the bossbabe podcast - 322. How To Prep For Q4 + Make it Your Biggest Cash Quarter Yet

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Ready to bring in the biggest cash injection to your business you’ve had all year? It all comes down to having lazer focus on the #1 goal we reveal in this episode. Natalie shares the core metrics every CEO must know to 10x your results (the same metrics she’s used that have led to our most successful launches at Bossbabe.)  Whether you’re a solopreneur or you have a team - this episode shares how to break down your biggest goal into a simple step-by-step process, leading yourself and your team to your most successful quarter yet.  HIGHLIGHTS How to guarantee Q4 is your most successful quarter yet How I’m working less than I ever have + still feel SO productive The key metrics + data deep dive that will let you know what shifts to make The #1 goal you need to focus on to get the best results What every visionary + CEO needs to focus on (and how to reverse engineer your timeline, and the individual steps to reach your big goal) LINKS Get the exact playbook behind Bossbabe’s most successful launches on our NEW podcast series - Launch with Bossbabe  FOLLOW bossbabe: @bossbabe.inc Natalie Ellis: @iamnatalie

Welcome back to the Boss Babe podcast. Okay, real talk. I have got a chamomile tea in my hand and I'm recording this while my baby is in bed. So we have been without childcare, I think I told you the last few weeks, and we've had some big deadlines to hit. And so it's been really interesting weaving in, building our businesses during nap times and sleep times. And actually, I'm kind of enjoying it. It's been really nice just to have our days full with playing with Noemi and just spending so much quality time with her.

And then when she goes down for a nap or goes to bed, just sitting down for a power hour and really being focused, not letting myself get distracted, not working on anything that absolutely isn't moving the needle and needs to be done and really leaning on delegation. It's been really good and it's really put my systems to the test. So we are taking it very, very slow in the search for our new nanny we want to find someone that really is the perfect fit for our family and it feels good just to take things slow and to yeah try our systems and just really soak up this time with her so I'm working less than I ever have

and I still feel so incredibly productive so yeah I'm coming to you with my chamomile tea. It tastes really good. I'm in a cozy room. I'm going to dive in and talk all about heading into Q4. And I feel like this cozy vibe is the right vibe to be talking about leaving summer and moving into Q4. Q4 is a really big quarter across most industries. So in this episode, we're going to be talking about how you can guarantee that your Q4 is your most successful quarter of the year. As we're talking, I'll reference launches a few times. So make sure you stick around to the end because I've actually revealed all of our Boss Babe launch secrets for free. And I'm going to tell you how you can access them at the end of this episode. It's really, really good. But first I want to lay the foundation for where we're headed. Oftentimes people get

caught in either over planning or under planning. I've had Q4s that I had been planning for since January and they were always underwhelming. And I've also had Q4s where I actually totally forgot about Black Friday until the middle of October. And that was really stressful. So this is your full audit to make sure you're heading into Q4 with the right clarity you need to see the results that you want. It all starts with a data deep dive. I cannot stress this enough. If you do not know your numbers, you've got to change that immediately. I have been on so many coaching calls where I'll start to ask someone about their business and they'll be telling me they're struggling and they can't pinpoint why the numbers do not lie when you've got them really clearly laid out you can easily see what parts of your business need the

most attention and what parts are thriving I know it can be hard to know where to start if you're not used to looking at numbers so I have came up with 15 metrics that you need to be checking on a regular basis. I call these the 15 core metrics. These are, and I'm just going to reel off a few. I'm not going to get into too much detail. I have these 15. If you want the 15, jump inside the society because I'm releasing a whole lot in there, but gross profit is really important. So you really want to know how much money you're making. Net profit, you want to be knowing how much money you're making after all of your costs are taken out. I really recommend having a short form channel and a long form channel. So thinking

about the metrics on both of those channels. So short form is probably going to be your Instagram or your TikTok and long form might be your podcast or your email list, then you want to be going on to your funnel. So how many people are opting in? What is it converting at? And then what are your actual offer sales across your offer suite? So those are the metrics that I really recommend tracking. If you want me to get into more detail of those, make sure you're in the society because I'm releasing that inside of the society. But high level if you want to rewind and write them down those high level are the things that you really should know if you want me to do a deep dive on what each of these mean and how to practically track them I can do that another episode DM me if you'd be interested in that but for now get as many numbers as you can

down on paper so you can really understand where your business is at. The next thing I want you to do is look at your numbers, pick your one main goal and reverse engineer it. I know you probably have so many goals but studies show that when you focus on just one goal at a time you make so much more progress. So let's think about habits right. If you want to introduce a brand new habit of drinking a certain amount of water every single day it's probably not going to work out if you introduce drinking water and taking supplements and working out and going on a walk and meditating all of these different habits all at once. You might get nothing done. In fact, you might miss your workout and throughout the whole day because you missed one thing and you feel like you can't catch up. But if you just focused on drinking a certain amount of water a day, it's going to become a habit.

Once it's a habit, you add the next goal. And so you drink your water and immediately take your supplements. It habit stacks. Then you add the next one. Do you see what I mean? What you want to do is think about using that same principle in your business.

So pick one thing, build your system around it, start to do it in your sleep and then move on to the next thing. That's how I think I got so good at growing an Instagram because it came a habit. So I didn't even have to think about it anymore. And then when I had a goal that has to do with Instagram, I would just pour gasoline on what I knew was already working. It also made it so much easier to delegate out because I had my system. I wasn't bringing someone in and say, Hey, go figure this out for me. I was saying, Hey, I'm going to hand this off to you. Here's the system. It's repeatable.

You continue doing this and I'm going to go focus on the next goal. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place so it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring

cleaning in your business you know get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students so if you're listening and haven't checked out Kajabi yet now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss babe listeners a 30-day free trial go to kajabi.com slash boss babe to claim your 30-day free trial that's kajabi.com slash boss babe so at the end of the day it is your responsibility to set that goal and to really think about what that goal is going to be for you in his book how to grow your small business story brand and business made simple founder donald miller says this the primary job of the to be for you. In his book, How to Grow Your Small Business, Story Brand and Business Made Simple

founder Donald Miller says this, the primary job of the leader and the leadership team is to clearly define a destination, then reverse engineer a plan to get there. So if you are the CEO or you're sitting in that CEO visionary founder role at your company, this is your number one priority right now. Even if you're a team of one, it's literally all I want you to focus on. Where are you going? What's your goal? And how are you going to reverse engineer a way to get there? So let's say you want to grow by a thousand followers. Okay, great. But what does that mean for your actions? You're posting every day, you're looking for trends, you're monitoring your top performing content, creating more of it. That's how you'd reverse engineer your plan. Or let's say your goal is a revenue goal. You want

to make another $100,000 so you can invest it back into your business and take some home for yourself. Okay, so how would you hit the $100,000? That's selling $10,000 products or $100,000 products and so on. So create your product at that price point and put a launch plan in place to get there. But it's really about reverse engineering. It's not as difficult as it sounds. You don't have to get fancy, but you do have to set your goal and then ask yourself, what are you willing to do if you're serious about hitting it? What are you willing to do? Then you want to create a rock solid calendar based on these reverse engineered goals. So when you've got your goal, I want you to reverse engineer your timeline, really work backwards from that big goal. So when do you want to add the thousand followers? When do you need

that cash injection? In my Launch with Boss Babe podcast series, which is a brand new podcast series, by the way, I'm super excited about it. You can search launch with Boss Babe, and I've also linked it in the show notes. I do an entire episode breaking down our ideal launch timeline. I'm going to link that specific one in the show notes because I actually talk about if I'm launching and I want to hit a specific goal, how I would chunk out all of my weeks and what I would focus on. So really you want to draw a timeline and start working backwards. So you know what to do now in order to hit your goal that next quarter. And then after that, I want you to think about how you're communicating the vision, the calendar and goals to your team to get their buy-in. Once you've got your data available, your goal really clearly identified and reverse engineered and you've set out your calendar, you want to communicate that with your team.

And I know we've got a lot of solopreneurs here and you might be thinking, I am my team. I am my whole team, Natalie. And if that's you, that's all right. Have a one-to-one with yourself and really let it sink in. Okay, this is what I need to do

every single day to hit the goal. Every single day when I open my laptop, these are the things that I want to do. We're taking the guesswork out of where your focus is and you know exactly where you're going. Ever since I was first building Boss Babe all the way to today, I keep a whiteboard available as a visual to see exactly what's going on and where I need to be focused. I can see my whiteboard right now. It's right in front of me. So whether it's just you or your entire team get those ideas defined and keep coming back to them so you always know if you are or if you're not on track the way that

you'll know if you're on track is by taking the goals the roadmap the calendar and turn it into a project plan with really clear deliverables and dates I almost think about when I had Noemi right I knew all the things I needed to have ready by the time we brought her home from the hospital, but it's not like I went to Target one day and bought everything, right? I really sat thinking about it. Okay, what exactly do I want? Let me do the research, put it all together in a registry. And I worked backwards from there and really planning ahead for what I would need. And that's how I want you to think about your goals and your roadmap and your calendar, right? It's all very similar. And maybe you're crushing this in your personal life and it comes so natural to you. But in your

business, it's almost like you go and try and do a million things at once and you do things in a different way. I really want you to think about that. It's really the same in your personal life, in your business life, the way you set goals. You are not going to hit all of your goals in a day you're not going to get every single thing done and planned that you want in a single day so plan for the benchmarks you need to hit little by little maybe it's having your offer outline put together maybe it's recording your curriculum putting your webinar together whatever it is think about those little milestones as part of this big goal. Let's say you wanted a thousand new followers by the end of Q4. That might mean you're getting 300 new followers a month. And so if you know you are hitting that number, you're going to hit your goal. So you can check in every single day, you can reverse

engineer it to see how many followers you need to be hitting in a day. And you'll know if you're ahead or behind based on whether you're hitting these milestones along the way. Whenever I'm doing launches, I have milestones to hit. So I pretty much know going into my webinar if I've hit my goals or not. Again, all of that's covered in the podcast. But I really reverse engineer everything so that I'm not just putting everything on the line for when I need to hit my goal. I'm not putting everything on the line for, oh, you know,

I said I'd get a thousand followers and I've gotten 10, but I said my goal was ending tomorrow. I'm not putting it all on the line for that. So if you're sensing a theme here with all the advice I've given you, it's this, you need a clear goal and you really want to work backwards and reverse engineer to make that happen. A lot of you are going to have goals around getting a cash injection in your business before the end of the year. And if that's you right now, one of the actions I want you to take is go to the link in the show notes and sign up for my podcast series all about launching. When you do, what you're going to get is a handout with each of the episodes. So you could listen to them one at a time or binge them all in one sitting. They're available right now. I've never gone this in depth, I think on a free

platform, but I get so in the weeds of every step we take during a launch at Boss Babe. Remember when I said, figure out something that works, then pour gasoline on it. That's how we approach launches at Boss Babe. And with these episodes, you're getting our whole playbook for free. And you can even print that off to go alongside episodes you're listening to. But I really want you to think about what you want to do in Q4. What are your big revenue events going to be? If you haven't already, start thinking about what your Black Friday, Cyber Monday is going to be. I know for some people, you know, that was an entire month last year. It doesn't have to be. You know, if you don't want that level of stress, just do something over that weekend. If you want to introduce maybe a bigger launch,

you could run it for a couple of weeks. Another thing is the holidays. Are you going to be doing any big holiday promos? I think there's a myth that no one's buying over the holidays, but we see such a huge spike in buyers just after Christmas and before the new year when everyone's really ready to get back on it. So really plan out what this looks like for you. Plan out month by month,

plan out what you wanna hit revenue-wise or audience-wise by the end of the year and reverse engineer so that you know what you should be focused on. I think one of the biggest things that keeps people stuck is waking up every single day and not knowing what they're actually gonna be able to do that's gonna move the needle. It's kind of like every single day is a free-for-all and you're like, let me just figure it all out as I go. When you're checking your emails and going

onto Instagram and scrolling, and then you're in Slack and Asana and a spreadsheet, and it's just this hamster wheel of doing, you really want to pull out of that and get strategic and work on your needle movers. So if you know, okay, October, I am prepping for my big campaigns. November, I am really running a big Black Friday, Cyber Monday campaign. December, I'm delivering on whatever I've sold and I'm getting primed to start selling after the holidays. Whatever that looks like for you, think about it now so that you can reverse engineer it and build in those milestones along the way so that you can hit your goals. So check out the link that I have put together for the podcast and start making a plan to reach your goal. In the meantime, drop me a message at IamNatalie on Instagram and let me know what specifically would you like me to do episodes

on when it comes to goal setting. Do you want me to go detailed in metrics? Do you find that really boring? Do you want me to talk about a different process? Let me know because I'm a big believer that if you want a freedom-based business, you really need freedom-based systems. And I just want to share all the systems that are working for me because it gives me so much more freedom in my day with my time financially. It's a game changer. So drop me a DM and let me know.