One of my mentors once said to me – a business that only focuses on profit, will never be truly successful. But businesses that have a purpose greater than profit, well they are the truly successful businesses.
It got me to thinking – how many businesses consider social or moral responsibility as part of the purpose of their business. What good is your business doing to this planet? Or to people’s lives? Or does your business support a trend towards the greater good?
Or perhaps your business is actively involved in charity.
I consider these points to be really important in business, and something that we should all be considering.
These days they even have a name for this – a “woke brand”.
This can also include my other passion – eco and ethical manufacturing!
If your business has heart, and compassion, you will be more attractive to the right staff. You will be considered well in your community or industry. You will form relationships with other business and industry people, including media.
If you stay greedy, surely your luck will one day run out. I’d like to think so anyway.
Lisa x
P.S If you don’t know this about me – I have given years of my spare time to charities, including spear heading an entire movement to raise funds for a town in drought – this included more than $120k cash raised and 23 semi-trailers of feed sent to this town. You can watch me on the news here:
Doing the juggle all day? Feeling exhausted? Here are my TOP THREE TIPS to avoid the juggle struggle!
Hands up if you feel like every day is a juggle. Between kids, pets, husbands, work commitments, staff or stock or whatever is your particular flavour.
Yawn! Are you tired even thinking about it?!
Juggle jugglejuggle all day long.
Then you get home and you have to juggle the household! Homework, the dog throws up, what’s for dinner mum. All you want to do is sit in the corner and cry.
I have a LOT of tips to help you through the juggle struggle.
Here’s my TOP THREE TIPS to help you through this:
TIP ONE – Block your hours
This means you cluster your tasks and block out a routine during work time. Monday mornings should be planning and team meetings. Tuesday and Thursday afternoons between 1 and 3 should be financials, pay bills, do pays etc. Fridays are marketing creative days.
Or whatever order you want. But find some structure and cluster your tasks otherwise you will keep switching between different tasks and overwhelm yourself.
Everytime you switch between tasks and back again, you use up some of your precious energy. By blocking these tasks and sticking to it, you will feel relief and need to use less energy.
This can even include cooking 5 dinners on a Sunday night so you can spend your weekday evenings hanging with your kids instead of thinking – crap what’s for dinner!!
Get organised, create a routine, and stick to it!!
TIP TWO – Book some you time
Find one night a week and ask hubby if you can take it off from him and the kids, and stick to the same night every single week. On that night (I used to call it DFNO – Designated Family Night Off) I would go to the movies on my own. Catch up with girlfriends. Read a book in a cafe.
But stick to it every single week, and claim it as your own girlfriend. You deserve the time off.
And start it from 4pm so you really don’t have to leave frazzled at 6 and find it hard to unwind. Claim your time!
TIP THREE – Outsource baby!
Let me guess – you do a little bit of everything in your business, but feel like you don’t do many of them well…! That’s because you are not supposed to! Whoever told you to wear ALL the hats in your business? Did you guess that yourself??!
Well you shouldn’t wear all the hats! It’s way too exhausting!
Instead, you should get really crystal clear on the tasks you LOVE to do, and are good at, and outsource the rest. Other coaches call it finding your “genius zone”. The things you excel at, and are naturally talented at. You’ll know them because they are the FIRST things you do every morning.
It’s the things you leave till last that are the ones we need to flick to someone else. You leave them to last because you HATE doing them! Outsource them baby!
But you say to me – no one else can do it like I do – or I don’t trust other people.
Well I say – stop being a control freak. Do you want to go to an early grave?! The only reason you will ignore my advice here is if you have a good old dose of control freakiness. So I would say – oh ok, you do it all mama, no worries. But if you get close to a nervous breakdown, maybe come back and listen to my advice then…!!
For those of you open to this – here’s my advice.
Write a list of the things you LOVE to do in your business. Then for 2 full business days, on a separate piece of paper, write down every task that you do inside your business, and the ones you should have done but didn’t. We want a list of all the things that need doing in your business.
Once you have your list, go through and highlight the things you love to do, and then with the rest of the list, start to cluster them into topics. Ie – graphic design work. Bookkeeping work. Basic admin chores work. Etc Etc.
Then start to find people who can do these parts of your business BETTER than you. For example, you need to do social posts every day, and interact with your followers, and it takes hours and you hate it. It’s a chore. So find someone like the girls both Nik and I use in our businesses to do the posts, images and interactions FOR YOU. Outsource it baby.
But I don’t have the budget you say – I simply can’t afford it.
What is the opportunity cost in your business growth you are missing out on, by spending hours every day doing things you hate. How far off the ball are your eyes? You are likely missing new products you could launch, new marketing ideas you could implement, new sales channels you should have considered.
How much are you SLOWING down your business by doing your own socials, instead of FOCUSSING on the things that you will GROW your business instead?
At night, I can’t sleep. In the morning, I don’t want to wake up.
Urrghh can anyone else relate?
I literally used to have panic attacks in the middle of the night about cashflow in our business, which meant cashflow for our family too.
It is one of the most debilitating things you can experience.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
So, I’ve written out my thoughts on my TOP THREE TIPS for how to work on your cashflow crisis concerns.
TIP ONE – Go Lean or Go Home
Reduce expenditure everywhere you can. Ask your accountant or bookkeeper or business coach for ways you can reduce your monthly expenses even further.
Chances are that you can’t see areas that could be reduced. But a different set of eyes could.
I make it a habit to do this every 3 months in any business I run. It’s just smart business to operate lean.
To do this, I go to my accounting software and print out the last 3 months of cashflow summary. This is basically where all my dollars exited the business, not in detail, but in summary. I.e. $4382 to Google Adwords, $491 in Bank fees etc.
You want to see the totals.
Then go through this report in detail, and try and work out which bits you could reduce. Sometimes you don’t realise how high certain expenses end up, and it helps you cut them back. It’s one of the first things I do when I work one to one with a new client, we go through this report together and I ALWAYS find them thousands (or in certain cases tens of thousands of dollars) they can save!
Be ruthless, or get someone you trust to help you be ruthless! Cut back baby!
TIP TWO – Increase your Revenues
Look for ways you can smartly increase your revenues.
With the current economic climate being so volatile, you need to broaden your product offerings right now. Offer more to the same clients. Find new clients. Find new geographic areas. Find new things to sell them. Increase your offering and turnover.
Sometimes an extra few grand a month in revenue can make a HUGE difference to your bottom line.
If you can’t see ways to do this, ask your clients what they want to buy from you. Stalk your competitors (especially in the USA who are more forward in ecommerce than we are in Australia). Get a good coach or strategist who can see things you can’t see to help you.
TIP THREE – Get eyes on your numbers.
Do you know where every single dollar of your money is going in and out?
If you use Xero accounting software properly, you should have clear eyes on numbers. You should look at your reports regularly. I am a BIG fan of Xero, firstly because it’s the only accounting software designed for Business Owners (the rest were designed for accountants and book keepers) and secondly because it’s part of a larger ecosystem of software platforms that all talk to each other to automate your business easily and cheaply.
If you don’t have access to your numbers, then you need to update your accounting system, or your bookkeeper.
You should have a number of reports on your desk every week. Every single week, without fail.
This includes your daily sales, by channel, every single day. I can help you with ways to automate this. It might come from your online sales platform, or perhaps other software or team members. But your eyes must be on your sales (and comparing targets vs actuals EVERY SINGLE DAY).
This definitely also includes profit and loss statements from Xero so you understand your breakeven point in your business, and do everything you can to ensure you get past breakeven every single month.
In the olden days of 2019, we used to sell products based on the features and benefits. The pricing, the length, the colour options. But this has shifted, and we now need to shift with it!!
We are so short of time and attention and when we click on a website, we have mere moments while we decide – is this for me or shall I click off?
Therefore, if you are still selling on features and benefits, most of your traffic won’t even get to your features and benefits before they click off your website!!
So, Lisa, what do we do instead?
Well, my friends, great question!! You sell on the solution; on the transformation they will receive by buying your products!!
You show them how you will take their pain point, and give them a brand new day!! Because none of us open up our wallets unless we have a problem or a pain point and we need to fix it.
When your customer feels understood, when they know you get them, they will keep reading. And the aim of your website header and hero banner (anything above the fold) is to keep them scrolling down. Piqué their interest enough to stay looking. Phew! They want to know more!!!
In doing this, we position our products as the HERO to them, something that can solve their problem, and if this is positioned correctly, we can really gain buy in by our customers.
“OMG They GET me!!!!” is a common thing we hear when we position a brand correctly.
In addition, we want your customer to see YOU as the founder of the product as the HERO that created the HERO if you know what I mean!!
When all of this is done correctly, we allow our potential customers to feel really engaged with our brand, to spend the time on our websites browsing and to BUY from us!
When we continue to offer a warm, connected brand offering, and back it up with a WOW delivery on our products, we will bring those clients back again and again!
I joke that facebook ads are like playing the pokies. You have as much chance of being certain of an outcome of the pokies….well almost as much!!!
You’re obsessing over your ROAS on your Facebook Ads, and disappointed that the algorithm seems to have changed in the last month and your ads aren’t being seen by nearly as many people, yet your ad spend is still up.
It’s causing you sleepless nights, putting your hand into your hip pocket to spend money your brand doesn’t have, to grow sales you need!!
Welcome to the club of E-com brands desperate for sales!!!
Shall I share my 3 tips here?
Focus on converting the traffic you already have.
Now this doesn’t work for brand new businesses with no traffic, but if you are getting more than a few hundred hits a month anyway, this could work for you.
Many of my clients burn through cash driving traffic to a poorly performing website.
How good is your website? If you are under 2% conversion rate, not great to be honest. You would be better spending your time and money on your website and improving its copy / imagery / design to enhance your conversion rate. If you take your conversion from 1 to 2% you effectively double your sales numbers without driving a single extra person to your website!!!
Such an underutilised tool!
Can you generate Traffic from other sources without ad spend?
What would happen if you didn’t spend ANY money on cold, top of funnel Facebook ads and instead focussed on generating traffic via User Generated Content?
This means you have relationships and collaborations with your Brand Ambassadors, influencer friends and other brands and you create content to share that drives traffic to your website without any spend.
Genius, isn’t it?!
If you are going to spend money on ads, focus on Warm Ads.
Instead of spending the bucks on cold traffic generation, instead use your precious dollars to look at your warm traffic. Bring ads up for people who have visited your website, who have abandoned their carts, and those that interact with you on social media.
If you want these strategies AND MORE inside your business, join us inside our signature, world leading e-com program The Academy!
You’ve started an online brand but scratch your head each day wondering why you aren’t getting enough sales….
You KNOW your product is great, but you can’t quite figure out how to get everyone else to see that and buy from you. You sit there and hit refresh on your app every 5 minutes to see if there’s been any new sales…
You pay money every month to an agency to manage your FB ads, but you have noticed a sharp decline lately in sales and ROAS. You aren’t alone!!!
I’ve been there too. But I built a couple of million-dollar brands, and I have some tips to help you!
Hack # 1 –
If you are generating less than $10k per month in sales, it’s dangerous to base your traffic solely on FB ads. In fact, it’s unlikely you will have enough income to cover ads management and ad spend.
Instead, focus on free or low-cost traffic generating activities. Think cross brand collaborations, media, influencers, social giveaways and other strategies. In fact, we have a whole section of my program – The Academy – based on strategies to help you drive sales, without relying on the beast that is Facebook!!
Hack # 2 –
Chances are you have some organic traffic already coming to your website every month. Did you know that your conversion rate is likely to be something like 1-2%, which means that for every 100 people that hit your website, around 99 of those will leave again without buying!
Isn’t that horrifying!!! So, inside The Academy we focus on strategies to convert more of that traffic into sales, and share with you many hacks to get that traffic and drive it back to your website to buy!
Hack # 3 –
Spend your dollars on warm traffic nurturing instead. Rather than throwing money at cold traffic generation, and then having those leads walk about the back door again, focus on how to re-ignite warm traffic and turn them into sales. AND, with a similar theme, focus on how to WOW the pants off anyone who does buy from you, turning them into repeat customers and advocates of your brand! That’s less money you need to spend on cold traffic!!
For more hacks and strategies like this, join us inside The Academy – a world leading E-commerce program for women just like you! This 12-week program will change your business forever – and arm you with tools to understand how to grow your brand and pay yourself first.
