3 things to grow your business

Good morning. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. I don't often get to say good morning on my lives because I'm not a morning person. Yeah. So I'm about to start my vacation. I'm literally in a hotel in Boston. My best friend and her family are here as well. But I also made a commitment. I wanted to go live on my vacation because I know otherwise I will go a little crazy. I've been talking a fair bit over the last couple days about the crappy things that we get committed to rather than the success of our business. So it's really easy to get like humbled up in the negative parts of it. But today I really wanted to focus on some things that you should be committed to in your business. Okay? Things that will absolutely move the needle, make you a success and make things so much easier for you. And I'm going to make this quick because I have my being brave call starting at 11am this 24 minutes and I need to have a phone call between that. So we're gonna be quick today, okay? So number one, number one thing that you should be committed to. And it's so easy, guys. It's. Well, it's simple, not easy. Sometimes we let our fear of being judged get in the way. But this is visibility, okay? This is one of the core principles of what I have my clients do. Visibility. Create visibility for yourself. You cannot be a secret and a success at the same time. It just doesn't work. If people don't know about you. How are they going to hire you and give you their money? That, I mean, it's just, it's so simple. But people get hung up on. Well, I don't really want to market myself because I don't want to brag and I don't want people to think I'm being selfish or self centered. And yeah, sure, you can get wrapped up in alt stuff all you want, but here's the thing. People need to know about you. People need to know about who you are, what you do, what you believe. Because they need to be able to opt in or opt out. Okay? They need to be able to have a reaction to you regardless of whether it's good or bad. I use this example with my clients all the time and I'm going to use it here. Louis Vuitton. So Louis Vuitton is a luxury leather goods accessories brand, right? They put themselves out there in all the ways that their ideal clients will see them. They are not concerned with being liked by the members of PETA, okay, it is just impossible. They make leather goods out of animals. No one who's part of PETA is actually going to go and buy one of those bags. They're anti animal abuse. They're anti, like, using animals for that stuff. I get it. So if you're. If you're keeping yourself small and you're not building visibility for your business, and you're doing it because you're afraid that people aren't gonna like you, honey, like, people aren't gonna like you. There are people who don't like me. I know, I know. They're crazy because I'm like the best person in the world. Just kidding. But anyway, there are people who are just not gonna like you. And let me tell you, what was the book, I think it was Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. People decide if they like you in the first five seconds. The first five seconds of having an interaction with you. Okay? So, like, you have no control over this. You have no control over this. And yes, like, if you share something that you believe that people disagree with, you know, whatever, but you know what's gonna happen is the people who do agree with you or the people who really resonate with your message, they're gonna lean closer because you were honest and brave enough to say the thing that needed to be said to invite them into your circle and they're going to be loyal for forever. And like I said, this is simple, not easy. This is one of the things that I spend a crap ton of time on with my clients. We go through. How do you market yourself? Where do you market yourself? I do editing for posts. Sometimes if they don't know how to phrase something, it's all game. There's so many different ways to market yourself. It really depends on who your ideal client is. But you need to build that visibility. Build that visibility, and, you know, there are going to be people who, you know, don't like it. And that's fine. Just be at peace with that. Vivek. Hi. Hi, Vivek. Candice. Thanks, Katie. I needed to hear this today. Yeah, well, I'm glad. I'm glad I got to be this message to you, Candace, because, you know, you know, it's so important as we're building our businesses. Okay, so that's, number one is visibility. You need to be committed to visibility every single day. Okay. Number two, again, simple, not easy. You need to be in touch with your ideal client. And when I say you need to be in touch with them, you need to know what they want. You need to know what they say they want, but they really don't want. They want this other thing. You need to know what their fears are. You need to know what their frustrations are. You need to know what obstacles generally get in the way of them, what they want. You need to know what their best case scenario is, what their worst case scenario is. You need to be in touch with who they're following, what accounts, what thought leaders, what books they're reading, what shows they're watching. You really, really need to get in their head. And for those of you who are coaches and consultants, there is absolutely this thing that you are your ideal client. Okay? Hi, Shreya. Thank you so much. I love this topic, too. Thank you. Jack McManus. That's that last name. Oh, man. You're for the win, too. Anyway, but here's the thing. So if you're your ideal client, say you're a coach. You're your ideal client, and you know all this stuff so intimately because you've gone through it, okay, maybe you're a relationship coach, and you've gone through the crappy relationships. You've dated, you know, you've done all the personal growth. You've healed, you landed this amazing relationship that just lights you up, but you want to turn around. You want to help other people out of the muck. And so you got trained as a coach, and you're now coaching people through this. The problem here is you now have expert speak. You're on the other side. You've learned, oh, I'm frozen. Oh, no. All right, we're back. The Internet. So the Internet's been kind of weird at the hotel. So I hope this is making sense. It's not all garbled and sped up and slowed down. So you now have expert speak. And expert speak looks like, oh, we'll find fulfillment, and you'll find your purpose and all this stuff, and you'll create a balanced life. No one knows what that means. Okay? Your ideal clients don't know what that means. They know their frustrations, and they know their wants, and that's it. And so when you're in touch with your ideal clients and you're turning around, you're speaking to them. You. You want to speak to them in their language. This is one of the first things I have my clients do when they start with me, and sometimes even before they start with me, if they can't afford to work with me right off the bat, and they want to get started in some way, shape, or form so that when they do start with me. They can hit the ground running is I have them do ideal client interviews. This helps them get out of their own head. Stop playing the guessing game of what your ideal clients are needing you to say to feel like you get them and just hear from them directly. It's amazing. It's amazing. It's. It's work. I know it is. It is a lot of work, guys. But if you're not doing this, the price you pay is that you're just spinning your wheels, playing the guessing game forever. And sometimes what you say works and sometimes what you say doesn't. And you're not going to know why. You're not going to know if you phrased it badly or if it wasn't the thing. It just. You need to hear it from the horse's mouth. Okay? So you need to be in touch with your. With your ideal clients. Hi, Vijay. Welcome. Thank you for watching this morning. Let me see. What would you say is the best way to stand out against your competition? Well, here's the thing, Jack, and that's such a great question. You know, I actually don't believe in competition, and I know it's like a. Like a woo, you know, like airy fairy kind of thing to say, but there's only one person who's Katie McManus. Right. There are a million business coaches out there. I'm of the opinion that it is a personality fit. It is absolutely a personality fit. So my clients who like me and wanted to work with me because they like my personality, they're not going to want to work with other business coaches and business strategists because they're not me. You know, there's something that, like, we just fit. You know, when we talk about dating, I'm just going to use this example because it's perfect. It's not like you're just going to go into a coffee shop and just start dating the first person you see. Like, you may talk to them, oh, my mom's calling. You may talk to them and never want to speak to this human again. There's, like a very small percentage of humans out there in the world that we actually want to spend time with, much less be vulnerable on the phone with and share all of our fears and our wants and our dreams for our business. Okay? So, you know, there's a small population of people out there who see me, see my lives, come to my being brave calls and realize, okay, cool. This is the person I'm going to be comfortable with. This is the person I'M going to trust really to stand out against your competition. Your competition is put yourself out there, let people see you, experience you and determine. I'm opted in. I really like this human and I trust them and I want to work with them or be like, whoa, they are super annoying. I hate how they say this. Wow, swears a shit. And I don't want to talk to her, you know, oh, she's liberal. Oh, she's this, oh, she's blonde, whatever. Let people just opt out. Literally. The world is, I mean there's, there are billions of humans on this planet. A great example I love to play with is if you're, if you're like later I want you to pull out your phone and I want you to open Google Maps and I want you to look up dentists in your area and just look at like a 10 mile radius and there are so many frickin dentists and they all have a booked calendar. I don't know about your dentist but like I have a three month wait to get a cleaning at my dentist. Alright, I really need a cleaning. But there are plenty of dentists all around and yet there are people who go to them. It's the same for any other business. We just have to be visible. We need people to see us and you know, also we need to be in touch with our ideal client. That's essentially it. We need people to feel seen by us. Okay. Especially in the personal development field because we can't guarantee an outcome. We just can't. There's no such thing as a guarantee when it comes to coaching. The closest thing that we can do is charge a good chunk of money so that people have skin in the game so that they actually do the work. But the key is that the client has to do the work. You can work and. Hi Scott, welcome. You can work with a personal trainer to try to lose weight all you want, but if you still eat like garbage, you're not going to see a change in the scale. You might see a change in your circumference. Get in touch with your client, let them see you and let them know that you see them and explain in their words how you understand them and what they want and what they're afraid of. Finally, number three, I hear so much that you can do it all yourself. You can do it all yourself. Name one thing that you have done throughout your life that was really genuinely all yourself. Okay, I'm going to use the example of laundry. Sure, yeah, I can brag about doing my own laundry. All I Want. But in reality, I have the help of thousands of humans who were smart enough and industrious enough to invent the washing machine and the dryer. Okay. And then other thousands of people who are smart enough, industrious enough, and understood chemistry, who invented the soap that washes my clothes? Okay. You know, I'm not going down by the riverside with my homemade lye and my scrub board, going to wash my clothes that way. It's just like, no, I would just walk around naked, really, Honestly, it's just not worth it to me. I hate laundry anyway. There is really nothing that we do in our lives that is done all ourselves. Food, laundry, our business, and we don't want to do it all ourselves. I have a client who hate technology. They hate trying to figure out back end stuff. And they work with me because I'm a millennial and I love stuff and I'm able to explain it to them. But still, like, if you don't enjoy building a website, why would you put yourself through that? And if you don't enjoy it, honestly, you're probably not going to be that good at it. So you're going to need someone who's an expert, who makes you look good. Okay. I mean, most of my clients come to me because they don't know how to market themselves. They don't know how to sell themselves and not sell themselves. I mean, sell their services. They don't know how to price their services. They don't know how to create an offering. Yeah, they could absolutely go to the library, take out dozens and dozens of books, read through them, guess at which methodologies are going to work best. Maybe ask some people, like which methodologies are out of date and which ones are up to date. You could absolutely do all the things yourself, but why would you do that? That's going to take years and years and years of time. Years and years and years of trial and error. Why wouldn't you just invest in a business strategist or website designer or someone who trains you on sales just to jump ahead? I just don't know when I invested in a business coach. And granted, I didn't need a lot of the training on all that stuff because I come from that background. I was a salesperson for a really long time. I've read marketing books for fun. It is just my jam. But there are parts to it that I had a gap and I needed to learn that there's no shame in getting help. And really, if you are committed to making this business work, you need to invest in Help. I don't care what kind of help that is. Anyway, those are the three things. Today, I want you to go and do something that is visible for your business, okay? Just create some visibility. I don't care if it's calling a friend and telling them that you started a business. It could also be calling up the producers of Good Morning America and pitching yourself as a story. I don't care. Build visibility any way you possibly can. Two, you're going to go out and talk to at least one of your ideal clients. You're going to ask them a couple questions. You're going to get in their head. And not like in a creepy way, but you want to hear how they describe their things in their layman's terms. Drop your expert speak, okay? And finally, if you have a gap, if you don't know how to sell your services, you don't know how to market yourself. If you don't know how to create an offering that people are dying to have, if you don't know how to. How to put yourself out there in the world, you're gonna DM me. You're gonna DM me. And we're gonna set up a time to talk after my vacation. So the week of the 5th of July, we're gonna set up a time to talk. And if it's a fit, we can talk about what it looks like to work together. And if it's not a fit, I'm going to send you away with some resources, some things that are actionable or humans to reach out to who can help you with that next step, okay? Because there's no excuse for you wasting time on your business anymore. No excuse. You have to do it. And if you're not reaching out to me, I want you to reach out to any other business coach or strategist. If you are watching this video and you're annoyed by me, I don't know who you're watching this video, if you're annoyed by me, but if you're watching this video and you're like, not my person, that is okay. That is brilliant, okay? I'm not your person, but there's someone out there who is. And I want you to reach out to them, okay? Because I don't want you spinning your wheels anymore. I don't want you wasting time anymore. I want you going and doing this business because no one is going to do it like you do, okay? No one is going to help your clients like you can help them. By you wasting time, you are robbing the world of your gifts and that is fucked up. So anyway, so those are your homework assignments for today. I hope this was super helpful. I have my Being Brave call in about seven minutes. It's too late to register for today and I'm honestly, I'm not going to commit to sending everyone who messages me a link to join. But if you want to register, I am going to be doing it next Friday. I do it every Friday at 11am Eastern. And like I said, if you are tired of spinning your wheels and you want to jump ahead with all the know how to start this business, get high paying clients, you're going to DM me. Okay, no more wasting time here people. Okay? There is a much easier way to do this and some of the things that I'm so proud that I get to offer my clients. But anyway, Scott treas. Vijay Jack McManus, great last name again, Candice Vivek. Thank you all for joining me. And if anyone was commenting from another platform and I didn't call you out, just know it's not on purpose. Sometimes Streamyard just doesn't show me all the comments from all the places. But anyway, I'm out of my wrist on the desk. But Anyway, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist coach. Have a great Friday everyone and I will see you all next next week. All right, bye.