ is the kind of thing we’re looking for. What’s important is that you think about all areas of your business and write down the problems for each. Some areas to think about:

• Time Management
• Order processing
• Customer service
• Storing information
• File management
• Finance
• Reminders about important tasks
• Delegation
• Communication
• Work / Life Balance

These are by no means conclusive, just a few ideas to get you started. I recommend just writing as many problems as you can think of that you’re currently facing in your business day-to-day. A problem doesn’t need to be a catastrophic disaster, but anything that you’d consider to be less than ideal.

Once you’ve done that, you can start to fix those issues by putting systems in place to help you fix them.

Go for it… If you want help dissecting the outcome, get in touch by ringing on 0800 644 0028 or emailing me on ads@advantixgroup.com and I’ll do my best to offer some solutions.