In this week's episode of Through The Marketing Lens, I talked about the importance of a good business strategy and building those fundamentals. How to focus on building your business and not wanting it built overnight. Sometimes it's hard for us to slow down. We have an unrealistic need for everything now and were used to living in this Veruca Salt culture if you will...
The what?
Do you remember Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and the girl Veruca Salt who wants everything and wanted it immediately?
It feels like that's everyone's mentality right now in this busy world...but your small business can't be like that. You have to build strong foundations first.
There a lot of things that contribute to this, right? When is the last time that we waited longer than two days to receive our packages? Thank you, Amazon! It's this TikTok culture of information being downloaded within seconds. And this Netflix binge. so this idea of like, I can't wait until next week for a show. And that's just the way our cultures are progressing it's this change, but it's happening so quickly and our brains are expecting things faster and faster.
It's really happening I'm seeing it all the time around me in every part of my life and when it comes to business, building a sustainable business is not fast. It's not, and our businesses are not Amazon packages, it's not this pre-systematized structure we have to build all those foundations and every business requires that no matter where you're coming from, so unless you are buying a business that already exists. This is pretty much a requirement across the board. So let me tell you a quick story of how this came up in my business, I have a lot of stories but I wanted to tell you this one because it's really simple, and I think a lot of us can relate to it.
So I go into this story on my podcast that really explains this but here is a little synopsis of it
A client of mine who I worked with pretty briefly had a killer product and she was organizing her launch and her website before she could tell me what kind of client she wanted to attract. This is why we have to take the time and pause, and really figure out what we are doing. Because she didn't want to do any of the pre-work, because she was ready to launch.
She had a lot of knowledge around what she was offering, and so she was already sitting in the expert's seat. She was not an expert in building a business, only in the services that her business could offer. But here's the thing... having a skill and/or knowing a lot is not the same thing as building a business and leading it as the CEO.
I think that's a lot for us to process because we don't necessarily talk a lot about how different those two things are. They're really different. You can be really really savvy at tech. It doesn't mean you have a tech company, right, you can work in the corporate world, and it's really different expectations you go to work. You do your thing, you don't have to be all the things. We focus too much on doing one thing, like getting our website up because it means we're official right?
I really think of it that way, because we all want that proof for ourselves, for our families for the people that are watching us whatever that looks like for you.
I am not saying you need to go on a perfectly straight line. You do not need to map everything out. Exactly, in any particular way. Perfection is not our goal and in fact, perfection is going to hold you back. What I'm talking about is putting in the time to create your actual business model. What you're doing, what you're showing up for, who you're showing up for. We skip that part, because it's hard and it's not sexy, and there's a lot of planning and brainstorming that goes into business. It's not all revenue-producing, but it's directly tied to long-term success.
A business plan can look a lot of different ways, but a business plan doubles your chances of long-term success. Well let's talk about that even deeper, continuing to put aside time for your business and your business goals, is what I'm really talking about. So if you craft a new offer really diving into that not just whipping it up. I speak from a place of I understand all the emotions that go into this so what am I talking about really specifically for every single business so really road-mapping out what you want to get from your business. Making sure that your offers and products are really clear to you and outlined in a lot of details that set you up for success because the expectations your client might see might be different than what they are from you.
On my website, there's an even deeper dive that I go into and there's a PDF that covers all the bullets, what they should expect when starting a business. You can find that here
I recently crafted a welcome kit right so when you actually enter into coaching with me, you're going to receive something that tells you exactly what the experience looks like so. I'm trying to hit from all different angles, everyone's on the same page and that took a lot of time to set aside for the kind of stuff that I'm talking about, doesn't have to all be there on day one, but there has to be a setup for all this because as I'm learning and growing. I want to make sure that as my business scales. I'm ready for that. And I have things like that that are just ready to go.
Really internalizing that none of this stuff is going to happen overnight, overnight success is not sustainable. You're not ready for 20 clients on day one, as much as you want the money, you're not ready, you can try to juggle but you will burn out, and the mistakes that you're going to make because you're not ready will ultimately be overwhelming. I don't even know how long, ultimately means because that overwhelming can crash down really, really quickly.
We all want growth but if we're not ready for that growth. It's the number one reason businesses fail. I want you to hear that again, this is the number one reason businesses fail and we attribute the wrong things to as why. An example is I ran out of cash flow. Yes, you ran out of cash flow, flow because you're not ready for the influx of orders that came in, or how much you had to invest, suddenly you scaled too fast. Right, that's what it comes down to, or you hear people say, I burnt out and so I burned it all to the ground. Yes, because you hadn't figured out how to outsource or delegate or internally hire, for those things that needed to be done. You weren't ready.
Or I couldn't fulfill my orders fast enough. Yeah, you couldn't fulfill them because you didn't have the right relationships with those factories or your appointment systems weren't implemented correctly right?
You were not ready. It all comes back to the same place so really it's preparing yourself to be ready. And the point there is. It's all a process so if you start at A, you can't go to E, you have to really build, to all of those places.
We have to talk about the work that goes in, in the beginning, and not just say like, it's hard. It really explaining. This is the stuff that's really hard, and you do have to do it if you want to succeed long term. You don't have to do all of it on the same day. It's a process, and it will evolve, but you do have to do it. So that's my point here and speaking to this because like I said it's been coming up a lot around me is this desire for I want it now, and I'm seeing it with people in the world but I'm also seeing it in my business world, so I felt really important to talk about.
If you're interested in hearing more, I definitely recommend checking out this episode of Through The Marketing Lens podcast, where I really go into why taking the time to grow your business is essential.
