Stop trying to figure out your sh*t all by yourself. I hear a lot of business gurus preach that we need to get a team to help us build our business but I’m gonna be super straight-up here – there’s no budget to put someone on the payroll. So when I say quit trying to figure it out yourself, I’m not talking about hiring someone to help you out. If you don’t have the money, you don’t have the money. You have helper wages sitting around in a trust fund that you haven’t tapped yet? I sure don’t. I think if any of us were sitting on a bank roll that would finance a little help around here, we’d jump at the opportunity to hand off the tasks that we suck at and hate doing.
What do you do when every penny coming into your business is already spent? I been there. I get it. I know what’s it like to hear a coach tell you that you should have a helper doing all the tasks that do not need to be done specifically by you. Let me make something clear. I’ve done that and it was not all it was cracked up to be. Here’s me story of taking advice that cost me big time and returned nothing.
I tried it. I hired a shop helper. You see, I was part of a group coaching experience that cost me a few bucks a month to participate in. One of the pieces of advice that I garnered early in that coaching experience was that I needed to hire help and stop trying to do all the things my own self. I heard this advice often in this coaching group so I gathered that it must be important. What I didn’t know, was that there were about a million other things that I needed to do to first. Hiring a shop helper was not going to solve my problem. My problem was not that I needed to hand off tasks. My issue was that I didn’t know the first thing about how to sell the product we were producing.
I hired a business coach with the hope that they were going to guide me down the path to business success. What I actually paid for was a lot of advice from a coach that had forgotten (or more accurately had never started at this level of unknowing ignorance). She told me that I was spending too much of my time on things that I should be giving to someone else to do. Hiring someone failed so miserably for me. I mean it was great to not have to sand or prep pieces for the short couple of months that she worked for me but I what I didn’t know how to do was sell the pieces we were completing. I had a sh*t ton of inventory and no idea how to sell it.
I had every style and color of furniture because I was literally picking a finish based on whether I had already tried it. I had a website, but no clue how to generate traffic to it. I had a booth at local antique store, but I had no idea how to price my work or even what might sell best in this booth. I was literally a million steps away from needing someone to sand furniture for me. There were so many obstacles that I needed to tackle ahead of hiring help. How do you price your work, how do you know what sells, how do you generate traffic to your website?
When I say get some help what I mean is stop trying to figure it all out on your own. Use the free resources that you have available to you. I’m talking about website tech support, free marketing and sales webinars through your online store host, podcasts, books. Just stop trying to figure it out on your own. I have truly spent hours trying to get something on my website to work that the tech support folks were able to do for me in five minutes – for FREE. Hello Bun, that was a colossal waste of your time.
We’re going to dig deeper into free resources and the folks that advise me now (and how they do that) next week so you’ll want to check it next week’s blog for that info. It’s good info and hopefully it’ll save you from making the mistakes that I made along the way.