Do you know how to identify if you are an order taker or a problem solver? In this week’s podcast, I am going to show you how to break out of some of these bad habits and come out on top of your business as the problem solver you want to be.
Biggest Takeaways
Where do you stand as the business world continues to change? Are you moving with the changes and sitting back and blending in? Over the next few months, I am going to teach you how to stay with the times and continue to push your revenue to the levels you dream of.
It Is Time To Become A Problem Solving Consultant
I know most of you would say no if I asked you if you are ready to start consulting but I know most of you are ready to start increasing your profits. I am going to teach you how to start being a consultant instead of selling. The climate is changing and you need to know how to maintain and increase your revenue.
Problem Solver VS Order Taker
Have you slipped down the path to being an order taker? Identifying where you and even your employees stand in the business as an order taker or a problem solver can drastically help you. The first step is learning where you stand in the sales process. Do you reach out and have an emotional conversation with someone who needs your services or do you just ask them how you can help? Once you know where you stand it is on to training your employees.
Show Highlights
- Are you ready to start selling? [7.17]
- Identify if you are an order taker [18.32]
- How to be a problem solver [27.50]
Want Some Free Sales Training?
I did a 3 part training series with a 20-year veteran sales master and provided you with some training experience that is out of this world! If you enjoyed this podcast about being a problem solver and want to continue your sales training, check out this three-part series with Aaron Miller.
- 1st Part: Episode #263: One Secret To Winning Almost Every Sale
- 2nd Part: Episode #264: The Trick To Be Confident In Closing Sales
- 3rd Part: Episode #265: How To Leverage Your Competition For More Sales
Links
Mastermind
Jump Consulting Website
Let’s Connect
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Are You New Here?
Welcome, I am so glad you are here. If you are a dog walker, dog sitter, cat sitter, doggy daycare, or kennel owner, then you found the right place. Jump Consulting is the one place on the internet to get all the resources you need for your pet care business. Can I give you some freebies to generate sales and increase revenues for your business? Grab your freebies below.
- Are you starting out? Been in business for less than two years? Get your startup resources here.
- Do you own an established pet care business and you want to take it to the next level.? Get Your builder resources here.
Transcript:
This is episode 273 of Bella in Your Business. Hi there, I’m Bella Vasta from Jump Consulting. You might know me from CBS, NBC, Fox, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, or maybe you’ve seen me speak on stage or read my book, The Four Dogs That Every Business Owner Needs. In any case, get ready because you’re about to get your hashtag Bella Butt Kickin’ in this next episode of Bella in Your Business.
So what do you say? Let’s get ready and jump. Welcome back to another episode of Bella in Your Business. It’s the second week in January, and I’m back here today to talk about—are you an order taker? It’s one thing that’s preventing you from thousands of dollars in sales. It became really apparent to me as I was actually having a conversation this weekend. You see, I ended up in what I call the time machine on my Instagram, if you follow me there. I got together with a whole bunch of people that I have not seen for eight to ten years. We used to run a nonprofit charity here locally in Scottsdale, Arizona, back in the day. We were all business owners, and it was before marriage and kids and divorces and all that stuff. We were just, you know, twenty-something entrepreneurs and we would dock up together and we just had the same tenacity for life, you know.
It happened to be one of the gal’s 40th birthdays and she came in from Colorado, and a whole bunch of us saw each other. It was actually quite emotional for me. Her parents actually live in one of the communities where I had a lot of presence with my pet sitting company. We were actually in one of the gated communities of the gated communities. Yes, you heard that right. And the last time I had been in there, I was actually Bella the pet sitter. So this is a long time ago. But you know, we got to talking and we were kind of like hanging out on the patio and just listening to music and catching up. And one of the gals there said that she actually owned a house cleaning company and that she also was doing pet sitting as well. She knew that I was a business coach, and she kind of started asking for some advice, which I don’t usually get into with friends, but I couldn’t help myself this night. And if any of you know me, it kind of like lit me on fire and got me excited.
The whole time her husband was also sitting there and he was like, yeah, tell her, tell her, you know? And she’s like, well, I charge $90 an hour to do house cleaning and I am just the best house cleaner ever. And you know, I will scrub those toilets with a toothbrush. And I was like, well, that’s great. Like, do you have anyone working for you? She said, no, it’s just me, but I only work like two or three days a week. And I was like, well, that’s good, but that’s also a ceiling. Like, what are your dreams, your goals, your aspirations? What’s your vision, you know?
And so we kind of dug a little deeper and she was very proud of her service, which is great, right? But they don’t have any desire to have kids and they want to be able to travel and buy all the toys, the RVs, the razors, all of that stuff, right? And so I was like, all right, well, how are we going to do this? Like, maybe you could retire your husband. She’s like, well, my husband has his own business too. I was like, oh, what do you do? He started a business that is powder for your balls. Yeah. So that was a really interesting conversation as well, but he actually started it out of his garage.
And she said lovingly to me, she goes, it looked like there was a meth lab in there. She goes, there was just powder everywhere. She goes, but he’s grown this business into a really, really good business to where they’re on the verge of having Walmart be one of their distributors, which is amazing. And so we get into talking and I mean, I can’t make this stuff up, right? So we just start talking and I start getting excited. He’s like smiling and nodding and pointing at me. And he’s like, yep, I’ve told her all of this.
And I was like, well, sometimes this is the syndrome that happens, guys, right? I know that any of you mamas or papas out there listening right now, you have kids or your wife or your husband that you’ve told something to—and it was sage advice—and they did not hear you. For whatever reason, they discredited you or it went in one ear and out the other, whatever it might have been. But along comes some random blonde-haired girl at some party on a deck, a patio, and she’s telling you the same thing that you’ve been telling them, and all of a sudden it’s like she’s hearing it for the first time. I’ve been guilty of this, right?
So I thought it was really funny because as our conversation kept going, more and more people came out. Another gal came out—she has a bestselling book. Another gal has another really lucrative company, and we’re all entrepreneurs. We’ve all started this from the ground up. Back in the day when we used to dock up and work, it was all of us kind of in the incubation stage of our first or our actual business. And so we get out there and we just start talking and talking. One of the girls, her mentor is Les Brown. I don’t know if you guys know him—look him up. He’s the most amazing inspirational person ever. And she tells her story about imposter syndrome and we just start like synergistically connecting—“Oh my God, yeah, this and this and this”—and the energy and the flow is so amazing.
Why am I telling you this? Well, I’m telling you this for a few reasons. First, it’s really a big matter of difference of the company that you keep—whether that’s the company you keep online or what you put in your head. You know, I was asking this girl as she’s trying to start this cleaning company, what are you doing to better yourself? I said, because eventually you’re going to end up being a leader and you’re going to have to start managing people underneath you because you cannot do all of this yourself. You need to put yourself out of a job. That’s what you need to do. You need to get really good at mastering a job and then handing it off and then starting another one. And then going above, above, above. And that’s all that this takes—it is the constant ability to put yourself out of a job. But you can’t get really good at that unless you take an active role in developing your mind—truly developing your mind and creating different neural pathways.
And so a bunch of us kind of overloaded her on all kinds of books or mentors or people that we like to listen to. I got out my Audible and just started rattling off a whole bunch of books, some of which her husband knew all about. And I said to her, “So what do you do while you are driving around or while you’re cleaning these houses? What is in your ears?” And she said some music band names—it was basically like music. And I was like, you’re missing an amazing opportunity to be learning.
And she said, “It’s so hard.” And I said, “Yeah, it is so hard.” And you guys, you know this—it’s so hard. But you gotta put down the shovel and stop digging yourself more of a hole. You gotta start braiding a rope that you can throw up and start pulling yourself out. That’s what you gotta do. When you don’t feel like it, you gotta start doing it.
And I told her the story that I’ve told on this podcast before of when I was coming out of everything with my daughter, Olivia—after she was born at 10 ounces—and how I had PTSD and postpartum depression. I was processing the horror and hell that I had lived through for two years that none of you guys knew about in real time, by the way. And then I started walking every morning for 30 minutes. I didn’t feel like it—absolutely didn’t feel like it. It felt like a frying pan had hit my head all day because I’d been living with high doses of stress. And I started listening to the Motivate app and putting literally one foot in front of the other to get things going when I didn’t even want to.
Okay, this is really important what I’m saying right now because I’m going to give you three examples today of three people that have continuously kept going with this stuff that we’ve been talking about on the podcast. I want to shout them out. I want to give you guys a glimpse and a glimmer of hope. I want you to be able to be like, “Wow, I can see myself in them.” I was terrified to do this, and I almost stepped out in faith on this whole sales thing that we’ve been talking about. I did something when I didn’t feel like doing it.
This whole conversation with my friends out on this patio this weekend at this birthday party just really inspired me to talk about mindset. I feel like the word is a dirty word because it’s overused. But it literally is the one thing that’s preventing you from thousands of dollars in sales—your mindset. It really is your ability to say you can do something or you cannot do something.
The last episode or two episodes ago, I challenged you guys to answer the dang phone. And I got a couple of messages. One gal said, “But Bella, I’m so busy that I don’t want to answer the phone because I don’t want to get caught hearing their whole life story and being on the phone forever. I don’t have the time for that.” Do you resonate with that? Well, yeah—that is a mindset. That’s a mindset of “I don’t want that.” So how can we overcome it?
Here’s what I told her. I said, “Listen, you have a script, and you figure out how to control the conversation. If you have to, say, ‘Excuse me, Mary, I want to hear every single thing that you’re about to tell me, but I just arrived at my next dog walking client and I don’t want to be late because I would never be late for you. Might it be all right if I give you a call back at date and time so that you can have my undivided attention? Or, if you’re absolutely eager to get going right away, feel free to go to callbellas.com/register and get registered, and tonight I’ll call you back.’”
All it takes is taking control of the conversation. Everything is figureoutable. I say this all the time. I wish I could say I was the one that came up with it. I found out that Marie Forleo actually wrote a book called Everything is Figureoutable. But it’s so true, you guys. “Figureoutable” and “mindset” are interchangeable. You have to be willing to figure it out. You have to be willing to find a way. That’s what business takes.
So one listener wrote me after that episode and said, “I listened to your latest podcast today, which I look forward to every Thursday. I’ve really been liking the challenge you put out about answering the phone. After listening, I purchased your phone script. As I was finishing the audio example you included, I got an incoming call to my business line. I picked it up and used your tips. It was such an enjoyable conversation. I felt so prepared knowing what questions to ask. I asked for her email address and will send a follow-up email. Thank you so much, Bella. I have a successful and enjoyable business in huge part to you.”
Because she switched her mindset. She said, “Okay, the way I’ve been doing it isn’t working. Let me try something different.” That flip in mindset landed her a client. Another message came in the same day: “I just answered my phone today. I usually have calls go to voicemail and have new clients fill out my website form. I even talked them into twice-a-day visits when they only wanted once for their cats. I also came up with a fun new way to answer—‘Hi, this is Pet Sitting. Meow, may I help you?’ Feeling empowered with Bella Vasta.”
And then we had a third message come in: “I answered my phone yesterday, which is huge for me. I talked a two-day-a-week walk into five days a week.”
You guys, what kind of stinkin’ thinkin’ mindset do you need to switch? I still challenge you—the next time that phone rings, answer it. Have a conversation. If you don’t know how to take command of a conversation, yes, go to JumpConsulting.net and download my phone script class for $79. It works—it’s been around forever.
If you’re looking for clients, maybe you’re still trying to come back after COVID, or maybe you’re hiring people and want to keep them busy, maybe spring break is coming up—whatever it is—the one thing preventing you from thousands of dollars in your business is your own mindset. It’s your own figureoutable, your can-do attitude, answering the phone, putting yourself in uncomfortable situations. Because what’s the worst that could happen? It could actually work.
Now, I know a lot of you are serial entrepreneurs too. So if any of you are in the house cleaning industry, I highly recommend checking out my friend Ken Cavrogno with the Smart Cleaning School podcast. He and I might be doing some collaborations soon. He left this comment: “I run a podcast in a general business cleaning and met Bella at a conference. I’ve been listening to her podcast. Bella brings a ton to pet industry owners. If you are struggling to pay your bills or grow your team, make sure to plug into Bella’s mindset. She teaches you how to think like an owner. You will not grow into higher levels of your business until you learn to think like successful business owners.”
Amen, Ken. And I’m not saying that to toot my own horn—it just perfectly bookends this episode: get a better mindset. Our mindsets can always improve. Mine can always improve. And I want to encourage you to do the same. Keep expanding your brain. Be around people who are inspiring and motivating, who are not just solving today’s problems but casting visions for the future. If you want to be around a group like that, go to jumpconsulting.net/mastermind and get in the mastermind. That’s where people are moving, shaking, and kicking butt.
You guys, this has been another episode of Bella in Your Business. Thank you so much for spending time with me. I want you to think about who you’re hanging out with—who’s filling your soul, who’s exciting you, who’s pouring into your business and life. Because that is a necessity if you’re going to be a successful entrepreneur.
Remember, when life gets you down, always keep jumping. I’ll see you next week. So what did you think? Did you love this episode? I sure hope you did because I put a lot of love into this for you. The best way you can show me that is by going to iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcast and go ahead and leave a review. I just might read it on the next episode. I also want to remind you that when life gets you down, remember to always keep jumping. Thanks for listening.