7 Pillars of Business Mastery

Hey, I'm Sian, and this is the Growth Code Podcast, helping you to create more revenue, profit, and freedom in your business. I'll be sharing the ideas, knowledge, and tools I've gathered over a career of helping businesses thrive. So welcome, agencies, consultants, and service-based business owners. Let's create that seven-figure business that loves you back.

Now I've worked with businesses to grow from six figures to seven, from two million to 4 million and I've helped one business to go from 1 million to over 20 million. So there's one thing I know for certain, you can't grow to any size without systems. The pillars are the seven individual systems that you need to work on and they also work together as a whole as well.

So those, I'm going to run through them quickly, but I'm going to encourage you to go and do the training on how to work on your business. So the seven pillars are messaging and marketing mastery. Selling and sales systems, the business model, world-class client delivery, systems that scale, financial health and legals, and you and your mindset. Now, I know that businesses that produce results in all of the pillars will crack the code.

It won't be a question of how do I achieve X revenue in my business? It'll be a case of being so strong in all the pillars that your your revenue goals are the obvious result.

Now I'm going to be taking a deep dive with my clients into each one of the pillars, looking at the key mistakes, looking at the things to avoid and the KPIs that you should be aiming for in each one of them. And then we kind of put it all together so that you can create more growth, predictability, reliability in your business. And you've got to master all seven so you can build a pantheon for your business.

Kind of like the pantheon in Rome that's weathered hundreds of years, wars, floods, earthquakes, and droves of tourists. And so depending on where you are in your business and in the business life cycle, you may be more or less focused on one of those pillars. And I can pretty much tell when a business gives me their monthly revenue, I can tell which one of the pillars are going to be more backed up or more blocked and have more issues.

So, of course, that's where you would start first. But I know for absolute certainty that two of the pillars are contingent. When you speak to any business owner about their challenges, the heartburn that they've got, the things that are keeping them up at night, I will bet my bottom dollar that more cash will solve their pain and problem. And 80% of the time, the root problem comes back to marketing and sales. Marketing and sales equals revenue and cash. So those are the two pillars of

your business that you have to work on first. They are contingent. In other words, if you solve those two pillars and really crack them, there's no business problem or challenge that you can't solve. There's no pillar or patheon that you can't build. But one of the things that we challenge ourselves with is shiny object syndrome. Sometimes I think we constantly avoid or procrastinate from the root cause, either because it's not fun, it's not sexy, or we've got a fear of getting it wrong again.

Sometimes we just don't know what to do next. And I know that most of my clients also tell me, hey, I don't want to do social media. I don't want to dance on TikTok videos. I don't want to point in the air at words on videos. And I get that. I get that. But once you understand these pillars and you can create an operating system that will consistently deliver, that will be your superpower. And you will build the muscle for spotting a blocker.

Spotting something that's slowing down your focus, slowing down your route to growing the business. Once you can do that, you will grow and scale faster than you realized possible.

So I want to take a deep dive into the marketing and sales pillars while we're here today. I want to also look at the mistakes that people make in these pillars and one KPI that you should know for each one of them. So pillar number one, messaging and and marketing mastery. This is about creating a real flowing pipeline without taking a leaky bucket to the ocean, to the bloody red ocean, that is.

You've heard the analogy that marketing is like taking your ideal client on a journey of getting to know you, like you, and trust you. And that's the journey you take them on as they work through your funnel. And yes, that is true, but it goes beyond ideal client avatars and this no-like trust factor. You've got to take time to understand where your audience is on their journey.

There's a start, a middle, and a squeeze point, and you have to map that out and align the marketing messaging depending on where they are. Now, inside my guide to marketing momentum, which I'll put a link to in the show notes if you want want to download that. I talk about the start, middle, and end in relation to the mindset of your audience, which translates into the type of marketing messaging, the purpose of the marketing, and then also the appropriate call to action.

And if you can get this right, your marketing will be so much more profitable. So that brings me to one of the marketing mistakes that people make. Communicating marketing messages that aren't stage appropriate. In other words, you're making wrong offer to the wrong mindset. You're trying to sell to someone who might not be aware of the problem, might not be aware of the solution, or they don't know, like, and trust you yet.

The marketing pillar is the most likely one to have the most blockers and mistake. And if there's one pillar you really want to nail, it's definitely this one. Let's talk about KPIs. I want you to know for certain, like the number on your bank statement, what is your cost of acquiring a marketing qualified lead? How many leads do you need to reach your revenue target? If you don't know, then I suggest doing a marketing audit and handling this in your next impact meeting.

If you know, you know. So what's next? I want you to go over your marketing campaign, download that guide to marketing momentum, and then go through whatever means of marketing you're using right now. Look at it and ask yourself whether you're just trying to target the people who are actually buying or whether you've engaged with people at every stage of of their journey. So when you know the marketing pillar and you understand how it works, you can see where you've lost momentum.

You can see where your marketing isn't being profitable and where you need to work on to get the leads, the qualified leads that you need.

Now, I'm going to be running a program called Nail It and Scale It. It's a way for you to nail your marketing strategy that's aligned to the kind of marketing you like to do, your audience and your business, and then way to scale your marketing. In other words, how to build out your marketing pantheon so that you never feel like you're at the mercy of the algorithm or whatever Facebook or TikTok or whatever elections might might be, or Super Bowl, might be to take your engagement and reach down.

So feel free to check out Nayla in Scalit. I'll put a link in the show notes and you can also book a call with me. We can have a look at whether it's the right thing for you and we can map out a personalized growth plan for you and your business.

But let's get into the sales pillar. So sales and selling systems. This is one of my favorite pillars because this is where we get to create selling systems and and processes. You know, once your ideal client reaches the squeeze stage of your marketing funnel, there are things that they need to believe to hand over their credit card details. There are things that they need to believe in order to start working with you. And the key word here is process.

How you convert, how you optimize conversion, how you create an experience for your your ideal client. Because this isn't the close, it's the start of your working relationship. So it's not about flash to bang, take my money. You're changing the relationship from sales qualified lead to prospect. Here's one of the biggest sales mistakes that I see. Not having the sales process mapped out so that it can be measured, tweaked and refined.

When you have your sales process mapped out, it gives you more authority in the sales process and more More authority means more certainty, and certainty means more conversions. So have that mapped out because you need to see where you can make improvements. Now, the sales KPI, the one that I really want you to look at is your marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead conversion and your sales qualified lead to new client conversion. Those are two KPIs you really want to know.

That'll help you decide how many leads you need, how many marketing qualified leads you need, and then what marketing you need to be doing to fill up your pipeline. So what's next? Well, if your sales qualified lead to client conversion isn't between, I don't know, I'd say about 30 to 50 percent, then you've got a problem. You might want to take a deep dive. What's the root cause of that? Is it your quality of leads? Is it the journey? Is it your sales process?

Let's have a look at whether you're leaving money on the table. And I bet that throughout the whole process that you can find a handful of two percent improvements here and there to get those numbers up. I don't think I can emphasize enough how insightful this exercise size can be. So don't skim over it. Let's do it. And don't get me started on sales follow-ups. I think that's a whole podcast episode in itself because sending one or two little nudges is not a follow-up and it's not sufficient.

I'm definitely going to be doing more on this topic, but like I said, to take a deeper dive into your marketing and sales pillars and get you unstoppable marketing momentum and really firing on these two pillars, then come and check out Nail It and Scale It because it could be the thing that helps you finally nail your marketing and then scale your marketing so that you can put those two pillars to bed and move on with your business with more joy, freedom, and ease.

High five. Thank you for listening to the Growth Code Podcast with me, Sian Lennigan. If you're ready to crack the growth code for your agency or consultancy business, then DM me on social media, the word growth, or email hello at workwithsian.co.uk. Let's see how I can help you navigate this wonderful crazy journey of being a business owner and pave your path to permanent profit.