Mistakes we have made

At Uncommon Wealth Partners, we get the opportunity to talk to many business owners.  We love working with owners because we are one of them! We love to talk through what is working as a business and what is keeping them up at night. One question I am always eager to ask is, “If you could travel back in time, what would you do differently in your business?”

I want to share my answer to that same question. My hope is that it will help those in similar situations and help others learn from my mistakes. There are many things that I would do differently but we learn a great deal from our mistakes and those mistakes have made us a stronger company.

What would we do differently? Here are the three things we changed in our business:

Hire an Intermediary-

We used to be the ones to talk to our clients about our fees but that turned out to be a huge mistake! We undervalued our expertise and discounted the value we offered people. We are running a business and people understand that they are going to need to pay for our expertise and knowledge. However, there have been countless times when we have saved a client thousands of dollars in interest only to tell them not to pay us. They even asked us, “How do we pay you?” and we said, “Don’t worry about paying us.” WHAT!

We know ourselves well enough to know that we needed to have another person involved who was responsible for communicating our prices. I am not sure what that looks like for you or for your business, but for us, we needed to protect our business from ourselves and our tendency to give everything away for free.

Get a Good Marketer-

I have written about this before, but having a marketer that understands your business, your ideal client, and most importantly your value makes a world of difference. They help the right people get in the door. We don’t want to be an advisor for everyone; we want to be an advisor to the right kind of people, and a good marketer can help with that.

Control your own Brand, Website, and Message-

It sounds so silly, but having your own brand and name that only you can control is a huge thing. Having this control can enable you to communicate with others in a way that provides a much bigger platform than just your personal name. This is a huge component to scaling your business. When you can have the flexibility to change things on your website to match what has been working with your clients, then you can really ramp up your business. Too many people don’t have control of their brand, message, or their website and it is crippling to their growth.

I am sure there are many other things I would have changed in the past and I am sure there will be more in the future but one thing is true, that each of these challenges has made the company stronger today than it was yesterday, and our mistakes have created learning opportunities for ourselves and many others.

That has to be the reason why I love asking business owners what they would do differently because I can see growth in each one of their answers.