Many business owners I talk to are busy. In fact, busyness seems to be the socially acceptable alternative to talking about profit. People assume that if you are busy, you must be doing well.

For a self-employed trades person, or anyone else working “in” their business, the amount you earn is determined by your hourly rate and how busy you are. If you have invoiced 8 hours of work a day for 5 days a week then that must be a good thing because you have been fully booked.

The underlying assumption of “busy” is that your “work” is invoiceable to a customer.

In this environment, to earn more, you need to charge a higher hourly rate. The more you charge, the less likely you are to get the work. Most tradespeople have a good idea, through experience, of the best balance of rate per hour and work available to them so that, everything else being equal, they maximise their earnings. There are two ways to get past the balance point: one is to convince your customers that you are worth a higher hourly rate and the other is to hire people to do the work on your behalf.

It is at precisely this point that you are ready to take the next step upwards on the Entrepreneur’s Ladder to move from self-employed to manager. At both of these levels you are still working in the business, but at the manager level other people are also doing some of the work. It is only when you get to the next level, owner, that you stop trading time for money. At the owner level, you no longer work in the business. You have a general manager who does that for you.

Remember, when you are self-employed, you don’t own a business, you own a J.O.B. (just over broke). Are you just going to keep going as you are? Or do you actually want to build a business?

One of my clients has a goal of having 50 IT companies as customers of his. One benefit of such a sharp focus is that he knows his average value sale with these guys and he knows the average number of transactions. He is therefore able to predict exactly what the achievement of this goal will do for his business in terms of revenue and net profit.

Another benefit of this focus is that everyone he knows, knows exactly what he is looking for. Not only that, they also know why the IT companies should be interested in meeting him. He is therefore able to harvest his relationships in BNI, on Facebook, on linkedin and with me his coach (3 introductions so far). He is also able to do geographic searches on directories like Thomson and Yell to identify other local IT companies.

I’m pretty confident he is going to achieve his goal. He knows his target market. He knows why they need to talk to him and he isn’t diluting his focus by doing other things.

That leaves a question for you: what focus do you need in your business?

Just a couple of years ago, I don’t think anyone doubted that you had to optimise your website through a mixture of SEO, web ready copy, links and blogs.

Faced now, with a new client who has no IT in their business at all and certainly no website there is a compelling argument for pursuing social media at the expensive of the traditional website route to market.

What’s happened over the past couple of years is Facebook. Facebook is the world’s thrid largest “country” after China and India and has overtaken Google in terms of internet traffic.

What is really interesting as well, is the number of people purporting to have expertise in social networking. How many people do you know that were doing one thing in 2008, something else in 2009 and now in 2010 they are social media experts?

In business terms, Facebook is very, very new. Be cautious about anyone claiming to have expertise. Proof is not a few testimonials from friends saying how “nice” the person is. Proof is results, business results. Sales.

One of the big differences for a business between a website and a facebook fanpage is cost. Getting your website done professionally can cost thousands with no guarantee of your ROI. Facebook on the other hand varies from cheap to free and allows you to target ads much more precisely than say, on LinkedIn.

The bottom line is you do have to have a website, if only for customers to find your phone number - oh yes, and you do take texts don’t you? I’d be looking to get a basic website up and I’d be driving traffic to it via social media participation.

What would you do?

So often when I meet business people, they tell me they are looking for anyone who needs (insert name of product or service). What I’m listening for, when they are talking to me, is the specific reason why people I know should be introduced to this person.

If you have an engineering manufacturing business - as one of my clients does - you could make anything for anyone. The real question is how specifically do you qualify? And it’s the specificity that really counts. Without it, how are you different from anyone else with an engineering manufacturing business so desperate for work they will make anything for anyone whether they have the expertise or not?

In this particular case, I knew that this client also worked with electronics and could make and assemble electro-mechanical systems. That became important when I met another business owner, not 30 miles away, who was looking for a UK manufacturer for his new electronically controlled mechanical device. Needless to say, my client has just finished making the prototype of this device with the prospect of some nice volume orders.

So, what is the specific reason your business needs to be introduced to your potential customers?

Dreaming is a very underrated pastime for business owners. Maybe it is a British thing, not to dream too big. For many of the people I work with, dreams almost have to be dug out of them. I think it’s because, at the beginning, they don’t believe their dreams will ever be achieved. So, if you were to achieve your dreams, how would that ever happen? What would you have to do? Who would you have to become in order to do those things?

Today’s conversation was with a racing driver. His dream is to race at Le Mans. As we evaporated all his reasons “why not”, one at a time, he became more animated. Now his dream is real he might actually start on the road to achieving it.

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