33 | The Karma of Commerce: Why Giving Back Pays Off

What if breaking the rules could be the key to unlocking your business's full potential? In today's episode of the Annoyingly Optimistic Show, we're shaking things up by challenging Tim—and you—to think beyond the conventional norms of your industry. Discover how borrowing innovative strategies from other sectors can give your business a unique edge, and learn practical methods to transform those borrowed ideas into tangible success. We'll explore the power of questioning the status quo, including engaging examples like the revolutionary impact of the "three-for-two" deal at Boots, to show how you can apply similar tactics to your own ventures.

But that's not all. Imagine charging ten, fifty, or even a hundred times more for your product—sounds crazy, right? By doing so, you'll uncover hidden opportunities to add value, enhance your offerings, and redefine your customer approach to meet higher expectations. Through Tim's journey, we'll illustrate how these bold moves and innovative thinking can help you get unstuck and push forward with renewed energy and optimism. Tune in to discover how breaking the rules can be the ultimate game-changer for your business!

If you are self-employed or run a small business and feel more like you're self-annoyed then get in touch, visit the website www.theannoyinglyoptimisticshow.com where you can submit a question or problem and start your journey to becoming self-enjoyed! 

The majority of 'business advice' out there isn't aimed at self-employed or micro businesses, following it leaves you frustrated and chasing quick fixes. I specialise in tools, systems, techniques, inspiration and help specifically designed for YOU, the person who has to do it all, who doesn't have a team of people, unlimited resources or the time to spend months learning complicated techniques. 

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Hey there, listeners, it's your annoyingly optimistic host here bringing you another season of the Annoyingly Optimistic Show. Welcome to Season 2, voicemails to Tim. Now let's meet Tim. He's been running his own small business for almost three years now and let's just say he's hit a bit of a rough patch. You know how it is Sometimes you get so stuck, you make yourself busy and just avoid finding the real problems. Well, that's Tim. So, as a good friend, I decide to leave him a daily voicemail, if I can't get hold of him, filled with nuggets of inspiration, insight and wisdom and downright brilliant ideas to help get him unstuck Every day. In just under 10 minutes, I'll share some tips, tricks and a healthy dose of optimism to get Tim, and maybe even you, back on track, because, let's face it, we're all a little tired, in need of help and muddling through. So here we go. Re, oh wait, never mind Tim's being busy. Here's the voicemail I left him today. Hi, tim, sorry I missed you. Good to catch up again.

Speaker 1 0:58

And this one bit of a weird one. I was walking, thought of you, thought I must kind of give you a quick call, missed you again, so breaking the rules. Now, I'm not talking about getting self-arrested and anything illegal or anything like that, not the big rules, but the rules of business. Yeah, everything great, different, amazing, new, fantastic, that we have kind of business-wise, product-wise, has generally come out of people breaking the rules, people coming up with something new, coming up with a new way of doing things, of approaching things, and we need to embrace that in our business. And the way to kind of do this is not to, you know, sell shoddy products or anything like that, but it's about thinking outside of the box. It's about breaking the rules of your particular industry. You know, looking at other industries other way companies advertise, other ways they promote things, other ways they sell to their customers, and seeing how you can take that idea into what you're doing.

Speaker 1 2:01

Because often by seeing something else that someone does successfully and co-opting that theory, that way of working, can make a massive difference to our own industry. Because we tend to follow the same patterns, the same style of advertising that our competitors do, that other companies in our niche who are doing really well, we try to kind of copy and emulate those, and often they've got bigger budgets, more staff and things like that. So if we want to cut through, if we want to, you know, really be different. We can sit there and reinvent the wheel and hopefully come up with something stunning and amazing, which we should always try and do anyway but what we can do is we can borrow, we can break the rules of our own industry and see how we can. We can do something differently. You know, it might be a subscription model, it might be a certain kind of giveaway or competition or a way of wording things. I always remember, years and years ago, advising some businesses who starting doing three for two and this is going back to when, you know, boots was one of the pioneers of three for two. You know, and you know, that if a big company is coming up with a particular way of marketing a product or marketing certain areas of products, that they've had focus groups and lots of teams of people doing it. So take that and see, okay, it might not directly apply, but okay, how can I take that idea, that wording, that way of focusing customers and make it my own, make it work for me, and that's something that that you know will work really well.

Speaker 1 3:32

The other thing about kind of breaking the rules is when you're looking at your competition and how they do it. It's, and there's a couple of really nice questions that do this. If you had to charge 10, 50, 100 times more for your product, you had to. There was no reason for what more would you deliver? How would you give them more? How would you add value to what you were doing? How would you change what you're doing? How would you market it differently and give more value? And it's an interesting kind of thing because it can lead to all kinds of well, I do this and this. That will be obvious. And so why aren't you doing that now? Because if you come up with those ideas when you kind of take cost out of the option, well, okay, how can we achieve that same idea where cost isn't a problem and it forces you to think outside the box?

Speaker 1 4:24

The other option is if you had to give your product away, for how would you market it? How would you get people excited about it? How would you do that kind of same value? It's these kinds of questions which challenge us and force us kind of outside of the normal lanes of just doing the same thing over and over again and suddenly we're confronted with doing things a bit differently, coming at them from a different angle and breaking the rules that we'd normally kind of follow. So it's's something I want you to kind of think about.

Speaker 1 4:53

So pick some cuts and companies that nothing whatsoever to do with what you do, but you just love their promos, love the way that they kind of do things and approach things and talk about them and, you know, ping me a, list them if you like, and let's see how we can take how they market and apply it to you. And all of a sudden you're going to have a fresh way of marketing, fresh way of positioning your products and the chance are you're going to get attention for those because you're going to stand out from all your competitions. So go break some rules and um, and let me know, let me know what you think and let's, let's have a chat about it so I'll catch up with you soon. Bye, tim. Hi, tim, hope you're well. God, you liked my little short one the other day. Short voicemail for you.

Speaker 1 5:37

Again, ebb and flow. I wanted to throw something at you and this was reminded because I was sorting through some old boxes, just sorting out. I've got a, you'll see it soon. I've got a having a revamp in my office and I came across some of the some newspaper clippings from some of the charity events that I did years ago and it just got me thinking and and I pinged out a couple of emails, I thought, oh, that's that reminds me. And I want to combine something that I meant to say to you the other week and this feels like a great opportunity and it's this idea of and I'll link it back with the charity it's this idea of give what you want to receive.

Speaker 1 6:16

If you are free with your time, if you are free with your money, your expertise, you will often get that back. You get back what you give. And there's lots of different ways that I could take this, but I wanted to focus on this kind of charity aspect because this was something that when I had my kind of high street presence, it was something I did a lot of and something I really enjoyed and got, you know, a ton back from. And it's the charity aspect that I wanted to focus on specifically, because what you're doing, we all in our business, we want more people to talk about us. We want more people to recommend us. We want more people to talk about us. We want more people to recommend us. We want more customers to come in and spend well and become raving fans and tell other people. We want people to know who we are, what we stand for and things like that. So in this kind of give to get kind of idea, give what you want to receive. If you do that with a charity charity, you help raise the profile of that charity. By supporting them. You put your time into supporting them, whether it be arranging an event or a particular promotion or whatever it might be. You are helping that and, by extension and this I sometimes pause, as I am right now, when I talk about charity because some people see it as being disingenuous, seeing it as being somehow trying to capitalize off the off these charities.

Speaker 1 7:47

Now we are businesses. That puts us in a position where we have an audience, we have a group of people that we can talk to and we can support charities by raising money for them, raising profile and pushing that out to our customers. But we also gain from it as well and that doesn't make it a bad thing. That makes it a fantastic, mutually beneficial relationship or activity and and that's great because the charity benefits, because they need people to help raise money and support their causes. If we benefit by, people realize that we're nice, kind people and stand for things more than just making money, then that helps our business, so why wouldn't we do it? That doesn't make it wrong that we are benefiting from it, but it's this idea. If we spend time doing these things now again me tim all the things I did with charity tended to be a little bit wacky and out there.

Speaker 1 8:45

I did some huge halloween fancy dress walks. We did one year where 900 people turned up. I've done Christmas things, I've done coffee mornings, I've done 24-hour events, all kinds of different things, calendars. I've run around the town with 50 brides and and stuff like that. So they're all weird and wonderful and that's just my own take on them, but they were things that the people that were involved got a lot out of them and they were talking about it. The charity supported it and got a lot out of it. I got exposure out of it and it was used to amuse me. One of the local newspapers would never feature any of the events that I did if I sent them a photo, but they would feature them as someone. Someone else sent a photo.

Speaker 1 9:29

So it's cool, saved me one, one more job, but it was the fact that I wanted and, if I bring this back to I in a business sense, in this kind of give what you want to receive, I wanted more exposure. I wanted people to know what my business was, where it was, what I stood for, who I was and the kind of personality that I had within my business through the things that I did. So, rather than trying to pay for advertising and put up posters and just literally tell people I showed them show, don't tell. I showed them by supporting a charity, creating an event around that support of that charity, which fitted within my, my, my desire, the way I wanted to work, and so I was doing what I wanted to do in the primary thing in terms of I was letting people see what I do, how I do it and what I stand for. But at the same time, I was benefiting a charity as well and they got the benefit from it and raised funds. I think over the course of four or five years, I think, I raised close to £10,000 for different kind of charities and so and I was getting stuff back from that, not on the day, but the goodwill that came from that, the halo effect that came from that, from doing these things, and to such a degree that I would actually start getting people messaging me months before I'd done an event the year before and they're going you do this one again when it was coming up, because they enjoyed them. They look forward to them.

Speaker 1 10:59

It's one of these things supporting a charity, an organization, something like that is a fantastic thing for your business if it's something that you really care about and stand for. But it's more than just doing that. From a business point of view, it's actually, if you get the right charity and you put the right event together, it can actually be a really powerful and incredibly cost-effective form of marketing, something that people will latch on to and can understand you. We all will look for connection. We want to support businesses that, if we're, you know, if we're very hot on sustainability or things like that, we want to support businesses that stand for something, that aren't just a faceless corporation, and we can tell companies we're doing that. But if we can actually show it, if we can actually show customers, I'm putting my time, my energy and my business next and aligning it with this charity and doing this, we're showing them how much we care about these things. We're showing them how much this means to us, and by investing that time and helping to promote something else give what we want to receive we receive promotion back. We receive people talking about us, recommending us, sharing the events that we're doing in our business and all the rest of it. So, again, we are giving what we want to receive. We want to receive people being aware of us, talking about us, sharing us. So we share that charities event, we create something and we get that back in spades. It's one of those things that and it's a reminder that we got to keep our heads up and look out into the world. The more we just focus down and worry about our own three-foot box around us and what we're doing, we lose sight of everything around us. And if we want to receive great things and in form of customers, recommendations and all the rest of it then one of the best ways to do that is do great things and put those things out there and put out what you want to receive. So hope that helps. Maybe let's talk about doing a charity event. Maybe it should be quite cool. But yeah, hope that's helped him and I shall speak to you again soon. Bye for now, and that's it for today.

Speaker 1 13:11

Episode of voicemails to tim on the annoyingly optimistic show. Now, remember, tim might be busy, but we're all in this together. Whether you're tired, in need of help or just muddling through, tim is here for you because, well, tim is you. Yes, you heard that right. Tim isn't just my friend. He's a reflection of all of us who are struggling to make it work. T-i-m stands for tired, in need of help and muddling through. So if you're feeling like a Tim, you're not alone For all those ambitious listeners. If you've got a burning business question, a quirky thought or just want to see if you can leave an even weirder voicemail, head over to the website voicemailstotimcom, submit your question and maybe, just maybe, you'll hear your idea in a future voicemail to Tim. So until then, stay annoyingly optimistic, keep pushing forward and remember, if life gives you lemons, leave a voicemail about it.