Okay so hear me out.
You have a business, and it’s your baby.
That’s great. You should be very attentive to your business because just like if it were your real flash and blood baby, you want it to grow and thrive.
Okay so how far can this metaphor go?
I’m not really sure, since I’m writing this by the seat of my pants, so let’s see, shall we?
Sometimes your baby gets spoiled and keeps you up at night. I don’t mean in the infant newborn stage, but a little after, when she should be sleeping through the night and she has already learned that she is a bit spoiled and knows your button pattern already. Even small babies can learn your trigger points and push the envelope. Sometimes a little restraint on your part is needed, like if you know that nothing is wrong, they’ve been fed and changed, and they still are looking for attention, but it’s 4am and you need some sleep. Sometimes baby has to learn that it’s time for beddy bye.
Well, your business sometimes needs tough love too.
How do I mean? Well, whether it’s that squeaky wheel employee, or a vendor that needs straightening out and needs to know that they aren’t the only source of their particular service, or for many things that crop up, sometimes you have to be a bit tough on people in order to get things done.
Not everything is a crisis deserving the time of the business owner. If you can delegate some of that then do it.
Don’t waste your time on constant minutiae.
Take basic tasks.
Okay, combine that with small business, like a one person outfit that is generating leads or some sort of business online.
Take following up on leads.
Online leads generation is a major thing that online marketers, internet marketers, or network marketers need to engage in since leads are the lifeblood of that type of business.
Now, for the person who needs to reach out to the leads via telephone, is calling up all sorts of cold leads really something that you should be doing?
I learned from Dave Wood, a guy who makes over $100k per month online, that this is something that you should be outsourcing.
Now if you’re brand spankin new, maybe you lack the budget, but did you know that you can outsource this to someone in the Philippines for a few dollars per hour while you donate your time to other more pressing needs that your business should have? The people there who engage in this business speak good English, know their business, and have a lower cost of living and hence a lower wage, so it’s a great way for the “first world” marketer to outsource something they see as stressful or a time eater, and at the same time they end up being able to donate more time to other more pressing matters AS WELL AS help feed someone over in a far away place who needs and is capable of the work.
It’s a win win for everyone.
This is a way of being tough in your business. You know that you’d rather do it all yourself, but you made the (sometimes) tough decision to outsource a mundane task to someone who can probably do the job better.
They screen the online leads and forward the really interested ones to you for followup.
An added benefit of this is that you seem more professional and in demand since they’ve already spoken to your assistant and this whole aura of success has just raised your stock in their eyes even more, and it all came about with the desire to show some tough business love and delegate something elsewhere.
So it’s similar in other situations.
There is in person toughness when dealing with vendors who haven’t serviced you well enough. Whether it’s a bank who didn’t go the mile for you when dealing with another company re: your accounts, or maybe an employee who needs a straightening out or maybe even a vendor who isn’t really thrilling you, tough decisions and hard love are needed in business so that your “baby” grows up on the straight and narrow and can eventually take care of you in later years.
Wow, did I tie that up together pretty well?
I wanted to mention these issues in a creative way that maybe made sense to people and drew on popular and easy to understand concepts.
Sometimes blogging is weird like that, coming up with ideas to blog about and then fleshing them out, especially when pressed for time and having to get to the next task.
That is one more aspect of being tough. I needed to get this article out and I could have left it for later, but I decided to be tough on myself and be disciplined and blog daily one way or the other, so sometimes you just have to buck up and get it done.
So, I got it done.
My (as of this writing) 5 month old daughter was being fussy in the wee morning hours when I needed to get this done, and she was well fed etc so I had to leave her in the bassinet a few feet away and resist playing with her because she really needed to get more sleep and my wife needed some more sleep upstairs as I got ready for the day, and it all came together to give me the idea for this post and this whole tough business love idea. Life has a funny way of throwing things together!
Put this baby to bed, because daddy has to get to work!
