When you're stepping into better leadership, and starting to work on your business instead of just in it, everything changes. Welcome to thrive by design, the podcast for ambitious, independent jewelry brands, looking to profit from their products, get ready to make more and sell more doing what you love, without spending every single waking minute doing it. Hey, and if you're a creative fashion or product based business, I want to welcome you to the show. I'll be dropping big tips on launching, growing and scaling your business. So you could spend more of your precious time using your creativity to make money. You ready? All right, let's do this. Welcome to the thrive by design Podcast, episode 405.
Hey there, it's Tracy Matthews, chief visionary officer of Flourish & Thrive Academy, and the host of the show today. And I'm excited to talk about something that I think a lot of people are curious about. It's like, what got you to one place in your business? How do you adapt that strategy to get you to another place. And so the easiest way to measure this is with sales growth. So I want to tell you a little backstory and behind the scenes, and I'm gonna get real raw and vulnerable with you guys here. But before I do, what I want to say is that entrepreneurship and growing your business, and taking leaps and bounds requires you to do a lot of introspective work, it also requires you to get the right support. And what I mean by that is that a lot of times, we operate in a silo, we operate in a vacuum. And it becomes challenging for us to see outside of that little microcosm of our business, to understand like what it's going to take to get to the next level. And so I'm telling you this because I was stuck, like really stuck for several years, you can listen to my episode about burnout from last fall. And I was really stuck. And my business basically was oscillating in the same place. And it was down from our best year ever, for about three years. And it wasn't until I completely restructured my team and my strategy, and got outside help and leveled up my leadership, did I break free from basically the insanity or the same mistakes that I'd been making over and over again. And so for the next couple of weeks, I'm gonna be talking about this journey of mine. But also, I'm going to be interviewing some people and how they grew and change their businesses to align with their vision of success, especially people who are doing great things in their business, like they, you know, already have a six or multiple six figure business they've been working on growing to the million dollar marker or people are scaling above million dollars. And whether or not you have any desire to do this, I think that you will learn these lessons. Because even if you have no desire to grow, you know, let's say a million dollar company, you still will need to level up. And I think some of the things that we're talking about here are going to be really powerful in what it actually takes to grow your revenue and sales, let's say from $100,000 Right now, to 500,000, or a million dollars down the road or multiple millions, right? Because I always like to say this because a million dollars for one type of company is not that much. And for other companies, it's a lot like when I was selling my demo fine line, and most of my price points at wholesale were like 50 to $150, selling a million dollars in revenue was a lot of volume. Now someone who's selling fine jewelry and selling pieces for $3,000 or $5,000. A million dollars isn't like that big of a stretch. You know, we had a student in our momentum program years ago who sold a $400,000 stone. So like her getting to a million dollars wasn't going to be that challenging, right? So this is all about, you know, meeting you where you are and and achieving your goals and figuring out what that looks like to you. So I'm gonna dive in in just a moment. But before I do, I just want to mention that I know I've been getting a lot of messages on Instagram, with people reaching out to me about their unique business models, and how I can help them. In fact, I just replied to someone right before I was started recording this podcast, who is starting up a fine jewelry company. And I know that sometimes you might want help, you may have been stalking some of our programs before you're not sure which program is really a right fit for you. Or you might be curious about more about how flourish and thrive can help you with your goals. I'm not sure that you know this, but we have courses and programs we have intensive accelerators. We also have coaching programs and consulting that we offer over here. And depending on what your specific business needs are, we can create a customized plan for you that can help you reach your business goals. So if you're someone who wants to move a lot faster, and you'd like some support in growing your business, I want to do give you an invitation to join us for a free discovery call on this discovery calls, you're going to meet with our expert, and she's going to talk to you a little bit more about your jewelry business goals, we're going to dig deep into some of the challenges that you're having in business right now. And try to really clearly understand why you aren't able to reach those on your own. Typically, when people join us on these calls, they have a challenge. Maybe it's growing their revenue or optimizing their business, like they're making money, but they're not profitable. That happens a lot like they're making, we work with a lot of people who are making several $100,000 a year, and they come to us and they're not profitable, and they can't figure out why. Or there might be other challenges that you're having. Maybe it's you know, finding and sourcing top talent for your team or other things. So whatever that might be, jump on a call with us. And let's discuss your business. And if one of our programs or our coaching packages or something like that, would be supportive to you, we'll let you know we'll talk a little bit more about what that looks like. So you can head on over to flourish, thrive academy.com, forward slash discovery call, you're going to fill out a quick five minute or so application and book in a time with our expert Kelly. So head on over to flourish, thrive academy.com, forward slash discovery call and let's chat about your goals. Alright, so today, I want to talk a little bit about what it actually takes to grow your business, you know, at whatever stage, so I'm going to use the marker of $100,000, to grow to 500,000. And then to grow to a million and beyond. So quick backstory, at every stage in business, entrepreneurs and business owners have the potential to hit an upper limit. So if you haven't read the book, The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, that book is all about basically you hitting your glass ceiling, because you your beliefs about yourself, haven't risen to the level of where you're trying to go. Or you've like gotten to this level of success and like the strategies that you're using, to get to the next level of success, basically aren't working anymore. Jason likes to use that term strategies. And so the goal here is to help you break through that glass ceiling. And when you do that, you have to change the way you're showing up. So quick story in 2019. I had, we had our best year ever in business over here at flourish and thrive. And I don't really like to talk about this stuff. But I think that this lesson will be really valuable. I had realized I was again in a stage of burnout that year. And I was really in not a great place where I didn't feel like I was being supported by the leadership on my team in the way that I needed to. And I also wasn't being a very good leader. And so what that caused was a lot of anxiety on my team, and a team member who I eventually let go, who in retrospect, I wish I wouldn't have let her go. But a team member that I let go because I had this belief that she wasn't going to get me to the next level. I kept thinking to myself, the reason why we're stuck here is because of the people on my team. And while that can be true to a certain extent, the growth of your company really depends on what's happening in within you and the leadership that you provide. So hard lesson to learn but a very important one. I ended up letting this person go. And we I ended up taking the advice of someone that I'd hired as a consultant. Her advice, actually was really bad. And I ended up hiring a bunch of the people that she recommended, and found out later that she was making kickbacks from those people wasn't in integrity, and a whole variety of other things that were just preposterous and sad. And so during that process, I found another person to help me run the business. And she was one of those people that was expensive and not worth it, like came to the table with a lot of experience where I would have expected her to be able to grow my my team. And she was great at certain things like she was amazing at coaching. But her fee did not align with the value that she was delivering. And I was starting to get into the hole because our revenue wasn't matching what she was commanding as a feat. And she wasn't providing the deliverables that she promised and so on and so forth. So there were some great things about hiring this person. But it wasn't the right fit. And so I went into this was the beginning of 2020. We had a not a great launch that year, because the ads team that we hired from this marketing person completely messed up our ads strategy. It wasn't great. And so we were rolling into the year, not doing very well and then COVID hit and so that put me into a massive trauma loop and spiral. It felt like everything was out of control and chaotic. And for years I didn't feel like I could get a grasp of what was happening. And so I had to go through A major three year long process of like, bringing in consultants, hiring team firing team trying all different sorts of things, until I finally got to a place where I was stepping into a place of true leadership again, like, and what I mean by that is like, taking responsibility for the hard things that I needed to do my business to move it forward. And I'm telling you this, it's kind of weird to say, say this publicly on a podcast when people are coming in to potentially be coached by us, hopefully, like, it wasn't super apparent on the outside, like, I think we did an okay job like on the outside doing it. But the inside of the business was really chaotic and hectic. And what I realized through this process is that my business was never going to grow, until I stepped into the leadership role that I needed to be in, in order to lead my team. And so what I had to do was, we were in not a great position towards the end of last year, I actually was thinking about closing down the company, because I was very unhappy with the direction of the business and what was going on inside of me. And remember, like, what's happening inside of your business is always a reflection of what's happening within you. And so I played around with some different scenarios, like if what would happen if I close the business or if I just let it burn to the ground, and then what would happen if I came in and just showed up differently. And I went through all the scenarios I, I envisioned and went through all the feelings of how it would feel if the business actually failed, and got on the other side of that, to decide that No, I didn't want it to crash and burn, that maybe closing it down will be an opportunity at some point. But it didn't feel right right then and there. But I did need to make some changes and step into a leadership role. So with the support of my partner, Jason, we took a look at our numbers and our books and cut like half of our team. And it was hard. And it did not necessarily go that great. One team member left in a huff was very angry, he was not doing his job. And we called him out on it. And he basically left without completing his duties, and handing things over which left the company in an even worse position. And then on top of that was demanding bonus pay. And we started laughing because we're like, you didn't actually do your job. So no, you're not getting bonus pay, we're in the past, I would have gotten to this place of feeling guilty, so wanting to pay it. And then we let we have to let several other team members go and restructure and hire some new people to take on basically one person taking on multiple roles. And just by restructuring things and rethinking how we were operating the functions of the business. And looking at it, we have launched into 2023 with the best year in Flourish & Thrive Academy history. Because I changed the way that I showed up, I held my team members accountable, and started working with my team to develop the systems that were actually going to allow us to scale. So there have been hiccups, I'm not going to lie, we actually just launched our T yc. program. And we had a little hiccup with our ad spend. And we didn't spend enough money on the front end. But we rallied again, together as a team to hit our goal of student enrollments for that, and our baseline goal, which was literally incredible. And what I will tell you is that when you can build a team that really is aligned with your vision, meaning they believe in what you're trying to do, they're there for it, they understand why the goals of the company are important. It's not just about making money, it's about creating impact, and about having the marketing dollars to be able to invest in reaching more lives. And all those things like we work together as a team to actually make that goal happen. And so when you're stepping into better leadership, and starting to work on your business, instead of just in it, everything changes. So we still have some work to do over here, we are hiring a couple of key roles. And if you want to learn it, if you are listening to this podcast and you're looking for a full time position, or a part time position in either marketing or content, or some other things head on over to flourish, thrive academy.com forward slash careers, because we might have a job description posted right there for some of the roles that we're hiring right now. I stopped accepting mediocre work and started only accepting stellar team. And a lot of my journey in this process in understanding what needs to happen is that if you make a mistake in your role, then we're going to hold your feet to the fire and accountability for it and that we accept work. That is like a plus work. And so we're still working out some tech issues on the back end, which has been a struggle because we're in a marketing CRM that is not intuitive, and we're looking to change that right now. But the way we're going Things are awesome. And so I wanted to talk a little bit more about what it really takes to step back a minute to reevaluate what's going on in your business. Or just to get to a place where you can scale. My friend Lee told me once that what it takes to get from 100,000 to 300,000, and then from 300,000, to 3 million is basically completely different. So it's that basically structure of scale that needs to change inside your business, that changes everything. Because when someone is doing about $100,000, in revenue in either it doesn't really matter what kind of business but especially a jewelry business, maybe it's maybe more like 150 to 200, you are kind of just getting to the place where you can start thinking about hiring, study team, right, you might have a couple of marketing Bas, or people who work a couple of hours a week. But if you're getting to that place where you need ongoing support, maybe it's someone to help with the making of your jewelry, or maybe it's someone to help with your marketing. Or maybe it's someone to help with your sales process. Or maybe it's someone to even help with your shipping. All of these things like you don't have a lot of extra funds to pay for those things until you get to a certain place if you're paying yourself a proper salary.
And so let's talk about what some of those things are that need to be in place in order for you to scale your company. So when you get to that, like 100 $150,000 marker in a jewelry business, this is a really pivotal time for you to change. You know, you're a six figure business owner, your goal is now to improve your profitability, and consider getting support to grow to multiple, six figures. And if you want to grow to multiple six figures, you need to start delegating your busy work. And it's time to focus on the strategic areas of your business that are actually going to move the needle. So some of the milestones when you're in this phase, like let's say you're at about 100,000, you want to jump to maybe 250 and revenue, some of the things that you need to be thinking about are documenting your systems and SOPs or your ways of doing things. The reason why this is important is that when you document your way of doing things or your process, and there's a lot of ways to document them quickly, right now, you can even use chat GPT and video content to record what you're doing and write out the system have it transcribed and all those things, so it doesn't have to take a long time. But this is so importantly, so important. Because once you have your way of doing things documented, then you can start delegating tasks, and you're gonna start prioritizing the tasks that you want to get off your plate first. So these are typically lower leverage tasks that other people can come in to do at a lower rate. So let's say you hire a high school student to come in and maybe work minimum wage to package and ship your orders a couple times a week. Now, that's a great thing to delegate when you're in like these early stages of hiring. Or maybe you hire a marketing VA who can come in and run your social media and comment on your social media and help you post your content so that you're staying consistent. Or eventually, maybe when you're in the couple of $100,000 ranges. Maybe you're hiring someone to help you at your in person shows or events that you're paying to run your booths or your tables. Or maybe it's that you're working with someone who is running the production in house and your business or helping you make the jewelry. So all these things need to be documented. And I call them lower leveraged. Sales isn't low leveraged, but so you want to definitely get a good person in that role. But you can pay them something like a an hourly wage plus commission. But some of these other roles I say are lower leverage, because they aren't the things that you need to be doing in order to run your company. Yes, I know that many of you want to make the jewelry. But if you do want to grow your sales, you're probably going to have to think about how you can get support in making because how many pieces can you physically make until you're tapped out to be able to continue growing your business and the idea here is that you start working on the highest leverage use of your time. So that would be sales, marketing and getting the work out there. So there's a difference between marketing strategy versus marketing activities that are going to just more like busy work. So we're thinking through those things and helping to keep you focused and moving forward. Now, some of the other things that you might want to be doing are outsourcing professional services. So if you've been doing like bookkeeping on your own or your own accounting, unless that's your skill set and you have like a nerdy accounting brain, which is awesome if you do I'm not insulting anyone, I just it's always mesmerizing to me because it is like putting pins and needles in my eyeballs for me to do that. Like outsourcing, bookkeeping, accounting, things like that, that are very detail oriented, that you can hire a professional services to do. This is a great time and marker to do those things. So other couple things that you want to be doing in this phase is to track your sales and marketing numbers and review do them every week, and then track them based on your goals. So you want to make sure that your business planning and that you're, you're creating targets for you to reach on and that you have quarterly goals that you're moving towards. And the most important thing is that you create some sort of strategic growth plan so that you're here, every quarter, you have some KPIs and milestones that you're trying to hit. And that the lower leverage tasks are delegated to someone who does not need to be you that might be an office manager, etc. Like I kind of went through some of the different types of things office manager, shipping, person, marketing, VA, etc. So, at the next step, like let's say you're kind of grown, you've already gotten to a couple 100,000, and you're trying to grow to, let's say, a half a million dollars a year, you probably already have some members on your team who are supporting you. Even if it's just very part time, maybe even full time people, or a full time person, maybe someone running your operation. At this phase, it's really important to understand that, yes, you're making your integrate cadence of sales, you have some money ready and available to invest in your growth. And you can probably even take home a little bit bigger salary, assuming that your profit margins are strong, and you're keeping your expenses down. So you want to get to a place where you have a proven track record of great products and customers that love you, or you're already in that spot. So you're ready to step into the bigger leadership and role by guiding your small team towards your vision. So what is really necessary here is to have a crystal clear vision of where you're the business is going. And you're sharing why this is important. And your y with your team, the people working with you. At this point, you might want to consider hiring some sort of office manager and operations lead integrator, like they're all great names, this might still be a part time position, or a little bit more than part time, or even a full time position. And this person will be wearing a lot of hats. This is the person who you delegate a lot of the stuff down to you work on the higher leverage. They might be, you know, doing shipping at one moment, you know, wrapping orders, they might be doing the project management, they might be doing a couple of different things in the role at this stage. But they're basically running the the front end office. And then another important thing to be doing at this stage is to make sure that you have a grasp of your numbers, and that you're evaluating your numbers on a weekly, monthly and year to date basis to evaluate whether or not you're on track. And then you're spending at least one day a month on strategic growth. So you're blocking out time in your calendar, to think about where your business is going. I like to call these creative days, I have them once a week. Sometimes I'm filling them up with creating content. Today is a Wednesday, which is my creative day. And I'm recording podcasts. So it's important to have that space and time though to think because I've worked on our whole marketing plan and calendar for the coming weeks. And then this is where you really want to start thinking through evaluating how your promotions are working. This is where you start to tweak and optimize your marketing systems, your promotion plans, and anything that you're doing to get your product in front of your customers. So the idea here is that you're working smarter and not harder. And yeah, this is a really exciting phase. Because if you do this right, you can actually grow really quickly. Stronger systems and optimization are really important in this stage. Now in the expansion stage, let's say you are getting to a place where you want to scale from $500,000 to a million bucks. Now, this is the stage where you've got a business that is doing well. You've hit some huge milestones. And this is a great opportunity for you to grow. You want to reach big annual revenue numbers, this is where profitability becomes really important. And really thinking through what you're investing back into the business versus taking home, right. And this is a great time for you to optimize your departments and get your team focused in helping you reach those goals. And so, at this phase, you really want to be looking at yourself and on how you're leading the team. You know, this is where the term crazy business owner comes from. Because at this point, it's like the breaking point, you're still kind of small, and you're out we're doing a lot of things, but there's also not a lot of opportunity for you to get stuff off your plate. So you might be feeling stressed out. And you want to get to a place where you can actually hold your team accountable for their responsibilities and lead them. And this is where having a number two is really powerful in this stage because that number two can be the person that manages the team. So there's a difference between leading and managing and I will talk about that in some episodes later in this month. Also, you want to be in a place where you're taking calculated risks, right, you might be starting to invest in advertising, you might be starting to invest in more team. And you might be starting to invest in new sales channels that are going to help you get the word out about what you're doing. Maybe that's expanding into different things online, investing more money in advertising, it might be, you know, sending a salesperson out to go sell more wholesale, or getting more sales reps, selling it in person shows, and creating systems for those things, so that you can transition those in person customers into online customers later down the road. The other thing that you want to do is to really get clear, this is where marketing planning becomes a really important and strategic. So you might be planning your launches for the year, and making sure that you're on track for your collection release dates, and that you're properly planning your marketing because the more streamlined and optimized you get in this phase, the more impact that you're going to have in getting that out into the world.
And this is really important to consider, like where are opportunities to cut the dead weight? Right? So you might have people cross functionally doing similar things, like can you optimize the functions of the business and have people owning certain parts or, you know, roles in the company that maybe had some crossover before. So you're, you're inspiring your team to take full ownership of the their functions of the business or what they own or their job description or roles. And you're also getting really clear on what your team members strengths are. Because one big mistake that I see a lot of times when we look at businesses and teams who are kind of growing in this space is that they hire people for a variety of different reasons. And a lot of times people are in the wrong seat, but they might be a good person, or they're just not a right fit. And it's time to cut, cut bait and let them go. Because this is really important. If someone is dead weight and dragging your business down, you're not going to move forward. And this is kind of we were had a really bloated system and team because I was hiring to scale my business. But I wasn't stepping into a leadership role that was actually inspiring them to step into the next level. And so there was a lot of micromanaging on and I'm not a micromanager and it was really sucking the life out of me. And this is really important. This was really like we already had a seven figure company and hovering, you know, at that point where the issue was that we're trying to scale to multiple seven figures. And it was becoming challenging to get past that like one and a half million dollar marker right. Anyway, and a lot of that was because there was a lot of loaded energy and deadweight that was holding the business back the functions weren't streamlined. So we had to reevaluate and optimize some of those systems. And another important thing to do here is to make sure that you get into a regular meeting cadence that people understand what their roles and responsibilities are, that you have goals and plans for growth, and that you're solving issues in real time as they come up. So in real time and on meetings. So here's where meetings start to become really, really important to get you to that next step. Now, once you've crossed the million dollar marker, and you're in that scale stage, this is where things start to get fun. Because what happens here to get to you to $3 million in revenue is quite different than what you did to get from 100,000 to the million dollar marker. So even though it kind of like talked about this episode getting to a million dollars, this is where a strong Operations Manager integrator or something along those lines is going to change your life. At this point in your business, you need to be focused primarily on business development and growing your company and coming up with strategies for growth. And if you're someone who wants to be in the weeds all day, your business probably isn't going to grow that efficiently. Now, one of the problems that we were having is that because I didn't have the strong leadership, I was stuck in the weeds all the time and getting sucked back down. And there's a lot more realizations that I will share on later episodes about this process, because we're kind of I don't want this episode to get too long. But I do recommend that at this phase, you really have a full time operator who's helping you scale and grow your company, someone who is really strong in operations, someone who enjoys detailed work, someone who enjoys managing team members, someone who's great at technology and systems and all those things that can really support you in your vision for growth. So I hope this episode was helpful for you because it was helpful for me just talking about it. What I will say is that I'm really excited because this is a really expansive year for Flourish. & Thrive Academy. We're having our best year in ever I was gonna say in four years, but it's actually our best year ever. And I'm hoping that I'm going to reach that goal of serving 1000 new members this You're in our programs and coaching and services. So with that being said, I would love to offer you an invitation to get support from me and my team of coaches. We have coaches that run the gamut from helping you with your marketing and scaling, business operations and hiring. We've had to do such a massive overhaul in all of our operational systems. And I want to share with you inside of our programs, like momentum, like how we did it, how we created protocols that are like helping us attract top talent and all the things so if you're interested in learning more about that, and how you can rise into a stronger leadership role for your company, head on over to flourish, thrive academy.com forward slash discovery call and jump on a call with one of our experts to talk a little bit more about your business, and how we can support you in reaching your business goals a lot faster. All right, this is Tracy Matthews, signing off. Until next time, thanks so much for listening to the show today. If you've enjoyed what you've listened to take a moment right now pull out your phone and rate and review the podcast on whatever platform you're listening on. Those ratings and reviews help us reach more people just like you who are looking for podcast to help support their business in the jewelry and product space. So thanks so much. I appreciate you, ciao. Until next time, I'll chat with you soon.
