Have you ever been to a restaurant that had terrible food but good service or terrible service but good food? Did you go back? Probably not. Yet in business, there seems to be this balancing act that entrepreneurs are playing trying to balance experience and results. As they hyper focus on results experience drops, and then they switch focus to experience and results drop. And it's this constant trade off. What many entrepreneurs believe is that in order to scale they have to prioritize one or the other. And there are mixed opinions about which one results or experience but I couldn't disagree more. I think the only way to scale sustainably is to elevate both results and experience across three core areas. So what are those areas. The first is marketing and sales results and the buying experience. If you focus on marketing and sales results at the expense of the buying experience, you come off looking like a sleazy car salesman. Maybe you're sending cold DMS to people spamming their inboxes with an absurd amount of emails, not taking no for an answer on a sales call or any other tactics, I'm sure you've been on the bad end of some buying experiences, right? So you know what I'm talking about here. At the same time, you can't prioritize the buyer experience over marketing and sales results either.

Otherwise, you might just give them everything for free or discount your rates or negotiate all of your terms. You might hop on sales calls for a $29 offer, you might avoid telling the people who are actually interested in your offer about it for fear that you're bothering them, you can go to an extreme where you completely prioritize the potential customer over what makes sense for your business. So you can't focus on one or the other, you need to find a way to elevate both. The second area is client results and experience. I've seen some entrepreneurs focus on driving results for their clients to the point of burning their clients out, pushing them towards goals that they don't even want or themselves or giving them what they need to get results. But in a very chaotic and unorganized way. You can tell this is happening when clients are getting results but either don't want to renew, or want a break before coming back. Maybe the clients say that they're overwhelmed or confused about their next steps or they just stop engaging all together. Or maybe their clients you have constant resistance towards the work you're doing together. Because it's not what they actually want to be doing. I've also seen entrepreneurs prioritize the client experience over results, saying yes to whatever they asked for, even if results will suffer, setting zero boundaries, spending money on elaborate gifts and events for clients instead of the additional resources to support the clients and getting the promised result. This might be the case for you. If you're spending countless hours over delivering, maybe you're supposed to be teaching them how to do something and you end up just doing it for them. Maybe you're answering their questions. When you're sitting at the dinner table. When you're in bed at night, when you're sitting there with your kids instead of playing with them. Maybe you're customizing everything for them. Maybe you're avoiding saying the hard things and an effort not to upset them. Maybe from the outside looking in your offer looks amazing and people can't wait to come to whatever event or to receive the gift that everyone's posting on social media.

But then once people enroll very few stay on track, or actually complete the program, because the program itself didn't have the intentional design that was needed. So it's clients you also need to focus on elevating both the experience and results and not trading off one or the other. The third area is team results and experience. As you hire a team you need them to generate an ROI for the business and that's a given. But I've seen situations where team members are held to unrealistic expectations, to be available all the time, to put an extra time for months on end, to generate results for the business with no reward. Results can't be at your team members expense. Before I started my own business, one marketing agency that I worked for had team gatherings for the last hour each Friday, and no one wanted to go. We were all so overworked that we just wanted to get our work done and go home. Another company I worked for, had a team of maybe 25 People max. And the President constantly called me the wrong name. It's important to show your team not just that you want results, but that you care about them as humans, not just resources that are a means to an end for you. On the other hand, you can't go so far to the extreme that you bend over backwards for your team. One entrepreneur now hired a team member and pay the team member more than she paid herself, hesitated to ask the team member to do anything that seemed low level, and instead did all of those things herself as the CEO, and did everything in her power to make the team member happy, avoiding disagreeing, or giving any criticism at all. The business owner wasn't stepping up and leading and results suffered. When she was finally forced to give some feedback. In an effort to improve results, the team member felt absolutely blindsided, and they ended up parting ways. So you can't trade off results and experience with your team either. You need both. If you want to scale sustainably, you as a leader must elevate both experience and results in each of these areas of your business, never trading off one or the other. You must design your business to generate sales with a great buying journey. Help your clients get their desired results while enjoying the process. Lead your team to get results while creating a positive work environment. It's never one or the other. It's always both.