True Profit Business

How to play your bigger game without burning out

Karen Skidmore

• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781788600842
• eBook ISBN: 9781788600866
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

*SHORT-LISTED FOR THE BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS 2020!*

We need to change the way we do business.

If you've decided to go it alone and grow your own business, you're probably finding it tough to make things work.

The pace of life is getting faster, our benchmarks forsuccess ever higher, and thousands of micro-business owners are facingentrepreneurial burnout, trying to cover up their stress and exhaustion with 'love-my-life'smiles and filtered images on social media.

It's not just the cashflow that needs fixing: your mentalhealth and well-being are at stake here.

If you are ready to make money, make an impact and thrive inthe process, True Profit Business gives you a simpler, more connected path to business success:

· Clarity – understand what your bigger vision of success looks like and how businessgrowth really works

· Structure – get clear on the five Growth Pillars to ensure sustainable growth

· Flow – discover when to Lean Back and when to Lean In to enable an effective energyflow between thinking, planning and taking action

· Process – discover which of the five True Profit Business Models will enable you tothrive.

True Profit Business not only helps you diagnose what's going wrong for you, it focuses you on yourbigger game and shows you the building blocks – the processes and people – youneed to turn your expertise and talents into a purposeful, playful andprofitable business.

Chapter 1

Playing your bigger game

The sound of the Pied Piper

Emma’s been at it for a few years now. Sure, it’s been a roller coaster experience but she’s hung in there; put in the hours and hustled for the business. If you look at her Facebook feed, you’d get the impression everything is going well. There have been photos of her at various events, of her laptop lifestyle at local cafes and the appropriate smatterings of #ilovemyclients posts.

On the outside, Emma looks successful. If you met her at one of those events posted on her news feed and asked her how business was, she would beam from ear to ear and tell you how busy she was.

But on the inside, she is knackered, beginning to feel disillusioned and often feels alone and confused. When she’s alone in her office at home, she sits at her desk and stares at her screen.

‘Why haven’t I got there yet?’

Emma’s not alone. She represents a new breed of going-it-aloners; parents starting up in business to create a flexible career around their children, professionals taking redundancy and deciding to fulfil a dream of being their own boss, and freedom seekers inspired by the opportunity to make a difference and change other people’s lives for the better.

It’s never been easier to start up a business, and yet this new entrepreneurial dream is beginning to feel like a scene from the Pied Piper of Hamelin; thousands of hard-working business owners chasing a story of hope, without realising the potential burnout waiting for them.

This is what’s driven me to write this book. I’ve been in the game for more than 15 years, going-it-alone in 2004. The first ten or so years of this new world were inspiring and exciting. But a lot has changed in recent years and the scale of quick-and-easy marketing ideas and digital opportunities being presented to hard-working business owners like you has been disturbing me.

Many of the passive income streams, set-and-forget marketing funnels and six and seven figure dreams that are being sold to you today have been the sounds of the Pied Piper’s flute, and the burnout stories that are epidemic now are the result. It’s killing the entrepreneurial dream and it’s now, more than ever, that we need people like you to be successful and able to make the positive changes in this world that we all so desperately need.

When you are alone in your office, it’s easy to feel confused about which direction you should be going in, and what you should be doing each day to enable your business to grow. I get that you want answers. But when your fears and doubts about how to grow your business are being used to sell you the idea that business success only comes from hustle and grind, and that a specific marketing or digital product idea will be the answer to your six-figure success, I get angry.

How your fears and doubts can be your greatest strength

Everyone doubts themselves at some points of their business journey. Sometimes feelings of fear and doubt can come from nowhere; one day you’re feeling great and then suddenly you’re reminded of an idea or a decision you haven’t taken action on, and you feel cross with yourself. You may have been scrolling down your Facebook news feed and up pops someone, pictured holding their new book. Now you may not have really wanted to write a book, but suddenly this image triggers a feeling of inadequacy.

‘How did she manage to do all that AND find the time to write a book?’

Everything you have achieved so far fades away in your memories. You get frustrated with your progress. You berate yourself for having not worked harder or taken bigger action. You then get confused and feel unsure which direction to go in now, or what action to take next. You become constipated with fear and doubt. You procrastinate, pull back and hide yourself away.

How many times have you sat at your desk, staring at your screen, and asked yourself whether you really have what it takes to do this?

Your fears and doubts can be felt in all sorts of different places in your body. Perhaps a knot in your stomach or a pain on your left side or a tingling sensation at the back of your skull. Sometimes the anxiety buzzes inside of you for weeks, at just enough vibration to keep you on edge and make you question everything you do.

Sometimes, your fears and doubts make you take decisions for your business that you know, deep down, aren’t the right ones. Perhaps there’s an online course that promises a new income stream that is being marketed hard to you. You ask yourself if it really is the right thing to do right now. But, as you feel you don’t have the answers and you are being told that if you don’t buy now you won’t get access at this price again, you feel you have to take action on something. So your fears and doubts spur you on to chase marketing tactics and buy into online courses and programmes in the hope that they give you answers and a path to follow.

It’s exhausting.

I have had my fair share of fears and doubts. They’ve shown up in bucket loads over the years and have often appeared as a gentle tight grip on the inside of my throat; almost like a child’s hand trying to silence me. I used to let this feeling in my throat silence me and pull me back, like a bungee cord. I’d come up with an idea that initially excited me; I let my mind play with it for a short while but then the bungee cord would snap me back. Each time I’d either dilute the idea to end up with a smaller, simpler version of it or would decide not to do it at all.

Yes, these bungee cord moments have been frustrating phases in my business. But it’s been my journey and these moments have provided valuable lessons to help me learn how to feel into my uncomfortableness; the feeling of vulnerability, shame, guilt and whatever else my inner shit throws up at me every time I want to play a bigger game.

That gentle tight grip on my throat has become my sign that whatever I was thinking when I felt it, was actually the right thing for me to do. As I’ve written certain sections of this book, I would feel it appear again, more gently than in years before, but it still shows itself to me which only proves to me that what I was writing at the time, was the right thing for me to share with you.

Much of this book focuses on the practicalities of business structure, systems and processes, but I will also help you go within and discover the power of your potential in order for you to know which path to take your business on. Throughout this book, I would like you to feel into any uncomfortableness of fear, doubt, shame or guilt whenever it appears, and see it as a sign of your potential power. These feelings don’t have to allow you to buy into the story that success only comes from pushing through and by hustle, but become aware of when you may be allowing yourself to pull back and play small. Feel gently into the knot or the pain or the grip or the buzz that you feel, because its job is to warn you that you are potentially stepping up and it’s trying to keep you safe. Safe is a lovely place to be on a warm, cosy Sunday afternoon, but if you want to make a bigger impact on this world around you and play a bigger game, then staying safe will only hold you back from fulfilling your potential.

What does playing bigger mean to you?

Your version of playing big is what is important here. It’s not my job, nor anyone else’s job, to tell you what ‘big’ should look like for you. There is no one definition of success because success means different things to different people.

Whenever I’ve asked this question to my community, there has always been a real mix of answers.

‘I want a life outside of work.’

‘To be the best version of myself, with a flexible business that keeps my family comfortable and location free.’

‘To have my business big enough for my husband to leave his job and join me.’

‘To have plenty of large clients with busy pipelines and a great team working with me to deliver fabulous and profitable events.’

‘To be able to sell my business within the next 10 years, which would allow me to retire.’

‘Having someone else manage the business for us, with a steady stream of good contacts always coming through.’

‘Having my business give me flexibility and balance with my time.’

‘To have enough money to put my three children through private school and university.’

‘Getting out of my own way so that I am confident enough to share my message and get my voice out there and help others move forward.’

Some answers are about wanting to make a difference. Some are about building a team so that the business is more than just them. Others want a better lifestyle or to make a better life for their family. But rarely do I get answers solely about money or about wanting to double or triple their turnovers.

For many of us, success is not first and foremost about the money. And yet, it’s very easy to believe that success has to look a certain way.

Are you sure?

Before we go much further into this book, we have to deal with the fact that what you say to yourself and others isn’t necessarily what you end up doing. It’s easy to talk about playing bigger and to tell yourself and others that you want to step up, serve more clients and make a bigger impact. But translating this into action and results is a whole other game.

If you take a look back over the past few years, how many excuses have you really, truly made that have meant you aren’t any more forward? Shit happens. You get ill. A family member gets ill. Your car breaks down. You don’t make enough sales for a few months. Your website gets hacked. You lose your phone.

And then there’s some of that shit that may feel like good shit at the time. You get an amazing opportunity to go to work on someone else’s project. You get asked to contribute to someone else’s book. You get an idea for a new product, programme or offer which you create and then sell. And then you get another idea. And then another.

All good shit on the surface except that if you say one thing but then allow yourself to react and make knee-jerk decisions, you are in danger of running hard on a treadmill, and going nowhere fast.

So before you read any more, I want you to be really honest with yourself about how much you want to grow your business. Because to allow your bigger game growth to happen, you often have to say ‘no’ to a lot of ideas and projects, slow down a little (and sometimes a lot depending on how fast you’re going right now) and commit to creating the space for feeling into what you want, as well as thinking and planning out what you may take action on.

You may have been using busy-ness as an excuse to pull yourself back and play small because you have not had the time to take action on the projects that have the potential to move you forward. I see this happen often and I’ve done it myself many times over the years. So before you get stuck into the practicalities of what I am teaching you here in this book, I need you to understand that it’s often not the actual doing that defines your success; it’s the feeling and thinking that you have that will allow you to play bigger.

Feel it. Think it. Do it

You know far more than you give yourself credit for.

Trusting yourself to know this and deal with growing a business in this way is not a natural way for many people. If you are like most people who I want to read this book, you have spent most of your professional career thinking your way through challenges and problems. Your default setting is to seek answers by engaging your frontal lobe, the part of your brain behind your forehead, as this is the part of your brain you access to process information, analyse, think and plan.

To be able to feel into your business, you have to ‘get out of your head’ and discover the other important control centres in your body, such as your gut, heart and soul. You may have used phrases such as ‘I knew in my gut that it was the right thing to do’ or ‘My heart is telling me this is the direction to go in’. Yet if your default settings are to use your frontal lobe, then the thinking part of your brain can kick in and give you a different and perhaps more pragmatic and logical answer, which often conflicts with what your gut or heart is trying to tell you. The more you use your brain to solve your challenges and problems and turn up the volume on the answers you get from there, the less likely the messages from your intuition get heard. If your stress levels are particularly high, then you will be more likely to access parts of your primal brain – such as your hippocampus which deals with fight-or-flight decisions – to find your answers, and thus answers coming from your intuition have very little chance of being heard.

If you allow yourself the space to connect and access your inner wisdom, you soon learn to trust your intuition and you often find far simpler and easier answers to your challenges and problems.

However, spend too much of your time accessing your intuition and making decisions from a place of wisdom, and you can find yourself ‘away with the fairies’ and not being able to articulate or communicate your marketing messages.

You need both. You need to feel into your intuition, as well as use your thinking to create the structure, process and systems to allow your ideas to take form. And, of course, you need to also take action to make these ideas happen. Let’s dive in to each of these areas in a little more detail.

1. Feel it

Creating the time and space to let your imagination wander, to daydream and to connect with what is truly important to you, is critical no matter what stage of business growth you are in.

You want to be able to give yourself the space to feel into what it is you want to create and why this is important to you. To allow these dreams and ideas to start to take form, find ways of tak...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Playing your bigger game
• 2. What’s going wrong?
• 3. True Profit Business
• 4. True Profit Growth Flow
• 5. Your True Profit Compass
• 6. True Profit Business Models
• Where to go from here
• Next steps
• Acknowledgements
• Resources
• About the author