5 things you SHOULD be doing but probably aren't...

Hi, everyone. Katie McManus here, business strategist and leadership coach. I'm so excited to talk to you this evening. We're on. What is it? April 5th. I was just reading an article about LinkedIn taking or giving all of their employees the whole week off. And I know I'm going live on LinkedIn, and I just got this little thrill that we can, like, get away with so many things, but what would we get away with? So, just a little insight into my very, very mischievous, childlike brain that thinks of weird things to get away with, like, I don't know, bringing more of Facebook to LinkedIn. But I think we've already done that. Anyway, I want to talk to you about this, about a few things this evening. The five things in your business that you probably should be doing but probably aren't. And forgive me, I'm a little tired. I've been on allergy medication all weekend. If anyone else deals with allergies, I've never had them before in my life. If you have any tips and tricks or remedies or anything that doesn't knock you out and make you feel like, I don't know, like you're a crazy person, I would love them. And hi, whoever's watching, welcome. A little later than I normally go, and we're doing this on a Monday night, so thank you for joining. Also, if you're tuning in from The Facebooks, from YouTube, LinkedIn, and you comment and I don't call you out, I like this to be interactive. So it's just the technology that's failing us. It's not you. Anyway. The five things that you should be doing in your business that you probably aren't, number one is jumping before you're ready. Okay. I cannot stress this enough. I was on a call with a prospective client today, and I knew it wasn't the right fit. Let's just say that I knew it wasn't the right fit. There was this question of being confident, being confident before starting. And I hate to break this to people. I hate to break this to my clients. I hate to break this to anyone who's about to do something scary and exciting. If you wait for confidence to grab you and say, I'm going to be with you, you got this. You're never going to do it. You're never going to do it. If you wait to feel ready to do the thing you've never done before. Sorry, it's just never going to happen. It's. You know, you're going to end up one of those People who always talks about how they coulda, shoulda, woulda done the thing, and you know you're going to keep doing the thing that you've always done and that could be fine, but you're probably never going to do that thing that really matters. The thing that you're waiting to feel ready to do. Okay. I don't care what challenge this is. If it's in your business, if it's in your personal life, if there's something that you really want to do and you're just waiting to feel ready, sorry, babe, that just doesn't work. You're never going to feel ready. You just have to jump. You have to jump before you're ready. Okay? You have to get out on stage before you're ready. You have to start doing sales calls before you're ready. The only way you're going to get ready is with practice and by doing the thing. Okay? I go live all the time. There are still times where I don't feel ready for it. Okay? I train on sales. There are times when I get on the phone with someone, I don't feel ready for it. It's just part of it. You can do something for decades and still have moments of not feeling ready. Betty White, Betty Flippin White. When she was on SNL in her late 80s, I think she's in her 90s now. She's. Oh, my God, she's a national treasure. She's almost 100. She has been acting and performing since I think she was 18 years old, 17 or 18. She basically had her own show in her 20s. Okay. She still has stage fright. She still had massive stage fright and nerves before she went on snl. Okay. She's been doing at that point. I think she'd been acting for over 60 years. Okay. So if you're waiting to feel ready, to feel perfectly confident that you can go and do the thing, you gotta just go do it. Okay. Because you know what? That, that fear is always gonna be there. But it gets easier to handle. You get better at managing it. And by the way, if you want a great, like hour long watch, the Betty White documentary on Netflix is where it's at. It's so good. She hangs out with a grizzly bear at that. Just, you know, I'll leave you with that. The next thing that you should be doing in your business but probably aren't is hiring help. And this is a scary one for people, especially if you're starting your own business, because you have to hire help before you can really justify it. Because you know, if you are running your own service based business, by the time you are so desperate for help, are you going to actually have time to train that person? Are you actually going to have the bandwidth and the ability to strategize what things can go off your plate? You actually want to hire help before you're ready for it. Obviously you want to take into consideration what your budget is and what you can afford. Maybe it's someone part time and maybe it's not even someone who works for you. Maybe there's someone out there, like a mentor or coach who knows how to do the next thing that you haven't done before. And it's just going to save you that much time to go out and do and hire that person to bring them in and have them show you the next steps. You need to be hiring help. What this can cost you in your business is if you wait until things start breaking, guess what? You're going to lose clients. If you wait until you are just stark raving mad because you are beating your brain up against a wall, not knowing how to do something and not asking for help. Oh my God, what a waste of your creativity and resources and energy and your brilliance. I mean, you're probably not going to be that fun to be around if you wait till that. And you know, honestly, if you wait till that happens, you're probably going to lose clients as well. Also, just the missed opportunity. The missed opportunity. For instance, I've recently hired a coach to help me write a book. Okay, she's not writing the book for me. She's walking me through. Here are the steps to write your book. I've never written a book before. Okay, that's a stretch for me. I really wanted someone to support me through that journey and save me the trial and error and all the costs that go along with it of, you know, screwing it up potentially. I'm sure I'll still screw it up in some ways, but I have someone who's kind of the guardrails. And this is one of the things that I offer my clients. When my clients work with me, I'm saving them all of the very costly trial and error that I went through and I've seen other other solopreneurs do in their businesses. You can invest in this and you can save a ton of money. Or if you really want to try it on your own, that's up to you. You know, it's your money, it's your time, your energy and your life. But I highly recommend hiring help. And can I Just brag. I have hired two assistants so far this year. I'm so excited. I have Ray and Helen. They're both working on different parts of my business and oh my God, I don't know what I would do without either of them. Anyway. Hi, girls. Thanks. The next one on the list is you need. I can't stress this enough. You need to track your numbers. You have to track your numbers. If you're not tracking your numbers, and I'm talking money, I'm talking follow up, I'm talking sales. If you don't know what your closing percentage is on your sales, that's. That spells trouble. Let's just go. Let's go with money, okay? So tracking money, guess what happens very, very often in businesses as they're ramping, as they're scaling. They run out of money sometimes, okay? This is normal. If you've ever been in that boat, know that you're not alone. It happens. But you know what makes it less scary is if you see it coming. If you're three weeks out from a big bill being due and you have invoices out that you need to have paid, and you see, oh gosh, the math just isn't adding up. For me to have money at this point, that's when you get on the phone, you start calling clients and say, hey, you know, I see that we have an outstanding invoice. Do you mind paying that? Or if you don't have outstanding invoices, that's when you start hustling. That's when you start building awareness. That's when you put on a webinar. That's when you start doing a drive for clients. Also when you track your money, let me just point this out. What you focus your attention on grows, okay? Just like a plant, what you water and what you tend to will grow. So if you're focusing on your money, if you're giving it your attention every single day, guess what's going to happen, that's going to grow. And there's never going to be a nasty surprise of, oh, shit, the check just bounced. Okay? When we're talking about tracking other numbers, like your closing percentage, and when I say closing percentage, it is a sales term for those of you who are not familiar with sales talk. So that means If I have 10 sales calls, if I have 10 calls with potential clients, that's only five, 10 and four of them close. That means I have a 40% closing rate. You may think that's really bad, but actually if you have a closing percentage, that's between 25 and 50%, you're actually right on point. Because if you're getting more than 50%, that means that you're pricing yourself too low and you could be making more money and, you know, working less time. If you're getting less than 25%, then you might be charging too high. But what you really want is for your service to be an investment, which means that not everyone can afford it, or not everyone sees the worth in it, or not everyone is the best fit for it. Oftentimes when I'm on a call with prospective client, the reason we end up not working together is because they realize their priority is actually not in building their business. Their priority is in throwing their attention at something else. In the meantime, they're not that serious about it. It's very rarely actually about the money. I will say this, there are people who can't afford my services and I am very intentional about that because when, and this is my mentality around pricing my services. I hope you borrow this. When someone considers working with me, I want for that investment to feel like they have some skin in the game because that means that they're gonna get more out of it. It means that they're gonna be invested, they're gonna do the work. If you are working in a service based based industry, you do a service that requires your client to do work in order for them to see results, you need to have a greater investment on their end. Okay, I don't care if you're a health coach, I don't care if you're a consultant who advises on strategy and then leaves them to do all the work. If you are, gosh, fitness coach, whatever, and financial coach as well. All those things you need to have your client have some buy in. Okay? This is key. You're gonna get the best testimonials out of that. Let me just tell you that. So tracking your numbers daily also means tracking your activity. Are you following up with people? Are you on social media? Are you posting every day? Are you commenting on other people's things so that it ups your engagement? What are your markers for success there? Because here's the thing, it is so easy when you run your own business to feel like you did nothing all day even though you did a million little tasks. Okay? But commenting on other people's stuff could actually be something you put on your to do list that allows for you to cross it off and feel like you've actually accomplished something. And I know I'm in the entrepreneur world, some days I just don't know where the time went, I don't know what I spent my time on, but all of a sudden I've accomplished something. I just can't put my finger on it. Give yourself credit. If you don't give yourself credit for the little tasks that you do every day, you are going to burn yourself the fuck out. And you're not going to be any good to anyone if you do that again. LinkedIn is giving all of their employees the entire week off because of burnout. Okay. How much is that costing their business? Just take that into perspective for your own business. Okay? So that's number three of the things that you should be doing in your business but probably aren't. Number four. I'm so sorry to tell you this. I'm so sorry. We're all zoomed out, but networking, networking is one of the best things that you can do for your business, even in a pandemic. I know I'm sending you to more zoom, but let me tell you, it is so easy. Network these days, literally on my phone I have the Eventbrite app. I go through and look for just free networking events and there are a few that are really good and a few that are really bad. Okay. So you get to try some out and see what works for you. Look for networking events, specifically search those and also look for things that are in your industry and maybe just industry adjacent that can be really helpful. And if you don't do this, like, networking is just the easiest way to build your community and build awareness as to what you're up to and really build connections. Okay. You're not going there to sell anything. Just I don't want you walking in with that mindset. I want you going in there with the purpose of building relationships and seeing what value you can add to the space. Because if you can be remembered and people want to reach out to you and talk to you, then they're going to be curious about what you're up to. And if they're your ideal client, perfect. And if they're not, I guarantee you if you do a favor for them, they will want to do a favor back for you. Which means that they may want to connect you with someone who is in your industry, who could use you and be your client. Use you. That sounded really bad. But who could utilize your services anyway? Networking also, you know what, we all need some social time. And my extrovert friends out there, I'm going nuts. Networking has actually been a great way for me to fill that cup a little bit. It's not the same. I know. I can't wait until we can do it in person again. The other thing about networking, do not. Do not. Oh, please, for the love of God and all that is holy, for the love of your great Aunt Bertha, do not use your introduction to give everyone the history of your life. The history. Unless, like, you live like an incredible life and there are movies written about or done about it and books written. No one cares. No one cares. Everyone is scanning the world for, are you useful to me? Are you useful to me? Is this thing useful to me? No, not useful. My brain is just gonna completely wipe it clear of my brain, of my memory. I'm not gonna remember you. So when you do a networking event, I want you to come up with some, I don't know, 22nd way for you to describe how you help people, what people utilize you for, because that is what people are going to remember you for. And that's what, what's going to get them to say, oh, I have to remember that. I'm going to write that down and then I'm going to connect you with my friend Judith. That's what's going to do it. So no one cares where you went to high school or college or, you know, what your first marriage was like unless it's relevant to that. But explain how you're useful to people and then give them directions to get in touch and then share whatever methodology you used for them to book time with you. So that's networking. The cost of not doing this, though, let me tell you one of the things that when I grew my business, I built it on referrals, which was wonderful, except, you know, referral come in intermittently on their own. And then you can do a drive for referrals. You can email former clients and people you've worked with in the past and you know, you can follow up with them through. There are only so many times you can do that in a year when you network, you're purposely putting your name out there and you're speeding up that flywheel of gaining interested people in your business. They may not be your ideal clients, but they will know people. So it keeps that referral flywheel spinning. And that's really what you want, because referrals are some of the best business you can possibly get for your business. Okay, so that is networking. That is number four of things you should be doing in your business but probably aren't. Number five is my favorite. And I need to learn this lesson myself. I need to get better at this myself. And by the way, nothing on this list. I'm not perfect at anything on this list. I'm getting better at them every single day along with you. But number five, you have to plan vacations. You have to plan for time off. You are not a robot. You can't work every single day of the year. I just. I can't stress this enough, and I'm stressing this to you because I need to hear this. Okay? I literally blocked off most of last week so I could get all the work done that I never get done when I am normally taking client calls. And it turned into a staycation. And I was punishing myself for it for the first three days when really, I realized I haven't had time off in almost a year. Actually. No, no, I'm sorry. I, like, I had. I gave myself a staycation in August of last summer, last year, but it really wasn't a staycation. I did, you know, some work and, you know, a lot of back and stuff. You need to plan your vacations. I know it's hard right now because we can't actually go anywhere. The world is going to be opening back up. But you need to plan time off. You need to plan time to recharge. You cannot. Excuse me. You cannot expect yourself to work around the clock and do so consistently and still deliver the quality service that you are known for. Okay, I'm going to use a sports analogy. I'm probably going to butcher this. Drew Howard, if you're watching, don't make too much fun of me. I hope I get this right. Okay, so pitchers in baseball, you know, they throw the balls. They don't just pass out margaritas, but a bunch anyway. Their arms get tired. They can't pitch an entire game. They can't pitch an entire game one night and then do an entire game the next night. If they do, they injure themselves. Okay. They are throwing that ball so hard. So hard. I think it's what, 93 miles? It's typical of a fastball. Oh, my God. Could you imagine? They're poor muscles pitchers. I know. For those of you who've been in sales the last few days of the month or the quarter, whatever your deadline for your quota is. Oh, my God. Could you imagine. I know how many hours I used to work at Closeout, which is that final few days. Could you imagine if you tried to make yourself work that much for the entire year, you would die. You would literally die of dehydration, lack of sleep, of alcohol consumption, whatever. It would just, you would deteriorate rapidly. And yet when we started our own business, when we started our own business, there's so much stuff we can do. There's so much stuff. There's this constant to do list of stuff that has to be done every single day, every single week, every single month. And because it's our baby, because it is everything that we've poured our heart and soul into, and we are so proud of it, we wanted to succeed. We run ourselves ragged, and we don't give ourselves time off. And this has costs on your health, this has costs on your relationships, and it has major costs on your business. You may think that hitting the gas that hard constantly is good for your business, but actually you lose your pizzazz. You lose your pizzazz. You're not as sparkly and shiny when you go on lives. When you get on stage, when you're writing, it comes through. If you're burning yourself out, your clients are going to notice that your. Your service is declining or at least your. Your presence with them, and they're not going to be as impressed. And you're going to start making mistakes. That happens. That happens when you're tired. Finally, this is a bonus one. This is the bonus one. I didn't plan to say this. I want you to remember something. So those are the five things that you should be doing in your business but probably aren't. And I hope you start doing at least one of them. But there's one more thing I want to offer you this evening before I sign off, and that's this. When you are tired, when you are sick, and when you are hungry, that is when your voice of doubt, that voice in your head that tells you you can't do cool things that you know, tells you so and so is mad at you or that you screwed up at that client and they're going to fire you. Or. Or you should be doing this and you're just failing at everything. When you're sick, hungry, or tired, that's when those voices pipe up the most. Okay, I've been running into it a lot. So many of my clients are facing burnout right now because they're doing just what I do. And we all need to get better at this. We all need to get better at giving ourselves some time off and some breaks and some vacations. So that's when those voices really jump in and take advantage of you. The other thing is that when you don't get good rest, when you don't nourish your body, and when you aren't feeling Your best. It's really hard to draw in the things that you want to have that abundant mindset, to have trust and faith in the universe that's going to deliver, to manifest. And I love manifestations. I, I'm not so sure about the metaphysical stuff of it, but I think there is something about focusing your attention on something. Kind of like when you want to buy a yellow Jeep and then all of a sudden there are yellow jeeps everywhere. When you're manifesting something, when you're really focusing on it and trying to grow it in your life, it's like a switch gets flipped in your brain and you just start scanning the world for those things and opportunities to get those things. All that is really hard when you're not well rested and not well fed. And if you're feeling, you know, a little under the weather, okay, so take, take a little break with yourself. If, when you're in those stages, we're human, it happens to the best of us. If you're tired, if you need a snack, if you're, if you stubbed your toe and, you know, broke your pinky toe and it's hurting, you just know that your brain is going to start piping in with those thoughts of fear and tell you that it's doomsday. And you're going to have a really hard time manifesting and bringing in those, those elements of abundance for yourself. And it's all going to be okay. Just get some sleep and eat something and take a Tylenol, you'll be fine. But don't trust those voices that are telling you everything is going to hell in a handbasket, because it's not. You're doing great. Anyway, I'm Katie McManus. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm going to be going live every day this week. I'm not sure of times it's going to be a surprise to both of us, but I hope to see you there. And if you have any thoughts on this, I would love to hear in the comments. Nothing came through, but I think my Internet's being a little wonky. Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderful evening and I can't wait to talk to you all soon. Okay, good night.