In this solo episode of The One Small Change, Yvonne McCoy shares lessons learned during the first eight months of the year and how entrepreneurs can leverage the remaining months with renewed focus and impact. The discussion explored the importance of evolving clarity, building confidence through action, and consistently attracting the right clients. Listeners are guided on how to identify real challenges versus distractions, refine their messaging, and find repeatable, effective processes. Several points were raised, including practical exercises and reflective questions to help entrepreneurs make meaningful changes and cultivate sustainable business growth.

Chapters:

00:00 Focusing on clarity and growth

03:59 Focus on clarity and refinement

07:44 Building Confidence Through Action

12:28 Sharing humor through funny anecdotes

15:16 Finding the right marketing platform

19:27 Finding business growth strategies

22:06 Monthly workshops and personal changes

25:07 Gaining clients through goal setting

Quote from the Guest:

"Learning without application is just entertainment."

Links:

www.bookacallwithyvonne.com

www.yvonnemccoy.com/workshop

Welcome to The One Small Change, and as always, I am thrilled

to embark on this journey of exploration and transformation with you.

I'm your host, Yvonne McCoy, and I bring almost 30 years, maybe

more, closer to 35 years now, of entrepreneurial

experience, and I have a passion for discovering growth

through the power of seemingly small change. So I want

to thank you for joining me, and here's the thing.

This week and next week, I'm going to be telling you

some of the things that I learned and some of the things that

were unexpected that I've discovered. And so what

I want to talk about this week is what's happened in the

first 8 months of this year. And I think it's really

an important thing to do because right now I think we're all in that

back-to-business energy. I mean, we're finishing out the summertime.

If we have kids, they're getting ready for school. We're starting to say it's fall.

You know, it's time to start cranking it up. So the question

is, with 8 months behind us and 4 months left to go,

what am I going to do next? What have I actually learned? And

what's changed because I learned it? I mean, I heard a quote the other day

that I just found really funny. It said,

learning without application is just entertainment. So

there are a couple of reasons I'm doing this. One is that I have had

some fantastic guests, but I always have to— I always want to

showcase them. And there's lots that I want to say and

don't normally get the time to say it. So I'm going to take 2 episodes

and do that too, because I think it's a really important thing

to do right now. I want you to have

back-to-business, business growth energy, but I don't want you to be

back-to-busy. So I'm gonna talk about the

3 things that I talk about, which is clarity,

confidence, and consistent clients. And what have I learned in all of these

things? So, you know, what I learned about

clarity is that it's something that you don't figure

out all at once, you get clearer as you go along, you refine,

it's not a matter of adding to it, it's about being more

in focus. You know, sometimes Clarity

is recognizing what you subtract and what you

keep, what deserves focus now. What a lot of people feel

uncomfortable about is that just because you put

something to the side doesn't mean you can never do it again. It just

means that you're not going to put most of your energy on it right now,

right? So, if, if a client came and you happen to

have certain skills and they're not, you know, the

main part of your business, you would still take them, but you're not

gonna actively market to that one-off. Okay,

that's the difference between clarity and taking the wrong

clients. The other thing that I think that's really important is that

we have to make sure that we're not, you know, working really hard on the

wrong problem. And so, you know,

one of the things that I've added this year that has added to the clarity

is we've been doing surveys before each event,

and we've gotten some interesting

insights. One is that people say that, you know,

they're struggling with visibility, but the real issue may not be

visibility. It may be that they're not being

recognized, and the reason that they're not being recognized is because of

their message and that they're not building trust.

Visibility is everywhere. You can be everywhere,

but it doesn't mean that you're gonna be recognized. And

here's the thing, visibility is a magnifier.

If you have a clear message, it magnifies that so

people know exactly what you stand for. If you have an

unclear message, it magnifies

confusion. And so that's why sometimes it's better to take things away

so that you spend more time on the things that are right. and write

for your right fit question, your right fit clients.

So if 10 times more people saw

your message today, would you have 10 times

more right clients? Or would you be, or would they be

10 times more confused? Right?

So, you know, the story that I give all the time is the story

about if you had to, you know, every time you put an

idea out there, you have to put it out 12 times. So, if you've got

5 ideas, you're putting it out there 60 times, right? So, how

do I, as a client, how do I pick and choose what you're really

trying to say to me, right? So,

if you were to do 1 message

and put it out 20 times, do you think you would get better

results? So, that's something to kind of contemplate

about why taking some things away. can actually be better

for you. So, clarity evolves. It needs

refinement. It doesn't necessarily need more

information. The other thing is,

too, is confidence. Now, you can be confident,

and confidence also is not a static thing.

Confidence also grows. And in order to become

confident, at some point, you have to be uncomfortable.

Right? There is no change without stepping out of your

comfort zone. So in order to grow your

confidence, you have to act. And so sometimes that's doing

something that, that feels uncomfortable, doing

something that feels wrong.

So, you know, I will tell you one of the things

I talked about working on the wrong problem. So one of the things that I

see a lot of, myself included, is when we don't get the results that we

want, We go, I'm going to work on my slide, I'm going to

work on my, you know, my presentation, I'm going to work on my this,

I'm going to work on my that, right, until I get it right.

It doesn't matter if nobody shows up to your event.

And I have to say, my coach said this to me, I don't know how

many times, until I finally understood it. It's better

for me to have people

Come, have them do the survey so I get some insights,

and then I can be more confident in what I'm presenting.

And when I see the reaction to that, when I get

validation, then I can become more confident

that my message is correct. So you need that

discomfort, right? I think the other part of

discomfort is it's not necessarily a

cowardly thing. You know, like, I'm afraid.

It's— I think it's also, I want to do better. I want to do my

best. I want to do the best for the people that are coming. And so

that doesn't mean that confidence is uncertainty.

Confidence is trusting yourself enough to decide, to act,

to learn, and to adjust, right? I used to say to

people, don't put yourself on a pedestal.

Don't pretend that you know everything because you're only going to get knocked off.

It's much better to be— to say, I don't know everything, but

I'm willing to look for the answer if I don't know it. Right?

And I think that's somebody you can trust. Somebody who acts like they know

everything is somebody that either has

a blind spot or really doesn't understand what's going on.

One of the things that the survey said which was, I thought, really

interesting, was 75% of the

people that answered the survey said they wanted something to change in

the next 90 days. And so that was the other reason I

decided to do this podcast, because we've got more than 90 days,

but by the time you hear this, by the time you decide what you

want to change, then you'll have like 90 days before you hit the

holidays. So The question that I

want to ask you about confidence is,

where are you waiting to feel confident before you act? And

when taking action,

you know, how is that going to actually help you build confidence?

Because you need action to build confidence, and you need

to be willing to say, you know, I need to fall down sometimes.

So, my question to you is, what do

you— what's holding you back? What's keeping you from getting out

there? I mean, I know we don't want to be embarrassed. I know we don't

want to look foolish or any of those things. But at the same

token, people can relate to you

when they realize you're not perfect. I mean, you know, and I say

this all the time about weight loss. There's nothing that irritated me more

when I was, you know, really, really big

than having this skinny person say to me, you can do it, you

can do it, just try harder. Well, hey, you know,

from a physical perspective, there were things that got in my way. Like, I had

a big stomach, you know, I got a big chest, you know,

I'm not going to be able to do a crunch as well as you can

do a crunch. Because I have physical, physical

barriers to overcome, right? So somebody

who's not willing to, you know, really see what I'm

capable of, or really see what I can do, or know that

people have challenges, is not somebody that I can have a lot of

confidence and trust in. All right,

the other thing we want to talk about is

consistent clients. And again, we're

talking about

what are the consistent results that you want,

and do you have a process that's going to make that happen?

So, you know, we talked about visibility, and,

you know, we've got social media, networking, speaking, referrals,

collaboration, podcasts. So it's not for lack of action.

or activity that, you

know, it's that we're repeating it. But I would

rather that you do less

but show up regularly. So, I mean, one of the things that I do with

my clients all the time is they're like, okay, I'm going to do this 5

times a week. And then you only do it 2.

All right. So you feel bad because you feel like you haven't

met your goal. But not only that, you show up 2 times a

week, or maybe you show up the 5 times the first week, but the next

week you only show up 2 times. I would rather have you build

that repeatable cycle or that

repeatable process so that you see what works and

what makes sense. When I first started,

one of my coaches said to me, You know, you need to get

out on social media. And I was like, I'm not doing that.

I'm not dancing and I'm not showing you my food.

Okay. And they were like, well, what do you like to do? And I said,

well, you know, I had the Blog Talk Radio show. And so I like

talking and I still like talking, which is why I'm doing

this solo episode. And they were like, okay, why

don't we start with you doing a video once a week?

And it's like, I can do that. And then we found something else

that I like to do. And so suddenly, you know, after a period of

time, I was doing— I was on social media twice a week.

Excuse me. And then I found something else that I like to

do. I found a method that for me was repeatable,

things that I was willing to talk about. So when I

talk, I talk about a couple of things. First of all, I talk about my

business and and, you know, my beliefs about

my business and things that you have to do to grow your business.

I talk about my family. I talk about my dog.

I talk about my weight loss journey. And I talk about humor.

Humor is really important to me. And sometimes the

humor is just humor that comes up within a post. And sometimes I see

something that I just think is really funny. So one

post that I did that I really liked was about an

astrophysicist. And they asked him,

um, do you believe that there are

other, um, life forces, life

forms? And he said, well, you know, we'd have to be really arrogant

to think we were the only people in the universe. And so he said, well,

how do you answer people who say they've been abducted?

And he said, I, I always ask them, did you steal anything?

Which to me just— it just made me laugh because it

seemed— I don't know why, but it just seemed funny to me. He was

like, we don't— as far as we know, we have no intergalactic law, so

nobody's gonna, you know, or any galactic sheriff, so nobody's coming after

you. If somebody abducts you, make sure you grab some piece of

technology that'll help us. That to me is

hysterical. Now, I don't know if that's your sense of humor or not. No.

But I share that every once in a while because it just makes me laugh,

and in today's world, I feel like you need to laugh.

So, to get consistent clients, they need to be able to find you.

If you keep changing what you're doing and you keep changing the

message that you have, what's gonna happen is, it's like you have a

mobile store, that Monday you're one place and you're selling one

thing, and then you move it on Tuesday and sell something else, and you move

it on Wednesday and you sell something else. And on Thursday when that person

comes back to where you were on Monday and

tries to, you know, 'cause they're ready to buy something, you're not there

anymore. Or if you are there, you're selling something different,

right? So you have to be able to be, you know,

to be found by your clients. And one of the ways to do

that is to stop reinventing. Stop

reinventing yourself and the way that you come across and that

kind of stuff. Be yourself. Focus on the things

that you do really well, right?

Understand your client's journey so that they know you know where

it is that you can find them. So I said, you know,

we're kind of in a changing kind of environment. You've got traditional

marketing and you've got all the new stuff that's happening. I mean, you've

got social media and then you've got AI and all this other stuff, and it's

kind of a dimmer switch. And you have to figure out on that scale

what your client is willing or

where they're looking to find the

solution that you've got. So if you're advertising

in a newspaper and your people are only on social media,

you are never going to get anybody, right? At the same

token, if you're dealing with people who are only occasionally on

social media, Or only on LinkedIn and they're not on

TikTok and all these other places. Being on TikTok doesn't

necessarily get you any clients. So you have to figure

out where that sweet spot is on that

dimmer switch so they can find you. So

the first thing I would say to you is, what's already

working in your business?

that maybe you need to go back to because,

you know, you saw something, some shiny object. Go back.

Here's an exercise which I think you might like.

If you decide that you're going to declutter and throw stuff away, look at some

of the things you did when you first started, when you

didn't know any better, when you were, you know,

a newbie. I did this a couple months ago, and

some of the stuff that I put together before I was, you

know, gone through different courses and stuff

like that, some of the ideas, the foundational

ideas were the same. I was saying

the same thing then as I'm saying now,

but I wasn't emphasizing them. Some of the things that I

started make

absolute sense now when I refine

them and focus them down. They were too general

necessarily before. So when you

first started out, what was working in your business that you

were enthusiastic about? Because that's part of being trusted.

That's part of what

clients are attracted to. Are you letting them see the things

that you're excited and that you are excited

about? One, one of the things that I find so exciting

is when I help a client put together a

message that actually helps them

talk about what they do. It's like

the curtain lifts. I mean, and it has happened

to me. My Be Found actually happened in real

time at a networking event where there was somebody,

you know, it was like a networking, you know, masterminding.

Everybody was, you know, trying to help this person with their business.

And I finally, out of frustration, said, do you have

paying clients? They said yes. I said, do they love you? She said

yes. I said, Then you don't have a

client, you know, a service delivery issue. You have a client

attraction issue. You don't need to be fixed. You need to be

found. And everybody in that room went, hmm. And I was like,

that's what I've been trying to get to. That's what I've been trying

to say. And when

I changed my message, when I started using that,

I normally, you know, listed my event, I've done my workshop under a

variety of different names and titles. But when I changed it to

that, the 20 people that I normally got that signed up for the

event that, you know, it may have taken me 10,

10 days to 2 weeks, I got in 2 hours.

Because we want to be found. Right? I'm looking for

people that don't have a service delivery issue necessarily.

They know what they want to do. They just can't find enough people to

find them. Okay. So here we go. We

talked about what the first 8 months of the year taught

me. What did it teach you? What do you need to do

so that clarity— you just

need to refine your clarity. You just need to evolve it. You

need to tweak it. Confidence needs

action. What actions did you take in the first 8 weeks that actually—

8 months rather— that actually got you results?

And what is it that you can repeat consistently?

Right? Those are the things that you need to take a little bit of

time if you want to use the energy of going

into fall, not just to be busy, but to actually grow

your business. So take a minute and

identify one of the things that you may be trying to solve

and make sure that it's actually the real problem. Is the

real problem the

slides? I don't think so. It rarely is that. Is the real

problem that not

enough people are seeing you? Right? So what does

that mean? Does that mean you do more networking? Does it mean that you speak

on other people's platform? Identify the one

thing and then see what has actually worked for

you in the past.

Then I want you to find an action that

you've been resisting, something that you've said, I'm not ready

for that. I'm not ready to do that. It could be Anything.

It could be speaking, like I said, speaking on somebody else's platform. It could

be taking advantage of that 30-minute phone call

that was offered at the end of a workshop. Something

that you would not have done at the first, the first part of the

year. Do something different. You know the old saying, if you keep

doing what you're doing, you're going to keep getting what you got. Right? And

that's the definition of insanity.

All right, consistency.

Identify the thing that's working

and keep repeating it. Maybe multiply it. So

if you are posting, you know, once a week,

maybe now you can post twice a week. If you were speaking on

one podcast, somebody else's podcast once a month, now

up that so that maybe you're doing it 2 times a month. Right?

Find a system that works for you. For me, probably the

consistency is having my workshop every month.

Now what I'm doing that I've decided to do is have a

panel every other month. And in between, I want to

be on somebody's podcast and I want to,

um, or be on somebody else's summit.

That has a good feel to me. And maybe in about, you know,

a couple months after doing that, I'll decide I can do more.

But for the time being, that's the way I want to show up because people

know that my workshop is the 3rd Wednesday of every

month. Right? They know that I'm running a

panel. They know that I have a podcast

and that I'm going to speak on other people's podcasts. All right.

So, this is part of the challenge that I'm gonna give you starting in

September. If you were one of the 75%

that wanted something to change in 90 days,

how long is it gonna take before you get started? If it takes you

90 days to change something in

90 days, that's not gonna really work, right?

And you need to find something

specific that you can do differently,

right? That you're actually gonna do.

So if you're thinking, I know something needs to change, but I'm not sure

that I'm working on the right thing, you can always—

we can always talk, right? You can come to my

workshop the 3rd Wednesday of the month.

All right. So

I'm going to take a breath.

And I'm going to say to you, remember at the beginning I said learning

without applying it is just entertainment. So what am I going to do

with what I learned? And, and, and God forbid, she's actually going to

do another episode. So what we're gonna talk about is what you're gonna

do less of, what you're gonna do more of, and what's new.

And like I said, we want September to be back to energy

month and not back to busy, right?

So we want

to figure out what can I subtract? What can I do more of already

I'm doing? And is my focus right? And we're gonna talk about

measuring. I'm probably one of the

people who's very resistant to measuring, but

you need it for validation, right? You absolutely do.

And so, part of that has to do with what do you already have in

your system that lets you do that? Because I

think that's the easiest. It may not be, it may not be the greatest

measure. It may not be the greatest thing to measure, but it's a

baseline to get started. And I think,

you know, one of the things that we can do is we can help each

other. Because one of my goals is always

to say to people, I hope that we're better off because we

met than if we had never met. So I'm gonna,

you know, check the notes. There's a book a call.

There are a couple events coming up. There's some other things. But like I

said, you may feel uncomfortable calling, booking that call,

but what if you actually get something out of it

that's gonna make your next client the closest? What are you willing,

you know, if you figure out what your results are that you want, aside

from I want more consistent clients, right? How

many clients do you need to have

to be able to invest in some support that'll make you get there

faster. So if you say, I need to have—

I want to make X number of dollars and I need to have X number

of clients, you know, so you say, I want to, I want to make

$200,000 a year, right? And

I need 10 clients to do that.

Let's say 20, you know, $240,000. 'Cause it's easy,

right? So every month that you don't have, you don't meet that

monthly goal, what is that costing you? If you could

speed that up, because isn't that really what we do?

We help people to focus, simplify

things, streamline things so that they can get results faster.

And that's what a call will do for you. So on that note,

I hope that you've gotten something that you can take away that, that

you can use immediately. And that

means

that

you're going to look at clarity, confidence, and consistent

clients and answer questions about that so that you can move

forward faster. One of the things that I always like to say is it

doesn't matter how fast you're going if you're going in the wrong direction. And

that's why I think this call is important as you

start to put your energy into, let's get a lot done,

you know, before the end of the year. So remember,

change is simple, but it's not always easy, and it requires

courage and resilience and a willingness to step out of your comfort zone.

And so I hope that you will keep joining me for the One Small

Change. And until then, be sure to check out the Be

Found workshop. Be sure to give me a call, but more importantly,

Stay very, very, very curious.

I'm Yvonne McCoy. Until next time, bye.