A few years ago saw the opening of the Hindhead Tunnel; a £371 Million road bypass project almost completed. It boasts to be the longest road tunnel in the UK measuring at 1.1 miles and is a most beautifully designed – almost TelyTubby like in appearance – piece of engineering work.

The A3 is a very busy dual carriageway that cuts the village of Hindhead in half and the traffic lights (just 400 yards from the end of our road) have become notorious in causing anything from 30 minutes to 3 hours of delay to both Southbound and Northbound traffic up and down the South East of England.

I moved to Hindhead with my family more than ten years ago when the plans for the Tunnel were still being debated. Hindhead back then was – in property prices – the poorer sister to the more desirable area of Haslemere. As the Tunnel project looked to be imminent, we decided the house we liked would be a sound financial investment. Once the Tunnel opened, Hindhead would become a village again; the juggernauts and lorries took away from the centre.

It took persistence!

But that was ten years ago. We honestly thought that a project like this would be approved much sooner. Campaigning for a new road started back in the 1970’s and yet it took more than 35 years for plans to be approved.

It took years and years of persistence campaigning to find a solution that suited the majority and approval from the Department of Transport.

Your small business marketing activity

What’s this got to with your business and marketing activities?

One of the reasons why so many of you fail at your marketing is because of a lack of persistence.

You may have read somewhere that it takes on average of 7 times to be in touch with someone before they become ready to buy from you. As the average consumer gets more and savvier and competition gets more and more competitive, this figure for most of you will actually be far higher!

I have had clients subscribe to my newsletter and receive it for two years or more before they feel ready to invest in business coaching or one of my products to help with small business marketing. It can take ten, twenty or even thirty times to be in touch with someone before they will buy from me.

It’s too easy to give up on your marketing efforts!

But it’s easy to give up. It’s easy to decide that after you’ve left one message for that potential client if they haven’t called you back within the week, you’ll drop them from your follow up list. After all, you don’t want to appear desperate do you?

It’s too easy to write off that direct mail campaign in which you posted one voucher to a few hundred prospects. You only got one response back so direct mail mustn’t work for you.

It’s too easy to publish a few tweets and start up a Facebook Page only to give up after a month because it’s not generated one spark of interest.

What if the campaigners for the A3 road bypass gave up after ten years? After twenty years? Or even after thirty? Yup, that’s right. We wouldn’t be enjoying a juggernaut free road through our village.

Hang tough. Be persistent and believe that if your proposition was good enough to shout about the first time, it’s good enough to keep on shouting.

You need constant and consistent follow up.

When you are running your own business, it is very easy to find yourself busy – ALL of the time.

When you aren’t answering the phone or replying to emails, you are speaking to clients, going to meetings and doing the work that you are being paid to do.  All that rushing around and no time to think!

But as a small business owner, it is critical to make the time for mental space.  And I am not just talking about spending valuable time on planning.

I am talking about time spent gazing out of the window watching the sun shine through the trees.  I am talking about the time spent walking around to your neighbour without listening to the latest podcast or business audio download.

It’s amazing how much clearer your business becomes and what the next stage of your action plan needs to be when you spend time leaning back in your chair – just gazing!

How do you create mental space for your business?  Leave your thoughts as a comment below.

Time is a precious commodity, there is no doubt. As I watch my teenage children grow older each and every year, I wonder how my little babies grew up so fast to become young adults.

But time is equal for us all. Every second, minute and hour equals the exact same period as everyone else’s.

Time isn’t like currencies that go up and down depending on the state of the economy. Time isn’t like the price of oil that rises and falls depending on tax and the state of peace in certain countries.

Time ticks on as slowly and fast as it always does.

So how come some people get more stuff done than others?

How come some people can drift around all day with a contented smile on their face and yet others run around with harried expressions, shouting at their watches like The White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland?

I’ve just come off the phone with an accountant who has wanted to create an online training programme for the past 7 years. She wants to move some of her income generation over to activities that don’t need her time to deliver.

But the irony is that she lacks the time to create them in the first place.

Time is not the problem here.

The problem is our choice with what to do with it.

Now, I know there are things that HAVE to be done. In the case of this accountant, there were tax returns that have to be in or her business would face fines from the tax office.

But if someone was to phone you up with a serious family emergency, I bet you would drop everything there and then – no matter what the fines or legal implications in not getting done what you need to get done – and you would go and deal with your family emergency.

(And this actually did happen in this case a few years previously.)

So why do we let stuff go undone when we think we have no time to do it in?

What’s so different with deciding to deal with a family emergency and deciding to deal with a business project that’s been on your to-do list for the past 7 years?

The only difference is the motivation and the desire to do it.

So don’t give me that never enough time excuse.

Either make a decision to park that idea (which is absolutely OK, by the way and it’s not seen as a failure if you decide not to make something happen because there will be plenty more great ideas that will come to you) or make a decision to commit to getting it done.

Your choice … because there’s always enough time.

The double-edged sword of social media.

On one hand, social media has revolutionised the way we can market ourselves and our businesses. Giving us tools to become visible and share our expertise.

On the other, it’s keeping so many of us away from fulfilling our potential.

On the whole, I believe you should be upbeat on Facebook and Instagram. After all, I don’t know many businesses who are successful in attracting new clients by moaning, ranting or posting updates about how much they are hating their life right now.

“OMG I am sick and tired of my clients this week. One won’t pay on time and the other three can’t make a decision on this bloody project. #hatemyjob”

You may think this from time to time. But you wouldn’t put this on your Facebook profile, would you?!

What I do see a lot of is the Prozac version of upbeat.

“OMG I can’t believe I’m attracting all these wonderful clients. I’m so happy right now and so grateful. #lovemyjob”

Now, of course, it’s absolutely fine to post Prozac-happy. When you’ve got something to celebrate, celebrate it loud and clear. I don’t think enough people do, particular here in our British culture.

But when you open up your Facebook newsfeed and you’ve been having a rough time of it, seeing posts like this over and over again can affect your ability to believe in yourself.

It’s really easy to take this snapshot of Facebook “reality” and think that because everyone posting in your newsfeed is having a #perfectlife … what’s wrong with me?

Why can’t I feel #lovemyjob like this all the time?

What am I doing wrong?

So my message to you, this week, is to celebrate and be upbeat on Facebook. But always be aware of how your newsfeed affects you in your real life.

#perfectlife is a life of filters, taking-50-selfies-before-I-find-the-one-I-dont-look-like-my-mother and of joyous quotes of famous people posing inspirationally in front of mountains or blue skies.

If you’re having a crap week or three, don’t feed your crapness with Prozac-happy. Because life isn’t #perfect.

When you run your own business, it’s easy to get personal about what you do. You care passionately about the images and messages that are used to represent your business. You worry if a spelling mistake or grammatical error causes offence. You worry that the price you want to charge isn’t too expensive to put people off.

You may even go to extremes and worry that the image on your About Us page is 10 pixels out of place and that the letterheads you got printed specially for a direct mailing do not quite match the Pantone of your logo.

Your business is a representation of you … and you want it to be perfect!

But the problem with this ideology of this perfection is that perfection causes rot.

Rot in your marketing. Rot in the products you create. Rot in the way you attract clients to your business.

Perfection is a disease that kills your business in a matter of months!

When I first started up in business in 2004, I discovered a coach called Andrea J Lee. One of her catch phrases was ” Completion, Not Perfection”.  And thank god I saw the light early on.

This is a message that I carry with me day in, day out. I slap it in the faces of my clients when they go on for too long about the detail of wanting to get it “just right”. And it was the BIG message that I got again when I attended a Nigel Botterill’s Marketing Madness Day in Bolton.

Nigel and the Entrepreneurial Circle team decided it would be kind of exciting to change the agenda of the normal marketing day planned and launch a business, live to an audience of 500 people. At 7 pm Sunday evening, Nigel told us what they were launching and they had just 24 hours to make sales.

Everything was built from scratch: the website, e-commerce platform to enable them to make sales online, the Facebook Fan Page (which incidentally created 62 likes, converting 2 of these Likers to paying customers, proving that when social media is done right … it can be profitable!), email campaigns, voice broadcasts, Google AdWords campaign, SMS texting … in fact there were 16 different types of communications and marketing channels used to set up and promote this business.

OK, they had a team of 4 giving it their all to get this business up and running. But even with that team of 4, none of us were in any doubt that they proved what could be achieved in 24 hours was quite inspiring.

You see they didn’t faff about with image placements. They didn’t change the logo, even when the whole room thought it would look better with a quick graphic change. They made a mistake and missed out a tracking url in one of the email campaigns, but still sent it out anyway.

They were against the clock … and good was good enough.

And that clock clicks for you too! So you may not be under pressure to perform in front of 500 people within a 24 hour time period. But you are under pressure to create that product so you can generate revenue. You are under pressure to get that website live so your potential clients can find you and do business with you.

If you don’t think you are under that pressure, then give up. Just pass all your leads on to your competitor down the road. Your clients aren’t that fussy. They just want their problems solved and they will hand over their hard earned cash to someone who can meet their needs, wants and expectations.

Tough love? Well, that’s what I give. Because good is good enough.

And if I find you moving a website image around by 10 pixels to the right. And then again to the left. Or spell checking an email newsletter for the 3rd time … I will hunt you down.

Get implementing because good is good enough [rant over!]

Can you really create extra time to spend on your business?

When you run your own business and work for yourself, spending time on your business can be hard to do.  After all, you are so busy trying to market yourself and then working on the clients you generate, spending time “on” your business can be hard to proritise.

Are you really able to increase the number of hours that you have in a day?

No, of course not.  Time management is such an awful phrase, isn’t it!  Of course you can’t manage time. Time just keeps ticking away the same way that it has been for millions of years.

What you can manage is yourself.  How you manage yourself in the hours that you have available is what counts.

And making sure you spend some of these precious hours working “on” your business and not “in” your business, is critical to your long term success (as well as your personal sanity!)

So how do you create the time for your business?

This topic comes up time and time again within my coaching and mentoring sessions (especially in regards to creating social media strategies!) and these were some of the strategies that we use to help create the time.

Use your diary. Whether you prefer electronic or good old fashioned paper, your diary can be used for more than just your client appointments and networking meetings.  Why not schedule in a “Meeting with Me” (and never re-schedule!).

Time commit your deadlines. Planning this month’s marketing is all very well, but if this planning session just doesn’t make it to the top of pile of things to do, it is never going to happen.  And all that means is another month of not setting up your LinkedIn profile or planning out your speaking strategy!  Set a deadline to projects.  Commit to a time, day and month – and stick to it.

Block out key days in your schedule. Whether you can work full time on your business or part time, you can’t work “in” your business all the time.  The magic formula that works for me is 3/5 working “in” the business, 1/5 on writing, setting up systems and general admin and 1/5 “on” the business for my business & marketing planning, including reviewing activity reports and statistics.

Learn and build your skills. It may be that it is your confidence or a lack of understanding that is stopping you from taking the time to plan out your business or marketing strategy.  Build up your confidence by going out to learn how to do plan a business, set goals and review your finances.  Don’t just stick your head in the sand and complain that you don’t have enough time.  That’s a poor excuse.

Little and often. Far better to spend one hour a week thinking, planning and reviewing your business every week, than leaving it until you run out of clients and start panicking about the lack of cashflow.  The business planning process becomes much more daunting then.

Take off and disappear. It is amazing how a change of scenary can allow us to be more creative with our business.  Sit and stare, let your mind think without your phone ringing or your inbox bleeping at you.  You may just come back to your business refreshed and renewed.

And finally, stop wilfing. A great term which stands for “What Was I Looking For?”  For those of you who spend hours being “busy” in front of your PC, searching for websites and reading articles, you may be better off pulling the plug and give those hours back to planning and developing new programmes.

What other ideas do you use to create more time for you in your business?