#88 - You’re growing fast, but the wheels are falling off! (Part 5/5)

You start with the delivery, get that off your plate, get that streamlined, free up that energy. So when you are showing up for your clients, it's just in the most impactful ways possible.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben. Where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier and with a ton more profit it too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello everybody. It is Kate here from HelloFunnels Co and welcome to episode 88 of the Doing It Online podcast. Today is the final piece of our special five part series where we are talking about the specific step by step action plans you need to bust through whatever roadblock or plateau you were sitting on in your business. All the way from right at the start where you're just getting started, those first important things to focus on. When your to do list is a mile long and you know you feel like you're just throwing spaghetti at a wall and no idea which of those things are going to stick all the way through to now. We've gone sort of step by step through the stages is include, as I said, no list, no offer. Stage number one is getting started. Number two, you started to get a bit of a list, a bit of a following bit of an audience and you're ready to offer them something. Number three, you have an offer, but it's not really selling that well. Number four, you have an offer, it sells well. So tick, tick. And now you are ready to hit the gas and scale and you want to of course do that in a way that is profitable and is not going to send you to the stressed out loony bin. And then that brings us right here to day five or part five, sorry, where you've actually already had some fantastic success. You are growing, you are already in that multi six figure mark. Your offer is selling. You figured out how to sell it. You already have an audience, that audience is growing. You know how to speak the language of that audience. So you know your message is connecting. It's like tick, tick, tick. Yes. You think, hooray, I finally made it. I'm kicking ass. I'm surpassing some pretty big goals that you probably thought seemed impossible when you first set them. First of all, I want to say congratulations. Not many people get here, so the fact that you have is amazing and is absolutely a testament to your not just skills but to your ability to Just keep going, pushing through the hard. But I bet you already kind of going, all right, I'm here. Where is that? Retire on a beach, working four hours a week kind of lifestyle that Instagram promised me, right? Like when you first got started, you probably thought that by this point in your business things would look kind of different. Welcome to the phase of growing pains. Welcome to the next phase of your business, which again, is another phase where you're gonna learn a bunch, get a bunch wrong, test out a bunch of things, figure it out, and then keep on going to the next stage where you'll learn a bunch more things. Like, this is just business now. Like, you kind of. We probably thought at the start that it would be, you know, squiggly and messy, and then once you've had a few ducks in a row, it would just be straight line up for success, for growth. And I think if you were here, that's probably not what you're experiencing. And if you're, you're not. Let me just paint the picture of what this tends to look like. And if you are here, feel free to, you know, DM us and let us know if this is what it's sort of looking like for you. Being stuck at this point in that multi six figures in this sort of quite rapid growth phase usually looks like a to do list that is a mile long and just seems to get longer. And it doesn't even matter how hard or how much you are working, it doesn't get shorter. But the thing is, you've been doing this for a while now and you're kind of going, okay, is it, is it ever going to get shorter? Like you're starting to approach a bit, like, you're probably a bit more tired. You're probably, you know, just from the, the sheer will that you've had to, you know, push into things to, to get to this point, that realization that, hang on, I, this is actually just more work now, like, what the hell have I done that? That's a thing you probably also have bought on some team by this point, they might be a bit haphazard. It might usually it's a mixture of maybe some virtual assistants, some contractors here and there. And while, yes, they have taken some work off of your plate, the way that this is often normally set up at the start, you probably are actually going, hang on, I'm now having to make more decisions. I'm now, because I'm having to check everybody's work and they're all looking to me. And if they don't if I don't answer them and help them out, then they get stuck and stop, and then we can't progress. And you realize that you're kind of the roadblock. And actually bringing this team on currently feels like it's more work and more stress, not less, which is kind of why you brought them on the first place. You are also spending so freaking much money. Like, at this point, most people, unless they're very, very, you know, savvy and lucky or a combo of the two, most people are not very profitable. Like, this is where, like I said, to get that growth, to push through, to get to this next level, to be able to deliver at the level with of these extra people is usually. This is quite an expensive stage. It's quite a low profitability stage, and you never want that because if your profitability starts going, like, upside down, where it's actually you're starting to spend more again than what you're earning, even though you're earning seemingly like a crazy, like, big amount of money. Most people in this stage, they actually get things like scary tax bills and stuff. And you're like, well, hang on, how can I have this big tax bill? I don't have any money in the bank. I don't understand. Like, how have I spent that much? It doesn't feel like it because it's slowly, like, it's built up bit by bit. And, like, getting a handle on your finances and stuff at this point is a whole other thing you have to wrangle. It's. It's a whole new skill set. You have to learn to be able to actually start being a bit more intentional and deliberate around your spending, otherwise you can end up in a really scary place. You are also usually no longer delivering that best possible service that you used to deliver, where, because you're now juggling so many balls and you're stretched in so many directions and you're stretched so thin that you just don't have it in you. You don't have the mental, emotional, energetic capacity. So balls are getting dropped. You're starting to realize that people aren't getting the responses there. You're not bringing your A game. You're not feeling as creative and as inspired as you previously had. You're starting to feel burnt out. You're starting to even feel like, oh, my gosh, I just need a break. I need a holiday. But you now have so many more things piled on you that that's feeling pretty impossible. Does this sound familiar? Okay, what do we do about it? Because let's let's, let's move away from that. Like just first of all, you know, this is normal. Like I said, this is the growing pains of being in this stage of business and it happens to everybody. Different things, probably more so than others for different businesses at different, slightly different stages. But all of this stuff is everyone who's grown through here, they've all had to go through it. They've all had to kind of get to this point and go, ah, something has to give, but I don't have anything more to give for it to give, so what the hell do I do? So this is what this action plan is for you guys. Similar to last week. The. If you didn't listen to our number action plan number four, which is the, you know, the ready to scale. We talked about the six things you need to have in place to be able to kind of scale and scale profitably. If you didn't listen to that, go back and listen to that because you guys need to have these as well. Because if profitability is a problem and reliability is a problem, even though you're at this like higher level of income, you need to go and have all those pieces. But I won't cover them all again because they're in the episode from last week. So first of all, you need all of those, but more than likely you have most of them. It might just be one or two that you are missing. Definitely need to get that in place. But the other thing you need to do, and this can be a bit scary, is you need to slow down for just a second. You need to take just that foot off the gas just for a little bit because you're going to need to get some things in place pronto. You need to build this next level foundation. So it's like basically where you are in business. You think of it like building a house. You laid the slab, you laid the foundation, you put the walls up, everything was going well and then all of a sudden you've realized, actually this is a two story house and things are going up, up there now. So you now need to go and build, get that level squared away, make sure the floor is secure, that the structure is secure before this next level comes onto your business or it's all gonna come crumbling down, even the original stuff that you built. So you do have to back off a bit. And I know this is hard because you've kind of gotten a bit addicted to this momentum. And a lot of us kind of feel like once we start, like, oh, that was a really good month. Next month should be better. That was a good month. Next month should be better. And it's not how it goes. Like, I don't know of any business that every single month after month is better than the one before. Yes, you want your overall trend to be up, but you are going to have to have those quieter months. And even if those months are not deliberate and intentional, it's just because of the ebbs and flows of life and business and seasons and things like that. But you're going to need to. Well, you kind of have two options here. One is somehow magically find some spare time to kind of be able to dedicate to this, these pieces. And getting these pieces in place, most of us, that's actually not an option. And I would dare to guess that if you are in this stage, you've probably already maxed out your resources of extra magical time that you can find and you're probably already running on vapors. So just going, oh, I'll just work till 2am for a couple of months every night is not probably the best thing for you to do. Please remember that. It's actually for most people and most businesses, as long as you're still able to pay yourself, it's probably better to have a couple of months that are quite an income wise where it's not where the resource that you are refueling and the resource that you are kind of allowing to grow is your own energy, your own space, your the systems and foundations, as I said, that are going to help you move forward rather than just going, no, cannot let the money stop, must keep going. I must keep getting bigger. And I'm just going to absolutely burn my health to the floor to get that done. Know that that is what happens. I'm not trying to be dramatic here. This is where a lot of people kind of get to this point and they crash and burn hard. And if you give yourself adrenal fatigue or some other health thing pops up because you've literally stressed yourself and stressed yourself thinner than what you're able to bounce back from. You're going to be forced to have those quieter months, but you're going to spend them recovering and getting better and not being able to actually have these intentional quieter months where you're putting the pieces in place that are going to support you to continue to grow and to help to take some of that burden and some of that stress off of your plate. You come to me for a bit of reality check, tough love. That's what I'm dishing out here. So as Long as you can, like I never want people to be financially stressed. But as long as you can continue to pay yourself if to just back off from the growth for a second to be able to get these things in place, it's going to make a really big difference. And this is something guys, you're going to start to realize once you, at this point in business, your job description kind of starts, it changes pretty significantly. Like your new sort of focus rather than being on the creation of things just for this part, like you get back to the creation of things again. But while in your, in this phase of growth and then quickly rapidly building things to, to make sure that that growth is sustainable and, and you know that you're, you're doing it in a way that you're still giving great service and all of that stuff. Your new role, rather than like creating asset, like creating courses or creating different launch things and assets and whatever and creating content, your new role is now like the remover of friction. Like you are now here you are here going what are the things that are stop that are going to eventually over time completely slow us down, if not break us? And how do we get rid of those as quickly as possible and make sure that we are systemizing them out, we are streamlining them out. We can then continue to grow again. And this time when we are growing, we are going to be able to pick up the pace even faster. We're going to more than make up for these quieter months. The physical toll on yourself will be reduced greatly and on your team. Because if you're stressed, just imagine how stressed your team is as well. And it's also going to mean that your clients are not paying the price of your success. These are the things that you need to start getting dialed in, really focusing on. And usually we start so where previously most things that you do first is always like, okay, what's the revenue generating activities like? How can we priorit those, make sure that those are getting the energy and attention Here we want to go, all right, what's the delivery activities? What are the things that need to happen every time I get a new client? And as they go through and making sure that client has a good experience all the way through to off boarding that client. And how can I make sure that all of that is systemized? And by systemized I mean all right, if this is a repeatable task, which it should be because you have clients more than once is all right, is this something that can be automated? Is this something that my team can do? Is this Something that we need to be tracking and keeping on top of. Okay, great. How do we do that? How we put a system in place and trying to do it in the simplest way possible. I think a lot of people, they come into this point in their business and they're like, oh crap. Like they start to. Again, it's like what people do with funnels is like they get out a whiteboard and they get out all the different colored markers and they go, this is how I'm going to systemize. And rather than making it simpler and more streamlined, they actually make everything just really complicated and create all these unnecessary tasks for the team and themselves. So what you need to do for this, for your delivery is just sit down and go, all right, like literally bullet point out. This is what happens when a client they, from when they purchase to how are they onboarded, what do they receive? All of this, like do bullet point it out in a list and then look at each of those steps, which are the ones that are happening manually right now. How can they be automated? Or how can someone, your team take over from them? How can I be batched? Even if, perhaps if you're, you know, if you are picking up some speed right now, you. The assumption would be you're probably getting more than one client a week. So maybe some of these tasks can be something that someone for half an hour, once a week is coming in and doing it for multiple people rather than doing each one individually as they arrive. Like, go through and do that for the entire sort of lifespan of your client all the way through to them being finishing up, you know, asking for testimonials, everything. Like map all that out and then get your team to put it into place. Like you. This is where if you have, if you don't have a VA or someone yet, it's time to go get one. And this is kind of the great stuff that you can start getting them to do and to really focus on. That's step one, get your delivery button down. Because that means that go out, you get a hundred clients tomorrow, they're all going to have this great seamless, streamlined process. So, and it's going to free you up. It's also a good time to look at, all right, delivery wise, where is my energy going? Like, where do I need to be showing up where for my clients to get a great experience? Like if you have a group program, is it one on one? Is it, you know, a more hands off, DIY style of things? Like look at how you are delivering and again, make sure Is, is this the best way that for it to be done? Are people getting enough of what they need? Do I need to be doing all of it? This is the place, the time to start looking at that. And you don't need to go and remove yourself right away, but just sort of start putting that plan into place and as you kind of continue to jump up different income levels. No. And this is one thing that I did like particularly. We were growing out ecourse Empire when we first started it. I did all the calls. You know, we've had like 10, 12 people in the program now. We're sort of up to our capacity of people in the program, which. And we now have eight different mentors who come in and share the calls. I still do my calls, but we now have experts on, you know, we've got Facebook ads expert, a mindset coach. We have a tech expert, a marketing expert, a systems expert, you know, all these things there and ready. A social media expert. They're ready to answer questions. And I have like this little sort of unofficial plan of. All right, well, when every time we sort of bumped up to another level of students, okay, I would bring in a new one or two new new experts or just to make it a better and better experience as it scaled. So that's your delivery. The next thing that you need to make sure is as systemized as possible is your sales. And we talked about this already in the previous episode. So that means obviously any launches you're doing, they are again, as systemized as possible. This is where you need to be able to have your launches as a thing that you are repeating a lot of, if not all of, as often as you can. And there's something that your team is able to set up the bulk of it for you so you can come up and go, all right, we're going to be launching every quarter, or we launch every 60 days or whatever your launch plan is. But you don't like, other than sitting down and mapping out the dates and kind of mapping out the goals, you should then be able to hand it over to your team. And you don't need to have a super high highfalutin team here either. You know, have particularly a lot of the setup things for launches. It's scheduling things, it's writing emails, stuff like that. Like you have a copywriter who's someone that is a contract copywriter. You go, here are our emails from last time. We want to do something similar. Can you just update them a bit? Here's some new testimonials Et cetera, et cetera. Then your, your VA could be going in and scheduling all of this, setting up your Facebook groups, all that stuff. You shouldn't be doing any of this at this point for your launches. Your main goal is as a set the goals, set the, you know, set the plan in place and then turn up and give your best energy. That's kind of the point you need to be to continue to keep that momentum going without you falling in a heap. And then the second part, like the, the second most important part when it comes to systemizing, automating your sales is obviously funnels. If you haven't don't yet have a funnel in place. It's not a quick, fast thing to get set up, but it is definitely something you should have in your priorities list going forward. And once you have a lot of this delivery piece, and this is why we kind of, I would recommend you do it backwards. Like, you start with the delivery, get that off your plate, get that streamlined, free up that energy. So when you were showing up for your clients, it's just in the most impactful ways possible that will free up so much of your time. Then we look at the sales go. Okay, again, like, you don't need to be scheduling your emails. You might just feel like it's five minutes here, 10 minutes there. But it all adds up. You need someone on your team who is like on, on, on your team, like who is a regular person who you're checking in with every week, you're communicating with regularly. They're part of your growth team to be doing all those things for you. Now you've taken 80% of your workload from your launches off your plate as well, and probably 80% of your delivery off your plate as well. Amazing. You should be feeling pretty great. So now it's time to make sure you have that, that funnel piece in place. So it's the. You've got. Now you've got your sales automated, got delivery automated. And that means that now your energy can just be spent where it needs to be. And usually that's, you know, that's helping to come up with ideas or creating the content for your marketing, for making your programs even better. Now you can start to ramp up the marketing again. Now you can start to, hopefully you'll feel more creative and everything again. Now you can start to scale again. But you need those two key pieces. Just systemize. You need to have your own support team in helping you to do them. Otherwise, like I said, you're going to burn out the wheels will fall off. You're going to have unhappy clients. Unhappy clients. And not like, not just because it's bad for them, but they are also going to go out and tell people like I was in their program. It was a mess. I never heard back from anyone. I got promised the world and nothing happened. And it's very hard to once that sort of starts getting out to the ether to course correct. Once that's happened. I know if you're in this phase, this is probably the last thing that you want to hear. Like systems SOPs. No, but it needs to be done and then the final piece of the puzzle. And this is kind of like that sort of those next level steps again as you once you've got those two pieces in like you've systemized your sales, you've systemized your delivery, then this is where you kind of really need to upskill. Get on your CEO hat, start looking at your metrics, start looking at your finances and start looking at elevating your team and how your team is run and managed. And as that means that as even if it's, you know, you don't have the budget right now because I said this is often a really expensive time and you possibly maxed out budget wise. But as that growth kicks back in with your more streamlined version of your business and the more revenue does come, having that plan in place for okay, who are the now who's my next key hire? Who's the next person who's going to come in and help to free me up even more help to potentially manage the team you have or someone else who's that next higher level person who is really going to help to, you know, to take some of that mental load off to help drive you forward. You kind of can't see the wood for the trees. You can't know which of the metrics I need to focus on. Who is that person I need. Until you have fixed those two things. Systemizing your sales and your sales process and systemizing your delivery and your client success process. Get those two things done, rehit the gas and then you're good. Until of course you get to the next level. And the thing is that I can kind of joke about this stuff because I've been there, I've been there multiple times in my various businesses. But like this phase here and all of the kind of much higher level questions, the ones you kind of can't just fudge, the ones you really do need to be able to ask somebody about and have like that mentor person in your life that can be like oh yeah. So this is how the best way to, to systemize this. This is the metrics you need to be looking at. This is a dashboard that you need. This is the person and the personality type you need to be looking for to hire to be able to have this piece in your business. Like these sort of higher level questions and problems is one of the reasons why we actually are currently extending our ecourse empire membership from the standard six months through to 12. Because we know people come in through that six months, they get their sort of funnel pieces in place, they get their offer in place, they get that growth happening, the scaling happening and then they get to this point where they' like woohoo, I'm making more money than I ever have. I've grown so quickly. This is amazing and we don't want to just abandon you here to have the wheels fall off and have you burn out like in a heap. I've done it myself. I don't want anyone to ever do that. It's like new level, new devil. And that's why we continue to support people as they come through this phase as well. Because we are that sort of very open and honest sharing place where you can ask us, you can ask the experts on the team, you can ask the other people in the group who are right there in that same phase of business as well, what they're doing, what's working for them, where they're finding amazing talent to bring onto their team. Hey, have you got a great system for this? Like we've had people in our program recently sharing their ClickUp task templates for different things so that people can just pop them into their business and they've got a great project outline or a launch outline or whatever it is. Yeah, I think it is so important at this phase to when you are focusing on streamlining these things and making those next level decisions that quite often we haven't had actual real world experience making yet. Having that, having some sort of mentor, some sort of support team is just freaking crucial. And if you don't have that and you would like us to be your support team, we would love to be head of on over to ecoursempire.com I'm pretty sure we have one or two spots left in this current intake. I am pre recording this so that may no longer be true. But jump on over ecosempire.com and get all the details you can pop in your application. Hopefully there's still some spots available and then you can come and join us and we would love to support you whether it is in this stage of business or you know, any of the ones in between. It's one of our favorite things to do is to help people who are those wonderful people out there with your skills and your passions and help to put them together to make a business that runs and grows and is as automated as freaking possible but is still out there doing good in the world, serving more people, serving you, being profitable, all that fun stuff. Ecoursempire.com head on over. Get the details. And until then guys and until next week, keep doing what you do and I'll see you online. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing It Online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@Stealmyfunnel.com.