What to Focus on First

Hey there, CEOs, Rachel Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. If you listen to last week's episode, then you know the topic for the month is all about making those CEO level decisions, which is especially important right now when we have so many external factors working against small business owners.
We have so much uncertainty happening in the economy. We have so many different policies being rolled out and then taken back. We have nonstop news hitting our feeds that is making us just agitated and overwhelmed, and it's leading to a lot of small business owners feeling incredibly stressed, especially when all of this uncertainty, all of these changes is impacting our businesses.
And the biggest way it's impacting a lot of small businesses right now is we are seeing slower sales or lower revenue than we anticipated. This is something that while we might not have been through this particular moment in time before, we have experienced in the world of small business times when sales slow, when revenue slows down. And it's important as the CEO of your small business that you understand what you need to focus on first instead of attempting to change everything in your business.
And that's one of the biggest reasons I wanted to record this episode for you. I hear so many small business owners who when things slow down, they have less revenue coming in every single month, they start to panic and freak out because we've all been sold that lie that your business should be constantly growing, right? It should be straight up all the time. That's not realistic. Businesses ebb and flow all the time. This is normal.
It's normal for revenue to slow down and for sales to slow down when things are changing in the world that are impacting buyer behavior, that are impacting our clients' disposable income, that are impacting the budgets of the businesses that we work with. All of these different factors are going to impact our bottom line. They're going to impact the revenue and sales in our business. So we want to go into this knowing that this is something that's happened before.
And when you develop this CEO skillset of understanding what you need to focus on first, you're going to be able to make smarter, more strategic CEO level decisions. What we don't want to do is hit the panic button and feel like we have to burn it all down. We have to overhaul everything. We need an all new marketing strategy. We need all new offers. We need to totally rebrand our business.
This is something I hear a lot from small business owners because they feel like, well, if it's not working, then nothing is working. The truth is there are probably only a small number of things that are going on in your business that aren't working. There's probably a lot more working than you realize, so we don't want to change everything. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
We want to take a beat and actually diagnose what the true challenges are in our business so that we can determine what we need to focus on first. And knowing what we need to fix first is going to save you months of spinning your wheels, it's going to save you so much money that you would be giving up when you throw everything out and start from scratch again.
So hang in there with me. If you've been feeling stuck, if you've been feeling like sales have slowed, revenue has slowed, and you just want to burn it all down and start again, let's take a beat. Let's take a breath and actually go through what those options are.
So before we get into that, I want you to know again, sales slowdowns are normal. This is part of business. This is nothing to do with you personally, more than likely. And if you accept that this is just part of the process, this is part of being a business owner, it's going to be a lot easier to stay grounded and to make smart strategic decisions.
When you panic and get up into that fear response, you start second guessing yourself. You start throwing everything out, trying to do everything all at once. This happens in all businesses, in all business cycles, especially when the market shifts, when the economy shifts, when there's policy changes, when there's political changes, when there's as much going on in the world as we are dealing with right now. Things are going to impact small business owners.
The wrong move is trying to change everything at once, at the same time. That creates so much chaos in your business. And even more than that, if you try to change everything at the same time, then you don't actually know what is or isn't working. So just like a science experiment, when you need to make changes in your business, you don't want to change all the variables. You only want to change one small thing at a time, change one input at a time and see if it changes the output.
If you attempt to do everything everywhere, all at once, you're going to cause more chaos in your business and make it less likely that you'll actually get back to the results that you were looking for.
So there are four key levers that we're going to talk through today to help you figure out what you need to focus on first. And I'm actually going to start with the fourth lever. So the good news is if you are signed up for the workshop I'm teaching on October 15th, all about CEO level decisions, you're going to see how these different levers tie into our CEO decision matrix to help you diagnose what you actually need to work on first in your business.
And if you've followed me for any length of time, you'll also start to see that these all tie in to our client growth engine. So hopefully that will help you see we have made this streamlined and aligned with the way that we teach how to sustainably grow your business.
Now the first thing I want to talk about is the deliverability lever. This is all about your client experience. So the key question here is if your sales are slowing down or your revenue is slowing down, this is really about revenue in this particular one: Are you retaining the clients that you are bringing in?
This is an important one to consider because sometimes we'll see revenue slow down and we won't be having as much revenue coming in this month that we had expected, and we're not sure why, because we're still getting the same number of new clients in the door. The problem is they're walking out the back, right? It's literally like you have a leaky bucket and everything is flowing through your business. You're not retaining those clients.
So the warning signs here for if you're having an issue with your client experience is that people aren't working with you long-term. People aren't working with you as long as they used to, and this is something that we should all be tracking every single month in our business, right? Our lifetime client value.
Whenever I work with my clients, it doesn't matter if they're a product-based business, a service-based business, I always want to know what is a new client worth to you. How long does a typical client work with you? How much does a typical client spend with you over the course of working together? This is incredibly important data because this is one of those long term levers that can make a massive impact in your small business.
In fact, I would say for a lot of service-based businesses, this is something that if you're not paying attention to this, you're going to spend all your time on marketing and visibility and less time working with clients. So we want to make sure that if a new client is coming in the door, we know about how long each client stays with you and works with you, and about how much they actually spend with you.
When we're talking about how long they work with you and how much they spend with you, we're not just talking about the initial engagement here. So for example, I have a lot of clients who start working with us by attending a CEO retreat, and that's a one day event that I host every single quarter. You've probably heard me talk about it about a million times because we've hosted, I think about 70 something of them by now.
So that's the first entry point that a lot of my clients take. They start with the CEO retreat, but if I'm actually looking at each client's journey, I often see that they don't just work with me for that one day. They often start working with us inside of the CEO collective. So that increases their client lifetime value. They stay with us, not just for that one day. They end up working with us for at least a year.
And actually, if I look at my real numbers, my client lifetime value, I happen to know a lot of our clients stay with us much longer than the initial year. We have a very high retention rate. We have a lot of people who renew and work with us for multiple years inside of the CEO collective.
Why is this so important? Well, if my revenue was starting to drop, if I was having less revenue coming in the door, but I still have the same number of clients signing up, brand new clients signing up to work with me, then that's a sign that something's not working here in our retention, that something is causing our clients to not renew or to not move on to the next offer.
So you want to make sure you know those two numbers. How long does a client actually work with you? A typical client, this is an average. It's not individual, it's an average. And what is your average client lifetime value.
The fix here: If those numbers have decreased and you're seeing revenue drop, even though you have the same number of new clients coming in, then you need to get in under the hood of your business and look at your client experience. How can you improve your client experience? This includes your onboarding processes, all of the workflows when you're working with those clients. It includes your offboarding, it includes how you invite them to continue working with you, to repeat working with you, to renew working with you. If there's opportunities for them to work with you at new levels once they've completed one offer, you really want to look at your overall client experience.
I just had a client in the collective who we had this conversation because she saw the same number of new clients were coming into her business every single month, but the revenue was dropping because some of the members in her team who were working with those clients had very low retention rates, so their lifetime client value was about half of what the practice as a whole, or the business as a whole had.
Now, that becomes a problem, right? Because then you're working to constantly replace those clients. You don't want to be constantly replacing clients. If you have a great client, you want to retain them because long term they're going to bring more revenue and more stability into your business.
So that's the first lever I always check because everything else, if you don't fix that, if you don't make sure that you're retaining the clients you're bringing in, then again, you are doing a lot of work and sending people to a leaky bucket. You're not going to keep the new clients you're going to acquire.
That brings us to the next lever that we need to look at, and that's new client acquisition. New client acquisition is all about, are your offers actually selling? Is your offer still the right fit, the right product, program, or service at the right price point, solving the right problem for the right person.
These are really important questions to ask yourself because sometimes things will change that impact product market fit, and sometimes you need to make adjustments to your offers or even change your offers.
So what are the warning signs here that your offers are no longer a fit? Your offers are no longer a product market fit? Well, one is you still have a ton of people who are liking your content, who are following you, who are engaging with you, but they're hesitating to say yes. They're hesitating to commit. Maybe people are saying, well, now's not the right time. This is where you might have people who say, is there a smaller option, a less of a commitment option to allow me to get started.
You might also start seeing a lot more payment objections than you used to see, so maybe people are saying that's a really big investment. I don't feel confident making that big investment right now. Do you have an offer at a lower price point, or do you have a payment plan available to make this happen?
Again, when we're looking at product market fit, it's a few different components there, right? It's the right offer at the right price point, solving the right problem for the right person. If any of those factors change, then we might need to make some adjustments.
So what types of fixes could we put in place there? Well, one, if you're hearing people saying that this is a big commitment, they're hesitating to make a long-term commitment, especially maybe your previous offer was a 12 month offer, maybe you need to add in some sort of shorter term offer in order to get people started, right? Something that makes it a little easier because it feels like less of a commitment if you make it a little bit less of a time commitment or less of a price commitment.
So taking something from, let's say a 12 month coaching program to a three month coaching program, that might be enough to get more people to say yes and at least get started. By the way, that's when your client experience system kicks in and works to retain those people once they know they're in the right place and they're the right fit.
So that might be an option. You might also have people who need some sort of what we call a bite sized offer. So instead of just shortening the term of your coaching package or whatever it is that you're offering, maybe they just need to get started with one part of it to really understand who you are, how you work, what your experience is like.
This is very similar to what the CEO retreat is for me inside of the CEO collective. This is a part of our larger 90 day CEO operating system framework, but it's a shorter commitment. It's bite size. It's sharing with them one piece of our bigger picture puzzle for how we work with people. So a bite-sized offer, an entry level offer isn't meant to be the only thing they get. It's meant to be the on-ramp into working with you in your signature offer.
And again, the reason I think a bite-sized or an entry level offer works is it gives your potential clients the opportunity to kind of try you on for less of a commitment and make sure that you truly are a fit for them to help them get some results, build their confidence not only in you, but in themselves and their ability to do that work. And then you can continue delivering an amazing experience and retain them as a client.
You might realize that you need to refresh your signature offer. Now this I haven't seen happening as much, mainly because the type of businesses that I work with, for a lot of the businesses I work with, they haven't had to massively change their signature offer unless they personally felt like they had outgrown it or they just were no longer interested in selling that offer. And that's a real thing that happens sometimes.
So that's a bigger decision if you decide that maybe the offer is a great fit for the market, but it's no longer a fit for you. You as a CEO have to make that call and that decision. Just know that every time you change the offers that you're putting out there, you have to go through that whole validation stage. Even if you already have an audience, if you put a new offer out there that's completely different from what people already know you for, you still have to validate that your audience wants this offer and it's the right product, program, or service, solving the right problem at the right price point for the right people.
So those are all different scenarios that you might need to go through to think about, do I need to change up my offers? Do I need to focus on my offers to get more new clients in the door, more sales in the door. Again, I often find that for a lot of my clients, it's not that they need to burn the whole thing down. It's often that they need to create a smaller entry point just to build that confidence not only in the choice they made to work with them, but in themselves.
A lot of clients, especially if you do transformative work, if you're doing coaching, if you're doing consulting, if you're doing a lot of personal development work, that requires a lot of trust, high level of trust, and that trust can be hard to come by these days. So sometimes adding in that little bite sized offer or entry level offer can help build that trust and build that relationship, and then you can work on retaining those clients long term.
Next lever, let's go back a little bit more in our client growth engine and start looking at our overall messaging. This is a big piece of the puzzle and it's often one that when we get into the mode of, well, we're going to set it and forget it and have passive income, it's really easy for people to not pay attention to how people are actually feeling right now. What do they actually care about right now?
I can tell you that right now a lot of messaging needs to shift, and I've been talking about this for a little while, and that's because when we're in uncertain periods, uncertain economy, a lot of change happening, then people go from looking for aspirational information and content to more safety and security related content.
When the economy is booming and money is flowing and people are buying all sorts of stuff, it's a lot easier to sell the dream. It's a lot easier to sell aspiration. It's a lot easier to sell all of these amazing goals, and wouldn't it be great if you could do this?
When things are uncertain, when people are feeling a little scared or squeezed, then we need to understand that they're shifting down in that whole Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They're no longer trying to fulfill aspirational needs if their base needs are not met, or if they're feeling a lack of safety and security.
So this is really, really important right now. You need to pay attention to what your clients are paying attention to and what they care about right now. Especially because if you're still talking about aspirational messaging, then there's a chance it will come across as out of touch. And we want to make sure that people are with us, that they're feeling like, oh yeah, she gets what I'm feeling right now. She understands what I'm going through right now.
So what are the warning signs that your messaging isn't working? A big thing is your content is getting views but no conversions. So people are opening your newsletter and reading it. Maybe they're opening your newsletter, clicking through, but they're not buying anything. Maybe your audience is still growing, but they're not buying anything. You start promoting something and crickets, you're not getting any sales out of it.
That often means that what we need to focus on first is updating the language. We probably need to really understand that what a lot of people are searching for right now is safety and security. So how can we help them feel like we are in touch with how they're feeling.
It means we need to not, I hate the whole copywriting thing about you need to agitate their pain. I am not a fan of that. I'm a much bigger fan of leading with empathy and saying, I understand. Me too. I'm in this boat with you. We're all small business owners here, so here's what we're experiencing now. Here's what's going on right now.
We need to address fears and not ignore them and talk about the very real pressures people are under right now and the things that are impacting them in this moment. It's all about being relatable and making sure they understand that you understand what's going on for them.
This is also where we need to focus on connecting our values to the outcomes that we offer. So if you have things that are really important to you, really important to your business that you're talking about, how does this impact your clients? Are you connecting those two things? If there's no connection there, then it's going to seem like you're using your platforms just to talk instead of to make change in the way that you can through your business.
So one of the things that we see often with our clients is we just need to shift the messaging a little bit again from highly aspirational to safety and security, not from digging at a pain point, but from approaching with empathy and approaching with, hey, we understand. We understand the fears you have, and here's how we can support you going through this transformation that you're about to go through.
Changing messaging is really challenging. Often it takes a lot more work than I think a lot of us realize. But the biggest thing I would say, and I'm not going to get into a whole how do you change all of your messaging right now, that's too big to unpack in this episode, I'm going to say it starts with talking to people.
And this is one of the biggest things I see a lot of people struggling with because as a lot of small businesses have shifted away from having interaction with actual humans, they have lost touch with what actual humans care about. So if you haven't talked to your clients, you haven't talked to your community, you haven't had recent conversations, this is a great time to get your calendar out and say, hey, I want to have some conversations with people about what's going on for you and how I can support you.
Because they're going to give you their real language about what is on their mind, what they're worried about, what their fears are, what they care about right now, and how they're navigating through this current world that we're all in.
The final lever that we can look at if things are slowing down in your business is visibility. And when I say visibility, I mean getting out in front of brand new people. So brand new people who do not know who you are. This is their first introduction to you, the first impression of you, first time they're getting to know who you are, and also visibility in front of your existing audience.
I am seeing a lot of small business owners who are no longer as visible as they used to be. And I absolutely understand this. I understand the exhaustion of logging into social media and just feeling like you're being assaulted with the latest news cycle. I understand the feeling of like, gosh, is this ever going to stop? Are we ever going to get good news? There's a lot of people right now who are feeling this way.
But as a small business owner, when you aren't visible enough, when you kind of disappear, if you're out of sight, you're out of mind. And if you're out of sight and out of mind, then that means you're probably going to have these warning signs. You're going to have fewer inquiries, fewer people reaching out for a consultation, fewer people joining your community, fewer people joining your email list, fewer people following you on social media, you're going to have traffic slowing down on your website.
So this is the very first part of our client growth engine, right? The marketing section: attract, engage, nurture. And if you slow down on the marketing, which is all visibility to either new people or your existing audience, if you stop being visible, you will stop seeing sales simply because what you put into the client growth engine impacts what comes out of the client growth engine.
So how do you change this, right? If you have been hesitating with your visibility, if you've been feeling burned out by visibility, then we still need it. And what do you need to fix this challenge? One thing is to be a little critical of the channels you are choosing, and I'm going to say this very openly.
If social media is draining you and it is no longer one that is helping you to get in front of the right folks, or it is no longer feeling aligned, it is okay to change your visibility channels. I have seen a lot of people who have shifted away from social media simply because they feel like it's no longer aligned, and it starts to feel incredibly stressful for them.
So I'm giving you permission if that is feeling stressful, if that is not aligned, then change, change that channel, change the visibility channel you're choosing to engage in. I've definitely seen quite a few people who are shifting which channel they prioritize. So I've seen a lot of folks who have moved over to LinkedIn. I've seen a lot of folks who have moved off of Facebook. Totally up to you.
I've also seen a lot of folks who have shifted over to being more podcast centric or more video centric, so it doesn't really matter to me which channel you're choosing. Whichever platform you're choosing, not as big of a deal to me as you're still showing up somewhere consistently.
So that could be, again, video, it could be podcasts, it could be social, it could be continuing to do your email, which I still believe is one of the most powerful visibility channels out there for staying in touch with your existing audience. It could also be looking at collaborations. It could be looking at how do you get in front of other people's audiences. It could be how do you go out there and do more speaking. It could be ramping up your referral engine and making sure you're putting the FaceTime in to build your network and to build those referral sources.
It could be going more high touch, which again, I think in the last few years there has been so much about automation and online everything, we have forgotten that you can have a thriving business that is very much built with real relationships and real people that you connect with in real life. So I want you to think about that.
I have several clients right now who didn't necessarily need to get on social media again, they didn't need to churn out a ton of content, but what they needed to do was to block out two hours every Friday and call it follow up Friday, and follow up with the people they had already connected with who had already indicated interest, who were new referrals coming in from existing clients, and just continue to follow up with those people or touch base with people who were sending them business.
There's a lot of ways you can increase visibility and it's time to become a bit more discerning about which visibility channels that we decide to put our time and effort into.
So what do we decide here? What did we talk through here? What do we focus on first? Figuring out what to focus on first when you have a slowdown in your business is all about a process of elimination. Instead of changing everything all at once, it's about looking at what's going on in your business and improving, optimizing one variable at a time.
So if you are bringing in clients, the same number of new clients that you had been previously, but your revenue is dropping, those clients aren't staying as long as most of your clients previously had, or they're not spending as much money with you, then we need to look at our client experience. We need to look at onboarding. We need to look at our delivery workflows. We need to look at our offboarding processes. How are we reengaging clients? How are we retaining clients?
Client retention really is the name of the game. I'm going to be talking a ton more in the coming months about retaining clients because smart, sustainable businesses aren't always chasing new clients. They're retaining the clients they have.
So that's a huge one that I think a lot of people are missing. If you are not bringing in new clients, your new sales have kind of stalled, then we might need to adjust the offers, right? You're still getting in front of a lot of folks. Your messaging is still good, but they're not buying the current offer you have because buyer behavior has changed. They're asking for less of a commitment. They're asking for a shorter timeframe. They're asking for a lower price point. They're asking for more flexible payment options. Maybe you need to adjust your offer.
If people are seeing what you have to buy, but they're not buying anything, you know enough people have seen it and they're not interested, then we might need to check your messaging. Maybe they're not resonating with what you're talking about right now. Maybe you're still using messaging that worked in 2022 and it no longer seems relevant right now. Messaging is something we're always having to work on, and if there's one thing I can share with you, it's that you need to be in conversation with people.
If the words on your website, the words on your sales page aren't the same as what actual humans are saying to you on a regular basis, if those conversations have changed, they're not going to connect the dots and they're going to think this isn't for them.
And finally, if people aren't seeing you, if you've kind of disappeared because you've been burned out on the visibility, you've been burned out on social, you have just felt like I can't show up everywhere all the time, it's too much. We still need visibility. As small business owners, this is something that none of us can survive long-term without. Yes, we can take breaks. I'm all for a social media sabbatical, but at some point you have to make a decision about what is going to be an aligned visibility strategy for you, and make sure that you can start showing up consistently again, both to get in front of your existing audience and get in front of new folks.
So I hope this has been helpful. This has been kind of like a workshop style episode, but I want you to know, like sales slowdowns, revenue slowdowns, market slowdowns, they don't mean that your business is broken. They don't mean that you need to throw everything out and start all over again. It often means that you need to press pause and really dig in to analyze what needs to be fixed, what lever do you need to pull, what piece of the puzzle do you need to shift to see if you can improve the result?
If you attempt to burn everything down and fix everything all at once, then we don't actually know what the problem was. So try focusing on one thing at a time.
If you want to learn more about this, on October 15th, I'm hosting a live workshop all about creating your own CEO decision matrix. I'm going to walk you through how to put one together, and this will help you to make those big decisions and will help you to figure out what you need to focus on first. I want to help more small business owners get out of this overwhelm and feeling of, oh no, I'm going to make the wrong call and mess up my business forever.
You're not going to go live in a van down by the river friends, it's okay. We can figure this out. But the first step is to get grounded, to get the clarity we need and to have a strong framework for decision making. So all the details are in the show notes. I would love to see you there.
Now I want to hear from you. If you like this episode, please head over to Instagram at Rachel dot Cook. Let me know what you think about it. I've got a few more coming your way over the rest of this month because I want more small business owners to feel more confident navigating these uncertain times. I'm not saying that I have any sort of clairvoyance and could tell you what exactly is going to happen in the future, but I can help you improve your CEO skills so that you can be more confident in making the decisions you need to make as a small business owner.
All right. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.