Grow With Soul: Ep. 43 How To Get Going In Your Business (Starting Out or After A Break) With Kayte Ferris
Today is a shorter kind of pep talk style episode with me. What I want to talk about is getting going. At the time I am recording this, it is the end of August where here in the Northern Hemisphere we are starring to look ahead to the Autumn and get going with new projects or pick up old ones, as we get that back to school feeling and in the Southern Hemisphere as you are emerging into Spring there is also that sense of getting going too so it feels like a good time to look at how to start something new or invigorate an existing business after a break.
Here's what we talk about in this episode:
Start gently and realistically
Fertile void
Starting out with a new idea
Reconnect with why you are doing this and who you are doing it for
Set some goals
Match your activity to those goals
Make movement
Links and resources we discuss:
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Read the episode transcript:
Hello, and welcome to episode 43 of Grow with Soul. Today is going to be a shorter kind of pep talk style of episode just with me, and what I want to talk about is getting going.
So at the time of recording this, and as it’s going out, it’s the end of August, where here in the Northern Hemisphere we’re starting to head to the autumn, and getting going with new projects or picking up old ones. And as we get that kind of back-to-school feeling, in the Southern Hemisphere I’m assuming you’re converting into spring and all the newness that that brings; there’s also a kind of sense of getting going too. So, it feels like a good time to start to look at how to start something new or invigorate an existing business after a break.
START GENTLY AND REALISTICALLY
I wrote to my newsletter subscribers this month about how I was exploring Kate Northrup’s concept of work cycles, and specifically the fertile void. She says there’s 4 different parts of the cycle, with all of our work and our projects, and the last one is the fertile void. It’s the thing we always skip, so we always start up with new projects as soon as one ends or even quite often before one has ended, rather than taking that period to rest and evaluate everything. To use a gardening analogy, the fertile void is the time to let our soil recover, to pile on some fertiliser and let some things germinate naturally rather than pull them up early and stick them in a greenhouse with loads of chemicals.
The reason I bring this up is because I went on holiday in July and I felt really guilty that I didn’t come back and hit the ground running with renewed pzazz, and all I actually wanted was a lie down instead of wanting to kick on. Instead of trying to force it, I accepted the fertile void state, so I didn’t post on Instagram for the whole of July. I delayed recordings for this podcast and pushed the first episode back a few weeks. I just generally did the bare minimum of what I had to do. And actually, you know what? I got so many ideas, and I got so excited to start pursuing them. Rather than having to force things to happen my mind kind of wandered freely and landed in new areas and that got it really excited, so I had time to think about what I really wanted in my business and make lucid plans instead of just raging through trying to push through everything. So I came back to work with so much more positivity than I did when we kind of dropped our bags getting back from holiday and I thought ‘oh god, here we go again’.
So, if you’re coming back from a break, my advice is to not force yourself into an intense working routine if you’re just not there yet energetically. Focus on a handful of important tasks and otherwise allow yourself to calibrate and ease back into the water. And, by the way, I found it really helpful actually to put a date on it. By kind of having til the end of July that I was going to be in ‘fertile void’, that kind of helped me to not be in it perpetually, but also give myself a little bit of structure just kind of for my mental state more than anything.
The same also goes if you’re starting out. For some reason, our brain really likes to psych us out when we’re doing something new, and if you’re starting to think about making your business idea a reality, then your head is probably full of what a gigantic, enormous, life changing thing you’re about to do. It’s this huge, big picture concept right now, and it feels like everything has to happen at once and all at the same time in order for it to actually happen. But, of course, it can’t all happen at once, and nor does it need to. So go gently and go realistically. Know that you’re not going to get to that big picture vision in a hurry, so don’t hurry. Give yourself little bits to do, just one or two a week, and you’ll find yourself making much more progress than if you keep staring at that big picture and think ‘right, I’ve got to get everything going, I’ve got to have all the different rings of the hob and have all the pans on high’. You can just start simmering one and that’s fine.
RECONNECT WITH WHY YOU’RE DOING ALL OF THIS AND WHO YOU’RE DOING IT FOR
A great way to build back up your motivation and to gain renewed focus, or focus for the first time, is to get back in touch with your ‘why’ and your ‘who’. And I know, I know, there’s nothing really remarkable about me saying that but it is really easy to get slowly swept away from these key foundation stones on the current of all your day to day activities and the expectations of others and certain opportunities. Checking back in with them is a good way to kind of hard reset and look at how important what you’ve found yourself doing really is.
On the ‘why’ side of things, you may decide what you want to do, or feel like you need to do, is a really deep dive on it, with something like my Purpose Kit. So perhaps your original driving ‘why’ isn’t resonating so much anymore, and you generally feel kind of lost, and you don’t know where to start with it. Or maybe it’s more simple than that; you just need a bit of time with a pen and paper to remember why you started doing this in the first place, and to reconnect with that motivation.
Either way, to feel clear about ‘this is what I stand for’, and ‘this is why I’m driven to build this business’ is a really important starting point to be a springboard to dive in from.
Similarly, connecting with who you serve in your business is important too. We all get a little bit wrapped up in what we want our business to do for us that we kind of lose touch with what our people really want from us. That’s something I definitely do! So this kind of reconnection could be literal, so sending out some questions or a survey or paying more attention to what people are saying online and being proactive with engaging with them to touch base and re-familiarise yourself with your people, so you can make sure what you plan is really focused on then.
Even if you’re starting out or your’e shifting slightly so you don’t have a pool of real people to talk to, still think about that ‘who’. Your educated guesses about who they are and what they want and what they need is always going to be so much closer to the truth than you think, and is always going to be a better starting point then nothing. Those guesses, that kind of intuitive knowledge, is going to be enough to get you to a point where you have real people to ask.
Another thing you can do as well if that still feels a little bit of a jump is look at people online or in real life that you kind of think ‘yes, I would love to work with them, I would love them to buy my things or wear my clothes’ or whatever it is, and kind of use them as your inspiration when you see what they’re talking about online or you kind of read between the lines: ’what sort of things are going to really appeal to them?’
SET SOME GOALS
As I say in Basecamp, which is my new course, when you’re going on a road trip, you need to know where you want to get to before you start planning your route. Once you know your end point, you can kind of work backwards from there. You need to plan what motorway junctions you need to come off at and, you can look at cute little towns or nice pubs or museums that you want to hit and visit along the way, and this is really how I approach my goal setting. So having a big end destination that kind of feels like it’s a long way off, but having little goals that I can relish that will get me closer and closer to that end destination.
Whether you’re starting out, or you’re years into your business, your destination goal looks and feels huge, so really I just look up at it occasionally to make sure I’m on the right path. It’s the smaller goals that I pay the most attention to, as they’re the things that will give you wins along the way and will keep you pepped up, and they also will form the basis of most of the activity that you do within your business. So making sure that you have some short term goals, ones that you can tick off within a month, or within a couple of weeks, is a really great way to get and to stay motivated, as you can really see your progress happening in real time right in front of you, rather than in 6 months time ending up at a place and like ‘Oh, I got here’. Which really brings me on to point number 4…
MATCH YOUR ACTIVITY TO THOSE GOALS
At the moment, my end destination is a six figure turnover and a day-to-day existence that involves more pottering around than needing to be keeping appointments. I wrote about this on the blog a few weeks ago. I think I’m probably a year or two off that end destination at the moment, so it’s my smaller goals that really are the big focus at the moment, so as part of reaching that destination, one of the things I need to do is launch new products. So breaking that down again, I need to launch one at a time because I’ve learnt from the past that launching more than one at a time is not good for me nor for anybody else.
Making and launching, for example, Basecamp was my goal for this quarter, but a goal is nothing if you’re not working towards it, so I needed to match the activity I was going to do this quarter to that goal. That involved writing and creating the course, which, breaking it down further, meant writing one or two sections a week, researching useful examples to use, finding someone to proofread it for me, and getting it all set up on Podia, where it’s hosted.
Right now I’m in the more promotion part of the cycle which has meant getting the podcast back up and running again, being more present on Instagram, organising some outreach, and I will be doing some Instagram lives soon as well, and from the middle of September I’ll be running the first sprint for Basecamp. So you can see how from that, from quite a big goal, I broke it down into actions and activity that will move me closer to achieving that goal. They were small things that meant progress was made in real time and that meant that I could get to the goal quickly.
MAKE MOVEMENT
We all love planning, and making sure it’s just right, and fiddling here and there with this and that. I’m not immune to spending a little bit too much time making a nice planning spreadsheet and then admiring all the lovely things I’ve got planned, but a plan is only marks on a page. It is your actions that actually make it something. The best way to get going in your business is to do stuff. To be in motion. Not with busy work, but with small focused tasks. Creating content, engaging with people, making products, connecting with peers. Finding the work that is efficient, that is effective, and isn’t just fiddling around here and there but that’s going to start really making a difference to your achieving your goals.
I can’t tell you here and now what those activities absolutely should be because they’ll be different for every business and every individual goal. Perhaps you have been thinking that ‘I’ve been spending a lot of time on Instagram, I’ve been doing loads of stuff, I’ve been really visible, and actually it’s time to go deep into creating this product idea and getting it out now’ or maybe you’ve been the other way round and you’ve spent months toying around with this product idea and fiddling around with it and actually now being visible is what you need to be.
If you’re starting out, a good bet is always to start creating content. So that might be blogging, it might be imagery, it might be podcasting, video, a hybrid concoction or something that we’ve never seen before. What creating content does is give people a reason to pay attention and when you’re starting out, that’s what you need. Content gives people something to get their teeth into and enjoy consuming and in so doing get a little bit attached to you and get to know you as well. What that does is start building an audience even if you don’t have a product to sell to them yet. So that’s always a really good bet because the more visible you are at the beginning, the shorter time span you’ve got, so if you’re out there and doing it and developing a product behind the scenes or even in front of the scenes, it means you’re there and doing it and breaking down that time it takes for people to know, like, and trust you.
If you’re looking to get going again in your business then you’re kind of in a similar position to me, so what I’ve chosen to do is focus on visibility at the moment. After being away for most of July and, actually, before that not really being very present, it feels important to get back out there as it were and reconnect with everybody again. I feel like I’ve had a really good reset now and being visible doesn’t feel so pressured or full of dread as it once was, so it feels like a good time and a good next step to really focus on, being out there with all the things that I’ve made and are being made rather than keep hiding away.
But most importantly they’re just some ideas – set some goals and think about where you want to be by the end of September, or the end of the year, and start to take the little actions that are going to get you there, and it doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing, what you think you should be doing, what some advice says. Focus in on where you want to be and what’s going to get you there; that’s all that matters.