I’ve noticed over the years that about 60% of my clients are women business owners. But this is far higher than the proportion of female business owners generally – about 15% of businesses are owned outright by female entrepreneurs, and another 20% of businesses are co-owned by women. See this government report for more facts and figures.

So why do I get more women than men?

I’m a woman

This would seem to be the most obvious factor – I’m a woman who has run businesses, and offers help and advice. However, none of my female clients have ever said that they wanted a female mentor, and they’re certainly not shy of employing men and doing deals with men, because they do this all the time. So it must be something subconscious, when we want advice we want it from someone like us.

Women are more likely to take advice

Photo by pure9

Actually this seems more likely. There’s a definite difference between my female clients and my male clients. Women are more likely to ask for advice directly and say, What do you think I should do about this contract?, whereas men are more likely to say what they are considering doing about the contract and then I’ll come in and make recommendations. So maybe women are more likely to look for an advisor in the first place.

Women like straight talking

I’ve been doing a bit of competitor analysis recently, looking at other business advisors and coaches and how they work. What I have found is that I’m very direct compared to other people. I offer practical advice, and give my thoughts on what my client should do.

It seems that this is unusual, and most advisors are very non-directive, and prefer to talk through the issues to help the business owner make a decision. This is more of a coaching model, I guess. I, however, figure that if someone is paying me good money for my opinion, I should really give my opinion, as long as I’m making it very clear that it’s the client’s decision as to what they decide to do – it is their business after all.

So maybe this is why my client list has lots of women in it – they just like to get a clear idea of what they should do next.

If you’re male or female and would like some straight talking about your business and the way forward, buy me a coffee and I’ll give you my thoughts.

Infinite Loop, photo courtesty of kurafire

The conventional wisdom in business about feedback is that it’s very important and you must always listen to it and act upon it. Which is all very well and good, but like all conventional wisdom can be a little simplistic. This isn’t my experience of how the real business world works.

Listening To The First Person You Hear

One danger in hearing feedback is that you react to the first person who gives you some feedback. Maybe when you have an idea for a new product, or a whole new business. Maybe you haven’t got it all completely worked out yet, and you tell someone about it, and they seem doubtful, or tell you that it’s a rubbish idea. So you don’t go ahead, and you always regret it…… That could have been the one that made you a million.

Listening To Lots Of Opinions

Have you ever been in the situation where lots of people give you feedback, but it’s all different?

It’s too expensive
It should be bright blue
You should make it out of recycled carrots
It should be olive green

This situation is often accompanied by people generating lots of ideas:

Why don’t we……

All of this feedback makes you very confused, and worse than confused, you can end up feeling guilty that you aren’t doing everything that everyone suggests. This can lead to a particular form of analysis paralysis – you do nothing because you cannot form a clear view. And we know that doing nothing is unlikely to make you a millionaire.

Where Feedback Doesn’t Fit With Your Strategy

So you’ve done some planning (or better yet, you’ve been on one of my strategy planning sessions and you’ve worked out what you’re doing with your business. And then someone gives you some feedback which sows those insidious seeds of doubt. Often, this is when a potential customer doesn’t buy, or someone says that your product is too expensive. Remember that not everyone is going to buy though, even with the best product and the best salesperson in the world. Your product is not going to be right for everyone.

Sometimes, feedback can fit neatly into your own doubts, especially when you’re trying something new or slightly uncomfortable. Wait until you have a little more evidence to go on before adjusting your strategy – have the courage of your convictions as Mr Hopkins used to tell me when I was 9 years old (it’s all his fault you know).

Maybe it’s going to take some time to sell, or you’re going to have to do some more work to get it front of the right target market.

Maybe You Disagree With The Feedback

Sometimes the feedback you get is just plain wrong.

It’s a stupid idea – I wouldn’t buy that said a friend of mine about a music download business. But this friend has never paid for music in his life, he’s one of those guys whose computer is full of illegal downloads, which he spends hours organising. He’s not the right target market, but lots of other people are.

There are a lot of women here someone said with a disapproving look on his face at a Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce meeting. 48% of our members are female. What would happen if I took this seriously, and acted on it? I’d have to ban women and resign myself!

You Decide

Ultimately, running a business means you have to decide. Listen to what people say, and encourage them to tell you what they think.

But you have to decide – that’s what being the boss means.

Need Some Help With Your Business Decisions?

Maybe you’ve been getting some confusing feedback and you’re not sure what path to take with your business. Although you still have to decide the best course of action, you know where to come if you want some structured serious help with making the right decisions to move your business forward. Do get in touch if you’d like some help.

Spotting a gap in the market is how we all think about business success. This is to be one of the classic key success factors in business.

Why you need a gap

Most of the businesses I see are very similar to other businesses, and often my starting point is to find out what that business does (or can do) which makes them remarkable.

A business based on a gap in the market should automatically be remarkable. They’ve been able to see something they can provide which no one else does.

They might have found something new to provide; Rubik’s Cube, kids’ scooters, a piece of the moon are all examples of these gap exploiters. You’ll note that many of these gaps are soon filled by cheap me too copy cats pretty quickly. By the time I got a Rubik’s Cube when I was a kid, it was a cheap knock off version from Brownhills market.

A Gap In The Business Model

Or the gap might be providing a product or service in a completely different way. LoveFilm rents DVDs, but they captured the market by sending them through the post, rather than using the videoshop model, adding convenience and a huge list to choose from.

Gumtree provide the classified ads which local papers have made money from for centuries, but they’ve changed the model by making 99% of the ads free and putting it all online. Tom Peters calls this “creative swiping”, where you take an idea from someone else, and give it a good twist to make into something new.

Copying Someone Else

The easiest way to find your gap in the market is to copy someone else. LoveFilm copied Netflix, and Gumtree copied Craigslist and transferred these business models from the US to the UK.

You could research what other people are doing in different countries (or other cities in the UK) and work out what gap you might be able to fill where you are. Ideally, you want to do this before whatever you’re copying has been widely written about, otherwise you’ll find a bunch of other people who are all doing the same thing, all launching at the same time as you.

Trends

You can find some amazing ideas by absorbing yourself in different trends in business thinking and what’s happening in particular markets.

The world is moving pretty rapidly, and technology and economic forces are very fluid. The trick here is to research into certain areas, especially those which are not altogether obvious. If you have some knowledge in a particular area already, that’s good, but you don’t necessarily need to be a programmer to understand what’s happening in online technology – you can always buy programmers later.

In fact, it can be better if you don’t have any industry knowledge as you won’t have any preconceptions and blind spots. One of my recent clients identified a gap in the market for a particular kind of product, and once she was certain that there was a viable business, she bought 2 days per week of consultancy time from someone who was already very established in that industry. That way, she was able to tap into a deep level of knowledge about suppliers, materials, manufacturing processes, without having to learn all this stuff from scratch.

Where To Get Started

You might think about:

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Free to get a grip on new business models.

Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work to see how others have done things.

Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, and his blog.

New Scientist magazine can help you to think about the world differently, as can reading science fiction.

PFSK have a great blog about lots of weird and wonderful ideas.

And of course…… you can come and see me for a chat about your initial ideas and where you would like to take your business. I can help put you in the right direction, challenge your thinking so far, and most importantly, help you make money from your gap in the market. Buy me a coffee, and I’ll talk you through the initial steps; pay me a regular fee and I’ll help you make it into something real.

How business mentoring and support works

Keep in touch

If you’d like to get more tips and thoughts to help improve your business, let’s stay in touch. You can sign up to my email newsletter to get all the gossip, or get this blog by email or RSS – see the big orange button on the left hand side. And don’t forget to follow me on twitter

I wrote recently about the businesses I can’t help, so I thought it was only fair to write about whom I can help.  It’s tempting to write this as a sales pitch, but I’ll resist temptation and try to be more objective instead. My strap line is that I help small businesses who want to be bigger businesses.  I specialise in businesses with less than 30 employees because the smaller businesses are the sexy exciting ones. The businesses where I can make the most difference are the ones where the owner is committed to growth, and knows that he or she needs some help and support to get there.  Where the owner wants to get to be a bigger business, but doesn’t really know how to go about it. Imagine a two-person design partnership.  They’ve developed some demand, and have some good clients, but they are uncertain how to move from doing all the work themselves to being able to manage other people doing the work.  If you’ve read any of Michael Gerber’s Emyth books then you’ll know that there’s a key growth stage in stopping doing the work yourself, and getting others to do the work, while you become responsible for developing and running the business.  The temptation for our design company is to carry on doing all the work themselves, getting more and more worn out by servicing clients, or by not spending any time on marketing, they risk running out of new business.  Or both. In this situation I can:

• Identify what sort of work the lovely designers need to go after
• See what how they need to price their work to remain competitive, but have enough to be able to afford to pay other people to do the production and improve their profits
• Help them work out what marketing activities are going to work best for them
• Refocus them on marketing, so they can attract new clients
• Make sure they do the marketing, by being there and reminding them of what they promised to do

Of course, my lovely designers could do all of this themselves, but what do they get extra by paying me to help them? I’d say they get:

• The courage to charge more money
• Some fantastic new ideas about marketing, which they maybe wouldn’t have been able to come up with themselves, because I spend all my time seeing what works and stealing other people’s tactics
• Someone to be accountable to – so they can’t just slip back to their old habits, but are reminded that now we’re doing business in a different way.
• Someone who gives a damn.  This sounds obvious, but how often do you have someone who actually really cares about whether you succeed or fail, and have that person be someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Let’s take another scenario, this time of a bigger business.  Here’s a company which has been running for a while.  They have 12 staff, so they’ve got over the delegation issue, and they’re nicely profitable.  But, the director knows that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life running this business – at the moment it’s still fun, but she wants to sell up in 3 years time.  And, she wants to have enough money to do something else after that, or to do nothing at all for a while.  In fact, she knows that she wants to sell for upwards of £1.5m. Why would she want to get the woman with the curly hair and glasses in? Our director (we’ll call her Alice) needs some help to achieve her target of a sale in 3 years with a price tag of £1.5m.  Where I can help is:

• Assessing how much turnover and profit she needs to bring in to make the business worth that million and a half, and make sure that the business is working in a way which will maximise the sale value.
• Working on a much bigger marketing strategy to build up the business
• Helping with the recruitment of a really hot sales director to bring in the big sales which are going to add up.
• Supporting Alice in all the little problems that come with growing a business, so she’s got someone to go through things with her.  Again, this is about giving a damn, and getting help from someone who has been through this themselves.

That should give you an idea of the sort of businesses I work with and how I make a difference.  If you would like to talk about how I can help, you know where I am.

I see a lot of businesses of all different shapes and sizes. Some businesses I can help, and some I can’t, and I’ve been thinking about the ones which I can’t help, and why not.

Sometimes, someone comes to see me and their business is a tiny little thing.  Now, that doesn’t mean I can’t help them – after all, everyone’s business starts from a little shoot, but not everyone can or wants to grow into a powerful oak tree.  The people I can’t help are the ones who only want to earn 20k a year from their business and are happy with that.  Actually, I often can help with a one off session which my friends at Business Link will fund.  But if your desire is only to run a little business (and there’s nothing wrong with that, little businesses often suit someone who has other priorities such as raising children or sitting in the sunshine) it’s just not worth paying me money to help you.  And I’ll tell people that, and I’ll tell people whether they have a business which could be expanded beyond that lifestyle business level.

Sometimes I see people who have the potential to grow their business, but they are incapable of giving up doing the work on a day to day basis. If you are dead set against outsourcing, or employing people, or if you already employ people but end up doing the work yourself because you don’t trust them, then this might be you.  I can often cure people of these ideas, but sometimes this is so firmly set in that I can’t do anything.  I once went along to a meeting with a client, and when I got to the office he couldn’t see me because he was peeling potatoes.  I thought that the important thing was to talk about setting up a new part of the business which was worth about 100k per year, but he thought the important thing was peeling potatoes.  He couldn’t free himself to think that he could phone someone else to help with the spuds, and he missed out on a great opportunity.  You have to want to develop what you’re doing – otherwise all of my bright ideas are wasted.

The other group of people I can’t help are the ones who just have a rubbish idea.  Often, I’m the first person who’s been brave enough to tell someone that their business is a pile of poo (although I phrase it more tactfully than that, of course.)  Sometimes people just need help to see their business in a different way, so that the idea becomes a good one, so I can help with this, but for someone who is so in love with the idea of a gorgeous shop selling lovely things to all of 4 people a week, or a blog which is covered in google ads which no one ever clicks on, there is sometimes no hope for them.

This goes for the people who think that they’ll get investment for their business, and that their wages will be paid by the investment, with no thought of how the business might ever make a profit.  Sometimes investment becomes the end in itself, and the idea of actually selling some stuff and making money on it is completely lost.  For entrepreneurs like this, a reality check from Julia can make all the difference, but some people just don’t want to hear the truth, especially when the truth is that investment is hard to come by, and almost impossible unless you can show how you’re going to sell stuff at a profit.

Does all of this sound a bit harsh?  Well, maybe it is, but when I’m taking people’s money for my services, I have to be completely sure that I am going to make a real difference, so there has to be the potential for real growth in the business and the willingness to make it happen on the part of the business owner.