In today’s episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, we’re going to talk about what the ONE thing is that will really amplify your business…
Let’s jump straight in!
No matter how many different questions people ask me about their business, there’s one desire that underpins all of them: they want to speed the process up.
We want to amplify our business – we want to get it rocking and rolling as quickly, easily and efficiently as possible.
We want to get to our destination quickly to amplify not only our results in our business, but also the reach and conversion that we have.
When I think about “amplifying,” I think about wanting to:
- Reach more people
- Convert more of those people into paying clients
- Achieve bigger results (like making more money or funding more projects)
The one thing you need to do in order to amplify your business, is you need to SIMPLIFY… you need to simplify in order to amplify.
There are a few different ways that you can simplify…
1. Simplify products and services
Simplify scaling and growth in order to amplify business success
The number one way to simplify is to have fewer products.
At the start of 2017, I had over 30 different products… I had 30 different paid ways that people were able to work with me, get support from me, and learn business from me.
That was just overwhelming!
By keeping my time divided between selling and delivering all of these things, I was actually slowing down my business growth.
I could see it really clearly at the Heart-Centred Business Conference in September 2017.
At that conference, and in the weeks after, I had this overwhelming reality check that I was spreading myself thin. I was consistently looking for new ways that I could work with people, and new things that I could sell to my potential clients.
In order for me to be able to amplify my results, reach, and conversion, and get my business growing faster, I needed to simplify my product mix.
I have done that over a period of time.
I’ve shut down several courses, I’ve stopped selling books, I’ve stopped selling short-term masterminds and planning things, and I no longer do single paid workshops.
I decided to pare it down to my key service offerings.
I now allow myself to play with short-term temporary new things from time to time when those things are working.
Even now, I can see that in the times when I’m experimenting with new things, I’m slowing down the growth of the existing things.
Ultimately, if I had thousands and thousands of women joining Take Off and the Heart-Centred Business Academy every single year, I would not even be tempted to create new things.
Yes, the entrepreneurial brain is always working, and I always say that there are new ways that I can be supporting people, but my biggest goal is to get my business serving as many women as possible, and really nailing that multi-million dollar a year income goal.
In order to do that, my best pathway is to stay focused on a few things, rather than spreading myself among many.
Maybe you also feel like it’s time for you to simplify your product mix.
It can be tough closing some things down. While the overwhelming majority of people were fine with it and totally understood, I’ve had people get angry at me.
I had people who thought I was completely crazy for not continuing to run things (particularly when I closed 100 Days of Colour, which was my income tracking and money mindset program).
I had people telling me that they would pay three times as much for that program if it meant that I would keep it open. Whilst I really loved their enthusiasm, I knew I needed to take a break at least for a year to see what life was like without offering this additional program.
I still haven’t made a decision about whether it will come back or not.
Many people said to me that I should keep it open and just have the people who were already part of it rejoin so that I don’t have to do any marketing. But I can say, hand on heart, I know that even that time holding space and connecting and delivering for people in that space, if I invested that time more wisely into my core service offerings, my business would be more successful… and that has totally come true.
In the time that I haven’t been running it, I’ve been able to really focus down way more strategically.
I’ve dedicated more time to delivering and setting up the automated sales processes for launching my core offerings and that has been much better for my business.
Fewer products might be one area where you need to simplify.
2. Simplify people and teams
Another area of simplification is to have fewer people in your business.
As a connector and someone who really loves having a team and the social element that comes with that, this is a big one for me.
Upon reflection on my business, I saw that I had the outlook of “the more the merrier” on my team.
But in fact, what I was doing was over-complicating my business.
It wasn’t just a matter of having fewer people on my team… it was also having fewer people report to me.
I’ve made a conscious effort to use my time wisely and NOT fall into the trap of spending more time managing others than I am spending showing up and being the talent in my own business.
For some people, simplifying your business in order to amplify it may mean that you need fewer people reporting to you, or you shift the way that those services are delivered.
I know for myself, there were several tasks that were being done by people in my team that could have been done much more efficiently by automations and systems (things like VIP onboarding, sending welcome emails, invoicing, etc.).
I realised that I wanted to surround myself with this big team because I was feeling lonely and I had other relationship needs that weren’t being met socially.
What that was doing was starting to slow things down and create too many handover points for different things in my business.
In order to amplify I needed to simplify the structure of my team as well as reduce the number of different people who were involved in my business.
3. Simply processes and steps
Another way that you may need to simplify in your business is to make things have fewer steps.
That could mean different things. It could be having fewer steps for:
- Your customers to come and purchase from you
- Delivering something or getting something done
How often do you stop and look at all of the processes happening in your business? How often do you take the time to truly question whether you need to include a step?
I’ll give you a really juicy example…
Every time I was setting up a webinar in my business, I would:
1. Create an event for that webinar
2. Post it onto my Facebook page
3. Share it into the Heart-Centred community
4. Schedule extra posts into the event to remind people to sign up
5. Get my ads person to put some money into making sure the event was seen by all the people engaged with my page in the last 90 days
Part of creating an event for a webinar was that I needed to create an additional five pieces of copy just for us to have that event. There was the copy in the event itself, then all of the information in the description, and there was also copy for sharing the event into different spaces, as well as a post to go inside the event.
The overall effect of all of that work was an extra 15 to 20 people registered for each webinar.
When I looked at that part of the process, I considered if I were to put that time and money into ramping up the Facebook ads instead, what would be the return on investment there?
It was a no-brainer to take that out of our process.
Now when I create webinars, I don’t create an event for it on my Facebook page. Sure, there might be 15 to 20 people who missed out on that. But can I get those 15 to 20 people other ways and make sure that they see that there’s a webinar coming up? Absolutely!
Have a look at all of the steps that are involved in your processes.
Review one process at a time, once a week.
Look at onboarding clients, VIPs and people into courses, and your email sequences, the way that you set up your newsletters, how you do your content each week… Whatever it might be – I want you to review it through the lens of:
- Are all these steps actually necessary?
- What is the return on investment from each of those steps?
- Can we lose a few of them?
We’re doing this in my business at the moment and there are lots of steps that we are cutting out.
There is a lot of anxiety for me about missing out on something, but ultimately, I have data in front of me, as well as my gut feeling on what’s really powerful and what’s actually not working.
I’d much rather simplify these things as much as possible.
4. Simplify freebie offerings
One last thing that you might want to do less of in your business (and this might be quite controversial) is consider offering fewer freebies.
I understand that it’s so amazing for us to be able to create free resources and be of value to our audiences regardless of whether they purchase from us or not.
I know the overarching theme out there is to create this trust cycle with people and to be able to get people a taste of working with us. But I got sucked into thinking that every single podcast needs its own unique content upgrade… and by the end of 2018, there were so many freebies on my website, with so many broken links, that the customer service implications of every single freebie were phenomenal.
When we did the big website makeover in 2019, one of my big decisions was we were going to eliminate all of those freebies and start again.
There were a few people who were upset and worried they’re going to miss out on freebies and have grabbed them all before I delete them, but ultimately, it has been so good not only for me, but also for people who follow me in my audience.
Part one of my simplification process in 2017 was a realisation that I was producing:
- A podcast episode every week
- A video blog of a different topic every week
- An interview every two weeks
- Three to four Facebook Lives on my Facebook page every single week
What I was doing for my audience was making them run around the internet following me to all these different places to make sure they got all the free value that I had to offer.
Instead, what I do now is I record one video podcast episode that gets shared as an audio podcast episode, a video you can watch on Youtube, AND a blog post on my website.
I also do one Facebook Live a week that is related to the podcast episode.
What I’ve done is I’ve taught my audience that they can chill out and get everything delivered to their inbox in my weekly newsletter.
The overwhelming feeling of relief for me not having to produce all of that content was huge, but was equally matched by the overwhelming relief that I got expressed back to me by my audience that had so much less content they needed to consume from me each week.
This was such a big eye-opener for me.
It’s not just fewer freebies in terms of fewer opt-ins and lead magnets, but it’s also fewer different free pieces of content.
Instead think about how you can be more strategic, aligned and structured rather than just spewing free stuff out onto the internet all of the time.
This also holds true with webinars. I recognised that I was starting to creep back into that belief that I needed to create a fresh webinar every time I ran one. Yet my VIP clients and Take Off students heard me saying to them, “Just run the same webinar again. If it works, nail it then scale it, and run it again at scale,”… and I wasn’t taking my own advice!
I was switching out webinars in my launches, and looking for new webinar topics to be running all of the time.
I needed to simplify by re-using and redoing the things that I knew worked effectively.
For the last few months, I’ve been rolling out the same webinars on repeat in different ways.
There may be a different focus point or different ways that I express it, and there’s usually slightly improved slides, but I’m scaling my audience larger and larger every time I do it. Now I have a set of webinars that I just cycle through, improve and scale, over and over again.
The need for me to come up with new webinars is totally gone and creates so much space in my business.
The one thing I would say out of all of this is: You know that when you focus on one thing, you are much more likely to get that thing sorted, finished, nailed and scaled.
We know this. I’m sure you can see examples in your past of where this has been the case.
I want to invite you to do a very powerful review of your business.
Where can you have fewer products, fewer people, fewer steps or fewer freebies?
Think about it from:
- Your client’s perspective
- A business coach’s perspective
- Your team’s perspective
- Your own perspective
Would it make it easier and simpler for your customers/team/business coach to be able to support you if you were to simplify?
That creates an opportunity for your business to be amplified.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
I’d love to hear your podcast “aha” from this one, so come on over to the Heart-Centred Facebook group, use #podcastaha, let me know you’ve been reading episode number 193, and pop any questions or comments you have there.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
