What’s Your Missing Ingredient?

Entrepreneur ExperienceGrowth MindsetOnline Business Strategy

Jun 4

In the spring of 2016, I bought a ticket to a small business conference.

My business wasn't yet making much money, and, honestly, paying the $500 for that ticket was a stretch.

Add to that the $247 for airfare to San Diego, and the $280 for my half of the hotel room that I shared with another attendee, and… ouch.

That was $1,000+ that I honestly didn't have available to invest.

No, I didn't put it on the credit card… but it definitely ended up forcing me to put some of our basic living expenses on it. ?

(To be clear: I wouldn't recommend “investing” money you don't have!)

So yes, it was a big stretch — but I was hoping that the investment would end up paying me back; praying that I'd learn SOMETHING that would help my business start growing and earning more money.

But that was NOT something I could assume. Because, the truth was, at that point, I'd already invested a lot of time (and a fair amount of money as well) into learning about business and marketing, and it seemed somewhat unlikely that I'd learn any sort of “secret” or “magic bullet” that would change things.

I thought I probably just needed to suck it up and work harder.

Sometimes, that's absolutely the case. You just need to work a little harder.

But, in this instance, I actually was missing a vital ingredient.

It seems SO obvious now, I don't know how I didn't see it, but…

I didn't have a visibility strategy for my business.

I had a product I was trying to sell.
I had a sales system I'd poured months into creating.
I knew my target customer.
And of course, I had colors, fonts, a logo, and a pretty website.

But I was barely making any money.

What I finally realized at that conference was that I was missing VISIBILITY — and that visibility is a vital ingredient that you can't make money without.

Because, as I (now!) always say, “Nobody can buy your product if they don't know it exists.”

“Visibility” was my missing ingredient. The thing that I had to have to grow my business and income.

Are you missing this ingredient? Or… are you missing a different one?

There are basically THREE essential ingredients to make a business work:

A product offer
Visibility
A system that turns your visibility into sales.

Maybe you're missing one of these things, but, even if you're not, there's still (always!) room for improvement.

For example, today in my business, our sales systems are our weakest area. We have several awesome products, and we get plenty of visibility, but our sales systems don't convert as many people into buyers as we know they could.

But, another business might have great products, top-notch sales systems, and get a decent amount of visibility… so they should focus on increasing their visibility further, so they can generate more sales and serve even more customers.