This might be a little hard to hear, but more leads is only going to amplify the chaos that is your business!!!! To scale your business, you need to sort out a few things first.
I don’t know about you but I see so much online that implies that all you need to grow or scale your business is more leads.
“Get 5 leads a day and you’ll be a millionaire!”
“How to get 100 new leads per day with no marketing budget!”
“Improve your lead generation by 300%!”
But this is the internet, so can it really be true?
Yes, you need a steady pipeline of leads coming into your business but this alone isn’t going to make your business successful.
It's like saying that you're going to be healthy if you just eat good food. You need the right kind of food for the right reasons in the right amounts. You can't subsist on junk food and expect to be healthy.
The BS you’re being told about scaling your business
“More leads” is being sold to you like it’s the magic bullet to scaling your business.
It's being sold as the thing that will solve all of your problems and propel your business forward into success without any other effort from you, just buy more leads, watch your success grow!
It’s BS like this that trips you up.
Sure, you need a steady flow of leads coming in, but having them alone isn't going to make your business successful.
I’m not saying that leads aren't important. Of course they are! But if all you do is get more leads into your business, it's just going to amplify the chaos that is going on in other parts of your business.
You’re already busy, there are never enough hours in the day, so what is going to happen when you increase the leads that are coming into your business.
The idea of getting more leads is that you will convert and have more clients with more work with essentially more money. Increased revenue is a great thing, and we all want that in our business.
But more than revenue we want more profit and we want to have more time in our life. And it's not just because we want to eat chocolate biscuits and watch Netflix for hours on end—it's because we need time to do things like pursue our passions outside of work, spend quality time with family and friends, or even just relax.
Unblock the pipe that stops you from scaling your business
Imagine you turn on the kitchen sink tap but the plug is blocked so the sink is filling up faster than it’s draining. Then the sink overflows and now you have to get out the towels to clean up the spillage. This is what happens in your business when you turn on the lead tap before you’ve cleared the way for your business to cope with new leads.
You want all your leads to take the pipeline path “like water goes down the drain” so to speak. The drain pipe is your repeatable process that you know is going to get results for your client and they’ll end up where they’re meant to be—instead of all over your floor.
When your drain pipe is blocked things get messy really fast, right?
Before you turn on the leads tap
So, make sure you clear that pipe by clarifying what you want to be known for (the problem you solve), creating a process that gets repeatable results for your client - this doesn’t mean you have to be cookie cutter (that’s a story for another day) and you set-up systems that allows you to automate or delegate responsibility to your team.
When you’re scaling your business, there is a tendency to believe that growth is the magic bullet. The more leads you can have, the more clients you’ll have and the faster your business will grow.
You’re not alone, most business owners think this way when they first go about scaling their business. They’re overwhelmed by all their tasks, they’re working too many hours in the business and they feel like there isn’t enough time in the day to do everything – let alone keep up with their marketing!
To them, it feels like an easy solution - just get more leads…
But it doesn’t work that way.
There are some things that you have to sort out in your business before you turn on the leads tap.
1. Vision that will make your business successful
Clarity of vision is what guides your business to success. I’m not necessarily talking about your vision statement or your mission statement — because it’s more than that.
Your vision clarifies exactly what you do and who you serve so you’re only working with clients who you know you can create results for, with your repeatable process.
When you understand how to clarify your vision, it makes it easier to make decisions about new opportunities—whether they’ll advance or distract from your goals.
And when you have a clear vision, you go from creating results for yourself to creating results for others. That means being able to translate your experience of getting results into visualised plans that help other people achieve their dreams, too.
So here are some questions you have to answer before you can scale your business
- What do you do?
- Who do you serve?
- Why does anyone need what you provide?
- How do they benefit?
- What do they want to accomplish?
- How do they plan on doing that?
- When will they need help doing it?
- And how will they know when they’re there?
2. Systems to propel you forward into success
If you're going to be a rainmaker, you have to have systems.
Systems are the foundation of success. When you get really good at something and do it over and over again, that's called a system.
A system is a collection of tasks that can be repeated without fail. If you have an automation process in your business, say for following up with clients, then you have a system.
It is important that you have a system in place before you start turning on the leads tap. Without a clear process that gets repeatable results, your sales process and service delivery will be difficult to replicate and will require constant customisation for each client, which is not only expensive for you, but also for the client.
Examine your own processes and see where you can create new systems to streamline the customer journey.
3. The team that will be crucial for business success
The next component to scaling your business is delegating responsibility for implementing your systems and processes to a team.
You need to hire the right people, with the right skills for the right roles. This is not necessarily as easy as it sounds. But delegating responsibility for implementing the systems and processes that are crucial to your business success (like marketing, sales, service delivery and operations) to a team is going to free up your time to focus on only the things that you can do.
Having a team creates the capacity you’ll need when you turn on the leads tap.
Synchronise to scale
When you clarify your vision and align your services, you can create your unique systems and processes to deliver results for that specific problem.
And once you've taken clients through the system and delegated responsibility for delivery, then you can turn on the leads tap.
But it's still not going to be the magic bullet to your business success; it's just one of four quadrants that need to work in unison to return great profits without sacrificing everything else in your life.
How to Scale your business without sacrifice
A business is as complex as us humans. There are many components that need to be aligned if it’s going to operate at optimal health.
In my coaching programme “The Agency Boss Accelerator” we look at your unique business, establish which pipes need unblocking so you can sustainably scale your business without sacrificing everything else in your life.
To get you started I’d recommend taking my 2-minute quiz and discover how to use your unique personality to systematize and streamline your business so you can scale your business (and work less!).
