The challenges of scaling your business and how to overcome them

Your Dream Business

English - November 08, 2021 00:00 - 20 minutes - 18.9 MB - ★★★★★ - 34 ratings
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Previous Episode: How to be remarkable and make your business stand out with Rich Brooks

Next Episode: How understanding your niche can get you more customers with Melitta Campbell

In today’s episode of the podcast I talk about scaling up – what it looks like and what the challenges are to hopefully help anyone who is wanting to scale their business.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

When you first start your business, it may just be you but as you scale you will need to manage a team.You need to be able to manage and trust your team.When you manage people, even if they are doing work for you, you need to still oversee what they are doing.Before you start working with a team, you have to come up with the process and brief them before they can do it.You NEED to have systems and processes in your business in order to scale.Start putting processes into your business, even if it is just you.You will be juggling lots of different things when you start to scale, focusing on different areas all the time.You have to be organised if you want to scale and plan out your days/weeks/years.It is really important to keep reviewing what you and your team are doing.Use systems such as Slack and Trello to help you stay organised.You invest a lot of the money you make back into you and your business.You should be coached by people you look up to and are ahead of you.It is sometimes easy to look at someone else’s membership or business income and compare – but what you can’t see is their outgoings.The more you make, the more you spend.When you do scale and get more well known, it is harder to celebrate the wins and be proud of what you have done.No matter what level, you will still look at your competitors and compare!Please leave me a podcast review!

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…No matter what level you are, you may still get imposter syndrome!

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN’T MISS

Managing people in your business 07:14Processes and systems for your business 10:23Juggling everything as a business owner 11:29Getting organised 12:25Investing more in your business 13:30Things that won’t change 16:15

RESOURCES MENTIONED

My 90 Day Program

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. This is the third podcast I've recorded in a space of a very short amount of time, like literally an hour or two because the others were interviews and I'd already done the interview.

So they don't take long. Anyway, I am so sick at the beginning. I can't tell you, like, I just wish I could come up with something different. Well, should I just not even say hello and welcome. Should I just like, just start talking that you really vicious. I hate it. Honestly, it raises we're headed anyway. So I've already started like a redone this one twice because I've messed up.

But anyway, uh, and I didn't, I don't mess up very often. Well, I'm going to take that back. I do mess up, but I don't delete the recordings very often because you need to know that people are human and I am human and I think you might disagree. Let me know that you quite liked the fact that I am human and this isn't super polished, and this is not scripted at all.

Like seriously, it's not scripted. In fact, if you could see what was in front of me now, it's literally 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 bullet points of things that I need to, or want to touch on as I'm talking to you today. And you have to remember, I've been doing this for 215 episodes. So like, without, I'm supposed to say so I'm good at this, but I hate blow my own trumpet.

Although I was listening to something the...

In today’s episode of the podcast I talk about scaling up – what it looks like and what the challenges are to hopefully help anyone who is wanting to scale their business.

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…No matter what level you are, you may still get imposter syndrome!

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN’T MISS

RESOURCES MENTIONED

My 90 Day Program

Transcript:

Although I was listening to something the other day, I was listening to a podcast where they talked about, you need to, I'm going to have to check this actually. Uh, I'm literally going to check what she said as I'm talking to you, basically, she was saying that that's it, lots of people are really good at showing authenticity posts, which I think I'm very good at the authenticity thing, but we need to be showing more authority posts.

And not that this is what I was going to talk about today, but actually I'm kind of glad this came up because this is something that I struggle with and something that I'm working on. Because my husband will say to me a lot that he doesn't understand. And neither do I sometimes why the people I coach have bigger memberships than I do.

And I asked them on the other day, uh, Someone who was interviewing me, but I happen to know. They were in and another membership. And, and yet they know me and I've worked with them and I said, 'Why did you choose that membership? And not mine, I'm just interested.' And I said to this person, she told me the reasons why she chose that membership.

And at the time, I don't think she really knew me at that point. But anyway, And then I said, so you do know I coach them. And she was like, 'Well.' And I said, 'yeah.' And then she mentioned some other names to me who were in the similar industry and I went, 'Yeah, I've coached them too.' And it's starting to very slowly dawn on me that I should be talking about this more, that the experts that you might be a memberships for, obviously I'm making a very sweeping statement there.

Are people that come to me for help. And I think I've got to get comfortable in saying, why would you go to other people when they come to me? Why not just come straight to me? Now, obviously there are many reasons why people choose different people in different memberships. And I get that totally. But it's just interesting that one thing I'm probably not very good at is saying I've been in marketing for 16 years. I've been employed. I've worked with humongous companies, like heading up marketing for Landrover. I've worked with Teeny Tiny companies where I had to do everything. And I started off my life as marketing, fax marketing, like literally sending faxes.

It was a thing and yeah, and I know what I'm talking about and I hang around with some pretty cool people in my space. I know I'm doing it. So yeah, it's hard. It's super, super hard. I think. I need to get better at in a nice way, showing off in a, and that's not necessarily what I want to do, but in saying actually I am, I am good at this stuff.

And I'm so good that other coaches come to me or other experts come to me to find out how to do things. I just need to get that across a bit more. But anyway, that's not what I was coming here to talk about. But I just find it really interesting that, like I said, this lady was on about authority posts as well as authenticity posts.

And I think I've been doing a lot of authenticity posts and a lot of like, you know, like I joke all the time. I'm not very professional on the podcast. I, you know, I am good, fun. I like to make things light. But maybe people don't take my credibility in, in the way that they need to take it because of those things.

So anyway, I feel like this is turning into a strategy session for my brand, which it's not, but yeah, like, anyway, it was just really interesting. So it made me think, and I don't know where that ridiculousness has just made you think. And are you doing enough of it? Are you telling people how amazing you are?

Because I know I'm not, I'm not doing it enough, so it's something I need to work on. Okay. That, isn't what today's episode about fyi. So today's episode actually is about scaling up. Obviously I've had my business in total seven years. I've had the online business for about I always forget. I should probably check the facts one day 4-5 years, maybe four years, three years.

I don't know. Anyway. And obviously during that time, things have scaled up. My brand is scaled. My awareness is scaled. My team is scaled. What we do has scaled, and I just wanted to do a podcast episode on what scaling up, looks like, and what some of the challenges are, because I don't know about you, but when I started, I thought if I could just get past this bit, if I could just do this bit, then everything will feel so much better.

I'll feel so much more confident, so much more organized. I won't be as busy. I won't feel as stressed. And I'm so sorry to tell you that it isn't quite as simple as that. It just, and I've talked about this before in the podcast, it doesn't get easier. It just gets different. And I just want to give you an idea of what scaling up looks like, and actually some of the things that you might want to consider when you're scaling up.

So, and there are some very different challenges. Now, just want to kind of show you what some of those challenges are. Do not get me wrong when I swapped this, not in a million years. I flippin love for, I do. I just want to let you know what some of those challenges might be. Okay. So the very first one is managing people.

Now, obviously when you just start and it's just, you, you don't have to manage anybody. I've obviously managed people in my past life. I've managed lots of people. I've managed huge teams of people. It is different now managing them within my business. And also I manage freelancers. All of my team, even the full-time ones are freelance.

Basically worked for me on a freelance basis. None of them are physically employed by me. That was just a decision that I chose to go with. I think probably from an admin point of view, I just couldn't bear the thought of actually employing somebody full-time in the business, which I know is going to be the next scale up and I will have to, but at this point I manage freelancers.

So obviously when you're starting off, you don't have people to manage and that can be tricky. So for instance, today, I am recording some podcasts and I'm recording some videos because one of my team who do the editing, Phil, who does the editing is going off on a holiday. So that obviously has an impact on me and my priorities and stuff, which is perfectly understandable.

Now allowed in holidays. I mean, they like to take them. I'm not keen. I'm joking. But yeah. So, you know, that's one thing, another thing is managing people how they work. So some people I've worked with have not been great. They've not given me stuff when I wanted it, or they'd been a bit slow in giving me stuff or it's not been at the quality I needed. And it's managing that and managing the fact of you're bringing them on and bringing them part of your team, trusting you, trusting you, trusting them that I'm trusting you for, you know, fair enough. There's lots of aspects and that, that is obviously different and causes new and different challenges.

The other thing that's interesting is I find that alongside juggling, sorry, managing people, I juggle a lot. So when you're managing people, they are doing work for you, which is lovely and wonderful. However, you need sight over all that work. So obviously I've got the team, but I know kind of hopefully at any one point what they're all dealing with and what they're working with.

And obviously some team members, I need to make sure that they have work because if they don't, I'll be paying them for nothing, which in some cases, I don't mind that, but obviously in an ideal world, you want to make sure that you're paying people, you know, for work they've done, but it relies on me.

Secondly, Like some processes I will do so much and then they will take the rest. But it doesn't mean I can forget about that process. I might have to pick something up at the end or I might have to remember something. So I find that now we got lots of lovely people working for me and I adore my team. I think they're amazing.

I'm also juggling a lot more things in my brain because it's like, I was just doing a lot of brainstorm yesterday about some things I want to organize. And I know that obviously I'm going to have to organize the first bit. I'm going to have to come up with the structure. I'm going to have to come up with the process, but then once I have someone else takes over, but it doesn't mean that that disappears off my brain altogether.

Obviously a thing about scaling up is you need processes. And I was very reluctant, not for any reason, just rubbish at this stuff. So my first team member, Katie tried, tried, tried so hard to get me focused and to use systems and put things in place. And I was just rubbish. And then it got to the point where I got another team member and another team member, and then a full-time team member.

And I have to bring these things in place. It just couldn't work, but I'm still learning. This is not done by any stretch of imagination. I am still bringing in processes all the time. So again, that's super important that when we talk about you kind of putting in some processes, even when it's just you, if you can, you're going to save yourself so much time later.

Whereas I didn't and therefore I was just well, I just have to now do all the processes. I'm just going through my list. I'm trying to put them in some vague order. We'll see. So I've put you spend your time doing different things. So the same way as you're juggling a lot, we do many different things now.

So whereas before at the beginning, it might've been very simple because we didn't do that much. And therefore, my focus is only on like the podcast, a bit of social media and the academy. Now, we will be juggling lots of other things. And therefore my focus is on other things and I'm doing different things.

Also, when I say, in fact, I know what I meant by that note as well though, is that I spend my time focusing on different areas in the sense of like said, I might not do the process, but I have to focus on what that process looks like and why we do it and what the need of it is and all of that sort of good stuff.

So I will focus on and spend time looking at a bigger picture and thinking a bit wider. Obviously just thought over the next few weeks or months. And now I think year ahead, I've put, you have to become really organized, which kind of goes along with the processes and the team. I've got to be organized because like I said, if I didn't get these things done fulfilled, go on holiday.

The podcast wouldn't come out. Well, it would, I'd have to edit it though, and I'd put more work on my plate and I wouldn't be as good, all those other reasons. So you do have to be organized and that's hard. Like when you're juggling a lot of things, that's not always easy, but what I always find is I bring myself back to center all the time.

So I will often sit. Well, as you know, I plan my days, and I plan my week, but I will often do a very quick like notes of everything that's going on in my world. And then like just quickly review where I am with everything. Also becoming a more organized thing means things like using Trello or slack or those kinds of systems that help you to stay organized. So at any one time we can see where we are with the podcast, or I can see where we are with booking guests for next year, for the academy to do training. Okay. What else do I got on my list? So the next thing I've got is you invest more. So I find that actually my other point that's staying here is you spend as much as you make.

Now. I'm not saying that's the case for everybody, but I have found that the people I go to, as I was talking about at the beginning of this, that lots of, you know, the people in the UK, I guess I've had some of the coaches come to me. I go to huge people and they cost money. And the reason I go and get training or support or coaching or mentorship through those people is because they are ahead of me, way ahead of me, where I want to be. And they are great connections. So I've had to invest more in that side of it. That's something that I've done the entire way through my business.

You should be with people that you look up to that you want to work with that inspire you, that motivate you, that you like, and you should define those people and work with them. And sometimes working with them looks like you're spending money with them. I'm the same Jasmine Star. I've bought her stuff. I remember social curator, Amy Porterfield, all those many years ago, I bought her course.

I've been in James Wedmore's next level. I've been in lots of different things. Sorry. I keep almost keep going to yawn, which is really bad, but it's about seven o'clock here. I've had a very busy day recording stuff. So I'm trying so hard to stay fully awake, and I don't want to keep pausing and stopping because it really affects like the flow and my flow.

Anyway, I'm going to like take a deep breath. And ignore the fact that I don't even say the word. So, yeah. So you do find yourself investing or I did investing more in bigger things. I have people who are ready to move to the next stage who'd come and join the 90 day program because that's a great way to get them to the next stage.

And when I see you spend as much as you make. I want you to remember that sometimes it's super easy to look at someone and think, gosh, look how much they must be making. I always do the math. I love that. Find a membership, find out how much it charges and then do the math. And then you go wowses. However, what you're not paying attention to there is their outgoings and my outgoings have gone up considerably as I've scaled my team, my systems, software, processes, like my, um, investing in other people, like all of that means that, you know, ads. I do ads. I pay for my sales pages to be created for me. All of that adds to the fact that you're spending more.

So even though you're making more, I have found that I spent more trying to start for that yawn again. If you're listening to this in the first in the morning, you're gonna think this is bad because it's the end of the day for me. And I'm a bit tired. Let me just check if I've said everything on my list.

Isn't. Yeah. Okay. So a couple of things that don't change, you don't stop having imposter syndrome. I am so very sorry to tell you, but you don't, you still feel every single stage who the hell am I? Someone's going to find me out. What am I thinking? Who did I think that I could do this? Every stage.

And I know people much higher stage than me who still think the same. So I think that, you need to realize that that might still be there. The other thing that I, that is kind of a problem and I guess still stays, but actually gets harder as it gets harder to say I'm a big deal. So when your, when I was like, just starting off and I was speaking locally, and then I would get picked up sort of nationally and then picked up internationally, it was, it was easier than to go.

Wow, look, look at this. I've been invited to do and look how people see me and view me and how brilliant is this. And that actually gets much harder to do now. It gets really hard to go. Yeah, it's a not a big deal. I hate it. But you know what I mean? Like, it gets harder to go. I'm good at what I do and come and learn with me or work with me or whatever.

And the other thing that doesn't change you still look at your competitors. You still look at other people. And I try very hard not to do this. And in fact, I have worked really hard at not looking at my phone because it's so true when it talks about the morning routine and that you get up. And the very first thing you do is look at your phone.

Then you see something on social that piss you off and you're like, 'Oh, how did they get to do that? Or why are they doing that? Or how are they looking so organised...