The Essential First Step Most Business Owners Skip

You're listening to Build a Business You Love, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping expert entrepreneurs just like you, coaches, consultants, and advisors, build a business that not only earns you a great income, but a business that you can enjoy building along the way. A business that is aligned with who you are and how you want to show up in this world and serve the people who you're meant to help. There are a lot of gurus out there telling you that you need the latest and greatest. But what if business could be simple? Each week I'll bring you an episode with ideas that you can try on.

And if you like them, you can implement them at no cost. Because I believe that when you build a business that is aligned to your values and your vision, you become unstoppable. Now let's get started with today's episode. Welcome back to Build a Business You Love. I'm your host, Ashley Frank, and today I want to talk about the connection between construction and building a business.

You see, there's a lot of construction happening in my city right now. In particular, there are a lot of high-rise residential buildings going up. And as I walk past these sites on a daily basis, it struck me that these buildings are not going up very fast. Yes, there's a giant hole in the ground, there's some excavators, some cranes, some concrete forms, some survey markers in the ground. And all you see is workers measuring things over and over again and leveling things off.

And if you didn't know what was happening, you might just think, are they actually building something or are they just playing in the ground? For some reason, the sites have been in this massive hole stage for months with little to no progress above ground. There's no walls, no windows, no roofs, no signs of building materials. Nothing looks like progress, just a big old hole in the ground. But anyone who understands construction knows that the foundation, that hole in the ground, is actually critical and one of the most important parts of what happens with construction.

Because eventually everything goes on top of that foundation. All of the floors, all of the apartments, all of the amenities are built over top of that foundation. And that foundation is a giant empty hole in the ground right now. When the walls start going up, the floors get installed, the glass goes in, people start admiring what they can see. And they go, Oh my gosh, there's progress.

We're seeing the building, we're seeing things go up. And the finished product is what they're waiting for, those move-in ready units. But every element of that building depends on what's happening below the surface, that foundational layer. If the foundation is weak, the building is compromised, right? And that compromising might not happen immediately.

The building may go up and it may look perfect, but eventually cracks start showing up, structural integrity is not there, and things get you know more complex without the strong foundation. If the foundation shifts, it could actually compromise the entire building and make it that people can't live in it at all because it's no longer safe. And the more I thought about the holes in the ground and the time it takes to get the foundation ready for building these great big buildings, the more I realized business works in the exact same way. And the challenge is most of us who are building businesses, we don't want the boring foundation. We want what we can see above the ground.

We want that completed building, we want that completed business, we want the vision to be visible. We want the website, we want the perfect logo, we want the branding, we want the social media, we want the podcast, we want to use AI to run the business, we want to get ads, but we don't want to take the time to step back and build the foundation. We want to get to the point right away where people say, wow, that's impressive, or look at my cool business, right? But over time, if we don't have a strong foundation in our business, all of those things that we want to build, they won't stand up. They won't last because the foundation, in my experience, is the critical element to a sustainable business that you love and that can grow over time.

And most of us, I've been guilty of this myself. We try to skip that foundational part because the foundation often is the boring part. It's not the part that is out there, you know, showing people what we're doing. It's not the part where we feel the most busy sometimes, but it is the most critical part of building a business that's going to sustain. And if you don't have that strong foundation, yes, you can likely build the business, but as it grows, you're gonna notice that things start to fall apart.

You're gonna start to have cracks. And when those cracks happen, you have two choices. One is to try to patch the foundation while you still try to grow your business. The other is that you reset and you rebuild the foundation and then build the business on top of a strong, strong foundation. You see, the foundation is the problem.

And I said I've been guilty of this as well. Over the years, I have chased strategies and tactics. You know, building a website is way more fun than trying to figure out my customer journey, going out and getting new certifications, great big marketing ideas, new tools, funnels, AI, software, you name it, they are all things that need to be built on top of the strong foundation. Because when the foundation part feels slow, it's easy to assume that the answer that you need is working on a tactic. But that's not the case because any tactic or strategy that you're using, if it's not built on top of that strong foundation, it becomes a shiny object.

And you'll look at other people's finished product and you'll go, Wow, I want that. And you'll start working toward what you see on the surface, that finished building or that finished business, not realizing that underneath those successful businesses is the foundational layer. And that foundational layer took some trial and error. It took time, and it took some patience as they built that as well. And building the foundation is also very strategic, right?

It's not just something that you throw together overnight. There's foundational elements, and that foundation actually evolves as the business evolves. That's why it's so important to make sure that you have a strong starting point. And as business owners, we don't believe that we have a foundation problem. We'll say things like, you know, I just need more leads, or I just need the right logo and people will find me, or I'm in the process of building my AI system so that when the customers come in, I'm ready.

And I hear these things on a daily basis. If you are a business owner and you do not have the foundation where customers are coming in and you know how people come into your business and you know how they work through your sales and onboarding process, spending a whole bunch of time building AI systems and building automations and you know, trying to find the next latest and greatest thing is not going to help you grow the business. I'll often ask people a question. And the question goes like this right now, how are the sales in your business? And most of the time, I get the awkward pause.

And they'll go, Oh, you know what? Like sales aren't great right now, but I need to make sure that I have all of the systems in place so that when the customers start coming in, I know that I can handle them. But you really can't test the system that you're building until you have those foundational elements of people being able to find you, leads coming in, turning those leads into happy customers, all of those kinds of things. And the reason why people often don't have the sales coming in that they need to grow the business to a point where they're successful, quote unquote successful, it's usually not because they don't have a great logo or they don't have the best systems. It's because their offer isn't clear.

They're trying to sell a whole bunch of different things, which just which just confuses the heck out of the market. They don't really know who they serve. So they're selling something, there's a little bit of clarity around it, but they don't know that specific person that they solve the problem for. They don't have a consistent way of following up. Maybe they're managing their sales through their inbox and post-it notes.

I see it all the time. And maybe every sales conversation and every lead that comes into their business follows a different process. And that's exhausting and chaotic. And you're not going to build a foundation on a process that is different for every single person. Because as you scale, it's only going to get more complex.

And that's when those cracks start showing up. And maybe that they're just a little bit scared, they're confused. They don't have the roadmap. So they're focusing on the things that they can see on the surface, not the things that need to be built underneath. Because we can see all of the great things once the building's up, right?

We can see the windows, the balconies, the rooftop, all of the cool features that they put on. But oftentimes we don't see what's underground. And it's the same when we look at other people's businesses. We can see what's there on the surface, but we don't understand what's underneath that foundation, that underpinning that helps their business be successful. And if you don't have the foundation, more traffic, more leads, more sales will not fix it.

It's not going to make problems go away. And it's actually going to lead to bigger problems. It's going to expose those cracks even faster. And if you if your offer isn't clear, most people will just be confused, right? When they come into your sales process, it's confusing.

And then all of a sudden you're wondering, like, why is there a disconnect? This is what I do, but this is what they're saying they want. If your sales process isn't working, more sales and leads, they'll just completely slip through the cracks. You won't follow up, you'll miss opportunities, you won't be able to stage a pipeline, all of those kinds of things. And if the conversion mechanism in your business is broken, you're basically just pouring water into a bucket with a bunch of holes.

So if you're saying that you need more leads, but your bucket is leaking those leads, you're just wasting the time and money that it takes to get those leads into your business. And here's one question worth asking yourself. And this will start exposing whether or not you have cracks in your foundation or not. And I want you just to really get curious with this. Ask the question and sit on it for a moment.

Here's the question that I'll ask to my clients. If today I dropped a hundred qualified leads into your inbox, what would happen? That's a hundred qualified people who are ready to work with you. There's no questions asked, they're ready to work with you, they're ready to have that next step conversation, they're ready to go into your sales process. Some of them are maybe even ready just to sign the agreement.

Would you know what to do with them? Would you know what exactly you're offering them? Do you have a clear offer that you can speak to each and every person about, or is the offer different for every person? What problem are you solving? Is it the same general problem for every person, or is it going to be different for everybody?

Do you know the clear next steps when those leads come in? Do you have a way of handling and first of all qualifying those leads? And then do you have a way of the next step of presenting a working proposal? And then if some of those people say, Oh, I'm not quite ready yet, do you have a way of staging those people out in a pipeline? Or do you just forget them and move on?

Because leads can be expensive. You want to make sure that you have a very methodical way of handling these leads, bringing the people on board who are ready to work with you, and those people who are not quite ready, maybe staging them out a little bit. So you need a clear process for bringing them in. Do you understand their journey of buying? Do you understand how these people buy?

Because every industry and every customer makes buying decisions a little bit differently. So if you're selling in a way that doesn't align with their buying decision process, there's going to be a disconnect and you may lose a whole bunch of these hundred leads. And these hundred leads are valuable. You know, do you have a process for following up? And would you be able to convert any of these 100 qualified leads into clients?

That's the real question. Because if there's 100 qualified leads, these are people who put up their hand, have an interest in your business, maybe even book directly in your calendar as a qualified lead, there should be a high percentage of those closing, right? Anywhere between 10 to 20 to 30 percent. And I'm guessing most new business owners can't convert that high. They would think that success is bringing on two of those customers.

And maybe that's great for now, but you're wasting 98 leads if you're only bringing on two. So when you have a foundation, you can add as many qualified leads to the top of the funnel as you'd like, and you'll be assured that you're not wasting those leads, that it wasn't a wasted investment of time or money. A lot of people right now, if you got 100 leads today, it would probably be chaos. And you might be shaking your head while you're driving or listening to this, go, yeah, if 100 leads fell into my inbox today, it could be chaos. But you see, when you put a foundation into place, it no longer becomes chaos because you know the step by step of how to handle them.

And maybe the foundation is there, and maybe AI handles some of that upfront qualification and booking the people into your calendar, right? But if you don't understand foundationally how they flow through your business and all of the steps and the things that that person needs at that stage of their buying journey, you're not going to be able to serve them and you're going to burn yourself out because you're basically just going to be frantically trying to deal with all of these leads. And then when they do become customers, how the heck do you manage them on the back end? Because up until this point in time, you thought you build all the systems to handle them on the back end. But when things really heat up and you start getting hundreds of leads coming in, those systems may no longer be sufficient to serve the clients that you need.

So when we when I ask that question, it starts exposing the cracks. It starts exposing the cracks in your business. And you go, you know what? Maybe I don't have the foundation completely nailed. And if that's if that's you, it's okay because the foundation, you can go back and revisit that at any point in time.

Sometimes you don't have to rip apart the entire business. Sometimes it's some underground maintenance that you need to do. You need to repair a few cracks, you need to share up some points in the in the foundation to make sure that it's strong enough. When I look at the foundation of your business, I really think of four pieces to building the foundation, especially from a growth standpoint. This is really focused on getting people into your business who are qualified, who can pay you, and who you want to work with.

Because at the end of the day, if you're not working with people that you don't want to work with, you're probably not going to build that business that you love. When I look at businesses that are growing consistency, excuse me, when I look at businesses that are growing consistently, regardless of their industry, I usually see four things that are happening. Not 50 different things. There's four foundational elements that they have locked in. Their foundation is solid on these, and they build all of the other tactics and strategies on top of these four foundational pillars.

And believe it or not, it's not a complicated funnel. It's not the latest and greatest AI. It is back to the basics, foundational work that all businesses need, no matter the industry that you're in, in order to be successful. And this is particularly true for my expert entrepreneurs, your consultants, your advisors, your coaches who primarily listen to this podcast. So I'm going to walk you through the four foundational pieces that it's important that you have locked in before you try to scale your business.

Foundational piece number one, you need to have a clear offer and you need to know who you're serving. Because if you're out there saying, I work with everyone, you're going to attract everyone. And yes, you might be able to work with everybody, but if you could work with one type of person or one type of business or one type of client over and over every day and absolutely love doing it and crushing it for that client, who would they be? And what are you offering them? The first foundational piece is your offer.

And if you need a strong offer so that people can quickly understand who you are, who you help, the problem that you solve, what they get when they start working with you, and most importantly, why they should care. Because there are options out there in the market. People's attention span is shorter than ever. And they need to immediately understand why should I care? Why should I want to work with this person?

Now it sounds simple, and you probably go, well, I have an offer, but it's amazing how many business owners struggle here. Because what you end up doing is you're really good at what you do. You're really good at building websites, you're really great at accounting, you're really good at providing HR services, whatever it may be, but you can do a lot of other things. So, what is that one offer that you could do over and over on repeat to serve your clients, to make sure that you're providing the most value to them, but also so that you're able to scale the business without burning yourself out trying to do a hundred different things. And usually when I talk to people, if they do have an offer, it's not a core offer.

It's like, like, hey, this is what I'd like to be doing. But every time I talk to somebody, that offer changes. And when you have too many offers, all of a sudden you have five people with five different offers, that can become really overwhelming to manage as a small business owner or as a solo expert. So getting clear on the offer for who you saw or who you serve, what you solve, and the outcome that you create and why they should care is super important. And the offer all comes back to the messaging because at the end of the day, you don't build websites because the person on the other end usually doesn't care about the website.

They might be looking for awareness or leads. So are you is your offer speaking to the problem that your ideal customer is trying to solve? Or are you on more of that tactical level of I do websites or I provide training? Because nobody buys training just for the purpose of training. They're usually trying to solve a problem.

Simple offers, they work the best. You don't have to be a clever, it doesn't have to be named some fancy name. People like simplicity and they like to know that they're coming into something that they can understand. Think about your offer as you know, going into a restaurant. The first thing that you do at a restaurant, whether it's a fast food restaurant or a sit-down restaurant, is you look at the menu, right?

Your offer needs to be your menu, and it kind of needs to follow logical, follow a logical order. So here are the starters, here are the mains, here are the drink menus, and here's the dessert menu. In your business, having a menu that has some logic to it is important. So if you do have more than one offer, people need to understand that here are the appetizers, here's where people usually start. And then from there, here are the mains that people go into.

And from there, here's some of the drinks that people get to pair with the mains. And here's you know how people kind of finish off the dessert. It's really important to have a clear offer and a way for people to be able to see themselves in society. And I look forward to helping you build a that's the starting point before you can grow any business. So that's foundational pillar number one.

Pillar number two, once you have the offer in place, you need to get that offer in front of people. So this is traffic. This is all about how do I get people in front of my offer or my offer in front of people. People need to know you exist. Pretty simple, right?

Now you can build a website, but that doesn't mean that people are going to know that you exist. You need to get traffic to that website. And yeah, organic traffic happens, but it takes some work. Again, it comes back to some foundational elements. And in order for a business to grow, the business needs attention.

You need eyeballs on your business. You need eyeballs on you. And depending on how big you want to grow your business, you might only need 10 people to see it, right? And that could be success for you. And that's amazing.

But other people might need hundreds or thousands of people to see the business. And this is where so many people just kind of take the if I build it, they'll come, right? If I put the website out there, it will just attract the right people. It's kind of that field of dreams vision, but it's not necessarily that easy. You need to be strategic about how you're bringing traffic into the business.

And this is where people start getting overwhelmed and confused. I've been there. They start saying, should I be on Instagram? Should I start a podcast? Should I run ads?

Should I be on LinkedIn? Should I create YouTube videos? Should I be on billboards? The list goes on and on. And although those questions matter, they're actually not the most important questions.

Because the question that you need to say is, Where is my audience hanging out? How do these people find services and become aware that they even need my services? And if you can place yourself at the intersection of where these people are with the messaging that hits them at that right time, you will bring traffic to Your business, you'll engage traffic. Now, usually when we're starting out, traffic comes from referrals and from networking, partnerships, all of those kinds of things. And then as we evolve, we get into speaking and content creation and advertising.

If you're just starting, I highly recommend the route of networking, partnerships, and referrals because the people coming into your business, they're a little bit warmer. And the cool thing is, is that you get to experiment and learn with the messaging that attracts and resonates most with those people. Then you can use the messaging that you know works to build on the content and on the speaking and on the paid advertising and all of those kinds of things. If you have your messaging and your offer dialed in, you can then start putting some ads behind that. Because if the messaging and the offers dialed in, the ads will just amplify that.

But if the foundational elements of that offer and the messaging are broken or they have cracks, advertising is only going to expose those cracks even more. You're going to spend a lot of money on ads and get very little return. You might get leads, but they could be leads that are just tire kickers or clicked on your ad for the wrong reason. I'll actually give you an example. So last year I thought I'd be clever around October, around Halloween time.

And I did a video about getting ghosted. And it was a fun video. It was just a short little video about, hey, are you tired of getting ghosted? And I had a call to action. And I thought that message was going to hit.

I just was like, it's that time of year. People are going to understand this. I ran an ad campaign on that video and got a handful of leads because I just did it as a test. But every one of my leads was a female over the age of 55. And I couldn't understand what was going on.

And the video started off with basically like a Halloween scene. And it was just attracting the wrong audience. People literally were like, oh, it's Halloween season. I'm going to sign up. And I had leads coming in that had no relevance to the business.

That was a crack in my foundation. That was an oversight. I didn't test my messaging before I put it behind paid ads. Now, luckily, I just did it as a test campaign. I quickly stopped it and realized that, hey, it was a fun idea, but not for the audience that I go after.

So make sure that you're testing, make sure that the offer is strong and that the messaging works before you start building a bunch of systems. And it's no different that, you know, if you're going to start, you know, going out and doing speaking, you need to know that that message hits with the people that matter in the audience. So they'll put up their hand and want to work with you. So the offer and then having traffic because people need to find you. People need to see you in order to be able to work with you.

Once you have traffic coming into your business, the foundational element number three is lead generation, generating leads, right? So you have traffic, people are seeing you, the message hits with them, the offer is strong to get them into your world. Maybe it's a free download, maybe it's a free consultation, maybe it's the opportunity to join a webinar, all kinds of things that you can do as leads. I'll do another episode on that. Once you have the traffic, the leads is basically when somebody puts up their hand.

And this is somebody will fill out a form, will respond to an email, will download something off your website, they'll give you a call, they'll reach out to you directly. A lead is basically just somebody putting up their hand and saying, you know what? I've seen your stuff. I like what you're doing. I'm interested in learning more.

And that's all a lead is a name, an email address, and a phone number. The quality of the lead depends, right? Our leads can be really high quality, high-intent leads that are ready to make a decision, or it could be that early stage lead where somebody's like, you know what? I think I have a problem, and this person might be able to help me. So when leads come in, we need a system for qualifying and for nurturing leads.

That's for another episode altogether. But for today, once you have traffic, you need a way of getting leads. And leads are going to come from things like people being able to download a guide, download a webinar, join a free workshop, join a challenge. There's all kinds of things. One of my favorites recently is a scorecard.

Give them a scorecard for how their sales are doing in their business. It's something that you can exchange in value for a person's information, their name and their phone number. Now, these are all ways of generating leads online, but you can also generate leads in person, right? If you're out there at networking events, have a business card or have a way to collect other people's business cards. And your lead, your lead magnet, we call these, could be as simple as you know what, let's sit down and have a 30-minute coffee chat.

I'm not going to sell you during that time. I really want to learn about what you're up to. You're going to walk away with two to three things that you can put into your business today to help you. And then if it makes sense, we'll have a conversation about working together. So it's whatever fits your business and it's for whatever stage you're in.

Now, the one critical error that I see with people who are getting ready to build something for generating leads is they start to overcomplicate this. They build the guide, they build the webinar, they build the challenge, they build the free consultation, they build the scorecard. They are in the building mode for months. No, no. The way to do this is pick one thing and you're going to use that as your test.

And you're going to put it out there in the world and you're going to tweak the messaging around the offer that you put out for the lead. See, you could have the, you know, the worst guide ever, the most poorly designed guide ever. And people will still go, yeah, I want to download that. They're not downloading it because they see the guide, they're downloading it because the offer that you've created for the guide with the messaging creates the demand to download the guide. So you don't have to put months into the creation of all of these different assets.

Pick one and stick with it. And if you're in the personal networking mode, that lead magnet, that offer can be let's sit down and have a chat. Let's have a coffee chat. I'm not going to sell you on the coffee chat. It's an opportunity for us to learn about each other, exchange some value, and then make a decision on how we want to proceed.

Without the leads, you don't have a way to ever bridge into having conversations with your customers. And when leads come into your world, there's the opportunity for you to convert some of those leads into customers immediately if they're at that consideration or decision stage. But if they're at the awareness stage, that's your opportunity to really show them what you're made of, right? You can nurture them with content, you can invite them to webinars, you can invite them onto a coffee chat, you can have touch points with them, all kinds of things. But again, that's for another conversation.

Today we're just talking about the importance of these foundational elements. So now we have three elements in place. We have the offer with that messaging, we have the traffic source, we have the lead mechanism for getting the person to raise their hand and to get a name and a number. The last foundational piece that we need is the conversion mechanism. And this is critical, right?

You can have all of the leads coming in, but if you don't have a way of bringing them in as a paying customer, you don't have a business, you're just a good old volunteer in your business. The conversion mechanism is where the revenue happens. And this is the spot that I would say the majority of the people that I engage with get a little bit scared and they try to avoid because conversion involves selling, and selling can be scary, but don't worry, it shouldn't be scary. The type of people that I work with are people who are selling things in real time. So it's a consultative sell where they're actually on calls with people or they're carrying conversations with people to help them make decisions.

So the kinds of people that I work with, they have a more complex sales cycle. They're selling a service, they're selling something where there needs to be some kind of a human interaction. Because having that kind of a sale is not about selling, it's about showing up as a guide. And I often will talk about you're the guide in the process, not the salesperson. And the conversions that we talk about have a system.

So a lead comes in as an unqualified lead. It then goes into a qualification process, which we call discovery. Discovery asks a whole bunch of questions and listens for the feedback from the person and then digs deeper. And really, discovery is all about taking the person from where they are in their problem to a desired outcome that you're going to help them get to. And you are guiding them across the canyon.

You're building the bridge. Now, you're building the bridge with your offers, right? And this is where having clear offers is so important because you can confuse the heck out of your lead really quick if you have 10 different offers, because you start saying, Oh, here's your problem. Well, we can get you over here this way and this way and this way and this way. All of a sudden, you've built four different bridges across the problem gap.

The person's confused and they're like, you know what? I don't want to work with this person. So your process of conversion is getting them on a call, figuring out are they a real lead? It's qualifying them. After they're qualified, you're then going to start walking them through how you work together.

It's building that bridge from one side to the other. This is a stage what I typically will call a working proposal. It's not a demo, it's not a presentation. Nobody likes to be pitched to. A working proposal is a way of guiding somebody through how you work with them, work walking them through an offer while involving them in the conversation.

It's that guiding process. So instead of you talking at them for a half hour to an hour, you're guiding them through, hey, from our discovery, I understand this is where you are, and I understand this is where you be, want to be. Let me take you on a journey. And ultimately, that working proposal then turns into the person making a decision to work with you. Now, they may make a decision to work with you immediately.

Maybe it takes a little bit of time. So they might go into a making decision kind of stage. That's not when you just abandon them. You need ways of helping them make the decision. Maybe they're hung up on they need another person involved in the decision making.

Hey, if that's the case, can we get on another call? Maybe they're hung up on comparing you to the competitor. Well, there's ways that we can navigate that before we even get to it if we understand that there's competitors. And we typically uncover competitors during that qualification stage. And yeah, the conversion part, it does involve selling.

But sales is not about the talking fast and trying to convince you to buy. It's about understanding your problem and where you are and being the guide that gets you across the bridge to the other side of the outcome that you know you can help that client achieve. And this is where people will really get hung up. Sometimes they let the stage four or this foundation pillar number four get them hung up before they even build the other pillars because they're so overwhelmed by the thought of selling. But if you build your foundation in this way, starting with pillar number one, which is a clear offer and clear messaging that matters to your ideal customer.

Pillar number two is all about getting traffic. Where are people finding you? How are they finding you? Is it paid ads? Is it networking?

Is it posts on social media? What does that look like? Once you have traffic, you need a reason for a person to put up their hand and say, heck yeah, I like this. I want to learn more. They download something, they reach out to you, they fill out a form, they join a webinar, you have a coffee with them.

That is the lead mechanism where they put up their hand. And then finally, stage number four or the foundational pillar number four is all about the conversion. When somebody comes into your world with a raised hand, what happens next? How do you follow up with them? How what is that initial stage?

Are you trying to sell them a complex multi, you know, $1,000 solution on the first call? Or is that first call to get to know them, to qualify them, to make sure that you're a good fit for them and they're a good fit for you? And then setting up that next stage where you do a working proposal. Or right now, are you just sending the proposal over, hoping that they close? Because that's the other thing.

As the guide, you need to make sure that you are guiding them at every stage. The minute that you send something to them for review without guiding them, you're letting that opportunity to chance and for them to make a decision, and they're already overwhelmed and confused. And if somebody else steps in as that guide, all of a sudden you become irrelevant because somebody else is helping them make a decision. Your role in the entire process of client acquisition and sales is to help somebody make a decision to either work with you or not work with you. And there is a foundational process that we just covered here that is underneath every successful business when it comes to sales.

And having a foundation matters more than ever. Let's talk about the elephant that's in the room. AI. It is everywhere. And I love AI.

I use it on a daily basis. I use it for things like back-end processes, helping me organize notes from calls, helping me organize my ideas and my thoughts and my calendar. There's a lot of great benefits to AI. But AI is also really leveling out the playing field. So many people are going to AI and saying, hey, I, hey AI, help me find clients.

Build me a client acquisition strategy. And yeah, it's working in some cases, but it's not going to help you scale your business unless you have the foundation. Where AI becomes even more powerful is you know your offer and you know your messaging, you know your traffic sources, you know how you're going to get those leads in the door, and then you know how you're going to convert them. When you know those foundations, and that's something that you as a human are deeply involved with, you can then layer AI over top, then you become unstoppable. But if you're letting AI build all of this stuff for you, you're going to blend in with that sea of sameness that is out there.

And as I said, the playing field is leveling off right now. If you're not taking the time to build your foundation and investing the time in it instead of just letting AI do it for you, you're going to be hurting in another six to 12 months time because you're going to start to see cracks in that foundation that AI just missed. Because at the AI, at the end of the day, AI is only as good as what you feed it. And if you're feeding it or just letting it go out there and gather information on its own, it's not going to be able to do the work that needs to be done to build that solid foundation for your business. So really thinking about this, if you have a weak foundation, everything that you build on top of the foundation is at risk of getting cracks and crumbling.

And you are building a business because you want to have something that earns you really good income and it's a business that you love. And before you start to build all of the elements on top of the business, it's so important that you have the foundation. So let me leave you with this challenge. I want you to rate yourself on a scale of one to 10 in each of the four areas that we discussed today. Do you have a clear offer?

And with that clear offer, is the messaging super clear on who you serve, how you serve them, the problem that you solve, and why they should listen? If that messaging is not clear, that is a foundational element to take a little bit of time to refine. Think about it as the restaurant menu. Do you have a clear restaurant menu, or is it super overwhelming when somebody opens up your menu? Number two, do you have traffic?

Are you posting on social media and just getting crickets? Are you posting on social media because everybody tells you that you need to post in social media, yet you're not getting any leads? Because if you're not getting leads from the posting that you're doing, it's just to keep busy exercise. Maybe you're doing it just to prove that you're still out there and you're still alive as a business, but your content that you're posting should be generating you leads. So do you have a traffic source that's bringing qualified people to your stuff on a daily basis?

The third spot to rate is your lead generation. Do you have a way for people to put up their hand and enter your world? This could be as simple as a form, a newsletter form on your website, or you can get more advanced and you can have a free checklist download. We call them lead magnets. And the lead magnet needs to be good, but that messaging to get the person to your lead magnet needs to be even gooder.

So in your messaging and the you need to create an offer for the lead magnet to get people in, right? Because at the end of the day, people are skeptical, they're busy, and you need a way of getting them to go, huh, this is really interesting. I would like to learn more about that. And then the last part is that conversion process. When somebody does put up their hand and they come into the world, do you have a way of guiding them from where they are to where they want to be without you being overwhelmed and feeling salesy and without scaring them off with pressure and trying to convince them?

Because that last one, you can put in all of the upfront work around your offer, your traffic, your lead generation, and scare them off with the conversion process if it is not dialed in and there's not a strong foundation for how to do that. And all of these things they link together, right? They build on top of each other. So there's like a micro foundation going on here: your offer, your traffic, your lead generation, and your conversion process. And all of those areas can use improvement.

Even if you've been around for a while, all of those areas can use a revisit. So if you've rated those, which one has the lowest rating and where is your biggest bottleneck right now? Are you saying you need more leads? But the reality is, is the last 10 leads that you brought in, you only followed up with them once and never touched them again. Because maybe you don't need more leads.

Maybe you need a better conversion process. Because if a hundred leads came in today, could you actually handle those in your business? Because at the end of the day, growing a business is not about doing more. It's about doing more of the right things, but not just doing more to stay busy. It's about building a system, and that system needs to be built on a strong foundation.

And these four elements that we talked about today are the foundational elements of your business growth. Next time you drive by a construction site, I want you to pay attention. Maybe slow down, maybe walk by it and notice how much time is being spent on the foundation. Notice how deep the hole goes. Notice how little work is visible on the surface, and for how long it's just not visible on the surface.

You need that same kind of focus and attention and depth on the foundation of your business. And remember, it's the things that no one sees that matter most inside of your business. Your logo is great, but everybody has a logo. It's the work underneath, it's the offer, it's the messaging, it's all of that stuff that matters so much more. Clear offer, consistent traffic, ways to generate leads, and a way to convert them that feels natural to you and natural to the client.

Those are the four pieces of your foundation that are probably missing or a little bit sketchy at this point in time. And they're what will hold you back from the growth that you're looking for. So let's build those four things first. And then the rest of this will just start layering on top. If what I talked about today sounds interesting, head on over to my website at ashleyfrank.com and just hit on the join button, join the wait list because I have some cool things that are coming up, some free offers, some webinars that I'm going to be doing around building these foundational elements.

And whether you have some of these elements in place or you're like, you know what, all of this sounds really new and I need to revisit my strategy, you'll be in the right place. And with that, you're going to be able to start building these foundational elements because it doesn't come overnight. Because we usually focus on what we see on the surface and not what's happening underneath. These are not tactics, these are the things that are going to help you build a business that sustains. So head on over to the website ashleyfrank.com and I will see you back here again next week with some more advice on building a business you love.