The Top 4 Mistakes I Made In My First 4 Years Of Drop Servicing Business by Dylan Sigley
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By the end of this article, you’re going to understand the biggest mistakes I made in the first 4 years of building my online, drop servicing businesses, so you can avoid those mistakes and learn from them to get results a whole lot faster.
Quitting my job too early
When building a drop servicing business, you need resources. It takes time. You need to actually sit down and with focused effort work on the system and build the structure of your drop servicing business so it generates revenue. So, you need the energy to put in a certain amount of time, then, finally, with money, you can invest in your business and grow it even faster.
Most think that time is the most important resource. The more time you have, the more you can work on the business, the faster it will grow. Logically, you think you’ve got 24 hours in a day, the more of those hours you can give to your drop servicing business, the faster it will grow. However, time isn’t the only resource at play here, money and energy-matter just as much.
We often overemphasize time as a resource, forgetting about the money and energy aspect of building a drop servicing business. In reality, you can have all the time in the world, you’re only going to be able to devote a finite amount of time to actually sit down and focus on the work. Not because you need more time, but simply because you only have so much energy to expend on going deep into a task. Then, using money, you can speed up the yield from that time and money invested.
In terms of energy, it makes the total amount of time you can get productive work done each day finite. Let’s say you do everything possible to maximize your energy, and your total productive capacity of focus is 6 hours. Well, freeing up more of your time, 8 hours, 10 hours, it’s not going to matter because, at 100% of your potential, you’re only capable of 6 hours of focused work each day. Instead of freeing up this time to do more of that work, you could use it to make money doing something more mindless, which you could then invest back into the business. So, time and energy are equally important resources.
Then, you have money, you could invest $0 and 6 hours a day putting your offer out there manually yourself and you might get a sale here and there. However, what if you spend $100 to have the same volume of offer>market going out, then you’d have more time to focus on the next marketing channel? Money speeds up our growth by allowing us to remove ourselves from the system and increase the volume of offers going out to the market. Which, in turn, grows our drop servicing business much faster. So, time and money are equally important resources
With the right blueprint, you don’t need much time, money, or energy, but you do need as much of each as possible to build your drop servicing business at maximum velocity. You should base your decisions upon what will give you the best balance of all three.
I thought by quitting my job, I’d have more time to invest in my drop servicing business. I was going by the assumption that the more time I had the faster my drop servicing business would grow. I used my part-time job as an excuse or barrier to growth, but that wasn’t the case, as I simply had less money and could only get the same amount done with the time I had.
In reality, I just had less money and no extra time because more time is useless if you’re already at productive capacity, you’re already putting as much energy as you can into it, so more time just means more time to waste. I ended up making the resource balance worse by removing the side income completely.
Parkinson’s law is true for anything that you can do. It’s the adage that states “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” What this means is that when you give yourself more time to complete a task, you’re actually going to end up taking longer to do it. You’ve probably noticed it at play when you only have a few hours to hit a deadline, you end up picking up the pace and getting the work done a lot faster
Having a job is not an excuse, it’s a power position. If you have a part-time job you’re going to have enough time, 2 hours a day, to work on your online, drop servicing business. Along with that, you’re also going to have all the money you need to really fuel the growth of your business to cosmic heights.
Once you’ve actually built the system, money becomes the more important resource. At a certain point, let’s say 100 hours in, your business will be fully built. The systems and structures in your drop servicing business needed to drive 6-figures without you working in the business will be complete. So no more time will really be required to work on the business. At that stage, it’s all about investing more money into the business to scale up the offers going out to the market. Here money is now more important than time and energy.
Springboard your way from your job to your online, drop servicing business. Let’s say you need 100 hours to fully build the systems and structure at full capacity. Then, you have the energy and time to do 2 hours of fully engaged work on the business each day. After 50 days, less than 2 months, the drop servicing business would be fully built. From there, all it would take is investing money into the business to grow it. Time and energy are no longer the bottlenecks or thing constraining production, money is! And that’s why quitting my job early was the biggest mistake I’ve made in building an online, drop servicing business.
Not managing my finances well
As soon as my business was making a bit of money, I started spending it right away. As if I needed to get rid of the money as fast as it was coming in. I didn’t track revenue, costs, or profit. I had no idea what was going on.
I traveled the world, spent money on clothes, and partied way too much. My drop servicing business continued to make enough money to fuel this lifestyle. As I wasn’t managing my finances, the problem was that I wasn’t growing my business.
Businesses need fuel to survive and move forward. The fuel of all businesses is money. So, by spending your money on stupid things, you’re not investing back into your business to grow. This means you’re missing out on more money in the future, and I’m sure we’d all like to grow as we move forward.
Cash is king for any business. It’s the lifeblood that allows it to grow and move forward. If you’re not tracking your finances, then you’re neglecting your business and leaving it stagnant, or worse, letting it fail.
Most ignore the financial side of business because it’s not sexy. They want to focus on getting sales and spending the money, but finances and accounting are like the doctor of your business, tracking its health and making sure it’s growing well.
Finances are the key to success. If you fail to realize that, you’re setting yourself up for mediocrity and failure at worst. This was the second biggest mistake in the very beginning, but luckily I learned from it pretty quickly and was able to move on to the next stage.
Playing with things too much
We are taught that the more hours we work, the better results we will get. If we do more of the thing that gets the results, then we will get more results. The trouble with this is we often mistake what brings the results. We focus more on doing stuff than the tasks that will bring us the greatest return on our time investment.
Results are what really determine that something is working. Rather than focus on working for the sake of work, we should be focused more on the result of the work. Before setting out on a task, determine what the outcome of that task should be, and ensure that the outcome actually contributes value and growth to the business. Then you know it’s worthwhile.
Often you can end up trying to fix what isn’t broken. We have this mindset of work for the sake of work, we end up playing with structures and systems attempting to remake what is already working, which can lead to catastrophic results when the decision is made illogically, and the changes are not made in a vacuum.
I remade my website video 3 times and my website 4 times, and changed my offer multiple times. But in the end, it was all the same. None of these changes had any real effect on results, so in turn, they were pointless changes to make. Instead, I should have been focused on things that would grow the business.
One time I even turned off the marketing channel that was working the best for three months while I tried to make it better, but all I achieved was making it worse. This is the greatest example of breaking something outside of a vacuum. Rather than testing my hypothesis with a brand new system to see if the expected results were true, I broke a system that was working and rebuilt it from scratch to test something.
This set me back by 3 months! Whereas I would have avoided this setback by making these changes in a vacuum, without making any updates to the existing system, I would have seen the negative result and not messed with the working system at all.
Not automating fast enough
The entire reason we build these drop servicing businesses is that dream of freedom. We find out the endless possibilities that come with being a digital marketer. But in the process of pursuing these possibilities, we often forget that beginning vision that drove us. We get stuck in the grind of day-to-day work.
Once our drop servicing business starts getting results, we get stuck believing we are the best at doing the things that get these results, so we don’t delegate those things. Because of this, we never get to the end goal we originally had.
This holds us back from attaining freedom but also growing our drop servicing business. If we don’t build the system, then automate the system, removing ourselves from it, we don’t have the time or energy to work on new systems! So, we fail to grow our businesses and have effectively built a job for ourselves.
The answer is to set up management systems so we feel comfortable that our team is handling the job and getting the results they should be getting based on the benchmarks that we set when doing those tasks ourselves.
Conclusion
Making mistakes is bound to happen when doing anything outside of your comfort zone.
The trick is to fail fast forward. The more you fail and learn from your mistakes and then implement those lessons, the faster you will move forward.
Hopefully, you can learn from my mistakes and not repeat them on your own journey.
The worse thing is when you keep making the same mistake over and over again.
The only way to get over that is to make sure you track that mistake down and make a conscious effort not to make it again, then reward yourself when you don’t.
Break down what causes the mistake and set up a system to keep track of whether you are doing the same things that lead to the mistake.
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