3 essential changes to make to your business *before* you hit $10k/month

In this episode, you'll hear about the 3 most impactful changes entrepreneurs should make your business before you hit $10k per month. I'll shares personal experiences and practical advice to streamline communication, standardize offerings, and optimize marketing visibility for your business (especially using social media)!

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Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

 So you've got a thing you love to do a thing that you think you could make money doing. So you start a business is slap a price on it and clients start coming in. 

The most magical moment is when you book a client and they're not friends and family, and they're not a referral. And they've just like found you. And it's so validating. And I feel like for a lot of us, that's the moment where we're like, I think I have a business. I think I have a business on my hands. 

You start delivering your service and then you find out there's all these other things that you need to do in order to run a business. It's not just about that delivery. It's not just about serving your clients. It's also the marketing and the sales and the bookkeeping and the project management and the managing your own time. 

And now you realize you're living inside this whole beast, this whole beast of a thing.  



 You probably downloaded Canva and found yourself becoming a graphic designer, making little flyers, and you probably became a web designer to whip yourself up a Squarespace site. And suddenly you've got all these jobs inside your job, and all you want to do is serve your clients and do the thing you're good at. 

And then some days you're so tired from running this whole beast of a business and all these other things that you start to resent your clients, and you don't even enjoy the delivery. Every does that resonate. I know that that's where I found myself a lot of days or, you know what, a lot of days at the beginning of my business, I think I was too tired to even know what was going on 

Or to even identify why I was tired. I was too tired to know why I was tired,

but now looking back at that time in my business, when I ;=;;went from making a couple hundred dollars a month  to. A couple thousand dollars a month to a few thousand dollars some months I'm reflecting on some of the most monumental changes that I made that you might not expect. And I am so excited to share them with you in hopes that you can make these changes too. If you find yourself needing them. And maybe we can turn down some of that overwork, some of that resentment and replace it with sleek business systems.

 



  One of the biggest changes that I made in my business was streamlining how I communicate with my clients and how I allow my clients to communicate with me. And when I made this change, it was so scary and it did not go well. And it did not go smooth. And I still would never go back. 



 

I wanted to apply to work with someone just last week and in order to apply to work with her, I needed to provide my cell phone number and that made me go, okay. I, I'm not going to work with this person, even though it had a little disclaimer and it said we will only use your number to text you a reminder of the zoom call that we have set up. 

I was like, Nope. Hard and fast, I have a boundary and that boundary came because I gave out my phone number too much. And now. None of my clients have my phone number and I only use my phone and texting for friends and family. The only person who has my phone number, who I work with is my operations manager, Lara. 



And even still. She will only use it, like if she really has to like, maybe I'm driving and she needs to call me other than that, we communicate through slack and through email. So what happened back in the day? Was I allowed my clients to reach out to me in any way we would talk on the phone. 

We would text, we would, , chat through messenger. Sometimes they would DM me on Instagram. We would email. And if you choose to communicate with your clients and all those ways, that is totally fine for me. I thought that I was helping them by being easy to communicate with. I thought that by. , not having a lot of boundaries around it. 

It meant that they would like me more and be happier with my service because we could use a communication style that worked for them. But what it ended up doing was really blurring the lines between my life and my work and making it really easy for me to miss stuff, because you know, you read a text and if you don't act on it right then in that moment, then it's easy to lose. 



And if you read the text, Because of the type of person I am nine times out of 10. I, if there's an action step, I'm going to stop what I'm doing. And then take that action step. And now productivity is out the window because you're like tasks, switching and clients switching back and forth. Plus when you start to get a bunch of clients, now, your numbers going out far and wide all over to people. 

And boundaries don't come naturally to me,  I had to learn how to have boundaries in every way, shape or form. So for you, it might be easy to get a text from a client at 10:00 PM and ignore it. But I, it was not, it was not natural to me as. I didn't feel good. 

I won't be able to stop thinking about it.  So there came a time when I switched all of my clients over to new communication systems and not all of them liked it,   another thing was I instituted Calendly. 

So you might be familiar with Calendly or acuity, which is a online scheduling tool. So you can give your calendar to someone with openings available. So maybe you only take calls on like Tuesdays and Thursdays. You can have those times open and the person can select a time and book a zoom call, and you both get the zoom invite and you both get the link and it automates the whole process. 

One of my clients gave me a lot of sash. She said she didn't want to book a call to talk to me. She wanted to just talk to me when she wanted to talk to me. And I had a meltdown when I was setting up Calendly because it meant I needed to change my calendar over. 

Like I truly had a meltdown. My coach to this day still makes fun of me for it. , And meltdown setting it up. Like it wasn't a smooth process, but it was a necessary process. And I could not go back. It would be insane for me to go back. I could never go back to the old way of doing things. And actually   

  

because I pushed through and because I instituted those changes, checkout, checkout the rewards. 

I reaped one. I didn't realize how much time I was hemorrhaging throughout the week, setting up calls with people. So if you have a business where you need to have meetings and take calls, think about all of the back and forth emails of does two o'clock work for you. Oh, no, two o'clock doesn't work for me. 

Just three o'clock work for you. Okay. Sure. Okay. I'll set up the zoom invite and I will send you the zoom in by. And then you get it and you need to approve it. And then, and then there's a mistake and you can go back. And like when you're doing that constantly throughout the month, it's hours and hours a month. 

So paying, you know, X number of dollars, like $16 or whatever Calendly costs a month 

actually gave me many, many hours a month back. So that was huge. And I learned this little saying.  Um, in this situation, I learned the people who don't like your boundaries are the people who are taking advantage of you. Right. The people who don't like you having boundaries are the people who don't like your boundaries. 

And that was true in this instance, too. This was one indicator. Like I understand when clients don't like that you made a change. That makes sense. You know, I sometimes resist change too, but this was actually more of a really beautiful, vibrant red flag that there was probably some other areas where I was being taken advantage of and some of the client relationships that I've gotten myself into at that point. And so.  We live and learn. Number one thing, streamlined communications. 

It's, it's something that you can take action on. Now, if you are making a change in your business, I encourage you to give your clients a lot of warning and to over communicate about it and to make the transition as easy as possible.  I do not take back streamlining my communications. It was huge for me 

maybe that means like having a work phone and a play phone or a work email, and a network email, or only checking your. Emails. , Monday through Friday or putting an email responder on, on the weekends, like I consider all of that communications and it's housekeeping and it's the type of thing that we ignore.  , but what if you set aside two hours this week and just like made some changes to tighten up your comms, you might find yourself like I did getting hours and hours back a month.  



If you're new here. 

Hi, I'm Jenna. I help service-based business owners get clients from Instagram. So that's one side of my business,  where I have a program called magic marketing machine that teaches you how to market your business, how to run your Instagram in 15 minutes a day. 

Make amazing content. Hone your messaging, learn copywriting and how to write sales content. sell with more confidence, all of that. So that's my program.  And the other side of my business is a social media management agency. I've had a social media management agency for seven years. I started as a solo preneur, exhausted at my dining room table in my bachelor apartment and grew and grew and grew until we had eight team and it's a well-oiled machine. And I did not get there on my own. 

I had lots of coaches and lots of support and learned lots of lessons. , but just for your reference, that is the business that I'm referring to.  I've seen inside many, many, many businesses and done their marketing for them. 



And that meant having lots of clients and lots of offers. And so the next big major change I made, and this was under direct advisement from my business coach at the time. I did not think of this myself, but it was to give everyone the same thing. 

Oh my gosh. It's one of those things where once you learn it, you're like, oh yeah, that makes so much more sense. But let's think about McDonald's here. McDonald's started by giving everybody that exact same cheeseburger. Right. There's a whole documentary on it.  





You would come in and you would get the one thing that they were really, really good at. 

And because they were only making the one thing, they could make it like a factory  one person's toasting the bun while the next person cooks the Patty and the next person decorates it with mustard and ketchup, and then it gets wrapped up and the next person gets ushered in. 

  Because they had that one offer. They could have a really clear system on delivering it, which meant they could do it over and over and over again, they could get super consistent in the result.  You see where I'm going with this.  In my business, I was giving everybody a different thing. 

Some of my clients, I was driving over to them and photographing them and doing photo shoots. Other clients. I was doing influencer collaborations. I would pick up work 

things like comment moderation or short-term  contracts, promoting films, or doing paid ads for films that had like ad spend. And they want Facebook ads. Like I was jumping all over the place.

Giving all your clients different deliverables means, you know, that factory I talked about, you know, that system instead of having one sleek system, you have like 15 systems. They're all different. Everyone is getting a different process. Everyone is getting different results and you have to remember how everybody is different and fixing that. Was more than something that I could do overnight fixing that took years. And still now that I have an eye for it. 

And now that I see the value in any importance in it,  I want to make everything sleeker. Like anytime I'm noticing a discrepancy in someone's service, I'm like, how can we streamline this? How can make it the same for everybody? 

Think about what you can remove from the list of things that you occupy your brain with or worry about.  

 Even having different rates for people. When I've had clients at all different rates, it's like, it gets to be so hard to track. And you just have to , remember how much you told them that you cost. It's just one more thing on your worry list, on your list of things you need to remember and things that are not crystal clear and written down, that you could pass off to the next person, you hire like a virtual assistant or someone to help you in your business. 

Like, what are all the things that are different for everybody that you just know? And can you. Align them and make them the same for everybody. 

 

 



 On a similar note, you want to look for tasks that are easily repeatable, and those can be some of the first tasks that you pass off. So it was really challenging for me and my business to find the things that I could trust someone else to handle. 

So I thought right. Uh, really hard to find the things that I could just pass off to someone because I wasn't ready to release sales. Like I want to keep doing my sales calls. My deliverables were all over the place, but what was everybody getting that was taking up a lot of my time so that I could make a clear system of that passed that off to someone to give me that time back to open up space, to figure out how to fix the rest of the business. 

  Think about how you might apply that to your business. What is repeatable and time consuming?   Maybe for you, that is some of your admin. Admin tasks, maybe that is email management. 

What is repeatable a really common way to look at? This is automate delegate, eliminate. 

So look at those repeatable tasks, those things that are taking your time away from you and keeping you from doing like from the business growth from the having space to think from the having time to sleep and see how we can eliminate them, automate them or delegate them. To a team member. 

I just found the biggest bug.  On my knee. I'm just going to leave him there. He's going to hang out with us. We're almost done here. All right. Next step. , getting really intentional about my marketing and my visibility. And becoming a magnet to clients instead of hunting for them. Well, See it, like I hunted for them. 

And I also got really active in my marketing, started showing up online because I was going through all of this and running this business  without using my own Instagram for marketing myself, I was so busy running other people's Instagrams. I hadn't really touched mine. 

I would find clients, , by like going to Craigslist and looking for people who were hiring for social media managers, I would find clients through. Uh, connections with friends who told me that their business needed social media. I would get referrals from people who I had maybe met in other areas of my life. 

I remember one big client that I got was because I met someone at an improv festival, and then they told me that they had a friend who owned a brewery who needed social media. So again, same kind of thing. I was kind of chasing down work and chasing down leads and going out and looking for it, which I still like. 

I love that mentality. I love the go get it, you know, take the reins, be in charge of your own success and go after it. And then also I think we want to balance that out with. Putting up your personal billboard sign and calling clients to you as well.  So part of our energy is going to be going out there and getting them, but that can be really tiring. 

So while one hand is going out there and getting clients, let the other one be waving on top of your head. That's your website. That's maybe a blog. That's guesting on podcasts.  That's creating Instagram content. That's being on Tik TOK and social media. That's all of these things, guesting and other people's communities. 

 Waving your hand above your head saying, hi, I'm over here. If you need me come over to me and that's going to make a really big difference because you are only one person and you going out there one-to-one chasing down leads can get you work. 



 But wouldn't it be nice if people found you? Wouldn't it be nice if people came to you? 

Wouldn't it be nice if you open your DMS every single day and see messages from people who aren't friends, who aren't family, who aren't referrals, but have come to you because you showed up in your marketing and you put your face up there on a virtual billboard and called people in.  

 My friend, I am going to go put this little bug out on the back patio. 



I hope you get a second to sit out on the back  📍 patio today.  





I hope this episode has helped , if it did, if there's anything in this episode that you are going to take away and implement or gave you a moment of like, wow, Jenna, thanks for that. Please do me a solid and leave me five stars on whatever platform you're listening on. 

It really helps to show. I get out to other entrepreneurs  

who can also benefit from them?  

Plus, you'd be making my damn day. Thank you so much for being here and I'll see you in the next one.