The topic today is this: anti growth – bigger isn’t always better and why I think as a business, you should stay small. 

This topic kind of came from this book I’ve been reading called “Company of One” by Paul Jarvis – 10/10 recommend buying this book! The byline *actually* says “Why staying small is the next big thing for business.”

This book really got me thinking and made me feel so validated in the way I do business – and I hope to do the same here!

I definitely took some of the similar concepts and applied them to a previous program I ran and it was so successful. It’s actually a lot to do with how I believe business should be run and actually how I ran my former business!

So if you don’t know, I formerly owned and operated a marketing agency. And now I am a mentor, a brand consultant and a Showit Web designer (hello multipassions!) Call me the Creative Director – I do It all. 

Back to this book, though, Paul talks about staying small, the importance of staying small and how that is the driving force behind a profitable and sustainable business. 

Now, why do I think staying small is important?I had an agency before the business I have now and I sold that agency. I never really saw this agency being this massive, massive thing. I think I thought that that’s what I wanted, but I never saw that for myself. It was behind this foggy cloud of like, okay, but how do you get there? And is that even sustainable? To be completely transparent, I was still trying to understand the agency model myself.

I definitely didn’t want a seven-figure agency with a hundred employees, that was not on my to-do list. 

Like… that sounds like too much stress for me, and I just remember seeing the turnover in the agency I worked in and just thinking, I don’t think that’s what I want for myself. 

So, I wanted it to be boutique, but how “boutique” was boutique? These were things I was having issues defining. 

What I didn’t know at the time was that what I really wanted was sustainability. 

I wanted to stay small before I even knew that staying small was cool or that staying small was profitable and sustainable before this online space really exploded. 

Have you ever heard of “more money, more problems?”

More money does not always equal more profit and profit is what deems a business successful. In fact, in the eyes of the IRS, if your business is not profitable, it is a hobby. It’s not a business. 

When you are in this growth mindset of like, I want to grow, I want to grow, I want to grow, I want to scale… you often neglect or forget about your bottom line, or you’re just constantly thinking about adding people to the team and the profit margins, not really growing. And we don’t want that. 

So with that being said, in entrepreneurship, there is a lot of pressure to join coaching programs and work with mentors. It seems to me like the content I’m even seeing, there’s so much pressure to grow as a business. 

No one talks about being honest about how long that takes, or what that even means, or why you should grow. 

I’m anti-growth here. And I preach that it’s not realistic to have this rapid growth right away. 

I balanced a corporate job and my business for multiple years before I was even able to take off as my own business, and be my own business. And I actually ended up scaling back when I went full time! That’s okay, too. 

It’s just full transparency. But there’s some things I want you to think about, and then I’m also going to go into four big tips for how you can get to a place of achieving and sustaining, while not growing, growing again. But before we do that, I’m anti-growth for a reason. 

What about sustaining a  lifestyle you love, right? People don’t normally – I feel like people don’t want to think about that. Entrepreneurs don’t think about that when they’re like, “I just

need to have a business. I need to grow it.” 

What about sustaining a lifestyle that you love? 

For me, that meant keeping a nine to five for a little bit to continue to be able to have really good health insurance and security. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There are some people who are like, no, but entrepreneurship is more security. You can get health insurance that way, but that’s a lot, that’s a lot to like jump ship and say, okay, I’m going to find health insurance, or I’m going to do all these things that are very uncomfortable now. 

Newsflash – you can ease into that. And that’s what I chose. And it worked really well for me!

You also need to be satisfied with what gives you the life that you want as a business owner. 

So it made sense to me to quit my nine to five, when I had a stable, sustainable income in my business and could continue the lifestyle I had, I didn’t have to scale back. So that looked like working 60, 70 hours a week there for a little bit, until I could get to the place of like, “okay, I’ve retained business. I can predict the next six months.” Great. I’m ready to scale back. 

Lastly, I found that most companies who place an emphasis on growing bigger neglect becoming better (I’ll let that sink in for a second).

So what that really means, and what I’m trying to get at with this, is that customer and client experience truly become neglected because you’re so focused on the potential clients and not the current ones when you are in this  “to grow” mindset. So as a result, client retention suffers. 

There’s a lot of tension in the workspace because things fall through the cracks. When you are constantly in a grow, grow, grow, add, add, add, state of mind and then you have to think about hiring people to fulfill, or have to plan your business around your personal life because you took on a new project… Many things start to suffer, and becoming a better business is what is going to ensure client retention and customer loyalty, which become the driving sales force for your business. 

So how do you get to a place of achieving and sustaining and being really happy, while of course always pushing to be better? 

 

Number one, step back. 

Step back and truly define what is going to make you happy in life. What is going to meet your needs? 

I always say, you need to put yourself first. You need to be selfish first. What do you want out of this? Because at the end of the day, you need to be happy and you need to be getting what you want in order to not burn out in order to sustain your business. So instead of focusing on growth and buyouts and employees, I suggest you focus instead on stability, simplicity, and dependence, becoming as profitable as you can. 

For me, that looks like maintaining zero debt in my personal life, it looks like providing a kick-ass client experience

As told by my themed programs and the way I deal with my clients, it looks like being able to travel without worrying about the funds to get there or having debt. 

It looks like raising a child and being able to send her to private school if I want to, it looks like giving my dogs a happy life. 

Number two, you want to create a plan for your business, a realistic plan, and you don’t want to marry that. 

Don’t marry that plan because then you’re going to be absolutely heartbroken when things don’t work out. So with that, I recommend documenting your thoughts, processes, strategies, all of those things. 

Those couldn’t be more important on a path to sustainable business. Especially if you’re steering your business at ship with a crew! If there are people helping you, whether it’s contractors or employees, to have everybody on the same page is so, so, so crucial. 

Much of the success of what I do on the mentorship side of my business comes from being an avid planner, but not marrying those plans, what I just talked about. This allows me to move and pivot and change with buyer habits and needs. 

Third thing I recommend you do is assess your sales cycle. 

Uunderstanding how your consumers and potential clients think is so incredibly important. 

I feel like in marketing and mentorship and coaching, like it’s a little bit beat with a dead horse that you should be doing market research, and you should be having conversations with clients and potential clients, but it’s so true. You need to document what causes them to buy, and what’s important to them in their lives. 

What turnover is happening in your business, and why do you need to assess why aren’t clients staying? Or why am I not able to sell them? Where are the opportunities to upsell downsell, cross, sell? What happens with all of that? That is all super, super important and that will tell you so much in your business.

What you need to do is document that sales cycle from top to bottom from when they discover you as a business, to when their time with you is near completion, come back and assess frequently often. And you’ll be able to find new ways to ensure that client retention, I guarantee. 

The last thing, the last thing, is becoming obsessed with data.

I have a background in insights and reporting from some agency work I did. When I first entered the working world, and then when I went part-time, I was in charge of taking insights, and tracking campaigns. When they were over I was responsible for reporting on them and saying here’s what happened, but not just saying “here’s what happened,” saying how it happened or why it happened – and then being able to provide thoughts and recommendations for them, to move forward with their campaigns. 

You need to do the same thing in your business. And I would say this has totally helped me in succeeding, sustaining, and scaling my own businesses, constantly being on top of what is happening inside of them, drawing insights, and making changes. There is just such a need to document your sales and marketing data often. 

To grow as a business, costs the business so much more than client retention, if that makes sense. 

So constantly being out there and in marketing, having conversations, if you really think about it,  the ROI on that is so, so freaking important. If you are constantly out there, but not assessing the clients you currently have in trying to retain those and keep those happy, I guarantee you are going to find that you are spending a lot more money – and time is also money – so please think of that. 

The focus should be on retaining because your current clients are your number one salesforce. 

They’re your number one driver of new and repeat business. Absolutely important to think of that on the client attraction side, the success of your marketing efforts directly ties in with client acquisition. And that will tell you where you really need to be spending your time. So many entrepreneurs neglect this, and they’re spending so much time podcasting, on Instagram, on LinkedIn. 

Let’s say if you’re putting all their time on Instagram, wondering why your leads are running dry, or wondering why they don’t have a lot of  business coming in from there, well look first of all at your current clients. 

How are you able to keep them happy? 

How can you  incentivize them to refer business to you, whether it’s through your good services, or through some program that you have? 

What’s happening there? 

Business moves really quick and you have to have to be able to adapt to changes.

You have to be able to pivot at the last minute. I have what I call a graveyard of un-launched programs and things that I thought were, a good fit. And it wasn’t actually the right fit.

One program was around in-person relationship building and networking, and this was right before people were comfortable even going out into the online space, or going outside of the online space to look for business and go to networking events. People weren’t ready for it. No one was really talking about it. So I had to spend a lot more time educating. I wasn’t meeting people in a place where they were problem aware, solution aware, and I was way behind. 

So what ended up happening is I spent a lot of time and a lot of money trying to attract clients for that program, when that was not what people were looking for. Therefore, it’s really important to be able to adapt to those changes. Pivot, move and meet people, meet your consumers, where are they are at.

I’m actually really excited to be launching a signature program around this, looking at that data, looking at insights, knowing what to do with that, teaching you how to assess your sales and marketing data, and really craft a plan for what’s next in your business. That’s why my business is still going, that’s why I have client referrals from years ago that are still coming back to me. 

It’s not just the way I treated them, but it’s the way that I built my business. The way my business model works. It’s because I am constantly assessing sales and marketing data!

If you’re interested in learning more, click here.

So I want to close this out by saying the goal is to get to a place where growth is a choice. You don’t need to certainly be in this place of feeling like you have to grow, you have to scale – that doesn’t need to be shoved down your throat anymore. 

If you are happy with your business, if you are happy with your revenue, great! 

How can you continue to innovate internally, so that you’re not bored, but at the same time, if you have enough profit and you want to choose to grow, you can also grow. Or if you want to go back to a part-time job, you can do that while your business just sits there and kicks and continues to bring in business for you. 

Otherwise you don’t have to do what everyone else around you is doing, or telling you what to do. 

You don’t have to sit in a place where you’re constantly chasing high targets, where you’re shelling out marketing dollars and wondering when you’re going to see ROI, or thinking “is this really going to work for me?” 

You want to be in a place where you can look at different areas of your business with a clear mind to decide which you’re ready to scale. What’s it going to take in order to do so where you are turning enough profit to be able to choose what your next move is? 

I think that is so powerful and so important – and you can do so without worrying about the fun.