When You Need To Accelerate Your Progress

Sometimes, you just need your business to move faster.

Whether that looks like more clients, new products and services or higher/more consistent revenue, you know in your bones that you can crank it up a notch or two.

The question is: how exactly?

Think of your potential solutions in three categories: doubling down on what’s currently working, leveraging your time/investment and executing a pivot.

Double down. This is ideal when you’ve identified something that’s already building momentum: an audience or client segment, a content theme you’ve been diving into, maybe a new service that’s been getting some traction.

Doubling down might look like changing up the messaging on your website and social profiles to attract more of your emerging clients/audience (niching down fits nicely here).

It might mean designing a new freebie and landing page with an email nurturing sequence—the good news is you’re already serving this audience, so if you pay attention, they’ll give you cues on how to attract more of them.

Leverage. There are so many different kinds of business leverage that whole books have been written about them. Todd Tresidder’s The Leverage Equation is a personal favorite—and you can listen to our interview with him here).

Here’s how to think about leverage as a solo: when you know what you’re doing is already working in the marketplace—then leveraging is your friend.

It isn’t just about hiring people to do things for you—although if you’re still doing things a good VA can take off your hands, you might start there.

It’s also about creating systems to save you time and—in the long-run—money. Those systems could be about giving you more time to focus on the things only you can do to drive your business: writing, developing courses, giving interviews, running a podcast or video series.

Or they could be about automating actions so that others (people or systems) can do them: procedures, checklists, on-line calendars and email automation to name a few.

Leverage can also be about other people’s audiences—when you give an interview on a hot podcast, you are introducing yourself to a new audience. When you write for a media outlet, you go beyond your email tribe.

The trick is to find the right lever.

Pivot. It’s a little too easy to shy away from pivots—at least the public ones—since they can feel like an admission of failure. Try looking at it as not wasting one more day on what isn’t working.

Pivots often look first like a (temporary) slow down. Strategizing on your next moves, then plotting and executing them takes some time. You’ve got to channel some patience as you work through the process.

The good news is once you’ve committed to that pivot, every step you take is building momentum. You’ll find reserves of creativity, energy and evangelism you may have thought were in your rear view mirror.

The bottom line is this: when you know your business has stopped accelerating, you have to be prepared to find the gas pedal—and then step on it.