Episode 497: Are you growing with your business?
Your business is growing, but are you? In today’s episode of My Daily Business Podcast, we’re talking about how to grow right alongside your business—because if you don’t, it’s easy to get left behind.
As your business changes and gets bigger, you’ll face new challenges. But here’s the thing: you need to grow too. This episode is about the steps you can take to make sure you’re leading your business and not just trying to keep up with it.
In this episode, Fiona discusses:
Why learning and improving should never stop, even as your business expands
How working on your leadership skills can make all the difference in how your business runs
Why understanding the basics of money can help you make better decisions for your business
How to build real relationships with your team that help everyone succeed
If you’re ready to take charge and grow your business in the right way, this episode is for you. Let’s dive in!
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Fiona Killackey: Do you love your life as a small business owner?
Let's be real.
Sometimes we just don't. It's my hope that this, the My Daily Business Podcast, helps you regain a little of that lost love through practical, actionable tips, tools and tactics, interviews with creative and curious small business owners, and in depth coaching episodes with me, your host, Fiona Killackey With more than 20 years experience in marketing, brand content and systems and having now helped thousands of small business owners, I know what it takes to build.
A business that you can be proud of and that actually aligns with your values, your beliefs, and your hopes for the future. So much of our daily life is spent working on and in the businesses and the brands that we are creating, and so it makes sense to actually love what you do.
So, let's get into this podcast and help you figure out how to love your business and your life on the Daily.
Daily hello and welcome to episode 497 of the My Daily Business Podcast. Today it's a quick tip episode and that's really where I share a tip, tool, or tactic that you can implement immediately. And today we're going to go deep.
But before we do that, I want to let you know that if you are interested in understanding how marketing works—regardless of what platform is suddenly like the IT thing—then check out Marketing for Your Small Business, it's my signature course. It goes through everything that I have learned over 23 years of working in marketing for some of the biggest companies in the world like Amazon, Audible, Country Road Group (which is massive in Australia), and a whole bunch more than a thousand now small businesses.
So, if you want to understand these are the things that work regardless of what platform, regardless of what's trending, these are the things that work. If you want to learn that and actually understand how to do strategic rather than scattergun marketing, then check it out at marketingforyourmalbusiness.com.
Also, before we head into today's quick tip, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the lands on which I run all these courses, do my work, and raise my family. And that for me is the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. So, I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
So, I was talking to a friend of mine recently who has had a second child and they were talking about how things are so much easier when you have a second child. Not so much easier, but I guess there's this maybe perception when you have a first child that, you know, you do one thing wrong and you are stuffing them up. You know, if you get them off a sleep schedule, if you don't get them fed on time.
And so I think with your second child, and maybe subsequent children—I only have two children, so I can't speak for three or four—but I have seen from, you know, family and other people who have three children that there's a bit more, maybe a bit more of relaxing between the second and third, because it's like, "Yeah, I've been here before, I know what I'm doing."
And there's that growth that happens through experience. And so you might be listening to this, thinking, "I don’t have kids. What am I listening to? Is this suddenly a different podcast?"
No, no, no. It doesn’t matter whether you have kids or you don’t. Today’s podcast is going to be really helpful. But I guess I’m giving you that context in that experience is such a teacher. But even if we have the experience, sometimes we don’t learn from it.
So, in the case of business, let’s say you've gone from just you working in the business to employing a couple of staff. Now you've got 10 staff and maybe you're looking to expand into another territory and you'll have even more staff. I'm wondering with that, you've got the experience of having staff, and maybe you're getting better at, like, hiring people or firing people quickly or, you know, managing staff. But are you as a person growing in that leadership role?
So, are you investing in understanding what a good leader does? Are you investing in leadership training? Are you investing in understanding HR policies? Are you investing in understanding how to just be the best incredible employee brand that people want to work for?
And if you're not, why are you not? Are you sort of taking it that, "Oh, okay, this has happened. So, I'm just learning through experience, and I don't have to actually grow and invest in either executing that experience in the best way possible or even implementing it in alignment with some more education in that area—in this case, leadership."
Another way that I see this sort of show up is that people make more money than they have made previously. And it's very common, and I've put my hand up here, too. The more money you make, the more money you can spend.
And you see that. You see the amount of articles and studies out there that say some sort of number, I can't remember, it's like $75,000 a year or something, is like the peak. And then from there, it doesn't really matter whether you make more or less. I don’t know if I believe that, but I do know that you can live off a lot less.
And that whole idea that, like Parkinson's law, the more you make, the more you'll spend is very, very true. And I see it in business all the time where people have gone from the business making X, it's, you know, grown substantially, or something has kicked off or, you know, maybe they... Something in the world has changed and they are doing really well.
And yet, that growth in understanding financial literacy, that growth in understanding, "Okay, this money is coming in. How am I going to best utilise this increase in income to better my life or to better my circumstances or to give back or to start some sort of charity component of the business?"
And so I guess the question is really to ask yourself: Am I growing with the business? The business may be growing financially, the business may be growing in staffing, the business may be growing in brand awareness. And am I keeping on top of that?
Not necessarily that you have to suddenly be like a licensed financial advisor, not at all. But that you have to take an interest in growing with that in the same way, like bringing it back to kids. I have a child who's on the cusp of being a teenager and I have had to learn a whole bunch of things that I didn't have to learn when he was younger, just because certain situations come up.
I am investing the time in, like, reading some books about teenagehood and reading books about making sure that I can be a really good mum for him. Now, I don't think you... You know, I think a lot of that kind of parenting and stuff sometimes does come naturally. But I don't think it harms anyone to invest in some education and grow.
Grow as you're parenting, in the same way, in business, are you investing the time to grow in these different areas?
Another example of this is, let's say marketing. You know, you start off, you're a solo operator, you do all the marketing yourself. Then you might get a virtual assistant or a coordinator or a kind of junior role to help you. Then you might decide, "Actually, I’m at that point that I want to outsource these to an agency." And then you have an agency, and then suddenly maybe you've grown even more and you're on a retainer now with that agency.
And so sometimes what can happen is that people then just take a complete backseat. Now I can hear people already. You're listening to this and you're like, "Oh my God, how am I supposed to stay on top of everything? That's why I'm paying a marketing agency to do it for me or this person or that person to do it for me."
And yes, there's a level of that. But if it's your business and you're putting money into anyone or any agency out there, then it should be also on you to spend a little bit of time. It doesn't have to be a huge amount of time. It could literally just be listening to a podcast, you know, listening to your favourite marketing podcast once a week.
So you're kind of keeping on top of it whilst you're doing something else, like doing the laundry or maybe going for a walk or something else. And I'm not into this whole, "Oh my God, you have to be micromanaging everyone at all." But I guess the question is really, like, are you growing with your business so that it doesn't get to the point where you turn around and think, "Oh man, how did we get here?" And I actually have no idea what they're doing.
Or, let's say you get to the point where you're like, "I don’t want to work with that marketing agency anymore." But actually, I have no idea how our email system works, I have no idea how this works or that works. And so it could be okay, I want to implement with all of our agencies a catch up once a quarter or even once a month where they walk me through something.
And again, you're not asking that agency to tell you every single little secret or every single thing that they employ. Obviously, that's their IP. But you're paying them. So it might be like, "Okay, well, can you just walk me through how to do this?" Or, "Could you document some of this for our SOPs?" Or, "Hey, we've got a junior marketing person starting and I'd love them to liaise with you and learn from you."
So could that be built into the retainer cost? And so then you've got that junior person feeding stuff back to you, or not feeding, but giving you an update on things. It shouldn't be a point where you absolutely have no idea what is going on.
I fully understand that the more senior you get—and I've worked in head of marketing roles where I'm not, you know, the one actually on the Facebook tools, doing the meta ads or doing, you know, xyz. But I still have a very good understanding of how these things work and, you know, what you need to put into them, what you need to change and adapt and evolve.
And I guess that's the question. Are you growing with your business? If your finances have increased, do you understand why they've increased, what has led to that, but also what you're doing with that money? How are you going to utilise and implement that money?
Are you regularly talking to your accountant, a financial advisor, anyone else like that? Do you have a remote CFO that you work with? If maybe you're not in the position to have a full-time CFO?
If you have new people coming on board, are you understanding who they are, why we've hired them? Even if you weren't the hiring manager, you understand who they are. I remember talking to somebody years ago and I had been around when that person had started their business and actually helped them with a small component of it.
Now, this is before I was business coaching, and this business has grown and grown and grown. And I was talking to the founder, and I jokingly said, "You know, what sort of boss do you think people think that you are?" And they said, "Oh, I reckon pretty scary."
And I was like, "Really? I don't think you'd be scary." And they're like, "No, I think I come across that way because I often don't meet any of the people that work for us until, you know, something's gone wrong."
And I was like, "Whoa!" You know, slowly roll for a second. Really? You don't meet your staff? And yes, they have grown, but they've still got, maybe it's under 100 people that work there, I would say. I mean, this was years ago. And I get that you can't have, like, lunches with every single person that works there if there's 100 people.
But you can definitely meet them for 15 minutes when they start their job, on that first day or in that first week, even if it's a Zoom call. You can write them a letter. Like, it is your business and you have grown it, and these people are coming on board to help you grow that.
And I think the least that you could do as a leader in that business is to show some interest in those people. And it could be, yeah, just a handwritten letter. If you're not around all the time, then maybe you write the letter on a plane somewhere and then, you know, it's given to them. But something that they feel like, "Yeah, I’m valued, I’m not just another cog in the wheel."
And so that growth has to happen. And the thing is, I've worked at places where you are just a cog in the wheel and, you know, nobody really cares whether you stay or go. And it doesn't make you feel that excited to come to work and to really put in all the effort.
So this is really the question to really think about today. Are you growing with your business? Are you growing your knowledge? Are you growing your curiosity? Are you growing your skill set as your business grows?
And it may be in different areas that you have to learn and upskill, even if you're not necessarily managing that department, such as HR, or finance, or marketing. So really let that sit with you. Are you growing with your business?
And if you're on a stage of business right now where you're like, "Well, my business is not actually growing and I don't have a whole bunch of staff and I'm not growing exponentially financially," it's never too early to start learning about that stuff.
So that when you do—and it will, everyone has peaks and troughs and those peaks will come—when you do, you have the skill set and the interest and the knowledge to understand what's going on.
So that is it for today. As always, you can find the transcript over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast497.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this useful, please, please, please share it with a friend. Share it with a business friend. Get the word out. Let them learn from this as well.
Thanks so much, and I will chat to you soon.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Podcast for a range of tools to help you grow and start your business, including coaching programmes, courses and templates. Check out our shop at mydailybusiness.com and if you want to get in touch, you can do that by email at hello@mydailybusiness.com or you can hit us up on Instagram at mydailybusiness_. You can find us on TikTok at mydailybusiness or find me Fiona Killackey on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting.
