The Biggest Lie Female Founders are Sold

Time. Money. Resources. These are the three things that most startup founders lack when running their businesses. The million-dollar question is: How do you actually start to grow while bootstrapping your startup?

Let's begin with the definition of bootstrapping. To bootstrap means to get (oneself or something) into or out of a situation using existing resources. I feel like the part of this definition that is sometimes missed is the part about resources. You actually need resources in order to bootstrap. This could be time or money. Many of us start by putting in our time because this is our free resource to give away. But as you'll quickly learn, your time is actually really valuable, and working on the highest-priority and needle-moving tasks should be your main focus.

The Biggest Lie Female Founders are Sold

The biggest lie female founders are sold is that you can do it all on your own, at home while taking care of the kids and the household. And honestly, many women are convinced they can do it all. I have myself fallen into this trap. We tend to believe that bootstrapping means doing it all on our own for little to no money. That is not what bootstrapping means at all.

And attempting to do everything required on your own and by yourself is exactly what will hold you back for years.

You need to invest in your business and if you are truly committed to bootstrapping your business, listen up. You need to focus 200% on sales and marketing. You, as the founder, must get laser-focused on nothing but generating leads, talking to prospective customers and making sales. These steps are so important and is the foundation for building your business. You trade your time for education and in doing so-- you begin to slowly reinvest and grow your marketing efforts with the profit from your sales.

Building a Marketing Team

• SEO
• Website Design and Maintenance
• Email Marketing
• Ads Management
• Social Media
• Partnerships
• Copywriting
• Automations
• PR
• the list goes on...

How to get started building your Marketing Team

Building a marketing team can be complex, but it doesn't have to be. The first step is taking a high-level CEO vision of your Marketing strategy and understanding the correct sequence in which to implement each part. This is the toughest piece of the puzzle and exact way in which I help founders thrive in my accelerator program.

1. Creating your Marketing Strategy: A solid marketing strategy is built around the Client Value Journey framework. These are the 6-steps that customers take from first knowing about your business to buying and becoming raving fans. It's a journey that you must intentionally design and it works as a 'Marketing Flywheel". Once you get it up and running, the flywheel will continue to churn always bringing new, fresh leads into your business.
   
   
2. Building your Marketing Process: This is where a lot of people get stuck. They feel totally overwhelmed when creating their marketing strategy because they think they need to implement everything right away. Creating a thriving marketing system takes time and patience. When you build out your step Client Value Journey-- you must then intentionally build it out little by little. For example, you can look at the first step of the journey "awareness," which is essentially lead generation. It might take an entire quarter to launch Facebook ads and you need to understand that. Then once you're done with one step, you can move on to building out the next. It is a process.
   
   

There are so many ways to grow a business and each business is totally unique. That said, the basic principles of marketing remain the same. The Marketing Strategy process and building out your 6-Step Client Value Journey is a framework that is industry agnostic. It is your #1 priority to create that marketing strategy and invest in the team that will support you in executing it.

Let's take the example of Facebook ads. If it was your quarterly goal to launch Facebook ads, you could do it yourself but it would take much longer than 3 months to learn how to run ads and optimize them. There is all the technical back-end stuff, not to mention the copywriting element and ad design strategy. Do you know all about that? There is so much. It probably isn't worth your time to figure that out. But you can bootstrap your way into it, with some external help, i.e. a freelancer who knows what they are doing.

That is why I am such an advocate for founders to know how to lead their marketing department rather than trying to do it all yourself.

If you need help understanding exactly how to build your marketing strategy and the order in which to execute it all, I invite you to join me in our free Build Your Scalable Marketing Machine Workshop. There you'll get step-by-step instructions and be surrounded by a group of ambitious founders and I will be your personal Chief Marketing Officer-- guiding you in the right direction.