How To Overcome Roadblocks

Ouch - yes that’s deep...

Whatever it is, at the time these things can seem insurmountable.

But what I find really helps is when you talk to others who have done it and realise that for virtually anyone who's ever achieved some level of success in life or business - whatever that may look like to them, they’ve usually all overcome several of these roadblocks.

As you know, building something worthwhile takes effort.

So instead of reaching one of these roadblocks, and retracing back to the comfort zone - the area they’ve always known and undoing all that work...

Instead, they take a step back and just think “How can I actually push past this?”.

And when you do that, you often find that the success on the other side is so well worth the extra effort.

In fact not only that, but they realise once they do push past these roadblocks, the ride on the other side is so much smoother.

It’s like flying a plane through turbulence and going higher and higher to where the air is smooth again.

It’s the same with running a business, if you have the right attitude towards hard things, everything actually becomes so much easier.

If this seems a bit too conceptual, let me tell you about what Matt did:

Matt’s a recent graduate of our program, during which he launched his very first 3D printed product.

It was a piece of simply made, but very clever “wall art” for a very specific niche that is currently hugely under served.

It’s the sort of item that when the right people see it, they know just how unique it is, and that they simply gotta have it.

Safe to say, Matt absolutely nailed his niche audience on this one.

Not just that, but it’s got a great margin for Matt too. Each one only costs him about $2.50 to make, they don’t take long to print and he sells them for $20 a piece.

Now when he first launched it - he got sales up to speed pretty quickly using the same launch strategy we’ve taught many others.

He was over the moon; and shortly after shared (half joking?) with me that his girlfriend was even a bit jealous, because she’d been selling her craft items online for years and he’d only been selling for a month and he was already speeding past her.

...not that it’s a competition or anything...

Things were going well, but then after a little while sales slowed down on the Amazon platform he was selling on.

This was unusual, because on Amazon and other ecommerce marketplaces (with the right strategy) you build momentum over time, growing and growing.

So for sales to rapidly tail off, clearly something was amiss.

Question is, what was it?

Now some people would have seen this roadblock and given up. Not Matt, though.

He understood all problems in business are mechanical - and mechanical problems always have a solution.

Normally the biggest problem our clients have when sales pick up is just staying in stock. It’s not that hard to do, but it’s just something to pay attention to.

Obviously if you run out of stock, it throttles your growth (you can’t really sell what you don’t have to sell).

But because Matt had created a small item, even with just 2 printers he was able to satisfy initial demand - so that wasn’t the issue.

After a quick look, it turned out a phrase Matt had used in his listing was against Amazon’s Terms of Service, so they’d penalised his listing.

Now instead of getting frustrated and crying into his coco pops each morning, he ploughed forward and just rectified the problem. And then, instead of waiting for sales to organically pick up, he chose instead to proactively “fight back”.

So he simply re-launched the product using the same strategy that he’d used the first time, the strategy that we give to all our clients, and managed to slingshot sales onwards and upwards.

With sales continuing to increase after the relaunch with no hiccups this time around, he wasn’t just able to “rinse and repeat” the initial launch to reclaim those lost sales and then-some, he’s also been able to continue using this launch process with his 2nd and 3rd products he’s released, too.

It won’t always be plain sailing, but he’s learnt to win with the Attitude, Ability & Action - which is the full package.

Gaining this mastery of being able to launch (and relaunch, if required) a variety of products at will gives his business far better resilience in future, and gives him the quiet confidence that all is never lost when a roadblock presents itself (as they so often do in life).

These skills give him a durable standing going forward.

And those all important gloating rights over his girlfriend - but I can’t see her losing out in this situation either...

So next time you’re pushing forward and meet resistance, either from external sources (like Matt had), or your own inner concerns or even others subtly telling you you’re not cut out for it - make sure you take a step back, reassess and push forward.

Because the reward on the other side is so worth it, but sadly - not everyone gets there.

Ed

Founder of The Institute of 3D Printing

"We Make 3D Printing Simple"