When I started my first business, as is so often the case, I didn’t have much money to spend on anything. Coming from the big budgets of a global corporation, it was quite a challenge to learn how to get maximum impact for minimum outlay! I still get great satisfaction from finding a ‘good bargain’.
However, this frugality has also backfired on me and held my business back.
You see, I believed it was wrong to spend much on training to learn more about business. But the free or low-cost seminars and workshops just left me increasingly frustrated because they didn’t give me the whole story!
I’d been following several very successful business owners whom I admired, hearing them tell about the importance of investing in their personal development, and that they spent as much as they could afford (sometimes even more than was comfortable) on hiring a coach and training.
At some point a couple of years ago, it dawned on me that my belief was actually holding me back from success. It wasn’t a case of waiting until I could comfortably afford to invest in training at all! The training had to be done first, and then the business would be more successful. Not really a light bulb moment, more of a ‘Duh, why didn’t I think of that before?’ moment!
All the time I was thinking small and penny pinching on my personal development, I was in effect saying that neither my business or I deserved more.
As soon as I took the plunge and started investing serious amounts of time and money in training and coaching for myself, that’s when I began attracting more business. I was even able to get some of the training paid for under a government initiative!
Business is still growing, and I’m still investing in it! Never again will I be a ‘cheap-skate’ because I now know that my business is worth the best.
