Today, we delve into the pivotal concept of macro trends and their critical interplay with the growth of your business. Understanding these overarching patterns is not merely an intellectual exercise; it is essential for founders seeking to align their enterprises with the shifting landscape of consumer needs and market dynamics.

Are you truly cognizant of why your company’s solutions are imperative at this very moment? We challenge you to reflect on this query as we explore the Macro Trends Explorer tool, which serves as a compass guiding you towards recognizing the significant forces influencing your customers' preferences and behaviors.

Through engaging dialogues and illustrative examples, we will illuminate how leveraging macro trends can not only enhance your marketing strategies but also propel your company into a realm of unprecedented growth and impact. So, prepare to embark on a journey of discovery where we will unveil the secrets to ensuring that your business remains not just relevant, but indispensable in today's ever-evolving market.

Takeaways:

• The episode emphasizes the critical importance of understanding macro trends to align your business strategies with broader societal shifts that can significantly impact customer needs and business growth.
• Listeners are encouraged to utilize the Macro Trends Explorer tool to identify and articulate the macro trends that validate their company's relevance in the current market landscape.
• Founders are reminded to step back from daily operations and gain a holistic view of the evolving market dynamics, ensuring they are not just reacting but proactively positioning their businesses.
• The episode highlights successful case studies of companies that have effectively leveraged macro trends to innovate and create products that meet urgent customer demands.
• Through strategic foresight and understanding of macro trends, businesses can uncover new opportunities and mitigate risks that arise from changing economic and cultural landscapes.
• The discussion underscores the necessity of fostering a culture within organizations that prioritizes awareness of macro trends, engaging all team members in understanding how these trends affect their work and the company's mission.

Chapters:

00:31 Understanding Your Impact

02:50 Understanding Macro Trends and Their Impact on Business

12:07 Exploring Macro Trends in Business

24:20 Identifying Core Trends for Business Strategy

29:20 Implementing High Potency Actions for Growth

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Coco Sellman, the host of the Force for Good Business Show, believes business is a force for good, especially with visionary women at the helm. With over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience, she has launched five companies and guided over 500 startups. As Founder & CEO of A Force for Good, Coco supports purpose-driven women founders in unlocking exponential growth and prosperity. Her recent venture, Allumé Home Care, reached eight-figure revenues and seven-figure profits in just four years before a successful exit in 2024. A venture investor and board director, Coco’s upcoming book, *A Force for Good*, reveals a roadmap for women to lead high-impact, high-growth companies.

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Welcome to this is why you Matter.

Discover your marketing timing advantage using the Macro Friend Explorer.

I am your host Coco Sellman, five ten Founder, Impact Investor and creator of the Force for Good system.

I'm honored to support you on your journey to building a high impact, high growth enterprise.

We get started consider are you 100% clear about why the world needs your company solutions now and in the future?

Are you pouring your energy into growth strategies that once worked but no longer are delivering?

And do customers see your offering as top priority right now?

And if they are, they're probably itching to have your solutions.

So often we grow our plan to scale in a vacuum without anchoring into the world's shifting landscape.

Are you too focused on the now and missing the forces shaping the future customers?

Is your team unsure why your work matters now in this particular economic, political environment, industrial environment?

Are you tapped into the forces shaping the future of your customers?

Could your company's impact multiply if you aligned with with powerful cultural, economic or industry shifts?

The answer to that is probably yes.

You really can if you're aware of them and you frame the growth of your company in service of that.

So these questions are designed to unsettle and awaken you to the possibilities of aligning your business with the macro trends happening all the time in the world.

And they're always shifting and changing.

Most founders, especially with teams of less than a hundred, are so deep in the day to day that they lose sight of the bigger forces at play.

So today we zoom out to see the landscape and invite you to realign your business.

To what Move forward in a more strategic and inspiring way.

Today's focus is around macro trends.

Within every masterclass we focus on a specific core growth element and today that core growth element within the Force for Good system is Macro Trends and each one of the core growth elements is one of these elements in the growth flywheel.

Every time we place attention and focus on one of those, we see opportunities not just in the one area but throughout how we can serve our customers better.

So today we're going to use a specific tool called the Macro Trends Explorer and you can download that for free this week at a forceforgood biz slash weekly dash tool.

You can also access all of the tools when you buy A Force for Good the book.

It's part of the Force for Good toolkit.

So download the Macro Trends Explorer Identify what the top macro trends are that are supporting the reason why your business exists and why your customers want need your solutions urgently to meet those market pressures Macro trends are the overarching patterns or changes in the broader environment that impact multiple industries and markets.

Some are broad, like the jobs report, the economy or interest rates.

And some are more narrowly focused on your industry.

Changes in my healthcare industry relating to regulations or nursing shortages.

These are the bigger trends that are outside the walls of your company.

And why you need to be thinking about these macro trends is first, it shapes the way your customers think, it shapes their preferences.

It affects well where they identify opportunity and risk.

Second, it shifts market dynamics.

So things are going to be changing with your competitors where others are going to start to meet those demands or meet the risks.

It's important for you to know what other companies are going to be focused on and building.

It also changes the actual opportunities for business.

Today we're talking about macro trends, but there's also another related topic, which are behavior triggers.

When the macro trends shift, it changes the behaviors of when people feel your customer feels triggered.

So we want to know what those different macro trends are and how it creates new business opportunity.

That's what we want to be focused on today.

It also can be reframing your marketing language so that the solutions you already offer become more relevant and more important.

Why you need macro trends, why you need to know what they are, why you as the founder, along with your leadership team, anybody on your marketing team, anybody in your customer support circle, anybody in your company, to some level, it helps for them to know what your macro trends are.

Your market is never static, right?

Macro trends signal tailwinds that could boost you forward and headwind.

AI is a tailwind and a headwind.

But for many companies, it became an opportunity.

They saw it as something.

Now I can go in and use this to introduce new products to lower the costs of being able to serve my customers.

So, like it's a tailwind.

Sometimes it's also a headwind, right?

So tariffs, for example, for a lot of companies, a headwind.

So your macro trends also explain why your company matters right now.

That's really the question.

Why does my company matter now?

In the frame of what's happening and what's being talked about over dinner, conversations with families as well as with colleagues.

It also helps you align your business to the relevance, resonance and readiness of what's happening in the world.

It reveals the unmet needs of your customers as well.

It helps to see what are they stressed about, what are they worried about?

They feel they need to do something because now there's this new opportunity and they want to take part.

There's a fear of being missed out.

Right.

You want to make sure you think about how your company can help solve those problems and needs for your customer.

See how you can share with your customers.

When you tune into what's changing, you amplify what's possible.

Sometimes we think that macro trends, even if they're negative, are just negative.

I invite you to look at them as opportunities for positioning growth, getting in front of things, managing risk.

A really important piece.

And as you become a more seasoned CEO, macro trends become more what you talk about because they help you navigate your ship.

If you're never thinking about them, that's a great place to start to elevate yourself as a leader by thinking about your macro trends.

So there's a great company called Narrow Ties founded by Katie Trous Taylor.

This company is under one of the funds I invest in.

I love this company, AI for science and policy communication.

It's a really smart, unique AI platform and it is meeting a trend in the larger environment where the rise of AI includes content creation and specifically in scientific research.

They have a special mechanism to create AI driven storytelling for science, medicine and public policy.

It helps those institutions translate complex findings into human centered narratives.

So this is a very specific platform and they're leveraging the trends that are happening.

Neurotype Thinks is a sustainable personal care and feminine hygiene company founded by Mickey Agrawal.

The macro trends that she's been focused on is the sustainability and echo conscious consumerism in personal care.

And her solution is a reusable leak proof menstrual underwear that replaces disposable hygiene products.

Reducing waste and promoting circular product use.

Great product growing quickly and doing really well in the market.

Modern Fertility is a company founded by Acton Vetchery.

It's a femtech reproductive health solution and the macro trend has been growth of at home diagnostics and personalized health is inside.

So this become really big.

The solution they're offering is at home fertility hormone test kits and digital tools that empower women to understand and plan for their reproductive health.

Eileen Fisher is a brand that's been around for a really long time ethical fashion and apparel and talk about a company and a leader Eileen Fisher that's watched and participated in the macro trends growing over time in this area.

So macro trend is that circular fashion and ethical production practices which they've been doing forever and their aligned solution has been a use of organic and recycled materials plus a clothing take back program that supports garment recycling and resale and minimizing fashion waste.

Companies are noticing what's happening in the macro world and then they're creating a solution that meets their customers need.

The trend is proving that their solution, their product, their service is what's really important and urgently needed by their customers.

So all of this is going to fit this idea of your macro trends are going to sit within the context of your full growth plan which sits on the four page growth plan plan.

On page one you're going to find trends and triggers the macro trends fit in this box.

This is in the context of knowing who you serve.

The four page plan has three parts.

Know your purpose, which is covered at the first page.

Know who you serve is on the first and second page.

Knowing your impact plan is the last two pages.

The section of macro trends helps to articulate why your customer needs you.

Let's go ahead and look at the Macro Trends Explorer.

There are three parts to it.

You're going to explore the trends of your industry.

Then look at how your business serves those trends and identify your core reasons why your company needed in the context.

Ready?

Let's do it.

The first section, exploring macro trends, invites you to spend some time and do a little research.

I like to use CHAT or some other AI device to help with that.

Recognize that this role of looking at macro trends is a big part of your job as a founder.

Your job is not just to respond, but to anticipate macro trends.

Show you where the world and your customers are headed.

We're going to break it down into these different areas and invite you to start looking for specific trends that are happening.

This is inviting you to step outside the walls of your company and into the broader world shaping your industry.

Think of this as a strategic cause, a chance to look up, tune in and gather insights that will help you lead with foresight, not just hindsight.

So we're going to walk through these 10 proven ways to research macro trends.

As we go, you can start to think about what comes up for you.

Jot down some ideas and put them right on the Macro Trends Explorer.

I highly recommend that after our session today, you set a timer for 15 minutes and give yourself permission to do some research on these topics and see what data you can pull up in terms of macro trends.

I think you'll find it exciting to explore these ideas.

So let's walk through these 10 approaches.

The first is market research.

Start with the basics.

What are the numbers telling us?

Look at consumer behavior shifts, growth forecasts, regulatory headlines, emerging competitors.

If you're in health tech, for example, what's changing and how people seek care, what they demand and who's funding what?

This is stuff you might know off the top of your head.

It's also stuff that you can put into chat or Google and ask for this information.

Second place you can look is industry reports about credible sources like McKinsey, Deloitte, PitchBook or whatever your industry association might be.

These places are gold mines.

Look for trend forecast, tech disruptions and changing customer values.

As you're searching through these reports, what's becoming more and more important to your customer?

What's happening with technology that's framing their situation?

Whether it directly impacts your sale or indirectly does?

The next thing you can do is start networking and talking with people in your industry.

Conversations reveal what records cannot what are your peers seeing on the ground?

What are investors in the space space talking about?

What trends are founders buzzing about at conferences or in your mastermind groups?

Look and see.

Like what are the conferences happening in your industry and what are their main topics?

These can help you identify what's going on and what's coming as well.

Media monitoring is a great way set alerts or thought Follow specific blogs, newsletters, journals, podcasts.

Pay attention to what's getting coverage in your industry.

What's being debated or spotlighted for the winning innovators?

What were they doing that was new or different?

Look at customer feedback.

Your customers are trend forecasters in disguise.

What new needs are they expressing?

What frustrations are showing up more often?

If you haven't done a voice of customer check in lately, this is the opportunity, this is a nudge to invite you to check in with your customers and get their feedback.

Competitive analysis is a really important piece.

Oftentimes people think of competitive analysis to become defensive.

I like to think of it as to become opportunistic and to become wise in your field.

Aware of risks, not of what others are doing, but what's happening in the bigger picture.

What are others in your space adapting to?

What are their new releases that are coming out?

What new needs are they expressing and talking about?

What are they talking about?

What shifts and messaging are they taking?

What new hires are they making?

What partnerships are they announcing or pricing models?

What's happening with their price?

These are all clues to the external courses that are at play.

Technology scanning very important.

Even if you're not in tech, tech is in you.

What's automating?

What's integrating?

What's innovating around your industry?

Which emerging platforms or tools could redefine your delivery model?

Look at the economic indicators.

How is the economy affecting your customers?

Spending your team's Costs or your pricing, power tariffs, interest rates, labor surpluses or shortages, they all shape your strategic decisions.

And what's your regulatory environment like?

What are the laws and policy shifts?

These are very important.

Everybody has employees, so the labor laws are always happening.

Are there new certifications, funding programs or legal requirements reshaping your space?

Are any upcoming bill at your state or national level that could be affecting your company in some way?

Think about the thought leadership environment.

Don't underestimate the wisdom shared online in your industry.

Who do you follow?

Who always seems to be one step ahead?

What are the top thinkers in your industry excited about?

What are they concerned about?

Staying in touch with that thought leadership is a good idea.

Write down some areas that are happening and affecting your company.

Think about which questions you most want to explore further.

If you want to look at market research or networking or technology scanning or competitive analysis, pick two or three of these areas that you want to spend some time with later today.

Take 15 minutes and go a little deeper.

You've already started to move some ideas around.

I know you're thinking of some trends.

So now we're going to go to the next piece.

Look at how your business serves those trends.

And so we're going to ask four questions and I'm going to give you some examples of how my former company elume my current company Force for Good Generics, SAS company and a generic women's health company might think about these things and it'll give you ideas and context.

It will give you answers that you can write down on your own plan which transfers your business alignment.

At Illuminate, there was a growing need for home based pediatric care.

It was a massive need.

There was kids not coming home from the hospital or Force for Good.

There's a huge uptick in values aligned business growth.

For sas, it's that need for workforce automation.

More and more workforce automation is seen everywhere.

Women's health is that there's this femtech revolution happening right now.

So which trends are aligned with your business and which trends does your business align with?

That's the first question.

The next question is which negative trends are you helping solve?

So illume, one of the big trends that we always focused on was nursing.

So we focused on being really good at hiring and retaining nurses.

And that's how we became aligned with the opportunity for force for good.

There's a lack of real scale tools for women founders and women leaders.

For SaaS, it's overall SaaS fatigue, right?

There's platform fragmentation.

And so you could be the company that makes it easier to integrate or not have so many different tools running.

In women's health, it's the under treatment of menopause.

Menopause has been shuffled under the rug for all these years and nobody's been talking about it.

Now suddenly everybody's talking.

So a company could use this opportunity, this trend of undertreatment to really move forward and help serve it.

The third question is which positive trends signal a growing customer base?

All right, so what's showing you More customers are coming.

At Illume, there was a demographic need for complex home care.

More and more children are becoming complex because we have all these medical ways to take care of kids that are keeping them alive even when they're very fragile.

So they need the support and service of care at home.

For force for good.

There's this rise in attention for women led businesses.

The lack of equity in funding, the lack of equity at the top, a lack of equity in women's voices being heard.

That is a trend that horse for good is supporting.

More women doing business with women more and more remote teams needing better business tools is an opportunity.

Women's health, new openness about hormone so there's the opportunity to go into hormonal health because now there's more people thinking it and wanting to try it out.

Next question.

Fourth question here is which trends confirm your unique positioning?

Right.

So for illuminae we were mostly Medicaid paid family integrated care force for good family built systems, operating systems and female focused.

For SaaS it could be a unified platform with plug and play AI.

For women in health it could be lifespan focused diagnostic ecosystem.

You decide how trends confirm your unique positioning.

Again, the questions are which trends does your business align with?

Which negative trends are you helping to solve?

Which positive trends signal a growing customer base and which trends confirm your unique position?

Okay, and now we are going to go ahead and go for it.

This is where you identify your core reasons.

Your macro trends are explaining why your business is urgently needed now and in the future.

On your Macro Trends Explorer write down the three to five most powerful macro trends validate the need for business.

Three is better than five, but there's probably three that really are driving how you can be the solution of urgent need.

Which three do you want to pick?

And maybe there's only one.

It's okay.

Pick as few as you can that are really valid and help articulate why your company is urgently needed by your customers.

Let me give you some examples for illuminate home care demand on the rise.

Medicaid before pediatric nursing shortage and an aging population.

Those trends validated the need for a limit for force for good.

A rise of women founders, more values based investing, higher demand for founder led thought leadership gives us a place within the market to be important for a SaaS company.

The trends are AI adoption, the subscription economy and cross functional automation for chemtech Funding surge.

It's totally happening right now.

Cultural shift in hormone health and C DTC Diagnostic Growth Macro trends describe why your company matters now and why it will matter even more tomorrow.

It's important as a founder to take a moment to disconnect from your head and move fully into your heart and soul and your body and acknowledge the wisdom, not just the information.

You discovered patterns driving change in your industry.

You clarified how your company fits into the bigger picture.

You've aligned your strategy with what the world wants and needs.

You've begun rewriting your story as a timely and transformational business.

And you've identified the macro courses that make your company inevitable.

Urgent.

Necessary.

Necessary.

So go ahead and update your growth plan.

You're gonna put in your macro trends.

Put three macro trends in there and just notice that on your four page plan.

When you put something new in, just notice how it fits in everywhere else.

Maybe it'll start to see you needing to make some adjustments like who they are, what they need, your total available market, your service goal addressable market.

Which things could be seen differently now that you know about macro trends?

All right, and now let's put this wisdom into action.

We do it in two ways.

First, we think about a ritual or habit that you can implement.

What are high leverage habits?

They're repetitive habits or rituals that when practiced, also guarantee breakthrough results.

What's one new weekly repeatable habit that could help you keep your finger on the pulse of macro trend?

I'll give you some ideas for weekly 15 minute trend scan with your leadership team.

What are people seeing and hearing?

Another thing you can do is have a monthly customer trend roundup shared with your full team.

So you're talking about your customer trends.

What you notice when you are out in the field and your team is out in the field asking them, asking your customers, what are you noticing in the market right now?

What are you seeing?

Save and tag articles weekly and put them in your slack channel.

What if every week you put one article in and tag it for your team to read?

You could schedule quarterly chats with customers about their evolve.

If everybody's having regular conversations, you, the founder or head of marketing could have intentional conversations about what they're seeing you could create a monthly dashboard slide where you talk about what's happening in the market, you see what's really in love.

You could identify one industry newsletter for your leadership to read weekly.

It becomes okay, everybody's going to read this.

It comes out every Thursday and we're all going to read it.

And then when we have our our weekly leadership team meeting, we're going to take five minutes and talk about what we learned.

So these are habits to help you think more consistently about the macro trends.

Can also identify one eye potency action.

This is an action that will be potent.

It will have reverberating positive effects in your company.

One bold move that accelerates impact.

Maybe you rewrite or elevate your homepage messaging or whatever collateral you have to align with that key trend or get a social media campaign going around that trend.

Create a one pager showing how your solution supports a major industry shift.

Write an article about put it on the blog, put it out on LinkedIn, pitch your story to a podcast or a publication that's on that trend.

Reach out to a brand aligned with a similar trend and do some co marketing.

You could update your investor decks with trend based market validation.

So those are some high potency actions that you can put in place.

Tint yeah, we did a lot.

We defined one of the core growth element.

Each core growth element helps you foster and accelerate growth, impact, scale and profit in your business.

Today we talked about macro trends, how to use the Macro Trends Explorer.

You can always back to that as a Great list of 10 different places to look for macro trends and you integrated that into your four page growth plan which is starting to really fill out.

You've been going through one core growth element at a time in each masterclass and you're starting to see how the piece of coming together, putting them back into your team on a weekly basis with your team huddles and in your weekly meetings is really helping you start to talk differently and think differently about your role as a founder and how you lead your business.

You've identified a high leverage habit to put into action and committed to a single high potency action to get the ideas of your macro trends into the business helping you grow.

And next I invite you to continue on with us in our journey.

Be sure to sign up for the course for Good Tool of the Week at ForceForGood weekly tool every week we launch a new tool and masterclass and it is free for a week and you can have access to it that way and then get the recordings and the links just simply by send Signing up the Next Thing I highly recommend you get a copy of the book.

It's a very low price.

It is designed to help you have everything you need in one place.

When you buy this book you will get not just the book with all the pieces and hearts and expenses explains what each core growth problem is, but it also includes the Course for Good Toolkit which has templates, assessments and tools that can help you if you're stuck in one area of your business, you can use one of the tools that can really help you foster growth.

Instructions for each tool and you get the whole system for the price of a book available, an ebook, printed book and an audible book.

The last thing I would invite you to consider is the Growth Accelerator and this is where I've put together a system that helps you implement the full Course for Good system in a set of exercises through 12 modules.

It will help you implement the full course for a good system and so the system is not just something you do the worksheets and are done.

The system for how you operate your company, work with your team so they become high performing, high purpose, high impact team leaders and participants.

It will help you install the system and it will help you step back as a leader and run your company like a CEO and less like the person you were when you started the company and needed to wear 27 hats.

It will help you continuously grow yourself as a leader and your team.

It has videos, tools and assessments.

You can do it alone or with your team.

It's tiered pricing.

It starts at $599 and works up from there depending on how much support you want.

You can get that at a ForceForGood biz accelerator.

Thank you for spending this time with me today and being a part, of course for Good Journey.

The world is made better by women led business.

So let's all go make the world a better.