How many times have you received marketing emails that looked bland and empty, as if they were simply copied and pasted? This kind of strategy does not portray inspired growth, nor an inspired entrepreneur. In this episode, Crista Grasso discusses what it really takes to create growth in your business - from escaping the sea of sameness and making yourself stand out among the rest, letting your values shine, and creating a deep connection with your target market. She also explains how to use another business model as inspiration without blatantly copying it, and why attempting to copy may work short-term, but will never flourish.
In this episode, I discuss:
- Meaning of Inspired Growth
- Sea of Sameness
- Example of Uninspired Growth
- Why sameness doesn’t work
- Cold DM Example
- What inspired growth looks like
Tune into Episode 2 of the Lean Out Your Business Podcast or keep reading below.
This is a continuation of the Top 5 Success Patterns For Scaling Your Business In 2021 post where I dove into some of the patterns and opportunities that I was seeing for 2021. Part 2 focuses on the theme for my business for 2021 that I invite you to consider leveraging in your own business.
2021 - The Year of Inspired Growth
Every year, I always look at a particular word or phrase that summarizes where I want to be focusing and where I want my intention to be for the year. For the Lean Out Method, that phrase for 2021 is Inspired Growth.
This is going to be a very big year of growth for the business. We've got a lot of big things planned and I'm excited to get to support, work with, and reach a lot more clients and a lot more people, and help them to lean out their business.
As I'm doing that and as I'm looking at the strategies that I want to put in place, and the things that I want to do, the thing that is more important to me than anything else is that I grow in a way that I feel inspired to.
Are you feeling the same way?
I'm seeing a big pattern in the industry that I do not like and I'm guessing you're probably seeing it too? While I'm seeing this across a lot of industries, it's especially prevalent in the coaching space.
I am seeing what I call the "sea of sameness" where everything is starting to look, feel, and sound exactly the same.
There are a few leaders who are growing rapidly and as more people are adopting their programs and starting to leverage the approaches they share, the sea of sameness is expanding. It's almost like it becomes this incestuous little circle where everybody says and does the same thing, and everybody knows each other, and everybody's following the exact same strategies and approaches for growth.
"There are many ways to successfully grow your business. You never need to choose anything not in alignment for you." - Crista Grasso Click to Tweet
I was a part of some of these groups in prior years, and I made the decision to step away from most of them. While I still have great relationships with many of the people, I chose to distance myself from the groups because I didn't want to be a part of the conversations where everybody was saying and doing the same thing. It felt important to me to create the space where I'm not influenced by or hearing or seeing those same messages all the time and where I could think about how I wanted to grow my business without the noise of others opinions.
I highly encourage you to do the same and ask yourself some of the same questions I asked myself:
- What feels like growing with integrity for you?
- What feels like alignment with the vision that you have for both your business and yourself, personally and as the leader of the business?
- What are your customers going to want and need from your business in 2021 and in the years to come?
I want to inspire a little revolution here where everybody is focused on growing in an inspired way, and stepping away from those very formulaic, cookie cutter, sea of sameness type of ways that I'm seeing happening so much right now.
I would like to invite you to consider doing the same and choosing to grow your business your way. That's the point of inspired growth. I don't think there's ever any one way to grow a business. There's never only one way to scale a business. There's never only one definition of success. There is whatever makes sense for you, for your business model, and for your ideal target market. All of those things are what should influence how you feel inspired to grow and scale your business in 2021.
An Example of Uninspired Growth
I recently received a series of emails from an established business owner who's been in business for many years and was appalled to see what she did. As someone who's had a lot of success so far and who has clarity on what she offers and who she serves, you would probably think that she would be pretty original in her messaging and is probably a thought leader (especially since she positions herself as one).
When I received the series of emails she sent, I noticed that they were word for word identical to emails that I got from the leader of a program that she was a part of. She had joined their program and as she was doing her launch, she copied all of the launch emails word for word and sent them to her audience, which I was a part of.
It was completely uninspired and unoriginal and the worst part was, she wasn't the only one. While she did the most blatant copy and paste out of everyone I saw who was in the same program, many others sent emails that were extremely similar.
In this person's defense, she had permission to use the emails, she did not steal them. So while it wasn't copyright infringement, I still think there is never an excuse to be completely unoriginal and to straight up copy and paste.
Even if you want to leverage a swipe file provided as part of a program you join, I think it's so important to take the time to make it your own, put it in your voice (not someone else's), bring in your own experiences, and word it so that it resonates with your customers and gives your customers what they need.
It's also important to take the time to understand why the strategy or approach worked for that other business owner so you can figure out how to make it your own and make it successful in your business, because it's not going to be the same for you as it is for them.
And here's the thing. The reason people copy and paste isn't typically because they are trying to be shady or lazy. It usually comes from being too overworked, too overwhelmed, working on far too many things at once, and having no room for strategy to work ON their business.
So they lift and load something from someone else with minimal effort and hope it works in their business. The problem is that it doesn't. At least not long term.
It's not that the approach or the thing that the person is teaching doesn't work. Usually things that people teach did work very well for them. In some cases, it works very well for some of their other students as well. The thing is, it worked well for them because they put it in their language. They knew their target market and their target market's struggles and needs. They created and positioned something in just the right way to land for their target market.
When somebody tries to pick that up and leverage it without making it their own, without positioning it and customizing it for their unique business, business model, experiences, and customer, it doesn't land. It falls flat.
Sometimes they can have a quick win because the other person did a good enough job with whatever they are sharing with them that they can get some immediate results. But the thing is, it's not sustainable success.
It ends up putting them on a revenue rollercoaster, where they have something work... and then it falls flat. They don't understand why it didn't work, so they move on and buy a different program or work with somebody else. Again, they copy and paste exactly what they do and get a small quick win... and then it stops working. Again. And the loop repeats.
How to Grow In An Inspired Way
As you think about growing and scaling your own business, or if you work with clients or individuals who are trying to grow and scale their businesses, something to keep in mind is encouraging people to do so in an inspired way, instead of in a formulaic way.
There are many different ways to grow and scale a business and many different ways to define success. You're going to have to decide which things align with your business and business model and which ones don't.
I'm going to give you an example. Something that many other business owners do, and even some of my clients do, is they will cold DM people. They will start conversations with lots of different people that they think may be prospective clients with the goal of getting them to eventually buy.
The do this knowing that it's a numbers game and if they DM enough people eventually a subset of them will say yes for whatever their initial free offer is, and a subset of those people will convert and become actual paying clients. It’s a very popular strategy.
However, it is one I will never use in my business. It does not resonate with me.
I have a very different philosophy on business. I believe in putting out my point of view, sharing my message, and allowing those who resonate to opt-in. When somebody opts in and they're in my world, whether they're reading this as you are, whether they're on my newsletter, whether they're joining me each week live in my Facebook group when I do Lean Coffee and I'm answering questions and interacting with people, they have chosen to opt in. They are then in my world. That is when I share with them, I interact with them, I build relationships with them. I let them know what offers I have and ways they can work with me.
What I do not do and what does not resonate for me and business is cold DM-ing people.
Could it work in my business? Sure. If I hired a full-time person who is dedicated to cold DM-ing people, and I gave them 200 people a day to DM, I know that some of those people would turn into paying clients. But that doesn't mean it's a strategy I am going to follow.
Different strategies work for different people in different businesses and different business models. For me, it's simply is not a strategy that resonates. For other people, it works incredibly well.
No matter how much you hear you have to leverage a particular strategy to grow your business, you don’t have to do anything.
If you think back to what we talked about in part one of this 2-part series, and you make sure that you're providing value for your clients, you're differentiating yourself, you're connecting, you're leaning out your business, and ultimately being very customer-centric, all of those things fit beautifully into the theme of inspired growth.
"When you're doing inspired growth, you are being different." - Crista Grasso Click to Tweet
Inspired growth encourages you to grow and scale your business in the way that makes the most sense for you and in a way that's aligned with your customer. You're not picking somebody else's strategy up and copying and pasting it, and using their language and their approach, and shoving it at your customer. You're thinking of your customer and their needs, and how they need to hear things to understand how it's going to help them. You're also making sure that in being lean and trying to do inspired growth in a very lean way, you're only infusing those elements that make sense for your business. You're not adding in a lot of extra stuff that isn't going to actually add value or profit.
When you think of all the different ways that you can grow your business in 2021, how you can scale your business and help take it to the next level, evaluate the different options that are out there. See which ones for you are a hard no, like the DM strategy for me is a hard no. You may have different ones.
What are those for you? Which are the ones that you feel inspired to do? Go out, experiment, have fun, try them, and see what's working. Measure and pivot as you need to. You can have a successful year where you are growing in an inspired way and further differentiating your business.
I can't wait to hear how 2021 goes and how you are able to leverage inspired growth in your business.
How do you grow in an inspired way in your business?
by Crista Grasso
Crista Grasso is the go-to strategic planning expert for leading global businesses and online entrepreneurs when they want to scale. Known as the "Business Optimizer", Crista has the ability to quickly cut through noise and focus on optimizing the core things that will make the biggest impact to scale a business simply and sustainably. She specializes in helping businesses gain clarity on the most important things that will drive maximum value for their clients and maximum profits for their business. She is the creator of the Lean Out Method, 90 Day Lean Out Planner, and host of the Lean Out Your Business Podcast.
