You Can’t Predict the Future, But You Can Prepare for It – Deirdre Tshien

Do you feel like your business is stagnating? Or perhaps you’re struggling to scale? It could be because you’re not setting the right goals. Our today’s guest may be of great help!

Deirdre Tshien is an entrepreneur, a podcast host, and a strategist for online businesses. During her eight-year-long entrepreneurial journey, she’s had many successes but failures too. Today, Deirdre is committed to helping other entrepreneurs scale their businesses to multiple- 6 and 7 figures. Not only does she help them through coaching sessions, but she’s also a proud Co-Founder and CEO of Capsho, software that helps entrepreneurs with content creation. She’s also the Podcast host of The Remarkable Entrepreneur’s Playbook and The Growth Boss Podcast, and the author of The Traffic Formula & The Viralocity Formula.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the importance of setting the right business goals, the benefits of systemizing your business, how to diversify your marketing strategy, and finally, why the difficult choices are often the best ones.

If you want to scale your business and grow as an entrepreneur, I think this episode will help set you on the right path. Tune in to hear some practical and creative tips from Deirdre.

Guest-At-A-Glance

 

💡 Name: Deirdre Tshien

💡 What she does: She’s Co-founder & CEO of Capsho. She’s also the Podcast host of The Remarkable Entrepreneur’s Playbook and The Growth Boss Podcast.

💡 Noteworthy: Deirdre embarked on her entrepreneurial journey more than eight years ago. Over the years, she has founded multiple businesses across five different industries and learned some important business lessons.

💡 Key Quote: “That’s why I say none of these strategies on their own is ever going to light the world on fire, but if you keep at it and they stuck up, then it does suddenly. It didn’t happen this way, but it felt like overnight we had become a success. And then from there, it kind of just snowballed.”

💡 Where to find her: LinkedIn

Key Insights

 

Ask yourself the right questions. As much as setting goals is critical to the success of your business, it’s equally important to set the right goals. If you want to build a stable business, start by asking yourself the right questions. Set goals that will drive your business in the right direction.

Deirdre considers herself hardcore with goals, but she says you have to be careful how you organize your business goals because they could cause more harm than good in the end. She explains, “You think about how we’re so hardcore with goals, the wrong goals, by the way, but hardcore with these goals, and also being driven almost by our ego because we were getting flooded by these [emails] and that was just a recipe for disaster because we signed up to these leases without probably doing the type of due diligence we should have. Because we had a goal in mind that we had to meet and we let our ego drive us to this so we opened these really expensive stores in sub-optimal locations being sold a dream and they didn’t all work out.”

You can’t predict the future in business, but you can prepare for it with systematization. Business systematization is essential to the success of any business – systems are the building blocks that help companies to operate. So if you want to make your company more bulletproof to unexpected scenarios, focus on systematizing your processes. Deirdre says she’s big on systematization but understands that sometimes you can’t predict the unpredictable.

She explains, “We can do all we can to systemize and put everything in place that will help us run a business and do all of that. But there are going to be some things that we just can’t foresee. And that’s kind of the lie about systemization because systemization is all about how do you foresee the future and how do you put the systems in place to meet that? And sometimes you just can’t.”

Diversify your marketing strategy. Marketing is all about diversification. Using multiple channels to promote your business will help you achieve a broader digital presence and improve your brand awareness. But, according to Deirdre, you shouldn’t put all your marketing eggs in one basket. Instead, create a comprehensive marketing plan that will set you up for long-term success.

She explains, “It’s all about diversification. And it’s kind of like diversification in everything, right? If you think about your own stock portfolio or whatever, you always want to be diversifying because again, if you put all your eggs in one basket, there’s a huge risk that you’re building into that portfolio and it’s the same with your business.

Go for the scary choices. As a business owner, you’re often faced with hard decisions and tough choices. While it’s tempting to always go for the safest option, sometimes you have to take risks. If you always play it safe, your business will stagnate.

Deirdre explains the power of taking a leap of faith, “Every time that we’re faced with this really scary decision which we are always going to be as entrepreneurs, whether that’s to invest in ourselves, whether that’s to invest in our business or whatever that is. Always know that sometimes the scary decision, actually, almost always the scary decision is going to be the right one because that’s when you know that you’re gonna be forced to level up.”

Top Quotes

 

“I was a little bit tongue in cheek and I was like, I would highly encourage that this not be anyone’s first business and I still do stand behind that but I think the thing that I’m also actually really thankful for is that it was our first business because we had to make it work. As I said, we were on the hook for debt. We were on the hook for lease agreements. We had all these things we couldn’t just easily get out of it. It’s kind of different now when you have an online business, you can just kind of shut down things but this we couldn’t and so we had to make it work.”

“We really rode the growth wave of Instagram. I really do credit that. But then, I have a love-hate relationship. I’m really loving this and this is so great. And then things happen as they always do. Algorithms change. It gets saturated land then and it becomes much more of a grind in a way to have social media working for you and that’s when the hate part of the love-hate relationship started forming.”

“If we had set a goal to be like, ‘Okay, we want to increase sales or we want to whatever’, which is a more general, generic goal, then your mind starts to think about other ways that it could solve that problem and this is the great thing about ask yourself the right questions.”

“This is the thing about ads is that when it’s good and they work, it’s just printing money. That’s how it can feel like and then suddenly when they don’t, and you haven’t built almost the foundations that you need to in place to actually have things running in the event that ads don’t work or in the event that platforms go down or whatever, then that’s when it’s like, ‘Wow, do I really have a business? Do I actually really have a sustainable business here?”

“The whole thing is based on your story. And it was designed that way because then it doesn’t almost matter what platform you’re on because your story is always going to be the thing that connects you with your audience regardless of the path.”

“Honestly, for us, we don’t hire for any particular experience or expertise. But we do lookout for people who are want to come into a culture like ours because it’s also enough everyone like we do ask a lot in terms of growth mindset, in terms of pushing yourself, in terms of wanting to work in a team, in terms of really wanting to contribute, and that can sometimes not be for everyone.”

Links

Capsho Masterclass: 4-Day Scale Your Funnel with Social Bootcamp

Deirdre Tshien Website

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