Time to discover the key investments you need to make to get your dream business thriving, not surviving!
Are you an ADHD entrepreneur who wants to take your business to the next level and achieve multi-six figure success?
Wondering how to make it happen?
Well, I've got the solution you've been searching for.
In this episode I'll be revealing the key areas of investment required to build a thriving business that generates the kind of revenue you've always dreamed of.
So get ready to grab whatever kind of thing you take notes on as I share the secrets to achieving the financial success and growth you desire.
Watch the episode promo
Do you want to take your business to the next level and achieve multi-six figure success? Wondering how to make it happen? Well, I've got the solution you've been searching for. In this content, I'll be revealing the key areas of investment required to build a thriving business that generates the kind of revenue you've always dreamed of. So get ready to unlock the secrets to achieving the financial success and growth you desire.
The Challenges of Scaling a Business
Scaling a business involves countless intricacies and challenges. It requires careful strategy, thoughtful investment, and persistent dedication. In order to break through plateaus and achieve higher levels of success, it’s crucial to implement different skills, strategies and action plans that are tailored to your growth targets. During the podcast, Katie presented these insights through compelling narratives. Her points reinforced the idea that scaling a business isn’t a walk in the park. It involves more than just financial investment- it entails investment of time, energy, and even pride. She argues that understanding these investments and meeting growth challenges head on can catapult a business to the next level of success.
Let me tell you – scaling a business is like embarking on an epic quest filled with countless intricacies and challenges!
It's not just about throwing money at it – oh no! Scaling requires a masterful strategy, thoughtful investment, and unwavering dedication.
honestly, it takes intentionality
We're talking about taking your biz to new heights, breaking through plateaus, and achieving those dreamy success levels!
During this podcast, I, Katie McManus, ADHD business strategist and money mindset coach, have shared quite the range of insights with you. And I’d like to think you’ve appreciated my honesty. And in this episode I’m being very honest again.
Scaling isn't a leisurely stroll in the park; it's a thrilling adventure that demands diverse skills, innovative strategies, and action plans tailored to your growth targets. So let's take this latest challenge by the balls and conquer it together once again!
You see, scaling isn't just about financial investments – it's about investing time, energy, and even a bit of our pride. It's a journey of self-discovery and growth, and understanding these investments is key to conquering growth challenges head-on.
But fear not! With the right tools, support, and a dash of courage, we can catapult our businesses to the next level of success!
Let's embrace the adventure, meet every challenge with grit, and create a business that thrives beyond our wildest dreams!
Dealing with Unsupportive People and Believing in Yourself
In the exhilarating journey to success, you might encounter skeptics and naysayers trying to dim your sparkle. Embrace this reality, for handling others' doubts is a crucial part of your growth.
Shining brightly requires letting go of others' opinions and believing in your own potential.
Throughout this transformative process, take full ownership of your actions and decisions.
Remember, the court of public opinion cannot dictate your destiny.
It's your unwavering belief and trust in yourself that pave the path to triumph.
In the recipe for entrepreneurial success, self-confidence and unyielding faith are essential ingredients. So, sprinkle a generous dose of belief in your abilities, and trust that you're capable of achieving remarkable feats.
Let your self-assurance radiate like a guiding star, leading you towards the brilliant future you envision. Rise above the noise of negativity and embrace your journey with conviction, as you carve your unique path to greatness.
Judicious Financial Decisions
In the mesmerizing realm of entrepreneurship, there's a common pitfall that lures us into believing that business growth is a direct result of pouring money into our ventures.
But here's the real truth, my fellow entrepreneurs—it's not just about the money; it's about wielding our financial wisdom to make adept decisions.
You see, the foundation of successful businesses is built on more than just dollar signs; it's about those ingenious financial choices that pave the way to triumph.
Every investment we make should be like a well-crafted masterpiece, strategically placed to nurture our business's advancement and breathe life into our grandest financial aspirations.
So, let's unleash our inner financial virtuoso and take charge of where our hard-earned money goes.
Here's some advice from your ol' friend Katie.
Be discerning, be savvy, and let each investment be a catalyst for the flourishing of our entrepreneurial dreams.
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 - Introduction: The Importance of ROI in Business
00:00:58 - The Importance of Consistency and Patience
00:05:20 - Overcoming Fear of Judgment and Investing in Pride
00:08:26 - Dealing with Unsupportive People and Believing in Yourself
00:08:42 - The Role of Energy in Business Success
00:14:25 - The Challenges of Scaling a Business
00:16:00 - The Downward Spiral of Anxiety
00:17:42 - Making a Choice: Settling or Doubling Down
00:18:54 - Next Action Step: Book A Generate Income Strategy Call
The next steps for you after you’ve listened to this episode are:
Book a call with me: If you want further help or action steps, you can book a call with me to discuss your specific needs and how I can assist you in achieving your goals.
Message me: If you're looking for insights and guidance tailored to your specific needs. Mention the Weeniecast when you do so I have context!
Check out my website: Visit my website to explore more resources, blog posts, and valuable content related to your area of interest. Stay updated with the latest industry trends and tips.
Follow me on Instagram or TikTok: Join my social media community to get regular updates, tips, and insights. Engage with my content and connect with like-minded individuals in the comments section.
Transcription
00:00:00
In this episode, we're going to talk about the three other areas of investment your future multi six figure business needs you to make. If you're a human in the modern world, you've probably heard of the term ROI, which means return on investment.
00:00:21
Now, typically, return on investment refers to how much money you make back from that initial investment.
00:00:30
And yes, that's a very important part of ROI when it comes to starting a business. How much money are you investing in starting this business? And is that going to end up in the red or in the green? Meaning, are you going to lose money by making this investment or are you going to make money by making this investment? Now, the best business owners, the ones who reach the highest levels of success, understand that a return on investment is not just monetary.
00:00:58
For you to succeed in your business, you're going to have to invest a ton more stuff in this business. And those investments are you're going to have to invest a ton of time. You're going to have to work consistently and keep working at it, even when there's absolutely no feedback that what you're working on is working. Now, the example I like to use here is sometimes when a client starts with me, and we've decided that LinkedIn is going to be the best place for them to post for their business to get clients, sometimes I get a text a week or so in saying, Katie, I'm freaking out. Like, I've posted three times on LinkedIn and I haven't gotten a client from it yet.
00:01:42
They've completely forgotten the conversation that we had about how LinkedIn works. I always like to describe LinkedIn and any social media strategy. It's like a slot machine. You're just going to sit there and put a quarter in and turn the little thing and probably not get a gumball. And then another quarter, and probably not get a gumball.
00:02:03
And you're going to sit there and you're just going to feed quarters. These quarters, if you're not getting the metaphor, are your posts and you showing up and being consistent on the platform. But at one point, a gumball is going to come out, and then another one's going to come out, and then three will come out. But for you to get to that point, you're going to have to feed a ton of quarters into this machine. Also, I feel like gumballs, I'm making them very expensive in this metaphor.
00:02:30
Like, how much are gumballs at this point? Can someone please tell me? Now, a business owner that doesn't understand this time investment is going to do what I just described those clients do. They're going to get a week in. They'll have posted three things.
00:02:48
They won't have gotten a client from it, and they'll think, this this isn't going to work. And they will give up.
00:02:56
Now, we're going to talk about this give up point, the failure point, a lot. In this episode, I want you to think about all the times that you got to a point with something and it got too hard or it felt like you weren't making any progress and you gave up. And I want you to really feel into what that felt like in your body. I remember hitting this point when I worked in corporate. I worked for a solar company, and I was in sales, and I was absolutely miserable.
00:03:24
And I'd had all these interviews with the marketing department, and there was a copywriting position open, and I had gotten a verbal offer from the manager. Now, I remember this phone call. I remember sitting in my car and I remember the feeling of my throat just dropping into the bottom of my stomach and feeling so sick because I was so excited about moving away from sales and into something where I got to actually learn something new and be creative and didn't have to be on this roller coaster ride of commissions. Because if you've ever worked in sales, you know that a big chunk of your income is commission based. And on this phone call, the hiring manager who had already verbally offered me the job told me that someone on the C suite level had put forward their nephew, and they were saying that the nephew had to get the job.
00:04:16
And I remember hitting this point and thinking, well, what is the point of me even staying in this company? It's too hard. This is never going to work. And that feeling of deflation, there's nothing like it. There's nothing like it.
00:04:30
There's this hopelessness that sets in. And I left the company because it was obvious that it was going to be too hard for me to make any transition that would have made me happy. Now, in hindsight, it was the best decision I could have made. They went out of business about two months later. My friends who had been working for them and not getting paid out commissions ended up getting paid like $300 for two months worth of work.
00:04:56
It was awful. So sometimes bad things happen for a reason. But I want you to remember that whatever time it was for you, where you hit that failure point and you thought, what's the point of me continuing in your business? That point is going to come up a lot unless you understand the different kinds of investments you're going to need to make. Time is one of them.
00:05:20
Money is another one. I have a lot of colleagues who aren't really colleagues because they're not coaching, who I went to coach training with, and they invested $13,000 in a training and a certification to become a coach, didn't get any instruction on how to actually start a coaching business. And they went out and they followed the coaching school's advice about go and coach everyone. Offer a free 30 minutes session to every single human that you run across in your day. And they did.
00:05:48
They spent a lot of time and they coached and coached and coached and it didn't turn into a business for them. And at that point, they were out the money, they were out the time and their pride had taken a massive hit. You don't realize this, but you are going to have to invest your pride in this business. There are going to be things that you do publicly that aren't going to work out. And a lot of those people that I'm talking about gave up.
00:06:16
They gave up. They went back to working full time in a job or they just stayed in their full time job. They never built a side hustle. They never launched into full time in their business because they never experienced a return on investment from their time, their money in investing in the certification and their pride. Now, as someone who regularly dresses in a hot dog costume for the sake of my business, I can tell you if you're not willing to invest your pride in this business, you're going to get nowhere fast.
00:06:47
One of my favorite authors when I started my journey of starting a business, like way before I even actually got trained as a coach, jensen chero her book you're a Badass. She talks about how her first business coach pushed her to get these really cheesy marketing pictures taken and she was cringing at the idea that she was going to have these posted online and that her friends and family would have to see them. And it resonated so deeply with me because I knew exactly how that felt because I was so afraid about posting to social media about what it was that I wanted to start. Now. Even after I got certified or trained and certified as a coach and I knew what I was doing, it still felt so gross to post online about what it is that I do.
00:07:35
Like, what did I have to say? Who is going to listen to me? And also, what if my friends and family laughed at me? What if people from high school, the mean girls, what if they saw and then they were talking behind my back? Not that I even talked to them or anyone from high school, but still, if you care too much about what other people think, you're never going to succeed.
00:07:55
And this is really hard for people. I have gotten so many messages over the last month from people who are wanting to start a business, but they are held back because the people in their lives don't believe in them. They think that starting a business is a really stupid idea and sometimes they actively sabotage it. They undercut your confidence and they make you feel silly or stupid for posting to social media. If you want to succeed in this business, you're going to have to do it in spite of them.
00:08:26
The last investment that you're going to have to make if you want this business to succeed oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.
00:08:42
The last investment that you're going to have to make if you want this business to succeed is your energy.
00:08:50
You cannot grow a business by sitting there manifesting in meditation. All the success and all the clients. You cannot throw money at the problem. I had one client. She's one of the very few clients that I've ever had who never saw any results from working with me.
00:09:08
And the reason is that she wanted to outsource absolutely everything, but she also was only willing to spend about $30 an hour to do so. So what ended up happening is she hired a whole bunch of people who didn't know what they were doing to do stuff that she also didn't know how to do and she didn't expend the energy it would have taken to grow her business. Now, in our work together, she was obsessed with mindset. She thought that spending all the time on her mindset was going to make or break her business. And let me tell you, mindset is important, but mindset on its own, without action, is going to do diddly squat for your business.
00:09:48
If you're investing time and money and maybe a little pride in your business, but you're not expending any energy, you're going to hit that point where you're going to get no results and that sinking hopelessness is going to land in your stomach and you're going to have that give up moment. Now, there are two choices you have here. You can give up or you can get real with yourself that you're not actually doing the things that are going to lead to your business's success. Oftentimes my clients start working with me at the point where they realize that they're not taking the right action. They've usually spent a lot of time already trying to get this off the ground.
00:10:29
They've probably spent some money trying to get some training to get certified. Maybe they've hired someone to build a website for them. Surprise prize, all that did not equal a business. They've probably told a lot of people that they were starting a business. Actually, not probably.
00:10:47
And they've usually told a lot of people that they're starting a business and they've started getting embarrassed because those people are starting to ask, how's your business going? And it's not going well at all. And because my clients tend to be very ethical, they feel really bad about lying about how well it's going. But they also don't want people to know that they're crashing and burning.
00:11:10
Now, I want to cut you some slack here. If you're at this point in your business where you've invested some time, some money and some pride and you're not seeing any results. And you're getting real with yourself that you're not actually taking the action that will make the biggest difference in your business. I want to cut you some slack that you're not lazy. I know as Adhdpreneurs, we tend to boil everything down to I'm lazy, I just can't be consistent.
00:11:36
I don't know how to stick with things. I'm a flake. Let that go. Go listen to episode 39 if you want to hear more about that. But for right now, I want you to let that go.
00:11:48
That is not actually what's happening here. What's happening here is that you were never trained how to start a business. I don't know about you, but my high school didn't train on that. There were no classes on that. My college didn't train on that.
00:12:03
There was no class that I got to take as an adult at the YMCA or my community center about how to start a business. You are literally making it up as you go along. And most likely you're making it up following advice from people who've never actually done it themselves. You and I both know how that goes. The absolute magic of knowing exactly what actions you have to take and what strategy you need to follow can be in the millions of dollars.
00:12:36
And I'm not exaggerating here. I know that sounds like a big number, but listen to me. My one to one clients on average see an 11.1 return on investment over three years in their business. And of course, this average is dragged down by the few who never did the work. But imagine if you make an investment in figuring out the right strategy and the right action plan right now, and you're able to take this business that you're not making any money in right now and grow it to $200,000 a year.
00:13:11
Ten years from now, that's $2 million that you would have generated from this business without the strategy and without the action plan. How the are you going to get there? What's going to end up happening when you don't have those two things is you're going to continue to hit that failure point, that give up point, and you're going to try something and it's going to get hard and it's not going to work out. And then you're going to give up on it, and then you're going to try something else. And again, it's going to get hard and it's not going to work out and you're going to give up until at some point you're going to start telling yourself the story that you suck at starting businesses, that you're never going to be able to do this.
00:13:47
And at that point, that hopelessness about one venture and a second venture and a third venture is going to evolve into hopelessness about your abilities to become independent, your ability to break out of your corporate cage and actually start a business and live life on your terms. You're going to start believing that's never going to be possible for you. And that gives off big weenie vibes. Now, this is true for new business owners who are just starting out. It is extra true for business owners who are already making low six figures in their business and want to scale up, right?
00:14:25
Because the bad news about scaling your business is that the bigger you get, the greater the impact you want to have, the more investment it's going to take for you to even get to that point where you know if you failed or not. Let me explain.
00:14:47
So when you start a business, say you're starting a coaching or consulting business, the fastest path to cash is always going to be one on one clients. It's only one person who has to decide, yes, I would like to work with you. Here's my money. I would like your service, please. The second fastest path to cash is going to be corporate clients.
00:15:05
It's going to take you a while to get these. The average deal cycle is typically six months to a year. Is typically six months to a year. If you have your heart set on working with corporate clients, you have to be fully invested time wise to see it through. But say you want to grow beyond that.
00:15:27
Say you want to launch a group. Say you want to launch a digital product like a video training program. Unlike signing one on one clients, and unlike courting corporate clients, launching a group or a digital product takes a ton more work on the front end to even get to the point where you're going to be able to see if it works or not. This is one of the reasons when clients come to me and they don't want to work one on one with clients and they don't want to do a group program first. They just want to launch a digital product.
00:16:00
I tell them no go, because I know it's not going to work out. It is so hard to build a digital product in general. There's so much investment that has to go into it, and that's just building it. I'm not even talking about having it be successful. A lot of business owners, when they get to that $200,000 mark, they tend to plateau because the things that they have to do to scale to that next level, to get to half a million, to get to seven figures, requires that greater investment of time, money, pride, and energy.
00:16:35
And usually business owners will try it a couple of times and it won't go well, and they'll face that give up point. And if you have ADHD, your rejection sensitivity, dysphoria is going to start playing up. You're going to start assuming that people don't like you for this. You're going to start thinking that people actually don't think you're as credible as you are because they're not signing up for your group stuff and they're not buying your digital product. And so starts the downward spiral of anxiety that we know will end in us buying more and more digital courses ourselves to try to figure out how we can make this better.
00:17:13
Now, if you are getting close to this give up point in your business, either you're just starting out or you're at that plateaued stage and you don't know what you're doing wrong. I can confidently say there's a 90% chance you just don't have the correct strategy. You're not taking the right actions to start seeing increased results from your business. And this is that point where you have a choice. You can absolutely say, you know what?
00:17:42
This is too hard. I'm going to call this a failure and I'm going to give up and I'm going to settle for whatever it is that I have right now. And that's just going to have to be good enough. Or you can choose to double down on your investment. You can recognize that what got you here to this point will not get you to the next level.
00:18:02
To get to the next level, you're going to need different skills, you're going to need different tools, and you're going to need a strategy and an action plan that is customized to your personality, your zone of genius, and to your business type. And if you're ready to push past that give up point and make this work, then I invite you to book a generate income strategy call with me where we will take an honest look at what you've done so far, what your goals for the future are, and the steps that you can take to get there. To book this, click the link in the show notes or go to www.weeniecast.com/strategycall.