The True Profit Business Podcast: Series 1 Episode 3
The True Profit Growth Pillars
Is all your focus on sales and marketing?
There’s no doubt you need to be thinking and taking action on your marketing plans and sales, but too many business owners only focus on where their next clients are coming from. All their time and attention is on marketing, product creation, launches and selling.
When you do this, you often find that you have designed and created an incredible penthouse business through big product launches and high ticket sale events. But when you’ve decided to grow and scale-up and tried to do your product launches again and again and again, you suffer from launch fatigue and often feel burnt out. When this happens, it’s because you’ve not paid enough attention to the 10 or 20 floors below to hold up your penthouse business; the infrastructure, systems, processes and people to support your growth.
Welcome to True Profit Business, the podcast that dives into what it really takes to create a purposeful, playful and profitable business. In this episode, Karen Skidmore takes you through the five True Profit Growth Pillars; Purpose, Planning, Power, Process and People.
In Karen’s book, True Profit Business, you can more detail of how each of these pillars in Chapter 3, as well as range of practical exercises that will help you review, reflect and plan what action to take to start building these pillars in your business.
But before you go off and do these exercises, listen in to this overview of how they all work together.
The True Profit Business Podcast: Series 1 Episode 2
The doing and being of business
Do you run on adrenalin or realise that you have taken on too many responsibilities to effectively keep up with all the stuff that needs doing in your business each week? Then perhaps you are a Dominate Do-er.
Or perhaps you find yourself procrastinating or find it hard to take risks and are even fearful of becoming visible and getting yourself ‘out there’? Then maybe you are a Dominate Be-er.
Welcome to True Profit Business, the podcast that dives into what it really takes to create a purposeful, playful and profitable business. In this episode, Karen Skidmore discusses these two polarities; the doing and being of business.
Our energy and the way we react, respond and move about our day-to-day lives come from two places; our doing energy and our being energy. These polarities show up in our left and right brains, the sun and moon, yin and yang, and in our heads and hearts.
The focus of most business teaching and training is very doing; marketing metrics, profit and loss accounts, digital dashboards and social algorithms. Success is often defined by numbers and taking action is always celebrated. Yes, there’s no doubt that we need to do and take action on our intentions, but too much doing energy often leads to burn out.
During this episode, Karen takes you through the profiles of Dominant Do-ers and Dominate Be-ers, she tells her story of how she allowed the Dominate Do-er in her took her to the extreme and explains how you need to find a way of using both powers to enable you to play your biggest game.
One is not better than the other. You need to access both to fulfil your potential and grow.
The True Profit Business Podcast: Series 1 Episode 1
What does playing bigger mean to you?
Welcome to the very first episode of True Profit Business, the podcast that dives into what it really takes to create a purposeful, playful and profitable business.
In this episode, Karen Skidmore kicks off this first series by diving into the topic of playing big and how big your big needs to be when it comes to your business growth.
It’s easy to get stuck on the marketing conveyor belt, focusing your time and energy on launching new products, building more marketing funnels and keeping up with your content sharing on social media. But what’s it all for? Where are you really headed?
Listen in as Karen highlights the dangers of following the Pied Piper marketing gurus and other people’s interpretations of success, helps you reflect on what you really want out of your business growth and then sets the scene for the upcoming episodes that will not only give you a practical road map to follow but also teach you how to connect and trust your intuition and gut when making decisions for your future business growth.
One of the big problems of working for yourself and running your own business is that you will often believe that you are the one to do anything and everything in your business. If you are still in the first few months of start-up, there is no doubt that you are doing almost everything yourself. From answering your emails and sending out letters and brochures, through to writing your blog posts and maybe even creating your own website, you will have started your business journey being a one-person show.
As you grow your business and start to take on more clients and sell to more customers, delegating often isn’t a natural talent. Some of you are self-confessed control freaks and like to do everything yourself because you want it done ‘right’.
Others of you genuinely don’t know how to hire or how to find the right person, so it always feels easier to keep doing it all yourself until you find yourself so busy that you are too busy to find the time to recruit.
The question I am asked again and again is ‘When is the right time to hire someone?’ My answer is always the same; ‘Three months before you need them.’
There’s a common misconception about hiring people in your business that the day someone starts, is the day you suddenly get more time. But the truth is that if you hire someone for ten hours a week, you don’t suddenly get those ten hours back in your week.
What actually happens is that your workload can often double for a week or two (and sometimes longer depending on who it is you are hiring and what job they are doing) whilst you spend time explaining what you need doing and training them to understand your business systems. Even with technical contractors or marketing assistants who should, in theory, be bringing a level of expertise into the role, time is still needed to get them up to speed and understand your business and the customers you serve. For longer-term hires, expect three months before you fully see the return on investment from their contribution to your business.
But don’t let this put you off. If you genuinely want to grow your business and play a bigger game, then your People Growth Pillar is instrumental to your success.
Who are your dream team?
Your dream team are the people you need to help you achieve your Big Vision. They are the people you hire, as well as your strategic partnerships, your suppliers, business buddies and supporters. You may even find that you need to include people who can support you in your home and personal life, particularly if you are a single parent. I’ve often seen my clients need to include a housekeeper to enable them to manage their home, as well as their business.
Your business will have specific needs, but there are three core areas where I believe you need to focus on. As I take you through each one, use the image in Figure 2 to write down the names or profile of the person you feel you need in each of the hands. There are nine hands there; you may need more hands, but you certainly won’t need less so it’s important to recognise the level of support you will need for your future growth. If you want to download this worksheet, you can find a copy in the True Profit Business Workbook that accompanies my book, True Profit Business. Here’s the link to access it.
PA and administrative support
This is usually the first area in which you may wish to hire in your business and they generally fall into these three categories.
Diary and email management: not only does a personal assistant help save you time in doing your admin, but their presence also helps with your positioning. For example, if you are a consultant working with larger organisations, having someone else confirm your meetings, agendas and send follow-up paperwork can help with your professional image. In addition, having someone act as your gatekeeper helps you avoid unnecessary sales calls.
Invoicing and financing: bookkeeping, VAT returns and invoicing are all administrative tasks that you, as the business owner, should not be doing as your business grows.
Client management: if you run group programmes or run events, having someone take control of the day-to-day communication can free up your time and mental energy hugely. Th ere’s always going to be someone else who is far better at managing email follow-ups and producing client reports than you will ever be.
Marketing and sales support
If the first person you hire is a personal assistant, don’t make the mistake of assuming that whoever you took on can simply take on more tasks in other areas of your business. The skillset needed to run marketing and sales support for you will be different from that of someone you’ve hired to proofread your proposals, organise your diary and hire meeting rooms.
Plus, you don’t really want to rely too heavily on one person to do everything for you. You run the risk of abdicating responsibility, rather than delegating, and if the relationship goes sour or they move on to another opportunity, you’re left with a huge gap to fill.
It may be that you need more than one person in this category, too. Again, you can’t assume because someone is great at researching and writing blogs that they will be good at managing your social media sites. Be very clear on what skills you need to bring into your business, as well as experience in the digital tools you use.
Creating consistent content: researching and writing blogs, as well as writing and sending out email marketing broadcasts.
Social media management: scheduling posts, images and blog posts, as well as potentially managing a busy Facebook group. This role is different from hiring an ad specialist. If you plan to run advertising campaigns, do hire at the right level because of the skills and expertise needed to run high-quality campaigns are often far more then a social media admin manager can offer you.
Pre-prospect phone calls: if you hate the thought of cold or warm calling, then hiring someone in this field can have a huge impact on your results. Several members of my Momentum business growth community have done this and they are now regularly securing meetings with organisations interested in what it is they offer. If you work with individuals, then a sales administrator may be able to conduct the initial enquiry call and make sure they are a suitable prospect before you speak with them.
Strategic partnerships
These people are the members of your dream team who have the potential of impacting your growth potential through partnership opportunities.
Referral partners and affiliates: other people selling what you offer to their own lists can open up huge opportunities for you. Depending on your positioning, you may have to think carefully who you want to be associated with and what the quality of their database and reach is. It’s not necessarily about the numbers. I would recommend you focus on how engaged and connected they are to their own customer base because this usually gets you better results. You may set up a straightforward affiliate commission for each sale or there may be other ways of mutually benefiting from your relationship. It’s important to consider it’s not always about the money, and what you are able to contribute could actually be more highly valued.
Community leaders and event hosts: what events or conferences are you able to speak or exhibit at? Leaders of online communities or member forums are often looking for experts to contribute content. Perhaps there are professional associations or trade bodies who would love to partner with you?
Distribution channels: more relevant for those of you with physical products but it’s worth considering if this is a potential in your marketplace. Perhaps one of your offers could be bundled up and included in another business’s offer, which would allow you access to their marketing channels and database.
Your nine hands
Who have you written in each of the hands?
If you’ve still got spaces, keep asking yourself ‘who else?’ until you find your full dream team. It may be that you need to do some work on your Big Vision, an exercise that you can find in Chapter 3 of my book, True Profit Business. This will help you discover potential gaps and ensure you have the right people to help you with your long-term vision. These people don’t necessarily need to be known to you right now, so if you don’t have a name, use a job title or short phrase to help you focus on recruiting or finding them over the coming weeks and months. Once you’ve completed this exercise, you can then take these thoughts and ideas into your 90-day planning process and decide on what steps you need to take to recruit or find one or more of these people over the coming months.
I’d love to know how this article lands with you and how it has opened you up to the prospect of who to hire over the coming year. If you want to find out more about how we can help you with your business growth plans, then book a call with us. Click here to find out more.
Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
How often do you consider the impact you are making?
There are three energies that your business can give you; money, creativity and impact.
Money allows you to be profitable and have the time that you want to live your life. Creativity allows you to work in flow and find joy from the work that you do. Impact allows you to be focused on your Big Vision, leadership and your desire to make a difference.
And it’s this energy of impact that I wanted to hone in on today.
I know that some of you reading this may pull back from the thought of being a leader, especially if you are feeling burnt out by your business or confused about the direction you are going in.
But ensuring your business is set up to allow you to step into leadership is important, no matter how small or big you want your business to grow.
If you want to make a difference to the people you serve, the values you stand for or have a strong vision for change, it’s important to pay close attention to what’s needed to fulfil your sense of purpose.
Impact serves you at a deeper soul level which in turn allows you to weather the money storms and find the motivation and desire to find a way forward when business doesn’t go according to plan. If you know you have clients who rely on you, trust you and see you as a partner in their lives, you will naturally do whatever it takes to make your business a success.
Many people think that to make a difference, you have to affect people or the planet on a global scale. The world you want to make a difference in could indeed be the global planet. But your world could also be simply your family, your local community or even the industry that you work within.
Because I know you are probably not in business ‘just for the money’, making a difference is a key part of what it is that you do, isn’t it?
Interestingly though, this is the one area of many people’s business that I see stifled the most. It seems that the change people want to make often gets buried under marketing plans and decisions about what to charge and what products to create because the fear of showing up can pull you back.
I have had my fair share of fears and doubts.
They’ve shown up in bucket loads over the years, often showing up as a gentle tight grip on the inside of my throat; almost like a child’s hand trying to silence me. I used to let this feeling in my throat silence me and pull me back, like a bungee cord. I’d come up with an idea that initially excited me; I let my mind play with it for a short while but then the bungee cord would snap me back. Each time I’d either dilute the idea to end up with a smaller, simpler version of it or would decide not to do it at all.
This is why impact is such an important energy to harness in your business. Yes, making more money is one aspect of growth, but having personally experienced burnout from ‘chasing the money’ and trying to grow by following 6-figure formulas and plug-and-play systems, I know now that I am not motivated to grow for growth’s sake. I value my health and vitality too much for that now.
Your influence on this world is far bigger than you may think possible right now and it doesn’t matter whether you are an accountant, physiotherapist, coach or trainer, the work that you do with your clients can influence and change their lives for the better. Although showing up as a leader may not be high on your list of priorities, deciding how you want to make an impact on the people you serve will help you open your business options.
Please don’t underestimate the ripples you can create by the smallest actions that you take.
One of the ways that I’ve decided to create a ripple and ensure impact energy is fuelling me and my team is to become a partner in the global Buy1Give1 initiative. B1G1 makes it incredibly easy for business owners like me and you to be able to give in meaningful and impactful ways.
One example of how we are using this in my business is being able to give two days of business mentoring to help a woman in Zambia grow her business, and lift her family from the cycle of poverty, every time someone books a True Profit Call with us.
Providing women across the world with access to education, decent work and representation in economic decision-making processes fuel sustainable economies and benefit societies and humanity at large. This particular business mentoring project is managed by MicroLoan Foundation Australia and the on-going training they provide is essential in imparting relevant skills such as financial literacy to ensure that their businesses are sustainable and profitable in the long run, allowing them to contribute to the livelihood of their families.
These are the ripples that you and I are able to make together.
If you are interested or know of someone else who would benefit from having a call with us to discuss their business growth plans and thus allow us to give another two days of business mentoring to these women in Zambia, please either forward this article on to them and send them this link => www.KarenSkidmore.com/getstarted.
Or ask them to email me directly at Karen@KarenSkidmore.com.
In the meanwhile, I invite you to take a moment and ponder on the question I started this article with …
How often do you consider the impact you are making?
Please don’t underestimate the ripples you can create by the smallest actions that you take, so I give you this space to decide where you could throw your stone in right now.
Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
I see many business coaches and mentors drive their clients hard; fuelled by the likes of Gary Vaynerchuk and other high adrenaline entrepreneur gurus, many people believe that hustle and grind are proof of success. Heck, I used to do it myself back in the early days of my coaching business. ‘Work harder’, ‘do more’ and ‘push yourself out there’.
Yes, there’s no doubt that there are times you need to step up, push your shoulders back and do whatever is needed to see a project completed, or to challenge or perhaps stretch yourself when you feel uncomfortable or nervous of taking action. But taking this energy with you all day, every day is not healthy. I only have to watch three seconds of a Gary Vaynerchuck video to feel my cortisol levels rise dangerously high. If you feel the same, I want to give you permission to stop feeling that these gurus represent success; they are simply one version of success and it doesn’t have to be yours.
Success is often thought of in terms of money, and the economy and business growth can look like this line on this chart below; the more effort you put in, the bigger the results.
If you were to relate this to your small business, it could be simplified as two stages of growth: Launch and Expand.
Launch: get a business idea and launch it.
Expand: do more and grow.
Simple enough but this version of success rarely happens.
A more likely growth chart is that your results go up as well as down over the course of the year, as seen in the figure above. This is often called the roller coaster, giving you periods of feast and famine throughout the year.
You launch your business idea, then try to grow in Expand stage, but you run out time, energy or resources, which means your results go down. You only need to go through a few of these roller coaster loops to feel burnt out. I often refer to this as ‘launch fatigue’ as you don’t have the energy to put yourself through yet another launch in order to grow your business.
Whilst the natural instinct for many people – particularly those who have left a PAYE job and have got used to a steady paycheque – is to hope that their business will give them a constant and consistent income, for most small businesses this simply isn’t possible.
External influences in the economy, regulation changes and even fluctuations in the weather can mean you have little control over whether your business can give you this constant and consistent income. Add into the mix taking time out of your business for holidays or periods of illness, or nasty surprises such as your website getting hacked, a team member leaving you suddenly, or a higher than expected tax bill, and this can mean your cashflow has regular highs and lows.
But what if this feast and famine, that we are all programmed to believe is bad, was actually cycles of feast and fallow?
As working harder isn’t an option any more, as you are finding out, what if you could feel comfortable with the ups and downs in your business, the same way that we adapt to the change in our seasons?
Here in the UK, we plant our fields in spring, watch the crops grow in the summer and harvest in the autumn. Winter may be the dormant month but Mother Nature still works away, preparing the ground for the next cycle of feast for the following year. Crops need to be rotated and fields left fallow between the crops, to allow the soil to replenish itself.
The only way to plant in a different season and get a consistent and constant harvest is to control the growing environment with heated greenhouses, artificial sunlight and plenty of fertilisers and nutrients. So rather than forcing your growth with artificial sunlight and fertiliser, could you follow your natural business growth cycles?
What if we stopped trying to control the natural rhythms of business and work in tune with these feast and fallow cycles?
The True Profit Growth Flow
This is how I see growth working. There are four distinct phases of growth within a True Profit Business: evolve, evidence, establish and expand.
Evidence: getting proof that you have people who will buy what it is you offer by spending money with you.
Establish: getting feedback, building credibility and developing your business offer so you understand the results your clients get.
Expand: once you’ve proved that what you offer works, you can then start expanding your marketing systems, processes and team to build on your initial success.
Evolve: at some point, your systems and processes will stop working as well, as external factors change and your marketplace evolves. Which means that you have to evolve, too.
The new approach or idea you decide to take forward then drops back down into the Evidence phase again for you to find proof of concept. And so the Growth Flow continues back around.
You will notice there are no straight lines; the journey between each of these phases take you forwards, sideways and sometimes backwards before going forwards again. There’s no certainty of going from A to B to C to D. It’s more of a journey from A to B and then ‘Oh, shit, we need to go straight to G’ and then back to D before deciding to get C sorted before you go any further.
Through my research in writing my book, True Profit Business, and the work I’ve done with my clients over the past few years, I have seen this Growth Flow happen at all levels. It applies to your overall business journey across five to seven years, and it also applies to the specific lifecycle of your products and marketing campaigns. If you’ve been trying to take the approach of Launch and Expand, shown on the previous business growth chart in Figure 4, what you’ve essentially been doing is trying to go straight to phase three or four; Expand and Evolve.
If your own growth journey hasn’t been going as well as you have hoped, I hope that this gives you the reassurance that you haven’t failed. You are simply trying to navigate the ebbs and flows of the True Profit Growth Flow.
Over the coming weeks, I shall be sharing more about True Profit Business as my new book, True Profit Business, is published this September. In the meanwhile, I’d love to know what insights you have this article so do comment below and share your thoughts on what profit really means to you.
Thank you for reading. Until next time, do less, be more, play bigger.
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