Why Being Transparent In Business Helps

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 04:53:47 +0100

There have been several key leverage points in my career which have been crucial in allowing my business online to grow and develop. Moving away from the idea that I had to do everything internally and allowing things to go outside of my business and reducing the number of employees that I had in my business made a big difference.

At one point I had nine employees working in my business who were doing all kinds of things. I did the math one day and I said, I think I can outsource this for less money. So I kept a small staff, my assistant and my brother who does all my video editing and that kind of thing. That became my staff. I made them work harder, frankly, but I paid them well for it.

They had to do a few more things sure, but the result was, I was able to outsource many of the things that these other people had been doing. Now I was paying an unweighted wage, and by unweighted I mean I wasn’t paying employment taxes, I’m not paying medical insurance, I’m not paying all these things for people. I was able to then recover all that money and put it right back to the bottom line and my profitability went up directly and frankly my stress level went way down because I didn’t have all these people to attend to on a daily basis.

Writing a book was another turning point for me. If you’re going to be the foremost expert in your market, at some point you need to write a book. I don’t care what your business is. People say, I’m in the fertilizer business. Great. You write a book about what fertilizer is about, what are the new innovations, how are people using it, case studies, all those kind of things. I don’t care what you tell me, I’m going to tell you to write a book anyway because that puts you in front of a whole new audience.

Even if it does nothing more than expose you to trade shows and places like that where you can come and talk about your book, it gives you such a deep level of credibility that people still instantly and subconsciously respect that.

Those were big things that were turning points for me. The big things now that are turning points for me today are obviously embracing social media . I’m sure I was one of the first people to sign up on Twitter. I was on Twitter in very early 2007 or late 2006. I embrace technologies early now and I figure out how they’re going to work.

So for me embracing social media early and learning what about it really worked was something that was very powerful for me and took my business to the next level. Anybody who’s thinking about growing their business or starting their business, they can look at that and say, ok, I better be embracing this.

What they should also be doing is reading my blog, for example, and seeing what I’m embracing next because I talk about all that stuff very openly about my successes and failures and how it works. The more I do that, the more transparent I am to people, the more my sales grow, the more my following grows and the more people want to interact with me.

transparent-business

Why Being Transparent In Business Helps