How a Simple Mindset Shift Saved Us 8 Years of Hard Work

Transcript

Hi I’m Carmen Sognonvi, and in this video I’m going to share with you the 3-step method to leapfrogging ahead of your competition. And it’s got nothing to do with marketing or sales – it’s a fundamental mindset shift.

If you want to run a successful local business, the first thing you have to do is come to terms with the fact that you don’t know everything. Let me say that again, you don’t know everything.

Don’t assume that just because you have a lot of skills and a lot of experience, those things are going to translate into success for this particular local business. You have to let go of your ego.

Maybe you had a dry cleaning business that did phenomenally well and you were able to sell it for a nice sum, and now you want to open a restaurant. Just because you rocked the dry cleaning game doesn’t mean you know the next thing about the food industry.

Or even if you already owned a successful restaurant in the past, so you have experience in the industry, and now you want to open a new restaurant, it’s still not the same.

The neighborhood you’re in now may be completely different in terms of demographics and what they’re willing to spend. Or maybe something in the restaurant industry has fundamentally shifted in the years since you closed your previous restaurant, and you need to do business in a new way you don’t know about yet.

My point is, every local business is unique so it’s important to keep your ego in check and realize that you don’t have all the answers.

Now, you’ve accepted the fact that you don’t know everything. So what do you do now?

The next step is to find people who are at the top of their game in your industry, find out what they’re doing that’s working well, and model it.

When we first opened Urban Martial Arts, we were fortunate to get a lot of great advice from a friend of ours who owns one of the top-grossing schools in the Bronx. We were able to cut our learning curve tremendously, avoid a lot of expensive mistakes, and it’s the reason that we were able to do in 2 years the kind of numbers that it takes other schools 10 years to reach.

Now, one important note. You only want to model people who are successful. If you own a dental practice, don’t just talk to a couple other dentists who are doing ok. If you do that, the best results you’ll ever see are the best results they’ve seen – just ok. Instead, you want to find out who owns the dental practice that’s absolutely blowing everyone else out the water. That’s the person you want to learn from.

Ok, so you’ve found a good mentor and you’re implementing the tips he’s giving you, but you’re not seeing the same results. What do you now?

This has actually happened to us. We had a mentor who operated a really successful school, and he encouraged us to put on free birthday parties for our students. The idea was that they’d invite 15 of their friends, they’d get to try out some karate, see how fun it was, and their parents would want to sign them up!

So every weekend we were doing 2, 3, 4 free birthday parties and while it didn’t cost us all that much financially, it was a huge drain on our time and our energy. And no one was signing up!

Finally we realized that this was just one idea that wasn’t going to work for us because of the unique characteristics of our neighborhood. It worked for our mentor’s school because parents drove their kids to the party, then sat there and watched. But in our neighborhood people walk everywhere. So kids would just walk over to the party by themselves and their parents would never even set foot in our door, so they never got to see the benefits of what we offer.

No marketing technique, no business practice is universal. If you get advice from a mentor, try it out verbatim first but if it doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to adapt it for the unique characteristics of your business, your clientele, your community, your neighborhood.

So just to recap, if you want to leapfrog ahead of your competition, you need to start with a shift in your own mindset.

1. Realize that you don’t know everything.
2. Model successful businesses
3. Adapt best practices to suit your business

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Thanks, and let me know what you’ve learned from the mentors in your life!

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