Episode 451: How do you know whether to be patient or take more action?

I’ve got a fabulous listener question for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, which is all about finding the balance between choosing to be patient and feeling the need to take more action.

I really want to dive into this one because I think it’s going to be super helpful for a lot of people.

Let’s dive straight in…

EPISODE 451: Listen using the player below, or click the links to your fave platform to subscribe and listen over there:

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Today’s question comes from the fabulous Sarah Lee Parker. You can find Sarah Lee at sarahleeparker.com.au and on Instagram @callistra.

Sarah Lee asks:

“How do I stay patient when progressing through the stages of business?

In the early stages of business, you are validating your foundations.

Do I have:

• A validated niche?
• A message that works?
• An offer that people are hungry to buy?
• A core marketing strategy that attracts and converts people within that niche into that offer?

We are validating those very core business foundations.

The next phase of business is starting to scale up the marketing side – so shifting the client attraction process from a one-to-one process into a one-to-many process.

The next stage is then scaling your delivery by leveraging your time delivering group programs, courses and memberships.

They aren’t always the stages that everyone goes through, but they are the stages that are proven to be the fastest and most profitable for most people.

They’re generally the stages that I refer to when I talk about going through the stages of business.

What you were talking about, Sarah Lee, was in relation to that validation stage of your business. And that is actually the answer to whether you should be sitting and waiting, or taking more action. Because ultimately, if you’ve got the capacity and the time and space to take more action, I would say take that action.

If you are itchy to take action in your business, take it.

The problem is that a lot of people take action that is not relevant or helpful to furthering them for the stage of business they’re in.

If you’re in the validation stage of your business, you’re not moving your business any further forward by posting randomly on social media.

If you’re in the validation phase of your business, you’re not moving your business forward by creating more free resources, by creating more online courses that you might sell sometime into the future, and by reviewing and updating your website.

What we need to be doing is connecting with people within your niche one-on-one and validating those business foundations.

If the action that you want to take is not talking to someone one-on-one, it’s not actually appropriate for the stage of business.

If the action that you want to take is not validating your niche, message, offer or marketing process one-on-one, it’s not appropriate for the validation stage of your business, and it is just that busy work.

I’m not sure how recently I’ve shared this on the podcast, but when I first started my business, I dove in full-time immediately. I didn’t transition out of a full-time job running my business as a side hustle.

Instead, I quit my job and started my business.

Because of that, one of the resources I had in plentiful supply was my time. That meant that I didn’t want to sit around waiting for things to happen. I didn’t want to just sit and wait for those external forces to start taking hold and getting momentum.

I had a lot of time on my hands, and I needed to use that time with strategic action.

That’s exactly what I would recommend for you as well.

If you have time as a resource that’s available to you, I wouldn’t recommend just sitting around and waiting for the results to roll in.

Use that time strategically.

In a nutshell, that’s my answer to your question. If you’ve got time and you want to use that on your business, I don’t recommend that you just sit around and wait for results to roll in. But I want you to be strategic with the use of that time.

One of the ways that we validate inside the Take Off program (of which Sarah Lee is a member so she’ll be familiar with this) is through our avatar interview process.

That’s where you interview people who are within your niche, and that gives you insight and validation for your niche, your messaging, your offers and your marketing processes. It also generates leads for your business, because some of those interviewees can turn into paying clients.

But that’s only one form of validation. That’s only one way that you validate in your business.

What I would be doing is looking for other ways to get that validation one-on-one. And really, the juiciest part of your client attraction process that we want to be validating as much as possible is one-to-one nurture and one-to-one invitations.

The reason why is that they are the two where most people get stuck and struggle to find their zone, and they’re the two that most contribute to making early sales as well.

It’s a win/win.

You get that part of your client attraction process nailed, and you also maximise the chance of your validation resulting in sales.

I even have a sexy little bingo sheet where I’ve gamified one-to-one nurture and one-to-one invite in the client attraction process. You can grab that for free here: CLICK ME

Just to give you a little idea, I want to circle back to my early days in my business.

As I said, I had a lot of time on my hands. That was my most plentiful resource because I started my business full-time. I didn’t have any other responsibilities, so I validated my business through avatar interviews and market research, but I did it in dozens of other ways as well.

Every day I set myself a goal of connecting with five people from my niche one-on-one in some way.

I was in Facebook communities where my ideal clients were hanging out, and I looked for people who were asking questions that I could help with. I looked for people who were my ideal clients and found ways to support them, encourage them, or practically and tangibly help them in a one-on-one capacity every single day.

I’d also set myself a goal of helping five paying clients every single week.

But I didn’t care how little they paid me.

From the very early days of my business, I knew that one of the things that would be the most powerful at building my own confidence in delivering my services (but also my confidence in marketing them) would be to have lots and lots of clients I’d worked with. So I didn’t care how little they paid me, I just went out and got myself a bunch of clients.

The way that I did that was by offering very, very discounted single sessions to work with me. I started out with some of them being $25 (imagine me doing that today! Probably not the smartest choice for me now). It was something that I did very consistently in the early stages of my business, and it resulted in a lot of validation, a lot of sales, a lot of upsells, and a lot of my initial clients.

It also got me a lot of referrals, it got me the first people on my mailing list, and it grew my social media following very quickly.

What I would recommend is to look for things that are going to validate the core foundations of your business one-on-one as quickly and effectively as possible.

Take action on those. Don’t sit around waiting.

Some of the other things that I did to validate in the early stages was that I offered free single sessions for people to work with me.

If I saw someone who had a question or was working on something that was in my zone of genius, I reached out to them in the comments and offered to do a free 30-minute session with those people.

I also made that offer on my own socials and in some of the Facebook groups that I belonged to.

After a couple of weeks, I realised that it was not appropriate for my market. One of the reasons was that because I was working in the online business space, people were a bit suspicious of free offers. But in a lot of niches, it still works really beautifully.

I offered a lot of free help to people. If I saw people asking questions, I would go and find the answer for them, even if I didn’t know what the answer was.

If it needed someone to walk them through something, I offered to be that person to walk them through it.

As I said, I also played with these low-cost single sessions as a way to build my confidence in delivering my services, build my network, get referrals, and get some of those early testimonials from people who had worked with me.

That was a very effective process.

Some of the one-to-one nurture that I did was I offered one-on-one for people who replied to emails to my mailing list to help them with something specific.

I’d send an email out to my mailing list even when there were only 12 people on it, and I’d say, “I have today free to help you because you’re on my mailing list, so reply and let me know what you’re working on, or let me know what you’re stuck on, and if we need to jump onto a free call, we can, or if I can help you with a resource, I’ll create it and send it to you”.

That’s how I wrote some of my first blog posts, and I then sent those blog posts to those people directly with some follow-up questions.

Some of those people became paying clients.

You can see I was looking for as many different ways as possible to be helping people for free, to be building resources that people wanted for free, but doing it in a very one-to-one way.

I was also finding as many ways as possible to build my confidence in the delivery of my services, but also in the marketing of them.

Hopefully, that’s helpful and has set the fire off for you, Sarah Lee.

I don’t think that there’s ever a time to just sit and wait and be patient if you’ve got time and capacity to be growing your business.

But what I do think we need to be very mindful of is choosing what action we’re going to take and being strategic with that action.

If you’re looking for ways in that early stage of business to get that validation fast-tracked, I would definitely recommend you grab my bingo game so you can play with some of those one-to-one nurture and one-to-one invite strategies: CLICK ME

I’d also recommend you get creative yourself and come up with all the different ways that you can validate those foundations, your niche, your messaging, your offers and your client attraction process one-on-one.

If you’re not sure where to start, make sure to check out my Fast-Track Your Business training: tashcorbin.com/fasttrack

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.

Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.