This is my 50th blog for my good friend (and literary partner-in-crime) Carol Roth. To celebrate, I am going to share with you 50 principles that I honestly feel are my own secrets to success, many of which are distilled from my four-plus years of blogging for Carol.
Too bad I couldn’t time this for my 50th birthday – I’m 61 now. But I’ll take two out of three.
Here we go:
- Build great relationships, for their own sake. A surprising amount of my business comes from people whom I never planned – or cared – to make money from. We just like and trust each other.
- Don’t sell – find ways to benefit people.
- Pick markets that mere mortals like you are already succeeding in.
- Become the expert at whatever you do.
- Don’t just do a good job for a new client – completely blow them away. Then keep doing it.
- Thank everyone for everything.
- Love your competitors.
- Being self-employed is sober and rational. Having one job that can get whacked at any time is risky and crazy.
- Happily offer and pay finder’s fees.
- Keep building great relationships.
- Don’t “feel the fear and do it anyway.” Fear is usually trying to tell you something.
- Have as few rules for customers as possible.
- You will never become great at something unless you are willing to be crappy at it at first.
- Learn how to really hear and acknowledge people.
- Always speak in terms of what you can do.
- Writing for publication is one of the best marketing skills you can learn. And few things will build your solo business like a successful royalty-published book.
- Lose gracefully and always leave the door open.
- Don’t ever be a prima donna.
- Learn how to apologize and take ownership.
- Don’t forget to build great relationships.
- Your credibility is much more important than your pitch.
- Slow-pay clients (not deadbeats, but the over-bureaucratic) are awesome. Really. If you have the cash flow to deal with them, you can take on a lot of lucrative work that others can’t.
- Give away your very best information.
- Have a great one-sentence brand.
- Forget about fines and penalties. They aren’t worth what they cost your customer relationships.
- Ask people good questions.
- Welcome everyone like your long-lost best friend.
- Link your experiences to other people’s stories.
- Do lots of networking – and don’t confuse it with prospecting.
- Remember to build great relationships.
- Get and keep at least six months of living expenses in the bank.
- Never act hungry for business.
- Don’t compete on price.
- Fire high-maintenance clients.
- You don’t have to do just one thing for a living.
- Treat yourself as well as you treat your customers.
- Cut people a break whenever you can.
- Invest in learning your craft from the best.
- Don’t just work harder, find what motivates you.
- Continue building great relationships.
- Become a student of human behavior and communications skills.
- Look out for the interests of your suppliers and employees.
- Don’t scrimp on health insurance.
- Learn what is important to your clients and cheer it on.
- Have a low-cost entry point for your services, if possible. Make it easy for people to discover how awesome you are.
- Being effective is much more important than being right.
- Treat everyone’s position as that of a totally reasonable person. Even if it isn’t.
- Never try to “educate” customers about how wrong they are.
- Be you.
- Did I mention building great relationships?
To sum up four great years of both blogging and real life in one sentence: if you are kind, connect well with others, make things easy for everyone, don’t push, and become really, really good at what you do (and there is a market for it), I honestly believe you will succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
Here’s to many more blog posts for Carol in the future!