Anyone that sees our brand today knows that we’re a multiple 6-figure brand with global impact (with reach in New Zealand, Israel, the UK, Germany, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Switzerland, and more).
But what they don’t see is all that was required in order to get here.
The late nights.
The sacrifices.
The doubts.
The tears.
The questioning of everything.
The desire to quit.
The failures
The overwhelm.
The burnout.
One thing I will always be upfront about is the level of work that it takes to build an impactful, thriving company. It’s one of the reasons we introduced our new Modern Day Businesswoman Diaries on the blog - so we can showcase and celebrate the messy journey of womanhood and entrepreneurship by sharing REAL stories.
Catch this one featuring my meltdown in the Venetian airport (showcasing one of my greatest failures in business history).
The truth is that what I *thought* it would take to grow to this point wasn’t at all the case.
It wasn’t ads and funnels.
It wasn’t growing a large community.
It wasn’t a secret strategy.
If I’ve learned anything from not only building our company from the ground up, but also supporting our 6 and multi 6-figure clientele, it’s that our businesses don’t succeed because of ONE tactic implemented.
They succeed because we have diligently put proper foundations in place.
Over the last few years, I’ve experimented within our own company, helped our clientele across various industries expand and scale, and simultaneously I’ve taken note of the key foundations required to grow to this level.
Because I don’t just want to see a few succeed powerfully. I want to see MANY.
So, I put these key foundations into a step-by-step framework that we teach inside of our immersive, group program, The Awakening Academy. Today, I’m going to break down a few of them for you at a high-level.
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It all starts with the most basic of foundations - your business model and offering suite. If scaling is in your growth plan, you need to make sure that you are intentionally creating a business that is designed to scale with ease and sustainability at the forefront.
What does that mean? We’re going to look at your offering suite via two lenses: 1) Aerial View and 2) Short-Term.
We’re going to create an Aerial View of your offering suite to be integrated over the next few years (this will not be an overnight process. Remember: we’re building with the long-term trajectory in mind, and that takes time). Be sure to design offers at a variety of levels, some of which allow you to be more hands-off (whether due to your desired team structure or the nature of the offer being passive). From there, we’re going to identify what takes priority in the short term so we can expand profits immediately.
It is at this point that we will look at integrating as many recurring revenue opportunities and diversified revenue streams into your long-term strategy as possible.
This stage is CRUCIAL and will allow you to achieve amazing momentum with your customer lifetime value - allowing you to hit major money milestones with ease. Check out how we leveraged our offer suite to generate nearly $40,000 from one client.
This foundation goes hand in hand with your offer suite. By nature, your offer suite should allow for a strategic customer journey to be integrated. What does this mean?
So often, people think that they need to acquire hundreds or thousands of clients in order to grow and scale their business to the 6, 7, + figure realm. It’s simply not true. With an optimized offer suite and an intentional customer journey in place, you can increase your depth of impact per customer and increase retention across the board - allowing you to work with less clients, impact them more, and increase revenue.
You’ll want to consider how to provide a well-thought-out journey for your customers both within each individual offer as well as across your offering suite (this is where we also consider elevating your client experience as well - increasing overall connectedness and trust with your brand).
We walk our Academy students through a full Customer Journey Mapping process inside the program so this is extremely simple but powerful for their customers.
One of the less “sexy” parts of successfully scaling a company is making sure your infrastructure is designed to carry the weight of your growth. There are SO many pieces to consider here, but I’ll walk you through a few that we cover with our Academy students:
Client Management - The first and most important area to streamline (and make excellent) is your overall client management. It will be important to have systems in place for things like on-boarding, mid-container check-ins and upsell opportunities, off-boarding, gifting, payment tracking, etc. Ultimately, we want to ensure that you’re providing an amazing experience for your clients with ease.
Sales - The ultimate goal: that your sales pipeline is full at all times. We’ll want to have a variety of efforts taking place here in order to achieve this (learn more about diversifying your sales efforts here). Beyond that, you’ll want to have clear processes in place to guide folks from first point of contact with your brand to conversion (think inquiring process, sales calls, follow-ups, etc).
Marketing - In order to drive traffic and sales for your brand, we’ll want to focus on your marketing efforts. You can start small here - with a basic content plan - and we can expand into more of an omnichannel approach as you have bandwidth.
Financial Growth - If you aren’t already, make sure that you have a routine and rhythm in place to track and project overall financial growth for your company. We do this weekly, monthly, and quarterly at The Awakening and teach our clients to do the same. If you need help creating a Profit Plan to get started, download our free profit planner.
If integrating foundations and expanding your business to the multiple 6-figure realm is something you’re interested in, click here to learn more about and apply for our Awakening Academy.
Ashton Smith is the CEO and founder of The Awakening, a platform dedicated to helping women in business build intentionally so they can leave a powerful legacy behind. She helps early-stage all the way to established entrepreneurs own their power as CEO, deeply connect with their vision, & sustainably scale their businesses.
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