Grow Your Business with Purpose – Tips from Lucy Horden

Welcome to the Bring Your Product Idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly, practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.

Hi. So today on the podcast, I'm speaking to Lucy Horden.

Lucy is a retail specialist who supports six and seven figure product business owners overcome, overwhelm and unlock the power of strategy and insight to grow with purpose and profit. So we spoke a lot today about growing your business, having a plan, knowing your numbers, which may not sound exciting. I hope it sounds exciting.

It was very exciting, but it's so useful and vital if you want to grow your business. Lucy gave us the really reassuring message that you don't have to want to grow your business.

You don't have to want to get to six figures or anywhere near that. And she spoke a lot about how your plans for your business need to align with your plans for your life.

So the two work really well together and, you know, in a more holistic way. I absolutely love this conversation with Lucy. I think that wherever you are in your business, there'll be something you can take from it.

And so I am now really pleased to introduce you to Lucy. So, hi, Lucy. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Well, you're so welcome. Can we please start with an introduction to who you are, your business, and what you do?

Yes, of course. So I'm Lucy Horden, retail and small business strategist.

I've worked in retail for 20 years, from brand growth and strategic partnerships, delivering sales growth and profit growth for big corporates, to four years ago when I pivoted to work for small creative product business owners.

And Now I support 6 and 7 figure product business owners overcome, overwhelm and unlock the power of strategy and insight to grow with purpose and profit.

Amazing. Thank you. And I have got so many questions to ask you around all of those topics, Lucy.

But let's start out with talking about goals, because I'm guessing goals is a really good place to start. Why is it important to have clear goals for your business and your life and how can they work together?

Yeah, absolutely. So when I work with small businesses, it's.

I mean, for any business, this is the kind of the foundation of business, knowing kind of where you want to get to and how you're going to get there. But obviously with small businesses, it's like so wrapped up in your life as well, isn't it? It's kind of, they're so intertwined.

So it's about getting really clear about what you're doing and why you're doing it, why it's important to you and also along with kind of what you want to do in your business and what you want to achieve, how do you want it to support your life? So by that I mean. You might.

Have certain income needs that you want to grow your business to a certain point to support your life financially.

So it's about understanding what kind of business you want to build to support, support that life financially, but also from a purpose and values point of view.

Thank you. That's really helpful. And I think you're right. For lots of us when we start out, it is just us, we are the business.

And it can get to a point where if you're not strategic about it, you can actually start to take over your life almost. And then you forget why you were doing it in the first place.

Yeah, no, exactly. And you can get so caught up in the day to day of business, can't you? And just kind of running on the treadmill of, of what you've got to do.

And it's so important to take that time to step away from the day to day and remind yourself why did you start your business? What is it you really want to achieve, what's important to you and kind of keeps you motivated and you want to deliver with your business alongside.

Actually, maybe you started your business because you wanted flexibility of being your own boss and being able to potentially pick up your kids from school. So making sure whatever your personal goals are, you're kind of building a business that can deliver.

Thank you. That makes a lot of sense because I think it absolutely does to look at them together.

Because otherwise you could end up in a situation where your business goals kind of are out of alignment with what you want in terms of family or whatever else it is that you do.

Yeah.

And it's so easy because I think especially because to be, to set up your own business, you have to be so ambitious so it can kind of your ambition can take over and which is which, if that's what you want is great. But if you're actually doing it, you're developing a business with a balance as well.

You need to kind of hold yourself account and hold yourself to your boundaries as well.

Yeah. Thank you for explaining that.

I really, when I saw that on your website, I really, really liked it and thought it was really important to start there, like the fact that your business and your life can work together.

So now let's talk about someone who's listening, who maybe is really early in their business or maybe not and is starting to think that, okay, you know, they're listening this far and going actually, do I have goals? Do I have a plan?

What, what are some signs that it's time to actually sit down and, and work on a strategy rather than just, you know, sometimes in the early days, I don't any disrespect. I know in the early days, my business, I was just winging it. I was just trying everything, seeing what worked.

How do you know when it's time to actually get strategic?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think first to your point, that kind of winging it phase, it's kind of like you said, you don't want to offend anyone by saying that.

But actually it's almost like such an important part of business when you're first starting because you're iterating, you're experimenting, you're testing and seeing what works and what sticks. So that is such an important part of business. And you know that that's working.

When your sales start to lift and then beyond that, when you are growing and you've got your kind of unique value proposal, competition and you know how you stand out in the market, hopefully you're growing yourselves, but you might reach a point where maybe your cells are stagnant and you can't go beyond a certain plateau. That might be a sign that you need some more strategy to understand how you can get to the next level.

Alternatively, kind of on the other end of the spectrum, your cells might be really erratic and feel completely out of control. Control.

And that might mean you're not being that strategic in terms of keeping that kind of more consistent sales level going that can support your life. And also, of course, that's all tied up with cash flow.

And if you've got that erratic sales cycle, it's really challenging from a cash flow perspective, which again, holds your business back, doesn't it, in terms of you can't grow if you haven't got the cash flow in place. And then along with that, there's the sheer overwhelm of growing your business, balancing so many things.

I mean, it's a huge role, isn't it, growing a product business? And I think it can be so overwhelming. And lots of. Well, most creative business owners don't struggle for ideas. I've got so many ideas.

But the overwhelm comes from like what to do next, what's going to have the biggest impact to reach my goals.

So having some structure and clarity and strategy around that can really help just get go from being a place of kind of unclear, not knowing, having lots of ideas but not knowing how to prioritize them, to knowing actually what are the fundamental steps in the order you need to take them to move you forward. And just one other point I'd say in terms of those signs is maybe your sales are growing, but potentially the profit isn't.

So if your sales are growing but the profit isn't coming through and you're having maybe again difficulties with cash flow because the profit isn't coming through, that's definitely a sign to definitely look into that and get some support.

Thank you, Lucy. That makes a lot of sense.

And actually one of the things you spoke about is something I hear from people quite a lot is the point of being super, super busy and sales really taking off and everything growing and that feeling of overwhelm, of, oh my gosh, my business is growing faster than I expected. Now what if you're in that situation, how do you know what to prioritize? Because as you said, we can't do it all. We often start out doing it all.

But there comes a point, doesn't there, where it's not sustainable or often it isn't sustainable. How do we know what to do, what to prioritize, what to let go of even?

Yeah, yeah. Well, obviously it's, it's unique. For every business, it's got to be. The plan is different, but there's certain things to look out for.

And I think one of them we touched on earlier on, in terms of getting that unique value proposition really nailed and leaning into what the customers love and testing in that area and just getting really clear there early on is so important. And in terms of what to.

So that's number one priority when growing product business, but in terms of what to lean into when you're growing, it's got to be your data. So you've got to use your data to understand, you know, it's going to inform your product strategy.

It's going to tell you what's working, what's not working as well, where to grow, where to reduce. And in line with that, it's so important to kind of look at those product, those performance trends.

It might also be customer trends and marketing trends, but looking at them over time. So you can see the trends that are occurring over time.

Because often I speak to business owners and they're like, oh, I look at my data, I know my performance, I know my best sellers.

But I ask them and they say they're checking their sales on a daily basis, which is great, but they aren't checking those long term trends and they aren't necessarily capturing those kind of more, those bigger, more strategic moves that kind of pack a punch in terms of growing business. So leaning into your data, you'll be able to lean into the products that are working and move away from the ones that aren't.

In terms of helping the overwhelm and also in terms of overwhelm and managing that and knowing what to prioritise, I think as you grow, obviously the likelihood is you're going to need some more support.

So support in terms of people support or you know, nowadays it's also AI, but also processes and frameworks to kind of organize you and bring more structure to the way you're working.

And that can sound a bit boring, but it's, it takes away the overwhelm and when you work with a very focused mind, you're able to move forward with more ease essentially.

But what I definitely recommend in terms of really nailing what you need is if you're feeling that overwhelmed, it's doing a time and tasks assessment. So looking at where are you spending your time, is there an element of business that is really sucking up a lot of your time?

For example, for lots of product business owners earlier on, it might be packing up orders. They're spending a lot of time doing that when they can't and then they can't do like product development or business development.

And so if they understand how much that is, they can look at how much would it cost to bring someone in to do that and can you budget that in? And that will be an opportunity to scale.

That's so helpful, thank you.

Coming back to the data, if you don't mind me asking us, Lucy, when we're looking at data for our product businesses, is it just sales we should be looking at or are there other indicators that will also help us work out what's going on and what's prioritised?

Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. There's different elements, aren't there? So I mean the first thing has got to be your sales.

But in terms of other kind of metrics that you'd look at within kind of the sales spectrum, if you like, would be things like your orders, your average order value, the number of quantity that you're selling, and then I'd always be.

And the reason is that's so Important, important is you could be having the same sales, or maybe your sales are growing, but your number of orders might not be growing. You might actually be getting that growth through an increase in average order value.

And if that's, if that's happening, you know, even another extreme is I've seen it happen where actually your sales continue to grow or stay fairly stable, but your orders are decreasing. And if your orders are decreasing, you look into that further because you say, well, why is that happening?

Maybe you're not bringing in new customers or maybe you're not bringing in return customers and you're not kind of filling your pipeline of customers for future growth. So you could well be in a position where actually sales are concealing a problem. So that's. You're absolutely right.

There's so many elements to data and kind of looking at, for a rounded point of view. And the areas that I focus on tend to be, you know, from a top line marketing point of view, I would be looking at customers and I would be.

Then it brings up questions as to whether your customer acquisition process is working and then questions with regard to, you know, ads or anything else like that.

But yeah, it's definitely your metrics in terms of your performance, your product performance, your categories and your sales channels to understand kind of where the sales community.

Perfect, thank you. That makes so much sense because I guess unless you've got a really clear picture of what's happening, you don't know where any potential issues are.

You don't know what you're doing well and therefore could do more of, I suppose about the data. You're blind. Almost. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So, Lucy, what would you say to anyone who's listening now and feels, you know, I should be getting a bit more strategic, I should be growing my business, but actually I'm a little bit nervous whether that's because of the work involved or will this compromise my values, will just take up more of my time, whatever it is. Because, you know, we all having most of us listening, you know, have our own businesses and we want to grow our businesses.

But then there's also that, I think it's. Is it called failure of success? It's something like that, isn't it?

There's a well known thing that actually people can be as scared of succeeding as they are. Yeah.

Fear of failing. That's. Oh yeah. I think what it really comes down to is kind of going back to the beginning again.

So it's about looking at why, you know, what it is you want for your business. So what is your vision.

And sometimes when looking at your vision and when I say your vision, I'm talking about the longer term plan for your business.

And this I think in line with what you're saying can be a really challenging area to look at because sometimes if you start thinking beyond two years in advance, it can be quite, oh, I don't know what's going to happen at that point in time. But if you can like unpick that as much as possible, you can get to a point where you understand better what it is you want from your business.

And in terms of, I think it's also important to bring in what your requirements are from the business.

So for example, you know, you've got a certain, if you've got certain income you need for your business to start support your life and your business isn't achieving that at this point in time. You know, I would encourage you to grow to a point where it's sustainable from a financial point of view to be able to cover that.

But then, or alternatively you might be in a different situation where actually you're comfortable, you're covering your costs and actually you've got a great work life balance and you don't want to grow. And I would argue that's absolutely fine as well. You know, it's about what's important to you and what drives you.

So, you know, some business owners can feel really motivated to kind of like hit certain revenue target and that, you know, gets them up in the morning, they want to do it. And others, it's more about, actually this is a, this is, this is business. It's a point in my life.

I'm really passionate about it, but I'm doing it for a bigger picture point of view and that's equally as important. But in terms of the role, your role changing, I think, or taking up more time, that also goes back to the scaling piece.

And you know, you can get support when you're at that point where you need extra support in your business to grow.

Thank you. And I really like what you said about how it's okay to not want to grow. You know, providing that your, your business is doing what you need it to do.

And I think that's really important for people to hear because not everyone wants to grow to a certain income goal or a certain size or, and some people do and that's brilliant. I think if you're someone who doesn't to want want that, you can always have a feeling of, oh, should I want that? Should I be doing that?

That's really hard. Yeah, it is really hard. And I think a lot of business owners, well, all of us, we're all can, you know, suffer from parasitis, can't we?

And you think, oh, we started around the same time. They're much bigger than me. Are they more successful?

And that can kind of influence your view as well when you're thinking about growth and it's, you know, we all just need to try our best not to be impacted by those thoughts because it's really important that you don't know what's happening behind the scenes.

It might be chaos, it might be really stressful, but irrespective of that, it's about what's important for you and what your personal circumstances are and goals for your business.

Thank you. I think that's really, I think that is really, really helpful because you're right.

Especially with social media, it can be so tempting to be think, I should be doing X, I should be selling in this place, or I should be launching this new range or whatever it is because someone else is doing it.

But coming back to what you said right at the beginning, I guess if you've got a really clear vision for what your business and your life looks like, hopefully that can take away some of that because you can say that's okay for them. Actually, that's not in my plan. That's not one of my goals. Yeah, 100%.

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. So let's say you want to grow your business, but you don't want to be totally overwhelmed.

Do you have any advice for someone who wants to grow their business but in a way that's sustainable, aligned with their vision, aligned with their life?

Yeah, yeah. So when I talk about kind of the way I work with clients to build a plan that feels aligned and not, not overwhelming.

So that's the primary purpose when you're building a separate strategic plan. It's a plan that reaches your goals and your targets.

So, and how I work with that with clients, when building a strategic plan, it's broken down essentially into three parts. So the first part is about getting clarity and that's kind of the foundation.

So that clarity is about clarity of where you are in your business today and where you want to get to clarity on your values, your purpose, your goals, and then your long term vision. So really stretching that to how far you can think in the future of where you want to get to clarity of your brand positioning.

So kind of how you stand out in the market and then an understanding of your top Line business performance. So that's where we start. And then the second phase is about getting direction.

So here we're looking at each of, kind of break it down to seven business areas. And in each of those seven business areas, we look at where you are in your business today, where you want to get to and how to get there.

So we literally talking through, right, what are all the things that need to happen to take you forward to reach your goals and move you forward towards your vision.

And then when we've got that kind of, we know all the priorities, we're looking at what needs to happen, what's really going to make the biggest difference and move you forward the fastest towards your vision. And then there's going to be some elements there that actually were like, that isn't as important, that's maybe a distraction.

These are the big things that are going to move you forward and they're elevated as important projects. And then the final stage is developing that strategic plan, which is really, it's about building a step by step process to reach your goals.

And it's knowing what you need to focus on when and not be kind of like overwhelmed by all those ideas because inevitably there's so many ideas to grow. But know specifically what you're going to focus on, when to reach your goals and kind of commit to. Right.

This is what I'm focusing on at this point in time and then methodically work through it.

So it's literally kind of taking away the overwhelm and making sure all those projects really align back to that first clarity piece of where they want to get to. And that's how we're avoiding, how we're moving away from the overwhelm. We're making sure it feels aligned and suits that specific business owner.

So it's very much about being grounded in what you're trying to achieve.

That makes so much sense. Thank you, Lacy. And I also think that makes it really doable as well. I'm a big, big fan of a plan. I love any checklist steps I can work.

Anything like that just makes it so much easier because once it's broken down like that, it is automatically less overwhelming because you're not doing this whole piece, you're doing this thing and then that thing and. And you're working through it.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

So one thing I loved that I saw on your website, Lucy, is you talked about growing a business with ease, which I think just sounds wonderful because isn't that what we all want? I just wondered what, what that does that mean to you? And how can we. What does that mean to you?

I guess is the first question, actually, and I'll ask my follow up one after.

Okay. So for me, that means building a brand with purpose.

So you're going forward with intention and you're designing a business intentionally to reach your goals and you're taking away friction wherever possible to bring in that ease. So that's fundamentally what it means.

Perfect, thank you. And so could that friction be things like not having enough time or not having the right expertise or not have enough money?

Is that like anything that makes running your business harder than it might be?

Absolutely, absolutely.

And like in terms of things like not having, you know, not enough money or cash flow and things like that, it would be down, you know, you'd get to a point where you'd realize that actually the way you're running the business at the moment, you're always going to be in that cycle. Unless in this example, unless the margins, for example, are reviewed.

So, you know, understanding the foundations, you know, in every specific example, it's, it's different, isn't it?

But if we use the example of not having enough money, maybe the business owner either doesn't drive enough sales or the margin isn't high enough to cover the expenses. And so it's about understanding, right? What levers do you have to be able to move forward with more ease.

So it might be a business owner needs to increase their margins, review their range and be able to increase their margins to build in that buffer and give it, you know, have more of a spacious business financially. That makes sense. It's about identifying the things that are causing friction and then thinking about how do we overcome that? Yeah, yeah.

I've never thought of doing it that way, but that makes so much sense.

And I think whatever type of business you run, I think that's something always of us can do, is look at what's causing me grief, stress, whatever it is, and then look at solutions for it. Yeah, absolutely.

That's so helpful. Thank you so much, Lucy, for everything you've shared with us so far.

It's been, it's been so useful and I think that it's given everyone some really practical things to go away and think about. I have a few questions before we finish, if that's okay. The first is what would you do if, you know, you're not sure where to find your data?

You don't know what you're looking at? Is that the point at which it's a good idea to get Some help?

Yeah, absolutely. You can, yeah, 100% get some help in terms of some pointers here to start looking at your data. So you look in your platform.

So I'm guessing probably a lot of the people listening have data insights in their platform. For example, lots of owners might use Shopify. There is quite extensive data available in the insights of the POS platforms.

And I think the challenge comes is understanding how to read that data.

So a lot of creative business owners don't necessarily love the data side and sometimes more it helps to have like visual elements that support the data that bring it to life, which is absolutely something people can help with. It's something I can help with. But I definitely say start off with what you've got and start off small.

Start off by just going in regularly and understanding what the key metrics are thinking for your business. What are the key metrics that you're going to focus on? So you know your sales volume against your sales target.

What is your sales target against last year? How are you tracking? Where are those sales coming from? Which of the sales channels?

Because by getting more familiar with those data points, you are able to kind of capture issues before they happen.

Thank you. And I assume we should be tracking our data over time. So how often should we be looking at all of the numbers?

I mean, is every day too much or should we be taking a step back and looking on a weekly or a monthly basis?

Yeah, so yeah, as I mentioned before, I know it's quite common, you kind of look at the data all the time and feel like you know it. But I definitely would say it's more important to look at longer term trends than daily trends because, you know, daily, daily sales are erratic.

We need to be looking at long term trends.

So 100% monthly at the setting side time monthly to look at your sales, looking at the trends and seeing how they compare against your expectations or your goals.

And you know, for lots of businesses that might also be weekly to be a bit more reactive and kind of whether it's weekly or monthly will depend on your capacity, depends on your business size and business type.

Thank you so much, Stacey. I will put links to where everyone can find you. Find out more about what you do in the show notes.

And my final question is what would your number one one piece of advice be for product businesses?

So my number one piece of advice is to take a step back from the day to day of business to look at the bigger picture and to do that on a regular basis. So kind of in line with what we're saying maybe on a monthly basis.

Hold yourself accountable and take the time to review your business performance against what your goals are. Understand if you're tracking kind of where you want to be and by getting that familiarity with your performance, you can react.

You can see if sales maybe aren't doing what you want them to be doing. You can react and you can, you know, by knowing what your sales target is, say for a month. If you're just shy of it, you will do what you can.

You'll send that extra email to get those sales in. So by holding yourself accountable and reviewing your business performance on a monthly basis, you'll definitely be moving forward. That's brilliant. That's so helpful. Thank you so much. Lucy. Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode. Do remember that you can get the full back catalogue and lots of free resources on my website.

Vicki Wise, Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.