Mindset Series: The Best Way to Make Sure Your Home Business Makes Enough Money to Survive (and Keep You From Going Back to Work for Someone Else)

This post is the first in an ongoing series about how successful home office types can free themselves from their businesses one step at a time by adopting the proper success mindset. Topics I’ll discuss in the series include:

  • How to market your expertise to generate new profit centers in your business
  • How to recession-proof your business by developing a loyal following of raving fans who buy from you again and again
  • How to migrate your business to a new model using the Internet as distribution channel

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/o2ma/

Fear is the Mind Killer

The home business owner’s biggest fear is not having enough money to keep the business going. You ask yourself, “What if the business fails? What if it all falls down and I’m left with nothing?”

This fear is what drives you, motivates you to continue plugging along. While anyone who works for himself does so for his own reasons and motivations, the common thread among the self-employed is an overarching desire to control your own time, tasks, and income. The threat of losing it all and going back to work for someone else should scare the living daylights out of you!

Consider, then, what most threatens your autonomy. How have you structured your business?

  • Is your cash flow dependent upon one or two key clients, without whom you’d find yourself homeless?
  • Do you have enough time to add more clients and more work to make more money?
  • Are you busying yourself in the day-to-day activities of your business, or are you planning and executing strategies that guarantee inevitable success and eventual liberation from your business?

If any of these circumstances reflects how you see your life and your business, please read on.

What I am about to reveal took me a surprisingly long time to figure out. I wish I could say that I came to it by myself, but one of my mentors actually clued me in to this fact:

I was leaving money on the table if I omitted the following strategy from my arsenal.

Your Business is Your Expertise

Ponder the following questions:

  1. How long did it take for you to get really good at what you do? What big mistakes did you make along the way?
  2. Of all the abilities you’ve learned and talents you’ve developed to do your business, which are the most valuable?
  3. Can you imagine for a moment that there are other people somewhere in the world who would like to know what you know without all the trial and error it took to acquire them?

In the “doing of” your business, you’ve learned the ropes, made mistakes, made more mistakes, and got past them to enjoy success.

Think about this for a moment.

Wouldn’t you pay a boatload to bypass all the years at Hard Knocks University and know all the juicy, insider tricks you now know? These are the tasks and techniques that you now do by instinct and second nature —skills that are useful and transferable to any type of business.

If you will observe and catalog these so-called “transferable skills,” you’ll begin to see that you really are an expert in many different areas, not just in your chosen profession. You must embrace the idea that there is profit in your accumulated expertise!

The Missing Piece

Here, then, is the much-ballyhooed strategy:

Find those people who desperately want to learn what you know how to do, then sell them information products that show them how to do it.

Yes, you can make money doing whatever it is that you do for other people. But there is a world of personal satisfaction and abundant profit margins in showing people how to help themselves succeed.

Certainly you’ve heard the old, misguided axiom: “Those who can’t—teach!” The new idea you need to embrace is:

Those who can teach will profit in the information age.

Your business will shift gears when you add valuable training products that teach people new skills or strategies. Selling info products online will open up a whole new set of markets and give you more opportunities to serve those markets.

We know that creating a diverse stock portfolio is the safest way to protect your investments. I say that selling a diverse mix of products is the surest way to ensure that your home business makes enough to survive and keep you self-employed.

Thanks for reading! In the coming installments of the Mindset Series, we’ll discuss some different types of information products you might consider adding to your mix, and how you can use the Internet to sell and distribute your original content.

Give Me Some Input

I’m especially interested in hearing from small business owners who have added info products to their businesses. How much work did it take? How has your life and your business changed as a result? Please let me know what you think in the comments below.


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Tags: liberate, inevitable success, home business owners, profit centers

May 24, 2008 · Filed Under Income Streams, Mindset

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