Back to Basics
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Happy New Week! I am packed and ready to speak at Build Your Own Brand this week in Alabama! It's a small, intimate room that will leave plenty of opportunity for good conversation and masterminding and I can't wait. I'm also giving a new talk that I haven't given before so I can wait to hear/see the feedback from it. Stay tuned! Today, let's chat about bringing it back to the basics for a minute... Because I have had multiple conversations this week that have made me want to grab business owners by the shoulders and say: You do not need another strategy right now. And all I talk about is strategy so this is why we need to talk about it... It's challenge and workshop season in the online business world. There are challenges happening for selling, visibility, outreach, lead generation, content, bringing people into your world...you name it, someone probably has a challenge teaching you how to do it right now. And listen, I'm not saying these strategies don't work, they absolutely do - I just hosted a workshop this week. There are a MILLION different tactics and strategies that can grow a business. Funnels work. Outreach works. Challenges work. Upsells and downsells work. Networking works. Content works. Paid ads work. Hiring people can absolutely help you grow. But that doesn't mean you need all of them. And more importantly, none of those strategies can replace the basic mechanics of a functioning business. I think that's the part we're missing. I had a client come to me this week saying she thought she needed an upsell, a downsell and a cross-sell. She needed this funnel and that funnel. She was also trying to figure out who she needed to hire because she'd been told she needed more support. There were SO many things she thought she was supposed to be doing. But when we actually looked at HER business, she didn't need most of them. She didn't even need to hire the person she thought she needed to hire. What would actually support her business was completely different and by just looking at what was actually happened - I literally saved her over $2000 a month in hires she was about to make that she didn't need and would have been a direct hit to her profit and savings! Not everything is for everybody. So before you add another tactic, strategy, funnel, offer or person to your business, I want you to make sure the foundations are actually working. How are people finding you?Do you consistently have people entering your world? Not "I'm posting on Instagram because someone told me I need to post five times a week." Where are YOUR leads actually coming from? Referrals? Networking? Search? Your podcast? Social media? Speaking? Collaborations? Your email list? Do you know? Once they find you, where do they go?I taught They Found You...Now What? this week, and I had so many people tell me some version of: "THIS is what's been missing." There wasn't a clear buyer journey. Someone could find them, follow them or join their email list...and then there were literally steps missing between that person becoming aware of them and eventually making a buying decision. No wonder sales felt hard. No wonder people weren't moving. They were trying to implement more strategies to bring people into a pipeline that didn't actually exist. What are you selling them?Do you have a clear offer that solves the problem your potential client actually has? Can people understand what it is, who it's for and why they would buy it? And are you actually SELLING it consistently? Because creating another offer, adding an upsell or building a fancy funnel isn't necessarily going to solve the problem if the offer you already have isn't being sold. And does the money actually work?This is the piece I will continue screaming about until I'm blue in the face. Is your pricing profitable? Do you know how much time you're spending delivering the offer? Do you know what it costs you to deliver? Do you have the capacity to sell more of it? Because generating more sales for an unprofitable offer isn't going to fix your business. It just gives you more unprofitable work. This is what I mean when I say we need to bring business back to the basics. I'm not anti-strategy. I'm a freaking strategist, so of course I am not anti-strategy... But strategy should solve an actual problem in YOUR business. NOT someone else's business. Before you invest in another program, join another challenge, build another funnel, hire another person or spend the next 30 days implementing somebody else's strategy, you need to know what problem you're actually trying to solve. Because otherwise, you're just adding more work. And sometimes that work makes you FEEL incredibly productive. You're building. You're learning. You're implementing. You're checking all the boxes. But is any of it actually moving people through your business and creating revenue? That's the question. The businesses that work aren't necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated and sexiest strategies and in all honesty - most of the time they are pretty simple and what most in the online space would consider boring. At the most basic level, you need a way for the right people to find you, a clear path for them to move through your world, something valuable and profitable to sell them, and a process that gives them the opportunity to buy it. Then we can optimize. Then we can add the funnel. Then we can add the upsell. Then we can hire. Then we can test another lead-generation strategy. But let's make sure the foundation we're adding all that shit ON TOP OF actually exists first, k? And if you're reading this and thinking - I know I am missing pieces here - I have my 60 minute strategy sessions discounted to $197 ($350) right now through October 10th. Snag one and let's make sure your foundations are solid so we can scale the shit out of what you are building! CEO Power Move of the Week: Before you add ANYTHING new to your business this week, answer these five questions:
If you can't clearly answer one of those questions, don't add another strategy yet. That IS your next strategy. |