Ep 80: The C’s That Will Help You Grow Your Business

Ep 80: The C’s That Will Help You Grow Your Business

In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about the three C’s in business; customers, consistency and cash. These are the foundations that have helped me and my clients grow our businesses.

I started using these back when I was 21 when I started my first ever business. Starting my business was harder than I could have ever imagined. I went through a cycle of feast and famine but when I started to think differently,  it was an absolute game changer in how my business grew. Slowly but surely I came out of that feast and famine cycle and I started to get consistent cash months. Not only were they consistent but they were also growing each and every month.

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Here are the highlights from this episode:

(04:31) These three Cs are my foundations

(05:53) You need to focus on your key objectives

(06:20) More customers 

(07:12) 80% of your to-do list doesn’t actually grow your business

(07:27) Consistency

(09:40) I teach all these fundamentals at the CEO Strategy School

(14:28) If you get these right everything else just flows

Check out all episodes here

Welcome to Dawn of a New Era, a business and marketing podcast with a difference, ranking in the top 5% globally for people who want to start, scale, and grow their own business. Dawn McGruer shares tips to improve marketing, motivation, and mindset, as well as her own real life challenges and experiences as an entrepreneur. Guests include some of the world’s most inspiring leaders too. So if you are an aspiring, established, or serial entrepreneur, this is your go-to podcast to fast-track results and rise to meet today’s challenges and master the art of online influence and business success and avoid common pitfalls along the way. Never miss an episode and subscribe and listen at dawnmcgruer.com.

 

Dawn:

Welcome to episode 80 of Dawn of a New Era, with myself, Dawn McGruer, author, speaker, and strategist. Now, today, I’m going to talk about the three Cs in business. These are absolutely the foundations that have helped me, helped my clients grow our businesses over many years. Now, I started using these back when I was 21 when I started my first ever business. My agency started and one of the things that I found very difficult was probably due to my absolute passion but naivety too, I truly believed in what I was doing, but when I started my first business, it was really, really difficult. It was far harder than I could have even imagined. And I went through a complete kind of feast and famine cycle. And this happens a lot in new business. It’s not necessarily a wrong thing. It’s just kind of like the starter journey.

But what happened was I started to think differently. And when I did this, it was an absolute game changer in how my business grew. Because slowly but surely I came out of that cycle and I started to get consistent cash months. Not only consistent cash months, but they were growing each and every month. Now, bear in mind, when I started my first business, I was 21. I was working in marketing. I was trying to recruit new clients. I was trying to service new clients. And I didn’t have a team like I do now to back me. So it’s very different having a team of 17 versus working on your own. And if you are an entrepreneur in business who is either a freelancer or you are the business, then you will completely relate to how hard it is when you are doing all the jobs.

So I had to make sure that my time was really associated with generating revenue and money and driving cash into the business. So how did I do this? Well, first of all, when I started my business, I was operating in a way that I was sporadic in my marketing and I would then work with clients and then I would think, “Right, okay, I need to find some new clients,” as I finished that particular project. So that cycle was kind of exhausting. But also from an audience point of view, bearing in mind when I started my first business, the internet was fairly new. I mean, Google started in 1998. My business was in the early 2000s when I started. I’m 43 now.

These three Cs are my foundations

Now, my job was to get my clients an online presence. And one of the things I noticed quite quickly is that I had to look at my own online visibility from the consumer view because what I thought people knew or how I thought my messaging was going out there was completely different. So it wasn’t correlating and it was disjointed, because obviously my marketing was kind of really intense and then there’d be a lull. So when I started to look at where my leads came from and I started to look at the successes of my business, very quickly I started to see some commonalities. And these are where the three Cs in business came from.

These three Cs are my foundations that I believe if a business works on, and I still use these today. I mean, I run three multimillion businesses. I have a team of 17. But these three core elements haven’t changed. I still focus on them. Because what happens in business is your list of to-do grows and it gets legs. I mean, literally additional to-do list is just massive. If you approach your role, your job, or your business in a way that you are task-orientated, you will feel burnt out and overwhelmed very quickly. And you will never ever get through that list because it’s ever-evolving. It’s dynamic, it’s flowing, it’s growing. So how do you manage this?

You need to focus on your key objectives

Well, if you think about the three Cs, these are the things, the core activities that I focused on. So instead of channel marketing all of the time, instead of looking at how do I grow my business in a way that I’m just going to do my SEO, my social media, my email marketing, which are big tasks in themselves, I looked at what the right objectives were for me. And very often people will focus on things like growing their audience, building their list, driving web traffic. And those are all great things and I won’t take anything away from that. But if you need customers and you need cash in the business, you need to refocus your key objectives so that you are focused in on the actual result you need.

More customers

So let’s put it this way. If you need cash in the business and you get a hundred new followers, does that necessarily correlate or correspond into driving cash? Not necessarily. So what you have to do is think about, right, the core activities would be, right, I need more leads, I need more customers, and I need more reach to do that. And this is where my three Cs really, really started to become my strategy. Because I knew if I worked on customers, I worked on consistency, and I worked on cash as my three priorities every day, I would absolutely move the needle in my business because those were the things that were getting me results.

80% of your to-do list doesn’t actually grow your business

So I switched my approach. I got rid of my to-do list. I focused on the activities and I thought, “Right, what are the things that I do, I can do, and I will do to get customers?” So I looked at what I’d done in the past, how customers had come to me, and I focused purely, simply on that. And I removed everything else out. Because weirdly enough, 80% of your to-do list doesn’t actually grow your business. Only 20% does. So this is about really being laser-focused on what is going to get your goals done.

Consistency

So the second one is consistency. So I talked about how my marketing was sporadic. Often when I meet clients now I look at their online visibility and it’s a bit kind of up and down, their messaging isn’t clear, there’s no kind of story. And the personal brand positioning isn’t there, or the business brand awareness is not there because the visibility isn’t. So you have to think about it. Like I created a quote that kind of positions this in your mind. And I always tell my team remember this because it’s the most important thing. Marketing is only marketing when a customer can see it. We can all be really busy building websites, doing things behind the scenes. But really what’s going to change is that if you reach your audience. But more importantly, if you’re pulling new people in.

So I want you to think about your consistency. I want you to think about every single day marketing is only marketing when a customer can see it. So think about how you can raise your profile, you can story tell, you can get that brand awareness so that people know what you do, why you do it, and how it can help them. So consistency could be going live. So for instance, at the moment, I’ve just committed to go live every weekday till the end of the year. That’s 98 lives. That’s a lot. Will it give me impact? Yeah. Will it help me attract a new audience? Yeah, for sure. Will it help me resonate and relate with that person in my audience and build a relationship? Of course it will. So these are the things I’m doing.

You can choose exactly what you want to do based on what’s working for your business. Because remember, it’s your business. You have to show up in a way that’s authentic and that also you are going to do. Because if it doesn’t feel aligned and you don’t want to do it, guess what? It’ll go by the wayside. It won’t happen. So make your marketing easy. Simplify it. Think about how you can be consistent in the approach. Think about automating, think about systems.

I teach all these fundamentals at the CEO Strategy School

One of the most magical things that I teach and I absolutely love doing this is that in the CEO Strategy School, I teach all these fundamentals. I teach everything that I had to learn myself from the age of 21 to get to 43 to build my businesses to give people the fast-track route to get there. So when I looked at what the core modules would be and I tried to understand where the gaps were in people’s businesses, they were the exact pitfalls, pains, and challenges that I had. And if you get these structures right and you get a pipeline, a sales pipeline, going into your business, guess what? This is where the third one comes in. Cash. Because I knew if I had a steady flow, an abundance of leads coming into the business that were being nurtured, that in turn were turning into paying customers, and I was using my social media to turn my connections into clients, that would drive cash into the business. So I had to think about getting that pipeline in place.

And this is why I teach pipelines. I teach systems, software, all the automation processes, everything that I put into my business that saved me 30% of my time. This was a biggie because obviously I was one person. I was trying to recruit a team. I was trying to do so much. I needed to save time. I needed to get all of that structure in place so that it was kind of like once and done. And then I could move on to the next thing. So when I built all of this, people started to say, “Dawn, how did you do this? How did you build your first business? How did you grow it? How did you scale it?” And I said, “Well, first of all, I built a pipeline. The second thing is I kind of got my structures in place. Then I really understood how to step up as a true CEO and manage a team and outsource and declutter and delegate, get my diary in order. And I had to reconnect with the goals of why I set my business up.”

I wanted financial security. I wanted freedom. I wanted flexibility. When I was working 16, 18 hours a day in the beginning, I didn’t have that. So once I built all of this in place, it was the steepest learning curve but it was the best thing I ever did. So you imagine you end your year, you end your quarter, you end your week or month, and you have those things in place, you start to understand that, obviously you’ve got a pipeline, so that means that every day you’ve got leads coming into the business, you’ve got means and methods to nurture and build those relationships, you’re using persuasive content to get those people across the line, that becomes a very different space in your business. It becomes a freedom that you’ve probably never had before.

And what I love about it is that when you start to find clients and you build a sales pipeline, that is like an infrastructure within your business that is so powerful. And then when you use consistency to increase your brand awareness, to get that all-important visibility, people to start to know you, and you cross a line and there becomes a point that when your audiences just naturally grow, that people know who you are and people start to refer to you. So it’s all about scaling. And these small steady steps really do build momentum.

And then when you go into automating and outsourcing and getting your workflow in place, that is honestly hands down the best feeling. Because when you can have time and space, you get your energy back. I always talk about marketing, motivation, and mindset. And these are my core pillars for an entrepreneur in terms of being successful, performing at your absolute pinnacle. When you think about scaling and stepping up as a true CEO, I had to understand what that was. I’d never been a CEO. So if you are starting or growing and scaling your business, that’s exactly what the CEO Strategy School does.

And for me, I feel that when I was 21, if someone had stepped up and said like, “Dawn, I’m going to do four weeks with you. I’m going to teach you exactly how to find clients. So how to attract them, how to convert them, how to do your marketing in a way that you can keep your visibility up and your marketing feels just really seamless. And I’m going to help you automate your workflow and day. And then I’m going to tell you what a CEO does,” I’d be like, “Oh my goodness, this is for me.” So this is why this CEO Strategy School started. I would love for you to come and join me. Come and check it out. It’s on the website. You can go to dawnmcgruer.com. There’s a banner at the top. You can click through and see it.

If you get these right everything else just flows

But getting back to my three Cs, I want to recap on this because it is so important. Remember, I talk about this as the foundations. If you get these right, then everything else just sort of flows and building the bricks becomes fast and easy. So you want to feel like your customers are coming in. So, one thing to do is look at where your leads come from, how they’re converting at the moment, where do your customers come from? And also start getting some testimonials and case studies. Finding out why they chose you. And this is a big piece of research, because if you can really nail who your ideal client is and become super clear, it becomes a lot easier to then reach and attract those people. Because your messaging flows, your positioning flows. You start to really adapt your product and services and everything you are doing to align to that person’s pains, problems, and challenges.

And then on the consistency side of things, once you’ve got that in place, it just sort of naturally flows, because it feels like you have the content, you have the clarity and the confidence that you can just go out and talk about it. You can post about it. You start to talk in a different way where you’re storytelling and people are on a journey with you and they will see the difference of your marketing. And then on the cash side of things, it’s about knowing your numbers, being really clear on how many leads you need and how many customers you need, what those customers need to be paying to be able to reach your magic number of whatever revenue target you have, and looking at really feasibly is that achievable. And being very clear on the fact that you have to be objective and think, “Well, if I’m thinking that I’m going to get a hundred or a thousand new customers a month, is that achievable?” I mean, that’s a very hard task for anybody, even the most established entrepreneur.

So you have to think about your business models and really think that if I’m selling something, is this going to be achievable in the numbers that I have to sell it to be able to get me to a financial security point, and understanding what those numbers look like and what shifts you could make. Small shifts in pricing can often be the dramatic change that you need for your business to be really sustainable and profitable. And we’re all striving for a successful business. So remember, the three Cs in business are customers, consistency, and cash.

Now I hope you have enjoyed this episode. I would love to see you on my social media. I am going live for the next 98 days. And you will see me obviously doing all of these three Cs every day literally. If you start to follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook, you’ll start to see this play out and you get a real flavor for it. Now, if you’re a business owner and you want to find out more about the CEO Strategy School, come on over to dawnmcgruer.com. Find out more about the program. You can always book a discovery call to find out more about what your challenge is and how we can help you solve that. So have an amazing week and remember, get your foundations right and the rest will flow.

 

Thank you for listening to Dawn of a New Era podcast. And for your free checklist to find out how to boost your business for growth, profit, and success, and join our community, go to dawnmcgruer.com.

 

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Multi-award-winning speaker, strategist & best-selling author of Dynamic Digital Marketing - Helping to inspire entrepreneurs to rise to meet today’s challenges and be powerfully present to shine online.

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