The One Thing I Did That Scaled My Business Beyond Belief

Welcome to episode 93 with myself, Dawn McGruer, the business growth coach. I'm here to talk to you today about something I get asked every single day. What is the one thing I did that grew my business? Not just grew my business to four figures, five figures, six figures, but multi-seven.

And this one thing surprises every time. My answer shocks. And what is that? If there was one thing that changed my business, it was me.

It was my mindset. It was my whole attitude and my whole way of thinking. We all have blocks. Every single one of us has a belief, has a truth that maybe isn't the truth.

We have a success barrier. So what was the one thing that catapulted my business forward? Stepping past my success barriers. There are literally hundreds of success barriers that we put up.

And you might be asking, like, why do we do this? Well, we don't consciously decide them. And when I understood that success was relative to me and what I wanted, it was a game changer because I started to get more and more into a growth mindset. I began to be more coachable.

I began to see mentors for the inspiration they were. I got past FOMO and looking at people online and thinking, Oh my goodness, they're doing bigger and better things than me. I got really super clear on my journey, and I started to look at what was holding me back. And when you look in the mirror, we forget that sometimes you are that thing.

And sometimes it just takes hearing it from somebody else. It's a brave move to admit it, and one that took me a while. When I started my business at 21, I used to get so into things. I had such a passion, such a vigor.

I was resilient. I got knocked down. My dad used to tell me things were character building. I wrote a book in my first year of business.

Character Building came out. Now, the irony there was is I'd ring my dad and tell my dad about the amazing things that were going on, but I was going through like a feast and famine. So the next phone call he'd get, I was down in the dumps, stressed out. I was trying to do everything.

I was pushing so hard. And I thought genuinely that the reason I was stuck in that cycle was outside factors, things outside my control. I felt like I was doing so much. I felt like I was just pushing and I couldn't do more.

And I just could not fathom what was the wrongness in my business until I wrote the book. What had happened to me was I suffered six deaths in six months, around about 19, 20. So when I started my business at 21, I was in a really, really positive state for my business, but I'd been dented a lot, and I'd kind of gone into myself. I was so focused on the business, I couldn't see that I was the barrier to my own success, because you have to do the work.

The weird thing was, as crazy as it sounds, getting offices, had a mortgage, I wrote a book, I got 37 authors together, I created a book that raised money for cancer research campaign. I met 37 of the most inspiring people in my life. Some were celebrities. We had Philip Schofield.

I was the only book, and still am to my knowledge, that got the rights, the publishing rights for Rudyard Kipling's If to include in my book. I was so passionate, and I was pushing and pushing, but it wasn't until I created the book and held the launch party, I realized that that was my journey. It was my journey to understand that every cloud had a silver lining. I had to embrace things.

I had to feel things. I had to really do the work, the mindset work, to get past, you know, six deaths in six months. At that age, you know, my late teens, early twenties was tough. Buying a house, all of these things were all catalysts for these things happening.

Starting a business, it gave me this do or die attitude. So as much as it was a positive, it was also a hindrance because I felt like I was invincible. I didn't care. I would push at anything.

I would do anything. I didn't let any confidence issues hold me back. I would just get past it. I would just do it, and I'd think, well, what's the worst that can happen?

I'll die. And Yeah, to a degree, that did catapult me forward. But really getting clear on my success barriers. When I wrote that book, by writing, by putting pen to paper, typing out that chapter, that was me cathartically getting past that chapter in my life.

It was dealing with it. So when I think about my barriers to success, they've changed at different times, and one of the biggest is overwhelm. It still happens to everybody I know. You know, we still hit a point of overwhelm until we get clarity.

But how do we get clarity when we're stuck in overwhelm? Well, if I think back to my feast and famine, I think about the overwhelm was like there's so much to do, there's so many ideas. I always talk about building the foundations and putting the bricks on later. The bricks are all the amazing ideas, all the things you could do.

But the foundations are the things purely aligned to building a sustainable, profitable business and doing nothing, nothing outside that, and only doing the things that serve the goals to achieve the foundation. Boxing the things till later doesn't mean you don't do them. It just means you don't do them right now. Overwhelm is one.

Imposter syndrome. Oh my goodness, I got my publishing contract, and it was the proudest moment of my life, but the scariest because I was thinking, oh my goodness, with a business book, you write the book once you get the contract. They hadn't even seen what I'd written. All they'd seen was a 12-page book proposal.

Yes, I was really proud of it. Yes, it outlined everything, but it wasn't a manuscript. They hadn't had that. I was tasked with writing a 400-page manuscript in four weeks, and when I handed it in, although I just thought, this is amazing and it's epic and I'm so glad it's done, I hit massive imposter syndrome.

But you deal to get past it. You really have to walk into it, embrace it. It sounds strange, but the more I embrace my success barriers, pull them in and feel them, the easier I can manage them and I can walk past them. So you never truly get over these things.

You just manage them through. You reduce the barrier to success to a point where you can step past it. Things like tech, having a team. I remember just thinking, oh my goodness, I've got to hire a team, and who do I hire?

And I had so many bad hires, so many bad hires. I've had my fingers burnt so many times by agencies, from outsourcers and contractors. I've employed people who I've put my heart and soul into, only to feel absolutely torn apart when I find out that they've gone behind my back or they've done something against me or, you know, they've copied something or taken it somewhere else. But then I learn that these are the things that I go with my gut.

Now I spread my risk. My barrier to success is literally I hire and work with the people I feel aligned with. I don't ever put too much into that person because I don't want to have that feeling of this one person, if they left, it would be a risk or an exposure to my business. Each person I hire does six things, six things for me.

They are super clear on what they have to do, my expectations. I've become a better leader, better manager, because really the bad hires were my fault in the first place. So when I realised that a lot of these things actually stem from me, then you start to change. But you have to have the failures to have the wins, because without those learnings, you know nothing.

And the more strategic I got on this, the better, because when I created strategies and I was super clear, I reduced the overwhelm. The imposter syndrome didn't come up as much because I would look back on things that I'd already achieved. So I was operating from a point of fact, a science. My confidence then grew.

And then I looked at things that I wasn't doing. I wasn't being visible. I wasn't getting on stage. I wasn't speaking on stage, or my peers were.

I love doing video. I love doing podcasting. But why wasn't I speaking on stage? The crazy thing is, is I just sort of built up in my head that it was a barrier, a thing I hadn't done, and the thought of speaking in front of 3,000 people scared the living daylights out of me.

I would have wished for the building to burn down rather than do that. But when I did it. I started smaller, built it up, and then won Best Female Speaker in 2018. So when you think about it, there are hurdles, but the hurdles are put there for you to get past.

And the bigger we stride, the bigger we embrace things, the better. And it's not always about pushing. It's sometimes about taking a step back and looking at the fear of failure. If I hadn't had some of the most epic fails, I mean, I look at some of the things I've invested in, you know, over the past 20 years, and I think, oh my God, how much money have I wasted?

But I haven't. I've learned something from every single penny that I feel didn't go the right place, because things got better. I catapulted my business forward because I learned by failing. I tested.

Things got more and more efficient. I launched a course thinking it was going to be the best thing ever, and it just didn't get traction. I took it back a stage, retested it, got clear on my messaging, got clear on my avatar.

And I hit like quarter of a million. It still wasn't the target I'd set. So I did it again. I revised it, I revamped it, put it out there, and now we're into multi-millions.

So it's not the fear of failure. It's a temporary failure. It's a glitch. It's a learning curve.

It's a, if I put this out and I do something, I learn something. If I do nothing, nothing happens. So you can't stay in a point flux. And quite often, I have done that in my early twenties.

I've stayed in a point of kind of like safety, but it actually wasn't. Being able to kind of get the support and the systems to just being able to start taking that step. Small steady steps get big momentum. And you don't have to make massive strides.

I learned quickly that it's not about doing everything right now, emergency, all systems go. It's about planning, getting the strategy in place, being accepting to it might not fly, and being able to think about scaling my business in a way that I wanted. I got to a point where I was traveling and traveling and traveling, planes, planes, planes, trains, trains, trains. I could have worked seven days a week, stages, training, presenting, literally talking about digital marketing, scaling businesses all day long.

And doing corporate training, I was getting paid a lot of money for it. I was literally doing a 30-minute slot. I was getting £3,000 minimum for that in the early stages. But did I want to do that for the rest of my life?

No, I didn't. So when COVID hit, I decided that I didn't want to travel, travel, travel. What was important to me? I got back to the root of it.

Success is relative, relative to you and what you want. So I started to really think about my scaling plan, my succession. What was important to me? Because what I wanted in my twenties was different to my thirties, to indeed my forties.

I'm 43 now, and the things that I want are enrichment, experiences. All of these things change, but so does your strategy, and again, in turn, my success barriers. Because I was just thinking, well, I'm working six days travelling, I'm getting paid for, like, huge amounts of money, five days a week. You know, I'm absolutely smashing it.

Was I joyful? Was I happy? Was I heck. I wasn't.

And it wasn't until I fell into that and started looking at my own barriers to success, why was I not loving it? Because I didn't want to be counting the steps to get on a train. I was counting hundred steps to think, I can just sit down, I can chill out for a minute, and I can go to the next thing. It was just pushing myself too much.

Taking a step back, reworking the whole plan, and actually thinking, well, do you know what? It's going to be a lot to try and change this. It's not going to happen overnight, but I'm just going to do little increments. I started to delegate.

I started to declutter. I started to design my diary. Slowly but surely, one month later, two months later, three months later, the world was a completely different place. I was still earning money, and then into my fourth and fifth and sixth month, I was earning even more money.

I wasn't launching. I wasn't travelling. I was spending, like, three and a half days working fully, with Wellness Wednesday afternoon off, Friday off as well, and it was just a game changer. But had I thought about that years before, maybe it wouldn't have been the right time.

Right time. Maybe it would have been. But what was my barrier to success? It was me.

I was the one who'd carved out this life and journey that I was living, and I was thinking, well, I can't get off and I can't stop it, and I just need it to be different, and I need a day off, or I just need a week where I'm not traveling. But I made those decisions. I was my barrier to success. But the exciting thing is, is you can be the absolute catapult to your success.

If you get this right, if you really hone into it, and you get really super clear on what it is that you want, your goals, the dreams, and really align to that, and get super clear on your why. Why did you start your business? Why did you get into the job you're in? What is the outcome you want?

What is the absolute aspirational kind of dream that it is that you want? Don't think small. Think big, and dream big. Because the thing is, is if you get past your success barriers, you can really, truly make it happen.

I can honestly say I have never been happier in my life, and the balance that I have just re-energizes me. The clients I work with, I absolutely love. The results that we get, everything feels in sync. Everything feels in flow.

And this game-changing moment came from me, because every time I think about how my business scaled, it was me. Every time my business stalled, it was me. So get clear on your success barriers, and empower yourself. Connect with them, and get ready to step past them, and make this a journey that you never forget.

Because we only live once, and it can be the most magical time. And no one said you have to do what you're doing today tomorrow. You have the ability to be dynamic and have change. So on that note.

Please think into this. Even if you take five minutes to think about this podcast, do something amazing today. Change one thing and connect with me on social media. Come and follow me on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, wherever.

I'd love to hear more about your journey and just come and say hi. I always, always reply to anybody who messages me. So come and tell me what this podcast meant to you and any changes you've made, any breakthroughs, epiphany moments you've had, and I will see you on the next podcast. So thank you for listening and have an amazing week.

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.