139. Mid-Year Mastermind: A Reset for Clarity & Consistency

Welcome.

I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck. And this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom. One business at a.

So I want to just give some direction of where we're going today and why I really wanted to host this. I'm calling it a mastermind like meeting. So I really feel strongly about helping us all to launch powerfully into Q3 and getting the support that you need to get into action. What I noticed so what I noticed so many women are really great in learning. We take all the classes, we download all the freebies, we buy all the, you know, we do all the free master classes, all the things. And we spend a lot of time learning, but not as much time actioning. And so I want to really offer a shift today for you that there's nothing wrong with learning. We all, you know, the whole entrepreneurial journey is about learning. But I want you to consider that you have everything you need right now to build the business, achieve the financial goal, the client goal, the impact goal that you have right now. You have everything that you need. You don't need to learn one more thing from the outside. And to really shift your learning to the inside, the inside of your business. What is your business telling you? What are your clients telling you? What is your community telling you? And what are, what is your internal wisdom telling you? And really think about learning from there.

Right?

And, and the only way we get clarity in that way is by taking action and then evaluating. And that's really what we're going to talk about today. And so my hope is that you leave with at least one action that you can take today that will create for you a 10x return on the time you spend with me today. Because obviously this was a free session, but I know that free doesn't mean free because your time is worth a lot more than any money you could ever spend. Because we can always make more money, but we'll never make more time, right? So what you walk away with in this time we have together, I want you to have one action that you can take that will make this worth 10x what you thought it should be worth, right? Or worth your time. And so just to set the stage. Okay, here we go. So what I really see is holding us back as women entrepreneurs from the progress and the growth and the revenue that we want is this, you know, lots of over learning and under actioning under marketing and under earning, okay? We're spending lots of hours and dollars learning. We're spending a lot more hours and dollars learning than we are implementing, right? So just think about that for yourself. Like, what is the. If you had to do a ratio of learning to actioning, what would that be? And you know what I would love to see it be is like 10% learning and 90% actioning, or even if it was 8020, because it's really in the taking action, you know, learning something and then taking action on it right away. Right? So if you're. You're believing that you have everything you need right now to build the business that you want to build, to bring in the clients you want to bring in to do the marketing and sales that you need to be doing, if you believed you have everything you need right now, what is stopping you from taking the action?

Right?

And that's what I want us to really uncover today. And oftentimes, you know, we spend lots of hours, like I said, learning and not implementing. We're buying all these classes. And then we, you know, for example, we buy a webinar class. You know, I have a client that's learning how to do webinars, and she bought this webinar class and, you know, it's gone through this huge program and about how to do webinars, but she hasn't done any webinars yet. Or we do one webinar and then we give up. We say, well, it didn't go like I wanted. The people didn't show up, the marketing didn't work, so I'm not doing any more. Well, and you decide you're bad at webinars or we're bad at sales, or we're bad at marketing, and we give up and we go search for the next big thing. Well, you're missing altogether the solution to getting better. You know, the fastest path to cash and impact, to revenue and impact is. Is taking action and then learning from that action right away.

Right?

And so, you know, that's why I teach marketing differently. I teach marketing. It's not all about the marketing tactics, but it's asking how do you want to meet people and show up and nurture relationships with them, Right? Because if you just imagined that all marketing works, where do you. Where would you love to show up to meet people.

And.

Because all marketing works because of your energy, not because of the tactic itself, right? So once you choose how you want to show up and you commit to mastering that marketing skill or those very few one to three things, then you implement, and you're gonna fail because that's part of the process. You evaluate, you iterate, and then you go again, and you keep going again and again and again. So that's what I teach my clients is this cycle of continuous improvement. So it's not, okay, we're going to do a couple webinars and then decide they don't. Webinars don't work for me. If you love doing webinars, then let's figure out what happened, you know, where the breakdown was, and improve those little things. And so building a business is all about incremental improvement, all about the small things, all the way to success, Right? So. So that's what I want to talk about today. And just as an example, so I was telling you, I spent a lot of time this weekend. I have a sprained ankle, so I can't go out and, you know, go hiking and paddle boarding and all the things I love right now. So I'm stuck at home doing my puzzles. Robin. And so I did spend some time really going through my numbers. And I have a spreadsheet. So I created. I create these trackers, and I have a spreadsheet, and love or hate spread. Michelle, she's probably like, spreadsheets, right? I love spreadsheets. But anyway, so I have my whole marketing plan in a spreadsheet, and I'll measure, like, the percentage of completion. So I have a goal. So, like, networking is one of my top marketing channels, right? So I have a goal to go to 10 networking events each month. So I'll measure, like, how many did I actually go to, Right? How many people did I meet? And I have goals for each one of my marketing actions. And then I measure based on the percentage of completion. Like, you know, I only went to 8 instead of 10, so it's only 80% completion, right? So I score myself. And so I've been. I've been doing this for years, but I looked at this year, the first half of the year so far, and what I noticed is my percent completion of my marketing plan is the exact same percentage of where I am in my goal for revenue. So, for example, If I completed 50% of all my marketing activities and my revenue's at 50% for the year, so what that tells me is if I want to get to 100% of my revenue, then I just go and be consistent with my marketing activities, right? And so what that also tells me is that my simple marketing plan that I've developed is dialed in like, it's not that marketing actions that I need to improve. It's the consistency. And so that's what evaluation tells me. So what I want to teach you today is how to evaluate effectively so you too can do this. And then you know, at the end of evaluation, exactly what, what are the improvements that you need to make to get to where you want to go? And it's just small improvements. So then you have this, these improvements, you make the improvements and then you go out again and you go and you implement, right? So evaluation is like going to school or taking a master class of what your business is trying to tell you. So that goes back to let's learn from inside our business rather than continually going outside and learning about everybody else's businesses.

Right?

And this is how you create rapid improvement and rapid growth in your business.

Right?

Okay. So I'm going to teach you my process for evaluation. And it's very simple. And you can do this for anything that you want to get better in your business. So whether it's for your sales conversations, you know, all the way from that to as simple as, you know, like Rob and I were talking about earlier, like systems, right? You can evaluate your systems. If something feels off, just take a moment and evaluate what's happening. And this gives you just crystal clarity on what you want to change rather than throwing everything out. So there's three questions that to this evaluation process, and you do them all in the exact order that I'm going to teach you. Because when we do it in this order, it opens your mind up to learning rather than criticism and judgment and despair. We've all been in that spiral, right, of like, nothing's working, everything sucks, and I'm not good at business, whatever. We, we want to stay out of that line of thinking because that is not productive, right? So our evaluation process, we always go from the perspective of what we can control because there's a lot of things that we can't control. And so I'll tell you when I got really. I'll tell you a little story about when I got really good at this process was early on in my coaching business. And I did 12 sales calls in a row, and all of them were nos. And I was so obviously disappointed. I felt like a failure. I was feeling all the rejection from having all those no's. And the only thing that kept me going was this process. Because when. So every time I would do a sales call, I would do this evaluation process and I would learn from every single one of those of what I need to improve to get better, I would make those adjustments and then I'd have another sales call. I screw up some other things, right? But little by little, you know, Even though those 12 no's, you know, equated to tens of thousands of dollars of business that I left on the table, I used it for learning. I learned from every single one of them. And I've gone on to create hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result. So that's the power of this process. So the first question is thinking about what worked, where you saw your growth in this attempt. So whether it's an email that you sent out, an email campaign, or a webinar or a sales conversation, anything, you can even evaluate networking events. So if you go to a networking event and, and talk to a bunch of people and then when you get back to your office, evaluate how did it go? Like, what do I think about, you know, my little 30 second elevator pitch? Or what did I think about how I did with all of these things? And so you ask yourself, what worked? Where did I see my growth? That's question number one. So we're going to take a moment and just think about if you want to think about June or the Q2 or the first half of the year, maybe just think, what are one, two or three things that you could just jot down right now that worked for you in growing your business, in your marketing or sales, whatever you want to evaluate. I got to let my dog in. So I love this because we all have things that worked, right? Even if we might be sitting here at the beginning of Q3, Q3, like, well, nothing's working. There are always things that are working. There are always things that are not working. That's just the entrepreneurial experience. All right, so the second question then is, what didn't work for you? Where do you see opportunities for improvement? Like, I didn't get as many clients as I want or wanted, or that marketing thing I tried bombed, didn't work like I wanted, or my close rate was 40%, I want it to be 70% or whatever, I didn't get as many consultations as I wanted. And I don't know if I mentioned this, but what's really important when we're thinking about these things, of what worked and what didn't work, we always want to be thinking from the perspective of what we can control, right? We can't control everything. We can't control whether people say, yes, 100%. We're not going to force people to say yes, right? We can't control the economy we can't control. The politics we can't control. You know, if, if there's, you know, I don't know, I'm thinking of Frankie with the, the huge weather thing that happened before your event. You know, like, those are things we can't control. But what we want to think about in this evaluation is what are the things we can control? Right. Like how we show up to our marketing or, you know, how do. How we show up at a networking event and have our 30 second pitch or our 30 second introduction ready and dialed.

Right.

We can control how we show up to a sales call, and we can control how, you know, the questions we ask to really uncover what that client most needs.

Right.

We can control how we follow up with them. And when we focus on those things rather than the things we can't control, then we can make meaningful change and meaningful improvement. Okay, so I'm sure we all had plenty of things that didn't work that were opportunities where we'd like to see improvement.

Right.

And then the final thing is, what do you want to do differently going forward? Q3. We're here, the beginning of Q3. It's a new day, a new month, a new quarter. This is the second half of the year. What do we want to do different that's in our control? What are our greatest lessons that we have learned the first half of this year? So now what I want to do is we're going to take some time for masterminding and hot seat coaching around one of those areas that you want to be different.

Right.

These are all opportunities for improvement, opportunities to get into action and to make some changes. So we want to support you in that, and I want to support you in that. So we're going to have, I'm going to set a timer for, for 10 minutes, and we'll each have 10 minutes to bring a marketing challenge, a sales challenge, something that is not working, that you'd like to see some improvement on that you want to get in action around. And I'll offer some. Some input and feedback, and then we'll open it up to the rest of the group. Because there's, you know, this is a room full of wise entrepreneurs, right. So let's take advantage of that and support each other and offer input to one another. So I'm going to just give us a minute to consider what you want to bring to the room, and I'm going to get my timer opened up here. What would be the most valuable that, if you had some clarity on, would give you that 10x return on the time that you're here today.

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