Business Growth & Success 101

Welcome to episode 101 of Dawn of a New Era, talking all things marketing, motivation and mindset, with myself, Dawn McGruer, the business growth coach. I thought I would celebrate this huge occasion by reaching 101 podcast episodes by entitling it Business Growth and Success 101. Over the past 20 years, I have worked with over 30,000 clients and have generated over £45 million for their businesses. It's not been plain sailing, starting and scaling and developing my entrepreneurial journey around four businesses.

But something I'm really proud of is the way I've done it. When I look at my growth and my success, I don't mark it really in maybe the milestones or the traditional money goals that others do. I look at my success from my soul. Over the years, obviously, I have worked in various different sectors, all sorts of different niches globally.

And the same thing is true across every single client I work with, every single business, is that when success feels true and it feels aligned, it's because it's been done authentically. Everything feels in flow. Everything feels easy. So what do I mean?

For you guys who may know what I do, I have worked in coaching and mentoring ever since I started. I started out with business and performance coaching and consultancy. I was working heavily in marketing as a consultant and a strategist, and I still do now across the board, even if I'm working, say, one-to-one doing coaching and mentoring, or I'm hosting our Strategize and Energize retreats, or even the Success from Your Soul Mastermind. Everything that I put into the way that I work with my clients, I truly believe is how I've accelerated my business growth and success, but also how I feel about it.

Because when I was starting out, I started like most people, looking at the numbers, looking at other people's journeys, getting caught up in FOMO and just having this utter kind of like fear of missing out, where I looked at other people thinking they were doing bigger and better things. I just felt like I could never catch up. When I started to really lean into what success was for me, I started to realize that every time someone said, Dawn, oh, congratulations. Oh, you know, you've been so successful, it just bounced off me.

It didn't mean anything. And there was a big, big validation and reasoning, because what people define as success, maybe is this sort of outer social media world, is not necessarily congruent to how you feel inside. There was a great question asked on my LinkedIn post today, and I've just released my edition two of Success from Your Soul newsletter. I host it on LinkedIn.

You can sign up on my LinkedIn profile or through the website. And I talk about all things marketing, motivation, mindset. I look at what's happening right now, what we're developing, trends, things that are really working and getting traction for me and for my clients. So I share as much of my journey as possible.

So it's a little bit like, I suppose, my podcast, where I talk about with you guys the truth about being an entrepreneur and how we really want to kind of position what success is. I'm going to take this a little bit deeper in this podcast episode because this gentleman said to me, Dawn, how do you define success from your soul? Great newsletter, love it. And I'd also like to know, how is it incorporated into your mentoring and retreats?

Brilliant question. I utterly loved it, and I went back and said, Ooh, great question. And what I shared was the fact that across everything I do, I believe success is in direct correlation to nourishing your soul. What does that really mean?

If we enrich our lives by doing things that come from deep within our hearts and souls, we end up fulfilling our true purpose naturally, and it tends to light us up inside in a way that we feel joy each and every day. Because success is not a journey. We have to really celebrate the goal and the journey and everything it takes to get there. Because if we constantly get on this treadmill, we're searching for the next best thing.

The next best thing may never come. We may just be on this hedonic treadmill the whole time. What we want to feel is connected every single day, and we want to feel that our dreams and goals are aligned to what we are doing both in our lives and businesses. And this is at the heart of it.

So success from the soul. This is when I really, really realized what success was for me. It was when I was doing something that just absolutely delighted me. And one of the things the gentleman asked was, How does it relate to retreats and masterminds?

Well, yes, I cover mind, body and soul, all things marketing, motivation and mindset, because I truly believe that to grow and scale your business, not only do you need great marketing and business foundation. But you need the motivation and mindset, and you need to overcome any sort of success barriers or beliefs that are false within your mind so that these things can be unlocked, because we need to unleash our true potential. If we don't, we may stay stuck or we'll hit consistent problems or challenges. Things like imposter syndrome, self-sabotage, these are all examples of things that might be hindering our success.

So when I talk about success from your soul, it's understanding those feelings. You may never be able to get over imposter syndrome, but you can certainly manage those feelings. You may be able to recognize more in your mindset when you are sabotaging your own success. So success from the soul for me is when I show up for my mastermind groups.

I have groups of 10, and in each group, they have been curated into communities so that everybody is on that same path and journey, so that we have inspiration, we have collaboration, and quite often, the great thing is we see investment in each other. They become clients as well as lifelong friends. And it's important in these communities that the person hosting it absolutely thrives from it as much as the individuals who are part of it. I love running masterminds.

I love running retreats because the energy that is within these communities is vast. So when I think about my own business growth, and I think about, well, what were the best moments? What were the moments that I felt most in sync, most aligned to what I was doing, where I felt like I was living and breathing my true purpose, I was operating in my zone of genius. And when I think about it, it's when I'm with clients in some capacity, either one-to-one.

Whether I'm working online or in person, or I'm hosting a retreat or a mastermind, these are the things that make me smile from inside to out. And these are the things that make me feel centered. They make me feel really positive and strong from a mindset point of view, from an energy point of view. And I never feel drained.

So if you can start to connect with the things you do in your business, in your life, that light you up and catapult you forward, then we're halfway there. So when I think about the 101, masterminds have been part of, yes, my growth for me being part of them and from hosting them. And here's a few reasons why. It's the networking opportunities.

When I dig deep into my success, it's when I have had a community, I have mixed with other people, I've been inspired, I've pushed my goals to more audacious and aspirational because I feel empowered in these groups. And the thing is, is when you are part of a mastermind, you're with people who have their own unique perspective and experiences. And I love to see how the relationships evolve in these masterminds because they so often lead to investing in each other's skills and services. It's like an ecosystem whereby everybody is thriving through each other's energy.

And number two is personal and professional growth. When I think about masterminds and how this aids to my personal and professional growth and how I'm nourishing my own soul and also others being part of mine, I'm very conscious that when we are sharing these experiences and we're listening, everyone gains such valuable insights into new ways of doing things and how others approach various challenges. So I love seeing how this leads to personal breakthroughs and transformations. And a real greater sense of confidence that comes from it.

And you see this each time that you connect in these communities because they—

Power. I always believe that masterminds should be smaller groups because of this deep connection. And again, people have to be aligned. There's no point joining masterminds that don't, number one, stand for your mission and vision, but number two, that aren't aligned to aiding you actually achieve your goals and dreams by being part of groups and communities to accelerate that, because that's half of what a mastermind is.

If you don't feel inspired in a group or you feel that you're the most knowledgeable person there, you're not going to be learning and flourishing and developing. And this happened to me so often when I joined masterminds. There've only been a few that have empowered me, and it's taught me a lot when I set mine up because all of the pitfalls, all of the things I hated in other masterminds, I really didn't want to bring through into mine, and I wanted to bring something that was special. And again, accountability, which is number three, is part of this journey because one of the biggest benefits of having such an inspiring group who hold you accountable for your goals, and you set for yourself these goals that are maybe bigger than you would have.

If you set something in silo and you don't have any outside creativity or influence, it's very difficult to benchmark what you want and where you are. And if you're not feeding that creativity, it's again quite difficult to move forward. And finally, if you are setting yourself a goal but not actually sharing that goal, it doesn't really feel as real. It doesn't feel that you are as accountable because you don't set as clear deadlines or markers or milestones that you have to hit.

So this creates a sense of urgency when you have a mastermind group because it's helping you prevent the procrastination or perfectionism. And this is definitely something that I was stuck in. And by having that fellow of people and seeing how people are moving forward, it just gives you this whole new vigor and motivation, and you feel like you are forging ahead. As a group, not just one person, because being a business owner, and being a business owner for over 23 years, one of the things I've always felt is that there's an element of loneliness without a community.

And when I've had masterminds, I felt held. I felt confident. I felt like I can show up. I can own my mission and my vision, and I can celebrate.

When I didn't have that, I'm definitely not my most creative, and I tend to go more into myself because being the top of the tree of the business where I have a team of 17, unfortunately, I have a really solid team who will give me some feedback, but they're not going to give me the sense of objectivity as someone outside of that. And again, they're not my ideal clients. So asking them to make a judgment would be the wrong thing because the feedback I would get is not correct. Only when I've been in circles working with a collection of my ideal clients have I been able to really hone the marketing, the messaging, the positioning, really get clear on that customer journey so I can accelerate my success to really, really ramp up the ease and flow of getting clients and working with my ideal client.

So clarity and confidence is key, and it's amazing what can be accomplished when others are also invested in your success, and this is huge. And when people used to message me from the mastermind, I used to just think, Oh my goodness, that's so kind. You know, like, I can't believe you've actually invested in me. But everyone is the same, and this brings me on to number four: collaboration opportunities, because collaborating with others can lead to more efficient and effective ways of doing things.

So by working with each other, helping each other, checking in with each other, there is huge momentum and shifts, and these small steady steps really do transform into really huge, life-changing results. So I love how group projects lead to new revenue streams and cost savings, and that's definitely been something for me because I felt challenged through people's creativity. I felt like I can think because I'm away from my business, working on my business. I've really started to show up more as a true CEO because one of the things that when I first started my business, I don't know if you can relate to this, but 20 years ago, it didn't feel like a proper business.

You know, there was people and peers outside of my business mind that were doing different things. My friends didn't really understand at 21 that I was setting a business up. There was, like, family members and peers who would always just, like, talk about my little business. And because I didn't go through the conventional academic route of getting degrees, et cetera, et cetera, it was kind of, like, shunned on.

I was made to feel, I guess, a little bit not as good, and I was maybe taking that on board myself because I hadn't done the convention and putting more judgment on me. So when you take yourself outside that circle and you start to see that other people have got these dreams, these ambitions, and they're business owners, they know what it's like to walk in your shoes. It's when I talk to clients, I have pretty much been through every single epic fail possible. So I can really relate when someone says to me, I'm really just not sure about this, or I feel this.

I've been there. I've done it. I've probably done it 10 times worse because the great thing is with working with clients, I mitigate a lot of these things. But with collaboration opportunities, the real game changer that helps clients grow and succeed is the community whereby you have fun and you laugh and it brings energy.

And this is probably why it lights me up, because it aligns to my personality. I feel that sometimes my true personality is not on show as much in social, but when I'm with my clients and I'm with my mastermind groups, definitely we're creating memories, experiences, lifelong friendships, and we're there creating freedom to enjoy our own businesses. And I think when we think about success from the soul, it's all about these things. So I want you to sit and think about this today and really kind of lean into where you are at.

What is success for you? When you think about success from your soul, does what you're doing in your life and business feel aligned? To your heart and soul, to your true purpose. Do you feel that you are showing up, leaving the legacy you wanted?

Do you feel that you are changing lives and impacting in other people's lives in the way that you want? Is success maybe positioned incorrectly in your life, where you're aligned to these traditional markers of financial milestones and publishing this or doing that? Think about what your journey is and what success is for you. And do you feel truly connected with the success when someone pays you a compliment?

And when you sit with this thought, you start to unravel piece by piece the things that you love. So, are you getting from your own community in business, networking opportunities? Are you getting personal and professional growth? Are you getting accountability or have accountability partners to spur you on and celebrate the successes?

And do you have the opportunity to collaborate with others and be empowered by peers and inspired by others who maybe are further on in their journey than you? So think about this. And if you were like me, you will come up with hopefully some little epiphany moments that these small shifts can really change the way that you actually see success, but you grow and you succeed in business. So I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.

I'm really excited at the moment because we have got so many new things, projects, programs, courses and things that we are launching, and we've got a very exciting new project coming up in the next month or so. So head on over to DawnMcGruer.com. Remember to sign up for my Success from Your Soul newsletter if you're interested.

You can do it on LinkedIn or on my website. Remember to follow me on the same channels: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, wherever you are at, and connect with me. And I would love Love to hear your story. So don't forget, if you've listened to my podcast, rate and review it on your favorite player.

But send me a message. Reach out to me. Tell me what your favorite episode was. Tell me what your biggest takeaway or shift has been from listening to Dawn of a New Era.

So have an amazing day, and take care, and I will see you on the next episode. 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.