One of the biggest mistakes I see every day in business is impatience with learning and applying the basics of business building.

These include knowing your audience, building a relationship with them, and creating valuable products and services that actually meet their needs (the needs they’ve told you they have).

Most people who are interested in working in the online space, want to jump to creating products and services. They dream of earning money while they sleep and they assume all they have to do is create a great course, put out a few facebook ads, and people will start buying.

Here’s the thing; people do not come just because you build it.

Paying for ads and sending traffic to a sales page isn’t enough.

People want to feel connected to you. They want to feel that you understand them.

If you don’t want to build a relationship with people, you’re wasting your time even starting a business.

If you feel uncomfortable about developing relationships with people, about spending time getting to know them, about asking them about themselves, then you might want to consider whether being in business is really for you.

Because the best businesses are the ones that focus on serving their community (which is good news for women because we’re conditioned to serve other people and think about their needs first. Which frankly, I don’t agree with. But if we’re going to be indoctrinated by this patriarchal society, we may as well eek some benefit from it).

And whether because of our conditioning or in spite of it, most business women I know have built their business because they want to serve some slice of humanity. In fact, most women end up over-serving them (which is the real downside to the patriarchal conditioning and is a whole topic in and of itself which we must discuss in the future).

But I digress…

Here’s the point; even when we have a desire to serve and we love our communities, our visibility blocks can get in the way of us serving well. Here’s how:

• They stop you from getting in front of your potential customers and clients and actually asking them what they want and need from you.
• They stop you from getting on the phone with people.
• They stop you from building a community.
• They stop you asking questions in online forums and really engaging with people when they respond.
• They stop you seeking input and advice.
• They stop you from putting out consistent emails or videos or podcast episodes to connect with people on the topics that really matter to them.
• They stop you from listening.
• They stop you from asking for the sale.

All of which is the long term relationship building work which sees people buying from you again and again and again.

When we don’t face our visibility fears, business building becomes miserable. It becomes confusing and frustrating. It becomes expensive and time consuming. It sees way too many women returning to work for someone else because they either:
(i) didn’t know what they didn’t know and hadn’t taken the time to learn, or
(ii) hadn’t cleared their inner blocks to really implement what they learned.

You don’t need lots of sophisticated strategies and tactics to build a successful business. In fact, most successful businesses I know keep the strategies pretty basic. The difference between their success and another person’s failure though, is that they consistently get the basics right.

The basics aren’t always sexy and they aren’t always the most fun parts of building a business but they are the thing that keeps your business alive.