“I am not a creative person like you.”

I get this a lot from small service business owners.  The funny thing about it is that I don’t consider myself a creative person in the way they describe.  But as a business growth strategist, providing various perspectives to my clients is my job.  Because of this, I am definitely intentional about keeping my mind open for new ideas.

There is bad news & good news associated with this story of “I’m not creative.”  So, if this is you, read on!

By the way, I call this statement a *story* because they are the ones who made a decision to label themselves as such based on…really no scientific or logical reasons.  It’s just a thought backed by nothing. More on that later.

Let’s start with bad news.

News flash: Trying to grow a business without being creative & resourceful, especially when you need to solve problems, will end up costing you in the long run.

Why? 

There are many problems that can be easily solved by using what you already have.  But because you feel you are inadequate to do creative problem-solving or to come up with new ideas to take your business in the direction you want to take it to, you end up relying heavily on outsourcing.

If it works out, great.  Most of the time though, the process of having others do the job requires some trial & error unless you are driving those projects.  This eats up your time, and you have to pay money for their work if the arrangement is not results-based, meaning you only pay for the results they are bringing in. 

The bottom line is, if you want to grow your business, it is your job to expand your way of thinking.

Now the good news.

I have 3 pieces of good news for you.

1.     Being creative doesn’t mean becoming the next Picasso.

2.     Small actions you can take will make a huge difference.

3.     None of the tips I will share in this post cost much.

As a kid growing up in Japan, I used to daydream about what might be out there waiting for me beyond the ocean lines. 

Because I lived in an island nation, my excitement for the unknown and the future was that much more intense. Unlike living in Austria or Bolivia, islanders are truly isolated by oceans. We simply have no concept of “just crossing the border.”  In other words, living abroad is very foreign to us.

I had all sorts of romantic & wild notions about the idea of living abroad & how different and special my life could be.

Fast forwarding 10 years to when I found myself in the US as an exchange student, I realized it wasn’t all that I imagined as a kid. Right then & there, I realized I took so many things for granted when I lived in Japan, especially things my parents had provided for me. 

This was a priceless lesson in my teenage years:  Appreciate everything; do not take things for granted, however small they may be. How ungrateful I must have looked in their eyes, dying & rushing to get out of where I was, all just to be let down by reality later on?  Like a deserter tumbling down the sand dunes, I ran towards a flowing spring of water, only to discover it was a mirage.

Wanting to rely on getting easy leads online is a lot like this story.  Many of us often romanticize what it would be like to get online prospects into our sales funnel semi-automatically by offering free, downloadable cheat sheets, check lists, webinars, video trainings, etc.  Heck, we can even invest a little in paid ads.  How wonderful it would be!

Now your brain will go haywire with all kinds of expectations.

“No more networking.  No more cold calling.  No more selling.  No more RFP’s.  I don’t even need to leave my house.  Better yet, I can sit by the beach with my laptop & WIFI… I’ll hire help remotely.  People will just buy my stuff online… One-to-one is so yesterday.  One-to-many is the future!”

This guide is for you if the bulk of your leads comes from offline, i.e. referrals and sales, and not from online, i.e. social media, webinar, live stream, and you want to boost your business’s online presence to build repetition (future-proof'ing), and you aren't sure where to start.

"Should I give Instagram a try?"

"Should I do a podcast?"

“Should I hire someone for social media?"

I hear these questions a lot from business owners who haven’t done many of these online activities and only have a very basic website with no content that gets added regularly. If this is you, there is nothing wrong with getting your leads offline.  But at where you are, these are wrong, fragmented questions that will keep you from building a solid base online.

Instead, I'd love you to take a step back and ask this question:

"What content creation strategy should I invest my time in to increase my online presence and stick with & leverage?"

The answer is:  Invest in long-form written content & post on your website regularly.

This strategy comes from my deep belief in building the smallest, meanest profit generating machine, in which you can do business activities that require less effort but produce the maximum effect over time. (Link) 

OK, it doesn’t sound like the sexy answer you were looking for.  But as you read along, you will find out just how smart this strategy really is.

When you focus on what generates compounding effect in your business, you will find yourself putting a lot of effort in the beginning of the process. This is actually the way it should be.  What you are aiming for is to eventually automate the process you are building right now.  To do this, front-loading work is inevitable.

This is the same reason many entrepreneurs don't opt for this route because it completely lacks instant gratification. The work seems endless and tiresome in the face of headlines like:

"How I got 5,000 followers on Instagram in just one week.” 

"How I made $10,000 directly from my Facebook group with 1 offer."

"The secret to my 200K traffic per month to my blog."

What these headlines don't tell you is what goes on behind closed doors.  Most of these posts do not answer the following questions:

In case you haven't heard me say enough, I love hosting interactive live events for entrepreneurs.  It truly allows me to witness a group of people coming together for one goal.

Needless to say, there are ups and downs through the prep process, but I always come out re-energized & so proud of my community’s engagement.

You might say, “Live events? Wow, that’s so old school!”

I totally get it. In this age, trust and genuine connections can just be established over the internet.

But I have news for you. There is a trend that many are already talking about in certain entrepreneur communities this year that you don’t want to ignore:

Online businesses, especially online courses & info products, i.e. group coaching, have hit the fatigue point. 

Do you know what this means?

It means people are looking elsewhere for more “hands-on” experience to solve their problems to attain true transformations.  So, servicing “1 on 1” is becoming sexy again.  Building a community where people can show up & share their thoughts is making a comeback.  Some are ditching their online courses & starting to provide in-person, 1 on 1 experience.  ­

This is all happening right now.

See, this is not a “flavor of the month” kind of trend.  This can easily last as long as “make money online” lasted.

This is the reason I chose the topic of “How to Captivate Your Audience Through Public Speaking & What Not to Do on Stage” for my Meetup group this month.  I wanted to arm my Meetup members with effective public speaking skills so that they can attract more customers by sharing their experience and expertise with confidence.

The problem? 

I’m not an expert in this area.  Luckily though, I knew who was.

Tricia Brouk, podcaster of “Big Talk,” award-winning film director, and the host of “Speaker Salon,” lives & breathes coaching professionals who want to give “fearless, ovation-worthy” talks.

I’ve asked Tricia to help my members master the art of public speaking so that they don’t have to go through endless trial & error to get where they need to be.

You know that yucky feeling you get when you see something that has so much “build-up” that you just want to wash it all away?  Whether it’s the way you feel about your hair being coated in product or your brain jammed full with daily to-do’s or not knowing what’s in your bag, I am sure you’ve had this feeling before. 

There is so much going on that you don’t even know what to keep and what to get rid of unless you just dump it all on the table.

The same thing happens to our business after running it for some time.  Conducting a business detox by removing all the build-up can bring in so many new business opportunities without actually starting anything new. 

Imagine being free from the anxious thoughts of having to offer something new or to try new marketing to gain more traction.  You just need to detox your business first by eliminating stagnant areas, which will allow things to run smoothly & effortlessly.

This is, by far, the most underrated, low-hanging fruit when it comes to business transformation strategies.

Visualize a gem covered with thick mud and clay that gets purified with fresh, clear water, revealing its true form.  That can be your business!

If your business is in the season of growth and expansion, what you don’t want to do is to amplify your mess.  Many entrepreneurs tend to focus more on adding things to their businesses over subtracting time-wasting activities, and that’s not a way to go.  For more on how to find out whether your business is “scale-ready,” check out my previous post here. (Insert the link)  

“Oh gosh! Right, I’m ready to detox my business!  Where should I start?”

Glad you are game. But hold your horses for just a minute.  Here, I am going to unearth this one crucial step business owners tend to overlook.  It’s possibly because it’s not often discussed in the business community.  Can you guess what that is?

I have a random question for you.  What cell phone carrier do you use? 

I’ve been using Sprint PCS forever.  Frankly, I don’t even know why.  It’s not so much that I am loyal to them, but more so that it works, and they don’t bother me much.

However, there were a few occasions over the years when I seriously considered switching to another carrier, and I finally had to ask them:

“Why are you (Sprint PCS) giving so many incentives to NEW CUSTOMERS & not the ones who have been with you the whole time?!”

Can you relate? 

I don’t think it matters which carrier you use.  In the US, as far as I know, carrier companies are obsessed with stealing customers from their competitors and completely neglecting their existing customers. I can see that it has loosened up a bit recently, but 5 to 7 years ago, it was so painfully obvious that the only thing they cared about was acquiring new customers.

To make matters worse, most of the carriers have a hefty penalty in place for those who want to switch carriers before their contract expires.  It’s a punishment for leaving your carrier. 

How’s that for CX (customer experience)?  I say it’s a crappy one, for sure. 

You must have seen this pop-up window show up on any website asking, “From 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to your friends?”  This is a part of NPS (net promoter score) in the world of CX.  In this case, I would score low for how likely I would be to refer Sprint to my friends.

To be clear, I am not ranting here about Sprint. I’m using this example purely to make my point for this post.  If this idea of being mistreated and under-appreciated resonates with this you, a long-time customer of any brand, you know how your existing customer may feel about your service.  So, let me ask you:

How have you been treating your existing customers lately? 

Do you find yourself having a hard time setting boundaries for your business?  Do you feel like there is no clear distinction between your personal life and your business?  You may be thinking you are too close to your business, and it’s nearly impossible to let go of some of the duties. Or maybe you feel hesitant to publicly declare what you do as a legitimate business.

Many of us start a business by pursuing a passion and/or what we mastered as a working professional, and then we grow it organically from there.  The downside to this is the line gets blurred between our personal life and our business. This also makes us feel like our business is an extension of ourselves, a part of our identity.  At times, it gets too personal because of this.

If you want to scale your business, you have to start treating your business like a business. 

A large part of this is because you are not going to do everything by yourself. You are going to need a team. If you deploy a team, then you need to systematize your processes.  In order to systematize your processes, you need to pull all of them out of your brain and start documenting.

So, what can you do immediately to start treating your business like a stand-alone, profit-generating machine?

Just like many of you, I was once living a corporate life.  Someday though, I knew I was going to leave this life, so I leveraged everything I could learn on the job.  I was consciously “intrepreneurship’ing” within all organizations I worked for. 

It was much later in my life I realized how fortunate that experience was and how much it impacted my business, which enabled me to skip most of the rookie mistakes. In a way, the experience allowed me to get right into making many more of the ‘other’ mistakes, but that is a story for another time.  At least, I did not have to start from complete scratch, so I’d say I was fortunate.

Finally, the dust is settling after this year-long effort of creating a versatile signature workshop, which is to be repurposed into various content.

My mission for this series is to share the process exactly as it unfolds.  As you might have noticed, I have plenty of other posts that clearly outline how to do things for your business. This series does the opposite of that.

I’m baring it all this time in order to give you taste of the mess that goes into it.  As a result, my hope is for you to feel less intimidated by any business projects that you commit to in the long term.  Creating a signature workshop can provide many opportunities to grow your business relatively fast.  I hate to see you putting this off because you feel it is too big of a task to tackle. 

It's never pretty & it's perfectly OK.

Also, I want you to see how some things happen in a way that you could not have guessed. Both good & bad. 

This leads to another mission of mine- to prove that action creates clarity.

I often hear, "I need to know exactly what I'm doing before I get started."  Sure.  Have a plan so that, at least, you see a rough path in front of you. But my problem is the word, "exactly."

Sorry to disappoint, but you are not going to be able to know that unless you start.  What you can do instead is to course-correct along the way based on what you discover as you go. 

This is a kind of ambiguity that many get hung up on. The only thing I can tell you is... trust Nike's slogan- just do it.

In this post, I'm going to show you what that looks like. Trust me, by the time you finish reading this post, you will feel like you are a lot more “put together” than I did.

To do this, let’s break it down in 5 sections.

1. What I've Done for This 3rd Round of Workshops

2. What I Did Differently to Prep

3. Challenges I Faced

4. My Takeaways: Things to Improve & A New Plan to Move Forward

5. What Does All This Mean to You?

Have you ever just wanted to hit the refresh button & start over? 

No, I’m not talking about shutting down your business. I’m talking about starting over with a clean slate, so that you can see what matters most both in the long-term and short-term.

It happens to me when I know I have strayed too far from the vision for my business by getting bogged down on daily matters. This nagging feeling of “Ugh, I need to regroup!” starts to run in the background. The struggle is real. 

At that point, my brain is fried from daily tasks, and my vision is blurred.  I know to block out some time to step away from those tasks and cut off all communication, so that I can reassess my entire business.

If you have ever felt the same way, you are at the right place because what I am about to share here isn’t one of those stuffy “annual strategy planning processes” you find online, which are all based on the idea of starting from a target revenue number first.

Frankly, I don’t believe in this method. Starting from a revenue goal can completely derail your business, as you will put too much emphasis on hitting the target number and less emphasis on achieving your ultimate business vision.

It is not even sustainable, as it does not prepare you for potential incidents, wherein some of the strategies you rely on to hit that number suddenly stop working. By the time you realize you need another strategy to compensate for the loss, it is usually too late. From that point on, it will take minimally 3 times longer to get back to where it was.

Another widely known (and used) prioritization method is 4 Quadrant Method, which was devised by the legendary, Steven Covey. By only looking at the quadrants, it does not tell much in terms of what criteria one must go by deciding exactly WHAT IS:

Urgent & Important

Not Urgent, but Important

Urgent & Not Important

Not Urgent & Not Important

On the contrary, the “Thriller, Filler & Spiller” method is fluid, yet clear.  OK, I know the name is weird. But, everything I come up with is weird. By now, you are already aware of that, and I trust you are here to get the insights you can’t get anywhere else. In this case, I know I won’t let you down.