Starting a business can be exciting, intimidating, and daunting all at the same time. It’s very easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of getting up and running and keep all the plates in the air.
In this episode of Influence by Design, we discuss five of our biggest business building mistakes and what we’ve learned from them so that your path forward may be smoother than ours.
No one likes making mistakes… they’re never fun! Yet in entrepreneurship, it’s guaranteed you will make a few along the way – because no one is perfect. Mistakes allow us to learn and grow to be better prepared for future challenges.
This episode is for you if you are a budding entrepreneur or an existing business owner. We hope that by sharing our mistakes and how we navigated them will help you find the courage to grow your own business despite any uncertainty you may be feeling.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- Why listening to too many people is not good for your business (04:19)
- The symptom of not niching early enough (07:01)
- Why having a team could be slowing you down (10:53)
- The importance of finding the true value you offer (12:54)
QUOTES
- “Our ability to succeed in business is directly tied to our ability to take lots of ideas and influences and filter them down into actionable plans.” -Tim Hyde
- “The value is what you provide, not the size of your company.” -Samantha Riley
- “By saying no to stuff that isn’t a great fit, you’re creating space and energy for the stuff where you can have a massive impact.” -Tim Hyde
- “The more systems, the easier will be for everyone.” -Samantha Riley
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WHERE TO FIND TIM HYDE
- Website: https://winmoreclients.com.au/
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CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
- Facebook: Samantha Riley
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TRANSCRIPTION
Tim Hyde 00:00
The ability to succeed in business is directly tied to how well, we can take in lots of ideas and influences and then filter them down to the into like simple, actionable plans. And you know, when we’ve got lots of advice, that’s fine. But if we get analysis paralysis when listening to many people, we tend to find we can’t convert that into action.
Samantha Riley 00:21
The more systems you have around your onboarding, how you resource your team for success on a daily weekly monthly plan is all around systems, the faster you can create them, the easier will be for everyone.
My name is Samantha Riley, and this is the podcast for experts who want to be the unapologetic leader in their industry. We’re going to share the latest business growth, marketing, and leadership strategies, as well as discussing how you can use your human design to create success in business and life. Inside and out. It’s time to take your influence, income, and impact to the level you know you’re capable of. Are you ready to make a bigger difference and scale up? This is the Influence By Design podcast.
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence By Design. I’m your Thursday co-host Samantha Riley and joined as always, with the fabulous Tim Hyde. How are you, Tim?
Tim Hyde 01:19
Good, I’m doing great, Sam.
Samantha Riley 01:21
Excellent. I’m really looking forward to today’s topic. Because we’re going to talk about the five business building mistakes that we’ve made, and what we’ve learned from them. And I think that there is nothing better to learn from than a mistake, because they’re painful and they hurt. And you remember that
Tim Hyde 01:43
was that was that roll fail forward, I find it hard to believe that you’ve made any mistakes in business and
Samantha Riley 01:48
you’re hilarious to hide, because you are the person that’s on the other end of the phone quite often when I go. As am I
Tim Hyde 01:58
never happens on us. My fingers are not crossed right now. But it’s this idea of kind of failing forward. And if and when one thing that I’ve always tried to do in my life is if I if I’m gonna lose the battle that I don’t lose the lesson from it. And, you know, we think that, you know, you three, I guess throughout our business careers, you’ve made plenty of mistakes we’ve made, what in the fullness of time have turned out to be the wrong decisions by the wrong people hire the wrong the wrong clients, all that sort of stuff. But you know, we’ve tried to, I guess, in this episode, distill it down to just five. It took us a while
Samantha Riley 02:37
to actually put the notes together for this because it could have easily been 55.
Tim Hyde 02:43
Wow, absolutely. Why was that wrong? Winston Churchill said, answers. If you want to speak me for a day, if you want me to speak all day, give me five minutes. If you want me to speak for five minutes, give me all day. So why is actually very difficult to sort of still down distill down to this? You know, a couple of things. But we’ve picked five we think probably relevant to you, dear listener, that might give you some insight. Yeah. And
Samantha Riley 03:08
I think what I really like about this is, or let me put this in a different context. My husband, Leon is in our part of our business, and he has his own business also. But he’s got a 30 year corporate career. So when he first came into the business, he’d never had any experience working in a small business, he’d always been in a large corporate looking after really, really large teams, he was in operations, he did amazing things. But being in business for yourself is you have a whole heap of different kinds of lessons. And one of the things, or this is the thing he found hardest at the beginning, was when things did go wrong like this, and they would land in your lap rather than in the lap of a team of 200 people. And he actually he found it really difficult to move forward. Sometimes he would get really overwhelmed. So I think that this is really a great conversation to have to understand that things do go wrong, every single day. And it is more about learning from the lesson.
Tim Hyde 04:15
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let’s look at the first one. And for me, I think one of the biggest business building mistakes that we can make is, is listening to too many people, right? Because there are a lot of voices and a lot of opinions about what you should be doing with your particular skill set and where you are with your team and your skills and everything else as well. But listening to too many people is definitely a bad thing.
Samantha Riley 04:47
Yeah, absolutely. So we’re not taught saying, Hey, don’t listen to anyone. It’s just that if you’ve asked 12 or 15 people for advice, their advice is going to be conflicting because everyone has their own opinion. And when there’s a lot of information coming in, it can be very difficult to distill it down. Which way do you go. And I see this often leaving people in, like a tailspin, very overwhelmed. They don’t know where to focus, they are unable to make decisions. And this has certainly happened to me before, where, you know, you start implementing what one person says, and then you listen to the other person and you pivot really quickly.
Tim Hyde 05:30
find myself doing this all the time. I’m like, Oh, that’s a good idea, too, though. We end up with lots of help build bridges.
Samantha Riley 05:37
Exactly. So, yes, you need to ask for advice. But you need to have your own, I guess, framework for want of a better word, so that you can make a decision quickly and do what feels right. So we want to listen to all of the advice, but then how are you going to distill that to make it work for you?
Tim Hyde 06:01
Yeah, look, I truly believe that our ability to succeed in business is directly tied to how well we can take in lots of ideas and influencers and then filter them down into the into, like simple, actionable plans. Love it. And you know, when we’ve got lots of advice, that’s fine. But if we get analysis, paralysis mean, listening to many people, we tend to find we can’t convert that into action. Yeah, we just become seminar and coaching junkies.
Samantha Riley 06:29
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I’m sure that we’ve all had leads or prospects or clients that have been like that. It’s very, very, very difficult to work with them. So this is not just a problem that we have as business owners, but it can also be a problem that your clients or your prospects might. So yeah, you need to be able to be able to take those ideas, as Tim just said, and turn them into something that’s actionable. Not be in this constant cycle of overwhelm. Yeah, number two, number two, one that’s near and dear to my heart, not niching. Soon enough,
Tim Hyde 07:08
Mommy. To be fair, though, Sam, if you go back to your early start, and you niched into a dance studio, and then Northern Beaches, that’s, you know, that’s a niche of sports. Okay, so
Samantha Riley 07:21
this is the very weird part of this story most people do. I’ll make this mistake. First. I made this mistake right in the middle. So I actually did niche, my first few businesses really well. My first four businesses, I niche really well. Then the next one, number five was the one that I didn’t niche. So you’d think that most people make this decision at the beginning? No, I did it because I was afraid of getting bored. I wanted to speak to more people. And Hmm, let me tell you didn’t go down? Well, it’s really hard to market, when you don’t have a tight niche. People will not notice your message. It’s just about impossible to do paid advertising, when you don’t have a niche, you have increased competition, it’s a lot harder to grow and scale. Because of that, you end up being a commodity people choose you on price, versus more talking about that one. Exactly. But all of this was a problem by not niching. Soon enough,
Tim Hyde 08:28
I think when we spin it around, and I know people are really afraid of niching because I think what if all these other opportunities come up, then I, you know, I could take that would generate the income in particular, obviously, when we start if we haven’t got a big pipeline of opportunity, or awesome reserves available to us. We think by niching, we’re sort of saying, you know, I’m not gonna be open to opportunity, we still are. I think that’s important to say if someone comes along that you really want to work with go and work with them exactly. Even if they’re not in your you know, your niche. But you’re absolutely right, it’s, you know, the ability to kind of focus down and find the people who, you know, resonate with you is much better. And I think changing the narrative, almost not looking at it from your perspective. But looking at it from your customer’s perspective is a really interesting way to see how they make a decision about the who they choose. Yeah. So for example, right? You’re a business coach. And if I said to you, Sam, and put whatever you want on or whether you’re, you know, a leadership coach, or, you know, an X Y, Zed or whatever thought leadership space that you’re in sales coach, yeah, sales coaching, and your customers are looking at you and saying, Hey, I’m a business coach, great. Next person, they’re comparing them to says, Hey, I’m a business coach, too, and I help businesses grow their business. Next one comes along, says I’m also a business coach, and I help people grow their business. surprise there. Number four comes along and says, I’m a business coach, and I help people grow their business, you know. And that’s fantastic. But the last one comes along and says I I’m a business coach, and I work with experienced business coaches who have a team of people, Brian, really take it from seven figures to eight figures. Alright, and all of a sudden you’re going, and you’ve got a team and you know, looking at that next step for you, and it’s like, this one really resonates with me. Yeah, that’s the one of you put it in your customer’s narrative and through that lens, and suddenly, it’s like, well, I know which one I would choose if it was me.
Samantha Riley 10:30
Yeah, it’s much easier to grow when you’re speaking to a specific audience. So get really clear on that niche, find that specific audience and speak directly with them, and have conversations with them that are targeted around the exact problems that they’re having right now. And the desires that they have right now.
Tim Hyde 10:51
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Number three, that we both agreed on this one to an extent, more so me, not onboarding or resourcing my team for success.
Samantha Riley 11:03
Now you say, more so you, but maybe that’s only just been in the last little while, because I’ve been running teams for over 30 years now. And I definitely have had this problem multiple times over. Apparently, I’m a slow learner. One of the biggest symptoms of this is micromanaging your team. And this is what I believe, or this is why I believe so many people say I don’t want to team, because what they do is say I don’t want a team. And they think because I don’t want to micromanage them. But if you could have a team that was totally autonomous and take time off your hands or take tasks off your hands, so you didn’t even know it was happening. Would you want that?
Tim Hyde 11:46
Yeah, of course you would? Of course he would. I think there’s a there’s a there’s another thing here that if we don’t resource our team for success, that you can potentially over resource, and it does create inefficiency, as well, like the idea of being able to give everything to someone else, but then not tell them what success looks like, you know, ultimately comes back on you because you’re sitting there going well, what are you doing today? Why haven’t you done it the way I would do it? Why haven’t you achieved the outcome that I was expecting? And it’s largely not their fault. It’s largely yours, because you haven’t shown them what success looks like. And then kept them accountable to deliver that.
Samantha Riley 12:25
Yeah, 100%. So there is only one thing I can say to this is you need to create systems, systems, and more systems. The more systems you have around your onboarding, how you resource your team for success on a daily weekly monthly plan is all around systems, the faster you can create them, the easier will be for everyone.
Tim Hyde 12:51
salutely I can’t agree with that more. Number four, I think is probably undervaluing myself. And I think for a long time, I probably didn’t value myself enough or didn’t really understand the market. I was playing with it. And if I go back to one of my first one, I’ve got quite a lot of first businesses but one of my first businesses as a like a real adult. I still remember we were selling advertising on our social media platform. And I think the first package we put together had a minimum sticker price of $100. Right? Because that’s the people I knew, right? There are all sorts of little micro businesses and startups and this and we said $100 People will afford $100. But not realizing that the market that I was trying to reach, we’re used to spending 50,000. Yeah, and so putting 100 bucks next to a $50,000 offer they go well, one of these is clean and effective, because I’ve always paid 50 grand and the other one. That sounds so cheap, it can’t be any good.
Samantha Riley 13:51
Yeah, I don’t want to waste $100 on nothing. Yeah,
Tim Hyde 13:55
yeah, that’s almost taking me more time to like write to an invoice for 100 bucks, and the $100 is gonna get me in return. And that was probably one of the biggest mistakes that I made early on. I still see that to this day. In fact, I was just on a networking event this week where people were talking about the $100 program, and $150 program and a $300 program. And unless you sell, which is okay, but unless you sell a lot of those, you really going to find it very difficult to grow and scale. You’d just be caught up in the weeds of your business all the time.
Samantha Riley 14:29
100% You said something really, really clever before we started recording. And that was because I’m little or because I’ve got a small business. I have this thought that I can only deal with other little companies or very small businesses. And I really loved that thinking because I know someone that started their business at the end of last year, and the first thing they did was signed a client for $500,000 One point What’s my first client? He said, he actually said to me, Oh, I didn’t go out to start a business. It kind of happened by mistake. But he said, Oh, I guess I’m in business now. Now just imagine if you could sign a $500,000. Client tomorrow. What would that do for your business? What would that do in your change in your life?
Tim Hyde 15:18
To be, you know, Shulamit transformative? If it’s not transformative, maybe you need to rethink another zero on the end?
Samantha Riley 15:25
Absolutely. So you know, just think, think about the value that you have to offer. Don’t look through the lens of how small is my company, because the value is what you provide, not the size of your company. Yeah,
Tim Hyde 15:41
a good friend of mine, Kathy Smith, who runs an agency in Western Australia said to me some time ago, and shout out to Kathy for this bit of advice, I don’t know where she got it from, was that companies are doing less than half a million, and then obviously, depend on what industry sector you’re in, you’re gonna find your mileage varies a little bit. But for when you present an offer to someone who’s doing less than half a million dollars, it’s their money you’re spending, right as it comes out of their pocket, or food off the table, school fees, bills, whatever, right? Because for a lot of companies doing less than half a million, and particularly if their staff or product involved, it is actually that right? You’re compromising the owners wages either go to you or to the owner. But over half a million the owner starts to take regular wage out. And the money that the business is now spinning is the business’s money. Not the owners money. Yeah, there’s subtle little shift. And I actually reflecting back now, and I go, was I approaching the decision making on behalf of my customer, based on the fact that I wasn’t making half a million dollars. And would I make would I spend this amount of money on that thing? And if the answer was no, well, why on earth would my customer do it?
Samantha Riley 16:58
Yeah, good point. Sounds like that was a big flip in your thinking, to be able to to, let’s say value yourself and to start to approach a different type of client or a different size client?
Tim Hyde 17:13
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. All right. I think lost jobs last year on this one without sort of harping on it too much. I think thinking that bigger companies have their shit together.
Samantha Riley 17:24
Yeah. Yeah. It’s absolutely incredible. Some of the companies that we speak with, and I know that I say we, you and I, because we talk about these things. And you’re like, how did they not know that? Or why are they not implementing that one tiny thing that we implemented before we were at, you know, 5k, a month kind of thing. And then million dollar companies, multi million dollar companies, so don’t undervalue what you think everyone knows.
Tim Hyde 17:55
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the biggest surprises for me that one of my clients had clients who, you know, as well into the nine figure, salary range, you know, didn’t have some automation in place to manage customer relationships. And like, how do you not have this red nine figures?
Samantha Riley 18:12
But imagine because, right, ticking that box, how much of a difference you could make, like that exponentially changes that revenue? Hugely. Yeah, absolutely, sir. All right, number five, number five, trying to please everyone. This is such such a horrible place to be such a disempowering place to be, isn’t it?
Tim Hyde 18:37
But I think it sort of overlaps with some of the other mistakes that we’ve made as well, but at least that try and like if I just say yes to everybody, and do whatever they want me to that I’m suddenly gonna grow my business, because I’ve got more people that are happy with me. But this is really weird thing. And a mutual friend of ours. Stevie Bosman said this before, it’s like, if I don’t tell people anything, they just stand around. If I tell them what I stand for, people will walk towards me. If I tell them what I stand against, they will run towards me. Or why?
Samantha Riley 19:10
Yeah, and that’s what I was just about to say you’ll have both however, you’ll have more people running towards you than in any of these other scenarios, even though there’ll be other people running away.
Tim Hyde 19:23
Yeah. And that’s, that’s a good thing. We want that in business. And so, you know, saying no, is not a bad thing. And just to sort of continue on the quote, that we’re sharing in today’s episode is one from Warren Buffett that I love, particularly novices, you know, successful people say yes to a lot of things. Like it’s no surprises, they take opportunities when they come up. But here’s the rub. Really successful people say no to even more. Hmm. So by saying no to stuff that isn’t really a great fit. What you’ll find is yes, you’re maybe giving up opportunity, but you’re creating space and energy for Stop, where you can have massive impact.
Samantha Riley 20:02
Absolutely. Just remember that when you’re trying to please everyone, you’re diluting your brand. And not only that, because you’re not, you know, true to yourself all the time. Although I know that everyone at some point in their business career has gone on to seek.com. And thought, let me just have a look for shop.
Tim Hyde 20:23
Wouldn’t it be easier? You know, that friend of yours who’s stealing apprentices, you should come back? You know? I could I would I would I enjoy it. That is, I think, I think the thing, our whole thing about business is we have the opportunity to choose and we have the, you know, we can do what we want. But if it’s not fun, and you’re not enjoying it, why would you keep doing it?
Samantha Riley 20:49
Absolutely. So think, hopefully, that, you know, our conversation today has helped you to think of some of the mistakes that you’ve made, and understand that we get the biggest lessons from these things that don’t go right or don’t feel right. And really to take those lessons and use them to change what you’re doing or to change something about your business. Absolutely. Thanks for sharing. Tim. It’s been a great, great, it was great to unpack this episode.
Tim Hyde 21:21
I don’t mind doing this. You know, there’ll be people out there that you see again, from advice who ever look like from the surface, everything’s going well. Absolutely tell you with 100% certainty that it’s not all roses behind the scenes. And although I like I like sharing,
Samantha Riley 21:38
not for anyone. Yeah, yeah. And I always say I like it that we both put our hands up and and say, hey, look, it’s not always perfect. It’s not always a bed of roses. It is lots of times they
Tim Hyde 21:52
thorns amongst the roses.
Samantha Riley 21:54
Thanks so much for joining us for another episode. We’ll catch you next week for another episode of Influence By Design.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more head over to influencebydesignpodcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business to join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook, the links are waiting for you over at influencebydesignpodcast.com
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