By Charlotte Kemp

Find someone who will tell you the truth

Jim Rohn

I consider taking this advice from Jim Rohn, to be instrumental in changing my life.

It is vital, if you are going to make any progress in any venture in life, that you soon determine the motivations that drive people. You may not always know their exact motivation, but you must be able to understand if they are driven by a desire to please others, avoid conflict, promote themselves, grow and learn etc. We always assume that people have the same goals as us, especially when we work together on something, or when we are part of a family or are friends. But it is bewildering the array of reasons that people will have for obscuring the truth.

You only have to watch an evening of TV to see countless examples of people who love each other, not telling each other the truth, and start to list the reasons why: the truth will hurt, disappoint, it has consequences and repercussions. To tell you the truth means that I have to reveal my vulnerabilities or engage with you and help you through yours. To tell the truth means you may have to argue what you consider to be the ‘truth’ and you may not feel like it, or perhaps you may not be sure about it. Truth is uncomfortable, unpleasant, painful and messy and most people prefer to avoid it.

Jim Rohn’s advice is not to just say to people “Tell me the truth. I can handle it.”, but to rather identify the person in your life who is actually mature enough and cares enough about you and your future, to tell you the truth if you ask, even if that person is going to hurt you. That person is on your side far more than the others who tickle your ears with pretty words. And if you don’t have a person like this in your life the find one.

So what does this have to do with business? Well can you imagine how many layers of deception, half truth, untold truth, misdirection and outright lies are told in business? I had no idea. Even among us in the store, we couldn’t bear to bring bad news to each other and without all that bad news painting a full picture, how were we to really know where we stood. We only had half the story – we were not telling each other the truth because it hurt too much. We needed all those facts, all those truths and we needed to talk with each other. We could have made decisions that would have been so much less painful and taken action so much earlier if we had been truthful with each other in the store.

I shed so many tears over this business in the 2 years that it was in existence. And to be honest, in spite of all the other signs that were there, I cried over the hurt I felt whenever I was told the truth by the only person I know courageous enough to do so. But you know what, I count finding a truthful friend who will stick with me through a crisis, far more valuable than a profitable business. For one thing, in spite of the economic climate, they are even harder to find.

This blog is an exploration of the lessons I learned when my business failed. Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas, as well as your own experiences. It will eventually be published as a book – hopefully as a warning to new entrepreneurs to avoid some of these mistakes. Please see the first few posts as an introduction.

By Charlotte Kemp

“People will deny that advertising works while responding to ads.”

Joe Vitale

There are impressive statistics out there about how many adverts we are exposed to in a day, and how many ads our children see before the age of 5, and how many innovative techniques the advertising world uses to get our attention to buy the products they are tasked with marketing. And we are savvy enough to try to rebel against that because we dislike being manipulated into buying something someone else is trying to make us buy.

But we need to remember two things. Firstly, practically everything we consume has somehow been chosen because the value – real or perceived – was communicated to us via some form of marketing, even if it was word of mouth from our friends or family. Think of your tooth paste, washing powder, brand of jeans and car. You don’t choose all those things entirely randomly or only on price. You need to gather some form of intelligence and information to make a decision first, and that information is influenced by advertising.

Secondly, when we have a product or a service that needs to be sold, one of the top things on the list is how to market it – how do we communicate the value that we know our product has, to our target market? All of a sudden we are looking for the help of that very industry we say we don’t approve of.

The point is that practically everything that is bought or sold is done so with the help of advertising or marketing. The only real choice you have is whether to market to people who want to know about your product or people who don’t want to know about your product. Seth Godin calls the former “permission based marketing”.

Spam is the opposite of permission based marketing. Real spam is the 93 emails I received in the last two days telling me how many billions I won in lotteries, inheritances, unexpected wire transfers and Fedex deliveries. (Strangely I don’t receive many ‘pharmaceutical’ emails. Can’t understand why – maybe the spammers do really good focused target marketing, and they think I need money more than blue pills.) Unsolicited email is email that is sent to you by someone you don’t know or that you aren’t expecting, but isn’t necessarily unwanted. But even unsolicited email is treated as spam these days. Interestingly enough you can now send a snail mail letter and it will be treated with more respect and less like junk mail, simply because people are tired of their inboxes being filled with rubbish.

As an aside, if you haven’t heard about Seth Godin I strongly encourage you to check out his blog and subscribe. His articles are mostly very short and certainly challenge a lot of thinking about how we do business.

But besides the being exposed to advertising we don’t want to see, our other complaint about it, is that it does not have a good return. But mostly that is our fault! Too often we have a shotgun approach to placing adverts, instead of having crafted a marketing campaign with advertising as one vital and specific element. We rush into placing an ad in a particular magazine or newspaper, maybe because of a special offer, but it is not part of an over all, clearly defined plan with specific measurable goals. We complain that we can’t measure the success of the advert, but we wouldn’t know how to anyway, because we don’t know what we are looking for.

Advertising isn’t a “necessary evil” – it is a vital tool. We only need to learn how to use it well, and efficiently. And we need to give advertising salespeople a little slack too.

My challenge, for the advert I just placed yesterday, is how would I know specifically if any business comes about directly as a result of that advert and how would I capture the names of anyone who reads it and is interested in my training, but not yet ready to buy? Do you have any ideas for me?

This blog is an exploration of the lessons I learned when my business failed. Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas, as well as your own experiences. It will eventually be published as a book – hopefully as a warning to new entrepreneurs to avoid some of these mistakes. Please see the first few posts as an introduction.

By Charlotte Kemp

Don’t follow any advice, no matter how good, until you feel as deeply in your spirit as you think in your mind that the counsel is wise.   David Seabury

As I have been exploring the lessons I have learned, it has become clear that there are two kinds. One kind is the obvious, clear cut lesson – Read contracts! Create systems. People don’t always act according to your expectation.

But the other kind of lesson is this strange kind of paradox, an inconsistency. You know the kind …

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
Vs … Don’t cross the bridge until you come to it.

It’s better to be safe than sorry.
Vs … Nothing ventured, nothing gained

Well some of these lessons are like that and this is one of them. We have already spoken before about consulting professionals and getting good advice. There are attorneys, accountant, financial advisors, business and personal coaches, consultants, trainers and if you are going through a tough time, counseling psychologists too. And that last isn’t necessarily a joke.

And of course, just like in any game of Patience, the minute you start in business you will have half a dozen friends and associates around to give you advice about what should go where and what will and won’t work. Some of them might have good advice and be sharing out of a concern for you. And others might just like the sound or their own voice, or take a perverse pleasure in spreading their own particular brand of FUD*.

Your skill, that you will have to develop through trial and error and specifically by applying your mind to it, is to sift through all of this advice, and determine what is valuable and what is not. And then you decide. And then you take responsibility.

After all, this is your business and not anyone else’s. The advisors can all give their advice but then they go home to their families with their payment confirmations in the email (it used to be more impressive saying “the cheques in their pockets”) and they don’t give your business a second thought. You are the one up in the middle of the night worrying about whether it is working or not. You cannot, cannot abdicate responsibility for decision making to someone else.

Remember too that your advisors are just human, just like all our leaders. We look up at leaders and expect them to fool proof and infallible and are so disappointed when they let us down. But if instead we learned to expect them to show us what they know and guide us without expecting them to be perfect, then we could actually get far more value from them. They are human – and it is entirely possible that you may know more than them. You many be more courageous that your accountant. Or you may have more contacts than your financial advisor. Or you may know of marketing plans – that are legal – that your attorney is not aware of. Discuss these things with them, and as long as what you are doing is above board, it is your business and you get to make the decisions. You do not need to ask their permission.

But you do need to take responsibility for the consequences. They get paid their fees, and you of course either pay for your mistakes or take the laurels for success. Are you willing to do that? Are you that kind of entrepreneur?

Just practice learning to discern the value of the advice that is given to you.

This blog is an exploration of the lessons I learned when my business failed. Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas, as well as your own experiences. It will eventually be published as a book – hopefully as a warning to new entrepreneurs to avoid some of these mistakes. Please see the first few posts as an introduction.

* Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt