Being an overnight success is not something you should aspire to. Because stable and sustainable businesses’ growth curve, over time, is steadier than a growth curve of something that occurs overnight.
Michelle Warner, a business designer, provides guidance about business maturity and the importance of understanding the stage your business is in.
Read on for key gems Michelle shares.
Following the stages of business is better than strategy
Strategies are what sit at the top of the funnel. They’re the bandaids slapped onto the foundation of your business. However, the foundation of your business grows in stages. Different strategies are appropriate at different stages. If you’re reading blogs and listening to podcasts, you’re picking up people’s preconceived campaigns and strategies and slapping them on a business that is not ready for it. It’s not going to work. You could execute it perfectly and it’s still not going to work. It’s largely due to the fact that you’re not in the stage of business that the strategy is going to work for.
So it’s all about understanding where you are now. What is true for your business right now? And what is the appropriate thing for you to be doing at this stage? When you don’t learn those lessons, the strategies don’t work because you’re deploying them at the wrong time.
Foundational focus for your business
Systematically figure out what you like about your business
Harvard Business Review has some seminal research from the early 80s about the five stages of small business growth. This research was done on your traditional, at the time, small business – brick and mortar, up to 500 employees.
There are five stages you should ground yourselves in. You should figure out what stage are you in, understand what does that means, and build from there. Are you in the validate stage (the first stage), which lasts a very short amount of time? Can you provide value to people? This does not mean your whole product mix is perfected and figured out.
Then stage two is sales, can you create a predictable and reliable marketing and sales system? This stage it lasts a long time because what else also fit in there is founder fit. That’s the point where you figure out what you like and don’t like and blow your business up and start over again. If you don’t take the intentional time to go through that stage and learn those lessons, you end up creating something that you don’t like. But then you have a multimillion-dollar business that you want to blow up because you hate every minute of it.
So there’s a benefit and frustration in kind of systematically going through that process of figuring out what you like, not only what works, but what do you enjoy?
Foundational gaps you should be aware of
A lack of understanding about who your audience is is one gap. If you don’t understand what your audience needs or who they are, frustration with your audience starts to build or you start creating products that you don’t enjoy delivering.
Another gap is owners who jump too quickly from selling to family and friends to now all of a sudden you feel you need to create this huge social media following. This is the relationship versus traffic sale that exists on a continuum. Over on the left is the family and friends very first sale – the relationship sale that means you’re selling to somebody that you know. Then on the right of the continuum is mass marketing – the traffic sale.
There are a million different steps and points of interest that you can stop along that continuum and find your sweet spot and learn how to market. But instead we go from relationship sale to traffic sale, no matter if the traffic sale is right for the product that you’re selling. All sudden you need 10,000 social media followers when you could actually just take that little relationship sale to family and friends and extend that by talking to a group of ten people who you don’t know. You don’t have to go all the way over to 10,000 Instagram followers to continue moving your business in the right direction.
Don't despise small beginnings
You can build on small beginnings in an iterative way that moves you along a spectrum between a relationship traffic sale. You will probably find a spot along that continuum that you love and that you can stop at. You don’t have to go all the way. We don’t think we’re allowed to stop. It’s like, it’s not a success unless you get all the way to this huge following.
But that’s not true for most people. Most people’s goals are around having a freedom based business that allows them all these different things and maybe that includes a big following if that’s something you love. But maybe it doesn’t. And you should consider that and try those things out. So, go as far along the continuum as you need to until you find the happiness and the business that you’re looking for.
One thing you should be doing before you hit your next plateau
Always be one step more active than what you’re doing right now. The continuum from passive to active. Passive is waiting for people to come to you and hoping that people are going to see you. But how can you do one thing more active today? Because that is going to have an iterative multiplicative effect on your marketing.
For example, if you go from just posting on Instagram and hoping someone is going to see that message and reach out to you, how can you notice that people are interacting with your message and reach out to them, not immediately asking them, please buy something from me, but building a relationship with them? You talk about audience borrowing. How can you look for one person to borrow an audience of ten people? These are the steps that we’re looking for is continually being one step more active with what you’re doing.
Resource
Free workshop to get a Network that Pays – desoladavis.com/networkthatpays
About Michelle
Michelle Warner designs tiny companies that are built to last. With an MBA from one of the world’s top business schools and 15+ years growing small businesses, Michelle knows how to make a business work. She’s also the creator of Networking That Pays, the introvert-friendly, always awkward-free connection system that brings in reliable leads, consistent referrals and meaningful connections for your business in just one message a day.
