Five Things I Learned My Fourth Year of Business: Part 3

Four years ago I registered my business: McEwen Media Consulting. I had no idea what this business would be or what a consultant does. And I couldn’t begin to fathom how much this process would change me. Every year as I mark the anniversary of this pivotal decision, I share five lessons I learned about myself and my business.

This year was the most challenging, so it’s hard to boil the learnings down to five. But as I always tell my clients, share publicly the pain you have processed and learned from. Keep everything else to yourself until it’s the right time to share.

A lot of these learnings have come up in my conversations with other business owners in my new podcast Pivotal. Be sure to subscribe to the McEwen Media YouTube channel to receive new episodes every Tuesday starting May 13.

Your business will always need tweaking, tooling, and improving. Be careful this doesn't lead you to believe your business is broken, flawed, or beyond repair.

Lesson #3: Find What’s Working And Do More of It

Building a business should be simple.

Step one, sell a product.

Step two, market this product. Find new ways to tell people this product is for sale.

Step three, amplify your marketing with media exposure (this is where I come in).

And yet so many businesses try to rush through all three steps; especially when there are so many digital marketing tools at our disposal and so many options to market ourselves.

1. Have a social media presence. Done.

2. Build a website. Done. 

3. Build a newsletter list. Done.

4. Sell to your audience. Crickets.

I can count on one hand (one finger, actually) the number of times someone has bought from me from social media alone. 

Every client has come from a referral. And yet I spent a lot of time and money trying to make a digital funnel for this same product.

This only slowed down a process that was already working.

At first, I felt like a failure. So many other businesses have figured out how to sell on social, why can’t I?

Then I remembered my TV days. It’s very easy to convince yourself that what you have created is a failure. Especially if the ratings support this.

Case in point, season 1 of The Marilyn Denis Show. I shared this anecdote in my recent Masterclass Power-Up Your Personal Brand. The first season we followed market research. We put together a format based on the dominant talk show trends at the time: an opening monologue, a celebrity interview, and some lifestyle stuff at the end.

This research ignored the fact that Marilyn Denis is not a trained comedian, like every other talk show that begins with a monologue. It ignored the fact that celebrities do not pass through the city of Toronto often enough to fill a daily talk show. And it ignored the fact that the established audience for that time slot with this host wanted one thing: lifestyle content.

In our rebuilding season, we threw out the research. What worked for other shows did not work for ours. So we started with our greatest strength: Marilyn Denis. The host with 30+ years experience and a Canadian legend. 

We built the show around her: what she liked, what excited her, and what guests she wanted to talk to. And as we developed the format that we would follow for more than a decade (winning multiple awards in the process) we continued to look at what was working.

Your business will always show you a mixed bag of results. There will be things that work and things that don’t. In the early years, where you’re experimenting with what you can do and what actually works for your business, focus on the things that are working. And do more of it.

I no longer judge myself for not selling on social media. That’s not where the brand is at right now (and it might never be). This year I’ve refocused on building a strong referral network. I’ve focused on connecting with marketing and PR companies to collaborate with and add value to their clients. There’s a referral program built into the website itself: https://www.mcewenmedia.ca/refer-friends

Sure I can keep trying to build a digital funnel constantly seeking out leads and qualifying them through a series of automated actions. Or, I can focus my attention on delivery quality results for clients knowing a happy client refers business to me just as easily.

And one day, when digital ads make more sense I’ll try that too. Until then, I keep looking for what’s working and doing more of that.