Small Business Coach Shares Advice
Patrick Snow
During early mornings, evenings and weekends in his 10 years in corporate sales, Patrick Snow built up a side business of coaching, speaking and consulting. Eventually, he quit his job to pursue his passion full time.
“People thought it was the biggest mistake,” recalls Snow, who runs his business from Maui. “It turns out it was the best decision I have ever made.”
A decade later, Snow now travels the world as a professional speaker and coaches others in entrepreneurship and small business ownership. As the author of two bestselling books, Creating Your Own Destiny and The Affluent Entrepreneur, Snow also guides business owners on how to write and publish books as a way to market their products and services.
Snow is coming to Honolulu May 13 to offer a free seminar on Becoming a Best-Selling Author from 6-9 p.m. at Manoa Innovation Center. From July 25-27, he also hosts a three-day boot camp on small business marketing and book publishing in Honolulu, location to be determined. Details will be posted on createyourowndestiny.com as it gets closer.
Snow, who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs launch their businesses, recently shared some advice that has worked for him and his clients.
* Make meaningful connections through networking.
* Focus your marketing efforts on growing your online presence – go to a site like Digitaladvisoryfirm.com that can help give the best digital marketing advice for your business. With digital marketing, you can see what’s working and what needs to be changed in order to help boost your business to the next level.
* Making use of social media for digital marketing and learning how to schedule instagram posts and other tools in order to effectively spread the brand throughout a large social network base.
“Instead of going out there and trying to sell to more clients, what we need to do is go out there in the marketplace and make more friends,”,he says. “The way we do that is we develop trust, plus respect, plus identifying the need, then asking them to do business with us.”
* The “50 percent rule.”
In running his business, Snow is the CEO, but he also is the accountant, the sales team and the janitor. He says the key to succeeding is to devote 50 percent of your working hours to the sales part.
“If you do a 40-hour work week, you need to spend 20 hours prospecting for new business,” he explains.
* The “3x 3x 30x rule.” Snow warns that many aspiring business owners underestimate the amount of time and money it will take to launch a business. To be safe, entrepreneurs need to plan for three times more money and three times longer than they think is required. If you can do that, he says, you will be able to earn 30 times more money than you make at your day job.
* Don’t quit your day job, yet.
“Allow your day job to become the seed money to fuel your business,” Snow explains, “and build your business part time on the side. Once you have one year’s worth of income and your business income has equalled your day job income, then you have my blessing to quit your job.”
He also has found something else successful entrepreneurs have: a true passion for their business.
“It is not about the earning,” he says. “It is about serving other people and making and providing a greater good. That is what the successful entrepreneur understands. The money is a side benefit. What it is about is serving others and solving problems.”
Visit createyourowndestiny.com or thepublishingdoctor.com.
coconnor@midweek.com
