Businesses across the country have been closing due to the pandemic, but there is a small percentage that have grown!
In this series we take you behind the scenes in those businesses to empower you to apply the same strategies to your business, whether you’re in growth mode, or recovering!
We’re asking three questions to bring out a few different kinds of answers from our interviewees:
What do you do?
What contributed to your growth?
What are you doing to ensure you continue growing?
This Week’s Interview Guest:
Don’t believe it when people tell you that nothing good comes out of LinkedIn, because this interview did! And in Stephanie’s words, Alaina is “pretty freaking spectacular!”
Prefer to watch or listen instead? Check out the youtube video.
Behind the Scenes
Question 1: What do you do?
Alaina:
So that’s a bit of a story, but I'll give you a very brief overview.
I started out in the music industry as a lawyer for 18 years. In the process, my career culminated and I built a multiple 6-figure law practice. At the same time, I was offered to and worked as the executive vice president of North American Operations for the largest independent music company in the world (At the time). When I took that job, a lot of my peers saw it as the pinnacle of success because of the prestige and the fact that it was a mid 6-figure job.
But the truth is, I was never more miserable in my life!
Working that job actually made me physically ill because I was sleeping so little for roughly 4 years (3-5 hours per night), and I wasn’t living my purpose. The whole lawyer thing had been my parent’s dream, and when I was finally wildly successful at that I could own it and say “this isn’t my thing.”
So I went in search of my true passion and purpose, and ended up in a dark night of the soul (what others might call a midlife crisis, though not necessarily tied to midlife). All the structures of my life completely collapsed in this: I went from having this sweet nest egg to being massively in debt, moved out of New York, my marriage fell apart, everything just collapsed in the process of trying to find my true passion and purpose.
It was intense!
And in the process, I learned a lot of techniques that helped me rewire my brain and rewire my perception of my state of being. I hired a purpose coach, and discovered that my purpose in life was really to help other people live their purpose in life.
My business has evolved over the years as my success has grown, but essentially I help 6-7+ figure business owners scale their impact, and ultimately their income. And at the same time, I help them do it in a way that they have to work less, because what got us where we are isn’t going to get us to the next level of success.
So many business owners think that if they just work harder, do more, and strive more that they’ll make it to the next level. But it doesn’t actually happen that way!
One of the biggest myths in business is that you have to work harder to be more successful. The paradigm we’ve been fed from the time we were young by society and billionaires was “work harder” as if that was the answer to having a good life. But the truth is, people who do that often end up without family or a life because they burn up everything around them in the process.
So what I do and love to do is help my clients work significantly less, but have more revenue and significantly more impact with their business.
Question 2:
What contributed to your growth?
Alaina:
There were a few factors that contributed to my growth.
First: Mindset!
The mindset that says “In every challenge, there is an opportunity,” helped a lot! So I looked at the pandemic and said “where is the opportunity here?” Because the pandemic hit a lot of people really hard, and I don’t underestimate or undervalue how hard it hit some people. It’s important to acknowledge that it really did hit a lot of people really hard! But regardless of where we are at, there’s always opportunities in the challenges for all of us.
Second: Adaptation
The second thing that really helped was that I shifted how I was approaching my clients, in terms of what their needs were (given what had happened). For almost a month I was pulling people to the phone and saying “what’s your problem now? What is it that you’re looking for now and how can I help you with how your world has changed?”
Third: Marketing Alteration
Aside from changing the approach to how I was interacting with my clients, I also changed my social media game. Facebook had been my primary platform before the pandemic, and after the pandemic hit I switched to LinkedIn because it helped me to interact with the people who needed me more. And it has been amazing for me! It opened a whole new world of referrals and space in my business that has allowed for activities like podcast interviews, and changed the way I was interacting with potential clients because I had new avenues of interaction with them.
Ultimately…
I took the pulse of the people that I wanted to connect to, so that I could hear the wording from them regarding their problems. I asked people what their problems were, so I could understand from their perspective what they were struggling with most. That has made the biggest difference!
Don’t be afraid to fail!
I will say one more thing about what I did: I trained myself to not be afraid to fail. We’ve been programmed our whole lives to believe that failure anywhere is a personal thing. But when you look at entrepreneurship, the people who are more successful tend to be the people who have failed more often. When you start to realize that failure is just feedback, data, and information, you can begin to take that information, iterate, and grow from it. The moment that happens is when you start to see massive changes in businesses!
Question 3:
What are you doing to ensure you continue growing?
Alaina:
Mindset again!
First I want to say, I don’t look at 2020 as tough and I don’t look at 2021 as being tough. I’m training my mindset to look at it and say “where’s the opportunity? Where is the experience?”
Life is a ride, and it goes up and down and different ways. When we judge what’s “down here” as worse than what we experienced “up here”, we get ourselves stuck. But when we see it all as experience, it helps us grow and be who we are meant to be.
More Visibility
I’m working on looking at 2021 as more of the same work to get more visible and connect.
In the beginning of 2020, I had a bunch of live-speaking canceled or rescheduled. So I’m not going to be doing live speaking until it’s clear that opens back up again. But I’m working continually on getting on more podcasts and building my visibility and authority.
For example, I just hired a social media manager to ensure that what I’m doing on LinkedIn is on all my other social media platforms. Because I put out a lot of content, I’m really engaging, but I want to make sure I’m doing that across the board so I’m getting more visibility in different places. Having the social media manager makes sure that everything gets put out everywhere.
More Reaching Out
I want to constantly be reaching out to people and understanding their problems so well that I can help them with things they didn’t know they needed help with. So I’m going to continue to reach out and discover what’s going on in their lives so that I can convey that I understand their problems even if they don’t 100% understand their problems.
One Extra Question:
What is one actionable tip you would give to struggling business owners?
Alaina:
Hire.
A.
Mentor!
I’m almost always working with a mentor, and right now I’m actually working with three. Because here’s the thing: You can’t read the label from inside the jar; we don’t always know what we need or what we need help with. So get someone who is proficient at reading those labels and can help you to grow in the way you need it.
Most people look at mentors as a cost, but the truth is that they’re an investment: especially for small businesses. Mentors for small business owners are investments in the CEO of the company.
Looking for the next place to discover a mentor and receive strategies for business growth in 2021? Book a ticket to the Grow2021 Livestream!