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Hello and welcome to the Aligned and Thriving podcast. This is a place for you as ambitious female entrepreneurs where we align systems, strategies, and self for a sustainable success, whatever that means for you, where we want to grow with alignment on our own terms, while creating the success that we truly desire.
This is episode two, and my name is Jada. I can't wait to dive in. In today's episode, I want to dive into and unpack the fact that what I'm doing in my business is not what you should be doing in your business. What you are doing in your business is not what somebody else should be doing in their business, and that we need to really move away from one [00:01:00] size fits all.
Strategies and step-by-step plans when we want to take our business to the next level. I believe you are likely here because you wanna go a little bit beyond the basics. You might have been trying to follow other people's strategies, some cookie cutter plans, maybe even hoping for that silver bullet that is going to resolve the challenges that you are experiencing in your business.
And I'm hoping that you have realized that there isn't one Now. Even as an entrepreneur with 15 years experience across different businesses, I still find myself getting caught hoping that the next best thing that I learn or there's going to be a shortcut or there is going to be some way of kind of skipping around something.
But you know what? Over and over again. It is put right in front of me and I learn the lesson [00:02:00] again and again. Hopefully one day I'll fully learn it, that there just isn't a silver bullet. There are ways to speed things up for sure. Things like working with mentors, uh, things like getting bespoke.
Personalized help. Through coaching, we can obviously bring our background and our knowledge and our experience into things so that we're able to speed up new endeavors, new offers, new businesses that we start. However, there are things that we will always need to move through and as we journey along our, our entrepreneurial.
Journey, looking for another word there. We discover that somebody else's strategy is not always best for us, and we need to be able to evolve from being in those early [00:03:00] stages of learning and developing as entrepreneurs into being able to take what we've learned. And personalize it. Take what we've learned, take what we can see is working and the core elements of strategies and make them our own.
We need to be able to look at what is going to be the next best move for us in our business, in this phase of business, our style of business, and what is going to serve us best for ourselves in the way that we function best. And so it's really important if you are wanting to grow your business, scale your business, move out of being frustrated that you feel like maybe you are trying.
To replicate strategies or you are signing up for these workshops and courses and you are learning all of the things and you're [00:04:00] implementing them. Most importantly, I hope you're implementing them, and then you're finding that it's still not maybe working for your business or not to the degree that you can see it working for other businesses.
So to dive into this a little bit more clearly and to put some context around it. As an example, I have. Recently, in the last two years started in two new directions within my business journey, uh, after having left our family business where I was the CEO and marketing manager for eight years and moved out to explore where I wanted to go next.
I've gone in kind of two pretty well related, related I guess. Um, directions, but quite different. And this last direction that I've been moving into, which is bringing in my expertise and my zone of genius around business [00:05:00] development, business design, business strategy, and being able to really bring that big picture and join it with what really needs to happen now to create the action towards the goals.
And helping other people With that, bringing all of my business expertise into helping others through mentoring and coaching, I have had to not only start back at the beginning in many areas, obviously not the very beginning because I'm bringing my previous experience, but I have had to have a look and realize two things.
One. Some of the strategies and setup and structure that I have focused on as first priorities in the past when I have created one to many offerings need to look different or I need to use different strategies or adapt those strategies so that I can focus on one-to-one, [00:06:00] attracting one-on-one clients versus the one to many offerings that I was more familiar with in the past.
And I've also had to remind myself that just because I might recommend a particular strategy or next best step for one of my clients doesn't mean that it's the next best step or strategy for me. In my current phase of a newer business venture and in conversations with many other entrepreneurs, I often see people.
And hear the frustration from them seeing them trying to fit a strategy or a structure or a system that they have learned from someone else into their business. So this is important. We have to start with a base. We need to learn the base structures. But if we want to be able to go beyond that, if we want to be able to grow and scale our businesses and [00:07:00] develop ourselves as entrepreneurs, we need to be able to move past that and start making them our own.
And so it's, it's why I am wanting to work with people more one-on-one, so that I can personalize the experience and the type of strategy, and then even within the strategy, how that strategy is going to be best. Uh, rolled out for the person, the individual, for the business phase, for the offer, and for the ideal people that they're wanting to serve.
What can be really frustrating though, and I'm sure you've experienced this, is we are marketed by lots of amazing people. The answer like this strategy is what works. If you are a coach and you wanna move from one to one into doing one to many. This is the strategy that you will need to be able to scale your business.
And then the person will share the strategy that they have used and that has worked for them and that they [00:08:00] have helped many other clients use and that has worked for those clients. But it's still a strategy that is not always going to be right. And of course it can be presented in a way that is very enticing and.
Most of the time, these strategies are amazing. They do work, but the question is, are they, is that particular strategy right for you, your business, your offer, and your ideal people right now? Should you be focusing on a particular area in your business? Or another area in your business, how do you know? So when it comes to strategies, we need to be discerning and we need to run the strategy through a lens of understanding ourselves.
That's a whole other episode. The importance of [00:09:00] understanding ourselves as entrepreneurs, how we function best, uh, how we make decisions. Just knowing ourselves deeply is so important as an entrepreneur. So when we're choosing a strategy, we need to be able to look at it through the lens of, is this strategy actually a match for me personally?
So when it comes to strategies, we really need to make sure that we are exercising discernment. It can sound really great, but we need to check whether it is a match for now, whether it's something you could put in your parking lot to implement later, uh, and also whether or not that strategy is going to fit.
As it's being presented to you or whether you want to learn it as a base so that you can then understand it deeply, try it out, and then personalize it so that it actually works for you. Your phase of business, your business goals, your offerings, and your ideal clients and customers. This also seeps [00:10:00] through what I'm doing in my business isn't necessarily right for what you are doing in your business through to structures and what you are focused on right now.
So for example, in starting up in a new space as a experienced entrepreneur, there are many things that I know I should and could have set up within my business, however. I also need to have a look at where I'm really at in this phase of business and what is truly the most important for me to be focusing on.
So what I'm focusing on in my, you know, newer stage of coaching and mentoring style of business, not as a coach and mentor. I've been doing that for many years, but as doing this as my own business. I am not going to have the same focus as I would [00:11:00] suggest. A client might have in a different phase of their business and who is focused maybe on a one-to-many program, or is newer as an entrepreneur, but maybe has, uh, has a more built up and established business.
Like what I'm going to suggest that they focus on is different to what I need to be focusing on. And it's the same for you, so you need to be very careful that you're not looking around and seeing other people focusing on particular things in a particular order and thinking that you need to do the same.
Ask yourself, is your style of business the same? Do you function in the same way as that person? Do you have the same goals? Truly, what does success look like for you versus what does it look like for them? Because usually it's a bit different if we, we go deeper inside ourselves, what that truly means for us.
So we need to have a look at not just jumping to that next [00:12:00] shiny strategy or system that we think is going to solve everything for us, but actually looking at it through the lens of is this the right fit for me and is this truly the thing that I should be focusing on in my business right now? Just because somebody else is implementing it doesn't mean that you should be, and maybe not now, and maybe not ever.
The way that you go about business does not need to be the same as somebody else, and you do not need to be implementing all of the same things as they are permission to be yourself. Permission to tap into what you know is best and permission to look at things, and truly put it through a lens of checking whether it is going to be right for you, for your phase of business, for your business goals.
All of those areas really need to be looked at. But I wanna share as like alongside this, that it's also important to [00:13:00] understand strategies enough to know which parts of them we shouldn't throw out. Because we don't need to fully reinvent the wheel. We don't need to. Start with a blank page. We don't have to create something entirely from scratch our, our own strategy, especially at the beginning.
Uh, or you know, even when we're going into a new area, we don't have to start from scratch and make it up completely. We should lean on the experience of others. We should lean into proven strategies and frameworks. Absolutely. Because this is going to speed things up. We do have, what I am saying is that we have to also be able to use our discernment and also learn those strategies and structures and steps deeply enough to [00:14:00] be able to know two things.
One, which parts are absolutely essential to making that strategy work. Those are the parts we don't wanna get rid of. We, the second thing we do need to be able to do with these strategies though, is to be able to personalize them. And the only way we can really do that is by learning them well enough ourselves and then experimenting and trying them out and making them more and more our own, leaning into the parts that really work, but doing so in a way that works for us and for our ideal clients.
And for. You know, the phase that we're in and our offers and our business goals, all of those things, we have to learn them deeply enough to do that and then experiment and take that time. So that takes time. And maybe you are in that season, maybe you're in that season of learning those strategies and trying them on and implementing exactly [00:15:00] what you've learned.
Maybe you're feeling frustrated that it's not working for you, how it seems to be working for others. If that's you, maybe it is time to have a look at that strategy and go deeper and understand which parts of that strategy are essential and how you need to, not just how you can, but how you need to. Uh, personalize that strategy so that it becomes more of a match for you, for your business phase, for your business goals, for your offers, and for your ideal people.
So, yes, take, take what is working, but figure out how to make you your own so you can do that through trial and error and experimentation. That takes time. It just does. We can't get around these things taking time. The other way that you can do that is to get support through a mentor or a coach who has been there and done that and knows these strategies deeply enough and has the skills to be able to understand you, your business phase, [00:16:00] your business goals, and your offers, and who you're wanting to really speak to.
So that they can help you to more quickly personalize it so that you are learning the structures and strategies in a way that is more bespoke to you already. That's a way that you can speed up the process, but we just can't get around needing to get out of this idea of one size fits all. So we need to let go of a strategy being this one size fits all, so we need to shift our mindset around it.
It and understand that what's working for somebody else and their business is not always going to function for you, or maybe parts of it will, but you need to be able to personalize it. So you need to think, how do I function best? What aligns with my vision? What aligns with my phase of business and where I'm at in my business?
'cause that's gonna be different to 10 years from now. Uh, and what is going to be a good [00:17:00] match with your clients? We need to really focus as well on your business phase. This really dictates your priorities and how you should be structuring your business and what strategies you really should be focusing on.
If you're someone who's early in scaling, maybe you've been in business for three to five years, or maybe you're before that, maybe you're ahead of it. Wherever you're at, it's completely different. What you need to be focusing on in that first year of business versus what you wanna be focusing in on through that, you know, three to five year period or what a business is gonna be focused on 10 years into the business.
Are you at the phase where you've got a new offering? So again, you might be 10 years into your business, but now you've got a new offering. So you need to come back to what is important when you have a new offering, what do you need to be doing? It's not the same as when you were in year one of your business and you had a new offering.
Of course [00:18:00] not. But when we have a new offering versus one that is tried, true, tested, and loved. There are different things that we need to be doing. So when you are presented with a new structure or strategy that someone is sharing works really well, you need to think about where you are at and is that structure a match for that?
Do you have a validated offer or is it a new offer? Are you caught between client work and bigger picture strategy? Like what's your focus right now in your business? Are you feeling pressure to do more? Build a team? You know, scale through new, new areas like increasing or starting out with paid advertising.
Are you in a growth or a scaling kind of a time in your business, or are you needing to really settle in and focus on structures before you move into that phase? Permission slip here. By the way, you don't need to scale fast. You need to scale, [00:19:00] right? So maybe it is time for you if you are like three to five years into your business and you're really wanting to grow and scale, are you set up for that growth?
Do you have the right structures and strategies that are going to be a match for this next phase of your business? These are things to ask yourself and I mentioned earlier, it's so important that we understand ourselves. You know, some entrepreneurs really thrive on lot high energy, live launching, and other people just really don't thrive in that environment.
How you work best is so important to understand how your current phase of business, where you're at with that, is so important to be clear on and understand. Are you refining? Are you scaling? Are you shifting? Are you moving in a new direction? Are you putting the foundations in place? Are your offers [00:20:00] one-to-one?
Are they one to many? Are they open all the time? Are they open and close? Are they new or are they validated? This is going to be a part of, of your, the lens you need to look through to choose and refine and personalize your strategies and structures. You don't have to launch or market or structure or design your business the same way as someone else.
You need to be clear on your goals, what's important to you, how you work, all of those things. We really need to release the should. And create also our own timeline just because someone says you need to be on YouTube or just because someone says you need to be on TikTok, or just because TikTok is really great for someone else, or just because somebody is hiring a really big team, or whatever it might be that you're looking out there and you're thinking, these people are doing this.
They maybe, maybe you're looking out and you're seeing [00:21:00] someone that you admire and they have a business that you admire and that you aspire to be like, and you aspire to have a business like them, and so you think that you need to follow and be doing the same strategies as them, but are you in the same phase of business and stage of business as them?
Do you personally function the same way as they function? Are your true goals and your true definition of success the same as theirs? Do you really want the kind of life they have, or would yours be another version of that? You need to check all of these things. Check in with yourself before you go following the next thing, the next strategy, the next shiny object.
Am I doing this because I want to or because I think I have to? Does this feel right? For where I'm at in my business right now, and is it really aligned, an aligned match for [00:22:00] my true business goals? So we need to release a lot of the shoulds. For example, I've had to release a bunch of shoulds in going in new directions.
Uh, and I think that the more we know sometimes as business owners, uh, the more we can. There, there's a, a bigger gap sometimes between what we know and what we're doing, and this can feel really frustrating. Uh, I'm going to do a podcast episode on that another time, but as I've started into a new direction in business, I've had to let go of being embarrassed by, or worried about not having particular things in place because even though I have.
I've been an entrepreneur and run multiple businesses, multi six figure businesses with many staff, very, very long-term businesses. I am at the beginning of [00:23:00] a new business, and so it's okay if I don't have all of the things in place yet, and also I've had to really take a good, hard look at what is it I need to be focused on right now.
Truly. To create the most important movement for me and my business now versus what other people might think I need to have in place or versus what I'd like to have in place, and I will get into place. For example, at the time of this recording, I don't have a website. I have been running multiple courses and a membership in one direction.
When I first went off on my own, out of our family business without a website, but I used landing pages, I know how to run Facebook ads. I know how to launch, so I was able to. [00:24:00] Put a launch together and launch straight into my first course. Within a couple of months. I've built, you know, the social media presence and all of these different things, and then I've changed direction again and moved into being the face of and leading as my own business and moving in the direction of being a mentor and a coach, which I'd already been doing for other people, but moving in the direction to be able to share that directly from my own business.
So again, a new direction and. I don't have all of the things in place, but I shouldn't and couldn't and wouldn't because it's a new business. It's a baby business. I'm not a baby entrepreneur, but it's a baby business, and so I have to check myself. Especially because I know what kinds of structures and strategies I'd like to have in place in the future.
I know how to implement them and I function in a different way, but I have to check myself even still without the, [00:25:00] even the outside influence and check, is this the best strategy for me? Or how can I personalize this strategy so that it works for this stage of this new, newer business? This is so important and we have to be honest and true with ourselves.
So this really moves into the power of refinement instead of starting over or adding more. What if you focused on refining what's already working? What if you stopped and you spent some time looking at your business and looking at the things that are in fact working? Do you even know? What are the parts of the strategies that you use and the structures that you have that are working really well in your business, and how could you optimize that some more rather than adding a new strategy?
Or if those strategies and structures aren't working at all, is it because they're not really truly aligned to you and your business, your offers and your ideal people? [00:26:00] Or is it that you truly need to be looking for a new strategy or structure only? You know the answer to that question. You need to turn inwards and, and think about that.
This can come down to, you know, something as simple as a funnel instead of a brand new one. Do you just need to figure out what's working and what's not, and optimize the one that you have. But this can be through to the structures you have, the kinds of offerings that you're doing. Maybe you started out, uh, with a course, but now you realize that what you're offering.
Would actually be a better fit as a membership and it would provide the kind of structure for a business and the kind of business structure that you desire to match you and your ideal life better. Well, maybe it's the other way around. Only, you know, by digging in, learning, trying, and personalizing and optimizing to help us through all of this.
The inner work [00:27:00] is so incredibly important. Business growth really does equal personal growth or personal growth, really does equal business growth really for our next level to be able to grow, to be able to scale, we need to be able to have this discernment to be able to look at the strategies and structures that we're using and know and figure out whether they're the right ones for now, for our future for us.
For our ideal life, for our ideal business, for our ideal clients, we need to be able to look at them and know which parts are working and which parts are not. We need to be able to personalize the structures and strategies so that they are aligned and a fit for us, our phase of business and our goals, and we need to be able to discern when we see a new strategy that looks great and that somebody else is doing and has having success with.[00:28:00]
We need to be able to look at that and have the discernment to know whether it's the right one for us now, or maybe it's one to park for the future. And we need to be able to look at taking the strategies and the structures and not throwing out the parts that are essential so that we're not starting from that blank page.
We're not starting from zero. Even if you do like to rebel a little bit like me and we need to be able to. Personalize them so that they are a match for us, for our business, our goals, our offers, and our ideal people. So I hope that this has sparked some ideas. I hope that you will go away and take action and have a look at the strategy strategies and structures that you have.
To see whether there are parts that are working that you could improve on. See if there are parts that you could personalize more. And when you're looking at maybe that next strategy that is presented to you, thinking that's gonna be the thing that [00:29:00] saves or, or you know, grows your business, have a look at it and make sure that you look at it through the lenses I've shared with you, and make sure that you understand that any strategy, any one of them, you are going to have to learn well enough to know which parts to keep.
Which parts you can personalize and how to go about that, and this is how we really move into that next stage and phase of business and entrepreneurship. If this is something that you are looking for help with, it's definitely something that I do with my one-on-one clients through holistic business mentoring and aligned launch coaching and consulting, so that we're making sure that we're matching you to your business and your business to you.
I'd love to hear from you. What's something that you are doing because you think you should be doing it, or have you experienced recently looking at a strategy that someone else is using or maybe going to a workshop or doing a training or a free master [00:30:00] class and seeing what looks like an amazing strategy that works so well for them, and thinking that that's.
Going to be the thing for you. Maybe you've done that and you've bought it, and you've tried it out and it still hasn't felt right, or it hasn't given you the results that you desire. Is this something you've experienced? Whatever it is, please make sure you take some action from this episode. Thanks so much for tuning in.
Bye for now. That's a wrap on today's episode of the Aligned and Thriving podcast. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. I hope you're walking away with insights, inspiration, and something you can take action on right away. If you love this episode, make sure you subscribe so you never miss a future one.
And if you know a business bestie who would find this valuable, please send it their way. Because thriving in business is even better when we do it together. I'd also love to hear your biggest takeaway. [00:31:00] You can screenshot this episode, share it on Instagram, and tag [email protected] Mentor, or send me a DM so we can connect.
Until next time, keep aligning, keep thriving and I'll see you in the next episode.
