Do you ever look back and think, “I wish I knew that earlier”?
There are 5 things I wish I’d learned earlier in my journey of building my business, and if I’d known them earlier, I wouldn’t have made as many mistakes or wasted so much time.
I share them here to help you avoid these traps and pitfalls.
1 – Your Audience Doesn’t Always Know What They Need
The first thing I wish I learned is that your audience doesn’t usually know what they need. A lot of people tell their audience what they NEED to be doing, instead of actually giving them what they WANT.
Many people focus on the method and the process to get to the transformation, but actually, people don’t even know that they need that.
They think that they know, but they don’t … or else they’d be doing it.
Remember that people aren’t at your level. This is the problem that I used to always come up against. I would be speaking to people from one level, when they were way back further than I was in their journey.
We forget how far we’ve come.
I see this with my clients all the time. They have unconscious competence around an area and forget how far along they are compare to their clients.
They speak to people at their level, instead of speaking to them on the lower, less experienced level, where their audience is starting out in their journey. They forget that in the beginning, they used to be back at the less experienced level.
The problems that they THINK they have are usually very different from the ones you have in the more advanced level of knowledge or experience.
It’s only with hindsight that you can see the problems are different at different levels.
People are always thinking about what they want, but they don’t actually very rarely know what they need.
An example of this is when I started out in business, I thought that people really knew that they needed to shift their mindset, improve their time management and productivity, in order to have a successful business.
I thought that people realised that they needed these things, but people thought they were fine in these areas.
They told me they just wanted to know how to get clients.
I was running workshops on mindset and productivity, and I could see these were areas letting people down, but the most popular workshops I ran were around marketing.
People often want what’s going to solve their immediate issues, so you’ve got to talk to them the way YOU used to be, not where you are now.
People don’t care about your processes or your method. They care about solving their immediate problem.
Are you creating ‘need’ marketing or ‘want’ marketing?
The idea here is to sell them what they want, and then give them what they need.
2 – The Power of Creating Over Consuming
The second thing I wish I learned earlier in business is the power of creating instead of consuming.
If you’re like me, you love learning. We can get caught up thinking we need to learn more, but in reality – we often need to just start executing on what we know.
We can get to a point where we need to stop absorbing because like a sponge, you can come to the place of being so full. It’s like you’re obese on knowledge, information and content, and you need to get it out there.
I call it ‘squeezing the sponge’.
Finishing something that you’ve created yourself, gives you an incredible feeling.
It gives you a buzz and a high of dopamine when you complete something.
But when you’re in ‘consume’ mode, it’s like this…
You wake up in the morning, sit down at your desk to create a great social media post, an email, an article on LinkedIn or you want to do a video.
You get your second coffee and try to get motivated.
Then you get stuck looking at other people’s stuff. Hours go by and you waste a whole morning, consuming other people’s stuff, instead of just sitting and creating your own stuff.
We do this because it’s easier. It’s our comfort zone, and it’s much easier to look at other people’s posts for inspiration. But then, next minute, hours have gone by and you haven’t booked any paid clients, you still haven’t got any sales conversations booked in, you have booked any discovery calls that week, and you still don’t have a profitable business.
I get it, because I did this. I thought that I needed to learn more, and I would continually keep going to more and more courses.
I would keep comparing myself to others.
Doing that doesn’t get you where you want to go. Creating great work in the world is what does it.
3 – The Power Of Core Messages
There is power in having core messages that you repeat regularly in the marketplace.
Ideally you want to have 3-5 very clear core messages that you repeat your core message every time you are interviewed by someone, every time you do a Facebook Live, write a blog post, and write your web copy.
You want to make sure that people are really clear on what your core messages are. It becomes your signature language.
When I show up, I say a lot of the same things over and over. It’s repetitive, but people need to hear things multiple times.
People need repetition, it makes it sink in.
Some of the core messages I say consistently are:
- The world is waiting for your words
- You overcome fear with a formula
- For business to be successful, it has to be simple
- You get proven success with a proven strategy
- Business is too hard to do alone
These are messages I use all the time in my workshops and marketing.
What are your 3 to 5 core messages that you can keep repeating, that people come to know this is your language?
You want to repeat these so that people start to associate you with these messages.
It’s like your brand values and positioning. You’re infiltrating everything, with your values and with these core beliefs.
I help people simplify things and turn things into a model where people can really understand it.
What got me into core messages was I learned about putting in what we call a phrase anchor. A phrase anchor is used in our webinars and presentations and this phrase acts like an anchor that you keep coming back to.
You have one main phrase that you use through your whole presentation.
So my question to you is: Are you clear on your core messages?
4 – The Power Of Having The Right Strategy
Having the right strategy is essential.
If you get up in the morning and want to post some content, but don’t know what topics to talk about, you can get a bit confused. But this comes down to not having a clear strategy. When you don’t have an overarching strategy, you don’t have a plan, so you end up winging it.
When I first started out, I would waste days and even weeks, because I would start something and not finish it. I didn’t have a strategy. I realised I had the ingredients, but I didn’t have the recipe that put all the ingredients together in the right order.
I felt like I was going to all these courses and investing a lot of time and money. But I still didn’t have the right strategy, because I hadn’t gotten an expert to sit down with me to help me build my strategy.
I had a lot of what I call half-built bridges. I would start building something here and it would get too hard, so I would start to build another bridge. When things get hard, we bump up against belief systems that stop us or we don’t have the tools or skills we need, so we start building another bridge and nothing gets finished. This is what I was doing.
People don’t pay for half-built bridges.
They pay for a fully built bridge that they can walk over to the other side. They pay for a journey and for a path. They pay for a step-by-step process and framework that takes them where they want to be.
I see a lot of people throwing out lots and lots of information, knowledge and content, but not giving a strategy. It is so important to give people a sequential process to follow.
If you have half-built bridges, you’re not alone as it’s human behaviour. I want you to think about your strategy. And it’s really important when you think about your strategy to make sure that you’re really clear on your positioning, like what do you and your content strategy.
People think positioning is something you need to become but this is more something you decide to act upon, so people describe you as that. What are the 3 words that you want people to use to describe your business? Position yourself around these.
This gives you full control. Don’t give your control to other people. You need to decide what you want people to say about you, and position yourself that way.
5 – The Power Of Consistent, Imperfect Action
The fifth thing I wish that I learned earlier in business is the power of consistent, imperfect action.
I used to get so caught up making sure every slide was perfect. And the whole formula was so perfect before I even posted.
Perfectionism is something that absolutely cripples people. And it has definitely crippled me in so many ways. I know I would have moved so much faster if I hadn’t been so freaking scared of getting things wrong or having mistakes or a typo.
Things can always get better, right? You don’t want to sit on top of something for 3 weeks, you just want to get something out there to help people. Having something sitting in your laptop is not helping anyone.
It’s better to have something out there that is 70%, 80% or 90%, than not having anything at all. I’m not talking about doing sloppy work. We must have a standard of excellence. But we have to be willing to release things before they are 100% perfect.
I do Facebook Live videos every week and often they are not absolutely perfect. I practice beforehand and have my talk planned, but it’s more about being consistent and showing up. But I’m not practicing 50 times at home by myself with no one watching, because it’s not helping anyone. I’d rather just turn my camera on and go live being imperfect.
There is power in imperfect action. You need to think that it’s not about you. It’s about your clients and it’s about the people that you are serving. If you do everything perfectly, you become unrelatable. When I see my multi-millionaire mentors make mistakes, it encourages me that they are human.
If you just took more imperfect action consistently, do you think that you would help more people and actually grow your business? If you create processes for your tribe to follow, do you think you would be able to help more people?
I created a step-by-step process that took me years to refine and tweak. I’ve now run hundreds of people’s through it and it works every time. It looks simple and it is simple when you know it.
When you don’t know it and when you’re doing it all out of order, then business can be really hard.
Want to know exactly how you do this?
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Here they are:
The first captivation weapon is compelling content.
To grow your business, you need to create consistent content that’s valuable and relevant to your ideal client.
It’s the type of content that your ideal client really wants.
Being consistent and constantly showing up and giving compelling content builds trust. People get to know you, like you and trust you.
We do business with people who we like, who we can trust, and who we feel gets us.
There are many people that have signed up with me as a client and said they just feel like I get them and speak their language.
There are a lot of people who watched my business over time before they decided to work with me and this built trust due to the consistency.
I never used to enjoy doing Facebook Lives. But I decided that I was going to do them consistently. There has to be a time where you get serious about your business and say, ‘I’m doing this and there is no ‘out.’ You have to decide to burn your bridges and go all-out in your business.
When I first committed to consistency, I assumed that consistency was going to pay off, but I had no proof. Now, I do!
The benefit of consistency is that you build trust with people who don’t know you. You’re not here today and gone tomorrow, you consistently show up because you want to help people.
When you’re consistently showing up with compelling content, you get to teach people what you do and you get to teach people new things. Through that, they will realise if they’re a match for you.
There’s a piece of research that was done recently where someone did a study that showed it takes seven hours of consuming content for people to make a significant buying decision.
So if you’re reposting other people’s quotes, you’re not really building that trust through your own consistent content.
You need to start increasing the time you are providing content. If you’re doing Facebook Lives, I encourage you to consider running a 60-minute Zoom event.
If you’re already doing 60 minute events, up it to 90-minutes then 2 hours, then commit to running a half-day then a full-day workshop.
Running online events and webinars with Zoom is one of the fastest ways to build up connections with people because when people book into an event, they’re more invested.
I recommend that you do both written and video content. If you’re better at one than the other, then just start with the type of content you are good at, and you will grow as a content creator the more you do it.
The more you put yourself out there doing videos, the less you will need notes, and the less nervous you will be.
Video is the way of the future. It’s also the way of NOW.
Putting out valuable video content builds your personal brand. You’ll get more people referring you as a go-to expert and you’ll be known as a reliable business owner.
One of my clients wanted to build her business, so we worked together. She was so committed to putting out regular content. She kept showing up and she now has over 40,000 followers on Facebook and she got them really quickly!
She was genuinely showing up and building her tribe and creating valuable, consistent content.
This is the first powerful captivation method
The second method is creating crafted online events.
Events are about organising your knowledge and having actionable steps for people to follow. It’s structured and organised.
You don’t have to be a great speaker. You don’t have to be an extrovert (I’m an introvert). You just have to have knowledge that can help people.
Repetition is the mother of increasing your skills and it’s the same with running online events. They are so powerful as you can reach more people at one time.
You can build rapport and connection with more people at one time by doing online events. It maximises and leverages your time.
Every hour that you spend with someone, you could spend that same hour helping 50, 100, or 500+ people via an event.
Doing online events allows you to educate people and inspire them. It can open so many new exciting doors of opportunity for you.
If you’re willing to run an event, people often start inviting you to speak in their groups and you become known as the go-to expert.
I suggested doing online events to one of my clients, Gaynor. She literally laughed, as she didn’t know how she could find the time, as she had her business and was also a busy mum.
I encouraged her to step out and when she did, her results were brilliant. Her first online event brought in $2,368. It was by no means perfect, but she still had people show up and get helped by it.
Since using that online strategy she’s gone on to make over $25,000 and now she has an online course. She used to run retreats in the UK and now she’s taken everything online. She never thought she could do it, but she did!
It takes work when you first start doing them and organising your knowledge, but the hard road gets easier and the easy road gets harder. Events are SO worth it!
The third marketing method to build more followers, engagement and trust is to have a client attraction funnel.
The thought of a client attraction funnel may freak you out, but they are actually simple once you know how to do it.
A funnel is basically an automated way to turn strangers into clients. They are where people can sign up to your services 24/7.
They may come across your post on a downloadable freebie that you created. They click to download the freebie and it takes them to a funnel landing page.
A landing page is a simple one-page website. The people opt-in, they put their name and email in your funnel and they get your freebie to download. In return, you get their details.
You capture people, get their information, and then you can continue to build a relationship with them. A lot of people get my emails and they don’t sign up straight away. But after nurturing them, they come to a point where they are ready to buy.
A funnel could also be a landing page that leads people to your event. A funnel could also be a landing page that’s a freebie that people download and they go into your email list and nurture sequence.
A nurture sequence is a series of emails that give more help and free gifts. Your ideal client will eventually work out if you are the right match to work with them.
Only 3% of people are ready to buy immediately when they come across you. Others need more time to build that rapport with you. A funnel is a way for you to consistently build relationship. You share and give value through your funnel system.
The right people will want to keep working with you. These are the people who see that you’ve sufficiently educated them and inspired them to actually take action.
These skills are all learnable and at some point, if you want to be a successful business owner, you do need to learn these skills.
Remember it’s all about just taking action, and it can be imperfect action.
It’s about making a decision and going for it.
