Business owners have one thing in common. Time. Or more specifically, a complete lack of.
Finding the time for growth
It takes a huge effort to get your business off the ground and then a huge commitment to keep it growing. I get it – starting my business almost five years ago took me through the same cycle of challenges common to all owners. A lack of time meant I was permanently panicked about finding the right ways to grow, finding the right resources and information to help me, and the right way to rapidly accelerate my offering. A combination of these pressures helped me make some classic mistakes in my first year. The thing is, I learned from them and now look back on that time with some fondness.
Let others make your mistakes for you
That’s because happily, there’s a silver lining to my errors. Very few people get it right first time. And don’t believe anyone who says they did it all on their own. Learning from mistakes, especially if someone else can make them for you, is by far the best way to whip your business into growth mode. Which is where I come in…
Turning catastrophe into a scalable business
In my first year I can count five classic mistakes. Crucially, they didn’t sink me. I got through it, and getting through it showed how I could help others. Along the way I realised understanding those mistakes was at the core of my success, and if I could help owners avoid them and learn from my path, I would be well on my way.
And so that’s what I did. I built something that gives owners shortcuts to the help they need, lets them scale fast, and finally generate better returns from the same set of resources. All of that good stuff came from these five mistakes. Take a moment to read them and you’ll see how cracking them was my real breakthrough:
1. I started with a service offering, instead of finding the one specific problem I could solve for my clients. I made the mistake of thinking more services means more clients. I doesn’t, at least not always. Sometimes it just means stretching yourself thin and taking on more overhead.
2. I tried to target ALL types of clients. I didn’t think about my ideal client. Again, this just spread me too wide and reduced my ability to deliver value to the clients I had. Which led to…
3. A business with no specific message or client profile. A business without a specific problem it could say it solved. A business like that is almost impossible to build an effective sales and marketing message around. Which in turn led to…
4. Me spinning my wheels chasing clients through word of mouth, spending too much of my time on the pipeline – all because I’d built a business I couldn’t effectively market.
5. Which finally meant I ended up taking bespoke work from massively varied clients, which meant I could never recycle learnings, and create a range of simple scalable solutions.
In the end, I was being paid for time and not value. No business can scale without immense cost if that’s the model. Without the ability to collate my learnings and build a business where my hard won experience could deliver easily recyclable solutions for my clients, I had created the perfect storm of pressures for myself.
Happy times for all
Now it’s different. By focusing on client needs and identifying the one problem I can help them with, I deliver value quickly. My clients get better value and I get more time to grow my own business. I’ve turned the perfect storm of pressure into a virtuous cycle of growth, happier clients mean better experience and learnings, which means more time for me to grow and deliver even more happy clients.
If you want to see how I did this, click here. You’ll see some free training I’ve built for you, outlining the three shifts I made in my business. You’ll also see how those shifts can apply to you and your business. It’s the start of growth for you and your opportunity for a sustainable and valuable business.
KS
