Bumps & Bruises
7 Lessons I Learned by Mistake(s)
by Steve Stewart

1. I have had good success with my products, selling a total of over 1,000,000 cassettes and 165,000 books since 1986. Because they worked and continued to sell, I continued to sell them without making any changes. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? In retrospect: wrong. The problem turned out to be that relying on them prevented me from moving ahead in my thoughts and writing to take on new ideas and new markets. I became complacent.

   I should have gotten each product (books and tapes) on line and given them a good run. Then I should have put them on a back burner where they could continue to sell (such as through my web site or through Amazon.com’s web site) while I took on new ideas like my competitors were doing. I should have been faster to make my thinking new than to renew a book or tape.

2. All industry-specific products (books and tapes) should have to pass the exhibit-hall-trend test. That is, products should be in line with what most companies are exhibiting at trade shows (technology, Internet, software, etc.) If I am going to buck the trends, there had better be an excellent reason other than simply standing apart from the crowd! Standing apart is good, but how come so many people are standing over there?

3. I would have an iron clad rule that 10% of all net speaking fees would go into retirement savings, I never thought I would get old enough to retire or would even want to. Now I’m old enough and want to, and can’t. I would also have an iron clad rule that 35% of all product sales would go into a separate reserve account to pay for the next product order. That is about what it costs to print, record, duplicate, bind, etc. Just take the money out, set it aside and deal with whatever is left because that is all that is left.

4. I would have put a firm ceiling of $4,000 carry-over debt on credit cards, and insisted that at least 6 months of the year, the cards would be paid in full no matter what. Credit card debt is a bitch. (Yes, I could have said bear or booger, but that just doesn’t cut it.)

5. My first hire was a personal assistant, and I’ve had seven of them over the years. That was smart. But I hired assistants who were good at running the office, and none of them soared at finances. I should have hired (out-sourced) a tax accountant within the first 8-9 months, and listened to him/her.

6. At the age of 37, and starting a full time speaking career, I focused programs on making people better at their jobs, helping them achieve more in the same time they spent. Now that that I’m 52, I think that was short sighted. We all recognize that when we look backward in our final days, we won’t regret "I wish I had sold more houses." "I wish I had gotten more financial clients to invest in Keogh Plans." "I wish I had trained more customer service directors."

   What we will regret is that we didn’t take more time with family, didn’t sit and listen to our spouses and kids, that we missed a daughter’s dance recital, didn’t tell people we loved that we loved them, didn’t honor commitments, didn’t stand up for beliefs.

   I made a career mistake. What I did was fine, but what I missed was the chance to make a more meaningful difference in people’s lives. There is time to change that now and I’m working on it. But I wish I had understood this five years ago (Geez, it’s not as if no one in NSA was telling me…).

7. Chapter member Barbara Geraghty writes in her book, "if nothing happens in your business when you aren’t there, you have a job, not a business." That’s worth writing down and taping to your bathroom mirror (where mine has been for the past two years).

   If I were just starting out today, I would have part of my business centered in my live presentations, and a lot of things set up on the Internet.

   • Online courses where people could learn without me traveling to Ohio to teach them.
   • I would use wizards and tutorials to walk people around my web site so they could figure out what to buy and what to enroll in.
   • I would use shopping carts, automatic credit card approvals and automatic shipping software on my web site.
   • All that because I want my business to pull its own weight, not require me to pull it around behind me wherever I go.