The Mentor Mindset That Builds a Successful Location-Independent Business
It's also the ideal approach for 50+ people starting expertise-based enterprises.
In the last lesson, we saw the trend of an increasing number of high-impact tiny businesses. There’s been a huge increase in the number of seven- and high six-figure businesses with no employees.
Not long ago, it was laughable to think that regular people could start a business that made seven figures in annual revenue, all without employees or investors.
Even celebrities, solo attorneys, and individual financial planners needed to be surrounded by a staff of employees to achieve that kind of revenue. That’s not the case anymore for them, or us.
Automation, data, outsourcing, the internet, and now artificial intelligence have led to tremendous increases in capacity, productivity, and innovation. This benefits firms big, small, and tiny alike.
And while the media feeds the narrative that building an “internet business” requires loads of venture capital and an IPO or acquisition, we know better. Instead, an entire movement has emerged that celebrates digital bootstrapping as a much better alternative to the VC song and dance.
In fact, the way solopreneurs and small teams succeed with digital businesses dates back 66 years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.
It’s called direct-response marketing, which means you’re focused on getting prospects to take some form of action. Since the internet is a direct medium (meaning you can connect directly with the people you want as customers and clients), we now simply call it digital marketing.
It boils down to these three bedrock fundamentals:
Audience (who you choose to serve)
Offer (what they want to buy)
Copy (how to best communicate)
Simple right?
Building a powerful digital business without investors or employees is more doable than ever. But it requires a particular way of thinking and a deliberate approach to marketing and operations that allow for the freedom to grow the business (or not).
You’re likely familiar with content marketing. If not, it means giving away valuable, engaging, and educational information that connects in the right way with your intended audience. Then, you’re in a position to invite that audience to buy things related to your topic (offer), using messages (copy) that lead to the sale.
You may also have heard the saying “content is king.” But content has never been king — audience is. You develop an audience by providing unique value to the “who” you’ve decided to serve.
A decade or more ago, creating lots of high-value content was the way to do that. Now, we have plenty of content and even less capacity for attention.
People are looking for credible guides who will connect them with what’s good, what’s real instead of fake or poorly researched, and most of all, what’s important to them. And they want to be guided by trustworthy humans, not algorithms.
And it’s not just content. People turn to reliable resources for advice on what to buy, what to watch, where to travel, and more. In an age of overwhelming information and choice, business people who combine expertise and trust (the two components of credibility) now more easily command an audience.
I call this approach the mentor mindset. And unlike self-proclaimed influencers (who often have very little real influence) and most digital marketers (who think all you have to do is run someone through a sales funnel to succeed), mentor-style marketing is all about serving the needs of the audience starting before they buy.
It brings to mind a quote from Zig Ziglar:
“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
At our stage of life as 50+ entrepreneurs, our crystallized intelligence makes the mentor mindset an ideal approach.
As we’ve discussed, crystallized intelligence is defined as the ability to use the vast set of knowledge and experience you’ve acquired over the years, and it tends to increase with age through one’s forties, fifties, and sixties. Plus, it doesn’t diminish until quite late in life, if ever.
Finally, thinking in terms of mentorship is a highly human-centric approach as we progress deeper into the age of artificial intelligence. Prospects will seek out solution providers who can pass on their own life and work experiences as a connective wrapper around generic advice that could be obtained from a machine.
In fact, connection is the key. So let’s dig a bit deeper.
The Five Core Aspects of Mentor Marketing
A mentor mindset puts you in a position to avoid the poor marketing mistakes that plague young businesses.
Let’s take a closer look at the mindset and methodology that makes mentor marketing work for you right from the beginning of your quest to create a location-independent business.