Tag: Business Success

How to Craft a Success Story with the Right Partners | Entrepreneur

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Before launching my first business in 2017, I made a decision that helped shape its success — I declined several C-suite positions. Although they were financially attractive, the opps didn’t resonate with my core values, particularly my commitment to ethical business practices.

It’s common for entrepreneurs to leap at the first opportunity that presents itself, typically driven by financial incentives. For many, years pass quickly, and though they have all the shiny things, many remain unfulfilled and miserable.

An alternative path does exist. Leverage your passions, core values and strengths, and selectively embrace opportunities that align with them. How about the rest? That’s simple — delegate them to trusted partners.

This approach has helped me shape a more fulfilling and successful entrepreneurial journey, one that allows challenges daily in vastly different industries while never feeling like I’m actually “working,” the latter always my ultimate goal.

Here are two strategies that have helped me on my journey.

Related: 3 Tips for Creating Powerful Partnerships

1. Resist ill-suited opportunities — a test of entrepreneurial resolve

For new entrepreneurs, quick success and financial gains are tempting. Although these arrive sometimes, the real challenge resides in resisting opportunities that don’t align with your passions, core values and strengths.

This happened to me ahead of launching my first business in 2017. First was the passion and core value elements.

All of my years spent studying literature and music helped shape my focus of only doing things passionate to me. This passion, along with a few of the business practices that didn’t meet my ethical standards, prompted me to turn down a highly lucrative C-level position. It was the best — although most challenging — decision in my entrepreneurial journey.

Before jumping on an enticing opportunity, pause and reflect. Do you possess the necessary knowledge and skills? And, more importantly, does it resonate with your passions and ethical outlook? Pursuing a venture that’s misaligned with your passions, core values and strengths typically fails.

Instead, focus on nurturing your unique talents. Embrace opportunities that allow you to leverage your interests and the skills you’ve honed over time. This approach increases your chances of success and leads to a more fulfilling career.

Building a business that mirrors your true self — your interests, skills and values — not only has a greater chance of success but also brings job satisfaction, leading to higher productivity, quality output and profitability. Someday, your interests may pivot, but as long as you built a solid business around them, you can also pivot from your role and pursue other opps. This could mean selling a business, passing leadership to someone else or simply taking on a new role within the company.

That said, all of that relies on having solid business partners, leading me to the next point.

Related: How to Use Strategic Partnerships for More Explosive Growth

2. Relentlessly seek ideal business partners

Outsourcing is a strategic move for small businesses. Instead of trying to juggle every task, finding partners who excel in areas outside your expertise or interest is more effective.

Identify tasks that are outside your wheelhouse, whether it’s complex IT challenges or social media marketing. Find individuals who specialize in these areas and who are passionate about them. Their expertise and enthusiasm ensure superior quality and commitment.

In my journey, I’ve learned that finding the right partners goes far beyond mere skillset matching. It’s about forging relationships with individuals or entities that resonate deeply with your business’s vision and core values. This alignment is the crux of building a partnership that’s not just functional but genuinely synergistic.

It’s like a well-orchestrated band where every member’s unique style and expertise contribute to a powerful performance. When partners share your vision, they bring more than their skills — they bring a shared commitment to your business goals, a mutual understanding of what you stand for and an unwavering dedication to driving the collective mission forward.

This synergy differentiates between a business that simply operates and one that thrives. It’s about creating a network where each component amplifies the other, leading to exponential growth, innovation and success. It’s a lesson I hold dear and a strategy I advocate for any entrepreneur looking to not just build a business but to create a legacy.

Also, this approach goes beyond mere delegation — it’s about optimizing. When experts manage tasks, they’re executed with greater efficiency, improving productivity, reducing costs and enhancing quality.

Related: How to Develop B2B Partnerships That Grow Your Business

With the right partners, you can concentrate on what you do best: boosting your productivity and work satisfaction. Seeking the right partnership can significantly enhance your business success. Combining your unique strengths with those of your partners creates a robust, dynamic business that’s well-equipped to succeed in a competitive market.

For budding entrepreneurs, it’s vital to resist the temptation of taking every opportunity and instead focus on areas where you excel. Outsource other aspects to individuals who are passionate and skilled in those domains.

This strategy leads to a streamlined, efficient business that thrives on your core competencies. Embrace the power of selective collaboration and watch your entrepreneurial venture flourish, anchored in your passions and expertise.

Ron Lieback

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January 1, 2024
Why Empathy is Crucial to Your Success in the Business World | Entrepreneur
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Empathy is the transformative force in business and life that allows leaders and managers to empower those around them. Beyond numbers and profits, understanding and connecting with others on an emotional level is a hallmark of exceptional leadership. This article delves into the power of empathy in the business arena — spotlighting its impact on leaders, teams and the legacy we all leave behind.

The essence of empathy in leadership

Empathy in leadership goes beyond just a soft skill; it’s a strategic imperative. As a manager, your interactions shape the team’s culture and morale. By understanding your employees’ feelings, needs, and perspectives, you forge connections that are the bedrock of trust and collaboration.

Empathy is the cornerstone of a positive work environment. When leaders genuinely care about their team members’ well-being, it creates a culture of camaraderie. Employees feel valued and appreciated, resulting in increased job satisfaction, higher morale and reduced turnover. By acknowledging individual strengths and challenges, leaders can tailor their approach, empowering employees to thrive and contribute their best.

Related: 3 Overarching Reasons Why People Quit Their Jobs — and How Employers Should Address Each One

Effective communication and conflict resolution

Empathy is a game-changer in communication. Leaders who listen actively and understand their team’s concerns can communicate clearly and tactfully. When conflicts arise, an empathetic approach promotes open dialogue, allowing conflict to be resolved constructively. This prevents issues from festering and maintains a harmonious work atmosphere.

Related: 8 Great Tricks for Reading People’s Body Language

Empathy and employee engagement

Employee engagement is vital for productivity and innovation. Empathetic leaders foster engagement by recognizing employees as whole individuals with specific aspirations and needs. This recognition boosts motivation and encourages employees to invest their energy and creativity in their roles. Engaged teams are likelier to go the extra mile, driving overall performance and organizational success.

Building trust and loyalty

Trust is the currency of effective leadership. Empathy is the linchpin of trust-building, demonstrating that leaders genuinely care about their team’s success and well-being. Employees who perceive their leaders as empathetic are likelier to be loyal and dedicated. This loyalty translates to increased effort, reduced absenteeism, and a willingness to weather challenges together.

Related: Why Do Your Customers Really Buy from You?

Empathy in decision-making

Empathy informs strategic decision-making. Leaders who understand the impact of their decisions on employees consider not only the bottom line but also the human aspect. This leads to conclusions that balance short-term gains with long-term sustainability. By incorporating empathy, leaders build a culture where decisions are ethical, considerate, and aligned with the organization’s values.

Empathy’s ripple effect

Empathy is contagious. When leaders embody compassion, their teams often emulate this behavior. This ripple effect extends to customer and client interactions, creating authentic connections that enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction. A company culture rooted in empathy can differentiate the organization in a competitive marketplace.

Related: Why Empathetic Leadership Is More Important Than Ever

Strategies for strengthening empathy

Developing empathy requires active effort. We can start by actively listening to others without judgment, acknowledging their emotions, and trying to understand their perspective. We cultivate a culture where people feel seen, heard, and valued.
1. Active listening: When someone speaks, truly listen without interrupting. Let their words unfold without immediately forming your response. This allows you to absorb the depth of what they’re sharing. Show you’re engaged through non-verbal cues like nodding or maintaining eye contact, indicating that you value their perspective and emotions.
2. Walk in their shoes: Take a moment to imagine what it’s like to be in their situation. Consider the challenges they might be facing and the emotions they’re likely experiencing. This mental exercise helps you better understand their point of view and fosters a deeper connection.
3. Open-ended questions: Encourage them to share more by asking open-ended questions. Instead of yes-or-no inquiries, ask questions that require thoughtful responses. This invites them to express themselves fully, helping you gain insights into their feelings and thoughts that you might not have uncovered otherwise.
4. Set aside biases: Recognize your biases and preconceptions and consciously set them aside during the conversation. Approach the interaction with an open mind, allowing their emotions and perspective to take center stage. By letting go of judgments, you create a safe space for them to express themselves authentically.
5. Engage in service: Engaging in acts of kindness or volunteering exposes you to diverse experiences and backgrounds. This exposure broadens your understanding of the challenges people face and the emotions they navigate. Being part of a more significant community effort allows you to connect with individuals whose stories may differ from yours.
Empathy emerges as a fundamental trait that elevates leaders beyond managerial roles. As a leader, nurturing compassion creates a positive work environment, boosts engagement, fosters effective communication, and builds trust. It’s a catalyst that transforms workplaces into thriving ecosystems where individuals feel valued and empowered. By recognizing the transformative power of empathy, leaders shape organizations that achieve financial success and leave a lasting, positive impact on their employees and the world at large.
Ryan McGrath

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August 29, 2023
How to Collect Millions From Your Existing Business Structure | Entrepreneur
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Over the years, I’ve partnered with many digital entrepreneurs in the six-to-eight-figure range to help them with their growth challenges. As a result, I noticed an interesting trend.

Despite each being unique with companies of different sizes, when it comes to growing a business, everyone typically faces the same problems. Why? Because, as you’ll soon find out, growth leaks are very predictable.

In this article, I’ll walk you through these growth leaks and show you how to overcome them so that you can collect millions from your existing business structure.

What problems do most digital creators face today?

One common problem I see often is that most digital entrepreneurs focus on social presence and sales (front-end), while they completely neglect existing buyers (back-end). Let me explain because this is critical. In marketing, you have two major focus areas: Front-end and back-end.

The front-end is everything you do to capture the attention of non-buyers and convert them into buyers. The back-end is everything you do to keep these new buyers and get them to buy more from you.

Although this is easy to understand, successfully combining the front-end and the back-end in your daily marketing efforts is a tricky task. That’s exactly where most entrepreneurs leave value behind.

This value is not just in the form of sales. It’s mostly in the form of impact on their audience — impact these people want and need. And this is where the growth problems begin.

Related: 5 Ways to Make a Strong Impression With Every Audience

Your front-end is not your profit center

Many entrepreneurs believe that the initial sale should drive profits. Unfortunately, that’s not the goal of your front-end efforts.

Your front-end has two main objectives: Acquire relationships and create awareness.

As you can see, the front-end is not about making money. That’s why I didn’t mention “getting customers.” Your front-end is about building relationships and creating awareness about yourself, your values and your business. The front-end exists so that people know more about you and understand how you can help them.

The digital entrepreneur who can risk attracting people at a cost, and who is not going after immediate front-end profits, is the one who understands what the back-end stands for.

The front-end is about lending money (not making money)

The front-end is not about making profits, it’s about acquiring relationships and creating awareness. But you’re an entrepreneur, right? If you don’t make money, you’re just running a charity. This is exactly where the back-end becomes relevant.

You acquire someone on your front-end and move them to your back-end where you’ll convert them into higher-value offers. That’s how to repeatedly make money. You can afford to acquire buyers at a loss as if you’re lending them money — this is your cost per acquisition.

But you get that money back in droves once they engage with you on the back-end and get impacted by your higher-value offers. This is how every successful business is set up, and it is how you maximize your profits and secure the longevity of your company. That said, let’s see how you can implement or optimize this strategy in your business.

Related: Maximize Profits by Using These 3 P’s

The perfect business model for maximum impact and profits

Whether you want to have a successful digital or brick-and-mortar business, the perfect business model for maximum impact and profits always consists of two phases.
- Phase 1: Acquisition. In this phase, you combine building relationships with creating awareness about your business and what it stands for (lending).
- Phase 2: Profits. In this phase, you build trust by capitalizing on those initial relationships (collecting).
When my team and I work with our partners, we find most of their growth opportunities where the front-end merges with the back-end. This convergence point is where you can acquire relationships at a loss, knowing that you have the systems ready to collect that money back multiple times across time.

Once the relationship is in place, you can tap into sales opportunities whenever you want. Why? Because people trust you. They trust that you can help them. They trust that you can deliver. And they trust that you have their best interest at heart. This is where infinite value comes from.

As an entrepreneur, don’t ever forget that you want to build relationships and awareness first. You want to nurture those relationships to continuously sell your back-end products and services.

Related: 7 Amazing Ways to Build Long-Term Relationships With Your Customers

In our experience working with digital entrepreneurs, this is where my team and I see so many business owners leaving money on the table. Money that was there, waiting to be captured without any significant changes to their business structures.

We’re talking about situations where we managed to collect an extra $1,000,000 in two months for one partner. Or where we helped another make $109,000 in two weeks (his best year ever was $350,000). We managed to collect these amounts from their existing business structures because we implemented exactly what I shared with you in this article.

Related: How to Craft the Right Organizational Structure for Your Business

The bottom Line

The formula to generate more sales is this simple, three-step approach:
- Build the relationships and create awareness (front-end).
- Provide a wealth of value (frontier between front-end and back-end).
- Drive deeper impact (back-end).
When you improve in any of these three areas, you can drive consistent growth to your business. That’s it. Nothing fancy or complicated. Just a surefire way to collect millions from your existing customer base without making any significant changes, investing a lot of money in ads or wasting a lot of time.
Svetoslav Dimitrov

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June 16, 2023
How to Think Outside the Box and Revolutionize the Customer Journey | Entrepreneur

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Traditional industries often change slowly, but they have a considerable market share and continue to succeed despite this because they are what customers are used to. They may hope for a more innovative product, but they have been content to settle for what the industry giants offer.

However, in a post-Covid world, consumers are interested in something other than the same old tired products and services they’ve always dealt with. Instead, they’re demanding newer, better solutions. To stay alive, companies must rethink the customer experience and offer the public something fresh.

Well-established industries can be slow to adopt new solutions, but there are a few ways to build a disruptive tech product and shake things up.

Related: The Post-Covid Leader — How the CEO’s Role Has Changed in the Past 3 Years

1. Build detailed customer profiles from scratch

It’s time to toss out everything you think you know about your customers and start with a clean slate. A recent report from WeTravel found that travelers are increasingly looking for more personalized experiences, but how and why they travel has shifted in a post-Covid world.

So, the best way to get to know your customers again is to throw away your notes, roll up your sleeves and figure out who they are and what they want. McKinsey recently found that there are more nuanced customer segments post-pandemic, so you might discover new categories of travelers with unique pain points and preferences.

For instance, premium travelers are now more interested than ever in feeling like they’re part of an exclusive community. Meanwhile, boomers are looking for more hands-on human assistance when booking trips.

The things that are most popular with your audience outside of your industry are the same things that will draw them to your product.

As an example, millennials are a “subscription lifestyle” generation. They like products and services that allow access with a simple subscription fee. That’s why brands like Dollar Shave Club and Hello Fresh remain popular with that age bracket. Travel brands like Inspirato and Bidroom use this subscription-style model to provide better, customer-focused service.

Gen Z, on the other hand, is more interested in the YOLO (you only live once) lifestyle and gamification. They’re spontaneous, experience-driven and attracted to things with fun game mechanics like the ability to unlock achievements or “level up.”

Travel booking app Hopper has leaned into this, creating daily login streak bonuses, dropping surprise destination deals and offering “loot crate”-style rewards to use in-app.

Related: 3 Books to Help Business Leaders Discover Innovation and Growth

2. Look to other industries to find ways to disrupt your own

Remember that you’re not the first to try to win against big players. Thousands of startups in dozens of industries are playing the same underdog game. Many are succeeding, so it’s worth considering what they’re doing right.

Always monitor new emerging products and business models in related industries. The most popular models with different demographics in other areas, such as dating, dining or entertainment, can give you insights about what to incorporate into your disruptive product.

This strategy is already working for companies like Turo, which utilizes an Airbnb-style model of peer-to-peer car sharing for short-term and long-term rentals. This was a truly disruptive idea. It opened up the car rental industry, allowing owners to earn money and renters to access vehicles at lower prices.

Dating apps like Tinder and Bumble have long been popular with Gen Z, so travel app OfftheGrid decided to capitalize on that trend to create a brand-new travel experience for the younger generation of travelers.

The brand allows users to “swipe on” and chat with travelers who share their interests while discovering new destinations. The result is a unique travel product that breaks away from the traditional model of sites like Expedia.

Related: #Digital Nomads: Unraveling the Millennials’ Way of Working and Living

3. Follow the tech trends

It’s important to follow where technology leads you to maintain a competitive advantage. If your company can get ahead of the curve, it sets you up to control a huge market share once the tech you’ve already adopted starts trickling down to your competitors.

For instance, once the internet became widespread, online travel agencies suddenly became popular. The logical progression that followed was moving from web browsers to phones as mobile internet overtook the telecom industry.

We’re now in the early days of the era of big data and generative AI, so it’s natural for innovations like ChatGPT to start changing everything we know about travel. Big names like Expedia and Kayak have already begun leveraging ChatGPT to allow customers to build trips through natural conversations with their chatbots.

By keeping abreast of technology trends, you can ensure the product you build is cutting-edge and can catch travelers’ attention.

4. Think beyond your product

Disruption won’t happen overnight. It usually has to be incremental because customers and competitors have to get used to the idea of being outside of what they already know.

Because of this, you need to think about more than just the disruptive product you’re creating. Remember, if you succeed, you’re essentially turning your sector upside-down. Other brands will want to follow in your footsteps.

So, ask the big-picture questions while you create: How will this change the market in the long term? What will the ripple effects be?

For example, AI and ChatGPT are taking over nearly every industry (including travel!), even though they started as tech industry ideas. Now, we’re seeing companies that aren’t willing to jump on board with AI get left behind while the ones that dive in are finding success in unprecedented ways.

We’ve figured out that a total overhaul of the customer journey is the key to successfully disrupting a traditional sector. If you’re looking to start a revolution in a well-established industry, you have to be willing to admit what you don’t know, get down in the trenches and figure out ways to make every customer segment feel like they can’t live without your product.

Ivan Saprov

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April 11, 2023