Transcript by Descript

Hey, hey, good morning. Good morning. Good morning. All right. So with our theme of if I started this last week or the week before, but with our theme continuing on how do you create your strategies for scaling and growing understanding that at this time of the year, it's very normal to do a deeper dive.

Hopefully you are doing regular assessment of how everything is going, looking at your numbers, looking on the parts. But at this time of the year, it's totally normal. We kind of get a fresh start with the new year. We start dreaming a little bigger. We feel like we can hit the reset button. So last week I gave you a tool using the what if it were easy, right?

What if it were easy? Using that as a question in a bunch of different ways. Go back and listen to that if you haven't heard that already. On how that question can be a tool in helping you create your plans for your business. So if you didn't catch it, go grab that. I want to give you another strategy for doing a deep dive on your inventory of where you are now and how that can help you create your plans for growing and scaling your business.

And the way that I describe it is this, find the anchor, find the anchor in your business. If you visualize your business as a combination of all of its parts, right, they're all working together to move the business forward. One of those parts is going to rank last. Last in productivity, last in efficiency, last in ROI, basically right last.

And So that means that one of the parts of your business effectively is holding the rest of your business. Back in my bodybuilding days, we used to say you can't out exercise your fork. And what we meant was no matter how much you were in the gym, if you didn't eat well, there wasn't really enough exercise that you could do to get the results you wanted.

If the way you were eating was basically holding you back as an anchor, it's the same way in your business. Your business can't outgrow your weakest link. Think about that for a second. Your business cannot outgrow your weakest link. By the way, this doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong. Having a weakest link doesn't mean you're screwing everything up or you're doing anything wrong.

If you rank things, Something's always going to come in last. So this doesn't even mean that there's a giant problem in your business. But if you're looking to grow, you need to know, lots of clarity here, you need to know which part of your business is going to hold your efforts back, which part of your business is going to keep your goals from happening.

Right? So, with zero judgment, because that doesn't help anybody ever. What do you need to take an inventory of? Let's get real tactical on this. What do you need to take an inventory of to find your anchor? To find your anchor. One of the things I say a lot about a lot of different things is you have a good gut instinct.

We all have good gut instincts, but our feelings will lie to us. Our feelings will lie to us. So if you don't like doing something, you're going to have a different feeling and opinion about it than the things that you do like doing. Right? So it's important to look at all of these categories. So we get a little bit more objective look, objective overview of the status of our business.

So what do you want to be looking at? Your money, right? Your finances. Number one, your finances. Do you have the space that you need financially to invest in the growth of your business? One of the ways I describe this is, are you paying November's bills with November's money? Or are you paying November's bills with August's money?

And for some people, sometimes, are you paying November's bills with December's money? Right? How much space do you have in your business to allow you to take advantage of opportunities when they arise? So that's one of the places you need to look. Another place is strategy. Is there an overall approach to your business?

Is that approach setting you on the path to the business you want? Or is it kind of all over the place? And you're really relying on hustle to make something happen. That could be a problem. There's no congruent strategy for how everything's going to move forward together. Another place to look is at your services and your products.

Do you have a clear portfolio of the services and products that you offer? Or are you reinventing the wheel for each and every client? Or, have you not truly vetted your offers so that you know what the market really wants from you, where you can best serve the market, and then focus on scaling that, right?

That's another way to hold our businesses back. Another area is branding. How can I put this? Are all the pieces of your brand, your message, your visuals, are they all congruent with each other? And are they an accurate physical manifestation of how you want people to feel when they experience your business?

Your brand is truly a feeling. It's an emotion that you evoke from people who interact with you. Do all the assets of your brand point towards that feeling? Or are some of them outdated? Are some of them not been updated to your new, you may have iterated and some things have been left behind marketing.

Are you playing stop and start with your marketing? Or do you have a client acquisition system that moves people through the journey of becoming aware that your business exists, right? You've been aware that your business exists and intentionally into sales conversation. Do you know exactly who you help?

And do you know what it is you need to and want to say to them in your marketing? And then do you have the activities happening on the regular that speak to those people? And move them intentionally, keyword there intentionally, into sales conversations. Which lead us to sales conversations, right? That's another category we want to stay on top of bottom line is none of the other things matter if you can't close a sale, if you're not able to convert people who are interested in you into people who are working with you, none of the other things matter I don't know enough said on that one, brutal truth, but that is what it is, right?

Another category to look at is your team. Your team, have you hired for horsepower or are you trying to move your business forward with task rabbits, meaning you've hired people who can just take something off your to do list, which means you replace doing the thing with managing the people, right? That doesn't actually move your business forward.

It just gives you a different role. It doesn't increase the capacity of your business. You end up burdening your business growth with people who require constant supervision and or intervention. By the way, a lot of times, or at least part of the times, this might not be their fault, it might be your fault.

Are you able to give over the control and empower people to be the horsepower they're capable of? Or are you relegating them to being a task rabbit? It can happen on either side of that equation. Is your team performing in a way that supports growth? And if not, why not? And are there processes in place that support this whole thing?

Are there processes in place where if something happens repeatedly? It is documented and thus occurring in the same manner predictably, not just so that there's consistency within the business, but so that we can just let go of worrying about it. We underestimate how much space is taken up in our brain by worrying about the minutiae of what has to happen and thus not being able to focus on the big picture things that you want to have happen.

I'm gonna stop here for a second because I know that this can sound like a lot. This can feel like a lot of moving parts and it can be overwhelming, which truthfully is another anchor, another potential anchor. If you think about all the things that I've been saying and your responses to back away and not listen and drop it and I don't want to look at it and this is way too complicated, that's actually a different anchor.

It's your mindset, right? It's your mindset. Are you doing what you need to be doing on the personal growth side to allow yourself to lead the business growth that you want? Your business can't outgrow you. So I want to take a second and remind you of last week's question. What if this were easy? I understand that there's a lot of moving parts, but you don't have to make it more complicated than it is.

It can be extremely straightforward. I just gave you a bunch of categories. It can be extremely straightforward. Take an inventory. Where are you in each of these categories? What's working well and what's not working. And then you create an action plan for the not working parts. And you understand that scaling your business requires all of these departments pointed in the same direction and working with each other instead of against each other.

So back to our anchor analogy, if there is a particular category that is seriously lagging behind. Compared to the other categories, you're going to need to fix that before anything can happen. If, if you do this inventory and you find that one of these categories, like maybe most of these categories are nicely rambling along, and then there is this redheaded stepchild category over here, nothing can move forward.

until you fix that. I often say you wiggle your way to success, right? We wiggle our way to success. We get up up over here and then we move this part over here and then we move this part over here. You wiggle your way to success in each of these categories. It's not quite the skyrocket experience we hear, right?

We hear in stories, but you can't even wiggle your way to success. If one of these pieces is holding you back like an anchor. So just like with the what if it were easy question, it's time to have an honest conversation with yourself. It's time to do the work before going to work. Take an inventory of where you are at with each of these questions.

Each of these categories so that we can identify where is the gap, where is the gap. And then from there we create the action plan that propels you forward the way that you're hoping to in 2024.