When you want to grow, the most important things you can do for your business is stop, work out what’s working, and do more of that!
If you are at the stage where you know your stuff works as a speaker author or coach, then it’s time to raise your game. Yes even in strange times! If you’ve got the clients, speaking gigs, published books you are happy with, then it’s likely that you’re ready to scale up. Only, you don’t. Or you haven’t.
Many people come to us saying that feel stuck when they think about expanding. Especially at the moment — they want to get more clients, expand their reach, increase their income, but they don’t know how. It’s one of the hardest steps to go from good to great (as Jim Collins would say in his book).
Accommodating this in changing times is even more important. It’s a rare person that wouldn’t want better results.
If this sounds like you, there are 2 things that need to be addressed: your mindset & what you are measuring.
Raise Your Game
In order to go from ‘good to great’, it’s important to understand how you can be more productive, effective and efficient so that your business is streamlined & gets you the results you want. In order to do that, you must have:
- clarity on what success means to you
- the awareness of what support and resources you have around you to achieve it
- visibility on what is and isn’t working in your business — and the only way to do this is through measuring.
Raising your game is about making sure you are effective, efficient and productive.
Sometimes these words are all clumped together to mean the same thing but they aren’t. It’s a good idea to check which of these resonates most for you. Are you being:
- Productive?
Productive in a dictionary definition is “producing or being able to produce large amounts products.”
- Do you have a range of products that enable your business to run without you having to swap time for money?
- Can you reach a lot of people or are you capped due to your capacity?
2. Efficient?
Are you “achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.”?
- Do you have systems and processes in place that automate your sales and marketing?
- Do you outsource work that you don’t like or aren’t good at to freelancers or software?
3. Effective?
Are you being “successful in producing a desired or intended result.”
- Do you set targets and goals that you work towards with singular focus that allows you to make the impact you want to make?
- Does the work you deliver get you closer to fulfilling your purpose?
It’s likely that you are at the stage where your success to date has come through working really hard, accepting all opportunities and being in the right place at the right time. But that’s not going to get you to the next level.
Game-changing success is different.
It’s planned for. It’s not only organic, accidental or incidental. And the way you start to shift towards that is to get clear about what is working and what is not working in your business, and then putting some structures and systems in place that allow you to grow in the way you imagine.
The world needs Changemakers and what we want is for you:
- to be making a difference at the scale and level you want
- to be making the money you want from the efforts you put in
- to be valued at the level you need to be and would like to be
- to actually have the time energy and joy of loving your working without the hard graft
- to know your products and services are desired, make sense and are being consumed in numbers they deserve
To achieve this, you need to get you into the habit of Reflecting, Tracking, Reviewing and Tweaking your business activities on a monthly basis.
Here’s how to do it.
Every month, set aside about 90 minutes to do “RTRT” — the 4 steps that will help you raise your game.
1) Take time to REFLECT:
– Define success as you see it — what does that mean for the business, for you, for the people you serve? (don’t just read what you wrote last month, but instead, define it first, then compare if you must — you may just find the ‘gold’ by doing it this way!)
- Ask: What’s right about the business right now, how is it doing?
- Ask yourself: How am I right now, how am I doing?
- Answer this: What does the business allow you to do?
- Check in: What’s got you to this stage of the business?
2) TRACK the results
Setting targets & recording activities in the main areas of your business is a way to measure the progress. We suggest that you have some metrics or measurements in each of these 5 areas. And that you stay consistent in what you track, as this allows you to start seeing trends — both seasonal and practical.
i) Marketing
ii) Sales
iii) Operations
iv) Finance
v) Team
3) Conduct your REVIEW
Take time to analyse the results and the stats you get from the 2nd step. It’s important to notice what makes the difference. If an increase has happened, explore why. For example, in your marketing you might notice that lead generation from speaking on stage or on virtual summits is getting a higher conversion than your digital lead magnet. This might show that you should put more emphasis on getting speaking gigs than FB advertisement.
4) TWEAK for success
Apply the insight you have gained to the day to day activities for the month or quarter to come. Put in to practice what might improve things even further. The numbers and tracking tell a story, so now your job is to decide what you most want to change and the tweak the process you have in place to ‘move the needle’ i.e. to change the situation to your advantage.
Consider this:
What is the most useful next action that will allow you to get to what the vision is that the REFLECT stage showed you?
The difference between a business in which you are happy about what’s happened and proud of what you’ve created is actually down to you taking the business seriously and fine tuning the progress one element at a time. It takes an investment of time, tracking, and identifying what you most want to create. But it’s so worth it.
We don’t expect you to remember all of this, so we’ve created a download we use on a monthly basis so you too can Reflect, Track, Review & Tweak with ease. You can get that here.
We wish you much insight as you do this and wish for you that it takes you to ‘great’.Speaker INsight
We support speakers, authors & coaches to monetise their message, market their purpose and create & manage their portfolio business, ON THEIR TERMS™.