Three Uncomfortable Truths About Why Most Businesses NEVER Crack Through To Top Income
It doesn’t much matter where you are in your business at the moment. You can be a well-established pro who knows his income ought to be higher. Or you can be a beginner coming out of the gate and trying to make your way…as long as you have your thinking straight and are serious about your business, you can hit the 7-figure income mark.
However, there are three “uncomfortable truths” about why most small business owners never will.
Truth #1: The highest income people tend to get paid more for who they are than what they do.
You are not entitled to a high income. Just because you have your law degree…your doctor degree…your certification in whatever… and 25 years of experience…etc. This does not mean you will automatically get paid more.
Think about athletes. NBA player Derrick Rose who plays for the Chicago Bulls is one of the highest paid athletes—even though he has been riddled with injuries most of his career. Tim Tebow, whose NFL career never put him in the same category of the best athletes in the game, made millions in endorsements. Why? Simply for being “Tim Tebow.”
So building up who you are is vastly more important than what you do or your competency level.
Truth #2: The path to more, more easily obtained and better customers/clients/patients, and consequently better fees, higher income, and more opportunity is NOT in working to become a better “doer of your thing.” It’s in working on your BUSINESS.
In other words if you are focused on becoming better and better and better at being an auto mechanic, a speaker, a dentist, a you-name-it…thinking that this will lead you to better clients, better income and a better life, well you are self-sabotaging yourself from joining the ranks of millionaire status.
There is no such automatic link, warranty or entitlement. It’s just not how business works. Nor is there a threshold that can be met and crossed before you are entitled to good money.
So the first quantum breakthrough in status and income is making the mental, emotional and actual shift from “doer of thing” to “marketer of self.”
The second quantum shift is moving from “doing work for money” to designing, developing and building a business. By business I mean, a process for monetizing your skill-sets, managing your customer/client/patient relationships, expanding your range and diversity of income sources, and developing assets.
But the most important point to grasp here is that technical excellence does not automatically bring excellent income.
Power is what brings it. That is having customers/clients/patients seeking you out, paying your fees without resistance, status, top income, and wealth.
Power is rarely give in recognition of skill. It is taken by application of business principles. Business owners who refuse to learn these principles, who turn their back on them in favor of working on becoming a better “doer of their thing,” who will not control and use them, are doomed forever to always be seeking (“work”) and rightly worrying that the big payday may never come.
Truth #3: An old one: The definition of INSANITY is: doing the same things the same way over and over again while hoping for different results.
You need to be willing to look for and accept a different approach—even a different concept of yourself and your business. That different approach may include a fundamental change in the way you think of yourself, your role, your business, and the way you present yourself to clients.
Some of it might feel uncomfortable. It certainly will be different from what you see others in your same profession/business/category doing.
At the risk of being obvious, one way you fundamentally increase your income is by increasing your value to those who pay you money. But most business owners invest all their energy in only one means of increasing their value: “doing their thing” better.
This is akin to trying to lose weight, keep it off, and be healthier only by reducing the quantity of calories, carbs and fat you eat—with no changes in physical movement, exercise, food choices, nutrition, nutritional supplementation and mental attitude management. Yes, you can lose some weight by doing just one thing to further and further extremes, but as any dieter will attest, you hit a wall when no more pounds can be lost even if you eat nothing but a leaf of lettuce with a squirt of lemon for dinner every night.
Sorry, but getting better and better and better at your “thing” will slam you into an income barrier and will NEVER lift you over that wall.
You need to increase your value to your clients/customers/patients in multiple ways in order to multiply your income and demand for your products or services.
If you want to leap-frog to a much higher income, then you must master marketing of yourself, use a more sophisticated approach to your business and your work with customers and focus on learning the strategies that are proven to catapult wealth.
The Kit Factor 