Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: Whether you have aspirations to grow without hiring, or you just want to grow, I need you to do this. Please stop waiting for growth to just happen to you. Now, here's a really interesting thing about my work. I don't advertise that I'm gonna come in and help you with your mentality.
[00:00:20] Ken: There are people out there that legitimately will just talk about that. and I'm not undervaluing that, but the way that I wind up changing. Your mentality is really along the lines of showing you how to actually do that.
[00:00:36] Ken: I can tell you that you have a limiting belief around being able to charge more, or I can actually show you how to charge more and how to make more while doing less. So I find with this particular area, especially that people are just waiting for leads to come to them. They're just waiting for the new client.
[00:00:56] Ken: They're just thinking that they have a LinkedIn profile, they have a [00:01:00] website. They're thinking that they'll get business just like they did all those years ago because you had an announcement that you were going off and starting your business, or you told a certain past network connection that was a really important network connection who really liked you and had an established client base themselves.
[00:01:20] Ken: Who then just. Handed you a bunch of leads,
[00:01:23] Ken: or you even just had a new offer that sold like hotcakes.
[00:01:28] Ken: Makes me sound really old, using an expression like that,
[00:01:30] Ken: but sold like crazy for a while until it didn't. And I have some clients who relied on any number of those ways to get business for years, for the last 10 years, for the last 15 years. I shared in a past episode that I relied or maybe overly relied on some channels that I didn't have full control over, like SEO, which was really good for me because I owned every top search result until, oops.
[00:01:58] Ken: Google change the [00:02:00] algorithm. And so if you don't have a go-to market motion, if you don't have a go-to market strategy. And you don't have that consistent way to generate business. You have no control over your business. It's why in one of the conversations, one of the episodes I talked about, what were one of the things you need to have before you actually would be able to hire.
[00:02:26] Ken: So definitely double back to that conversation if you haven't listened to it already.
[00:02:30] Ken: But today what I want to do is get a little bit more specific around what I kind of think through on your go to market motion. And I have a system that I call the go-to-market strategy canvas that goes into this in very specific details, but I can't obviously go through that just in a.
[00:02:51] Ken: Podcast episode, so I'm just gonna give you some of the tactical components that you need to have in place in order to have a way to generate [00:03:00] consistent business and. My clients who have hung around with me for a little bit know that I am a big fan of pop culture.
[00:03:08] Ken: They know that I am a big fan of metaphors. I'm also a big movie reference guy,
[00:03:13] Ken: and I like to think about this a little bit around the lens of. Going fishing. There was a favorite clip of mine from when I was a kid. It came to my mind years ago when I was teaching about the different kinds of ways that we can generate business. And it's a clip of Bert and Ernie going fishing.
[00:03:30] Ken: They're sitting out in a fishing boat. I will not do the entire breakdown for you today, but essentially Bert couldn't get any fish and Ernie said, yes, you need to call to the fish and. Bert was saying, duh. Yeah, that's, that's what I've been trying to do all day. Not a single bite. And he said, no, you have to call to them and proceeds to do a fish call where all of the fish jump in the boat.
[00:03:52] Ken: This doesn't always happen, and it doesn't happen also overnight at the time of this recording, at least some of the algorithms on [00:04:00] other platforms. Like LinkedIn are not super favorable, so the fish aren't necessarily jumping into the boat. And that is the point of why I'm having this conversation with you today.
[00:04:10] Ken: Because for the people that have just relied on free distribution, high visibility on social platforms, and by the way, LinkedIn is just the latest platform to have that previously happened on Twitter. And then X has definitely happened in different ways on. Google search algorithm as I shared before, but it's just the latest platform that has this particular issue where if you don't have a proactive go to market motion, then you are someone who also has no way to generate business, and it's why some of the largest and biggest creators right now are freaking out.
[00:04:46] Ken: Even though they have audiences of 50,000, a hundred thousand, a million, and they're constantly trying to fill the top of the funnel because they just don't have a way to get clients like they used to or [00:05:00] get customers like they used to because the fish AKA clients and customers are not jumping in the boat.
[00:05:05] Ken: So we'll try to get a little bit more tactical today. But I also think that a lot of people are beginning to like this conversation because it does help you understand not just the day-to-day tactics, but the broader strategy of how to grow without hiring.
[00:05:19] Ken: So where we're starting with it is you need your bait.
[00:05:22] Ken: What is your bait? The bait for you and for anyone who is trying to stop waiting for growth to happen to you is your scalable offer. People think that the bait is immediately just. The marketing, it's an email campaign. It's the LinkedIn post. It's the direct message. No,
[00:05:45] Ken: those are the parts that activate and resonate because of the bait. And I do a whole program around this called Scalable Offers Mastery, but the short version is that the offer, and I've mentioned this in other conversations, [00:06:00] but I'll go into a little bit more detail here, is that link between the marketing side of your house and the delivery side of your house.
[00:06:07] Ken: It's not just about sales, it is specifically about the thing that they really care about. And why They will listen to you think about marketing as the activation of your sales. So if you do any of those marketing things I mentioned and you don't have something that they care about, you will not have, not just fish not jumping in the boat.
[00:06:29] Ken: You'll just have no one replying to a dm. You'll have no one caring about your LinkedIn post. You'll have no one caring about your cold email. You'll have no one caring about your blog post, so on and so forth. And I also have a lot of data behind this because guess what? My clients include some of the top outbound and copywriting experts in the world.
[00:06:50] Ken: I have clients who legitimately started the clay go to market movement. I have clients who have hundreds of thousands of followers on [00:07:00] LinkedIn and until I help them with their offer. And until I help them to really understand how to differentiate that offer for what I call that lighthouse client, that premium client that's gonna pay you more.
[00:07:11] Ken: They didn't make any money, didn't have the resonance to be able to grow without hiring. And when you have the offer, the scalable offer, which doesn't just arrive one day on your doorstep, but when you put in the work to understand what your targeting looks like. You're laser targeting to go deeper than just title headcount and revenue.
[00:07:29] Ken: When you take the time to really define this lighthouse client, when you take the time to understand what your differentiated positioning is, which I call Blue Ocean Services, you know what you don't need, and by the way, I'm a fan of this, but you don't need extensive amounts of personalization and volume.
[00:07:47] Ken: Again, I have been talking about this for a long time, but even the people that are sending millions of emails a month will tell you the same thing and they'll tell it to you in other markets beyond the kind [00:08:00] of market that we work in. Here's a really quick aside that is relevant for you though. You are not an SDR, you are not a unicorn startup.
[00:08:08] Ken: You might be working for those kinds. Of people or even mentoring or training them, but for the most part, as a consultant, as a founder, as an agency owner, as a coach, whatever it is, you don't have to have just in general, the kind of volume that those kinds of businesses have. You also can't send five or 10 dms or do.
[00:08:32] Ken: A post a month and think that you're gonna get the ability to have growth, but when you put the thing that someone cares about into whatever marketing you're creating, because you understand the offer that people want to buy, and that is scalable on the backend for your delivery, now you have the bait.
[00:08:51] Ken: So if you're having a problem with people not caring about you or what you do.
[00:08:56] Ken: You haven't taken the time to properly [00:09:00] define your scalable service offer,
[00:09:01] Ken: and this could be something as simple as understanding what is it that they're really challenged with and what is it that they really want on the other side.
[00:09:09] Ken: It's not that you write more words as a marketing consultant. It's not that you do more reports as a financial accounting professional. It's not that you write more code as a developer or an engineer. It's not even the fact that if you're an agency that you can create this beautiful, elaborate website.
[00:09:31] Ken: You need to understand if you're a money maker or you're a painkiller and your offer has to sit around that.
[00:09:39] Ken: So you have to have the bait. That is step one. If you don't have the bait, and by the way, you might have created some bait, you you're sitting there and saying, Hey, yeah, I've really thought about my offer, and you're getting the wrong client of client. You have the wrong bait. If you have a value proposition, like telling someone, I'm gonna get you more leads, or I'm gonna help [00:10:00] you get more sales, or I'm gonna help you.
[00:10:03] Ken: Get clear reporting, or I'm gonna help you use the word more and more and more and more, or better and better and better,
[00:10:09] Ken: then you are attracting that kind of quote unquote fish, that kind of prospect, and you are really only getting that kind of prospect who's gonna buy on price. We're gonna shop you against others, and that also is not gonna help you grow without hiring. So we have the bait and you'll know if the bait's working because independent of overnight having 20 booked calls, you will see momentum.
[00:10:34] Ken: I have a brand new client that started with me this week. They previously and prior to coming to me, so I won't take credit for this, but they had made some positioning changes and as a result of those changes, they then had. A lot of interest almost overnight because they were in a different market that was attracting a kind of client that just wouldn't pay them a fraction of what they can get for this other part of the market.
[00:10:59] Ken: [00:11:00] And now we're changing their sales and delivery process to ensure that they can close those kinds of clients, those kind of lighthouse clients, and to make sure that they're also on the other side, not gonna be drowning in delivery help because. They're in a spot in life where they really value their time with their family and they've kind of put in the work like you have for a long time, and they don't want to just be doing 50 hours of work every single week.
[00:11:25] Ken: That's an example of making a pivot and creating something that is more of a bait that attracts your right type of fish or lighthouse client. Okay. Don't wanna. Spend more time on that. And you've heard some of this and some flavor of this in other conversations, but let's move into the next piece of this, which I promise you that as a technologist, I do way more than almost everyone else does on the market.
[00:11:51] Ken: And I call this the sonar. Oh, Ken, you're really just beating this metaphor to death. It's gonna stay in your brain more, I promise you, [00:12:00] compared to me just talking about these points. Otherwise.
[00:12:02] Ken: And this really is powered by not just technology, but technology is definitely a part of it. It's powered also by you thinking about who really is the person that's gonna buy from you the fastest.
[00:12:19] Ken: I really want you to get into a mentality shift here beyond the technology, and I'll talk more about what I said is the sonar or the ultimate tech stack that kind of powers it, that you're often willing to do this. You're often willing to send marketing in whatever form and shape you're doing that.
[00:12:37] Ken: Into the void of the innerwebs, right? You're willing to put a post. I understand that you have followers or you have an audience possibly on a social network, or you have an email list, or you have a blog or whatever the thing is that you do. Even just using your network, but without having an understanding of what signals to look for [00:13:00] on the quote unquote sonar.
[00:13:01] Ken: You are just going to spend a lot of time trying to hunt things down that are not showing any interests, right? That are not showing the desire to actually engage or buy from you. I was talking to a prospect yesterday and they went through a bunch of different. Prospects in their queue, their own prospects, because I'm a cool person.
[00:13:24] Ken: I like to help people, and I was trying to nudging this person along to say, stop sitting on the sidelines. By the way. Let's go work on closing these things. But through that rundown, first there was zero pattern of similarity, which makes it very hard to acquire clients or prospects at scale, and then to close them.
[00:13:43] Ken: But also what they showed me through that is that they had very little understanding of why these people would buy, and they had no signals to understand if they were actually engaged or showing any interest. I have a fairly large audience on social. I had a very large audience early on on [00:14:00] what was then called Twitter, and then focus more on SEO and on my website for my agency.
[00:14:07] Ken: But with all of my email newsletter today, my social platforms, again, LinkedIn is much larger than X's today, and even, you know, a little bit of an audience on YouTube and so forth. I really don't prioritize just the entire email newsletter list or the entire set of people following me. I focus on the warmer.
[00:14:30] Ken: Lighthouse clients that are ready to buy, let's kind of call them the people hanging around my marketing, which is that net, and then I may use the spear, because they may not be jumping into the boat today based on conditions that I don't have full control over.
[00:14:45] Ken: There was some uncertainty earlier on in the year that was introduced into the market. Not saying there wasn't that last year as well. There is the global marketplace. There's remote work, there's the rise of solo entrepreneurship. There's startups that are [00:15:00] going to zero because of ai.
[00:15:02] Ken: All these different factors mean that buying preferences are changing, and people also, by the way, are just much more biased towards results from people like myself, but also people like you. We've tried the consultant, we've tried working with external help.
[00:15:19] Ken: We've tried the agency that charged us 30 to 50 KA month and did nothing. There's just a bias against some. Of the external help because of people that don't know what they're doing. We do know what we're doing and the people listening to this will as well, but we are selling against all of those things.
[00:15:37] Ken: So instead of just posting, sending, creating, we first need to create and send and post relative to. The bait and knowing the kind of fish that lighthouse client that we want to go after. And then we need to have our sonar that shows us the signals and some really basic things here. Could be as simple as looking at [00:16:00] followers on LinkedIn.
[00:16:00] Ken: People will think about connections and I think about followers because followers actually wanna learn. Most people trying to connect with you are trying to sell you on something, or it might be someone who clicks a link. Off of an email versus all the people who opened, or it might be the person who's hitting a bunch of different pages on your website.
[00:16:20] Ken: And you can use any number of tools for this. And again, this is a little bit geo-specific, but during the agency days, I had HubSpot, and this is a while ago, and when someone would submit something, I could see how many different page views they were looking at because of HubSpot was one of the biggest values of it.
[00:16:35] Ken: So I knew not that every single person. Who hit a certain page view something like 17.1 or 17.2, but all the people that were customers had at least that number of page views, not that every person converted, right? You get the point. If I'm sending out a proposal like I did this week, and I sent out three different ones this week, two of them closed already, but the two that converted out of the three and they converted very [00:17:00] quickly.
[00:17:00] Ken: Were people who were engaging and looking at what I had sent them. Don't worry, these are all compliant based on GDPR and so on and so forth. Some people think, oh yeah, you're just spying on them. No, we need the sonar, we need the signals. 'cause guess what? I'm not gonna do. I'm not gonna keep hunting the person down who didn't even look at the proposal versus the one that looked like maybe they were seeing a section or looking at a certain part of a deck for a longer period of time.
[00:17:26] Ken: And oh by the way, they were engaging with my content. Or, oh, by the way, they're also reading my newsletter. If you have a 360 degree view of these things, and it's something that I've actually been working on, it's kind of a little bit of a low code, no code thing. I have to be able to see all of that. Who are you gonna prioritize?
[00:17:46] Ken: People are surprised that even during the down times or the hard times, that I still am able to close. More things than others on the market. And I would say I actually have a more skeptical buyer than almost all of you, because I [00:18:00] quote unquote, am a business coach. I don't call myself that, but people might group me into that.
[00:18:05] Ken: They spent money on a lot of people who just got them zero ROI, right? So I have a more skeptical buyer, and it's because of using the sonar, it's the ultimate tech stack that is simple. I don't need. AI to do all the things. I don't need. 27 tools. You'll find these elaborate flows, especially on places like LinkedIn that will show you how they've replaced all their employees with agents or how they use 17 or 18 or 20 or 27 or 57 different tools.
[00:18:35] Ken: Not needed. I was at a $5 million a year run rate in an agency with a very simple tech stack, and today it's even simpler. And by the way, your ultimate tech stack, your sonar needs to be highly tuned based on the specific lighthouse client and this metaphor of the fish and the kind of offer it is itself.
[00:18:53] Ken: The thing that I do for someone who's not yet at half a million dollars a year versus what I am using for the [00:19:00] one that's a multimillion dollar entrepreneur, completely different what I call offer funnel stack, different tech stack for that, for that particular flow. Versus someone who's not there yet.
[00:19:11] Ken: And during these times especially, you will have to be more proactive. I shared something on social this week, and I said, kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier, that the people, the creators, the established consultants, the big agencies are freaking out because they don't have this go to market proactive motion.
[00:19:29] Ken: They don't have the spear at all and right now. You should still market, but between the net and the spear, the nets are not working very well. The fish are just kind of going past it, or there's holes in the net, or there's changing tides. However you want the metaphor to play out, and it does help visually paint this picture in your head.
[00:19:48] Ken: You need to be more proactive. You need to have more spear right now. Still create all of the things. Still create. The content, still do a post, still do a newsletter, still have a podcast, whatever it [00:20:00] is that you're doing, but realize that you're gonna need to use the sonar more and kind of hunt around these areas and or go deeper out into the sea to put the fish on the deck.
[00:20:12] Ken: So prioritize the blips, the beeps off of the sonar versus. Just relying on things flowing into your nets. That is critical right now as of the time of the recording of this particular conversation.
[00:20:26] Ken: And so then we get into the actual process of trying to reel that prospect in to reel that lighthouse client prospect in to reel in the fish.
[00:20:39] Ken: And this specifically is your go to market strategy, which is in some ways comprising of all of these different pieces. Again, I have this thing that I'm working on with my clients called the go to Market strategy canvas. That kind of gives you a 30,000 foot view because they get very lost on all of it.
[00:20:59] Ken: But here's just a [00:21:00] couple of examples of the real end. When you think about a social post and you hear the word hook, which is that first line or the first and second line, that kind of grabs someone to make them wanna look more at whatever you're creating. When you think about the subject line or the preview text of an email, when you are sending a one-to-one message, a direct message or an email, all of this is informed by the first two things that we've looked at.
[00:21:25] Ken: It's informed by your offer. It's informed by trying to hunt down those people that were showing more engagement and more interest. So these are the hooks. These are the email sends, these are the videos. These are all of the things that activate your scalable service offer
[00:21:45] Ken: and that show you. These prospects have more interest than just the generic internet or interwebs where you've been throwing things out into a void. Even if you have thought about your quote unquote ICP or [00:22:00] your lighthouse client, but you're just trying to go after ones that care. Nothing about what you're saying.
[00:22:06] Ken: I had a client who has been. Posting to social, doing dms, doing all the things for a long time, and they've heard me, they've heard other clients I've helped that would get inbound leads. And inbound leads, especially right now, like I said, are very, very challenging to do. Again, even my top clients that are really well known copywriters they have a harder time right now with some of these things.
[00:22:31] Ken: And this person continued to put in the reps. They don't have a large audience. Sometimes there's not a lot of engagement. And by the way, even for me right now, I don't have a ton of engagement relative to what I have in the past, and especially for having 30,000 followers on a place like LinkedIn. But they kept trying different angles, they kept trying different positioning, and they just shared a win.
[00:22:52] Ken: With me this week and with my mentoring group because they put up a post, they tried a different angle, they tried something [00:23:00] that was a little bit more vulnerable, something that hit someone between the eyes a little bit more, and they gave me credit for that. 'cause I've told them before, hit them between the eyes, they had leads come in through that post.
[00:23:11] Ken: And part of having a very clear go-to-market strategy is noting down when these kinds of things happen. Have another client who has worked previously in a very established corporate company. When he first announced that he was gonna go out into doing his own thing, he wound up getting these fish just jumping into the boat right away.
[00:23:34] Ken: Kind of part of what I painted the picture and how I described this earlier on. And for that person, they didn't do that again. So what I shared with this particular client that had the inbound lead this week was, please note this down and do not get off of that until you see that that's not working anymore.
[00:23:54] Ken: Does that mean every single post says the same thing? No, and it's also hard to manufacture that quote unquote [00:24:00] lightning in the bottle, but we can do a whole bunch more between dms. Emails, videos that hit on very similar pain points or that strike that same nerve. And a lot of people will have that happen one time and then they won't go back to that. Well,
[00:24:16] Ken: meanwhile, my approach is I have a bunch of wells that you can see all over the place, and I went to those wells until they ran dry, and then I dug another one. And in some ways, a lot of what I've done. It is very similar over the last two or three years, but they're just approaching the problems from different angles.
[00:24:34] Ken: Do you want to build a scalable offer or a scalable service offer? I had people, literally the fish jumping in the boat for years, including lots of people that I've mentioned, and then at some point the market sort of said, uh, we don't really want to buy from you this way anymore. And so I started looking at maybe I should fix your offer, right?
[00:24:54] Ken: I talk about scalability within that, but maybe I need to fix your offer. Not meaning to add another [00:25:00] nautical fishing metaphor here, but I do talk a lot about this element and recently shared inside one of my mentoring sessions, and sometimes I do mention things. Multiple times. 'cause I want it to be in your brain.
[00:25:12] Ken: But this was about Bubba and Bubba and Forest. When Bubba talks about the hundred different ways that you could do shrimp. I'm not gonna do the Bubba impersonation, but there's all these different approaches to creating styles of shrimp and cooking shrimp. It's the same offer. It actually is the same positioning, but you're just trying it from different ways.
[00:25:31] Ken: You're maybe sauteing it versus frying it. Maybe you're putting some more butter versus not. This is what it means to have a go to market strategy versus you heard one thing one time and it worked and then you didn't know why it worked and you didn't have a way to replicate that. By the way, it's actually a really big reason you see sort of gurus and influencers come and go
[00:25:52] Ken: because they often just wind up copying something that they saw somewhere. And that works for a little bit. And then they actually don't know how to do that again because they [00:26:00] didn't actually come up with it. So for you, in the reel in, you have to be disciplined in what you're trying.
[00:26:06] Ken: Don't try eight different ways. That's not what I'm saying. But if you try something for four weeks, for six weeks, for eight weeks, and you're just not getting the bites and you're not getting any interest. It is time to move on. It could be a different lighthouse client. It could be the different bait for that lighthouse client.
[00:26:22] Ken: If you're not seeing the signals through the sonar, it's also time to say, is the sonar broken or is there really just no fish? In this area? You have zero signals,
[00:26:33] Ken: but the minute that you get the nibble, the bite, whatever you want to use. To understand that there is interest, put out a whole bunch more lines, please, and do not get off that until you see that it's not paying you back anymore.
[00:26:48] Ken: I do talk about this concept of having one channel that you dominate or saturate, and then have two warming up, including one that you own, so you're not necessarily in those other channels, testing out [00:27:00] these other hooks, these other angles, these other positioning. But you can do that in those places. I call it a shadow funnel, and you can test out sort of the thing that you think might be the next new thing.
[00:27:11] Ken: But it's really important to be disciplined. If you're trying to sell in dms and you're also trying to sell in your social posts, and you're also trying to sell in your newsletter, but you're doing each of those a different way. You don't have clarity of the value proposition across all those places, and they're different lighthouse clients, you have no way to understand what is working or what is not working.
[00:27:34] Ken: So make sure if you want growth to stop waiting for it, there will be times, by the way, this is just cyclical where the fish start jumping in the boat again, or you're starting to see that same level of traction. And it's not just a macro trend, but it can definitely be related to the overall climate of the economy.
[00:27:51] Ken: And obviously there are then segments within that economy. I think there are certain parts of my client base. Who are doing extremely well. And there are other [00:28:00] ones that did really well in the past that then have seen a slowdown. So there is some cyclical nature to business.
[00:28:05] Ken: There is some seasonality to business, there is some resting and charging forward in business. But if you want that growth, you have to really look at the bait, your scalable offer. You have to have the sonar, which is your ultimate tech stack, to track these signals and prioritize warmer signals, and you have to have the reel in your go-to market strategy.
[00:28:28] Ken: So that's gonna be where we end our conversation for today. Always enjoy diving into these concepts with you. If you're getting a nugget, if you've got something that you learned today, would appreciate a rating or review. You can also always send me feedback. Read all the feedback and I make changes and I focus on different topics based on that feedback.
[00:28:48] Ken: I love these conversations and I love helping you grow. I want you in this case to stop waiting for growth, so look forward to the next time that you come back when we learn how to grow without hiring.