Are You Struggling With Consistency In Your Business? Find Out: Is One Of The Four Parts Missing?
One of the problems I solve in my coaching business is the problem that many solopreneurs and entrepreneurs face, of not being consistent, when it comes to marketing, lead generation and income producing activity.
This then impacts their ability to track and measure results, which then impacts their ability to make decisions.
It is impossible to make important decisions such as:
where to spend time and money
whether or not the business is a worthwhile investment,
without consistency, tracking and measuring.
There are many roll on impacts to this problem, such as a lack of:
clairy on what to focus on
duplicatable activity to systemise
setting up systems and outsourcing the activity (where applicable and where possible)
moving forward with confidence
momentum
If you want to solve this in your business there are four parts to work on, simultaneously.
Part one: know the answers to some fundamental questions about your goals, in order to reveal which outcomes you are seeking, so you can form a strategy (plan) around your goals
Part two: implement consistent action
Part three: track and measure your results
Part Four: make decisions based on the results, and pivot if necessary
All four parts are interrelated.
You need a strategy so you can work out what to become consistent in, and therefore what to start tracking and measuring.
Only once you start tracking and measuring, can you make better and better decisions about whether what you are doing is getting you the results you want, and whether or not you should continue with the activity, or pivot towards different actions, or another strategy all together.
Before I get into Part one I want to state the obvious (which needs to underpin why your business exists) which is that, business is about solving problems for your target market, delivering value and making money in exchange for your innovation (product or service).
Assuming you are absolutely one hundred percent clear on the above,
The following Questions form part of Part One:
How much money do you want to make in your business?
How much money do you need, to cover your expenses?
What are you fixed costs?
What are you personal costs?
How do you pay yourself and how much?
How many clients do you need to work work with, in order to meet your revenue targets?
How many clients do you need to work with to break even?
Of the clients that sign up to work with you, how many conversations do you need to have with prospects before they become a client?
What is your conversion rate? This means out of 10 people that you speak to, how many become clients. If the number is 1 out of 10, then your conversion is 10%.
How many prospects are you needing each month, to show interest in your products or services.
If you have been in business for a few years, how are you tracking month to month compared with last year.
What metrics do you track currently? For example, if your goal is to grow your database by a certain number this year, how many new emails do you need to collect each month?
If you advertise, what is your return on investment?
If you outsource what is your return on investment?
Case Study
I’m going to use an example from one of my clients who worked with me for six months.
Her goals were to:
earn a living online through her art
be able to stop going to markets to sell her art
wind up having to have a part-time income stream to keep her afloat
First we had to confirm the following:
Who was her target market.
What were other potential target markets and collaborators that she had not considered. We brainstormed these and set up some lists in Google Docs.
Current earnings through her art work.
Current activity that she did on a regular basis and how much time this took her - ie social media posts, sending out emails to clients and prospects, going to markets, in her case.
How her current brand supported her new goals (which we worked out, did not, and therefore part of the work was putting together a strategy to rebrand)
Current assets in the business ie website and size of her email list and her art works which are all original.
Once we confirmed all of the above then:
We decided that she needed a new brand. So she worked on that and got it worked out including registration of a new domain name, design of a new logo, and rebrand of her Shopify site.
At the same time as the rebrand was happening, we set some activity targets to get some momentum going through:
daily posting on Instagram
monthly blog post created and distributed
monthly email to her list
Weekly emails to prospects and potential collaborators
Then we started implementing and tracking the following?
How many posts on Instagram she did each week including engagement?
Monthly blog post distribution results
New works of art deadline schedule set
Number of monthly emails she sent each week to prospects and potential collaborators? This included how many names she had generated each week, to continue the outreach, as well as following up. (These formed sub-tasks of the task and to leverage her time, I helped her get some outsourcing from my VA in the Philippines, who built the list of people to reach out to, as well as sent some of the emails. This is a low value task which was valuable to do, but not by her, so she outsourced this for $3.50 per hour part-time.
Monthly email to her own email list, and results generated from that if any
These are the results she achieved, over six months:
Rebranding herself and updating her website
New updated flyers to continue reaching out via email to prospects and potential collaborators
Started creating one new work of art per month
Daily posting on social media
Obtained a high profile collaboration who commissioned her to do a new work for a festival they were running, as well as using some of her current prints.
Set up Mailchimp and entered all of the emails she had had for a few years but had done nothing with. The list was less than 300 at that stage.
Three emails were sent in total, once the rebrand was completed, which equated to one email per month.
The first email to her own database generated around $70. (A previous client clicked on the email and went over to her website to have a look and purchased a few things).
The second email generated $140
The third email (always to her own database after the rebrand) generated roughly just over $1000 (as she had updated her website with some of the new works.)
So the strategy then become continue all of the monthly activity according to the deadlines, given that each one had produced at least one result, (and if you can get a result once, you can get it again).
Plus adding on a new strategy which was to try Face Book ads. The goal being to grow her database more quickly, and get more people to view her work, via the monthly email which based on the results we got, would increase the online revenue, and thus help her achieve her main goal.
When we stopped working together she was working on learning FB ads through a course on Udemy and gearing up to run the FB ads, as well as continue with all the activity that we had set, as the monthly activity benchmarks.
After working together for six months and getting good results, she lost interest in the goal she had set. She was not convinced whether all of that effort, would have taken her where she wanted to go, given the marketing activity was in and of itself, not what she loved.
My argument is that, given we got proven results, that with more time and testing, her revenue would have increased, which would have enabled her to spend money on getting the tasks she hated off her weekly and monthly to do list. And in that scenario, she could spend more time on what she loved, which was painting and creating art.
She chose not to keep going, which to me was a shame. However she can always come back to it once she has a break and gets some perspective, and at least the work we did together, gave her a solid foundation.
Hopefully this case study inspires you to follow the four part process to achieving your business goals.
To boost your inspiration the the thing I want you to realise is that, this all takes time. It takes longer than six months. In my client’s case, I would have given it a year, before deciding whether to quit or not.
At the very least, it takes three months minimum, to try a strategy, track and measure it, and work out whether or not to continue. If it is going to work you will see some results within three months.
Is this a lot of work? Yes.
The thing to work out is, how badly do you want this? Anything worthwhile mostly, does not arrive on a silver platter.
If you want it badly enough you need to add one more thing into the mix in order to bulletproof your results, get some accountability. This is where I come in.
I am committed to your success. I want you to live a life of inspiration and purpose, of which consistency, tracking and measuring is part of getting you there (this applies not just to business but to life as well) and I can help you set this up.
Reach out and book a chat. Call or text me on 0414 707751.
Join my group on FB: http://bit.ly/2pLKyL3
Hear What Others Have To Say: http://bit.ly/2NwC307
Download the Start-Ups Roadmap for Ultimate Business Success: http://bit.ly/2RzZOek