Posts Tagged ‘Patience’

The words you choose to communicate your message matter. You need to pick the right words for your intended audience. You may have heard that you need to dumb down your language for a universal audience. Well maybe, but that is not what I am talking about here. It doesn’t matter if you speak like a Harvard professor or a first-grader, if you use words that your intended audience doesn’t relate to, you’re sunk.

Don’t Cuss at Church

Imagine you have a chance to give your message in front of a church audience. You go ahead and get up there and give your normal speech, which just happens to be laced with expletives and graphic imagery. How well do you think you will get your message across? Not very.

Adapt to Your Audience

You need to adapt what you say to your audience. In the case of your business, your audience is your ideal customer. Lets say that you sell technological solutions to small businesses. There is a pretty good chance that this set of customers, small business owners, is not all that well-versed in techno-speak. If you try to speak to them in your own language, the one you use when conversing with fellow geeks, you simply won’t make any sense to them. You need to change your words, use stories and examples, and perhaps talk real slow.

Its Your Fault

If you ever find yourself loosing patience with a customer for not keeping up or not understanding what you are saying, take a deep breath and consider that it may be you who is at fault. If you don’t take the time to change your words so that the customer can better understand you, then you should not expect them to be able to keep up.

Useless Information

There is a pervasive problem of businesses using their own key words and jargon in their marketing and sales pitches. Here’s a classic example, and forgive me if I get the technical terminology wrong. If you are selling a computer, you are likely to talk about the memory in technical terms. You might say that a computer has 3 gigs of memory. In the sales pitch, this will just roll off your tongue and you will think nothing of it. You know what it means. Its part of your every day speech. However, your customer doesn’t have a clue what it means. When you say it and move on, a customer who doesn’t understand is forced to file it the drawer in their mind which is labeled “useless information.”

If you recognize that what you are saying isn’t understandable to your customer, you can change the way you say it. Instead of talking about gigs, you can tell the family-man looking to buy a computer how many pictures and videos he could store on it. Likewise, you could tell the business-woman how many documents and Power Points she could store. Change your words so that they make sense to customers.

Learn to Relate

You want to be able to relate to your customers. You can be the most affable person in the world, but if you use words that don’t make sense, you will never achieve this. Instead, get to know your ideal customer and learn how they talk, what they think about on a daily basis, and what they are likely to understand.

I read a great article the other day called I Don’t Talk to Clients About Social Media Anymore, by Edward Boches. In this article, Edward talks about how people don’t relate to the terms that we relate to. Instead of talking about Twitter, social networking, and blogging, all terms that can scare away the uninitiated, he suggests talking about things that businesses already understand and then relating them to social media.

Make Them Comfortable

That is a great way to still get your point across. Just change your terminology and find ways to relate what you are saying with what your customers already know. People don’t tread far from their comfort zone. Your job as a small business is to find a way to make them comfortable buying from you. Using the right words can make all of the difference.

photo credit: dno1967

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

You need patience to run a small business. Goals are not met overnight. If you work hard and are patient, you are likely to see results.

There is a danger though, of misunderstanding what patience is. In no way does being patient mean that you are just waiting around for results. Patience is about continually doing something, over and over again, until you achieve the results. When it comes to running a business, being patient goes hand in hand with being active.

It Doesn’t Just Happen

Say you want to add on 20 new customers this year. What is going to make that happen? Growth is a necessity of business, and growth takes work. It is never enough to set the goal. Once you set it, you need to walk, run, or crawl toward that goal. Whatever you can do.

In the old children’s story of the Tortoise and the Hare, the Tortoise ends up winning the race because the Hare is so cocky it thinks that there is no way that the Tortoise can win. All the Tortoise thinks about is the finish line, and it just keeps moving toward it. The Tortoise does not win by default, but by patiently moving in the right direction.

The same thing has to happen if you want to add those 20 customers. That is your goal. You probably can’t just go out and get those customers the next day. You need to have patience. Its patience that keeps you sane and keeps you moving toward that goal, even if you think there is no way to ever achieve it.

Patience and Hustling

There may be a myth around patience. Does a picture of an aged guru come to mind, a man with a flowing white beard who is very wise? You probably don’t think of the young entrepreneur, working 12 hour days and running from meeting to meeting just to scrap by as patient. You may not even think of yourself as patient. Yet, patience and being busy do happily coexist.

In order to get the success you need, you have to hustle. I remember Little League coaches always telling us to hustle on and off the playing field. Sure, it was probably because they didn’t want to be at the game all night, but that got instilled in me. Why walk slowly to a location when you can get there much more quickly if you hustle?

In business, you hustle to get done the things you need to get done. You make ends meet, you go the extra mile. In the end, you do whatever it takes to win. But you are not just moving for movement’s sake. You have a goal, a dream for your business. You are pushing yourself to get there, and the sooner the better.

Getting there takes time, though. Sometimes a whole lot of time. And effort. This is where patience comes in. If you aren’t patient, you are going to burn yourself out on all of the hustling. Patience helps you to keep getting up every day and doing. It also helps you to pace your hustle, so that you aren’t doing too much at once. Patience doesn’t have to slow you down, though. Instead, it keeps you on track.

When the Going Gets Tough

This is where patience really pays off. Its on those days that getting there just doesn’t seem possible. You have lofty dreams for your business, but you just don’t know how you are going to pay the next set of bills. How are you going to be able to hire on staff if you can’t even keep your business afloat now? That’s when you need patience, big time.

It is during the hard times that patience and tenacity with help you keep your head down and keep you moving forward. Giving up is rarely a good option, and sometimes is just not possible. Panic is the polar opposite of patience. You just need to hang in there. You just need to keep throwing one foot in front of the other, no matter how impossible success seems at the moment.

Patience is your steady companion when the going gets tough. It helps you to see past the clouds. If you are faced with a lack of money, be patient. Look at your plan. Look at your projections. Maybe you have to revisit things and change things. Maybe you will feel like you have been thrown completely off track from meeting your goals. This can be frustrating, even devastating. Being patient will help. Know that if you just keep moving in the right direction, you will eventually get there.

If you throw in the towel when the going gets tough, you will always be left wondering if success was just around the corner. One last thing about patience and tough going. Sometimes tough times are impossible to avoid. But a lot of tough spots will be avoided completely if you take a patient, long view of your business. Its usually in the rushing, the cutting of corners, that you get into big trouble with your business. Moving steadily, on track, toward your goal and having the patience to take as long as you need to get there can help you avoid many pitfalls in your business.

So be patient, and never stop moving.

photo credit: Dennis Wright

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow Bradford on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BradfordShimp.com

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