6 questions I’m reflecting upon to grow my business in 2024

As we approach the end of another year, it's super important to spend some time reflecting on the year that was and start planning for the year ahead. In today's episode, I'm sharing 6 questions to ask yourself as you reflect on 2023 and look ahead to grow your business in 2024.

– Why identifying any blocks in your business or things you need to change will pave the way for the next level of your business.
– How reflecting on what this next level of your business requires you to be will help you to step up both personally and professionally.
– How supporting your business with other income and realising where you're leaving money on the table can help you to make better decisions.

 

 

Today I'm sharing a couple of the questions that I'm reflecting on as we wrap up 2023 and start to head into 2024. So a bunch of different questions that I will be journaling on or thinking about in the coming month or so. As we start to think about how the next iteration of this business will look next year.

I encourage you to take some of these questions, tweak them if you need to, to suit your business a little bit more, and set aside some time for thinking and deep reflection. I think that's one thing that we don't do enough as business owners. We get so caught up in the day-to-day doing that we forget to take a step back and ask ourselves what our business needs from us and give our business that attention and that love that it needs from our peace and thinking time.

 

Question #1: What is the next level of my business and what is stopping me from getting there?

So what does that next level look like? What do I do in that next level of my business? What don't I do? That's just as important as the things that I do because the things that I say no to then free up my time for a more intentional yes to the things that I want to do. What is stopping me from getting to that next level of my business?

For example, I have a terrible habit where I will often leave recording these podcast episodes until the very last minute, and then it creates chaos for me and my team, and that chaos is not the best use of any of our time and energy. Another thing that holds me back is believing that it's not possible for me and I know that many of you struggle with this one as well but I need to have that list of things to change first and that's where taking the time to reflect on that question can be so valuable. 

 

Question #2: Who does the next level of my business require me to be? 

So in other words, the person who attracts this kind of business would dot, dot, dot what kind of thing?

What do I need to do and who do I need to be to attract that next level of my business? And as the captain at the helm of this business, how I show up impacts everything. And this is why I have invested tens of thousands of dollars in my personal development and growth, coaching, mindset, all of those things because how I show up impacts everybody. It impacts my team. It impacts my students. It impacts my audience, my listeners. 

I know that when one area of my life is off, even if that doesn't directly impact my business, it has a massive indirect impact on my business because everything is connected. And sometimes my business might also require me to let go of something.

So take a minute to ask yourself, how is this behavior that I don't like? How is this serving me? It can be a great reflection tool and it can help you to get a little bit out of the shame and guilt of like, why do I keep procrastinating? Why do I keep being a perfectionist? When you start to realise you're doing it because it's keeping you safe or you're doing it because it's serving you in some other way. It's not necessarily inherently a bad thing. It's just stopping you from growing to that next level in your business and that is a sign that you maybe need to change that a little bit. 

 

Question #3: What decisions would I make if I knew my success was inevitable? 

What would I start doing or stop doing in my business? And maybe for you, would you start a podcast? Would you create and launch that course? Would you start showing up online? How would you show up differently for your business every day if you had 100 percent certainty that you would succeed? Would you make decisions from a place of confidence and certainty?

One of the reasons I'm such a big fan of somebody getting a part-time job in the early stages of their business while they get their business off the ground is so that they do not have to make these decisions from this place of fear and urgency, this place of, I need to make money and I need to make it now because they know that at least they've got some income still coming in so they can make decisions that are a bit more aligned with the long term of the business rather than this short term need to bring cash flow in.

And, you know, there are better decisions than the decisions that serve that longer-term vision, that is how you build a business that is profitable and sustainable in the long term and isn't just reliant on you working so hard in the short term to keep bringing sales in. 

 

Question #4: Where are we leaving money on the table?

James Wedmore has this beautiful quote and he says, you are always leaving money on the table, always. And I agree with this because there are always more ways you can serve your audience. More ways you can make sales, following up leads, making sure your audience knows which offer is the best fit for them, knowing and making sure they know how it solves the problems they're experiencing, creating new offers to solve new problems that your audience is experiencing, re-engaging past students and clients and finding out what else you can help them with. 

Ask your audience what else you need help with right now. And then creating those new offers that help them with what they want or reworking your old offers to better serve them where they're at right now. These are all some ways that you can stop leaving money on the table in your business. 

 

Question #5: How can we increase course completion rates?

Now with all of my offers, I've always said, if you're going to sign up and let this course gather dust on your shelf of courses that you've bought, I would rather say that you didn't sign up at all because it's really important to me that my students finish the courses they sign up for. And while our completion rates are pretty good already, they can always be better especially when one of the big hesitations that's coming up is I've bought so many courses that I don't use.

I've said this before, if you're a course creator, you are in the business of behavior change and behavior change is going to always be met with resistance, fear, procrastination, perfectionism, all of those things because it is scary. It can be really scary. 

 

Question #6: What can we simplify?

I find it easy to come up with new ideas and add new things to the business and my team is amazingly good at executing all of the millions of ideas that I come to them with, but I can often be a little bit too focused on adding new things. And I need to remember to pause and evaluate whether all the new things are working, whether we need to remove them, whether we need to streamline things.

Sometimes that can get a little messy and complicated, and it can lead to us spending time on things that maybe shouldn't require as much time from us. This also applies to anything where we've been overcomplicating and sometimes I call myself out on this.

 

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