A couple of weeks ago, I did something I’ve never done before. I went horseback riding through an obstacle course. It was a 3-mile course and 23 obstacles were set up.

My friends and I thought, “No problem. We’ll be able to breeze through this and maybe do it a second or third time.”

Three and-a-half hours later when we arrived back to our trailers, we were exhausted!!

Read more of the sordid tale below (hint – it involves PVC pipes and comfort zones), but first here’s a preview video 🙂

During the obstacle course, it was mentally exhausting to think about what we needed to do to get our horses to do what we wanted.

For me personally, the long PVC pipes were our downfall. And they were in about 8 of the obstacles. Anna Marie (my horse) decided that those PVC pipes were going to eat her alive, and she was going to get away from them as fast as she could.

Now, imagine this… I’m holding the PVC pipe in one hand, have the reins in the other, and I’m trying to get her to stop moving sideways at 100 miles per hour (okay, it probably wasn’t that fast, but it seemed like it!). I’m sure it was quite the sight!

Our other big challenge was just walking up to fences or barrels, for example, so that I could get something from the side of them.

I get back home and decide I’ll be prepared next time (if there is a next time!). I found a long PVC pipe I could use, and I had plenty of things I could step up to sideways. The weather straightened up enough this week that I could finally start practicing.

And do you know what that crazy horse did wrong?

Absolutely nothing!

She could have cared less about the PVC pipe. The video is me swinging it back and forth over her head 30 seconds after picking it up.

And we maneuvered me right up to anything I wanted her to.

I was telling my husband and he said, “Well, of course. She’s at home and comfortable here. Try taking that PVC pipe with you when you go riding again and see what happens.”

People are the same way. When we’re in our comfortable environments, we rock it! But when we get plopped down into a situation we’re not comfortable, we may fall apart. This is normal and not a problem if it happens occasionally. To be a successful entrepreneur, however, we need to learn to make peace with a certain level of ‘discomfort’ outside our comfort zone.

Moving outside our comfort zone in business isn’t easy. There is a reason it is called a comfort zone. It’s where things are familiar, you know what to expect, there aren’t many surprises and you are secure.

This isn’t a bad place to be, unless you stay there.

Entrepreneurs who never move outside their comfort zones become static, stop growing and eventually become irrelevant.

The only time we grow is when we challenge ourselves, become a little uncomfortable, learn new things and develop both personally and professionally.  Yes, it is hard and requires that you face some fears.  But the payoff is new skills, richer opportunities, more confidence and often a better bottom line!

Face Your Fear

Susan Jeffers wrote a book with a title that sums up the comfort zone fear factor.  The book is called, “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.” And this is one of the best ways to deal with the fear that comes when we move away from what is familiar:  acknowledge the fear and then move forward, knowing that it will get easier.

Equip Yourself

Moving into the unknown is easier when you are prepared. Regardless of what your new venture is, equip yourself with whatever knowledge and familiarity that you can beforehand. Granted, you can’t prepare for everything, but do the best you can with what you have. Just make sure you don’t get stuck in the planning and prep stage and never actually start!

Keep Going

Everything is hard before it is easy. What is uncomfortable today will eventually become part of your comfort zone, so you will need to step outside again.  This ensures you never become static and irrelevant, but you continue growing and developing, moving closer to your goals.

I was talking to a business owner who has built a very successful business completely by referral. One person has referred half a million dollars’ worth of business to her! But she recently had someone tell her that building a business by referral is dead – that she needed to be doing online marketing, social media, blogging, etc.

Clearly, my friend isn’t alone in her success: generating referrals is still a proven way to build a lucrative business.  Certainly there are other ways as well; online marketing is a powerful force (especially when combined with referrals).  And depending on the business model, one or the other may be more or less effective.

For example, my friend is interested in adding an evergreen/recurring income stream to her business, which will be fueled with online marketing. But rather than abandon the referrals, she will adjust her model to include both strategies.

My philosophy is, if it’s working, why not nurture that more? The key is to understand how to generate referrals in your business; there are some fundamental practices to have in place to tap into this profitable method of business building.

We’ve rounded up the best of the best tips for generating referrals. Read through the following list to identify where you can make changes in your business to make referral generation a strong income producer, along with (not in place of) online marketing.

1.  We’ll start with the obvious: Ask. In fact, Forbes insists that you should ask constantly.  It’s easy to forget to ask, and some business owners are shy, making it even more difficult.  But if you don’t ask, you miss out on a staggering number of potential customers.

When should you ask?  Kern Lewis, contributing Forbes writer, says you should ask, “In the midst of delivering excellent service, and regularly thereafter.”

Which leads us to the next tip…

2.  Give them a reason to refer you. “People won’t give you referrals unless you deserve them” (Ray Silverstein, Entrepreneur.com). If your products and services aren’t dazzling people, they will not be inclined to speak favorably about you to others.

However, if you are intentional about your relationship with your customers, being empathetic, efficient, and trustworthy, they will want to help you (by sending business your way).

Do a quick audit of your current customer relations process by asking yourself these questions: “What does my customer expect of me?  Am I delivering that?”  The idea is to determine what they consider excellence, and then give it to them.

3.  Make it easy for your clients to refer you. You can do this by providing a template they can use to pass along information about your business.

Hubspot offers a sample email template here, but you can easily write your own to send to your clients.  All it takes is a few sentences that your client can quickly personalize and email out to their friends and business partners.  The idea is to do the heavy lifting for them, making it more likely that they will actually carry through with the referral.

4.  Finally, offer an incentive. There’s no shame in offering something in return for profitable referrals. Some incentive ideas from Duct Tape Marketing include a discount, upgrade or something free. Test out different offerings on your current client base to determine which idea works the best.

Using referral generation to add additional income to your business doesn’t have to be a mystery; use these 4 tips to do it right.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my business coach and we got on the subject of horseback riding — when and how I got interested in it.

I’ve always loved horses, but did not get my first horse until 13 years ago, and that was Gypsy who is retired now, but I still have her.

Anyway, our conversation got me thinking about my experiences around horseback riding and I thought about my very first time on a trail ride and on a horse that wasn’t being led by someone else! It was late winter/early spring in Indiana, and I was a pre-teen (I think). The horses hadn’t been ridden all winter and were very fresh and excited to be out of the barn!

We were riding along nicely in an open field when the horse I was riding took off full speed ahead — running and heading towards the edge of the woods. He did not want to slow down, and I didn’t know enough to get him slowed down. All I could do was hang on and duck (to keep from getting knocked off by a low hanging branch)!

One of the adults riding caught up to us, grabbed my reigns and got us stopped. We then made the plan that I would stay behind everybody else to keep my horse from running away again!

As entrepreneurs, we often find ourselves running full speed ahead — hanging on and ducking — with no strategy in place.

Have you ever gotten what you thought was a brilliant idea for a new program offering? Of course you have! And then did you proceed full speed ahead creating the program? Maybe!

Sometimes you end up spending all that time, energy and money creating a program that your target market doesn’t want. You have zero sales. And now you have a program that nobody is interested in.

Is it that nobody is interested or was the messaging wrong? How do you know?

Before creating your next latest and greatest program, go talk to your list. Talk to your existing clients and get their feedback on the struggles they’re having and the solutions they’re looking for. What would appeal to them?

Continue talking to others who are not your clients, but who are your ideal clients.

Now that you have this information, create your outline for the new program. If it’s a program that you’ll drip content out or do weekly calls, don’t do the whole thing just yet. Get ahead a little and create the first lesson or two, and then sell it!

Don’t spend time creating the entire program until you absolutely know it will sell.

Another common way entrepreneurs run full speed ahead is by not having the right team in place.  One person cannot do it all for very long, no matter how motivated or equipped he or she is.

When solopreneurs have success and the company begins to grow, they can run full speed ahead and hang on for a short while, ducking here and there and enjoying the windfall.

But eventually, things will start to fall apart because there is not a support team in place to help hold the reigns and keep things balanced and stable.

However, if the right team is in place from the beginning, the success still comes (and it can come quickly), but the difference is you’ve got a group of skilled people holding things together, complimenting each other’s strengths, and ensuring that the business keeps up with and grows along with the market demand.

What are some ways that you may be running full speed ahead in your business? It may be time to slow down a bit to think about how you can regroup to ensure your business is not only profitable but also balanced and organized in the New Year.

The goal of your business is to make a profit, and pricing your product or service right is a key factor in whether you make money and enjoy time freedom or lose money in spite of working long hours.

Finding the ‘optimum price’ is a balancing act.  Ask your customers to pay too much and, well, they won’t!

But if you set your price too low, you’ll either be viewed as less valuable than your competitors or you’ll be overwhelmed with too much low-price work, or both!

Here are some tips to help you price your product or service right:

1. Research the market. Before you set your price, find out what the market can bear.  While it is important to factor in your costs, if the final price is more than your potential customers will reasonably pay, the price is too high and you’ll need to work on lowering your own production costs.

What are your competitors charging? Look closely at what others in your industry are charging for similar offerings and decide whether you want to match or beat their prices.

You’ll need to look at more than just price, however.  Consider what may be going on behind the scenes in their companies to make their prices possible. If they have proven systems and manpower in place to deliver quality work at a specific price point, be sure you can produce the same result with your current business structure.

2. Use Pricing Tiers. Setting up pricing tiers simply means that you charge different prices for variations in your products and services, and it is a powerful way to appeal to different segments of customers in your market. You’ve seen this in action yourself; think of the shipping options when you make an online purchase!

Another benefit of tiered pricing is that it can limit how intensely your potential customers compare you with your competition; they essentially compare you with you rather than you with someone else, because you are offering them a variety of purchasing options.

Add value as your tiers increase in price.  This value could be in terms of:

• Speed (consider our shipping example)
• Quantity (more of something – such as hours of work)
• Customization (giving them more options in what they receive from you)
• Duration (the product or service is available for a longer period of time)
• Access (the higher the tier, the more access they have to something – and perhaps that something is you!)

3. Find the right prospects. Finally, it doesn’t matter how perfectly you’ve priced your product, if the right people aren’t seeing it, you won’t sell it.

Be sure you know exactly who that ideal customer is – the one whose problems you have a solution for and who is willing to pay your prices — and make sure they are aware of your offerings.

And take advantage of networking and joint ventures.  Those competitors we’ve been talking about? They can become a great asset when you work together to share referrals and promote each other’s special offerings.

One last tip: be flexible.  Pricing products and services is not static; it will need to adjust with the changing market, so plan to periodically revisit your pricing structure and make changes as needed.

For a business to grow, it takes more than just being noticed; you need to stand out from your competition.  All businesses have competitors – those companies which are providing products similar to what you provide.  But what makes a prospect choose one company over another when there is little difference between each company’s offering?

That’s the question we set out to answer by checking in with some of the top thinkers in marketing, and we’re sharing our findings below (along with links for further study).  Keep reading for 3 ways to make your business stand out from the competition.

1) Be Authentic. No one denies that first impressions are important, but Seth Godin insists that every impression is important because you don’t know which of those impressions or points of contact between you and your prospect will be the one that sticks.

Every piece of your marketing needs to be authentic, full of integrity and grounded in your company values.  When you do this, you don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel to present a perfect persona:  you are simply authentic, and in our current atmosphere of marketing overload, authentic is refreshing and attractive.

Read more about Seth Godin’s take on marketing authenticity at Blinkist Magazine.

2) Forbes thinks offering a guarantee is a great way to make your business stand out. Seems risky at first glance – to offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee – but you really shouldn’t be selling something you don’t have enough confidence in to offer a strong guarantee!

At the end of the day, people don’t want to invest in something that they may later regret.  If they know they are protected by a guarantee, they are more likely to take the leap and do business with you.

3) You knew it was coming: if you want to be unique and stand out from the crowd of competitors, create an outstanding customer experience.

Let’s start with this quote from an article written by Vala Afshar at Huffington Post:

Customer experience is the last source of sustainable differentiation
and the new competitive battleground.

— Tiffani Bova, Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst

That’s powerful. And it means that each of your customers needs to be treated like VIPs. A good rule of thumb is to make them feel as if they are your only customer. Not only is this necessary to make your business stand out, but customers are now expecting and demanding excellence in their experience.

And what’s in it for you?  Likely increased revenue, as the article goes on to site this statistic:

Research shows that 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for a guaranteed good experience. Kolsky points out the word ‘guaranteed’, noting customers are no longer satisfied with just being promised a good experience.

It may cost you to provide exceptional customer service, but in the long run, it’s worth it.

Your homework:  think of at least one way you can improve your company’s performance in each of these areas.  How can you be more authentic, how can you let your customers know you guarantee your products and how can you delight your customers with a legendary experience?

Will you share below in the comment section?