Successful Entrepreneurs Know These 4 Secrets
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Marie Forleo and Jenna Kutcher both create content about: How to grow a successful business.
but the secret to their success is not always in what they share. instead, you’ll find it if you look closely at the right stuff.
Success leaves clues or crumbs…just like your darling children do throughout your entire house. 😉
Today we'll follow that path of success breadcrumbs straight to their business secrets vault. 🤫
I've observed these ladies’ businesses over the years and have discovered four secret strategies they're both using to explode their growth.
When it comes to running a business, these four tips are an ABSOLUTE MUST for figuring out where to focus your energy and what’s just a waste of time.
Secret #1: Sell the same thing for YEARS & become known for it.
If you look at Jenna and Marie’s content, you’ll notice they have something in common: their courses are their main offerings.
These ladies have sold the same courses for years.
Maria has been in business the longest. Her B-School course has been around for 14 years! 🤯
Jenna’s courses are also all about marketing. She has increased the number of courses over time but she still sells her original courses from 2016. She's been selling the same courses about Instagram, Pinterest, and list-building for years.*
*Of course Jenna updates the courses when needed, but the meat of the courses and the courses themselves have mostly stayed the same.
The moral of the story?
You don't need to launch new products every single year.
Many entrepreneurs assume that if their original offer was a success, this automatically means the best way to raise revenue is to create more offerings to sell to their current customers.
I get it. It feels like we should be working hard, thinking up big ideas, and launching sexy new things.
Plus, we think that…
Doing the same thing year after year will get stale.
Our audiences will get bored.
Our audiences will grow so we should be there with the next product to help them at the next stage.
☝️ This isn’t always the case.
As these ladies show, you can sell the same thing again and again and again for literally well over a decade.
Marie and Jenna were only able to scale their products to the household names that they are today because they invested their time and energy in marketing. That wouldn’t have been the case if they’d filled up every waking moment with creating new offerings.
Imagine if your favorite chef only ever cooked one signature dish. But over the years, that dish became so legendary that everyone had to try it. 🍜
Jenna and Marie perfected their signature dish: Their courses.
Rather than filling the menu with a bunch of options that nobody actually orders, they stick to what they know and make it the best thing on the menu.
Secret #2: Master 1 marketing strategy before adding another.
Jenna is mostly known for her massively successful The Goal Digger Podcast. 👇
AndMarie for her award-winning show MarieTV (YouTube channel). 👇
but you might be surprised to learn….
While both ladies are now active daily on Instagram, this was not always the case. On top of that, there are many examples of social media platforms where these ladies were (or still are) less active than one might expect…like Jenna’s highly inactive Tik Tok account with 700 followers.
What can we learn from this?
Jenna's YouTube channel holds the answer.
Jenna started The Goal Digger Podcast in 2016. In 2020, after creating 341 episodes, she THEN decided to expand to YouTube.
(Oh, and when I say “expand to YouTube”, I just mean she started to upload the podcasts there as well. No video - just audio.)
Finally in 2024, Jenna started adding podcast videos and custom thumbnails for her YouTube content.
Yup…she pretty much ignored YouTube for eight years!
Now, I know what you’re thinking:
How is failing to make use of one of the best marketing platforms online a secret to success?! 🙄
Each marketing platform has its own intricacies, strategy, and algorithm. Jenna knew if she tried doing all of them at once, she wouldn’t get anywhere.
focusing on fewer marketing strategies until you see massive success is both counterintuitive and an incredible business decision.
Note: even today with their mega teams and mega budgets, neither of these ladies is “perfect” on every platform ( Heck they aren't even ON every platform).
Jenna and Marie intentionally didn’t diversify their marketing from the start. They were consistent with one thing for a long time. It doesn't sound sexy, but this strategy works.
It doesn't matter if you pick podcasts, YouTube, Instagram or TikTok. What matters is that you stick with your choice until you become exceptional at it. Only then should you think of adding in other strategies.
Starting with one marketing strategy is like laying the foundation for a skyscraper.
You wouldn’t start by spreading your resources thin over a wide area (like you do when building multiple houses at once). Instead, you focus on digging deep and building upwards until you've built the tallest building in the city.
Marie and Jenna didn't spread their foundations. They built skyscrapers.
Psst… struggling to figure out which of all the marketing platforms is right for you? I have a quiz to help! 👇
Secret #3: Pick an A storyline and stick to it (with just sprinkles of B.)
Marie has spoken many times about the struggles of being a multi passionate entrepreneur. Her old brand was called Rich Happy & Hot (RHH). She had a live event for it and wrote a book called Make Every Man Want You.
Jenna was painting and selling watercolor prints for a while.
clearly, these ladies haven't always stayed 100% in their business’s main lane.
However, the more they've grown as entrepreneurs, the more they’ve stuck to associating themselves with one main topic.
For Marie, it's business.
For Jenna, it's marketing.
It takes a long time to become the go-to expert associated with a specific topic. Producing a year's worth of content on one topic won’t cut it. It honestly takes like a decade.
That’s why flip-flopping your direction (speaking about one thing this year and something completely different the next) will not serve you long-term in your business.
It’s true that both entrepreneurs have made pivots in the past:
Marie had her Rich Happy & Hot brand phase, and Jenna's first course was geared towards photographers (Photo Lab).
Today, Jenna serves all creative entrepreneurs (not just photographers) with marketing courses. Marie dropped the RHH branding and talking about dating. She now consistently focuses on business content.
The key thing about both ladies’ pivots is that they weren’t an annual occurrence AND they were mostly made during the early years of the business.
Over time, they have stuck to becoming associated with one main topic.
Now, one caveat to this is they're both personal brands. So naturally, as their lives and interests have evolved, some of their content has evolved with it.
Think of it like a movie… 📽️
There's an A storyline: the main focus of the movie. It's takes up the majority of the film's time.
And a B storyline: the side story. It adds interest, but it takes up less space in the film.
In Jenna's business, the A storyline is marketing education. The B storyline has been:
Her struggles to start a family
Body positivity
Maternity leave
Running a business as a new mom
In Marie’s business, the A storyline is business advice content. Her B storyline is all about entrepreneurial health:
Mindset
Manifestation
Tapping
In conclusion, if you feel called to switch topics, go for it. But…
DON’T make it an annual pivot. You should eventually settle on one topic that you feel excited to speak about for 10+ years.
DO feel free to incorporate B storylines and make your brand personable. Adding in bits of your life keeps things interesting. It makes you more than just a talking head with information.
Secret #4: Be consistent and choose progress over perfection
Ah yesss! everyone’s favorite word: consistency. 😅
Of all the strategies on this list, this is the one entrepreneurs struggle with the most. It also happens to be the most important. It's possibly the hardest to achieve and is what really sets the mega-successful apart from business owners who are just getting by.
Jenna and Marie have both shown up with consistent content, consistent emails, and consistent offers for years ( in Marie's case, over a decade).
Regardless of what platform, when these ladies decided they were going to show up, they were consistent about it. This isn't just luck. It is setting priorities and planning your time really well.
It’s also about dropping perfectionism.
Marie’s videos might look super polished and professional (and they definitely are). She clearly has a studio and a team that helps her make professional-level content. But if you look back at her first videos, it was just Marie, a laptop, and some bad audio and video quality.
During the pandemic, she was recording solo from her computer at home - just like the rest of us (Except she clearly has a much more fabulous living room than most of us do 😍.)
These ladies definitely live the “better done than perfect” mantra.
They’ll put out content to stay consistent, even when it’s not to the level of quality they wish it would be.
The reason so many people flounder for years in business is that they keep switching. They flip-flop and try to associate their name with a new thing every year.
In my business, I am always after what I call “lazy-efficient strategies”. 👆 Basically, a lot of return for little investment.
Doing so isn't just a good way to have life outside of your business. It's also an incredible method for business growth.
Complication is the enemy of great execution.
You probably started a business so you could live your dream life. Don't shoot yourself in the foot by constantly creating new offers, pivoting, and fretting over perfection.
Even if you follow all 4 secrets, you're likely still going to struggle with mastering consistency.
Lucky for us, our dream duo released a video on exactly how to master consistency and time management. I highly recommend checking it out! 👇 💯
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