Welcome to episode 327 of Hit The Mic with the Stacey Harris.
Today, I want to talk about three things you need to know about your business. As we sort of refresh for the new year, and as we close up this year, there are a few things that sometimes in the course of running our business we forget, we don’t give stock to. Today, I want to cover those three things. It’s going to be a short, quick one, because I want you to take action on this stuff. Again, I want you to make sure you’re sitting down and evaluating these pieces, because they will feed into all of the stuff we talk about in literally every other episode. Certainly going into some of the episodes we’re going to have in January, I want you guys to have these foundations in place of knowing this stuff. It’s easy to say, “I’m in year two, three, seven, ten. Of course I know this stuff.”
Are these choices the same as they were the day you made them the first time? Are you in the same place? Are you aligned with the people who you’re talking to now? All of those things. Let’s jump in. Okay, so the first thing I want you to know about your business is what are your goals? What are you doing? What are you building? Why are you building it? I don’t just mean this from a, “Oh, I want to make a million dollars,” or, “Oh, I want a six-figure business,” or whatever variation of that you’re hearing all over the place right now. What I’m talking about is your lifestyle goals, the impact you want to have on the world, those goals. The time you want to spend with your friends and family, those goals. The time off you want to take, the trips you want to take, where you want to live, what you want your life and your business to look like, those goals.
Because what you are doing right now may not serve them. This is something that I came face to face with really early in my business. It was the cause of a lot of change. I’ve ran into it a couple times. When I first opened my first business, which was a virtual assistant practice. About a year into that I realized that the business I had created wasn’t at all aligned with my goals. Then, I evolved and I started Hit The Mic Marketing, which is of course now The Stacey Harris. Again, I ran into a situation where doing what I was doing was not aligned with the goals I had for my life. I was never going to hit my income goals in that business model. I evolved further into The Stacey Harris, and now I’ve got Hit The Mic Backstage, and we do consulting on a much more limited basis, because it allows me to take the time.
We’re putting staff in place for next year, so that again, Charles and I can both take the time to be fully unplugged and still supporting our community and still generating revenue and still doing what we need to do to keep the train a-moving, if you will. Look at your goals. What are your goals and does your business model serve it? Does your pricing serve it? Because you might find a disconnect. You may have had a really successful year on paper when you talk money, but were you happy with your business? Is it aligned with the goals for what you want? Pay attention to that.
Number two, clients. Yes, this one’s a really important one. Unfortunately, it’s one of those ones that sometimes we skip over. In the interest of hitting those financial goals, we will set aside, we will lower the priority of some of the more focused projects on our goals and who we want to work with, and how we want to serve them in the interest of it being a really great payday, it being a really big spike in our revenue. I want you to make sure that you are still serving the people you want to serve. For me, this meant shifting … This was a big reason behind the push of Hit The Mic Backstage.
I had certain revenue goals, but I also had a very specific group I wanted to serve. I want to be able to serve the people who couldn’t afford to bring on a strategist, who couldn’t afford to have a strategy custom-built for them, who couldn’t afford to be losing hours every month trying to figure out, on their own, what they needed to be doing and what they needed to be paying attention to. I created Backstage so I could save people time, so I could save people money, and so I could serve the people who needed it most, and often have the hardest time affording it, which is those people who are in the first one to five years of their business.
Make sure that what you’re doing is serving the people who you want to serve. Now again, those aren’t my only clients. We have clients who are much further along in their businesses, and that’s who we do consulting for, and we’ve done some consulting for start-ups and things like that. I love those projects. They’re so much fun, but I also like being able to serve that first group. We have different sets of offerings, and we have different parts of our business that serves those different communities. Again, we’re able to serve the people we want to serve in the way that they need us, and we’re also able to hit those revenue goals. You’re seeing how these are kind of tying in together.
Look at who your clients are. Again, not just, and I talk about this all the time, not just the name, rank, serial number stuff, but who are they? What do they need from you? Why are they looking to you? Where else are they looking? What are they not getting when they’re looking at those other places? What are the things that you know about them that they don’t know about themselves? By that I mean the stuff that you solve, that missing piece that they just can’t find. What’s that thing? Because that’s what they need, and that’s what they need you to talk to them about. Pay attention to those clients.
Wrap up this three things episode, I want you to revisit your what. What exactly is it you do? I was actually asked this recently, and I was like, “I don’t know how to talk about it anymore.” I always say I’m a social media strategist and trainer, which is what I am, but that’s not what I do. What I do is I help people build communities that build their business. That’s what I do. Look at what it is you do, and is it clear? Does anybody but you know what you do? Do you know what you do? Look at that what. That what is also going to bleed into those offerings. Like I talked about the reason we launched and structured Hit The Mic Backstage. That came … That was a big look at our goals and our clients, and then figuring out what it is we needed to do to serve them, and what it was we needed to create to serve them.
Your what is very much so going to be you offerings. What are you launching next year? What are you selling? How are you serving those people that need you, those clients that we talked about in the second piece. How does that set you up to reach those goals when we talked about the first piece, because again, we want to make sure that those offerings, that what serves not just our financial goals, but our lifestyle goals, our overall business development goals. Make sure that checks all the boxes previously mentioned. Take some time and look at your what. What problems are you solving? What it is you do.
It’s so important. All right? All right, that’s it. Just to recap quickly, look at your goals, look at your clients, and look at your what. It’s going to be really, really helpful going into 2017, especially if right now you’re hearing a lot of people talk about their plans, and what they’re going to do, and they’re going to roll this out and [fa-da-la-la-la 00:08:48]. You’re like, “I don’t know.” Take a step back and look at these things. If you get disconnected over the course of 2017, or 2018, or whenever it is that you’re listening to this, make sure that you step back to these things and get clear. Come back to center and go, “Oh, yeah, this is it. This is my goals. This is who I serve. This is how I serve them. This is what I do.”
It’s always really helpful when you start to feel like you’re getting too far left, okay? All right, if you want to go even further, you want to connect with me, you want to connect with the community, the logical next step to upgrading your podcast experience is joining us backstage. Check out HittheMicBackstage.com for all the details on what’s inside of there, and of course to get connected to the community. I will see you backstage.
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