The story I tell below is not meant to be a brag or a power trip. I think I made every mistake in the book and I had to take the long way around to success, but I still made it happen.

I tell this because I want you to know that things don’t have to be perfect before you start up your dream business. You do however, have to set your goals and plan how you will accomplish them, and commit to the path.

If I can do it, then anyone can. That’s why I am posting.

When I started my offline business in the Pest Control industry, I had a lot to learn. And it took me some time. My momma didn’t raise any dumb kids, but let’s face it, I wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. I needed to really work at something to make it happen.

After school and early on in my career, owning a business was the dream. I must have had 40 jobs in my early twenty’s. Nothing seemed to light my fire, so I would work at a place for a short time and then usually find something wrong with it and quit.

One thing I really got good at. That is finding and getting the jobs. I just couldn’t stay at them. I never got fired but soon lost interest every time.

I was always the dreamer. (Still am, but now I dream bigger dreams and work hard to make them happen.) Back then, I spent so much time worrying about how to start a business, I didn’t know what to do with it once I had one.

I have some rather specialized knowledge now, but back then only having a high school education, I severely lacked real business expertise and knowhow. That didn’t stop me.

I decided to go back to night school and get my business diploma through a local college. That took three years of working during the day and studying and lectures during the evenings.

I was desparate. I wanted to be self-employed. Although I knew that it would take a lot of hard work, I could make a lot more money in business and enjoy the freedom of making my own decisions.

It seemed worth the sacrifice to be able to set my own hours and be my own boss. I knew virtually nothing about how to make a business plan or promote a business until I took those courses.

A lot of people take courses on how to promote a business, and I naively assumed that, since I understood what I was doing, I would be able to get clients. Even though I didn’t have a well thought out plan for getting new business, I went ahead and started up.

Not planning out my moves in advance, turned out to be a very serious mistake. I did have a few connections, and that is key to promoting your business, and I thought that would be enough. However, those connections were quickly exhausted.

They were simply not enough to make a decent living for me. Because I went ahead with the business without planning and strategizing, there were some very good ways to get new business that I wasn’t using, even though I was aware of them.

Ever since I had started my own pest control business, I started and maintained a good web page. I did get a fair bit of web traffic, but it didn’t seem to be translating into clients.

Then I figured out the problem: I hadn’t done any keyword or niche marketing research ahead of time. My traffic was far too generic and looking for information only. They were not intending on buying.

Understanding how to promote your business starts with understanding the nature of your business. In my case, because I was a small player, I needed to have a small loyal, local market. When I finally marketed myself as an industry expert located in the neighborhood area, the calls started coming in.

What people never tell you when they give you tips on how to promote your business is how much busy work there is. I put up flyers all over the neighborhood, made connections at local chamber of commerce club meetings, and even went door to door to businesses trying to interest them in my flyers, etc, etc.

It took me a couple of years, but at that point I finally had a steady client base. Getting to a critical mass of people is the key to how to promote your business. Once you have enough clients, word-of-mouth takes care of the rest – at least it did in my case.

That was some time ago, and I haven’t looked back since.

During the last few years I have been focusing more on my online business and actually limited my pest control business clients, so I can work more at home online.

WOW! What an awakening that was because since I started serving only my biggest customers and gave the rest away, my actual productivity has gone through he roof. Go figure!

I have gone on and on again. The moral of the story is: Don’t expect business to come to you. Work hard promoting and marketing yourself all the time. Plan your strategy and take action. Your business is either growing or dying, it never stays the same.

See you next time.