When is the right time for harvesting?
There’s a cycle that’s as true for business as it is for agriculture. In order to enjoy the fruits of your labor, you must focus first on sowing the seeds that will provide you with success. Do the planning, lay the groundwork, cultivate the soil, plant the seeds, and then patiently wait for it…
In reaping the rewards of your labor and effort, you will have to harvest on time. Harvesting at the right time optimizes the opportunity to be successful and have consistent outcomes.
This is also much the same in running a business. We entrepreneurs must go through the process of planting the ideas and actions, and then wait patiently to actually get to the late harvest which is the actual growth of your business.
Do you want your business to grow as fruitful as it can be?
Get ready for this season’s finale as I introduce and share the concept of early harvests and late harvests within your business. Thrive with me as I talk about the three distinct roles that business owners need to play and the four elements that can help you move your business forward.
A happy season-ending to all of you thrivers! This season has been full of lessons and phenomenal guests that are listening to as you work to move forward with your business. Pick your favorite episode and if you missed one, be sure to catch up during the break!
If you'd like to set your business in motion and gear up for 2022, sign up for my four-week program, Move YOUR Business Forward. Click here to learn more!
The best is yet to come, take care thrivers!
Thriving Points:
- Don't spend a lot of time focused on trying to get that early harvest out. Go through it. Go through the process.
- The impact that you want your business to have out in the world is going to help inform how you operate the business.
- There are always large businesses that are looking to partner with small businesses.
Other resources mentioned:
About the Show:
Women Thriving in Business features candid unscripted conversations with entrepreneurs, business experts, authors, and academics aimed at contributing to business success. This weekly show provides interviews with business leaders who have built, grown, and are thriving in business. Nikki A. Rogers, host of the show, also discusses achievements, lessons learned, and advice for aspiring business owners to develop the mindset, strategies, and connections necessary to thrive in business. Whether you are just starting or you have been in business for decades, WTiB offers inspiration, strategies, and resources to help you THRIVE in business.
About the Host:
Nikki is a strategist and transformation coach who believes life is too short not to do what you love. She is passionate about helping entrepreneurs build sustainable companies and supports business leaders in developing the mindset, strategy, and connections to create thriving businesses and build legacy wealth.
Nikki is the CEO of The Bladen Group and an alumna of North Carolina A&T State University and UNC-Chapel Hill.
Connect with Nikki:
Your business is an asset that can support a thriving life. I believe this, and I'm committed to making this a reality for every entrepreneur and business owner who listens to this podcast. The Women Thriving in Business Podcast was created with you in mind, whether you were thinking about entrepreneurship or you're a business veteran, this podcast has inspiration, information, and advice you can use to thrive in business.
Women Thriving in Business features candid, unscripted conversations with entrepreneurs, business experts, authors, and academics who will contribute to your business success. I seek out and talk with business leaders who have built, grown, and thrive in business. My name is Nikki Rogers, transformation coach, author, and the host of the Women Thriving in Business Podcast. I work with women entrepreneurs to develop the mindset, strategies, and connections necessary to thrive in business. Join me and your fellow Thrivers each week on this journey of discovery and success.
Nikki Rogers: Welcome Thrivers to this week's episode of Women Thriving in Business Podcast. Can you believe it, this is the season three finale? As we wrap up season three, I just wanted to share some things that have been on my mind that I've been thinking about. So today's episode I share my thoughts about what the Fall looks like in regards to harvesting the fruit of your efforts and labor on your business over the last year. And how you should think about the activities that you're going to pursue going forward to ensure that you are getting the harvest that you want to see in the end. I also share about a book that I've been reading recently, The E-Myth Revisited, and the insights that I took away from that book. And then I share four things that you should be thinking about as you seek to grow your business.
At the end of the episode, I tell you all about my new program called Move Your Business Forward that kicks off the first week in October. You can find more details by following the link in the show notes. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this final episode of season three. Look out for some great guests that we have coming up in season four. And I look forward to hearing from you.
Let me know which guests and which topics have been of most interest or most help to you as you've gone about your entrepreneurial journey. And look for just more great things to come in future episodes. So listen in to the show today to hear about the things that have been on my mind. And then tune back in for season four coming soon. Let's go.
Welcome Thrivers to this week's episode of Women Thriving in Business Podcast. I'm your host, Nikki Rogers. And today is a solo episode. I have a couple of things that I want to talk to you all about, so this will be a mix of topics. I hope you enjoy it. So the first thing I want to talk about is as the fall approaches, this is a time of harvesting. Traditionally, in the agricultural calendar, this is when you start to realize the bounty and actually, reap the rewards of your labor and effort over the past year. So my question to you is what are you harvesting? As you think back over the last nine months, over the last year and a half, over the last two years, what are you harvesting now that you actually laid the groundwork for a while ago? And as you think about that, I want to share with you this concept of an early harvest and a late harvest.
When I was in conversation with my self-care coach and in my self-care group, they brought up this idea of an early harvest and a late harvest. So if you think about the rhythms of when you harvest different plants, different fruits, and vegetables, some of them come early in the fall. So you get to enjoy them early in the summertime, earlier in the year. So if you think about most of your berries and melons, those things are harvested during the summertime when the weather is quite hot. And then as you move into the cooler weather at the beginning of the fall, we start to get apples, and we start to get things like pumpkins and squash. And then as you move on later into late fall/ early winter, then you're getting more of the heartier vegetables like greens and, I would say, collards, turnips. Those types of things, I believe carrots and beets come out in late fall/ early winter.
If you think about the nutritional composition of those things, so early harvest would be those things that are sweeter, lighter in nutritional value, and then you get, as it goes alive and get those things that are more dense calorically. They have more of those concentrated vitamins and minerals. And so, if you just think about that from your business standpoint, as you put in your efforts, what are you harvesting early on? So if you think about that, that could be an early harvest, could be all the social media metrics. Some of those metrics relate to who is seeing you, how often are you being seen, and those are like those early efforts.
And if you think about what your late harvest would be, that would be more along the lines of actual qualified leads that would turn into sales conversations and it would eventually be generating revenue that would be the late harvest. So if you think about your business and those terms, you definitely want to go through that period where you had the early harvest. But don't spend a lot of time focused on trying to get that early harvest out. Go through it, go through the process. Use that early harvest in order to actually get to the late harvest, which is where you want to be generating revenue, generating consistent revenue, predictable revenue. So that your business actually continues to grow and it becomes a sustainable business and a way of actually supporting the life that you want to have.
And so that leads me to topic number two. I've been reading this book, well, actually listening to it. So I actually have the hard copy of The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. I bought the hard copy and then I decided I would actually borrow the audiobook, so I could listen to it and really take in the words and the lessons that were in the book. I have listened to this audiobook probably three or four times over the last week or so, and I have really enjoyed the book.
If you haven't heard of this book, The E-Myth Revisited is all about why small businesses don't always work, and what you can do about them as a small business owner. And in the book, Michael Gerber talks about the three distinct roles that entrepreneurs need to play in their businesses. So if you are a business owner, you need to simultaneously be the technician, which is what most people are. They're the technician. They started a business to do the thing that they love. As your business grows, you need to move into being the entrepreneur and the manager of your business. And he breaks that down into detail around some of the conflicts that may arise if you stay mainly in technician mode.
If you're in technician mode and you're bringing on people into the business and you don't switch into that manager role, what can happen is that you start to really, what he says, abdicate responsibility. And so you are leaving the responsibilities to other people without delegating those responsibilities. You're bringing on other people, and they're serving as now an extra pair of hands, and added technician. And so now, you have multiple technicians and you have no manager. And so as a small business owner, you actually have to transition from being a technician and transitioning into that manager role as you're bringing people on.
And then the third role that has to be a part of this is that of the entrepreneur. And as an entrepreneur, you're working on your business and not in your business. So you are taking time in order to understand the landscape that is around you. Think about strategy for your business. Set the vision for your business, so that you, again, don't have just a whole bunch of technicians going about whatever their chosen field but you actually have someone at the helm of the business setting the direction in order to be able to move the business forward. So if you haven't had a chance to check this book out, I highly recommend it.
Even if you're just starting out, it gives you a great framework by which to start to grow and build your business. And if you've been in business for a while and you're facing some challenges from either dealing with employees or maybe contracted staff that you may have if you're facing challenges and going above or growing beyond a certain revenue level, I highly recommend this book as a foundational lesson and how to grow a successful and sustainable small business that will help you thrive.
And that leads me to topic number three for today. So, I think there's really a couple of elements that can help you move your business. I've thought about this for a while, and there are four pieces that I think can help people really move their business forward. One is really getting clear about your relationship with money. And this means, how do you feel about money? Do you have a good relationship? Do you respect money and money respects you? Do you feel like money is always just running through your life without sticking around? Do you feel like you don't know what to do with the money when it shows up? And then again, it just leaves this quickly as it has come. Do you feel like money is unpredictable?
And when I'm talking about money, I mean, really, most people do have this concept of money as a distinct entity. Instead of thinking about money, it's just energy, as money is just one form of currency. So when you're thinking about your relationship with money, if you're facing any challenges around that, that can show up in your business. It shows up in how you price, it shows up in how you talk about the value of the services you provide, it shows up in how you keep your books and how you manage your finances, and in how you manage the documentation for your business. If you feel like you throw up your hands, you don't understand money, you don't want to deal with it, that shows up in the financials of your business as in either not collecting our invoices in a timely manner, or not going after opportunities because you feel like you don't have the capital in order to resource those opportunities. So it is a major factor in how you manage your business. Your relationship with money is key.
The second thing that I think is important to help you move your business along is a vision for your business. And when I say vision, what is it that you want your business to do out in the world? What is the impact that you want to have in the world? So this is different than what your business does. So for instance, I am a consultant and a business coach. But when I think about the vision for my business, it is really around impacting the organizational culture of large businesses. So that is what I want to do. That is the vision for my business around the consulting piece of it. And the piece around the business coaching, my vision for that is that I hope, in particular women entrepreneurs, create thriving businesses that support them and building a financial legacy.
So for instance, I run a coaching and consulting firm, and my vision for my business is that within a 10-year time span, I will have developed a profitable, lucrative business that impacts small businesses on a global scale. And that is going to translate into a certain amount of revenue. It is going to translate into a certain amount of jobs that I've created, both within my business as well as within the businesses that I work with. And that is my vision for my business.
So if you think about, again, the impact that you want your business to have out in the world, the revenue goals that you might have for your business in the next 5 or 10 years, that vision is what is going to hold all of your activities together. It is going to help inform your strategy. It is going to help inform how you operate the business. So vision is number two.
The third thing that helps you move your business forward is strategy. So a vision is the North Star, and vision is the ultimate outcome that you want to see as a result of your business activities. The strategy is how do you get from where you are now to where you want to be. And in strategy, I talk about three things. There are goals, there's the assessment and the plan.
So when we talk about vision, there's the impact that you want to see in the world. There are some underlying goals associated with actualizing that vision. So you identify those goals, like what are those incremental steps that let you know that you're on the way to realizing your vision? You want to identify those, you want to have some measurement in place, and you want to have them time-bound. So that as you're thinking about how are you going to get from here to there, you actually have some markers of progress that help you understand where you are along your journey.
The second part of that is assessing where you are currently. Being very honest, taking an honest look at where you are in your business right now, and then planning. So again, I call this "mind the gap." This is all about strategy. So goals, assessment plans, that is how you create a strategy and that is how you get from where you are now to where you want to be in actualizing your vision.
And finally, the fourth thing that you can do to move your business forward is to identify large clients and go after them. And in my case, I've identified government clients as one of the largest buyers of the services that I provide. And so, whether you decide to go after government contracts, you decide to go on with corporate contracts, you decide to go after partnering with other small businesses in order to move your business forward, you really have to identify those large customers and go after those opportunities. And so thinking about how do you do that? Don't let the perceived difficulty of paperwork and documentation and regulation keep you from pursuing opportunities that are available to you. If you think about this, and I think a lot of business coaches in business books have shown that there's going to be a lot more people who are vying for smaller opportunities than those who are vying for larger opportunities. Oftentimes, we miss out because we think, oh we're too small, our company's too young, or whatever the two whatever's are going to be. We need to actually go after those opportunities because there are all those people who are thinking the same thing as you are. That we're to something to go after this opportunity. So there's actually less competition at the top.
The other thing is, there are always large businesses that are looking to partner with small businesses. A lot of them have mandates or commitments to bring along small businesses as part of their partnerships. And then once you have one of those now, or you have a partnership with a large business, now you're getting a past performance. Now you're getting experience. You are getting that in a very low-risk way so that you can really have a training ground/ a proving ground before you decide to take on one of those large contracts on your own. So I just encourage you to identify what are some additional sources of business that you could be thinking about, that you could be pursuing, that you have not thought about before?
So those are my four pieces of advice for how you can move your business forward. One, being clear about your relationship with money. Two, defining and articulating the vision for your business. Three, developing a strategy to move your business forward. And four, identifying new sources of business that you can pursue. And if you're thinking, Nikki, that's great information. That's great stuff, but I actually need help executing on those. You are in luck.
For quarter-four 2021, I am actually running a Move Your Business Forward Program. Starting the first week in October, we will have sessions dedicated to each one of those four topics, starting with a money salon, moving on to a visioning session, a strategy development session. And then finally, will be how to do business with the government. And I would love to have as many of you all there who are interested in moving your business forward during this season.
If you are ready to move your business forward and want to know more about the program, check out the link in the show notes. I would love to see you in the program because I believe that you can create a thriving business that supports the life that you want to have. I would love to have you in the program. Aim to move your business forward as we finish up 2021. And because I believe that you can create a business that supports a thriving life. So until next time, take care and keep thriving.
Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Women Thriving in Business Podcasts. If you like this episode, share it with a friend. You can also join us on social media to share your feedback and comments. We'd love to hear from you. Be sure to like, review and subscribe on iTunes so you never miss an episode. Until next week, keep thriving.