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Do you want people to watch YOU burn?

October 3, 2011 in Motivation, Passion with 7 Comments

Light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles around to watch you burn! ~ John Wesley

I heard that quote this week while watching a sermon by Craig Groeschel from LifeChurch.tv. As soon as I heard it I paused the sermon, wrote the quote down, and emailed it to both Skye and I (I email ideas to myself ALL THE TIME!).

I LOVE that quote! It resonates with me. It makes me want to record another video, and be EVEN MORE IMPASSIONED during it than normal.

I want people to know that I’m passionate about what I do. More importantly, I want to BE passionate about what I do!

Because there’s a distinction.

You can present a passionate face to the public, for a time, and not actually BE passionate about your topic. However, if you commit to something for the long haul your TRUE feelings will eventual come out. If your passion is just a front, a face you show to the public, it will be discovered.

However, if it’s real, if it’s heart felt, if it’s what you’re dousing yourself with and BURNING WITH day in and day out… People can tell that to0.

And I’m passionate about helping struggling small businesses succeed. I’m passionate about helping the current employee who has an idea start their business and become successful in it. I’m passionate about sharing my ideas, thoughts, and opinions on this blog!

And it shows. At least from the comments and feed back I’ve been getting. People can see that I’m lighting myself on fire with passion. AND THEY’RE COMING TO WATCH ME BURN.

Visits to the site are increasing. Comments are increasing. More and more people are contacting me to work with them. People are “watching”.

And I love it! I want to give more. I want to help more. I want more people to be successful in business.

For the first time in I don’t know how long I am waking up in the middle of the night, not worrying, but EXCITED. Ideas keep coming to me on how to help people, no matter where I’m at or what I’m doing.

And it’s contagious. People around me are feeding off it. Skye seems to be happier and she’s getting excited about getting some of her projects going that have been dormant. Friends have noticed and are starting to do things they have been dreaming about. Other members of online communities I’m a part of are feeding off of it.

IT’S AWESOME!

What about you?

Are you so excited, so impassioned about your idea that people are “…com[ing] from miles around to watch you burn” with it? Do people KNOW you’re excited about it? Is it SO MUCH ON YOUR HEART that you can’t help but talk about it? Is your idea consuming your thoughts so that you have a hard time of seeing or doing ANYTHING without thinking about it?

If so, please share. I and all the other readers here would LOVE to know and support you.

If not, what can be done to get you there? Let’s talk.

~Ivan

008 – Forget Benchmarks, Do Your Best!

September 29, 2011 in Be Remarkable, Motivation, Video Blog with 1 Comment

I’m obsessed with stats. Especially stats for this site.

I’ve referenced this before in Quantity vs Quality. If left to myself I will try to analyze any and all numbers available to me from 360 degrees. I enjoy it. It tells me things people won’t always say to me. I kind of obsess over them.

So last week I went into Free Agent Academy and posted about the success I’ve been having here at A Better Way of Business’s site (more on this in a future post). I was hoping to receive some comparison data to see if I am doing as well as I think I am when compared to others.

Instead of getting comparison data I received one of the best compliments I’ve gotten to date regarding my business.

Check out this video where I talk about it:

YouTube Preview Image

Victoria Jone said, “You don’t need a benchmark, you just need to rock – and you do!”

HOW AWESOME IS THAT?!?!

I think it’s REALLY awesome! Made my day.

And a VERY valid point for us all. Are you comparing yourself to a benchmark, that may not be on the same plane as you, or are you simply trying to do your best?

I learned a long time ago that I will tend to do WORSE than I’m capable of if I compare my results to the results of others. I guarantee that if you perform the same analysis you’ll find that you’re doing WORSE than you’re capable as well.

Remember, forget the benchmarks, DO YOUR BEST!

Or as I’m fond of saying now, BE REMARKABLE!

~Ivan

007 – Why Wait

September 27, 2011 in Action, Motivation, Video Blog with 6 Comments

I get a little worked up in this one.

It’s the after noon after I had a swallow test. Starting last year I occasionally have issues swallowing. This REALLY SUCKS when I’m eating. Because occasionally food will get caught in my throat half way down.

Yeah… not good.

Last year, 2010, it happened twice. This year it’s happened a dozen or so times with the majority of those instances happening in a 3 month window recently.

Here’s the video:

YouTube Preview Image

Yeah… so not only has stress and frustration caused me to have 1) high blood pressure, 2) pretty rough headaches, 3) asthma attacks, it has also apparently affected 4) MY SWALLOWING! ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!?!

If any of you that just watched this video and read this post have been waiting and waiting and WAITING on going after you dreams, PLEASE STOP! ACT NOW! What are you waiting for?!?! Are you waiting to turn out like me and be 32 years old and suffering from issues normally associated with people MUCH OLDER???

I ask you, WHY WAIT?

~Ivan

What’s my motivation?

September 19, 2011 in Books, Motivation, Purpose with 8 Comments

After lying in bed for 45 minutes WIDE AWAKE, I finally got up and took a shower. I originally thought I was too tired to take my evening shower, but apparently not.

I’m wide awake due to two things. 1) I had caffeine with dinner (it keeps me up at night if I have it after 2PM). and 2) My mind is racing a million miles an hour with ideas for blog posts. So I need to get some of them out.

One of the thoughts that I keep having lately is, “What’s my motivation?” “Why do I want to start A Better Way of Business?” “Is my reason strong enough to carry me through the difficult times that I know lay ahead?”

I don’t have exact answers for all those questions. At least not the short, sweet, one sentence answers that many experts might say you should be able to give. But I have ideas feelings and beliefs.

Allow me to explain part of what I mean and give you an answer to “What’s my motivation.”

Courtesy of Amazon.com

I read the E-Myth by Michael Gerber probably around six years ago. I was fascinated by his story of how he became involved in helping small businesses. I loved his discussions on the “entrepreneurial seizure”, “the technicians”, and why you need to “work on your business vs in it”. I loved the idea of putting systems in place so your process is repeatable by others so you don’t have to be there every minute of every day.

I remember thinking only a few chapters in, “I WISH I could do this!” I wanted to help small businesses transform from the worst job you’ve ever had (and the lowest paying) to the business you dreamed of when you first started. I wanted to help people start a business in the RIGHT way so they could avoid the pain of mistakes and possible failure down the line.

I dreamed of doing this.

And that’s all I did.

Me, being me, I analyzed the CRAP out of the idea and thought of 100, may several hundred, reasons why I could NEVER do it.

So I talked myself out of it. I crushed my inner spirit and desire to try it.

I put the book with all its highlights, pen marks, and written notes in the margins and at tops and bottoms of pages back on my book shelf and forgot about it.

Then came the pivotal time when Skye told me to put up or shut up with regards to starting a business. I decided I WOULD start a business, but didn’t know what.

I thought long and hard. I asked others what they thought (people who knew a lot about me and how I’m wired).

Professor teaching - Courtsey Inmagine

The spark came when Skye pointed out that the only job I’ve ever enjoyed was teaching. I LOVED helping students learn. I got a THRILL from standing in front of the class talking. I got a RUSH from sharing with others what I had in my head. And I can think of few things as satisfying to me as the point in time when you’re looking into someone’s eyes and you see that they FINALLY GET IT!

So I, or should I say we, decided that teaching should be a part of my business. The only issue is I didn’t and don’t want to teach for a school. There’s numerous reasons for this, but that’s for another discussion.

So how can I take the aspects of teaching that made teaching GREAT to me and apply them to a business?

I could take the aspects of teaching that I loved and combine them with what I saw Michael Gerber do in E-Myth!

A Better Way of Business was born.

I could help people take the idea they have and turn it into a business that functions properly from the get go. I could help the business owner who has created the worst job they’ve ever had, with the longest hours and lowest pay, and show that person how to turn their creation into a successful business. I could share knowledge that I have, with others, to benefit them. I could speak to groups of people who are all wanting to start a business, and thereby get the experience of standing in front of others sharing. I could work one on one with people and witness first hand the spark of recognition when they GOT IT!

It is the best of both worlds.

It is what motivates me to take one step after another in the direction I am sure success lies.

It is why A Better Way of Business exists.

~Ivan

Are you excited?

September 12, 2011 in Motivation with 4 Comments

I started typing this at 5:11 AM on a Saturday morning.

What time did excitement get YOU out of bed?

I’m surprised it didn’t happen much earlier seeming how I thought my alarm was about to go off, I mean I was just laying in bed wide awake and thinking the alarm was going to go off at any moment. After a few minutes, I’m very impatient, I got up and walked across the room to check my alarm clock. 3:39 AM. Yeah… I can’t get up that early. We have to drive to Macon this morning to pick something up, close to a two hour drive, I need SOME sleep!

So why am I awake so early? What could possibly cause me to miss out on some oh-so-precious-sleep???

Excitement!

OK. If that were typed how I just thought it (didn’t say it out loud because Alexander just whimpered in his sleep and I don’t want to wake him yet) it would be EXCITEMENT!

I am PUMPED RIGHT NOW! I had a hard time going to sleep last night. I woke up several times during the middle of the night. And I laid in bed waiting for my alarm to officially sound at 5:00 AM all because of EXCITEMENT!

And this has happened a couple days in a row now. And it’s happening more and more frequently.

So what’s got me excited?

A Better Way of Business. And all the things going on here. I’m excited that my first video blog was a huge success. WAY BIGGER than anything I expected. I’m excited about the relationships I’m building with people over the last few months. I’m excited about getting to get up and work on that oh-so-special-project I keep hinting about but haven’t divulged yet. And I’m excited by getting feed back that I am motivating other people to LAUNCH THEIR BUSINESSES!

Check out part of this feedback I received yesterday from Curtis Hollembeak from http://www.fundamusic.com/:

I have been encouraged by your postings at FAA to go ahead and do something. Your energy has already motivated me. FundaMusic.com went live this week, and I too am excited about the possibilities.

It’s feedback like this from Curtis that erases any doubt as to whether or not I’m heading in the right direction. I read his comment last nigh a little before bed. I as tired, I’d had a long day, and I was ready to go to sleep. After reading his comment I could have run a marathon! OK, I could have walked a mile or two and then collapsed from asthma is more realistic, but STILL! You get my point. That comment got me EXCITED!

So I ask YOU! What’s got you excited? Are you so excited about your business idea that it keeps you awake at night? It wakes you up in the middle of the night because inspiration just hit? It can force you to get up early on a weekend morning so you can get started and devote focused time to it?

What is it?

Do you HAVE anything that gets you this excited?

I can tell you that this is new to me. This level of excitement isn’t normal for me. Yes, I get excited easy, and lose it just as fast. This is different. This is POWERFUL. This keeps me going when I want to throw in my towel and quit.

So I ask you again. What gets you THIS excited?

~Ivan

Quantity vs Quality

September 8, 2011 in Blogging, Motivation, Priorities with 2 Comments

Quantity vs Quality

So I’m a numbers guy.

As a kid I grew to love baseball. And do you want to know what turned me on to baseball? It wasn’t the actual game. I had to FORCE myself to watch the game. It was long, and boring, and I only had about a five minute attention span (it’s up to 10 minutes now!).

It was the cards. Specifically the back of the cards, where several years worth of stats were kept. I LOVED looking at those stats. What was the batting average? How many doubles? Homers? RBI’s? Who had the highest average, per year, for the cards I had? Most homers? What about for 3 years? Add up the total number of hits for three years and divide by the total number of at bats. Who has the best average???

I loved it. I would make my own note books and hand write out all the stats from the back of the cards so I could then analyze the players easier (I wasn’t introduced to Excel until my college years). I would even go so far as to create my own stats and see what kind of numbers I’d get. Let’s give John Smith 605 at bats, with 203 hits, 47, doubles, 39 homers, and 146 RBI’s. Is that realistic?

Crunch the numbers!

It was great.

My love of stats transitioned into video games. Favorite sports game of all time? Tecmo Super Bowl. Why? It was the first game I came across that kept stats.

One of the reasons I love role playing games so much? You have to level up your characters, thereby changing and improving their stats.

To this day I’m still obsessed with numbers. Take this blog for instance. I found out I can monitor traffic at this site. I can see how many page views I get a day. I can see where the views are coming from. I can see so many numbers, and not all of them make sense to me yet.

I LOVE IT! Actually, I can see myself getting obsessed with it. Are my links from Facebook and Twitter working? How can I get them to funnel more readers over here? Do I get more views on Monday or Thursday? How can I tweak the titles of my posts to make them more attractive to drive more traffic? HOW CAN I GET MORE PEOPLE?! MORE TRAFFIC?!?! MORE MORE MORE!

You get the picture.

I actually had a bit of a melt down last Wednesday. I got to work and was pretty busy, so I didn’t check the blog until around lunch. That’s the day I wrote, “Can you accomplish everything that needs to done?” This was and is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart as I start A Better Way of Business. I was really excited about this post. So when I checked at lunch I was expecting this post to have a decent number of views, for me that would have been 20 by lunch. So I opened up the dashboard and what do I see???

To my GREAT surprise I see 1. One single, solitary, lonely page view. And that one view just so happened to be me because the way I get to my blog is by clicking on this link that I set up that takes me to the daily post (guess I need to change that so I don’t skew my stats) and then I click on the dashboard. So really, I had had ZERO page views by lunch.

I was crushed. I was defeated. I wanted to throw the whole site away as a failure.

I sent Skye a text asking her if I was making a mistake trying to get A Better Way of Business going.

About 30 minutes later it hit me. I was obsessing over the wrong thing (I do that too often). And I think I discovered what the right thing IS!

My love of numbers and stats had been telling me the IMPORTANT piece of data is page views. The more page views the more successful I am. The more people stopping by my blog, the more people who actually value what I’m saying. The higher the number of page views the more business I have…

Wait a minute…

THAT’S IT! That’s where I was wrong. I was equating page views to number of clients that actually want to work with me and have me help them and their businesses grow into their dreams.

And that’s not necessarily the case. I realized, that what if I had 1,000,000 page views in a day. I would be TOTALLY PUMPED ABOUT IT! But what if NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WANTED TO DO BUSINESS WITH ME? It would be POINTLESS to the extent that I want and need A Better Way of Business to provide income so I can support my family.

So it dawned on me. I shouldn’t be so concerned with simply having a large quantity of page views in a single day. What I NEED is a much smaller number of the RIGHT page views in a day, page views that will actually lead to clients working with me and me helping them and their business succeed better.

My thinking had changed.

It was: Quantity is all that matters.

It is now: Quality at the right quantity will lead to success.

What about you? Are you focused on numbers for numbers’ sake? Or are you focusing on the RIGHT numbers?

For free or for fee, that is the question.

September 6, 2011 in Fees, Getting Started, Motivation with 2 Comments

Should your first clients work with with you for free or for this?

If you would have asked me one month ago whether or not I should charge for my very first few clients I would have told you no, I shouldn’t.

First, who would want to pay for an “untried” catalyst agent? When you’re first starting out you HAVE to have your first client. And my thought pattern was the first client would be mentally unwilling to pay for the services I have to offer.

Second, even though I did not intend on charging a monetary fee, I was going to be paid in other ways. Mainly by 1) gaining experience and 2) requesting a testimonial. Both of these have value to me and will also be of value to future clients, even if not directly thought about.

Enter a discussion I had with Chris Sutton, a good friend of mine who also happens to run 212 kick (link below).

Chris and I were on Skype discussing what I’ve been doing at A Better Way of Business and he asked, “What are you charging your first clients?”

I paused for a second and told him, “I’m not. I’m working with the first few clients for free so I can get testimonials and experience.”

Chris followed up by saying, “It’s hard to get people to take you seriously if they don’t have skin in the game.”

It’s like a million-candle-power light went off in my head!

He’s right!

In general, people tend to not value highly things they have received for free. Since whatever it is didn’t cost them anything they have no reservations, no hesitation, no remorse in ignoring it or throwing it out whenever. Often, without even taking full advantage of the free item.

So in the case of A Better Way of Business, what’s a person’s incentive to actually LISTEN to advice I’ve given them for free? What is the motivation to value the time we have spent together?

The answer might be the incentive is to get his or her business up and running or their existing business running more efficiently and effectively.

Or it could also be that they have no incentive to listen to me because they haven’t invested anything more than an hour or two of time with me, so what does it matter if what I say is ignored?

After speaking with Chris I’m a firm believer of having a pricing structure in place BEFORE you start working with clients. You don’t have to try to make your first million on your first client, but you also shouldn’t give away everything you know for free. By charging SOMETHING you are working with clients who have “skin in the game” and are more likely to listen to what you have to say and then ACT on it (and we all know I’m ALL ABOUT ACTION).

And please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should start charging to respond to an email, phone call, or simple question someone asks you the next time you’re out. But I am saying you should plan to charge your clients when the two of you agree to work with each other.

~Ivan

212 kick – Chris Sutton

Be you!

September 1, 2011 in Getting Started, Motivation, Passion, Purpose with 0 Comments

As a business owner, how are you presenting yourself to the world?

Speaking in broad terms, I think how you present yourself falls into two broad categories. You can either try and present what the world is wanting from you at that particular moment in time or you can present who you actually are to the world.

I’ve heard educated individuals argue on both sides of this discussion.

I have heard it said that if you want to start a business then you should look at what the market needs most at this point in time and start THAT business. Whatever it is. Regardless of your internal wiring. You see a need. You fill a need. Period.

I have also heard it said:

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.” (Howard Thurman).

The way I interpret this, be you and present that to world, because what the world needs is the real you.

In this case you look inside at how you have been made by God and what you have that is unique to offer the world and you do that.

Guess which field of thought I lean toward…

I lean towards being yourself and giving to the world the real you. Only then will you be fully alive.

And I don’t just say this because I like the quote by Howard Thurman, which I really do. I say this from experience. I have gained several positions in the past by being what it was the company hiring was looking for. In other words, I disguised who I was in order to make myself appear what they wanted. And let’s just say NONE of those situations turned out positively.

There have also been instances in the past when I was looking for a job that I decided I would present the “real” me to company doing the hiring and if they did not like what they saw, then we’d both be better off without each other. Some of these instances I got the job. And those jobs went GREAT. Some of those interviews were VERY SHORT and we both departed a little frustrated, but I believe much better off.

Some of you might be thinking, “What is this guy like?” And I’ll tell you.

I’m intense. I’m confident. I’m excitable. I’m full of energy. I tend to see numbers and facts, and ignore emotions and feelings. I go out of my way to help those I care about. I have a hard time getting over past wrongs (but fortunately I’ve learned how). I love my God, my family, and my friends. I’m self motivated and I’m over achieving. I’ve been accused of being a perfectionist in the past, but now I’ve learned not to ruin good with perfect. I’m all this and so, so much more.

Once I learned that trying to be who others wanted me to be didn’t work I would frequently use this line in interviews, “I am who I am, and what you see is what you get.” I always thought I was smart for coming up with that. And then I was told “what you see is what you get” did not originate with me (big let down).

But it’s true. I do my best now to present to the world who I am.

And I hope you’ll do the same.

~Ivan