7 things I’ve done this year to streamline my business

Today, I'm sharing seven of the things that I have done this year to streamline my business. So I guess, about quarter two of this year, I realised that I was feeling exhausted. I was feeling just a little bit over my business.

I was having so much fun, but I was also working harder than I have worked in years and I was just so exhausted doing all of the things. Couple that with the pending recession and I had a second business that I want to start spending a bit more time working on.

And I realised that maybe the solution for the rest of this year is not constantly to be doing more staff. But to really streamline this business and set us up for future growth.

 

1. Focus on the podcast and my email list

So the first thing that I did to really streamline that business was to focus on the podcast and my email list. So instead of trying to do everything, I am just focusing on creating content for the podcast and creating content for my email list, and focusing on getting more people to listen to my podcast and more email subscribers.

So that means that I only have to focus on promoting all of my free content things, rather than sending people to my blog and follow me on Instagram and on TikTok and all of the different things.

I just have two pathways – podcast and my free lead magnets which is usually the kickstart kit. This is the main free lead magnet that I send people to. And it feels so much more streamlined because I'm not sending people to a hundred different places. I know that if somebody listens to my podcast or they joined my email list, they will figure out pretty quickly whether they like me or not.

And by listening to that podcast, by being on my email list, they start to know me, like me and trust me, and over time, they become ready to buy from me.

I know that if I create amazing podcast episodes and if I send great emails to my list and then proactively get in front of new audiences, my audience is going to grow a lot quicker than if I'm just posting content on social media hoping that one day the algorithm is going to like me and my posts are going to go viral and I'm going to grow an audience. That's generally not how it works.

I've been doing this for years. I've been on Instagram for five years as this account and there has not been one particular post that has gone viral and got me thousands or even hundreds of followers. I think the most I've ever gotten from one single post was like 50 followers and that's in five years of doing it.

Now with my email list, I am emailing my subscribers more than I ever have before. I send them daily biz boosters, which is literally a daily email going to my list. I have two or three emails per week that go to my general email list and I've found that email is what converts best. Email is generally where I get the best results.

 

2. I stopped creating endless new things

It feels like we're in this online world of people constantly creating new things, constantly launching things. It feels a lot like, oh, I have to be constantly creating new stuff otherwise, my audience is going to get bored of my old stuff. They going to be sick of hearing me talking about the same things over and over and over again.

And what I realised was I don't need to constantly create new offers. I don't constantly need to create new lead magnets, new sales pages, new emails, new captions, or new ideas. That was such a relief.

And it saves me so much time even if somebody has seen the same thing more than once, it's going to take them a couple of times of seeing it or hearing about it before it sinks in and they're not going to get sick of hearing about it. Also not having to create all these endless new things makes my business feel so much less cluttered.

There was a time a couple of years ago when I had way too many offers, I had all of these little mini-courses that I'd created because I thought I wanted to build a library of products that people could buy.

And it became really confusing for my audience and it became really cluttered for me. It meant that I constantly didn't know what to promote. I didn't know what to sell. People didn't know what I offered and it was exhausting to maintain all of these products.

So having fewer offers, fewer lead magnets, and fewer everything means I can deliver a better experience. It means I can create better content. I can create longer podcast episodes. And it means I can focus on the one thing that I know. Getting people the best results and that I love doing, and that is teaching Launch Magic. I launch it twice a year. That to me makes my business feel so streamlined. It gives me the structure that I need.

 

3. Doubling down on live launches

Now that is what I'm talking about with Launch Magic. I live launch Launch Magic twice a year. It's easy. It's fun. It works really well. Each time I launch it, I know it's going to work and it's how I get to help more people because each time I do a live launch, I know I'm going to get 50 people in the door.

It's also really nice knowing that I don't have to do five long live launches a year if I don't want to. If I don't want to be live launching every single month. I don't have to, I can take a month off if I want to. And I've also taken a little bit of pressure off myself with the live launches. It used to be that I felt like every single time I launched Launch Magic, I had to hit a higher revenue goal.

But what I've realised is right now this year, I'm really enjoying that same revenue goal that we've hit the last couple of times. Slowing down a little bit. Hitting that goal and knowing that I don't have to put this massive energetic push in to reach some arbitrary number because I feel like I have to grow linearly.

Each week I was creating the slides and teaching them live. Now that it's all recorded and I know the course content inside out, it's like an hour or two each week that it takes me to deliver the course and that's just the time where I go live.

 

4. I started working with clients again

I know this sounds really weird. Like it's not streamlined, right? But it actually is because I'm only working with them in that VIP launch intensive capacity. It's a six-hour container.

I don't have ongoing retainers. I don't have ongoing coaching or anything like that. I can open up and close spots in my calendar when I want to, which means if I want to take a month off like I'm about to.

I used to launch a lot of new things in my business because I just love the creative side of a launch. I love going in and brainstorming the content and coming up with ideas for lead magnets and webinars and all of the fun stuff. I love doing that.

But when I'm constantly launching new things in my business, it makes the rest of my business really messy whereas with other people's launches, I get to go in and do the creative side of it and I don't have to manage the product. I don't have to maintain the product. I don't have to do customer support or any of that kind of stuff. So it satisfies my launch cravings, which is amazing.

Now the whole process we've streamlined really well. So basically if somebody wants to book in for a VIP launch intensive, they go to my website and they can book a kickoff call. The kickoff calls are a 90-minute kickoff call and it's the only time that we need to be involved in the entire process essentially and it's me extracting the information from you that I need to then go away and spend six hours working on your launch.

So we look at what you need from me in the launch? Do you need me to write your launch content plan? Do you need me to outline your webinar? Do you need me to help you with pricing? Do you need me to come up with ideas for your bonuses? Do you need me to give you an audience growth plan in the lead-up to your launch?

Or if somebody who's already launched before, maybe it's reviewing that last launch and looking at where can we tighten this? Maybe I will review your sales page and give you feedback on that or your emails. All of those different things are so fun because it's like a custom service.

I just go through as much as I can in six hours and get through a lot in six hours. I just finished working on one client where I essentially rewrote her entire sales page and cart open emails and I got through that in six hours, which was awesome. We've streamlined that entire process with tech.

 

5. I hired an operations manager

Now, this was actually December last year, but I'm putting this in the 2022 category. Wow. I don't even know what year it is. Now I am not naturally very good at remembering things. I'm not good at being consistent. I'm not good at following processes. It's just never been my strength.

But Jay, who is my ops manager. She's great at these things. These are her strengths. She's so super organised and I'm super disorganised. So we work really well together. Shout out to Jay who is also editing this blog.

It frees up a lot of my mental space knowing that there's somebody there to stay on top of the things that I'm likely going to forget and it's things I'm going to forget. It's also things like documenting processes, which to me is the most boring thing ever. I can't do it.

But she's naturally good at it. Clearing up a lot of the backlog, a lot of just the random tasks that have been sitting there on my to-do list forever.

It's been really great having somebody who is a proper employee in my business in the past, I've only ever worked with contractors and contractors are awesome.

Except a lot of the time, they have competing priorities. You're not their number one priority. You have to let them know well in advance when you need something done and I am not that great at planning in advance. It's just not my strength. I know my strengths. I know my weaknesses in planning in advance.

 

6. Wrote a book

I know that sounds like more work, right? But writing a book meant that I have been able to step back from constantly creating new content all the time because now I have somewhere that is like my launch process documented in a way.

And people can go to learn more about launching from my book once they've come across me. Often when I am stuck for content ideas, I have no idea what to do a podcast episode about today, or I have no idea what to write about today. I flip through the book and sometimes I will take a snippet. I'll take one of the 99 Launch lessons in the book.

And I'll use that all the time. The book gives me ideas for captions or content ideas and the process of putting that all together was really good for helping me to fill those gaps in my frameworks and my content and I really enjoyed the process. It was really relaxing to work on something that felt like a big meaty project, rather than lots of little scattered things.

 

7. I stopped thinking of Instagram as a way to grow my audience and reach new people

Now I think of Instagram as somewhere that I can post to when I want to if I want to, but there's no pressure to do so it's not something I have to do and now that the pressure to post there has been lifted,  I actually feel more inspired, actually want to post to Instagram now that I don't have to, I'm not just posting junk for the sake of posting content because I'm scared my audience is going to forget about me.

Now I'm posting things that feel worthwhile when I want to, it becomes something that I'm doing for fun. Like if I see fun audio that I want to do a reel for, I'll do it.

But I'm also not putting pressure on myself to record three reels a week. Instagram's now become this place for me to nurture my audience, not a place for me to find new people because I see algorithms just not really going to do that anymore. The algorithm's not really going to get you in front of new people like it used to.

So it's now it's a community for me. It's now a place where I can have a two-way conversation with my audience. I can share content. I can nurture them there. But I'm not going at it with the expectation of going on Instagram to get all these new followers and they're going to buy from me because they probably won't.

And the same with TikTok, I've played around with it and it's something that could be fun. It's not something I want to commit to doing regularly. It's never going to be a cool part of my business. Well, never say never, but it's unlikely to be a core part of my business. But if I see an audio that I think is fun or I can record a video really easily, I'll do it.

But there's no pressure for me to post to that all the time and having that pressure lifted has made my business feel so much more streamlined because now I'm just focusing on creating awesome podcast content and sending awesome emails to my list and the rest kind of flows from there.

 

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