Last month when we reviewed our April numbers, I was absolutely thrilled. Not only were our sales excellent, but what truly blew me away was that we had doubled our margins compared to March. I didn’t set out with the specific goal of doubling our margins; instead, I focused on being strategic in every aspect of the business. We made shifts and changes across various areas, ensuring that everything was aligned with our company values, vision, and impact. The success we’re experiencing now is the result of the work we’ve been doing behind the scenes for the past six months. In this episode I’m sharing exactly HOW we did this, specific practices you can adopt and implement into your own business, and the #1 thing that I’m attributing to the momentum we’re experiencing in my business right now.

I’ll be sharing:

• How we conducted a comprehensive audit of every area of the team and the company, identifying areas for improvement and increased efficiency.
• My approach to investing in areas that we know will yield a return, such as paid ads and live events.
• That by prioritizing what we knew would work, we maximized our impact and avoided unnecessary risks.

… and so much more.

When we enter into an economic downturn, the mass mentality is to hunker down and not spend any money, but sometimes cutting costs on the wrong things can really hurt you in the long run. In this episode, I’m sharing how we’re not approaching our budget from a place of lack, and are instead getting really smart about where and when we spend our money.

Tune in for how you can approach investing in your business with intention, clarity, and a strategy that will see you through to your biggest goals.

Like the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple or Spotify.

_________________________

Ways I can support:

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[FREE] Get a weekly behind-the-scenes look at what is getting our clients’ insane results in real-time delivered straight to your inbox: https://go.embodiedmarketing.com/newsletter 

Tired of inconsistent revenue & marketing strategies that leave you overwhelmed? Whether you’re just starting out or ready to scale to multiple 7-figures, book a call with Team Hirsh to see how we can help: http://helpmystrategy.com

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh: 

Hello and welcome back to the podcast we are on week two of now the Embodied Marketing podcast. It has been a wild week of just honestly processing and talking to so many of you and getting so many messages about the event. Took me a while to fully grasp everything that happened and I know I shared last week on the podcast about the embodied business circle but that is probably 1 of the best ideas I’ve ever come up with. It’s been amazing. So now. All of our clients. No matter what package you’re in, from emerge all the way up to elite just as a part of being a client. You also have an invitation to the embodied business circle which is a community directly with me as well as leaders on my team that includes a WhatsApp chat group. I was just in there today. People were setting their intentions for Monday and a monthly strategy call with me. I’m going to teach on all different things and workshop on different things from company planning to team and hiring to setting 90 day goals as a company like give you my viewpoint on business outside of marketing because the marketing is covered by my team and then also an in-person 2 day event in October in Austin Texas so I basically added all of these things.

Existing clients with no additional charge mostly because I wanted to create community within my circle of clients that might be in different offers but are all badass entrepreneurs trying to do the same thing which is build a business. Make more money hit goals make an impact and just live a fulfilled life and so I wanted to create a community I wanted to create deeper connection and I also wanted to create a way that I could serve outside of marketing but also supported all of the marketing support that our team provides so it’s been such an incredible container. Already and I’m just super excited. It was a continuation of the event in that weekend and the idea just dropped in when I was driving and I was like yes, that’s exactly what I’ve wanted and didn’t even know it. So. All right I wanted to give you guys a little bit of a behind the scenes strategic episode on my own business. So last month I got our numbers back for April last week and I was like whoa. We crushed it. Not only do we crush it in terms of sales but I doubled my margins from March to April which is incredible and so we had an awesome month in terms of sales but an incredible month in terms of margins and that’s huge right now with where the economy is and especially with a business. You know I have 1718 employees and just that’s a very important thing. 

So I wanted to talk about what I did and I didn’t actually intentionally go into this and say I want to double our margins. I just more so was being very strategic with everything we did and with this shift to embodied marketing. We looked at a lot of different areas of our company. And we took our company values and kind of the vision and the impact and we made sure that everything was aligned and with that came some shifts and some changes and I also feel like right now in my business and in my life I’m really reaping. The benefit of seeds that I’ve been planting all year like we’re just in an incredible phase where our delivery is incredible. Our retention rate is incredible. Our client satisfaction is incredible. We’re hitting sales goals and numbers. We’re growing our list. We’re growing our audience every single day. And just in massive momentum which is a result honestly of all the work that I’ve done the last six plus months around everything in our company. The offers the voice, the values and our marketing, our delivery, our team like we really behind the scenes, we’ve changed a lot and embodied marketing coming to life was really kind of the final cherry on top to all of those changes.

And I know I talk about this a lot and that this episode is not about this. But if I was to contribute 1 thing to our growth the last six months and the success that we’ve had honestly and truly no fluff. No bs I attribute all of that to my own growth to me going. Double down on myself and how I show up as a leader how I cast the vision for the company. How I allow myself the space to do that, the support I surround myself with the mentors and growth that I’ve surrounded myself with the. Retreats that I’ve gone to that have pushed me to completely new edges that is hands down the biggest contributor to my success. The last six months in the company’s success because. Your company is just a representation of you as a Ceo and as a leader and so when a Ceo changes and grows and evolves naturally so does the company. And I’m super excited for our Alaska retreat happening in June with the ceos that will be on that retreat and get to go through that experience of just completely up leveling themselves their business.

And have an experience that’s life changing. So if you haven’t checked out the Alaska retreat you can go to embodiedmarketing.com/alaska and it’s five days june tenth through fifteenth and is a complete representation of having it all from. Deep business strategy talks and workshops to hikes and beautiful adventures in a gorgeous place which is Alaska to connections with other female entrepreneurs that will be lifelong memories lifelong connections to luxury of massages and pouring back into you I mean it will hands down 100 % guaranteed change your life so we have a few more spots left until we’re full and I could not be more excited because retreats were a huge part of my growth this last six months and investing in those experiences. Gave me the connections and the growth that has led to massive growth for our company. So here are 3 specific things that I did to improve our margins and this is also without a scarcity mindset. I think that’s really important to note here because I do think when the economy is impacted. People start to have this idea this mindset of like stop spending money and fear and that’s not at all how I feel like I mean I invested in an event last and this month you know and last month and

I had no idea how that was going to pay off I still don’t know the direct roi from the event but I didn’t care I still invested in the growth in the company I still spent money on ads still invested in my marketing like it wasn’t just cut all these expenses and see if we can make more money. So. The first thing that I did. Myself and my leadership team we looked at every single area of the team and the company and the expenses we were spending and we had the entire team do a time study, which we actually do those quarterly. They’re awesome. Basically yourself and everybody writes down what they’re doing every 30 minutes for 1 to 2 wo weeks and you look at that and you look for ways to improve efficiency you look for ways that you could adjust a role or maybe there’s room to add more or adjust things and basically I sat down with my leadership team and we looked at the company and we said okay, are there ways that we could get creative here like. Oftentimes when you have a company and you’re growing a company there naturally becomes this like fluff and bloatedness and I think that a lot of companies go through seasons where you’re hiring and you’re adding and you’re investing in that type of growth and support and then you have to have a pause and double check it all and make sure it’s actually supporting you the way you had hoped. It’s as as efficient as possible and that there’s not room to shift things and so we sat down and we looked at the entire company the way that we had structured departments the way that we structured roles.

I honestly looked at things that I hadn’t looked at in four plus years One of those things was my sales and the way that I was doing my sales and how much I was spending on my sales and I hadn’t looked at it in 4 years and I just kind of wrote it off as like oh that’s just the way it is because that’s how I’ve always done it. And so with looking at every area especially at the areas that we hadn’t changed in a very long time and they were like status quo because that can get dangerous and when an economy and an industry shifts so much and then you have an area of your company that you haven’t looked at in a long time. Chances are the industry and the economy and the need for change in that area of your business is there but you haven’t looked at it so we looked at everything and we made adjustments. We made some cuts. We made some shifts. I shifted my entire sales setup to be much more cost effective for the company and that saved me a lot of money. And we adjusted our team structure in a way that made it more efficient. We made some process that allowed more efficiency like we had some process in place that was like wait if we implement this. We’ll get the same end result in half the time. And so we didn’t go into this with the intention of like let’s cut a bunch of costs. It was let’s unturn every area of the business and look at it from a strategic standpoint of do we need it and do we need it the way it’s set up or is there a more efficient and cost effective way to do this.

That will get us to the same end result so it wasn’t about cutting getting to the same outcome like we needed to have the same outcomes but could we do them better right? And so I sat down with my leadership team and we made quite a lot of shifts and that was probably the biggest contributor to. The saving of expenses. So my imitation no matter what size your company is right now is to just take inventory like are there areas that you just haven’t looked at for a long time like another one of mine was who was doing my bookkeeping I think I’d been with the same company for like 5 years and I felt like over time the cost just kept getting inflated and I hadn’t really looked at like what are they actually doing for that cost and if I was to get some quotes like what would that look like and I ended up cutting the cost I mean I end up cutting it in half right? from what it was and so. This is a very important thing and you might have areas that you’re not even thinking about and realize oh I’ve just done this the way I have for the last year and you know could I do it better and get to the same end result and then. The next thing that we did is we still invested like I still invested in my paid ads. I still invested in a launch. I invested it in a live event but I invested in only what was working and I doubled down on that versus going really wide. So I’ll give you an actual tangible example I know.

That paid ads for me are one of the best ways for me to invest in my company and I think that’s the case for a lot of people because almost everybody’s audience is on Facebook and Instagram it’s the fastest way to amplify your content amplify your funnel and get more eyes which therefore gets more leads and sales. So I know that and I know what works with our ads and and I also have things that we might want to try that would cost money and I wouldn’t know if they would work. The event is an exception because I had no idea if that would work or not and that was definitely a gamble that I was willing and intentionally going to take. But we had something we’ve had in the works for months that we were going to invest in which was a different form of advertising this podcast and there’s a company that does like this form of advertising that’s totally I think it’s basically out like podcast feeds. And I run ads to my podcast and that works but we basically had this idea of we’re going to test this out and we actually decided last month. Let’s not do that because that’s a total gamble like we don’t actually know if that’s going to work and it’s iffy. But we know that visibility ads and Facebook ads work. And we’re going to put the budget there and we’re going to keep it there because we know we can get a return from that and so instead of going really wide and spreading my budget to places that really didn’t feel like for sure that they would have a return. We just kept it very targeted to what we knew.

Would be the best chance for a return. So I still invest it in the growth. It’s not that I cut my expenses investing and I think that’s really important because as people look at an economic situation. That’s maybe not the best. Sometimes they make decisions like let’s just cut all expenses. Let’s not spend any money on ads. Let’s not spend any money on marketing and I know I’m biased because I’m a marketing company. So I recognize that and you can take it for what it is but you know I walk the talk and I still spend my own money significant amount of money on paid ads. Every single month because if you shut that down, you might be fine this month you might not notice it and you might be like cool I increased my expense and I increased my revenue because my profit because I I cut this expense but come the next three months when now you’ve had three months of significantly less traffic in leads. You will notice it 100%. There’s a delayed reaction that happens and if you significantly slow down the amount of traffic in leads that you’re bringing into your business. You may not notice at the first 30 days you do that because you’ve got warm traffic and you can convert them and it’s still working. You will notice it though in the coming thirty days so it’s really important that you when you make decisions to cut expenses or you choose to not invest in something that you understand the pros and cons of that right? and is it a short-term or a long-term decision?

I also think there’s seasons in business like this investment in the podcast marketing that we want to do I’m not saying no to it forever. I just didn’t want to do it last month because we were focused on how much we can improve our margins and I knew I had the event that I was investing in. And so I chose okay. I’m going to not do that right now because I’m going to put the money in the event and what I know will work and I think there are seasons where you can kind of cast a wider net and test different things. But then that needs to be followed by a season of okay now let’s evaluate probably like ninety days let’s evaluate how it’s working and what we should stop doing and start doing businesses go through seasons all the time and you have seasons where you’re focused on let’s cast the net let’s see what’s working. Let’s try new things. Let’s invest in some different avenues. Let’s hire the extra team. Let’s do this and then we need to follow that season. And by okay, let’s evaluate the changes that we made and see what needs to change. So that’s the second thing that I did to improve company margins is I invested in growth that I knew would work and I doubled down on that versus going wide and trying too many new things. And then finally I focused my own marketing on what I knew would work and so we had a live launch last month which was our challenge and that is our best live launch as a company. We have the data to back it. I know not everybody has data to back those types of things but I have.

The data to back that that challenge does well every single time it does well and so in a month that I wanted to make sure our sales were really high. Our margins were good. We focused on a live launch that we knew would work and we knew would move the needle the most and so if you have things that you’re like okay. You know it’s kind of like the eighty twenty rule of putting 20% or putting your effort into the 20% that’s going to make a difference right? and a lot of businesses making the choice of where the resources are going to go because there is never a shortage of things that you could be doing. And things you could be testing and trying and implementing and projects. You could be doing but it’s constantly the decision and it’s ultimately up to the leader to lead the team in a way of like I think these things if we can focus on these few things are going to move the needle the most. And so focusing on what you know, even if you don’t have the data like let’s say you don’t have the data but you’re like okay you know I can either create a downsell I can do a big live launch and I have a warm audience or I can launch this new funnel and start getting consistent leads because I’m not currently doing that like which one of those. Is going to move the needle the most? Let’s pick one of them and let’s go all in on it and let’s make that create success for us right? so.

Overall I think that good company margins and profit is really important. It’s always important, but it’s especially important right now with where the economy is and just trying to have a good cushion of cash if you can and. You know, not not investing in things that are a huge gamble but still yet walking the line of investing in your business and not having a scarcity mindset like I said business is a constant game of kind of like that push and pull you go through growth where you have higher expenses you pull that back you cut some expenses you go through growth. We’re probably going to go into soon, a growing phase, because we’re having such consecutive great months of sales that we need to grow our team now and we need to probably invest in some more support and have the money to now invest in maybe the podcast marketing if we decide right? And so. Just important that each season is followed by a season that contrasts that one and wherever you are in business right? now is unique to me so some of these strategies might be relevant to you now. 1 of them might be relevant to you now or they might be relevant in a month from now or three months from now and you know overall though with every business improving your profit making sure your business is profitable during this time is about investing in growth not having a scarcity mindset and ultimately being intentional.

I think that’s such a great word to describe what I did last month is like every decision was intentional and so when my team came to me and said hey let’s should we invest in this podcast marketing right? I could have easily said yes to that. But I sat with it for it only took me 5 minutes but I sat with it and I was like. Now this actually doesn’t feel right to me like I’ve got the event. We’ve got this challenge. We’re doing. We’re gonna hold and it’s not a never. It’s just a not right now I don’t think it’s the most important and then I think that is the job of a Ceo that is the job of a leader. Is to make sure that the moves happening in the business are intentional and that you’re aware of those different areas and corners of the business that maybe haven’t been looked at in a while and I think for me, that’s another thing that I did is I looked at those areas and I brought more intention. Back to those areas that had lost the intention and had become status quo and the numbers speak for themselves. We doubled our margins from one month to the next and how to hire sales Month. So our net profit was really good, the best it’s been in probably a year of net profit and this month is trending in the same direction. So that’s kind of where my mindset is as a Ceo and where I think a lot of people will get some benefit from so all right, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in and I will talk with you guys on thursday.