Good Marketing, Good Business

081: Grow Your Business From The Inside Out

• Shannon Stone • Episode 81

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What if your business achieved the same revenue levels but with far less stress, time and volatility? And once you achieved that, then you focused on scaling it? This is growing your business from the inside out, consider it the anti-scale which still scales your business.

By listening [and taking notes], you’ll learn:

  • How streamlining client delivery created 150% of new working time
  • How to scale your business but do so the right way
  • How to increase profits without more clients

Let’s not scale problems and leaky buckets, let’s fix them first and then go bananas with taking on more quality clients in your now smooth-operator business.

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If you’d like to work together with me as your 1:1 business and marketing consultant, book a call here.

Shannon Stone:

Hey, welcome to the podcast and welcome 2025. It's the first episode of the year, so I'm super excited that you are here listening and that I am back recording these as well.

Shannon Stone:

I had an incredible holiday New Year's Christmas, all the things. I had a really good break, really well rested. But in saying that I did so much, I was pretty much outside the whole time and that was my intention. It's that I do want to take a break and I just planned on taking two weeks. I did take a bit longer than that, but I really did a lot and I love that and I feel very recharged, very rested and really just ready to come back, so I hope you're feeling the same. I hope you had a great holiday break time. However, you spent it, even if you chose to work through it as well.

Shannon Stone:

Well, let's jump into it. I'm very excited for this episode today where we are talking about what to do, I guess, to scale your business, but I want to talk about it from this position of before you scale your business or look at growing your business, so taking on more clients, increasing your revenue. There's some things I want to share with you which are really actually quite pivotal. I wrote an article on this, which I definitely recommend that you check it out, either on my website, shannonstonecomau, or just find me on LinkedIn. You'll see it there. You'll know it because there's Oprah standing right there with a meme, and I'm pretty sure it was her that said you get to scale your business, you get to scale your business, everyone gets to scale their business.

Shannon Stone:

I'm pretty sure that's how it went and that's the thing we hear so often in business that we all need to be scaling our businesses. We all should be growing our businesses, and if you're not doing that, what are you doing? Which is obviously not entirely the way things have to be. But obviously, in business we are almost like wired to want to grow. So I absolutely understand that there's never been any client I don't think that's ever come to me and says I just want help with my business, but I don't want to grow. Everyone wants to grow. Now, it's how you grow. That is the distinction. So if you've been in business for some time, you're used to growing, you're used to periods of growth.

Shannon Stone:

But what I want to say with this, before I stutter it all out, is I want us to look at how we can grow your business from the inside out before going down that traditional path of taking on more clients, investing in more marketing. There's a lot of ways we can grow our business and make it far more sustainable, far more optimized, so that as you scale and this is the catch 22, your business will scale and it'll actually grow by doing it. Some of the ways that I'm going to share with you. So there'll be some practical ways that I'm going to share with you, but also I just want to share this concept that there is not only one way to scale. There is not only one way to grow your business. What if you achieved, say, the same level of revenue, but you achieve that with far less stress, far less time, far less dependency on yourself as the business owner, far less time of your team taking the time to do things and deliver onto clients, and less volatility. So what if you were able to achieve the same numbers but it was far easier, done in less time, and a lot of that links into profitability. If things are getting done quicker and smoother without the stress like green flags all around, I think we can't argue that that is what everyone wants. So what if we created that first, while increasing your profitability there and build upon that?

Shannon Stone:

Because the opposite of this is, when I see people in businesses, they want to grow but they don't want to address the holes in their business. So A really obvious one is a lot of people want to do more marketing, they want to take on more clients. But if you ask them about, is it time to increase your prices or even review your pricing? And they know and they even want to increase the prices. You want to be doing that before getting out to more people. Taking on more clients Like why would anyone Like it's so illogical to take on more clients that are underpriced, wouldn't you Unless it was like a marketing campaign, like that was your marketing angle before putting your prices up. That is perfectly fine, but you want to sort out the problems in your business before really going and growing it again and again.

Shannon Stone:

So I want to share this with you today. I want to talk about how we can grow our business from the inside out. It's not about delaying growth, it's just. I really just think it's the right way to do things. So I want to share that with you today. So I've got three different practical areas that you can look at. These are not the only ways to improve your business and grow it from the inside and out and really prepare you for scaling by taking on more clients, but these are some of the ways that you can do that.

Shannon Stone:

So number one is to improve your offer and what it is that you sell. I have mentioned before and I'll mention it again, but I could talk for days about how improving your offer can improve your business. I'm just going to give you some, I guess, high level tidbits to help you with it. But this is really pivotal. Like we don't have a business unless we have something to sell, and that's something to sell and those multiple things that you sell are the catalyst to anything. It's the heartbeat of your business. It's why people come to you, so obviously it's going to need a lot of attention. So we did touch on pricing just a little bit before, but that is something that makes up what it is that you sell, and I shared some examples around that. You know, before you put more marketing to it, make sure you're pricing it correctly, because otherwise you're just leaving money on the table and also you might even be turning clients and customers away because the price is too low and that creates a lot of doubt and skepticism in people as well. So your pricing is something that you would want to consider within improving your offers or your offer suite, or your services and packages, whatever it is you want to call them.

Shannon Stone:

The other thing around your offer is the offer design, so how you've structured that service or your particular services. Part of this is just the way that you've set it up. So, for example, maybe you're an accountant. Do you sell? You know your time by the hour. You know do you get people to book in for a session, or do you have different packages that you sell? Do you do an assessment of someone's finances and their business and their books, and then you come up with a report and then you suggest how to work together. Moving forward, do you have like a complete transformation accounting program for businesses that you've set up that you take people through every quarter? Like, really look at how you've designed your services and packages and, like I said, I could talk about this for days because it's actually very pivotal it can actually be a really hefty catalyst to growing a business and to making a business stand out, just based on how they've structured their services. So your offer design is incredibly important.

Shannon Stone:

The last point I'll make around your offer and improving your offer so you can grow your business from the inside out is looking at your client retention through your packages and services. So a really simple way with this is if you're selling say, you were that accountant and you were selling one-off sessions, for example, can you bundle it into sessions of three? Can you start to package it up? Or maybe you do have some type of thing where your clients work with you for three months at a time, for example. Well, if you've got clients typically either signing on to work with you for three months at a time, for example. Well, if you've got clients typically either signing on to work with you again after those three months, just forget the three months and turn it into six months or turn it into 12 months. So change the commitment term so that you're retaining clients even longer. The other way I look at this is or in part and parcel, is like I can talk about this for days.

Shannon Stone:

If people really need to work with you for a certain period of time in order to have the value, have the transformation, have the results, in order to work with you, attach that timeframe to it. You are doing people a very big disservice if you're giving them a fraction or a taste or just a small piece of the pie, for a couple of reasons. One, they might not ever get anywhere close to that transformation and because you've given them a small piece of the pie, they might think it's you that's the problem, not them, and really it just comes down to how you've packaged up that term commitment. So just want to bring some highlights to what it is that you sell, how you sell it. It would be an amazing brainstorming session with yourself, with your team, with the people very influential to your business, around what it is that you sell and how you sell it, because it fast forward but also rewind back to when I said this is growing your business from the inside out.

Shannon Stone:

So we are and we have been, as an economy, as an economy of businesses, in this, I'll just say, like a funky, weird place, right. So, because we've been there, this is like a prime time to be having these types of conversations and having these reflections and recreating something that is more relevant for now, when things need to change because business isn't performing how it used to. It's not just your marketing that needs to change. There's a lot of cogs in your business that you can look at, that you can address well, before stepping into just your marketing. Okay, so that is the first practical area that I wanted to talk about improving your offer. The second is retaining and re-engaging your clients. So contrast is amazing.

Shannon Stone:

So why would we actively promote your business, get you more clients and all the things, if you can't keep the ones that you have or keep the ones that are going to come to you or re-engage past clients? So there's really I wouldn't even say there is a point. There's like no point in trying to scale your business if you are churning through clients all the time. I have seen and I'm sure you have seen businesses who do that. They're just happy to just kind of you know mass market go through customers and clients Like there's no tomorrow, thinking there's always going to be new clients around the corner. If you are in an industry that is not competitive, or if that is a business model that you want to subscribe to, or you're in a unique market like that's entirely like, go you basically. But if you are not that and you are in you, you are in a very saturated market and you just really want to do good work by keeping the clients that you do have you want to look at.

Shannon Stone:

How can you retain the clients you have, how can you keep them longer, how can they continue to sign up to work with you and how can you re-engage all your past clients as well? Now, this is not forgetting that I wouldn't say there's an expiry on clients working with you, but there are times where you know it comes to an end or it comes to a pause, or it comes to a point where you're not going to be working with them for some amount of time. That is perfectly okay. You've done all the things that you can do. You've taken them where you need to take them and, for whatever reason, there might be a break for some time. That is okay too. But I want, with this point, I want you to really look at how you can really retain those clients and re-engage them.

Shannon Stone:

Some of the things that you can do is and we talked about this on the offer side is set up longer term packages. You can commit clients to work with you for longer. You can do work so good they will never want to leave and that is a really good question to talk about and think okay, this client, what could I do for this particular client? If I did so good with them, they would never leave. What would that actually look like? And really just brainstorm and see what you come up with and then apply that to all of your clients. You could do that with a couple of clients and just see what ideas come to you. You can maintain the relationship with your past clients so you're always on their radar. So that could be a newsletter that could be reaching out to them every so often. That could be client cards and gifts.

Shannon Stone:

You could also either ask clients or show clients the impact working with you is having on them. So if you are a marketing agency, for example, or a social media agency, whatever it have, you even the accountant our friend the accountant you could show them accountant. You could show them reports. You could show them reports. You can take them through the reports. Now, that's very quantitative. I always also love qualitative, so sometimes even just asking, like, what impact has that had on you? What difference has that made? If you are B2B, you know, what impact has this made on your business so far? Are your talk about their conversion rates? Was it easier to close those sales calls? Like, if you're a sales trainer, for example, get some of that feedback. So you can do that two ways. You can show people with information that you have and you can also ask them as well. So, both sides of the fence, there's several things that you can do.

Shannon Stone:

If you do check out the article, there's a few more ideas there. Look for the Oprah memed article on LinkedIn or on my website. You'll see it there. But if you take any of these ideas seriously, like just one of them, like even if you just say, okay, how can I just show clients the impact of our work on them and you really ponder that, you really dissect that, you really talk it out and brainstorm it. I know it's going to have an impact on your business if you do something with it. Don't let it just be an idea that you talk about one time. Turn it into something, maybe it is that. Okay, we're going to create a client exclusive newsletter. It'll be once a month or once a quarter, something really manageable and maintainable where you can be really consistent with it, and that's just how we can keep in touch with clients in a way where we're not having to maintain a weekly touch point to our email database. It could be something like that, okay.

Shannon Stone:

The last one I want to share with you is streamlining your client delivery and reducing the time spent. So you may or may not know, but I used to run a marketing agency. Creating content was one of our big service offerings. Now, if you know anything about creating content, even if you do it day in, day out and you are the experts at it, it still takes time, and this is like before the days of AI and a lot of the tools we have today, so it took a lot of time.

Shannon Stone:

Now I knew that there was two ways to grow the business. One, obviously, to take on more clients. But for me, I was like I don't want to take on more clients in this way or just yet. So I knew there was a second way to do this and that was how can we reduce the time we spend per client without compromising quality, like maintaining, and even like how, if we reduce the time spent on our clients, how could this improve our service, how could this be better for our clients as well? So I love the power of good questions, so I looked at it as let's reduce and optimize our time, be more productive, be more organized, look at our systems. I really dissected all the pieces going on in the pie or in the puzzle and I ended up getting our.

Shannon Stone:

So one client would typically take five hours a week and we got it down to two hours a week on average. So I did the numbers on that. That's a 150% of new working time. So something that used to take five hours was then taking two hours a week. Like you're getting back two and a half three hours. You're getting three hours a week back per client. That's very significant per client, per team member. Now that is in the model of a marketing agency the one that I ran.

Shannon Stone:

So with this, if you were to streamline working with clients and the time it took to and for most businesses, client delivery takes up most of their time. The other big pocket of time can often be their marketing. But if we're looking at your client time, how could you get back more hours or even more minutes? So that is the third way that I'm sharing with you today around how you can grow your business from the inside and out. So I think by now you would see that you can really start to gain back a lot more time. Earn more revenue, create more profit, get back more hours, retain the clients you had for longer, price your services more fairly, start to reduce the reliance on you as the business owner. Less team requirement, focus on doing better for your clients. There's a lot of things you can do within your current business, and I always think the best way to grow a business so many people think it's like looking out there. It's like if we just look within the confines of your existing business that's the truth teller, that's got all the information we need in order to grow it.

Shannon Stone:

So I hope you found this episode useful and it's got you to have a look at growing and scaling your business in a different way. What I will kind of end on here for us is I guess it takes a bit of patience as far as, or just changing gears of how we grow our business. It's not always jumping out and getting in front of new clients all the time. It is, I guess, a patient's flex. You need to really develop and work and use that patient's muscle to say actually we're not going to be hitting out, we can keep our marketing going obviously don't ever stop that.

Shannon Stone:

But we're going to look at growing our business a different way. We're going to see how can we retain our clients longer, and that's going to be our key focus. Or we're going to go through this project of reviewing our services and how we can improve them from every possible angle, from our pricing to how long we work with people, the onboarding process, all those bits and pieces. But if you want to grow your business, let's grow it from the inside out and once we get all these working so much better, however long and like, this really is a piece of string, this is not something where you're ever done. It's that constant and never ending improvement and refinement, in this case for your business. Once you kind of get through this and, I think, address a lot of those chunky areas that you know, maybe through listening to this, have really kind of like been lit up to you and said, actually there's some of the things we should really really work on. Once we do that, then we can be more confident and ready to invest in growing our business more, taking on more clients, because now we can do it where we're pricing really really well, we know we're going to retain them because we've worked on these systems and processes better. We're going to, you know, do all these amazing and magical things with them. So that is what I have for you today.

Shannon Stone:

I hope you found this useful. If you have any questions, always reach out. My email is just shannon at shannonstonecomau, but definitely connect with me on LinkedIn if you're over there and do check out the article if you like. I always love a paper version to read through. So that's over there. Now have an amazing week. I will talk to you in the next episode, if not in between. Have a great day and I'll talk to you soon.

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