Today while mowing the lawn I began to think about some of the lessons that I have learned, as bizarre as may it sound that relate to my life and my business. You see in my life, the state of my lawn is a real good indicator for where I am at with my life. If what I am doing is balanced, if I am keeping the plates spinning in my life, and things are in order, then my lawn is always well maintained.

I take pride in my lawn and when my life is in order and I’m managing my time well, my family and my friends will know that because my lawn is well maintained. If my lawn is long, messy, and the weeds are growing in my garden then it’s a good indicator to my friends and family that I am far too busy and have too many plates spinning.

From that thought I have come up with four important lessons that I have learned from the task of mowing the lawn.

1. Use Indicators to Know how you’re Tracking in Life and Business

As I just explained, the state and tidiness of the outside of my house is the biggest indicator in my life of how balanced things are. When I am working too much, when things are getting stressful, or I have too many projects and plates spinning then my lawn becomes messy. As it’s something that I take pride in if I don’t have the time to do it, I tend to leave it undone rather than doing a quick and messy job of it.

It’s important in our business and even more so in our life to have indicators that show us how we are tracking. These can be financial indicators, they could be working hours, they could be the amount of exercise that you take, the amount of time you spend outside, whatever it might be ensure that you find the indicators in your life. Just like mine is mowing the lawn that shows you when you need to stop and bring everything back into balance.

2. Look After Your Resources

When I was mowing the lawn today, part of the handle came loose making it difficult to complete the job quickly and easily. Its basic common sense that now I need to take the time to look after these resources that I use to get the job done. Without a mower that is working correctly and running efficiently I am unable to complete the job well. Not only that, it will take me longer and cause more delays in the future.

We need to take the time to look after our resources. For equipment, we need to maintain it, service it, and repair it when needed. Most importantly for people, we need to build relationships, expand our influence, and stay healthy.

3. Understand and Accommodate for Different Seasons

Planning is such a critical part of our life and our businesses. We need to be forecasting into the future to look at what resources we need, what time we need to allocate, the finances that we need to acquire, all those different aspects that go into planning. It’s important to remember that we need to understand and accommodate for different seasons.

Over summer which is generally the busiest time of the year for me, my lawn needs to be mowed each and every week. So I need to accommodate that time in my life, set it aside to complete that work. However in the colder times of the year over winter, at times I will only need to mow my lawn once a month. It means there is a difference in my planning and my resourcing depending on the time of year.

One way that I overcome this is often during summer I will employ a local contractor to occasionally mow my lawn. When I have time, when I am able to allocate the resource then I can mow my lawn myself. Perhaps the following week I am too busy but to maintain that balance in my life and to accommodate for that different season, I contract this person to come in and mow my lawn for me because I understand and also accommodate the different season that I am currently in.

4. Take the Time to Provide Feedback

This feedback can be on yourself, on others, and even received from others. Feedback is important in our life. Constructive criticism when handled and delivered correctly is something that causes us to grow and improve for the future. As I mentioned in my last point, often I will have a contractor mow my lawn and recently we changed to a new provider.

Something that I have realized that may be a point in itself is that nobody mows my lawn like I do. I don’t miss a blade of grass, every edge is cut, every clipping is picked up, and every weed is pulled out of the garden. When a contractor comes in, because they do not own my lawn like I do, I tend to see that the job is done not as well as if I had done it.

This is where I am faced with a choice. Do I provide them this feedback so that in the future they will improve and the job will be done to my standards or do I let it pass? It’s quite obvious that letting it pass is not the best outcome for me or for this individual, but if I take the time to provide feedback and deliver it correctly then both of us will receive the benefit of that in the future.

Whoever would have thought that so many lessons could be learned for our life and business from the chore of mowing our lawns?

I have a friend of my parents who in times past has often liked to consult on my business without invitation (that’s putting it politely). The unfortunate aspect about this friend is I knew too much about their own life experience to be able to take the advice as credible. When I would receive these pearls of wisdom, what would be running through my head is “do as I say not as I do”. This person would give me advice on aspects about my life and my business that they had not achieved in their own. Their business was not successful, they were not an entrepreneur and they did not exhibit financial freedom or even financial control.

It made me realize a simple strategy when looking for somebody who is an expert, a guru, or can give me information to move my business and my life forward. That is to ask for experiences and not for advice.

Anybody can give advice. You could email me about the particular aspects of your business or your life and I could give you advice on that. It does not mean that my advice is qualified and most importantly that it would work.

If you were to ask me to share experiences about my journey, my business, and things that I have achieved then you would be able to learn from those. You could learn from the things I did right and you could learn from the things I did wrong, as accounts of real experiences don’t lie.

Ask me for advice on where to go for a holiday. I could tell you that backpacking with your family through Europe for three months would be the best holiday that you could do – but I have never done that. So how could my advice point you in the right direction to having an enjoyable holiday in Europe? I can’t tell you where to stay, where to go, or whether backpacking is the best choice and method of holiday for you.

However if you ask me in my experience what is a great place to visit, I could tell you that South America and in particular Peru is an amazing place to visit. I could tell you that visiting the non-tourist areas and seeing the real Peru is a fantastic way to spend a holiday. I can tell you this because it is an experience that I have had. I travelled with a family of friends who are actually from Peru. I didn’t visit all the tourist sites, I visited their homes in the mountains. This is an experience that I had and not just some advice I could give you.

Don’t be sucked in to the diminished words of ‘guru’ and ‘expert’ that exist in the world today. Rather gather experiences from people, and not advice, so that you can learn from their strengths and weaknesses and not just their words.

Something that has really helped to develop my love (and some would say addiction) for coffee was the McDonalds drive-thru window. Being able to drive in, and without getting out of my car, order and receive a coffee in the morning was something that quickly became a habit in my life. It makes me consider the ease and convenience that we have in our own lives.

The requirement of me to find a park for my car, to walk into the shops and wait for a coffee to be made, probably kept my new found taste for coffee at bay for years longer. Now being able to drive-thru a McDonalds and purchase a half decent coffee in a manner of moments is a convenience that has become a stable part of my day.

Don’t we all operate in this world of convenience? The unfortunate side of having such a convenient lifestyle in this modern age is that we expect everything instantly. Like I said, I personally will take a lesser quality coffee through a McDonald’s window than to stop, park my car and line up to get a nicer tasting coffee.

We are programmed to want things instantly. Only a few short years ago we could handle if we phoned somebody and could not speak with them instantly. Now with mobile phones, we can quickly become irritated if somebody doesn’t answer their phone or call-back within a couple of minutes.

This ability to have things instantly can have an effect on our motivation to see things accomplished. The age-old saying has been modified to “if at first you don’t succeed, then give up”. It is becoming a rarity in this modern age that we “try and try again until we succeed”.

When I analyze my life and look at things that have been successful, I realized that they are things that occur after time. They didn’t happen instantly and I had to work hard to achieve them. Consistent small steps are generally the key to seeing things accomplished and becoming successful in your life.

The business that I now operate today didn’t happen in the time that it took me to order coffee from McDonalds, but instead consistent small steps over a period of time allowed me to have what I have now.

A constant lesson to learn in life is that each day we take small steps towards the goals that we want to achieve. We should learn quickly to not be dismayed when things don’t happen the first time, but to realize that every victory and every success will be built upon consistent small steps.

I can relate one of my most significant steps forward in business to a late night discussion with a friend regarding hopes, dreams and desires in business and entrepreneurship. That one discussion triggered us to form a mastermind of other friends who put us into an environment of dreaming big, and for me it was one of the biggest motivating times that pushed me into business and entrepreneurship.

The 3 benefits I personally receive from a mastermind (and why I think you should use them as well):

1. To bounce ideas off

The people in your mastermind group generally come with a range of different experiences. Some had been where you are going, some are coming from where you’ve been, and others have created an entirely different map for themselves. It allows you to get a great quality of experience and the ability to bounce ideas off for wisdom and direction from this group.

2. It allows you to dream big in a safe environment

There are discussions I had within mastermind groups that I would be embarrassed to share publicly. They are dreams and aspirations that if I shared with a lot of people, well,  if they didn’t laugh they would at least smirk! These mastermind groups allowed me to share and to dream big in that safe environment.

3. It allows you to pool resources

I have built entire businesses from connections created within my mastermind groups.  We realized that one’s person’s strength is the perfect fit for another’s weakness; and therefore collaborating is the perfect outcome.

The reality is that the customer is not always right! But does that change the way that we deliver customer service? I believe the answer is no!

Even though the customer may be wrong, their opinion may not be relevant or their complaint warranted, the customer is still right. This is because the customer has a voice that promotes our business and talks about our product and service.

Think back to the last time that you heard somebody in your circle of friends or family talk about an amazing customer experience that they had. Now consider within the same circle of influence the last time (or the amount of times if you can count them) that you heard somebody discussing a poor customer experience.

Whilst the customer at times may be incorrect, we need to treat them as always being right. A customer who has had a bad experience is more likely to inform their circle of influence then if they had a good experience.

It was not that long ago that we were still communicating across country by telegram and methods of communication that took days to deliver in some cases. The threat of a customer when experiencing bad service is that they would “tell everybody” was not something that could make or break a business as it does today.

A bad customer experience today can be told to millions, and heard by a countless number of perfect strangers. It is an interesting thought to realize the power and influence that we have as consumers to drive change in products and services. But on the other hand, the importance of providing a great customer experience to anyone and everyone.

One of the first business ventures that I started with was importing consumer electronics into Australia. When I first began to research this I was looking at different eBooks and courses I could purchase online. At one stage, I purchased an eBook and it was only a nominal amount of money but it was advertised as the “get everything you need to know and start making money yesterday” philosophy to importing and drop shipping.

This situation just highlights to me how we live in an age and a culture of “we want it now and we want it upsized”. We look for the easy answer, the quick solution to our problem and it in this age of purchasing information; we still have trouble distinguishing between what is a need and what is a want.

When a customer is searching for our product or our service, they can often overlook the perfect solution because they are searching for the wants and not the need.

I have created some great information products previously, that in my opinion were gold in terms of content and what people needed to know to get started or to get producing. The interesting thing is that they often did not convert well; actually the truth is they did not convert. Selling an information product that tells people what they need and not what they want did not end up being a viable solution or product for my business.

Recently I have actually found more success in giving the product away for free and then selling a service that targets the “what people want”. As someone who enjoys creating content and producing this type of information and sharing the knowledge that I have gained, it actually pains me to put a lot of effort into creating an information document and then giving it away for free whilst throwing a simple solution together and producing an income off that.

But it is human nature; we will look for the path of least resistance. If we are offered in one hand a guide on how to write the perfect job description for your workers, and on the other hand we are offered the completed form where we simply needed to fill in a template, we would take that.

It might be what we want but it’s not what we need, as in most cases, we need to learn and understand what went into creating that template and not just ending up with the outcome.

Put human nature aside to help your products become more successful in converting, look to target what people want and include for free what they actually need.

Recently I have been landscaping around our home and putting in some gardens, plants and basically just doing whatever my wife tells me to do! The obvious advantage of having this list of chores is the opportunity to visit the hardware store more often and walk around looking at things that I do not need but I would definitely like.

When I think about the selling message and using either benefits or features, it reminds me of going to the hardware store to buy a shovel. There were literally scores of different shovels when I walked up the aisle but all had the same outcome – they dig a hole and what I am looking for is ultimately something that does exactly that.

So many brands were listing features; such as the quality of the steel, the length of the handle, the type of timber in the handle and a whole bunch of other useless facts. The brand that got my attention was the one that had a stick that unashamedly said “digs deep holes quickly”.

At the end of the day I do not mind what goes into making my shovel because a shovel just shovels. All I want to know is if it digs a hole deep and quickly.

Do not get too absorbed in selling the features of your product or service when your customers just really want to know the outcome.