Five Things I Learned My Fourth Year of Business: Part 4

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 calendar says everything you need to know about the future of your business. Is it filled with busywork or is it moving your growth?

Lesson #4: Daily Actions Build Your Business

There’s a little-known addiction in entrepreneurship: an addiction to the launch.

It’s very exciting to come up with a new idea. And it’s very exciting to get other people excited about your new idea. This excitement is perfectly parodied in the final season of Succession when Kendall Roy tries to start his own media company.

Kendall is the embodiment of the launch addiction. If you never have to put your plan into action, you can stay in the ethereal realm of “ideation” and “innovation” and never put your idea to the test.

You can have the energy of “business” without actually doing business.

As long as you live in hype-mode, you never move into action, which involves creating a plan. Breaking things down into actions, habits, processes, and policies.

It’s unsexy, and it’s how businesses work.

And while launch-addiction can keep you from the real work that builds a business, so too can filling your calendar with tasks that look productive, but don’t advance your business.

This is the real test of a business owner. You work for yourself so you can have control over your time and schedule. This also means you need the discipline to build it with the right actions. Here are two daily processes I’ve created this year to make sure I’m on track every day.

My To-Do List

Every morning, I create an event in my calendar and write out that day’s to-do list. I break it into three categories:

Me

Clients 

New Business

It reminds me of the three priorities that make up my business. First, there’s my well-being. Entrepreneurship can wipe out your healthy habits if you let it. The “Me” category reminds me to take care of myself first. Usually the first order of the day is exercise. If I’ve managed a morning workout, I check it off first thing. Or I leave it open as a reminder to get in some movement, even if it’s a long walk with the dog at the end of the day.

The “Me” category can also include any appointments or errands to factor into my day. It’s also where I include any creative projects, like writing this blog series or working on my podcast. These remind me to mark the ways my business serves me; the creative fulfillment and ability to pay for regular errands and self-care.

The next category I work on is “Clients”. Are there deliverables due? Is there a coaching session or check-in meeting? If there are no client-facing tasks or deadlines, I will think about a service that needs testing or improving. Is there a better way to serve?

The final category is “New Business”. Every day I try to do at least one task that moves forward the three key areas of business development: awareness, nurture, decision. Most days I’ll do something under all three categories. But if my schedule is “Client” heavy, or “Me” heavy, I’m happy if just one category is served.

This focus ensures my day is spent on the three key aspects of my business: me (the product and glue that holds it all together), clients (the source of revenue coming in) and business development (ensuring a steady stream of revenue coming in). And to make sure the tasks in the final category are quality tasks, I have my other tracker.

Sales and Marketing Tracker

For every day that I complete a task in one or all of the parts of securing business, I track the specific actions: who I reached out to, how, and what was the result.

At the top of this spreadsheet is the ongoing update of closed business - how many clients are signed up for different services. And my close rate. 

If you’ve never calculated your close rate, it’s the number of closed sales divided by the number of sales calls in a given time period. I track the close rate per quarter, so I can look at a glance what outreach leads to what engagement, which leads to sales calls and closed sales.

Similar to my approach for marketing, I look at what is working and do more of that. Who is booking sales calls and how can I get more of that?

These daily actions are more of a slow-burn sexy. It’s not obvious at first, but once you start to see the patterns and results of these daily actions, that’s when the real fun starts. And when you can use these tools to identify key pivots you need to make in a changing economy??? I will take that energy over empty hype any day!!!!