Rich Schefren - Strategies to build Your Online Empire
By: Ric Thompson
Rich Schefren is the founder of Strategic Profits and is known as the Coach to the Internet Gurus
TAMMY LAWMAN: Rich, can you give us an example of what point people are at in their businesses when they come to you? Is it all different stages, like some beginners and some who have been in business for years? Does it matter?
RICH SCHEFREN: It doesn't really matter. There tend to be three different transition points for people who come to us. The first is people who are first starting online who are intelligent enough to understand that if they don't know about business, it's almost going to be impossible to build one. They come. The next group is people who get online, try to succeed, and tend to become overwhelmed and frustrated. They end up coming to us out of desperation.
The last group would be people who build a somewhat successful stream of income online. They get as high as maybe $10,000 or $15,000 a month and then find that they cap out and can't go any further. They're not doing poorly. They're making $100,000 to $150,000 a year, but they're overwhelmed as far as the amount they can do. They can't do any more. Those are the three times where people start to self-reflect and come search us out. When we're doing marketing, we get a wide group of people in all different phases of business-building.
TAMMY LAWMAN: You talked a little bit before about overcoming people's false beliefs. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that keep people from being their most successful?
RICH SCHEFREN: Sure. The first is to believe that you can build a business based on sameness. In other words, you can buy a marketing product and therefore get wealthy. That really flies in the face of all basic business. A business has to, at the end of the day, create value for its customers and do it in a way that either they're able to charge more or it costs less to do. There's really nothing more basic than that when it comes to building a business.
When somebody first gets online and starts studying different marketing tactics, what tends to happen is that they go from one tactic to another tactic or one program to another program. They never really make the progress they want because they're following a completely wrong approach. Over time, what happens is that by following that wrong approach, they tend to start thinking there's something wrong with them.
In truth, there's nothing wrong with them. They're just following a very poor approach to building an online business. One of those false beliefs, I would say, is the belief that the right marketing makes up for everything else. It doesn't. Another one would be not necessarily a false belief but just a lack of understanding that ultimately, your business is going to succeed or fail based on the value you can provide.
Another area where people make a mistake is not understanding what their personal strengths are. For example, in our second module of our "Business Growth System," we help entrepreneurs figure out what their personal strengths are. We do that through training and different psychological tests we use. Based on that, we can create a profile of how this person thinks and, therefore, how they can succeed in business.
That's incredibly important because if you try to do something you're not good at, you tend to not do well at it, get frustrated, and not make progress. When you do something with your strengths, you tend to have fun, get better results, and make a lot more progress. The analogy I like to give people is imagine writing your name out with your non-dominant hand. It's harder, it takes longer, and the results are poor.
If you write your name out with the hand you normally write with, it's easy, your results are better, and they come faster. Most entrepreneurs make a huge mistake right off the bat. They don't know what their strengths are, and they don't ever build a business around their strengths. The next component after that is that once you know your strengths, you then need to build a business around those strengths.
For example, Mike Filsaime came to us when he was doing all right. He was making about $15,000 a month. By the time he left the coaching program, I think he was making about $300,000 a month. After that, he went up to as high as $800,000 a month. Primarily, we took his strengths, which were knowing how to make software and marketing, and combined the two to then create a company that did those two in conjunction in the internet marketing space.
Then he was able to go from $15,000 to $300,000 a month. It really is a very linear process in building a business. You start with understanding what an entrepreneur does, which most people also get wrong. It would take me a long time to explain how you should really look at entrepreneurialism, but understand that you're creating something that's bigger than you. That's the plan if you want to build a business.
You have to approach even the steps of building a business a little bit differently than most people do. Once you know how to look at business, you then focus on your strength, isolate it, and know which one you're going to be using in the business. You then take that strength and build out a positioning so that you are the default choice in a market where the biggest loser is the person who doesn't buy from you. You end up with a much stronger value proposition because of it.
From there, it's about using marketing strategies that are very effective in getting the word out that you are the default choice. It's a very step-by-step process. Most people ignore Step One as far as being a better entrepreneur. They ignore Step Two, what makes them unique. They ignore Step Three as far as building a positioning around it. They jump right to Step Four, doing marketing tactics, and then they're kind of shocked that they don't get the results they had hoped for at the outset.
TAMMY LAWMAN: Do you find that there are certain characteristics that make the best entrepreneurs? Is it something people are born with, or is it something that can be learned?
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour-long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to get your hands on ALL 24 interviews, simply click here and check out Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.
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