Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction

Business is as I talked about in the first part of the personal mba course, business is a fascinating, fascinating topic because it's the one area of life where you can spend a lot of time and a lot of energy helping somebody else and do it in a way that makes it sustainable because they pay you the more you help other people, the more they pay you, which gives you money and resource is and all sorts of wonderful things so you can go and help more people and that cycle just continues and so businesses this fascinating area of life where you can invest yourself and help more and more and more people and make money doing it and how fun doing it and so tow orient ourselves as as ah, russ said earlier, this is part two of the personal mba course when I usually teach this material, I teach it in in my hometown of fort collins, colorado, and we spend three days talking through all of the most fundamental ideas in business. So part one of the personal mba on creative live was talking about bu...

siness, reviewing business fundamentals, what businesses are, how they work and how to create an effective business that actually works part two and what we're going to be talking about today is an and tomorrow is the softer side of business how to work with yourself how to work with other people, how to learn new things, how to make sure that these ideas that you have up in your head can actually be translated into something in the real world that can help people. Okay, so I just want to take just a few minutes to recap the main lessons of part once we can kind of ground ourselves into what is a business and how does it work, and how can we use that knowledge to actually create some sort of result? Now, the best way that I like to think about effective business, what does it need to be good at business is clear, calm, systematic thinking when you're running a business or when you're working in a business there's a lot to do there's a lot to pay attention to. There are some things that are more important thing, others, and so the process of becoming good at business is really training yourself to think in a clear, calm, systematic way. So when the world is chaos around you and customers are calling and you have five billion projects and you don't know what to do, these ideas are designed to really help you understand and break down and try to figure out what's the most important, most valuable thing that you could be learning we're doing right now, okay? There's also a very basic approach that I personally take to teaching business, which is we're going to be talking about core ideas, general principles, things that apply in lots of different situations because when you know the core ideas when you know the core principles you can use them in in millions of different situations to accomplish the result. So we're not going to talk about how to get five million followers on twitter right that's a tactic and sometimes some tactics are useful and very often they're not so what we're going to focus on in this course is teaching you the principles that will help you decide if getting five billion followers on twitter is a valuable use of your time or not and if not what you should be doing that will provide value to your customers or your business and this is one of my favorite poets ever that's from what ralph waldo emerson as two methods there maybe a million and then some but principles are few the man who breasts principles khun successfully select his own methods the man who tries methods ignoring principles is sure to have trouble. So what we're going to be talking about in this course our principles not necessarily the tactics will mention some tax six two but it's designed this course is designed to help you really understand the most important ideas so you can go off and do what you need to do the other nice thing about business when you really understand it when you spend some time really understanding what businesses are and how they work, what you'll find is a lot of business principles, a lot of business teachings reduced to common sense and simple arithmetic and that's great because your business conf eel very large and very overwhelming at times, but when you really understand the core principles, they're very, very simple and because they're simple, they're easy to understand they're easy to implement, so we're not going to be talking about anything of either in part one or over the course of the next two days that involves advanced mathematics involved spreadsheets involves things that particularly for for creative type people kind of, you know, shuts down right? Scary, intimidating we're not going to talk about that stuff. These principles are all common sense in simple arithmetic, it got it good so far, you know, to ground ourselves in again what a business is and how business works. I teach an idea called the five parts of every business, which is just a definition. What are we doing when we say that we are doing business? What is the business? What is a business at a very basic fundamental level? And the five parts of every business means that every single business larger, small from the largest ball time national corporation with billions of dollars a year in revenue to the smallest garage micro venture that you do just created on a whim right what makes a business a business and it turns out five things the first of those things is what's called value creation every single business creates something of value you two other people right could be a products could be a service could be subscription or some type of resource that is useful to a paying customer so if you want to have a business you need to create something value valuable to somebody in the real world that's that's willing to pay it right or to pay for it the second part of every business is marketing so once you have this this wonderful thing of value if nobody knows that you exist nobody can buy your product or nobody can pay you for what you've created right so marketing is the idea of attracting attention to this wonderful valuable thing that you've created and maybe making people interested in learning more so not necessarily buying yet but just interested tell me more this looks cool ok that's marketing sales is the process of turning a prospect someone who's interested in what you may have to offer into a paying customer so it's the process of getting a person who said I'm interested into actually pulling out their wallet checkbook credit card and saying I'll take one here's my money right that sales value delivery is the idea that when you take somebody's money and you promised them value if you don't give them what you promised, you're not running a business, you're running a scam, and so value delivery is the idea of what is it that you have to do from the time that you take someone's money to actually deliver this thing of value that you've promised? And so everything from from order fulfillment to customer service is all part of this process, delivering the value that you promised in a way that hopefully makes the customer happy make sense and the fifth part of every business his finance and finance is the part of business that is really scary and intimidating to people usually it's actually quite simple, so when you're creating value, you usually spending money when your marketing your spending money when you're selling money comes in. Yeah, yeah for sales right when you're delivering value your spending money and finances, just the process of doing two very simple things looking at all the money that's flowing in and all of the money that's flowing out in answering two very important questions first is more money flowing and then flowing out because if not, you're in trouble and second, is it enough? Is it enough to make all of this effort worthwhile? If it is congratulations, you have a successful business it doesn't matter if you make ten dollars it doesn't matter if you make ten billion dollars as long as what you are doing is worthwhile for the effort you're putting in that is the on ly same definition of business success the night off and that really is a business in five steps value creation marketing sales value delivery finance if you're doing those things and roughly that order you're running a business ok that makes sense now part one of the course the personal mba course on creative life focused on the what businesses do part so we went through and in very deep detail into each of those five parts of every business and talked about the core concepts what we're going to do into this course over the next two days is talk about how to do it right so it's one thing to know the principles of marketing it's one thing to know the principles of talking to a customer in a way that results in the sale it's one thing to know what you need to do to analyze finances appropriately right but that's not all that's required of us in business we actually have to do this stuff right you know it's it's nice to know how tio construct a cash flow statement in theory it's another thing to actually sit down in front of your computer and start the calculations right and that's hard sometimes because we all have a lot to do, uh, so working with yourself, understanding how you collect and process information, how you make decisions, how you decide what to work on versus not to work on is really important, and we start getting into wonderful, fascinating topics like behavioral psychology and there's a lot in the literature that can help us understand how we think and how we behave that will actually make it easier for us to sit down in front of our computer or whatever tool that we used to do our work and actually get the work done. So we're going to be talking about understanding human psychology, how we think, how we feel, how we process, how we make decisions and how we use that to actually get a result. Now, when you know about how people work, you could also work magically with prospects better good work with customers, better you can relate to people, you can manage them, you could lead them. And so all of the things that we'll be talking about in terms of behavior of psychology are really, really valuable when it goes when it comes to marketing and sales and customer service, and all of those those wonderful parts of business that involved relating to people and communicating to people and leading people understanding psychology also helps us would we want to learn something new? So a lot of you know, particularly if you're freelancer were a solo entrepreneur or somebody who is just getting started in business, there's a lot to learn there's a lot to do. You may not know how to do all the stuff you need to do and the thing that I've noticed and and this really is a clear defining line between people who decide to go into business and succeed and decide to kind of dabble with business and and decide it's hard and not do it anymore is really this the people who don't succeed say, oh, you mean, I'd need to learn how to sell in order to run a business? I don't know how to do that, so I'm going to go do something else, right? The people who succeed say I have to sell to run a business, I don't know how to do that, so I'm going to sit down and learn how to do it. So we're going to talk about this great topic and the focus of my most recent research on the topic of skill acquisition. How do you decide that you want or needed to learn how to do something and actually sit down and learn how to do that thing? And if if there's a process there's a method there's things that you can do to make it easier on yourself to learn what you need to know and if you know how to learn in a smart way you can decide to learn anything and go from knowing absolutely nothing to being really good in a very short period of time we're going to talk about skill acquisition now the last thing we're going to talk about in this in this course as a topic is building systems which is really, really important and because I know creative live folks tend to be very entrepreneurial and very creative and artistic this is the part of business that has a lot of misconceptions because you start talking about things like systems and processes and checklists and it's like oh you know don't constrain my creativity, right? This is boring boring stuff new building systems is the sexiest parts business no joke, no joke and the reason is very simple there are things that that are involved in running a business that you're going to need to do pretty consistently right bringing in a new customer, sending an invoice you know all of those things that are really necessary to make a business run and sometimes take a lot of time so if you don't have systems and you don't have processes, what you find as a creative person is your spending all of this time and all of this energy doing this process stuff that you hate and you don't have any time to be creative but if you spend a little time learning what systems are and how they work and how to build one, and how to improve one, what you'll find is just a little time building and maintaining and improving systems will save you so much time and energy that you have more time to be creative. You have more time to do your photography or do your art or do this thing that you made you excited about going into business in the first place. So we're going to talk about a whole bunch of things that you can do in your business to make it run very smoothly, very efficiently and in a way that allows you to get a better result and focus on what you like doing don't make sense, all right? I've got a lot of people already who are getting very excited about systems. Alaia williams, who was here a couple weeks ago, says, I think six systems are sexy, I love work. Yes, I created a media building systems I love that, so you're not alone. Seriously, we're going to be talking about a lot of information if the big thing that you take away from this course is building a system to accomplish a result is a sexy, fun thing. My work here is done seriously. Love it. Yes, and girl says he's, making me sweat. My brain is jumping. Yes, but I think the right attitude to be in right at the beginning. Excellent. All right, good to go understand where we are in this whole process. So here's, the organization of over the next two days we're going to talk about skill acquisition first because it's really fun. We can get some good quick winds in terms of understanding how to learn things in a way that gets you a particular result. We're going to go from there into the basics of behavioral psychology. Uh, and then finish up the day with personal productivity. So by the end of the day, you will know how to get things off of your to do list on here done list extremely quickly, extremely efficiently. You can start putting network right away. Tomorrow will reconvene and talk about management and communication and leadership. So working with others working with other people and then really dig deep into the system's side of things how to build a system. And then I will be open for q and a about anything.