How to Build Business Momentum and Keep It Going

Okeydokey, we’re going to record a podcast episode. We get high notes. Episode 28. Oh, my goodness. All right, here we go.

When you have the wind at your back and your business is doing good, you’re probably facing a situation where you’ve got momentum on your side. But when the big mo slows down or disappears, that’s when you will always feel the most stress in your business. In this episode, I want to explore creating and sustaining momentum in our businesses.

My name is Eric Dingler. I’m a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and four kids, and we are currently in Costa Rica. As I record this, it is July 2024 and we have finally, I believe, made some decisions for the fall. So if you stick around to the end of the podcast, I’ll give you a travel update. If traveling is your thing, that’s why I put it at the end of the podcast, because not everybody here is into the full time traveling side of things, and they don’t care about that part of our life and what we do. But for many of you, you do like that and you kind of want to know. So stick around to the end and I’ll talk about that.

Now, momentum is the, and you may not have ever thought of this, but if you would take a little bit of time to sit back and reflect, momentum is what you’re chasing. But momentum is key to business because, well, what is momentum? Momentum is a forward movement that is happening with its own energy and it can just keep going. And we like that. It doesn’t take nearly as much effort. Now, it can’t go on forever. We have to put a little bit into the system, but we don’t put nearly as much into the system to get it moving. And so you want momentum.

Now, the problem is when we have momentum, we don’t take the time to ask, whoa, what’s happening? Why is this working right now? And I would encourage you to do that when you are in a season of great momentum. And you know you have momentum because leads are coming in, sales are happening, projects are going out on time, you’re getting referrals, customers are happy, the budget is looking good, and just all of these things are happening and you’re sitting there going, I’m, oh my gosh, I am like an entrepreneur or God or goddess, amen. It’s just, it feels good. You fall asleep easily. Food tastes better. Relationships are better. You’ve got it in that moment. What you want to do is you want to diagnose what’s working.

Because here’s the thing. If you don’t know why it’s working, when it slows down or when it starts to stall, and it will, you’ll have no idea what to fix. You’ll start to panic a little because you’re going to start to notice that things are slowing down. And at this point, you’ve already lost momentum. And you’re going to start to take a little bit of time to figure out, wait, what’s happening here? This was just working, and now it kind of starts to become a domino. Maybe it starts with leads, not always, but maybe it starts with leads. And so the leads are slowing down, which means the sales start slowing down, which means the budget starts to slow down, and then morale starts to fall. And all of these things kind of calm down. That’s what momentum is to our business. It’s that forward movement with significantly less effort required than it takes to get it started.

And so we want to create momentum, but then we also want to make sure we sustain it. So, like I said, you got to make sure you’re asking why. You got momentum when something works, ask why. Document it, because then you can repeat it. That’s so, so important. A lot of people just don’t do that.

Well, I believe creating momentum, the best thing to create momentum and then to multiply it, is a little bit of a formula. It’s focus over time multiplied by the power of your offer. And by “over,” I don’t mean you divide, it’s focus plus time, I’ll say it that way. Focus plus time, multiplied by the power of your offer, creates momentum.

Now, under this there are three things I want to cover. The first thing I want to cover is the three P’s. This is what you want to focus on. The second thing I want to talk about is innovation. And the third thing I want to talk about and hit on real quick is feedback loops, because that is part of understanding why things are going well and how to add to the momentum and how to keep things moving along.

So let’s do this real quick, kind of a high level view. I will call it quite a masterclass, but I’m going to give you a 30,000 foot view of these three things that it takes to create and sustain momentum. And if you’re like, hey, I want to hear more about one of these, then you can send me an email, Eric at DNEPodcast.com, and say, hey, revisit this thing you said, and in this episode I want to know more about that.

So what are the three P’s? The three P’s are the things you focus on, and you’re going to just keep at this until your business is well past, you know, $1,000,000 or $8 million in revenue. Until that point, this is where you want to focus on the three P’s. And the three P’s are: the first one is one persona, the second is one product, and the third is one pathway.

Here’s what I mean by that. One persona. This is, you know, another way people talk about this is avatar. I first learned this years ago. I recently heard somebody else talk about this as one avatar. I learned persona, doesn’t matter which way you want to use it, but to keep it in the three P’s, I’m going to keep with persona. So it’s one persona. You need to identify the person who is your ideal client. Now, you can go as far as a lot of demographics with this, and some people will do this. They’ll be like, oh, my avatar is a soccer mom with three kids, and this is their income, and this is what they do on Tuesday night, these are the magazines they get, this is the last book she read, this is her favorite music, this is the kind of car she drives, like, really detailed in it.

Now, that works. That works if you’re a well scaled up business and you’re going to go out and do multiple marketing fronts to try to reach several of these different types of individuals. For the most part, you don’t want to get that granular at the beginning. In my experience, when I’ve tried to get that granular, because I’d listen to somebody talk about this and I’m like, oh, I got to do that, it doesn’t work for me. And generally it’s because the person sharing that advice, their business is multitudes larger than mine, and it works at that stage. But if you ask them, did you do this when your business was younger? Well, no. And it wouldn’t have worked. You’ve got to remember, you’ve got to wrestle with the principle behind the practice. I’ve talked about this in a past episode. You’ve got to ask yourself, is that the case because their business is the size it is, or is that universal across all businesses?

For most of the people that are going to be listening to my podcast, I’m going to recommend that your one persona is more of an intent type persona. For me, for my digital marketing agency, which is my 9 to 5, my full time gig, the business I own, the my day job, if you will, our persona is a business owner who’s been in business for at least five years. They’ve tried all kinds of marketing, it hasn’t worked for them, and so they’re now skeptical about digital marketing, and they have $750 a month to invest in digital marketing. That’s about it. I want somebody that skeptical because our system works, and when we show them and we gain the trust and we have a great offer that helps with that, and we will get them those results, for the first time they actually get results from digital marketing, and they’re excited, and the lifetime value, they stay with us for a long, long time. So I have more of an intent type persona. So persona, that’s the first piece.

One product. Have one product. Don’t diversify. Don’t just stay focused. You’re not that good. You can’t do multiple things. You shouldn’t have multiple products. You want to have one problem, you want to have one product that solves one problem. Over in my agency, we have the Marketing Momentum System, which comes with a smart website, that’s our bundled product. It’s one thing, that’s what we do. Now, in the sales process, somebody may want to just be part of that, or we may look and go, we don’t need a new website, you just need the Marketing Momentum System, so let’s put those strategies around your current website, boom, turning that into a smart website. But just as many people come to us and we’re like, your website, we need a new website. And so they get both. But you got to have one product. And here’s why this is important, well, I’ll tell you what, we’ll get to that in my next tip, just for right now, hold on to that one product.

So we’ve got one persona, we’ve got one product, we’ve got one pathway. The pathway is our sales funnel. We’ve got just one, and we’re only going to do one. You’re there at the top of the funnel, you’ve got to do something to bring leads in, and you’ve got four options, and you’ve only got four options. Well, there are four categories, and within these categories are lots of options, so it can seem overwhelming when you think about it. But when you realize you’ve just got four categories and you just have to choose one of them, it immediately eliminates a lot of other things.

Let me see if I can explain this through audio. Normally I draw this out, but I think I can explain this through the audio podcast. I want you to imagine a quadrant, okay? It’s a square with a line down the middle from top to bottom and a line across from side to side, creating four equal sized boxes inside that. Got it? Good.

One of these quadrants, we’re going to put paid ads. That’s one option to put at the top of your funnel. You can fill your funnel with paid ads. And that is all kinds of paid ads. Facebook ads, meta ads, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, which is part of pay per click, and Google ads. You’ve got offline paid ads too, billboards, magazines, radio, TV, you can run an ad on Hulu now, you’ve got paid ads. So that is one category. In the second quadrant, you’ve got content, you can pump out content and use that to bring people in. And the third quadrant you have cold calling and cold emailing, which I don’t like, but it is there, it is an option. And then in the fourth quadrant, the fourth category we have is networking and referral.

Now, I prefer, for most of my coaching clients and for me, I prefer networking and referral, that’s my preference, that’s where we, that’s what we have at the top of our funnel. I don’t like paid ads as my main thing because if I turn the money off, the leads stop, and I just don’t like it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. If you like, do it, if you want to do paid ads, do paid ads, if you want to do content, do content, that’s fine, it’s great, you have to put it out a lot, you need to do it daily, you have to study that, you have to get better and better, you have to become an expert at the platform. But it works. You just do that, or you do cold calling, cold emailing, and you’re constantly testing your scripts, that kind of stuff, but that’s just what you do, you just live in that world, or you do networking and referral, and that’s where I prefer to be.

One of my coaching clients messaged me this morning on Marco Polo, and he said, “Eric, I just got contacted by somebody who wants to know if I want to spend $500 to place a quarter page ad inside a magazine,” air quotes, a magazine that really, that goes to realtors, that realtors can give to new homebuyers in the area, business locations, corporate and residential. “And I keep going back and forth.” And I was like, do you know the answer? It’s simple. The answer is no. And here’s why. You don’t do paid ads, you do networking and referral. Remember, the only way a paid ad works, is there such a thing as a unicorn where it might happen one time? Yeah, sure, okay, yes, of course. But in the real world where the rest of us live and own businesses, you’re not going to put an ad in one magazine that a group of realtors get, he said like 80 realtors use it, you’re not going to put an ad in one thing that goes to new homeowners and expect to make any money off of it. It’s just not going to happen. Paid ads work when you blanket an area where they see your ad over and over. They see it here, they see it there, oh my gosh, it’s in the magazine, now it’s online, it’s on billboards, that’s when paid ads work, and they work great when you put them in front of eyeballs over and over and over again, and they work even better when you put the ads in front of the eyeballs in different places.

So I just don’t do paid ads. Now, down the road we may, but right now we don’t, because we’re focused, we’re focused over a period of time. And at the top of our funnel we do networking and referral. And then you move people down the pathway of our funnel and they hit our email newsletter. And then at the very bottom we’ve got what we call reply back campaigns and webinars. That’s my funnel, and we’re constantly studying it, testing it. I’m constantly studying effective webinar strategies, email newsletters, and networking, and we don’t just go to networking events and shake hands, “hi, how are you doing tonight?” We have a very intentional strategy that every time we go into a networking event, our goal is to walk out of there with a set number of coffee meetings, one on one meetings from a networking event. And then at that networking event, we want to walk away with that person’s permission to add them to our email newsletter. We want to leave that coffee, that one on one, with them sharing with us their current biggest struggle when it comes to marketing. And then we want to leave there with a third thing, which is a referral for somebody else they think we should talk to, that they can introduce us to. So we know there’s a lot more nuance to that in the conversation, but that’s the thing, and we just keep developing this and getting better and better.

If I was trying to do a content strategy to bring in leads, and I was trying to do paid ads, and I was trying to do networking and referral, I would be terrible at all of them, because I don’t have enough time to master one of them. And so you have to pick one lane and quit being, you know, schizophrenic and jumping from this one to this one to this one to this one. That’s why your business isn’t growing. Your business is never going to create momentum when you jump from one lane to another. That’s not how momentum gains. Momentum happens when you stay focused on one thing over time, and the one thing has to be the three P’s.

And it sounds kind of weird to say one thing and there’s three of them, but for me the focus is on our one persona, our one product, our one pathway, and I say no to everything else. Eventually I can say yes, but not until I have a ridiculous positive cash flow stream, not until I’m sitting on an unbelievable bank account of retained earnings, not until I’ve got a C-suite level of leadership handling the finances, and I’ve got a director of marketing, and I’ve got somebody over sales, and I’ve got somebody over all of the four major parts of my business. I say over leadership, but I can have somebody over lead gen, somebody over lead conversion, somebody over collecting and managing money, and somebody over project management. Well, when I have that team in place and we’re making profit all the time and all of those things are humming, and I’m just focused on leadership, then we can start to diversify out. But not until that point.

If you’re listening and you’re a solopreneur, if you’ve tried more than one thing this year to sell, if you’ve tried more than one thing this year to bring in leads, it’s why you’re still sitting there struggling. But if you have stayed focused this year, you’re listening to this going, man, I love momentum, he’s right, this is what it takes. So, focus plus time multiplied by the power of your offer creates momentum. Focusing on the right things, and what are the right things? One persona, one product, and one pathway.

That’s the first thing I want to talk about. The second thing I want to talk about that creates momentum is innovation. I love innovation, and you can see this for yourself, you’re going to see it everywhere. I want you to go to the grocery store, not this second, okay, I’m not being bossy, you got your busy, you got life, things are happening, you can’t stop what you’re doing. Go to the grocery store. The next time you’re at the grocery store, I want you to go to the laundry detergent aisle. Not because your clothes are dirty, but I want you to go to the laundry detergent aisle, and I want you to take note of how many new and improved formulas there are. New scents, new formula, improved formulas, like there is a whole subcontinent of the world somewhere that we don’t know about, full of people who just research and create new formulas for laundry detergents. It’s unbelievable to me.

It also happens in pizza places. Pizza Hut’s always coming out with something new. Papa John’s always coming out with something new. Taco Bell’s always coming out with something new. Why do these places do that? Why do they come out with new, why do they come out with improved? Because people like it. People get bored really quickly. People move on very quickly. People, when they’re looking for something new and improved, that sounds positive, that sounds exciting, I want in on that.

So, back to my agency, we are regularly innovating our product, not changing our product, we have our product, but we are regularly making improvements. We call it CANI, constant and never ending improvements. And so we have a backlog, a whole list of things that we want to do. And every so often I’ll move a group of things from backlog to on deck. And then after on deck, each of my team has one of these cards under their name at all times, and I keep an eye on that. And as soon as I see, oh, this person on my team, they’re about finished with this innovation on our product, they’re about done with this, I look at what’s on deck that I want to hand off to them, and I prepare for it. I create what we call a vision guide, where I go through and I say, this is what this is going to look like, this is why we’re doing it, here’s a clear definition of done, this project is done when this list of six, seven, eight, nine, ten things are checked off, here’s the cadence of communication, here’s your deadline, here’s the time it’s going to take, here’s your budget if it needs to be a budget, here’s what I have to sign off on. I have this whole checklist that I create, and the whole way that I create these, it’s super easy, I can create one of these vision guides in about 45 minutes.

And then when I put it in there, and when they’re done with their current innovation project, we celebrate it as a team, and I move a new card from on deck under their name on our Trello-type board, if you will. And then we announce it, “new and improved X, Y, Z.” We’ve got our new Marketing Momentum System right now, and we’re going to talk about our new and improved Marketing Momentum System for quite a while, and probably in about 18, 24 months it’ll be new and improved because by then we’ll have added so many amazing things to it, it will be improved.

And so we’re constantly focused on making our product better. We stay focused on one persona, and we’re constantly looking at that persona and adjusting our copy to that persona. We’re focused on one product, and we’re regularly innovating to make it better. Just last week, my team, I’m telling you, geniuses. So we have the Marketing Momentum System, which is a CRM that can do all kinds of things, email marketing and all kinds of things, that we build out completely for our clients when we build them a website and we integrate their website with it, and all of that, and they’re good to go, and they can start sending email newsletters on day one, and we give them training on how to do that, and then go in and schedule their social media posts, and all kinds of things that they can do in there, and we train them to do that.

And last week my team said, “what if we started creating a whole series of standard operating procedures? We use these every day, what if we started creating these, and when we hand the keys over to this marketing engine, when we put the business owner in the driver’s seat, what if we handed them a manual, a digital manual of standard operating procedures with checklists and videos and everything?” So they know how to send their newsletter, and under that was a standard operating procedure on how to prepare the newsletter, how to create content ideas, how to prepare, how to manage all that, and then how to post it, how to follow it. Oh gosh, I’m so excited for this. Are we going to get these tomorrow? No, it’s going to take probably three months before we have those. When we do, “new and improved onboarding resources,” I mean, this is innovation. You have to constantly be innovating your system.

Now, it’s got to be connected to your persona. Because if you don’t, imagine a restaurant like Chick-fil-A coming out with a hamburger. Well, that would be totally defiant of their brand, that wouldn’t work. They would create a whole lot of money, a whole lot of people would want to taste it, but then there would be no money after that. It would hurt them in the long run because it would dilute the quality of the chicken, because now they’re not just focused on chicken, they’re working on chicken and beef, and it would violate their brand principle, and it just would not be well in the long run. Now, that’s a bit of an exaggeration to make my point. So you can’t violate your product and go against your persona and your brand promise, but you can constantly be like, how can we make this better, how can we make this better. But if you’re trying to sell this service and this service and this service, and this thing, and I got this, I’m going to do it, and now that I get this, I’m going to start this side hustle, and I’m going to do this, and I’m going to launch a course, I’m going to launch a membership, but I’m going to have this going, I’m going to write a book, and I did it, and I did it, nothing is going to be great. You’re not going to be able to innovate. Innovation doesn’t mean starting over from scratch, it means making it a little bit better. Innovate it, make it better.

The third thing you got to do to sustain, to create and sustain momentum, is you have to have feedback loops. You have to regularly be getting feedback from your end user, from your customers, from your team, even from your vendors, you’ve got to be getting feedback from complete strangers, you’ve got to create some feedback loops. We are getting input so we know how to improve the product, so we know what messaging is resonating with your persona and not resonating with it, to see what part of your pathway needs a little tweak, where people are getting hung up, where they’re not converting in the stage that you want them to. You can’t do this if you’re trying to do a whole bunch of other things.

The key to momentum, the key to growing your business, the key to success, especially for those of us who are building our businesses at the speed of cash, we’re bootstrapping our businesses, we don’t have venture capital, we’re not making over $1,000,000 a year, over $5 million a year, the key for you, the key for me, keep focused. Over time, multiplied by the power of our offer. And the power of our offer comes down to how we position our product to our persona. I don’t have enough time to get into it in this episode. If you want to know more about creating great offers, let me know and we can cover that in a future episode.

Well, I want to go ahead and wrap up with this week’s leadership tip of the week. Why do I do this? Because leadership is the future of your business. Your business cannot grow beyond your capacity as a leader. And so I end every single episode with a leadership tip of the week. Before I share this one, if this was beneficial, if this was helpful, if you got anything out of this, would you do me a favor? Would you please leave a review? I know you’re listening, I can see the downloads happening, and I’m looking for those reviews. If you don’t have anything nice to say, because this hasn’t been great, well then I would invite your feedback, send me an email, let me know, like you could, if you did this it would be better, and I’d leave you a review. Make sure you subscribe and share this with people. Do all the nice things if that was beneficial to you, if that was helpful to you, if you got one little thing out of it, please do something nice in return, leave a review, subscribe, and share this.

All right, what is today’s leadership tip of the week? Today’s leadership tip of the week is simply, what gets measured gets managed. That’s good, isn’t it? Right, you probably want me to repeat it. Okay, I’ll repeat it. What gets measured gets managed. If you tell your team that X, Y, Z is important, but you don’t have a way to measure X, Y, Z, then X, Y, Z isn’t what’s going to get managed. You have a measurement in place, and if you don’t have a team, if you’re a solopreneur, well, if you don’t have a way every day to look at your pipeline, your leads count, your meeting deadlines, whatever it is that’s important to you, if you don’t have a number to look at, a way to measure that, you’re not actually managing it. You’re going to manage something else. What gets measured gets managed. It’s so important to have the right measurements in place for the right things.

We were having some issues, a little bit of an issue inside our company. We’re constantly learning and growing and experiencing growing pains from time to time, and I realized the issue was I was measuring the wrong thing. So in our leadership team meeting every week, we have a dashboard that we look at, and one of the metrics that was on there was that so many social media posts were going out, and then the newsletter went out, you know, the newsletter went on Thursday, this went out on social media, we had some content things that we were wanting to hit. And the thing is, we were hitting those, but I was constantly having to go, hey, wait a minute, this is misspelled, hey, wait a minute, there’s an error, hey, wait a minute, nobody’s followed up with this comment. But those things weren’t getting managed because it’s not what I was measuring.

So now we measure perfection. We measure error free. How long have we gone since we’ve had an email newsletter go out with no errors? And I can look and say six emails, seven emails, eight emails, none, and we just keep this number getting bigger, because we evaluate the newsletter, no grammar problems, no spelling issues, every link was correct. One little error and we start all over from zero. So, how many weeks since we’ve had an error free newsletter, not since we’ve had one, how many weeks have we had an error free email newsletter go out. But that is a completely different measurement than, did it go out. So, this can get a little nuanced, but what gets measured gets managed. Now again, if you’re a solopreneur, you may not want to worry about that, that’s not the key thing you want to measure. How many consultations, how many initial discussions, those are the things you want to look at, and then from there, how many people took the next step.

All right, so there we go, there’s that. Now, real quick, I did say I’d give a travel update, this is why I keep notes, I totally forgot to say that. For those of you that have been listening to the podcast for a while, since we launched 28 episodes ago, holy cow, I love doing this, when I launched this 28 episodes ago, so, half a year ago, our plan was to leave Costa Rica at the end of August, beginning of September, and go to Spain, we were going to do a year in Spain. Well, that changed several weeks, a couple of months ago actually, and we have been toying back and forth with lots of different options, and where we landed on this last week, now again, this can change, this is the beautiful part of this lifestyle, when we change our mind, the world is our oyster, as they say.

But currently we’re going to spend September and October in Argentina. We’re really, really excited about it. I’ve heard the meat is good, and we love good hamburgers and steaks, so we’ve heard the meat is good. I’ve also heard there’s an emerging cheese scene, and I’m excited about that, I’ll be honest, I’m pretty excited about that. But we’re going to leave here beginning of September, head to Buenos Aires for probably four weeks, and then there’s an overnight train, we’re going to get a sleeper car on this train and take an overnight train in a sleeper car across country to another town, and then we’re going to stay there for about a week, take a bus to another town for a week, a bus to a third town for a week, and then an overnight bus to a port town for a week. We’ve never done an overnight bus, so we’re going to do about four or five, maybe six weeks in Buenos Aires, and then we’re going to city hop for four straight weeks. Really excited about that. That is our tentative plan, and then after that, I don’t know, we don’t know, we have nothing planned beyond that. So stay tuned, I’ll keep you in the loop with what’s going on.

Okay, my friend, well, thanks for listening. Thanks for doing that review, subscribe, share, means the world to me, really appreciate it. So I look forward to reading your review on an upcoming podcast. Until next time, chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels.