32 | The Rich Were Broke Once: The Power of the Right Decisions

What if the secret to skyrocketing your business lies in breaking all the conventional rules? Join us as we sit down with Tim, a small business owner facing tough times, and challenge him to think outside his industry's box by borrowing successful strategies from unrelated fields. We'll explore questions designed to ignite innovation, such as how to add value if prices were drastically higher or how to market a product for free. This episode promises fresh perspectives that can help you stand out in the market and make your offerings truly unique.

We also tackle the all-too-common dilemma of whether taking on a part-time job helps or hinders your entrepreneurial journey. Through a candid discussion, we reveal the hidden pitfalls of diverting your time and energy away from your business, emphasizing the importance of dedicating yourself fully to your venture. Finally, we'll delve into the power of intentionality and decision-making in achieving success, showcasing inspiring examples of individuals who have risen from humble beginnings to remarkable achievements. This episode is packed with motivational insights and practical advice to empower your path to success.

If you are self-employed or run a small business and feel more like you're self-annoyed then get in touch, visit the website www.theannoyinglyoptimisticshow.com where you can submit a question or problem and start your journey to becoming self-enjoyed! 

The majority of 'business advice' out there isn't aimed at self-employed or micro businesses, following it leaves you frustrated and chasing quick fixes. I specialise in tools, systems, techniques, inspiration and help specifically designed for YOU, the person who has to do it all, who doesn't have a team of people, unlimited resources or the time to spend months learning complicated techniques. 

Transcript

Breaking Business Rules for Success

Speaker 1 0:00

Hey there, listeners, it's your annoyingly optimistic host here bringing you another season of the Annoyingly Optimistic Show. Welcome to Season 2, voicemails to Tim. Now let's meet Tim. He's been running his own small business for almost three years now and let's just say he's hit a bit of a rough patch. You know how it is Sometimes you get so stuck, you make yourself busy and just avoid finding the real problems. Well, that's Tim. So, as a good friend, I decide to leave him a daily voicemail, if I can't get hold of him, filled with nuggets of inspiration, insight and wisdom and downright brilliant ideas to help get him unstuck Every day. In just under 10 minutes I'll share some tips, tricks and a healthy dose of optimism to get Tim, and maybe even you, back on track, because, let's face it, we're all a little tired, in need of help and muddling through. So here we go. Re, oh wait, never mind Tim's being busy. Here's the voicemail I left him today. Hi, tim, sorry I missed you. Good to catch up again.

Speaker 1 0:58

And this one bit of a weird one. I was walking, thought of you, thought I must kind of give you a quick call. Missed you again, so breaking the rules. Now I'm not talking about getting self-arrested and anything illegal or anything like that, not not the big rules, but the rules of business. Yeah, everything great, different, amazing, new, fantastic, that that we have kind of business-wise, product-wise, has generally come out of people breaking the rules, people coming up with something new, coming up with a new way of doing things, of approaching things, and we need to embrace that in our business. And the way to kind of do this is not to, you know, sell shoddy products or anything like that, but it's about thinking outside of the box. It's about breaking the rules of your particular industry. You know, looking at other industries other way companies advertise, other ways they promote things, other ways they sell to their customers, and seeing how you can take that idea into what you're doing.

Speaker 1 2:01

Because often by seeing something else that someone does successfully and co-opting that theory, that way of working, can make a massive difference to our own industry. Because we tend to follow the same patterns, the same style of advertising that our competitors do, that other companies in our niche who are doing really well, we try to kind of copy and emulate those, and often they've got bigger budgets, more staff and things like that. So if we want to cut through, if we want to, you know, really be different. We can sit there and reinvent the wheel and hopefully come up with something stunning and amazing, which we should always try and do anyway but what we can do is we can borrow, we can break the rules of our own industry and see how we can. We can do something differently. You know, it might be a subscription model, it might be a certain kind of giveaway or competition or a way of wording things. I always remember, years and years ago, advising some businesses who starting doing three for two and this is going back to when, you know, boots was one of the pioneers of three for two. You know, and you know, that if a big company is coming up with a particular way of marketing a product or marketing certain areas of products, that they've had focus groups and lots of teams of people doing it. So take that and see, okay, it might not directly apply, but okay, how can I take that idea, that wording, that way of focusing customers, and make it my own, make it work for me, and that's something that that you know will work really well.

Speaker 1 3:32

The other thing about kind of breaking the rules is when you're looking at your competition and how they do it. It's and there's a couple of really nice questions that do this. If you had to charge 10, 50, 100 times more for your product, you had to. There was no reason for what more would you deliver? How would you give them more? How would you add value to what you were doing? How would you change what you're doing? How would you market it differently and give more value? And it's an interesting kind of thing because it can lead to all kinds of well, I do this, this and this will be obvious. And so why aren't you doing that now? You know, because if you come up with those ideas, when you kind of take cost out of the option, well, ok, how can we achieve that same idea where cost isn't a problem, you know, and it forces you to think outside the box.

Part-Time Job Pitfalls

Speaker 1 4:24

The other option is if you had to give your product away for free, how would you market it? How would you get people excited about it? How would you do that kind of same value? It's these kind of questions which challenge us and force us kind of outside of the normal lanes of just doing the same thing over and over again. And suddenly we're confronted with doing things a bit differently, coming them from a different angle and breaking the rules that we'd normally kind of follow. So it's something I want you to kind of think about. So pick some cuts and companies that nothing whatsoever to do with what you do, but you just love their promos, love the way that they kind of do things and approach things and talk about them and, you know, ping me a list of them if you like and let's see how we can take how they market and apply it to you. And all of a sudden you're going to have a fresh way of marketing, fresh way of positioning your products and the chance are you're going to get attention for those because you're going to stand out from all your competitions. So go break some rules and um, and let me know, let me know what you think and let's, let's have a chat about it so I'll catch up with you soon.

Speaker 1 5:30

Bye, tim, hi tim, sorry I missed you again. Um, thanks, for it was great to catch up with you at the weekend. Um, and I'm glad you liked um, the inspired by you, t I and m? Um, and you're interested in steve as well, which I said I'd get a copy of you. So glad you like that bit of a bit of a step outside, um, the normal voicemails. I was leaving you, but yeah, I'm glad they kind of hit home and, um, you've got some questions and some things we're going to crack on with. I wanted to, um, get us back, uh, some some I would say, some more normal ideas, but generally I kind of throw all kinds of wind of wonderful things at you and and this is going to be no different really um so, but so back to normal.

Speaker 1 6:12

From the point of view of it's, it's it's a bit kind of out there and it was something that the the kind of struck me. I think it's one of the very first conversations when we started catching up again which was in my mind and I've talked, you know, a bit about time and we're working on some bits like that but it was this kind of question of and this comes up a fair bit, particularly with people like you, tim, who are self-employed, you know, who have their kind of struggles every now and again, and there comes around this kind of almost it's almost like an annual question, but it comes around every so often of people going should I get a part-time job? You know if, if things are wobbling a little bit and things like that and it's a question. And there's two, two things I want to focus on this idea. The first thing is that that idea of getting a part-time job although it kind of often feels like, well, you know, that will bring me some money and that will help kind of steady the ship, every single time I've been working with someone or know of someone that's done that, going from self-employed and getting a part-time job, it ends up increasing the pressure rather than relieving it, the pressure rather than relieving it.

Speaker 1 7:29

If the money, if obviously money is the, is the pressure we're trying to relieve, because what it does, is it a? It uses that vital resource that I've talked about energy. You're using up that energy, running around, earning money for someone else. And it's that classic thing can't remember who said it? If you're not earning money for yourself, if you're not in charge of yourself, then you're earning it for someone else. You're doing it for someone else. So if you're just working for someone else, you're doing it for someone else. So if you're just working to pay the bills, you're working to pay the mortgage company, the electricity company, the water company. You're not doing it for yourself. And when you, if you're working for someone else to earn a wage to pay those bills. You're working for two other people and even further away from working for yourself. So, firstly, there's an energy cost to that, which again is something that we will dismiss, you know, in in the rush to to fix that financial issue.

Speaker 1 8:15

The other one is the time pressure that it puts on, because and you know we've spoken a bit about your time and I think, if you're considering this, unless you are sitting there twiddling your thumb for half the week and you've literally got 20 hours just kind of going, I've got nothing better to do. I'm just sitting here watching telly. If you've got that much time, then that's time that should be spent in your business and would generate more money in your business. If you've got that much time and you're not doing anything, well then yeah, you could go and get a, a part time job, because it's it's time that's not earning you any kind of money. Now I know for you, tim, you'd wish, you wish you had that much spare time, but you haven't.

Speaker 1 8:58

So you know, getting the part time job not only gives you less energy, it zaps you from that point of view, but it still is the most important commodity. It still is that, that point of view, but it still is the most important commodity. It stills that that commodity of time, and so that's why it typically ends up and again it's not not in all cases, but I would say it's a probably an even 50 50 split that there are those that find some kind of balance, but their business is scaled right back. So if the money you are earning is enough to kind of so that your business is the top up, then fine. But it either ends up just kind of creating this where the, the part-time job, becomes more important and generates more of the income and the self-employed business becomes the the side hustle again. And for the other group of people it's the beginning of the end in terms of slowly that takes up more energy, more time brings in more money. Their business, they're getting less and less return from.

Speaker 1 10:01

Now what typically happens is it very rarely completely kills off the business, because your business is a passion, it's something that you feel you really want to do. So as you feel it waning, it reaches a point of going, I'm losing my business, I'm losing this thing that I really want to do. This wasn't the idea, and often by the time that comes around, not that it's too late, but it's even harder because you've got to then try, and, you know, grab that time back and at that point you've become a bit more comfortable with the second kind of income and things like that. So it's not that it can't work, but it's one of those things that can make things a little bit kind of tricky. So what I want to do because you know me annoyingly optimistic, I never just want to leave that on a downer, you know me annoyingly optimistic, I never just want to leave that on a downer I want to look at the other side of this idea of part-time, because we have these notions of, you know, nine to five, full-time, 40-hour weeks and all the rest of it. And I've said you know I've skirted around it a little bit when you're self-employed, none of that is, or a lot of that isn't relevant.

Speaker 1 11:06

You have to find your own kind of set of working practices and times. The construction of nine to five is a complete construction. You know it's a. It's a modern day thing. You know you go back into history. People worked when there was light. They worked at different times, at different times of the year. Look at different countries. Look at European countries where they have a siesta every single day, that's part of the day. Look at some scandinavian countries where they have literally six weeks off. You know so, different countries, different cultures, different times through history work very differently in terms of how they deal with time.

Speaker 1 11:42

So you have to first of all break through that shackle of oh I have to put this many hours in and I have to do this and this because the reality is most people working nine till five, that 40 hours a week. If they get 30, 20, 18, good productive switched on hours in that they're doing really well. So the whole 40 hours is a is is just a as a construct and you've got to find your own working time within that. But one of the ways to look at this is and that the idea that I said just now, that if you've got 20 hours kicking around, that you're not doing anything enough to fit a part-time job in there cool, go and do one. But one of the other ways of looking at it and this will seem counterintuitive to start is that if you can break down the work that you're doing and really, really focus on every minute, every hour of every day with a view to go right, I'm gonna work 30 hours, 24 hours, basically part-time.

Speaker 1 12:48

Now, if you physically cannot cut down any hours out of your week and you are still struggling to get everything done and manage everything, then that clearly points to the workflows, the systems, the capacity of what you're doing, and you need to really delve into those to make it work for you, not the other way around. If you can quite comfortably cut out big chunks of time by just merely focusing and going, yeah, actually that only takes me a couple of hours. And if I did it all on that day rather than doing bits and bobs over the week, and then it takes me five times as long and you find that you can easily suddenly go. Well, yeah, I could, probably. If I moved a few things around, I could not work those two days a week.

Speaker 1 13:35

As soon as you do that and this comes, you'll see where this links in with this idea of getting a part-time job. If you can do that, then what you've just acknowledged is that whatever you're currently earning, um, you're earning it pro rata, because if you've just taken two days of your week out and let's say you were doing a five day week, which again would be unusual, but it's easy from the maths point of view. You know, if you're earning £50,000 a year and you needed to earn more and you thought you worked five days a week but you've now managed to take two days out're actually working fifty thousand pounds. Fifty thousand pounds from three days work. So your pro rata, you know, if you worked, those five days would be worth a lot more and that alone can help you kind of refocus and go well, wait a minute. Why, why aren't I making the most of those two days?

Speaker 1 14:22

And this comes back to something I said very, very early on what is it you actually want of your business? What is your profit purpose? What is it you want your business to do? Because at that point you can actually go God. If I had those two days, I could spend time with family, I could go and do something else, I could engage in a hobby which would fulfill you and energize you and give you more enthusiasm in your work. You could volunteer, you could go and do a part-time job one day a week, you know, but it all immediately you've restructured and looked at what you're doing and kind of go, wait a minute, I wasn't doing this effectively and there was time left on the table that was just wasting, because we're monumentally fantastic at being busy fools, at sitting down in front of that computer, clocking in and clocking out, and as long as we're moving the mouse and looking at the screen and checking our emails and checking our social media and moving files around and generally in the workspace, we will give ourselves a little kind of pat on the back. But if you're not, we'll give ourselves a little kind of pat on the back.

Speaker 1 15:27

But if you're not actively generating new business, following up business, satisfying your current clients, putting ideas together for future things, if you're not actively really kind of pushing and developing that, then the chances are there's time left on the table that you could spend reading, walking, learning, doing a course, researching, know, researching things for future products, spending time, getting more rest time, whatever it might be. But you've got that time back. And if that then becomes time that you want to get another part-time job, well, you can now fit that in because you're not trying to squeeze it in through everything else. You've actively looked at what you're doing, how you're spending your time, how you're spending your day Is it productive or is it just busy? And that then gives you the impetus to then make those decisions based on what you want.

Empowering Decisions for Success

Speaker 1 16:21

Hi, tim, sorry I missed you again. Hope you're well. Sorry about my last voicemail. It went on and on and on a bit, but sometimes that that happens, I do tend to talk a bit, um, so hope you are, mate. I just had a, an idea. This is probably gonna be complete opposite of the long last one, because it was just something that I think I read or heard kind of recently and it's obviously been bouncing around my mind and it was something you said about kind of being busy the other week and not having enough time, which is one of those kind of struggles and you know every successful person has the same number of hours in the day as the least successful person and things like that.

Speaker 1 16:59

But there's one specific thing and it comes down to this idea of our own own drive, our own creativity, our own personality and what we are really really doing and the decisions that we make. And I mentioned in in the last voicemail left you about, um, you know, intentionality and and we've talked about action and things like that, and this kind of brings all those together, because a lot read, most do the research or whatever you can reel off the names, but a lot of the most successful people, the people that we look up to, the people who you know have achieved amazing things, amassed great wealth and all those kind of things. They were broke once, some of them literally, literally bankrupt, literally, you know, had nothing, and now that they're successful people, and what I want to highlight with that is that, wherever you are in in terms of being busy and wanting more money and not having enough money and things like that the only difference between you and them is the choices they make. If you've got nothing, if you've got no money, got no resources, it's the decisions you make, the intentionality, the commitment, the compounding effect of those little changes, the you know, the energy you put in there, and the, the deciding to be great every day. It's all of a combination of all of those things which combines to to create something, to do something, to to move you forward.

Speaker 1 18:39

And, on this basis of the, the most successful people at one point had no money and now became successful. The only difference is the decisions they made, the choices they made, the direction they took, which means all of us have that power within us. All of us, you know, can potentially do the first bit the being broke. It's then the intentionality and the decisions that we make which takes us to the next step. The intentionality and the decisions that we make which takes us to the next step. Now we've talked about not being able to be, you know, better than the, the sum of the knowledge you have, and things like that. You know these people will have experience, but experience will have been what got them broke. You know it's when those experimentations is those things that they tried, the things that succeeded and the things that didn't, but then it's the learning from that and it's kind of moving forward.

Speaker 1 19:28

So what I want it to be is this kind of empowering idea that whatever you want, wherever you want to go, whatever you want for your profit purpose, for your business, whatever you want to kind of achieve wherever you are right now, whether you feel like things are going well and you've got money in the bank, or you feel like it's a bit tight and you want to earn more, the power is in your hands to change that, to change that direction, to change the fortunes, literally and metaphorically, and actually to make those decisions which then move you in the direction you want to go. Yes, you've got to know what that direction is. You've got to know what the steps are to take you towards that. But it's just this reminder that it's about those decisions that we make. It's about the things that we decide to do. It's about saying no to things, it's about saying yes to the right things. It's about doing the things and committing to them. We have that ability, that power, that potential, wherever we are, to make changes and to get where we want to go, because the most successful people have done it. They've gone from you know nowhere to somewhere.

Speaker 1 20:42

In a book I'm listening to at the moment he does a a potted history of ste, you know, who dropped out of university after one year, was sleeping on campus, was a bit of a celebrity on campus because he never wore shoes, was kind of scrounging food and sleeping on people's floors, you know, and bounced around a few different jobs in between going off and working in the commune, around a few different jobs in between going off and working in the commune. And, you know, the world around him changed in terms of these computer things suddenly appeared and building, you know, motherboards and you know with him and was, and then there was an opportunity, and bosh you know, but it was. He had nothing other than the thoughts, ideas and the energy that he had, and and we all have our own version of that we all have that energy, that drive and something we want to do. It is just the intentionality of deciding how, how, where, when we're going to apply those things and to what end. You know, what is it we want to become on that journey, and that's one of the things I've talked about before is the goal is important. You need to know what you want to achieve, but the steps that you do to to get to that goal is about the person that you want to become and the things that you want to do and that compounding effect of that, day by day, by day, and the result will come if you, you know, choose greatness in the day. So I just wanted to kind of put that out there and this kind of sometimes really, again, we need to be reminded that you know, people that achieve great things don't have some kind of magic time portal to get more things done. People that achieve great things aren't, you know, built, uh, you know, born with a pot of money in their pocket and and a silver spoon and an army of people waiting to make things happen. They make things happen, you know so, if you, the people with nothing, make things happen, the people who have the same amount of time as us, make things happen. It's about that intentionality and deciding to make those things happen. So I just wanted to kind of I just I wanted to throw that one at you, hopefully to kind of spark something, tim, and hopefully that's been useful and can't wait to catch up with you again soon. Bye for now.

Speaker 1 22:55

And that's it for today's episode of Voicemails to Tim on the Annoyingly Optimistic Show. Now, remember, tim might be busy, but we're all in this together. Whether you're tired, in need of help or just muddling through, tim is here for you. Because, well, tim is you. Yes, you heard that right. Tim isn't just my friend, he's a reflection of all of us who are struggling to make it work. T-i-m stands for tired, in need of help and muddling through. So if you're feeling like a Tim, you're not alone For all those ambitious listeners. If you've got a burning business question, a quirky thought or just want to see if you can leave an even weirder voicemail, head over to the website voicemailstotimcom, submit your question and maybe, just maybe, you'll hear your idea in a future Voicemail to Tim. So until then, stay annoyingly optimistic, keep pushing forward and remember if life gives you lemons, leave a voicemail to Tim. So until then, stay annoyingly optimistic, keep pushing forward and remember if life gives you lemons, leave a voicemail about it.