549. Pro Coach Series Part 3: Knowing Your Business

If you don’t know your business, how are you going to improve your business? How are you going to grow your business? A lot of people think they know their business, but they’re actually confused and misunderstanding their business. Now, you might think I’m going to tell you that you need to know the numbers in your business. And to a certain extent, you do, but that’s not what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about five other ways that I want to make sure you know your business if you want to take your business next level. This is our Pro Coach series, and this is part three, Knowing Your Business. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

Well, that’s the question… what will you do? Let’s find out.

Sometimes, listening to a podcast is enough. But sometimes, you’ll feel inspired to go deeper. If you hear things that speak to you in today’s episode, consider it your invitation to a complimentary coaching workshop.

On this live, interactive Zoom call with me, you’ll get a taste of the power of this work when applied in real life. You can participate, or be a silent observer. But you have to take a step if you want to truly see change in your life… two steps, actually. Head to JodyMoore.com/freecoaching and register. Then you just have to show up. Your best life is waiting for you. Will you show up for it? JodyMoore.com/freecoaching. I’ll see you there.

What’s up, everybody? We are getting closer and closer to February 16th, which is when Pro Coach Camp begins. Pro Coach Camp takes place over the course of two weeks, and I will be going live on Zoom every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of those two weeks to help support you in your goals of growing your coaching business, of better serving the people you want to serve, of getting more clients, of making more of an impact, of making more revenue, and taking everything next level. So if you’re not registered, make sure you go to ProCoachCamp.com and get signed up. It’s completely free. There will be replays, limited time replays available if you can’t be there live, but this is unlike anything I’ve done before, unlike anything I have planned to do for a very long time because it’s going to be a significant investment of my time and energy, so I won’t be able to do it regularly.

But I’m excited to spend some time with you at Pro Coach Camp. So go and check that out. This is the third episode in a row I’ve done on this topic. So for all of you who don’t want to learn about business, stay with me. Next week we’ll be back to a different topic, but I would say that it’s all interrelated. So anyway, today we’re going to talk about knowing your business, knowing your business. Now, like I said in the intro, a lot of people when they say you need to know your business, what they’re talking about is knowing the numbers.

And to a certain extent, you do absolutely need to be paying attention to your P&L and things like that. And sometimes in marketing, knowing your numbers can be useful. And it’s up to you how much you want to dive into it. But I’m not going to talk about that part today. That’s actually a part that I’m not amazing at, to be honest. I do know my numbers to the extent that I really need to, but I definitely have room to improve in that area. So I would be remiss to think that I’m the one to teach you that topic. One of you can probably teach me that. What I’m going to talk about today, though, are five other ways that I think you need to know your business if you want to become a pro coach. Five ways that pro coaches know their business that I notice amateurs seem to not.

And like I’ve been saying for the past couple episodes, there’s no shame in recognizing that you might have some work to do, that you’re falling in the amateur category in certain areas. Zero shame invited here. Okay? We all start out as amateurs, and in different areas, we always will be. So be willing to be an amateur, but also, let’s turn you into a pro. Okay?

So the first thing that I notice is that amateurs think that their attitude about their business is just a reflection of what’s happening in their business. Pros, on the other hand, intentionally craft a positive attitude, or what I like to call, a positive relationship with their business. They don’t expect their business to make them feel good about their business, in other words. They choose to feel good about their business so that they can provide the business what it needs for them and turn the business into what they want it to be.

Okay? So I like to think about this as my relationship with my business. And for me, this sometimes requires getting in there and doing a little bit of work on my brain and on my attitude. Okay? It is not something that just you check a box and you’re done with, if you’re like me and most people, right? It’s something that’s easier to do at times, right? And harder to do at times, but it’s an important thing to keep an eye on. Because if you’re frustrated with your business, if you’re overwhelmed with it, if you’re looking down on it as not good enough, not providing you what you need, then it’s going to be very difficult to keep working with that business.

I like to think of it as a relationship because just like a relationship with another person, if I’m constantly judging the person and telling them that they’re not good enough and they should be further along than they are right now, and I’m frustrated that they didn’t produce the result that I wanted, and if I just, all I do is talk negatively to that other person, or I talk negatively too much of the time, then after a while, they’re going to want to hide from me and avoid me, and it’s going to be even harder to get what I want and need from that person, right?

That’s not how it works. A true relationship, a healthy relationship is a give and take. So, yes, my business is hopefully going to provide some of the things that I desire. It’s going to meet some of my needs, my need to contribute, my need to grow, my need for financial stability and freedom, etcetera. But also, I need to provide a lot to that business because I love it, because I care for it, because I want to take care of it, not because if I do, then it’ll finally give me what I need. That’s manipulation. That is not a positive relationship, right?

So let me try to give you some more concrete examples. I remember the time, I don’t know, eight or nine years ago when my husband and I made the decision that he was going to leave his full-time job and come and work in the business with me. And we were going to put all of our efforts into this business. It was going to be the way we were going to support our family, provide ourselves benefits like health insurance. We were going all in on it. Okay? I noticed that not long after that transition, I started to have a very negative relationship or negative, not useful attitude about my business.

It went from being a fun project that I was doing because I was passionate about it and because I just wanted to, to something that I have to do because this is how we’re going to pay our bills. This is how we’re going to support our family. This is how we’re going to put our kids through college. And that was a shift that happened in my mind, right? I would have blamed it on external things. Like my husband now works here with me, but nothing else about the business had changed, right? Other than again, my husband didn’t have his other salary, but that doesn’t affect my business. Having him in my business meant that I had more help for my business, more resources, more opportunity to make money, right? But in my mind, I made that switch from I get to do this. I want to do this. This is fun. I’m doing this because I want to, to I have to do this. I don’t have a choice here.

And that created for me a negative attitude, a negative relationship with my business. Thank goodness, I was working with great coaches at the time who pointed out this shift in my attitude. And I went, oh, I see what I’m doing there. And I chose to clean it all up, right? And to shift my attitude in my business. That’s what you have to do as a pro coach. And I wish I could say that’s the only time I’ve had to, but it’s not. There are other times when I have to go in and reset my attitude and my relationship with my business. That is what the pros do.

All right. Now, the next thing that pro coaches do is they are clear about their business model. They’re clear about what they’re trying to achieve and how their business is set up to help them achieve that. Amateurs are very confused about their business models. They don’t quite stop and think through what they’re doing, and therefore, they don’t always take the most useful actions. Here’s what I mean. Here’s a really good example of it.

There are a lot of people online. I’m just going to use Instagram as the example because that’s the platform where I hang out the most, but you can apply this to wherever you like to hang out, TikTok, LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, wherever you are. Okay? There’s a lot of people online posting content, right? And there are a lot of different types of people posting content online who have businesses, either organic content, we call it, which is just free. We don’t pay anything to the platform anyway to post it, or inorganic, which is paid content, meaning they we pay the platform to put that content in front of more people. Either way, there are lots of people with lots of different kinds of businesses using social media, using Instagram in my example, to get clients, to get customers, to make sales, to make an impact, to make money.

So it’s tempting to look around at what all these people are doing online and to think maybe I should do what they’re doing, especially if it seems like they’re getting a lot of attention, they’re getting a lot of engagement with their posts, or they seem to have a successful business. Then people we start going, maybe I should be doing that. And sometimes that can be useful. Maybe you should be doing what they’re doing, but stop and ask yourself, do they have the same business model or a similar enough business model to me that what they’re doing that’s quote unquote, winning and working for them would make sense for me. So I see a lot of coaches confused, thinking that they are supposed to be influencers.

Okay? Influencers post content about all kinds of things, depending on what kind of influencer they are. But let’s just use like a general lifestyle influencer that is maybe making money off promoting clothes and maybe household items and things like this, right? Life and style, we might call it. Okay? So an influencer wants to build an audience. They want a following, and they want high engagement on their posts because they ultimately are going to sell other people’s stuff.

So they want those other companies to see that they have a big following, to see that their post gets lots of engagement so that the company will say, yeah, we want to partner with you. We want you to promote our brand. And every time the influencer sells something from that brand, they get a little cut of that. So they need the audience in order to, first of all, have a lot of people listening when they say you should buy this buttery soft cardigan, right? But they also want the brand to say, yeah, we think you have a big enough following that we want to partner with you.

Okay? If I’m a coach, I’m not trying to be an influencer. I’m not trying to sell other people’s stuff. I’m trying to sell my stuff, my programs or courses in most cases, if you’re a coach. Okay? So I don’t really care how big my audience is. Now, if I have more people following me online, am I likely to generate more interest and then one day have more clients? Yeah, yes and no, maybe.

Okay? But I know some super successful coaches and teachers who have very low following or don’t even use social media. But if they do, they have a very low follower count. Their posts don’t get a lot of engagement, and they’re still making a big impact. They have lots of clients and lots of business.

Okay? Because it doesn’t really matter what your social media numbers are. It’s not a direct KPI for your business. Okay? So don’t be confused. This also means like if I’m trying to be an influencer and I’m going to be promoting children’s wear or stuff that is related to kids, then I might sometimes show my kids online or talk about my kids, or I might need to open up and show my family. I might need to show parts of my home because in a really natural way, I want people to think, gosh, I like her. She seems like me. I trust her. Or I want my home to look more like her home, or I want my family to be sort of, you know, seem to be thriving and healthy like her family. So for that reason, they’re sharing personal things.

I’m not saying that you should never share anything personal, but what is your reason why? Do you need to? Does it relate to the topic that you teach? Is it going to build trust? Maybe. It doesn’t have to be a direct connection. Sometimes just getting personal builds a little trust, but not to the same extent that an influencer probably needs to do it if they’re going to be promoting those brands and those products.

So amateurs don’t understand this, and then they’re just left copying a bunch of people who have totally different goals. Pros understand their business model and they get this. Again, if you need help figuring out your business model, come to Pro Coach Camp, or maybe you’re like, oh, I know it is what you just said, I’m selling courses and programs. Come with me in Pro Coach Camp and we’ll talk about then what does that mean and how does that translate to the actions that you take when you’re posting but also in a lot of other ways. All right.

Next point, amateurs don’t know what the weaknesses or opportunities in their business are. Amateurs don’t know. Okay? So I can tell when somebody’s an amateur in this way in knowing their business because I will say, what are you need to work on next? What does your business need next to grow or improve to get easier or to get better.

And they either say, I don’t know, or they speak in vague generalizations. They say things like, I’m just kind of all over the place and it feels really hard. The other thing that will be an indicator here that you might be an amateur about this area is that you will have ideas that are all over the map that could solve for all different kinds of things. And I don’t mean getting ideas is an indicator of that, but I mean you get excited and run away with ideas, but you haven’t thought through, is this the kind of idea that I want to execute right now? Because is it possibly going to solve for what I think is the biggest opportunity in my business. Now let me back up and emphasize.

I realize we don’t always know for sure. I’m not saying pros know exactly what’s going on. Sometimes they do, but sometimes it is a guess. But they are still guessing. They are still asking this question. Which conversion do I think I want to work on next that would make the most impact, that would get us to the next level? Which part of my business? And when people say, I just need more clients, that’s big. Which part of getting more clients is a problem? Because there are multiple conversions and multiple components that go into getting clients.

So that’s a sign of amateur knowledge level of your business. If it’s just I need to make more money, I need to get more clients, you don’t know your business to the level I want you to. Okay? A pro will say something like, I need to increase my show rate on my consultation calls. And they’ve looked at the big picture. And that doesn’t mean that’s the only thing they want to work on. They’ve just decided or they know that’s the area that they think might make the most impact right now, and so they’re looking for solutions to that.

Okay? Amateurs get confused because they either have ideas or people offer them ideas and they think that’s a good idea, maybe I should do that. But they haven’t thought through the problem that it’s even going to solve. Let me give you examples.

I’ve had people say stuff to me like, you should sell merch, Jody. Like, you should put some of your sayings and things like that and your logo and whatever on t-shirts and, I don’t know, phone cases and key chains and pens, and you could sell that stuff at your live events especially, you could sell it in the back of the room and you would make more revenue. Okay? So what problem would that be solving for? What problem would that solve for, specifically?

It’s an increase in revenue, potentially, right? But it’s also, more specifically, revenue generation at a live event, if that’s where I decide I’m going to sell it. So is my main problem, my biggest area of opportunity right now, generating more revenue at a live event? Right there on the day of the event. For me, the answer has never been yes to that.

Okay, because keep in mind anything, any strategy I decide to execute is going to have trade-offs. There’s going to be work involved. There might be cost involved. Like if we’re going to sell swag, we would need to purchase the swag, we need to outsource that and figure out who’s going to make it. And so that means there’s a cost to buying it all, but then there’s where are we going to store it, whatever doesn’t sell. There’s who’s going to be there managing the table where people buy it. There’s staff time involved in even researching it. There’s my designer’s time to like create the design work that we would want to have printed and then, you know, again, do some research to figure out who do we want to produce this. There’s a cost involved to creating all that stuff and selling that stuff. And is that really where I want to be putting my efforts and my time right now? And for me, the answer’s always been no, because that’s not our biggest opportunity. That’s not the biggest weakness in my business right now.

And again, I’m not saying it couldn’t be for some people at some times, but it’s not for me, especially given the ROI on selling a t-shirt or a pen or a key chain. It’s pretty low, right? So could I sell some stuff and maybe bring in a little money? Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to put the time and effort in that. It’s not going to make the biggest impact in the area of my business most needs right now. People say things to me like, you should hire other coaches to coach for you. And you could, right? Like there’s tons of other great coaches out there, especially great coaches say this to me. They’re like, you should hire me. I want to work for you. And I say, yes, I could, and that would be fun to work with you. Don’t get me wrong. I think you would do a great job. But what problem would that be solving for you guys? What problem would that solve for?

If I have a lack of people available to fulfill, that’s a fulfillment problem, right? To fulfill on the orders we’re getting from potential clients, I’m calling them orders, but you know what I mean, then I might need to hire some great coaches. Or if I have a gap in, like right now, I’m the main coach in my program. So maybe there are areas where I don’t have the knowledge or the skills or the expertise to be able to coach people and bringing in another coach might fill my knowledge gap or my skill gap, then that might make sense to hire another coach, right? But if I don’t have either of those issues, then I don’t need to hire any other coaches.

Right? People say to me, you should create an app. This used to come up all the time, not so much anymore, now that we have like private podcast feeds and stuff like that. But people used to always say, you should create an app. And I would say, okay, but why? Well, it would just be really cool. People would like being able to log into an app. Okay, yeah, that might be true. But that’s solving the problem of people are frustrated right now. They’re not getting what they need out of the program. And that’s not our main problem. I’m not saying everybody loves everything or that it couldn’t be better. I’m just saying that’s not the biggest problem in my business right now. So why would I put the money, the time, the effort, the resources into creating something and building something that isn’t going to solve for my main problem. I got to give you one other example. This is my favorite one. Somebody reached out to me who is very successful, who knows a lot about designing sales pages. It was another company.

And they took one of my sales pages for a program I happen to be promoting at the time, right? So the page was active and live and probably getting lots of hits and that’s how it came up for them. And it was one of my high-end program offers, multiple, many thousands of dollars this offer, okay? And they took the page and they created a video for me showing me how this page could be so much better. And they did a lovely job of it, right? I didn’t find it to be insulting at all. They also complimented where they could, but they just showed me like notice how if you changed this part or you added this or you whatever, this page would probably convert better, right? And they sent me this video and said, do you want to talk about working with us? And I said, guess what?

That program sold out in 30 minutes. We had to shut it down after 30 minutes because we had so many people wanting to buy it that we capped out in 30 minutes. Okay? So does that mean my page was amazing and couldn’t be any better? No, it doesn’t. I guarantee the page could be better, but it doesn’t need to be any better to achieve the goals I’m trying to achieve in my business because it’s already selling out. So thanks so much for your offer, but we don’t have a sales page problem right now, at least not with that program. So we’re not going to spend the time to make it any better. It’s already doing its job.

Okay, this is what I mean by if you don’t know where the weak points are in your business, you’re not thinking about that when you have ideas come to you, then you may spend time and effort on something that doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t make an impact the way you want it to. Okay. The next thing I notice when it comes to knowing your business is that amateurs don’t have much of a vision for the future of their business. They’re not thinking about the future.

Pros, on the other hand, allow themselves, and they spend lots of time intentionally thinking about the future of their business. This is difficult to do, my friends, at least for me it is. It’s so much easier to think about my business in the past or even my business in the present than to think about my business in the future, because the future’s a blank slate, right?

But you’ve heard the saying that everything’s either growing or dying. Yeah, I don’t know about you, but this makes me nervous in some ways and not in others. I’ll tell you why. I do believe that’s true. Even something like a business is either growing or dying because stagnation is just not a thing. Even if you’re like, I love how my business works right now. I don’t want it to be any bigger. I don’t want to change anything. It’s functioning great. It’s serving my life. I love it how it is. Cool, that’s fine. But the world is changing, my friends.

Technology will continue to change. The way people purchase things will change. The way products are delivered will change. If you don’t at least keep up with the changes that are existing in the world, your business will not make it. At some point. I remember when I used to work in corporate, one of our directors used to talk about this topic, and he used to talk about, this was in Huntington Beach, California, and I didn’t grow up there, so I didn’t know the pizza chain, but he would always name this certain pizza franchise and ask the people if they knew it.

And because most people were from Southern California, they all said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he said, when’s the last time you saw one of those pizza places? And everybody said, yeah, we haven’t seen it in a long time. And he said, that’s because at one point, pizza places used to not deliver pizza. You had to go in and get your pizza or eat your pizza there. But then pizza delivery became a thing, and they refused. They were like, we don’t want to deliver pizza. It’s working great for us this way. People come in to eat pizza or they pick up their pizza. They refused to add delivery, and maybe they sustained it for a little while, but eventually, they went out of business because when we think pizza, we think please bring it to my door.

So that’s what I mean by growing or dying. So you don’t have to want your business to be any bigger, and if you do, great. But if you don’t, you don’t have to necessarily want to grow revenue-wise or anything like that, but you need to be constantly keeping your business evolving or it’s going to ultimately suffer, right? And this is where your vision for the future comes in.

What do you want to create in your business this year, even? And certainly in the next five years, the next three years. What do you want it to be like? Growth might be literal growth, but it might be that it becomes more efficient. It might be that it becomes more effective. It might be that your clients are achieving more success than they are right now. Pros have a vision of where they’re going with their business and what they want it to look like. Amateurs don’t know, or they just don’t think about it.

Okay, finally, pros think about their business and their brand beyond just surface level. Okay? So your brand is sort of the identity of your business, right? And brand includes the colors and the fonts and the way it looks, but amateurs tend to think that’s all it is, right? Pros understand that it is also your values. Your values for your business are probably going to be the same things that you value personally.

But I want you to think about a business that has a strong brand and ask yourself, what are their values? So the most obvious example that comes to my mind for me is Apple. Apple has a very strong brand. And by strong brand, I mean you recognize it. You know what to expect from it, and it stands out from everybody else competing with it. So Apple has a certain look about it, but what do you think is one of Apple’s values? The word that comes to my mind is simple, or minimalism is something they value, right?

Simplicity. Now, you can see that in the white everything and very clean lines and all of that, but you also feel that and experience that with the way they create their computers and devices and even their graphics, right? So we see it, but the value, I just want to point out underneath it is minimalism or simplicity or something really clean and simple. How about like, let’s take a Ivy League school like Harvard?

What is a value that impacts their brand? I would say excellence. They value excellence, right? It’s one of their values. How about Mr. Beast? You guys follow Mr. Beast or you have kids that are Mr. Beast fans? One of Mr. Beast’s value for his business and his brand, I would say, is playfulness. Very different brand from Harvard or Apple, different values. He doesn’t value minimalism like Apple does, right? He values playfulness and impossibility type of thinking.

So both very successful brands, Apple and Mr. Beast, very different values, very different experiences that you get as you engage with their businesses, right? So what values do you have that make sense for your business that are going to be part of your brand? This is what pros stop and think about. I’m going to give you a quick run through of mine just by way of example, but I want you to think through yours and I can help you do this if you haven’t done it before. But one of my main values, my first value is this is going to be fun.

Okay? I like to have fun. I operate best when I’m having fun. I’m most effective and my business is doing the best. It grows the most, it thrives the most, my clients seem to enjoy it the most when I have fun. So I’m not always good at bringing this value into everything. It’s not what I’m saying, but it is important to me and it’s something that I try to keep in mind and even, you know, my team will like write an email and they’ll go, how does this sound? And I’ll say, could we make it more fun and less corporate? Could we make it more playful? Because fun is a value of mine. Another one of my values is everything is figureoutable. This is something I learned from Marie Forleo, right? So I value us trying things that we don’t know how to do right now. And I value helping my clients do things that they’ve never done before. So everything is figureoutable is one of our values. And I try to keep that alive in what we’re doing here at Jody Moore Coaching.

Another value I have is make things better. And this value really shows up for me in the form of not being a perfectionist. Like, we can create things, we can offer things, we can post things, etcetera, and then the things that people like, the things that are effective, the things that are helpful, we will go back and make them better. But we’re not going to start with perfect. We’re going to just go. We take lots of action. We go fast, and then we go back and make things better as appropriate. Some things don’t need to be made better. Some things are good enough as they are. Some things didn’t land at all and we’re going to scratch them and we’re not going to put lots of time and resources into going back and making them better. So make things better is partly how I live my life, but it’s also how I run my business. And then the final value that we have at Jody Moore Coaching is err on the side of generosity.

So we got to take care of the business. We have, whatever it’s called, legal terms and policies and procedures and all of that, and we’re not just going to like give anyone a refund who comes along and complains. We got to have policies and things. But there are times when there’s a gray area, right? Like, gosh, we don’t technically have to refund this person, but maybe we want to because we understand why they’re in this situation or maybe we weren’t clear or something like that, right?

And so we err on the side of generosity. If there’s a question mark and we can do it, we will be as generous as possible. This one comes up whenever we do make a mistake, right? Because we do sometimes make mistakes. And then we stop and ask ourselves, okay, how do we turn this mistake into us being generous? What can we do to own the mistake, apologize for the mistake, and then compensate for it in a way that feels super generous. And our clients love this about us and they know this about us. They tell us all the time how generous we are. And I want that. That’s how I want to live. And at the same time, we’re very profitable and we’re very successful.

And so I think sometimes people think you can only be one or the other, and I promise you that those two things, success, profitability, and generosity, they go together. They’re not in opposition to each other. That’s my belief. Okay? So do you know your business? If not, I would love to help you dive in and get to know your business. So go to ProCoachCamp.com and sign up. I will see you February 16th. Have a beautiful rest of your day, everyone. Bye-bye.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.