Posts

MDH 80 | Business Growth Models

MDH 80 | Business Growth Models

 

Most people dreamt of turning your passion into a very profitable business. After all, what is better than having fun while making money? In this episode, Victoria Wieck teases out a chapter from her upcoming book, Million Dollar Passion, called Optimize to Maximize. One way to make a profitable business is by learning how to maximize your business idea, using your time efficiently, so you’re working the least number of hours and, at the same time, making the most amount of profits. Victoria spills the four business models you can employ to achieve explosive, sustainable growth! You don’t want to miss out on this conversation!

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here


 

Optimize To Maximize: The Four Business Models For Explosive And Sustainable Growth

We’re in the middle of a series. If you’ve been tuning into the last few episodes, we were talking about how you turn your passion and purpose into a profitable business and build yourself a nice little empire that you can sustain. In this episode, we’re going to talk about optimizing your business idea. In my book called Million Dollar Passion that’s coming up, there’s a chapter called Optimize to Maximize. It is about maximizing your business idea in terms of how you use your time efficiently so that you’re working the least number of hours and making the most amount of profits.

Four Business Models For Explosive, Sustainable Growth

Let’s get right down to the various ways you can achieve your desired profits and experience explosive growth that’s sustainable. I love the word sustainable in this phrase because it’s important that you achieve fast and explosive but controllable growth. It’s the growth that you can control. If you’re growing out of control, there is a phenomenon called The Growing Broke as opposed to going broke.

When I was at HSN, I saw many entrepreneurs, and I’m talking probably a couple of hundred people, that achieved beyond their dreams. They were doing somewhere between $2 million to $10 million a year and they grew broke. I’ll do an episode on how people grow broke, but right now, let’s focus on growing controlled growth.

These are just the basics. A lot of you may have some portions of this already in your business or some idea of how you achieve the various different business models. I’m going to get right down to business here. There are four major business models. People use different terminologies for this, but there are four different ways you can achieve explosive but sustainable growth.

Number one is business-to-consumer. You are selling mostly to individual consumers. If you’re a hairdresser and you’re cutting hair and your clients are mostly women in your neighborhood coming to get their haircut, that would be considered business-to-consumer. A restaurant, for example, would be a business-to-consumer.

Business-to-business, if you’re a manufacturer and you’re selling to retailers, that would be considered business-to-business. You’re a manufacturer only to wholesalers or somebody who goes to one business. Maybe you don’t even manufacture the stuff yourself, but you have expertise in exporting and you understand the laws of different countries, freight rates, custom duties, and all that stuff.

You are helping a bunch of business people pick their products overseas. It could be to Europe, Asia, South America or wherever. That would be considered business-to-business. If you’re a hairdresser and want to create your own shampoo line and you want to sell it to a department store, that would be considered business-to-business.

There’s a combination business where you can sell business-to-consumer or a portion of it. The hairdresser was an example. She’s selling her haircutting services to consumers, but also selling her shampoo products to other hairdressers, a department store, on TV or whatever. That could be business-to-business.

The fourth model is becoming an affiliate for someone or having affiliates under your umbrella. That is a new phenomenon that happened. It has always been around, but it exploded in the 1990s with the dot-com bubble. That’s one of the things that came out of that and stayed with us, and it’s benefiting a lot of businesses.

Business-to-business is tougher in the beginning, but you can grow faster.

Understand Who Your Ideal Target Market Is

Let’s talk about the pros and cons of doing business with each business model. Before I even get there, I want to explain to you the most important thing before you even talk about any business model you have. It is to understand who your ideal target market is. Who’s going to use your products? What does that person want? How do they shop? What do they shop for? What time of the year do they shop? What time of the day do they shop? Where do they congregate in very large numbers?

For example, you are selling fitness classes. You’re running a business as a yoga studio and you find out that they want a Zen-type of environment. They also want somebody who’s on time. They don’t want to pay more than $15 per class. They don’t want to have any more than twenty people per class. There are all these requirements people want to have ideally.

You understand that and then you want to come up with yoga clothing, for example. You understand who they are, what they want to pay for, and how often they use yoga products. Let’s say you find that in your neighborhood, a lot of them live in a certain area of town. That gives you a lot of information to work with. Understand who your target market is.

Business-To-Consumer

For my jewelry business, I have combinations of several of these businesses. Number one, I do business-to-consumer. In my one-of-a-kind business, we do concierge service for somebody who wants above and beyond. She wants something very unique for herself and she’s willing to pay a lot of money for this. It’s something highly unusual.

I have that business on the RachelAndVictoria.com site. If you go there, you’ll see what we’re talking about there. Our average price point there is about $10,000. We don’t do volumes of them, but we do enough business where that’s very profitable. The average price of $10,000 means some things are $5,000 and some things are $50,000.

Business-to-consumer is the easiest because you just have to convince a few people. If you’re a hairdresser, you got to convince ten people and do ten people’s hair. They then talk to ten other people or they go to the golf club or a restaurant and they say, “You got such a cute hairdo. Where did you get that haircut?” It’s very easy. That’s how most people start their businesses.

In business-to-consumer, you know a few people who need your services or you think you can sell enough to sustain yourself with a few people without having to go through a lot of expense. The drawback is you grow very slowly because you run out of people. The example that I gave of the first ten people who then tell ten more people, and then they all tell ten more people, even if you do all that, it’s slow growth. You’re not growing at 20%, 30% or 40% per month. You might grow a little bit, but you’re not going to build an empire in that model.

Having said that, I know people who have built their empires this way. That’s a different type of business. They’re very internet savvy. Maybe you came up with a tote bag for photographers and found a bunch of photographers that needed a tote bag that organizes. It’s lightweight and keeps their professional camera equipment very safe so they can check it into the airline, that kind of stuff. You can easily find photographers at conferences, associations, where they congregate or even on the internet. You can go and market to them. I know people who have done that as well.

For most people, the growth is very slow. Even in that example of a photographer, you have to learn how to do the internet. You got to come up with great sales funnels. You have to understand how many times you can touch them. There’s a whole other art to talking to consumers because when you’re doing business-to-consumer, more than the need, you’re talking about emotional connection. You need to connect with each person emotionally because they need to fall in love with you, trust you, and understand that they’re getting something special. That’s tough.

MDH 80 | Business Growth Models

Business Growth Models: When you’re doing business-to-consumer, you need to connect with each person emotionally because they need to fall in love with you, trust you, and understand that they’re getting something special.

 

Business-To-Business

Business-to-business is tougher in the beginning, but you can grow faster. In the example of the shampoo and a hairdresser cutting hair, I don’t know what haircuts cost in your area, but where I live in California, they go anywhere from $80 to $300 to $400 a haircut. In the best-case scenario, let’s say you’re charging $200 a haircut. Since you’re cutting your hair yourself, you might be able to do 8 to 10 people a day. It still limits you to how much money you can make. You got to pay rent, the shampoo person, and all that stuff.

Most people don’t do ten customers a day, seven days a week. Let’s say you’re averaging 5 or 6 a day and you’re charging $100, and you’re working 5 to 6 days a week, Tuesday through Sunday or Monday through Saturday. You’re paying rent and doing all that stuff. You can make a profit, but you can’t grow that fast. If you are coming up with your own unique shampoo product and it sells well, and you are selling to beauty salons, you might sell 1,000 or 10,000 bottles at a time. If you’re on TV, you might sell 30,000 bottles at a time.

When you do that, you can grow very fast, even if you’re making a lot less money. Let’s say you’re making $4 a bottle of shampoo and you’re selling 10,000 of them. That’s $40,000. That’s a lot of money. You can grow very fast by attracting businesses so that they can make money. Businesses don’t care what you sell. If you give them a plan where they can make more money with your products and other people that they’re carrying, they’ll try you out.

That’s tougher to attract in the beginning, but you can get economies of scale, meaning you can also buy your ingredients. If you want to buy a single shampoo bottle, you can go to Ulta or a bottle supplier. They’ll sell you a plastic bottle for $2, $3 or $4 a bottle. If you’re doing 30,000 bottles at a time, you get them for $0.25 a bottle. That’s how economies of scale work. If you can buy things at a cheaper price, you can grow up faster.

A Manufacturer To Wholesalers

You can do a combination of both. I gave you the example of the hairdresser. I do jewelry, so I do one of a kind. Sometimes I’ll make it easier to manufacture by the thousands of them. When I sell to TV stations, our runs are usually somewhere between $1,000 to 10,000 pieces. I’ve occasionally had pieces that were sold over a million pieces of that same item. In my one-of-a-kind business, because I’m looking for a truly one-of-a-kind unique stone, I don’t get to buy them in large quantities because of the nature of that business. We can charge the most amount of money for that one item that nobody can have except you.

If you do the business model where blue Topaz-Amethyst is very plentiful, I can get 5,000 to 10,000 pieces at a time. Even if you only make $10 a piece, that’s a lot of money to make. You can do a combination of both, but not with the exact same product. That’s important because, let’s say, you sell to somebody for $10 a bottle, so they sell it for $25 a bottle, but then you sell it to your consumer at $18 a bottle. You’re undercutting yourself. Most of your customers aren’t going to like it.

If they know that you’re going directly to the consumers for anything less than what they’re selling it for at any time, they won’t carry you. They want to see that they were selling it lower than what you were selling to your consumer. When you are selling on your website for $25, make sure that the business people that you’re selling to can meet their margins.

Let’s say they want to double the money, in most cases, they want to make more than double the money. They want to get a 70% margin. For $18, you would have to give it to them for $6.50 or $7 max. You can see how the margins are a lot smaller, but if your actual cost is $5, it’s still making sense to do at least both or do the business-to-business model.

Let’s back up a little bit. If you’re going to do business-to-business, it’s tough. A lot of times you’re going to end up with sales reps that specialize in that part of the business because you’re running your business. You’re manufacturing and doing all this stuff. You’re making sure that people show up to work and things are shipped out on time.

The affiliate model is so easy to do that it would be a shame if you don’t incorporate some portion of that in your business.

You can’t be traveling all the time looking for businesses. Typically speaking, you hire somebody who has expertise. A lot of times, these are executives that used to work at Nordstrom or VP of some division at a huge major store that’s networking with other department stores that they’re now consulting. You can hire them for a percentage of the cut.

Business-to-business is tougher because of the added layer of personnel and the type of personnel that you have to attract to get that business. With the combination of the two, the challenge is that most of your business partners or business customers like Nordstrom’s or a TV station want to see if you carry it elsewhere. They want to be the cheapest because right now, consumers can Google all day long.

In jewelry, it’s very easy to do because even though it’s the same brand name, styles can be very different. I can design a completely separate collection of jewelry for Saks that I don’t do for Neiman’s. Many of you don’t have that option. If you have shampoo, you can’t say, “I’m selling my shampoo with a purple bottle here and a yellow bottle somewhere else.” That becomes a little challenging. In some cases, depending on how big that retail customer is, they may limit who else you sell to. It becomes a little tougher game. I’ll get into that a little bit more when we talk about scaling our businesses.

Becoming An Affiliate

With affiliates, I would say you could do a combination of all three. You could get an affiliate or a bunch of affiliates to you. An example I’m going to give you is if you’re selling some weight loss program, cryotherapy, or you have your own way of losing weight. You’re also recommending that they do some exercise but you’re not a fitness instructor and you don’t want to open a fitness store. You don’t want to be responsible for that because there’s a whole liability that comes with that.

Let’s say you own a cryotherapy/weight-loss center and you see four blocks down the street, there is a bunch of yoga or Pilates places, or there could be cardio or a gym. You could easily recommend them and you could even sell them as a package and get a cut from that studio. The studio also might do it the other way around where they can sell a package and give you a cut.

If you are selling facials or laser treatments, which are exploding. A lot of people want to take care of themselves and their bodies. Out here in California, that’s a huge thing. I have a friend who does this. She’s an aesthetician. She’s not a nurse or anything. A lot of these medical spas need a doctor. She would rent a space inside a doctor’s office. What she found out was that a lot of times, a plastic surgeon or somebody who does gastro surgery will package in a bunch of lasers/facials and smoothing type of treatment. They then get a cut. These are all what they call affiliates.

You can easily recommend it. If you’re a hairdresser, you end up recommending a bunch of hair products that you don’t sell. You don’t have to inventory them, buy them and take a risk, but you could give them a company recommendation. You might even have some of the samples at your place where they can then order it and you get a cut from that. The model is so easy to do that it would be a shame if you don’t incorporate some portion of that in your business. There are very few drawbacks to the affiliate model.

Here’s the other thing, a lot of times you get customers that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Let’s say you’re doing cryotherapy and you get somebody from fitness centers. You’ll get a bunch of people who would have never gotten before because until they got to you, they thought all they got to do is exercise, but now they’re doing all of the above. That’s a source of a new customer for you and them. That’s a true win-win situation where the end-user wins because she’ll get the results that she needs by incorporating weight loss and exercise. You win a little and get extra money, and then they get all the extra money that they wouldn’t have gotten.

Conclusion

Think about what business model you want to have. The thing that I want to talk about a little bit is to give it a lot of thought. If you do business-to-consumer and you want to incorporate the business-to-business what’s going to happen is that you’ll be able to buy even all the things that you are buying and buy it cheaper because people see the potential that they can do a lot more business with you.

MDH 80 | Business Growth Models

Business Growth Models: Businesses don’t care what you sell. If you give them a plan where they can make more money with your products and other people that they’re carrying, they’ll try you out.

 

That’s a huge benefit but at the same time, it does come with little strings. You have added expense of hiring somebody who’s an expert in that area. The standards are higher when you’re doing business-to-business. If you’re a jewelry designer like I was, when I went to HSN standards, I had to deal with QA departments that were horrendously difficult to deal with. I understand why they did that because if you’re doing business one-on-one and I’m making a piece of jewelry that falls apart, I made a mistake on the one piece. If you do 10,000 pieces and you made a mistake, the mistake is repeated 10,000 times so the cost is high.

All the standards and expenses go up high, but it’s something that you might want to consider when you have a certain base of customers. I wanted to expose you a little bit to all the different business models. If any of you have any questions about this, go ahead and write to me. It’s VicWieck@Gmail.com or you can sign up for any of my classes on my website.

I go through all this pretty extensively because I’ve had personal experience with all four of the models. I started as a business-to-consumer then I went to business-to-consumer/business-to-business. I then went to business-to-consumer, plus business-to-business, plus the affiliates. I’m still in all of the above. It’s worked out pretty well.

Sign up for any of my classes on my website, which is VictoriaWieck.com. You’ll see a monthly webinar there. It’s all free, or you can visit MillionDollarPassion.com. It’s all about turning your passion into profits, sustaining it, and working fewer hours as a result of working more efficiently and effectively. Thank you so much for reading.

If you haven’t already, please go ahead and leave me a review. If you can give me a five-star review, that would be great. Please share this episode with at least one person that you know could benefit from this because that’s how we multiply our voice and how we can serve our community better. Until the next episode, please have a great safe and happy week. Remember, happiness is a choice. I hope you make great choices. Thank you.

 

Important Links

MDH 78 | Ideal Target Audience

MDH 78 | Ideal Target Audience

 

Identifying your ideal target audience is critical to the success of your business. Bigger isn’t always better. In today’s episode, Victoria Wieck explains why niching down your business and trimming down how you define your market is key to earning more. If you do this right, you can achieve greater returns even without doing advertising. Tune in as she shares essential tips on determining your niche and adding the best value for your customers.

Watch the episode here


 

Listen to the podcast here


 

How To Niche Down And Identify Your Ideal Target Audience

I’m so excited to get into this session. This is part of the multi-week series of the Do It Now System that I wrote a book about. The book is titled Million Dollar Passion: How to Turn an Idea into a Multimillion-Dollar Business. I speak from my heart and from my own experience. I broke it down to very few bite-sized information so that you can follow along my journey.

This is week five. If you have not read weeks 1 through 4, I highly suggest that you do that because you can take your passion into a profitable business. You can start that business with no experience, no money, no outside capital, and no real connections of any kind. I can tell you I did it and did it in a very big way. Read the other four weeks.

Before I get into this, if you find this information interesting or you found other episodes interesting, please go ahead and subscribe. Share any of my episodes with at least one friend so we can amplify and elevate the topic here. Without further ado, let’s go get into the target market and target your audience. If I can think of one thing other than your product or service itself, it is critical that you understand who your target market is. It’s important.

I’m going to try to make it as simple as possible. There are masterminds on this topic. There are courses being taught on this topic but I’m going to try to break it down to a twenty-minute segment so that you can get the basics of it and understand it. Understanding the target market is directly related to how successful you are going to be and how fast you can achieve that success.

Make It As Small A Niche As Possible

Let’s get into this. The first thing is to try to make it as small of a niche as possible. I didn’t originate this saying. I don’t know who originally came up with that, but a lot of people would agree with me, “The riches are in the niches.” Make sure that you break it down to as small of a niche as possible. Whatever you are doing, try to find the first 200 people that are going to buy your product. Not the first 20. That first 20s are your friends, family, and the people who are obligated to buy something from you but the first 200 or 400 are critical because you have to understand who they are, what they are buying, what their needs are, and how you can provide solutions to their life.

If you have not read the first four weeks, you are going to see a common theme there in everything I do, which is the only way you make money as an entrepreneur is if you learn how to add value to other people’s lives. People don’t pay for information anymore. It’s all free on Google. People don’t pay for frivolous things that they don’t need. They usually try and return it. You have to learn how to add value to other people’s lives. For you to do that, you have to understand who they are. There was a saying that if you try to be everything to everybody, you are nothing to no one but if you try to be everything to just a few people or if you try to be everything within a topic, you can be that.

The only way you make money as an entrepreneur is if you learn how to add value to other people’s lives.

Enough with the general. I want to give you an example. For example, I turned my passion for jewelry into a multimillion-dollar business. I’ve done nine figures in this space. I could say that jewelry is for everyone. This is the number one mistake people make. They define their target market as too big. I could say that women love jewelry. People get married. Men love jewelry some men jewelry for themselves. Most men have a mother, sister, wife, daughter, female friends or grandmothers. You can think about how you can justify, “Maybe I should target the men who buy the jewelry for the women in their life.”

You can see how I could sit there and say, “I could design jewelry for all women and most men.” It is everybody. Men who are older or younger love jewelry. This isn’t an heirloom piece. They all love it. If you were to identify your market as that, how would you design for that market? How would your jewelry be different than everything else out there on the market? I’m going to get back to that in a little bit. If you identify your target market correctly, you can almost build a business without any advertising or any outside influences. I will show you how you can do that with my jewelry. Keep that in mind.

Let Them Know, Trust, and Like You

Also, remember that before people buy anything of significance, whether it’s a course or jewelry they are going to wear to a sorority party, a high school reunion or maybe for them to get married, they still have to like you. They have to trust you. They have to know that it’s going to be good for them. If I come across on TV or on my mailers that I’m not a likable person because I come across as braggadocious or a very loud person who talks about herself all the time, they are probably not going to want to deal with me for their intimately and emotionally connected purchase.

If they like you, they still have to trust you. They have to trust that you are the best jeweler they could find. They also have to trust that you probably aren’t going to screw them over. Those are the two factors of trust there. They have to trust you as an expert that you know what you are talking about and bringing real value to their life. They also have to trust that you are not going to overcharge them and the information you are giving them is true. They will ask, “Is this going to be good for me?”

Let’s say you are teaching an online course on how to do digital marketing, and you are charging them $5,000. They have to know, “Is this personal likable? I’m going to be Zooming with that person for the next twelve weeks.” If you find that person is always about talking about himself or herself and less about the content, you may not want to spend the money.

Provided that they trust you, they still have to know, “Is this going to work for me? Do I have the type of business that can benefit from the type of online course that this person is teaching? Do I have the infrastructure for that? Do I have all the other stuff? Can I get the same information from a person who is more experienced for less money?” That’s when pricing comes in.

MDH 78 | Ideal Target Audience

Ideal Target Audience: Understanding the target market is directly related to how successful you’re going to be and how fast you can achieve that success.

 

Pricing only matters after they find out that they love you, like you, fall in love with your story or journey, you have some expertise that they can trust, and you have their interests at heart. They are going to be like, “It’s good for me. It happens to be an amazing price.” That is the perfect formula for that. Instead of all these generals, I’m going to tell you a little bit about my personal journey.

Identify Your Target Audience

My personal journey happens to be in jewelry design, which is a huge market. It is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide. It is one of the oldest industries worldwide. It also happens to be the most competitive industry anywhere in the world. Many of you know that I’ve traveled extensively around the world. I have been to some countries that most people didn’t even know existed.

In every country you go to, from South Africa, Kenya, Dubai, all over Europe to all of a sudden, Latin America, in any little port or airport when you go to any shopping environment, there is a jewelry store every few blocks. It’s not as quite as many as Starbucks but it has a lot of jewelry stores all over the world. It’s one of the most competitive businesses. It’s also a business that’s known for having the good old boys around the world owning 80% to 90% of their business.

In that environment, I started a small company targeting a very specific small group of women. Remember, I said that in jewelry, I could have identified my market as all women who love jewelry, even if that’s generalistic. Most women who get married want to have some ring that says, “I’m married.” Your tastes may differ. That’s a piece of jewelry. If you think about the choices women make, in a christening, bar mitzvah, and all these events, they are wearing jewelry. Maybe it’s the heirloom piece that was given, you inherited, and was passed down.

You could say, “My target is all women and most of the men who buy for their wives, significant other, friends, mothers or sisters.” If you do that and say, “My jewelry caters to all women. I’m going to design for all women,” Let’s say you somehow can do that. You understand what women want. If you were going to create a Facebook ad, what would that ad say? “I design beautiful pieces of jewelry. I have a whole collection for you. I understand that you are a woman. All women have jewelry. I have a large selection of jewelry. It is very inexpensive. I’m 25% lower than your local department store. We are having a sale here. Come to come to my store.”

That’s pretty much what you could say because you can’t talk to every woman. When you talk to every woman, it sounds that way. You are not talking to that woman. How I did it, though, is when I was starting my company, I found that most of the jewelry was sold that way by the major department and jewelry stores. They talk to every woman like, “We have bridal. We have this. We have that. We have all the things that you all love. Women love jewelry. We have what women want. We are the cheapest.” The precise language is different than what I said but that’s genetically what most of the ad said.

If you try to be everything to everybody, you are nothing to no one. But if you try to be everything to just a few people, you can be that.

Some of them had better models or different styles but the messaging was the same. “Women have jewelry. I know you love jewelry. We have high-quality jewelry, and our prices are the best. Our jewelry is routinely sold at 70% off,” which also was a lie. They would jack up the price so that they could take the 70% off, which then became the regular price.

In fact, many jewelry stores and department stores were sued by the FTC about that. If they say that every two weeks, you can take the 70% discount, then that discounted price is a retail price. They’ve gone through lawsuits but I digressed on that. What happened was when I came to this country, I realized that in South Korea, most of the jewelry was heirloom pieces. They were 24 karat gold pieces that were given to a child as their future inheritance. It was more of a monetary value.

The heirloom pieces that they wanted to hand out to the next generation were highly personalized. They were mostly custom-made pieces by a local jeweler for their family. They might even have a family emblem. Some of them might have their favorite gemstones as opposed to diamonds. For example, if a region was known for fishing, it might have little fisherman knots embedded into it. If they lived on a farm, they might have little wheat patterns.

When I came to America, I was astonished at the lack of selection. It was mostly sold on snob appeal. I was mostly sold on, “I have a 2 karat diamond from Tiffany’s or I have a 1 karat diamond from whatever store.” It has a little bit of a snob appeal but it was a stone set in four prong setting with the bond. That was what it was. I saw a huge opportunity to speak to different women. When I say different women, they were women who had different emotional needs for reasons why they bought jewelry.

1989, which is when I started my company, was a time when many women in America were going to work outside their homes. It was the first time in history that most of these women went outside their homes to work. I say that because taking care of your children at home is a full-time job. They went outside their homes to work. They had titles like marketing director, vice president of something or senior manager of something. They had managerial positions for the first time. They were making decent money. There were still huge inequities in salaries but they were still making good money.

They went to work looking like miniature men. I was one of those women. I had to wear button-down cotton shirts. I had a business suit in gray, navy, and black. They didn’t have jewelry at that point. They had jewelry but were nighttime jewelry. They were very fancy. You don’t want to go to work looking like you are a show-off. These women had a need. They needed to look polished. They needed to look intelligent, sophisticated but understated.

MDH 78 | Ideal Target Audience

Ideal Target Audience: If you identify your target market correctly, you can almost build a business without any advertising, without any outside influences.

 

At that time, in the marketplace, they had junk jewelry. They were plastic. They were brassy. They clinked and made all these sounds. It looked like a tortoise. They had animal prints on them. They looked cheap and junky. You could go buy the expensive jewelry that had the snob appeal. You would to these places to pay $10,000, $15,000 or $20,000 for once-in-a-lifetime jewelry and wore until you die.

I designed jewelry that was much more for daytime to go to work. It looked understated, fun, and beautiful but had a little sparkle or a little metal. They also had little florals. They had ways that were still timeless but very classic. They had florals or little critters like ladybugs. They had a little accent here and there. It didn’t look like it was wild but it had interesting topics that you can talk about. People are curious. Other women are complimenting you. You stood out as somebody who takes care of herself and is successful.

I sold high-quality jewelry at lower prices that were emotionally connecting and personality reflective jewelry. I catered to the professional working woman who made a ton of money for the first time. Before our generation, men went to work. The money was tight, so she didn’t go outside the home. She didn’t need daytime jewelry. I was defining my target market as professional working women in a professional environment. It is only that woman.

My Facebook ad would say something to the effect of, “Come and experience sophisticated, understated jewelry that you can wear to work, semi-formal or a cocktail party. You can save all this money. You can stand out for all the right reasons. Someday in the future, your daughters or granddaughters can inherit this because these are very high-quality products. They are custom designed for you.” They were just for a few people because I didn’t have a huge distribution. I would also say, “For the next two weeks, you could have it at a 25% off discount.”

Luckily for me, there was nobody doing that. I ended up with a huge market share. This is how I sold over ten million pieces of jewelry in America. This is the power of understanding who your target market is, providing products for your target market, and messaging that in a way that you can connect with them emotionally. All your marketing message needs to sound like you are speaking to that person alone.

I understand that most of you are not going to be in the jewelry space. For example, if you are a real estate broker, you can’t go and say, “I’m a real estate broker. I specialize in Beverly Hills to Compton, to Newport Beach or to San Diego.” Nobody is going to believe you. A lot of entry-level home markets are catered to younger families that want great schools. They want a place that has great little parks around, and that’s safe. Your messaging will be different than if you were selling a $3 million to $10 million property. They are looking for something completely different than entry-level homes. You can’t be a specialist at both ends.

All your marketing message needs to sound like you are speaking to that person alone.

Maybe you are in the vacation home market. Maybe you are in Palm Springs or places where older retirees buy their retirement homes or vacation home. They have very different needs. Make sure that you understand who you are talking to. If you need Lasik surgery for your eyes, you are not going to go to a general practitioner for your eye surgery. You are going to go to the best Lasik surgeon.

I went to a Lasik surgeon several years ago. She had done 7,000 Lasik surgeries. Most of them were successful but 1% of the people ended up with dry eye or something like that. I chose to go to her for the reason that she did nothing but that. She does not do cataract surgery. She doesn’t do anything else. This is the woman that does nothing but this one thing.

If you are a pain management expert, you help people manage pain. If you specialize in Olympic athletes, tennis professionals or high school athletes that need to fix up, be at peak performance every day, are healthy otherwise and are watching their body for every single little joint, that’s a different market than senior citizens who are in chronic pain that is on Medicare or Medicaid.

I’m giving you two very extreme examples of how a generalist can’t survive in either of those places. If you say, “I’m a pain management specialist. No matter what your pain is, I can help you,” and you don’t explain exactly why you are best for that person, you are not going to get the high school athletes. They are going to look for athletic physios and athletic professionals.

I’m going to give you the most extreme example of a restaurant in Los Angeles. I lived in LA for 40 years. It’s funny. Across from my office, there was a fish restaurant that stayed there. They were there for 30 years. Before I was even in that office space, this was an iconic restaurant. For some reason, this family decided to close up several years ago. Every six months, it seemed like there was a new restaurant that came in. None of them made it.

The last one that I remember was called Global Cuisine. Their menu had Salvadoran food, halal food, sushi, and vegan food. The owner was very proud of the fact that he had a very large family. He had a son who married an Israeli girl that moved to Israel and spoke Hebrew. He also had one of his daughters marry somebody in Japan. He was very proud of the fact that his family is so diverse, and they eat this food all the time.

MDH 78 | Ideal Target Audience

Ideal Target Audience: Getting your target audience nailed down helps you attract new customers at a much faster rate than if you try to broaden it.

 

He opened a restaurant called Global Cuisine. If you wanted to have pizza and pasta for lunch, would you go to a global cuisine like this, where they serve everything under the sun? If you are a sushi connoisseur, would you go to a restaurant that serves vegan or El Salvadoran? You would probably go to a sushi restaurant that has nothing but sushi. This family did not last either. They didn’t last even six months. It was a tough sell. Nobody wanted to go in there. They were curious. It was a neighborhood joke but nobody ate anything that I knew other than his own family. It didn’t work out.

Remember, getting your target audience nailed down helps you attract new customers at a much faster rate than if you try to broaden it. I know it’s very counterintuitive to think that you have to make the target market so small as opposed to bigger but trust me on this one. You do have to make sure that your target market might get as small of a niche as possible. Once you start to achieve some success, you can then branch out into other things.

For example, my target market for the longest time was professional working women. They grew older with me. I was in my twenties when I started my business. I’m not even going to tell you how old I am because I have been through so many decades where a lot of my customers are ages 45 to 65, and some of them are even older. I thought, “I can help Millennial woman navigate their bridal things,” so I created a separate company that deals with Millennial bridles who want great choices and custom-made jewelry. That’s doing well. I figured it out but I don’t mix those two.

My Millennial bridal site is called RachelAndVictoria.com. You should check that out. It’s a beautiful site. All the model pictures are actual pictures of my daughter, Rachel, who is partnering with me on this. The messaging is very different. The Millennials want choice. They want to experience. They want uniqueness. They don’t want anything that’s mass-produced. They don’t want to buy things at a department store. They want things that are made for them and only for them. They are very concerned about ecology and what their footprint is in the world in terms of their carbon footprint, climate change, and all that.

On that site, we spell out our philosophy. All the metals that we use, gold and silver, are all recycled. We don’t do any Earth-mined gemstones. It means that anything that we have to dig deep through the Earth, we don’t deal with that. All the diamonds are lab-grown or above Earth. All our packaging is recycled paper. For the women that are aged 45 to 65, they understand my philosophy is the same but it’s not a huge deciding factor. It’s a plus factor. They like the fact that I am very conscious about saving the planet Earth but it’s not the determinant factor for them. Your messaging, products, and price point changes based on who your target market is.

Determine How You Add Value

Lastly, once you clearly identify your target market like this person with pain points who’s a pain expert remember, the only way you make money is if you add value to somebody else’s life consistently as an entrepreneur. That means, how do you add value to somebody else’s life? Does your product help them save money? Does it help them save time?

Messaging changes based on who your target market is.

Does it help them right social wrongs? Does that help them prevent a problem in the future? If you are selling alarms, security systems, vitamins or insurance, does it help people feel significantly better emotionally? You might be selling entertainment. You might be selling them how you connect with your customers if you are business-to-business.

There’s a whole other list I can give you but I’m trying to keep this very simple and short. If you can help them save money and time and prevent a future disaster from happening, these are great. You got to check at least one off of this. If you can’t, you must keep working on your target market, products, and how you can solve their problems or add value to their lives. You will see a huge difference in how you start your business. You can see why you can start your business with no money and no expertise. It’s simple, basic common sense.

Thank you for tuning in to this lesson. I love this topic. I may revisit this topic at the end of the series because it is such a critical topic. It’s a topic that’s counter-intuitive to most entrepreneurs and needs a little bit of getting used to. Thank you, again, for tuning in. Until next time, please stay healthy and happy. Remember, happiness is your choice. Also, if you can rate and review the show, I would be ever so grateful.

 

Important Links

MDH 62 Tim Fitzpatrick | Key Marketing Fundamentals

MDH 62 Tim Fitzpatrick | Key Marketing Fundamentals

 

Learning the fundamentals of something is important if you want to get good at it. The same thing applies to the key fundamentals of marketing. Having these in your pocket helps make marketing your business easier. Victoria Wieck and Tim Fitzpatrick of Rialto Marketing get into the basics. They discuss the concepts and how each is an important part of the whole. Tune in and see the breakdown of marketing your business.

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Key Marketing Fundamentals For Success With Tim Fitzpatrick

Many of you, readers, are already entrepreneurs, and quite a few of you are successful. Some of you are struggling. I always like to start my show with a proposition, also to solve problems that you are facing every single day. One of the first things that a small business entrepreneur has to navigate, if he or she will be successful, is the whole idea of marketing yourself, getting yourself out there, getting visibility, letting people know what you do, how you serve them, and why you are the unique and the best in that field.

Why will they give you a try? This is all part of the world of marketing but we are living in a world of so-called experts who tell you what marketing is. It could be digital marketing, advance, use slick ads, all those things come into play. I’ve got somebody here who has grinded it out over several businesses that he has founded and worked through. This isn’t marketing solutions for people who’ve got millions of dollars to spend. This is for those of you who have to watch your money, actions, and time as well. Without further ado, I want to welcome Tim Fitzpatrick, who is a marketing expert. Welcome to the show.

Victoria, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

First of all, give our audience a two-minute overview of how you became a marketing expert and why you are uniquely a different kind of marketing expert.

My entrepreneurial journey has not been a straight path. I don’t think any of them are but when I graduated from college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was a Math major. My dad had been an entrepreneur for a long time. He had started a wholesale distribution company a couple of years before I graduated. I knew he needed some help. He had no full-time employees at that point.

I said, “Let me work for you for three months. Give me time to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. You need the help.” He said, “Yes.” I jumped in. We were selling consumer electronics and home theater equipment to contractors. After three months, I was hooked. I loved it. I became the first full-time employee. I was wearing every hat. I was, “Let me pick up this phone.” I’m doing AR, “Let me do this.” I’m doing sales. It was an awesome experience. My dad and I grew that company about 60% a year for nine years, and then we sold it.

I learned more doing that in 6 months than I did in 4 years of college. It was an amazing experience, one that I would never want to change. When I’ve got out of that, I needed to do something different. I shifted gears. I’ve got involved in residential real estate for a while, which I did not like. The one thing I learned from that was how to put myself outside of my comfort zone. There’s not much I’m not worried about jumping into.

When I decided to get out of real estate, I was waking up each day going, “I hate this.” Why own a business if you are going to be in that position? I shifted gears again. That’s when I’ve got into what I’m doing, which is marketing. We focus on the fundamentals, keeping marketing simple. It is so easy to overcomplicate these days. I love marketing. It’s dynamic. It’s always changing but the fundamentals of any discipline do not change.

I agree with that 100%. I forgot to tell you this but I have a Master’s degree in Marketing. I was told that I was not going to be good at Marketing because I didn’t understand the nuances. My professors were looking out for me. They didn’t think there was any future in me with Marketing. They convinced me to change my major from Marketing to Finance.

Marketing is dynamic. It’s always changing, but the fundamentals do not change.

I had taken too many courses at that point to give up on the majors. I went ahead and finished that out and I still got a degree in Finance, neither of which I use. I wouldn’t say I don’t use that Marketing degree per se but a lot of the things that they teach you in school are not applicable for a small business. They are made for plugging into a large company and learning how to spend their money. In your case, in your father’s company, that’s where you probably have learned a lot about marketing principles.

In this day and age of all the slick, the buzzwords, and the new trends in marketing that comes and goes, the basic principles of marketing don’t change over time. How human beings react to something, a word or a message, how they feel about how somebody touches you in terms of the wordings, whether you do it digitally, TV or in person, they don’t change. All of a sudden, it becomes some sort of an animal. In your opinion, what is marketing if you have to describe it simply? What are some of the principles, and why are they important?

To answer your first question, what is marketing? Marketing to me is getting someone who has a need or a problem you can solve to know, like, and trust you. That’s it. We all buy from people we know, like, and trust. The job of our marketing is to get in front of those people, get them to know, like, and trust us so that when that need or problem they have that you can address becomes great enough and they raise their hand, they think of you, and then it’s transitioning to sales.

When it transitions to sales, it’s not a cold conversation. It’s a warm conversation. They already know, like, and trust you. That conversation then becomes so much easier. To me, that’s what marketing is. Why the fundamentals are so important? The easiest way for me to describe this is from a quote from Michael Jordan, “Get the fundamentals down, and the level of everything you do will rise.”

I don’t care what the discipline is. The fundamentals do not change. The fundamentals of shooting a free throw are the same as they were years ago, and they are going to be the same 50 years from now. The fundamentals are immutable. The fundamentals lay the foundation for you to build the rest of your house from.

If you skip them, you are building a house without a foundation. You can have success skipping the fundamentals but it’s going to take a lot longer. You are going to waste time and money. At some point, it is going to come crashing down. You are going to hit a ceiling that you absolutely cannot push through. A house without a foundation will stand up for a certain time but when stuff goes bad, it’s going to fall down and crumble.

There are plenty of people who skip the fundamentals. The biggest mistake I see is most people skip the fundamentals and get tactical immediately. You mentioned this, Victoria. There are all kinds of shiny objects in marketing. We see people battling information overload. You need to be on Clubhouse. You need to do TikTok. You need to have a blog. You need to have a podcast. It’s like, “What do I do? There’s so much information coming at me. I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what the next step is.”

That’s why we need to get back to the fundamentals. When you get the fundamentals in place, it helps you eliminate all that information. It helps you cut through the noise and outline what your priorities are so that you are not overwhelmed. You know exactly what you need to do when you have clarity but you can’t do that until you have the fundamentals in place.

There’s quite a bit of information that you unloaded there. It’s interesting because my husband is in real estate, and he used to do commercial property. He retired. It’s interesting that we still build our houses and any structure in the same way. We don’t build a roof first. You always start with the foundation because if you build a great foundation, later on, you want to add a second story, you can do that.

MDH 62 Tim Fitzpatrick | Key Marketing Fundamentals

Key Marketing Fundamentals: One thing we learned from real estate was how to put yourself outside of your comfort zone.


 

You don’t ever start building homes or anything else with the roof because it’s more convenient, or it looks shinier or prettier. You are going to end up having to go back. When you said you can achieve success, skipping some of those foundations but eventually, the way you succeed is you stumble onto some of those basic principles, whether you like it or not, because some of the key principles have to be there.

We are going to get into the key principles. Tim said earlier his definition of marketing is getting in front of your target audience and get them to like and trust you. Let’s go back to that very basic principle in the first place. One of the first mistakes I see a lot of beginner entrepreneurs and those who succeed in the first five years after you figure this out is identifying your target market in a way that’s too broad or narrow sometimes. You can have the right product for the wrong people. You could have the wrong stuff to the right people. When do you know when you have your target audience nailed down?

You have your target audience nailed down when you are working with people day in and day out that you love working with, that are profitable, that you get great results for. There are too many people that their target is too broad. Unless we have an unlimited budget, we cannot target broadly. When we say narrowing down that target market, that doesn’t mean those are the only people you are doing business with. That means those are the only people you are targeting your marketing towards.

When you can hone in, and you know who those people are that you enjoy working with, why do you want to be in business and bang your head against a wall every day? If you are going to stay in business, you need to work with people that are profitable. There’s nothing wrong with making money. If you are going to work with people and stay in business, you have to get great results for them. You have to understand who those people are.

Initially, when you first start, it can be hard to know that. Unless you have prior experience in the specific market that you are going into, it’s hard to target it narrow. What you need to do in that case is do a little bit of research and get an idea based on what you know, who you believe is going to be best. You need to take those assumptions, go out there and test them.

Based on what we know, we believe these types of people are going to be best for us. Let’s get out there and start to market to those people. Once we start to have some success and do business, then we can dig deeper and hone in on it. A lot of the people that we work with have been in business for a while. They have current and past customers. That’s when you hone in on your ideal clients, you look at the people you have worked with and ask yourself three questions. “Who do I love working with? Who do I get great results for? Who are our profitable clients?”

When you ask yourself those questions of the people you have already worked with, you end up with a subgroup of customers. It’s that subgroup that you can start to dig deeper in, to look at the demographics like, “What are the numbers around these people?” More importantly, though are the psychographics. What are their thoughts, their feelings, the results they are looking for? What are their behaviors? As you start to identify those elements, inevitably, what happens is some smaller groups with commonalities come to the surface. Those are your ideal client types.

Why is it that once entrepreneurs, even experienced ones, have a little bit of money, their first thing is to go out and try to broaden their target market? I do a lot of mentorship work, free speeches, and workshops. I’m doing quite a bit of volunteer work. When I work with new entrepreneurs, they are so insecure about identifying their target market in a narrow way.

For example, I sell jewelry. If I say every woman loves jewelry, that’s great. I always tell people, “Try to think about placing a Facebook ad. If somebody gave you free money and you had to place a Facebook ad, and your target market is all women, what would your ad say?” You might say something like, “All of you love this stuff. It’s 25% off or whatever.” You can’t identify certain types of women.

If you’re going to stay in business, you need to work with people that are profitable. There’s nothing wrong with making money.

In my case, when I first started my company, I targeted working women because I was the first generation of women who went outside the home and had titles like Director of Marketing. We weren’t in an administrative capacity. A lot of us left our kids at home, making good money. We had to stand out in a workplace that was very rigid.

My ad would have said, “This is great for a workplace where you can look polished. You can add a little femininity with a lot of affordability. When you are done with that, ten years from now, you can pass it on to your children for peace.” That was very targeted. By the way, working women had money.

When you are staying at home as a stay-at-home mom, and you are working on one income, the husband’s income, and you are young, your husband is not making a whole lot of money yet because they are not at the peak, you don’t have money for one. Number two, you don’t have a need to go anywhere to look for jewelry. You are not buying anything.

Identifying that working women in a corporate environment was the smartest thing you could do at that time. A lot of times, by identifying a target market that’s narrow will narrow your marketing message. The other thing too is you also know where they hang out so that you can connect to them quickly with less expenditure. I love the fact that these are basic marketing principles that a lot of people like so-called experts, don’t talk about because there’s no money in it.

Like a lot of drug companies won’t tell you if we find out that spinach is a cure to cancer. They are not going to ever talk about that because there’s no money in it for them. A lot of your experts out there doing these masterminds and everything else will charge you all this money to come up with the new sleek campaign about the unique selling proposition.

You have to get down to the basics first. Understand who you are dealing with, who you want to do business with, and how you can make money before you play with all these other variables that come into play that can amplify more once you have those basics. In terms of your principles, are there any other nuggets you want to share?

You touched on this a little bit. Once you understand who the target market is, then you can determine where they hang out and congregate. You have a list of where you can be to get in front of the people that you want to attract. Rather than casting a line out into the ocean, seeing what fish you catch, you are casting a line out, knowing exactly where you need to fish to catch those exact people you intend to work with.

It’s super important. Many people go out there and throw up over everybody, and it doesn’t work. The first fundamental is the target market. The second is your message. How do you communicate your value in what you do? How do you gain their attention and grab their interest? You honed in on working women. The message to working women is a completely different message than to a stay-at-home mom. It’s not to say that one is better than the other.

The message is different. If you try to put that message for working women to stay-at-home moms, it’s going to fall flat. It’s not going to go anywhere. When you are targeted, and you know who you are going to attract, and you understand them as well, if not better than they understand themselves, then and only then, can you create a message that is going to get in front of them and grab their interest. It’s super important.

MDH 62 Tim Fitzpatrick | Key Marketing Fundamentals

Key Marketing Fundamentals: It helps you cut through the noise and outline your priorities so that you’re not overwhelmed and know exactly what you need to do.


 

The third thing is we’ve got to have a plan. What’s our plan going to be to get that message in front of those people? Too many people don’t have a plan. When you don’t have a plan, everything looks like an opportunity. When I get an email that says, “You’ve got to check out this newest marketing tactic.” If you have no plan, you are like a squirrel chasing a nut. You follow everything, spin your wheels, and don’t get consistent, repeatable results. You get overwhelmed because you can’t sort through all the information overload. You’ve got to have a plan to get started.

Tim Ferriss talked about the 1,000 raving fans. You don’t need 10,000 people to like you on Instagram, especially if your customers are not on Instagram. TikTok could be the new, big thing. If you are selling anything serious like marketing or even expensive jewelry, TikTok is not your ideal customer. You can get a lot of followers there but it’s completely useless.

You have to figure out where your ideal customers hang out and engage with you. You have to get your people. When you are first starting out, if you are launching a new product, you are better off getting those 1,000 raving fans who are fanatical about you and your services so that if they tell 10 people, each person, there’s your 10,000.

With that, you can do a lot. You can do quite a bit of business. You can do a lot of research. There’s a lot to build from. Understand your market. I’m out there. I work with the Global Society for Female Entrepreneurs. Whenever I’m talking like how you and I are talking, a lot of women will say, “This is so much information. I’m overwhelmed. I’m overloaded.”

If you are reading, and feeling overwhelmed and overloaded, don’t worry because you can go to Tim’s website. It’s RialtoMarketing.com. If you do that, you are going to get a lot of free information there that’s downloadable. You can learn a lot about this. I love free information. Even if I go through the whole website, I find one thing that I didn’t know before, it’s worth it.

If you want to connect with him further, you can go to RialtoMarketing.com/million-dollar-passion. Don’t be overwhelmed. We are having a conversation here. You go through all of Tim’s materials and narrow it down to actionable tips. Strategies are great but without logistics, a real action you take in a certain order is going to help you more than just talking about strategy forever. Go to those actionable tips. The easiest way for you to be un-overwhelmed or feel like you can tackle this is doing your homework.

Find out who you think your target market is and where they shop. What TV programs do they watch? You can do a lot of research on the internet. You can put a call. If you get 20 to 50 random people, not your friends, mom, and dad but random people to give you feedback, you have a lot of information there that you can chew through. Do your homework, ask them questions, and be vulnerable. Let them know that you are not perfect.

Let them know that as a small business owner, this is your distinctive advantage, being able to be nimble, personable, likable, and somebody you can trust. A lot of Corporate America doesn’t look like they are cuddly, nice people that are going to care about you. They can’t because their personas are already out there.

It is so easy to get overwhelmed as business owners. There are so many different things that we’re working on that it’s very easy to fall into that place.

Do your homework and educate yourself. That’s the other thing. I built my business. Many of you know my background. I built an over $500 million company without any money. I have spent less than $10,000 in 35 years of advertising. Think about that. I was grinding it out, understanding who my target market is, and keep on evolving, whether you like it or not, your customers are constantly evolving. They move away. They do all these things. You have to keep on evolving and elevating. If you don’t have the foundation, to begin with, you are going to have a hard time elevating or innovating. Is there any other information you might want to share more on this path?

I will add to one of the things you said, Victoria, which was about being overwhelmed. It is so easy to get overwhelmed as business owners. It’s very easy to fall into that place. One of the things that have always helped me there is focusing on the next measurable step. When you look at the high level, there are all the details and all these things you have to do. Do the first thing you need to do next that you can measure to get that much closer. When you get that done, then you go to the next one and the next one. It makes it so much easier and less overwhelming.

The reason why many small business owners, anybody who’s doing that $5 million and under, feel uncomfortable that this is a territory you don’t know is that you are bombarded with experts telling you all the marketing tactics, the trends, and what’s working. Most small business owners are good tacticians and technicians in what they do. They are passionate about their product, the marketing, the legal, the admin.

These are all the stuff that they’ve got to do but they don’t know it. They think, “Can I do this?” The answer is, yes, you can. You are better off doing it yourself than hiring somebody else because those other people don’t know your business, your heart, and your product. You have to pay them to educate them. They’ve got 200 clients.

Learn how to do it yourself. When you do that, when you understand your business, when you understand your target, then you can hire an expert who’s fit for you that you can work with that is going to be surgical about your business in your effort to market and do whatever you have to do. Talking about short attainable goals and being able to measure them and keep yourself accountable, whether that’s weekly or monthly, the next measurable step.

Every year, 75% of Americans have a weight loss goal in their New Year’s resolution. By February 15th, 80% of those people had given up on their goal already because their goal was something like, “I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to get into this. I’m going to get healthier. I put it off for 5, 10 years. I’m 20, 40 pounds heavier. I’m going to lose weight.” This is their goal.

You try to lose weight. You don’t know where to go. You do know. You have to cut down on eating and probably have to exercise but you don’t have time. It’s the last thing you do. The next thing you know is, “I’m going to get to it later.” The next year comes, it’s the same thing. If you said to yourself, “I am going to lose 10 pounds in the next 10 weeks. I have to lose 1 pound a week.”

MDH 62 Tim Fitzpatrick | Key Marketing Fundamentals

Key Marketing Fundamentals: Don’t skip the fundamentals. The fundamentals are the fuel behind the tactics. Any tactic can work; it’s what you put behind it that will determine whether it works or not.


 
If that was your goal and you say, “What do I have to do to lose one single pound a week?” You have to cut out 300 calories a day. You are like, “I can cut out my wine in the afternoon or my toast in the morning. I’ve got to walk my dog anyway. I will do that.” Ten weeks later, you might lose 7 pounds, not 10. You might lose 15 pounds but either way, you’ve got momentum. You are better off then.

If you didn’t get to the goal, if you’ve got the 7 pounds off, the next 10 weeks you do that, you might get another 7 pounds. That’s 14 pounds off, and that’s 20 weeks. Think about that. It’s the power of setting those very short, attainable goals that you can achieve. That’s true with marketing, whatever you do, think that, “I love that.” That’s how I built my business. I started my company, trying to make $2,000 a month so that I can feed my kids.

I was driving a car with 150,000 miles on it. It was a Ford Pinto that blew up. It was known for fires and stuff. This one didn’t make it. I bought the whole car for $1,500. I drove that thing for five years. I was trying to make $2,000 a month. The next month, I was trying to make $3,000 a month. Once I’ve got to $5,000 a month, I was making $20,000, $30,000. I did more than $1 million in the first 18 months by doing that. When you do those short attainable goals, it makes you good at the things that you focus on. You don’t relearn that skill.

On the first day, you might walk your dog down the block and have cut out one piece of toast. After ten weeks, you might go, “That wasn’t so bad. Maybe I will cut out the toast and the wine. Maybe I can go down two blocks because when I went down that block, I saw a little lake there.” The next week you might go three blocks. It builds momentum. You already know the two blocks along the way. It becomes easier, and your dog is conditioned to doing this. There’s power in everything you have said. Tim, as we close this episode, do you have any last-minute tips?

I’m going to sound like a broken record here, Victoria, but don’t skip the fundamentals. The fundamentals are the fuel behind the tactics. Any tactic can work. It’s what you put behind it that’s going to determine, whether it works or not, whether you choose to have me help you with those fundamentals or not, don’t skip them. You will be so much better off. You will get to where you want to go faster by taking the time to get these in place.

How do people find you, Tim? What’s the best place for people to connect with you and find you?

Our website at RialtoMarketing.com is the best place. If you want to connect with me personally, LinkedIn is the best place for me, it’s www.LinkedIn.com/in/timpfitzpatrick/.

Thank you so much for reading. I sign off every week with wishing you health and happiness. Remember, happiness is a choice. I hope you make great choices this coming way. Thank you.
 

Important Links

 

About Tim Fitzpatrick

MDH 62 Tim Fitzpatrick | Key Marketing Fundamentals

I am an entrepreneur/business owner with expertise in marketing and business growth. I have 20+ years of entrepreneurial experience with a passion for developing and growing businesses. That passion served me well in operating and managing a wholesale distribution company I co-owned for nine years. Our company grew an average of 60% a year before being acquired in 2005.
Since then, I’ve had failures and successes that have helped me continually grow. I started Rialto Marketing in 2013 and have been helping service businesses simplify marketing so they can grow with less stress. We do this by creating and implementing a plan to communicate the right message to the right people. Most people overcomplicate marketing. It doesn’t have to be that way.