Welcome to the no fluff small business simplified podcast. I'm your host, Sam DiNicola, owner of the digital marketing agency, Sam DiNicola Digital, and coach for entrepreneurs looking to start and grow their own small businesses. This podcast is for anyone who wants to market their business effectively, without huge budgets, massive teams, or burnout and overwhelm. I'll be cutting through all the noise to give you straightforward and actionable tips. So you can apply my knowledge and expertise in your small business.

I want to talk about the 10 things you need to know to build a successful small business, these are all things that are at the core of what makes up a successful business. And if you are missing one or two of these things, that's okay. But it's definitely something to focus on and look at. Because having all these things is just going to set you up for success. Not having any one or two of these things, it's not going to instantly mean that your business is a failure. But it's just going to mean that you are more likely to hit your goals, and really create a business that is supporting you financially, energetically, all those good things.

So let's kick off with the first thing that you need to build a successful small business.

1. Connecting to the why in your business. This is so so important. And I tell this to my coaching clients all the time, it's really easy to get bogged down in the day to day tactical items in your business, right? What should my pricing be? Do I do an LLC or an S-Corp? How am I finding my clients? How do I get more clients? But you need to really sit down and think about why are you building this business? What do you want to get personally and professionally from this business? So that you can run every decision that you're making through that filter of is this connecting with the why in my business? Or is this not connecting with the why. And that comes in really handy. If you are talking to a potential client and you're seeing some red flags, it comes in handy when you're deciding if you're ready to outsource. It comes in really handy if you're deciding what your pricing needs to be. Knowing your why of your business and connecting back to that is going to help so much when you're making those decisions. So if you're like, what the hell is that? Why do I care what my “why” is? I really encourage you to sit down and journal a little bit about that in 20 years in 30 years, 30,000 foot view? What do you want to be getting out of your business day to day? What do you want to feel? How much do you want to be working? How much do you want to be making? Who do you want to be helping and working with? Sit down and journal about all of those things, and you're going to start to feel a lot more connected with your business, and it's going to make you feel a lot more supported.

2. Know how to set clear goals. So many people, especially this time of year are setting these huge goals that are really general and they're not specific enough at all. So an example of that would be “I want to make more money in my business.” What the hell does that mean? Does that mean $10 more? Does that mean $10,000 more? What does that mean? You might be setting a goal of “I want to help small business owners start their own small businesses.” Great. What the hell does that mean? How many small business owners? How are you helping them? What does that look like? Getting clear on those goals and setting what's called SMART goals is going to allow you to be able to more easily break down those goals into smaller action items that you're actually going to be able to accomplish. So by this time next year, you're going to be able to reflect back and say, “Okay, did I actually make more money in my business?” versus “Did I actually make $10,000 more in my business this year?” or “Did I help more small business owners this year?” versus “Did I help 100 new small business owners this year?” And it's going to be able to also be a very clear barometer for you throughout the year, on how close or how far are you from accomplishing that goal. So you really want your goals to be super clear, and really measurable and realistic. And when you set those goals, be thinking about how are you going to break them up into smaller actionable items that you're going to be able to achieve each quarter each month, each week, even each day, if that feels good for you.

3. Know what you're selling and what you're promoting. And you might roll your eyes and think like, “Well, obviously, I know what I'm selling, I'm running a business.” But getting super clear for yourself on exactly what your priority products or service or packages are that you really want to focus on selling is going to help you to keep those things top of mind. So that then you can really remind yourself, “Okay, am I talking about this thing often enough?” “Do I have enough marketing around this thing?” “Am I promoting this enough?” All of those questions for you, if you are getting too general, and not promoting really specific products or services, it's going to make your audience really confused. Yeah, she's giving me value. She's giving me education and content, and I trust her. But what does me working with her look like? What does that mean for me? What am I getting out of that? So being super clear on exactly what you're selling, and what you're promoting, is going to help those potential customers really see the transformation that they're going to get from buying your product or working with you with your services.

4. Know where you're marketing your products and services. And obviously, I'm sure so many people have heard the saying that you can't be everywhere, right? You shouldn't be trying to promote your business, on every social media platform everywhere, via every different strategy. And a lot of times, people get caught in this shiny object syndrome, where they're flitting from one thing to another, “I'm gonna be on Instagram. Now I'm showing up on Instagram Stories every day open. Now I gotta go over here and do TikTok!” and you're just bopping back and forth to all these different things. And you're not giving any one or two or even three platforms, enough consistency and attention to really grow them and help them to succeed. So really think about where do I want to put my focus when I'm marketing my products or my services? Where am I spending the most time? Where am I putting the most effort in in order to market those things? That might be Instagram, that might be TikTok that might be Facebook groups, that might be really focusing on marketing to your email list. It doesn't matter. Like, I don't care where that is. What matters is that you and your team, if you have a team, are super clear on exactly where you're putting the biggest and most focus on marketing your products and services.

5. Know how to create content that's going to connect with your ideal customers. This is really, really important. It doesn't matter what content you want to create. And that's really hard for some business owners to hear. Because I think there's a certain level of ego that's needed in order to trust yourself and have the confidence in yourself enough to start a small business and grow a small business. There's a certain amount of ego that you really need in order to build a successful business. That's not a bad thing. But with a lot of those types of people, you get excited to create content that you really like that you connect with. But newsflash, that doesn't mean your ideal customers connect with that content. Same for where your marketing. Just because you want to be on Instagram, that doesn't necessarily mean your ideal customers are spending their time on Instagram. So give yourself a little bit of a reality check there, do some market research, talk to some of your ideal customers, and really find out from them. What type of content do they like to see? Do they like Instagram stories? Do they like TikTok? Do they really like getting consistent content in their email inbox every week? Find out from them and figure out how you can create more of that content that's really going to connect with them and meet them where they're at. And I guarantee you, all of your marketing is going to be more successful.

6. Know how and where to promote that content so that it gets the most mileage possible. This goes back to you can't be everywhere to everyone, you can't be everything to all people 1,000%. But if you are not repurposing your content, across multiple channels across multiple platforms, you are making more work for yourself and for your team, and you're leaving money on the table. There are really easy and simple ways for you to create one or two core pieces of content, and then easily repurpose that content. And get it out on multiple different platforms, get it out on a few different social media channels, get it out to your email list, get it out to your Facebook group, wherever you are promoting your products and services. You shouldn't be creating a fresh piece of content for every single one of those platforms all the time, you need to be repurposing and recycling your content. I cannot stress this enough. So many business owners are spending so much time creating so much content, but they're not giving that content a chance to live and breathe and connect with their ideal customers on those different platforms. So if you're not repurposing your content, get your shit together. Because that should be one of your top priorities in the new year, even this month. Look at your content and look at how you can be repurposing that content to get the most mileage possible.

7. Know how to track your metrics, and then how to review those magic metrics to see what's working and what's not working. A lot of business owners get so focused on creating that content, marketing their services, and connecting with people and building relationships online. And that's important. We know we need to be doing those things. But if you're not tracking those efforts, how the hell are you ever supposed to know if they're working or not? Because I guarantee you're going to have a recency effect. And so if you got a lead, come in through Instagram, all of a sudden, you're going to be saying, oh, Instagram is working. For me, Instagram is working for me, it's so great. But if you were tracking your time, and tracking how much time you're spending on Instagram, and if you were tracking how many leads are actually coming in from Instagram, you might realize, “Oh god, I have to spend 20 hours on Instagram in order to get one lead.” versus “I might be able to spend two hours in Facebook groups and get one lead from that.” And so really knowing those metrics is gonna allow you to start to see those things. Also tracking the leads that are coming in tracking those follow ups, you're gonna start to be able to see, “Okay, on average, I get X number of leads coming in each month from each of these platforms. And it takes on average X amount of months for someone to discover me on this platform, and then become a warm lead and become a client or purchase from us.” Knowing these things can be really, really purposeful in your scaling because you know what works and you know what it takes to make that strategy work. So if you are not tracking your time, if you're not tracking what you're doing, if you're not tracking your leads, and your follow ups, start doing that immediately, immediately. And there's a bunch of easy spreadsheets that you can you can just do this in Google Sheets, it's not hard. So don't build it up to be something bigger than it needs to be. Start using Google Sheets to track those things. And just do it as you go along. It's not going to take you any extra time, but it can lead to massive positive results in your business.

8. Know how to apply your metrics to start making smart business decisions moving forward. So again, this is looking at, “Okay, I'm ready to get a VA. What should I have that VA do for me?”, “What should I start to outsource?” Well, if you are tracking your metrics, you can look at your Toggl time tracker and you can see what you're spending the most time on every day, what is taking you the most time, and you can look at, okay, what are the things that I have to keep doing, versus what a VA could take over for me? Great. Now I can look at here are my sources of leads. So now that I've offloaded maybe five hours of a certain activity every week to this VA, I can now reallocate those five hours in my week, to focus on those traffic sources and those sources of lead generation that are getting you the most business. And guess what, that's how we scale our revenue. Wow, I know, I am blowing your mind right now. That's a joke. It's not hard, you can do it. Right, you can do it. But you have to be tracking those metrics. Or else you're never going to know if something is working or not working. And you're going to continue to pivot your business too often, you're going to have shiny object syndrome, because you don't know what works and what doesn't work. And everything is going to feel a lot harder for you.

9. Know when something needs more resources, or time or attention, versus when something needs to be tweaked or abandoned. This is going back to our strategies and tracking those things. So if you've been consistently applying a strategy for 60 to 90 days, and this is important, 60 to 90 days, we're not doing a strategy for two weeks, and then deciding it doesn't work. We're not doing a strategy for just 30 days and deciding it doesn't work. You need to be applying any strategy for 60 to 90 days and track those metrics. Because then what you can do is you can look at, are there any easy tweaks I can make to this strategy to help it to perform well for me? If there are great, let's apply those tweaks instead of abandoning. Setting up a new strategy is always going to take more time for you and be more expensive in terms of your team, then tweaking if a strategy can be tweaked and made to succeed. If you can apply more resources, more time, more attention to that strategy and make that succeed for you, do that versus do we need to need to make a slight change to this strategy in order to make it really start to perform for us? Or is it really time to walk away from this strategy? And think about what we could be doing instead? That would work better? Knowing when and how to make those decisions is what makes a CEO and is what makes a strategic business. These are all strategic business decisions. So if you are a business owner, and you don't know your numbers, how the hell are you supposed to drive the strategy, because make no mistake, your team is there to support you and to support the strategy that you outline for them, they are not going to drive the vision of the business. That's connecting back to your why in point one, and they are not going to drive the strategy in your business. That is up to you as the business owner, you cannot outsource that. So being able to know your metrics, measure those metrics, read those metrics, and apply them to make these smart business decisions on should we allocate more resources to something, should we tweak the strategy? Or should we abandon the strategy, those are going to make the biggest difference and the biggest impact in your business.

10. Know when to ask for help. So you might be hearing all of these points and be like, “Oh, my God, I don't know, where the hell do I start?” I understand everything that you're saying to me. But I don't understand how to apply it to my business. Right? That's the point where it's a good time to look at, do I need a coach? Do I need to invest in group coaching? Do I need to invest in a course to be able to learn these things? Or, if it's a strategy that you're saying, Okay, this needs more resource or time or attention. You might need help, you might need support and that support might come from a virtual assistant. It might come from an OBM, it might come from you getting help on executing the strategies that you're driving. Or it might be okay great. I don't have the knowledge expertise to move this strategy forward in the way that we want it to in order to make it work for our business. So that might be where you outsource to someone who has an expertise in that space. That might be ads, right ad management, that might be a social media manager, that might be someone to update your website or get your funnels tighter. But you're not going to be able to know when it's time to get help unless you do these other items first in your business. Because you're not going to know strategically when you need help, until you've done all of these other things, then it's time to raise your hand and ask for help. Because asking for help means I want to get to this place. And I want to get to this place faster. So I'm going to go ahead and get help. You can get to any of the places that you want to go. You can grow your business as large as you want on your own. But you're going to be figuring it out on your own, you're going to be using the University of Google to try and figure out all those things, and figure out how to apply them to your business specifically. So if you want to get there faster, if you have that vision, if you have that strategy, if you have that goal, getting that help or getting that support is what's just going to get you there so much faster.

    So those are the 10 things you need to do. And you need to know in order to build a successful a successful small business. I hope this was so helpful for you. I hope that these strategies were super actionable. If you have any questions about how to apply these strategies for your business, I am on Instagram here. Drop me a line over there and I would be happy to help you through any of these strategies if you have any other questions. And if you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe to No Fluff - Small Business Simplified so that you can get bite sized actionable tips for your small business every single week!