FTV: Scaling from Entrepreneur to CEO with host Ashley Alderson

Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and.

Do it with the balance and the.

Happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat.

Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. It is yours truly this week and we're going to be spending some time together because I want to get really personal with you this week and just kind of walk you through some personal experiences I'll call them, that we've had in growing the Hub and in helping tons of boutique owners like yourself manage growth and scale. I often get asked questions around Ashley, what's it take to grow my business from say 10, $10,000 to $50,000 to $100,000 to a multimillion dollar company? And as I think about that, you know, it's easy to find information on the tasks that it takes to grow your business, right? The Facebook ads and the social media and the email automations and the task that it takes us to grow. But the most common objection and stumbling block that we all run into isn't necessarily the task, but it's having the time and the money to complete the task. And so I started to ask myself, as I look backwards through our own business, I walk backwards these five steps that I think we took in order to grow our own business and I see them mirrored in other businesses. And as I call it, it's five steps to scaling from an entrepreneur to a CEO. And in case you were hanging out with us at Virtual Summit, I actually made this an entire keynote walking through these five steps. And the last step is actually iterate if I give away a little sneak peek. Because at the end of it, you walk through these five steps and then you start over and you do it again. Because growth is always a process. There's never a mountaintop moment. That's the pinnacle, right? I'm sure you've reached a goal in your own business and you've gotten there and you're like, okay, now what? You know, what's the next goal and where do we go from here? And that's life, that's business. That's what we do. But in order to reach that goal, you truly do have to walk through these steps to overcome that objection of time and money to complete the tasks that again, we know we need to complete in order to grow. So today, what I want to do on the podcast, and I hope this hits home with you, I hope if you are living in the moment that I'm about to talk about with you, that you take a screenshot or take a picture wherever you are, shoot me a message on Instagram, AJ Alderson, or boutiquehubbusiness, because I'd love to connect and hear how this is resonating for you. But what I want to step into today is step number one on the five steps to scaling from an entrepreneur to a CEO. Step number one is mindset. And so today I want to break that down for you, and I want to deep dive into the mindset differences between an entrepreneur and a CEO. Because as we've walked that journey and as we've seen others walk that journey and help them with that journey, it's really obvious that they have several things in common. All right, now I'll tell you this. I grew up on a ranch in North Dakota, about 80 miles from a town with a stoplight or a Walmart or pretty much anything else. And I'm super proud of that. I love where I came from, but it was a very rural community. And when you grow up in a rural community, I mean, it's how you were raised. And I think we all face this to a certain degree. How you were raised is how you were raised, and you see the world through a certain lens and you think, gosh, everyone else must think like I do as well. And so we worked hard. I love so many of the lessons that I learned there about the value of a dollar and working hard and how you treat others and how you need to be willing to give other people the shirt off your back, you know, if they need it. Just genuine hard work, integrity, trustworthiness, like all those values were so important. But because my family had to struggle and had to build our ranch from the ground up, it also kind of came with this stigma that there was only so much money in the world and there's only so much time in the world, and there's only so much opportunity, and that some things just had to be a struggle in order to happen. So there was just these little certain things that became truths for me. And I don't look at that as a fault. I think we all are raised with certain truths that just are what they are. But as we start to live our own lives, we have to discover what is true for us now. So as I think about growth, mindset, and moving from an Entrepreneur to a CEO. A lot of these things began to become very clear with me. Number one is growth mindset. Growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And there's a gazillion and a half books I know you could go read on Amazon or on Audible right now about this. But to me, the way I look at growth mindset is this. There's two types of people. There's people that seek to gain, to gain more, or there's people that seek not to lose what they already have, right? So there's people that seek to grow what they have to take risks. They, they view the world as abundance, right? That's abundance. And then those that seek not to lose live in scarcity, right? There's only so much to go around. I've built this great thing. I don't want to lose it. And so rather than take risks and grow, we start to move into protective mode. We begin to view others as competition, right? We start to see the world in a different lens around us. So the way I look at scarcity and abundance is this picture. You are at the beach and you're going to pick up as much sand as you can, right? Your livelihood is sand. And you're going to pick up this sand. And as you do, you scoop your hands deep down into that warm sand, and as you pick it up and you're holding as much sand as you can, your palms are wide open, they're facing up, and you've got mountains of sand, sand in your hand. It's abundant, right? There's enough sand to go around. You're just going to keep scooping the sand with your open hand. But as your mindset starts to shift into scarcity and lack and there's not enough to go around, you're like, oh, no, but what if the wind comes up? But what if this person standing next to me bumps into me? What if I trip and fall? And so then you begin to think, oh, my gosh, I've got to get more sand. Well, I better protect what I have. And so when we do that, then our hands start to tighten and close. We begin to clinch our fingers around the mountain of sand in our hand. And when we do, the tighter and tighter we squeeze our fists around the sand, the faster and faster the sand starts to seep through the cracks in our fingers and we lose it, right? That's abundance and scarcity mindset. And I think the same is true in business. And this was a huge shift when we very first started the boutique hub, and a huge shift. I know, for a lot of you right now that are thinking about, should I hire my first employee? Because when we started the boutique, I'll just tell you from experience, even in hiring a business coach, you guys, hiring a business coach was the best thing I ever did for my business because she helped me make these mental shifts that I would have never seen before. No one would have called me on my crap before either. Like this girl held my feet to the fire and made me cry. I don't know that that was really on purpose, but I did cry because I could see, see the things that I was doing that were mindset focused in my business that were wrong, right? That were in lack, they were in scarcity, they were not in growth and abundance that were really holding me back. I felt like I had to save and hold on to and not spend money on and also at the same time not charge enough because I didn't feel like I was worth it enough, right? There's all these things that we do that really hold us back in lack and in scarcity that we can't always see. So abundance is asking for help. It's investing money when you know you're going to get 10x the return on investment. So growth mindset is number one. I want to move next into time time. So mindset number two after growth mindset is values time. And this is going to tie back to growth mindset in just a minute. So I always ask myself this question, are you the bottleneck of your business? You've heard me probably say this on the podcast a hundred times, but I asked this question because nine times out of ten, no matter what stage of growth you're at, the answer is typically yes. You know, we grow and we say no to things, we hire people, we move things off our plate, but somehow we continue to just fill our time. It's like the theory of the small plates, right? The more, the larger your plate is, the more food you're going to put on it and the more you're going to consume, the smaller the plate you have, the less you're going to put on it, the less you're going to consume. Our productivity and our time management is really the same. If we have a 40 hour workweek, we'll fill it. We'll fill it with whatever we want to fill it with. If we have a 20 hour workweek, studies show you'll get as much done in the 20 hours as you will in the 40 hours because you'll approach it and execute it much differently. We'll get Rid of all the distractions that we have in life, but because we think, oh, I've got all week, I've got next week, I've got this, I've got that. Then we take all the time in the world to complete those tasks. So the more we value time, then the more we set boundaries around our time and we get really specific. Especially guys, now that it's shortly after a holiday weekend. If you think about, like, why did I start this business in the first place? Was it for more freedom, for more flexibility, for more time to be with my family so that I could break out and go to the beach whenever I wanted to? Right. So I could have a laptop lifestyle? If we really get back to the root of why we started a business in the first place, a lot of it has to do with time and flexibility. But that only comes if we can set a hard boundary around valuing our time. For me, valuing my time means at 5:30 every day. And there's days that are earlier than this because I like to go golf with our kids. But at 5:30 every day, we're done. Like I'm done working. The kids have to be quiet all day up until 5:30. They've got to do something else. And then it's time to go practice, you know, to go ride horse, to go out and eat, to go to a park, whatever we're going to do. But that's a hard boundary. And weekends are a hard boundary. Like on weekends, the same thing. We're going to have family time, we're going to do these things. But it hasn't always been that way. It was when I really started to value my time and my family's time that that boundary was able to be put in place. So the more you can set a hard boundary and the more you can value your own time. And you realize as a CEO, your time is worth hundreds of dollars an hour versus an employee, which may be, you know, 12 to $14 an hour. You start to play this leverage game of, as a CEO, I'm going to work on $100 an hour jobs, but I'm going to leverage out the twelve to fourteen dollar an hour jobs. It's not that you're not capable of doing them or you're above doing them, but you just have a price tag on your time and you know what that's worth. And you've set hard boundaries around what you're going to do and when. So look at it this way. I use this analogy inside of the virtual Summit that's there's two people, right? There's an entrepreneur and a CEO. The entrepreneur, they both get $100. They're both, let's just say they're going to build a website and they've got one month to do it and to make as much money as they can. And I'm going to just use really simple numbers for you. So they both get $100. The entrepreneur says, I've got this, I've got Shopify, I'm going to DIY this. I'm going to build my own website, and it's going to keep the $100. Okay? So the entrepreneur keeps $100. They DIY the website. It takes them three weeks to get it done. At the end of three weeks, they launch it, and by the end of the month, they make $300 profit. So at the end of the day, they've got their $300 plus $100 they had to start with. They take home their net profits, $400. Whereas the CEO would approach a situation and go, okay, I've got $100. I'm going to hire three people, going to pay them $20 each. So that's 60 bucks a week. And we're going to build this thing, but we're going to build it in one week's time, and then we're going to profit $300 a week going forward. Now, again, these are websites, a random example. I'm just using super random numbers. It doesn't really line up to what your profitability would be on a website. Way different. So what that math shakes out to is, okay, if I spend $60 a week, that's $180 plus. I kept my initial 40 from my initial investment because I spent 60 in that first week. I'm going to sell $300 a week. That's 900 bucks. So roughly, I'm going to net 760. I'm going to net 760. So about double what the entrepreneur is going to make. The CEO is going to double the money because they leveraged and hired three people to hire and get the job done quicker. So the more you value time, the more you value profit. All right, mindset number three is values progress. So we've got growth mindset, values time. The next is values progress. And what that means is done is better than perfect. I don't know how many of you guys feel like you are the perfectionist of your business and part of the reason you don't hire anyone is because you feel like no one can do it. As great as you can. And you're probably right. You're probably right. You could always do it better. Well, maybe not always, but let's say nine times out of ten, right? Because you should always be hiring people that are smarter than you. But when it comes down to certain things, you do feel like you can do it better. But that doesn't move the needle. Just like the entrepreneur versus the CEO. You could DIY it all day long, but you're better off to train someone to build the culture of your team, to think ahead and start to build. And then you can spend your time coming in and just tweaking or monitoring or coaching or improving. CEOs will coach. Entrepreneurs will do. They will hustle, they will grind. They will put in the hours to get it done, which is a totally different mindset. So value Progress. Know the 20% of your list that's going to get you 80% of the results and then hammer it out. Your email inbox is not 20% of the list. Right. The email inbox is a holding place for other people's agendas. But your value comes from the big rocks that are on your to do list. It's about branding, photography, building automations, using your data to buy smarter. Right? Sourcing or restocking, doing live sales, learning Facebook ads, hiring Facebook ads, managing and coaching your team. All those things are way above some of the miniscule things we find ourselves so busy with each and every day. Mindset number four is building culture. CEOs build the culture empowerment. They build a culture to teach a man to fish, to feed him for a lifetime, versus giving a man a fish and feeding him for a day. Entrepreneurs often feel threatened by employees. They worry about, what if this person steals my idea? What if they copy what I'm doing? You know, they can do the task, but they can't see the vision. Because I'm the entrepreneur and I've got the vision, but the CEO says, no, I'm going to empower my team to make myself not the center point of my business. The business is not about me, the entrepreneur. The business is about a profitable unit that I can scale and later on I can sell. So totally different way of looking and operating and growing your business. So building that culture into your team means empowering them to think creatively about what needs to happen next and rewarding them from making great choices, great decisions, great calls, versus just micromanaging them and having to have conversations if things don't go exactly as planned. So being a great coach is building great culture. Inside of your team. All right. And finally, mindset number five is building systems. Ooh, systems. You guys, if you're like me, I laugh at this because I think about our business. I read the book Rocket Fuel, and in the book Rocket Fuel, they talk about how every business has a visionary, which is usually the entrepreneur. They're the squirrel that has the idea, and they can see where the business is going. But every visionary has to have an integrator. And an integrator for us is Beth. Beth on our team is like, okay, Ashley, tell me your crazy idea, and I'll see if it's possible. And then she starts to put some of the pieces together. And so the two of us make a great team in that way, because I can be crazy and think of all these wild things, and then she can help figure out the how. So in your business, really figuring out, what are you? What's your strength? What's your weakness? How can you find someone on your team to support you and complement you in that and then build systems? Beth loves building SOPs. I don't think I knew what an SOP was when we started this business, but Beth was like, oh, you know, we should probably have some continuity. We should probably write down some of these things that we're doing to make our lives easier, like, what if you go on maternity leave? Like, what do I do with myself at that point? These are all questions we have to answer every day. So we really started to get specific about operations manuals, SOPs. Every task in our business, we try to, like, document the step one, step two, step three. So if someone ever left, like, there's some type of continuity that keeps those things going. But it also just streamlines everything about our business. Now you can have an SOP in every area of operations in your business, which we talk all about that inside of Retail Bootcamp. Also, the culture piece that we just covered, all of that is covered in Retail Bootcamp as well. But taking SOPs and systems to the next level is also thinking about really getting a roadmap on growth. So if I want to grow certain key numbers in my business, certain key metrics, making sure I have mapped that out and worked my numbers backwards so I know what milestones I have to hit along the way. Like, how can I increase my average order value? And what will that do to the traffic needed on my site every day in order to hit my sales goal every week? Or what if I tweaked my conversion rate right? What if I took this week and I made some changes to the homepage of my website, which increased my conversion rate. How does that impact the traffic I need on my site every week and the weekly sales goal that I have? Once you have a roadmap for those KPIs and you know that only attract number grows number one. But if you are tracking those numbers, these different levers, you can pull any which direction and get a result. And that's where the growth really starts to come from. Because then things become duplicatable. You have systems, you have processes. You know that Sally can do one thing and Tim can do the other. And in unison they're going to build your business together, right? So systems come along with building team and building culture. When you first have the power to value your time, value progress and have growth mindset and you are willing and able to grow. Now, Ashley, you might be saying, Ashley, I am not making enough money to do any of that. It is still just me. You're still battling the, the financial aspect of it. You guys, this can start as small as $10, $1, whatever you want it to be. For me, you know Beth, she is the, the operations manager of our business. She's our go to gal. She started babysitting kids in college and then from the very beginning saw this business start to grow and just piece by piece, just learned one more piece, learned one more person, built one more relationship just piece by piece. So wherever you are, it might be a trade with someone to, you know, come and watch your kids or it might be a trade with a local photographer. Don't be intimidated by where you are in thinking that you can't leverage this CEO mindset. It starts with a simple, simple ask of getting someone in to help with your business. Help a couple hours a week here, there, Take some things off your plate so that you can step into the role of operating of the hundred dollar an hour jobs versus the ten to twelve dollar an hour jobs. Guys, this is such a process, but such a beautiful process. Like I said earlier, growth and growing your company from again $100,000 company to a multimillion dollar company. Whatever it is, it's not about the end number. It's not about the end game. It's not about this award you win or this big goal that you meet. It's about the journey every step of the way and all the little moments you're going to celebrate as you go going to market, right? Making your first, let's say $100,000, right? Then making your first million dollars. Hiring your first employee, having your first like Sold out, launch of a new collection or a live sale that gets 100 viewers on their live at a time. Whatever it is. Like it's all about those little tiny milestones in your business, not just this one big thing. So don't compare yourself to anyone else who's on this journey with you because this is about abundance and growth mindset. And there is more than enough opportunity for everyone in this industry to succeed. And we'll do it faster when we start to lift one another up in this process and not view one another as competition. So just remember, when you're scaling your business, think like a CEO. How would a CEO show up in the business today? Not just an entrepreneur that's just hustling and trying to get the thing off the ground. The more you can leverage your time, the more you can leverage your money, the more you can leverage your growth mindset. Seeking to gain and not seeking not to lose, the better off you're going to be in the end. Guys, I hope these five tips were helpful to you. Again, this is the five mindsets that will shift you from entrepreneur to CEO. But these are all things that are so personal to me and also personal to our team. So this is why we have built all of these pieces into Retail Bootcamp. Because it's too much to try to learn this by crashing and burning along the way like we have as you go. So we just want to share everything that we have learned with you along the way inside of Retail Bootcamp and inside of the Hub in general. If you're not yet a member of so guys, if you have any questions again, please hit me up on Instagram @ajalderson or over on Boutique Hub Business. I'd love to chat anytime, but this week is a very special week because we are just now opening the doors of Retail bootcamp for semester two, 2020. And I laugh because when we opened the doors for semester number one, 2020 back in January, we were like, 2020 vision. This is going to be the best year ever. You know, all these things.

And we did.

We kicked off the year with a bang. And it's ironic, now we come into July and we're like, oh man, this is the craziest year ever. But man, is this year happening to you or is this year happening for you? Because while I know there's lots of businesses that are struggling through the pandemic that we're in, there's also a lot of them that have pivoted and created something so beautiful. So, you guys, we just want to Walk with you, Sarah. On our team, myself, we bring in over 25 guest experts into Retail Bootcamp and you get lifetime access to everything that we share in the program. 12 weeks of live group coaching with our team. 12 digital modules where you can walk through every single area of your business. And it is set up in sequential order for a reason because we've done this with hundreds of boutique owners. I think We've got over 20 templates and downloads and how to's inside of Bootcamp, plus a private Facebook group for all of our Bootcamp students, which again, you get lifetime access to that. And then kind of the cherry on top is once a year we take a private trip to LA for the LA experience and we take about 100 retail boot campers. So past, present, wherever they're at in the journey, if it works for them to go, they go. So this is all part of Retail Bootcamp. Again, it only opens twice a year, but it's opening this week. So we'll link that up in the comments for you. You'll hear about it next week as well, but we would love to invite you inside. And again, if you've got any questions, drop them in the comments where we can find them or shoot over to me on Instagram. And we would love to help you succeed. But again, the five steps from scaling from entrepreneur to CEO. We definitely cover this inside of Bootcamp as well. Guys, I hope you are having an amazing week. I can't wait to see you here next week again. And again, thanks for listening to the podcast.

Hey guys, I just wanted to say thank you this week, this week is our hubiversary or our Boutique Hub anniversary and we wanted to pull you in to celebrate. I linked up in the show notes a link to our hubiversary celebration page and we're actually doing a giveaway this week for our hubiversary giving away an enrollment inside of Retail Bootcamp. Free swag at the Boutique Hub, a Boutique Boss planner, a Boutique content calendar, our Content Sanity Masterclass, and also one general admission ticket to the Boutique Summit 2021. Hoping we get to see you in person in 2021. So if you guys want more information, again, it's linked up inside of the show notes the boutiquehub.com backslash hubaversary and we're celebrating all week long. We're sharing Boutique Hub memories and all kinds of feel good things. We just wanted to say thank you for making the Boutique Hub possible. You guys, all of this would not be possible if you didn't truly believe in community, community over competition and in coming to this one central resource for our industry and trusting us to provide you tools each and every day. So that says a lot about you and we really, really value your relationship. So thank you from the bottom of my heart, I truly believe you guys. The mission at the Hub is if we can change one business we know we can change a person's life, we can change their family's life, we can change their stage staff's life, and we can change communities. So that is our mission each and every day. And you guys are empowering us to make that happen. And in return, you've changed our lives. You've changed me personally, you've changed my husband Eric, you've changed our kids, Hadley, Eason and Jade. And you've changed our entire staff. There's 15 of us that make it possible at the Boutique Hub right now and we love getting to work for you each and every day. So from the bottom of my heart, you guys, seriously, thank you for listening to this podcast, for being a member of our community, and happy pubiversary.

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