Best of 2022: 7 things I’ve done this year to streamline my business

After a massive start to this year, I felt exhausted, it was time to take stock and reassess my priorities for Quarter 2. With an unsteady economy coupled with my competing priorities, I realised that now was a great time to focus on streamlining my business to set us up for future growth. So today, I want to share with you the 7 things I have done to work to this goal…

In today's episode I cover:
– The benefit of redefining my pathways…where my audience get to know me, like me, trust me and over time are ready to buy from me
– Resist the urge to over-create…keep it simple and consistent!
– Restricting live launching through streamlining the process
– Flexibility in client work (that satisfies my launch cravings)
– Building out my team with my first permanent employee
– Content collation – I wrote a book!!
– Lifting the pressure on Instagram…

 

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. Plus couple that with the pending recession. And I have a second business that I want to start spending a bit more time working on. 

And I was realising maybe the solution for the rest of this year is to not constantly be doing more stuff but to really streamline this business and set us up for future growth. 

 

Seven things that I have done this year to streamline my business

 

1. I 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 TikTok and all of the different things. 

I just have two pathways podcast and my free lead magnets, which is usually the kickstart kit is my 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, trust me. And over time, they become ready to buy from me. And while these things on their own, while podcasting on its own and emailing my list on its own, doesn't get me in front of new audiences. I know that if I create amazing podcast episodes if I send great emails to my list and then proactively get them in front of new audiences. 

My audience is going to go a lot quicker than if I'm just posting content into the social media void. 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 because 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. 

Now, I know some people are like, oh, but surely Instagram's where you get sales from. I actually get very few sales from Instagram. I get very few people clicking through from Instagram to find out more about anything that I'm promoting. So Instagram's there for fun. And I'll talk about this a little bit more in a second. Instagram's for fun, but it's not the main focus of my business because it doesn't give me the same return on energy and time as my podcast and my email list do. 

 

2. I stopped creating endless new things. 

It feels like we're in this online world of people constantly creating new things, and 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 actually 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. Ah, 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.

 

3. I doubled 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. Great. 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 launch 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. 

Now each time I live launch each launch plays out with webinars. So I typically have two or three webinars each time I launched Launch Magic, then doors are open for seven days, roughly I did cart open emails. So I sent an email pretty much every day to my email list. While doors are open and doors closed. It's super simple. It's streamlined. I am not posting a million times a week on Instagram during that cart open time. 

 

4. I started working with clients again.

I know this sounds really weird. 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. And I can open up and close spots in my calendar when I want to which means if I want to take a month I want to and not work with the clients for that month. 

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. 

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. 

 

5. I hired an operations manager.

Now, I am not naturally very good at remembering things. I'm not good at being consistent. I'm not good at following processes. Yeah. 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, super organised and I'm super, super disorganised. So we work really well together. Shout out to Jay who is also editing this episode. And 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 the things I'm going to forget. It's also things like documenting processes, which to me I'm like, that is the most boring thing ever. I can't do it. 

But today it's like, 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 for 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 and advancing are not one of my strengths. 

And it also keeps me accountable to somebody as well. It means that when you're running your own business, you don't have a lot of external deadlines other than clients. And it keeps me accountable because if I'm late on a podcast episode, she can't do her job either. 

 

6. I wrote a book.

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'm like, 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, and truly 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 a 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, oh, I'm going 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 I'm like, oh, this 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 too really easily. Yeah. 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. 

 

Pin it?