The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 286: The Most Important Shifts in My Business

Today, I am diving into some of my biggest business shifts I have made. We are going to chat about what these shifts did for my business and how they can help you. I am also going to be sharing some things I wish I had known when I first started my business to help you scale your business sooner.

The Most important shifts in my business

BY: MELISSA LIN

Today I really want to spend some time talking about some of the more important shifts in my business and things that have helped me get to where I am in business right now. I want to share some of these shifts with you so that you can make these shifts much sooner than I did to help you get to where you want to go. I'm going to be sharing some of the most important shifts in my business, the support that has helped me get to where I am, the shifts that have helped me scale, and so much more. 

FINDING YOUR BUSINESS GUIDE

The first thing I really want to chat about is what I deeply believe the most important shifts I have made in my business are. The first one is mentorship. I do believe that you have everything in you right now to get to the results you want. You have everything you need at this moment to start and grow a business. However, if you find a mentor to help guide you, it is going to help you get there so much faster. During my first year in business back in 2014 I started on my own and it was so much easier when I found a mentor to help me get to where I wanted to go. 

Earlier this week someone asked me when I started making money in my business and when I felt ready to leave my nine-to-five. This is an area that mentorship could have really changed the game for me in my very first year in business. I can remember getting to work at 5 in the morning when I had my engineering job and getting some of my morning duties finished so I could then spend some time doing business activities to start to grow my business. I spent a lot of time on Google trying to figure out what I needed to do to start my coaching business. I spent so much time trying to figure it out on my own. I could have found a roadmap, but I didn't realize it back then. I spent about a year-and-a-half trying to do it myself. I made some sales and signed some clients, but they were all very low-ticket offers. I wasn't making nearly enough to quit my nine-to-five. 

Once I started to invest in courses, masterminds, group coaching programs, and private coaching, it really shifted things in my business. Not only was I given a roadmap for what to do, I was also being supported when challenges that I had never experienced before came up. I highly recommend hiring a mentor before you feel you need one. Get into some type of container where you have that support to start growing your business. You will face things that you've never faced before in your business. If you wait until that challenge hits you to hire your mentor or hop into that container, you are going to be wasting so much of your time, energy, and money. You will have days when you sign multiple new high-ticket clients. You're going to have days where you might have somebody who copied your social media content or your entire program and they're selling it, that has happened to us multiple times. There will be days when you have your biggest cash months and then the next day you're going to have multiple clients fail on their payments. There will be days when business feels so easy and then that afternoon you're going to want to shut down. There could be days when all of this is happening at the same exact time. As a business owner it's so normal to feel a roller coaster of emotions in one day. One of the best ways to really navigate this is by having a mentor by your side, it is such a game-changer. 

FALLING IN LOVE WITH SALES

The second shift that has supported my business is really learning how to sell. I actually fell in love with sales. I absolutely love selling. I deeply believe that selling is serving. Selling is you sharing with the world how you can help them. Selling is sharing the opportunity for them to get to where they want to go. I needed to learn how to sell and how to love to sell to really take things to the next level in my business. If you avoid selling it is going to be difficult to grow your business. You get to sell often. People need you and they can't get that help if you aren't selling and sharing about your services. 

When I first started in 2014, I was absolutely terrified of selling. I was so attached to the outcome of my sales when I first started my business. It would really affect me personally. My feelings were so up and down. As I started to learn and practice the skill of selling, I started to increase my numbers and sign more clients. Of course there are always going to be some people who say no. Every single business will have “no” come their way. Selling is something you can always continue to improve on. 

Selling is something that you can choose to delegate at some point in your business. You can also shift into other forms of selling. We do a lot of sales in our DM. We also do a lot of selling in our emails and converting through funnels. You can outsource. Many of my clients have team members that do sales calls for them. There are a lot of ways to make that easier as you start to grow. However, you first get to learn how to sell in your business because you are going to be the one person who can sell the best because it's your program. If you are struggling with converting, it's going to be very difficult to teach somebody else to sell for you, so start selling. If you feel icky about sales whatsoever, please send me a message on Instagram. I have lots of resources for you to start to work on that sales mindsets. If you are not feeling good about selling, you can only get so far in your business and it will be near to impossible to grow. So again, falling in love with sales is the second shift that has really supported my business. 

IMPROVING YOUR BUSINESS

The third important shift in my business, and these are in no particular order, is always looking for ways to improve. This looks like finding ways to improve my social media content. I take a look at what's trending and which of my content is performing well. I am always continuing to work on and improve that content. I am always looking for ways to improve client experience. I do this through mid-program feedback forms and monthly check-in forms for clients. How can we improve content? How can we improve the way that my team and I work together on the backend? 

There is always an opportunity for some type of improvement in your business. There will not be a day where there's nothing to improve. The bigger things we really focus on are content, client experience, running in the backend, team support, and systems. We like to look at ways to improve how things are delivered to clients. 

STEPPING OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE

The next big shift for me in my business over the years has been stepping out of my comfort zone and playing even bigger every single year. As Tim Ferriss said, “typically what scares you the most is what is needed the most.” Typically to get to a place that you've never been before in your business or your life, you get to do things that you've never done before. If you are working on selling, then ask for the sale more often. Go do something you would not normally do today in your business. Go after what scares you. If I hadn't started going out of my comfort zone early on, I would not have gotten to where I am as quickly as I did. I would probably still be in my 9-to-5 where I was comfortable. 

PERSEVERANCE IS KEY

Another big shift for me and my business has been not giving up. One of my favorite quotes is, “the only way to fail is by not trying.” You truly cannot fail as long as you keep going and don't give up. Your success is inevitable. Entrepreneurship is not for everybody. If you know deep down you want to run your own business, you get to keep going and step out of your comfort zone. I have definitely had so many moments over the years where I've wanted to give up, and I'm so happy I never did. This is where I’m meant to be. This is where I absolutely thrive. I love supporting my clients and helping them get results. I love helping them create their impact in this world. I love helping women all across the world find freedom through entrepreneurship. 

WHAT HELPED MY BUSINESS GROW

Those are some of the shifts that have really helped me grow my business and now I want to share some of the support that helped me get to where I am as well. One of the biggest things was hiring team members and learning how to actually delegate tasks to them. For so long I believed that I could do it the best and the fastest. I thought there was no reason for me to hire somebody to help me. That was a belief I had probably up until right before I made my first hire in 2018. I absolutely love my team. A big belief of mine is that as my team supports me I am able to support more people. I cannot do it alone. I can't create that incredible impact by myself, I do need the support. A team can support you with delegating and outsourcing. Automation is also another form of that. All of that has really helped my business grow to the next level. I didn't hire my first team member until 2018, so it took me four years. I wish I would have hired sooner. My typical recommendation is if you're bringing in about $3,000 a month in your business, you're definitely okay to hire your first team member. 

Another thing that has really supported my business is amplifying my systems in the backend. For you to be able to grow, you get to help more people. The systems that you have right now in your business most likely won't be the same to support a business double your size, right? If I were to hand you 30 brand new clients for the program you're selling right now, would your business handle it? If the answer is no, then we get to start to work on those systems. We want to set you up for success so that when that comes to you you are ready for it. It's never fun to turn some away because your systems inside of your business can't handle that influx of clients, so start thinking about it now.

SCALABLE BUSINESS SHIFTS

Now I want to chat about some of the shifts that truly helped me scale my business. The big one was how many programs were running. I really needed to shift how many programs were running five years ago versus today to get me to where I am today. Five years ago my business could not handle the number of clients I have now. I needed to be very open to shifting the way that my programs were running. You can shift your programs and the way that it runs and still create incredible client results. Five years ago, I did not have support coaches inside of my Academy to support me and more clients, but now we do. My coaching programs are also now all Evergreen. We don't do open-close anymore. 

The second thing is knowing the difference between strategy hopping and experimenting. I've noticed over the years, there's a lot of experimenting in the industry. Sometimes experimenting is good, however, there's a difference between experimenting and distraction. In my first year in business I was strategy hopping almost weekly. So, of course, nothing was working in that first year and my results were up and down. Then once I hired a mentor and learned about different strategies and stuck to a strategy for more than just a week, things started to come together. 

Those are some of the bigger shifts that have really helped me scale. We have touched on a lot today. We covered teams, amplifying systems, mentorship, and really learning the skill of selling and falling in love with it. We also touched on shifts that have helped me scale, and so much more. I am always going to be your biggest cheerleader, so you taking the time out of your day to hang out with me truly means the world to me. I’ll see you next time!