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Today’s talking points:

I’m running through three stages of business growth. Identify the stage you’re at and feel confidence knowing what to focus on.

Download The Solopreneur’s Growth Playbook

Welcome to a brand new series here on the podcast called “The Path to Predictable Income” where we focus on ways to grow your business!

Over the next 5 episodes, I am going to walk you through 5 steps to help you create steady, consistent income to grow your business, so you can get out of the feast or famine cycle for good.

Here’s something that a lot of my clients and students, when they first start working with me, they have in common.

They say: “I've taken training after training after training, and it feels like I'm constantly shifting direction, I’m going round in circles and as a result, I'm just not getting where I want to go.”

Have you ever felt that way? If so, this one is for you.

you need to do this first…

If you want to make sure you're not just wasting time trying out a million different strategies and a million different approaches to grow your business. Instead you want a strategy that makes sense for you and your business, then the stages I share here will be super helpful for you.

The honest truth is that not all strategies are meant for every business owner. The strategy that makes the most sense for you right now truly depends on your stage of business. Many of the most popular strategies that are talked about, especially in the online space, are meant for people who are a bit further along in their business.

So for example, I hear from business owners all the time who are focused on creating an automated webinar funnel and they want to create sales funnels. But they don't even have a brand or a business strategy, or a proven offer in place. It's kind of like they've trained to run the marathon to run before they can walk.

When you try to skip these foundational pieces of your business, you are setting yourself up for a lot of frustration. You have to do the foundational work required first, to make sure that those strategies actually get results. There’s no shortcut to real, sustainable success. And you have to start first by building a solid foundation.

I’m going to walk you through each of the business growth stages so you can figure out where you are on this journey and what you should focus on to level up. I'll give you a quick summary here, but you can grab the full playbook with detailed insights on each stage.

stage one - The starter stage

Stage one is the starter stage. The stage we all go through. Just like you can't skip the toddler phase of life, you can't avoid laying down the foundational blocks before you start to grow your business. Now, real talk – this is perhaps the toughest phase of being a business owner. It's where many get stuck, and sadly, some never make it past this initial stage, they get stuck here and give up.

The focus in the start stage is validation. If you find yourself in this phase, your top priority is to validate your business idea and your products or services. Without taking the time to confirm that people are willing to pay for what you offer, you'll run into roadblocks when attempting high-level strategies. All the fancy marketing and sales tactics won't save your business if people aren't interested in what you're offering.

How do you validate your products, programs, and services? The simplest way is to talk to people – real, live human beings. There's no authentic validation without having actual conversations. Having meaningful conversations is crucial to understanding what your dream clients and customers truly desire and are willing to invest in.

Now, if you're service-based, your top marketing and sales strategy in this stage is likely to be one-on-one. Let's be honest, you're in business to make money, not just to have a hobby. You need a profitable venture that pays you a decent income, and you need it soon. No one has years to waste, right?

So, how do you start raking in revenue during your business's infancy? The quickest path to cash often involves one-on-one marketing and sales. I get it; everybody's raving about list building, launching, content marketing, webinars, and more. While those strategies are designed to help you grow an audience and scale your sales, they take time to yield results.

Think about it this way: If your goal is to generate £5,000 in sales for your business, focusing on one-on-one conversations with potential clients means you only need to enroll five clients into a £1,000 program, product, or service to hit your revenue goal. One-on-one sales conversations usually convert well, often seeing one in four conversations turning into paying clients. So, you'd only need 20 potential client conversations to secure five clients.

On the flip side, imagine trying to sell that same £1,000 offer through a webinar. Most online marketing strategies like webinars or sales emails average around a 2% conversion rate. Yes, you'll hear about folks claiming 8% or even 20% conversion rates, but that's not the norm. So, if you're converting at 1-2%, you'd need 500 webinar attendees to secure just five sales.

So, let me ask you, what's easier at the start when you are trying to grow your business? Having conversations with 20 people to get five clients or wrangling hundreds to a webinar, praying for a 1-2% conversion rate to hit the same target?

Starting with one-on-one marketing and sales in the early stages can quickly fill your coffers. It takes the financial stress out of the equation and sets you up for later leverage strategies. My aim for you is to breeze through the startup phase as swiftly as possible, no matter what you're offering. I've witnessed people power through this phase in just a few months when they commit to validating their product, program, or service for the right people, at the right price.

Head to the Solopreneur's Growth Playbook where I'll guide you through exactly what it takes to validate your ideas and secure your first paying clients or customers.

stage two - The success stage

The success stage is one many people are happy to stay in.

This is where you can create a very comfortable lifestyle business that is focused on doing work that you love, and paying your bills with ease. And when I say a lifestyle business, I mean one that pays you a great salary, where you love doing the work that you do every single day. And it's not about building a massive team or a massive business. It's really about funding your dream lifestyle. So your focus in the success stage is gaining experience. As you shift out of the starter stage and into the success stage.

As you move beyond the startup phase and into success, the good news is that you've already validated something - you have a product or service that people want to buy. Congratulations! Now your attention turns to refining what you offer.

One common mistake that can hinder progress toward a predictably profitable business is frequently launching new programs or services. Some entrepreneurs create, fill, and run a program, only to pivot and ask, "What's next?" This constantly puts you on a new learning curve and prevents you from mastering anything.

Take inspiration from successful business owners. They create signature offerings, fine-tuning them with each iteration. They learn how to market their offerings, improve their marketing strategies, collect case studies, and showcase their clients' successes. This is how you transform and grow your business into an asset capable of generating substantial revenue over the long haul.

In the success stage, you might encounter the feast or famine cycle. Now that you're officially in business, clients come and go, and you're juggling various tasks, which can be overwhelming, especially if you're a solo business owner managing everything yourself.

To break free from this cycle, it's essential to establish systems, especially in marketing and sales. During this stage, your marketing and sales strategy evolves from one-to-one to one-to-many. You may shift from primarily marketing and selling your offerings individually to strategies that reach a broader audience.

This shift could involve expanding from networking and referrals to content creation, growing your email list, appearing on podcasts, or writing guest posts. These strategies help you build a larger audience and grow your business. As your audience grows, you might transition from one-on-one sales conversations to more leveraged strategies.

stage 3 - scale stage

The final stage, stage three, is the scale stage. This is when you're ready to transition from a lifestyle business - one that supports your ideal lifestyle and provides a great salary - to a multi-six-figure business.

It's essential to understand this, even if you're not aiming for it. Making the shift from the success stage, where you're paying yourself a comfortable salary and your business is predictably profitable, requires a change in mindset.

In the scale stage, you are no longer a solopreneur; you need to think like a real CEO, a boss, a business owner. This means getting out of your own way and implementing new infrastructure behind the scenes. You must upgrade your business's infrastructure, including your team. No one operating a multi-six-figure business is doing it as a solopreneur. They all have a team, even if they're not employees; they may be contracted. No one runs a business of that size 100% on their own.

In this stage, your focus is on growth. You have a proven product, program, or service that delivers tangible results to your clients. You can scale this offering to generate more sales without working additional hours. This means your offering is more leveraged or passive. You've optimised it so that clients get real results. You've already promoted this offering, so you know the necessary marketing and sales strategies. You've mapped out a customer experience plan so that you can serve more people, and your team can assist in delivering the product, program, or service without you needing to work more hours. You can serve 100 or 1,000 people as easily as 10 with this offer.

However, it's important to note that there's a misconception that scaling is only possible for coaches or with passive products. In reality, you can scale a service-based business by bringing on additional team members to deliver those services. For instance, if you provide copywriting services, you can scale by having other team members write copy for clients. The challenge in this scaling stage often centres on the business model change. As you shift into this final stage of business growth, building systems and structures capable of marketing, selling, and serving many people simultaneously becomes essential - you need to be able to market, sell and serve to a lot of people at once

One of the things that, unfortunately, I see with people who pursue this stage, without thinking about the internal infrastructure of the business is that they actually blow up the business. They may get really great at marketing and selling the thing but if they don't have the customer service nailed in place, they don't have the customer experience set up, and they don't have enough people on the team to manage all the different moving parts to deliver a product programme or service, they end up with a lot of unhappy people because they can't service as many people as they are selling to.

We have to make sure that these things are growing together. We have to make sure that that infrastructure is in place to support the growth.

Let’s recap

So those are the three stages of business growth you can find in the Solopreneurs Growth Playbook.

Stage 1: Starter Stage

Focus: Idea validation and foundations.

Stage 2: Success Stage
- Focus: Profitability and refinement.
Stage 3: Scale Stage
- Focus: Multi six-figure growth. Expand without overworking, think like a CEO.

This applies to any business, it's just all about customising it in a way that works best for you.