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3 Questions to Ask To Grow Your Business Into a Movement

Today on the Rebel Rising Podcast I'm going to be asking you three key questions that will help grow your business into a movement:

1. Who do you want in your movement?
2. How big do you want your movement to be?
3. What is the change you want to create in the world?

The answers to these questions provide the foundation for your business and for your movement. And the good news is, you most likely have the answers to at least half of these questions, right? So dig in with me as we go through each question to make the beginning of your movement actionable.

Tune into the audio:

On last week's episode, I talked about how I realized over Christmas break that I was not fully owning my message. I spent 2019 playing small.

I was not living up to the message that I wrote about in the 3 Word Rebellion book. And I say that with as much love and compassion towards myself because frankly, I clearly wrote the 3 Word Rebellion book from a higher version of myself, the future version of me, but I spent 2019 solving smaller problems. You know, helping people get clients, get on podcasts, get speaking gigs, and all of those problems are great problems to solve because they're helping people create more impact and create sustainable businesses and make more money.

But at the end of the day, I want to be solving a problem that actually subsumes all of those smaller problems. I want to be helping business owners create a movement that impacts hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

And how do you do that? That's a much bigger and, frankly for me, a more interesting problem. How do you attract that many people and get them to act and be interested in what you're up to and your message?

And yes, of course I want you to get more clients because if you're going to have a business that turns into a movement, you will definitely need money. And that's your business' number one job to make money. And I'm going to talk more about that one next week, but right now, what does it mean to turn your business into a movement? I mean, what is a movement really? What does that look like when we talk about a movement of people?

So I'm going to walk you through some questions to determine what turning your business into a movement could look like for you and your business. Because ultimately you are in control, you get to define this for you. You get to decide what kind of leader to be here.

Then I'm going to talk to you about three things that you probably already have (or at least half) that you will need to make your movement happen.

So what is a movement?

Well, simply put a movement is just a group of people with similar values, ideas, and aims going after a common goal, a common change. And usually there is one central leader. Sometimes there might be multiple leaders, and as a business owner you would be that leader and there is a message they rally around.

That message is like a flag that is planted in the ground and it's represents the change they want to create. And yes, that does sound a lot like a 3 Word Rebellion. But, here's the cool thing. A movement doesn't have to consist of millions or even thousands of people. A movement can be started in your backyard. Heck, most social movements are started in people's basements, in garages. They start small, and your movement can start small. Your neighborhood can be the site of your movement, your city, your township. It doesn't matter.

But a movement can be any size because they can be transformed by your 3 Word Rebellion. So the size doesn't matter. It's up to you.Now, selfishly, yes, I would love for you to impact millions, but it doesn't matter. You get to pick.

But, here's my caveat before we get into these questions.

If you are new to business, if you are still trying to figure it out, like last week I talked about Charlie Gilkey and his five stages of the small business lifestyle. So if you are pre-revenue or if you're just making a little bit of money, you're in the entry stage or figuring out what to offer, what problem to solve, so you're in that stage one, what I want you to do is just focus on making money. You can still answer these questions and dream, but get sales through relationships and networking. This is not important work for you to be doing right now.

For those of us who are in a growth stage or in the crucible stage where we can think about creating something bigger than us and creating bigger messages, solving bigger problems, then yes, this episode is our next step.

All right. So time for the three questions you can ask yourself.

So the first question I want you to think about, because these people truly are people who share similar values and aims, is who do you want in your movement? Who would you want to invite in?

And it's so funny because I was journaling about a similar question this morning, so I'm just going to read to you about the people that I want in my movement if I can define this.

So my people are wildly successful, they had a lot of growth in their business and now they just want to reach more people and make a bigger difference. And they're super smart. They have a lot of ideas up in their head and it's really hard for them to express those ideas in a way other people really get because they tend to overcomplicate everything and they know that they can't make a difference in the world if they keep over complicating everything the way they have been. And they're also very, very funny and talented and they give back a lot to different causes. They tend to be politically active in different ways. They're very forward thinking in that way. They're very politically involved and they just want to help as many people as possible with their work. I mean, they're amazing at what they do because I mean, one of my core beliefs is that business owners who are freaking amazing at what they do should be known for their work.

My clients are also insanely funny. They make me laugh. I would love to hang out with them even if they weren't a part of my movement. They're not afraid to impact more people and they're not afraid of the hard work it's going to take to get there, to reach the people and to do the bigger messaging work that's ahead of them. You know, they're really here for this work. They're here for making a difference and making an impact, and those are the people who I feel want to claim their power and take up more space and have a voice in the world so that they can make a difference.

Those are the type of people who would join the 3 Word Rebellion movement and want to turn their business into a movement. So who are your people? What do they value? What are they like? Where are they hanging out?

Go find your people because most likely you would probably want to hang out with them anyway. So that's question number one.

Question number two is quite simple. How big do you want your movement to be?

For me, I'd be happy with a hundred businesses impacting a million people. That would be amazing. Also, that would be 100 million people impacted. That kind of makes me want to puke a little bit, but you see how this works. It's the ripple effect. It's like compound interest for your impact. You know, a hundred businesses impacting a million people is a huge amount of impact and reach. It doesn't take much. Oh my goodness. So think about it. How big do you want your movement to be? It can be 10 it can be a million, it can be 100 million. I don't care. But it should make you feel a little uncomfortable.

And then the third and final question is what change do you want to create?

This question may sound familiar to you because we are getting in to the 3 Word Rebellion territory and actually I might add these questions to the 3 Word Rebellion teaser that you can download for free if you're thinking about buying the book, but you're not quite sure about it yet.

This question, this is where 3 Word Rebellions are born because we rally around the vision of change and that's why people join movements, right? Because there's the change they want to create in the world.

So what change do you want to create with your business?

Like for me, I know that I want good business owners doing amazing work to be known for that work and to have that massive impact. My other big motivating factor is to have communication matter again. I wrote about that in the 3 Word Rebellion book because I often feel like communication gets short changed, it gets, you know, reduced to hacks or people think, oh, I have like a mouth and I can speak. And that means, oh, I can talk and I can communicate.

But that's wrong.

There's art and science behind messaging and communication and it needs to matter because language shapes and creates our reality.

So tell me, what change do you want to create?

So think about these three questions. Growing your business into a movement doesn't have to be this big scary thing. Really it's getting a group of people together that you would probably want to hang out with anyway to rally around a change you want to create in the world and go after the goal of creating that change.

Once you know that, then you can start focusing on the three foundations that you need to actually grow your business into a movement. And those foundations are fairly simple and you probably have parts of them or most of them because you need you to step into your role as that visionary CEO. You need your business with your systems and your processes in place and the message the people rally around.

And we're going to talk more about that next week when I tell you about the seven foundational principles to turn your business into a movement so you won't want to miss it.