The 5 Key Steps to Start, Scale & Grow Your Business

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. Welcome to episode 63 of Dawn of a New Era, and in this episode, we're going to be exploring how you grow your business. Because in this podcast, Dawn of a New Era, we are always exploring different business, different marketing topics, all about starting, growing, and scaling your business.

Now, year on year, we assume that we are in a growth stage of our business, but it's not always true. We are going to explore five critical steps in terms of actually scaling your business and looking at whether it's the right strategy for you. Because first of all, number one, you need to really kind of assess where your business is and look at what your plan is going to be. Because there are lots of different types of growth, from outside investment to premises to teams to diversifying products and services.

And when you look at diversification, this could be into different markets, attracting different types of customers and audiences. It could be that you're looking just to scale the number of people that you're recruiting into a particular product line. So scaling for everybody is going to look really, really different. And each business, although you may be looking at growing, it could just be that you're growing in terms of obviously the amount of revenue, or more importantly, growing the amount of profit.

So it could be that in year two, year seven, year ten, year fifteen, your business is focused on growth all around profit margin. And this is something that's really important because it's the most important aspect of a sustainable business. So if we look at how your business is running, the first way of growth, the best way of obviously having the amount of money that you need to scale would be to start looking at things like your profit margin. Now, it doesn't matter how much you're earning.

You could be earning a thousand pounds a month. You could be earning a million pounds a month. It's irrelevant because it's the amount of profit that's coming. Coming out of that revenue that is key, and it's critical to how you're going to move forward.

So do an evaluation and just jot down, first of all, maybe at a rough sort of sales forecast, looking at your products line by line and services, looking at which ones, obviously, you are selling most of, but also which ones have got the highest return on investment that involve maybe the least resource or effort or money to actually get that sale through. So once you start looking at the profit margins, how many you're selling, you start to see what your key signature sellers are, your best sellers, the ones that are really driving your business forward and ultimately are growing and scaling your business. Now, once you've done that, the second thing to look at is finding the money, because when you look at scaling, you're going to have to invest in something. It could be that you're investing in premises, team members, suppliers, automating your business.

All of those different things could be, for instance, that you are investing in ads because you know that you are running some amazing campaigns and you're going to invest in those adverts. Now, where the magic happens when you look at advertising is putting the money out and then quickly getting it back in and liquidating your ad budget. So it's one of the best ways of growing a business because it shouldn't be costing you any money. Now, we run ads in Facebook all of the time, and one of the amazing things is, is that when you run campaigns, you can have what's called a self-liquidating offer.

It's an item that when you offer perhaps like a free guide or a free masterclass, that as soon as someone signs up for that, you go, Hey, stop. Actually, while you're here, while you've actually attracted their attention, you've got their interest piqued, why don't you perhaps look at this? And it's often referred to as a tripwire. Or an upsell.

And what it means is that you can give an amazing value product for, like, a one-time only offer price. So quite often it's a 27 or a 47 or even a 97 pound item. Now, the reason that that's important, especially if you're selling higher-ticket items, is that you might have quite a long sales cycle. So the amount of leads and ad spend that you'd need to actually get customers coming through, there could be a bit of time in between, which is cash flow.

So you may want to think about liquidating your ad spend by putting mini bundles in, mini products or services to see whether you can actually get them to cross the line as a customer. The other important fact there is as soon as they become a customer, the relationship's different and it's easier then to upsell. The trust is there. They've got proof that, you know, you're amazing at what you do.

They've sampled it, and it's an easier sell just to upsell onto the next item. Now, number three is all about securing the sales, making sure that before you move forward that you've really identified what you're going to be scaling and if your product or service is actually scalable. So quite often in business, people are working one-to-one, so growth could be really difficult because there's only one person. It could be that you are now looking to do one-to-many.

So securing those sales and making sure that you have sales coming in before you start scaling and you've got some past history. So really the message is don't scale too soon, because what happens is that once you test the market, you'll have to evolve your product or service. We've done it lots of times. We've put things out, they've not turned out as well as we'd hoped, or we didn't get the results or the sales.

We've tweaked the messaging, we've rejigged the proposition and gone to market again, and then we've started to really reap the just desserts. And, you know, when we look at how you invest in your business, number four is about investing in technology. So as you're scaling, you know, your workload could scale. So, you know, we've got to look at time, effort and money, and really you want to be doing less of that because the natural progression is that, you know, we assume that when we scale a business that our expenses will go up.

Well, actually, you know, it could be the opposite. And, you know, quite often in business, it's true that when we see a business hit a point, we look at the products and services, we start looking at margins, we start looking at how we're going to really drive that profit forward, and you've got momentum in your sales and your program, and you've got that profit, obviously, in the business, that the investment in technology can often reduce the time, effort and money. And this is the great thing that, you know, if you've got ads running, then all you're going to be doing once they're set up is optimizing and tweaking, retesting, you know, and these are small amounts of time in a day and even things that, you know, can be outsourced. So investing in technology and looking at the stages of the customer life cycle.

How do you meet somebody? You know, how do you recruit somebody into the business? Are you using ads? How do you get someone from a suspect to a prospect?

And by suspect, that could be someone just signing up for a free guide. They've not expressed an interest in your specific products or services yet. And ultimately, we've got to remember that 97% of people who visit your website, who go to your landing pages, are not ready to buy. So if you're only recognizing 3% of people who are buying and inquiring, that's a lot of people not to be obviously keeping in touch with.

Now, this is why investing in technology is great because you can use nurturing processes by using tools like ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp to automate that nurture campaign. So as soon as someone signs up, the mistake that businesses make is they leave them sitting in a list doing nothing, not building a relationship, not building trust, not taking them and moving them along the sales cycle. So investing in technology can save time, money and effort. effort ultimately, and can make the business more profitable.

So we use ActiveCampaign. It's an amazing tool. Every time someone enters our world, signs up for something free, be it a quiz, a guide, a masterclass, we take them on a journey. We send them emails.

We nurture that relationship. We don't always just keep asking people to buy things. You know, this is where people go wrong. A nurture series for me is about opening up communication, having this two-way conversation.

The natural reaction would be to reply to an email. So we call them Chatty Cathy emails because we're trying to get the conversation, we're trying to get trust, build a relationship. And once you deepen that connection and really resonate and relate with someone, this whole nurture series, this email series, is there to really create desire around the product. Not necessarily sell the product, but add value so that you become such a trusted member of their world that they see you as an influencer, an expert in your niche.

And ultimately, if the time is right, when the time...

Right, that they're far more likely to refer or to choose you. Now, last and but not least is finding the team, you know, or strategically outsourcing. No one said that you have to have offices. No one said you have to employ people.

It's your business. You started it. You know why you started it. If you don't want to manage teams and have that hassle, don't do it.

You know, some people just are not, you know, interested in being a leader for teams. You know, the thing you've got to remember is that when you employ someone, it's not for them just to do whatever you're obviously asking them to do. It's their career too. So you have to be investing and prepared to put time and effort and, to a degree, money to back this person, to enable them to train, to grow, personal development, career development, giving them the perks that, you know, for them is their dream job.

So if that doesn't sound like the sort of thing you want to do, don't do it. Go to somebody who's set up their business, their passion, who is totally happily to do the jobs you don't want to do, and empower them to do it because that's what they want to do. They chose to do that. So if there's things in your business you don't want to do, delegate, declutter, and outsource, and get things moving.

Because what happens is, is the business stalls if you have a huge procrastination over topics or you have things that drag on your to-do list. You need to lighten that load, declutter it, and get other people moving it forward. Because if there can be things that are happening when you're not in the business, this is when you really start to see your business flourish. Because you need to be able to walk away from your business, your business run without you, and your business earn money without you.

And this is really where the emphasis should be every single month, looking at how you can do this and going back through these scaling processes, looking at the evaluation of products and services, thinking what your plan is, looking at where the money is coming from, how are you going to get actual sort of profit increases, how are you going to secure the sales into the business. Business, what technology do you need? Are you going to invest in technology? Are you going to invest in training or personal development for yourself?

Or are you going to grow a team? Or are you going to outsource to other people? So I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast, and I will see you on the next one. And don't forget to head over to DawnMcGruer.

com, subscribe to the podcast, and there are some goodies waiting for you, some freebies, things like free guide and just additional resources. And also, don't forget there's lots of other episodes that we've done. You can have a quick look on the website and you can do a search. We have literally recorded all sorts of different topics in the world of business and marketing that cover starting, growing and scaling.

So really valuable resources, and we've transcribed them too to make it super easy and accessible for you to get your business to a point where you've always dreamed of. So see you on the next one. Take care. Bye.

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.