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Rooted & Relentless is the podcast for big-dreaming, soul-led entrepreneurs building businesses—and lives—on their own terms.
Hosted by Biz Growth Strategist & Operational Powerhouse Steph Rubio, this show blends unfiltered business strategy with personal growth stories, mindset shifts, a touch of randomness, and plenty of humor to keep you laughing. Everything is on the table. It’s raw, real, and relentlessly honest.
New episodes drop weekly(ish). Bring your notebook & an open mind. This is where strategy meets soul, & scaling doesn’t mean selling yours.
Hang with Steph:
Boost Your Biz Strategy Sesh: https://www.stephrubio.com/small-business-consulting
Find Out Where You're Blocked w/ The Biz Blocker Quiz: https://www.tryinteract.com/share/quiz/6810432a8fa23ab768307116
Follow (& DM me - really, I love DM chats) on IG: https://www.instagram.com/virtually_stephrubio
Alright. We're just gonna dig into this one. I'm excited. It's extremely important to me. It's very valuable to what I do, and it's something that's becoming a buzzword, which is problematic.
Steph Rubio:What I'm talking about is the word strategy. I'm going to talk about the difference in the word strategy and what a strategic plan or being strategic or having a real strategy actually means. Hey. I'm Steph Rubio, your go to for no nonsense chitchat on growing a business and life that you actually love. Around here, we're rooted in who we are, even if we're still learning to love her, getting clear on where we wanna go, and we're relentless in our pursuit to get there.
Steph Rubio:We're clawing our way out of survival mode and learning to bet on ourselves. We get into the nitty gritty of growth in life and in business, money, identity, boundaries, healing, leadership, parenting, partners, and all the messy bits in between. If you're ready to grow on your own terms, laugh a lot, possibly cry a little, maybe laugh until we cry if we're lucky, then hit subscribe and let's get into it. This is Rooted and Relentless, where strategy meets soul and scaling doesn't mean selling yours. Grab your notepad and hold on to your tits.
Steph Rubio:This one's for you. If you hop on social media and you scroll for two minutes, you're going to see strategy in at least 15 different places. It's becoming a bit whitewashed, and I do have an idea on a couple of reasons for this. AI and chat GPT being one of them. I think it comes about that way.
Steph Rubio:I think it also comes about because folks are trying to get really creative in the online space on how they differentiate themselves. So people start throwing around the word strategy, and you see it in so many areas, and sometimes it's just not always real. So let's talk about what strategy is. Let's get into it. Essentially, a strategy is answering all of your questions.
Steph Rubio:Who, what, why, when, and where, and not in that order. Why would you answer who before you answer why? So you start with this big vision. Where are you going? What are you doing?
Steph Rubio:And before we get into that, let me back it up a little bit and say that this is foundational to what I do in businesses and what I have done in businesses. And I also got my business degree last year, October 2024, a shout out. I put in a lot of work for that baby to get my degree in strategic management. The capstone course I took, which is just the course that you have to take to close it out to actually get your degree, was actually a strategic management course where I had to run a global shoe wear company with a team of four people. And there was a simulation, but it was real.
Steph Rubio:It was with folks all around the globe, other teams. And we came out in the top 10. You have to peel back all the layers and dig under the hood and understand everything you do in your business, how it's functioning, what you do, why you do it, who you do it for, and how all those interconnect. And they all interconnect to reach that why, that vision of the future and laying the map to get there. So for me, what I do in businesses now, small business solopreneurs in the online space like we do, but I also did it with larger corporations and organizations with the COO as chief of staff, director of operations.
Steph Rubio:So when I talk about doing strategy or developing strategy for your business or making strategic decisions, that's exactly what the heck I mean. Okay? It's not a buzzword here, but I still wanna break down what that means for you so you know what to look for and why it's important and why I use that word specifically so that you know that what you're doing, the actions you're taking align to where you want to go so that you're being strategic in your plan to get there. You're not just trying things and seeing if they work. I'm not saying like we don't test, but we test strategically.
Steph Rubio:We formulate a plan on what we think we should do and why with actual research and grounded in knowledge. And yes, we test those and we try again and we pull different levers, but we don't just try it because. A framework, it's not a strategy. You might have been strategic in developing it, but a framework is something you're saying that you could fit everybody into. That's not a strategy, unfortunately.
Steph Rubio:That's not deeply considering where people wanna go. Not saying you can't have a framework to help people develop a strategic plan, but you see what I'm saying here. So I'm not taking anything away from, like, specialists who say they bring strategy, but even a marketing strategist, to bring strategy, to validate that, to actually be for real, they have to look at the bigger picture. That's exactly what a strategy is. So they can't just say, oh, let's start an email list, and let's get you on social media, and let's post three times a week.
Steph Rubio:That's that's not a strategy unless they understand why, where you're trying to go. You can get strategic in which social media platforms you show it up in. So should you be on Instagram? Is that where your people are? Is that where you should be spending the most of your time, I should say?
Steph Rubio:That's where you start asking all those why questions. Why am I doing this? A long to do list, that's not a strategy. Having goals, that's a part of your strategy, but that's not an overall strategy. So let me walk you through, like, if I was walking into an organization and they hired me as a chief of staff or chief operating officer and I was setting up a strategy for them, we start with that vision, that long term, like, you wake up in three years, what does this all look like?
Steph Rubio:What do you actually want it to look like? Where are we going? That's where we start. We try to peel that back. We gotta pull that out first.
Steph Rubio:If not, we're just, like, rocking it. And when you start your business, that's completely okay. A lot of us start and we just want to make a little money and we just want to quit our jobs or we just want to be home with our family a little bit more. Me too. Me too, baby.
Steph Rubio:That's exactly why I did this. So, I'm saying that that's okay. But at some point you get to a stage in your business that I call the growth stage. You get past those nitty gritty startup I don't just call it that, by the way. Let's not make this about me.
Steph Rubio:That's actually true. You have startup companies, you have growth companies, and you have mature companies. So people are like, boom, we're doing it. Put it on repeat and let's just do it again. Does Apple come to mind?
Steph Rubio:They do the same thing every year. They launch iPhones the same time every year and we eat it up. They're a mature company. They're a profitable company. Okay?
Steph Rubio:When you're a startup, sometimes you're not profitable. You're spending some money to get that traction and bring it in. Okay. I'm going down a rabbit hole. Clearly, I love this, so let's pull it back to the top.
Steph Rubio:When we start with that vision, what I'm talking about is basically knowing where the hell you're going. You have to know where you're going to know what you should even be doing every day to get there. Unless, again, yeah, you're in your staky startup phase. Then do it, baby, talk to clients, network, and do what you can, validate it. But when you get to that point, you're like, okay.
Steph Rubio:It worked. Like, what's next? What's more? Or maybe this isn't what I wanna be doing day to day, or maybe I'm tired of being unsure all the time. But you get really clear on where the heck you're going.
Steph Rubio:Your clear choices, intentional direction, and repeatable execution essentially, and a lot of other things. Let's talk about Your positioning. I already said vision. That is answering where you're going. Positioning.
Steph Rubio:You hear positioning a lot in the online space. It's very important. Your position in the market. How do you position what you do? Know why you're the right person for the right people.
Steph Rubio:Right? The decisions you make, the execution, measuring, all of those components. So again, if I was walking into an organization and I was working with the leadership team, this is what I would do. We would start with that vision. So in the vision, I say in three years, this is what I want it to look like.
Steph Rubio:This is what I want to be doing. Then we break that down into achievable goals year by year. I'm talking about getting real into the weeds here. Step out of your office, get outside where you can get creative, and remove all the bars from your mind, move remove the ceiling from your mind, pretend that anything's possible, be bold, be honest with yourself, and get real on what you would love the day to day to look like. What do you want your life to look like?
Steph Rubio:What do you want your business to look like? Okay? That's your vision three years from now. That's what we're gonna march towards. We're gonna peel that back to goals, and your goals need to be specific and smart.
Steph Rubio:They're not like, I want to drink more water. I want to drink a gallon of water a day so that I have better looking skin. That's the goal. And I'm going to start doing that by the August or now because it's a gallon of water. But you see what I'm saying there?
Steph Rubio:You time bound it. Then you take that goal and you develop action steps from there. Do this for every area of your business. When I say area and function, I mean you have sales. Right?
Steph Rubio:You have marketing. You have development, like what you're actually developing. That's your product, your service, and that's very close to your marketing because you wanna figure out how to position it, price it, place it, all of those components. Then you consider your operations. What do need to do on the back end to make all of this happen?
Steph Rubio:Are you showing up in the right places? So we peel that back and then we start to set not just goals, we have actions, your actual to do list component of it, right, to reach it, to measure your success. So if you've set three years from now what you want it to look like and then you have goals that are smaller that you can march towards, and those goals need to have tactics or actions aligned to it, like I'm going to post on social media three times a week specifically on LinkedIn because that's where my folks are. Like, you turn that into a task to develop your content, and you do need to be strategic in your content. But it's not like, I wanna go viral on TikTok so more people will see me, and what you're doing is one on one.
Steph Rubio:You don't need more people to see you if you do one on one offers. How many people can you realistically help if you do one on one offers? Right? Now if you're doing a membership and there's not a limit of people and more people means more money and more people and more money means more folks that you can actually help and you're passionate about that, then that goal is going to be different. What you need to do and how you need to show up is going to be different.
Steph Rubio:That's essentially what a strategy is. It's answering all those who, how, where, when, why questions. Hopefully that made sense. Hopefully it starts to peel back the layers of understanding. You should be able to put a strategic plan on page, on a paper, and it should be those components.
Steph Rubio:You should be able to see the vision, and then you should be able to see actual objectives you wanna march to. What do you want to be doing and what is going to determine that it was successful? You know? So if you're launching a new offer, that's a component of it. What makes it successful to you?
Steph Rubio:And then the tactics and the to do list you need to do, that's where you try and monitor. So you have to be strategic in taking the actions needed to get there, and we won't know that unless we know where there is. Then we walk backwards. You then, congratulations, have a road map to reach your big, scary, audacious, exciting, bold vision for the future. Well, that's a wrap on this episode of Rooted and Relentless.
Steph Rubio:If it made you laugh, not alone, or grab that cute little notebook of yours and scribble something down, please hit me with the SSR. Subscribe, share, and review, as in leave a review. Don't forget to tag me on Instagram at virtually underscore Steph Rubio and tell me what you're reading this week. Seriously, a live for a good book moment. Thanks for hanging.
Steph Rubio:Bye.