Business Owner Newsletter - 2011 Archive

You have probably heard it said many times that Sales is a numbers game.  That has certainly been our experience here at E-Myth Benchmark, but just what does that mean?  I mean seriously, in real numbers what does that mean?  If you were in front of 100 potential customers who were all within the demographic model of your most probable customer, and you offered them an opportunity to buy whatever it is you sell, how many would you expect to have immediate interest?

Actually, there is a fairly consistent answer, regardless of what you are selling.  It’s about three percent.  That number has come up several times in recent quantifications we have done both internally and with clients.  It is so fascinating (to those of us who are fascinated by human behavior and the sales process), that I recalled reading about it several months ago and went back to review it.  “It” is a book by Chet Holmes, entitled “The Ultimate Sales Machine” (Forward by the one and only Michael Gerber), which I highly recommend. 

Have you ever wondered what your business is worth?  I don’t mean what you would like to get for it; I mean the amount someone would actually pay you for it.  Do you know what conditions or attributes make your business more valuable?  How about those that make it less valuable?  As best-selling E-Myth series author Michael Gerber said, “The only sane reason to own a business is to sell it”.  It might be tomorrow or 20 years from now, but creating a highly valuable and saleable business is, after all, one of the principal goals of business ownership. Not only that, it’s an activity that begins the day you open for business and never stops!

According to a Chinese Proverb, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.  The second best is now.”  How often have you found yourself wishing you had started something much earlier than you did; that you had given yourself more time to do a better job or to get a better result?  “With an earlier start and more time”, you reflect with regret, “I would have had so many more options and wouldn’t be scrambling so much as my deadline approaches.”  And yet, this is not the first time you’ve found yourself in a last-minute rush to get something done…you’ve been here before.  Haven’t you?

So, wouldn’t this be a good time to ask, “When is the best time to establish year-end goals and begin to meet them?”  In the last quarter, or the first?  When there is only a month or two left, or eleven? 

We are born.  We die.  In between is Time.  And even though Time is what it is, we try to get our arms around it by measuring it…in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years.  But more importantly, we get to decide how to use it…every single one of us.  The Time that has gone by we will never see again (at least not in this lifetime).  We don’t know how much Time we have left.  We can no longer choose how to use the Time of yesterday…we already did that.  We don’t know if we’ll have a choice about the Time of tomorrow…hopefully each of us will.

The only Time we really know we have and can choose to use in a way that brings us joy and satisfaction is the Time happening NOW.  As a matter of fact, when you really think about it, the only Time that really matters is Real Time—the Time happening NOW.