EP # 215 - From Random Luck to Predictable Success. Mastering Your Business Patterns

Do you often find yourself wondering, "I have no idea how this client found me" or repeating the same mistakes (ex., accepting clients that are cheap super hard to work with)? 

In today's episode, Maggie reveals why successful service business owners think like scientists—and how mastering the art of looking back can transform your random wins into predictable, scalable success.

Discover the critical CEO skill that separates thriving businesses from those stuck in cycles of feast or famine, and learn exactly how to become a student of your own business patterns.

What You'll Learn

✨ Why "I don't know how that happened" is sabotaging your growth and keeping you stuck in random results

✨ The simple habit that transforms struggling service businesses into predictable success machines

✨ How to track back every client win to understand what's actually working in your business

✨ The difference between short-term and long-term business reviews (and why you need both)

✨ Real client examples of discovering hidden patterns that led to breakthrough growth

✨ The basketball analogy that explains why business gets easier as you develop these skills

Key Insights

🎯 "The thing about business is that it's simple. A lot of common sense, a bit of math... if you allow yourself to develop basic business skills, it's very easy to understand business."

🎯 When you attribute good things to luck and bad things to outside forces, you become helpless

🎯 Looking back gives you the confidence to know you're in charge of creating results as CEO

🎯 Every sales conversation, project, and client interaction is data you can learn from

What to Review in Your Business

Short-Term Reviews:

• Every sales conversation (win or loss)
• Individual projects and deliverables
• Client complaints and feedback
• Monthly marketing performance
• Social media engagement patterns

Long-Term Reviews:

• Quarterly business performance
• Annual financial and operational analysis
• Year-over-year comparisons
• Seasonal patterns and trends
• Outlier events (both positive and negative)

Your Challenge

Take Action Today: Choose ONE recent business event (a new client, lost sale, completed project, or client interaction) and spend 10 minutes analyzing:

• What worked well that you can repeat?
• What could be improved for next time?
• What patterns do you notice?

Share your insights—Maggie reads every response!

Tools Mentioned

📊 DREAM-PLAN-DO Journal: Includes monthly evaluation section for ongoing business review 

🎯 Strategic Planning Events: Annual business reviews to identify patterns and plan growth

Connect with Maggie

🌐 Website: https://stairwaytoleadership.com

📱 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-perotin-business-and-leadership-coach/

📱 Instagram: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-perotin-business-and-leadership-coach/

About the Diamond Effect Podcast
Join business and leadership coach Maggie Perotin every Monday for "Maggie's Moment" (quick actionable insights) and Fridays for strategic deep-dives. Transform your service business into a sellable asset while creating the life and impact you truly want.

New episodes drop every Monday and Friday wherever you listen to po

Transcript

EP 215 - Power of looking back

Audio Only - All Participants: [00:00:00] Recently I was asked by a colleague saying, Hey Maggie, do you ever get clients that you need to fire because they're hard to work with, or they don't listen to what you tell them?

They don't respect you. And I thought about it and told them. Not really. I did have one client in the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey that probably wasn't a great match. They had a very victim mentality. Everything is happening to them. They would not implement anything that I suggested coming up with the excuses, and therefore I couldn't help them.

But I learned from that and since then I never had that issue. And what I find is that as my business progresses, I attract more and more of my ideal dream. Clients, people who are mission driven, very ambitious, [00:01:00] but also open, willing to learn, willing to apply, try, take actions, and what I realized is because I've learned from that one instance, and I never wanted to repeat that again.

There is big power in looking back at your business on a regular basis and learning and being a scientist and a student of your business where you really understand what's going on at the micro level and the macro level, so then you can improve without repeating same mistakes, without doing the things that are half working, but not fully working over and over because you are not realizing how you're creating them or how to avoid those situations

today's Diamond Effect Podcast, episode 215. The [00:02:00] idea came from a number of conversations that I've had with my clients and that calling were I help them learn from the business. That's very often something that I do, that I teach my clients how to be the scientist for of their business, how to be students of their business, and learn from every opportunity so they can just keep getting better.

So here is what happens when you don't develop that skillset of looking back and learning from what's happening in your business. First of all, you will repeat the same mistakes over and over. Unfortunately, that colleague shared with me that quite often they deal with clients who are not really ideal, where it's difficult to work with them.

They're not always, valuing their expertise or push back, and then it's hard to deliver risk. Results in the area that they help their clients with. Because of that, [00:03:00] you also deprive yourself of agency and confidence that you are in charge of creating the results for your business as the CEO when you attribute.

Good things happening to lack and you're like, I don't know where those things came from, and let's say unfortunate things happening. Attri, you attribute the unfortunate things happening to, in your business, to the economy and outside forces. You become helpless. You deprive yourself from agency of knowing how to create wins and successes in your business, and also the ability to figure out solutions to your challenges.

So just this week, I help my clients realize how they. Landed their most recent clients. Whenever my clients tell me, I don't know how this client came to me, it's [00:04:00] out of nowhere, out of blue. I never let them believe that. We always look back and track back. How did that client find you? So for one of my clients, their most recent project.

Came through Google and my client was saying but I don't know. There's so many other business owners who do what I do in this area. Why did they choose me? I have no idea. But when we looked at the situation and at the particular project that my client landed was exactly what they specialize in. Those were exactly the testimonials that they have on their website. Those were exactly the alignment with values that they portray on their website was there, and that's why this particular code lead came directly to them and booked with no issues. But in this case, if my client just allowed themselves [00:05:00] to believe, oh, it came out of nowhere, I don't know how they would've never learned that.

Whereas looking back and trying to understand affirms that what they do in their marketing works and that gives them confidence in continuing that route and scaling from there.

And another thing that happens when you don't pause and learn and look back from your business is that you miss to see certain patterns. You miss to see opportunity for improvements. You miss. To notice what can be better, what is already working, how the clients are behaving, or things that are stopping to work.

And you realize that much, much later if ever. And with that, you might have lost money or time or opportunities to go after.

The thing about business [00:06:00] is that it's simple. A lot of common sense, a bit of math, like understanding your numbers from financials to some KPIs in your marketing and sales and so on. But ultimately, if you allow yourself to develop. Basic business skills and utilize common sense with it.

It's very easy to understand business. Then of course, the better you understand your business, the more skilled you are as a CEO, the faster you grow and it, the easier it is to grow. Just really think about it as a sport, right? When you are starting with a sport, let's say basketball, when you're a brand new beginner, everything seems hard.

You are not, maybe you don't have stamina. You are. Not very effective. Therefore, your scoring, your results are [00:07:00] not that great. But if you keep practicing basketball skills, also your understanding of the rules and the game, you get better and better. And then when you become, let's say, more advanced.

Not a pro yet, but amateur, then it's easier to score. You'll get more stamina. It's just easier to get results. And then you move to the ginning level or pro elite level. It's all in the skillset. Business is exactly the same way.

So learning to look back is a critical skillset in the game of the business, right? Understanding how your business operate, what is working, what is not. Is key. So what are the types of, looking back, you wanna look back short term and also longer term because short term, looking back, give you instant [00:08:00] inside.

The more the micro learnings that you can quickly fix or quickly new things that you can apply that give you. Immediate results. Looking back on a little bit longer term scale allows you to see the patterns, gives you a different insight, like a zooming out bird level view that allows you to see things that it's very hard to see when you're looking at an individual event.

All of it makes you more money, makes it easier to run the business, allows you to see great opportunities for improvement, for scaling, for, client retention, all those things. So what are some short term things or some immediate things you can start looking back at and learning?

For example, every sales conversation. So depending on your process and how you sign clients, every time you [00:09:00] had a lead and that lead resulted in a sale or it hasn't, you can look back at it and say, okay, what worked so well that. I landed a sale, or maybe I did land a sale, but it was an arduous process.

What was it that I could improve next time? So the process is more smooth. If I haven't landed the sale, what could I have done differently to. Landed, right? Or how can I improve my process for the next time? Every new project. So if you're in a business where you work on a project base, it's very powerful to evaluate individual projects.

So for example, if you're a contractor, so every major renovation. You might wanna look back at it. What went well? How can we repeat that and scale what didn't go well? How we can prevent that from happening again with a different client. [00:10:00] Definitely if you experience client complaints, looking at everyone, not only to respond to the client deal with, but also to improve your business.

To improve your service delivery and eliminate this type of complaint. Other things you can look at is your marketing campaigns or even. Not only individual campaigns, but your day-to-day marketing. You can look at your, let's say, social media marketing once a month, once a quarter, to understand what was working, what can be improved, right?

Look at your KPIs. Look how you can grow your social media presence. Convert more followers into paying clients. All those individual smaller things that you can start looking back at to learn and get better results. In terms of looking back at a longer [00:11:00] term, this is more in depth at a higher level, and those are your quarterly or annual business reviews.

And once a quarter and once a year, you look back. It's your finances, it's your marketing service, delivery. And look more for patterns and how your business did, rather than those more minutia, individual occurrences. It's also good that once you have data year over year, occasionally looking back at that, this is how you may understand seasonality in your business.

Or you can understand certain odds that maybe were different than the norm. If there is a norm in business because of certain events, or you can identify outliers that help to have a record year of income or have, unfortunately. [00:12:00] Major income lower that particular area or that particular quarter, right?

So you can identify those outlying events.

Zooming out is very valuable and pairing that with. Learning from individual events, you truly become expert in your business, expert in understanding your clients and knowing your offers, knowing your value, and that allows you to grow much faster.

So I teach my clients this skillset when we have our coaching relationship, and it happens naturally in multiple ways. During our relationship together it happens during coaching sessions. So whenever there is an event that happens that my clients tell me about, and I see it's worthy of pausing and learning from, I prompt them to do that.

And the more I prompt them, the more of a habit and the [00:13:00] skillset they develop to also do that for themselves in my dream plan, do journal. There is a section at the end to do monthly evaluation that I teach my clients to do. It's very simple, just a few questions to do. So when they do that for six months straight or a year or more, they develop a habit and a skill set in doing that.

And then occasionally we do quarterly. Reviews, but definitely once a year I run a strategic planning event, and part of that event is a quarterly review. It's an annual review of their business.

So I have a challenge for you to do. Today is to think about one thing that you are gonna pause and look back at in your business and review and learn from, whether it's a project you recently delivered, whether it's a challenging client you had to deal with, or a sales [00:14:00] process or conversation that didn't go the way you wanted to. Pause

and review it and learn from it, and I would love to know what's, what are some aha moments and learning you'll get from it. I hope this was helpful, quick but powerful Diamond Fact episode 215.

Have a fantastic week. Bye.