CAIR 9: Overcoming YOUR Business Pain Points...

What a pain in the neck!! What are the major pain points for YOUR business? What opportunities are you missing because of them? In this episode we will discuss several major, common pain points and techniques to overcome them...

Thank you for coming to another episode of ClickAI Radio. So today we're talking about pain, right? Something that well, we often Try to avoid I know I do. So we're talking about pain in our business and what that means and the different elements of pain that drive us. When it comes to your small to medium business. The question is, what are your pain points? What are the problems that you face? So I have an opportunity to talk with a lot of companies. And the list of pain points certainly has some common themes across industries actually, across the world. There are certainly unique characteristics of pain to each organization, but there is some common threads threads, what I find tends to change is the prioritization that we put on mitigating those pain points. Sometimes we get shiny object syndrome, right, and it's the next best thing or what we think is the next best thing or the next cool thing. And rather than mitigating those pain points, we will often avoid them because well, heck, who wants to mess around with pain? Right? So When I think about pain, when you think about pain in our business, there's four that I'm going to identify here. And I'd like you to think about, do you have these pain points in your business? Alright, so here we go. I'm gonna go through four of these. So, number one, number one. So that is what I see lack of time or resources to get certain things done, right. There's just when I look at all of the things that are on a small, medium business, this is a pretty consistent one. One startup I did years ago, we were developing some technologies to help software teams. We were so busy taking care of day to day challenges, that we ended up missing some significant business opportunities. Again, our argument was, well, I'm so busy taking care of day to day stuff that we didn't pull our head out enough to look around and say, Gosh, we could have really leveraged something to have received a better revenue and income opportunity for the business.

A survey found on medium.com indicated that 26% of businesses say that inadequate funding or staffing is their main obstacle for online marketing. That's interesting stat. Right. I actually think it's higher than that. I think it's more I think it's above that. But the bottom line is you're so busy. we're so busy, right when we're running our small companies, that we actually need a way to hand off what I would call treasured tasks.

Write things that are critical, but for which we need to hand off to someone to help us find those insights that can help the business because lots of times we as the entrepreneur, we become the blocker to the business, right? We become the bottleneck to it, because our skills right your skills are needed in so many places. So on the one hand, that's good, but the other hand We end up blocking in slowing down our own growth, because well, we're not handing off key things. And one of the most important things we can hand off is have someone take a look at what is it that we have been capturing and tracking our digital footprint over time, if you will, or say to the way our business information, what's inside there, what is it really telling me? What's the story of the past? What's the predictive look into the future that can come out of this that has high probability? All right, so that's pain point number one, lack of time resources, lots of times to even just go get insights. Alright, that's number one.

Number two. All right. inconsistent cash flow, right. So here's the question, right, kid can you identify opportunities to develop consistent cash flow? See, this is one of the big challenges here, right, which is, especially for us right and small to medium businesses, we've got things that we can do to improve certain aspects of this like improving our billing cycle and invoicing. Right? And leveraging good credit right through through good financial relationships and prioritizing our expenses, and saving and all those kinds of things. But in reality, and those are critical. So we got to make sure we do those. That's like taking your vitamins, right? That's like taking care of yourself and eating right. So those are just good practices we got to do. But what about, what about the cash flow coming in? So there's the management of it internally that I've mentioned, but is there something that I could do to help bring a consistent cash flow? What would that look like? Well, the turns out that there is cash sitting in your business, but the question is, is how do you access it right?

Generally, you're going to find that by looking again at what the Prince tell you, right? What are the insights from your business information that are going to say, Oh, it's during these times when you in fact perform the best that you exhibit these behaviors. Let's do more of those. And let's stop some of the other things that are actually not helping us. So that's the second pain point.

Let's move on to pain point number three. So this one has to do with what we call looking for the next lever to pull. Right. And so the problem around this is, you know, there's shiny object syndrome, right? We talked about that a moment ago. It's this, it's while it's good to be able to pivot as a business owner. It can also be confusing to our customers, right when we're constantly shifting to do the next big thing. Now, certainly, as a business owner, you got to always be looking for what the next big thing is, but sometimes we do this in the dark, right? We we We say, well, let's just go try this. So when we're marketing something, let's just go try this, see how it goes. And then, and then we say, well, let's see what happened there. Well, we're not really sure why it didn't work, or we're not sure why it worked even. But the bottom line is to overcome this, we need to be able to shine a light on our information that can help us provide insight in terms of where we should go next. So while it's good to be able to pivot, we also need to be able to say, Do I know why something worked or didn't work? And can I have the insight to do that? So no more reaching in the dark, right? There's ways to overcome this pain point.

All right, let's take a look at number four, pain point number four. So this is the one that is it feels a bit like a real downer because it's it's missed opportunities, right? It's a It's the opportunity cost that we bring upon our business. When you know, lots of times we don't even know it happened until later later down the road. In fact, I referred to it earlier, when I talked about the small startup that I was doing in the technology space, man, we totally missed some opportunities. And at the time, is like, not even aware of it. Not even aware that that happened. So what is an opportunity cost? Right? So you might as a consultant, say, you might get $75 an hour just making that up. And instead of working one night, right, you go to a concert that costs say, $25 in the last two hours, so the opportunity cost of the concert was $150. Make sense? Right. And there's plenty of examples of this that we do in our business, right? We might have, we might decide to quit working right and go to school for further training. Well, the opportunity cost was lost wages for a year, but what about for a business so Here's an opportunity cost you might spend your time and your money in your business selling a product. fact, let's say that you sell a product in market a rather than in market B. So the opportunity costs was, well, those opportunities we did not get from a right from the market. A question is, is that the right thing to do? What if we can have some insights that shed light on the better outcome, or course to take, there's some insights from the footprint of our data, right things that we've been doing over time as a business that actually can give us some great guidance on the time of the year or the month or the day or the time of the day even or whatever it might be, or when specific markets we should go after. So the common theme across these pain points while they're different and they're varied, is one word that I would use called leverage. Leverage requires To build on something, and the thing that we're building on is our business information, right? It's our data. It's the stuff that we have. And so it becomes critical that we nurture it, we take care of it. We know how to manage it. And we're also stopping to look at some insights that can guide us through this. So data is our friend wasn't that in the movie Finding Nemo?

Fish aren't food fish are our friends. Well, data is our friend. So I encourage each of us to take time to go look at our data and get the insights from that. My name is Grant. Thanks for joining and until next time, go get some leverage.

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