Ep 133 Transcript: Why Your Next Growth Move May Already Be Inside Your Business

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors in spelling or inaccuracies in the spoken words.

Shauna Lynn Simon (01:50.942)

Welcome to the Real Woman Real Business Podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And today I want to challenge something that a lot of us have sort of just accepted as being true because enough people say something, you start to believe it. But I want to challenge this idea a little bit, and that is that the idea that if your revenue isn't where you want it to be, that the answer is simply more marketing. And don't get me wrong, yes, sometimes that is the answer, but

A lot of times we think, if I just throw more content at this, more visibility, I just need to post more frequently on social media, I need to run some more ads, I need to be on more platforms. And it's all about more, more, more. But what if that's the wrong way to be looking at things? What if the growth you're actually looking for is already inside your business and adding more marketing is actually gonna just pull your attention away from the things that are already working and the things that are going to drive your revenue.

Let me tell you about a client that I worked with recently. And I'm going to share you something with from my own business as well. Because I think that together these kind of tell a story that a lot of Accidental CEOs really need to hear. Now, if you are new to this podcast, I'm going to explain what an Accidental CEO is. If you're not new, you're I'm going to be a bit of a broken record for a moment. But an Accidental CEO is someone who followed more passion than plan. You are great at your craft. You have built something.

Very real, very strong. It's a legitimate, very real business, but it's running you down because what you've done is you've built it on an incomplete foundation. It's not a scalable foundation. It was built on a whole lot of survival systems, on a whole lot of hustle, on a whole lot of grit. But now we need the structure to be able to support it in order to make it something that's actually sustainable, that can actually be scaled. And so this falls across.

Numerous areas of your business, be it marketing or actually being able to deliver the services that you offer. Maybe it's the administrative stuff just keeps getting behind on things. And it's because as an Accidental CEO, you tend to wear too many hats. Even if you have a team of staff, a lot of things are still running through you. And we don't have that real structure in place to allow you to be able to step into the true intentional CEO role that you probably want to step into, but it hasn't exactly panned out the way that you would like it to.

Shauna Lynn Simon (04:08.514)

So I started working with a client a little while ago, and I'm going to keep her information anonymous because of course I do like to protect the privacy of my clients, but I'm going to tell you that she has been in business for over 15 years. This is not someone who is new to business. She has built something very real. She has a whole team of staff. She has loyal clients, she has consistent revenue. One thing that we identified though is that she doesn't feel as though her revenue is predictable. It always shows up every month, but she never feels as though it's actually predictable.

So we worked together to help to eliminate some of the ambiguity that she was feeling around her financial numbers. And we took a look at the business. And from the outside, you know, the business definitely looks like it's working. When you get onto the inside, it actually is working, but not as smoothly as she would like it to, because again, there's certain things that were just kind of hidden to her. She was exhausted. She was worn down. She was simply carrying too much.

And she came to me with a feeling that a lot of you are going to recognize. And that is that sense that she needed to do more in order to grow. The money that was coming into the business, the money she had left over every month, the money that she was paying herself never quite felt like enough. And so we did dig into, you know, what kind of reserves does she have? What kind of cash flow does she have? But the challenge that she was facing month after month was finding the capacity to actually grow the business.

And again, she thought growing the business meant I need to take on a whole bunch more jobs. I need to do more marketing. I need to do more things. I need to do more, more, more. But the thought of doing more and adding just even one more thing to her plate was absolutely exhausting. It was just too much. So I did what I normally do at the start of any sort of coaching relationship. And that is that we pulled back the layers. We looked at where the revenue was actually coming from in her business and how the business was actually running. And we looked at what was going on underneath all of the

busyness that she was experiencing, what is actually happening day to day, what is actually driving things forward, how much of it does require her to be involved in it. Are there things that we can start eliminating sooner than later? So that's a big part of it is that I am more about let's eliminate things rather than add things to our plate. As a creative entrepreneur, which most of my Accidental CEOs are, it's we we're great at ideas. We're really good at ideas. Let's be real. We are so good

Shauna Lynn Simon (06:31.368)

at ideas, but we don't have time to execute on every single idea that we have. And the problem is that we just kind of keep stacking them on top of each other and we get things kind of half done because it seems like a good idea, or maybe we took a webinar or a course or something and someone told us to do something. We're like, yeah, that sounds good. It worked for this person. It should work for me. And we just keep layering upon layer upon layer of busy work. And so we took a look at what she actually needed to be doing. What are the things that she's doing that's working well? What are the things that we can make a little bit more streamlined?

And underneath all of the busyness, we actually uncovered something that was really incredibly interesting. And this required us to dig into not only her processes, but also her financials. What was really interesting is that her marketing spend each month was incredibly low. I'm talking like less than a couple hundred dollars. She was basically paying for a website every month, and then she did a client event once a year. And so when you amortize that over the year,

the monthly expenses worked out to is like around $160, let's say. And so that was really interesting because here's the kicker. You wanna know how much she was generating in revenue each month on average? $40,000. $40,000 in revenue on average for less than $200 of spend. That's really impressive. What that told us is that majority of her business was legitimately coming through referrals, through a small loyal group of the right clients.

So she didn't have a marketing problem. She had a clarity problem. And we just really need to be able to bring these things forward into the light so she could actually see them. When we dug deeper, the growth wasn't hiding somewhere out there in like a new campaign or a new platform. It was right there inside of her existing relationships and her existing business. She had clients who loved her, but they weren't necessarily using her consistently. She had a

revenue stream that was coming in based on some renewals, some auto-renewals of things that was actually quite significant, but it wasn't being tracked or maximized the way that it could be. She had a client experience that was genuinely excellent, but a back-end process that was creating a lot of friction and costing her a lot of time that she didn't have. And because of all of this, she was holding a lot more in her head than she needed to. And that was taking up her mental bandwidth as well.

Shauna Lynn Simon (08:51.672)

So ultimately the answer, it was not more marketing. Sure, she had the budget for it. I mean, she was barely spending any money. We could certainly, you know, turn on that tap a little bit. Let's throw some money at the problem and see if that would generate some things. But I really didn't think that that was the answer for things. We really just need to get clear on what was actually working and then lean into it. And honestly, this is not something that I just see in client work. It's actually how I've built my own business as well. I've never run a paid ad.

For any of the work that I'm doing. So everything that I've built, the coaching practice, this podcast, my speaking gigs, the partnerships that I have, all of those have come through organic relationships, through word of mouth and just showing up consistently in the right places for the right people. That's not an accident. That is a choice. It's a choice rooted in the same principle I just described. I would rather go deeper with what's already working than spread myself too thin, chasing something new.

Now, I do want to be clear, I am not saying that paid ads are wrong or that more marketing is never the answer for some businesses at the right stage with the right foundation. It absolutely is. But what I see more often than not is that women are adding these marketing tactics on top of a business that hasn't yet gotten clear on its foundation. And when that happens, more marketing just amplifies noise. It doesn't actually solve the underlying problem.

So when we worked with my client to help to identify exactly what was working, the answer to what she needed to do was actually pretty simple. We streamlined some of the back-end processes that allowed her to be able to free up some of her own mental bandwidth and just frankly her own capacity. And then we set a goal of outreach that we wanted her to do every month. And this was not necessarily like,

Hold calling people or meeting new people, sure, if those opportunities arose, those would be great. But it was more about leaning into the contact she already had. That agent you haven't heard from in a couple of months, that client that hasn't called you in a couple of months, let's reach out to them. Let's see what's going on. Not necessarily to say, like, hey, what's happening over there, but just literally connect with them on a real human level. What if we, you know, sent a referral to one of our existing clients of our own, like sent another client to them? What does that do for them?

Shauna Lynn Simon (11:10.252)

What if the next time we received a referral, we sent a handwritten thank you note with maybe a little gift card for a local coffee shop or something? And these are tactics that may not work in every one of your businesses as well. This is something that worked for her. And the idea was that we were only going to do a couple of these intentionally each month. It wasn't about adding a ton. We identified that we really only needed one to two more clients every month for her to go from feeling comfortable in that consistency to making it feel a bit more predictable.

So in order to get one or two more jobs each month, she needed to reach out to about four to five people in a month. That's really only one person a week. That's really not that much when you think about it. And if in that time she ended up at an event that had a whole bunch of her ideal clients in it, perfect. She's done for the month, right? So how do you know whether or not you actually need more marketing or whether you just need to work with what you already have?

This is a common question that comes up because I'm often challenging people's ideas about, I need to add more marketing. And one of the things that I often advise my clients to do is take a look back when you were first starting your business. What were some of the marketing tactics that you used that actually worked? And they might be things that might feel a little antiquated now. They might be things that feel felt kind of almost luxurious because, well, I had time to attend all these networking events and I don't have the time to attend all these networking events now.

Sure, but were there specific events that seem to produce more than others? Maybe we focus on being very strategic about this. Were there certain people you were meeting at those events that were more valuable clients than other clients? Maybe that's where we want to lean into of like where do we find those people? So I want you to take a step back and ask yourself some important questions. I'm gonna give you three questions to help you to identify what your next step might be. And sometimes it means finding an old school marketing trick that you were using.

And revitalizing that and utilizing that and putting that to work in your business today.

Okay, so the first question I want you to ask yourself is: where is your revenue actually coming from? Not where do you think it's coming from? I want you to really dig into this and identify where it's coming from. If you've never really mapped this out, you actually might be surprised. Most service-based businesses get the majority of their revenue from a small number of sources.

And when you can see that clearly, you can start making really intentional decisions about where to put your energy instead of defaulting to adding something new. Now, if this is something you don't already have, it's really simple, very simple spreadsheet that you'll want to create with different lead type sources, whether it's a referral, Google, social media, a particular campaign that you've done, a particular network that you have, whatever it looks like, put those all as headers on top of your columns.

And then just identify each month how many of each one you're getting. So go through your past couple of months. You probably know where a lot of these people came from. Write those ones down and then start tracking it going forward. This is really, really valuable data that I promise, once you dig into it, once you start seeing it, it's amazing the patterns that you're going to see emerge. And they may not always align with what you think is actually happening. Now, the second question I want you to ask is: are you fully working what's already in front of you? So before we start.

Adding something new, let's start thinking about what we already have. Think about your existing clients. Are they coming back as often as they could be? Are they referring others to you? Do they fully understand everything that you offer? Maybe there's things that they're not tapping into yet. Think about your existing relationships, the partners, the connectors in your world. Are you showing up consistently enough that they think of you first? Before you go looking for something new, it's worth asking whether you fully activated.

Shauna Lynn Simon (15:40.876)

what you already have. One of the things that I think we often underestimate is the value of your existing relationships. It is far less expensive to re-engage an existing client than it is to get a new client. And you might think, well, I there's really nothing else to do for that client. I know some people build their businesses, like think of a therapist. You're literally building your business on trying to make it so your clients don't need to come back to you. But that doesn't mean that they can't be sending you referrals. So just because your

Client may not have a need for additional services from you. Who do they know in their network and how can you tap into that? And I'm not talking about aggressively demanding referrals or anything like that, but is there a way that you can tap into that relationship? People genuinely want to refer someone that they feel does good work. So maybe there are things that you can support other people with that your clients aren't aware of. If we can engage that relationship, if we can ignite something there,

That is going to be way less expensive than trying to take someone from being a cold lead to us and turning them into a paying client. A referral source, I don't know about you, but when someone, if I ask for like a good restaurant to go to and someone gives me a recommendation, I'm more likely to go there than to go on and look it up myself. Right. So the third question I want you asking yourself then, this one trips a lot of people up. Is your client experience as strong as your service? Listen, I know your craft is

excellent, genuinely excellent. But if the experience of working with you has any sort of friction in it, that friction can cost you. It costs you referrals, it costs you renewals, it costs you the kind of client loyalty that makes organic growth actually work. Before you invest in bringing more people in the front door, make sure the experience inside the front door is what it actually needs to be.

This means making sure that your client's expectations are being managed. It means making the process of getting started with you as easy as possible. It means trying to identify the things that would potentially turn someone off from wanting to work with you again and smoothing those edges out. Anything that you can do to make that client experience as seamless as possible, that is where you're going to get the referrals. Because what I end up doing when I re recommend someone, I'm going to often compare them to the things I don't like about other people.

Shauna Lynn Simon (17:57.974)

And that's why I'm referring this guy. So, for example, everyone pretty much who knows me knows that I am a runner. I do different races. I also participate in what's called a Tough Mudder, which is a 15-kilometer obstacle course, yes, through a lot of mud. And I'm known for injuring myself occasionally. So to me, it's incredibly valuable for me to have a sports doctor in my back pocket. So I've got a sports doctor that I can call on at any time. I will tell you, I am probably the largest referral source that this doctor has ever had.

When it comes to their work. And that's because of the work that they do. One of the things that they specialize in is a really unique technique that focuses on identifying the true root cause of your injury and really targeting with micro exercises, targeting that injury. But what makes them especially unique is that their goal is not to have you coming back for physio appointments several times a week for several months on end and just hoping that something heals. Their goal is to see you in three or less targeted visits.

And have you healed and on your way. Now, is that possible with every client and every injury? Of course not. But the idea is that their goal is to see you in as few visits as possible to get you healed and on your way. And what that does is it brings you back for the next injury and it has you sending other people, right? So when I'm speaking to someone who tells me they've got an injury, especially when they tell me that they've seen everyone they can see and it's still not getting any better, I tell them about my guy. I'm like, listen, what I love about my guy is that he's all about trying to fix you in three visits or less.

So you don't have to worry about months on end of physiotherapy. He gets me back up and literally running in a matter of weeks, if not sooner. That is a genuine referral, right? And that is what we want. So before you start bringing people in that front door, make sure that that experience behind that door is as top-notch as it possibly can be, because your referrals will be that much stronger because they're going to be singing your praises about everything that makes that whole experience.

Incredible, especially if they've had any negative experiences with other providers as well. Now, here's something that I do want to make sure that I mention because I think there's a reason why so many Accidental CEOs tend to default to adding more marketing, even when the growth is already there. It's easier to add something new than to get clear on what we already have. Adding something new, it feels like action, it feels like momentum. It feels like you're actually moving forward. Getting clear, really clear.

Shauna Lynn Simon (20:22.188)

Actually, kind of feels like a step backwards, right? That's going back to your roots. That's going back to the beginning. It's not as sexy. It's not as exciting. We're going to focus on your numbers, your client relationships, your processes, your revenue streams, the things you're already doing. It's kind of boring, but it's incredibly important. It requires you to slow down. And we don't like to slow down, right? We're go, go, go. That's how we got this business. That's how we built this business. That's how we're going to grow this business. But the reality is, I actually need you to slow down a little bit because.

You've probably heard the saying, what got you here won't get you there. And this is an exact example of that. If you have built that strong business, but still feel like you're lacking the stability in it, you've got maybe that team of staff, you've got the revenue is coming in, you've got clients that are singing your praises, but you still feel like it's ready to topple over at any time. I like to use the reference of a Jenga tower. If you've ever played the game Jenga, basically this block tower, and you're taking pieces of blocks from the bottom and you're stacking them on top and you keep

Basically making holes in the bottom of your tower. That's what you're doing when you're trying to go fast, when you're trying to add more, when you're trying to do the next big thing. If we slow down and instead fill in some of those holes that are sitting at the bottom of our tower, think about how much more stable that's going to be to be able to build on it. Slowing down when you're already overwhelmed, though, feels very counterintuitive. I mean, at best it feels counterintuitive and difficult.

At worst, it feels absolutely impossible. And I've heard all the time that Shauna Lynn, I don't know how I'm supposed to slow down. I don't know how I'm supposed to stop. Things will stop running if I slow down. But the reality is that clarity that you need on your business, it's always faster than the hustle. My client and I did identify her real growth opportunity in a single session. Not because I had some sort of magic answer or even some magical framework or process necessarily. I didn't. She didn't.

But because we created the space to actually look for it, something that she hadn't had time to do on her own. That is the Accidental CEO trap. It's not laziness, not lack of effort. You're working hard every day. Trust me, I see you. You just never quite have the time and the space to step back and see what's actually there and what's actually working for you. This is one of the biggest things that I work on with my clients. It's exactly the kind of work that we do in the Real Women Real Business Mastery Program.

Shauna Lynn Simon (22:40.63)

Not adding more to your plate, but getting clear enough to see what actually belongs on your plate in the first place. Understanding where your revenue is really coming from, which relationships deserve more of your attention, where your client experience has gaps and what your actual next move is. Not just the next thing, but the next right thing. So you don't just feel like you're just doing things to stay busy, but you're actually working on the right things.

The program that we have is built around 12 pillars of business success. And it actually starts with an Accidental CEO assessment. So you're not working on everything at once. You're working on what matters most for your specific business right now. There's on demand elements to it where you can watch trainings, get the worksheets, the tools, and templates that you need. But we also have twice monthly coaching calls with me. So you get 12 months with me. That's 24 coaching calls in a year, plus an entire community of women.

Who are all in it alongside with you. These are all women who have built strong businesses. We're not necessarily starting our businesses from zero. These are women who have an established business who are looking to grow and looking to scale and looking to do it in a way that does not mean adding more to their plate. Because this is one of the reasons why I hear a lot of women say that they don't want to scale. They don't want to grow. And that is because the thought of adding more is absolutely overwhelming and terrifying. And they think that in order to get

bigger in business to grow their business, they have to do more of what they're already doing. And they're already doing all of the things, all of the hours of all of the days. And that is just not sustainable. The program is designed to be adaptive, which is the best part about it, to your business, to your goals, to your life. It's not about a formula. It's not a blueprint that only works for your business if if your business looks exactly like someone else's. If you're ready to stop adding more and start working smarter with what you already have, I'd love to have you inside the program.

The link to learn more is in the show notes, or you can go to realwomenrealbusiness.com. If you want to talk it through first, you can check out there's a link on that page as well to book a call with me and we can have a discussion about your specific business, your specific needs, and make sure that it really is the right fit for you. Now, if you take nothing else away from this episode today, here's what I want you to take with you. I think I've said this a few times. I am a bit of a broken record, but I am going to say it one last time to make sure that you've really heard me. Before you add more to your plate, the next time you think you need to add more.

Shauna Lynn Simon (24:59.82)

I want you to take a look and see if there's something that you have that's already working that you just need to lean into a little bit more. That's the more that you want. Not adding more layers, but instead taking away some layers and really getting clear on what matters and what's working and what's going to help you to move your business forward. And again, if you want some support with that, I'd love to have you join us inside the Real Women Real Business Mastery Program. It's a 12-month program. Go to realwomenrealbusiness.com to learn more.

All right, that's a wrap on today's episode. I hope that this one gave you permission to pause before you add that next thing and ask whether the growth that you're looking for might already be closer than you think. Now, of course, if today's episode resonated with you, I do hope that you will continue to tune in every week. We drop new episodes every Tuesday morning. And of course, I would love it if you could also subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. And don't forget to leave us review wherever you get your podcast as well. It really does help the algorithm. And I truly appreciate everyone who's just taking the moment to.

Leave us a review over the last recent weeks. And of course, the best way that you can support not only this podcast, but your fellow women entrepreneurs who are building and growing alongside you is to share this episode with someone that you know really needs to hear this message today. Maybe one of your colleagues just recently told you about this new shiny object idea that she has for her marketing. Send her this episode first. Help her to get clear on where she needs to start so that we can ensure that we are not just simply adding to our tower.

And making it topple over without the right supports beneath it. Until next time, keep thriving.