KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• In the early days of my business I worked really hard to network, find clients and build my email list.
• During the first few years of me running my business, I did a lot of local speaking gigs.
• Once my business started to grow, I was able to hire my first ever VA, who has now grown to be No.2 in this business.
• It was great having someone who understood how businesses are run as she helped me turn my business into an agency. I now have 6 freelance members of staff within the agency.
• When I started speaking on bigger stages I noticed that I was getting less and less enquiries from clients.
• Although my team were working with clients back home, I knew that these speaking opportunities were something I had to do.
• As my clients started to reduce, I noticed that my email list and audience was growing and growing.
• I soon realised that fifteen years of experience put me in a position where I could offer valuable advice to people who are in the same position I was in years ago. I wanted to work out how I could offer this advice to people and still earn money as a business.
• For me, the best step was to open an Academy. I knew I could talk about growing your business all day every day and never get bored.
• I moved from a one-to-one to a one-to-many model for a number of incredible reasons.
• Once I launched my academy, I had to be more selective when it came to bringing on new clients. I also had to rejig the way in which my team worked and accept that I’ve had a drop in income.
• Although I have taken a drop in income, I now have a business that I love even more.
• I want you to think about what you’re doing as a business and whether or not that is what you want to do. What changes would you make? How can you get there? Can you grow your business without having to grow your time?

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

The real organic content that gets the most reaction tends to be the things you create off the cuff. Although you can hire content writers and social media managers to run the day-to-day aspects of your business, the most relatable content will come from YOU.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• Me and My Business - 03:12
• Hiring My First Member of Staff – 10:00
• Increasing my Speaking Opportunities 12:20
• Growing my Audience – 15:00
• Taking Things Online - 17:50
• One-to-One to One-to-Many – 25:00

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE

Episode 69: A Guide To Starting Your Own Membership With The Membership Guys

Episode 34: 3 Mistakes I Made When Starting My Business

Episode 79: 5 Top Tips For Gaining Speaking Gigs In Your Industry

Buy The E-Myth Revisited

Attend A Masterclass

Join My Academy

Transcript below

Speaker 1: (00:33)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Marketing That Converts podcast. I nearly forgot the name. Uh, that's a great start to the podcast. Well done, Teresa. I hope you are well and having a great start to your week. I would just wanted to mention that I've had some lovely reviews on iTunes. I appreciate it so, so very much. And you know what's really, really nice is that so many of you have said that it's like listening to someone you'd go for a coffee with or having a chat with someone or like a friend. And I love that. I just think I'm so glad that's what people think. And obviously I just get on and I just do my thing and talk away whether it's very professional and I'm yet to decide and I guess that's for you guys to decide. But I really liked doing it naturally.

Speaker 1: (01:24)

I really like doing it a little bit off the cuff. I like the fact that it's not scripted, that I literally just get on hit record as I've just done and start speaking. So for me, I'm over the moon that you like it that way and that you guys think and feel that we are literally just having a conversation and we're like sat down and having a chat and we could be having a coffee or depending on the time, maybe a gin and tonic, glass of wine, glass of Prosecco, champagne, you name it really. Any of them, I'm up for it. Cool. No problem.

(01:57)

Okay, so this week is a solo episode and I've been racking my brains, right? I focus so much on getting interviews in place and I've got a load of them stacked up and there's some brilliant ones and I focused so much on that and so much time on planning what they're going to be that the solo episodes are kind of forgot about, very organised of me and I've just literally sat down and thought, right, I need to record. I'm doing some batching at the moment. What am I going to talk about? And I always go back and see what we've talked about previously. I look at kind of other people's topics, what are the people talking about at the moment? And I try and come up with a few different ideas. And today's episode I've decided that I want to talk a bit about business overall and I want to talk you through some of the things I've learned and changes I've made in my business because I really think that you're going to find this interesting. And I also think you're going to be able to sit there and resonate with some of the stuff I'm saying and it might help you think about your business going forward.

(02:59)

And one of the other reasons I've chose this for today is because last week I was in Newcastle in the UK and I went to Retain Live, which is part of The Membership Guys and they were on the podcast not so long ago.

Me and My Business

Speaker 1: (03:12)

I'll put the number in the show notes. I wasn't expecting to talk about it and I forgot what episode they are, but it was a great upset. I had both of them on it, Callie and Mike and yeah, so I was up in Newcastle, at Retain Live and Retain Live is all about memberships and doing memberships and as I'm sat there looking at all these people in the room and the speakers on stage and thinking about how good and effective memberships are, I kind of realised that I never ever intended to go out there and have a membership. So it was interesting that I've sat in the room and kind of made me think about what got me to that point. I suppose I should start with saying, and I have said it before, but in case you didn't know, I actually never intended having a business at all.

Speaker 1: (03:57)

I was a very good employee. I liked being employed, I was very efficient. I liked having that kind of structure in terms of this is what you do, the accountability, being patted on the head when you did something right. I really liked all that. So the fact that I even started my own business is a bit of a shock still I suppose when I think about it. But then what it's gone from and to, it's taken a real curve. And you know what? What's really interesting is at the moment I'm at a really interesting point in the business, which is a little bit scary and I wanted to talk to you about that and talk to you about kind of some of the steps we have to make in order to move on and get the life and the business you want.

(04:38)

So let me start by going back a bit. Let me start by telling you how my business started. So, like I said, never intended to have in a business. I have talked about this before in another episode so I weren't going to too much and I will link up to the episode in the show notes cause I literally took you through the gory details of the fact of I had no husbands, no rich parents and no savings and I left my fairly well paid job while I had my daughters look after, a roof to keep in my hand and a car to keep running. Very smart decision, Teresa. Managed to come up with a brand and a website in about a week and basically had to earn money immediately or otherwise I would have been homeless and I would've had no home and no food for my daughter and no car to run. So I basically started of the business as a marketing consultant slash if you didn't have a marketing manager, I could be your part-time marketing manager.

Speaker 1: (05:33)

And the idea was I thought about, shall I go in and work in people's places? And there was a couple of clients I did that for initially. Shall I just do the stuff for them but do it externally? And I started of by offering all sorts of marketing because my background is marketing. Obviously if you haven't gotten that by now, I've been in it over 15 years. I have a degree in it. And although I was doing digital and social media and staff at that point I, when I offered marketing in general, in fact my first view, um, business cards actually said marketing and PR because people didn't know the difference. And I was worried that if I didn't put the word PR on there, people might discount me out when actually the thing that they wanted was marketing. Anyway, so I started off that and I realised fairly quickly that I didn't want to be tied down into someone's office and I could be way more efficient doing it in my own time, i.e. taking the work off them, doing it from home or I had an office at the time and getting in a lot more work that way and therefore could increase my income. And in the early days, I literally busted a gut. I was out and networking all the time. I was promoting myself. I was doing social media all the time. I was trying to build my email list and I was working really hard cause I had to, cause if it didn't have any money, my daughter and I didn't have a house so I was really sort of fighting if you like really hard to get clients and I was pitching a lot. I was meeting loads of people for coffees and really trying to get my name out there and I discovered that one of the things that would really help is speaking locally. Now a couple of episodes ago I talked about again doing an episode around getting speaking gigs and I do talk about the fact of, I started small and I did loads and loads of local stuff, but from my marketing consultancy type business, which started to turn into a bit more of an agency type business, that worked really well because I was sat in a room with people who were physically close to me, i. e. They, they were in business in the same area. They were the types of businesses I was working with and I was able to very quickly relate to them and speak to them and talk to them about what I could offer. And I love what I do. I'm very passionate what I do. So normally if I'm trying to do a sales pitch, if you like, to a client, if I'm face to face, I can normally do all right because I love it and it's really easy for me to get excited about it and come up with loads of ideas. So that's what I was doing. And then I, I started to realise that my time was like hitting that barrier where you're, you're done. There's only so many hours in the day. And I started to read some books at this time as well. So this was about the time that I started to change and develop as me rather than seeing my business as I am being paid by individual people to do my day job, i. e. Marketing that I'd been paid to do forever.

Speaker 1: (08:25)

But as an employee, I started to think about myself as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, which literally I used to say I was the accidental entrepreneur because that word just didn't actually resonate with me. In all honesty, I didn't even know how to say it. Like it wasn't until someone told me it was French that suddenly it made sense how to say it. Anyway, side note. Um, so I had, I do this all the time. I'm so sorry. I will get back in focus now and then what happens is I start talking and laughing about something and I completely forget where I was on and what that was I was talking about. Anyway, let's get back to it. So like I said, it was about this time that I started to see myself as a business owner rather than a person who did their day job.

Speaker 1: (09:09)

And I read a book called the E-Myth Revisited. Now if you are a business owner where you have gone from an employee position doing a particular type of job to then having a business that does that type of job, you really want to check this book out. Because it really changed my thought process and made me think, because it was basically saying you're no more a business owner really by doing that because you're literally just selling out your time to do your job and it just happens that you haven't got one client or one boss, you've got loads of them. So it really kind of made me think about how am I running this business? How much time have I got? And by this point I was doing okay. I was, the business was growing, I was earning money, but I didn't have any time.

Hiring My First Member of Staff

Speaker 1: (09:53)

So I took on my first VA, Katie, who is still with me to this day. So she's probably been with me like four or five years now. And I was working with Katie, didn't have any idea why I needed her, just know I needed someone and something and it was really organic and we kind of, I took her on and suddenly things started to work out about, oh she did this and this was really good and that was really good. Katie by the way, has turned out to be so much more than a VA. She isn't a VA anymore. She is actually like number two in the business. She's the one, I discuss everything with, she is my person that we, we talk about the direction the businesses going and she helped me so much in that. So, so for me that, that was a kind of another step that not only did I start reading and listening to these books, but then I took on someone else that I could talk about my business to that I could share ideas with and someone else who was super smart when it came to running a business and helped me bring in processes and change systems and actually get more organised cause I was literally winging it because I was doing it all myself. So it was fine cause I was the only person that needed to know about it. And then the agency started to grow and I started to take on other people. Now all my team are freelance. They're all based around the world. I've got six of us now in total and all the team are doing very particular things for particular clients. And I've got people who are content creators, I've got people who do management, I've got designers, I've got tech people, I've got ads people. So I started to bring on these people and I was really happy by the fact of they were freelance. I always, and that was the thing when I started the business, I guess if I had, if you'd asked me, how did I want the business to go? I'd have said I want an agency and I want a team and I want an office. And it's just so interesting how time has moved on and changed and how no longer that is important to me.

Increasing my Speaking Opportunities

(11:45)

So, like I said, I started to do more of this and I was realising that my time was getting thin and spread thinner amongst clients and I was struggling to serve everybody. And the bit that I loved was the speaking and the speaking was starting to grow more and more the kind of being seen as the authority was growing more and more. But you know what happened when I started speaking on bigger stages, I started not getting as many clients. So this was a real interesting tipping point for me because it was like, okay, you would think as my credibility goes up and as my awareness of me and my personal brand goes up, that suddenly more clients would want to work with me.

Speaker 1: (12:25)

But I was speaking on much bigger stages to many different types of people and it wasn't those local people who wanted that marketing assistance or that agency assistance and it just didn't quite convert into promoting the agency. Somehow the agency kind of just kept quiet and I barely talked about it. And also at this point, like I said, I wanted to find a way, how could I build the business, help as many people as possible but not feel like I'm being tied down every minute of every day. And that's how I felt. And there was some times that I worked with back then literally wanted me at their beck and call. And that's a really difficult thing because I am a people pleaser. I like to please people and therefore I would feel so bad if I couldn't take their call immediately or if their email came in and I didn't respond within five minutes, but I had to keep reminding myself these people are only paying for a small chunk of your time and that's not full time.

Speaker 1: (13:26)

If they want to do full time, they'd have to pay you full time. But I've really struggled with that as well. And then as the events started picking up more and I started to do more...