EPISODE 57 & 58 - LAUNCHING A NEW BUSINESS? 10 THINGS I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY IF I WERE TO START FROM SCRATCH! (PART 1 & 2)
Ten things I’d do differently if I were starting my business from scratch!
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE HERE:
LAUNCHING A NEW BUSINESS? 10 THINGS I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY IF I WERE TO START FROM SCRATCH! (PART 1 & 2)
On these episodes, Danielle shares the things she would do differently if she were to start from scratch today! This blog post covers Part 1 & Part 2!
Always Put Your Values First
Look out for red flags. Faith, Family and Personal Priorities should ALWAYS come first!
Your personal values should come BEFORE your business! Danielle shares about the first years in her business, and how she vocalized her values as priorities but didn’t always live them out. She was working around the clock, never taking breaks, and (as you all know) she’s hit burnout multiple times in her journey. It's so important to get clear on your personal values and make sure you are staying true to those!
Get Clarity on Who You Want to Serve and Create Products and Services that Directly Solve their Problems.
Don’t waste your time trying to please everyone. Instead, choose your niche and then really get to know your ideal person through market research. Understand their biggest frustrations, wants, and wishes, and then do your best to serve that specific group of people the BEST you can!
Building a Business can be Lonely. Find a community who you can connect with, collaborate with and can be there to support you through the ups and downs of this entrepreneurial journey!
Community is SO important. When you are growing a business - especially if you are working from home, it can get really lonely and you can get caught in a rut if you don’t find a community, other people to connect and network with.
Streamline and Prioritize your Profitable Action Steps!
The more hours you work does not equal more income in your business. If you are starting from scratch, you need to get really clear on what your priorities are and the actions that would be the most productive and profitable. Danielle shares that, when she first started her business, she spent a lot of time-wasting on tasks that didn’t really help her in my business and were just distractions.
Focus on one main project at a time to scale before you move on to another - It’s so easy to get distracted by one million shiny objects!
As entrepreneurs, we are often multi-passionate people! It’s one of our many gifts which is beautiful, but it can often lead to overwhelm if we are trying to do too many things all at once. As one of our past guests, Taylor has said on the podcast, you can do anything you want, just not all at once and not all by yourself.
Create Systems, automate and outsource when you can.
Creating systems and automation are KEY to keeping organized and on track! As you grow, start to outsource things that are not in your “zone of genius” Danielle shares that, over the last 2-3 years, she’s implemented so many new systems to her business and wishes she wishes she would have started earlier.
Find mentors and coaches who can show you the way.
Find other people who can support you in making your vision come to life. Danielle shares that she wishes would have invested in this type of coaching and support earlier. As soon as she found someone who resonated with her and that this person could help her get to where she wanted to go, it was SO game-changing! Her coaches have been able to see things that she could have never seen and they give her fresh ideas and perspectives that she never would have thought of on her own. Sometimes we are so close to our business that we can’t see the proverbial forest for the trees.
It’s okay to have a part-time or full-time job while growing your business.
Some businesses can profit immediately but some businesses don’t profit for 5+ years. It really depends on your initial investment as well as your business model. Taking a second job can take the pressure off for your business to be profitable right away. Danielle shares that she did take a few part-time gigs on evenings and weekends so that she could support herself while scaling her business. That being said, there also might be a point where you need to make a decision to jump into your business full time - sometimes this is a leap of faith!
Bring in the fun!
Danielle talks about first getting started in business, and how she took herself and her business really seriously. She then shares that you can take your business seriously and be a hard worker without taking yourself too seriously AND bring in fun into your work and everyday life as much as you can - not only just by giving yourself time off to do fun things and hobbies you enjoy, but, also by bringing fun into your everyday life - it could be something as simple as playing music while you work, to lighting a candle, to taking breaks to go for walks and listening to podcasts.
Create space and time for Daydreaming.
Leave yourself space and time where you don’t have “TASKS to accomplish” - where you can be creative and dream about what you want your business and life to look like. This is something that we talk about in Action Takers Club - having a “CEO Visionary Day” on the day of the week - take yourself for coffee, or, if you have little ones and are working from home, make yourself a fancy coffee at home while they nap and get out a paper and brain dump all of your ideas! We often don’t give ourselves that space and time to just think, be creative and dream! It’s often what leads to overwhelm, burnout and frustration in your business.
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transcript
[00:00:00] Danielle: Welcome back to the podcast friends. I'm so excited that you're here. Today, we're gonna be talking about launching a new business and 10 things that I personally would've done differently if I were to start from scratch today. So no matter if you are a new business owner or if you've been in business for several years, I think you're gonna get so much out of this episode and maybe be able to relate to some of the things that I would do differently as well.
[00:00:26] Before we get started, I wanted to share with you that action takers club is open for enrollment, and it's been so exciting to watch all of our new students jump in and be attending our coworking calls that we have weekly and our coaching calls. And we have our networking event coming up. It's just such a fun community.
[00:00:47] And if you haven't heard of action takers club before, it is our signature program, and it teaches you how to scale a profitable business without working around the clock. So it's basically a step by step [00:01:00] framework to create a business that is a scalable and sustainable. So if you feel like you are, you know, working around the clock, you're doing all the things and you still feel like your business isn't growing the way that you want it to, I would love for you to jump into our program.
[00:01:18] this is an incredible community of entrepreneurs to help you keep you accountable. And for me to personally coach you and support you inside of this program. Plus, we have some really exciting bonuses right now. One is our profitable workflow system. So this is a step by step video training that shows you exactly how to create your profitable workflow.
[00:01:40] So imagine waking up in the morning and knowing exactly the steps that you had to do that morning. Three to five things that we're going to move your business forward. You can actually just copy our systems and our workflow. We give you templates. We have a training for you, and it's just super easy steps to take you from [00:02:00] completely overwhelmed in your business to super streamlined and super organized.
[00:02:04] You ,guys I am so excited about this training. I have never been so excited about a training in my life I don't think because I really know it's gonna help so many of you get extremely streamlined and really organized. And another bonus that we have right now is our automation toolkit, which is all the tools that you need in order to scale your profitable online business. So these are simple automation tools that will save you hours of your week. They're completely customizable depending on where your business is at. And then the beauty of this is that you can get coaching from me on our monthly coaching calls on how to actually implement this into your specific business.
[00:02:43] So it's totally catered to you and I am so excited about this toolkit. The third bonus that we have right now is something really exciting. We're actually offering lifetime access to our action takers club course material. So normally you get one [00:03:00] year access to the course material, but right now, when you jump in, you get lifetime access. You get lifetime access to the current material, as well as any future pieces of content that we add in which is so exciting.
[00:03:13] So I would love to see you inside of action taker's club, so you can get access to all of these bonuses. And if you're on the fence about joining or you have questions or you wanna learn more, I would suggest to actually watch our master class that we did a couple weeks ago, because I really go into depth on the framework, in all the details and what you can do is just learn from that masterclass, regardless of whether you join us inside of action takers club, you are gonna learn so much just from that 60 minute masterclass itself. So go ahead and either go to business babes collective.com/action takers club. If you're ready to join us, or if you're still unsure, you can go to business babes collective.com/ masterclass and you'll get immediate access to our free class there. Without [00:04:00] further ado, let's go ahead and dive into the episode today.
[00:04:04] Welcome to the business babes collective podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Wiebe. In this podcast, you'll learn tangible business tips and strategies on how to grow successfully and sustainably. We'll also interview seasoned entrepreneurs so you can listen in on their stories and see behind the scenes of what it took to grow and scale their businesses. Let's dive in as we discuss the wild, exciting, crazy, challenging, rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship.
[00:04:35] 10 things I would do differently if I were to start my business from scratch today. So I'm excited to dive into these because a lot of these things are things that I have personally learned along the way of being an entrepreneur. And so I'm excited to share this with you, whether you are just getting started on your entrepreneurial journey or whether you've been in business for a while. I hope that you reflect on some of these things [00:05:00] that we're gonna be talking about and really see where you are at in each of these categories.
[00:05:05] So, number one is always put your values first. So the reason this is so important is because it seems, you know, that seems like an obvious one, right? Like put those things that you value first before your business. Your personal values, you know, spending time with family, your faith, your friends, all of those things. And it's easy to say that we value those things, but if we're really honest with ourselves, you know, looking at the time that we spend and things that we're prioritizing- are we really prioritizing those things? Our own personal health, time with family time, with, you know, connecting with our faith, if that's something that's important to us and taking care of our own selves and our own health. Are those things that we actually are prioritizing?
[00:05:55] And I think like the first year, or, you know, year or couple years of my business, [00:06:00] I was just really wanting to make this business a success. So I would, you know, work around the clock, never take breaks. And as you guys know, I hit burnout multiple times in my journey. And so I think this is why it's so important to get super clear on what your values are and making sure you are actually staying true to that. And one of the best ways to do this is really not only to write them down, but to put them in your calendar first, before you put in any of your business tasks, you put in your personal priorities before that.
[00:06:35] So let's say you map out your week and then you've actually put in those priorities, whether it be date night or time with your family or reading in the morning or working out or taking a walk. Whatever those things are, putting those things in your calendar first, before you schedule out the rest of your day, which could include your work blocks. Right? So that's one of the things that I wish and [00:07:00] something that I would've done differently if I were to start my business from scratch today.
[00:07:04] Okay. Number two is getting clarity on who you want to serve and creating products and services that directly solve their problems. So this one is so important because I don't want you to waste your time trying to please everyone. At the beginning of my business, I did so many things that really weren't in line with who I really wanted to serve, but because I am, you know, a recovering people pleaser, and I wanted everyone to be happy. I would get caught up in trying to please everyone and trying to basically serve multiple different niches instead of focusing on one niche.
[00:07:48] And, I know we've talked about this in previous episodes, but it's so important to be able to niche down so that you can actually scale. And so it's important to also know and [00:08:00] understand what your ideal person's biggest frustrations are, what their wants are, what their wishes are, and then doing your best to serve that specific group of people the best you can.
[00:08:13] all right. Number three is building a business can be lonely, so finding a community of people you can connect with, collaborate with, and those that can be there to support you through the ups and downs of this entrepreneurial journey. So I think this is so incredibly important because when you are growing a business, especially if you're working from home, it can get really lonely. And you can get caught in a rut if you don't find community or other people that you can connect with. I know, for me, when I first started my business, even though my business was really centered around community, you know, that was once a month when we hosted our events. But, all the rest of the time I was working from home and I didn't really have that [00:09:00] community that I could check in with, or that I could bounce ideas off of throughout the month.
[00:09:05] And so it really took me a long time to really understand, like who could I reach out to? Who could I connect with and who, how could I build that community around myself, whether it's joining other courses or online communities, or even in person communities where I could build those relationships with others so that we could either work together in person or over zoom. And we could just be there for one another and bounce ideas off of each other and have that community.
[00:09:35] so that's number three, number four is streamline and prioritize your profitable action steps. So this one is really important because the more hours you work, we talked about this in the past episode does not equal more income in your business. So if I was starting from scratch, I would get really clear on what my priorities were and what [00:10:00] actions were going to be my most productive and profitable action steps. Because when I was, you know, in my first few years of business, I spent a lot of time wasting my time on tasks that honestly didn't really help me move my business forward.
[00:10:17] When I think back on them, they were really just distractions. So if you can get super clear on what your profitable action steps are, create this streamlined calendar for yourself, so that every single morning, you know exactly what you're doing. So you don't get, caught up in that shiny object syndrome and bouncing from task to task, you know, all day. That is a really exhausting way to run your business. And I know, when I first started my business, that's exactly what I was doing.
[00:10:47] all right. So number five is focus on one main project at a time to scale before you move onto another. This one is really related to the last one as well, [00:11:00] but it's so easy to get distracted by all of these different things that you can do and all these different things that you can scale as an entrepreneur.
[00:11:07] And really as business owners, often we're multi passionate people, right? And I think this is such a gift as a business owner. We're creative. We have all these ideas that we wanna implement, but it can often lead to us feeling super overwhelmed. Where we are trying to do too many things all at once. And as one of our past guests, Taylor, on the podcast, she said, you know, you can do anything you want, but just not all at once and not all by yourself.
[00:11:39] So, this is really key because you might have seasons of your business where you're scaling one aspect of the business. And then, you know, the next quarter you're focusing on something else. If you try to scale too many things all at once, or you try to be on too many platforms all at once and scale them all, you're gonna end up feeling so incredibly burnt [00:12:00] out. And you're also just gonna be overwhelmed with the amount of tasks that you have to do, and you're not gonna make the same impact or progress in any of those areas, right? Because if you have one focus for a certain amount of time, you're able to put all of your time, all of your energy into that, make that successful, then move on to the next project.
[00:12:21] all right. We are actually going to pause here. I've decided that we're gonna have this as a two part series. I realize sometimes it's better to have less information. And so you guys can really soak in these first five things that I personally would've done differently if I were starting my business from scratch today, you can do some reflection in your own life, in your own business and really figure out like, what can you implement?
[00:12:50] So choose one thing from today's episode that you can potentially implement into your business today and tomorrow, I'm going to [00:13:00] release the next episode with the next five things. So I'm really excited to see you on the podcast tomorrow for the next five things. In the meantime, reflect on these five things.
[00:13:12] Again, I will go from number one is always put your values first. Then number two, getting clarity on who you wanna serve and creating products and services that directly solve their problems. Number three is building a business can be lonely. So finding a community who you can connect and collaborate with, who can support you. Then number four is streamline and prioritize your profitable action steps. And number five is focus on one main project at a time and scale that so that you don't get distracted by a million different shiny objects.
[00:13:48] so those are the first five. I can't wait to connect with you in our next episode tomorrow for the next five until then have an incredible rest of your day. And we'll see you tomorrow.[00:14:00]
[00:14:04] If you love this episode, make sure you screenshot post and tag us on Instagram at business babes co. Want to know when the next episode goes live? Subscribe on your podcast app, and while you're there, give us a review. Until next time, keep dreaming big, setting goals, and taking action.