Stay away from ‘toxic’ people
by Greg Milner on 14/08/08 at 1:37 am
Had two conversations this week which demonstrate clearly how frustrating it must be for so many people who are bursting at the seams to succeed – only to be held back by others like a ball-and-chain around the ankles.
One was a very sincere salon owner who had applied for a 30-day Test Drive of the Worldwide Salon Marketing Inner Circle marketing and mentoring program. Turns out she is the family’s major breadwinner, with her ‘house-husband’ staying at home to look after the family. At age 37, she was working her fingers to the bone, helped only by a part-timer. It had been this way for the past SEVEN YEARS!
I asked her the hard question: “If you keep doing it the way you’ve always done it, can you see yourself still doing the same thing ten years from now?”
As I suspected, it was her husband who was holding her back, too fearful to allow her to invest in anything that would help leverage her off the tools and turn her ‘job’ into a real business. By the end of the conversation she was reduced to tears of frustration. She would have to go home and ask (beg!) the husband for his blessing to join the program.
Not surprisingly, I haven’t heard from her since.
The second conversation was with another lady; different circumstances, same frustrations. She’s a sales rep for a skin care product company, whose owners are blinkered by the ‘old school’ of sales – knocking on doors, cold calling. That’s all they know, that’s the way everybody else does it. Too ignorant/narrow-minded/pig-headed to even investigate the possiblity that there might actually be more effective ways of getting customers (eg, carefully-drafted direct response marketing that gets customers calling you instead of you chasing them.)
If the dilemma faced by these two ladies resonates with you, listen up:
If you keep asking permission, sooner rather than later you’ll find somebody who’ll say NO. It’s easier to seek forgiveness that it is to get permission in the first place.
Find yourself in the position where your ambitions, desires, hopes and dreams are blocked by the ignorant, the timid, the fearful, those stubbornly resistant to change?
If you can’t easily remove yourself from them (husband, wife etc) then suck it in, grit your teeth and commit to change without enrolling them in the process. Bite off more than you can chew, and chew like hell. And when you succeed (not if…when) then you can justifiably go back and say ‘I told you so’.
And if, as I told the sales rep, you’re hamstrung by a boss who will obstinately refuse to get out of the way of his own failure - to educate himself on better ways to do business, to bring in customers, to market his company using brains instead of brawn and hard labour – then for the sake of your own sanity, you have a duty to yourself to remove yourself from that toxic influence.
It’s about two very simple, but BIG things. Making the decision… and then acting on it.
Yes, being a member of the Inner Circle program gives you the tools, the guidance, the inspiration and the encouragement to make your salon or spa successful. But only YOU can make the decision and take the action to join in the first place.
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| Rebecca Skehan of Gaia Hair – from $8,000 a month to $22,000 a month… |
Speaking of success - a topic that’s far more palatable, easier to digest and produces less stomach acid than failure – I’m always delighted to hear of the great successes of our Inner Circle members, many of whom have made the tough decisions above and are very shortly thereafter reaping the benefits of those decisions.
Like IC member Rebecca Skehan, of Gaia Hair in an outer southern suburb of Brisbane, Queensland.
Rebecca was savvy enough to join the Inner Circle program and get her marketing kit before she even opened the doors of her salon last year. Her sales figures after one year in the program speak for themselves:
Sales in July 2007: $8,119 – with two full time staff
Sales in July 2008: $22,669 - with 1 full time staff member, one part-timer, and 1 apprentice.
That’s a shade under 300% growth in 12 months. If you play the video in the right column of this page, you can see and hear Rebecca talking about this experience.
SYDNEY Road to Riches Conference Bursting at the Seams
As of today – Thursday, August 14 – we have 278 salon & spa owners registered for Monday’s day-long marketing conference at the Novotel Brighton Beach hotel in Sydney. That’s a big day, and if past conferences are anything to go by, every one of them will leave dazed, thrilled, a little bewildered by the information they’ve absorbed – and fired with new determination to make serious changes in their business and personal lives.
Late breaking news: Australia’s most inspiring motivational speaker, Pat Mesiti, will be there to give us his own (fire)brand of get-up-and-go business-boosting training. Pat is one speaker I never get tired of listening to.
And at the end of the day, somebody’s going to ride out of the hotel on our door prize, a brand-new, fully registered $4,000 Vespa scooter. Can’t wait to see that.
NOTE TO MEMBERS:
Inside the ‘sealed section’ Members area, look in the Newsletters category for new templates for you, in Microsoft Publisher format, in both US Letter and A4 sizes. These are templates of the very successful monthly newsletters created and used profitably by IC members Angeline and Andrew Griggs of Nails & Beauty with Attitude in Cairns, Queensland.
Simply download them and use them as your own.
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A post by Greg Milner The odd idea, a bit of prodding, a nudge here and there, a little fun, and the occasional dose of brutal reality. Greg is co-founder and CEO of Worldwide Salon Marketing, a writer, direct response marketing consultant, specialist marketing systems adviser and coach. He (sometimes) accepts private consulting clients. |
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