You don’t need a bigger audience.
Not what you expected to hear from me, right? Let me rephrase that. You don’t need to reach more people – at least, not yet.
This is something I hear a lot. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time, especially in my new Facebook group (if you’re not in it already, I’d love to have you! It’s called The Art of Streamlining and Scaling Your Business! I’d love to chat with you there. We do Facebook Lives and discuss tons of different topics like this.)
But when I talk to entrepreneurs, a ton of them say, “This is where I need to scale my business! I just need a bigger audience. I need to be featured somewhere, I need to run Facebook ads…” etc.
Sure, all of those things may be helpful for your business – depending on where you are.
You have to ask yourself this question: Is your business ready for a bigger audience?
One way to think about this is to imagine, if you were featured on Oprah tomorrow (or replace Oprah with any other massive traffic source), what would that do for your business? Would it be great? Would it do nothing? Or would it even break your business?
Are you truly set up for that kind of flood of traffic? I’m not just talking about if your website host can handle it. I’m talking about, do you have systems and processes in place to fulfill orders, whether digital or physical? Or, is the only way you’re selling and making money your one-on-one time? How scalable is that? Can you really get a flood of leads and turn those into customers? Well, no. There’s a limit to that, right? There’s only so much of you, and there are only 24 hrs in a day.
So I would argue that instead of focusing every minute of your workday trying to expand that audience, why don’t you setup the backend systems and make sure that you’re tidying them up in order to be able to scale?
Here’s a good analogy for this. Think of your business as a bucket, and think of traffic and leads and money as water. If our bucket is intact, then sure, turn on the faucet full-speed and let’s fill it up and, hey, let’s get another bucket while we’re at it. 🙂
BUT if your bucket is full of holes, all those leads (the “water”) are still not going to fill the bucket. It doesn’t really matter what kind of flood of leads or exposure or eyes you get on your website, you’re still not going to fill the bucket because it’s leaky. You have to spend some time filling those holes.
You can do that in several different ways, but bottom line is this:
You need to be able to leverage yourself so that your business is able to handle that scale.
I love to hire people, of course, but in addition to hiring – or even more important than hiring – you have to have systems in place. That will help those new hires help you operate your business so that you can remove yourself from the bottleneck and really scale your business to the moon.
If you want more tips on streamlining and scaling your business, please join us in the Facebook group! I would love to see you there.