EP # 190 - Mastering Business Consistency: From Side Hustle to Successful Enterprise

In this episode, Maggie reveals why consistency is the foundational skill every entrepreneur needs to master first, even before marketing and sales. She shares how strategic consistency can transform your business results and explains why simply being "consistent" isn't enough.

Key Highlights:
• Why consistency must come before mastering marketing and sales
• The difference between basic consistency and strategic consistency
• How consistency creates valuable data for business decisions
• Real client success stories showcasing the power of strategic consistency

💡 The Four Pillars of Strategic Consistency:

1. Building a consistent self-identity
2. Developing sound business strategies
3. Creating high-performance habits
4. Implementing weekly accountability systems

🔍 Client Case Studies:

• Stephanie's journey with marketing funnels
• Jennifer's success story with strategic partnerships

📌 Key Takeaway: Consistency is a skill that requires time to master, but it's essential for achieving consistent income and sustainable business growth.

Ready to develop your strategic consistency and transform your business? Book a consultation with Maggie to discuss how she can support your journey.

https://stairwaytoleadership.com

Next milestone: Stay tuned for Episode 200 - something special is coming! 🎉

Transcript

Consistency

Audio Only - All Participants: [00:00:00] Welcome to the next episode of Diamond Effect Podcast and it's in episode 190. I can't believe we're 10 episodes away from 200. I need to do something special for the 200th episode. I'll think about it and I'll let you know. 

Today I want to talk about something that's been on my mind and I've been thinking about a lot and namely consistency because As I'm launching my foundational group offer, Diamond Effect group for entrepreneurs who are just starting or have a side hustle and they're working towards gaining that momentum, gaining some consistent income, making their business real and professional. I was thinking about what are the skill sets that every starting entrepreneur needs to acquire and at first I've always been thinking like a marketing and sales is critical.

If you don't know how to attract your ideal clients and then how to convert them into paying clients, [00:01:00] you will have a hard time growing and scaling in business. You'll be very dependent on the economy. So having marketing and sales skills is key.

However, there is one skill that you need to develop and master, before in order to be then able to master marketing and sales. That skill is consistency. And that's why today's episode will be focused on it. How through consistency, you can master marketing and sales and any other skill you'll ever need as an entrepreneur. I definitely am a very consistent person. If you talk to anybody around me, whether it's my clients or people who follow me, my family, anybody, if I am one thing. I'm definitely consistent. So I have this identity of a consistent person. I always have an identity of a leader where [00:02:00] if I decide to do something and I commit to myself, not even to other people. 

When I decide something for me, I will follow through with that decision. I will get it done and I will do it consistently until I get it done. That's how I have been achieving my goals. I've been very consistent in pursuing things and learning the skills that I need in order to achieve whatever goal I set for myself.

But what I've noticed In entrepreneurship, when I entered that world, it's just having the identity of a consistent person is only a start, it's only a foundation, and it's not enough to keep being consistent and keep doing things you need to do, just because entrepreneurial journey is very rocky. The rollercoaster of emotions is real, the failures that you need to go through.

So even with an [00:03:00] identity of consistent person, if you don't have other things in place, it's very hard to be consistent. So in a sense to be successful in business, you need to take a consistency to the whole new level. So now I want to address why consistency comes first and why it's almost impossible to, master marketing and sales without consistency, because what consistency does, it creates data. It gives you enough information to then look back and see what is working, what is not working, how can you improve it, what do you need to do to improve it. 

Let's say if it's marketing and let's say you're going on and you build your presence on social media. If you only Post anything once a week for three [00:04:00] months, and then you don't do anything for a couple months, and then you go back for once a week.

Meaning you're not really consistent, you don't even have enough data to then understand what are the things that are working in my marketing, What are the things that are not resonating with my audience and what can I do to improve it?

Because what can I do to improve it? It's a theory that you're basing on that data, right? So first you have to be consistent with your approach. You need to grow your presence from maybe once a week to two times a week, three times a week, five times a week, and do it long enough to then look, let's say every quarter to see, oh, okay, these type of posts or captions work, these type of approaches work, so let me get better at that, let me do more of it.

Or this didn't really resonate. Why is that? Pose a theory, fix it, and try again. It's the [00:05:00] same with sales. If you're having sales conversations with the clients, if you're having one every three or four months because your marketing is not consistent and you're not getting any, and let's say a client doesn't buy. Then it's hard to just look back and say okay, was it because it was the wrong person and they weren't my ideal client?

Was it of something that I said during my sales call? What can I improve? It's hard to identify what you can improve if you're not doing something consistently enough. Another way I look at it is when I see many entrepreneurs, they might be consistent, but not for long enough, and therefore they're losing opportunities to master those other skill sets.

For example, let's say they go and they're very consistent for three months, posting even every day on one platform, and then they don't get results that I want, and then they blame the platform. [00:06:00] They move away from that platform and go to something else. And they're taking the same approach that hasn't worked on one platform on another one.

And then they're expecting different results, which is not happening. And then again, they're not consistent enough to figure out how to approach that new platform to get the results that they want. And then they're just keep switching and switching, right? 

So consistency is critical in staying with the strategies that you chose, as long as they're thought through, they make sense for your business, they make sense for your ideal client, because that will lead you to then figuring out a way to make it work.

That will lead you to understanding the marketing, understanding the behavior of your clients, to then see what you need to do in order to convert them to paying clients. So as an entrepreneur, [00:07:00] what you need is more than just having an identity of a consistent person, you need to develop what I call Strategic Consistency. 

Consistency that allows you to Master other skill sets and where you do money making activities long enough. And when you are able to look back and tweak things until they work for you.

I'll give you two examples. One of my clients, Stephanie, was learning how to create funnels and ads and emails. And she purchased a course where through that course, she set up some funnels, created some emails and so on.

And she ran those for a certain time, but then even though she was consistent, but because they weren't working for her, she stopped rather than going back and thinking okay, what do I need to, how do I figure it out? [00:08:00] Because she didn't feel she had the support, she could figure it out. But then when we started working together, we went back to what she was doing.

And even though, it was consistent, she wasn't really mastering the skill set. So after that, we went back we tweak those emails, we tweak the things, and then they started working. So then now, She's consistently sending the emails, and they're working, but what she needed to do is look back and understand why they weren't working, and of course, having some help to understand that why, so that's what I call Strategic Consistency.

You're consistent, but not only doing the same thing, expecting different results. But if you're not getting the results you want, then you're looking back and identifying, okay, what do I need to tweak? Or what do I need to learn in order to tweak it to get there? It's the same with my client, Jennifer, who was working at [00:09:00] first on her own to develop strategic partnership relationships with professionals who could potentially be referral partners for herself. At first, even though she was somewhat consistent trying to do it, it didn't work and she stopped. She just was consistent at the basic level, but not strategically consistent.

She didn't look, she allowed her brain to tell her it doesn't work for her, even though the strategy she picked was right and it was working maybe for. other professionals in her industry, she made herself believe that, it's not working for me. However, when we started working together and we started approaching it from that strategic perspective, that consistency in building those relationships, paid off hugely.

After a year of building the relationship, expanding her network, majority of her leads now, right now, are actually coming from the strategic partner. [00:10:00] And not only leads, but clients, because she's being introduced by people. who are already gained trust of their clients or people that they know and now she's, being warmly introduced to her potential clients and closing majority of them. 

Now you might be thinking, okay, Maggie, that sounds great, but How do I do it, right? How do I build that strategic consistency? of course, the first part is that identity. Building your self identity as somebody who is consistent already or could be consistent if you decide to do it, right? If your business is important for you or enough.

If your business is important for you and you decide to do something and you believe that whatever strategy you're picking is good, you can be consistent. So that's first and the foundation. 

Now the second thing [00:11:00] that helps with that consistency is strategy. Actually making decisions of what actions you're going to take in your business to grow your clientele, to increase your income, to scale that it's based on some sound foundation. And understanding your market, understanding your clients, understanding where you are in your business. And also what's important to you to then strategically pick tactics and actions that you're going to take because that helps you believe that at the end of your actions, there will be results that you want.

As long as you're consistent and as long as you're mastering other skill sets that go behind it. The third part to it, especially in entrepreneurship, is making the consistency easy through building some high performance habits. Because [00:12:00] again, sometimes doing things that we're learning or we're in the messy middle of learning and we're not getting the results we want can feel hard.

And trying to just willpower yourself and always feel motivated to do them it's impossible. So how do you make sure that you take those actions, you do them, even if you don't feel like you're on top of the world that day, or you don't feel super motivated, and yet you still need to do them.

That's what consistency is all about. So what helps me and my clients is building habits and systems in your business that Make it easy to implement the strategies you choose that make it Inhabitable for you to do that and that's through weekly planning, maybe automating certain things It's deciding to do the hardest things In the morning, and there's [00:13:00] other little hacks and tweaks that when I work with my clients are always customize it to them and where they're struggling with, where we build habit and systems that just make that consistency inevitable for them.

And then last but not least is when you are in the progress of building it, having weekly coaching is very powerful. Because what my clients tell me and what I see is every skill set, When you're at the building stages of that skill set, when you're in the beginning of building your consistency in making money, making activities, something you just do every day, no matter how you feel in your business, it requires more intention.

And for example, it's easy to sometimes fall off. So you do something consistently for four or five days and then you hit a roadblock or a [00:14:00] challenge or just like you're tired and your mind starts going down, down, down on that emotional rollercoaster and then you stop doing it. If you don't have a weekly check in with somebody like me, like a coach, then it's easy to just go weeks on end and not do the things you initially decided to do.

So when I meet with my clients weekly, if I see they're slipping off, I push them on it, whether it's a mindset thing, whether it's something that they forgot. Of course, weekly check ins or weekly coaching calls also create that accountability.

So I decide for me, what I'm doing, but if I decide that in front of a group that I'm in the mastermind with, or that I tell my coach that also creates accountability now, I promise somebody else that I will do it. And we're more likely to keep the promises we [00:15:00] do to other people. And the last part of the weekly checking is that as you implement the strategies you decided you will encounter challenges.

And it's so much easier to overcome them and figure out a solution to those challenges where you have a coach in your corner who is looking at them from a different perspective, who has different experience, who has expertise in some of those things, right? So it's also more motivating to stay consistent when you overcome challenges very quickly and you're not stuck trying to figure them alone for weeks on end. And just know that consistency like any other skill set requires time to master and develop. Nobody becomes an NBA player in a week or in a month. 

The same way you don't master being super consistent where you don't need anybody's support anymore in a week. That's why, for example, [00:16:00] with my Diamond Effect group for beginning business owners and side hustlers who want to have a professional business and that coaching program when they join is a year long because in there we ensure that not only they get consistent income and clients, but we also want to make sure that they develop the habit of that consistency. Because once you know it, you will always be able to apply it to any other area of your business in your life. 

Even when I coach clients one on one, I work with them in six months increments to ensure that they don't only start certain things, but they master whatever we're working on in order for them to be able to continue the growth of their business.

Even after we don't coach together anymore. Just think about it in order to grow your business [00:17:00] consistently in order to get consistently common clients and consistent income. You need to be consistent first, and that's why consistency is the top first skill set you will need to develop in entrepreneurship. So if you're seeing yourself not being consistent with whatever actions you're taking in your business, focus on growing that skillset first. And if you need help, book a consultation with me. I'm happy to talk about it and see how I can support you in growing your business. Have a fantastic week.