Understanding The Two Different Business Cycles

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Understanding The Two Different Business Cycles

I’m Jeffrey St Laurent with SellingCoaching.com and today I’m going to teach you the two different types of business cycles we can have as an entrepreneur. One we want to have and one we want to try and avoid.

Our success as an entrepreneur relies on us understanding how we get paid. And also understanding the cycle of business in entrepreneurship.

Being an entrepreneur is a completely different animal than having a 9-to-5 job. And it’s important we understand that in order to be successful not just now, but long-term.

When it comes to business cycles, here’s the typical business cycle. And this is not only just in this industry, it’s in a lot of industries, is I have my marketing activities. Marketing activities – these are the things I talk about in order to get leads.

It’s getting out, and it’s doing a seminar, it’s doing a telephone class, it’s speaking at workshops, it’s getting ourselves in front of people, and even when we get out there at networking meetings, networking with people, online and in person. It’s calling people up, it’s getting ourselves and our name and our brand and our image out there, and our message. And then what happens is we start getting leads.

The more we do that, the more leads we end up getting. Well now, suddenly we’ve got all these leads coming in and now we’re sorting through those leads and that’s the part I talk about where we get clients. We sort through the leads and we find the serious from the curious. And from there we get clients and then we get paid. So what happens is as we start off and you can look at this this slope going up, this is our marketing activities.

But what happens is, now we’re at the top of the slope where we get paid… typically what happens is now we have let’s say a lot of coaching clients, and we’re on the phone, and we’re on the phone 2, 3, 4, 5 hours a day and the majority of our work now is actually taking coaching calls and doing coaching clients.

This is good because we’re doing what you love, however, the problem with this is, is that most of our time now is spent actually taking the coaching calls, or actually doing the seminars. And as I say in one of my other videos, that’s not a revenue producing activity. Because what happens as we start doing this, and this is where the majority of our time is spent, well now we’re not doing those marketing activities to get leads as much, if at all anymore.

And what I found myself doing and a lot of people I’ve worked with and just entrepreneurs in general… is when we’re doing the activities that we’ve gotten paid for, taking the clients, doing the calls those types of things, we’re not doing the marketing activities anymore, especially if we’re still a solopreneur, meaning we’re the only employee, we’re the only one doing it. And typically most of us, that’s what we’re doing.

We’re doing the marketing, we’re doing all the leads, and we’re taking all the calls. And so we’re doing all these calls and it’s great, and it’s fun, but we’re not doing the marketing activities to keep getting those leads. So now what happens is, some clients end, they stop working with us etc. And now we go up here and then now, all of a sudden, we’re down here again. And we’ve got one or two clients left, or it’s like oh my God, I don’t have any clients, or I don’t have any leads right now, and we kind of freak out a little bit and then we got to start that cycle all over again.

Now I’ve got to get out there and I’ve got to start marketing again, and I’ve got to start doing all the stuff, and this is that up-and-down cycle, it’s an up-and-down cycle, so on the up phase where marketing or generating leads, at the top it’s where we’ve gotten paid… we’re feeling good, we’re feeling confident, and we’re taking all those calls and then all of a sudden, next thing you know, boom! We’re at the bottom of that cycle, and we’re freaking and then we’re going to start that cycle over again.

The message here is that we don’t want this type of a business. That’s typically what people end up doing is going, up and down, up and down and that’s horrible because it’s anxiety producing. It’s anxiety producing because now all of a sudden you’re feeling great about yourself ‘cause you’ve got all these leads and you’ve got new payments coming in, new clients coming in, and then at the bottom it’s scary again because you don’t know where your next Paycheck’s coming from. So what happens now is you got to start the process over.

What we’re looking to create is what I call the flat line effect. The flat line effect your lows are high and your highs are low. Meaning, there’s no big up-and-down swing and that’s a really good thing. It means that we have our time for marketing, and no matter how many clients we have, we still have that time for marketing.

Because we still have the time for marketing, we have a consistent flow of leads, and it’s always good to have more leads than time, that’s why you never caught up on one or two leads that are just kind of lingering out there, if someone is not interested just say no, switch on to the next, and I’m on to the next one. And when you have more leads coming in in time that’s great, because you keep up with them and you keep moving forward.

But when you keep up with those marketing activities, you’ve always got this kind of steady state, that flat line effect. So business is always good, and then when someone stops coaching with you or, there is a slight dip, all of a sudden there’s another lead that comes in and brings it right back.

It’s so vitally important that we understand as an entrepreneur that the activities that we do to market those are activities we need to do on a regular basis, on a daily basis. I can’t express that enough.

I talk a lot about this in one of my videos called: The Top 4 Revenue Producing Activities. That’s in the Get Leads section, and that’s all the things you do to get those leads. It’s so important that we understand that we keep those actions there on a regular basis, on a daily basis. And that keeps that engine going that keeps the leads coming in so we never have that dip.

That dip is something that we want to avoid. That dip is somewhat of a feeling if you’ve ever been in a job and they’re laying off people and you think you might be one of those people getting laid off, and you start freaking out because you’re like, what if I get laid off? What am I going to do? How am I going to earn income?

That can happen a lot as an entrepreneur. You don’t want that to happen a lot as an entrepreneur, that’s not a good thing to happen. That’s why it’s so important I talk about this, creating this flat line effect by keeping those marketing activities going.

There’s a law of getting paid in entrepreneurship that says: we get paid today, for the work that we did yesterday. So if you’re not getting paid today, that means yesterday you didn’t do the work that was required in order for you to get paid.

So let’s look at this cycle that we want to avoid, that high and then that low. When we’re on that low, that’s a place where we were anxious and we’re not getting paid. It’s like we don’t have much business. We don’t know where our next paycheck’s coming from.

Let’s back the time cycle up. So this is today we’re low, we backup to let’s say, yesterday what were we doing? As I said earlier, on the top of that what are we doing? We’re taking those coaching calls, we’re doing those events and those aren’t revenue producing activities because they don’t generate leads. We’re on the phone all day with current clients. Yeah, if we’re asking for referrals that’s different. But the point is we’re taking calls all day and then what happens is boom! Today comes and we’re not getting paid. It’s because yesterday we weren’t doing the marketing activities.

Just another reason why it’s so so important that on a daily basis, we include a revenue producing activities that get us those leads so we continue on that cycle and not have that bottom effect, that high and those lows, we want to create that flat line effect.

So if you’re ready to take that leap, always remember Selling Coaching is the absolute best way to fast-track your business from a part-time hobby to a full-time career. Now get out there, GET LEADS, GET CLIENTS and GET PAID.