The Business You Have Today is The Result of The Marketing You Did 3 Months Ago

Let's start today's conversation with the tale of two entrepreneurs. Our first entrepreneur is so fired up about her business. She has really loved working with her clients, and now she knows it is her time to turn this business into a six or seven-figure empire. What does she do? She starts joining all of these different programs because she's told the secret to her success is launching a funnel. Nope. The funnel didn't work.

Okay, we're going to shift gears and now we're going to do a webinar strategy. Oh, the webinar didn't work so let's jump into doing a five-day challenge. I only got “uh-huh” results, not that great. Instead, we're going to shift completely and now we're going to create a tiny offer. The tiny offer is totally the secret to making sure I can continue to run my Facebook ads and not be spending too much money. Well, nope. It is killing me because the ads are not working right. What am I going to do next? Screw all that. Let's go jump into a premium high ticket offer.

This entrepreneur is finding herself spinning her wheels because she has this amazing vision for growing her business but she is hopping from idea to idea to idea, she is not following through with any specific tactic if it doesn't provide instant success.

Now on the other hand, we have our second entrepreneur. Now she also is excited about the idea of growing her six or seven-figure business. She can see that long term, this is the work she wants to be doing, the people she wants to be serving, and now she's looking ahead at “How am I going to grow this business so that it's a business I absolutely love?” She knows that overnight success is a myth and that's often not how you get where you want to go.

This entrepreneur has a different approach. Instead of trying absolutely everything and changing course, she is committing to the slow and steady approach. She has taken the framework we teach inside of our CEO Collective and is plugging in one strategy to each part of her overall customer journey to make sure that she's consistently attracting, nurturing, engaging, inviting, and delighting potential clients into her business. She's committing to those strategies for at least three to six months to determine if that strategy is the right fit for her and her business.

Because she is rinsing and repeating these strategies, she's actually able to get to the point where she's not just learning about these strategies but she's able to optimize these strategies and see better and better results. The best part is as she gets to the other side of 6 months, 12 months, 24 months, it becomes inevitable that she reaches her revenue goals because she has stayed consistent with her follow-through. Which entrepreneur do you want to be? Let's dive in.

Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook. 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. Welcome to another episode here on Promote Yourself to CEO, actually, that I am recording live on TikTok. Those of you who have been following along with me know that I have been doing a TikTok experiment. I'm in month one currently of my TikTok experiment, looking at how I could leverage this platform as another Attract strategy for my business. So far, I have a lot of insights that I shared when I went live a few days ago to share the results from my first month.

But I wanted to record today's podcast because when I started sharing that I was doing this TikTok experiment, I heard from a lot of people who the first questions that they have for me is, “Well, have you gotten any results from that yet? Have you gotten any clients from that yet? How do you know that's actually going to work for you?” Just all of these different questions about basically “Am I going to get instant results using TikTok in my business?”

I thought, you know what, this is a topic we need to really dive into because one of the biggest challenges I see for so many women entrepreneurs is that they'll come to me as their business coach and strategist and say, “Hey, I have tried everything. I have done everything everybody told me I should do in order to grow my business. I have tried being on social media. I've tried sending emails. I've tried growing an email list and I can't grow my email list. I've tried doing a webinar and that didn't work. I've tried doing a challenge and that didn't work. I've tried doing sales calls and they didn't work. I can't find any clients. All I hear is the tiny violin saying woe is me, nothing is working.”

My first thought here is, “Okay, let's really explore this. Let's really dig in and see what is actually going on.” Because most of the time, what I see is not that nothing works, any strategy will work if you truly follow through 100%. I find it's not the strategy that's the problem. It's not the way you're trying to go after growing something in your business. But what does hold you back from things working is you're not going all in. You're not truly putting in 100% effort. You're like tiptoeing in to testing that strategy.

What does this look like? For a lot of the people I talk to, this looks like them saying, “Well, I heard TikTok is a great place that I should go and grow my business.” So they set up the account, they post a couple times, and when they don't see results right away, in a few weeks, they're like, “Well, this isn't for me. This doesn't work. What a waste of my time.” Meanwhile, they've spent more time scrolling than they have creating content, engaging, or trying to provide value on the platform. They really haven't gone all in on the platform.

I also see this with people who are trying honestly any other strategy in their business. I have people who will come to me and they said, “Well, I tried to do a launch for my online course or a group coaching program or training, and it didn't work for me. Launches just don't work for me.” I'm like, “Okay, tell me more. What else is going on here?” What I often find is they really didn't go all in on that launch. Often, they were hesitant to really implement the full strategy. They'll send out just an email, maybe a couple emails, about their product, program, or service. Then if they don't get results right away after that first email, they're going, “Well, this isn't for me. No one wants to buy this.”

Then they go back and start trying to create a whole other thing. It leads to this cycle of entrepreneurs who try something honestly half-assed and they do one little baby step, they don't do the whole strategy, they don't truly follow through, and then they say, “This didn't work,” and so they go off and buy another course about a whole other different marketing and sales strategy and they run the same thing again. They're like, “Instead of a webinar, I'm going to try the challenge.” They half-ass it, they don't truly follow through with the full strategy, and because of that, they don't see the results that they're looking for.

I think what we really have as a problem here—and this is a little tough love from your CEO coach, Racheal—is it's not that the strategy is not working, it's that you didn't really go all in on the strategy. You didn't really follow through 100%. If you're not willing to follow through 100%, you're not willing to put everything into that strategy, you're not even giving it a chance to work. We've got to stop with this instant gratification running our business. If you are hoping that one strategy is going to be the secret to your success and it's just going to happen overnight, you're always going to find yourself in this struggle feast or famine cycle because that's just not how it works.

What I want you to think about is if you're looking at your plan, what you're trying to accomplish in your business, and you're looking at the strategies you are implementing—your marketing strategies, your sales strategies—I want you to ask yourself are you really throwing everything at it to see if this can work for you. I want you to know that the first time you're going into implementing a strategy, that is where you really have to give it a 110% effort. Because if you just come in with a 10% effort to test the waters, you're never going to see the result that you're looking for.

I want you to start asking yourself “Did I really go all in 110%, and do what I should do to see the results I'm looking for?” How do I know that people aren't seeing the results because they're not going in 110%? Often, it'll look like they go through our 90-Day planning process, they attend The CEO Retreat, or they purchase one of our CEO planners, or they're in the first couple quarters of The CEO Collective. They'll set these goals, they map out their plan, and then they come back in their quarterly review, and they say, “You know what, I didn't achieve my goal.” Okay, why didn't you achieve your goals? “Well, I had five goals for the quarter, I only tried to work on one.”

Okay, well, you didn't do any work there so you didn't follow through on those other ones. Why didn't you achieve the one you were working towards? “Well, I didn't really follow through with all the action steps that would have helped me achieve those goals. I only sent a couple emails, I only reached out to a few people, I only had a few sales calls.” That's the answer right there. It's not the strategy, it's not the plan, it is the follow-through. If you're struggling with the follow-through, if you're struggling to stick to it, you will not see the results that you want.

Something I tell all of my clients to help them reframe and shift their perspective away from this instant gratification, overnight success, is that the business you have today is the result of the work you did three to six months ago. You need to know this going into any strategy you're going to implement into your business. You really have to commit to each marketing strategy, each sales strategy 110% for a solid 3 to 6 months for you to see those results.

Why is that? Well, one, it takes a while for you to figure out the strategy. I am in month one of my TikTok experiment, so I am still figuring out so much about TikTok. There's so much I'm learning right now in the moment as I'm going through this experiment. I know that the best results are not going to come at the super beginning when I am a super beginner on this platform. I am going to embrace being a beginner, I'm going to embrace that this is a time for me to learn, for me to test, for me to play around with it, and really try to figure out how I can make this platform work for me and my business.

I know that the first three months are just the learning phase. Anything I get out of this beyond learning this platform in the first three months is icing on the cake. I know that I've got to get through that learning phase first before I can get to the optimization stage where then I can actually use this platform to grow my business, to get more people to my podcast, or to get more people to check out my programs at The CEO Collective.

Because I know that, I didn't go into this thinking, “Well, I better get clients within the first couple weeks of me going live on TikTok or posting on TikTok.” I went in with the expectation that it was going to require a learning curve, I was going to have to go all in to do that learning curve, and then I was going to have a period where I could optimize it and really ramp it up a bit more before I would see results that I'm looking for.

That mindset shift helps me stay in the process. It helps me stay in that follow follow-through mode because I know that even when I'm doing something on TikTok and I don't see the results that I want or I make a mistake, like when I accidentally used music that apparently I wasn't supposed to as a business, it got taken down, I know that's part of the process. I know the failure is part of the process. It's all part of learning. Fail just means first attempt in learning. Any little failures I have on TikTok right now are all helping me learn, they're all helping me get better so that I can get to the next stage which is optimization, and then the results that I'm looking for.

I know it'll take three to six months. I've committed three to six months. I'm going all in on this strategy. By going all in on this strategy, what have I done for that? One, I know that I needed a lot of content to post, so I hired a videographer, I worked with a team, I have support to make sure that I can create all the content and post all the content. As someone who has a lot going on in her life and has chronic health care issues, I can't be somebody whose strategy on TikTok depended on me being able to show up in every single day. I physically energetically can't do it, so I needed to find a strategy that worked for me that helped me create all the content. I needed to find a strategy that worked for me to follow up and engage with people. I needed to find the strategy to work for me to keep that list going of the next batch of content we're going to create.

I made sure that when I decided I was going to commit this time, I mapped it out, I made sure it was aligned with what I have the bandwidth to do, what I have the capacity to do, and then I'm following through on it. I am tracking like crazy. I am always tracking what is going on with anything I'm doing in my business so I know that every day I'm trying to post a video, every day I'm circling back for a few minutes to answer comments. Because I have that plan and I am committed to following through, I'm going to see the results that I'm looking for.

I'm already seeing the results that I'm looking for and I didn't expect that to happen in month one. But it's this longer term perspective that is going to help you. Because what I see a lot of other people do when they decide to test a new platform, our new way to get in front of potential clients is if they don't see the results right away, they assume it's not going to work for them and they're still in the beginner stages. Remember, the business you have right now is the result of the work you did three to six months ago.

Another example of how this plays out for a lot of people that I talk to, a lot of people are super interested in podcasting right now. Obviously, I'm recording my podcast right now. I've had a podcast since 2015. I had one previous to that since, I want to say, 2012, 2013. I've been podcasting for over a decade. I love-love-love podcasting, so as someone who has recorded hundreds of podcast episodes, I can tell you that most podcasters who have been around a long time, they know the reason that they have succeeded long term is because they went into it knowing it would take at least a year to truly get the traction they're looking for and seeing results.

Now, there's always going to be exceptions to this rule. The people who seem to be the ones who get that overnight success who instantly have the top ranking podcast or instantly going viral on another platform, honestly, a lot of times, they're able to have that fast massive success instantly because they already have an existing audience that they're directing in that place.

If you already have a massive social media audience and you're directing them all to your brand new podcast or you're directing them all to TikTok, you're going to see that take off a lot faster than someone who doesn't have a huge following, who doesn't have an email database, who doesn't have a lot of people on social media. Those people are not going to see as fast of results because they're building that audience from scratch. That's something you want to think about. That's one thing.

The second thing when it comes to podcasting is research has showed that on average, most of the podcasts that are out there stop after 10 episodes. Think about that, they took all the time and energy to come up with a podcast, to brand the podcast, to launch the podcast, and they after 10 episodes decided, “You know what, I'm not seeing results from this. Let me stop.” Again, the first 10 episodes, you're just figuring out what your podcast is about. You're just figuring out what your audience is actually interested in. You're still in the learning zone.

If you're truly interested in that strategy working for you, you have to be willing to commit six months to a year to figure it out, to make sure that you're publishing enough content that you can see whether or not people are interested in what you have to say. Then once you get through that learning stage, you can get into the optimization stage where now you know what people love hearing about from you and you really go all in again on those specific topics. That's when you'll start to see the results. Keep that in mind.

Podcasting, if you want to do that, don't pod fade after 10 episodes because you thought you'd see results in just a couple months. You won't see results until six months or more. I think TikTok is a little bit faster from what I'm seeing and I think that's because the difference between TikTok and other platforms where you might be creating content, TikTok is a discovery engine. That's what I'm finding is TikTok is a discovery engine where they are pushing on the For You page, content out that it thinks you might be interested in, which is why I think we're seeing a lot of people who are getting a lot of growth faster than I would expect, honestly, because they're getting found a lot easier.

Podcasting is a little bit different. Often, the growth from podcasting comes from search. If you go have a podcast, people can search your topic in Apple Podcasts, or whatever, or it's coming from you sending your audience there. It's very rarely coming just from people organically finding it, unless you happen to do something that I do often, like I do a ton of podcast interviews. I've had a podcast for over a decade but I can tell you I probably average anywhere from 40 to 60 podcast interviews a year on other people's podcasts because that's how more people find me on podcasts.

That is a strategy where, again, I see people who say, “Well, I've tried pitching myself for podcasts and that didn't work.” I can tell you currently right now, the average acceptance rate for a pitch, if you're pitching yourself to a podcast where you don't know that person, where it's a cold pitch, or you have very small connection to that person, usually we're looking at 10% or less. It might be less than that for a lot of people. You actually have to factor that in. If you're only sending four pitches a month, you're going to be waiting around several months before you actually get a yes because the numbers are going to play out in your favor.

We have to shift expectations around this. We have to shift the expectations around what it really takes to go all in on a strategy and see it work for you. If you're looking at producing a podcast as part of your marketing strategy, as part of your Nurture marketing strategy, commit to a year so you can go through the learning stage, so you can go through the optimization stage, and then you'll start to really start seeing the results coming in.

If you're deciding to pitch yourself for podcasts, speaking, interviews, or media, don't send just five pitches and hope that you're going to have amazing results because it takes volume, you truly have to go all in. You need to understand what goes into a pitch, what goes into the follow-up, which is a huge part of it, and what are the components of a really strong pitch. For any type of pitching yourself to be a guest teacher, to be on an interview, to be in the media, it takes a lot of volume.

That didn't even sink into me until I started hiring people on my team to specifically pitch me for things. Then I would start seeing like, “Oh, wow, in six months, they've pitched me for 80 things and I got 10 interviews out of that.” I would have never had that realization if I didn't actually look at the numbers and what it actually takes to get the results that you're looking for. It takes being super clear about the numbers, it takes being super clear about the timeline, it takes being super clear about what it's going to take for you to truly follow through.

The follow through is the biggest part of any of this. If you don't follow through, then don't expect the results. If you tried something once and it didn't get instant results but you didn't continue following through all the way, I'm not surprised that the results weren't there. How else do I see this? I see this often when people come to me and they say, “Launching doesn't work for me. I've tried sending emails out about my product, program, or service being available, no one bought.” I think this is such a misconception. This is that whole “if you build it, they will come” mentality. I'm here to tell you that is not how marketing and sales works.

Very few of us are going to have the type of businesses that have so much demand that you send one email and it's sold out. That's something that you can create. If you have an incredible overall marketing strategy and system in place, that can definitely happen for you; you just build up the excitement and the demand for the offers that you have. But when you're getting started in a new strategy, when you have a new product, program, or service, I'm going to be honest, it's going to take more than one email.

Often, I see people who are like, “Okay, I'm going to launch this,” and they don't even send a dedicated email to promote their product, program, or service. It's like their regular newsletter with a little PS. “PS. I'm now taking on a couple clients for XYZ.” They've buried the sales invitation in the bottom of the email and no one saw it. Now, they're surprised why no one bought it. That's not how that works. You have to really make sure that you are capturing those people's attention.

This is one of the hardest parts about if you are leveraging any online marketing strategies to sell, to market and sell your products, programs, and services, you've got to know that you are competing against everything else in that person's life to get their attention. You are competing against all the other emails in their inbox. I can tell you right now, my personal inbox is a hot mess—my business inbox, thank god, I have an assistant in there to keep it organized and under control—but my personal inbox is filled with stuff for my kids, it's filled with things for the home renovation we're doing, it's filled with personal requests from my friends and family.

If I was trying to find your pitch in there, and it wasn't super clear that you were selling something right now that I would be interested in, it's going to sit in that inbox for a long time. You need to know that, you have to think about how people behave when it comes to how they interface with their email.

Same thing with social media. Social media, I see people who post like one little “Now taking clients.” But they have to remember, the algorithms on all these other platforms are not pushing out your content to your followers. If you're just posting one time about your product, program, or service, and that's it, most of your followers didn't even see it. This is why we've got to get used to the idea that you are not bothering people when you are following up, when you are sending multiple emails about your product, program, or service being available, when you're posting multiple times about your product, program, or service being available.

If you're doing an enrollment of a group course, a coaching program, your nutrition program, or intensive that you're doing, whatever your offer is, you need to plan to send multiple emails, you need to plan to post multiple times. Wherever they're hearing about this, you need to talk about it a whole lot more than you think you need to. This is where, for a lot of people, it feels really uncomfortable because we don't want to bother anyone.

But I love and I'll give credit to my friend Stacey Harris who produces my podcast over at Uncommonly More, go, check her out. Stacey shares with me that the biggest shift in her mindset for sales that she ever had was “I'm going to just keep emailing people about my offer until they decide to unsubscribe. Because if they finally unsubscribe or they finally unfollow you, that means they were never going to buy from you in the first place.” They weren't ever there to actually become a client, to actually take that next step and work with you. They were just there for the free information.

You're running a business, so if somebody is in your business ecosystem, they're in your email list, they're on your social media, they're in your database in some way, they have already raised their hand and said, “Hey, I'm interested in what your business has to offer.” Don't feel like you're bothering people when you're following through with actually sending out those emails, actually posting all the things, actually showing up.

Remember, 20 years ago, they used to tell us that you had to see a marketing message at least seven times before it's like your brain registered, “Oh yeah, I want to buy that thing.” These days, because our attention span is so shortened, first, but also because of just the sheer volume of information we're getting, it's completely different than it was 20 years ago. We just have so much bombarding us all the time. Now, you don't have to be visible 7 times with your offer; it's probably closer to 21 or 30 just because of the sheer amount of information that is hitting people's inboxes, social media feeds, podcast feeds, anywhere they're hearing from you.

I really want you to think about this. The business you have today is the result of the work you did three to six months ago. If you're not willing to commit to follow through with the strategy 100%, if you're not willing to commit to follow through with the strategy for at least six months so that you can get through that initial learning stage where you're figuring the strategy out, where you're really familiarizing yourself with how that strategy works, you've got to get through that stage first. Remember, failure in this stage is just your first attempt in learning, you're learning a lot.

Then, the next three months is starting to optimize. That's where you start to see like, “Okay, what content are they actually paying attention to? What was it that the questions that came up that I can really lean into more?” That's when you can optimize your strategy even more. That's when you get to the other side of that, you should start seeing those people transferring from wherever they found you to now coming into your business.

Now, I think this is just so important because the time is going to pass anyway. Three to six months are going to pass anyway. The difference between the entrepreneurs that I work with who follow through, who do the 90-Day planning with us, who use their CEO Planner—and I built this CEO Planner because I use it. Anybody who's new to me, I actually have a print 90-Day CEO Planner. You can buy it, it'll be shipped directly to you. There's a whole process behind how we implement our 90-Day CEO system, and a huge part of it is the self-accountability with the follow-through.

Because if you can't hold yourself accountable and continue to take those action steps, you're never going to see the result. If you're hoping someone else is going to hold you accountable, you can hire a coach but they're not going to show up to your door and sit down in front of your computer and write your emails and press send. They're not going to make you show up live on TikTok and record things. You can hire all the support in the world but it's up to you to actually do the thing.

I love the thing that I heard about accountability which is you can hire a trainer to give you all the tips and get you in the best shape in the world, but they're not doing the push-ups for you. You still got to do the push-ups. Grab the 90-Day CEO Planner, follow through, and be committed to following through for three to six months so that you can see the business you want instead of staying stuck where you're constantly jumping to the next tactic, to the next big thing that you hear might be the solution. If you're not willing to go all in, then you're not willing to get the results you want.

I hope that was helpful. I hope you enjoyed this live recording of the Promote Yourself to CEO Podcast. I cannot wait to get this one up and out there for you. If you followed along on TikTok, I'd love to answer any questions that you might have.