Business Lessons from

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hi everybody its Deanna Fenton I am happy to be with you here today and glad to welcome you to simple steps to online success this is my weekly Facebook live broadcast where we talk about all things online entrepreneurs the latest tech tools and hopefully soon to be some screen sharing using the be live platform although I’m going to do a special edition of this show in the next couple days early next week probably where we’re going to test yet another tool and I’m going to be able to experiment a little bit with actually doing a multi streaming Facebook and to my youtube channel as well as a webinar so stay tuned and stay in touch and we’re going to I’ll keep you updated on all of that great stuff but today if you know somebody who is a little confused or concerned about getting their online business up and running and needs a little help invite them to join the show it’s every Thursday at 12 noon pacific time and it is on my page and if you search for deanna fenton and the facebook page you’ll you’ll come up with it I am just checking to see if we are live yet on the Facebook page I don’t hope I see it now so we’re in good shape because I am on the awesome V live platform if you want to make comments I can pop your comments onto the screen as well so please go ahead and feel free to ask questions as we go along I do have a specific topic to talk about today something that I’m interested in I’m also testing you know me I love to test my stuff testing what is called the talk show format with be live and I believe I’ve gone over that before and I also play with it a little bit where one I can invite those of you watching on to the program I can have up to three people on screen at the same time I had asked one of my group group people if they wanted to participate and everybody was sort of like well I don’t know I haven’t set up my webcam or my my microphone so can I have some hesitancy there but if you have something to share when I introduce today’s topic I’m happy to have you join me also going to be using kind of the poor man’s screen sharing on this I do have the option of adding in some photos from an album on my Facebook page or my personal profile so we can kind of play with that again so again share this if you have people that are looking for information about business starting a business because today is I think it’s extremely valuable for anybody in business it doesn’t matter if you have an online business or not if you’ve started a business or you’re thinking of starting a business I do want to share something that I was was introduced to just over the weekend by my husband so I am it’s funny because I am going to write a blog post about this and I’ll just give you a quick summary my husband is retired he reads a lot he either is on Amazon ordering books or he’s down at the local library picking up books and he happened to pick up this book he likes biographies picked up a book called ray and Joan the man who started McDonald’s and the woman who gave it all away and it was a story about Ray Kroc who um there is some question as to whether or not he should be referred to as the founder of McDonald’s and his third wife Joan Kroc I am reading the book right now because then from that my husband who also loves to watch TV and movies asked me if I wanted to watch the founder and the founder is the movie it came out late in 2016 that is about Ray Kroc and how he started McDonald’s so it’s interesting because just going to pop this picture in here right now my husband typically doesn’t isn’t really into business topics into me and I know this movie actually did not do well in the theaters and I cut not kind of I’m not surprised honestly because it doesn’t seem like a topic that would have been a huge draw in this day of guardians of the galaxy and Star Wars right but we watched this at home and it was on on-demand and Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc and for me I was just going crazy as I watch this I’m sure I was driving Bob crazy with all my comments because to me this was almost like an mba class on entrepreneurism there were so many nuggets of wisdom in the whole story now right or wrong if you know the story or you seen the movie you know that Ray Kroc basically screwed the McDonald’s brothers out of their business however the McDonald brothers kind of contributed to it so I’m not gonna if you haven’t seen the movie I really do recommend it it shows I get just the real difficult relationship between Kroc and the McDonald brothers but both brought such a tremendous value to what is now McDonald’s Corporation and these are just some of the lessons I want to share with you and again if you want to jump in and you have things that you want to share about it or about the things I’m talking about please do bye-bye feel free I’m actually going to post right now in the comments a little link so if you are interested um you can use this link and I will hopefully everything will work good and I will see that you come in as a guest in the lobby so let’s talk a little bit about some of these lessons and the first one I want to share is know what business you’re really in and this is funny I’m not actually going sequentially in in the the lessons it’s just I wanted to highlight some of the key ones for me and this one really hit home because too often we go into a business and we have an idea and a concept of what it is that we want to offer and its really defining what is it that the business is is meant to do and meant to deliver so the example from the movie is that initially Ray Kroc convinced the McDonald brothers to hire him as their franchise partner to go out and sign up new franchisees form McDonald’s restaurants to do that they had an ironclad contract with him that minimized his Commission I mean he got a commission but it was an extremely small commission a small percentage let’s put it that way so as he went out and he was very successful initially he signed up people that really were not a good fit as franchisees he then learned his lesson he quickly started signing up young couples primarily because he felt having people that were really hungry to be successful in a business there was a husband and wife where both were going to participate in the business and support one another they would follow his system so he started getting very successful signing up franchisees the franchisees were doing very well but Ray wasn’t making that much money and he was struggling and he had put in everything he had mortgaged his home without his wife’s knowledge he had done everything and invested everything put everything on the line to make this a successful venture and he wasn’t making any money he happened to run into a gentleman named Henry at the bank when he was going in to try and plead his case again to to the bank and get more money where Henry who later joined McDonald’s I told him he said you’re not in the hamburger business you need to be in the real estate business so where Ray had been focused on making McDonald’s successful one hamburger at a time he couldn’t make money doing that so Henry’s with Henry’s help he learned he needed to go out and buy real estate then lease the real estate to the franchisees and he would be making money from the real estate instead of the tiny percentage off of the sales of the franchisees so without giving all that whole section of the movie away I mean the McDonald brothers were really incensed over that but Ray won pivoted his business he was able to realize I don’t want to be in the hamburger business because financially that doesn’t work for me if I’m in the real estate business then I can grow and I can become financially stable and I can make a living so think about what business you are and the business that you’re in and take it to another level and look at it a different way as far as I recently was listening to a really great program I’ll give a plug to my good friend Kim Doyle the WordPress chick she did a amazing podcast episode where she interviewed a gentleman who’s written a book on SEO and he was talking about web developers and how web developers go out and they focus on building websites and they are they run into competition with lower price offerings you could be a wordpress developer and trying to sell a website and you’re competing against Squarespace or you’re competing against other web developers that are willing to undercut you and sell a website for $500 or $1,000 where if you figure and you pivot your business and you focus on being a trusted marketing partner with your customers you’re not selling a website you are selling consulting services that a website is part of that to help them grow their business and show them a return on their investment so regardless of the business that you’re in think about how you can pivot that and what you’re offering is not another wannabe or another similar product where you can position it into making it more financially successful for you and provide greater value for your customers so that was one of them and that I thought was an awesome awesome point and again as you are watching even with the rate replay because I know a lot of you watch this afterwards you get to catch it on the replay put a comment below I would love to hear your comments about the movie and and the thoughts that I’m putting out here in terms of the business ideas so the other one that I really focused on was when you’re talking about your customers you want to give them what they need wrapped in what they want so let me explain this one was really the genius of the McDonald brothers because at the time this movie is taking place and you can see here we’re talking in the early to mid 50s the McDonald the the idea of drive-thrus the drive-throughs juice drive-ins um were ways that people could come in and their intention was to get food fast well however the way that the drive-ins were set up they used car hops so these girls would be on rollerskates are running and they’d have to go run to the cars take the orders go back to the kitchen give the order to the cooks try and deliver the food so the concept of fast food didn’t exist because it would take 30 minutes to get a meal delivered to your car and then the restaurants themselves were expending a lot of effort and cost because they were serving food on dishes and the car cops would have to carry dishes on these trays to people and it also was gathering an element of people that were hanging around the parking lots and it just for the McDonald brothers it wasn’t the concept that they wanted to provide they wanted to target families so the families needed to get a fast good consistent food but they wanted it fast and what they came up with was the idea of one the assembly line which we’re going to talk about which systematized how they prepared and delivered the food but they also had to get people to walk up to the counter to place their order because people were used to driving up with their car and sitting there honking the horn and the car Hawk would come out to them so what they needed for them to one keep the prices very low because originally when it started out the hamburgers were 15 cents the drinks were a dime the french fries were a dime so like for 50 cents let or less they were getting a meal so they wanted to give them that cost-effective I’m quick quick delivery of the food and give them really what they needed was which was the time so this strategy I love the strategy because Marie Forleo also talks about the strategy and she calls it the Trojan horse strategy which is our potential customers have a need so for example and I’m only using web developers as an example because that’s kind of what I do but you can apply this for your business as well people want a website that’s not what they need what they need is a lead generation system so this is where I’m saying you need to kind of start looking at it from a different perspective when you are selling a service or a product what is it that your ideal customer really really needs and how can you position it to actually give them what they need so if you were a web developer if you were selling a website you want to actually bundle that and package it as a lead generation system because nobody needs just a website because all you’re doing is creating a brochure site that isn’t going to drive traffic you’re not gonna be able to drive traffic to it if you drive traffic to it you need to convert them into an actual prospect so I loved this concept and this was still like I said directly from the McDonald’s brothers where they were talking about being able to position what you’re offering now another lesson that I learned that I think is really really key and all of us can do this is looking outside your industry because there’s so many of us that are in if we’re in the online business you see everybody is out there with coaching programs with membership sites with these types of online products that are being sold but what if you look at a different model that’s outside of your industry to try and put a different twist on what you’re offering so in this example from the movie the McDonald brothers realize that one of their goals in trying to convert their business is they had to deliver the food quickly and the processes that they were using that were traditional at that time in food service just weren’t fast enough so they looked at and modeled Henry Ford’s assembly line structure for building a car so they looked at how can we systematize our business to reduce the time reduce the waste and become more efficient so they looked outside to model this and there is fabulous fabulous scene in the movie which according to my husband who read this other book it’s like a hundred percent accurate they actually went out to a tennis court and drew a chalk model of their kitchen and had their employees come out and go through Panta mining the process where they could figure out how can we create our own assembly line to improve the efficiency and reduce the time it’s going to take to deliver a meal to our customers so think about what can you look at so one of the ideas and and this is not a new idea at this point but in the membership site world one of the models now is to imitate Netflix where instead of opening up a membership site where you have a ton of new content and people get in there and they are immediately overwhelmed you release small bits of content ala Netflix and people who are a subscriber have the access to this new content because they are a subscriber and that way you kind of control the flow of information and people have something to anticipate and look forward to obviously so think about in your business and your what you’re attempting to provide to our ideal client how can you take something that another industry is doing and put that twist just to give you another example one of the things I’ve also seen is being able to model a subscription program where people actually get a surprise box kind of thing every month if you think about some of the models there they exist in the cosmetic industry they exist in what is it Harrods harry shaving company or something like that that every month you get a box with razors and that type of thing how can you take what you’re doing and package it in a unique way to deliver to your ideal customers so moving on any and again even if you’re watching the replay and you have comments I would love to I’m going to come back and read every one of your comments so I’d love to hear from you so here’s another one again it’s kind of playing on those our previous topic was don’t just imitate what others are doing improve on it so once again that’s what the Donnell brothers did with their concept of their restaurants they weren’t trying to imitate all the drive-ins that were out there in the 50s they were trying to improve on that experience and because they knew who their customer was or who they wanted their customers to be they wanted to improve the experience because they were targeting families so part of the concern or the issue with drive throughs or drive-ins was they were drawing a more of an unseemly element people you know teenagers and hoodlums were hanging around in the parking lots and families didn’t feel comfortable to go to the drive-in restaurants so again the McDonald brothers concept was eliminate the loitering by having people come to the counter they had to get their food and it would tend to eat their food and throw away the paper wrappers and go on their way so similar we’re talking about it don’t just start a course that is focusing on teaching a particular concept or a coaching program how can you improve on it and that again looking outside of your industry to come up with ideas on how you could do that so my other favorite is knowing how to pivot to make the business work so one of the things that the story tells is that the McDonald brothers actually had started a movie theater and the movie theater was started back around the depression and as soon as they started a movie theater and the Great Depression hit nobody was going to the movies they didn’t have any money so they had to close it and decided to kind of regroup they had to figure out how to make the business make a business that would work so they came up with the idea of course getting into the food industry because everybody still had to eat right so they created their first restaurant and in their first restaurant they started out with barbecue which is funny when you think about McDonald’s today right so they started out with barbecue and they had a huge menu of items and they’ve had hamburgers – but hamburgers were just one of the many many many offerings but quickly they realized one they were spending a lot of money on food – they were losing a lot of money on food because obviously food is perishable and if they weren’t selling enough of a particular product item um they could very easily waste that product so they decided to really look at what were the top-selling items so think about this in your business they use the 80/20 rule and they found that 80% of their sales we’re coming from hamburgers french fries and drinks so they quickly decided to pivot their business and minimize their product offerings to just hamburgers french fries and drinks and you know soft drinks and milkshakes which is you know one of the big the beverage item that actually brought Ray Kroc to them so how can you pivot your business so look at 80 percent at the the 20% of the items bringing 80 percent of your sales that make sure I accept that right earlier right 80/20 role so look at the 20% of what you’re doing that is bringing you the majority of your revenue or your profit and get rid of the rest systematizing your business which is what they did when they modeled the Henry Ford’s the Ford assembly line can help you provide greater service to your customers help them achieve their goals much faster and help you increase your profits and be able to grow your business even more and that I think is also one of the things where again they focused on being able to target who they felt they could best serve and they did everything in their power to model the business to provide that to their ideal customers so I’d love to know what you think of that the movie if you watch the movie it’s on demand we happen to be in California and watch it on Comcast I’m sure it’s probably out on DVD if you do that I don’t you know these days me to keep up how people watch movies because you’ll read in the blog post that I’m not a huge TV person so I don’t always watch movies and I only watch movies when my husband says hey you want to watch this I was so grateful to him for sharing this with me because like I said I got so much value out of understanding these different lessons and really thinking about it I am going to be expanding more on these in a blog post there’s actually more if you could believe it I really had more like ten different lessons there was a couple more that I’d love to share with you so you could always visit me at Deanna Fenton comm and you can um also uh so let’s just pop that it here on the screen real fast okay throw BNF inton calm and you can go ahead and watch for that blog post and I also wanted to invite you and anybody else that you may know of to join when I’m calling the reinvention revolution so one of my favorite things to do is work with entrepreneurs or want to be entrepreneurs that are over the age of 50 so if we think about it today let’s just be real I’m 58 um I feel like I’m going to keep working for a long time mostly because I want to but there are also those who want to and there are a lot that have to so I’m looking at at this time of our life why can’t we be in a position to be able to UM oh hi hi kirinda oh I hope it’s both said your name correctly hi welcome to be live yeah well I’ve been using be live actually gosh about four to six months I guess and you shared that thank you so much I appreciate that very much um so what I was talking about as far as the reinvention revolution and the idea of the over 50 entrepreneur and I have to be real honest with you I’m not even minimizing or minimizing limiting it to entrepreneurs I am looking at people who are actually interested in making a a perhaps radical transformation in their lives and that could be um you retiring and you want to start a non-profit you are maybe you’ve had a business this is another area um Oh dr. Josh ugh I would love to hear about what you do that would be awesome I would really I’d love to hear that and see if we can’t get together that’d be great I’m definitely interested in working more with the talk show format and actually I’m kind of I’m kind of coming up to that too that we could talk about so the reinvention revolution is really focused on people that are looking to reinvent themselves over 50 or people that have a message to share and that could be a story a product or a service for the reinvention revolution so this is let me share this with you real fast this is my group that is here on Facebook and I just posted the link in the comments and that is focused on