150: Are You Giving Your Business Enough Consistency?

Are you struggling to grow your business? If you look deep down, you are probably struggling with consistency. On this episode, I'm covering 5 areas you can get more consistency with right now. Come join me. Welcome to the Launch Your Box podcast with weekly tips, tricks, and strategies to start, launch, and grow your subscription box. Now here's your host, Sarah Williams. One of my favorite quotes says, success isn't always about greatness, it's about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success, greatness will come, by Dwayne Johnson. Let me break down that quote for you in Simple Sarah terms. You can be an expert in your field, you can have all the expertise there is out there, be be the best at what you do, but if you don't have consistency, it's never going to make you successful. On the other hand, the person that may not be the best expert, may not be the greatest, may not be the most knowledgeable, but it has consistency, is going to outperform the expert that has no consistency every single time. Consistency trumps expertise every single time. So if you're sitting there thinking that you're not good enough, you're not worthy enough, you're not the best at what you do, it doesn't matter. All you have to do is be consistent. Consistency is the key to having a successful business, and I'm going to break it down for you in a couple different categories because this year we're talking about building healthy habits into your business. And really getting consistent with them and really being intentional about how we spend our days. I would prefer you do a few things very consistently than trying to do all the things very inconsistently. And we can apply this to a lot of different things. But one thing that's coming to mind is social media. We don't need to be on all the platforms if we can't be consistent. So instead of trying to be on 8 platforms, Let's pick 3 and be really consistent with it. Let's pick 1 and be really consistent before we go to 2. We really need to be consistent at everything that we do. It's a healthy habit, consistent habits that are going to help your business grow. All right, so if you're a note-taker, grab your notes because we're going to talk about some areas that I really wonder if you're giving enough consistency in these areas in your business. And so the first one is planning and curating your boxes consistently. I really want you to take the stress out of your day-to-day business by planning your boxes ahead of time. We talk about this a lot, but if you're sitting there not even knowing what you're going to have in next month's box or the month after, we're not planned out far enough. This year, I want every single subscription box owner to be planned at least 4 to 6 months out. And if you're a higher-level subscription box owner where you have thousands of subscribers, you need to be a year out, okay? Because it takes so much to get that, that amount of product manufactured for you. So we should be planned out at least 4 to 6 months. So if you're sitting here right now and you think, man, I don't even have next month planned out, I don't even have the month after that planned out, This is where we have to build consistency. And one of the ways that you can do this is putting a planning day in your calendar, not even a whole day. It could be an hour or two. Every single month I do a subscription box planning session. It's an hour long and I sit down and I go through all of my upcoming boxes. Every month I take one solid hour to plan out what's coming. If you need more time than that, block 2 hours. This is so important to your business, but the problem is we get so bogged down with the day-to-day— hacking, shipping, social media, marketing, email— all the things that we have to do in the day-to-day. We don't plan out our boxes far enough because we think, oh, I've still got months. Oh, I've got 2 more months to figure that out. No, we should be having month 6 from now figured out today. So if you can consistently block an hour in your schedule— mine is like one Monday a month— I block that in there and I turn everything off, all the distractions off. I close my door, I put my phone away, and I look at my Trello board and I see what I've got going on, and I plan out as much as I can in an hour. That's designing And it's not even really designing, it's just what are my color themes, what are, what are the products. And then I'll take time to design and create later, but I need to have the plan. If you could do the Six in Sixty, that workshop that I do, and if you, if you haven't taken it, we'll put a link in the show notes. It's a free workshop that I provide. But if you could sit down and just brainstorm, it doesn't even have to be 6 months at a time, but if you could do 2 months every month. If you could sit down and plan 2 months at a time, you're going to get yourself ahead. And you'll look back in about 4 or 5 months and you'll be so far ahead because you sat down and took that hour to plan out these months. That's what we need to do. We need to build consistency. And if you're struggling with what to put in a box 4 months from now, I want you to go take my free workshop, the 6 in 60 workshop. Okay, now number 2. And it's really unpopular opinion here, but I really need you to go live consistently. Some of you listening are very good at that. You have it scheduled, you do it week after week, you show up, and you're really good at that. Great, you can check this one off. Some of you listening go live once or twice a month randomly here and there. Proud of you, but we gotta get more consistent. And some of you listening are terrified of the thought of even going live once. We have to build consistency with going live. We need people to know, like, and trust us. It is one of the best ways that we can build an audience, okay? It's our superpower as small business owners to be the face of our brand. You've got to show up. I say it all the time. I, and I am like the perfect example for this. I've been out of town all of this week. I have not done a live at all this week, and my sales reflect it. I haven't shown up in my business this week because I've been traveling, and my sales are deeply affected by this. You need to show up, and it will change everything in your business. If you're struggling to attract the right customer, we gotta start going live. If you're struggling to make sales, we gotta start going live. If you're struggling to build your subscriber base, we've got to start going live. It is one of the best things that you could do for your small business. So I want you to do that. I want you to show up for your audience even if you're scared. And let's get consistent at it. If we're just going live all willy-nilly whenever we feel like it, nobody knows when to show up. Let's pick a schedule. And I always say, pick a schedule that works for you. It doesn't always have to work for your audience. Whatever works for you so that you'll be consistent at it. Okay? That's what we need to do. So if that means that I can go live on Thursday mornings at 9 o'clock before my day gets derailed, that's what I'm going to do. Are a lot of my customers at work on Thursday morning at 9 o'clock? Yes, they are. But that's okay. I'm live, they can watch the replay. I consistently have people show up because they know I'm going to be live on Thursday morning at 9 every time. All right, so we have to get consistent at showing up for our audience. Okay, number 3, we've already been talking about this a lot over the last couple of months, and I'm not going to stop talking about it. So if you're not doing this consistently, we got to get on it, and I'm going to help you with that. We've got to email your list consistently. Okay? Your email list is a business asset. Truly is. Unlike your social media accounts, you own your email list. We've got to continue to build the list, nurture the list, and sell to that list consistently every week, multiple times a week. If we're not being consistent with email right now, let's get a plan to start emailing weekly. If we're already emailing weekly, let's get a plan for an additional campaign, a follow-up campaign on that email. How can we get more consistent with emailing our list? It's huge. I, I call our email list our ATM. We put a little copy and graphics in, money comes out every single time. And if you're not being consistent with email, you're probably not seeing consistent sales. And if you are seeing consistent sales, it's probably because you're being consistent in another area of your business, like going live, doing social media. But what if you could add email consistency to that list? It would generate more revenue. It would generate more subscribers. We own that list. We don't own social media. So we need to be very intentional about building that list, nurturing that list and emailing that list very consistently. Stop leaving money on the table. Number 4, I said it already, you probably already know what I'm going to say: post on social media consistently. Yep, we need to go live. Yep, we need to send our emails. Yep, we need to be on social media. That's posts, that's Reels, that's every which way that we can. Social media doesn't do the work for you. You have to work it, and you have to quit looking at it as a negative part of your business. It is one of the biggest blessings in our business as small business owners. Before the days of social media, reaching our target customer, our ideal customer, was very challenging. Have you ever taken out a newspaper ad, a magazine ad, a radio spot, a television ad? We couldn't even target the people that we wanted to target. Social media allows us to find our perfect customer, yet we see it as a negative. I need you to be social with social media. I need you to be consistent with social media. We need to plan a week, plan a template, plan a schedule, because if you have a plan, you're more likely to implement it. If you're going all willy-nilly again and you don't have a plan, like you don't have a plan for lives, you're going to be inconsistent. You're going to post twice today, you're going to ghost it 3 days, and you're going to post, you know, a couple times again after 3 days. We can't. It messes up the algorithm. We have to get consistent with social media. Let it work for you and stop resisting it. All right, number 5 kind of goes hand in hand with everything that I've talked about. Okay, so it kind of just wraps all of them together. We have to talk about our subscription box consistently. We do. We have to talk about it consistently in lives. We have to talk about it consistently in emails. We have to talk about it consistently on social media. One of the biggest areas of opportunities for all of my subscription box owners is that we don't talk about our subscription box enough. Period. We think everyone knows, everyone sees, people are sick of me talking about it, but we have to be creative about it. What if for the next 30 days you could do a social media post about your subscription box every single day? That'd be amazing, right? And they would all be different. It wouldn't be the same. It'd be amazing, right? Yeah. I got training for you inside Launch Your Box. It's called Subscription Box Social Media, and it's in the marketing module. and I give you so many ideas. There are at least 30 of them in there. You could do one every day. What if when you went live weekly, you mentioned your subscription box at least once in that live video? It could be wearing something from a past box. It could be showing something from a past box. It could be doing a box opening. It could be a behind-the-scenes live of packing boxes. How can you incorporate your subscription box into your weekly live every single week. That's consistency. Emails— recently I did a Monday Momentum, um, about how you can email your list every single week about your subscription box. If you could do one email every single week about your subscription box, you can go over and find that on my YouTube channel, which we'll link here in the show notes. And I'm giving you play-by-play of what to email your list every week. So every Sunday I send an email out about my subscription box, and all 4 emails are different for the month. But you know what, because I have a monthly box, all I do is rinse and repeat them for the next month with the new box content. So go check out that video on my YouTube channel and really start being consistent with talking about your subscription box in email. If you can consistently post every day for 30 days about your subscription box. And again, all you have to do is rinse and repeat it for the next month. Okay, if you could consistently talk about your subscription box when you go live weekly, and if you could send one email a week to your list about your subscription box, how much awareness about your subscription box would be out there? How much different would your business look 30 days later than it does now? And what if you got so consistent with that in the next 30 days, and then you rinsed and repeat it for the next 30 days and the next 30 days, and all of a sudden your subscription box business was growing and growing because you got super consistent with the way you were marketing it? Talking about your box creates buzz and excitement. It builds community. It creates that all-important FOMO, that fear of missing out. You can make these healthy habits. You can get really consistent with these 5 things. And I need you to be honest with yourself right now. If you were to rate yourself from 1 to 10 with, I'm really consistent in my business in all the areas, or I'm really inconsistent in all the areas, if you could rate yourself 1 to 10, what would you give yourself? And then how could we improve that? And right now, if you're not doing any of these things consistently, then this is where we need to pick one. Don't— this is where we all, this is where we all get into trouble. Don't try to do all 5 of these things today because you'll never be consistent at them. You have to build these habits into your everyday life, into your everyday schedule. So if that means you're not being consistent with curating your boxes, planning your boxes, get it on the calendar today. Go block an hour of of when you're gonna work on planning your subscription boxes. That's something you can all do. And then go block it for the next month and the next month and the next month. So every time you open your calendar for the month, you know what day you're gonna sit down, shut everything off for the hour and plan your boxes. Every one of you can do that. If you haven't been going live, let's start that. And then you know what? You can follow that up with an email. You just have to start with something and keep getting consistent. Because the person over here that's great at lives, knocks them out, does them well, but doesn't do them because they're not consistent, they will never build their business. You don't have to be the expert in everything, you just have to be consistent. And there's 5 areas here that you can be incredibly consistent at. So I hope that's helpful, because I guarantee if you ask yourself Are you giving your business enough consistency? The answer is probably no. So pick one of these areas. Let's lock it down. Let's get consistent and let's make real actionable progress this year. Make sure you subscribe to the Launch Your Box podcast. I'd love for you to take a minute to rate and review it. Let me know which episode is your favorite so far. Don't forget to join me next week right here.