In short
Podcast Summary: The $100 MBA Show - Episode MBA2283
Overview In this episode titled "Why You Are Not Getting Any Traction + Free Ride Friday," host Omar Zenhom discusses the common issue many entrepreneurs face when starting their businesses: the struggle to gain traction. The episode emphasizes the importance of focus and strategic energy application to overcome initial challenges and achieve growth.
Key Concepts
- Traction: The crucial factor that determines whether a business will succeed or flounder during its early stages.
- Escape Velocity: A term borrowed from space travel, referring to the point at which a business escapes the "gravitational pull" of stagnation and begins to grow sustainably.
- Focus and Concentration: Essential strategies for new entrepreneurs to efficiently channel their energy and resources into singular, impactful efforts rather than spreading themselves too thin.
Main Arguments
- The Struggle for Traction: Many new entrepreneurs feel frustrated when their efforts don't lead to measurable success. Common questions arise about whether their idea or product is flawed.
- Energy Distribution: Entrepreneurs often spread their efforts across multiple platforms and strategies without seeing significant results. This diluted focus hinders the ability to gain traction.
- Importance of Focus: The key to overcoming initial hurdles lies in concentrating efforts on one area or platform at a time, which can lead to greater visibility and eventual success.
Actionable Strategies
- Identify a Single Objective: Choose one platform or marketing strategy to focus on initially, allowing for a more concentrated effort.
- Build Credibility and Momentum: Establish a solid foundation through focused efforts (e.g., creating a successful blog) before branching out to other methods or channels.
- Prioritize Customer Acquisition: In the beginning stages, the main goal should be securing the first few customers to validate the product and generate some revenue.
- Learn and Iterate: Use successes and failures from the focused efforts to improve and adapt strategies as the business evolves.
Examples and Anecdotes
- Omar shares his own experience with Webinar Ninja, explaining how he dedicated the first two and a half years solely to building a strong blog, which later became a significant source of revenue.
- He illustrates how successful entrepreneurs often appear to have things figured out, but they have typically gone through a process of focused effort and learning over time.
Conclusion
- The episode reinforces that entrepreneurship is a journey that demands discipline and focus. Gaining traction takes time and perseverance, and it is essential to compare oneself to peers at similar stages rather than established businesses.
- The importance of consistent effort, even when results are not immediately visible, is highlighted as a critical trait for successful entrepreneurs.
Free Ride Friday
- The episode concludes with the announcement of a winner for the Free Ride Friday contest, encouraging listeners to leave reviews for a chance to win access to the $100 MBA live program.
Final Thoughts Omar emphasizes that focus is not only vital for overcoming initial barriers but also sets the foundation for future growth and success. He encourages listeners to remain disciplined and continuously strive for improvement in their entrepreneurial journey.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. Power to the people. Business people that is every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons lessons for the real world.
0:30Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away access to our$100 MBA live two-day event. It's two days of training that is guaranteed to make you a better entrepreneur. I share with you the small little changes that I've made in my business and my career as an entrepreneur that has helped me make major strides in my business and in my life. From sales to marketing to mindset, we cover it all. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday like today. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode.
1:05In today's episode, you will learn why you're not getting any traction. So many of the people that I speak to in business that are starting their business, starting their product, their project, ask me this question. I'm trying so many things and yet it's not really moving the needle. I'm not making enough to really have a sustainable business and live the lifestyle I want. Is it the idea? Is it my product? Is it me? Well, in today's episode, we dive in. In most cases, I found it's actually one thing that contributes to this lack of traction, to this lack of growth and getting your business off the ground and making sure it's profitable enough to sustain your lifestyle.
1:45We're going to talk about in today's episode and how to avoid it so that your business does what it's supposed to do. grow. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. It can be incredibly frustrating when you're starting a business and you're working on it and you're spinning your wheels. You're trying every single thing. You're on every single social platform. You're posting daily. You're online 15 hours a day and it feels like you're going nowhere. I've been there and it's incredibly frustrating. And I actually have spent a lot of time trying to understand why this happens because it's so common with a lot of entrepreneurs starting out a new project, a new business, a new product, whatever it might be.
2:22It's so hard to get to what's called escape velocity. This comes from, you know, space exploration or space travel. It's the minimum speed needed for free non-propelled travel. Basically, you're escaping the gravitational influence of the earth. Once you reach escape velocity, it's so easy to travel because you're not being held back by gravity. And the same goes with any business or project. In the beginning, gravity is pulling you down. It's hard and it's not easy to see your business grow. But the interesting thing about escape velocity is that it's actually not a long length of space, meaning it's only 11.2 kilometers.
3:01The interesting thing is when a rocket goes into space and it's in that gravitational pull, it's actually not that much of a distance to get out into space, but they have to really use a lot of focused energy so they can get to a speed which is 11.2 kilometers per second and get out of that gravitational pull. Now why am I talking about this? Well it's the same for business. In the beginning you really need focused energy so you can have what's called escape velocity and get out of that gravitational pull and most of us when we start something we're not focused. We're trying to do everything at the same time.
3:37We're trying to be on Twitter and Facebook and start a YouTube channel and a podcast and be on TikTok and have a thriving blog. We're trying to do it all. And the problem is that we're spreading our energy way too thin and you're not going to get any velocity because what happens here is like, think of your energy and your content and your message as credits or units. And if you're spreading your credits across 10, 15 different platforms on those platforms, you're not really being seen versus imagine you focused on one thing, one place, one objective at a time, using all your credits at one place, you're going to be seen.
4:19You're going to have traction. A lot of us, we don't understand the stages of business. Meaning when we start out, we can't be the same as people that have been in business for 10 years. I'll give you an example. I've been running my company, Webinar Ninja, for eight years plus now. We have a thriving blog. We have this podcast, right? That helps us promote our brand. We have a YouTube channel, right? We have a thriving private community called Ninja Town. We have customer service specialists that you can talk to and get one-on-one help. We have a marketing team. We're advertising on paid ads.
4:53We're on social media, right? But we didn't start this way. Okay. This is where we are now. We focused on one thing at a time in the beginning. So at the start with Webinar Ninja, we just focused on the blog. We were like, we got to have a great blog. And that's all we did. We focused on great content, on mastering, understanding what the audience wants to hear and learn and providing that in our blog. And this is why over 40 % of our sales comes from SEO because we really focused on that in the beginning, built our blog. And we're talking about two and a half years of just making an amazing blog.
5:29Once we have established some credibility and we have escaped velocity when it comes to blogging and it's getting us results and we're getting traction or moving forward and we're getting results and we're working and getting better and better and better and really perfecting that area, then we move on. And then we're like, okay, let's keep this going. Let's see what we've learned from the blogging experiment for the last two and a half years. Can we turn that into a YouTube channel? Can we use those skills? Can we find great talent to take over that project? But what most people do is that they're trying to be everywhere.
6:01This does not work. Okay. So especially when you're starting out and you don't have any customers yet, your priority number one is to get customers. Now, a lot of us were really like, okay, I'm going to get customers by being on every social platform or being an influencer or building my personal brand. This is not horrible ideas. I'm not poo-pooing this idea, but this is something that happens in stages. In the beginning, your job is to get your first customer, then your second customer, your third customer, and your fourth customer. You need to prove your product is actually something people want.
6:35You need to exchange value, meaning you got to give your product in exchange for money, right? So get on some phone calls, find out how to make a sale, right? Make a sale, close some sales, talk to some people. So once you've been able to secure a few sales and you've proven that your product is worth its money, right? And people actually want what you have. Now you have some traction. Now you can use some of those success stories, some of those testimonials in your social media. And even in that stage, you need to really focus on where you're going to go and how you're going to add value to that platform.
7:10Where's your audience? Are they mostly on LinkedIn? Do they frequent Twitter? Maybe it's Facebook. Choose and go 100%. This allows you to really provide great content for that platform. So for example, if you are all in on Instagram, then maybe reels and videos and short form content is something that you can really perfect. This is what the platform is built for. By focusing on that, your content will reach and resonate with people in a stronger way versus you saying, I'm going to create one piece of content and try to, you know, slice it up and repurpose it across every single platform. That doesn't really work because not every platform is made for that content.
7:49So what you want to do here is understand that the way you get traction is to focus on each step, each stage of your business, whether it's gaining your first customers, taking that velocity, taking that momentum and using it in your content, whether it's your content marketing strategy saying, hey, I'm going to focus on creating a great blog or YouTube channel at the start and getting some success. The problem here is that a lot of people, they spread their self-sustent and they never have any success in any particular platform. So get some wins, score some goals, have a way to say, hey, okay, this is actually going somewhere.
8:27It's actually helping my business. I'm seeing this convert to leads and traffic, and I can start to tweak and improve it. And the thing that we don't talk about is in that process of reaching success on a particular platform, on a particular project, we learn a lot of hard lessons. We learn a lot of things that work, that don't work. We improve as a content creator, we improve as a provider of great information, and then we can take those successes and those learnings and those wins and translate them into another platform as we move on. But this doesn't really work if you're trying to juggle a million things at one time.
9:03So again, if you want to reach that escape velocity, get traction in your business in whatever you do, you need to focus just like a rock ship has to use focus energy to get out of the gravitational pull and then it becomes effortless because they don't have that gravity pulling it down right now i'm not saying that there's no hard work once you get some traction but it's a whole lot easier the boulder is rolling down the hill rather than up the hill and a lot of people underestimate success once you have success in a particular area in your business and you're able to monetize that and be able to see the rewards of that there's a lot of things you can do with that whether it's uh your audience has grown so now that audience can then you know, starts seeing you other places.
9:45So for example, if you grow a podcast and your listeners are a thriving audience, and then you start going, you know, 100 % in on YouTube after you get some traction with your podcast, then you can, you know, tell them, hey, we have a new YouTube channel. If you want to see me on video, go ahead and subscribe to that. So you can translate a lot of those successes once you have success. But if you're trying to do this all at the same time, And, you know, there's no success to move over to one place to another. So what we want to do here is when you're starting out, priority number one, of course, is make a sale.
10:18Make sure that you have customers that are exchanging money for goods, right? That you're actually, and that might mean making phone calls. That might mean meeting people in person. That might mean just getting one customer at a time. But you're going to learn a ton in the process. to wrap up today's episode it's tempting to try to be everywhere at all times but the thing that we have to remember is we have to compare ourselves to other people that are at the similar stage in our business you know if you're just starting out or you're in your first few months those are the people that you want to look at that are having success in the last few months right or in that stage not the people that have been around for 10 years they had that time where they had to work on focusing on what they do.
11:01They have customers, they have an audience now. You just can't leapfrog, right? You can't go from being a college student to a neurosurgeon overnight, right? Like in any profession, there is a learning curve. You have to train, you have to have a chance to understand what it takes to be successful and see what works for you. that wraps up today's episode but today's episode's over because we have free ride friday of course it's friday let's see who won this week's free ride and the winner is 1127 hank that's the handle on apple podcast hank says actionable and educational info and easily digestible five stars entrepreneur or not we are all busy and always looking for the best and easiest way to achieve something.
11:48Omar showcases some of the brightest minds in entrepreneurship who genuinely sound like they live for offering golden nuggets. Think of it as your continued education and not just entrepreneurship. Learning about people and the simple fact that we all want to belong and find a common ground. Thanks, Hank, for the amazing review. Your mission is to email me over at omar at 100mba.net so we can hook you up with a free ride to the$100 MBA live program. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast.
12:20If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app. That way you get access to over 2200 lessons in our archives over in our back catalog. And of course, if you loved today's episode, if you love the podcast and want to show some extra love, go ahead and share it on social. Let people know to go to 100mba.net so they can listen to the podcast as well. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I always say that entrepreneurship is one of the best personal development programs you can take part in because it forces you to become better. And one of the things that you have to get better at is discipline, to discipline yourself, to stay focused, to continue to do things even when you're not seeing results at first, just so that you can be consistent, you can grow and you can get better.
13:00Every successful entrepreneur that I know personally has this trait. So stay focused and stay hungry. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 LNBA show. I'll check you in Monday's episode. Until then, take care.
13:14Thank you.
From the publisher
You’ve launched — but your business just can’t seem to get anywhere. Why? What makes some businesses grow steadily (or suddenly), while others just get stuck on the ol’ hamster wheel?
Today, we diagnose the problem.
In this episode, we’ll explore what exactly creates that all-important traction, and allows new companies to reach “escape velocity,” a.k.a. the point at which you break through the invisible barrier, and your expenditure of energy isn’t the only thing moving you forward.
Y’know…like a rocketship.
It’s the difference between pushing the boulder uphill, and simply guiding it while it rolls downhill. Need another analogy? No, you don’t! What you need are actionable strategies to get your new business its first few wins, so success becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
Long story short, it comes down to concentration and focus. Applied strategically and consistently for a certain amount of time, your business will develop some momentum. Then, the fun begins. Click Play!
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