Ann Hawkins The Business Owner's Mentor

Grow your business, make more profit and have more time to enjoy it

Are you solving problems or creating delight?

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Child dancing with a sculpture

Most businesses are started to solve a problem.

A few create delight.

If you can do both you should not only be very successful but you’ll probably be very satisfied and fulfilled as well.

Do your customers have a pain that your service or product can alleviate?

If not, they may have an irrational passion for something that you can supply?

It’s not always as obvious  as it might seem. It all comes down to what you’re really selling.

These three famous brands seem to have it nailed. What do you think they’re selling?

Revlon ad Harley Davidson Nike tick

 

On the face of it (sorry) Revlon could be seen to be solving the problem of imperfect skin or ageing. Harley Davidson might have started by solving a transport problem and Nike is solving the need that sports people have for high performance equipment and garments.

According to their own marketing departments,

Revlon sells hope;

Harley Davidson sells freedom;

Nike sells winning.

This takes the idea of solving problems and creating delight a step further by identifying the emotion your customer feels when they buy from you.

There is another theory, that all purchases are emotional ones.

If you’d like to talk about what emotion your business is creating for your customers, send me an email and I’ll help you to nail it!

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The Radical Re-Design of Business

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There are many examples of how established businesses are being challenged by new ways of doing business.

Don’t think it’s only big businesses that are affected!

Did HMV see what was happening in the music world or did iTunes, Spotify and other download platforms take it by surprise? Where does your business sit in this world?

Here are three short interviews I did with people who are radically disrupting the status quo in their business sector:

Faisel Rahman of Fair Finance Faisel Rahmen of Fair Finance  has taken on the banks, the pay day loan companies and the door step loan sharks and is getting spectacular results. Starting with the 7 million people who don’t use banks as their major source of financial help, those who have bad credit or no credit rating, Faisel has proved that his model works and is set to expand beyond London and into other major cities as well as creating new products for both personal and business finance, making a huge difference to the lives of many people.
@FaiselR @FairFinance

 

Luke lang of Crowdcube Luke Lang of Crowdcube has taken the world of business funding and shaken it up – a lot! Instead of going cap in hand with complicated business plans to banks or groups of angel investors or venture capitalists you can now put your idea onto the Crowdcube site and see if you tell a good enough story for investors to – literally – buy into what you want to do.
The Crowdcube platform has raised over £12,000,000 from small investors into UK business to date with 15% of bids reaching, and in many cases exceeding, their target.
@LukeLang @Crowdcube

 

Clive Rich of LawbiteClive Rich of Lawbite has devised a radical way give small businesses access to the law with affordable and transparent fees. The basic pack of plain language contracts costs just £99 and provides a way for both parties to the agreement having access to the drafting process. There is a also a virtual law firm available at the touch of button to give advice. Lawbite has already had a huge vote of confidence by raising £460,000 on Crowdcube – £100,000 more than they asked for.
@TheCliveRich @LawbitDocs

 

Could you look at your business and give it a radical redesign that means you become the disrupter and not the displaced?

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How to be happy

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“My schedule for today lists a six-hour (1)Why do we need to know how to be happy?

Why is happiness so important? Are we born happy and then lose it? What has happiness to do with business success?

I recently became aware of a number of business owners who work such long hours that they neglect all the things that make them happy, except their work.

Because I believe that most of our best ideas come to us in the downtime when we are playing or relaxing, and because I believe that we are all so much more than our businesses, this bothered me a bit so I decided to conduct an experiment.

I asked people to list ten things that they DO that make them happy and then to schedule into their diaries every day something they looked forward to doing and then actually DO them.

Over 130 people shared their lists with each other on-line and about 30 turned up for a meeting to discuss their ideas on happiness, led by philosopher John Turner (www.metathink.co.uk)
These are some of the ideas the people in the group expressed:

To be happy we need to focus our minds, not drift along without being aware.

To be happy we need to be in the flow with an absence of distractions

To be happy we need to be creating and doing

To be happy we need to feel valued – by ourselves as well as others

Happiness is our life’s purpose and nurturing friendships is a major part of this

We need a verb: “to happy” (apparently, in ancient Greek, there is/was)

On one thing everyone was agreed: If there was a machine that could make everyone happy all of the time, we wouldn’t want to turn it on. There are times when we need sadness, and happiness is something to be worked towards.

“Happiness depends on ourselves.”

2500 years ago, Aristotle enshrined happiness as a central purpose of human life and a goal in itself.

2500 years later neuroscientists came to pretty much the same conclusion.

The Nature of Happiness 

Despite the fact that many human beings live their lives believing that they will be happy if they get everything they want, both ancient and modern wisdom shows that this is far from true. Tests show that we are notoriously bad at predicting what will make us happy (or unhappy) and we prove ourselves wrong time and again. Rich people are not happier than poor people and yet much of our society is geared to the pursuit of material possessions and fleeting pleasures.

There is a school of thought that says that happiness cannot be pursued or sought and we just need to be open and wait for it to alight in our lives  but this too is disputed by both philosophy and science. This is because happiness is not something that can be gained or lost in a few moments, like pleasurable sensations. It is about the ultimate value of a life, measuring how well we have lived up to our full potential as human beings.

Aristotle tells us that the most important factor in the effort to achieve happiness is to have a good moral character — what he calls “complete virtue.” He argues that virtue is achieved by maintaining the balance between two excesses – reminiscent of Buddha’s Middle Path.

Neoroscience shows that happiness is inextricably linked to the faculty of attention.

Attention systems that lack focus or have become habitually trained on feelings of poor self worth or criticism lead to emotional states that are out of control and lead to anxiety, depression and other distressing states. Studies show that contemplative practices such as meditation are wonderful ways to train the brain into new habits of paying attention to subjects or feelings that enhance self-worth and strengthen new neural pathways.

The language is different but the message is the same.

Happiness takes effort.

Aristotle advocates the education of the whole person, including one’s moral character, rather than merely learning a set of skills. He taught that developing a good character requires a strong effort of will to do the right thing, make difficult decisions, not give in to immediate gratification and that through training and practice we can achieve our full potential and the enrichment of human life.

Neuroscience shows that we can change our brains, not by intervention with medication or stimulants but by practicing new thought patterns. The basic structure of our mental life is habit and, just as we strengthen muscles in our bodies by practice, so we do the same with our brains.

Qualities we admire in others, e.g., kindness, generosity, humour, patience, compassion are not innate qualities but are skills that we can learn with practice until they become new habits. If we admire these qualities in others we can aquire them for ourselves by paying attention, repeating behaviours and becoming the kind of person we most want to be.

So, happiness is about human flourishing and thriving not about feelings of pleasure and it is an activity rather than a state. (Click to Tweet)

What does this have to do with business?

Building a successful business, especially when you are working alone, requires great discipline. Doing the right things at the right time, even when we don’t feel like it, making difficult decisions, turning away from the quick fix in order to stick to a long term plan, staying focused on a task, being mindful, keeping the promises we make to ourselves are all important.

If the pursuit of happiness is about human flourishing and thriving, applying the same principles to business can only be a good thing. Happiness is not something we take time off to do and then feel guilty about, it becomes both the reason and the way in which we do everything.

Rather than say “I’ll be happy when ….” (I’ve got to x turnover / this job is finished / that client is satisfied / I have some reliable staff), and recognising that these things are not what makes us happy and that we don’t have to wait for them to happen, creates the freedom to make the pursuit of happiness an habitual activity that leads to real fulfilment of our potential as human beings.

Take part in the experiment

If you would like to take part in the happiness experiment simply schedule into your daily activities things that you DO that will make you happy and then DO them. Repeat until being happy is something you do every day.

If you’d like to talk about how to grow your business, and be happy while you do it get in touch! 

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5 Easy Steps on How to make an Impact

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Actor Richard Burton

How do you make this kind of impact in a crowd?

When Richard Burton, (RIP) was a young actor and was cast in the role of spear carrier in crowd scenes, his presence was so compelling that he stole the limelight from the actor playing the king.

When you meet people for the first time, how do you get make sure  they take notice of you, trust you, want to know you and recommend you to their friends?

There are all sorts of techniques that help people change their self-beliefs in order to become more confident.

However,

People don’t see your beliefs.

They don’t know what you’re thinking.

They’re not aware of your emotions.

The only thing they notice is your BEHAVIOUR

For thousands of years, actors have been making us believe in them by displaying the BEHAVIOUR of the kind of person they want to portray.

What happens in their personal lives doesn’t affect their performance.

They are often insecure as individuals but still deliver great, believable performances.

They often do it eight times a week for hundreds of weeks with great consistency.

They can portray characters that are totally unlike themselves with enormous conviction.

How does this help an ordinary person who wishes to create an impact?

Easy! We can copy what the best actors do.

Five Easy Steps on How to Make an Impact

  1. Define the role you want to play, e.g. charismatic leader, honest salesperson, trustworthy consultant, creative designer, useful team player
  2. Define the qualities a person in this role displays, e.g. charm, authority, consideration, tact, etc.
  3. Take each quality and work out what you need DO with your body to show those qualities, e.g to display consideration you may need to show that you are actively listening. What does a person who is actively listening DO? They make eye contact, lean forward and nod.
    Repeat this process for each quality until you know exactly how to DO what a person in your chosen role would DO.
  4. Practice. Practice until you become your behaviour, until its stops being an act and becomes authentically you. (Physical actions trigger emotions and create beliefs)
  5. Be the best version of yourself that you want to be – consistently.

Do – Be – Have

When you DO the things you need to do to BE the person you want to be, the things you want to HAVE will  follow.

Burton played 136 performances of Hamlet over 18 weeks. The production grossed $1,250,000. It was the highest-grossing and almost certainly the most profitable presentation of the play in the USA, if not the world.

He was born the 12th child in a family of 13 children in a mining village in Wales. His mother died when he was 2 years old.

This post is inspired by a training session with Mark Doyle of  The Method

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Dare to dream

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Marcus Orlovsky

Imagine the excitement of buying, selling and racing cars at aged 19 and making enough money  to not only pay for yourself to go to university but to buy a home for your mother and grandmother.

Imagine starting work at one of the world’s biggest firms of accountants and owning two Ferraris and therefore not toeing the corporate line and getting promoted again and again because, instead of telling your bosses what they wanted to hear you told them what they needed to hear.

Imagine owning a string of antique shops while still working in the corporate world.

Imagine borrowing £7,000,000,000 (that’s £7 billion) and re-building vast areas of London, including Broadgate, Ludgate Circus and Stockley Park.

Imagine owning Tiger, Tiger the famous bar and club in London’s West End, a software house (PLT) and starting Lazy Town, the internationally renowned children’s entertainment and lifestyle brand that has a direct and measurable effect on the health of children.

(Marcus has asked me to point out that in most of these projects he was part of team and didn’t do it on his own)

What kind of a man manages all of these achievements?

Imagine having a father who was so violent he beat your mother and threw you down a set of concrete stairs when you were just five years old.

Imagine being taken into care when your father went to prison and your mother was sectioned and incarcerated in a mental health institution.

Imagine working to get yourself through university and caring for a mentally ill mother who committed suicide one day when you forgot to supervise her medication.

Imagine losing £2.25 million when your stock crashed and you chose to try and help others recover their investment, instead of taking the easy way out and selling it while you could.

Imagine raising and giving away millions and bringing all of your remarkable talents and qualities to bear on challenging an education system that consistently fails those who don’t conform and helping to change the curriculum, teaching styles and the physical environment.

Is it any wonder that Marcus Orlovsky left an impression on his audience that most of them will never forget?

Before divulging his own background, Marcus got the audience thinking about why it is better to do the right thing than the done thing. He used examples from the food industry, the oil industry, education and others where decisions that caused misery could have been avoided if there had been stronger leaders instead of managers, willing to speak up.

He asked us to name the CEOs of the world’s five largest companies. We couldn’t.

He reminded us that feelings are more powerful than knowing, talking and thinking and asked us what we would all wish for any new born child.

cute baby picture

The answers, universally, are to create unique human beings who show happiness, helpfulness, kindness, creativity, inquisitiveness, inventiveness, resourcefulness and love. And yet their formative years are spent learning facts and they are judged, often for the biggest part of their lives, on how well they remember lessons in maths, history and science and hardly ever on the things we all wish for them to achieve.  Worse than that, their dreams are often dashed and they are forced into pigeonholes and punished for displaying  behaviour that doesn’t conform to the accepted norms of our educational systems.

And yet there are remarkable examples of people, like Marcus himself, who don’t fit the system and succeed against all the odds. Of the 200,000 iphone apps, many were invented by under 14 year olds and 40% of employees in Google have autism.

Marcus now spends his time at the educational consultancy http://www.bryanstonsquare.com/ bringing his prodigious talents to bear on improving education and helping to build an environment that gives children a chance to make their dreams come true.

The reaction from many members of the audience was that Marcus caused them to re-think their definitions of success and question their own assumptions

He left us with this thought: “If it has never been done before, there are no experts” with the subtext “So dare to dream and give it a shot!”

If you would like to find out more, sign up for the Bryanston Square newsletter and follow them on Twitter @BryanstonSquare

I’d love to hear your views so please leave a comment below …..

 

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