An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

You Can’t Do It On Your Own: Whether it is hiring a coach, service provider, industry expert or team member, if you want to start a business seek out people who have done it before and can help you get there faster. There are plenty of people who would love to see you succeed and have the skills to help you.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shannon Bain.

Shannon is the Creative Director and Consultant of Shannon Bain Digital, a Brisbane-based agency that works with pupose-driven coaches and service-providers. The agency creates sales-driven websites, strategic marketing and time-saving systems for their clients.

Shannon’s purpose is to help people start, grow or scale their own profitable, location-independent business that enables them to live a life of freedom, personal growth and financial independence.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

Sure! I grew up in a family of 3 girls and moved between the Gold Coast and rural Queensland before spending my teenage years in Darwin, Australia.

As a child I was ambitious and tried a lot of different things, but like most teenage girls I lost interest in most of my hobbies when it came to high school,. My twenties were challenging, trying to figure out what value I could bring to the world. Again, I tried many things before I found my purpose in helping others start and grow their businesses using using systems, web design and marketing.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

There are two:

1. “You can have it all but you can’t do it all” — I feel this is profound because I truly believe we are the master of our own destiny and the CEO of our own life. This means we have full control of the outcomes we experience or at least if we perceive them to be positive or negative. You have the POWER to achieve anything. But, the truth is the only limitation we have is TIME. That means we need to spend it wisely, and as such if we try and DO everything and lose the ability to properly manage the investment of time, we are less likely to achieve the outcome we want. So you CAN have everything you desire, but you need to choose your path wisely.
2. “Don’t confuse movement with progress, you can run in one spot and never get anywhere” — this one hit home for me. Just like many other business owners, I can be guilty of pushing to go fast, blinded by the pursuit of my ambition. But just because we are doing ‘something’ doesn’t mean we are achieving or closer to our goals. I am much more thoughtful and strategic with my time and focus now and aligned to the quote above about ‘having it all’ but not ‘doing it all’.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. This book is all about being in the present, which is essentially all we have in life. Living in the past is the definition of depression, living in the future is where anxiety lies along with all the ‘what ifs’. I am still learning to practice this more, but becoming more aware of living in the present and being mindful that time is our most limited resource made a profound impact on me. I value time above anything else in life.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

I have a method called ‘Idea to Income’ . It’s an 6 step process that can take anyone from indecision and lacking confidence, to a bulletproof mindset and making sales with their offer.

Firstly, the big problem is that people struggle to make decisions and taking action, which is due to lack of understanding around their purpose. Without clarity on the driving force and purpose in what you are doing, you will suffer from lack of confidence or worry about what others think too much. This will affect your ability to take action on any idea that you have.

It’s not easy by any means but the first step is to get clear on your the thing that you would love to do everyday, that the world needs and that people would pay you for. This is what you should build a business around.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

It doesn’t matter if the idea/offer is already out there because of 3 reasons:

1. Your special ‘sauce’ or ‘method’ and personality will make it unique and/or better. People will invest in YOU, your process in combination and the outcome you are helping them achieve.
2. There are MORE than enough people out there to build a business around any idea that solves a problem people are facing (billions to be exact), there is a market for anyone to be successful.
3. If there are already people making sales/being successful with your idea it means it has proof of concept and there is a market for it. This is a good thing.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

I can’t comment on patents and manufacturers as I primarily work with coaches and service-based businesses. But if you have a product, program or service idea that you haven’t taken action on, follow these steps:

1. DEVELOP A SUCCESS MINDSET: That means knowing your purpose, eliminating fear of judgement and building self confidence. Mindset plays a big part in our ability to make decisions and take action, so is just as important as any other strategic or skill-based factor.
2. DEFINE THE OFFER: Define the offer based on the transformation. Your offer will have the biggest impact on your success, along wth your ability to market it. Create a solution-based offer by mapping out where your ideal client is right now, where they want to be and then the 6–12 steps they need to take to get to that goal. You should then decide on your delivery vehicle, like how will you actulaly help your client/customer get to the outcome they are hoping for. This could be a product, ‘done for you’ service, coaching, consulting or something else, the choice is yours.
3. ATTRACT YOUR TARGET MARKET: Now you have your offer, you need to create a brand, then go out and find the congregation points of your audience and market yourself there. You should use a combination of inbound attraction-based method and outbound engagement methods to get closer to your audience and create awareness of the offer you have created.
4. NURTURE YOUR AUDIENCE: If you are a new kid on the block you cannot expect to make sales straight away, as you haven’t built what the marketing industry calls the ‘know, like and trust factor. Consider creating high value, free content and engaging with your target market regularly, always trying to understand and deliver what they want and need, not what you think they want.
5. MAKE REAL SALES: Once you have found and grown your audience, it is important to try and make sales, even BEFORE the offer is 100% ready. This allows you to essentially gain proof of concept, adapt your idea around the real needs of your client and get paid to create it. Real sales also help you build confidence, force you into action-taking mode and as sales are the life blood of any company, you must learn to love sales.
6. OPTIMISE YOUR OFFER: Business requires never ending consistent improvements and your offer requires constant assessment, refinement and optimisation based on the needs of your clients, the results, feedback and changing market conditions. The work doesn’t stop once you launch your offer, in fact it has only just begun. You can then market it to a wider audience.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

1. Confidence Comes From Taking Action: Confidence and fear works in cycles, and the catalyst for breaking the cycle of fear and moving into a cycle of confidence building lies in taking action. When we decide that the fear of taking action and the ‘what if it fails’ or ‘what if they judge’ me concerns are less painful than the possibility of NOT achieving our goals, we can take action easier. When we take action, we gain experience, that allows us to develop new skills, when we have skills and the expeirience in something, we have confidence to do that thing, while also becoming more comfortable in taking other actions we may have once avoided too.
2. Simplicity Scales, Complexity Fails: When I started my business I wanted to do everything for everybody and thought I had to have super complex marekting funnels and offer every service under the sun just to ensure I didn’t lose a potential client. But this is far from the truth. One thing sells and scales better than 10 things.
3. Everything Doesn’t Have To Be Perfect: As I have elluded earlier in this article, inaction is the biggest dream-killer out there. Don’t wait for everythign to be perfect, messy action is better than no action at all. Even if you fail at something you will be 1000 steps ahead of someone who never tried at all.
4. Consistency Is The Key: The simple things done on a consistent basis is what will move the needle forward in your business. Think of it this way — a 1% improvement each day or week will get you to your goals faster than a 2 steps forward, 1 step back method.
5. You Can’t Do It On Your Own: Whether it is hiring a coach, service provider, industry expert or team member, if you want to start a business seek out people who have done it before and can help you get there faster. There are plenty of people who would love to see you succeed and have the skills to help you.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

1. Do market research
2. Look for competitors
3. Define the idea in detail

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

I would recommend finding someone who can provide a framework of steps to follow so you can reduce the time needed to test and launch your offer or brand and avoid costly mistakes or unnecessary failures.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

You don’t need a lot of money to create and test a service or information product. Keep it lean and costs low while you are still trying to prove the concept.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

My purpose is to help people start, grow or scale their own online business to enable them to live a life of freedom, personal growth and financial independence. I feel that the world is a better place when we are trading value on a community basis and living lives that we truly love.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I’ve said this in a previous article before, but I would like everyone to do ‘screen free Sunday’, where all devices are inaccessible and we all need to get out into nature for the day.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I would LOVE to meet Gary Vee to talk about the next generation of business models using blockchain technology and how we can harness the power of the creator economy.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

---

Making Something From Nothing: Shannon Bain On How To Go From Idea To Launch was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.