In this solo episode of The One Small Change Podcast, Yvonne McCoy looks at how entrepreneurs can use the final months of the year with more intention and less busyness. She explores what to stop, simplify, automate, or delegate, how to identify what’s already working, and how to test new ideas without constantly starting over.

It's time to focus on measuring meaningful outcomes, not activity. More clients, better leads, increased revenue, greater capacity, and more time can tell you far more than the number of posts published or events attended.

Chapters:

00:00 Sticking to what's comfortable

04:18 Balancing business and personal life

09:21 Deciding what to prioritize

10:31 Evaluating and Adjusting Strategies

15:30 Testing and analyzing signup issues

18:26 Evaluating Leads and Workshop Changes

21:35 Questions to guide business growth

24:14 Client clarity and focus session

Quote from the Guest:

“It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re going in the wrong direction”

Link:

www.bookacallwithyvonne.com

www.yvonnemccoy.com/workshop

Welcome to The One Small Change. I am thrilled that you embarked on

this journey of exploration and transformation with me. I'm your host,

Yvonne McCoy, and I bring almost 30 years of entrepreneurial experience, and I

have an incredible passion for discovering growth

through the power of seemingly small change. And I want to thank you

for joining me on this entrepreneurial journey. And I try to bring

somebody new and different to you every week. But last week and this

week, I decided I had a lot to say, and rather than try to squeeze

it in over somebody else, I decided that I would talk

about it myself. So, I'm really

happy that you're here. I'm glad if you survived the

last episode that you came back for more.

Here's the thing. 8 months have gone by, and we

talked about a lot of the things that we learned, that

clarity needs refinement, confidence needs action,

consistent needs to be repeat, something that's repeatable.

But knowing all that doesn't change anything, because learning without

applying it is just entertainment. And so,

what I want to say to you is, we have 4 months left of the

year. My question is not, what else can I

add? It's, what can I do less of? What

deserves more of my attention? And is there a new

thing that's worth trying? Because September is back

to school for our kids and most of the world in some form or

another, you know, whether you're working a job as a teacher. But for

us, it's kind of back to business energy. But that doesn't mean that we

have to go back to being just busy. So the first thing I want us

to take a look at is less.

Being good at something can keep you stuck. This is an

idea that I really want to keep. And, you know, if

you find the 4 Levels of Genius, that comes up

into one of the things that you can do extremely well,

and that's part of the problem. Competence can become really

comfortable. You can do it well, and so it's

one of the first things you go to. We keep doing the things that we're

good at, but being good at something doesn't mean that it's the

best use of our time and our energy. Just because I can

do something doesn't mean that I should be doing it, and I have to

tell you, I learned this lesson

In a really harsh way in November when I fell and

got a concussion. Some of you know me from the Sunday Scoop,

and I used to spend almost all day on that newsletter trying

to get the information and the links to work and all that kind of stuff.

So, maybe I wasn't all that good at it, but I liked doing it.

And so, one of the first things that happened is I had to decide whether

or not that was something that I wanted to keep.

Was it serving me? What was the purpose of it? Okay.

And one of the things that I decided— people said to me, you know, you're

not making any money from it. You should just let it go. But for me,

it served 2 purposes. One was that it was a

way for me to be able to reach out when I was networking and

have something that I could offer to people and say, hi, this is like a

first step to working together. So in terms of collaboration, it was

a really good tool. 2, it exposed

my audiences to other opportunities and other

events aside from mine. And so to me, it was worth keeping. And I

said, how can I do this? And the way that I did it

with the help of a coach was we set up a form so

people could take the responsibility of submitting their

information themselves, right? I didn't,

you know, the VA took it and I put it in the format that I

want. Yes, I still fiddle with it. Mm-hmm. More than I should,

but it now takes me about an hour as opposed to

when it used to take me 4 or 5 hours before.

So just because you're doing it because you've always done it doesn't mean

you can't get the same results by either not doing

it and, you know, or doing it a different way.

So you may decide you want to stop. You may decide you want

to simplify. You may decide you want to automate it, you,

you know, or delegate it, or do some of them, you know, all of them.

But, but here's another piece to this. If we're

talking about

intentional growth, one of the things I think that we

set out to do is say,

I'm going to become an entrepreneur because I want freedom, I want to do things

for my family. And yet we build a business that requires more

and more of us, right? And so we have less time for our family. And

so this is another reason, as we take a look at what

we're doing between now and the end of the year, to ask yourself,

what can I do less of so I can have more time for the life

that I'm trying to build, right? Weigh those

2 things. I think that you're going to find it an interesting

discussion to have with yourself, because like I said, just because you're

good at doing it Doesn't mean that it's the best shoes.

And if you stop doing it or find another way to get it

done, what does that leave room for?

Intentional growth is not just about what you can do. It's

about making more room for what you want to do

and helping you to show up with your unique powers and to be the

best person. And it also helps you to show

up so your clients can find you. All right, so we talked about

less. So we're going to talk about less, we're going to talk about more, we're

going to talk about new. All right, so we talked about less. What can

you— what can you get rid of, right? What can you put, you know, and

that could also be what can you put on hold? It's like, I'm gonna do

it but not now, right? You don't have to do everything at one

time. So before you go looking for

more, Let's see

what's working. And one of the things that I think

we all have varying amounts of expertise

is looking for evidence of what actually

worked. And when I say looking for evidence, I'm talking about the numbers. How many

clients? How many conversations? How many referrals?

What kind of opportunities? What's the income? Energy is

hard to give a number to. But it is also

part of the equation. So you want to

ask yourself, what have I done once or twice that might work even better

if I did it consistently? So we're talking about the

things that if you post,

do you post once on a Monday and then 2 weeks later you

post on a Wednesday? If you're going to post once a week,

post on the same day and do it consistently. It makes it a lot

easier. For your clients to find you. Um,

there are lots of new strategies and tools and platforms and programs

and stuff, but you need to see what's working

right, and you need to solve the right problem so you can do more

of it. And again, I'm going to talk to you about my coach.

Um, like most of us, if you do a workshop and it

doesn't go the way you want, the first thing you think is, I'm going to

work on my slides, I'm going to work on my talk. But if you look

at the numbers, you'll see maybe I didn't have

enough people there. If I need to have, you know, I make 1 sale out

of 10 and I only had 5 people who showed up, the

workshop, the slides is not the place to go.

Getting more people to show up, what works that shows

up? What am I doing? If I'm doing 2 things,

what's getting me the most? clients and conversations.

So one of the things I'm looking at this year is panels versus

summits. I've decided— I did 3 summits, I

really enjoyed them. I've done 2 panels. I've

gotten more people to attend panels

if you look at the work that goes in it, right, than on a

summit. So I think I'm going to do a panel every 2 months.

Right? And see how that works. That's what I'm going to do more of.

So you don't have to keep inventing, right? What you need

to do is refining and repeating.

And this is where focus matters. If you have 5 things that

work, what's got the highest leverage for you? Which— what is the

thing that's going to bring in the most money, the most

clients, that's going to feed your soul the most?

Because I think that's the thing that you can keep doing.

You don't have to— you know, if you've got 5

things, there are definitely 1 or 2 on that list that you love doing, and

there's definitely 1 that you don't like doing. So put your

energy into the 2 things that you like doing, right?

It's really hard to spread yourself across 5 things, and that

comes when it comes to opportunities.

It sounds weird, but it's really hard to be able to

say to somebody, I don't think this is the right thing for me.

Sometimes it's really easy. I was asked to speak at an

event and it had to do with books. I don't do books,

right? I know a couple other people, I could refer to them, but books is

not my thing. So that one's easy. It's a lot

harder when it— when you haven't decided on what you're

doing. So that you can know what things to say yes

or no to, right? So ask

yourself, if I can improve only one part of your business in the next

90 days, which one would make the biggest difference?

Which one is going to leverage and get your

flywheel going so it's going to spin faster? And

what's already working that you haven't given enough time and attention and

consistency to? So, what I

want you to look at is, is,

you know, focus isn't saying you can only have one option. It's deciding

which is the best option that deserves your time.

And that's where I'm going to come in and say, the part

that we don't do is we don't evaluate. And I'm as

guilty as the next person. And if you've been,

you know, if you've been at this for a while, we have a tendency to

try something, say it doesn't work, I'm going to try something else.

And 2 things happen. One is, without taking a

look to see what part of it worked and didn't work,

you're throwing the bat, you know, the baby out with the bathwater. It

may be just a slight adjustment, right?

Is this the right time for the clients that I'm trying to attract?

What if I change the time? Right?

So for me, I, I never do anything on a Monday

because I just think Monday is chaos day in everybody's

life. It's, you know, if you're building your business, you've got stuff to do.

If you're working a job, you have stuff to do. It's the beginning of

the week. Monday is just a terrible day. So if you've been having your

workshop on Monday and you not— you have not been having good results,

Don't throw the whole idea out. Just try it on a different day

and see if you get different results. And that's where it's

really important to measure, okay, what's

going on. The other thing

is, I call it situational awareness.

Look at the situation that you're in. Are these, you know, the

right people at the right time on the right topic? You

don't necessarily have to change all 3 of those things, but

change one thing and see what happens, right?

All right, so that's doing more of what's working.

And the last part is new. Now, when I say

new, there are a couple things that I want you to think about.

I'm not saying don't try anything new. Because in

order to grow, you have to feel

uncomfortable and you have to do some experimentation.

But there's a difference between experimenting

and continually starting over. And so that's why I said

before, do more and change something. And the other

part is make sure that you're taking a look at

what's working. So part of what happens

is we're— we start out in our comfort level.

We need to make a change, and so we have fear, right?

We're uncomfortable. It's new. We have these thoughts, right?

From there we go, what's missing? What do I need? What am I

learning? All right, so you learn something, and then hopefully you

apply it, and that thing will give you growth.

And the only way that you're gonna know that is

if you're looking at the data. And so

if you do something new, don't

start over again. Try something new on something that you're

already doing because you've got a baseline. So for instance,

one of the things that I did with one of the

summits Was I put a teaser in the invitation, like,

if you want to jumpstart that, you know, your experience,

try this. And I had never done that

before, and it seemed like it worked. And so

I did it on the panel. And what I found was, in both

situations, I found my attendance was better.

It was a way of introducing myself and what the experience was going

to be like to people who other people had

invited. So it was a different experience from them.

So in terms of the pipeline, you've got to

get the word out there, whatever you're doing. You have to get

people to sign up. You have to get them to show up.

Hopefully you have, you know, you get them to participate and then

you get them to follow up and convert. So that's kind of

the pipeline that you're looking at. And the question is,

what's working in all those? You kind of have to start at the beginning.

What am I putting out there and is it attracting people? And

really focus on that. So if you're doing

something new, it may not be a totally new strategy.

It may be, I'm going to move the button on my landing page.

I'm going to put 2 buttons to sign up, one at the very

top, And one at the bottom. One at the top for people like,

yeah, I'm in, I don't have time to read through a whole bunch of stuff

or scroll, and one at the bottom for people like, I'm not really sure,

you know, what's going on, I need to know a little more. Alright?

When you do that, you can compare apples to apples,

right? You can look at the numbers. I put it

out there, I had X number of clicks, I had X number, I had

X number of Right, clicks. I had X number of

people who signed up,

right? One of the things we looked at, I mean, sometimes,

you know, something happens and you have a whole lot of clicks and no

signups, and it's a technical issue,

right? So you don't want to wait to the very end until the day of

your event to take a look and see, you know, as you're testing new

things, it's like, okay, I put this new

button out there. And now my signups are lower.

So first, is the button working? So you need to

test that. If the button is working, then you have a different, you know,

you're looking at a different problem. So that's, that's just, you know,

my experience and what I've done.

Okay. So

One of the ways you build confidence is not by having a perfect plan.

Like, you know, confidence is

being confident enough to say, I'm willing to do this. I'm willing to

take a risk. I've looked at the options, and this is the best one.

You don't have to know if the new thing will work in order to do

it. So, based on what you learned on the first 8 months,

what's one new thing that's worth testing before the end of the

year? And are you

ready to try it? Are you ready to feel uncomfortable

and try it? You don't have to totally know that it's going

to work, because that's what a test is. That's what an experiment is. You

just need to know that you want to be able to learn

from it. The other part to this

is, and I've mentioned this before, is you have to

measure. This is what makes this

not just an activities list. It's not just,

you know, I did less, check. I did more, check. I did

something new, check, right? It's about

what would have to happen for me to know that this worked? What's the

outcome I'm looking for? Not how many posts did I make?

Not how many networking events did I attend, not how busy was I,

but what changed. And, you know, one of the things that I say when,

you know, people are participating in my event, yes, you've

committed to doing 3 posts about the event, but what you really

committed to is bringing 20 or more,

20 or more people to the event so that we all

have a full room. If the 3 posts don't get you

that, then you need to do something else. In all

fairness to everybody else. So it's not about how busy

I am. It's, you know, did I

get more right-fit conversations? Did I

get better leads? Did I get more clients? Did I get more revenue?

Do I have more time? Is there, you know, less complexity in my life?

Right? Did my work-life balance get better?

When you're doing all these things. And one of the things that I found interesting

by measuring was, you know, we added a survey,

which makes it really easy before the workshop to, to have

data that you can measure. Is,

as I made some changes, I had a smaller amount of

people come, but a higher percentage were

more qualified. So let that sink in for me.

I mean, I find it a little, you know, I have to think about it

myself. As we made some changes based

on the survey that we got that gave us some high-quality

leads, we got a little bit

smaller attendance, but

a higher level of quality.

So then what you're asking yourself is, what do

I stop? What do I keep? What do I refine? What do I

repeat? Okay.

So let me take a breath here.

Because if you don't define the results, it's really easy

to confuse being busy with making progress. And

the results have to be your own results. I mean, everybody's got a

strategy, everybody's got a way of doing something, but you have to be—

you really need your dead reckoning to say, this is what I want my life

to look like, this is what I want my business to say. So,

you know, this is where I want to bring the survey back. So when I

did the survey, 50% of the people I surveyed said they were ready to

scale intentionally. And I want to come back to the word

intentional. Scaling intentionally doesn't mean

doing more of everything. It means deliberately deciding

what doesn't serve me anymore and do

less of that. What's working and deserves more

focus and more effort and do more of that.

What's worth testing on what I've learned.

And all through this, you need to measure. So, if you do less,

And you're measuring, has it made a difference? Has, you know,

have your numbers gone up or down? The same thing with what you're

focusing on doing more. Do the numbers

that are important to you go up or down? Okay,

which of those numbers are

really applicable? Okay, so what I

say to people, if you're not used to looking at the numbers, one of the

things that I think is really important is pick a number that's really easy for

you to get to. Mm-hmm. It may not be

a great quality number. It may not really

tell you 100% of what you're looking for, but it's someplace

that you can start looking. And then you can start asking the questions,

what does this number really mean? So if you're looking

to grow your business and intentionally scale, you

have to decide what, you know, where to put your energy,

right? And you don't want to end up

building a business

That's going to end up giving you a life you don't want, where you're

scurrying and you're, you're feeling like you're left out of things, that you're

not doing the things that you want.

So here's a couple questions that I want you to ask, or things

that you, you know, to kind of

gather this all together. Choose one thing to

stop, reduce, simplify, automate, or delegate.

Now, that one thing can be, I'm gonna stop doing this for one

month or one, you know, quarter or whatever. Just because

you stop it doesn't mean that you can never go back to it if it

turns out that you're not getting the results that you want.

Choose one thing that's already working and

commit to repeating it and doing it more. If you

are posting once a week, try posting twice a week.

If you are trying to be on

podcasts, make a goal for yourself. I

want to be on podcasts a couple of times. Now here's the thing about

that— was really not a great example unless you've got your own podcast,

because you can't control when that comes out, right? But you can

control how many you have in

the pipeline, right? And I think the one that's the most

important to me, if I had to rate

them, do less and try something new would be the way that I would

go. But I would try

something new on something that's already working so that that's

kind of like tweaking it, right? So

what result is going to tell you that it's worth

continuing. All right. So, here's the

thing. 75% of the people

that I surveyed said they wanted to make a change in 90 days. So, here's

my question. If you keep doing exactly what you're doing,

what will actually be different in 90 days? What will be different when— by the

time you get into December before you start 2027?

And maybe the harder question is, how long have you already been trying to

change that? You know, so there are a couple

options for you. If you know something needs to change, but you're not sure you're

working on the right thing, book a call with me and we'll sit and

talk about, you know, what maybe you need to do less of, what you

need to do more of, in a recognition clarity session with me.

And the other thing is we can look at what's happening, what's getting in the

way, and really what deserves your attention. Last but not

least, Don't let the energy that's here

right now, the back to business, don't let it become back to busy.

Don't keep doing what you're doing because, you know, they say

that's insanity. If you keep doing everything that you're doing, you're going to keep getting

what you got, right? And the more you

focus, the

less you need to be fixed. If you have paying clients that love you,

You don't have a service delivery issue.

You just need to be found. You have a client attraction issue.

So by doing less of some things and more of

others, you will be easier to be found by your clients.

So, um, I want you to think about that a little bit.

I said a whole lot. I had a whole lot to say to you. But

this is the last part I'm going to say to you.

One of my favorite sayings is,

it doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the

wrong direction. So I'm going to loop back to the first,

you know, the last week's episode about clarity.

Take some time to really think about the life that you want and the

business that you want. Right. In the

meantime, be sure you subscribe and share and

engage on social media about the podcast. One of the reasons that I

did it is so that I could supercharge your business and add

connection to it. So you guys know me, so feel

free to share with somebody in your community and expand the

community. And I'm hoping that there are ideas

that are going to help you In your quest for growth

and impact. And it can be the smallest

change that can yield monumental transformation. And

this is not the first time I've done individual episodes, so there are a few

out there. And like I said, you know, it doesn't matter how

fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction. So

remember, change is simple. It's not always easy. It

requires courage and resilience and a willingness to step outside your

comfort zone. And sometimes that can be scary. So I hope you'll

continue to join me for The One Small Change as we embark on this

journey of a bold vision and innovative possibilities.

And until then, join me on one of my workshops, give me a

call. And until the next time,

stay very, very curious.

Thank you.