Good Marketing, Good Business
Have you noticed so much business and marketing content out there is so abstract and airy fairy - what they’re saying sounds good, but what do you actually need to DO?
That’s where the Good Marketing, Good Business podcast comes in, this is where I share practical strategies to help you grow your service based business. Everything from exactly where to find more clients through to how to follow up properly without pestering.
Your host, Shannon Stone is an award-winning business and marketing consultant and for the last 10+ years she’s been diving in deep with small business owners, helping them to make more sales and get more done in less time.
The Good Marketing, Good Business podcast is here to make your life and business a whole lot easier as long as you’re ready to put in the work - if you’re a good-hearted business owner who wants to grow, this is the podcast you'll want to call home.
Good Marketing, Good Business
073: Are You Lacking Knowledge or Execution?
What do you actually need… Business owners will often invest in the wrong resources or come to the wrong conclusions about what they need to help them with their business and this can be a costly exercise.
This episode is here to help you get more clear on what resources your business may need so you can protect your investments and see greater results sooner.
By listening [and taking notes], you’ll learn:
- Important distinctions between knowledge and execution
- How to ensure any knowledge gets put to good use
- The wealth that lies within knowing what doesn’t work
Enjoy!
Resources:
If you’d like to work together with me as your 1:1 business and marketing consultant, book a call here.
H ey, welcome to the podcast. Super, super excited for this episode.
Shannon Stone:Today we are talking about whether you have a knowledge gap or an execution gap in your business. It's actually going to be a brilliant episode. If I do say so myself, it's really one that we're going to bring some awareness to something. That is one of those that. It's a small but mighty distinction when people almost diagnose the wrong area for them to work on in their business. There can be some pretty expensive, costly, timely impacts that come from that, and one of the big ones that I find is when people invest in the wrong thing. So they might have more of a knowledge gap, but they're investing in people to help them, but what they're helping them with is not the right things, or vice versa. Maybe it's that you know what to do, but you keep investing in things so you can keep on learning and learning and learning, when actually you just need to execute the things that you do know. So, okay, we could stop there in a sense. But if you only understand it on that level, maybe things are still not going to change for the business. So I encourage you to definitely listen into this one and think about okay, how is this happening in my business and how can I change things so that, moving forward, I move a lot better. I move a lot better, I move a lot quicker, I make better choices with the investments that I do make, even if the investments are of your own time, of your own learning. It doesn't have to just mean hiring, help, investing in experts, joining a program or whatever have you. There are a lot of ways that you have resources available to you, and that also includes your own resources. Okay, so we'll start with the knowledge gap side of things.
Shannon Stone:So you might have caught yourself saying a couple of these things and, as I share them with you. I also want you, if you ever say it or ever moving forward, ask yourself are these actually true? Because sometimes we can say things but we don't actually believe it. So if you have a knowledge gap, you probably might say things like I don't know what to do. Or you might say what we're doing isn't working. Or you might say what we've done? Or we've done what they told us to do. Maybe you hired someone to help you. We've done what they told us to do, but that still hasn't worked.
Shannon Stone:So if you've said any of these things remember I said ask yourself is that statement even true? So if you say I don't know what to do, is that really true? Because if it's not, you're not going to get the right answer at the end. So do you really not know what to do? Or is what you're doing not actually working? I even love that sometimes or often, people will say what we're doing isn't working. But when you dive into it, you look at things like data. You look at, say, where your clients have come from. You actually do find actually what we are doing is working. We just haven't looked at it from that perspective. We haven't really assessed it properly to say, actually it is working. So that's why I say to yourself really ask yourself, are these actually true? Because we can only work with the truth if we want to get the right answers.
Shannon Stone:If you genuinely say any of those and it is absolutely okay and they are genuinely true you've probably got a knowledge gap in your business. You probably don't have the know-how or the expertise to solve the problem and often on the podcast we're talking about growing businesses, acquiring more clients a lot from that perspective. So if you apply it to that, maybe you don't know how to generate more clients than what you have at the moment, or better quality clients, or increase your prices and have people continue to say yes to working with you. If you don't know how to do that and you don't have the expertise, that is okay, because you're an expert in something. That's why you've got a business, but there's a gap of knowledge there. You don't actually know how to solve that particular problem.
Shannon Stone:Other things that might be happening if you have a knowledge gap is that you might feel just at a standstill. You feel like you've tried everything, or everything that you've tried up until now, it just hasn't worked. Or another big one that is happening a lot at the moment for businesses is what they tried in the past is not working anymore. It's not working the same. It requires so much more effort even reach the same level of results and, like that, reach is a reach. It takes quite a bit more effort to even maintain where they're currently at, because a lot of things have changed in business. You could have some knowledge gaps that have started to come up because business has changed, the economy has changed. The economy has changed how people are buying, what they're buying, what we have to, I guess, explain to them in order for them to still invest the same. A lot of that has changed, so you could have a knowledge gap around. How do I adjust my business to keep up with where people are at now and where people will continue to go? So that could be a knowledge gap that you are facing as well.
Shannon Stone:The last thing I will say about those that have a knowledge gap and you can definitely have a knowledge and an execution gap absolutely. But if you have a knowledge gap and I'm guessing you've tried a lot of things you know you've been doing things already in your business. You've also tried other things. You've probably looked for other solutions. Maybe you've invested in other things.
Shannon Stone:The bittersweet statement of this is that you know what doesn't work, so you've tried a lot of things that actually don't work. And that is actually a really good thing, because in order to find out what does work, you have to go through the mud of discovering what doesn't work, and a great reminder of this is Einstein and his light bulb invention, which took a thousand steps. If you know the story, an interviewer asked him what does it feel like to invent something and make a thousand mistakes before you actually got to how to create the light bulb? And he said they weren't mistakes or they weren't failures. The light bulb was something that took a thousand steps. So keep that in mind.
Shannon Stone:We're not all inventing the light bulb, but in your business, if it's about growing your business, client acquisition or whatever it might be you're always going to find the things that don't work first before you find what does work. Same thing of like if you've lost your keys and people are like where was the last place? You put it. Obviously, if you knew, you would definitely go there, but you've got to look through all the places you don't know where it is first in order to find where your keys are. So if you do have a knowledge gap, you're probably really resonating with a lot of those things. But what I want you to know just overall with this podcast episode, is just making that distinction between is it that you don't know what to do verbatim, or is it that you're not doing anything or you're not applying the things that need to be applied, and that's more of the execution gap. They're two very different things and it's important to know because, say, you do have that knowledge gap and you are investing in more, maybe hiring a marketing assistant to help you, you might think the marketing assistant is failing or failing you or failing the business because what they're doing it's not working. But maybe you or the business or the assistant just doesn't have the resources, the knowledge, the guidance of what to focus on to see the results you're looking for. Okay, so that is the knowledge gap side of things. Let's jump into the execution gap.
Shannon Stone:So if you find yourself saying any of these type of statements, it's probably true that you have an execution gap. So you might be saying I'm too busy and inconsistent, or you might be saying we don't have time to implement, even if, what we have done in the past has worked. Something else you might be saying is we have to focus on filling or fulfilling client projects, client orders, client requests, before we can do anything else. Often it's that I do want to grow the business, but we've always got to prioritize this client work, and this client work keeps us extremely busy. But also, on the same token, we need to be growing the business as well. We don't have enough. We don't have the clients to reach the targets we're looking for.
Shannon Stone:So if you find yourself saying any of those, you're too busy, you're inconsistent, you don't have time to implement things, even if what you, if you did implement the things they have worked previously, you just don't have time to do it right now. You probably do have an execution gap and I will say if you're trying to grow your business, you will have to do things you haven't done before and you will have to do things when conditions aren't ideal. Ie, you're too busy. If you're too busy, that's just a fact of business. Business owners are always busy all of the time, but something's got to change. It's that thing of like the chicken or the egg. Do we wait for more clients to come on before we invest, or do we invest and then bring more clients on? Or for team members is often another one as well. It's like we're so busy but I don't have the resources to hire the team. Hire the team, then you'll create the resources.
Shannon Stone:One of those kind of like between a rock and a hard place sometimes, but it doesn't have to be, but just that idea. There is that we often have to do things in non-ideal scenarios, non-ideal conditions, and we often have to do things in non-ideal scenarios, non-ideal conditions, and we often have to do things that we haven't done before, which I think is a lot of where businesses are in 2024. We're having to do things that we didn't have to do before. It was a lot easier before. It was even easier in the pandemic and that was pretty crazy for a lot of people as well, I will say.
Shannon Stone:With execution gaps, they can be frustrating, because we all do have the best of intentions to do the do. It's like, yes, I'm going to create this plan and all I have to do is follow the plan in between all the other work in the business. But if this has been going on for months or years or even decades for some people, where you're just still not getting done those things that you intend to do. Like we're lying to ourselves if we think for some reason it's going to change. This time let's just almost like pull the plug, pull the pin, hire the people to help and if it's not, the people, create the systems and better do the operations so you've got more efficiency in your business.
Shannon Stone:There are multiple ways to look at executing more in your business. So I do want you to imagine for a second. Imagine if your business focused on putting into action all the things that you know to do, Like if you think of all the things that you know that you should do that have actually produced results in your business. Imagine where your business would be. And that doesn't have to come down to your bare hands of you doing that yourself. Even if that's how you've built the business up until this point moving forward, maybe it needs to be someone else that helps you with those things. Or you offload some of the other areas in business so you can keep doing working on, say, the marketing, the business development, the client acquisition.
Shannon Stone:The last thing I'll say around the execution gap is it can be really painful when business owners believe and this is kind of bringing it home with both of them, when business owners believe they've got a knowledge gap, so they will invest in things to learn more, but them or their team actually just need to be applying more. So if you invest in, say, a program to be learning about what you need to do to grow your business but you're not applying any of it, that's always going to be a problem. And if you do invest in any kind of because we can all learn and I think it's always going to be a problem and if you do invest in any kind of because we can all learn and I think it's always really important to be on the cusp and very forward and innovative when it comes to learning and knowledge that's never going to do you wrong. It will only do you wrong if you don't do anything with that information. Otherwise, it's just like it's like entertainment. It's like it's not doing anything for your business. It's just taking up space. So if you do invest in anything knowledge-based, you have to make sure you've got some type of function and ability to execute, whether it's you, whether it's your team, because just someone spouting great ideas at you is not going to transform your business. It's not going to take you to where you want it to go, it's not going to get you more known by the people that should be working with you in your business. So keep this in mind when you I guess, from this podcast episode forward of how you invest in your business. And is it that you do need more execution support or is it that you need more knowledge support? And it can definitely be a combination of the two. We'll talk about that in the action steps. But make sure you do have a function to put knowledge into action so it doesn't just sit there as a piece of entertainment or something that was like oh well, that was really cool to know. Okay, so let's get into the action steps and what you can do from here. So we've kind of laid the awareness around.
Shannon Stone:What is the difference between a knowledge gap and an execution gap? So number one is to identify what gap you have, and if you do have both, that is perfectly fine. Probably more likely than not that you would have a bit of both, but you need to get specific on what that is, where that is in your business. So what kind of knowledge are you lacking? Or what type of execution are you lacking. Get really clear and specific on that. Step number two might help you with this and that is to make a plan to close that gap. One of the best ways I find to make a plan or close that gap is to talk it out loud with someone. So if you've got a team or you've got a business peer or you've got someone that helps to support you, who is across your business, I would be talking with them about this whole episode.
Shannon Stone:But to make that plan, to sit down and work out okay, what do I need to do? What do I need to do differently? Sometimes people would just jump from saying oh my God, I have an execution gap to then hiring a marketing assistant. Let's just kind of slow it down a little bit, make a bit of a plan. That's why an open discussion can be really helpful, because you get a lot of insights around where that help would be best used and you'll make better, more informed decisions when you go and say, hire that marketing assistant.
Shannon Stone:So number two is to make that plan. Number three I've added this in here. It might be a little obvious, but it's to follow through on the plan. Make a plan, but make sure you follow through on that plan. It is really, really important. And then the fourth and final step is to review your results and adjust accordingly. So you've decided okay, or you've identified you've got an execution gap.
Shannon Stone:Go through all of this, identify it, make the plan, follow through on the plan, hide the people, whatever have you, and then review your results. You want to know that this is starting to make an impact and you know nothing is perfect from the get-go, so you do need to adjust accordingly. So, as you make those changes and as you make better decisions in the business, review the results. But they're not going to be perfect. So what do you need to tweak? What do you need to do a little bit differently with those people that are helping you as well? Okay, that is what I have for you today.
Shannon Stone:I hope you found this useful. It is one that can bring a lot of powerful awareness to what is going right and what might be going wrong in your business. Do you have more of that knowledge gap? Do you have more of that execution gap? Have a discussion through it, think back through, look at your business, and I would love to know how this episode helps you. Feel free to reach out anytime, but that is what I have for you. I hope you have an amazing week and I'll talk to you soon.
