The world is full of great tools now. YouTube offers you business video production tools, Facebook has tools for advertising and audience building, GoToWebinar lets you host free LIVE webinars. These companies have all invested millions upon millions of pounds to create tools to help you run your business.
The problem is, tools don’t grow your business, assets do – and these tools don’t work without you plugging your assets into them.
A YouTube account doesn’t do much unless you upload a video. Facebook Ads need you to provide the images and the copy. Webinars need you to have slides and a script.
Assets are unique to your business. Tools are available for everyone to use.
Struggling businesses obsess over tools. They put hours of research into understanding the features of a CRM system, they get excited about auto-responder software, they read blogs about shopping carts and which colour button had the highest click-through rate and shell out thousands of pounds a month investing into these tools thinking they’re going to get a massive return.
The truth is, although you will see a significant return (whether that’s revenue or saving time), creating and using an asset is where you’ll find the massive return.
Successful businesses obsess over their assets – and I’m not just referring to their four-storey office building. They focus on capturing powerful stories on video, they write insightful blogs, they win awards for their work and get insanely specific about their company brand and culture.
Armed with great assets like books, reports, videos and a honed message these companies quickly discover that any of the tools they use come to life and perform. Their books sell well on Amazon, their videos on YouTube generate warm leads, their community page on Facebook has a dozen new members every hour because people can see the unique points of difference.
A business with amazing assets can use very basic tools and get a huge result. Conversely, a business with every tool ever developed but nothing much to say is dead in the water.
We live in an era where tools will actually come and find you if your assets are good enough. Your job as an entrepreneur is to create assets first and then look for tools that can leverage them. Not the other way around.
Your business will not suddenly change (certainly not long-term) because you’ve discovered some tool developed by another company. It doesn’t really matter what CRM system you use, or if you have a robot tweeting 100 times a day on autopilot, or if you’re subscribing to a webinar platform that has bells and whistles built right into its features.
When you have an ecosystem of assets, the tools suddenly become useful. Your business will take off when you have remarkable assets that are totally unique and can be leveraged across the multitudes of platforms (tools) that are available.
The good news is that you are probably a lot closer than you think to discovering valuable assets. Every business owner is sitting on assets. Whether its a particular way you do business, content that only lives within your head or a methodology you’ve built to bring success to your clients. Whatever it is, you need to be in the right environment to unpack your mind and create those assets.
Next month, we’re running the Business Brand Accelerator and we believe that this is the perfect environment to get you into the mindset of creating rather than consuming. It’ll be full of entrepreneurs and business leaders who have established businesses, along with industry leaders who will each be doing a keynote talk.
Creating assets is vital to growing your business. Start now.
