Episode 80: Do More of What Works

Welcome to Scale to Seven®! Your behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to scale your business to seven figures. I'm your host Kathryn Binkley, business and leadership coach for online entrepreneurs. Here's what I know, building a business that will generate millions requires the mindset, strategy, and action of a future seven-figure CEO, starting now. Ready to Scale to Seven®? Let's go!

Hello, welcome back to the podcast. This is episode number 80. And I want to tell you a story going back to my marketing agency day. I started my career working for these full-service marketing agencies as a marketing strategist and account executive serving hundreds of clients and helping them grow their businesses, leveraging, marketing, and companies would hire us to develop their strategic marketing plans for the entire year. And we would spend weeks developing the plans. We'd list out every single strategy that could help them reach their goals. We would, of course, do tons of research before making recommendations. For every strategy, we would list out all of the tactics, we would put together the implementation plan, the budget, and really have everything laid out for an entire year, which sounds a little crazy now because I never plan for a full year now. I may talk about annual goals, but I only plan in quarterly. But what would happen is then we go in and we present these plans. And these strategic marketing plans were sometimes 60 pages, 100 pages long. There was so much to cover, that we've even sometimes split the presentation into two separate meetings. And the thing is clients were overwhelmed by the amount of information, and even more overwhelmed by the thought of implementing everything in the plan. Now honestly, looking back, I didn't see it, then I just, you know, did what I was supposed to do in my role. But looking back, I think that was part of the agency's plan. It was never really like explicitly stated. But an overwhelmed client was far more likely to hire the agency to handle all of the implementations than to go try to do it themselves. 

So it was in the best interest of the agency to list all of the ideas and to really make sure that everything sounded complex. But I remember one specific client, just one out of all of my years, out of the hundreds of strategic marketing plans that I developed. I remember one client who said he didn't want to see the full plan. Now, he said he understood if we needed to do that ourselves, for ourselves, if we needed to document all of the research if we needed to go through our senior process, but he didn't want to see it all. He just wanted a one-page executive summary. And I remember the agency owner was shocked and question whether the client really understood the value of our work. But boiling that 100+ page plan, down to a single page didn't diminish the value of our work at all. In fact, I think it made it much more valuable. Simplifying things down to the essential to the most important and focusing on the 80/20. That was smart. So why do I tell you this? And what does this have to do with you? Well, here's what I see happen a lot. You set these big goals, the kind that will really stretch you. They may feel impossible, yet entirely possible all at the same time. And you know that you need a plan for how to achieve them. So you start brainstorming. And brainstorming doesn't sound like something that's that bad of an idea. It sounds like a good idea. But you list out all of the things that you could do to reach your goals. And then you skip one important step, simplifying, instead of trying to boil all of that down into just the essential you take all of those ideas you brainstormed, and you make that your plan and you find yourself exhausted and nowhere near your goal. 

So what went wrong? You thought that doing more doing all of those ideas. Putting all of that into action would help you achieve more. And that couldn't be further from the truth. When you do more the quality of your work and performance actually drops, right? There's this tipping point where more doesn't actually equal more, it turns into poor results. And with poor results, you lose money and you lose time and you lose other resources, like your energy. If you're aiming to scale, the goal isn't to do more, the goal is to do more of what works. And that actually means doing less, you say that again, doing more of what works actually means doing less overall. So first, if you want to do more of what works if you want to scale, then you need to know what's working, and what's not. Many entrepreneurs still spend time on all of the unnecessary and time-consuming tasks without really considering the effectiveness. You think you're supposed to do this and that to get such result. So you do, right? You, you think you're supposed to do all of these things in order to get a result. So you try, you try to do all the things, but you're not really taking the time to understand whether it's helping or hindering progress towards your goals. Spoiler alert, probably hindering, if you find yourself starting a lot of things but not finishing. If you find yourself doing so many things, that you're touching all of it, but not actually seeing results with any of it, that's not a good thing. 

So how do you know what's working or what's not working? Here's a simple exercise that you can do today, I want you to go through all of your active projects, list them out, make a full list, you can look at your to-do list, you can make your project list, you look at all of your projects and tasks. And then I want you to ask this question if you stop those projects, if you didn't complete those tasks, would your results change? For many of you? The answer is no. If you're really truly honest with yourself, if you really, truly look at the results of the work that you're completing, as it relates to your big picture goals, not just any result, but your overall end goal that you want your definition of success. Is this project, is this task contributing to that? Is it helping or is it hindering progress towards that goal? If it's not helping, then you need to cut it out. And instead, you need to stick to doing what works, you need to do more of what works. So you'll eliminate all of the unnecessary tasks and double down on what's working. Why? Because that's how you'll increase result. That's how you will work less. That's how you'll be able to enjoy this journey. And not just to hustle your way to the end goal that you want. So turn what works into a repeatable system, do more of what works, document what works, and turn it into that system, and start creating predictable results. If something's working, you want to do more of it. You want to streamline it. So it's more efficient. 

This is how you can simplify your way to seven figures, and create that positive, predictable overall impact that you want. So just to recap, scaling your business is not at all about doing more and wearing yourself out from overworking. It's about doing what works for you, for your team, for your business. And that means you need to know what's working and what's not. You need to do more of what works. And then turn what works into a repeatable system. Scaling to seven figures is all about doing more, but not just doing more, doing more of what works, which again, means actually doing less. Now we have a proven framework with the nine elements that you need to scale to seven. And I share it all inside of my "Free Scalability Factor Training." You can go check out that training, you can figure out exactly what you should be focused on. You can learn about the proven system that we've created so that you can do more of what works and cut out the things that don't work. Visit kathrynbinkley.com or the link in my show notes to watch that training right now. You can go sign up and watch it today.

Hey, if you're ready to Scale to Seven®, I want to invite you to join the Scale to Seven® Mastermind. It's my coaching program designed to turn your online business into a self-sustaining scalable business that can generate millions. Just head over to kathrynbinkley.com/scale-to-seven. We'll see you inside!