The System that Outsmarts the Hustle (3 Case Studies)

[00:00:00] Steady sustainable growth isn't about doing more. It's not about more tips, tricks, and tactics. It's not about chasing the latest trending audio. It shouldn't be about doing more marketing. It's really about understanding what actually works for you and your business, and then building a system that lets you rinse and repeat it intentionally.
Are you ready to grow? From solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host Rachel Cook, and I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems and support in place to make it happen.
Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, the hard lessons learned along the way. And practical, profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.
Hey there CEOs, Rachel Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. I hope you have been enjoying this series on the podcast where we have been uncomplicating your marketing and really shining a big old spotlight on some of the issues that I have been seeing.
Over and over again for small business owners, because marketing doesn't have to be this hard. This doesn't have to be so hard. It doesn't have to be so complicated, but over and over again, when I talk to small business owners who are running real regular, small businesses, they're so overloaded with all of this conflicting advice and information, and it's causing chaos in their business.
Right. We talked about why most of the advice out there is really aimed at high volume businesses that require high volume marketing and those businesses, if they need to have thousands of sales a year or tens of thousands of sales a year, then yeah, they need to get in front of hundreds of thousands of people in order to make that happen.
But for most of us, that is not the case. Most of us do not need thousands, much less tens of thousands of clients a year in order to achieve our small business goals. For a lot of the small business owners I work with, they might need a dozen, a couple dozen, maybe a hundred at most, a couple hundred clients a year because we are often selling.
Higher price point done for you or done with you services. We're not selling widgets, right? We're not selling impulse buys. We're not selling one off things. And I think the confusion with marketing has really happened in the business space, in the small business space to our detriment, because we have seen the rise of online business, quote unquote, online business.
We've seen online marketers who are all marketing to each other. They're all talking about how to make money online, how to make money, selling courses online, how to make money selling. Um. Membership sites online, how to make money selling info products online. Like all of the online business noise is them marketing to themselves, right?
They're just marketing online business to other online business owners. And same with the coaching space. We're seeing coaches coaching others to start coaching businesses and it becomes this MLM of coaches, coaching coaches, and then we see influencers. Who aren't selling their own products, but they're building massive platforms so that they can get paid to promote other products.
And this is creating this visibility bias in this marketing world because we're gonna see what's the loudest. The algorithm loves those business models. It's why they have been able to grow these massive platforms, and it's created all of this confusion because now it has everybody thinking that you just need to go viral.
You just need to be documenting yourself all day, every day, never being able to take a break. That if you can't do that now you can go create an AI twin to be pumping out slop content for you. Well. That might work for them, but for our businesses, for relationship driven businesses, for high trust driven businesses, that doesn't work for us.
It doesn't work for us, and it definitely doesn't work for our clients [00:05:00] because if you are offering a product, a program, or a service. Based in your experience and your expertise, because you have that proven track record of helping people get results of helping them get to an outcome. They're not looking for AI twins.
Right. In fact, if they find out that it's an AI twin, they're probably gonna trust it less. And they're not looking for someone who is doing all these trending things. They're looking for someone who can actually help them get results. So all of these tactics might work for those other high volume, highly transactional business models.
But they don't work for relational businesses. They don't work for businesses that. Depend on trust between you and your clients. Your clients need to have that confidence in you, that you actually know what the hell you're talking about, right? They need to know that you're a true expert, that you have got.
Credible outcomes and you can help them get to where they wanna go. Our clients are more likely to buy through more relational marketing. They're more likely to buy because of conversations they're having with us. They're more likely to buy because they've actually had an opportunity to understand us, right?
They're more likely to buy because of our reputation and because of the type of results that we can get. And understanding this is really the key to uncomplicating everything else. So today I wanna talk through some examples of a few different businesses that I've worked with over the last few years and how they have been able to build more steady, sustainable growth without doing more.
Marketing without having to have like a film crew walk around with them every day, all day, recording every single thing that they say. I don't know about you, but that sounds like torture to me. I would never want to have to be on all of the time. I am so deeply introverted and even right now as I'm recording this, the idea of having to, you know, get out of my cozy.
Sweatpants and actually do my hair and makeup so that I can be on camera all the time. That just sounds so exhausting to me, and it doesn't fit my life. It doesn't fit my lifestyle, and it definitely doesn't fit, you know how I want to be moving through every single day trying to be an influencer. We need our business to fit our real life.
We need our marketing to fit our real life, and that means we need it to be more aligned. So I'm actually going to share some episodes on the podcast and you'll see them following. This episode, you can listen to the entire conversations I've had with each of these clients, but I want to kind of walk through some of the challenges that they were having and then how implementing the client growth engine has helped them to uncomplicate everything and make their business more steady and sustainable.
Now the first client I wanna talk about is Gabi Day, and as you'll hear in our full length episode in her business, bright Body, she was bumping up against quite a few challenges. The first thing was. She was running on vibes instead of having a real repeatable system in place. So in the episode we recorded, she shares that before having twins, she used to run on vibes, meaning she would market the business when the mood struck her, there was no real game plan in place, and that worked well enough until it became glaringly obvious.
She had two newborns that vibes aren't a plan. And so her marketing at that point was more inspiration driven than systems driven. And this might resonate for a lot of people. This is something I hear all the time. People go, I don't know what to do for my marketing. I'll do marketing when I'm in. Aspired to share something, and that means newsletters only go out when you're inspired.
Social media posts only get created when you're inspired, and that creates a lot of inconsistency. So how did client growth engine fix this issue and make it more repeatable? Well, the biggest thing is she was able to develop a more repeatable plan for her nurture and invite. Marketing so she [00:10:00] didn't have to come up every single week with something new.
In fact, one of the things that she did that I absolutely love is she took the concept of having a year at a glance, like one sheet of paper. Where she knows exactly what the game plan is for her nurture or her invite strategies. Every single month, she has mapped it out for the year, and that means she can rinse and repeat it.
This is a concept I teach in client growth engine, and the reason it is so powerful is we tend to think that we have to come up with new things all the time. But the reality is if you did something last January. It'll probably work this January. If you did something last April, it'll probably work again this April.
You just need a big picture calendar that lets you know what are the important things that I need to be talking about every single month, and what am I gonna be actively promoting every single month. The shift that Gabi described is that that plan created freedom for her. Once she had that year, at a glance of her client growth engine, she was able to stop spinning in the, what do I do today to market my business overwhelm.
She was able to stop going, oh my gosh, I don't know what to post. I'm not inspired. Nothing is coming to mind. Instead, she actually could go. To her plan, to her calendar and know that every month has a theme, every month has something that she's gonna be actively promoting and inviting people into, and that means less decision fatigue.
More runway, more freedom, more assets that as she continues to build them year after year, she can continue to share them year after year. And that means a clearer sense of what actually moves the needle. Another big challenge that Gabi was having with Bright Body was that inconsistent revenue. You know, the feast or famine cycle, 82% of small business owners are struggling with the feast or famine cycle.
So if you are one of them. Then listen up because when Gabi shared with me that she was really, really struggling with, I always have to be doing something. If I slow down, if I stop, then I don't know what's gonna happen. Once she implemented the client growth engine, she realized very, very quickly what created demand.
And what started to generate results and because the client growth engine forces clarity here, then you know what you need to stay super consistent with. You're no longer questioning, does this actually help me? Does this actually make a difference? Now you know what's gonna generate the results, and this means no more panic selling.
No more flash sales. No more looking at your bank balance going, am I gonna be able to pay my mortgage this month? Gabi actually said that what happened for her was such a game changer because now she can reliably within 10 to 20% predict her revenue month after month, and that is a game. Changer. Gabi was able to move from sporadic promotions to having this really, really consistent nurture and invite rhythm through her client growth engine.
And because she has her at a glance calendar with her client growth engine, it's been able to make her revenue. More predictable and she can actually predict it within 10% of what is going to come in. And that means she's been able to sustainably grow. She's had more confidence to support her team and to actually know that she can hit payroll.
She. Really locked in when she realized you can't employ a team if you're running on vibes. And that is the truth. If you have a team, if you are looking at I need to outsource things, I need to bring people in to support me. You can't do that if you don't know what your revenue's gonna be month to month.
You have to actually accurately be able to predict that, and you have to know when is the right time to bring people on. The third big thing that she had was this mindset of I always have to do something new, and that is exhausting. So Gabi shared with me that she had somehow created this rule for herself that everything needed to be new and fresh and different, that all of her marketing needed to be.
Constantly changing that all of her promotions needed to be constantly changing. They all had to be new and different all the time, and she had this fear that she was [00:15:00] bothering people. If she repeated herself, she was worried that if she shared something she had already shared, then people were gonna be annoyed at her and.
That's actually so far from the truth. I hope you guys really hear this one. Client Growth Engine is all about repetition, and the reality is your potential clients need repetition. That is the point of strong messaging. They need to hear the same messaging again and again and again. They need to hear about your products, programs, and services again and again and again.
We have to rinse and repeat them in order for our clients to even. Perceive that we have these things available. If you're constantly coming up with new and fresh and different all the time, it's actually causing a little bit of confusion for your potential clients. So once Gabi understood this and locked into this, she realized I don't have to reinvent my marketing.
Every year, I don't have to reinvent my sales promotions every year. Now, at her year, at a glance of her client growth engine, she has themes that she can repeat and only a little bit of it changes. Now she's done this thing where we build the asset once. So an asset in marketing or in your, um, sales materials.
This could be a sales page. This could be, um, the copy that you've written about it. This could be emails that you have. This could be social media content that you have about it. Once you create those assets, you should only ever really have to update them or tweak them or them up a little bit, maybe 10%.
And the outcome of this is now you build your own asset library of reusable templates and SOPs, and that means things become easier to run over time because instead of creating everything from scratch, you're going into your library pulling out something that you know is proven to work and just giving it a little Z so you can use it again.
The next big challenge that Gabi was having with Bright Body was she had no clear monthly invite rhythm, meaning she never was really sure what she was gonna focus on promoting to actually get sales in the door. So we talked early about you really need to be inviting people to buy from you every single month.
Every single month. This is a major challenge I see for a lot of small business owners, and I see this, especially when we are hesitant and we feel like, oh no. If I'm constantly telling people what they can buy from me, they're going to be annoyed. I can promise you, if they are following you, if they are in your world, they wanna hear about what they can buy from you, right?
So you need to be. Talking about your products, programs, and services every single month without some sort of plan, it just becomes. A never ending list, though it becomes real overwhelming. So as I shared how Gabi approached, this was her year at a Glance client growth engine, it made sure that over a 12 month year at a glance one pager, she knows what her theme is.
Every single month, and that theme informs all of her nurture marketing. It informs all of her emails, it informs all of her social media. She knows exactly what she's going to actively promote. Every single month. So this eliminates a lot of that decision fatigue. And the best part is she shared, is that everyone on her team can see what's coming.
Her production team can plan. So if she's gonna do a big promotion going into Mother's Day or a promotion going into, um, a holiday, she. Knows in advance what the products are that they're gonna be promoting and that she doesn't have to make a whole special to do about it. They have a clearer game plan and they can build clearer systems around it.
The next big challenge that Gabi was running into was her marketing and operations weren't integrated enough, and Gabi shared in our talk that scaling isn't just turning up the ads. Right. You can't just push a button and say, time to scale. Let's turn on the scaling machine if you don't have the infrastructure behind the scenes to go alongside of it, right?
That's a great way to break your business. Honestly, if you just think scaling is [00:20:00] just getting as many sales as possible, but you don't have the infrastructure behind the scenes to handle fulfillment, to handle the workflows in her case inventory. Back stock shipping. If you don't have the SOPs in place, if you don't have the team in place to handle all of those clients, all of those orders, all of those projects, then it's gonna break your business.
So what client Growth Engine allowed her to do is to have that clarity about what actually was happening, and then she was able to build the internal capacity. Build the infrastructure and this allowed her to now build the operations behind the scene to deliver what she's promised to all those people who just bought her products.
That is a game changer. Now she's able to run ads. She runs a lot of ads on social media, on Facebook, on Instagram, I believe she's playing around with other ad platforms. Now she's able to expand into different channels, and the reason she's able to do that is because of the predictability, because now she knows if she can get this many people in through her track strategy.
Paid advertising, then she can expect to get this amount of sales on the backend and she can predict when she needs to increase their capacity behind the scenes operationally in order to keep up with it. So all of this is a game changer. She understands. What needs to happen? She has a clear 12 month game plan.
She has clear nurture, invite rhythms that she can rinse and repeat things become. Easier over time because now she's building assets that can be used again and again. This has created more predictable revenue. She knows within 10% what is going to happen each and every month, and because she understands what's gonna happen, she know.
When to make additional strategic decisions like when I need to hire someone else on the team or how I need to scale up fulfillment. These are major challenges for a small business like Bright Body and having the framework like client growth engine to simplify everything is a game changer. Okay, the next case study I wanna talk about is Paige and Podium Press, owned by Amanda Edgar.
And in her interview you'll hear so many things that were going on when she came to us, but she comes from the world of academia, so definitely not someone who got into business understanding business or marketing at all. And she did what a lot of people do, which is get on a third party platform. So she.
Was ghost writing for folks. If you wanted to have a book ghost written, she could work with you. But by going onto a third party platform, which is something I see with a lot of small business owners to get started going somewhere like an Upwork, you know, making yourself available. It sounds great in theory and it's a great way to kind of.
Get going, but when you don't own your lead generation, it can cause a lot of other issues down the road. So most of her leads were coming from a third party marketplace who were looking for ghost writers, and additionally, that third party marketplace took 20% of the fee and controlled the relationship.
That is a lot of cash to be giving away to a third party marketplace. A 20% pay cut. I was like, no, we gotta figure out a different way to get you in front of people. And additionally, she was kind of nervous because ghost writing is a pretty quiet niche. There's not a lot of ghost writers out there who are actively promoting themselves.
It's kind of like a, if you know, you know, um, if you know you need a ghost writer, you kind of figure out a way to find one. But there's not a lot of people actively marketing this. So that niche is kind of a quiet one. How client Growth Engine helped her was it helped her find how to build out her own, attract and engage channels that she could own, visibility that she had control over, and she really leaned into YouTube and to getting in front of other people's audiences by guest teaching and speaking.
This visibility that she led. Now meant that she wasn't renting attention from a platform and she didn't have to give up 20% of her fee to that platform. So that was a big shift for her. People started to find her organically and that growth. Was [00:25:00] exponential. The next big challenge she had without client growth engine, and especially being tied to a third party platform, is that she had no case studies or testimonials she could use, which made it even harder to sell premium level services.
So the platform she was on often required non-disclosure agreements, which meant. She had no usable testimonials. That's brutal for a premium service because if you have no testimonials, but you are charging thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for this service, people wanna know that you can get results, right?
They wanna know what you've done. So how client growth engine was able to help her solve this problem is because she was able to now own her channels. She was able to own her visibility, her attract marketing, her engage, and her nurture marketing. Now, she owned that entire process. And this means she was able to bring in clients who would now allow testimonials.
She didn't have to sign an NDA by a third party, and these were people who honestly wanted their book promoted and they were happy to talk about the results of working with her. So this led to having even stronger conversion assets, testimonials, examples, social proof, which led to easier time having.
Sales conversations and having those conversions. Another huge challenge she was running into was clients who she just didn't enjoy working with. You know, we've all had clients who aren't fit, who we've said yes to, because we need the revenue. And that's what happens when you're on a marketplace. If you have no control over your lead generation, if you have no control over your visibility, then.
Those leads are random, you know, and they're all gonna have different expectations. There's probably gonna be a lot of difficult dynamics. And Amanda actually called it the island of misfit toys, clients. It was kind of frustrating. It just created a lot of friction and it was draining. Right. And you've probably experienced this too, if you've had like a hodgepodge of clients and you're just thinking, I don't.
Really know that I love working with these clients, but I don't know what else to do. How Client Growth Engine helped her to fix this was, it really helped her to clarify her messaging and her positioning so that the right people self-select. This is one of the things that we don't talk enough about when it comes to marketing your business, and it is being able to really call in the right.
Clients, and the way to do this is to go deep into your specialty, to go deep into your values and your perspective and what you stand for. With Amanda, she really has this incredible specialty of doing what she calls a hybrid memoir, and she really has passion about helping more women, um, to get their stories out into the world and more people who are able to use their stories to make the world a better place.
So now she has such better fit clients because her entire marketing system allows her to really. Talk about these things or allows her to really position the importance of these things. And the best part about it is now that she controls all of the stages of her client growth engine. Even when Amanda's not the writer and it's another ghost writer on her team, everything is so much smoother because they are able to articulate clearly in every step of the client growth engine, what they stand for, what their processes are, what their standards are.
That's a game changer for any business. The next big challenge she ran into was that nothing was scalable. The marketing wasn't scalable. The delivery wasn't scalable. Nothing could grow beyond Amanda. And this again is another huge challenge even for service providers, and I hear from a lot of service providers who believe that services aren't scalable.
I'm here to tell you services are scalable. Services are so scalable, and Amanda has done it. She's brought in ghost writers on her team who work with her clients, but originally the platform wouldn't allow her to scale this. She couldn't send links to these people who were working with her in a platform.
She couldn't have other team members log in to that platform. She couldn't offer expanded services within that platform, so she couldn't offer. Editing or proofreading or publication support. She was so limited by what she could do with that platform. And her confidence [00:30:00] initially made her hire, um, some non-intimidating people, so it just was not a good fit.
How this all shifted when she started owning her client growth engine, by moving off of this third party platform and really building out her own client growth engine, she was then able to build. A real team. She was able to hire additional writers who could work with her clients, meaning she wasn't limited to just who she could work with.
She was able to bring on additional people and expand the capacity, and she was able to offer additional services, which has led to her being able to go from just offering ghost writing to now additional book coaching and a group program. So client growth engine allowed her to delegate things and bring more people on because now the business isn't dependent on one person's daily hustle.
Now anybody on the team, she can train them into how to do each piece of the puzzle. And because they have systems in place, they're able to sustainably scale a lot easier. One of the things that she shared with me when Amanda found us is that she was really struggling with. Learning without implementing, and this is something that I hear from a lot of small business owners.
I'm sure Amanda's not the only one I know. So many of us are kind of swimming in information overload, but we don't have like a framework to help us. Implement, and that's something that Amanda shared with me was that she had been Bing the podcast. Um, I hear from a lot of my clients, they're like, yeah, I've been listening to your podcast for like a year, and I listen to every single episode, it's so helpful, but I don't really have a framework for how to implement.
So she's like. I would default to putting my head down and just doing everything in overdrive mode. I would just lock in for like two or three days and work nonstop like crazy to try to implement everything. And that's not sustainable long term, y'all. It's just not, um, we need to have a implementation framework.
It's like if you are going to go train for a marathon, you can't just. Put your head down and run 26 miles if you've never done a marathon, right? Like you've got to have kind of that training plan to pace yourself to build. Up to it to make sure that you're not gonna hurt yourself or burn out. And that's what Client Growth Engine really allows you to do.
It gives you that path to run on. And I find that when you have this framework, suddenly you don't look at it and think, oh no, I've gotta do every single piece of it right now. I tell people all of the time that this framework is something that it does take time to implement into your business. This is not an overnight, like a push button, instant success type of situation, right?
This is a framework that for most of my clients, takes anywhere from three to six months to implement into their business. Then it takes another three to six months to truly integrate it and to work out the kinks. But by the time you get a year into using this framework, suddenly you're reclaiming a lot of time and energy.
You're not having these chaotic bursts of energy or these chaotic, uh, panic driven promotions because you're realizing like, oh no, I need clients right now. Or, oh no, the revenue's running out. You end up with a much more steady, sustainable rhythm to go with. Okay, so with Amanda's case study here, one of the biggest challenges was really that third party marketplace, and that's a unique situation.
I know not everybody, um, has that particular challenge, but one of the things I see over and over again is just not truly owning. Each step of your client growth engine. If you don't own your visibility, if you don't have the ability to understand exactly where people are coming from and exactly how you can continue to get in front of those folks, if you don't understand the strategy behind your marketing messaging behind who your ideal client is behind how to position yourself so that those clients are.
Definitely wanting to work with you. You become their person that they absolutely can't wait to work with. It creates so many challenges. It creates so many challenges for so many small businesses. So a lot of Amanda's results came from really stepping in to owning her visibility, getting really, really [00:35:00] clear about who she wanted to work with, and making sure everything was as aligned as possible.
Okay. This has been really fun for me to listen back through these conversations and when I was listening through, I've had so many different conversations with clients over the years on the podcast, and I was pulling these episodes. I wanted to pull clients that had a. Array of challenges and different business models because the client growth engine is such a powerful framework.
It really works for so many small business models, even though I know we're all a little bit different, but still it's that high trust, high relational. Component that makes this so incredibly powerful. Well, in my final case study I wanna talk about is Dr. Libby Wilson, and she owns a concierge medical practice called Best Life Functional Medicine.
And I thought this would be a great case study to pull. And of course I'm sharing the full conversation, um, on the podcast. Because her business model's a little bit different. You know, one of the things that I talk about a lot with my clients is building clients for life into their business. We want to focus on making sure that people don't just work with us one time, that they're staying with us for a long time, right?
That they're with us. Um, to not only do the first step, but to continue to build this long-term relationship. And you definitely want that with a doctor, right? If you're going out to find a concierge doctor to work with, then you want to build that relationship with them. So the marketing is actually a little bit different because instead of marketing being built on acquiring tons of new people.
The marketing really is about retaining existing clients, making sure they stay with you long term, and then those clients generate referrals. Those clients are sending their friends and their family and their colleagues, so it's a little different application of the client growth engine, but I have had so many service-based businesses who are in the same boat as Libby who want their clients to.
You know, have an amazing experience with them. Stay with them long term. And that's really how they grow, is by being client first. Well, one of the challenges she was running into was availability, right? Her business depended on availability, marketing. Meaning as a concierge doctor, she felt like she had to be available 24 7.
Libby felt like people are paying me a lot of money, so I need to give everything I can. I need to be available 24 7. I need to give them my phone number. They need to be able to text me. I should have to reply in the middle of the night on the weekends when I'm away with my family and all of those. You know, you might think, okay, these are boundary issues and some of them are right.
It is, and the fear underneath it is a marketing related fear. It's if I'm not available, if I'm not responsive enough, then they'll leave and my business will implode. My business won't survive. Well, how client growth engine helps fix. This is one of the elements of client growth engine. You know, we talked about attract and engage with Amanda.
We talked about nurture and invite with Gabi. Well, when we're looking at Libby's, we're really talking about the that delight stage, that client experience stage. And this is. A marketing stage, even though people have already paid you, you are still marketing to them. Right? And the way that we approach this is we need a clear pathway.
We need a clear journey, and we need to reframe the value. Of working with Dr. Libby from having 24 7 access to having a clear support pathway. And the way we look at this is when we're looking at delight, we're looking at what happens in onboarding, what happens in the main delivery of working with your clients?
What happens with offboarding? What happens when it's time to renew people? And. How do we make sure that there are really predictable touch points each step along the way? This is such a change from customer support. Right. This is customer experience. This is client experience. Client experience is designing everything and thinking proactively.
Where are people gonna get stuck? Where are they gonna need help? How can I proactively connect with [00:40:00] them when I know that they might have questions? And the more proactive you can be, the easier it's going to be. Right? So when you have these predictable touch points, because you've designed your client experience.
It smooths out a lot of this fear that you need to be available 24 7. Another huge part of this is clarifying the different ways that you can get help and in customer experience. You have to explicitly share. How do I get help? How do I get support? If I have a question, what do I do? Where do I go? How do I communicate with you?
And the reason this is so important is probably something a lot of us have experienced at some point is if people don't know, then we end up feeling bombarded with messages from everywhere, right? You'll have a client who they don't know exactly how they're supposed to reach out to you, so they're DMing you on your social media, they're sending you an email, they're sending you a text message.
And it becomes chaos, right? It is too, too much. You have to clarify those communication channels in your client experience, and this allows you to build something where you're a consistent presence instead of a constant presence. So Libby shared that. Watching how I run my programs helped her to realize that.
Clients can feel so taken care of without you being on demand, and I'm a big fan of that, right? So my favorite part of this is she shared, she was able to go from feeling like she had to be on call all the time to really working nine to four Monday through Friday. And she schedules now that she has things in place in her client experience, in her onboarding, in her delivery, to make it explicitly clear that they don't have after hours access anymore.
And what to do if something comes up, how you know what the process is going to look like. It helps people feel taken care of, but also helps her protect her sanity. The next big challenge that Libby was running into was content creation, and she felt like it was such a heavy lift, and a lot of that was because it just wasn't systematized.
So Libby had a lot. That she wanted to teach and to talk about. Surprise, surprise, I am surrounded by brilliant women who love to share what they know, right? It's kind of like if you get us in a room and you ask us about the thing we're an expert at, let me info dump everything onto you. It's, we love this, right?
We research this. This is our life. We spend our time. Learning all the latest stuff, going to all the conferences, like we get excited about things that everyone else would think is like a little crazy. So she had so much she wanted to teach, but she was creating so much content. Unnecessarily. Even though what she was doing worked right, so she had clients, but she had turned this content creation into something she had to keep doing.
She felt like she should keep doing. And again, kind of similar to to Gabi, she felt like she had to constantly be putting something new. So similar to Gabi, she used the client growth engine 12 month calendar at a glance calendar and stopped reinventing the wheel. She instead chose one topic per week.
Okay, one topic per week, and she was able to repurpose that topic across all the channels she was using. So her clients get a newsletter with that topic. There's a blog with that topic. Her community that she runs has that topic. So that is client growth en engine in action. It's one core message and then you distribute it across channels and you rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.
And my favorite thing about this is she was able to, the next year, you know, rinse and repeat that instead of going, well, what do we talk about this week? She already had her list of what the topics were going to be. This kind of relates to the next challenge she was running into, which is she had been creating so many things 'cause she wanted to teach so many things that she was creating what I call couch potato content.
And that's when you create content once. And then it dies in the archives. It dies on your website, it dies on your blog, and it never sees the light of day. And that pattern is something I see for a lot of small business owners. They spend so much time creating something, whether it's a blog or a podcast or a newsletter, they share it and then it gets buried.
And after the sharing, no one else hears about it ever and ever again. [00:45:00] It's not doing anything for you, right? It's couch potato content. It's exhausting, and there are no compounding results really from that. How did client growth engine fix this for her client Growth engine is all about creating a library of.
Resources, a library of assets that you're continuously sharing. It's not a one-time performance, right? We want to make sure that people are hearing your message multiple times and in multiple formats. You want to make sure that if you created something once you're sharing it again and again. This is something I feel like.
There is this huge myth that everything has to be brand new and fresh every single week. Someone who heard or read an article that you had or read a newsletter that you had a year ago is not gonna remember it most likely. So you really wanna be thinking about your content as assets. These should be assets that you can reuse again and again in multiple ways.
If it started, um. As a blog post that got a good reception last year, pull that baby out and repurpose it. She was really struggling with, I would say, marketing and delivery because the operations were also undocumented. And again, I brought this up with the other two clients who worked with me, with Gabi and with Amanda.
This is something that people. Really don't discount, right? People really believe that if they wanna scale their business, all they have to do is more and more marketing to get more and more sales, but it has to grow together. Your operations aren't documented, then none of the marketing in the world is gonna fix it.
Right? So what was happening for Dr. Libby was she would be hiring help and. There were no SOPs, there were no standard operating procedures. And so without those, each time she was onboarding new support, she was constantly re-explaining herself. She was constantly trying to explain how things were kind of working.
Um, and of course, each time she was doing that, she was explaining it probably a little bit differently. So there was a lot of inconsistency. How does client growth engine fix this? Well, one, it makes all the decisions in advance, right? When you have your client growth engine documented, you have your strategy in place.
You understand what your ideal clients are, you understand what your positioning is, you understand what your messaging is, you understand what you're doing for, attract, engage, nurture, invite, delight, and you've documented all of these things. And then when you document all of these things. Other people can step in and take over parts of it or all of it, and that's what's really fun for me to watch for my clients is to see them go, oh, now that I've got this documented, my team can take over most of the delivery and I only have to step in and do this, this, and this.
That is so exciting, and by the end of working with us, she was able to bring in two new assistants so that she could stay in her zone of genius and the assistance could be behind the scenes working on the client growth engine and keeping things moving. So. This was a, you know, a different business model to talk about, but so relevant because I know so many of the people who are listening to the podcast right now.
If you're listening to this and you have clients who work with you long term, maybe they're, you know, long-term retainer clients, or they're people who come back to you again and again and again. They were new with you all the time. This is a different approach to marketing. You wanna market. For clients for life, you don't need tons of new people, which means you probably don't need to do most of the noise that's out there.
You want to focus on building out that client experience. You wanna build out those support pathways, and then you want to build out the marketing systems that you can rinse and repeat. That become, you know, here's the themes that we return to every year. Here's the topics that we are building assets around, and you do the heavy lifting upfront.
You build those assets up front, you build those systems up front, but each time you go to share them again, to repurpose them again, you just have to Z them up a little bit. You know, tweak a couple things, put up a new graphic, but it's not starting from scratch and that's the game changer. In fact, one of the things that I absolutely love hearing from my clients who have [00:50:00] businesses like Libby's, where.
You have a client base that works with you consistently is you get to focus on doing things so much easier. You get to really spend more time in her case with her patients, with our clients, and then you can go off and do other fun projects. She was actually able to write a book and she talks about that a little bit in the podcast.
So if this episode was inspiring to you and you're like, okay, wow, these were a lot of similar challenges to what I've struggled with that I want you to come check out Client Growth Engine. We are making this program available outside of the CEO Collective, a hundred percent on demand as a self study, and I wanted to make this available because this framework.
Is a game changer. And most of the clients who I've worked with over the last 20 ish years come to me and they're so funny because they'll say, I always keep that in mind. Every single week I think about what is my attract, what is my engage, what is my nurture, what is my invite, what is my delight? Like, it just kind of gets into your head as a way to think about marketing as a way to.
Think about keeping things running smoothly, and it becomes a way to make things simpler to uncomplicate so much in your business. It becomes a way to make those hard calls and to be able to discern between, okay, they're talking about this, that and the other. Should I do this and add this into the mix?
It helps you make smarter CEO level decisions. It's not magic. It's really not magic at all. This is about having a repeatable, a rinse and repeatable framework that will help you simplify things in your business. It's about making those strategic. Decisions. If you decide that you want to check out client growth engine, I'm going to make sure that all of the, um, links are in the show notes for you.
We are making this available from my birthday from the time this episode goes live, February 24th through March 4th for only $297. And the price point will increase after this promotion, but when you decide to go through this program, you're going to get access. To the entire on demand training, you're also gonna get access to the Living Breathing Playbook so that you can document these things for your business.
And I'm also gonna be giving you access to some of the high trust business systems that have really made the biggest impact for my clients. Including our consultation system to help you make sure that you're bringing in the right fit clients, that their booking consults are showing up for those consults or saying yes and actually hiring you to work with them.
We're gonna share our referral system, our referral growth engine for how you can get more referrals into your business by creating more referral opportunities. And we're also gonna share some of our automated systems behind the scenes that help you to leverage those marketing assets that you're building for your business.
And the reason that this, um, is important to know, here we are for the first time launching a Client Growth Engine Mini Mind. What is a Mini Mind? A mini mind is a six week. Live group coaching to go through the client growth engine together with me. I am only allowing 15 people to join me for the mini mind.
But when you go and join the Mini Mind, in addition to client growth engine. Then you will have access to a weekly call. I'll be hosting starting on, I believe it's March 11th, Wednesday, March 11th, um, until April 15th, Wednesdays at noon. And each call, we're going to go through a part of the client growth engine framework together to get feedback.
As you are working on it, this will ensure that if you need support making those big decisions about what strategy makes the most sense for you, or how can I make this work for my business, you are gonna have the support you need with me. Going through that process. So this is the only time this, uh, first half of the year I plan to run the mini mind.
If you think you want to join us, then you need to go ahead and get a spot. 'cause like I said, [00:55:00] I am limiting the seats for this to ensure that everyone who joins does get a chance in these calls to have every single step of this reviewed by me and to get feedback on your client growth engine. Okay. This was a fun episode.
I would love to hear from you what ahas or insights you have. I would love to hear, you know, if any of these challenges stood out to you as, okay, I've had similar challenges or similar stumbling blocks, and now you're like, yes, I can see how client growth engine can help me simplify things. Please let me know.
Alright, I look forward to hopefully getting to work with you and I will be sharing those full length podcast episodes from my three case studies today following this one. So if you wanna dive into those conversations, I encourage you to go ahead and do that.