5 Steps to Start or Reset a Sustainable Business | Confident CEO Groundwork

Paula Shepherd Author

5 Ways to Start or Reset a Sustainable Business | Confident CEO Groundwork | If your goal everyday to just make sales? Let's reset your mindset and ta

Is your goal everyday to just make sales?

Let's reset your mindset and talk about 5 steps to start your business on a firm foundation.

I need to be honest with you about something, friend...

8 months from now, we won’t all be entrepreneurs.

Why? Because not all entrepreneurs treat their business like an actual business right from the beginning.

If you want to grow your business to the six figure mark and even seven figure mark, then you need a solid foundation!

You wouldn’t rush into building a house, would you? NO! Because it would crumble and it wouldn’t be structurally sound.

To build a house, you need a solid foundation, and your business is no different.

What a lot of entrepreneurs get wrong is focusing on making money right off the bat.

There’s actually a lot more that goes into building a successful, sustainable business than just making money.

If you want to have a business 18 months from now, and even years from now, then you NEED to set up your business foundations.

There are key ways for you to recognize that you are not running your business in a sustainable way.

So 1, you are lost completely in your day to day. You have completely lost sight of your vision for your business, or you didn't start with a clear one in the first place. You don't even know what that is.

Maybe you have wanted to go on vacation or you want to step away even for the weekend, and you have absolutely no idea how to do that because you are afraid that your business is going to suffer & you're going to be super stressed out if you step away from your business, right? Do you think, "I'm worried about stepping away from my business" whether it's logical or not?

Now, I want you to think about this.. tomorrow 20 new clients signed up to work with me or I got 20 new orders through my website and had fulfill them. Would I be able to handle the influx?

In the beginning of our business, that's not what we're thinking about. We're thinking about today and today's important, but today is one step in the direction of where you're going. We need to set our GPS and we need to know where we're going.

The other thing is you are probably stuck doing all the things in your business. You're doing everything.

You are the marketer.

You are the copywriter.

You are the website designer.

You are the graphic designer.

You are the email opener and the responder to people.

You're the salesperson.

A reason why I know about this is because it was me too.

So maybe you're not organized. Maybe you're not focused on on anything right now except for making money. Every day you wake up and you think, "how am I going to make more money? How many can I get another sale? How am I going to be able to afford that? How am I ever going to grow?" Right? But here's the thing, you're always feeling like you're on this roller coaster ride. So you're going up, you are doing really well and you're thinking "oh, man, I just need a whole lot of money." And then the next day, you don't have a sale, and now you're shaming yourself for not doing that.

There's nothing wrong with these being descriptors of you. At every level in business, you're going to come across these things, and you're going to need to step back and reevaluate. The reality is that there are going to be people in your business, or people as you're going through business, that are going to start at the same time as you, and you're both six months from now, not going to wind up in the same place. The difference between those two people, you preferably, is six months from now, ahead of others, is that you're building a stable foundation in your business. This is going to help you scale without burnout. Now, I want to clarify for you for just a minute, because you're going to see scale all over the internet, all over social media, over the last year as people are building coaching businesses, or consulting businesses, or service based businesses, with a yearly earning scale. You hear 10k all the time, because, you know, people want to make six figures.

But here's the thing... Killing yourself to get to six figures, quickly, is not a sustainable way to run your business. How do you want your business to look?

So that's gonna take me to step one.

Step 1 of Building A Sustainable Business: Be More Aware

Let's talk about our business like it's a salad bar. I talk about this in Confident CEO Groundwork.

I start with my business, and you start with your business. And we both have different reasons, we have different purposes, we have different visions for wanting to start a business. This is the lettuce. This is like that bed of lettuce that we have on at the bottom. You may love tomatoes, and I might be allergic to them.Maybe you like black olives, and I like green olives. At the end of the day, we built this amazing salad. But we still have a salad. It looks different. It tastes different, but it's still a salad. And that's the same thing about your business. I want you to think about that as you are building out your business.

So there are five steps in starting or resetting to a sustainable business. The first step is I want you to think about being more aware & bringing awareness to how you're thinking. Stop doing doing doing.

Are you acting and thinking like an employee? So when you think about getting a job think about working for someone else, and being someone's employee. You start with that job description. Here's your to do list. These are the things that you know you have to do every single day in your job without fail. You know you have to clock in and clock out or you know. Every single day you have to make sure you're accounting for and working for an entire amount of time (8 hours, 12 hours, etc.).

Well, the beautiful thing about being an entrepreneur is that you don't have to do that. It's all about streamlining. It's all about streamlining your processes. It's about streamlining your thinking. It's about being able to step into a role where you are a visionary enough to do.

You may be thinking.. "Paula but I am just starting out. That's not where I am right now." But the reality is, if you don't think that way right now about where you're going. If you don't put the address into the GPS, you're not going to know where to go. So that vision for you is going to be the address. That's the address of your final destination. Not the scary movie, but final destination, right?

You're gonna start looking at the way you're behaving or to start looking at what you're doing every single day.

Are you staying busy?

Are the things that you're doing just busy work, or are you actually doing things that are pushing you toward your ultimate destination?

So bringing in awareness to what you do every day.

The next step is just, honestly, so crucial. So if you're not doing this in your business, you need to go do it.

Step 2 of Building A Sustainable Business: Setting Yourself Up as a Legitimate Business

Let me just say, I am not a financial professional, nor am I a legal professional. This is for informational purposes only.

I want you to set yourself up to succeed. That means being legal and legitimate. It means making sure that you have contracts for yourself, protecting yourself, protecting your business, protecting your personal assets, making sure that you are set up to succeed from the very beginning.

There are lots of amazing people to help you, including my amazing attorney, Natalie Puglisi. She is the CEO of Legal Babe Society, that's an amazing way to get access to an attorney for your business and get legal templates, and some really great advice. You can go get contracts on lawdepot.com. But make sure that whatever you're doing in your business that you are setting yourself up now, so that later on you're not taking payments from here and taking payments from there. Trust me, I know people that have made $100,000 in revenue in their business, and they still haven't done all these things.

So please, please, please make sure that you are setting yourself up to succeed as a legitimate business.

Step 3 of Building A Sustainable Business: Know Your Values & Your Mission

There's so much out there about scaling your business. The reality of the situation is the people we're selling to, our people, who we're selling to, are human beings like you and me.

The most important thing for me when I'm investing in a business is understanding what their values and their purpose and mission are. Because if they don't believe in similar values or have similar values. Or if they are way on this end of the spectrum, and I'm over here then that's not going to work.

I believe in people over profit. But if you've got somebody over here, that's just worried about making a bunch of money. I don't want to work with those people. I want to work with people that actually care about other human beings. And that's where you're going to attract the right people.

You need to know from the start what your values are. So that everything that you do is an extension of your values and mission. 

This is that whole word intentional. Everybody talks about being intentional. And it sounds cliche, but the reality is, you do want to be intentional. That intention, that anchor, is your values and your mission. How do you continue to act and behave in a way and run your business in a way that is anchored to those value. That's going to become very important as you grow a team because they need to know what you stand for. So they can also be an extension of that. So that they can also help you maintain the reputation that you have so gracefully built.

So there's lots of ways for us to to make sure that you're building your business on a sustainable foundation. So now you know your values, you're going to become more aware of what you're doing. You're setting yourself up to succeed. Making sure you're protecting yourself, you're protecting your contractors, you're protecting your personal assets. Then the next step would be knowing your values and your mission. Connecting everything back takes me to step 4. 

Step 4 of Building A Sustainable Business: Create Micro-Goals

You want to make sure that you are taking it seriously. Setting goals is not enough.

You cannot just write things on paper and have no logical way to meet your goals.

I have worked with so many clients that have come to me so proud that they had goals, but when we looked at how are you actually going to realize those goals, they didn't have a plan.

So saying that in the next six months, you want to make a certain amount of money, or you want to donate to certain charities every month, or you want to hire your first teammate. You have to know how you're going to get there.

So what are those micro-steps that are going to get you to that point? So if you have goals, fantastic. That's a great start, but I want you to look at them with a fresh set of eyes and decide, do I know how I'm actually going to achieve that goal?

What are the sub tasks?

What are the things that I need to do the ladder to get to that goal?

And my guess is that a lot of you have goals, but you weren't really sure how you were going to meet them. And this is what happens with goals is you create the goals, you write them down, you don't know how you're going to get there, and then you shame yourself. Then you're upset with yourself when you don't actually follow through, and we're waiting for some magical thing to happen. Then all of a sudden we're gonna make more money, and then that goal is gonna come to pass.

If you knew that you had a bill that you had to pay, you could pay it and you set it to the side and you never looked at it again. Right, but it doesn't go away and then it compounds. So when we have our goal, we're going to find ways for us to meet them.

Step 5 of Building A Sustainable Business: Build Genuine Connections

Now the last step is all about building genuine connections. You say that you want to build genuine connections...

All of your sales strategies are systematic.

So look for the disconnect, in the way that you're working with people, the way you're having conversations with people. So if you say, I really love human connection. I really love meeting with people. But all you find yourself doing is going and posting in other groups or talking about yourself, or not caring about creating strategic relationships.

And what I mean by strategic relationships is that we are not we were taking advantage of someone. These are mutually beneficial relationships. These can look like partnerships that result in additional income for you both. So maybe an affiliate program, I'll call it an affiliate program loosely, but like a partnership program, where you work with certain people exclusively.

It's very important for you to forge strategic relationships with people because this is going to help you

1. with lead generation,

2. credibility,

and 3. you are going to not have such lonely ride on your way in entrepreneurship, because you have other people who are in the same boat trying to go the same place.

So thinking about the five people that are closest to you.

Those five people that are closest to you are the ones that are going to really make an impression on your business.

So there you have it friend, my 5 steps to start or reset a sustainable business. This is exactly what I cover in Confident CEO Groundwork.

Becoming more aware about what you're thinking about right now, in your business? Are you just worried about getting things done?

Or do you really know what you need to do so that you can be a visionary putting the destination in the GPS and getting there setting yourself up as a legitimate business owner?

Knowing what your values, your purpose your mission are, so that you can anchor everything back to what they do, and everything that you do becomes an extension of that.

Then taking your goals and creating micro-goals so that you can actually get to where you need to be.

Then really creating strategic relationships. Those strategic relationships are going to be instrumental in organic growth, credibility, and can also be really, really important in being able to leverage other people's audiences in an ethical way honestly.

If you are wondering, how can I set this up? How can I create my value & mission statement? How can I protect myself and set myself up in a legitimate way? How can I start to build genuine connections? How can I stop thinking like an entrepreneur and I don't want to hustle anymore? How can I really step into my power as a true CEO? 

The answer to that is Confident CEO Groundwork! Which is a digital program, with a private Slack channel where you get access to me RIGHT AWAY to be able to answer your questions and get feedback and accountability on your assignments as you walk through. It's your chance to get all of these things and my help personally, through a Slack channel.

There is no fluff here, we talk about getting your mindset straight, we talk about tangible goals, give you the workbooks, and this is the lowest ticket price to be able to get to work with me.

I built this program because I wish someone had this program when I started my online business. I know how expensive it can be to set yourself up to be a legitimate business owner, and really protect yourself and know what you need to do to get started.

So I wanted to make sure that this was a price point that allowed people that are already in business or just starting businesses to be able to get their things straight before you move on.

Before you start worrying about social media marketing, before you start worrying about getting more visible, before you wonder how you're going to hit a 10k month.

A 10k month is dangerous, If you have not protected yourself as a business owner. Or if you don't know what your vision and your mission is.

I really love tapping in to you and making sure that you're building a business that is really genuinely yours and aligned with you which is why your mission and your message are so important to me.

If you have any questions, Jump on a call with me, for a no pressure chat.

And if you want to join a free community of amazing entrepreneurs who are figuring out this whole digital business thing just like you, I’ve created a Facebook community to help support your journey and connect you with likeminded people. My Facebook community, I Am Becoming..., is all about community and collaboration. I want you to be successful! That's the intent here.

Continue the conversation by joining my private Facebook community “I am Becoming…” 

Lastly, if this blog was just what you needed in your online business, please let me know by sharing it with your entrepreneur and coach friends!

Cheering you on! 

XO Paula