What Do I Need to Focus on to Grow My Expert-Based Business?

So, what do you need to focus on to grow your business? Have you asked yourself that question?

Don wrote in this past week and said:

“Hey, Jeanine! I’m a process improvement consultant and I want to grow my audience so that I can fill my workshops. When I open my inbox, I see a lot of people telling me to do different things to grow my business, so does that sound a little bit familiar? I started a podcast, I’m writing a weekly blog post, and I’m working on creating some videos to grow my list, but nothing seems to be gaining traction. What do you recommend?”

First thank you Don, for sending your question in.

I absolutely get where you are with this because the number one thing we have to constantly battle as small business owners is overwhelm — and it’s really easy to get into overwhelm.

There are two things you can ask yourself to get out of overwhelm and identify what your power move is so you can get your business moving forward as fast as possible.

1. Do you have a cash priority?

A cash priority is a nice way of saying, “I’m not really sure where the revenue is coming from 3 months from now, 6 months from now, or maybe even next month.”  A cash priority tells us that the focus we need to have on our business is to go out and get more clients.

As experts like us who have businesses where we’re supporting people and getting results, that might mean I need to go get one-on-one clients. Getting one-on-one clients is one of the fastest ways to bridge the gap in a cash priority.

If you have an online course or offer workshops, it might mean getting more people into those as your #1 key priority in your business right now.

Once you have the cash priority handled and you’ve got that threshold revenue coming in, then you can ask yourself the second question.

2. Do you have a way to serve one-to-many?

So a lot of people talk about leverage…but what I mean by leverage is, do you have a way to serve your clients without you having to be involved?

Do you have a way you can generate revenue without having to connect with someone, sell it to them one-on-one, or deliver what you’ve sold one-on-one?

When you have a leveraged product like this, you are creating what most of us signed up for when we started our businesses.

When you went to start your business, what were the things that you really, really wanted to create? Most of the entrepreneurs that I talk to wanted to create more freedom when they started their businesses.

This freedom creates the space to do the things that are really, really important to us. That can be anything — like share our work in a bigger way, spend time working on the projects that really fuel us, or hire rockstar teammates to help us reach our goals.

Freedom to do those things comes from having a leveraged product.

Freedom to spend time working on projects that fuel us comes from having a leveraged product. Click To Tweet

When you’re thinking about your next power move, ask yourself:  

1. Do I have a cash priority? If I do, I need to go out and generate revenue fast, which means getting more clients. 

2. If I have the cash priority handled, then my focus should be on creating a leveraged product.  

Once you have those two things handled then it makes sense to work on getting more people into your work, increasing your reach, and growing your traffic. It makes sense to move to these types of business-building activities after you have these two priorities handled because they are long-term strategies to grow your reach.

When you start getting those clients, it’s really important that once you have your cash priority handled, you move quickly into creating a product that’s going to allow you to scale faster. The faster you move to creating leverage, the bigger your reach is going to be, the bigger the impact of your work, and the more space you’re going to create to do the things that you’re really, really here to do.  

So the question I have for you as you think about this: What is your power move? Do you want to focus on generating quick revenue gains by bringing in more clients? Or are you ready to move onto creating a leveraged product?  

Share with me in the comments what is showing up for you.