From Frankenstein Marketing Mess to a Sustainable Growth Strategy

[00:00:00] 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.
One of the biggest reasons that marketing feels so complicated and overwhelming and exhausting is because most small business owners are running a Frankenstein strategy. They've stitched together a bunch of tips, tricks, and tactics from dozens of different experts. From different books, from different programs, from different podcasts, all these different opinions about what they should be doing.
No wonder it feels so hard to sustain. Today we're getting into how we can un Frankenstein your strategy. Let's get into it.
Hey there, CEO. Rachel Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. And I hope you've been following along the last few episodes where we've been talking about uncomplicating your marketing, because I know this is such a major pain point for so many small business owners who feel like they are on this feast or famine cycle that they.
See things slow down the minute they take the foot off the gas with their marketing, but it's just not really sustainable. It just feels like this nonstop to do list of activity. And what makes it even more complicated, as we've talked about over the last few episodes, is one we talked about in the first episode.
That not all marketing fits every single business model. And in fact, that a lot of the advice out there is really geared towards high volume, high transaction businesses that require thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of buyers. And when we are trying to use that marketing strategy, that high volume marketing strategy for our businesses, these highly relational high trust.
Regular, everyday small businesses that are owner operated with maybe a small team. You know, it's such a mismatch because high volume, high transaction businesses require extremely high volume marketing, and ultimately most of them require a team behind them. But if you're like me and you're primarily a one woman show with a small but mighty team.
You don't have time to be marketing all day long, right? You don't wanna be a full-time content creator. You don't wanna be an influencer. You don't have to be on all of the time. So we talked about how we can shift into really discerning if this strategy makes sense for us as a high trust, high, highly relational small business owner.
We talked in the second episode about marketing advice works. Right. A lot of the advice out there, it does work for someone, just not for our businesses. So we talked about what are the common myths that a lot of us are hearing and why it's holding us back. Right? So a lot of the advice out there works for someone, just not for you and me.
If you're not an online business, trying to market to other online business owners or an online marketing trying to. Market to other online marketers, or if you're not a coach who's coaching coaches, or if you're not an influencer or a content creator who is trying to build a massive platform, this advice is so prevalent because it's the visibility bias, right?
They're the loudest, they're producing the most content, but. That doesn't work for a lot of small business owners. It's not aligned for a lot of small business owners, and honestly, it's not aligned with how our clients are making buying decisions. We talked in the third episode about some of the biggest mistakes that I see when I am doing strategy reviews for my small business owner clients.
And it's so important to understand these mistakes because if you don't know what the mistakes are, then how do you know what to fix? Right? And a huge part of the problem is that it's not a motivation issue, right? A lot of people are thinking, oh God, I'm just not motivated to create enough content or to post enough or to be everywhere and to do all the things.
It's [00:05:00] not about motivation. It's about we have a systems issue. We don't have a system that is actually aligned with our business model, aligned with us personally and how we need to show up and do our best work, and it's not aligned with our ideal clients and how they're looking for someone like us, how they're looking for solutions to their problem.
Is, so this all causes this mess of an issue where so many small business owners, by the time they come to work with me, I know they have already put in their 10,000 plus hours and becoming the expert in what it is they do. Right? You started doing what you do. You have the education, you have the experience, you have the expertise.
And you have a proven track record with getting results for people. But none of us, you know, launched our business knowing exactly how to get clients. Even I who have an MBA and worked in the consulting world, I had to figure some of this out too, right? Nobody has the Bulletproof Blueprint out the gate, and so we start learning.
If you're listening to this podcast, I know you're listening to other podcasts, I tend to attract a lot of really smart women who love learning, and so you've learned so much about all of this, whether it's been from podcasts or books or videos or emails, you've maybe signed up for programs or signed up for workshops.
Signed up for trainings. But the problem is it becomes this kind of Frankenstein of a business model because. We're learning all these different siloed things. We learn Instagram from this one person. We learn sales from this other person. We learn how to build a funnel from this other person. We learn how to launch from this other person.
We learn how to do ads from this other person, and there's all these different people with really specific tactics and tools. That they're teaching, but we learn all of those things separately, right? And it becomes a Frankenstein, just like Dr. Frankenstein had to go find all the different body parts for the monster and from all these different bodies.
Like nothing really fits together and we know nothing fits together when we don't know where our next 10 clients are coming from. When there's no predictability. And it creates this like low level anxiety. Like we just never know if another client's gonna come along. Predictably, we never know if our revenue's gonna be predictable, and we don't know if our revenue's gonna be predictable.
We don't know if we can predictably pay ourselves. And if we can't do that, how are we gonna grow? And it just creates this huge conundrum where we're always second guessing ourselves. We have to. Pause and take a step back. We have to get away from the tips and tricks and tactics, and we have to look at a bigger picture and make sure that everything actually fits together cohesively.
And that's really the difference between strategy and tactics, right? Right. Tactics are choosing, I'm gonna post on Instagram five times a day. Strategy is understanding where that fits in. With how everything else works in your business. So strategy is the big picture, right? It's deciding the things that matter in your business, the things that matter to you, right?
That's important. That's essential to having a clear strategy is what matters to you. What are your criteria? What are your non-negotiables? What are you best at? How do you best communicate? And then we also have to think about what matters to our ideal clients. How do they hear information? How do they wanna learn?
How do they make buying decisions? How do they decide who to work with? So strategy is all about deciding what matters. It's all the big decisions that come before we choose a tactic. And if we're choosing a tactic without understanding who is it that we're trying to help. What matters most to them? What helps us stand out and why do they wanna work with us?
Right? Understanding our positioning. What is the process we take people through? Like all these big picture decisions we need to make. If we're trying to just choose tactics without understanding that, then it's kind of a mess, right? And when it's a mess. It's inconsistent. It creates a lot of friction for our potential [00:10:00] clients, and when they get confused, instead of trying to figure out how to work with us, guess what?
A confused mind says no. So we can't just say yes to a tactic without understanding the strategy, without under stra understanding the strategy. Everything feels confusing. You don't have line of sight into where your next 10 clients are coming from, you. Find yourself constantly hustling 'cause everything feels urgent 'cause you're just trying to keep up with everything hoping that something will work.
So the good news is strategy reduces a lot of that friction strategy reduces the decisions you have to make. Strategy reduces how much effort you have to put in tactics. Focusing on tactics first, they're gonna multiply the number of decisions you have to make. Tactics first is gonna multiply the amount of effort that you have to do.
One is about being smarter and one is about working harder. So when you focus on strategy first, you're able to be smarter, and guess what? Then you don't have to work so hard. That's the best part. That's the best part. You don't have to work so hard. Everything works better and more cohesively, and when everything is cohesive.
It makes it so much more sustainable for you and for your business. So this is what we do at the CEO Collective. We're focused on big picture strategy. We don't teach tactics. We focus on the big picture strategy. We focus first on what we call the 90 day CEO operating system, which is our growth framework.
And you've heard me talk about this, if you've been listening to the podcast for a while. It's a big part of the way that we teach people to operate their business, but the first system we put in place and every single business is a client growth engine. So if you've heard me talk about the 90 day co operating system, it is a growth framework that starts with understanding your vision and your values.
So where you're headed and your rules of the road to get there. We talk about your CEO leadership, helping you uplevel your skillset, uplevel your decision making, uplevel your habits, and we do that in a 90 day cycle with our 90 day CEO planning process. As we start to work with every single client, the first thing that we look at is their client growth engine, because your client growth engine is the process.
Your clients are going through, whether you understand it or not, whether you intentionally design it or not, when they're trying to make a decision. We all, as humans, go through a decision making process when we're making buying decisions or when we need a problem to be solved or we have a desire we're trying to fulfill, right?
So it doesn't matter if you're trying to buy a car or if you're trying to decide if you should buy the new iPhone, you're going through this process. And when you can align your actions to the way your potential clients are going through this process, it's so much easier. It becomes so much more predictable for you.
You know where your next clients are coming from. You can actually forecast your revenue and your growth within 10%. You know where to fix problem. When they bubble up and you know where you need to optimize or you need to make things work better and be even smoother. If you don't have that, it's gonna be Frankenstein together, and there's a lot of friction for that potential client.
So the client growth engine is the very first system we put in place. It's your marketing, your sales, and your client delivery. It's every touch point of your client journey and your client experience, action, and to make it easy for each step of that journey. For your client to know exactly what's next and be empowered to make the right decision for themselves.
So this is the first thing we put in place because without it all, the other effort is wasted. Right? If we don't have a client growth engine that's running smoothly for us, then trying to hire a team is a nightmare because they don't know how to consistently. Bring in clients. They don't know how to consistently market your business.
They don't know how to consistently make sales, and they certainly don't know how to consistently deliver the same level of results. So the client growth engine really is one of the most important things any business owner can have, and you want to design it intentionally.
So I wanna walk through at a very high level, the client growth engine. [00:15:00] And as I am going through this, I want you to see if there are any gaps in yours, because again, whether you intentionally design it or not, your clients, your potential clients are going through this process as they are making decisions, as they are trying to decide who can help them.
What offer can help them to ultimately get the result they're looking for or to fulfill a desire? So there's five elements in the client growth engine, and the first three, attract, engage, nurture, are your marketing system. So your marketing is all about getting in front of folks who have not paid you yet, right?
Potential clients. And the very first step of this is attract. Attract is crucially important. As we discussed in a previous episode, a lot of small business owners are confusing, attract, and nurture, and the biggest difference here is attract, is getting in front of brand new people, very first time getting introduced to you.
Your business, your brand, what you do, how you can help. And nurture is when you are building the know, like, and trust, building the relationship with those folks who already know you so they can make the decision whether or not they wanna work with you. If we confuse the two, then at some point you run out of potential clients.
There's simply not enough people hearing about the work that you do to become clients. So attract is crucially important. This is really like turning on. The spigot, and if you are not doing enough attract, it's like a little drip, drip, drip. If you're doing more attract, it's like a steady flow of potential clients who are hearing about your business for the very first time.
Now, there's a few different ways you can attract new clients into your business. There's five that I've identified that work for small business owners. Again, highly relational, regular small business owners. The first is search. Think about it. People go to Google, they go to chat, GPT, they're typing in their question.
They're trying to find an answer. They're trying to find a solution. Search is incredibly powerful and so underrated, especially if you do something really, really specific, really unique, or you are a local business owner. There's a lot of businesses that search is incredibly powerful. For the next is what I call other people's audiences.
Now other people's audiences is all about someone else has an audience and they are facilitating the introduction somehow. Whether they're sending you a referral, they're sending you a introduction to somebody, or they're getting you in front of their audience at large. So maybe you're being interviewed, maybe there's media being written about you, um, like press.
You're being on a morning news show or you're being written up in a magazine or your local paper. Um, this is one area that I really lean into a lot. I do a ton of interviews and I find that for my business, my clients like to listen to podcasts. So when I do a lot of podcast interviews, it's a great way for them to hear about my podcast, so it becomes a little more cohesive in our strategy here.
So other people's audiences is great for experts. I absolutely love this. If you are someone who has a very unique perspective, a very unique. Thought leadership, you solve things in a very specific way. Getting in front of other people's audiences is, especially interviews is really, really powerful. But for a lot of my clients, referrals are where it's at.
The next attract strategy is discovery. Now, discovery really became super popular for me in this framework as I'm working with my clients. When TikTok really popped off, because for the first time it was a social media platform that wasn't based on. Your existing network, it was based on delivering new content because you interacted with that type of topic before.
So suddenly people were discovering all sorts of new things. I find that discovery is now getting through a lot of different platforms. We're seeing a big shift here because it was so successful. But overall, this is the, has the potential to be really powerful to get you in front of new audiences that otherwise might not know who you are.
The next is cold pitching. So this is a tried and true. I know not everybody loves it, but if you are especially. A small business that tends to work with more corporate, more enterprise level, um, working with larger organizations, then chances are you just have to show up and put yourself in front of those folks.
So Colt Pitching still works. You know, this is how I started my entire life and career, was being the person who would cold call for my dad's insurance agency. I would flip open the yellow pages. Call all these businesses and set appointments for my dad's [00:20:00] insurance team. Um, it still works. It very much still works and not for everybody, but definitely a viable strategy for many.
And then the final attract strategy is paid advertising. This is usually the last one I encourage people to look into because to be honest, it's really easy to spend a lot of money and not get a return here. Um. It is one that works if you have the rest of your client growth engine built out, but you have to make sure the rest of the engine is built out or else you have a huge potential to waste money and not get the number of new clients out of it that make it make sense.
So attract is the very first step. First touch point, first introduction. What happens next? This is the key for client growth engine. You're asking yourself, well, what happens next? Where are people going next with a track? Once they hear about you, your goal is that they engage with you. Why is that important?
Because you could have a hundred people who hear about you and very few will proactively follow up on their own. You have to get their contact information so that you can follow up with them. This is all about being proactive, right? So let's say I was just being interviewed or I was running a Facebook ad.
What is the next step? Well, they heard about me for the first time. The next step is I'm sending them to my website, and on that website they are gonna have one of two choices. They're either going to request a consultation, especially those of you who are service providers. This is probably your biggest call to action for new folks is to request a consult, where now they can talk to you about how you work or they're gonna request content.
And this is all about you Now, being able to follow up with them proactively knowing that if they find your website for the first time, even if they loved whatever they just read on your website, unless they're getting into your community, they're probably gonna forget about you very quickly and you wanna continue sharing content with them.
You wanna continue building the relationship with them. So engage is making sure that if you're sending a hundred people to your website or to your business, that they're not all disappearing and forgetting about you. That instead you've made it sticky and now you have their information and you can follow up with them and build a relationship, which is where the third part of your client growth engine of your marketing system here comes into play.
And that's nurture. So people often do not buy from most of us at the first impression. Let's be honest here. Okay. Most of our businesses are not impulse buys. We're not high transaction businesses for a lot of our businesses. People need to know, like, and trust us before they're ready to make a buying decision, and that's why nurture is so important.
It is about helping people understand more about who you are, what you do, how you can help, who is, you know, who you help. And it's all about helping answer those questions for them so that they can decide if you're the person they want to work with, that they want to hire, that they want to invest in a program with them.
Now, nurture is particularly important for a lot of small businesses because. One, it takes a lot of repetition for people to get to know you, right? Very few of our clients buy on the first time they're hearing from us. They need to hear from us a little bit. They need to make, make, uh, time to go through our content, or they need to look more into what it is that we do.
So nurture is really where a lot of the selling in advance happens. This is where you're answering questions, you're providing resources, you're educating, you're really helping that potential client assess, fit, and assess if what you have to offer is what they're actually looking for. So attract, engage, nurture, that is your marketing system.
And then what happens next? Again, client growth engine is all about reducing the friction. And answering the question, what happens next? Well, someone's found us, attract, they've engaged with us. They joined our email list, or they requested a consult. We've proactively followed up with them, nurture provided education, provided content, provided context, answered questions in advance, let them get to know us a little bit more, and they now are at the point where they're going, okay, I think you can help me.
You have the ability to help me get this solved. Solve this or fulfill this desire. So now we've gotta proactively invite that potential client to take the next step. And again, I talked about in the Mistakes episode. We don't want to this to be passive. We don't want them to have to guess. We don't want them to have to [00:25:00] search.
We wanna make it easy peasy for them to know exactly what the next step is and how they can become a client. Whether it is signing up for a program that you have. Or having a consultation and working with you, et cetera. We wanna make it really, really easy for people to know how to buy, and then once they buy with the invite.
We have to delight them, and this is where the client growth engine isn't just another funnel, to be honest. I understand so many people are obsessed with funnels, but the client growth engine is really about building an ecosystem that helps you build a business based on clients for life. When you have a solid client experience in the delight stage, it means you're clear about how do you onboard everybody.
So everybody has the same expectations and the same understanding, and the same beginning of how they work with you. How do you deliver your product, program, or service so that you can consistently get your clients' results, even as your team starts to help you work with your clients and deliver to your clients?
The consistency builds. And everybody consistently is able to get to the results. That leads to high client retention. That leads to clients renewing and clients repeating. So they continue to work with you. They continue to come back. They continue to ask, what's next? How else can we work together? What's the next step after I finish this program or this service?
And now we have this full ecosystem where everything works together. Every step of the process, every touch point with your clients is intentionally designed to help answer the question, what's next? And to help them feel more confident that you are the right person to say yes to, that you are the right person to hire, that you are the right person to work with.
So as we go through this process in building out a client growth engine, it's all about making smart decisions. Every step of the process. This helps you figure out what is it that you need to focus on. If you were listening to me walk through the client growth engine, you thought, oh, I don't have an attract strategy in place.
I'm not consistently attracting people. I'm not seeing my audience grow consistently over time. In fact, it's getting smaller. Like that's a gap that tells you this is something you might need to focus on. If you listened to me talk about. Invite and you're like, oh no, I need to focus on this 'cause I'm not proactively inviting.
It's all very passive. That's a gap We need to solve for that, right? When you're making decisions around each step of the process, it also helps you figure out what can you ignore and what can you stop doing? There are probably things that you have heard over time that you should be doing, but if you are really to get hypercritical about it and look at it.
You might realize there's a lot of activities that ended up on your massive marketing to-do list that aren't getting the results you're looking for. And when you start to understand how your client growth engine actually works, how your clients actually interact with it, then you can very quickly see what you can ignore or stop doing.
And this is what helps you to build the consistency. This is what helps you to understand what needs to happen in each step of the process. Not just what tactic or what platform you're going to use or how many times you're gonna do something, but when you have a real strategy, it helps you understand what is going on in each stage and what needs to happen and why it needs to happen and who it's happening for.
And understanding this simplifies it. And when you simplify it, it makes it easier to be consistent with it. And even more than that, a huge part of building out a client growth engine and the way that we design it. It is about building these core assets that you can rinse and repeat in your business.
It's all about doing the hard work upfront for each stage in the process, and then instead of having to start over from scratch each time you already know what to work with, right? You already made a lot of the decisions and you can use the system over and over and over again. When I go to invite people into the CEO collective, I'm not starting from scratch.
I know exactly what my invitation process looks like. All I have to do is pull that system out. 90% of it is done. I'll just ush it up a tiny bit each time I go to run that system. When it's time for me to attract more people into my business, I don't need to recreate the wheel every single time. I know what works, and I just go into our system and rerun it.
I just have to [00:30:00] do a little bit of a tweak. So it actually becomes easier over time. Even when I had to take most of 20, 25 away from the business, it was able to help me. Having this framework was able to help me see how I could keep things running and have the team keep things running. While I was taking care of my mom, while I was helping her in memory care, I was able to know exactly what my constraints were.
I had to make a big decision last year because in the past I had primarily attracted new clients with podcast interviews and with TikTok. But because my time was now no longer available, I had to choose a different attract strategy that someone else could run for me. I couldn't show up on an interview.
I couldn't record a bunch of tiktoks. We decided to instead run Facebook ads, but. I had a system for that, and all I had to do was shift from my interview system to my ad system, and it was able to be up and running incredibly quickly. With no gap, which is amazing, right? So that's the goal of this for all of you, is that you understand how everything works, that you've removed all the friction for your potential clients so they can easily make a buying decision.
And when the circumstances of your life or your business change a little bit that you know what you need to swap in and swap out, you need to sell a different program or a different service. Cool. We have a system. We can swap it in, swap it out. Easy peasy. We have not much time to create all new content.
No problem. We've built assets we can rinse and repeat, and the goal is within a couple years of running your client growth engine, you're not creating from scratch at all ever again, right? This is what happens when everything clicks into place and stops feeling like a big Frankenstein. Marketing plan and instead is a cohesive client driven process.
You have more predictability, you know what to do, you know when things are off or when things are wrong, so you can troubleshoot easily and you're able to build out these systems and not only can you rinse and repeat, but ultimately your team. Can rinse and repeat on your behalf, which is what allows your business to be more sustainable, which is what allows you to take time off and take space from your business and ultimately is what allows your business to grow and you have control over the speed at which you grow.
So I wanna hear from you. Would fewer decisions around all of these elements. Create some relief for you and your business if you didn't have to sit down and wonder, what do I need to do this week to market my business or to sell things in my business? Would it help you feel more in control? If it would, then I want you to come check out Client Growth Engine.
It is now available 100% on demand. I have pulled the entire training out. From the CEO collective to make it available because I just feel so incredibly strongly about helping more women entrepreneurs be able to step out of the weeds of the massive marketing to-do list stop duct taping everything together, stop frankensteining everything together and actually lead with strategy so you can have a simpler, more streamlined, more effective, more cohesive process.
That gets results in your business. So if you're ready to start leading with strategy, get instant access. The link is in the show notes. You can head over to the CEO collective.com/client growth engine and get instant access. Dive into it right away. All right. I hope you liked this episode. If it was helpful for you, if it gave you some ahas or insights, make sure you head over to let me know.
At Instagram, at Rachel dot Cook, that is where I'm most active in the dms. Would love to hear from you what gaps you saw as we're going through this and what your next step is gonna be to creating your own client growth engine. I will see you in the next episode where we are going to have some case studies about how this actually works in real life.
In real life businesses, real life every day, just like you and me, businesses. That are not he huge trans transaction, high volume businesses, but instead these very intentionally designed small businesses like yours and mine, and how this creates more ease and more simplicity for the business [00:35:00] owners.