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:
Susie Schaefer of Finish the Book Publishing
Susie’s company has doubled this year, and Stephanie got the opportunity to go behind the scenes on how Susie made that happen in her latest interview.
If you prefer to watch or listen rather than read, check out the interview here!
Behind the Scenes
Question 1: What do you do?
Susie:
I am the Book Angel for Cause Publishing, and the company name is Finish The Book Publishing. The company is a recently established company, and I launched the business in February 2019.
What we do is that we help authors take their visions and books from manuscript to fully published and marketed: everything from marketing to cover design to what causes they want to support and how they intend to use the book to make the world a better place.
In other words, we support authors by allowing them to focus where they shine (the writing) and we bridge the gap between a written book and a published book that really impacts people.
Question 2:
What contributed to your growth?
Susie:
Actually, oddly enough, the 2020 shutdown is what kicked me into growth mode. When I founded the company in 2019, I was driving part-time for Lyft to support the business and myself. But when 2020 struck and Lyft took a hit, I couldn’t do that anymore. Lyft revenue dried up, so I quit and focused solely on the business.
Essentially, the shutdown sort of kicked me into putting the systems into place that would help me grow the business.
I started by getting help.
I am an expert in book publishing, but I know I am not an expert in business growth. So I knew I needed to get help with that. I ended up hiring Shannon Hernandez [Speaker for the upcoming Grow2021 Retreat and founder of Joyful Marketing] as a coach, and diving into her programs to help me grow my business. It was a big investment, but I knew that I needed to truly invest in my business to move forward and create the traction it needed to replace the income stream that I lost.
So the first thing that I did was investing time and resources, and getting the help that the business would need to grow. Secondly, I started putting myself out there in the right way (I. E., Niche Marketing)
Niche Marketing
In terms of marketing, I leaned very heavily into Social Media Marketing and worked on designing a strong marketing message. But it took a lot of thought and design because my industry is so very niche. It’s not a necessity like a plumbing company: you don’t need a specialist to publish a book (Although it helps a lot!) but you do need a specialist to fix a plumbing issue.
What I realized is that people do need community and support. Community is a necessity, so I designed Cause Publishing around creating community collaboration and connection for authors. When everyone got concerned about meeting in person, we began offering free online workshops to publishing and writing groups. The result was that we helped people stick together, and they learned about the publishing industry while they wrote their books. The good news for us was that it did a lot for our visibility: people began to realize that we were there, and now they know that we are here to help if they need guidance in the publishing world (or if they just wanted help publishing their books).
The Big Change: Mindset
Although the growth required a lot of work, the big key in growing my business was the mindset shift I created. I did a lot of meditating and realized that if I didn’t invest in my business (and myself) I would continue to struggle as I had been doing in 2019. But taking the steps to invest was scary!
Spending the money that I needed to get help from Shannon initially seemed terrifying to me. But as I began to meditate and investigate that feeling, I realized that I needed to let it go. Because money is energy: when you invest energy, that energy comes back to you. So I knew that if I invested the money, it would come back to me. And it did! I made tenfold what I was making before.
But I had to take the time to create the mindset shift so that I could let go of my fear, take a leap of faith, and press into the things I knew I needed to do (like getting help to move my business forward).
The way Shannon described it in our recent group session is…
The mental barriers and struggles that we face (E.G., fear of spending money) are energy leaks. They sap you of energy and joy. But when you decide to consciously work on that, you get what’s called Inspired Action where your actions are inspired by personal growth and freedom. Because you’re connecting your head and your heart with your higher self needs, your work begins to take on a joyful flow which is where business growth really happens.
I would strongly encourage business owners to start on some sort of practice that helps you to understand yourself and consciously work through mental barriers like fear. Because if you shift your mindset and lean into the scary things until you understand them, you’ll be able to move past them.
Question 3:
What are you doing to ensure you continue growing?
Susie:
There are two things I am working on to continue the growth: Inspiration and Action.
For Inspiration, I attended a business growth retreat.
The growth retreat I attended was the Joy Money Retreat in Sedona. It helped me find inspiration and direction for the next year of the business.
We were all focusing on recognizing the things in our businesses that bring us joy and the things that bring us money. We looked at those different aspects of our businesses from a perspective of finding a way to marry them all together so that the whole business was bringing us both joy and money. From there, we worked on looking at how to get rid of all the things that don’t bring us either. It was awesome!
For Action, I am continuing to get the help I need to grow the business with a plan.
I just had a VIP Session with Shannon and we sat down and revamped a lot of the business based on what I learned at the Joy Money Retreat. We mapped out a new program and new opt in workshops, and even our marketing is changing. After that, I began implementing the new program, workshops, and marketing so that we’re ready to roll out those changes in 2021.
Essentially, I am following a two-step plan: getting inspiration, and setting out (and following) a how-to plan to bring that inspiration to life.
A Short Series-Thus-Far-Sum-Up:
Of the five interviews we’ve had so far in this series, the common denominator has been proactivity.
All of the business owners who have created growth in their businesses this year have been proactive about growing their businesses: it wasn’t just luck of the draw. And often it was fueled by getting involved with a coach or program that encourages them and provides an outside perspective for the next step to take.
So I would encourage you to get involved in a mastermind or retreat that will propel you forward into the new year with motivation and a plan for growth.
If you’re sitting here thinking you don’t know of anyone putting on an event or mastermind right now, check out our event the Grow Retreat. Susie’s coach Shannon will be speaking at the event, and it is widely known for offering San Antonio business owners the exact tools and community needed to fuel business growth.