how do you stay focused as a new entrepreneur?… #ASKSUNNY

Let’s dive in to another question from you. If you aren’t familiar, this is #AskSunny, where I answer your questions. And today, we’re taking a question from Audrey, so let’s dive into it.

“Hi, Sunny. Greetings from California. Thank you for including my questions into Ask Sunny. So here are my two questions. The first one is, I know you and other successful entrepreneurs mention that you focus on what you do best, you focus on your superpower, and just delegate the rest. So for someone who just started a journey, I find that’s hard because my budget is just tight so I end up having to do everything on my own. And I want to know how you did it, how you just started. And the second question is like a follow-up question, so because I have to do everything, I find it a little hard to keep doing everything consistently. So I want to learn how to build up consistency. Thank you so much for the tips. Thank you for all that you do.”

I love this question so much. And I wanted to dive into this because this is a topic that I don’t think enough people talk about because there is so much information and so much overwhelm when you’re starting a business. And that’s when you’re most vulnerable to trying to do too much, because you haven’t learned really what has worked for you. If I could go back in time as a new entrepreneur with everything that I know now the best way to explain how to approach it and create consistency and to allow yourself to focus on the things that are actually going to create a return is honestly the iPhone.

I know that sounds weird, but my biggest inspiration on this really is Steve Jobs. I’ve talked about this before, but when he created the iPhone, which was a completely new and different phone experience, he needed to get it to market quickly because he needed to know if it was actually going to work. And so he approached it with this prototype mindset, which is what we really do focus on with our clients. I want you to test fast and evolve with time. And the same thing applies in your business when you’re getting started, you want to test a lot of different things, but don’t stick with all of those things. Don’t try and do all of the things. The thing to understand is, you have to get something into the real world in order to know that it works, and that was very much what happened with the iPhone.

Steve Jobs led user tests. He had his employees test it. He got it to market so he could get real world feedback to figure out what he could fix, because nothing is going to be perfect the first time around. So with your business, you have to make sure that you’re not trying to do all of the things and you’re focusing on the core, and I’m going to say this really clearly, revenue generating activities. I was talking to a woman the other day and I was speaking to her about her business and she said, “I’m just really stuck and I feel like I’ve been at the same place with my business for so long and I just can’t seem to make any money.” And she kept calling it a “business” in air quotes. And I asked her, “Why do you keep calling it a business?” And she said, “Because it’s not making money.”

And I said, “Okay, well, tell me what you’re doing every day.” And she said, “Well, I’m working on social media. I’m posting content on social media. I’m working on my website. I actually have trademarked my business.” And I just said, “Okay, let’s take a step back because I know all of that seems so important right now but until you have a product to drive people to using social media and you understand your ideal client, none of those activities are actually getting you any results.” Now, this is a crazy story, because I know you’re sitting there going, “But without social media, how do you get clients?” This is going to make me sound real old, but when I started my business, I didn’t use social media to get clients for four years. I had a small consultancy here in Vancouver and everything that I got was through word of mouth, and for a long time, social media didn’t exist.

So listening to people who were saying, “You have to be doing this. You have to be growing your Instagram followers. You have to be getting YouTube subscribers,” before you know who you’re trying to serve and what you’re offering to them is truly counterintuitive and it keeps you stuck and it keeps you in just a “business”, which is really just a hobby if it’s not making you money. So the important thing to focus on is those revenue generating activities every single day and cut out all the extra noise. You should be obsessed with your client. You should be obsessed with the product that you’re offering into the world. And that’s really your core key focus. So the first thing I would do, Audrey, and for anyone else who’s struggling with this, is I would really do an audit on your time on a daily basis for the next seven days. And I would identify where you’re spending your time and what is actually coming out of that time spent.

Because I would guarantee you’re spending your time on things that aren’t actually generating any revenue, which is keeping you stuck, frustrated, and overwhelmed. So when it comes to all of those activities and when you start writing them down and you start noticing all the things you’re doing, it’s great to test a bunch of different things. But if something doesn’t work, then ax it, get rid of it. And the biggest thing for you to grow as an entrepreneur is to create consistency in doubling down and focusing on the activities that are actually creating momentum for you. And I can tell you that those four key things for me, and I truly believe this is for any entrepreneur, you have to focus on generating leads and that can be done so many different ways. It doesn’t have to come from online. It doesn’t have to come from social media following.

We have clients who don’t have any following who are still launching their businesses successfully and getting clients in the door very quickly. So focusing on getting leads for your business, making sure you have the best product on the market by truly understanding your ideal client and what they really need from you and what they don’t need from you, subtracting any noise or distraction, make sure you’re getting social proof in your offer, so making sure it’s actually working and getting results for people, and then finally, increasing your profitability. Because, as Audrey said, when you’re in that beginning stage, and I’ve been there, you have no help, you have no one to support you, and it’s overwhelming. And, truthfully, there’s six pillars when you’re growing a business, and this is something a mentor taught me, that you have to build up to getting that team, and when you get that team, that’s when you create real true success of scale in your business.

And it doesn’t take a big team. Some of our clients have one person working for them and they have million dollar companies, but just a lot of the busy work and the overwhelming activities, you can take those off your plate when you get through these six pillars. So every business requires these things. First and foremost, sales is your lifeblood. So, that’s the first pillar. You have to be generating revenue to have a real business, so focusing on sales, the next thing is fulfillment. So what is your client experience and customer experience like? Are they happy? Are they getting results? So sales fulfillment, finance, knowing your numbers, making sure you’re paying close attention to your numbers. What is your profitability? How much cashflow do you have? Because cash is king. Cash allows you consistency in your business, it allows you to scale, it allows you to hire. It’s really important.

So sales, fulfillment, finance, and then marketing, making it sure that once you have a proven offer then you’re spending time on getting more people into that offer through messaging and marketing and positioning. And then, from there, operations. A lot of people try and create all these really complicated systems and processes in their business when they don’t need them. When you’re getting started, you’ve got to test a bunch of things to figure out what you actually need in terms of systems. So, operations and then team. Once you have all of these things worked out together, you have the six pillars to hold the foundation of your entire business, and that allows you to create consistency. So consistency doesn’t come from trying to post a YouTube video every week, trying to be on Instagram every day, trying to send an email every week, all of these things.

Consistency comes from figuring out the core activities that you need to be doing on a daily basis, which truly are those four things that I mentioned, and those are my only four focuses every day. And when I started focusing on just those four things every day, everything changed in my business and everything grew, to be totally honest with you. So making sure you’re focused, like I said, on creating the best product on the market, generating those leads, getting social proof and testimonials to prove that it works and you’re getting results, and then, ultimately, creating profitability and cashflow so that you can grow and scale with ease and abundance. So not focusing on all the things, focusing on simply just the things that work. So just like Steve Jobs did, you want to test, you want to try a bunch of things, but only focus on the things that actually work and generate revenue in your business.

So I want to know, Audrey especially if you’re watching this, when I’m saying this, what can you subtract right now from what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis? And I would love to hear from you as well in the comments. Has this given you a light bulb, some of the things that you can cut out and remove the noise for yourself so you truly can focus and feel less overwhelmed? As a one woman show, one person show, for me, my biggest downfall was trying to do everything and trying to do everything myself when I didn’t need to be doing half of the things that I was doing. When I look back and I truly audit what made me grow as a business, it was very simple activities, not everything. So try to eliminate noise, unfollow people that make you feel crappy, unfollow people that make you feel distracted, and stay in your lane and stay focused on only what is moving the needle forward and creating momentum in your business.

I hope this was helpful. And I have a whole free training about how I built my business by subtracting, by getting rid of a whole bunch of stuff. So make sure you check that.

Are you with me?