Episode 199: Examples of how to take the first step toward a goal
It can be very daunting to take the first step. Start small. In today's episode, Fiona talks about four things she did to start her business. Tune in as Fiona gives you fuel for thought ideas!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Passion Purpose Profit
How Fiona started her business
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Michael Webster
Tracy O Janice
Hello and welcome to episode 199 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. I cannot believe we are one episode shy of 200. Even just saying 199, it's just blowing my mind, to be honest, that we are already here. I just feel like this podcast started, I feel like it started like three months ago or something, but obviously, it didn't. It started, I think what now? 18 months ago. And it has just been such an incredible thing that I've done for my business. And I just can't believe that we are here and it started with one episode. And that really ties in well to today's quick tip episode, which I will get stuck into in a second. And if you are new around here, every single Tuesday, I put out a quick tip episode, which is really a tip tool that you can implement immediately.
On Thursdays, Australian time, we put out either a small business interview or a coaching episode, and they're a bit longer. And of course, if you are new here, feel free to binge all the 198 previous episodes. All right, before we get stuck in just two things, one, I wanted to remind you that if you are interested in the Marketing for Your Small Business course and coaching program, we have actually started that already. We will be running it again this year. So if you're keen to get on the waitlist, you can just email us at hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. And also if you're just keen to get started, you can do the course. Anytime you just can do the nine-week live coaching program two times a year, but you can do the course and you can find that and how to get on the waitlist over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/marketing. The other thing I just want to acknowledge as always the traditional owners and custodians on the land on which I record this podcast, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I pay my respects to the elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. All right, let's get onto today's quick episode.
All right. So I work with people all that time on not just setting goals, but actually how to achieve those goals. And sometimes that's through mindset changes. Sometimes it's through systems and processes. Sometimes it's through marketing. Sometimes it's about the shift in their brand, all sorts of things and all, all of those things sometimes as well. And what I'm always kind of conscious of with people is that I think particularly where we can see things on social media and we can see these kinds of unicorns that pop up all the time. We can sometimes think that we have to go from 0 to 100 with our goals in particular or with some sort of change that we wanna make. So say, for instance, we are like, our systems and processes aren't working, or we don't even have them. It's like, I have to go from having none to having every single thing perfectly laid out that anyone could follow within a week.
And it's just not the case. It's just really not. If you have a copy of my book, Passion Purpose Profit you may have seen in there the top 12, I call it a top 12 list, which is really to break things down, to break anything into 12 steps. And those 12 steps, you might just do one a month for the whole year. So maybe you give yourself 12 months to get to something as opposed to, you know, 12 days that you've gotta get there. Likewise, you might do one of them a week, which gives you three months to get somewhere, but you can always break down a goal into at least 12 steps. Sometimes you'll have more, but I think breaking into 12 steps, even if you decide you'll do two or three in one chunk, allows you to sort of break everything into smaller, more manageable, more realistic kinds of goals, like sub-goals of the big goal.
So I wanted to talk about that tip today or that tactic, which is to break things down into at least a top 12. Sometimes it'll be more and kind of give you an example of just simple ways that I have, I guess, taken small steps. I guess that's the biggest kind of tip today, to start small. It doesn't need to be this huge thing. And because this is a quick tip episode, I will be brief, but I wanted to talk through four things that I have done in my business and the first and smallest step that I did to kind of kick them off. And I feel like once you make some of these steps, you sort of gain momentum rather than thinking, it's like the whole cliche, like don't look at the mountain, just look at the first step in front of you.
And it might sound so cheesy, but it is just so often all you can do and all you need to do to get started as opposed to just staring out and for like hours or days or years, not even taking one step forward. So I was gonna talk about kind of a few things that I've done in my business the first, and there is no particular order, but just sort of giving you a real example of how I did this myself. And hopefully, it might inspire you or give you some ideas. So the, I guess is this here podcast so I knew that I wanted to start a podcast. I had worked at Audible in 2012, was it 2013? And I consulted on their launch into Australia. And I knew that working in their audiobooks at the time was very much like, they were still sort of seen as like an older human being, or like the last priority rather than an ebook or the actual physical book.
And so I had looked into podcasts at that time, just out of research, and found just so many amazing things that were happening. But of course, it took many years. It's still a new medium. Let's be real, even though it's been around for a while. And so in 2016, I was like, I'm launching a podcast. And I just took the very first step, which for me was to figure out what type of podcast I was going to run. Now at the time back in 2016, there were nowhere near as many business podcasts as there is now. But I did know that I wanted to interview people, but I didn't want to just interview people because I thought I have worked in journalism. I have worked on the other side of PR the one receiving all the PR requests. And I didn't wanna just make a podcast that was a PR vehicle for other people I wanted to also promote myself.
And I know that might sound all sorts of ways of like ego egotistical. But I was like, if this is going to be a marketing channel for my business and a way of increasing brand awareness, I need to increase my own brand awareness and not just awareness of the brands of people that I was going to interview. And so I looked at, I to do the small business interviews, but how else am I going to get across, like what I do and what I'm interested in sort of show authority and credibility and all sorts of other things. And so I sat down and I started researching like, and I just listened. And it's just so many business podcasts were the same. And they were just doing an interview-style, which was fine, but I just thought, well, I wanna do like tips. I wanna do something that is easy and digestible, but then I also wanna do something that shows more information about a particular topic and then also the small business interviews.
That was the first thing just literally sitting down and being like, what is the format gonna be? What are things that I can do quickly? So the quick tip, like today it's 10 minutes or less. And literally looking at the clock, thinking this episode is not gonna be 10 minutes or less. It might be like 12 minutes, but they're roughly about that time. And so that was the very first step. It was just, what do I want this to be about? And what is the objective of this? And then once I was really clear on that, it was so much easier to then go, okay. So what would that look like? How many times a week would I come out? What were the process and systems? And if you're interested in that, I've actually documented all of this into a course and it's just called how to start a podcast.
And it goes through everything that I did to start this podcast. And you can find that at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast. So that was the podcast, the first step. So Passion Purpose Profit, sidestep the hustle, and build a business you love was a book, or is a book that I wrote in. I wrote it in 2019. It came out in 2020 during the pandemic and lockdowns. And actually, in 2021, it won the best general business book, the Australian business book awards that has sold more than 10,000 copies around the world, which is amazing. And shout out to Heidi Grant Books, my publisher, they have been fantastic and you can buy it everywhere. That is online and all around the world in different bookshops and small business shops as well. But with that again, I knew I wanted to write a book and I literally thought, okay, who do I know in book publishing?
Now, I was lucky enough to work in book publishing. And I also studied for a postgraduate diploma in editing and publishing books in Australia. And so that was in 2007 that I had studied that. And I was thinking about this in 2018. And so I was talking about it, yet again with my husband. And he was like, why don't you just contact somebody? Like, why don't you just do it? He actually said, what would My Daily Business Coach say as a joke? And I was like, well. Like what would I tell my client? And so I thought, okay. And the very next day I wrote a list of like, who would I know? And I just sat there thinking who would I know? And my first small step was to go back, I'd totally lost it.
Like what his title was, but this incredible man in publishing called Michael Webster. And he looked after the whole course when I'd done it. But it was like 11 years later. I was like, I have no idea if he will even remember me if he will even reply if this is even still his email address. So I contacted him and just sort of said, Hey, I do business coaching. Now I'd really like to write a book. Do you have any suggestions of who I could talk to because actually, I should say the very first step was I started looking at the submission guidelines online for different publishers, but I was like, I have no idea if these are the right publishers, plus they're asking for a hundred pages of the manuscript. And like, I don't even know if they would even want my book.
So I don't really wanna go and write a hundred pages if then it's just gonna get turned down everywhere and I totally get for fiction. That is probably what needs to happen. But for nonfiction, I just thought, no, I've got an idea and I just wanna bounce it off with somebody and be like, is this even like possible? Or am I just having a pipe dream? So then I emailed Michael and I said, I've got an idea for a business book or a few business books. Like, I don't know. Do you have any idea of like, which publisher I should go with because maybe I will write a hundred pages, but can you give me an idea of which publisher is better for nonfiction and business books in Australia? And he said, well, why don't you talk to this other woman, Tracy O Janice.
Who's incredible. And I, she had been a guest lecturer and also part of it, I think she had come on board and done a lot more since I had studied it. So then I contacted her and she was literally like, I'll call you today. And I said, okay. And then she called me and I remember I was in Aldi in the supermarket and I got this call and she was like, well, I'm assuming you have a book proposal. And I was like, yes, I totally did not have one. And she was like, can you send that to me this afternoon? And I was like, sure can. So I raced home and I just literally Googled how to write a book proposal. And I tried to think about the stuff that I'd studied, but it was a decade ago.
And so I just wrote, I looked up a few different things online and I kind of amalgamated them into one proposal and I just blasted it. Like, I just put all my thoughts and ideas and I sent it up to it that afternoon. And that is how everything kind of happened. So the first step though, was me reaching out to somebody that I knew, and I have done this plenty of times, not just with people I know, but with just literally doing a LinkedIn search of like, I would like to contact somebody at this company who might that person be, and then just finding them and sending an email. I always think people are not ****. Excuse my language. My dad used to always be like, most people aren't jerks. They're gonna be nice. Like if they don't give you a no, they're gonna respond in some sort of nice way, or they're just not gonna respond at all.
So they're not gonna be horrible to you and be like, how dare you email me? What are you thinking? Who do you think you are? And so I just did that first step of contacting somebody who I did not really talk to for more than a decade. So again, that was the first step of getting started with the book. Another example of just taking the first step was when I started this business, I knew that I wanted to run workshops and I used to run live workshops quite a bit before the pandemic. And I'll do them again at some point, but I remember sort of thinking, well, I don't know like how to run workshops. And I had done them for like corporates and digital agencies that I'd worked at, but like running it myself. And I didn't know, kind of these ideas that I'd sort of worked at in companies and sort of coming up with myself as well.
I don't know how long that class would actually be. Like, is it three hours? Is it a whole day? And so General Assembly is an incredible institution. That is an educational hub around the world. And often works with people who are already in careers and in the workforce, but who wanna do like a night class or a weekend class. And they put on some incredible things. And so I had known somebody from there who I'd met through. I can't remember how we'd met actually. And I contacted her and sort of said, could I run a workshop? And she was like, yeah, here's a submission form. Like here's a, basically a word document. You need to fill it in and send it back to us. And we'll see if it's the right fit. And so I filled it in, I filled in like three of them.
I was like, I could run these three classes. And they were so lovely. They were like, let's give it a go. And I ran the first, which was Marketing for Your Small Business. And that is a 56 video course. It is a long course. That's why we do a nine-week program. It takes a while to get through it. And if you come to a live workshop of that, it is a full day and there is work to do afterward. There is pre-work. And yet I somehow thought that I could do that in a three-hour evening class and those poor people that came to that very first class because they couldn't even go to the toilet. I was like rushing through the content. And so I realized this is not a three-hour class. This is like a full weekend or if I'm gonna put it online, obviously being online, you can put a lot more information, a lot more examples, and all sorts of things into it because people are working at their own pace.
But that first initial step was to contact the General Assembly and be like, “Hi, how can I run a class?” I had no idea. My email was very chilled and I did not have this beautiful presentation. I did not have a pitch deck. I was very basic, but it allowed me to get a foot in the door and start meeting peo ple that wanted to know about marketing or wanted to know about brands or wanted to know about how to become a writer, or how to get, all sorts of things. And so I often suggest to people, why don't you start with General Assembly? Like it's an incredible place to work. They've always been absolutely lovely. They cover the menu cost, they cover the food cost. They cover a whole bunch of things. And they've got a huge audience so that you can test ideas and really understand like, what are people actually interested in?
So that was the first step there as well. So I know it can be very daunting to take the first step, but I hope that today's episode has just reminded you that if you've got something that you're thinking of, just don't think of, I didn't think, I have to go from zero to I'm selling out my own workshop at like the best venue with the most incredible food. And like, I've got 60 people listening to me. I have been to General Assembly as a student. I think what they do is go would, could I potentially do a class for like, even if there are five people that turn up, that's awesome. I can talk to them. I can understand things. I can validate my ideas and I can do it without having to put the risk into hiring a venue, getting an assistant, getting everything printed, like all this stuff that was just such a great experience.
And I worked with General Assembly many times since then. So I just hope that that has given you fuel for thought ideas. And if you're interested in the top 12 list, make sure you check out Passion Purpose Profit you can find it online, or you can go into your local library and ask for them. And if you just can't find it anywhere, please send me a DM. And I'll let you know of a small business owner who can sell you that copy. All right. So if you are interested in the text format of this, you can find it over at mydailybusiness.coach.com/podcast/ 199. The next episode is 200. If you have found this useful, I would also love it so much. If you might leave a quick review or even just tap the stars, if you're on Spotify, you can also leave a review now, which is awesome. So that would just be really helpful because it makes it so much easier for other small business owners around the world to find these episodes as well. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you wanna get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
