In today’s Q&A episode of the podcast, I’m answering a question from the fabulous Michelle about what the daily, weekly and monthly actions are that you need to tick off when you are starting a business.
This is a great conversation for us to have.
Let’s dive in!
Today’s question comes from the amazing Michelle Reid from Michelle Reid Feng Shui. You can find her on Facebook at Michelle Reid Feng Shui.
Michelle asked:
“Hey Tash, I understand there are actions that we need to take each day to work and grow our business. When you first start in business and don’t have any experience, what are the key actions to do daily, weekly and monthly?”
What a great question, Michelle.
My answer isn’t going to be particularly great in the first instance, because it totally depends.
If you’re first starting out in business and you’re not particularly experienced or confident in your ability to deliver for your clients, then I would say you need to develop your skillset and experience first.
It might be that your focus when you’re first starting out is getting lots and lots of experience working with clients – whether that be paying clients or non-paying clients.
If you’re really confident in your ability to deliver but you don’t know how to market, then you’re probably going to need to learn some of those marketing activities – you’re going to need to practise.
If you want to have video as a core part of your marketing strategy but you don’t love doing video and you’re not very good at it, then you want to practise that more often, because it’s going to be part of your ongoing strategy.
It really does depend. However, I do like to have a consistent and balanced approach to both mindset and strategy during the week.
What I’m going to do is give you my example of how to have a good balance between mindset and strategy on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
I’ll also share with you how to tailor your daily, weekly and monthly actions to what is important and a priority for your business.
Let’s start with mindset.
I think that this is something that can be very overlooked when you’re first starting a business. It’s so often pushed aside as something that you’ll deal with when it comes up.
For me, one of the things that helped me to get very successful very quickly in my business is my daily, weekly and monthly actions to nurturing my mindset and paying attention to those negative thoughts, feelings and beliefs, and those limiting beliefs that popped up throughout my journey as a startup.
One of the big things that I’ve read is that there’s no personal development journey quite like starting a business.
I would agree, it is one of the most challenging things you can do, but it’s also one of the most inspiring and life-changing things that you can do.
The personal development and personal growth that happens from studying business is really powerful and amazing.
It can be a really joyful part of that journey as you go, so long as you’ve got a focus on it.
Don’t let the mindset stuff be the stuff that’s constantly the burden on you.
Make sure that you embrace the mindset, personal development and growth part of starting a business.
The minute that you decide that you’re not a finished product yet and you still have lots to uncover and work through, that process can become really joyful.
If you decide that you’ve done all the personal development work before and now you’re completely perfect, that’s when the mindset stuff gets really hairy when it pops up.
The things that I would recommend to do on a daily basis when you’re in startup is to write down your goals and track your results.
That’s something I’ve done since day one of my business.
I write down my goal every day and track my results at the end of each day.
Tracking my results at the end of each day has changed and developed over the years.
At first I just tracked my income for each day.
Lots of people really resist this in startup because they know that the won’t be having money coming in daily.
Instantly they’ve made how they feel about their business reliant on the external results.
That is huge mindset work to uncover. That is huge stuff to work through because there are going to be times in your business where you’re not going to have results that are what you want, you’re going to have less-than-ideal results for things, and you’re going to feel like you’ve done all the work and it’s not reflected in your income.
If you want to set yourself up to have that knock you off your perch and feel terrible after that happens to you every time in your business, then fine, don’t track the negatives and don’t track the zeros. But if you want to set yourself up so that you still feel good even when the result doesn’t necessarily reflect what you think it should, then track your income every single day from the minute that you start your business.
You can also start tracking other things.
I love tracking what three things are that I did that day to move my business forward. It doesn’t have to be outcomes, it can also be the outputs (like what outputs I’ve generated).
I would recommend writing down your goals every day and tracking your results every day.
Then on a weekly basis, one of the things that I’ve done very consistently is journaling.
Woman journalling as part of her daily, weekly and monthly actions in business start-up
I don’t journal just weekly, I’d probably journal in-depth three times a week, but I have a weekly date with my journaling coach and I actually do one-to-one journaling pretty much every single week in my business.
I have journaled on a weekly basis consistently from starting my business until today. In the last seven years, there has not been a week where I haven’t journaled – I have always journaled at least once a week.
Just giving yourself that time and space to pay attention to your thoughts and feelings, write some things down, see how things are going, and document and allow that free flow of thought onto the page, is such a powerful practise.
It really does help with my mindset.
The thing that I would recommend monthly is a monthly review and check-in.
I do this from a strategy perspective, but it also includes a mindset component.
I have a CEO date with myself at the end of every single month to review how everything’s gone – what have my results been?
Then I also look at:
- What have I created? How do I feel about that?
- What did I spend? How do I feel about that?
- What did I put into the business? How do I feel about that?
It’s not just looking at what the result is, it’s also looking at how I feel about that and incorporating the mindset work.
A monthly review is a really fabulous thing to incorporate because it does give you that time and space again to just see how you feel about your business journey and how it’s going.
One of the things that it’s really helped me with is when I don’t hit my goal. At the end of each month, if I haven’t hit my goal, it would be easy for me to just put myself down and move on to the next month, but when I actually stop and do that very structured review and pay attention to how I feel about those things, it allows me to review through the lens of love and NOT just look for doubling my income goal over and over again.
Rather than setting these big stretch goals for myself and being disappointed and depressed when things don’t go to plan and I don’t hit them, what I can do is in that monthly review look at what I HAVE achieved and what I HAVE done.
It’s the whole concept of gratitude, and focusing on what is showing me that this business is succeeding.
Even though I may not have achieved my goal for the month, I know that I’ve moved forward, I know that I’m getting closer, and I know where I can focus my energy and attention next month to really maximise those results.
That’s my suggestion for mindset daily, weekly and monthly actions.
- Daily – write down your goals and track your results
- Weekly – some kind of journaling practise
- Monthly – overview
On the strategy side, this is where it gets very much dependent on what the specific goal for you is and what the area that you want to focus on developing consistently is.
One thing I would put into daily, weekly or monthly actions, depending on where you’re at, is learning.
I think we often underestimate the time and energy that goes into learning things in our businesses. It’s been a very strong focus of mine as I’ve grown my business.
I am a lifelong learner.
I love:
- Doing courses
- Listening to podcasts
- Listening to audiobooks
- Going to webinars
I really love learning about business, myself, mindset, and health and wellbeing.
I love learning from how other people do business and getting insight into behind the scenes, and I love learning about the really detailed execution, as well as some big picture things about business as well.
For me, I actually incorporate learning daily, still to this day, in my business strategy.
I think for a lot of people there can sometimes be this feeling that you shouldn’t be consuming so much, and instead should be creating more. It definitely can be a form of self-sabotage when you over-consume and under-create, but I have a balance between consuming and creating every day.
There are also so many rules about learning and consuming, but I want to give you permission to explore and play with what works best for you.
I know what works best for me is when I consume and learn first thing in the morning.
I listen to podcasts as I walk in the morning, I often will listen to a module of a course that I’m doing while I’m in the shower and I can think about it, and then I will re-listen to that module and take notes at my desk later on, and I will usually have a fun little learning session on a Friday afternoon.
Consuming in the mornings is amazing because when I then sit down to work in my business, I’m really inspired, really fired up and I’ve got lots of ideas that I want to play with.
In my first 90 minutes sitting down to work in my business, I will often start by doing a big brain dump of all the things that have come up for me in my morning inspiration and learning time that I’ve had as I’ve gone for my walk and had my shower and got ready for my day.
It might be that you want to incorporate learning daily (I know I have a lot of time freedom now in my business so I can do that daily learning and it is something that I prioritise because it really fills my cup and it makes me feel like I’m in the right zone).
If I can learn something every single day and be in that learning space consistently, then I feel like I’m in heaven. Little 12 year old Tash is so pumped up by the time I’ve got through that little learning segment of the day.
That is something that I do for my own personal development, as well as my professional development, and also to create a business that’s really aligned with my strengths and my gifts.
If that’s not a priority for you, you might decide that that’s a part of your weekly strategy.
Once a week you have a dedicated time to learning and sitting down and doing the modules of the course that you’ve purchased or listening to that audiobook or reading a business book.
You want to be very strategic about the type of thing that you’re learning.
If you already have all the strategy that you need, and you know exactly what you need to do for the next year in your business, don’t go and buy more strategy courses. But if you want to have that learning component, maybe it’s time to buy a course on mindset or to jump in and join some kind of group program or to do some work with someone on something that’s slightly different. Maybe it’s advancing your skills in your modality if you want to really refine and create something that’s even deeper.
Maybe it’s learning skills outside of your modality.
One of the most powerful things that I ever did was buy a course on copywriting.
I work mostly in online marketing and business marketing, and I love helping people in start up and creating and launching courses, yet I actually did a course in copywriting.
Copywriting is not something that I teach at all, but I found that learning about the different methods and styles of copywriting really helped me to filter all of that and see how I could better serve my clients and my audience with my take on copywriting because actually, one of the big things that I learned from one of the copywriting courses that I did was that a lot of those old school masculine strategies for writing copy, writing ads and writing offers was not something that I wanted to teach to my audience.
I wanted to find a way for them to still get the same results without having to dial up people’s fear points, creating false scarcity or creating authority when you didn’t have connection.
For me, even learning things that are out of the box of my normal modality meant that I could bring something else to the table.
I’ve also done short courses on Emotional Freedom Technique, and I then decided that I wanted to do my EFT practitioners qualification. I don’t teach EFT or anything like that, I do use it a little bit in some of my program, but it was just something that I felt like would bring another layer to the type of work that I could do with my clients and it was a fun project for me to do in 2020.
Find what works for you.
It might be one of your daily, weekly or monthly actions, but I do think incorporating learning into your business strategy consistently is powerful because you’re constantly growing and finding new ideas and finding ways to incorporate those into your business – whether it’s your marketing, your delivery for your clients, the way that you support and nurture yourself, or the way that you support and nurture your clients.
I’m a big fan of leaning so I had to chuck that one in there.
When it comes to actual tangible strategy in your business, for the daily piece, I generally like to find ways to do all four parts of my client attraction process.
My client attraction process is reach, nurture, lead generation and conversion.
Reach is reaching new audience. Nurture is nurturing people – usually it’s content or value. Lead generation is inviting people to consider something or jump onto my mailing list to learn more about a product or service. Conversion is where I make the sale.
These days in my business, it’s all much more automated and my job is to just check on those things. But in startup, you can absolutely choose one activity in each of those four things to do each day, then you know that you’re growing your business.
What’s one thing you can do to reach more people today?
Maybe it’s posting in a few Facebook groups, scheduling up some posts onto your social media, putting yourself forward for some interviews or inviting some other people to be interviewed on your social media platforms.
There are lots of different ways that you can reach more people.
Just pick one thing you’re going to do today to reach more people.
The next one is nurture. What can you do today to nurture your existing audience?
Could you:
- Give them a tip?
- Create a really juicy piece of content?
- Invite people to ask you questions and answer them?
- Send an email out to your audience, ask them a market research question and strike up a conversation with some people?
Find ways that you can nurture your audience. Just pick one thing each day.
If you nurture your audience every day, and you can do it in lots of different ways each day, then you’re going to be starting to warm up that audience.
The third one is lead generation. For me, lead generation can take on many forms.
Something you could do on a daily basis for lead generation is you could do an offer into a Facebook community, or for lead generation, you could do an offer on your own social media platforms, talk about a product or service that you have on Instagram stories and invite people to reach out if they were interested in having a conversation with you.
For me, lead generation is where you’re striking up a one-to-one conversation or inviting people to find out more, and inviting people to take that action where you can meet them with that action.
A lead generation strategy could be offering free 15 minute chats about one of your programs. You could invite people on social media stories to ask you questions about your program, and then when they ask you the question, you can answer it on stories, but you can also strike up a conversation with them one-to-one – that’s generating a lead.
You could also promote a webinar, and that webinar is getting people onto your mailing list and therefore it’s getting them as a lead for whatever you’re promoting on that webinar. Or you could promote a static standalone freebie that would also get people on your mailing list and generate leads.
The fourth one is conversion. A lot of people think that they can’t convert every single day… but you can take actions to improve your conversion rates every single day.
What is one thing you could do to convert someone today?
Could it be that you need to:
- Follow up with someone who was interested in working with you?
- Reply to a private message?
- Send messages to people who voted on a story that you did?
- Reply to some people who have commented on something of yours on social media?
There are definitely things you can do every single day to improve conversion, if not actually convert.
On a weekly basis, the one thing that I feel is a non-negotiable is creating your juicy content and mailing your list.
Whether you do a written blog, video blog, podcast or anything like that, getting some juicy piece of content out each week to your mailing list, is definitely the bare minimum and something that you want to get working as quickly as possible in startup.
Another little bonus thing I would put in weekly is your follow-ups.
If you’ve done my client attraction challenge before or you’ve listened to my Tashmas, is I have follow-up Fridays. I have a spreadsheet of people that I need to follow-up with and every Friday I dedicate 25 minutes to doing my follow-ups.
Some people I think could absolutely justify doing an hour of follow-ups a week.
Make sure you’ve got that appointment with yourself every single week to do those follow-ups, you’ve got a system to record who you need to follow-up with, and do those follow-ups. I think it’s a really powerful way of plucking that low hanging fruit and making sure that you are doing all that you need to do in order to maximise conversion.
The money is in the follow-up.
How many times have you bought something the first time you saw it? How many times have you bought something the 10th time that you saw it? We don’t necessarily make impulse buying decisions, especially when deciding to buy a service or a premium product in the market.
You need to take responsibility for following-up with people.
That would definitely go into weekly for me.
Then on a monthly basis, I would say having one high connection, high conversion lead magnet.
For me, that’s webinars in startup. Every time people ask me what the best opt in for startups is, what the best way to start practising talking about models is, or what the best way to get a price increase out there and maximise the number of people who buy it, my answer is always the same. Webinars, webinars, webinars.
When you’re starting up, it’s really good for practise at speaking, presenting to your audience, conversion, connection, and growing your email list. It ticks so many boxes.
Every month, I would be running a webinar without fail.
I say often, if I started my business over from scratch today and I had to start a fresh brand new business, I would start by running a webinar every single month, and then everything else flows from there.
A couple of things that don’t necessarily fit into daily, weekly or monthly actions, but I do want to make sure you’re not missing out on, is you want to make sure that you’re delivering.
If you’ve got work to do for your clients, you’ve got reports to write for them, or you’ve got client facing sessions, make sure you prioritise that the fastest way to dry up new leads is to stop delivering for your existing clients.
If you are under-delivering for your existing clients, you are energetically going to be closed off to new ones.
You want to make sure that you’re definitely delivering great service for your clients.
The other thing I would say is also the high connection, high conversion strategies.
If you’ve got time in your week, make sure that you fill that time with high connection, high conversion strategies that are going to grow your business.
Thank you, Michelle, for a great question. It is a little bit of a tricky one to answer because it’s different for different people, but hopefully this little framework has given you some insight into things you could be focusing on or things maybe you could be letting go that are bright shiny objects that I haven’t even discussed on this podcast today. Those are my daily, weekly and monthly actions.
For everyone reading, I would love to know what you thought of this episode and if it’s created any light bulb moments for you or if you’ve got any follow up questions.
As always, come to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, use #podcastaha, let me know you’ve been reading episode number 251, ask any questions, share any light bulbs and let’s continue the conversation over in the Heart-Centred group. Please share which of these daily, weekly and monthly actions you like the most.
If you want to ask a question for me to answer on the podcast, you can do so here: tashcorbin.com/question
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
