How being honest and purpose-driven can build real business growth
“Just keep going at it. Even if it’s slow, even if you don’t have a big community yet. Just keep going and just put one foot in front of the other and just keep putting out your best work.”
Focus on creating real value. Don’t worry about the size of your audience. Just keep putting out your best work. These are the principles that helped Molly Patrick of Clean Food Dirty Girl grow her business from a small blog into the successful plant-based living business it is today.
We invited Molly to Crowdcast Talks this week to learn more about this journey. Molly’s got a “no BS” approach we love, leads her business with purpose, and is an avid user of Crowdcast for her trainings and Q&As. And she has a colorful, uncensored vocabulary we personally find refreshing. :)
Read on to learn some of our favorite lessons from Molly.
It’s okay to not have a clue what you’re doing at first
“It’s been a very wonky path to where we are now. We didn’t have a fucking clue,” says Molly about making the leap from photography to her online business.
The learning curve was a steep one at first but their continued efforts paid off. Now they run a successful business and recently moved to Hawaii — and all of this after starting a business with zero marketing background.
Even today Molly admits she doesn’t have a clear-cut plan for the future. “We’re kind of making this shit up as we go along.” The lesson? Your blueprint may not be defined but if you know your mission, that’s what can get you started — and keep you going.
High-value content is king
Content, they say, is king. But what about when there’s just too much of it online? Molly has an important piece of advice on this. The key, she says, is consistency combined with exceptional quality.
Consistency + quality content = success.
Her own weekly newsletter is a testament to this simple formula: it’s been published every Saturday morning at 9AM since 2014 without a single week missed. Through a combination of “an extremely insane amount of hours and work” and word-of-mouth, her recipes and articles were able to catch on, letting Molly and Luanne grow their business without spending a dime on marketing.
Don’t have any readers or customers yet? Don’t worry — this is where we all start at some point. The only way to get anywhere is to keep putting “one foot in front of the next, even if nobody is paying attention yet, even if you don’t have a big audience or a big community yet. Just pretend you do and keep going because you will eventually. You just have to be really consistent with it.”
The “slow and steady” approach — versus focusing on short term hacks — can also help you earn higher quality customers and gain lots of useful learning along the away. “This is the slower route, I think, but with that you get more people who truly want to hear from you and truly want to be in your community and they’re gonna be around for a long time.”
Focus on genuinely helping and the traffic will follow
In fact, don’t even focus too much on the numbers at first. The slow path to quality customers is all about commitment to producing true value. Molly’s own business started not from a desire to build traffic but to share something useful with people.
“Do what you’re good at, do what you love to do, provide excellent excellent information, be honest in whatever it is that you’re providing and just let that grow because the money will come.”
Why does this work? Because there’s already so much bad content out there that people’s B.S. detectors will go off unless you come from a genuine place. “They’ll know it within one blog post,” notes Molly, and suggests figuring out the mission behind what you do so you can keep going.
The surprising habit that most grew her business
Finally, we asked Molly what the biggest single key to her successful business was — and were genuinely surprised by her answer.
Her secret? Quitting drinking.
“I really do believe that my drinking was getting in the way, it was dulling me. I wasn’t able to put 100% of myself into this. Once I stopped drinking I got really clear, I got really focused. I was much more sharp, I could focus more, the quality of my work got better.”
Too much alcohol, says Molly, can “deplete your spiritual tank.” And to fuel your business — which can require a lot from you — you need to fuel your mind and your body. “It really does make a huge difference,” she says, even though it may seem like a “boring” or minor habit change.
How Crowdcast helps her build a real community
We were also curious to learn how Molly uses Crowdcast for her business.
For the most part, says Molly, she uses Crowdcast to give her existing customers direct access to her and to the community with live trainings, noting that people even sign up for the membership program just to be part of the Crowdcast events. It’s great for “[fostering] our community in a really big way,” she notes.
“I really love [Crowdcast] and our community really loves it too. It’s like a big party once a month when we get on our calls.”
Thanks Molly — we love you, too!
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We hope you loved Molly’s insights as much as we did. Got thoughts or feedback? Leave comments below. And for the full conversation, click here for the replay.
Next up we’re inviting world-class growth expert Sujan Patel to Talks. Sujan was named one of the best growth marketers today and has helped companies like Salesforce, WSJ, LinkedIn and Expedia boost their traffic. Interested in learning his growth marketing tips for 2017? Sign up to join the conversation.
