My Top 5 Business Lessons of 2020
To get your marketing plan for 2021 created, be sure to sign up for my LIVE MARKETING WORKSHOP ON DECEMBER 17. During the workshop, I’ll be showing you exactly how to create content for social media that’s designed to attract your dream clients! You’ll walk away with clarity on your messaging and you’ll have a calendar full of content for January! And best of all…the process you’ll learn is repeatable, so you’ll be able to use it over and over again to attract clients well beyond January, too! Save your seat here: https://keshiamwhite.lpages.co/december-live-workshop.
In this podcast episode, I reflect on my top five business lessons of 2020.
This year was my second year in business full-time. And it was a year of transition for me, as I was working on transitioning from a service-based business to a course business. I learned lots of lessons (some the hard way!) as I worked to keep the business going and to make a transition during a pandemic year.
Here’s a short summary of the top five lessons below. To get the full details on each lesson, be sure to listen to the episode.
Lesson One: Hire the right business coach.
I learned a hard lesson this year by hiring the wrong business coach at a five-figure investment! This taught me to look beyond the “surface level” when deciding which coach to hire. It’s not about how “shiny” and “fun” their brand seems to be online. It’s about the curriculum they’ll be teaching you with the strategies that you’ll need to make your business a success!
Be sure to get a detailed look or explanation of the curriculum/teachings that the coach will be offering before you invest — especially if it’s a large investment of $10K or more.
Lesson Two: Prioritize your audience growth and marketing.
When you’re really busy with lots of client work, it can be easy to put marketing on the backburner. But having a large audience can help you make easier pivots as your business grows and changes! You may not need the large audience now, but by being proactive and working on growing your email list or creating an evergreen source of traffic for your business (like a YouTube channel) when you don’t need it, can help you immensely in having an audience to launch to, once you decide to create a new offer or course.
Lesson Three: Take action FAST!
As you learn new things in your business, be sure to implement the steps fast! The quicker you implement, the faster you’ll be on your way to getting the results you’re looking for. Too often, people learn new things to help them make more progress in their businesses, but they sit on the information for MONTHS or even years before they implement. This can really slow down your progress.
Make it a habit to implement all new information that you learn in your business quickly and watch your results transform!
Lesson Four: Don’t forget about your personal life and health/wellness as you work to grow your business.
As entrepreneurs, it can be really easy to let the obligations in our businesses take over our lives to the point where we feel like we’re “too busy” to do the personal life things we used to enjoy or to exercise and eat healthier. But I learned from experience that being “all business” without any balance with fun, relationships, and taking care of my health actually makes life sorta miserable for me.
I prefer a much more balanced approach to entrepreneurship, integrating my personal life with my business prioritize, so I can have a good mix of everything that helps me live my best, most full life! I love maximizing the flexibility in my schedule to spend time with friends, go on dates, to cook/meal prep, and to get workouts or walks in the park in!
Lesson Five: Be persistent as you test new strategies to get the results you want in business.
Most new strategies that you try in your business aren’t going to work overnight. It’ll require some testing and experimentation with different methods of doing things until you figure out what’s going to get the best results for your business. Therefore, it’s crucial that you’re persistent, so you can avoid giving up before you give yourself a chance to get the results that you’re looking for!
And one of the main factors that’ll help you be more persistent is keeping in touch with your “why” for starting your business. What impact do you want your work to make on your clients? What will having your own business do for your lifestyle? What’s driving/motivating you to do the work you do? Reminding yourself of those things is a great way to stay motivated as you deal with the ups and downs of building your business.
To get your marketing plan for 2021 created, be sure to sign up for my LIVE MARKETING WORKSHOP ON DECEMBER 17. During the workshop, I’ll be showing you exactly how to create content for social media that’s designed to attract your dream clients! You’ll walk away with clarity on your messaging and you’ll have a calendar full of content for January! And best of all…the process you’ll learn is repeatable, so you’ll be able to use it over and over again to attract clients well beyond January, too! Save your seat here: https://keshiamwhite.lpages.co/december-live-workshop.
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Step Four: Give yourself specific goals & deadlines to reach in your business.
Without deadlines, it’s easy to make simple tasks in your business take FOREVER to accomplish. I floundered around for about three years working on my “business” on the side of my 9-5 hardly making any money or progress because I didn’t have any specific goals or deadlines to work towards. I was in what I call “hobby mode” and over that three-ish year time period, I made less than $2,000 working on my business. But once I left the corporate world and went full-time, I had six months of savings to support myself until I got my business off the ground, so that gave me a firm deadline to work towards! And as a result, I went from hardly making any money in my business at all to making $65,000 my first calendar year in business full-time!
You can do the same in your business! Give yourself a deadline for when you’d like to hit certain income goals. Give yourself a deadline on when you’d like to be able to quit your job! This allows you to work backwards and plan what tasks you need to complete every day to accomplish your goals in time. When you have a certain date in mind, it also pushes you to keep going, even when things get tough for challenging!
Step Five: Work on your business without getting discouraged in the early days.
The early days in business are the most challenging for everyone! It’s the time when you have to build a new audience from scratch, you have to make yourself known to your ideal clients, and you can often feel like you’re talking into a void and no one is paying attention to you online. LOL
But remember, it started that way for us all. The way you become successful is by continuing to work on your business consistently, even if you feel things are too slow or challenging. That’s because if you keep starting and stopping, you literally slow down your momentum and audience growth. But if you could just stay focused on doing your marketing for six months to a year consistently — it makes a world of difference in being able to create a full-time business fast!
In conclusion —
If you start with executing these five steps right now — choosing a service to specialize in, getting your mindset in check, creating a plan for what you plan to sell and at what price and learning how to attract high paying clients, giving yourself deadlines and goals, and working on your business consistently — you could be quitting your job this time next year (or sooner!).
But if you choose not to do these things, remember you’ll continue to delay your progress and it’ll take you years and years to create the full-time business you’re longing for, when it should really only take a few months. Don’t let any of the most common excuses get in your way — like saying now isn’t a good time or telling yourself there’s something you need to do/accomplish first before you start or thinking everything needs to be “perfect” before you can get started — NONE of that stuff has to stand in your way, when you know what steps to execute and you commit to doing the work!
Get started right now with my free masterclass on The 3 Steps to Book High Paying Clients Consistently, so you can create a profitable full-time business faster! Watch it instantly here.
