By Ken Brokaw
Remember the first time you rode a bike? I am not talking about training wheels here. I mean the real deal! It was liberating. It was a sign of accomplishment.
Think about business just like you would bicycling. Learning to ride a bicycle takes grit and determination to get started. At first you fail over and over trying to balance your bicycle and get some momentum. You fall, get up, dust off the dirt and try again. Business is the same when you first start out. Failure is a part of the learning process. It’s important to fail and learn how to recover quickly. It may be a wasted inventory or lost opportunity due to pricing. There are thousands of ways to fail within your business at first. But just like riding a bike, you learn from your mistakes. The key is to only fail at that one thing once and keep moving forward. I remember when I first started Facebook marketing. I truly didn't know where to start, how to target my audience best or, worst of all, which image to use to get people to click on the advertisement. This is a fail, fail, fail, fail, succeed process. You must keep failing in order to understand what your audience will not click on in order to find out what they will click on.
After learning from your mistakes you start to gain some momentum. When you start to gain momentum in riding a bicycle, you want to keep it going. If not, the bike will tip over. The moment you stop peddling your bike is the moment it starts to slow down and eventually causes you to crash or fall over.
When I found an ad that finally got a click through and conversion rate I was happy with, I coasted on that momentum. I didn't keep peddling. I didn't keep my momentum going by continuing to split test and simply relied on that one ad. Well, the audience got bored of that ad and I lost all my momentum by not keeping up with the process. Business is all about moving forward. Some days you may move slower than others but the key is to keep pushing.
When you first start riding a bike, you learn to do so on a one-speed bike. Eventually, you move up to a bike that has multiple gears. Gears on a bicycle are there to help us maintain or increase our momentum. Once you gain enough momentum in one area of your business, look for other avenues (or gears) you can use to strengthen your momentum. Facebook is not the only marketing channel your customers live in. Can you utilize the same strategy for Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, email marketing, trade shows or direct mail. If all of these areas start to help you move your business forward, it will be hard for you to lose momentum because one channel starts to lose traction. When you start to figure out how to use multiple gears (channels) in your business, you will see massive results simply based on the fact that momentum creates income. Gears make our lives easier by creating less resistance. In our business, there are literally thousands of gears you can use. They don't have to come in the form of different channels such as my marketing example. They can come in the form of employees, tools, virtual assistants, partnerships and more.
You will find that some areas have more resistance than others. It may be that the cost to acquire a customer is higher or maybe the barrier of entry is more work than others. Identify the ones that yield the highest results. This way, you may have a bunch of easy channels. If and when you fail, it will be easy to pick up and gain momentum again. Look for ones that yield high results and have a little more resistance.
The key to starting your business is to keep moving forward. Fail, learn quickly and peddle until you find momentum. Whatever you do, don’t stop.
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Ken Brokaw is the author of "Leveling Up Your Life: Build a Business Around Your Life, Not A Life Around Your Business." See more at www.LevelingUpYourLife.com.