What Should I Focus On In My Business Right Now?

In Mumstyle CEO, podcast, Strategy and Tips by Annelise

In this current climate, it can be confusing and overwhelming knowing what to do in your business. Especially in the early days, and especially if you’re facing big changes in the way you run your business, or adapting to the industry changes that have rocked your business. 

It can be difficult to know where to focus your time. Our time is precious and finite and only more so with many of us working with children at home. 

I’ve been helping my clients navigate this through customised business and marketing strategies, which I realise I can’t do for everyone listening – but if you’d like to chat 1:1 please do reach out.

But I realised what I can do is talk through the things that I’m doing in my own business, and that I’m recommending my clients do also. 

In business, as I’ve mentioned a couple of times over the last few weeks, we need to choose how we’re going to invest. In the early days when we are the be all and end all of the business, and further along when we have staff it will occur in a bit of a different capacity – but we need to decide … are we going to invest our time, or our money

At the start, we invest our time, and probably lots of it. And we have to – because we’re not making any money yet. 

Then comes the point where you have to invest your money. In a website, in branding, in product, in marketing … whatever that looks like for you. 

And then hopefully you start generating income, and you’re still doing as much as possible to try and reach your revenue goals.

For most people this dance looks like working too much for too little money. Then working too much for ok money – realising they can’t possibly do any more to earn more – and they can’t sustain the current pace. 

Then this is the tipping point. It all becomes too hard and gets thrown in, or it works at this level for a while, or they hire someone and take a hit to the income themselves and then business dips and they get rid of the person that was helping them and then .. and then and then. 

This is one reason that so many new businesses fail. The income to work ratio is not working. 

The business owns the owner. They’ve bought themselves a very demanding and very expensive job. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s the sticking point that I see a lot of clients get to. And now, in this uncertain landscape we need to be in control. We need to be in warrior mode. We need to take a stand for the business we want and deserve. To step back and look at what’s going on with fresh eyes and decide on the most strategic and effective move to make. 

For me, and for a lot of you, it’s going to come back to where you spend your time and your money. 

What are you investing in right now? 

The first thing I’m investing in is myself. 

Our business supports my family, my husband works in the business with me, and yet I know we’re not at the best point we could be. So I decided to get a coach. I spent way more than I was comfortable with and committed to 12 months of serious coaching, and I tell you what. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done for our business.

I’ve seen the financial return already, less than 3 months in. 

So why in the midst of all the chaos did I invest so heavily in my development? Because YOU are the best investment you can ever make. You are the centre of the wheel, the centre of your little universe. You drive your business, and you likely drive your family, not to mention everything else in your life. But the stronger the foundation, the more creative the foundation, the more skilled the foundation … the better everything else is because of it.

And you better believe that when you invest in YOU significantly, you do the work. You step up and you do what needs to be done. 

Not only that, but in a time when you can’t rely on even the basics of what society has taught us to rely on – you’ve only got you that you can control.

The next thing I invested more heavily in was staff.

When you invest in you, you think bigger and you play bigger. It means you have less time to be doing things that you can pay someone else to do for you, for less.

For me, it makes no sense doing tasks that I can get my staff to do for $40 an hour, when I’m charging my own time at multiples of that. 

Your staff should be making you money, not costing you money. So when you hire, you do need to be thinking about how they’re going to either bring money in physically, or save you time and money so that you can bring in more money and do things at that higher CEO level pay grade. 

I know this step can be scary – but it’s totally necessary if you’re going to grow.

It’s very unlikely you can build the business of your dreams without a team. And maybe that team is 1 or 2 support staff, but you’re going to need people.

The key here, in my experience, is hire before you’re ready. Even an hour a week. Just get some things off your plate that is going to free up your time to do the income generating activities that only you can do. Or that it only makes sense for you to do.

For me – that’s marketing, and podcasting and creating content, and speaking with new clients. I can’t outsource that. But bookwork and finance and social media management and blog posting and the list goes on – I can outsource, and I do. 

It definitely didn’t happen overnight. And funnily enough the first thing I outsource I now do myself. But you learn and tweek and adjust according to the needs of your business and your life, and what your priorities are. 

The other big thing I’m investing in is advertising.

Again. This is a lever I know is going to bring money into my business.

This may also be super scary, but done well, it’s the best investment that you can possibly make. 

Yes, you need to have a formula that works before you throw money behind it, and you need to be strategic around how you actually do this, but once you have a formula – you can rarely get better return on investment than from ads.

It’s the rocket fuel that boosts the results you’re getting. If you know that a certain percentage of website visitors book a consult, or buy your product or sign up for your email list – imagine if you increased that by x10. What would that do for your bottom dollar?

For example, in the agency, we get a phone call from a new lead for about $100. We may have to speak to 10 people to get a new client, so it;s cost us $1000 for a new client. Which sounds like a lot. But the average amount we get from one client is in the tens of thousands. So I’ve spent $1000 to get at least $10000 – that’s a pretty good deal. 

You’ll have your own version of that, and just may not know what it is yet.

But you should know. You should find out.

If you don’t know the number in your business, you’re not going to have a business for very long. You can’t run things properly without knowing where you are.

And so the next question becomes – how do I run good ads? 

And that my friends is where you are in luck.

We’re running our DIY Ads That Convert workshop again starting on the 7th of June inside the Social Marketing Method Facebook group.

It’s 5 days of LIVE teaching – it’s 100% free – and I promise you you’ll get more out of it that you got from the last course you paid for.

You’re going to learn the A-Z of running social media ads. From targeting, to testing to knowing what’s working and what’s not – and what to change.

I’m talking agency level details here – you’ll learn the real deal and you’ll leave the workshop having designed your ad campaign and being ready to go and start running ads.

So if that sounds good and you’d like to join us – join our private FB group where all the fun is happening – go to anneliseworn.com/workshop and it will take you to the page to register.

Can’t wait to see you there!