How to find focus and direction in your business
It’s Monday morning, and you turn in your computer only to stare at the screen as you’re not sure what you should be doing. Well, you know you should be working on your visibility and be on social media every day, and you know you need to build an email list, and making passive income sounds amazing so, you kind want to do that as well. But your current services are not really working so maybe a new service might be the answer?
So you spend some time scrolling through Instagram comparing yourself with competitors, going to their website to see what services they are selling and getting frustrated because you feel they’ve got it all together. Only to find out it’s already 4 pm and another day went by without really doing something that is making an impact.
Sound familiar?
To me, it sounds like you are overwhelmed with everything that you are ‘supposed’ to do in your business and are unsure of how all the pieces of your brand’s strategy fit together. As a result, you are missing a clear direction in your business. Something that you can go back to each time you get shiny object syndrome, something that can be your brand’s true north.
In this blog, you’ll learn:
Why you are feeling so overwhelmed
What having a clear direction can do for your business
How you can go from overwhelm to clarity
Feeling overwhelmed in your business? Here’s why.
One of the questions I ask my clients in our initial conversation and my market research surveys is this great question from Jonathan Stark: if it would be 3 years from today, and you were looking back over the 3 years, what has to have happened in your life both personally and professionally, for you to feel happy with your progress?
The answers that I see coming back are:
I want to have my niche nailed down
I want to know where to find clients
I want to know how to attract clients
How to be consistently booked out
I want to have more joy in my business because I will have projects that will fit better
I want to make £xK months or 5/6 figure years
I want to build a business model with 1:1 services and passive income
When I follow this up with the question of what they are struggling with the most when it comes to their current clients they say:
That their potential clients don’t seem to have the right budget for their services. And that they sometimes reduce their pricing to still convert the client.
That they usually do not appreciate the knowledge and experience that they have. Leaving them feeling like they are an order taker.
That they have said yes to some clients they shouldn't have and didn't enjoy the work.
That they are dependent on word of mouth and that this gives a lot of stress
That they are not getting enough clients at all
And that they seem to fall off the face of the planet after the initial conversation
After this, I ask what strategic and foundational elements are in place. The results are as followed:
Is in place in most businesses
Goals
Competitor analysis
Client profile
Is not in place in most businesses
Mission and vision
Positioning
Messaging
Customer journey
Sales funnel overview
What I take from this is that most business owners do great when it comes to setting goals, but it does seem that these goals a lot of times are not based on the mission and vision of the business. There is time spent on market research and getting to know the client and competitors, but the results are not used to create a clear positioning that can help your business stand out versus competitors. As well as that the results are not used to create brand messaging to connect with the potential clients. And there is no customer journey mapped or a sales funnel overview that can help with how to turn a social media follower into a client.
So some elements are missing to create a clear strategy for your brand in regards to how you are going to build an emotional connection with your audience and how you can turn them from followers into clients.
If this is you, I can understand why you are feeling overwhelmed. But don’t worry, you can fix this. But let’s first look at what a clear direction can do for your business.
What a clear direction can do for your business.
Remember that example that I started this blog post with? That it is not how you want to spend your days right? When you have a clear direction (and I’ll come back to how you can go from feeling overwhelmed to getting this direction further down this post.) you will be so much more intentional about not only your business but also on how you spend your time. So let’s look at a couple of things that will be different with a clear direction.
How you spend your time
When you know exactly where you are trying to go with your business, you can set yourself yearly, quarterly and monthly goals. These monthly goals can be broken up, in your big 3 goals of the week. Which in turn, can help you with your big 3 tasks of the day. When you approach your planning (of course next to the client work that you need to do) this way, you will always know that what you are working on is actually helping you get closer to reach these goals.
Let me show this in an example.
Let’s say you want to make £50.000 this year in revenue. You offer 3 different packages which you sell for £1.000, £2.000 and £5.000. You sell your middle package the most, and this is generally 2 per month. Now you can calculate how many times you need to sell each service to get to £50.000.
Now you know that you need to sell package 1, 6x this year, package 2, 12x and package 3, 4x. If it’s April and you have sold package 1, already 4 times, you are right on track with this contribution of this service towards your end goal. If you sold it 4 times and it is August you know you need to focus on this more. Maybe you can do a promotion or a challenge that relates to this package.
Related posts:
How to turn your vision into goals
What to do if your big goals seem to be unreachable
Shiny object syndrome
I think we all know this one. And if you have been in business for a while, you have seen the phases go by that you really needed to have your own podcast, a membership, a course and a Facebook group. But how do you know if this next big thing that you supposedly need to get into right now to grow your business to 6 figure months is the right thing for you?
When you have a clear direction, you know where you want to go as a business, who you want to target, what topics to talk about and how to talk to your audience.
You will have your brands north star that guides you. Because the only thing you need to do when you come up with a new idea is to ask yourself these questions:
Is this new idea, service etc. going to get me closer to my 3-year goal?
Is this new idea, service etc. something my clients or audience have been asking for or have you validated this idea with them?
Is it in line with my purpose, mission and values?
If you answer with a no, it might still be a great idea, just not for your brand.
Does this sound good to you? Ok, let’s have a look at how you can achieve clarity and direction so that you can be more intentional about growing your business and connecting with the ‘right’ clients.
How to go from overwhelm to clarity.
Clear Direction
To go a clear direction in your business, you need to go back to the foundation first. This includes your goals, your brand's purpose, mission and vision, but also your values and beliefs as this will drive your businesses behaviour. And as a result, this will impact your client journey and client satisfaction.
Risk when you don’t do this: if you have no mission, what are you going to base your goals on? Without goals, how are going to make sure your business will become a success? If you have no values and believes what will determine your behaviour and keeps this consistent?
Make your business stand out
Once you know these foundational elements, you can use this to make your business stands out. You do this through combining your mission and vision with your personality, expertise and knowledge to create a business that truly stands out in the market.
Risk when you don’t do this: if you don’t know how you stand out from your competitors, how will you be able to present yourself as the solution to the problems of your audience?
who do you want to work with
After this, you can focus on the first step of identifying your ideal client. In this phase, the first thing you need to do is figuring out who you want to work with. It has no value when you dive straight in client profiles and defining your services if you don’t know who you want to work with.
Risk when you don’t do this: if you don’t know who you want to work with how will you know who to survey for your market research? When there are no boundaries when it comes to the type of clients you want to work with the likelihood you will have projects running way longer than should, have clients that don’t respect your knowledge and expertise is much larger
Market research
4)But once you do know this, you do market research on your audience and find out what they are struggling with. You will need this to create your messaging and to determine the topics you will talk about in your blogs posts, newsletters, videos and social media posts.
Risk when you don’t do this: if you don’t know your ideal clients there is a large change your services don’t sell, you don’t know what to write about in your blog post and newsletters and general engagement is low.
Research competitors
Next is performing research on your competitors. Competitor research can be used to see who is already solving your ideal client's problems. But instead of looking at it from your point of view. You're trying to look at it from the audience point of view. What can you take away from what they are currently doing and what can you do better?
Risk when you don’t do this: if you don’t know what else is out there how are you going to convince a potential client they need to pick you? You might be compared with a competitor that offers the same services at much lower prices then you, and if you can’t explain your value they will most likely go for the cheaper option.
Ideal client profile
Only after the research, it’s time to creating your ideal client profile. In this profile, you are combining who you want to work with and what their demographics and psychographics are. As well as their goals and what is holding them back.
Risk when you don’t do this: as mentioned above if you don’t know what your ideal client is struggling with how are you going to create your messaging and content?
brand messaging
Now you know this it’s time to combine everything that you have worked on and get your business out there by creating your brand messaging and your services.
Risk when you don’t do this: you can know everything about your client, but if you can not convince them off all the value that you have to offer and how your services can help them, you will still struggle with converting these ideal clients.
Customer journey
The last step is to define the customer's journey. This means how you are going to get them from following you on social media to becoming your client.
Risk when you don’t do this: if you don’t know how to grow your visibility and how to have the steps in place on how you can lead your potential clients from attention to interest to desire to action it will drastically cut down your number of clients.
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