In this session we talk about the three phases of business life which is the process I go through when I have to launch a new business or service. They are required to build a business but even before the three phases, get the concept of customer promise. Know how the life of customers will shift and change because of your work, products and services.

Before your customers you must be truly, emotionally and passionately behind your products and services, and only then you will be able to create emotions in your customers, team and vendors.

Now comes the three phases of business life which are:

• The Think Up Phase: You choose a design in this phase.
• The Get Up Phase: You literally move forward and start the business in this phase.
• The Reach Up Phase: The final phase that deals with scaling, growing and building.

Each of these individual phases has three stages to them. If you are able to journal them and follow them as a check list you will be able to raise the probability and level of business success.

Three Stages of the Think Up Phase

• Decide: Make a decision to be an entrepreneur and sell products or services. Know the reason behind it and decide on the things that you are going to do. Be informed about the timeline and obstacles as well.
• Ideation: We all have plenty of ideas but we don’t know whether they are good or not. If we start on multiple ideas, we never finish them. You can’t do it all at once. In this stage we evaluate multiple ideas and think them through.
• Model: This is the phase where we begin to create our model. It is about how you will create, capture, package, campaign and deliver value at a holistic level. It shouldn’t just be customer centric but it should be modeled around your team, staff, employees, contractors, business owners, investors and yourself as well. Know how to create value for them that is beyond the paychecks.

Three Stages of the Get Up Phase

• Plan: Look at what the markets are, analyze where the sales might come from, the people we need and the financial aspects of what we do. We need to figure out whether the idea is commercially viable.
• Structure: This is where we think about how to structure the business. Decide on matters like entity selection, risk exposures, asset classification while eliminating or reducing risk exposure. The structure should always integrate with your life vision.
• Finance: Your business might need assets, real estate and equipment. Know how to finance them and decide on whether or not to bring investors.

Three Stages of the Reach Up Phase

• Launch: In this stage you put things in place to accelerate your business in a growth sense or to create growth for your business.
• Scale: Make it a personal, professional and a lifestyle decision on whether to raise the ceiling and grow or stay where we are at. If we decide on scaling beyond us, we need to delegate accountability and responsibility.
• Exit: Every business will have an exit. This is the time where you exit the business and there are a variety of ways to do it.

— Begin Transcript —

Hey there, I’m Mel Abraham, the author of The Entrepreneur’s Solution and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy, where we teach you how to design a business and create a life: A life of financial freedom and peace of mind.

And welcome to this next episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show and after a brief introduction, I’m going to come back and talk about the three phases of business life. I know in a previous episode we touched on the five keys to mastering your business. Well this is the process, process that I go through when I’m going to launch a business or launch a new product or a new service and will constantly come back to this process.

So, I’m going to take you through the three phases of Think Up, Get Up and Reach Up when we come back after this brief introduction. So, stay tuned. See you back here soon.

Hey there welcome back I’m Mel Abraham the author of The Entrepreneur’s Solution, the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy and welcome to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show. This show is been amazing—the comments that we’re getting, the feedback that we’re getting.

So, we’re going to keep going, we’re going to keep building, we want to build your entrepreneurial mentor to kind of be there to guide you, and make this year and the rest of the years of your life changed forever and that use entrepreneurship as a vehicle.

So, in this show as I said, I want to talk about the three phases of business life and what it takes to build a business. This is the process that we go through and I’m going to introduce you to the process and then we will dig deeper into each of the aspects of the process.

And there’s three phases to it:

• It’s basically The Think Up: What the design in the think up phase of it.
• The second phase is The Get Up: It’s the starting of it.
• And the third phase is The Reach Up: The scaling and the growing of it.

And so those are the three phases and their steps in each of them that we’re going to take you through. But there’s an over-arching basis and foundation in which all of these things ought to be made. And once you think about this and if we’re going to go through this, here’s something that I would invite you to do—get yourself a journal or a notebook or a pen and paper or something, and as we work through some of these episodes and some of these sessions take notes.

Take notes not from just what I might say, and some of the concepts and some of the principles but take notes as to:

• How it applies in your life.
• How it applies and what you trying to do?
• How does it apply to making your dreams a reality?
• How does it apply to scale those dreams to epic proportions?
• What does it take?

And if you need to, you stop and pause for a moment, reflect on what I’m saying, write it down; take the time to do that. So, that’s why in many of these episodes:

• I’m going to give you takeaways,
• I’m going to give you exercises,
• I’m going to ask you to do things

…just like the assessment that we did in a previous episode to reflect and think about things.

Most of the really successful entrepreneurs that I’ve worked with, that I’ve seen and talked to and interviewed, most of them journal or do something like … they’re constantly thinking, they’re constantly reflecting. Their mind is always-always going but then they’re documenting it. It may be ideas, it may be thoughts, it may be philosophies.

I’m constantly journaling; I carry my journal around all the time—I’m constantly writing. When I’m reading something and something comes up, I’ll write in it. So, I’m constantly documenting it and I go back to it from time to time and re-read the notes to revisit some of the things.

Some of the things you write may come into fruition years down the road. But the key is that you got it down, you got it written.

In fact, I have a really good friend of mine down from Australia. He’s a mentor, he’s a colleague. I call him, he’s my Australian brother and he talks about how he has actually been on planes flying and he takes the disposable bags in the back seat when he doesn’t have something to write on, something comes up and he jots it down on that.

The point is that he’s constantly working; he is constantly thinking about things and trying to document and build.

So, I invite you to take that approach and see how it works for you. It may be awkward at first. It may be strange because you are not used to writing and reflecting but through the exercise of doing it will make it easier and you’ll see results like crazy because all of a sudden it leads to different things. And there’s something that happens when you actually put pen to paper versus even typing on a keyboard and doing that.

But literally, picking up a pen and writing it down—there’s something that happens, something magical that happens and so that’s what I invite you. Call it your entrepreneur solution journal, get it out, keep it with you every time you go through a process. Now, if you’re listening to the podcast and driving, don’t get the journal out; you can do it when you get home, all right?

So, let’s move forward into that. Now assuming that you got yourself a journal or you got yourself a piece of paper and pen; you’re ready to go.

So, here’s the thing: before you get into this process of the three phases of business life. Before you even think about:

• Launching a product,
• Launching a service,
• Launching a business.

The one thing that I need you, that I invite you to, that I urge you actually to really think about seriously and get clarity on, get specificity on it to really dial it in—is this concept of the customer promise.

What is the customer promise?

We are looking at things and many times we go, “I’m creating a product” but what’s the promise? The visceral promise of life transformation.

How is their life going to be different?

• Because they’ve worked with you.
• Because they’ve bought your products.
• Because they’ve had you do services for them.

What is it about their life that’s going to shift and change?

Because:

• That’s where we need to be.
• That’s where we need to understand it.
• That’s where we need to really drill it down

…and dial it in to a point that we can succinctly say it and have it generate emotion, not only in the customer but in you first because if it doesn’t viscerally create emotion in you, it’ll never create emotion in your customer or in your team or in your vendors.

They can’t get behind it because you truly are not behind it. It’s intellectually that you’re behind it, but you’re not emotionally and passionately behind it.

Remember, we talked about this concept of value. Value starts with a product but then you add to it:

• Purpose,
• Passion, and
• Promise.

And so that’s what we need to do is get that as the ground level, that’s the playing field we’re playing at. We’re not playing at a commodity level. We’re trying to create something that is aspirational, that is shifting and changing people’s lives. And when you take it from that level, now we can create something that starts to move and capture the eyes, the hearts, the minds of your market and your audience.

So, assuming that you got that in place and we’ve got the customer promise in place. Then, we need to look at the phases. We go through these three phases:

1. The Think Up Phase
2. The second phase is The Get Up phase
3. And the third is The Reach Up phase

And each of them has three stages to them. And we’ll go through each of that.

So let’s start with the think up phase, to begin with.

The very first stage, the think up phase is decide.

Decide. This is one of the most important things for you to do and some of this is mindset stuff, philosophy stuff, culture stuff that really is impactful. So, we want to take this and really take this seriously.

• What is the decision you want to make?
• Do you really want to be an entrepreneur?

Because it may not be suited I believe. I know that there are studies out there that say, “Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur” and I disagree with that. I say, “People can be entrepreneurs.” They may be different types of entrepreneurs. I think everybody has the ability to be an entrepreneur.

• Do they have the desire?
• Do they have the fortitude?
• Do they have the perseverance?

Not so much? Not everyone…it’s not made for everyone but that starts with a decision.

• Do you want to be an entrepreneur?
• Do you want to really put that forward?
• Do you want to sell this product?
• Why?
• What kind of things you’re going to do?
• What’s the timeline?
• What obstacles?

This is one of the key elements at the very first place. You know, if you’re going to go in and dabble there’s plenty of dabblers in the world and they get nowhere. And I know that I’m being somewhat direct and I don’t mean to be flipping and I certainly don’t mean to be insulting but we’re talking about building a life.

Remember, this concept of business is about creating community, supporting society and living your dreams. If we’re going to live dreams, let’s live them epically, let’s create big dreams, let’s make a decision and move forward with that decision.

So, the very level is Decide. There’s a lot that goes into that. We’re going to talk about that in a later episode. We’re going to dig deeper in each of these stages.

The second stage is the concept of ideation.

Now, this is typically not the problem for entrepreneurs or many business owners because they got ideas flying around all the time. In fact, I call it the entrepreneur’s curse. Or you will hear me talk about what I call The Hummingbird Syndrome.

We’ve got plenty of ideas and we’ll start plenty of ideas if we’re not careful and we never finish them. And many times we start it, we don’t even know if the ideas are good ideas. We just kind of go. So, it is important for us to really think about this and evaluate the ideas.

I’m sure if we’re sitting here right now, if I asked you, “How many ideas do you have in your head?”

I’m guessing that there’s more than one. You’ve got all kinds of ideas that you want to do, all kinds of products that you might want to launch, services you might want to offer.

But we can’t do it all at once. So, the question is not which one but which one first?

And now some we might say, “We’re not going to do it”.

So, in this stage this is what we evaluate the various ideas. We start to focus and select some of the things that we’re going to do or the keys that we’re going to do. We’re going to consider how we’re going to create value in the value creation model. We’re going to consider what marketplace we’re going to serve. And then we might have to rethink and redesign based upon market feedbacks.

So this is the ideation stage where we’re thinking it through. Remember, this is all in the think up phase of business. And then once we’ve made the decision and then we’ve gone through that process and we’ve gone through the ideation process.

Now we go into what’s called the modelling process.

This is where we start to create our model and this goes back to that … we talked about it in a prior episode—this concept of creating value.

Remember your business model isn’t about how you make money. It’s not a revenue model. Revenue model is just one little aspect of it. Your business model is really:

How do you deliver value?

• It’s how you create value.
• It’s how you capture value, in order words how you package it.
• It’s how you campaign it.
• How you deliver it.
• And it’s how you cultivate the value as a cultural element within your organization and in the marketplace the perception of value.

So, when we talk about model, we’re talking about how is this value exchange coming about in all aspects of the business at a holistic level. Remember, it’s not just customer centric—we need to ask ourselves, “How are we creating value?” to not only our customers but to our team, our staff, our employees, our contractors. How are we creating value?

And when I talk about this it’s beyond the paycheck because we’re going to compensate for their time and their services and their work. But do we create any value beyond that?

And then how do we create value for ourselves—the business owner, the entrepreneur, the investor. How do we create value for them? Answer these questions up front.

So, before we ever start to really invest a lot of money or invest a lot of time or a lot of resources into launching a product or service or launching a new business or any business division; we’ve gone through a lot of process to do this.

And this process that we’re talking about, this whole three phases of business life—is the process that I use and when you see it all work out; this is how we minimize the downside and maximize the upside. Remember, the analyst model that we talked about in a prior episode, the whole purpose of business is minimize the downside, maximize the upside. This process forces you to do it.

And what that does is it raises the probability of success and it raises the level of success. Nothing is a guarantee but it certainly changes the dynamics and shifts things into your favor.

So, once we’ve done the think up stage, we then need to go to the next phase of this business life; the three phases.

Second phase is called the get up stage.

This is where we are literally starting it. We’re going to move forward and start the business. So we’ve gone through thinking about it and now we’re going to start to get some action in place to start really moving forward.

And the first stage of the get up phase is: Plan.

So, when we start thinking about things like, the business plan and we’ll talk about business plans and my philosophy on business plans and that type of thing. But, we’re going to look at what our offering is. We’re going to look at what the markets are. We’re going to analyze and pick a part, where the sales might come from, how we might sell it, the kinds of people that we might need or the people that we’re going to work with, the financial aspects of what we do.

I mean if we got a great idea but no one wants to pay for it, it’s just that; it’s a great idea. It’s a hobby more than anything else; because no one’s going to pay for it. It’s not commercially valuable. It’s not commercially viable and so we want to make sure that the financials makes sense. And then we’ll start to document it in the context of potentially a plan.

Now that plan may be just for you, the process for you. It might be for investors, it might be for a bank. It depends on what level of business you’re trying to create and where you are and what stage of work it is.

So, once we get through the first stage of phase two of the get up phase, we then can move to the next stage.

The next stage is the structure.

This is where we start to think about how do I structure my business?

You know everything from entity selection. Do I want to be a Corporation, or trust or non-profit; so entity selection but also about risk assessment.

• What risk exposure do I have?
• How do put things in buckets and asset classification?

So we make sure that we eliminate or reduce the risk to us personally as business owners, as entrepreneurs and try to reduce that exposure.

What are the different things that come into play with respect to the business operations?

In fact, remember we said that business is to create community, support society and live your dreams.

So, how does this structure integrate with your life vision?

Because if what you’re creating doesn’t integrate with the kind of life you’re trying to create then it’s going to cause a lot of incongruent, a lot of friction, a lot of tension, a lot of stress and you’re going to feel consumed by the business, by the idea, by the product. So, we need to make sure that however you structure things; you structure it with your life vision in mind.

Remember, this concept of work-life balance I think is a myth and that all choices, all decisions that we make though they may be in a business context are life decisions—we need to build that structure around that.

And then once we’ve dealt with this second stage or phase 2, we can then move to the next stage and the last stage of phase 2 which is the finance stage.

Now, some business, many businesses aren’t going to need financing. So, you may move right through this pretty quickly. But others might. You might need to buy assets, you might need to buy real estate, you might need to buy equipment, computers. So, how are we going to get it finance? And we will talk about some needs and access and the source and how it affects equity.

• Do you bring in investors?
• Do you bring not bring in investors?

We talk about all of those elements but at some point we need to think about how do we finance the plan and the structure that we’re putting in place to do that?

So that would complete phase 2—the get up phase; which is really about planning, it’s about structure, and it’s about finance. And from there, we then move to this final phase.

The final phase is the reach out phase.

This is where we scale, this is where we grow, this is where we build it. Now that we got it off the ground, we got life off; so now we got it off the ground; we’re going to launch it.

So, the very first stage is this launch.

And so now what we’re going is it’s accelerating in a growth sense—whatever your service, your product, your businesses; now we’re doing things and putting things in place to accelerate that growth, to create that growth.

Now this is an area, where when we get to this phase and we’re trying to scale the business because the next stage of phase 3 is to:

Truly scale the business and this is a challenge for many businesses.

Many businesses fall into what I call growth purgatory. There’s a point where you’re not small enough … you’re too big to be considered a small business, but you’re too small to considered a big business and we’re in purgatory and we’re not sure do we make the decision to really scale and break out of that ceiling. Or do we stay where we are at?

And that becomes a personal decision, a professional decision, a lifestyle decision depending on what it is you want to do. But it needs to be a decision nonetheless. And then you need to move forward and one of the challenges for many-many entrepreneurs including myself, I have had to challenge at times, it’s this concept of delegation.

At some point, we’re going to have to let go of certain things that we can’t do and we’re going to need to think about accountability and responsibility and putting systems in place and moving outside of it to allow it to take life—to allow it to continue to grow and to scale beyond us—if we choose to do so and do that. So, that’s the scale stage, the second stage of phase three in reach out.

Then, the last stage which I call the exit stage of phase 3.

Now, every business will have what I call an exit. A time where you, the developer, the creator of the product, the service, or the business, the entrepreneur is going to exit the business. And there’s a variety of different ways to do it. But here’s the key behind this: The late great Steven Kubby talked about start with the end in mind, begin with the end in mind.

And that advice is so important to consider because many times entrepreneurs they get an idea:

• They don’t go through these stages,
• They don’t go through the process,
• They don’t go through all these stages.

And they just run full-fledged with their idea—excited and passionate about the idea—and they start to build something, all of a sudden they get to a point where they’re wrestling with a monster that they can’t figure out how it got so out of control.

It’s because they didn’t go through a process, they didn’t go through a system, they didn’t go through this and as you sit here and go through this think about this not as, “Well, Mel’s giving us some concepts”.

This is a checklist. This is the process that you need to go through where you literally are creating a checklist and say, “Check, Check, I got this, I got this, I got this.” That’s what is going to allow you to do this, but one of the keys is to understand and begin with the end in mind.

I made this mistake in my career. I was a CPA, I still am a CPA and I started to build my practice, I started to build my reputation – I built a national reputation and people were calling me. The phone was ringing off the hook. I was doing financial consulting and strategic planning and building, working with entrepreneurs, mentoring entrepreneurs. I was valuing businesses, I was testifying in court about values and financial matters, and buying and selling businesses. I was doing all that.

But the challenge was they were always calling me. I didn’t build it in a way that allowed me to step away from it, so when I moved away from it for whether if it was a vacation or what have you. In fact, couple of times you’ll hear these stories         at some point, you know, I got injured. I was out of service for a while.

Well see when that happens, everything stops. And I didn’t consciously decide it that way; it just happened that way because I was; maybe it was ego based when I first started to develop it. I was trying to build my business.

But the challenge with that is that I had nothing, if I wasn’t there. And that’s okay, many of us are going to build businesses around our name and that’s okay as long as we’re conscious about it and intentional about it.

I’m intentional about it now, I still do my consulting under Mel Abraham but I now know what I’m creating and I created differently. And I know that at some point if I step away from it, it goes away. But I’ve structured my life—one of the stages in phase 2. I’ve structured things in a way that it still feeds my life because I began with the end in mind.

And so, understand what is that you want to do to this business or this product or this service over time. Now it may change, but at least you start with something and you don’t just get on a boat, on a river, where you don’t know where the river is going, you don’t know how bad the current is, you don’t have any oars to steer and you don’t even have a life preserver.

So, I’d rather you choose a destination, choose a journey, choose a path, and if we need to shift and change paths we can rather than allow the path to be chosen for you. And so, that’s the reach up stage. Launch, scale and exit.

So, if we think about this whole concept of the three phases of business life.

• Think Up is about deciding, it’s about ideation, it’s about model.
• And then the Get Up is about planning, it’s about structuring, it’s about financing.
• And Reach Up is about the launch, the scaling, and the exit.

But all of this again is driven by customer promise and that’s one of the key takeaways I want to give you from this session as we close this session. I’m going to go deeper into each of these elements and we’ll keep digging deeper and deeper as we do this.

You’re going to find that the way The Entrepreneur’s Solution show is structured—it’s layered. So, I will give you a piece, allow you to digest it and then we’ll go a little bit deeper. And then I’m going to answer questions relative to that.

So, if you have questions or comments or anything: go ahead and go to AskMelNow.com and you can leave me a voicemail. You can leave me a message directly from your computer—you can leave me a question. If it’s a question it may end up on a future show answering those questions. I’ve got a few already that I need to answer.

In fact, the comments and the questions that have been coming in are phenomenal. Keep them coming. I love that. That’s one way for me to serve you as your entrepreneurial mentor.

But here’s what I want you to do for this session, this episode—your take away here—is I want you to focus on the customer promise. I invite you to do that to really drill it down to a point where you are creating a succinct but emotionally compelling promise for your customer.

And if it is not emotional for you, it’ll never be emotional for your customer. Think about this, let’s look at Zappos and I know that I’ve used them as an example but they’re a phenomenal company with a phenomenal leader Tony Hsieh. And in their customer promise is all over their boxes, it’s talked about and if you ask anyone that’s done business with Zappos, almost everyone is going to say, “Delivering Happiness”. Delivering happiness is two words not even a complete sentence—Delivering happiness.

But that is their customer promise. It’s clear, it’s emotional, it’s visceral, the people that work there that team, the core, the executive, the vendors know that their primary promise is to deliver happiness.

• It’s not to deliver shoes.
• It’s not to deliver clothes.
• It’s not to have the fastest delivery.
• It’s not to have the biggest variety.
• It’s not to have the lowest pricing.

It’s about delivering happiness.

And so, I want you to take the time in your journal and think about your product, your service, your offering. Think about your customers, the audience that you want to serve; at the level you want to serve. Think about the aspirational transformational element of your product or service, and create a succinct emotionally compelling customer promise.

• Create it,
• Write it down,
• Digest it,
• Think about for a couple of days; see if it still feels the same,
• Try it on.
• Try it out with some of your customers.

Ask your customers what they feel they get out of this beyond the product or service. How does it shift or change their business? And so that’s the piece.

We drill down in some of my live events much deeper into this. We call it “The Global Purpose” statement but here I want you to focus on the customer promises.

Here’s what I actually like you to do: is in the comments below or on the voicemail line at AskMelNow.com.

I want you to come up with the customer promise, leave it, post it, let us see it, let us support it, let us celebrate the customer promise and let’s allow it to grow, let’s allow it to take route.

So, I’d love to hear from you about your customer promises. I’d love to hear from you if you got questions again it’s AskMelNow.com.

And for any of the takeaways here for this show make sure that you can go to, MelAbraham.com/session004 to download any of the takeaways.

If you enjoyed this session, make sure that you subscribe if you haven’t already. So you will be notified of the next episode and might as well share it with a friend. Share it with a friend; give them the gift of bringing their dreams out of the darkness to create an epic journey through entrepreneurship again.

Until we get a chance to see each other in the next session, the next episode

May your vision be grand, your journey epic and your legacy significant!

Thanks. See you soon!!

— End Transcript —

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Like this? Please share it and help a few more people bring their dreams out of the darkness and give life to them again.  Cheers, Mel

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