Don’t Grow It Alone
Hello, hello, and welcome back to Strategy Snacks. I am your business strategist, Frenchie Ferenczi, and I work with service-based entrepreneurs and creatives to really help them get their business to the next level of growth.
Today, I want to talk to you about the idea that you should not grow your business alone.
(Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a five to 10 minute pitch all about me and how I can help you grow your business, although I can, and I'm happy to chat with you about that.)
What I really want to dig into today is, how do you identify where you need help and when you need help? I want to talk about this in three different areas:
Where do you need tactical support?
Where do you need emotional support?
Where do you need mentorship?
I consider myself more in the mentor bucket, but there really are these three areas of support that I think are really essential to people's businesses and business growth. And more importantly, their ability to grow their business to the level that they want to grow it to.
First up, tactical support.
Almost every business owner I meet who has been a “solopreneur”, and I'm gonna put solopreneur in air quotes forevermore because none of us are really solopreneurs unless we're building a business in a cave somewhere. So most of those solopreneurs really struggle with this tactical support.
It's too early, it's too soon. Why should I have a VA? Why should I have any of that? So the thing that I really want to think about there is sometimes our initial hires are not like the VA or the marketing assistant or what have you, sometimes those initial hires actually free up our time. So my first employee in my business as I see it is actually our nanny who offers childcare to my children. Having a nanny and having someone that allows, you know, that takes care of my children, opens up my time to focus on my business. That is intrinsically connected to my business, and yet it's not, there's no online marketing for that, right?
So I think really understanding that sometimes those, that tactical support, that hands -on support can look a lot of different ways is really important. And really finding ways to bring those people on. Other places I see people do this, meal planning support, childcare, like I just said, house cleaning, dog walkers, all of those can be really, really valuable, helpful, and important ways to give you more time in your business.
So when I think of this tactical support and the fact that we don't really want to go without it, I really focus on how this opens up time for me to do my work. So that's bucket one.
Bucket two is the emotional support.
When I think about the emotional support, these are your therapists, your life coaches, your mindset coaches, all those people who really give you that boost and who can help you unpack some of the emotional journey and stuff that can clog up your business.
You know this about me. I'm not here to be like, your mindset is broken, blah, blah, blah, and I think a lot of those conversations are toxic. And yet, I am deeply immersed in therapy. I've been in therapy for 15 years. It has been enormously valuable to me. I understand and I fully believe that our emotional state has a direct impact on the state of our business. So finding the tools that are not looking to make you erase your mindset or whatever, but that are actually giving you pathways and channels to let both things exist at once are really, really valuable.
Then the third category is mentorship.
That can look like teaching, that can look like business coaching, that can look like strategy support, that can look like learning how to do really tactical specific things like how to make a good Instagram strategy or what have you.
So the mentorship piece is really where we see the most marketing around this idea of like, why would you grow it alone? I actually think and this is against my best interest. So just take that for what it's worth. I don't know that we always need those people in our business. When do I think that we do need those people? When do I think that you might need those people? What are the signs? 'm gonna start with the more tactical and then go into the less, kind of the more theoretical.
When we think about the more tactical, when do you need these supports?
When do you need to make these investments in your business? When there is a very specific skill or ability that you don't have that you believe you need to have in your business, right? So how to write really good landing page copy is a really good example. Again, back to that other example of Instagram strategies, if you want to launch a podcast… there are certain skills and abilities that other people have mastered that you can just learn from them and kind of skip some of the learning curve for yourself, which can be enormously valuable and helpful and can really fast track your results.
So that's one area where I'm like, yes, like get clear on your strategy, which is what I help with and then from there, figure out what are some of the skills and abilities that you need to complement in order to get to that next level, to actually implement and achieve the outcomes that you want.
Then we zoom out a little bit into the more generalized support.
So the reason that I'm so passionate about what I do is because I think about it as that first step. I think about it as that first layer. I'm this other set of eyes as you are building out a strategy and I can see what you can't see.
Now, the question of can you grow your business without that? 1,000%, but the other question more importantly is, I'm laughing because I'm like, this is not a great sales pitch, but I mean it. I do think people can grow their businesses without this. One, if you are a natural strategic thinker, then probably you can build your business without it. Also, there are people who are just more comfortable knowing that they're gonna take a longer winding road to get there.
Where I think about myself fitting into people's businesses is actually like, let's just say you can see the end goal and you can think of a path to get there and maybe it's long and winding, I can figure out the really quick and easy direct path to getting there. So that's where I can come in, because I can help you get on that more straight path.
But is that necessary? Would I go around being like, why would you ever take the longer path? No, you're going to learn a lot of stuff along that longer path. It just depends on your tolerance and patience to actually get your results at a different rate, a slower rate, and so on and so forth. So when we think about that mentorship, I think that's really, really important.
Where I want to be really cautious…
Just because a mentor or someone who is selling their services as a mentor and has had really good results themselves will often say, “I could have never gotten here without a mentor,” sometimes in that messaging, the question that I want you to ask and think about is, how many people have you worked with? How many people have successfully benefited from your work? Because what I see a lot is that we meet mentors or coaches, whatever you want to call them, who have a data point of one and it's themselves, that's not necessarily the person that's gonna be the most impactful and valuable for you. You might be lucky, but we really wanna think about someone who is more expansive in how they're thinking about your business.
TLDR;
When we're thinking about this idea of how we go about getting support in our businesses, I always like to deliver thought patterns that are going to help you make the decisions in your business.
So first think about, is this tactical hands-on support? Is this taking something off my plate and free up time and help me make decisions through that lens? Then also deciding what will I do with that time? Is there the emotional support that I need? The emotional, the psycho-spiritual, psycho-emotional support that will help me more effectively achieve my goals and outcomes? And then third, what is the mentorship I need that might be able to either help me up-skill and up-level or help me get to my end goal faster, more efficiently, and with more purpose?
And all that to say, I think we do need some form of support in all of these at different times in our businesses. This doesn't always look like paid support, this doesn't always look like buying someone's course or program, this doesn't always look like signing up to work with someone one-on-one or anything like that. Think about it through the lens of these categories, and then think about it through the lens of what are your goals and what support do I need to help me achieve my goals?
That's really how I want you to think about it and if you get to a place where you're like, well, you know what? I just want that strategy to figure out how I can get to that end goal faster. That's when I'm your person and we can talk about it. But there are so many amazing people out there who can support you. I just want you to have your spidey senses kind of aware, not hypervigilant, aware of when someone is using this fact of you being alone as their key marketing message because it's probably not really speaking to that core opportunity and your core challenge as much as you think it is. It probably is speaking to more of like a pain point, wounded place.
So here are my thoughts on don't grow it alone. Come back to this post anytime you're really trying to figure out where to invest and think about investing in your business so that you can make decisions that feel aligned that you don't end up either putting in your graveyard of courses and programs or that you don't end up feeling like you wasted a bunch of money on. I don't want that for you or for anyone you love, so please share this episode with them too. This is Strategy Snacks. I'm your business strategist, Frenchie Frenczi. Thank you for being here and we'll be back with more soon!