Image credit: Social Squares
The online business industry is growing rapidly and with the internet allowing us to connect with ideal clients all over the world, the opportunities to build successful web-based remote businesses are endless. As the demand for services like web design, social media marketing and even coaching skyrocket, as an entrepreneur, you may be faced with the exciting challenge of growing your business.
Growing your business (or scaling as the top gurus like to say), seems great in theory and can certainly positively impact your profit–at least that’s the goal–but it isn’t always the most straightforward process. Between streamlining your business operations or hiring new team members, everything feels like a priority and it can be a challenge to accomplish everything while doing good business.
One key concept that I like to stress with my clients is the importance of recognizing how your role can and should shift as your business or your team grows. While there’s something to be said about your skills, experience and approach you took to get to the season of growth you’re currently navigating, up-levelling your business also requires stepping into your role as a leader. It’s a necessary evolution that you’ll need to navigate as an entrepreneur and unfortunately, not something you’ll learn how to do on whatever $397 course of the moment you buy (and forget about).
The good news is that there are a few key traits that most leaders have in common that can help you grow your business successfully, as in your clients and your team members are seriously dedicated because you’re a dream to work with and for. Here are 3 things that great leaders excel in:
Image credit: Social Squares
Questioning Assumptions
If your business is growing, you’re probably pretty good at what you do. It’s likely that you’ve mastered your process, found a groove and can consistently meet or exceed your clients’ expectations. Doing things on autopilot and having a workflow that you know like the back of your hand is one of the advantages of being an in-demand expert, until it isn’t…
Because you’re sooo familiar with your work, your process and your approach to doing business, it’s possible that you may let your own biases or assumptions overshadow the truth in your business. When you build a team, it’s important to practice questioning assumptions and ensure that it’s an approach taken by each team member as an operational principle.
Why?
Pushing the envelope, developing and testing strong ideas and eventually conceiving and executing a bulletproof strategy starts with obtaining accurate information and challenging any preconceived notions or biases you may have.
In Practice:
One of the ways I see this impacting the growth of small businesses is the dreaded faithful follower. That is, an entrepreneur who idolizes the business guru of the moment and takes their advice and teachings at face value.
The truth is, not every strategy being taught by celebrity entrepreneurs will work for you, your team or your clients… not to mention a plethora of information that your fave business icon leaves out of their curriculum (i.e. that their 6-figure course launch only turned a 5-figure profit).
While there are definitely stellar strategies being taught in the world of online business, as a great leader you’ll need to challenge your assumptions, avoid following the crowd and get real about what you actually need.
Image credit: Social Squares
Getting Comfortable With Experimentation
Great leaders tend to have a scientific approach to leading a team or growing a business. This means that it’s important to be able to generate a measurable hypothesis. Whether you’re looking to refine your marketing strategy or tackle a new product launch, the experimentation phase is going to provide some valuable insight. This is the time to get crystal clear on the nitty-gritty details and make quantitative theories to test. AKA no more broad statements like “I want to increase my email subscribers so I’m developing a new opt-in”. Think back to high school science class–specifics were a must when conducting experiments, and the same goes for your business.
Why?
Get this! You can get really good at challenging assumptions (à la point #1) if you have tangible, quantitative data to paint an accurate picture. You’ll be able to look at the results of your efforts to determine if they truly made a difference in the growth of your business, ruling out your own biases and judgement.
In Practice:
Let’s keep rolling with the opt-in example… you’ll want to start with selecting a measurable goal so ‘get more email subscribers’ won’t cut it. Think about the percentage of growth you want to see and the ideal time it will take to achieve that. For example, your goal may be to increase your email list of 1000 people by 10% in Q3. That leaves you 3 months to add 100 emails to your list.
Next, you’ll experiment with the ‘how’. Where are you marketing your opt-in? Who are you targeting? How are you connecting with them? This also lends space for experimentation as you could decide to test different copy, images, calls-to-action or more. The options are endless but it’s crucial to experiment in such a way that you can analyze the results in an insightful way. You might decide to run a marketing campaign on Pinterest to reach a new audience so pick some metrics (i.e. pinning your opt-in 3 times a day for 30 days) to analyze and tweak to find the sweet spot for the results you’re looking to achieve.
Challenging Perceived Causality
We’ve all been there… dreaming up an incredible idea, the be-all and end-all offer, the piece de resistance that’s going to catapult you into unthinkable business success… and then it doesn’t. What’s up with that?
Here’s the thing, those biases and assumptions we talked about earlier? They can be a real problem if you’re like most entrepreneurs–full of dreamy big ideas. But not every idea is created equal. It can be easy to find yourself investing all of your resources into building a new product, launching a new concept, or chasing a genius idea because you’ve experienced a bit of success.
Why?
While it’s possible that the success you’ve experienced is actually attributable to the idea you had and/or the way you executed it, it’s also possible that something else may have caused the success. Being able to challenge causality will allow you to determine if there could be other explanations for a result. There is a very key difference between causality and correlation. And mistaking the latter for the former can be a costly mistake.
In Practice:
Picture this… after an exciting conversation with a member of your community, you dream up the ultimate offer. Your community member has expressed their needs and you know you have a solution that will help not only them but many members of your audience. You spend time and money (and utilize your team members) to build out a product from scratch (we’re talking onboarding workflows, contracts, welcome packages, automations, and entire systems to support this brand new offer) and you book that enthusiastic client, cha-ching! You start marketing the product to your audience.
And then crickets… it turns out, that enthusiastic client who was all over your DMs enticing you to move forward with your big idea? They’re a serious fan of your business who would throw money at anything you sold them but they aren’t actually representative of your ideal client and the rest of your community.
With your underlying bias, you think:
Great idea = booked client
when the reality is:
Great idea (sold to a huge fan) = booking a single client (correlation)
and not:
Great idea (well researched, reflective of your ideal client’s needs with stellar marketing) = selling to full capacity (causation)
Final Thoughts…
When approaching leadership in your business, it’s important to recognize your own biases and approach every endeavour as an experiment and learning opportunity (with tangible data and measurable results). This scientific approach to leadership helps your team and clients learn to trust your judgement and feel confident approaching you with new ideas (backed by hard data). It’s an openness to new ideas, continual questioning and challenging assumptions that pave the way for small business growth.
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