Five Things I Learned My Fourth Year of Business: Part 1

Four years ago I registered my business: McEwen Media Consulting. I had no idea what this business would be or what a consultant does. And I couldn’t begin to fathom how much this process would change me. Every year as I mark the anniversary of this pivotal decision, I share five lessons I learned about myself and my business.

This year was the most challenging, so it’s hard to boil the learnings down to five. But as I always tell my clients, share publicly the pain you have processed and learned from. Keep everything else to yourself until it’s the right time to share.

A lot of these learnings have come up in my conversations with other business owners in my new podcast Pivotal. Be sure to subscribe to the McEwen Media YouTube channel to receive new episodes every Tuesday starting May 13.

Decision-making can be fraught with emotion, triggering a cycle of stress and more emotion.

Lesson 1: Don’t Make Decisions Based on Emotion

What I love most about creating this series every year is the chance to mark the personal growth the entrepreneur journey has provided.

I’ve done A LOT of work on regulating my emotions. It might not be obvious to others, but I know I am a lot less reactive. Very rarely do I make emotional decisions (even grocery shopping while hangry. I always make sure to have a snack first).

But making emotional decisions is not the same as making decisions based on emotion.

When I started McEwen Media, I wanted to break down barriers to media exposure. I was tired of being a “gatekeeper” in network TV and wanted to give media access to everyone.

I had a deep emotional connection to this idea. I felt it was my calling. And I used it to guide business decisions.

It’s true you need an emotional connection to your idea in order to see it through. But that doesn’t mean you should make your business decisions based on this emotion. Because this emotional connection will keep you from seeing the catastrophic errors you don’t know you’re making.

In order to be available to everyone, I needed to be accessibly priced. When you offer accessible pricing, you need to sell in volume. It’s why fast food chains are able to sell inexpensive meals. The turnaround is quick, so they can move a lot of product.

For a coach or consultant, this means group offers and a large social media following.

A group offer is an efficient use of your time. You can serve a lot of clients at once at an accessible price.

This means you need to sell a lot of this service in order to make it a viable investment. Which means you are now selling all of the time.

This is exactly where I found myself this year. A bulk of my time and energy was spent prospecting, selling, and promoting. Luckily I enjoy these activities, but it felt disproportionate to the amount of client work I was doing.

I was in love with the idea of “being for” everybody. And in the process was building a business that didn’t work efficiently and also worked against the original purpose of working for myself.

The original idea was to create a business where I could have control over the stories I told and where. I wanted to tell my own stories and attract clients with their own interesting stories. And yet I painted myself into a corner where I was mainly creating promotional content to build my own brand, and making time to work with clients in the group.

Midway through this past year, I took the emotion out of the business. The most basic rule of business is to sell a solution to people who need it most and who can afford it. In other words, my business is not for everyone. So I need to stop building it that way.

For the past six months I’ve been making strategic changes known only to people inside the business (until now, of course). My target is more specific - established thought leaders and executives looking to build more visibility. My marketing is direct (the head of a bank isn’t going to find me through a free Masterclass). And is built on quality, high-touch, dramatic transformation. I’ll be working with fewer clients at a higher price point, because that is who needs to work directly with me.

The reason you haven’t noticed a difference is simple. I’m still committed to making confident self-promotion accessible to everyone. I can make this information available to the masses the ways I’ve been doing so all along: through my content.

You don’t need to fully separate emotions from your business. You do need to learn when to follow your head, your heart, and your gut. Someone has to take the lead, and each will send you down a specific path.