Finola Howard 0:01
Hi. I'm Finola Howard, Business Growth strategist with a joyful heart, and your host of the your truth shared podcast, I believe that every business has a story to tell, because that's how the market decides whether to buy or not, and your story has to resonate with who you are and with the people you want to serve, and this podcast is about helping you reach the market in a way that feels right to you. So if you're an entrepreneur with a dream you want to make real, then this is the podcast for you, because great marketing is your truth shared. Let's talk about what makes a business real. It's not the website, it's not the award, and it's not the rebrand. A business becomes real when it can sustain itself, when it can not only make sales, but make them again and again and again, when it achieves the goals its founders set not someone else's definition of success. So here's the reality check. Globally, 86% of small business owners pay themselves less than 100,000 a year. Let me be clear. That's not total revenue. That's not net profit. That's what they actually put into their own bank account after expenses. So when you state your goals, be clear, do you want to generate 40,000 or 100,000 in sales, or do you want to pay yourself 40,000 or 100,000 from your business? The distinction matters. If your business isn't paying you, it's not sustaining you, and that's the real measure. In Ireland, I see so many female entrepreneurs turning over between 40 and 50,000 a year. In the UK, the average owner only business turns over around 70,000 and in the US, while we hear about solopreneurs hitting 500,000 by year five. The truth is, most never reach that level. So if you're sitting below 100,000 in sales or paying yourself under 100,000 you're not failing. You're in the majority. But here's the thing, if you want to grow beyond that, it starts with articulating what you actually want from this business you're building. Every client I've ever worked with, every person on my programs, I always begin with the same question, what do you want? What do you want out of this business? How much do you want to generate in sales this year? How much do you want to pay yourself? Do you want 100,000 in turnover or 100,000 in your bank account? And here's the surprising part, I have yet to hear a woman answer that in one simple, direct sentence, something as clear as, I want 100,000 turnover by the end of this year, or I want to pay myself 60,000 next year. This has to be coached to be believed and ultimately embraced. The tendency is to soften the statement and hide behind the detail of things like the number of customers or offers that might be sold. The numbers are always danced around. And here's what I think is really going on. The resistance is not just about fear of failing. It's about the fear of wanting. The voice that whispers, who am I to want that? Who am I to say I deserve 100,000 or 250,000 or more. But let me tell you, if you don't feel like you deserve it, you will never build towards it. And the truth is you do deserve it. You deserve to want what you want. You deserve to say it out loud without apology. This isn't talked about enough, and that's what needs to change, because the fear of stating your financial goal, whether it's 40,000 80,000 100,000 or beyond, is stopping your growth. So if there's one thing you take away from this part of the episode, it's this, articulate it, practice it. Write it down. Say it to yourself. Say it to someone else. I want 40,000 in sales. I want 80,000 in personal income. I want 100,000 or a million in turnover. Whatever the number is for you, put it out there, because if you've never articulated your goals, how can you possibly know if your actions are taking you there? Let's talk about the busyness trap now. Here's what I see again and again, business owners with their heads down, busy doing all the things, posting, tinkering, reacting. For me, this just feels like a hamster wheel of pointless activity that conditioning so many of us carry to be consistent. Consistent, to be visible, to post every day. Do, do, do. But here's the thing, consistency, without consciousness, is just busyness. It's not strategy. We've been taught that if we're busy, we're productive. If we're posting, we're marketing, if we're showing up everywhere, we must be building a business. But busy. Being busy doesn't mean you're producing results. You can spend hours on social media and still not grow your top line or your bottom line. The clever thing isn't to do more. The clever thing is to pause, to allocate time, to think, to reflect, to consciously ask. Is what I'm doing, working where is the best place for me to spend my attention today? Is this moving me towards the goals I've set? Or am I just filling up time and I get it? Many small businesses are afraid to stop some because they don't want to face the answers. Others, because they don't know what questions to ask in the first place. So they chase advice. Do this post that follow this trend, and they never stop to trust their own wisdom, the common sense that's already inside them. Is this working? Is this business viable for me? And here's something I want you to hear clearly, those blanket statements you've been told you can't expect to make a profit yet. This is just how marketing is for small business. They're not necessarily true, and they're definitely not true for you. If you stay on the hamster wheel of busyness, you will stay small. If you get off pause and become conscious, you give yourself the power to shape your business around your goals, your life, your dreams, your business doesn't actually need more action. It needs more awareness. Let's move on to the missing engine piece in your business. Okay? Because here's what I see so often, a small business invests in a website, a shiny new brand, maybe some positioning work, and then they stop. They stop because they've run out of steam, or because sometimes they've run out of money. But here's the truth, that beautiful website, that polished brand, that's just the beginning. The real work starts after that, the marketing only truly begins when you build the engine, and the engine is what drives customers to you, nurtures them, listens to them, and takes them step by step to the place where they say yes to what you have to offer. It's so many skip this part. They jump from I have a website straight to I need to be visible on social media, but visibility without an engine is just noise. An engine is what takes someone who's interested in you and turns them into a customer, not just once, again and again and again. And this is the piece that gets ignored because it takes attention to detail, because it means recognizing that there isn't one single conversion. There are many conversion happens when someone comments on a post, when they download a lead magnet, when they open your email, when they attend a webinar. There can be 1012, and even 20 steps before someone ultimately buys the thing you are selling. And yes, small businesses look at that and feel overwhelmed. They also get bored. They think, Do I really have to do all this? But this is the piece that makes the difference between the 15,000 turnover 100,000 and a million in turnover. It's the piece that moves your business from busy work to viability and from surviving to growing. Think of it like dating. You don't ask someone to marry you on the first date. You build trust, woo them, you take them deeper into their relationship, step by step, until the commitment feels natural. And that's what your sales engine does. It doesn't just sell once it builds a relationship that sustains so let me put it to you directly. Do you know who your customer really is? Do you know their real pain point, the one that keeps them up at night? Have you built an offer that truly solves that, and does that offer stand out in the marketplace? Do you have a way of drawing people in, nurturing them and converting them into customers? And when you've done it once, can you repeat it and improve it again and again? And if you can't answer those questions with clarity, you don't have a sales engine, and without an engine, you don't have viability or growth. A brand, remember, without sales is just a logo. A business without sales is just a hobby.
Finola Howard 10:01
So let's go a little deeper and talk about the whole business thinking and the fact that even a sales engine doesn't live in isolation, it can't your sales depend on your pricing. They depend on your positioning. They depend on how you deliver, how you follow up, how you show up. They depend on whether the whole of your business is working together, not just in fragments, and this, again, is where so many businesses falls down. Sales get siloed. The people who deliver the product aren't connected to what the sales team promised. Customer Service isn't looped in, and the result unhappy customers, missed opportunities, money left on the table, and that's a cultural issue in a business, a culture of separateness, as opposed to whole business thinking. Now I know you might be thinking, but I'm a solopreneur. That's just me, and I don't have to worry about those kinds of things. But here's the thing, culture matters just as much when it's just you as when it's 100 people, culture is the edge, because your culture, your values, your purpose, your mission, your vision, set the tone for everything. It's what colors your business. It's shapes the flavor of how you show up in the marketplace. It's what makes your way of doing things unique. If you don't articulate those things, even as a solopreneur, they won't be expressed externally, and that means your messaging, your marketing, your customer experience, they'll feel flat because there are no foundation behind them. But when you do articulate them, everything aligns the way you make your product, the way you deliver your service, the way you speak to your suppliers, to collaborators, even to yourself. That alignment is culture in action, and that alignment is whole business thinking, because building a viable business isn't just about the sale, it's about everything around the sale working together, shaped by what you believe in, whether you're a solopreneur or you've built a team and the engine only works if the whole business works. So how do you move from unconscious hamster wheel to aligned systematic growth? Well, you need a framework that stops you from being mindless and brings you into full awareness. Because here's the truth, so many small businesses are running on formulas that they downloaded from the Internet, or they're copying tactics they saw in a YouTube video. It's not strategy, that's not alignment, that's not agency. The consciousness framework is about giving yourself the power of choice. It's also about trusting yourself. It's about knowing why you're doing something instead of waking up one day and realizing you spend 10 or 20 years running hard but staying in the same place. So here are the questions I want you to ask of everything you do. Number one, why am I doing this? Why am I going to this network? Why am I posting this on social? Why am I avoiding this task? And sometimes the more powerful question is, why am I not doing this? Because that reveals the blocks you need to clear. Number two, who is this for? Who is this post for this campaign, for this event I'm attending? And be specific, because targeting everyone is targeting no one. Every action should be focused on a real person with a real need and a real pain point, you're solving. Number three, what am I trying to achieve? Be concrete. What outcome do I want from this conversation, this campaign, this podcast, write it down. The act of articulating the goal itself brings consciousness, which leads to aligned action. And then number four, how will you measure it? How will you know it worked? If I go to a networking event, did I feel enriched by the experience? Did I meet peers who energized me? Or if the goal was new business, did I meet my target customer? How many of my target customer did I meet? Did I make connections that convert into revenue? Always put a number on it. And lastly, number five, what will make me follow through? Because this is where so many entrepreneurs fail. We get distracted, we get tired, and the moment we're halfway through one campaign, the next great idea pops up. So we drop what we're doing and we half finish it because something shinier has grabbed our attention. But here's the truth, your time is far better spent finishing one campaign all the way through. Two than half assing two of them, because unfinished campaigns don't build momentum, they don't deliver results, and they don't teach you what worked and what didn't. If you don't close it, if you don't take your customer through all the steps in that buyer journey, all the small conversions, all the follow ups, then it's as if the campaign never really happened. And that's not just a waste of energy, it's a waste of opportunity. So ask yourself, What will make me follow through? What do I need to do to actually finish this thing before chasing the next idea? So take one action on your to do list right now and run it through these five questions. Why am I doing this? Who is it for? What am I trying to achieve? How will I measure it? And what will make me follow through? Because when you start asking these questions consistently, you're no longer running on that hamster wheel. You're running on consciousness, and conscious choices are what build growth. Here's what I believe every business is capable of more. Every solopreneur is capable of hitting 100,000 and beyond. And I don't just mean by hustling harder or burning yourself out. It is possible to hit that milestone without sacrificing yourself, without chasing hustle culture. It's possible with preparation, with method, with belief and with support. But here's the thing, it doesn't come from the shiny work. It comes from the boring work, the work of following through, the work of doing one campaign properly all the way to the end, instead of half finishing two and getting distracted by the next new idea, because growth doesn't come from distraction, it comes from sticking with a process that builds piece by piece, step by step, and that process is what I call the conversion journey. It's not just one yes, it's many small yeses along the way, the comment on a post, the download of a lead magnet, the click on an email, webinar attended, live the landing page, visited. Each of these moments is a conversion. And if you're willing to map them, to understand them, to see what nudges people forward and what stops them. That's where the growth lies. And I know this might sound methodical, pragmatic, even boring, but that's the work. That's the difference between a 15,000 turnover and 100k or a million turnover. So let me ask you directly, are you willing to do what it takes? Are you willing to be potentially bored by the process? Are you willing to pay attention to the steps that build consistency? Because if you are, you can build a business that works for you and your customers. And this is why I care so much about this work, because I've seen too many solopreneurs paralyzed by anxiety, chasing shiny objects, or worse, begging their followers online to buy something just to keep the lights on. That's not the business you deserve, and that's not the business you need to build. It can be easier. It should be easier, but only if you stop the distractions, stop the fragmentation, stop chasing everyone else's advice and start focusing on the end game. And yes, I know the odds only 20% of solopreneurs reach that 100,000 to 300,000 bracket, or just 3.6% of solopreneurs ever hit the million mark. But I've made my declaration. I plan to build a million euro business, and I will do it by following the very principles I've shared with you here, not with hustle, not with shortcuts, but with consciousness strategy and sustainable growth, the odds don't scare me, because consciousness tips the odd in my favor. So here's my challenge for you, pick one thing in your business right now, just one. Run it through the five questions and be brutally honest with yourself, because this is how you move from the 86% stuck under 100,000 into the 20% who breakthrough, and for the brave few, this is how you move forwards towards the 3.6% who build million Euro businesses that last not busy, not fragmented, conscious, aligned, sustainable. So remember, sales prove you can start a successful business. Consciousness proves you can grow, and sustainability proves you can stay.
Finola Howard 19:36
Thank you for listening to your truth shared. And if this episode resonated with you. I'd love for you to subscribe, rate and review the show. It really helps more entrepreneurs find it. And if you know you're ready to stop being fragmented and start building consciously, join the SOAR wait list. That's where I guide you, step by step to build the engine your business needs to sustain itself and scale. And until next time, stay conscious, stay aligned and keep building. You.
