10 MINUTES TO CONQUER: MOMENTUM REVISITED

Hi! I’m Erin Marcus, Founder and CEO of Conquer Your Business. Welcome to the 10 Minutes to Conquer series of the Ready Yet?! podcast. I’m excited to bring you quick tips and tools that will help you know what to do to move your business forward and who you need to be to do it.

All right. Full transparency, I’ve been watching a fair amount of football lately. It’s the one sport that I tend to watch on television. I enjoy going to sporting events, but football seems to be the only one I will sit down and watch on TV. And what I’ve been watching lately, what I knew, but became glaringly obvious of a reminder, is the importance of momentum, right? The importance of momentum. 

So, this past summer, I did a live event called the Forward Momentum Method, where I broke down into step by step by step the process, an actual process that I use to keep our momentum moving forward. It’s a decision making matrix that helps me keep things moving forward. And I just wanted to revisit this idea of the importance of momentum, because if you weren’t feeling it at the beginning of the year, there’s a really good chance by now, you’re feeling the effects of what some people are saying is an actual recession, but certainly a slowing down and constricting of the economy.

And it’s one thing to be able to keep your momentum and build on your momentum when it’s already kind of running in your favor. But what do you do when it feels like the momentum is against you? What do you do when you feel sometimes a little bit by surprise, sometimes it’s a slow creep, but you find yourself on the wrong side of momentum where things are getting harder instead of easier, and your business is constricting instead of growing? So, I wanted to talk to you about that because being able to not just maintain momentum, but manage momentum is an absolute fundamental key to success, right? What do you do when the going gets hard? What do you do when things aren’t easy? What do you do when the things that used to work now don’t work? 

And the way you respond and the way you can behave and the actions you choose to take in those moments are just as important as your skills in marketing and your skills in sales conversations and your skills in delivering your product to your client.

So, that’s what I wanted to do is give you literally some tactical, tactical, tactical, tactical things to do if you’re feeling a shift of momentum going against you so that you can help turn your own tide, right? So, one of the best pieces of advice, and if you’ve followed me at all, you’ve probably heard me say this before because this is something that was said to me, oh my gosh, like a good 20 years ago, and it holds true today. So, one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got was from one of my mentors in corporate who said, “Step on the gas when everybody else is stepping on the brakes.” And right now, if you are experiencing a slowdown in your business, that advice is spot on. It is natural. It is normal. It is totally understandable for when the hard feelings hit, people tend to retreat from them. I get it. But if you can fight the instinct to back away from the hard and instead lean in to what has to be done, not necessarily with brute force, but with flow, it’s one of the things that I see shift momentum all the time. Lean in when everyone else is stepping back. 

But what does it mean to lean, like to do what? That’s great for me to say, but what am I supposed to do, Erin? What do you want me to lean in? I get it. So, number one, lean in. Don’t retreat from the heart. Number two is look at your data. Look at your data. Analyze your data. What is working? What’s not working? There really are only a few different levers in your business to pull. There’s only a few different measurements to keep track of. Growing your audience, the different activities that you’re doing to grow your audience. How effective are they? Are they less effective than they used to be? Nurturing your audience. Of all the things you’re doing to nurture your leads and nurture your audience, are the same ones working that used to be working? How many sales conversations are you having? What activities are you doing that is leading you to be able to talk to people about becoming your client and how you can help them? Has that data changed? Are the sources of those conversations changing? Do you have to change what you’re doing to enable you to have more of those conversations? Because while it might be true that we’re in a recession and the economy is restricting, it does not also have to be true that your business needs to restrict with it. 

In fact, just as many businesses find their stride and grow during a time of recession, as those that contract. It’s the businesses that pay attention to what’s going on, adjust and respond as needed and lean into the opportunities that not only make it through the recession, but come out so far ahead of everybody who stopped. So, that’s what I want you guys to think about. 

Number one, lean into the hard. Don’t retreat from the hard. Step on the gas when everyone else is stepping on the brakes. One, not only will it get you through the temporary challenge, but it’ll set you up for massive success. Number two, data driven decisions. Take an objective look at all the different things that are going on in your business to see where adjustments need to be made. And number three is about removing obstacles. Number three is about removing obstacles. I posted about this the other day. Our businesses tend to get complicated on us without us even trying. Now is the time to remove the complications. Now is the time to remove the eight-step process. Now is the time to just make your life easier by simplifying the things that you’re doing, truthfully, so that you can pivot more quickly. It’s hard to pivot complicated things, and it brings you closer to your client. And since people buy things from people they know, like, and trust, being closer to your client helps build that on a much faster basis. 

So, look at your momentum. It starts as a gut feeling. It really does. It starts as that gut feeling. And if your numbers are showing that things are not working, that used to be working, take a deep dive into them, make some decisions, make some intentional adjustments. What I want you guys to really be doing is responding to data not making emotional based gut reactions, because we’re all very, very influenced by being surrounded by the media and surrounded by the noise. And we want to make sure that you are making your adjustments based on your business’ data and not a story that is skewed by whatever channel you happen to listen to. 

So, with that, if you have any, any, any questions, pulling apart numbers and looking at growth business strategies, one of my favorite things to do. So, if there’s anything I can do to help, just reach out. Visit conqueryourbusiness.com. It’s real easy to get ahold of me through there.