What is the “gaping neck wound” in your business?
Why there is only one thing you should be working on right now
If you are anything like me, there are at least 900 “essential” things that you “should” be doing in your business. They are all important and working on them will have a positive impact on your business. The problem is that if you try and do them all at once you won’t actually achieve anything. Instead, the most important thing to do is spend some time working out the one area that your business is lacking in and then make that your primary focus for the next 3 months.
The main parts of your business
One of the first things that my coaching group asked me to do when I joined a couple of weeks ago was to look at the following areas of my business…
Traffic
Funnel
Offer
Fulfilment
Systems
They asked me to score each one from 1-10 for how happy I was with them and how they were performing. I also had to justify my scores.
Everything can be improved
Be careful not to look at these 5 areas and think that they could all be improved. They could but that is not the point. You don’t look at the person with a gaping neck wound and think “oh they could maybe do a little more cardio”. Yes, they could have a higher level of fitness but right now the priority is probably stopping them from losing all of their blood. Disclaimer: I’m not a medical professional so I might have got this completely wrong.
Not getting bogged down in the weeds
It’s so easy to get hyper focussed on that tiny glitch on one of your web pages or what colours your headers are or taking a great photo for that one Instagram post. These all feel very important in the moment. But, the reality is that the main parts of our businesses (listed above) are the only things that really matter.
Thinking about the 5 broad areas of my business was very empowering. Some of them are performing pretty well (Fulfilment, Offer and Systems) while traffic is ok and funnel is completely non-existent.
My funnel is a 1 out of 10
I don’t have a “funnel”. Instead, people join my mailing list and then I send then more and more free content. Every so often I send some promotions to the whole list.
Now, when people join a mailing list that is usually the moment that they are most likely to make a purchase so it would probably be a good idea to have some kind of sequence of emails, videos and promotions that they get shown right from the start.
Why focussing on one area at a time makes the most sense
I could easily work on everything at once but it doesn’t make sense.
If I work on increasing my traffic without a functional funnel for them to go into then I am just increasing the size of my mailing list.
If I work on my offer but there is no one seeing it because I don’t have a funnel leading to it then it could be the best offer in the world but no one would be directed to it.
If I work on improving my fulfilment but I don’t have any customers to fulfil then no one will ever know how wonderfully they could be looked after.
Don’t even get me started on systems. I’ve implemented systems over the years every time I’ve hit a pain point. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. You can’t imagine what a system should be like without experiencing building, creating and refining processes while actually making some money.
The next 3 months
The gaping neck wound in my business is my funnel (or lack thereof) so that is all I am focussing on. And, believe me it is tough. I would love to be creating new products, doing more content marketing and tidying up my systems but for the next 3 months I’m working on a funnel.
So, my question to you is: what is the “gaping neck wound” in your business?