Let's get the the tough part out of way here... 

this is not going to be easy. Yes you are probably going to take longer than 30 days... yes it's gonna cost money. No you aren't gonna quit your day job any time soon. 

The bright side is this guide has the advantage of actually being possible and will produce results unlike most other guides. So with that said here is the outline of exactly what you will learn how to do.

• Identify a Business Idea That Is Realistic With Basic Economics 
• Find a Way to Deliver Exactly What Your Customers Want
• A Simple Startup Style Approach to Getting Customers 

Here we go... Hold on to yer butts... 

Does any of this sound familar to you? 

• When you post an ad you get little to no sales leads.
• Your industry is filled with "think positive" people and not get work done people? 
• It feels like everyone save a few "thought leaders" are shams faking it tell they make it. 

If so you may be suffering from unrealistic standards disorder. You see our society has decided to move away from reality which can be harsh, difficult and generally hard work to a fantasy world where we tell eachother how great we are and fantastic we are going to be. 

Which I am sure is great for people who would rather talk about being successful than be successful but for the ones who are trying to actually DO something and not just SAY something this can create some very unrealistic standards for people to shoot for. 

So let's throw a splash of reality into your face with a few basic facts

• You are not what you think you are worth. Stop Saying that. You are what the market thinks you are worth your opinion of your value means nothing. I can say I am worth $5000 dollars a minute all I want if the market gives me 2 bucks I am worth 2 bucks. 
•  If you are selling a product that can make your more than $1000 dollars net revenue per sale you will be needing to work 80-100 hours a week and be in the top 10% of what you do. That means if you want to be a business coach for example you are competitng with Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk and Noah Kagan. Good Friggin' Luck.  
•  But wait it gets worse! :D Not only are you not what you are worth and competing with people much better than you they also have the advantage of resources and time. When you jump into a market that has a higher supply than demand you can't just be the top 10% you need to be 10% better than the best and you need to do that for long enough so that your 10% eventually surpasses the best. 
• No matter what your work ethic is and no matter how positive you are you will NEVER defeat the basic laws of supply and demand, market competition and the free market. 

Okay... Okay calm down. You are most likely experiencing some cognitive dissoance right now because what I just said directly contradicts what 90% of the stuff you are listening to says and that is scary.

However There is hope...

Now that I am bringing your awareness back to reality and these economic principles you can begin to see them at play. Yes it is impossible for anyone to escape the rules of the free market but if you learn those rules you can begin to use them to your advantage. 

So if you are tired of starting and failing again and again. If you are done with doing "sales launch" after "sales launch" to not even make enough to pay rent this is the guide for you. 

To actually start a business you only have to do 4 things in order and if you do them correctly you will have a business. A real business. Not a "brand" not a facebook status a real genuine business. Here's the steps...

We will Look for an economic situation with higher demand than quailty supply.

With our access to technology and software you can easily be in the top 10% in days. 

We are gonna keep this simple let's get customer coming to you and paying! 

You got your cookie! Now everyone else wants your cookie. This is the part real businesses do that sucks.

Alright if you made it this far congradulations! You are one of the few who is ready to stop dreaming and start doing! Let's do THIS!!! Let's start with some questions. Write down your answers to the following 

• What have strangers (not family & friends) given me money to do in the past. 
• What have i spent money on in the last 30 days
• What businesses have made you say "geeze how are these guys in business still?" 

With those questions answered you will obviously have different ideas for your unique circumstance. I am going to go into the process with sample info to show you how to move forward from here. 

• I used to go door to door doing window washing in the summer for extra cash.
• I spent alot of money on household maintenance services. 
• HOW can you tell me you are going to show up between 9am-12pm on a weekday, show up at 4pm and still be in business you plumbing sham! HOW! Sorry. I got a little upset there. 

From these I think. Hmm household service industry. They are delivering bad service to me, I still pay them quite a bit of money and I used to get paid to do it! Let's add it to the list! I would then make a list of different house services and go through this process a few times until I have about 10-15 different business ideas.

Good rule of thumb. The more boring and nonglamorous the business the better. Pro tip try to get a business that is built for repeat business so margins are Yuuuge! 

Once you have your list let's see if Yelp agrees with your experiences! Type into yelp the different businesses for your local area. We want to see a lot of businesses and we want to see alot of 3 star reviews. Shoot for at least 10-15 businesses within 25 miles and an average star review of 3.5 or below.

Make sure you read all of the 3 star and 1 star reviews and take notes on exactly what the customer said sucked and wish hadn't happened. 

Finally call up 5 or so of the businesses and get quotes from the websites. Figure out what they are charging by taking the quotes and averaging the prices out. 

Now why are we doing all this? 

Well what you have just done is found 

• A market with enough demand to supply multiple businesses with customers in the area.
• A market that has a larger demand than qualified supply based on reviews
• You found the exact wants and needs the customers have in the 3 & 1 star reviews
• You found the amount the market is willing to pay for those kinds of services.
• You are now 1000x more likely to succeed than the guy trying to beat Tony Robbins. 

So as we discussed above if you are going to succeed you need to be at least in the top 10% of your competition and when your competition is Tony Robbins... well let's just say if you had the ability to compete with him you wouldn't be reading this article you would be beating him. 

But now we aren't competing with Tony Robbins anymore we are competing with lousy 3 star businesses in your local area. That's competition we can take down. For reference when I launched a $0-$100k LTV Lawn Care business in 6 months half of my competition didn't even have a website. You can typically jump into the top 10% by doing the following:

• Build a fantastic looking website. I Use leadpages and here's my affilate link.  
• Have a fantastic online checkout experience. I like Launch 27 for service businesses. 
• Have ad copy that highlights how you do the oppisite of all the things the customers complained about in the reviews. (I.E. #1 Complaint is charged but didn't do the service so my ad would include You Aren't Charged Until The Jobs Done And You Are Happy!)
• Get on all dem social medias! I recommend starting with 3 for a local business Yelp, Google Plus & Facebook and expand as needed from there. 

Just those four things alone combined with an effective marketing plan and a market with lousy competition will easily put you in the top 10% of businesses. Of course make sure you run a google search for your target area like "nail salon in brea & brea nail salon" and see who comes up on the top. Make sure your website looks as good or better than those guys.  

Wait Tyler...Those... things cost money? 

time for another reality check...

If you are going to start a business... it's going to cost money. There is no way around that. I'd say at a minimum expect to spend 500/month for a year before your business is self sufficent (you may need less for example if you do the work vs hiring others but that amount will give you a good safety buffer) 

Now what do you do if you can't afford to lose 500 a month for a year? 

Well... for starters don't start a business right now. You need to focus on getting a job that will pay you enough to afford to do this and ideally in a field where you can develop skills needed for running a business. 

If you can't get a job that will allow you the income needed to pay for food, rent, expenses and 500/month for your business you probably aren't valuable enough yet to hoof it in the entreprenuer space.

 You should instead stop here in this guide and focus on developing highly valuable skills that complement each other and getting into the top 10% of those skill sets. This will be covered in far more detail in future episodes of the Ask a Wizard Podcast. 

Now for The Hard Part of Being The Best 

The above method will defintely make you look like the top 10% but if you can't deliver top 10% service consistently and reliably you will be out business faster than that guy hocking MLM health supplements that wont shut up on facebook. 

So you have a few options to resolve this

• If you can deliver the best you can do the jobs (most profitable/cost the most time)
• You can handle multiple functions such as customer service, marketing and networking and partner with someone who is the best at the service aspects. (medium profit/medium time)
• You can hire the best service provider and handle the marketing (lowest profit/least time)

Each method has its pros and cons none is better than the other. I can tell you from personal experience that starting out its easier to do the work yourself because you get to know the service side of things and will start making a net profit much faster but it is very hard to scale in the future. 

The other thing to consider is that finding a great reliable service provider is one of the most difficult aspects of business. I would go so far as to say that we probably don't have a job market issue. There are plenty of jobs we have a quality employee issue and the workforce is generally deluded about their own value. 

Getting an awesome partner, employee or independent contractor is hard its best to start looking ASAP if you go this route. 

This is most likely going upset quite alot of you, especially if you have been following the delusional approach to business, but getting customers is actually really easy. If you are the best in the market, look the best online and target a market that has more demand than qualified supply it's startlingly simple. 

First however we need to address one piece in the advertising puzzle. The authority cognitive bias. For those of you who don't know this is when marketers will put logos/symbols you already trust on their brand to build credibility. For example FDA Approved, Oprah's Choice and As Seen On TV.  

A common misconception, spread deliberately by sleazy marketers, is that by simply buying authority symbols people will instinctively trust your brand more. For example if I was a graphic designer and had client's brands i've serviced like Disney, Pixar & Dreamworks you would think hey this person knows what they are doing Disney hired them! 

And that's true... if the authority is true and relevant. If not you just shot your brand and business in the foot. We are all familiar with the old con where someone gets a PHD is a completely unrelated field then hocks something like health supplements, chiropractic services, life coaching, etc. and calls themselves a "doctor". 

When you do that it would be like if you saw the disney graphic designer aboves portfolio and it was just a bunch of stick figures and doodles. You got their expecations up and let them down and yes.. It really is that obvious to everyone. Fake authority isn't fooling anyone especially with the internet. 

So rather than trying to con people with false authority symbols like degrees, being a "published author", using purchased awards and what not lets invest that time into building true authority! 

Sound good? 

First let's get you in the news! No seriously it's actually really easy. What's great about getting in the new is it let's you put true authority symbols on your site like "as seen on ABC" and its very easy to get them! 

When I get my clients in the news all I do is bust out my trusty list of submission emails for all the local and bigger news vendors. (we have about 5,000 emails) we then send out a press release to all of them written up nice a professionally by my copywriting team. 

Luckily with the News industry being a complete and total joke that has 0 credibility, proof reading or fact checking whatsoever as they try to fill the infinite void of content space created by the internet about 10% will just outright publish your press release which means you are mentioned in 500+ news sites! 

Of course not everyone has access to 5000+ emails and a copywriting team but what you probably have is a phone. A quick google search will show you how to put together a nice press release and the contact info for all your local news sites. 

Put together a list of about 100 or so news contacts and just start dialing/emailing for dollars and pitching your press release! You only need 1 to say yes and boom as seen in "Your Home Town Register" 

The news isn't completely neccessary but its a really simple way to get a little brand equity and exposure right off the bat when you are starting out which will make the most important authority symbol easier to get...  

Alrighty are you ready to start getting customers? :D 

Ready To Start Doing Jobs? :DD

Ready to Start Losing Money Again! :DDD 

Wait what? 

That' right! The best way to build authority is you guessed it! Real genuine testimonials and the easiest way to get those is to deeply discount/giveaway products and services. 

I personally recommend people throw a launch party with friends and family for there business and ask everyone to post about it on social media.

 At the party raffle off free services and give raffle tickets in exchange for various social media functions like 1 ticket per post, 2 tickets per share 10 tickets per blog post, etc. This approach has 2 benefits. 

The first is the immediate family exposure which are much more likely to buy from you and second if you do free service for a family member and screw it all up... they are alot less likely hop on Yelp and Flame your business with a nasty review. 

Now go out and do an amazing service! If you are in a visual business snap before and after pics/videos. Get video of the customers reaction, and have them right you a nice review for your website and ideally yelp, google and facebook. 

After about 5 or so of these you will be ready to go. You wanna plaster these babies all over your website! 

Pro Tip for those of you doing a video testimonal most of the time your customer isn't well.. a professional actor. I would recommend getting a written review and then hiring someone on fiverr to read the script to get a more professional testimonial. It makes the whole thing alot easier and less awkward for everyone. 

Now the time has come... 

How do we get you a bunch of customers flying in to your website?

 Simple. Like every everyone else is! 

Where is your competition showing up? Start making a list in excel. When I googled window cleaner in brea what came up was 

1. Google Ads

2. Google Plus

3. Yelp

4. Angies List

5. Thumb Tack

 Get a list of 10 to 15 different places you can get customers in excel that your competition is already using and make guestimates about how many customers you think you might get from those channels. 

Then you just go and buy/setup/do those channels and record that data in your spreadsheet. 

At the end of the month keep what works and replace what doesn't with something new to test.

Then just keep doing that forever. Walla that's my job in a nut shell. 

So in practice...

I would get on thumbtack which is a lead generation site sweet, then google ads, oh that guy who goes door to door i'll do that too, then lets see oh the yellow pages and so on and so forth until I have 10-15 channels. 

make sure all your ads point to your website and that your website has a nice proment phone number on it. 

and thats really the basics of it. Yes each channel needs practice. Yes you need to learn how to use each channel. Yes My experience as a professional marketer makes that easier for me than you. Yes there are way more advanced things you need to do with analytics, lead generation, sales funnel, etc.  

But  

you don't need that right now. You will later on but this is getting you from no business to business.  

Alright now all that's left! Creating compelling ad copy!

Luckily if you followed all of our above steps you could do almost everything wrong here and still do just fine because 80% of ad copy is based on the initial pre-sausion that occurs with design, authority and testimonials. 

I would recommend keeping things simple use the AIDA formula.  

Attention Interest Desire Action.  

Attention 

this is about getting there eyeballs on you in this case because we are choosing channels that are ready to buy our services (bottom of the funnel) getting the attention is a simple matter of Clearly Stating our Service.

For example for window cleaning a Google Ad Could Be  

Headline Professional Window Cleaning-Window Cleaning Service in Brea  

Interest I focus on overcoming immediate objections I can do this by saying how we do the oppisite of what they complained about on Yelp For example "We Don't Charge Until The Job's Done & You Are Happy!  

Desire this is about getting them excited enough to act right now. Personally because I use digital marketing most of the time and have to pay for each click I like to instead filter them out at this section by stating a price up front. That way those who click are already on board with the cost. So Something like Weekly Window Cleaning 35/wk  

Action Here is where I like to make "crazy stupid" offers this is an offer that if the person said no they would have to be crazy. Like a 200% Gaurentee or Best Window Service of Your Life or We Will Pay You $50 bucks for wasting your time! obviously you want yours to be unique to your business but the idea remains the same make sure the offer communicates something that would just be plain silly not to act on right now. 

So in Full our ad copy would center around those themes here's a short form ad example 

Professional Window Cleaning Service in Tustin CA You Don't Pay Unti You Are Satisfied! 35/wk Weekly Service! If it's not the best service we pay you $50 Book Now!

 Simple Straight to the point. Clear message. Keep the message clean and clear throughout the whole site and you are in business baby!

and full disclosure yes ad copy is one of the most important parts of the business. Yes this could be much better. That is why we picked a market with worse competition so that even if we do it badly it is better than the rest who aren't doing it at all.

Boom there you have it! A top 10% business, 15 channels to get customers and a message that will compell them to buy. Just turn on the channels and start getting customers!  

BTDUBS! if you want a copy of one of the best starter guides to ad copy you can get it right here it's from Copy Blogger and those guys are great!

You have finally made it. You found a market, made a top 10% business, you designed a beautiful site, you analyzed your competition and solved a problem, you found where your customers hang out and put your message there and finally you created a beautiful message and convinced them to let you give them an amazing service! 

That's just marketing and advertising. Now you have to do the other 80% of the business.  

The list is endless and you will need to hire people along the way but some things include 

• Operations Management
• Customer Service
• Sheduling 
• Accounting 
• Expansion
• Equipment Cost & Expenses
• Data Analytics
• IT Work
• Financials 
• Sales Training 

These are the things no one talks about because quite frankly they are very off putting for he entreprenuer at heart. None the less you need to be able to do them or hire someone who can for your business to succeed. 

I can't help you with all of them but I can help with the marketing and advertising as that is where my strengths lie and that's the take away.

 If something is not your strength hire someone else to do it. They will get it done better and usually cheaper. Too many entreprenuers flame out because they try to do everything instead of letting that be handled by others. Don't fall for this trap.

Alright assuming you have followed what I said...

You have done it.  

You have made it all the way into business success! Now you have the map to navigate the entreprenuer terrain. If you stayed through to the end of this article you may have figured out the true secret of this article. 

The secret is that what I discuss here isn't how to start a service business. What I have given are the blueprints and principles that can be used in every business, even dare I say, the highly competitive ones.

All that changes is the level in which you must compete and where you spread your message.  

I hope you enjoyed this guide and that it helps even one person live the life they want or save them from chasing an imaginary fantasy. If that happens I consider it a success. 

If you feel like this would help any other entreprenuers you know please share this article on facebook! 

 Now it's your turn... Comment below with your number one "reality breakthru" moment when you realized what business was really about!  

P.S. 

For love of all that is Holy and Virteous on this God Given Earth... PLEASE Install Google Analytics PLEASE. It's free... it's the most important thing you could possibly do... and it takes about 5 minutes to set up. PLEASE TRACK YOU DATA.

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