Ep #339: Year-End Referral Reflection

Stacey Brown Randall: Hey there, and welcome to episode 339 of the Roadmap to Referrals podcast, a show that proves you can generate referrals without asking or manipulation.

I’m your host, Stacey Brown Randall. My journey from a business failure to a successful business now 11 years in, I know generating referrals naturally and consistently has made all the difference. Working with clients around the world, we leverage the science of referrals, protect relationships above all else, and help you build a referable business.

So typically, at the end of every year, I use the very last episode to do a reflection and do a referral reflection, kind of like my thoughts on how I saw referrals evolve or change or be impacted by the year.

And so I’m still gonna do that. It’s just gonna be smaller. I’ve got some other things I wanna talk about as well that I think are necessary as we move into 2025. But instead of doing the referral reflection at the very last episode of the year, we have something different planned for that episode.

So I’m doing the year-end referral reflection now, which is, of course, just a couple of weeks into December. But don’t worry. I will have a very cool end of year episode coming up.

So while this may be a couple weeks early, I mean, really, we’ve had over 50 weeks in the year, so I feel pretty qualified to do a referral reflection on what referrals have looked like over the past year.

But here’s the thing. I do a referral reflection, a year end referral reflection every year. And after a bunch of years, let’s be honest, they start to sound the same because referrals are evergreen.

Being able to generate referrals in your business is not a new flashy tactic that came onto the scene and now you’ve got to go understand it and how to use it and what to do with it. It’s not new. It’s not flashy. It’s fabulous. It’s another F word I would call for it. It’s not flashy, but it is fabulous.

And there is a lot to consider when you think about referrals, but they’ve been around forever. And they’re evergreen, which means you should always have a referral strategy in place in your business each and every stinking year.

And so as you think through what I would say about a referral reflection, it always, always comes down to the basics. And it’s what I believe every business should have in place.

Because generating referrals, whether referrals are going to be 30% of your new clients, 50% of your new clients, or 75% of your new clients, whatever you want referrals to turn into in terms of paying clients, you have to have a strategy in place. You have to have a plan in place so that ultimately happens.

So I’m not necessarily doing a here is my reflection on referrals. I mean, for those of you who didn’t have a great year, referrals probably mattered more than you could have ever imagined.

And for those of you who had a great year, I’m going to guess probably referrals were a piece of it or could have made it even better if you had had strategies in place to generate more referrals, because you should have a strategy in place for referrals each and every year.

So what does that look like? Well, it’s these five bullet points overall. And this is the thing that I would say this year and next year and every year moving forward, and it’s probably the things I’ve said in previous year referral reflections.

And that is this. Number one, know who refers you and take care of them correctly.

Number two, know how to develop new people referring you.

Number three, create a referable client experience and know how to extract referrals from that experience.

Number four, have the right processes in place for different situations that you will face, whether that is when referrals arrive or when those referrals, you have issues with them because they’re not the right quality, what to do within the buyer’s journey, what you should be doing with referrals on social media.

If you do events, how do you extend the referral ROI of those events, right? Have the right processes in place for different situations that you may come upon.

And number five, develop your multi-layered strategy for referrals and execute it on it every stinking year, year after year after year.

That’s really those are the five. Those are the things I want you to do. I just went through and boom, boom, boom, because you’ve been hearing me talk about them.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a really long time, oh, like six years, then you’ve had six years’ worth of episodes where I talk about this and how necessary these individual points are.

You know, just for the person and maybe in the back that didn’t hear it, let me just hit these again real fast, these five.

Number one, know who refers you and take care of them correctly.

Number two, know how to develop new people referring you.

Number three, create a referable client experience and know how to extract referrals from your clients.

Have the right processes in place for different situations, whether that’s when referrals arrive, what you’re tracking, issues with referrals, what to do in the buyer’s journey, social media, extending the ROI of your events with referrals.

And number five, develop your multi-layer strategy for referrals and execute on it every stinking year.

I could just play this on repeat every year because it’s the same thing I want you to know and do as we move into the next year, whichever next year that happens to be. These are the things you need to have in place.

Okay, so that’s my referral reflection for you. Referrals are evergreen. Good year, bad year, you need to have a focus on generating referrals.

Some years, they’re the things that’ll save you. Other years, they’re the things that’ll just make your year that much easier. And sometimes, they will take your year to an entirely different level that you didn’t see coming.

Referrals will always play a part in how you are bringing on clients if you will let it. And some years, it’ll be what makes you survive. In other years, it’ll be what helps you have the best year ever.

They have their place, and their place is with you every single year, not the flash in the pan, the latest, the greatest strategy that you need to be doing on social media or with this funnel or with this communication or how you should change your website this way.

They are the steady Eddies, and you just need to have referrals as a steady Eddie part within your business. Let it perform for you by doing it the right way.

Alright, so I want to do a few other year-end thoughts. There’s actually a couple of things I want to hit on. We’re going to do a couple of year-end thoughts, and then I want to talk about some gadgets and tools that I’m using now that I am loving or learning to love.

I think I should give that a caveat. And then, of course, we’ll round out with what changes are coming to this podcast. Alright, so let’s move into some other year-end thoughts.

So the first thing I want you guys to think about is how do you overcome a year that wasn’t what you expected?

So this year, 2024 for me was one of my best years revenue wise. What was interesting about that is that it didn’t feel that way. Like I was tracking it, I could see the numbers, but there were moments throughout the year where it didn’t feel like it was going to be my best year.

And it really kind of took a totality look back of reflecting on the entire year and being like, oh, actually, that was better than I thought it would be. And that is because of the emotional piece of it.

My emotions of how this year felt did not accurately reflect what was hitting the bank account from a revenue perspective. And I think that’s really important that we pay attention to moving into next year.

For some clients that I worked with, the election and the fear that was around the election really impacted maybe their spring, but definitely their summer and their early fall, and kind of continued to impact, in not a great way, regardless of who was elected, through the end of the year.

For others, it didn’t have an impact at all. But for some, they definitely felt it. So for some of us, right, we had a great year. For others of us, maybe we didn’t have such a great year. And regardless if you had a great year or not, for some of you, it just didn’t go according to plan.

And I know for many of you, possibly in the real estate market, it probably didn’t go according to plan for the second year in a row, which is really tough to hear, I know.

But what I always feel in this, and what this year reminded me of, is that even though I had a great year, I didn’t always feel it throughout the year, is how very important that I didn’t allow that to detract or derail my planning for next year.

So how I managed my thought process, my mindset, what I bring to the table, my energy, my beliefs, the things that I believe to be true, and really paying attention to that and having tools in place to actually deal with that.

Because that’s what I find so fascinating is I know some people who didn’t have a great year. And I would tell you throughout the year, I wasn’t really quite sure I was having a great year.

Even when I had a buddy saying, oh my gosh, your business is just blowing up. I was like, oh, it blew up for a month. I’m like, actually, no, it didn’t. It did a little bit more than that.

But I was always finding the context for why something was happening. And I think that negatively impacts our thought process.

So regardless of what your year looked like, great year, average year, not so great year, think it through how you felt throughout that year. Think through what felt heavy, what had you nervous, what created fear for you.

One of the things I like to do is when I recognize that I’m having fear thoughts and I’m having fear moments, is I’d like to invite that fear to get its butt into the backseat, preferably the trunk. Like, get out of the front seat. You’re not the driver. Get to the back seat.

Actually, get all the way into the trunk. I mean, I don’t think fear will ever leave the car. You know, fear sometimes can be good. It does keep us alive in certain situations.

But recognizing what it is, labeling it for what it is, and then telling it to, you know, take a hike or at least get out of the driver’s seat and move to the back seat or the trunk.

And I think that’s really important. And I think it’s something that business owners don’t spend enough time thinking about.

So the question that I want you to consider as you’re reflecting on 2024 is how do you overcome a year that wasn’t what you expected?

Most of the time people hear that question and they think it belongs to them if their year didn’t go according to plan or wasn’t as good as they anticipated in January of this year.

But it can also be if you did have a great year, but you forgot to really recognize it and enjoy it along the way as well. Remember, very few things are a linear straight line. Most things zig and zag all over the place and that is okay.

One other thing I want to talk about is you need to keep your eyes on your own paper. Remember that? We are always told that not to cheat, right? In school, keep your eyes on your own paper. Don’t look at your neighbor’s paper for the answer.

It’s the same thing in business. You’ve got to run your own race. You’ve got to be willing to run your own race and you’ve got to keep your eyes on your own paper because what you’re building, what you’re developing and the constraints or the benefits and strengths that you bring to the table are different from the person, the business owner sitting next to you.

It doesn’t matter how similar you think you are, you’re just different and your business is different, and you probably want different things.

So most of you know because I’ve talked about it here on the podcast before that I am in a mastermind with other business owners and some of those businesses I am doing better than and some of those businesses are doing way better than me.

And I have to remind myself, keep my eyes on my own paper. I am running my own race. And there’s a reason for that. And I don’t have to try to compete or look like other businesses that may be doing things differently than me.

One of the quickest ways I bring myself down to I would say like just getting off of the comparison game, is I quickly pay attention to what is their life like outside of their business.

So when I look at someone who’s like business is like exploding, I’m so happy for them because they probably wanted that, right? Most people who want it, that’s, I mean, some people I guess who don’t want it, it still happens to them.

But you know they’re working hard for it, and that should be honored and celebrated, and we should be paying attention to that. That is amazing.

But before I let myself get down the path of comparing myself to their explosion and their growth, I do pay attention to what else is going on in their life.

And not like, oh, they have this, and I have that, or they have this, and I don’t have that. I don’t mean it like that. I just mean looking at the totality of the person.

I look at it as, from the perspective of, there’s a lot that I’m attempting to do with my business that allows me to have the home life and the family life that I want. And that’s, you know, not everybody has that. That’s just the fact, right? Not everybody has that. And so it affords time for us to do different things.

And so I always just pay attention to not only, oh my gosh, they had all this great business success, but what else was happening outside of business that allowed that to happen or didn’t allow that to happen or is impacting or maybe not impacting it, right?

There’s all these factors that kind of come into place. And so the most important thing for us to remember is that we need to run our own race and we need to keep our eyes on our own paper.

And when you do find yourself starting to compare yourself to other people, it is okay for you to take stock of what’s different between you and them and what makes you as amazing as you are.

And maybe some of the things they’re doing or having to do to get to the success they’re having, you’re not willing to do. That’s a big one for me.

When I watch other people have success and I’m like, hey, how many hours do you work in a week? Or what does that look like? What’s your travel schedule look like? Or are you working on your vacations? Those are the kind of things that I’m most interested about.

And so if they’re like, yes, I never stop working, but I’m having this banner year, I’m like, oh, I don’t want a banner year like that. I’m OK with that.

I just think it’s important for us to run our own race and keep our eyes on our own paper and stop trying to compare ourselves to others.

Celebrate others’ success. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it doesn’t mean you have to want that for yourself. And it’s OK to kind of pay attention to what that looks like.

OK, here’s another thing that I want to talk about real quick before we move into the gadgets and tools that I’m loving or making myself love.

And that is, don’t forget. As we move into 2025, what gets measured is actually what gets managed.

If you’re measuring, if you’re tracking, if you’re setting metrics, and you’re setting whether it’s goals or it’s metrics or it’s KPIs that you want to hit in your business, KPIs being key performance indicators, if you’re actually setting those, like this is what I want to do, and then you’re trying to measure your success against that, you will naturally manage them.

They will get managed. Obviously, you guys know what gets measured gets managed is not my quote, but it is such an important one for us to keep in mind. Like what we pay attention to typically expands, typically grows.

So it’s important for you to recognize in 2025, what are you committed to tracking? What are you committed to setting maybe goals on? Or if you don’t love the word goals, maybe it’s the KPIs that you’re committed to tracking.

Maybe it’s the type of activity you’re willing to commit to doing and then tracking if you do that activity or do those different projects, whatever it is. But what are you committed to tracking in 2025? I think that’s a really important question that we need to reflect back on.

OK, so last piece, I just want to talk about something I personally think is kind of fun, and that’s some gadgets and tools that I’m loving or, as I’ve said a couple of times, trying to make myself love.

Plus, what changes are coming to this podcast? Definitely let’s make sure we talk about that as well.

Stacey Brown Randall: Hey there, pardon the interruption. If you’re a long-time listener of this podcast, then you’ve heard me mention my Building a Referable Business 12-Month Coaching Program.

But there are two other ways to work with me as well. You can dip your toe in and get started with my starter course called Your Next 5 Referrals, which is a four-module online course. Or if you have a team and you want me to build your strategy for you, then my VIP experience is right for you.

Links to all the ways to work with me can be found on the show notes page for this episode. So you can find links to Your Next five Referrals, the Building a Referable Business Coaching Program, and my VIP Referrals in a Day experience. Now back to the episode.

Stacey Brown Randall: Alright, so some tools and some gadgets that I’m loving or trying to make myself love. Let’s start with what I’m loving.

So I got introduced to Miro board. I think it was earlier this year. It may have been actually at the end of last year, but I had heard about it and then kind of forgotten about it and then got reintroduced to it.

And for me, I’m a very visual person. So for me, I like to see things when I can see them, then they can click. I map out all of my trainings and the referral strategies that I do when I do trainings and stuff. I map them out linearly.

Like I just I like to map things out like this and this and this. And then I like to visually see it, and then it helps me connect the dots so that I can put it in a linear process that helps me teach it. It’s just kind of how my brain works, right?

And so for me, the Miro board allows me to have a digital version of seeing things like big picture from a visual perspective, which has been great.

Now, we are moving into a new software called Funnelytics in the company. We are just diving in. I don’t have a lot of opinions yet. In fairness, Kathy, my assistant, will be the leader of that.

She typically has a tendency to be like, I’m going to dive into that and learn all about it because I know if it stays on Stacey’s to-do list and it’s technology-based, it won’t happen because she’s so smart. She knows me well.

But hopefully, I’ll be able to say after time next year of using Funnelytics that we love that too. So Miro board and Funnelytics, they’re kind of similar, kind of mind mapping, but they are very different types of software.

I don’t usually have like gadgets and software that I’m loving. That’s not my love language is to be like, Oh, I’m loving the software. It’s just not who I am. So the fact that I had some, I was like, Ooh, I actually want to mention them.

Okay. Something else that I’m loving is actually my standup desk. I know many of you have had a standup desk since like pre-COVID, but for me, I’m a little late to the game on some things, and this is definitely one of them, but I’ve been really enjoying my standup desk.

Now, I also got a walking treadmill. And this is the thing that I would say that I am trying to love. It has been a little bit more of a learning curve than I thought it would be.

And my husband was so funny because when I was complaining about my walking treadmill, he like sent me an article that talked about sometimes walking treadmills create more anxiety. You may be getting your steps in, but you’re creating more anxiety.

And I think for me, I’m just trying to get used to the idea that I’m walking at a slower pace than my mind is moving when I’m trying to stand up and do work. And so I have had to just reposition how I think about and use this walking treadmill and what I should be expecting from a work scenario.

So I have a goal. I’m trying to do three hours a day on the walking treadmill, not all in one three-hour block. And I hopefully will increase that. But every day, my day looks a little different.

I’m not always in my office every single day of the week, like Monday through Friday. So it’s not always getting used to that. But that’s the goal. That’s what I’ve set for myself.

If I can do three hours of walking on the treadmill and then obviously spending the rest of my time sitting down or just standing. So we’ll see. I’m going to be honest. I have stumbled off the stinking treadmill.

So if you have a treadmill and you’ve stumbled off and you think you’re the only person in the world, you are not. because I have two. So this is what I’m trying to love is the treadmill.

But I really am enjoying my stand-up desk. And of course, I got both mine off of Amazon. I was like, let’s make sure I like it before I decide 100% that I’m going to do it.

Something else that is, I guess, a gadget that I’m really enjoying is actually a pop-up steam room, like sauna.

Like I know this sounds so crazy but my friend got one and she was like oh my gosh you have to get this it’s literally like a pop-up steam room, like you go in you turn it on and it’s like this it looks like um like a tarp but it’s like you know positioned around these poles and it’s little, two people could probably stand in there, but one person can sit in there.

It sits for us in our sunroom, and it’s just a great way to wind down the day. And I’ve been starting to make my son, who plays competitive baseball, I’ve been trying to make him get into it after he works out and stuff. Just give yourself 10 minutes.

His big thing is it’s boring because you can’t have your phone in there. I’m like, then that should be the best 10 minutes of all of our days. But he’s a teenager, so phone addiction is real.

But I am loving this pop-up, pop-up as in we don’t take it down, it stays up. But this pop-up steam sauna. And that was just a couple hundred bucks, which I thought was pretty amazing.

So a few things that I am loving this year have to do with like me trying to get, you know, healthier, which I think is important. But I just wanted to mention this couple of things that I am loving.

Alright, so let’s finish up this episode with what’s changing for next year. I have two things I want to talk to you about. I’m very excited.

So first up, the podcast is sticking around. Don’t worry. I know I mentioned earlier, there may be some changes happening to the podcast. This podcast is coming back for 2025. Do not worry, but we’re becoming a video podcast.

And I hope you can hear all the excitement in my voice as I say that because I’m forcing myself to say that. If you know me well, you know how much I love batching my podcast episodes when I’m able to do it. I don’t always get to batch every single month. Some weeks that’s not what it looks like.

But when I get to batch my episodes, I like to like, you know, sometimes I’m hanging out my pajamas and I am churning through a bunch of podcast episodes, batching for my editor to produce them. And a video podcast is just going to be different because then the camera’s got to be turned on.

So I know this will be great. I believe that it will be great. And I believe that before the year is out, I will be like, I’m so glad I made the decision to add a video portion to the podcast. So of course, we’ll be loading the video portion of the podcast on YouTube, on my YouTube channel.

The podcast will still be on all your favorite listening apps, so don’t worry about that. You’ll still be able to find the podcast wherever you listen to the podcast.

The audio, me here, in your AirPods, your earbuds, will still be there, but we’re also just creating a video portion of it as well. So we’ll see how it goes.

I mean, guys, just say like, fingers crossed, send some good mojo vibes my way, say some prayers, that I last the entire year. That’s the goal. The commitment is to do a video podcast for next year and see how it goes. So we’ll see how that goes.

Alright. And the last thing I want to mention is depending on how long you’ve been kind of like in my orbit, in my world, or a follower of what I do, you know that I work with clients in three ways, right? We’ve got our online course, we’ve got our coaching program, we have our VIP experience.

And of course, with the VIP experiences where I build your customer referral strategy for your business, I come to you and your team for two days and it’s all built, and we implement and then I’m with you for an entire year on call as you deploy, and I help you deploy and help you implement.

It’s an awesome way for me to work with my clients, but it really truly, let’s be honest, it isn’t for everyone, whether that’s a team size constraint or a budget constraint or timeline issue, right? So the VIP experience isn’t for everyone.

So I decided that I’m going to offer a VIP experience in Charlotte for a small group of business owners in first quarter of next year.

So imagine what the VIP experience is like if I came to you, right? That’s still available. I can still come to you, build it for you and everything. Or you can join me in Charlotte. We’re aiming for February.

You can join me in Charlotte in February for two days and we will build your referral strategy for the rest of 2025 together. And it’ll be our ability to knock out your plan and all the facets of it fast. And we’ll do that together in two days.

So instead of having to do the VIP and know that I’m coming to you and that’s all the kind of pieces that are in place. You can come here, and we can do it together in two days and you’ll do it with a group of other amazing business owners.

So be on the lookout for more information coming out about that. We will have a wait list that goes out for people to start signing up, so you’ll be able to find all the information you need.

When the waitlist is live, we’ll first announce it to our email list. If you’re on our email list, you get our emails every week, now you will definitely be the first to hear about this. But we will also be sharing more information about it here on the podcast, too.

But just kind of put that in your thought process like, hey, if I want to do a VIP experience with Stacey, but not doing it the way she does it when she comes to a client but come to Stacey.

Go to Charlotte to be with Stacey and do this in two days like, go ahead and put that on your radar. Put in part of your first quarter 2025 plans because we’re going to do it it’s going to be amazing, and I can’t wait.

Alright, perfect. There we go. That is all the things that I wanted to share with you for this year, and I am so excited that we have another year coming up together.

Now, we still have two more episodes coming up. We’ve got a Q&A episode next week, and then, of course, with our final episode for the year, we’re doing something a little different. I’m very excited to see how it turns out.

So, of course, all the resources that I mentioned can be found on the show notes page at StaceyBrownRandall.com/339.

All right, we’re back with another great episode created with you and your needs in mind. Until then, you know what to do, my friend. Take control of your referrals and build a referable business. Bye for now.