Doing It Right

Now you know what to do and you’re doing it. You’re past learning, you enjoy having, using and promoting your construction. The maturity period is the most rewarding age from an entrepreneur standpoint. You’re in the middle of something but you can also control it and observe it from the outside. You can’t be wrong.

Whenever your cash-flow is steadily positive for more than 2 years, you can bet you’re in a maturity period. Steady pool of clients and loyal employees are also a sign of a business maturity. If you stared the business with outside financing, this is usually the time when you’re able to pay your debt and make break even.

Past partnerships are running smoothly because they were verified in the attention period. Your products or services are solid and you make a lot of recurring sales. Your clients knows you and you don’t need to convince them to buy from you anymore, they’re just buying. Your role is mostly to observe and adjust.

What To Avoid

Although you reached a more than stable point, there are still some thins you can do wrong in your maturity period. Here’s what I find out it’s better to avoid:

Relaxation

This is the biggest trap in the maturity period. Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean you DID IT. One of the secrets of successful entrepreneurs is that they never think they did it. Success is just a temporary station on the road to the next one. Nevertheless, the relaxation temptation will be very strong. After the first 3 periods of very high involvement, all you have to do now is to observe and adjust. Just don’t relax too much otherwise you’ll miss some important details and you won’t make the necessary adjustments.

Partnerships

This must confuse some of you. In the maturity period, I avoided all kind of partnerships. All my successful partnerships were done in the attention phase. But in the maturity period, although I received almost weekly a new partnership proposal, I avoided it constantly. At some level, I was just postponing the most important ones to the next stage, the expansion. And at the other level, I was trying to avoid some brand dissolution. If you’re known in your market, the best way to still be remembered is to just remain the same.

Expansion

Just because you can predict your processes and profit of your company doesn’t mean you’re ready to expand. In my experience, expansion was a constant temptation, during all stages, but was much more present when I experienced a moderated success. Expansions means partnerships and the same reason for avoiding partnerships was applied to expansion: keeping a strong market image. Also, expansion works much better if you have at least 3 years fo constant growth behind.

What To Do

As always, each business stage is better suited for specific activities. Here’s something I successfully did during the maturity stage.

Invest

Don’t be afraid to put your money where your business is. Invest constantly in your processes, in your employees, in your products. Your positive cash-flow will be able to sustain short and medium term investments. Depending on your business type you will want to invest in materials, stocks or people. I had a business in services so most of the investment was done in people. I started to add consistent incentives to increase performance and started a team building program. And of course, I started to invest in me, by attending several courses and starting an MBA. Didn’t finish the MBA, but it was a nice experience.

Enjoy

It’s your right! You’re successful, enjoy it. I met a lot of entrepreneurs in the maturity stage of their business with quite a sad attitude. Although they had a successful business they were constantly worrying. Most of them lost their businesses shortly after the maturity period. I do think a balanced and happy attitude is one of the keys to constant success. There is no better stage to really enjoy the benefits of your work than the maturity period. As long as enjoying is not equal relaxation, you’ll be fine.

Prepare

During this relatively stable period it will also be very good to start preparing for the next challenges. Maturity is usually followed by expansion, one of the most demanding and risky periods in your business. Approaching it in a good shape will be one clever move. Preparing means observing your market, identifying other key players, assessing new products and markets, hunting for new employees. All that will be needed in the next stage. Preparing also ,means observing your cash-flow and making provisions for your next fights. Last, but not least, prepare means just getting ready to run again.

From Maturity To Expansion

If you made it till maturity, you’ve already accomplished a lot. But you’re not even by far at the end of race. You’re heading towards expansion. The next phase will be demanding and you better get ready for it. I remember that, when I was in the maturity stage, I had no idea that I’m facing expansion, so I made one of the mistakes I told you to avoid: I relaxed too much. When I had to face the decision: grow or die, it was like hitting a train. Well, I survived.

The maturity period lasted about 3 years for me (from a total time frame of 10 years of having a business from the first stage to the last one). It was the only period where I enjoyed a positive cash-flow and also it was the most fulfilling one. If I would start a business again – which is not at all improbable – I would do my best to start it directly into the maturity stage.
***

You can find the remaining 6 ages of your business on these fine personal development and business blogs:

What is split testing?

Putting it simply, imagine you have a page where you are selling a product you are promoting.  You promote using adwords and social media.  Okay, so have the sales page and there is traffic coming to it, you are using this as the base sales page to measure against.  You then make another sales page which is exactly the same except this time you change the headline on that sales page.  You then drive traffic to the two sales pages and find out which one performs better i.e. which brings in the most sales or the most signups to your newsletter.  You then take the best performing sales page and use that as your base sales page.  You then make another sales page and make it exactly the same except you change a graphic and then find out which ones performs better.  You keep doing this until you have optimised your sales page.  Yes it takes time but you will see your sales gradually going up over time.

How you can apply this principle to your life

This is a very powerful way to change your life for the better and sometimes you can often see results within a few days.  The truth is if you keep doing what you’ve always been doing you will always get the same results.  So if you are getting crappy results from something in your life it’s time to change something that you’re doing in that particular area.

This might not make much sense to a lot of people so I will give you an example from my own split testing.

Example 1:

Rich Schefren has found a statistic that states that a lot of people spend more time on their emails than they do with their kids.  This is a quite sad, but in people’s quest to become independent and start their own business it’s very true in a lot of cases.  I know I spend a lot of time with emails, I have around 20 websites, only about 5 that I really work on and I check my emails as they come in and deal with them there and then.  The first thing I did was check how much time I spend on my emails each day, I don’t mean opening them and reading them I mean opening, reading and acting on them i.e. check out a website someone has sent me a link to.

The results for 1 week astounded me.  I spent, in 1 week, 12 hours dealing and acting on emails – 12 hours! I found that a disgusting statistic.  For that same week I spent 9 hours purely with my children, that is going out with them alone, or sitting down with them at dinner, taking them to school, sitting with them for their homework, fooling around and watching TV.  I have my laptop downstairs and work all night so my wife and children always have access to me but that’s not what I am talking about here I am talking spending time away from the computer and with my children.  Only 9 hours with my children as opposed to 12 hours on my emails.  I did spend more hours with my wife but not that much.

So, split testing this.  The next week I checked my emails midday and at 4pm.  I deleted all the emails that would not drive me forward on my online business quest or bring in more money.  I kept the personal ones and dealt with them there and then but all the other ones, if they did not drive my business forward or did not bring in more money I deleted them.  This meant deleting the next big marketing ebook promotion, deleting the cool link to a youtube video, deleting the cool website link that someone sent me, deleting the newsletters I am subscribed to and deleting the ones that promise me an extra 2 inches.

The end result:

You’ll see from the chart that I spent a lot more time with my children and I certainly was a lot happier and felt a lot better by being away from the computer.  My children, I hope, were a lot happier at spending more time with me.

Now, I have a base measurement I can work with.  The best result was spending 5 hours on email and 14 hours with my children.  I now work with this and try and find ways to spend even less time on email, this could be done by hiring a virtual assistant to screen my emails but I am not at that stage yet but you get what I mean.

Example 2:

I used to have a terrible time getting my children up for school in the morning.  I would wake them up to 7am, wake them up again at 7.05am and then start shouting at 07.10am at 07.15am we had fell out, my children might be in a bad mood, I would be pissed off and by the time everybody was ready we might be late for leaving for school at 08.10am.

This went on for months before I tried waking them up at 06.45am.  I would wake them up gently, give them a hug and ask if they wanted an extra 5 minutes, I would wait until they confirmed that they wanted an extra 5 minutes.  I would then give them 10 minutes and wake them up again.  The second time I told them that they had had an extra ten minutes and it was time to get up.  The transformation was amazing, no more shouting in the mornings, no more rushing about and we always get to school on time.  That extra 15 minutes made a huge difference to me and my children in the morning.

With split testing your life you constantly tweak until you get to a result you are happy with.  Another thing you’ll notice with split testing your life is that it’s got to be measurable, if it’s not measurable it’s going to be hard to test and change.

Other areas of your life you can split test

I have found this is a great way to self improvement and can be done on almost any area of your life. I have found that I am much more conscious about how I can improve my life and where it can be improved whereas before I might moan about certain areas of my life and how bad it was.  Now, if I am unhappy about something I try and find a way to improve it.  The more I split test the more I think about ways to improve my life and my families life.

A word of warning, I would only do a few split tests to get you into the swing of things.  Some tests might take a few weeks whilst others might take a few days or even a few hours depending on what it is.  Once you get into the swing of it you will be able to do a lot more and your self improvement will take huge leaps.

Some people do this unconsciously but I hope now that you will see that split testing can be a fantastic self improvement tool.  If you decide to try it or already do it let me know your results, it would be good to know how you get on with this self improvement tool.