Self Employed Success

The phrase “business reinvention” might have you quaking in your boots. After all, who wants to start all over again from scratch?

Ah. I think I can help by offering up a different definition for you to ponder.

Business reinvention isn’t about tossing it all away and starting from scratch (unless you really, really want to do that). Instead, I think of business reinvention as a process of looking at your current business model and your own goals, and finding places that could use a makeover. Knowing why you’re reinventing your business is the first step in the process of transformation.

There are lots of places where you can transform your business: your marketing, your target audience, the services and products you sell, the way back-office administration happens, your technology, your scale (national versus local), your resource base, your business and personal goals. You can choose to remodel every single one of these items or pick the one that will give you the biggest bang for the buck.

Some business reinvention stories…

One of my clients is a chiropractor and has been doing it for nearly 30 years. But as she gets older, its harder and harder to lift patients off the table and the work itself causes her back and shoulder pain. In addition she feels that she would like to reach a larger audience with her message of being in conscious choice about all aspects of your life and not just following what everyone else tells you to do or think. She will take everything she’s ever learned as a chiropractor and everything she’s been studying and living for the past 30 years and create a new business where she can teach and coach.

One client of mine is taking her existing locally-based business and making into a virtual business that she can conduct from anywhere in the world. This frees her up to travel with her husband and continue to have a business she loves.

Another client of mine stayed in the same industry but changed his service offerings. In the past he had offered sign design and installation to his local customers. Now he’s offering sign management on a national scale to large organizations with multiple locations throughout the USA. He’s taken all his knowledge, experience and connections and put them to work for a new, larger, and more lucrative target audience.

In all these business reinvention stories you’ll see a common thread: as a small business owner, your goals, your values, your needs and your lifestyle can change. And you can reinvent your business to reflect these new dreams and move you towards the business and life you want.

You decide how, when and where to transform your business

Business reinvention is what you make it. But it’s not making tiny tweaks here and there; it’s shaking up the whole business and marketing models and realigning them to your goals, values and needs.

First, let me get a secret off my chest: it took Pamela Wilson and I nearly 8 hours to create an 8-minute video. Yes, it’s true…everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

But I learned a lot along the way and I want to share some of this great adventure in video with you.

Video is a super way to market your mastermind groups, coaching and consulting programs, classes, webinars, and all your service offerings. Here’s some tips to get you started:

1. Write a script. Don’t think you can wing it, especially if you have more than a minute or two of information to share. You’ll end up wasting a lot of time flubbing your lines and having to re-record over and over again. Be efficient…plan what you’re going to say before-hand. Use a teleprompter, like EasyPrompter, to work with your script while recording your video.
2. Make sure your video script matches the text on your website. It’s so easy to say one thing in the video and have it slightly different on your website copywriting, especially if you create the two items several weeks apart. Your audience will pick up on these small differences and it will make them wonder which offer is the true offer.
3. Practice. And then, practice some more. Both Pamela and I found that we were nervous and a little stiff in the first few takes while recording the video. After a while, we calmed down, acted naturally, and even cracked a few jokes. You want to come across as confident and relaxed; practicing will help you do that.
4. If you flub a line, stop recording. We thought we would be Super Geeks and just edit together several versions of the video in our video software. Big mistake! It’s so much easier to re-record from scratch than to try to match up video fragments in your editor. Unless you’re really good at video editing, do yourself a favor and just re-record the whole thing. (We recorded our full video five times, and that doesn’t include the recordings we made that ended after less than a minute because we goofed a line or started laughing at our mistakes. We should do a Blooper Reel!)
5. Do a test run, then put that recording on your computer so you can see it full-screen.  The little screens on a camcorder don’t really reflect the quality of lighting, color and sound. So set up your lights, do a test recording, then watch and listen to it on the big monitor and good speakers on your computer. If something’s not working right, you want to know immediately, not after you’ve done the “perfect” recording then realized the sound was awful.
6. Use a microphone. You can buy a simple lapel microphone at your local Radio Shack or electronics store for under $40, and it will make the quality of your sound 100 times better than using the microphone built into the camcorder. Just make sure your camcorder has a microphone jack (it might say “Mic”).
7. If there’s more than one person in the video, expect to spend more time. When I create videos by myself, I can create 10 or 12 short two-minute videos in a four hour recording session. When there’s another person in the video, there’s more setup time and more chance for errors. Plan accordingly.
8. Relax, laugh at yourself, enjoy the process. Don’t get frustrated or angry if it doesn’t come out perfectly the first time. Instead, think of it as a fun adventure where goof-ups and mistakes are part of the game. If you find you’re just getting annoyed with yourself, stop, take a break, then come back and do your recording again.

After much trial and  error, Pamela and I created an 8-minute video which introduces our new mastermind group for self-employed people, called Leap Year. We had a lot of fun that day and laughed at our mistakes. When things went haywire, we took a relaxing lunch break and came back refreshed. It was THAT recording, right after lunch, that is the one we used here:

http://www.leapyearsuccess.com/

Are you planning to use video to launch your next service offering, mastermind group, information product or class? I’d love to hear how you’re going about it! If you have any questions or stories to tell, just put them in the Comments section of this blog post.

P.S. Did you know that YouTube is the #2 search engine? And video results from YouTube will show up in Google search results, boosting your SEO rankings. That’s a very compelling reason why you need to create videos for your business, both to educate (and entertain) your audience, and for marketing purposes.

We think of branding and we instantly think of products. Let me tell you a story about the importance of good brand design when launching a new service.

For six months, my JV partner Pamela Wilson and I have been working on a new mastermind group program. We realized we wanted it to have its own brand, its own personality, separate from either of our existing businesses. Together we went through a series of steps to identify not only the brand, but the program itself. I’d like to share those steps with you now so that you have a checklist for branding your services.

Here are some things to think about when you’re creating a brand for your new service offering, whether it’s a group coaching program, a training class, a mastermind group, or a special package of services you’ve bundled together:

Ask the big questions first.

Start with the most important questions: Who is this service for? And what do they need?

This will help you to get a clear understanding of your target audience, and from that knowledge you may find that the name of your new service offering comes to the surface easily. For us, we said we wanted this mastermind group to be for small business owners who have been in business 3 or more years and were ready to take their business to the next level. The name Leap Year came easily once we defined our target audience and their needs. (It didn’t hurt that the Leap Year program would begin in 2012 – which is a leap year! )

Decide on the personality of the service.

Is it serious? Is it playful? Is it creative? Is it linear? Come up with five adjectives that describe how you want people to perceive the brand of your service. With Leap Year, we wanted it energetic, powerful and inspiring. So when Pamela created the logo, she melded those adjectives together and came up with the perfect logo:

Be consistent in everything you do around your brand.

Branding isn’t just about logos. It’s about the colors and graphic elements you use, about the words you choose, even about the music you select. Use your brand in all your marketing and communication materials, even down to the handouts you create or the ebook cover you design.

When putting together our website, we wanted to create an invitation video with an animation to start it out. Pamela used the logo and colors to create the animation, then enlisted her son Gabe Zurek (who is majoring in composition so that he can learn to write scores for films) to come up with several musical themese for the video. After watching the video with each of the different pieces of music, this one stood out as being perfect for how we wanted to portray our brand:

By putting all the branding elements together, you present a cohesive package to your customers through your time with them, from marketing through delivery. Start small: put a brand name to your service packages, groups and classes. From there, you can grow your brand with logos, colors, text…and maybe a little music, too!

P.S. Want to know more about Leap Year? Visit the Leap Year Mastermind Group website here.

Many people quake in fear at the idea of writing a business plan. They imagine in their mind a 100-page document full of charts and financial figures. While it’s possible to create a business plan of that magnitude when trying to get capital for your business, a typical business plan for self-employed people should be less than 10 pages.

The purpose of a business plan, for a self-employed person who is financing his own business, is to have a central repository for all strategic thinking about the business for the coming year or two. Here’s what should be included:

• Your business idea in three sentences.
• Your target audience.
• The challenges that your target audience faces.
• The benefits of using your products and services to meet those challenges.
• Your company brand and image.
• Your projected revenue and expenses for a year.
• If you project more expenses than revenue for the first year, a statement about where the money will come from to pay for those expenses.
• A list of your major competitors, and how you are different from them.
• At least six marketing techniques you’re planning to use over the coming year, when you plan to implement them, and what results do you expect from them.
• A list of people who you will need to hire to implement your business plan or marketing plan (unless you have the business skills and time, yourself, to do all the work).

You should review your business plan, and update it, annually. I recommend reviewing the marketing section of your business plan quarterly, so that you can gauge the success of your marketing campaigns.

I went to a professional video techniques workshop this weekend with Rick Toone and Ken McArthur. They focused on the importance of planning in creating video as a marketing tool for your business, being strategic in your intention for  the purpose of each scene, the overall message of your video, and what will you do with it.

I know I harp on strategy and planning a lot, but bear with me as I harp on it some more. What Ken and Rick were talking about regarding creating videos for your business applies to every thing you do to market your business. Some people enjoy writing blog posts or creating videos to market their businesses. Some people enjoy public speaking and networking to market their businesses. But before you get your hands and head into your next marketing project, ask why you’re doing it: who are you trying to attract, what are you trying to say to them, what you want them to think and feel as they interact with your marketing technique, and what you want them to do afterwards.

But don’t forget the biggest why of all: Why are YOU doing this particular marketing technique?

I’m speaking on Wednesday to a group of women entrepreneurs at the Women’s Business Forum. Before I write that speech, before I haul myself out of bed before the sun rises, before I stand in front of an expectant group of business owners and talk about the psychology of marketing to women, I have to think long and hard about my personal intentions for this program.

Sure I want to educate them and introduce myself to them…that’s a given, a basic necessity, the bottom-floor reason why I’m doing it. I have always deeply admired what the Women’s Business Forum is doing: as a non-profit organization, they empower female small business owners to succeed by offering free educational programs and mastermind groups. Giving 1-hour and 4-hour workshops to this group, free of charge, is my way of contributing to the magic that is the WBF. I’ll do it as often as they invite me to do it.

It’s not my intention that someone walks away from my presentation on Wednesday and says, “Gosh, I can’t wait to hire Karyn for thousands of dollars!” (I won’t say no if they do…I also have an intention for earning a large income from my coaching and consulting business. ) But if one person walks away with a little more knowledge, a great marketing technique, a brilliant way of looking at their business through a different lens, I’ve done my job.

Of course I’ve planned out my speech. Of course I’ve planned out my wardrobe. Of course I’ve loaded up with business cards. The most important implementation I’ve done is to stop and ask myself: Why are you giving this particular speech, on this particular day, to this particular group?

Strategic thinking starts with self-knowledge.

(P.S. Thanks to Rick and Ken, I’m re-energized around creating videos for my biz. Keep your eyes and ears open for more great Ask Karyn Anything educational videos coming soon! Submit your questions here.)