by Karen Skidmore | 07,22 | Business Planning, Team & Hiring
There are lots of ways of how to take your business to the next level, but having been working as a business coach for more than 15 years, there’s no doubt that the general theme to most business growth strategies and tactics is ‘how to have more’.
This is why I changed tact in my own business about six years ago. So much of my focus was around marketing and product development; teaching how to build email lists, create one to many programmes and plan out marketing campaigns. Over time, I began to realise that, although what I was teaching was good and was getting results for my clients, there was a lot of effort and energy in having to ‘feed the machine’.
As soon as one marketing campaign was over, it was time to start the next one. Then the next one. And then the next one.
When you are young (and yes, I mean in your 20s and 30s!), you have the energy for this. Your body forgives a week of back-to-back late nights with extra cups of strong coffee. You thrive off the busy weeks and love the thrill of creating the next new thing that you want to sell.
But in your 40s and 50s … well, I don’t know about you but the midlife shifts and extra family responsibilities (children and/or eldercare) mean that your mind, body and soul wants to slow down. No matter how exciting or fun your work is, it’s harder to keep up and too much adrenaline and cortisol starts to show up as fatigue, brain fog or one of the many other peri-menopausal symptoms many women can experience, especially when living a full and busy life.
This was me. And I realised that many of my clients were experiencing this too.
What I was teaching and coaching my clients wasn’t sustainable.
Flip to today, and I now run a business coaching and training company that focuses on sustainable growth strategies. Yes, we still work with our clients on marketing strategies and how to get clients, but the emphasis is on playing the long game and planning, and then deciding on which growth strategies apply to get them the best results.
And no matter what those strategies are, there are three simple rules that I now always apply; are they trackable, repeatable, delegatable.
Let me go through each one in turn.
Is it trackable?
When you first start out, you have no idea really what is going to work. But over the months and the years, you get data on what does work. A huge problem though is very few business owners track this data; they keep it all in their heads (or worse, they only focus on social numbers such as social reach and engagement) which means the decisions they make are based on emotion (or in the case of social numbers, ego).
Some examples of basic data you want to track are:
- Number of leads you get each week/month
- Number of conversations you have each month
- Number of sales you make each week/month
- Number of new customers each week/month
- Average spend in first 90 days
- Average lifetime spend
Knowing this kind of data means that you can begin to make decisions commercially, as well as emotively (we need both … data only gives one part of the picture, yes?). So in everything you do, in particular with regards to your marketing, ask yourself ‘Is this trackable?’
Is it repeatable?
Once a business is up and running, the things that you do each week are often on repeat. The way you reply to emails, write and send proposals, market and run events, deliver your programmes or work on client projects. Again, the problem is that the business owner is often too busy to take the time out to see this, and then be able to do something about it.
How many times have you searched your outbox for an email you sent to a prospect that you wanted to use to send to someone else?
How many hours have you spent formatting a proposal or client acceptance letter from scratch, and found yourself typing the same words over and over?
It’s the same with marketing campaigns; why create something new when you can use what you did last time and adapt it to your new offer?
The energy used to start everything from scratch is exhausting (or worse, searching folders for a document you know you’ve saved somewhere!) so there has to be a time in your business when you start to switch your thinking. If you ask yourself ‘is this repeatable?’, you’ve got the beginnings of a process that needs writing out and seeing what templates, checklists or repeat actions can be created.
When you follow a process, you can then use that precious brain power for working on the bigger vision for what you want.
Is it delegatable?
Which takes me nicely into the third rule; delegatable. If you are busy delivering work for your clients, there’s often not much time left in your week to be thinking and creating these repeatable processes. Which is why setting the delegate rule is instrumental to your success long term.
To begin with, you may not have anyone you can delegate these repeatable tasks and processes to. If this is the case, start by making a list of what comes up over the course of a week, and you will have written the first draft of your job brief. You can’t grow a business without help, so it’s critical that this rule comes into play if you don’t want to burn out in the process.
These three rules are simple questions to start asking yourself from today. Why not write them on a post-it note and stick it on your computer screen; this can help remind yourself to ask these questions as you go about your day.
Of course, this isn’t a quick-fix, especially if you are working flat out, but these three simple rules and questions will begin to change your thinking as a business owner, and ultimately engage your CEO Mindset, and start to steer you along a path of sustainable growth.
If you want to discuss how you can put these rules into your business and begin growing sustainably, then let’s talk. Book a call with one of our Grow Strong business coaches. There’s never any charge for our first call together. Click here to check out times available.
Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
by Karen Skidmore | 06,22 | Business Planning, Marketing Articles
There’s plenty to think through when deciding if your new product idea is going to be worth investing your time, energy and money in. Is it something that your clients *really* want? What price should you charge? How do you go about marketing it?
But there’s one question that gets forgotten … what job is this product going to have in your business?
Let me explain with a story from one of my clients last year. She had been running her marketing consultancy for some years, and although it was going OK, she was struggling to expand it and increase her revenue. No matter what she did, her business didn’t shift.
Then she was given the idea of creating a membership product. What’s not to love about a membership product? Regular, consistent income … a perfect passive income! She threw herself into developing the idea; went on a course, learnt all there was to know about setting up and running a membership product and launched it.
When we started working together, she had been running it for around six months. It became very clear that she was spending 80% of her time with the clients that were generating 20% of her income. Her membership product, although packed full of value, was running her ragged.
She told me the reason she wanted to create this product was because she wanted something to offer the people who couldn’t afford her consultancy fees.
At first glance, this may seem to be reasonable … why leave money on the table?
But her bigger vision was to scale up her consultancy business so she could outsource much of the delivery, and free up her time to start up a new business. What this membership product had done was to make her busier than ever, working more with the clients who weren’t going to help achieve her ambitions.
She’d created a down-sell product for people who realistically were never going to be worth more than a few hundred pounds a year, and yet ended up taking up most of her time and expertise.
In a very short period of time, she had closed down her membership product, which immediately freed up her time to focus on the right projects to move her towards her bigger vision, and four months later she had launched her new business alongside her current consultancy.
Of course, this isn’t about whether a membership product is a good idea or not. There are plenty of businesses who thrive having a membership product, serving hundreds of people every year, often as an up-sell or prospect product to their existing programmes and services.
The point is whether the job of your new product idea is going to help you achieve your bigger vision.
In the case of my client, it made strategic sense to NOT create a down-sell offer for the people who couldn’t afford her – because let’s be honest … it’s going to take a very long time before any of those people are going to be in a place to afford her consultancy fees (there are plenty of more effective and less time intensive ways of staying engaged with them if that’s what you want to do) – and instead focus her time and energy on what’s going to free up her time to allow her launch her new business.
So when you are pondering on your next new product or service idea, ask these three questions before your creative surge takes you too far down the launch path.
1. What is the job of the product?
Is it to give an easy, low risk way of acquiring new clients … will it be your core offering that you focus most of your time on … or to add value to your clients and increase their average spend … or is it a way of extending your client lifetime spend?
Know exactly what you want this new product to do for you and your business and keep this clear in your head as you set about the creation and launch process to ensure you don’t go off track.
2. Will it help you achieve your financial goals?
No matter how brilliant an idea it is, will it move you towards what you really want out of life and business … will it really increase your revenue and by when … or spread you too thin across too many products?
Set clear financial goals and quantify your expectations because there’s every chance you will also see you’ll need far less leads and sales to make this a success, especially in the early stages.
3. How can this product idea scale your expertise without you?
It may be that you are still very much your business, but if your ambition is to grow and scale, it’s never too early to start asking questions such as how much of your time is needed to create and deliver this product … what resources could help speed up the process and make it easier … and who can you ask for help?
One of the biggest shifts you can make to move from being a busy freelancer to having a profitable, scalable business is to change your questions from ‘How do I?” to what and who questions … it shifts you to not just being a business owner, but to being a CEO and opening up your growth potential.
For most people I speak to about growing a business, coming up with new ideas is never a problem. And it’s very easy to get caught up in all the fun, creative stuff in those early stages of a new idea. So before you get too far down the process of creating and launching a new product or programme, stop and think about it strategically.
It will save you months, if not years, of stress, worry and frustration.
Looking for your next step to take?
Let’s talk through your current product offerings and I can help you see where you could be running your business smarter – book a Next Level Business Strategy Session with me. There’s never any charge for our first call together. Click here to check out times available.
Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
by Karen Skidmore | 05,22 | Business Planning, Leadership
Being able to make good decisions is one of the keys to adopting a CEO mindset and growing a successful business.
But decision fatigue is real; the more decisions you have to make each day, your ability to make decisions becomes worse.
We’re faced with thousands of them every day, from the mundane (What to cook for dinner?) to the business-changing (Can I trust this person?). And for most of us right now, we are still reeling from the past two years of making decisions about stuff we never had to think about before (Which way do I walk through this supermarket? Do I have to wear a mask? Is it OK to hug this person?).
I always prided myself on being able to make quick decisions. Even at the start of my career, I realised I was able to process information fast and see where the real problem was.
But as I got older, my brain got faster as I took on more and my expectations of myself climbed, and the decisions I was making became more knee-jerk and reactive as I jumped from one task to the next.
I simply couldn’t keep up with what life and business was throwing at me so when I hit my 40’s, exasperated by peri-menopausal symptoms of brain fog and exhaustion, I found that I didn’t trust myself to make good decisions any more. And this had a direct impact on my business.
Procrastination not only slows down growth … it’s exhausting!
To be able to get better at making good decisions, it’s important for us to learn how to first trust ourselves, our own judgement and instincts.
The first step in trusting yourself is knowing that you don’t have to be good at everything, all the time.
I get that we have incredibly high expectations of ourselves, largely because of our society’s expectations (You can have it all; be a perfect mother AND run a successful business), but also because of experiences we had growing up both at home and at school. But let’s be real: nobody is perfect. Nobody ever will be.
No matter how much we try to make ourselves into some sort of superhuman machine, everyone drops a ball or makes a mistake from time to time. And that’s okay! It doesn’t mean we’re horrible people or should feel ashamed about ourselves; it just means that being human means not being perfect all the time.
So giving yourself a break and being kinder to yourself, particularly on the days you feel more tired than usual or you’re juggling family needs, is critical to allowing yourself the time to step back and give yourself some breathing space.
Trusting your gut is something you have to work at.
The older we get and the more responsibilities we take on, the busier our heads get and the longer our to-do-lists grow. When your head starts controlling your life, it’s easy for it to override any intuition or instincts you may have. And when you get so busy that you forget to give yourself the space to hear the advice from inside of you, that connection can get cut off.
It’s the same as working out and keeping fit; if you stop, your body loses the muscle definition you gained, and your fitness levels go down.
The next time you are faced with a decision, instead of panicking or saying “I don’t know” – take a moment , close your eyes and listen closely inside yourself first. If you really don’t know how to do this (and yes, ten years ago I was so ‘in my head’ that I really didn’t know how to hear what my instinct was telling me!), then take note of my next point.
Spend more time in your body.
Many of us will exercise for the sake of fitness and health, measuring success by steps or sweat. But because so much business is often solved in our heads, these kinds of exercises can feed the brain; giving you more things to take action on and complete.
Spending time moving your body consciously can really help you connect with the neural pathways that run around your body. Movement such as dance – prancing around the kitchen rather than following a structured class – and slower walking focused on your posture – noticing how your feet connect with the ground with each step – can be simple ways of sensing your body and spending time ‘out of your head’.
Recognise that fear is different from intuition
… and sometimes it can be good to take the moment to ask the fear what it may be trying to tell you. Is there anything that you can put in place to make your next steps less risky for you? Perhaps you need more time to put your decision into action … maybe you need to hire some help?
If you choose to ignore your fears, you may find that you procrastinate and pull yourself back from taking action. So use your fear to shine a light on anything that you may avoid simply because it feels uncomfortable as this can be helpful in making sure you don’t avoid taking action on your decisions.
Be prepared for change, even if it means sacrificing some things you really care about.
Trusting yourself means putting your faith in your ability to make good choices and decisions. It means taking risks without being afraid of the consequences.
If you really want to take your business up a level, then there is every chance you are going to have to stop doing some of the things you are doing right now – and yes, that includes certain clients, programmes and team members you may really care about – and do something different.
This may mean that you stop offering a particular service, programme or product; it may mean you have to change your pricing structure; it may mean you have to fire one of your team members.
You can not grow a business without change. Get comfortable with that concept because trusting yourself means knowing when to let go and when to hold on.
You must trust yourself even when the outcome seems uncertain and you may not know all the answers.
One podcast I’ve got into recently is The Diary of a CEO. I was particularly taken by one of his more recent ones – Moment 54: How you should make every big decision with guest Rochelle Humes.
They reference a conversation he had with Barack Obama and his 51% decision making rule. Steven says “It comes down to if we are always looking for 100% of the facts, data and certainty to get our decisions over the line, it leads to huge procrastination and time-wasting. Getting to that 51% is a much more efficient system, and it reassures us that it will be the right decision to make.”
Knowing that we can make another decision or even reverse it if needed can open us up to bigger thinking and bolder decision making … and that the cost of procrastinating and trying to be more than 51% in favour for, or against of that decision is potentially huge.
I like this idea of having your logic brain to be only 51% convinced … it opens up to trusting our intuition more.
Next week, I want to dive into the importance of slowing down, and how going slow can actually speed up your progress. So for now, comment below and let me know what resonates with you here.
Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
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by Karen Skidmore | 05,22 | Business Planning, Leadership
Last week, I was writing about the difference between being a freelancer, business owner and CEO, and the phrase that seemed to get the biggest reaction was …
“You may think you are a business owner, and call yourself a business owner, but your current work schedule has pushed you back to being a busy freelancer, simply at a higher revenue.”
And yes, several of you shared with me the frustration that even though they may be selling more, they aren’t earning any more. They were busier AND poorer. Ouch!
So what to do?
The usual reactions are to work harder at finding the right marketing strategy; to create a new suite of offers and products so you have more to sell; to go find yourself more customers.
All the above can work but only to a point.
The real shift in your future growth comes from how you are thinking, your behaviour and thus the actions you take.
And this is where your CEO mindset comes in.
Most people start with action, and this is what is celebrated the most in our entrepreneurial culture (you’re killing it … let’s get shit done … you smashed your targets). Of course, action is critical, but if you are already busy, bouncing from one thing to the next, you aren’t really making decisions … you are simply reacting.
And if you are tired and already working to capacity, your ability to think strategically is significantly hampered. Your brain is working super fast, keeping multiple tabs open (and often throughout the night!) and the only thing you are capable of doing is dealing with what’s right in front of you.
Great for dealing with a crisis … not so great for strategy and growing your business.
So how do you begin to switch from crisis management to strategic thinking?
There are three key behaviours that can directly impact your ability to think strategically
- Trust
- Ability to slow down
- Breaking the YES habit
Today, I want to dive into breaking the YES habit, and how saying yes to everything is great at the start of your business journey, but at some point, hinders you significantly.
When you first start out, saying yes opens you to opportunities and possibilities that you may never have considered before. It gets you your first few clients and projects, and builds your confidence.
But at some point, the clients and projects you say yes to start to pull you in too many directions. And if you don’t have clear boundaries and know the direction you want to be headed, you become reactive and transactional.
You begin to behave like a fast food server … “Would you like fries with that? And a large drink?”
If you are good at what you do, then your diary can fill up over time with projects and delivery, but you speed up, work faster, and eventually you have no space to breathe. And, believe me, a fully booked diary is NOT a good problem to have. It can leave you exhausted at best, and burn out at worst.
If you’ve found yourself heading this way, then there are some quick fix ways of taking back control.
1. Go long
Don’t try to fix your busy diary in the short term; it’s too stressful to try to push back projects (unless of course, this is an emergency health crisis and you really don’t have any other option but to cancel for the sake of your wellbeing!). Go to the point in your diary where the weeks start to be a little clearer.
This may be in two months time or further … no matter … but from wherever it’s starts to clear, block out a dozen or so days for the next three months as non-negotiable, non-bookable days for anyone but you.
Don’t worry about what you are going to do with that time right now … you just need to be sure you have this time blocked out so you stop the habit of saying yes to everything that comes your way. This blocked out time in the future will be critical to give you the space you need to work ON your business, rather being IN it all the time, and to allow for strategic thinking and decision making.
2. Audit your current diary & cancel anything that isn’t business critical
Have you got network meetings or buddy support groups that are no longer serving you? Have you got meetings with people booked in with you who just want to pick your brain, rather than be interested in buying one of your programmes … or want a chat about how you can collaborate together? What have you said yes to because it felt good to say yes at the time, but now with the power of commercial hindsight, it’s just another distraction and a thief of your time?
3. Batch
Batching is one of the most powerful things you can do with your diary, because bouncing from different calls and meetings throughout the day takes a lot of mental energy to switch and transition. Ideally, you want to have sales calls on one day, and client delivery on another; you are showing up differently so stay in sales flow for your sales calls, and then stay in delivery flow for your delivery.
You also don’t want to be squeezing in tasks such as invoicing, proposal writing and content creation in between meetings, sales calls and delivery, so start to book in time chunks to get this work done.
I’d also recommend batching weeks as you start to take back control of your diary. For example, you could have full delivery weeks for three weeks of the month, which could then allow for one clear week of no delivery each month to allow you to have space to work on projects that will build your business.
4. Schedule time in your diary for preparation AND recovery
It’s easy to only put appointments into your diary, and then forget about the before and after. For many of my clients, their work can be full on, especially if they are delivering in person (coaching, training, consulting), and not recognising the need for recovery time means you put yourself on a conveyor belt of doing, doing, doing, and then collapse.
5. Set clear rules for how you want to work
You may be very clear on how you would love to work, but have you written down the rules to make this happen? For example, I hear a lot of people say they want to work less hours. So if you want to NOT work Fridays, when was the last time you said NO to a project or meeting that happened on a Friday.
Stop, write down 3 or 4 rules of how, when, where and with whom you want to work and stick it up on the wall next to your desk. Looking at these rules BEFORE you say yes to anything, will help begin to break your YES habit and set new and better behaviours.
Next week, I want to dive into the importance of trust; trusting yourself, trusting your business and learning to trust others so you break the habit of thinking you have to be the one to do everything yourself.
So for now, comment below and tell me which one of these five things you are going to do today. Then let know next week what difference it’s made to your YES habit.
Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
by Karen Skidmore | 05,22 | Business Planning, Leadership
Wow, what a week! I’m writing this just as I come to the end of our first week of our next new Momentum planning cycle, which is always a high energy, back-to-back week of calls, and I wanted to share with you today my thoughts about being a CEO in your business.
Between Melina and myself, we’ve spoken to almost all our members to ensure they are clear on what their next priorities are for the coming months, and I am super impressed with the up level of thinking this year, far more than previous years.
Visions feel bolder.
Targets seemed to be stretched more.
Health and wellbeing being taken more seriously.
One member told me this morning that his most recent contract win was at twice the price he would have considered offering at last year before he joined.
Another shared how her profits have increased tenfold since the start of last year.
And many of the conversations highlighted how much more confident they felt as a business owner.
As I have been processing and reviewing what we have been doing differently from previous years, it’s become clear to me that my focus on transforming our members from being a busy freelancer to being a business owner and then ultimately adopting a CEO mindset, has an integral part.
You see, everyone usually starts their business as a freelancer.
You do everything; from marketing and website copywriting to selling and delivering client work, and what you do sell is usually your time and expertise so it’s a trade of time for money.
At some point, you bring enough business in to merit hiring your first support person and you start to work on what systems and processes are needed to run your business.
You start to become a business owner; you may still be the only one delivering client work, but some of your focus during the week is on how the business works – the marketing systems, follow up emails, proposal templates and creation of products or programmes.
But the bigger the contracts, the more programmes you sell and the more clients you attract, the less of you there is to go round.
The dynamics of your working relationships with your clients start to change and there’s every chance you start to feel overstretched.
When this starts to happen your business can start to feel like project management hell; you begin to drop some balls and you don’t get the chance to catch your breath or take the time out to work on your own development because you are spending all your time either working with clients or working on the projects to support your business structure and processes.
You may think you are a business owner, and call yourself a business owner, but your current work schedule has pushed you back to becoming a busy freelancer again, simply at a higher revenue.
And this is where the importance of having a CEO mindset comes in.
If you want to grow your business beyond a certain point, then you have to stop treating your business as something you do, and start getting clear about who you want to become … the role you want to play, the life you want to have outside of your business (because you do have a life outside of work, yes?!) and the bigger impact you want to make.
And it’s this CEO mindset that can make all the difference to how you think strategically about where to focus your time, resources and energy.
Over the next few weeks I want to share more with you about who it is you need to be and what it really takes to become a CEO, and share how to break the patterns of behaviour that keep you in freelancer and business owner mindset, and how to develop new rituals and practices to harness your CEOship power.
For now, I’d love to know where you feel you are right now. Are you behaving like a freelancer, a business owner or CEO? Have you distinguished the difference between them before?
Leave a comment below as I’d love to know how this resonates with you.
Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
by Karen Skidmore | 02,22 | Business Planning, Stories, inspirations & thoughts for the day
I want to write to you today about patience.
I’ve been staying with my mum since Thursday last week. She’s 81, incredibly independent and wants to stay this way for a long while yet. But she’s had another operation on her hip; to correct the one she had in 2019 which left her with one leg an inch shorter than the other, which also led to her having to have a knee replacement last year.
You could say we are getting pro at this after surgery care, but unfortunately she’s now having to deal with the fact that, this time around, she can’t put any weight on her hip for the next six weeks.
Her desire to be independent is being tested. And her need to be patient is forcing her to slow down and ask for help in almost everything, from cooking meals to washing her feet. (And yes, I know she’s providing me a wonderful mirror opportunity for my own life lessons LOL)
On one hand six weeks is a long time for her to be resting. And it’s a long time for my brothers and I to juggle the after care needed. But I also know that six weeks in the grand scheme of things is nothing, if being patient now will mean she will be walking without pain by the summer, and be set to carry on her independent living for many, many more years to come.
All this has got me thinking today about how often do we choose to play the patient game in our businesses, in particular the patience at winning over our ‘pregnancy clients’.
There are two types of clients that I talk to my clients about:
– the ‘bread-and-butter work’ that pays the bills, is easier to turn around and get results quickly, but are often short-term, lower paying clients who can use a lot of your time and energy without the right systems and processes in place.
– and the ‘pregnancy clients’ that – yup, you guessed it – can take up to nine months (or more) to sign the contract or buy your programme, but they are often buying at a higher price point, can be more profitable and potentially have a longer and more meaningful relationship with you, which in turn reduces your need to rely on ‘bread-and-butter work’.
Our 24-7 society, that means we can get groceries and books delivered the same day, expect responses to our emails within hours and answers on chat within minutes, has meant that our expectations have massively increased over the past decade.
And not only do we expect results and success quickly, we, as consumers, demand far more trust and confidence in the brands and businesses that we buy from than ever before; we check out online reviews, speak to friends or family members, scroll through social media feeds to see what they are publicly sharing and may even google the CEO to see what they stand for or what causes they support with the profits of their business.
All of which has had an impact on our own businesses and marketing. These shifts have meant that we all have to work that little bit harder to win more ‘pregnancy clients’ in order to avoid getting exhausted chasing too many bread-and-butter clients.
We have to choose to spend more time on projects such as:
- nurturing relationships
- creating content that builds trust and confidence (rather than trying to beat the algorithms)
- hiring the right team to support you and your business
- having a sales process that gives them what they need to make a decision in their own time (and not because it suits you and your need to make money right now)
Projects that may not give us the immediate results we are programmed to expect. But, with patience, will allow more ‘pregnancy clients’ to come to you; clients that give you more meaningful work, and potentially better profitability.
Wherever you are at in your business journey, there is a time to hustle … but as you become more established and want to grow, there are more times needed for patience.
Not sitting back, twiddling your thumbs and waiting kind of patience.
But the patience needed to doing the work that gives the clients you want to attract, the trust and confidence that you have the skills and expertise to help them give what they want. Just like my mum right now, ensuring that she take her slow recovery seriously for the next six weeks in order to be back walking at a pace by the summer!
Until next time, be more, play bigger.
