I truly do believe in hard work, but I also believe in smart work for team success. As a business owner, who has been the 4x top leader, I’ve gone through lots of peaks and valleys as the business has grown, plateaued, and maybe taken a few steps back and grown again. I’ve been through a lot of seasons of business growth, and I’m standing on the other side right now as a business mentor.
I’m finding as I’m mentoring people, I recognize that some of these things don’t come naturally for others, or some of the things that I prioritize are things that other business owners do not prioritize at all. What I find, and maybe this is you, I find that people are sort of reacting to their business. There is a launch for the new program, so let’s create the launch plan, oh, there’s a new incentive from the company, so let’s go do this. We’re always sort of reacting to what the company or the organization is putting out there instead of taking a step back and saying, how do I slow down to speed up? How do I make sure I have the right system in place that help me achieve success?
What if your income wasn’t solely based on what you did, but on the success your team has? What would that be like? Imagine what it would be like to be able to go away for a week or two weeks and still have the same amount of income coming through the doors. It doesn’t rely on you being behind the computer, closing sales doing follow-ups, and even all the social media stuff as well. What about having a team of leaders that are duplicating the systems you’ve put in place and then customizing it in their own way? Wouldn’t that be amazing? Do you want depth in your organization? Don’t you want that success?
Today, I am covering 7️⃣ systems and skills that I believe should be implemented into your business for massive success. I want you to simply say yes or no underneath each one of these areas, I want you to start to think, okay, if these systems aren’t scalable, if they aren’t duplicatable, what are the things that I can do? What are the processes I can start putting in place so that my business can be duplicatable and scalable? Check out this blog to read more about managing your motivation for next level success.
1️⃣ Do you have a simple, clear onboarding system as you are bringing new people into your business?
Do you have a simple onboarding system, that is very clear, and it is duplicatable? If you don’t have all three of those, then you’re going to have an ineffective system. Could you pass it off to one of your downline, partners or distributors and could they just copy and paste basically, and move things into their own words and have their onboarding system, too? I would tell you to do is start creating Google Docs where you have your standard operating procedures.
2️⃣ Do you have a process for planning your social media content?
Every single month, I sit down at the last week of the month with my Direct Sales Done Right Social Media Planner and Time Blocker and I ask myself a few questions.
1. What are my business goals for the upcoming month?
2. What are my business goals in terms of recruitment?
3. What are my business goals in terms of customer sales? Parties? Volume, Qualifying Volume, whatever you are measuring.
This is why being strategic about the times of the month that I’m going to be marketing is important to plan out. Then I can go from there to say, so what is my social media going to look like? I’m able to create a month at a glance on social media. But I’m also obviously going to do some things in real-time. My marketing strategy is aligned with what’s showing up on social media. I take it one step further. I am sharing my marketing calendar and goals on my team page with my organization.
This business is not this fun little hobby, you’re a business owner. You can achieve success with a marketing plan, strategy, and planning out your social media. We will not just throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, that is not success. We’re connecting our social media back to our business goals. Social media is a tool to help you achieve success!
3️⃣ Does your team know your vision and what your goals are?
So often I work with leaders and they don’t want to share their vision. They don’t want to make it all about them. They don’t want to tell their team what their goals are. What I have found to be true over the past almost thirteen years in direct sales is that people want to follow you. They want to rally behind a shared goal, a team vision. They want to be a part of something bigger. If you can share that and communicate that shared vision and get the team behind you, what’s going to end up happening is people are going to rally.
In my first year as the top coach in the organization, I remember going live in my team page and reminding everyone that there is no I in the team. I remember taking screenshots of leaderboards to post in the team page saying we, the dream team, are number one. We are the top team in the company. It is not an I thing. That’s super important that you remember that your team wants to hear the vision. They want to know how it’s going to benefit them, be a part of it, and be a part of the recognition that goes alongside that as well. Make sure that you are sharing the vision and telling your team how they can be a part of that vision, too.
4️⃣ Do you have a back-end marketing strategy?
Back-end marketing is what you do behind the scenes. This can include running freemiums, advertisements, email marketing campaigns, and nurture sequences.
For example, do you have a form that somebody fills out if they are interested in your products, programs, or services? Once they fill out a form for a particular service, do you have a series of emails that nurtures the person to build trust and shows that this is a good purchase for them, this is a good investment for them? I want you to think of automation. Somebody fills out a form, they get an automated email with additional information. From there, you can communicate with the person!
5️⃣ Are you holding your people accountable?
Whether they’re brand new in the business or they are leaders that have been around for a while, are you holding people accountable for what they said they wanted to do? If somebody has told you what their goals are, are you taking it upon yourself as their mentor to check back in with that person regularly to make sure they are on track to reaching their goals? And if they’re not, what is your action plan?
When I think about accountability, I think about the different ways that I mentor people. If somebody comes to me, and they’ve been a part of my organization for a very long time, but are not achieving the goals that they said they were going to achieve then proceed to ghost me. Randomly, they come back out of the woodwork and say to you I need to make my business work. I need to set up a call with you. Can we jump on a call? Can we talk, my back is against the wall and I need to make x amount of money in the next couple of months?
The old Melanie would have jumped on a call. I would then clear my schedule and jump on the call because I felt like I was the reason people would be successful or not. I’ve learned to say pause in my mind. I pause and ask them to tell me a little bit more about why their circumstances have changed. I’ll say to the person based on your media presence or your activity in the online office, I can tell that you haven’t been active lately, here’s what we’re going to do before we have our first call because I want you to come to the call with a baseline. I want you to print out our tracker and complete it for the week. In addition, can you show up on social media, I want you to create that presence. Then we can set up a one-on-one.
I’ll say let’s do that. Here’s the tracker. Let’s touch base in a week. But, in between, send me your trackers and ask me questions. I am all about action. That is what can produce success. It can’t be me just always giving and not getting, you know, the effort matched on the opposite side of things.
6️⃣ Do you do incentive trips? Do you do things for your organization that is all based on where you’re at at this point in your business?
When I was early on in the first two years of my business, I was doing incentive trips for newer leadership. It was downline-wide, and it was a great way for people to get together. If you’re a new leader, you want to start with that lower-level leadership. What are the ranks that you want people to get to that you want to reward them for? Where do you feel are the key points that make the most sense for you to invest? The retreats get more robust and higher level the higher level the leaders are.
7️⃣ Are you hiring help?
Do I have a team? I want you to think about that. Do you have a team?
About ten years ago, I hired my first employee. It was an admin, an admin that worked for me 4 hours a week. She helped me with scheduling some of the routine and very almost, they were just the same, the same kind of tasks, mundane tasks, that of just scheduling content that was in my groups that I already had a script for. It was just a copy paste and tweak it and schedule it at the appropriate time. I hired somebody for that, and then as my business grew, I expanded. I gave that person more hours and they started to help me with other things such as creating a newsletter and recognition. As my business grew, so did the help, and it turned into a full-time administrative assistant position, a marketing position, back-end ads and drip campaigns, and email marketing.
Now I have a team, customer support, admin, sales, and marketing. I don’t run this business, just Melanie Mitro. Because listen, I have sales, I have a team. I am the CEO, I’m the CFO. I am marketing. It would be crazy to think that a CEO of a large corporation does all of those things on their own. No, they hire people and have help. I have a staff that helps me to get to where I want to be. If you are spending too much time in the weeds and can’t get out of your way, it might stop you from achieving success. So, wouldn’t hiring help be more beneficial than hurtful?
Growing, scaling, and becoming successful means you have to adopt the CEO mindset. I hope this blog today made you think, how do I be a better leader? How do I create a business that is automated, that is starting to run on its own, that is scaling? I believe these systems and strategies can help you achieve success.