I’m a business growth strategist who’s revealing the truth about scaling your business, so this episode series may have surprised you. But I want your eyes wide open when you go into business growth mode. It’s not just about making more sales; you also need to scale your team, customer experience, and infrastructure behind the scenes so your business doesn’t implode. In this final installment, I break down some key things for you to start thinking about to be more strategic and sustainable when you’re ready to go into high growth business mode.
On this episode of Promote Yourself to CEO:
3:57 - Which mode allows me to have the lifestyle I want? Being more strategic and intentional while looking towards business growth.
7:26 - Women entrepreneurs tend not to step into leadership in their finances. You can’t allocate resources or make smart decisions otherwise.
11:42 - Keep it simple, upgrade as you go, have perspective, and stop comparing yourself to others. Here’s a particularly helpful recommendation for both new and experienced entrepreneurs.
16:14 - Marketing is one area where I see people get overwhelmed. Some personal examples of how I use my own system to prevent this from happening to me.
20:07 - Slow down. Things take time. We tend to overestimate how much we can accomplish weekly or monthly, yet underestimate our amount of productivity in a year.
25:08 - The biggest disconnect I’ve noticed between entrepreneurs and other small business owners. What the former tend to do.
27:03 - Here’s something not talked about often enough behind the scenes, particularly for female business owners. Having a team of support, both professionally and personally.
30:54 - Growth isn’t linear, and that’s okay. Some pointers on handling plateaus and explosive periods of growth.
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You hear a lot of terrible advice online these days that causes people to focus on scaling at all costs. All of that effort only leads to your business blowing up. Things break and go awry, and you’re constantly putting out fires, feeling overwhelmed and stressed at the cash-eating monster you’ve created. So let’s forgo this unsustainable approach to growth and do something different. Avoid the three biggest things I see causing problems with business scaling.
On this episode of Promote Yourself to CEO:
3:58 - The first mistake I see entrepreneurs make and how you can get yourself into this situation. No matter how much money you bring in, you feel like you can never get ahead.
6:33 - When do expensive, robust systems make sense to purchase and use in your business? Technology audits and figuring out where you’re unnecessarily spending money right now.
9:50 - Female entrepreneurs are especially susceptible to this mistake. Trying to do it all yourself vs. paying everyone but yourself.
12:12 - These specific incidences of comparison often lead to overspending. Here’s how you can spend in a way more cost-effective way.
18:04 - Mindset that contributes to the second key mistake (especially for a product that doesn’t fit your market). Test this first, instead.
26:00 - The third key mistake feeds into both of the previous ones. Dangers of having overly complicated systems in your business.
31:04 - Bringing more humanity back to business. I ditched my Frankenstein-looking system for an old program that wasn’t working and simplified it.
34:20 - Recapping all three key business mistakes.
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Is it really possible to double, triple, or 10x your business in just a year? Or to take your business from 100k to $1,000,000 in revenue within just 36 months? If you listen to all the noise online, scaling seems like the name of the game and what we all should be focused on. But the honest truth is scaling for the sake of it can be detrimental to your business. So in this series, we’re talking about the truth of scaling your business.
On this episode of Promote Yourself to CEO:
2:44 - The difference between growth and scale. While the terms are used interchangeably, they’re not the same thing at all.
6:25 - Entrepreneurs focusing just on scaling sales and not putting infrastructure in place create unstable and unsustainable businesses with irate customers and bad word-of-mouth.
9:25 - Emergency panic mode triggered by a large influx of customers creates chaos. Exhausting sales cycle leads to burnout with the type of massive, expensive launches you see online all the time.
15:15 - All the expenses going into massive launches in pursuit of scale focuses on top-line revenue, not profit. The entrepreneur gets paid last and doesn’t actually end up pocketing a lot of money at all.
18:00 - This year exposed how fragile so many businesses really are. One launch or bad month away from having to close up shop.
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