Business Success Strategy Call with special guest, Anne McKevitt

Mari: Drum roll! It’s time to rock and roll. This is Mari Smith and I want to welcome you to today’s call. I’m very, very excited to have you here with us. This is a global teleseminar. I see we have people from all over the world tuning in today. I see Canada, Australia, UK, all over the US, and this is really, really exciting. Awesome!

You’re more than welcome to tweet nuggets from today’s call. Just use #successcall. We’ll be talking about business success principles and social media success methods as well.

For those of you dialing in by phone or by Skype, you’re all muted out throughout the call for optimal audio quality. However, we’re going to be breaking through periodically for questions. All you do is press *2 to raise your hand during those times.

For those of you tuning in via the webcast, there’s a Q&A pod on the lower left of the web page. You can just put your question into that little field right there on the lower left.

I’m delighted and honored that you are taking time out of your busy day to join us today. In fact, I know for some of you it’s actually the wee hours. I’m really excited to co–host this powerful call with my own business coach, Anne McKevitt. I’ll introduce Anne formally in a moment.

Anne and I are going to be sharing the four main pillars of creating a successful and profitable business. We’re going to pack the next two hours with plenty of usable business-building content, and I absolutely know that all of you are going to get a ton of value throughout this call.

I do recommend that you have a notepad and pen handy if you like to write longhand or scribble notes to the side there by your phone or computer. Otherwise, many of you are on the computer, so go ahead and open up a Word doc and take some notes. You’re more than welcome to do that. We’re going to give you plenty of content.

Before I introduce Anne formally I’m going to give you a quick overview of exactly what we’re going to cover on the call today. They’re really four of the pillars that go into creating a successful profitable business, as I mentioned.

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The first pillar to build a success business is it has to start with a solid foundation. Certainly for you and your business – that’s products, services, your revenue model, your profit model and so on – but also in your personal space – how you function, your environment, your productivity – and of course with your different social media channels – your platform, your message, and your reach.

By the way, sidebar, I didn’t really formally introduce myself. I know many of you on the call today are already familiar with me and the work that I do, but for those of you may be tuning in and listening to me for the first time, I am Scottish-Canadian and based in California, so I’m kind of Scandifornian or something like that. I have a strong background in internet marketing, e- commerce, and for the last 5-1/2 years I have immersed myself in the world of social media, especially Facebook marketing.

I travel the world and speak and teach on social media success principles. I’ve written many books and I am certainly one of the leading social media strategists, thought leaders, and influencers in this arena. I feel very blessed and honored to be sharing information with you today that will help you with your business.

As I was saying with the four different pillars, and then we’ll get into bringing Anne onto the call, the first is foundation.

Once your foundation is set, the second pillar is to build on that foundation in all areas. You’re going to build systems, build success habits, maintain consistency and strategic intent in all that you do, and you really want to have clarity on exactly what is it that you are building. Anne is going to be talking to you about building a lifestyle business versus building a brand that can be sold.

The third pillar, it’s time to ramp up on that foundation and what you’ve built and go on to growth mode. A lot of people get stuck on build mode. Anne will touch on that, too, how actually people get addicted to all the tweaking and perfecting and don’t really go into growth mode. Anne’s got some surprises for you on that one. You need to really look at what’s working well in your business, your social media, your daily productivity habits, and what size of company are you actually growing.

Then the fourth pillar is one that many entrepreneurs miss entirely, which is scale. Anne has certainly mastered this area and will share some golden nuggets with all of us today. You’ve got to be able to build teams, to delegate, and to outsource. I’m learning this and have learned it over the years myself first-hand. It’s not possible to build a sizeable business without this element, without really keeping an eye on the horizon and knowing how to scale. Otherwise you’ll reach a plateau.

The same thing goes for your social media platforms. I was actually doing all my own social media marketing, content sourcing, writing blog posts, fielding questions, literally spending

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hours a day up to about a year ago, and finally have managed to scale that area. I’m going to share with you some tips today.

As we progress through our call here today, Anne and I are going to do our best to cover as much as possible on those four pillars: foundation, build, grow, and scale. Plus each of the pillars are taught in-depth throughout the one-year curriculum in my brand new coaching program. There’s a link for those of you who are on the webcast. We’re going to be going through a little bit of the Club and the site and explain more about that later for those of you who have an interest.

Anne, I know you’re waiting patiently there. Without further ado, let me go ahead and introduce Anne McKevitt, who happens to be my own business coach. She is a fellow Scot, born and raised in Scotland, calling in all the way from Sydney, Australia, where she lives now. Thanks for joining us, Anne.

Anne: Hi Mari. Good to talk to you. It’s a sunny morning. The sun’s just coming over the bridge here in Sydney. I’ve got a view from my home office of the bridge, the opera house, and the whole Sydney skyline, and I’m really thrilled that I’m going to be talking to all of your audience.

As you were saying, I’m honored myself as well that people are taking the time out of their day, that they’re staying up late, that they got up early to hear this call, wherever you are in the world. I’m really looking forward to sharing some of my insights, which will hopefully help you grow your businesses, too.

Mari: Awesome. Thank you, Anne. I really appreciate it. When I hear your accent it always sounds much thicker. Your brogue’s thicker than mine.

Anne: I think what happens when I’m talking to you, Mari, is we rub off on each other and the accent kind of gets more strong. I’ve just finished three conference calls to New York, and I think my accent gets slightly diluted when I’m doing those, and then I get back on talking to you and it gets a bit thicker. Let’s just hope that we don’t need sub-titles below the teleseminar so everybody understands what we’re both saying!

Mari: I know, we’ll throw in a few Scot words for them to keep them on their toes! That’s funny.

Anne, before I ask you the first question I’d like to go ahead and share with our listeners here today just a few sound bites from your bio, because it’s certainly one of the most impressive bios that I’ve ever come across.

For our listeners today, just to give you a sense of who we have on the call with us here today, Anne is widely recognized as one of the world’s most powerful business leaders. She left school

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at 15 without a single qualification, but within a few years she’d created her first multimillion- dollar fortune through her property development company.

During the last few decades Anne has founded and headed up more than 20 separate businesses. She also has a background in television. For more than a decade she was a regular prime time host on lifestyle TV programs syndicated to 22 countries.

Anne has also written five best-selling interior design books. Her first book sold a million copies. She’s guided such corporations as Mercedes, Toyota, Hewlett Packard, Wal-Mart, Bloomingdale’s, and Marks & Spencer, and she’s advised both the Bush administration and the Clinton Global Initiative.

Anne, that’s certainly a very, very powerful bio. I know you have an incredible background. I love all the different corporations you’ve worked with. I know today we’re going to touch on a few brands. We’re going to have the listeners pull up a few sites for different brands.

I would love it if you could go ahead and share a little bit more about your background. What happens is people see this huge impressive bio and they’re like, “Oh my god, Anne must have had some kind of special luck or whatever,” but share with everybody how did you get started in business? Did you have access to a lot of resources?

Anne: It’s actually a funny story, because I didn’t set out to actually own a business at all. I was working in the fashion industry when I first left home at 15 and worked that until I was in my early 20’s, then I had a very, very bad car accident, and was told I would probably not walk again. I spent the next 11 months, 23 days, and 8 hours lying flat in bed, where I couldn’t move.

Eventually, friends of mine stepped in and they helped get me back down to London and get treatment so I could actually get well again, and I did get well again, and obviously I learned to walk again and so on.

Then when I was trying to figure out what can I do with my life, because I couldn’t go back into the fashion world because of my injuries, I decided to buy my first apartment with my husband. We were newly married.

A little side note – I’d met him and then we decided to get married 10 days later, and we got married and we’ve been married 24 years now. I guess that kind of sums up what kind of person I am. I like to do things quickly if I think they’re the right thing to do.

After we got married we bought this apartment together. I did it up, and when it was finished being done up people kept saying to me, “Oh my god, you should sell this. It looks incredible,” but it was in the middle of the recession. I thought, “I’ve got nothing to lose. Why don’t I put the apartment on the market and see what happens.” I did that and, to cut a long story short, I sold it for well above asking price at that time.

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I thought to myself, “Hmm, maybe this could be a business,” so I hadn’t set out to set up a business. Then when I started out I literally had no money, so that very first apartment I bought, myself and my husband didn’t even have the funds for the deposit. Probably quite illegally, but not knowing it at the time because I was naïve, I took out a MasterCard. I hadn’t got any credit cards at all at that time, so I applied for a MasterCard and got the MasterCard.

It had a £5,000 limit on the card, so I kept going to the ATM every day and withdrawing £250, which was my maximum, until I’d withdrawn all £5,000 in cash. I then used that £5,000 in cash as the deposit for that first apartment that we’d bought. It was incredible naiveté, probably doing stuff that was completely wrong, but ultimately it was that £5,000 that set me up on the road to where I am today.

When I bought that first property, I then renovated it, made the money that I did from that, and saw that there was potential to actually turn that into a business. When I eventually then went on to do the second apartment and beyond that, I very quickly had to gather a staff together because I didn’t know how to do that stuff. I wasn’t an electrician, a plumber, or know all these things.

It was a huge advantage when I look back because I had to delegate from day 1. I didn’t have an option to kind of go, “Okay, let me get the manual out and work out how to plumb the toilet.” I had to ring up somebody, get the plumber in, tell him where I wanted the toilet placed, and he had to get on with it. From day 1 when I started my business I was delegating.

The funny side of it, when I look back, was that I was operating off a coffee table, sitting on a cushion on the floor for the first two years I was in business. It didn’t actually occur to me that I should buy a desk and maybe a seat to sit on. It’s funny, and also my entire accounting system was done in one of those pocket cash books you get, those very small ones. I used to write what the price of the property was going to be, what I would spend doing all these different things, and then as I was going through the process of the renovation I would be marking that up against my estimates of what I would spend.

I’ve actually kept all those pocket books even to this day from when I started out, and I look back and think it’s kind of nuts that I managed to do what I did with the complete lack of resources, and total and utter naiveté. It’s a real lesson that you can be a “wet behind the ears” entrepreneur, but you can actually create an empire with that.

I think for everybody listening here, they might kind of go either, “Well, I don’t want to create a big empire,” or “I just want to have a good living.” Whatever your circumstances are, where you are now is not necessarily where you need to be in two years, three years, or 10 years from now, but you have to have a lot of courage. You have to have a lot of determination, and actually more than anything you have to have a huge amount of belief in yourself.

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Mari: Absolutely. I love your story, Anne. It really is so inspiring. Just to plus what you said, similarly I came to San Diego, CA in 1999, so coming up on 14 years ago, completely flat broke, 50 British pounds in my pocket, which is just under $100 US dollars, two suitcases, and I had a 30-day return ticket. I couldn’t get a one-way ticket because they wouldn’t let me in the country otherwise. I came in on my British passport.

I was able to renew my Canadian passport, having been born in Canada, and within six weeks I actually met a wonderful group of people in San Diego, including an immigration attorney, and I traded him his legal fees to help me get a visa, for building a website. I built him a website back in 1999.

I’d never heard of this. We didn’t really do bartering in Scotland. I didn’t know what that was, but the fact that you can come here to a new country and, like you say, that self-belief – I often say to people there’s a difference between a belief and a knowing. Belief is kind of like you’re willing yourself to believe something, but a knowing is etched into every cell of your being. You just know. I just knew I was supposed to come to this country and have a whole new life.

A couple logistical things for our listeners here today. We’re getting a few questions. This is audio only. Some folks are saying they’re not seeing any visuals, and should they be seeing some visuals or slides or desktop or anything. Today is a call only, audio only, nice and low-tech, so just enjoy and go ahead and tweet any nuggets that you wish at #successcall.

Anne McKevitt’s Twitter ID – you’re welcome to put her name in there – is @anne_mckevitt. You can look at some of my last tweets @marismith and you’ll see Anne’s Twitter ID in there, too.

Also some people are asking about the replay. We are going to go for two full hours, and there is a replay. We’re absolutely recording. For those of you listening into the webcast, it’s the exact same length that you’ll find the replay. Please, please, please stay with us live. We’re going to be opening up shortly for questions, and you really want to get this information today live from the horse’s mouth, as we say.

Anne: I’m glad it’s a teleseminar. It’s 7:00 here in the morning in Sydney and you don’t want to see what I look like at 7:00 in the morning. [laughing] Let’s just say it’s a good thing that this is not a webinar.

Mari: [laughing] That’s a good thing. I’m dressed down today. I’m in my casual clothes, no make-up on. My hair is done, though.

Anne: I’m not going to tell you what I’m wearing. [laughing]

Mari: Okay! [laughing]

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For our listeners who are at the computer, we’re going to have you go ahead and pull up a few websites in a separate tab so you can follow along. Those of you who are on the webcast, I do have a big button for you there for the Business & Beyond Club website and the four pillars. If you want to click on that button and go across to the third tab that says Coaching Program. I have a whole bunch of information in there about the four pillars – foundation, build, grow, and scale – really drilling a little bit deeper into them, and you’re welcome to follow along there.

Also we’re going to pull up some different brand websites, and Anne’s going to walk us through some really powerful and successful brands out there. We thought we’d use the Club website too as an example.

Anne, let’s talk about pillar #1, the foundation. The foundation is absolutely creating a solid sustainable profitable business or brand. It must start with the foundation. People often focus narrowly on their social media marketing efforts, for example, when unfortunately their business model is flawed.

I always say that social media amplifies everything. If you’re just going and putting social media on top of a business model that’s maybe flawed, then you’re not amplifying the right message, the right brand, or the right revenue model. It’s really, really important to set up for growth and then be able to scale as soon as you’re ready.

By the way, a quick sidebar. If you’re not on the webcast, it’s just www.BusinessAndBeyondClub.com. That’s where I have the four pillars I’m talking about.

Many, many business owners and entrepreneurs are striving to build a solid business, but it’s on a shaky foundation. Anne, what would you say are some of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs and business owners make when it comes to setting up that solid foundation? They make those mistakes and it actually sets them back from creating true success.

Anne: Surprisingly, one of the biggest things is that a lot of people don’t realize there needs to be a foundation. That would be one of my first things. Ironically, because my first business was in the building industry, it’s like anything. If you’re going to build a house, it doesn’t matter how great the windows are going to look or what kind of closet space you’re going to have or what fantastic vases and pictures you’re going to hang in that space. You might be painting the picture of all this in your mind, but ultimately if the house is not built on very, very stable foundations, you’re completely and utterly wasting your time.

I think people in their mind’s eye when they’re building their businesses always think in terms of how a house is built. You’ve got to have that stable foundation before you’re going to actually elevate beyond that. There’s a lot of bloopers that people make.

I suppose one of the biggest ones that I hear – and up until about 10 years ago this wasn’t part of the language of people, but today it’s very much part of the language of people – is where

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they go on and on about their passion. They’re being driven by their passion and they bring zero logic and common sense to what they’re doing. This whole passion piece that people add to what they’re doing all the time – often their passion means that they’ve completely put on blinkers and they can’t see beyond that passion.

I’m going to give you a kind of silly scenario, but it’s a good example. If your passion is making six-fingered gloves, you’re going to find it very, very hard to find a marketplace. Of course there are people with six fingers out there, but you’re going to have a very, very small niche to operate in and make money from. Sometimes people get passion blindness. They forget that the word business means that you’re in business to make money.

If you look at something like the music business, it’s a good example. There’s so much talent out there in the world when you look at the X Factor and American Idol and all these other shows, but the music business is not necessarily always about finding that talent. It’s a business in itself, and you’re in business, whatever you operate in, to make money.

I find it utterly startling that so many people don’t think about the money as the primary thing of what they’re doing. It’s like if you’re going after the wrong marketplace, the wrong genre, you are never going to do anything other than struggle.

The very first thing is to almost remove your ego or stop stroking your ego about what you’re passionate about. Maybe your passion is something that you do from 6 pm to 9 pm in your off- time, but is your passion the right thing to turn into a business? That would be absolutely one of the first things I’d ask.

Keep away from that kind of airy-fairy universal passion that kind of needs to stick to the bedroom, and take logic and dispassion only to the desk. Think about is your passion linked in to earning proper amounts of money? Is it a viable business?

The second thing is most people don’t have a failure policy in place. People kind of take a jump back when I talk about a failure policy. I’ve actually just been teaching a number of my clients about why they need to think about a failure policy.

We obviously all set out in business to succeed. There’s no reason you would go into business for any other reason than to try to succeed. However, when people are faced with failure in part of their project or all of their project or even their entire business, it’s quite a surprise to them. Failure is absolutely part and parcel of being in business, as much as success is.

I always kind of joke to people that I’ve got a bookcase in my office that’s filled with volumes of my failures, because when you have failures you have to learn to dust yourself off, get yourself back up in an instant, and get on with the next thing. It could be the next thing within your business or it could be that you’ve got to completely change what business you’re actually operating in.

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The carnage that people face when things are going wrong, they might have a really big failure. There’s been what I would call a train wreck happen within their business, and then they kind of go, “Okay, so how do I know how to handle this?” and they sink to the level of the failure rather than rising up above it. You’ve got to be able to rise above it.

When I was teaching my clients last week about failure, one of them actually then sent me this thing through. Heidi Pollard sent this to me. She said, “Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for lacking imagination and having no good ideas. Oprah Winfrey was demoted from her job as a news anchor because she wasn’t fit for television. Steve Jobs, as we famously know, was fired from Apple. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.”

All of these people had something in them that allowed them to have a failure policy be an acceptable part of achieving their success. I think that is something that’s missing from many small business owners. Anybody else who’s more established, longer in the tooth and has been doing this for a long time understands that failure is part of it, and you cannot let it get you down. You have to just rise above it and move on to the next thing.

The other thing, and this may sound very stupid, is that people see that they own a business, but actually they own a job. They’re what I call just self-employed. They haven’t actually created a business at all. Now, if you just want to be self-employed that’s fine, but if you actually do want to own a business, then you have to treat that business as a business. Let me try to explain a little bit more the difference in my mind.

A job where somebody is self-employed is usually the kind of person that is the shittiest boss on earth, because if you are self-employed and that’s how you’re running your business from a self-employed mindset, you’re probably doing absolutely everything. When you’re doing everything, it means you’re not excelling at any one thing and you’ll have a very, very plateaued business. It really isn’t a business, it’s a job. You have to get real with yourself. There’s two different words. One word is job, one word is business. Which do you actually want to own?

When you make that decision about what you want to own, if it’s a business then you have to set a business owner mindset. If you do just want to have a job and you just want to be self- employed and you don’t want anything else, that’s fine, but understand from that point onward that in a way business talk and business mindset really is quite irrelevant to you because you’re going to be so stuck doing everything. You’re not ever going to have time to actually move on, learn more, and achieve more, and ultimately you’re not going to earn more money.

I think it’s the delegation part that’s absolutely key. You cannot do everything yourself. If you do do everything yourself, you’re setting yourself up for permanent struggle. You’re permanently going to be struggling to do everything and all things.

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I’m Scottish and I kind of cut to the quick. I don’t mess around with what my view is. Delegation and lack of it to me just means stupidity. It just means you’re really stupid about how you’re running your business and you need a massive wake-up call. I think for most people it’s just getting to grips with all those foundational pieces.

Of course the fourth or fifth foundational piece that’s really important is going after the money. I cannot reiterate this part enough. Where you make your money from is incredibly important, so that you want to make the most money in a genre that’s set comfortably with your moral compass, that fits with all your beliefs, but you want to make the most money with the least amount of effort in the shortest time frame.

You’re not going to win a Biz Olympics gold for picking a difficult market. You cannot push water up a hill. In business if you want to be successful, go for what’s easier. Go where there’s a marketplace where people want to buy. The whole idea of business is commerce. You’re in a world that’s all about commerce. You have to have a service or product that you’re selling that people actually want to buy. If they don’t do that, then you’re going to have a very, very empty bank account.

That to me, Mari, are my basics on what you actually need to have if you’re going to set yourself up for a strong foundation.

Mari: I love how you make the distinction between the job (being self-employed) and building a business. Then even to plus that, there’s a whole difference between building a business and building a brand. Then for entrepreneurs to be really clear on that, whether they’re building a business or building a brand that will be an asset, to be something that they’re actually able to grow and have equity and be able to sell it at some point.

Do you want to say a Iittle bit about what stage in the business development that people should be looking at that – are they building a business or a brand to sell at some point?

Anne: When I was 23, naïve and knew nothing, it didn’t even occur to me that I needed to create a brand, but ironically I did actually create a brand without knowing I was doing that. I didn’t set out to do it intentionally, but my background part of being involved in the building industry was when I was in the fashion industry. I worked for a hair stylist called John Frieda, and I worked hand-in-hand with John himself. John had the most successful salons in the UK at that time, and certainly in London every single client that came through the door was a red carpet celebrity.

John wanted to launch his own product range, so I helped him create the John Frieda Hair Care range. For all the women on the call, you may know about his products like Frizz-Ease. John was the first person to do those types of products ever in the marketplace, and I worked with them all. He ultimately sold I think for $795 million several years ago.

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So I had had that experience when I worked in fashion, and also the people I was surrounded with in fashion were all people who owned other brands – like Andrew Lloyd Webber and his brand of musicals.

The difference between building a business and building a brand is a business is something that more often than not you’re locked into because you kind of set it up around yourself. It’s kind of a very self-based business. Now, you can have personality-led brands that obviously are built around yourself, but for your average brand it’s not built around personality, it’s built around a product or a service. A brand is a business with an end goal in mind. If you’re building a brand, more often than not the end goal is ultimately you want to sell that brand for a high value.

Some of the most successful brands in the world are names that we all know because of their success. If you’ve got time at the moment you might want to just quickly go onto Apple.com. Apple, as we know, is the most successful brand in the world currently, but the reason it’s the most successful is because their offering, their communication style, and all their touch points are all coming and speaking from one very strong brand message.

Even when you go on Apple.com, that’s the kind of virtual version of what you get when you go into an Apple store. Then when you buy an Apple product, the product comes in Apple packaging that emulates the feel of the store and the feel of the website.

I bought my new iPhone 5 last week, and I laughed because when I was trying to shake it out of the box in the store for doing the set-up, the guy said to me, “It takes 11 seconds to get the lid off.” That just made me laugh because they had thought through how long they want you to shake that box to get the lid off, because it’s all this sense of an experience.

That’s one of the reasons, without going into massive details, of why Apple is so successful, apart from having amazing products. They understand the delivery of a brand message, and ultimately then they’re able to have something very sellable.

A lot can be learned from that if you’re a small business owner. You can emulate a lot of what you see with big brands, but when you’re seeing big brands, they have a lot of ingredients that you can see immediately that make a business into a brand. When you sell a brand, that’s when you go and crack the champagne bottle because that’s when you make lots and lots of money.

My own experience is that when I sold my brand I made more money than I’d ever expected in my lifetime. I work with clients like Mari and many other people, to take their business from being in business into a brand that ultimately they may want to sell, or at some point down the road they’re trying to amplify and grow into a bigger entity. I think it’s incredibly important for people to understand that kind of difference.

Mari, maybe I can ask you a question at this point, because I think it’s important that people also hear from a social media point of view. I know that you agree with me on many points on

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foundations, because we’ve had these discussions before privately. But maybe you could share with the audience the key foundational components that are going to be in your Business & Beyond Club that help people understand how to build a foundation, the components they’re going to get, and how that helps set them up to be in the right frame of mind, the right mindset, and the right tools to actually grow their businesses.

Mari: Sure. I am very passionate about helping entrepreneurs and business owners. They could be in start-up mode, they could be rebuilding, or re-evaluating their foundation. As I said earlier, social media amplifies everything. I’m watching the tweets and someone tweeted it amplifies everything, including mistakes, including the flaws.

I’ve always felt that I’m doing people a disservice if I only teach social media, because it’s really critical to look at where are you driving traffic to. If you have an over-arching strategy, a content plan, it’s not enough to just have content pouring into your tweet stream and your Facebook, and there’s no real direction to it. There’s no conversion to it. Is it the right brand, business, or revenue model? It needs to be simple and obvious for prospects to do business with you.

The critical foundation pieces I really think that all social media teachers out there are missing, and it creates this fuzzy messaging. You get a lot of frustrated business owners and CEOs, and in fact frustrated fans, friends, and followers, because it’s noise. We use this term in the social media industry – noise. You see all this noise. You want to be able to rise above that noise and have that clarity of knowing what is it that you’re offering, how you help people, what they can purchase from you as products and services etc.

I often say unlike building a house, it’s never too late to go back and lay a solid foundation with your business and your social media marketing. With the foundation pillar, and all the pillars actually that we’re talking about, but with foundation in particular right now, the three main areas are personal productivity, and we talk about delegating. I do agree with you. Sometimes it’s stupidity. I know what you’re saying. I’m a little gentler with words than you are, Anne. I know you like to be direct! [laughing] I understand where you’re coming from because it makes sense.

If your time is worth $500/hour and you’re doing a job that’s $10/hr or $20 or $50/hr, it’s just so critical to be able to leverage and be more productive with your strengths, and get the business results and get the social media success.

A few quick tips on building a solid social media foundation. Once you’re clear on your objectives – and Anne, you’ve been talking a lot about being self-employed versus building a business versus building a brand, and really knowing that you want to be focusing on cash flow as well – then from there the branding element comes into play with your design.

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Most all social media profiles have a nice big cover image. They’re really going that way now with Twitter recently. Obviously Facebook has it, and Google Plus has it, and LinkedIn now. You want to have a nice background image or a skin, a good avatar, a good profile picture, and then just really making sure your design communicates the right message. Is it seamless with your branding?

Also, not a lot of people know this, but the #1 fear that stops people from really embracing social media marketing is their fear of negative comments. I say embrace that. You need to get over that.

Just like you were talking about having a failure policy, I think you have to have a written social media policy in place, regardless of the size of your business. Whether you’re one person, 10, or 100 person company or whatever, you’ve got to have a social media policy, ideally written, so that you know how you’re going to handle any customer complaints or negative tweets or Facebook posts. You know how quickly you’re going to respond to it. Ideally the faster the better.

I was reading a study the other day that was mind blowing, that most people that complain about a brand in social media channels expect a response within 30 minutes, but ideally within 10 minutes. All of that takes a system. You can’t just be stuck to your computer all day every day. You’ve got to have people in charge of that and managing it for you.

Then also having a content strategy, not just blasting out your content willy nilly with no real purpose or strategy. Make sure that you’re always adding value, of course, but also that it serves your business and your growth strategies.

Let me just take a quick pause break. If you’ve just joined us, you’re listening to Mari Smith and my business coach, Anne McKevitt, who’s calling in from Sydney, Australia. Yes, we both have funny accents. Hers is more Scottish than mine. Mine is Scottish, Canadian, and Californian. We’re discussing business success strategies and social media success methods as well.

You’re listening in either by phone or on the webcast. If you’re on the webcast you can submit questions on the little lower left there. We do see some questions coming in, and this would be a good time to press the pause button on our content here and switch over to some questions.

If you have a question and you’re on the phone line, the easiest way to do this is to press *2. If you’d like to talk on the phone we can unmute you. Just press *2 and that will raise your hand and we can bring you in there. I see some hands going up here, and then we’ll also take some questions from the webcast.

I think we might have Monique. Is Monique there, it looks like from right here in San Diego.

Monique: Hi Mari!

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Mari: Hey, that is you! That’s so awesome, I thought it was you. Monique and I have actually been working together for quite a bit, I think since 2009. You have a background in the cosmetic surgery arena, I believe.

Monique: Right, and it’s just aesthetic medicine in general, things that insurance doesn’t cover.

Mari: Right, all those luxuries, right? Thanks for joining us today. What’s your question?

Monique: I’ve made so many strides forward since you and I met in 2009 and I did your first Mentor with Mari course, 1.0 as we called it. I’ve really gone from 0 to 100 in the last two years, but what I’m finding is that it’s really culminating in a wonderful way. You really helped me be true to myself and who I am and the way I am, and not apologize for it. I’m one of those people who puts a smiley face at the end of her name because that’s who I am.

You’ve helped me build my brand in such a way that is true to myself, and what I’m finding is that I’m getting so much business coming my way, which is so wonderful because I’m very open to it, but I’m now getting like a call a day. This is even in the last maybe six weeks, so it’s a little bit frightening because I’ve got 15-17 clients and I have two people working with me, but how to really make that jump when all this starts coming your way, and how to take it to the next level.

Honestly, I’ve run large companies, I’ve done so many things, but when you’re doing it yourself for the first time and I see other really successful people with huge companies, but that’s them and I’m just me, how do I kind of break out of that mindset where I do everything and I’m little, which I like to call boutique – I’m a boutique firm – but how do I make it to that next big step?

Anne: Do you want to answer that, Mari, or shall I?

Mari: Please step in, Anne. I’d love for you to jump in on this.

Anne: I think the first thing you have to do, Monique, is actually get out of your own way. You’ve almost kind of said it yourself. You said, “That’s them, they’ve got big businesses, but this is just me.”

One of the hardest things for people to get their head around is that you are worth it. I often jokingly use the L’Oreal phrase, “And I’m worth it.” You are worth having a successful business. When you’re doing your own business successfully you can have a boutique business, but you still have to run that well, and that eventually you can kind of step away from and let other people take over the operation.

The first thing you need to do, and a really basic critical step here, is to map out all the tasks that you do every single day for a week. For a whole week you want to log all those tasks in an

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Excel spreadsheet or a Word document. Start writing down every single thing you do. You then take all those tasks over the period of a week and you work out which things are you doing that are repetitive that somebody else can be doing. You then start to farm that out.

Now you may farm that out to physical people that you want to employ who come into an office that you work in, or it could be that you’re going to do that online and work with a virtual team. You might go, “Okay, I do a newsletter every week, and I’m writing that and that takes up three hours of my time, then another hour to set it all up on the website and then to email it all out.”

When you look at that you have to go, “Is the four hours that I’ve been spending doing that newsletter a really good use of my time?” It’s kind of like cleaning a toilet. If you’re charging $X hundred dollars per hour for your actual real service, but you’re still cleaning toilets, then you’re doing something very wrong. It’s the same with all the small components in your business. Every small component you have, you need to farm out.

Would you agree with that, Mari? That’s the kind of stuff you’re going to be teaching people anyway, isn’t it, in your Business & Beyond Club.

Mari: Yeah, 100%. The thing is, it’s business and it’s personal. I have not cleaned my own house in about four years. I pay someone to clean my house and I’m more than happy to do that. I love my cleaner, Sandra. Shout out to her, she’s amazing. It takes her a couple hours twice a month, and that’s time that I want to be spending either on my own personal life and other areas, or of course working on my business.

I also have a dedicated personal assistant who helps me with running errands, dry cleaning, going to the bank, and gassing my car. I know that might sound like a luxury to many people here, but it’s absolutely amazing.

It doesn’t have to take a lot of money or a lot of time, even if you have help for one or two hours a week and you just dedicate a nominal budget and you start slowly delegating parts of your personal life and then parts of your business life.

With social media and business, one of the easiest things to delegate, I think, is help finding content so that you have someone that’s just purely in charge of trolling the web or trolling your own sources of content and chunking them down and putting them into a hopper like Hootsuite and prescheduling them.

Monique, I want to thank you for your question. I really appreciate you being on the line with us today.

Monique: Thank you so much, Anne and Mari. That’s wonderful.

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Mari: Best of luck, and we’ll see you soon. Bye now.

Monique is actually going to be joining us in the Club, in fact. I know that she’s already signed up for the Business & Beyond Club, so that’s fantastic and I’m delighted.

Anne: She’s going to get a chance to really learn step-by-step how to actually do it. That’s perfect.

Mari: Yeah, it’s exciting. You see she’s really on that precipice where she knows that she wants to get to the next level, but I love the advice you just gave her about basically having to get out of her own way. She can see it and feel it, but it’s really time to get those systems in place.

I’m watching the time here and I want to make sure that we continue on with our content. I’m going to go ahead and on a similar subject we’ve got two questions that were submitted online. We have Sandra from Scotland – hello Sandra in Scotland – and then Patty in Redondo Beach, CA. They have very similar questions and each of them are saying, “What if you’re starting out your business and you can’t afford to delegate to others, you can’t afford to hire people?”

Just to reiterate and underscore that same point that I was making there, many years ago I was in the same place myself. I was doing everything myself and I said, “Oh my god, I better get myself a VA. I don’t want to spend too much on a VA. I could do it faster, quicker, and cheaper myself.”

Then I’m like, “No, wait a minute. I’m not valuing my own time here. I’ll be okay if I can pay $20- 30 an hour and just have them maybe one or two hours a week,” and it’s a massive, massive relief. I started to do that with finding my own content for Twitter, just investing in someone to do that. For me that’s about two hours a day of my time.

Anne: The thing is, Mari, everyone on this call cannot afford not to delegate. That’s ultimately it. You cannot afford not to delegate. It doesn’t mean you have to be delegating like 40 hours a week out. Even if you start with one hour a week or two hours a week, it’s a start.

When you delegate a particular task that would normally take you two hours, what I then want everybody on the call to do is during that two hours that you delegate something out, I don’t want you to go and goof around and just do something dumb, and just fill in your time and make phone calls to family and friends.

What you’re meant to do in those two hours now is actually do something that’s highly productive and is going to now make you money. It could be you’re ringing up somebody who’s potentially going to do business with you, or it could be marketing yourself to go and speak at an event, or it could be putting together a proposal for doing a book, or it could be chasing up an unpaid bill that a client owes you. You’ve got to take that one hour or two hours that you’ve now delegated out as your starting point as some money-making time.

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Once you get your head around that, you then kind of go, “Okay, I’ve delegated this out. It’s costing me $15 to $20 an hour to delegate this task out for two hours. Now I’m going to take the $40 that that’s costing me and I’m going to turn that into X, because I’m going to chase up that bill or I’m going to get that extra speaking event or I’m going to do whatever.”

It’s not about then filling the time with any old rubbish. You’ve got to use that time to make more money, because the more you do it, the more your brain becomes hard-wired to understand that delegation out allows you to create more money in.

Mari: That’s such a good distinction because that probably is a mindset shift. People are thinking, “Gosh darn, I can’t have this money going out, because now it’s in the expense column,” but when you take that time you just freed up and you’re now focusing on what I call income-generating activity, revenue generating as you say, just to make sure you’ve got that cash flow coming in, and you start to see the floodgates will open –

To me I always think the universe is paying attention and noticing and going, “Oh, okay. Oh, you’re valuing your time. Oh, you really want to build something. All right, we’ll send you some more business, we’ll send you some more clients. Now you’re set up to handle them.”

I do want to make sure that those of you who are listening in on the webcast, you do have that button. Please do feel free to click on the Business & Beyond Club. Those of you who are not tuning onto the website, maybe you’re on your phone, you just want to go to your favorite browser and pull up www.BusinessAndBeyondClub.com.

I called it Business & Beyond Club because it really is more than that. It’s funny I just mentioned about the universe and the spiritual principles. I actually have noticed a massive difference in my life over the last 3-1/2 years since I began to pursue a more spiritual path and to be more in alignment with my truths and my inner guidance, whatever that might mean to other people.

Basically what Anne and I are talking about today are these four fundamental principles and pillars of creating a solid successful profitable business, giving you lots and lots of tips and watching some of your tweets in-between our chat here. You’ve got a lot of questions, and I know some of you have your hands raised. We’ll do our best to get to you.

At the end of the day you’re going to ask yourself, “How am I going to implement all this? I’ve got more questions.” You really need to have a solid plan, expert guidance, and accountability. Please do take a look at the Business & Beyond Club. It’s very exclusive. We’ll absolutely max out at 100 members. We’ve made it absolutely as affordable as possible.

We’ve recently added on a very special live event. It comes with a free 1-1/2-day live mastermind event in San Diego in April 2013, so we’ll actually all get to meet each other in

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person for those of you who are able to come to San Diego in April. I’m very, very excited about that. Make sure that you take a look at that, and we would love to include you in the Club.

With that, Anne, let’s now talk about pillar #2, which is build. Now we’ve got the foundation. We’ve talked a lot about foundation, a lot of the different areas of foundation. Now you’re going to build upon that, setting in place your day-to-day operations. Everyone has 24 hours in a day, it’s a great equalizer, but how are you spending or investing those 1,440 minutes a day, each and every day?

You need to be working on that, implementing the most powerful personal and professional daily success habits, and building creative campaigns for generating more cash flow, just as Anne was saying there. You don’t just delegate and then sit back and put your feet up. You need to have these campaigns in place, including social media, to leverage your business.

By the way, it’s highly likely that every single member of the Business & Beyond Club will be recouping your monthly investment probably within the first two months.

You know what? My assistant, Lori, is reminding me here that one of the things that we’re going to be doing today, everybody who joins the Business & Beyond Club, we’re going to be doing a drawing for you to win a half-day one-on-one private consult with me, either in-person or via Skype or webinar. Somehow we’ll get together one-on-one and we’ll dive deep into your business. We’ll be drawing one lucky winner out of everybody who joins the Business & Beyond Club. That is a $15,000 value, so take a look at that. I’d love to work with you.

Anne, on this point about build, many people out there are quite happy with a lifestyle business, which you’ve talked about. They’re not necessarily attracted to building a mega multimillion or even billion dollar empire. It’s a different approach, of course, building a lifestyle-based business versus a brand that can be sold, as we touched on a little bit earlier. How can an entrepreneur get really clear on the right path for them?

Anne: I’m so pleased you asked this question, and I’ll tell you why. A lot of people talk about lifestyle brands, and a lot of it’s pure fantasy, it really is, because when they’re talking about lifestyle businesses, they’re often using their own selves, talking about how they live their life and where they go on vacation, what cars they have and what shoes they wear and so on. We’ve all seen these messages. You know what I’m talking about.

The reality is that to have a true lifestyle business is actually a business that’s a well-oiled machine. It doesn’t necessarily mean you want to have massive scale to what you’re doing. You may be happy having something that’s much smaller, but the ultimate goal here is a well-oiled machine that means you can step away for weeks at a time if you so want to, so that you do have the lifestyle that you choose.

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There’s lots of people who think they’ve built a lifestyle business, but they’re absolutely tied to their laptops minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day. I know because when I have in the past worked with some scholarships through my own coaching program, the amount of hours that people spend building supposed lifestyle businesses usually is in the region of 12-18 hours a day, which tells me it’s not working.

Ultimately what I would say to people is you want to earn a good living. Whatever that good living is, you’ll have in your mind’s eye what that dollar figure is going to be per year. Then it’s about making sure that you create something that allows you to step away from it.

If you work out your dollar figure, you’ve then got to work out how you’re going to achieve that dollar figure, i.e., you’re going to have to delegate. Then the other part is that you have to have the ability to allow what you’re doing to run without you being there.

One of the things that I think I should share with you is when I first started out at 23 with my own building business, before I started doing lots and lots of other businesses, I was 18 months into the ownership of that business and it was doing incredibly well. It was making multimillion pounds and lots of clients and we were thriving. But 18 months into owning that business I took 8 solid weeks off work and went and did traveling around the world.

This was in a period – because I’m old enough – where there not mobile phones and there was not the internet. For 8 solid weeks I had no contact at all apart from two phone calls over 8 weeks to check that everything was okay back home. When I came back my business was running as well as when I’d left, and I’d made as much money when I was away as it would have made had I been there.

That is a lifestyle business. It doesn’t matter if you want to do it small scale or big scale. It’s all about having a business that you don’t have to be a part of all the time, that you can step away from. That to me is what a lifestyle business truly is, not the kind of Walt Disney version that we read about and see about all the time on the internet.

Mari: Right, exactly.

Anne: I think it’s something that people have to get their heads around, so if you’re going to build something, it’s how you’re going to go about building it. You’ve got to build something that allows you to step away. You set the foundations in place, and you’re now at the point where it can keep going without you being there.

Maybe Mari, if you don’t mind, I can ask you what you think are the persistent challenges that you repeatedly see with regards to building a social media presence, and is that connected in any way to people when they’re talking about their lifestyle dreams.

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Mari: Absolutely. It’s interesting because so many of us started out four, five or six years ago when Facebook and Twitter were really starting to blow up. We’d get out there with our personal names and we built these personality-based brands.

I’m such a stickler for not delegating my voice. I will not have anybody speaking as me. Any time people ever see me speaking in first person it’s absolutely me. I’m just so rigorous about that.

I think if you’re a celebrity like a singer or actor, then it’s come to be acceptable that it’s not always going to be you doing the tweeting or Facebook or whatever. In fact, it would be quite shocking if it were. It’s okay to have a ghost tweeter. But it’s something really credible to me. I don’t want someone out there building a relationship with someone on my behalf, as if they’re me. It’s just not a fit for me.

We touched on this a little bit earlier, but one of the challenges is not approaching your social media with a strategic mindset. You end up being very scattered. You and I often have conversations about how in general, business owners are just frustrated as heck with social media because they’re almost like “doing social media” because it’s just part of business. It’s peer pressure or social pressure. You’ve got to do it, but they’ve no idea on how it all ties into their over-arching business goals. They don’t have any systems in place. They’re not measuring anything.

In fact, what often happens, and I see this almost every day, is people are measuring the wrong things. They’re counting their number of fans, or their people talking about this, or their reach. Facebook Edge Rank is always getting screwed around with.

That’s not what you should be counting. Ultimately you want to be counting your conversion, your leads, traffic to your website, the number of prospects you’ve got, how many sign-ups for an event or a product. Ultimately it all has to tie in to the bottom line. Are you making more money? Is your business more profitable? That is what we call the ROI metrics versus the social media metrics. You’ve got to tie the two of those together.

That’s one of the things I’m just so passionate about teaching people. Certainly in my Business & Beyond Club the members are going to be getting a solid proven step-by-step process for creating consistent measurable results, and the social media methodology that I’ve been using for many years. It includes content calendars, editorial and promotional calendars, daily checklists of exactly what to do at certain times of day for the best results, and then strategic maps.

I think for years people have been saying, “Social media is just this thing. I’m going to throw a bunch of stuff out there and see if it sticks.” I really love to boil things down to a science, make them simple, make them systematic, and come at it from a real strategic point of view.

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Anne: Also Mari, if I can just jump in there, I think the other really, really critical part here – whether it’s a lifestyle brand or you’re trying to build something that’s bigger – is it’s about developing really good habits.

I know from my own coaching as I’m working with my clientele, and I know that we chat about this, too, when you’re working with your clients, you’ve got to develop these habits and get people to stay on track. I know one of the things you’ve been looking at is how you can do that with your members, the things you’re going to have implemented within the Club when you’re going through these four very, very important pillars of growth, the build part and the habits and the staying on track. So how will that work?

Mari: I am such a big fan of what’s called the compound effect. Typically a habit takes about 30 days. Some people might say 21 days, but I think it takes about 30 days every single day religiously to build a new habit. It really can take effort.

It’s so easy to fall off the wagon on day 7, day 10, day 20, whatever, but let me put it this way. Big massive success isn’t something that happens overnight, that one day you wake up the next morning and you’re like, “Holy smokes, I’m so outrageously successful! Look at all this money in my bank account! Oh my gosh, someone just gave me a million new Twitter followers. How did that happen?”

It happens over time. It compounds. Success is incremental daily habits – every single micro- decision you make, where you’re choosing to spend your time, who you’re associating with, who you’re hanging out with, who’s influencing you.

I think really one of the major keys is accountability. I think what happens with people, especially entrepreneurs and business owners, they’ll kind of get stuck into their habits of, “Well, another day’s gone by. Maybe I’ll ramp it up next time or tomorrow or whatever.”

What I’ve done with the Business & Beyond Club is I’ve baked into the design of the Club for all members accountability. We actually have 3-way accountability partners. There’s self- assessments, there’s the coaching, and there’s the live webinars each month.

One of the biggest excuses I hear from many of my coaching clients over the years is, “I don’t have the time.” I know we’re getting some pushback about this concept of delegating. People are saying, “I don’t have the money. I don’t have resources. How would I do it?” but they’re getting stuck in this Catch-22.

Here’s the thing. I’m going to get bold. I’m going to put your hat on for a second here, Anne. I’m going to borrow your bold hat. “Stand back, folks! Mari’s going to say something!” I’m not going to hold back here. I think when people say, “I don’t have time,” what they’re really saying is it’s not important to them. They’re not able to prioritize. They don’t know why. They’re not clear on their why, and they’re making excuses.

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The busiest people on the whole planet have the exact same amount of time as all of us. It’s the great equalizer. We all have 24 hours a day. It’s so important to get clear on what is important to you. You’ve got to get clear and you’ve got to prioritize, and you’ve got to be able to sleep peacefully at night. Maybe you just don’t want to build that big a business, and that’s okay. Be peaceful with it.

I’m just such a big proponent and advocate of having these daily success habits, and making sure that’s in all areas of life, personal and business, whether it’s fitness, taking time to meditate in the morning, or taking time to be in nature.

Every single morning the first thing I do when I wake up is I read something spiritual and uplifting. I listen to positive affirmations on my iPod. I’m listening to one right now with Deepak Chopra and I just really love these messages. It sets the tone for the whole day. Sometimes I’ll pull an angel card. For those people who love to do that, they’ll know what I’m talking about. It just has an affirmation or mantra for the day.

In the past it was so easy to open my eyes, or even one eye, and I’m ashamed to admit that the first thing I’d do is check Facebook and check Twitter. I know everybody can relate to that on the call.

Anne: The first thing I do when I sit down to work is actually not a work task. I go onto YouTube and I look at some funny cat or dog video, always. I’m an animal lover and I like to start my day by looking at something funny, because I think it sets your spirit up for feeling awake and alive and in good humor. That’s what I do. I don’t do the whole deep spiritual Deepak Chopra thing. I do the YouTube funny cat video.

Whatever turns people on, do what makes you happy first thing in the morning. If you start your day out on a happy note, then you’re more likely to have a positive result throughout your day.

Mari: I totally, totally agree. It’s very, very critical. As many people on the call know, some of them were tuned in a couple weeks ago to the crunch time webcast that we did, and my spiritual teacher was a guest on that show, Esperanza. I’ve really learned a lot from her about how the first things we choose to do in the morning absolutely set the tone for the day. Those are all habits.

Let’s press the pause button right there and switch over to Q&A mode. I do see some of you have got your hands raised. If you do have a question you can press *2. I know a couple of you I see there have been patiently waiting. We’ll do our best to get to as many people as possible. You also have been submitting your questions via the web chat and also Twitter chat. Lori from my team is in the room with us here, and she is scooping up your questions the best she can.

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I’m going to open up the line for Shawn Clark. I know you’re dialing in with Skype. He’s from Norfolk. Are you there, Shawn?

Shawn: I am.

Mari: Hi! Welcome to the call. Thanks for being here. What’s your question?

Shawn: I must be the token male this evening. Really for me it was on the delegation side of things. When your business is focused so much around yourself, like yours is, there’s only so much you can delegate. How do you get off the fact that it’s Brand You, if you like?

Anne: I don’t really think it makes any difference whether the brand is you, if you’re the name on the brand or not. You’ve got to start looking at the business itself and look at it as a business entity. One of my early brands – not my building business, but when I started to do branded products – was based around my own name, but I didn’t treat that as self, I treated that as a business entity.

You can literally delegate almost anything, apart from the things that Mari has touched on. You don’t want to delegate your own voice, but you do want to try and delegate almost everything else out there.

I think, Shawn, when you actually take the time and map it out in a Word document or an Excel sheet, it will probably shock you how much you can actually delegate out. When you do that, you may not have the funds immediately to go and delegate all the tasks out, but what you do is you then take those tasks and look at what would be the most important or annoying tasks to you that you can get somebody else to do that you don’t enjoy doing.

The worst thing in the world is thinking that you are the best at everything. I’ve always believed that the sole purpose of being an entrepreneur is – in my case, because I’m right-handed – is to be very, very good at pointing with my right hand to what other people are meant to be doing, not to be doing it myself.

Then of course there are things that I have to do myself. Like I mentioned earlier this morning, I had three conference calls to get up very early for and have with New York. Nobody else can do those but me, so I do those calls.

It’s just allowing yourself the opportunity to see what tasks you do, map that out, and take out the ones that are the ones that you can delegate out first. It’s about like throwing a snowball from a mountain. When you throw the snowball from the mountain it starts out the size of your hand, but as it travels down the mountain it picks up more and more snow and becomes huge.

When you delegate, the first thing you do is you fire a very small snowball into all the work that you’re doing, but gradually as you’re able to delegate more, it picks up more momentum and

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you’re able to see that you’re able to create more money with the delegation spaces that you’ve created. Does that make sense?

Shawn: Yeah, that makes sense. I get the small tasks. One of the things that I do at the moment is a lot of consultation where I’m spending time with clients. In the back of my mind is always, “How am I going to scale this?” because I’ve got five days a week, maybe six days a week that I can potentially sell. Not to be too grandiose about it, but they are buying me, my time.

Anne: Shawn, they could be buying your method and your thinking. For example, at the moment – and I’m going to say this and I don’t mean it in a nasty way – your ego thinks that they’re buying you. You’re not allowing yourself to see that they’re buying maybe your teachings or your method or your format of doing something, which you in turn can teach somebody else to do on your behalf. That then allows you to grow that.

Shawn: That’s spot on. I get that.

Anne: That’s again to do with a mindset change, wouldn’t you say, Mari?

Mari: Oh yeah. Like you said to Monique, we have to get ourselves out of our own way. Sometimes you just can’t see the forest for the trees, as that saying goes. Shawn, thank you so much for your question. I really appreciate you tuning in today.

Anne: Thanks a lot, Shawn.

Mari: Next we have Lucy from Florida. Thanks for tuning in. I’m delighted. Lucy, you and I have actually done a little bit of work together. We got to meet a couple months ago here in San Diego. You were at my Intensive.

Lucy: Yeah, and I’ve done actually a lot of your courses, too. I was looking back in my little customer sign-in and I realize, gosh, I’ve known you for quite a while now. I guess probably the biggest thing for me with you, Mari, is meeting you and doing the Intensive with you just really sealed the deal for my further study with you. I’m uber excited about the next year because I know more than anything that you’re going to hold me accountable for me and my perfume business, so I’m really excited.

Mari: Absolutely, that’s what we’re talking about. Thank you. Did you have a question for Anne or me today?

Lucy: I do, and it’s really directed to both of you or whomever. Anne, I launched a small organic and natural perfume line. Of course you don’t know me, but I want to reach a global audience obviously with my natural and organic perfumes. I just want to know how I know if I’m focusing

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and building the right sort of connections as I build my presence in my business and in my social media etc.

Anne: The thing I’d say to you, Lucy, is an organic perfume business is an area that will grow and grow and grow, so I’m pleased you’re in that marketplace for a start, because you’re in a marketplace that’s going to grow over the next decade. That’s something that you should feel pleased about, that you’re operating in the right area.

The next thing is to kind of figure out how you’re going to sell and who you’re selling to. Are you selling direct to consumers or are you selling to retailers, or are you doing both? When you figure that out, it’s then making sure you can service that in the best possible way. At the moment, Lucy, are you doing direct to consumers or are you doing to retail?

Lucy: I’m doing direct to consumers because I had a soft launch. I was afraid not to be able to produce because at the moment I’m also the manufacturer.

Anne: Okay. You’re actually quite typical of a lot of product-based businesses. People start something small, and then there’s a fear in taking it larger. I’ve got a number of my own clients who have done things in small ways, and then were looking at how to explode that to amplify it in a way that makes it become a whole different platform for them.

It’s good to start small because when you start small you can fine-tune, refine, tweak and find out what works. That to me is what I call the first act of a business. You then at some point have to go on to the second act of the business, much like watching a theater production. Your first act is kind of opening the scene, setting the scenario up, and getting the audience engaged with what you’re doing.

You get into the second act and it’s much more ballsy, much more happening behind it, and that’s really where you’re going to make your money is in the second act. So the first act is just making sure that what you’re building is something that potentially can become large.

For example, because you’re in the perfume industry, you could create something that really, really works, and then you could take your perfume concept to large retailers and start doing presentations to them. You would have to know how to present properly and how to do brand presentations, but that can be taught. Mari would help you with that. I know you’re going to be a member of the Club, so you’ll get that type of information.

The thing about doing this is if you get a very large order, nobody is expecting you to stand at your kitchen sink and mix the perfumes in hundreds of thousands of gallons of product. What you would do is you would take your product to a large manufacturer and you would say either, “Can you do this under license for me?” or “I have a big contract that’s come in from X retailer. I can’t look after the production of it. Are you prepared to be a half investor or a quarter investor in making that happen?”

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Never be held back by what’s happening at your kitchen sink. See that as just your first act, and your second act is about really getting out there and doing something big, if that’s what you want to do. If it’s not what you want to do and you always want to sell direct to consumers, then it’s perfecting the way that you sell direct to consumers so that you’re making the most money doing that. Does that make sense?

Lucy: Yes it does, and that’s amazing advice. Thank you.

Anne: My pleasure. Mari, do you have anything to add to that?

Mari: I’m really excited about Lucy’s business. It’s really a unique niche, and I’m glad that you’re saying it’s one that’s an industry that’s going to be growing over the next several years. Lucy’s picked something that she’s good at and she’s passionate about.

She’s really very, very strategically setting up the right foundation so she can build upon it, really establishing the brand and then establishing the social media channels, too, so that people come to recognize and associate the kind of brand messaging that Lucy wants to get across there. It’s called Pure, I believe, is that right, Lucy?

Lucy: Yes, it’s Lucy Miller Pure.

Mari: Beautiful. This is awesome. Thanks for joining us here today, Lucy.

Lucy: Thank you both.

Anne: I look forward to buying some of your perfume!

Mari: I wish we had time for more questions, but we have to cover the next two pillars. For those of you tuning in on the webcast, you do have that button there. Please do feel free to click on the Business & Beyond Club. It will open up a new window.

I should explain that if you’re listening in on the webcast. We have hundreds and hundreds of people listening in right now, actually close to 1,000 people listening on the webcast and then several hundred more on the phone line.

Go ahead and click the Business & Beyond Club, that big button there on the webcast. It opens in a new window, so you will not lose the audio. Those of you who are not on the webcast, just type in www.BusinessAndBeyondClub.com.

I do want to give a little shout-out here to Angela Brooks. I know Angela Brooks has decided to become a member of the Club. We have Jacob Sapochnick and Lucy, as we heard from Lucy Miller there. We have Karen Smith and Pam Ryan Brie from Maryland. Then I see Simran Singh,

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and I know who you are, Simran. You’re the publisher of the 11:11 magazine, one of my favorite publications. Wow, that is fabulous! You have made my day. I look forward to working with you for sure.

For those of you listening in, Anne and myself are giving you a lot of content today. You’re going to be thinking, “How on earth am I going to implement all this? I need a solid plan, I need expert guidance, and I need accountability.” That’s huge. You’ve got to have someone who’s willing to hold your feet to the fire a little bit and push you outside your comfort zone.

That’s what Anne does for me, and I do pay a small fortune every month to be able to invest that into my business, one of the best investments that I’ve ever made. The beautiful thing of having this Club available to my peeps, if you will, is it’s so, so affordable that with many of the different teachings that I’m learning from Anne and other mentors, I’m able to impart that same wisdom and teaching in a manner that other people can access through the Business & Beyond Club.

It does come with a free 1-1/2-day live mastermind event in San Diego. That will be in April 2013 and you’ll get details on that at www.BusinessAndBeyondClub.com. Anybody who does decide to join us in the Club, you’ll also get entered into a prize drawing where one lucky winner will win a half-day one-on-one private consult with me, where we’re going to dive deep into your business and your planning and really make sure that 2013 is your breakout year.

Go ahead and please feel free to keep submitting questions. I’m going to be capturing all these questions and we’ll go through your questions. We do have about another 35 minutes to go here, and I will do my best to get through as many questions as we can here today. We’ll keep pulling them off the website as well. We’ll open up the lines a bit as well.

Now we best dive into pillar #3. This is the part where I think, Anne, a lot of people get stuck at the build level. They maybe have a semi-decent foundation, they’re building it, but then they keep building, building, and building. They’re not really shifting gears into the third pillar, which I call grow.

This is where your habits and systems are established. You’re ramping it up to growth mode. You want to create predictable success at this level. It’s not about lying awake at night freaking out on where is the next flood of cash going to come from. You want to make sure that your business, your finances, and your social media reach are all expanding at a rate that you’re satisfied with, and that everything’s in alignment with your big Why, your vision, and your primary goals.

People often get stuck there and they get in their comfort zone, as I call it, even though sometimes a comfort zone doesn’t mean it’s comfortable. It can actually be quite uncomfortable. We should actually call it the known zone. I’ve thought about that for years. It

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should just be the known zone as opposed to the comfort zone. We know it, we’re familiar, even though it’s actually extremely uncomfortable.

Anne, I love how you say money-making is in the boring. You find a system and you do it over and over and over. Entrepreneurs often get addicted to the building, the shiny new thing. They’re polishing, tweaking, and revamping, and have Bright Shiny Object Syndrome. How do you think business owners can really set themselves up for profitability in this growth level?

Anne: It’s interesting, Mari, because I wasn’t even aware that businesses really did this until I started coaching people. It wasn’t something that I did. My whole thing was to go through the foundations and the build and do the growth and sell and make lots of money.

Then I started coaching people, and then I realized that so many people were stuck in that addiction to the build. They just kept building and building and polishing and fine tuning and tweaking. “Can you just get on with making some money from this?” It appalls me that people will keep doing that build part. The growth part is absolutely vital to understand.

One of the ways that really successful entities out there make a lot of money is they are repetitive. It’s repeating the same formula over and over and over and over and over and over again. That’s why franchising works in so many ways, because it’s a repeat formula that you just take and you plunk down somewhere else.

I’m not a lover of McDonald’s because I’m a very strict moral vegetarian of 38 years, but if you look at McDonald’s as an entity, they completely get the formula. Everything about McDonald’s is the same wherever you go, with marginal territorial or national tweaks to it.

It’s about getting your business to a point where you actually do get bored with it. You can’t look for excitement in your business. Excitement should come from your personal life, not necessarily your business. The money is in the boring. The boring is doing the repeat. It’s about like getting up in the morning, going in the shower, shampoo, rinse, repeat, shampoo, rinse, repeat. It’s exactly the same with this. When you’re doing any kind of business, it’s that repeating of it daily that allows you to start making lots and lots of money.

To go back to Shawn’s question earlier where he was saying, “I can’t do this because I can’t do more of my time. How do I do more of it?” I said it’s about doing the method or the teachings that you have, and getting other people to do that. It’s the same thing. He has to teach people to do that repeat formula.

I have a client who’s a very, very well-known personal trainer, who’s known for doing every celebrity body that walks on that red carpet that you see in Hollywood. You would think that she’s the only one that’s doing the training, but she has 32 trainers who train with her method. It’s not like you’re always going to get her. You’re going to get somebody else who’s been

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taught to do the method, and it’s exactly the same with everybody else. It’s the repeating of a system to make sure that you actually have something that can grow.

I’m not known for my subtlety when I’m talking, but sometimes business owners need to give themselves a damn good slap in the face and say to themselves, “Look, I’ve got to get my shit together here. I’ve got to make this happen, and I’ve got to understand that the boring is part of it, and that being in business is tough for all of us.”

No matter what your business is, it can be tough, but fluff is for your navel, it’s not for your business. I’ve said that before. Keep fluff for your navel and just do not have any fluff tied up with your business. You’ve got to make sure that your business is something that’s systemized and operates fluidly, does that make sense?

Mari: Yeah, totally. I love it. Even tying back to something that you said in our first hour together here today, Anne, it’s about coming more from a logical standpoint than emotions, and not having that emotion in the business. I’ve learned a lot from you over the years because I tend to sometimes get things filtered through my emotions rather than just letting the feelings flow and then going, “Okay, let’s be rational here. Let’s be logical. Let’s do what makes sense.”

Sometimes it’s whether we feel like it or not. You just have to have those systems in place to have the accountability, to have the support, to surround yourself with the right mentors, and always just be connected into your purpose and what’s driving you, your motivation, just making sure you have that solid way of working in place.

I’ve learned a lot from you in the last year about a systematic approach, and I think one of the things in particular was about calendaring, for example, and scheduling. We’ve become so used to looking at our day-to-day lives through the screen of a computer, or the even smaller screen of an iPad, or an even smaller screen of a smart phone – and I love my smart phone – but it’s almost as if you’re looking through this tiny little peephole at your whole life and your whole business.

One of the things I learned from you, Anne, was the importance of having a wall-to-wall floor- to-ceiling year-at-a-glance planner. Now I turned my office into an engine room, as you call it, a money-making engine room.

Anne: Can I jump in there, Mari, and give a little bit away of the scenario when I first came to work with you. I am a little bit subtle when I first working with clients maybe on the first meeting, but that’s it. I went to Mari’s house for the first time, and we’re having a meeting and we’re going through various things. Actually was it the first meeting or second meeting I came to your house, Mari?

Mari: Second meeting.

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Anne: So the second meeting I come to your house. I’m in San Diego and Mari showed me where she worked in her office. She showed me what she thinks is her engine room at the time, and all I can see is these bloody butterflies climbing this wall behind me that she had stuck onto plants and various other things. There’s this kind of framed picture on the wall, and I just kept thinking, “Oh my god, how is she ever going to make money working in this room?” but I didn’t say anything to her.

It wasn’t until after I’d left and I think I had a call with you maybe the week after, or it was my email, and I said, “One of the things I think you need to do, Mari, is turn your home office into a proper money-making engine room. Can I suggest you get rid of the butterflies climbing the wall? It would make it less kind of girly.” [laughing]

I know that lots of women obviously want to feel feminine etc with how they’re working, but the other thing is business is tough and we do still operate in a very masculine world with how business is done. Sometimes you do need to grab yourself a pair of testicles and actually bring some testosterone to what you’re doing, and approach business in a fairly aggressive, quite arrogant style. You cannot do that if you’ve got too much fuzziness around you in the environment that you work in every day. Have I given too much away, Mari?

Mari: My butterflies are now in my bedroom, and I love my butterflies, but I know what you mean. I had the futon and the fancy turquoise and bling cushions, and I had designed it for the backdrop for when I did webcasts and webinars.

But talk about delegating – for all the webinars I’ve done throughout the year now I rent a professional TV studio and I have a whole crew there to help me with the lighting and the technical side of it. I just show up and be the talent, and I love that now. I don’t need to be the one thinking about what buttons to press and is my stream going to break down or whatever. It absolutely does make a difference.

I created a separate space in my home office where I can have another work station and be productive in other areas, but my office is more exclusively a clean desk and just really focusing on specific projects at times.

Anne: I know you probably want to bring some Q&A in shortly, but I think one of the big things is people kind of don’t have that separation enough in the space that they work. They may only have a desk in the corner of a room. They may not even have a room that they’re working from that’s specific to work.

I think the problem is there’s too much of your life encroaching in on the work zone, whether that’s just a desk, or in my case when I started out it was a coffee table, or if you’re fortunate enough to have a whole room to work from, or even a professional office. That separation helps bring the right mindset to the work that you do.

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I’m not against butterflies. [laughing] It’s not this thing where I hate butterflies. I actually love butterflies. It wasn’t that. To me it just didn’t feel like the right kind of environment that your mind could be in a space where it was about trying to create a business and grow your business in a working frame of mind.

I think that’s important for people to understand. It’s not about thinking that you’ve got to stop being a woman or stop being feminine. It’s not that. It’s just that there’s a mindset you have to bring to the table when you’re going to sit there and do business.

Mari: I think in the last five years since social media has really encroached on a lot of what we do, in having all these different notifications and bells and whistles and alarms going off every time someone pokes you on Facebook or whatever, or Likes something or tweets to you – I have all my notifications turned off. However, each time you go to Facebook they have the little red notifications.

I think the actual physical environment that you’re talking about helps to keep that clarity of mind in place, that when you’re at your desk focusing on revenue-generating activities, cash flow, money-making ideas and implementing, then you’re not being distracted. It’s so critical to not allow oneself to be pulled down a rabbit hole and, oopsie daisy, two hours just went by chasing things on Facebook.

You can even have a whole separate work space. That’s where you can be on the sofa or at the coffee table or whatever when you’re chit-chatting and building relationships on Facebook and Twitter, which is important, and other sites obviously, but not to be having that all muddied in and mixed in where it actually takes you ten times longer to do anything when you’re in your productive zone.

Anne: If you’re fortunate enough to have a wall where you can put up a big calendar or your main goals you’re trying to achieve, that is by far more important than anything. Then of course have some personality pieces around that make you happy and keep you in a really good mood for the day, but ultimately if you’re going to be productive in a session, you want to do that in an environment that’s going to make you money.

Mari: I love it. I actually even got these million-dollar bills and taped them to my office door. [laughing]

Anne: I have one of those. [laughing]

Mari: Let’s switch to Q&A mode. Folks on the phone, you can go ahead and press *2. *2 will raise your hand and let us know that you’d like to ask Anne or me a question. Alternatively you can pop your question in on the webcast area. I know many of you have, and I’m going to do my best to get to some more here in a moment.

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Who do we have on the line? It looks like someone from Los Angeles. Is that you, Catherine?

Catherine: It’s me. Hi Mari. Hi Anne.

Anne: Hi, how you doing?

Catherine: Really good, thanks.

Mari: Awesome. I’m so glad you’re here. Is that Catherine Hedden?

Catherine: Yes, Catherine Hedden from Films About Me.

Mari: Catherine and her husband – give David credit for sure here – you guys are one of the best video production teams I’ve ever seen and had the pleasure of coming across. I’m glad you’re here.

Catherine: Thanks, Mari. You were a gem to work with. We had a great time working with you on your Business & Beyond Club video. Thanks.

Mari: Thank you! Awesome. Did you have a question for me or Anne?

Catherine: I do, and I’m coming with my question a little sheepishly. I heard Anne say that money-making is in the boring. David and I, I don’t know if either of us fully embraced the boring. Mari, I participated in your Social Media Intensive a couple of months ago and it was amazing, the best money I’ve ever spent on any training, and I left there with a really clear plan.

I came back to my office and I put up my calendars and I listed all of my marketing events that I was going to do, and like two days later another shiny sparkly thing came along that actually seemed like a really huge business opportunity.

I’m struggling with does business always feel like a zigzag as opposed to a straight line? Even though I do something that’s incredibly creative, I’m also a CPA so I understand the straight line. I feel like this entrepreneur thing is very much a zigzag, so then how do I know when I’m zigzagging and it’s appropriate versus when I need to say no to something, some new creative idea.

Anne: Business is not a straight line, and entrepreneurship is not a straight line at all. To me it’s like the heartbeat that you see on a heart monitor in a hospital, which I guess is a form of zigzag. When I refer to it as a heartbeat, a business should have a heartbeat where it’s consistently going. There’s going to be ups, there’s going to be downs, there’s going to be opportunities, there’s going to be lack of opportunities, and all that’s happening all the time.

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I think if you think it’s going to be a straight line, you’re imagining some kind of fantasy of what entrepreneurship is, in the way that often people imagine being a successful business owner or a successful entrepreneur. They want to take half the gene pill from Donald Trump and half the gene pill from Richard Branson and create some kind of love child from that. It would be interesting what kind of hairstyle it would have, wouldn’t it?

But what you need to understand is that business is like a heartbeat. It’s also about momentum. It’s making sure that you keep momentum under what you’re doing. So when you say you kind of set your office up etc, and then something bright and shiny came along, the bright shiny is okay as long as you allow yourself to be self-critical and kind of do a reality check every so often.

I don’t mean do a reality check every three months. I’m talking about a daily reality check. Is this bright shiny object that’s come across your desk or been sent to you by email something that’s the right thing to do, or does it go in the “not really for me” pile.

Ultimately with business it’s about not just having a set cemented way that you’re going to do business. It often is the opportunities that slide in that can completely change your path and direction of where you’re going, as long as it stays within the overall framework of what you want to try and do within your business. Does that make sense?

Catherine: Yes. That makes me feel so much better. Thank you.

Anne: So you can take your tail from between your legs. It wasn’t quite as bad as you thought.

Catherine: Good! Thank you very much. The call’s been really rich with content. Thank you.

Mari: Thanks, Catherine. I appreciate you being here, and I can actually relate to that zigzagging. Sometimes people look in and they think, “Oh my gosh, Mari’s really focused and productive,” but I have my days.

Anne: Everybody has their days. I have days where I sometimes sit at my desk and stuff doesn’t come. What I do is I kind of take my failure pulse. My failure pulse is if I’m not actually being productive I just have to get up and realize today’s not a good productive day. Stuff’s not going to happen. Obviously I might have meetings and things I have to attend to, but it’s not necessarily a day of having great mindful insights. It’s just a day of getting through the humdrum instead.

Mari: Right, exactly. I see a few more hands raised and we’ve got a couple more questions. I do want to make sure that we take time to cover the fourth pillar about scale. We’ve got 15 more minutes to go. We might be able to take a couple more questions just before the top of the hour.

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I do want to give a shout out. We have several new members of the Club who have signed up. A shout out to Lynn Davis, greetings and welcome in California. Dianne from Queensland, Australia. Fantastic! Hi Dianne Summerville, and Teresa Pangan from Iowa. Beautiful, fantastic! Greetings and welcome. We’re delighted to have you on board.

We are going to be capping the Business & Beyond Club at 100 members maximum. We might have a little less than that, but I don’t want people to be thinking that they won’t get much attention because it’s thousands of people. That’s not what we’re looking for here.

It really is a very, very powerful program that will help you with a solid plan to make 2013 your breakout year. There will be expert guidance and accountability. That’s at www.BusinessAndBeyondClub.com. It’s $395 a month. I’ve made it extremely affordable, and it comes with a free 1-1/2-day live mastermind event in San Diego in April 2013, which is actually a $1500 value or more.

Plus for everybody who does join the Club, you’ll automatically be entered into a drawing to win a half-day one-on-one private business and social media consult with me, worth $15,000. You can go ahead and sign up at www.BusinessAndBeyondClub.com, and we will be announcing the winner of that in a couple days’ time. I’ll finish up details on that at the top of the hour.

Let’s move right into the fourth pillar. In fact, it’s kind of one of my favorites here, Anne. It’s funny. I’m guilty of that whole ‘avoiding the boring’ aspect and really getting addicted to the bright shiny objects, chasing the butterflies, and zigzagging as Catherine was just talking about.

The final pillar could seem out of reach to many people, and it really can be hard, especially when you’re the talent, as Shawn was saying. You’re the entrepreneur. You’re building a personality-based brand, or not. Maybe you’re building a solid brand that’s not your name.

You’re looking at how you effectively delegate and outsource. That’s really been a theme here throughout our call today, how you get out of the trenches and become the visionary leader that you know you’re meant to be. The answer is that you absolutely must know how to properly scale.

Anne, what does it take to make the quantum leap? You’ve been there and done that many times, to make that quantum leap of getting from initial start-up to six figures, seven figures, and ultimately way beyond into hundreds of millions of dollars in value.

Anne: One of the key things for me – and this is going to sound really odd, because I’ve been talking about money a lot, and talking about setting up a serious engine room to make money and all these different things I’ve mentioned through the call – but ironically I’m not actually that interested in money, even though I’ve made a lot of money.

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Money to me is a way that shows you that you’ve achieved success in the western world running a business, but I’m not a very materialistic person. Yes, I want to have a nice home and all the rest of it, but I couldn’t really care less about what kind of car I have. I don’t buy labeled clothing and all the things that people might expect of somebody who’s created the money that I have.

The thing for me with scale is that it’s allowing yourself to be comfortable adding that zero to the income level that you’re making, and then continuing to add zeros to it. The comfort part goes right back to one of the things I was saying much, much earlier in the call, that you’ve got to feel like you’re worth it. Because you’re worth it, you’re able to actually create a business to the scale that you want it to be, and to have the success that you want it to have.

To do that, it happens along a pathway of getting there. When you have failures, it’s handling those well. It’s having courage to know that there’s never a time that you’re going to feel 100% comfortable doing new stuff. I do new stuff all the time and I do things that I’ve never done before all the time, and each time you have to step into it.

It’s a bit like being an Olympic athlete, or even training for the first time to do any kind of sport. It’s about habit-forming. When it becomes habit-forming that it’s okay to go up to the next level, when you get to the next level you realize it’s okay to go to the level beyond that. When you get to the level beyond that, you realize it’s okay to go to the level beyond that.

It doesn’t have to be a slow path. We’re all kind of conditioned through how we’ve heard messages from parents, teachers and school leaders that you’ve got to put in the hard work. Yes, you have to work hard as an entrepreneur, but more than anything you’ve got to work smart. You’ve also got to allow yourself to reach the income levels that that business is capable of reaching.

The #1 thing I see is actually fear – fear of allowing yourself to add those zeros either to your own personal bank balance because you’re now making more money than you thought was ever possible, or adding more zeros to the business because it’s getting more clients or selling more products than you ever thought was imaginable. It’s allowing yourself to understand that it’s okay to feel fear about that, but for the fear not to stop you getting to that point of actually scaling up.

It really, really is about mentally changing, and I’ve talked about this a lot through the call. It’s mentally changing your mindset so that you can allow yourself to acquire what you want, rather than being your own worst stumbling block to getting there.

Mari: Right, exactly. It’s just really clarity on what you want. I’m going to get a little esoteric on people here, and they can take it however they want. I always just say that God didn’t put a dream in your heart that you can’t manifest.

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If you keep thinking, “I’m doing this job but it’s really not making me happy. I really have this big vision. I want to go out and create this business. I want to make a bigger difference,” but you’re holding yourself back – you mentioned a lot today about worthiness, which I really resonate with. I think to me that’s really an inside job.

It’s so important to just keep working on that mindset and that heartset even, to just know you’ve got to do the inner work. Realize that anything that happened in your past doesn’t have to affect you now. You absolutely are worthy.

I always say to people that one of the easiest ways to make more money is to raise your rates. Whatever it is, if you’re charging for your time or if you’re selling information products, maybe you’re not charging enough. A lot of people complain about not getting what they’re worth, but unfortunately they are. Right now, at this particular time, whatever they’re charging, that is the rate they’re getting. I’d like to challenge you just a little bit outside that comfort zone, to stretch and really be able to widen your net of possibilities.

This affects social media, too, and this whole pillar of scaling. We’ve talked a little bit about it today – scaling your social media efforts, but without losing that human touch. Be high touch and high tech, but still have the freedom to focus on building your business.

A lot of business owners are stretched. They don’t have time to always be adding a personal touch. We’ve talked today about how many business owners and entrepreneurs are frustrated in social media. They know they have to do it, but they don’t really know how to scale it.

Some solutions, for example, on Twitter would be to have additional team members. I always love it when companies display who these other team members are, so it’s very clear. At least they’re going to sign off on Facebook or Twitter. If you are having someone communicate through your channel, just make sure you know who they are.

Examples are Exact Target. Shout out to Exact Target. They’re @exacttarget. You can see a whole list of their different social media managers and community managers. They have pictures and they have names of the people.

Another one on the personality-based brand is a guy who is completely seen for writing the book on influence and persuasion. His name is Robert Cialdini, @robertcialdini. He actually says right there in the bio they have several people tweeting through. This is a person’s account, but they always sign off on who the people are, so that’s a great way to scale.

On Facebook, I actually invented an awesome solution myself that many people are welcome to copy. It’s on my Mari Smith fan page. I ended up creating a separate fan page called Team Mari, then I have team members who go and sign in through the Team Mari page, and they respond to questions on my main page as Team Mari, then they sign off their first name.

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That’s a beautiful example of scaling where I’ve freed up probably on Facebook I would say an hour a day of me not having to always be the one who’s answering questions on my own fan page. It really does help to build up social equity when you’re in there and you’re being responsive and you’re helping people know that they can come to you for support. You’re building up those relationships. I think that’s just really powerful.

We’re coming to the top of the hour. We’ve got five more minutes here to go. We want to make sure that we honor people’s time. I want to give a shout-out to Debbie. Fantastic, wonderful, in Toronto, Canada. Hello Debbie and welcome to the Business & Beyond Club. It’s a joy to serve you.

You can all go to www.BusinessAndBeyondClub.com today. If you need to check with a spouse or just check your calendar you can do that, but I do recommend that you do join us and make that decision ideally today. We’ll go ahead and do the drawing for the one-on-one live half-day coaching session with me, and we’ll announce the winner on Monday next week. You’ve got just a few days to make that decision.

Anne, are you doing okay on time?

Anne: I’m doing okay on time, Mari, if you want to kind of wrap up. But then if you want to I’m able to answer more questions and do anything you need.

Mari: That’s so kind of you. Let me just summarize for everybody, because I know people have blocked out the time for this today, and we want to make sure that we kind of wrap up.

To summarize what everybody learned, we started out with that solid foundation, the business, the personal space, the environment, the engine room, your productivity, your habits, your calendar, your planning, and of course your social media. To me the social media almost comes last. It goes on top because it’s then amplifying everything else.

The second pillar is you’re going to build on all of that in all areas – your systems, habits, maintaining consistency and strategic intent in everything you do. You’re clear on what exactly you’re building. Is it a lifestyle business? Is it a brand? Is it something you’re going to be selling? Is it a personality brand? Get that clarity.

With the #3 pillar you’re going to ramp up from there and focus on growth. Here’s where the boring comes in, daily habits that work well in your business, your social media, your daily productivity, and how big do you want to go with that.

Then the #4 pillar is scale. It’s often out of reach for people because they don’t really understand the power of delegating and how critical that is, to build teams, to be able to start slow.

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We really reiterated this several times throughout the call and with many of our callers and questions here today, Anne, about just starting somewhere, paying someone $10 an hour twice a week to help you around the house. Then use that time that you just freed up to go ahead and focus on generating income. It’s so important to get that scale piece in place to build a sizeable business or brand.

I know that Twitter’s been really active. I’ve seen a lot of tweets from people. I really, really appreciate your questions. You’ve been putting some questions into the webcast and I’m going to be going through them after the call here.

If you want to find out more about how to create consistent solid results with these four pillars, I invite you to become a member of the Business & Beyond Club. It’s an exclusive group of committed professionals, and I would love to welcome you on board to come on this journey with me for the next year.

It’s basically a 24-lesson curriculum. You’ll get two lessons a month. I am going to push and stretch you, but it’s absolutely doable for every single one of you. We meet once a month on a live Q&A webinar. You’ll see my screen, you’ll see me on camera, and we do that once a month. Then once a quarter we have Power Master classes, which go on quite a bit more in-depth. The emphasis is on implementation and accountability.

That’s at www.BusinessAndBeyondClub.com. I see a few of you asking, just to reiterate the website. If you’re on the webcast it’s just that button there, the Business & Beyond Club button on the webcast link.

I really want to invite you to get ready for massive growth, wherever you are right now. I know we had some questions. Diane asked, “Does the Club allow for fine-tuning? In other words, do we need to fully know our product or service to be able to benefit from the Club?”

No, you don’t, because in the first month or two that’s exactly what we’ll be doing for those of you who are not quite crystal-clear what your product or service is. I’m also supporting people who are at a different level, those of you who are looking not just to fine tune what you’re offering, but also to ramp it up, to expand what you’re offering. You’ll get everything you need to accelerate your business productivity and social media success.

My Club’s big promise is this, two things. I’m absolutely committed that you’re going to learn how to free up more time, because you’ll be spending it wisely. You’ll have systems. You’ll have support. You’ll be focusing on the right areas for you. And you’re going to make significantly more money. That is the beauty of investing in yourself and investing in coaching, having that accountability piece. I truly believe that investing in the right mentors and coaches is one of the best ways to assure success in business and life.

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I didn’t mention at the top of the call, but Anne and I actually met four years ago. Certainly being a fellow Scot, Anne, I resonated with you immediately and just loved your down-to-earth style and how you’re obviously a very accomplished person, but you’re very approachable and generous with sharing your knowledge.

I was thrilled that we were able to work together starting a year ago. I’m also thrilled that my Business & Beyond Club members can vicariously learn from me of much of your expert guidance as well. I really appreciate you.

Anne: If I can just say here as well, I think back to when I was 23 and starting in business. I was very fortunate that I created the success I did, but had I had something like the Business & Beyond Club to be part of, who knows how much faster that would have grown at that time.

The thing that people don’t realize is how costly it is to make mistakes if you aren’t actually investing in your learning, not only from a financial point of view it can be costly making mistakes, but the biggest thing is you can end up going down some horrible rabbit hole for a year or two years that you shouldn’t be going down, whereas if you’ve got a really great coach like Mari is, and I totally respect everything that Mari does, and you also have accountability and all the things that Mari is going to be offering through the Club, then it really, really does help set you up to be doing stuff on the right path.

Ultimately everybody on this call just wants to have a successful business that they enjoy running, that they make enough money from so that they can have the lifestyle that they want, and they can give back to the community and the charities that they believe in. That’s what we’re all here for. It’s not really to fly to the moon or do something totally amazing. It’s to use the amazing powers that you all have to create a fantastic business so that you yourself and your family have a great life, and you are able and have the power to give to those that you want to give to.

Mari: Beautiful. Well said. I totally concur. With that, I’m going to go ahead and let’s press the pause button here. We could easily stay on the line chatting for another half hour and taking questions and what not, but I do want to respect everyone’s time. This whole call was recorded.

Those of you listening to the webcast, if you joined us later, it’s the exact same length. As soon as we wrap up shortly you’ll actually see that the MP3 download is available there.

Lori just popped a question in front of me here. Michelle is asking, “If we join the Club will we be able to email you and get help with certain areas that we may be stuck in?”

The beautiful thing, and I didn’t talk about this, but my Club comes with a private Facebook group. A private Facebook group allows all members to connect with one another and get peer support and access to me. I make a promise as to how much you’ll get from me in the Club, and access to me. I know that I like to over-deliver. Those people that have worked with me before,

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I over-deliver and make sure everybody gets what they need and want. I can’t always promise that everybody will get one-on-one individual attention, but I can promise that nobody will be stuck, and you will get the support that you need. Michelle, I’d love to welcome you into the Club.

On that note, those of you that might have questions about the Club, you’re welcome to email [email protected]. My team and I would be happy to take your questions if you have any concerns or questions about what the Club is about. Everything is there on the FAQ page and on the Coaching Program tab at www.BusinessAndBeyondClub.com.

I’m going to read through many of your tweets. I’ve seen many of you tweeting away a storm here. I just love it and really, really appreciate it. I’ve been resisting the temptation to tweet back to you all whilst leading this call, so I’ll do my best to tweet back to you.

Thank you again, Anne. I really, really appreciate your time today and your knowledge. I’m seeing a lot of tremendous positive feedback. People really enjoy your no-holds-barred style.

Anne: That was my diluted version, wasn’t it, Mari? [laughing]

Mari: Yes it was! We’ve seen a lot more shockers. You didn’t get too many swear words in there today.

Anne: I loved chatting with everybody. Have an absolutely fabulous weekend, everybody. Thank you all for all your amazing tweets and for following me, and retweeting and mentions etc. I’m not possibly going to be able to get back to all of you, but I just want you to know I really, really appreciate it. I look forward to finding out more about those who join the Business & Beyond Club.

Mari, thank you for your time, and have a great weekend.

Mari: Awesome, will do. Thank you so much, Anne. Thank you everybody for joining us here today. We look forward to welcoming more of you into the Business & Beyond Club. I’m maxing it out at 100 spots. We have several spots left, but they are filling up fast. I’m really looking for committed business professionals, committed people that are ready to lock in that seatbelt and go on a journey with me through 2013 and really make it your break-out year.

With that, have a fantastic rest of the day. Remember that if you sign up for the Club between now and the next couple days, you will be entered into the drawing to win a half-day private one-on-one consult with me, worth $15,000, and that is my gift to you.

I see @finnwaterly. She’s tweeting for the Brits among us. She says, “At £250 per month, who’s in?” You’re right! You see, when you put it into pounds it’s even less money per month. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Awesome.

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We’ll talk more soon. Thanks, Anne, and thanks everybody. I truly appreciate it.

Anne: Take care everyone. Bye!

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