This Simple Strategy Could Double Your Leads with Eleanor Beaton

Update: 2025-09-23

Description

Episode 989: Show Notes

What if the fastest way to grow your business wasn’t figuring it out alone? What if you leaned into collaboration? Today on the Strategy Hour Podcast, I’m joined by Eleanor Beaton, Founder of Safi Media and Host of The Woman-Owned Podcast. She’s trained tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, advised at Yale, and built a business that’s changing the way women approach growth. In this conversation, we explore feminism, the pressure to be a provider, and why hyper-independence isn’t the solution many of us think it is. Then, in the second half, we’re going to break down her round table growth strategy, a simple but powerful approach that could double your leads organically. I hope you’re ready, because we’re about to go deep!

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The Fire Behind Eleanor’s Mission

What sparked her focus on women scaling in business? As a child, her mom told her, “Eleanor, money is power. Always make your own.” That advice stayed with her and drives her passion for financial empowerment and independence. Her strategies work for everyone. While Eleanor and I are feminists, we also see how feminism sometimes feeds the myth of the Lone Woman who is so independent that she needs no one. We view both women and men as providers: men often financially, women through stability and resources. The real question is, how do we build partnerships that help us become our best selves?

Why Eleanor Believes in a Bold Vision for 2030

Eleanor has a goal to double the number of female founders scaling past a million dollars by 2030. Through all the data collection she has done, Eleanor has learned that the majority of service and knowledge-based businesses have very similar growth paths, challenges, and revenue. A million dollars is a very powerful benchmark, she explains, because once you’re able to take your business past that, there is a certain degree of resilience in the business that provides a lot of structure and freedom for the founder. It’s a very important developmental milestone in business, and there are not enough women who are there.

How to Leverage Corporate Deals for Financial Runway

When she first started her business, Eleanor focused on leadership coaching for women. Her packages were $3000 for three months of one-on-one coaching. Then, she created a program. Next, she sold it to an organization, doing a $150 000 contract to take her six-week program and turn it into a six-month program, taking two sets of fifteen people through it. This allowed her to hire her first full-time executive assistant and her first contract coach to help deliver and fulfil. The larger cash infusions start to create a financial runway for a company where you can start making investments that really help you grow.

What Deal Velocity and Deal Durability Can Do for You

Cashflow challenges can really drain you as an entrepreneur, she shares, but ultimately, it’s so important that we start to see stability in cash flow. You want to have deals closing fairly regularly: that’s deal velocity. These become your cash anchors throughout the year, and they’re very powerful — we love them! One thing Eleanor sees preventing growth for business owners is customer acquisition. She believes that success today is really about who is going to be a good business leader, look at their costs and improve profitability, and build the strongest brand to be able to charge high profits. It’s about who can recruit the best team that can drive the best value.

The Roundtable Growth Strategy You Need to Pay Attention To

Conversations create real value, so how can we use them as a marketing hook? One powerful approach is a roundtable: a 60 to 90-minute virtual event with 3–5 speakers on a topic your audience is hungry to learn about. Each speaker then promotes the event to their own audience, multiplying your reach. Eleanor shows how effective this can be. By leveraging her reputation, inviting the right speakers, and clearly outlining the benefits, access to an engaged community, and strong promotions, she turned roundtables into a proven way to grow her audience. For many entrepreneurs, they’re doing account-based marketing. In those cases, roundtables work exceptionally well because you invite your target clients to be speakers.

How to Continue Leveraging Your Audience After a Roundtable

Eleanor has found that a lot of small businesses, particularly those that operate in the online space, are over-indexed to inbound marketing. They hope that their digital funnels will do all of the hard work. One of the most underdeveloped functions in the business is often the sales function. Have you called every single person who showed up for your roundtable? Everybody should have a little Post-it note somewhere in their office that says DFD - Dial for Dollars, says Eleanor. If you’re unwilling to do that, her question to you is, what do you hate so much about money?

If you want more of Eleanor’s advice, find her on LinkedIn or Instagram at @eleanorbeaton. Send her a message with the word ‘roundtables’ for a full guide.

Quote This

It’s impossible to overstate how cash flow crunches and cash flow challenges can really drain an entrepreneur of their energy

-Eleanor Beaton

Highlights

The Fire Behind Eleanor’s Mission [0:01:10 ]

Why Eleanor Believes in a Bold Vision for 2030 [0:10:18 ]

How to Leverage Corporate Deals for Financial Runway. [0:14:38 ]

What Deal Velocity and Deal Durability Can Do for You [0:18:25 ]

The Roundtable Growth Strategy You Need to Pay Attention To [0:26:29 ]

How to Continue Leveraging Your Audience After a Roundtable [0:40:03 ]

OUR GUEST:

Eleanor Beaton

Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

Eleanor Beaton is the founder of Safi Media, a coaching and education company dedicated to doubling the number of women founders who sustainably scale to $1M+ by 2030, and the host of the Woman Owned podcast, now ranked in the top 0.5% of all podcasts globally, providing insights and strategies to empower women entrepreneurs.

Since 2016, Eleanor has provided training to over 25,000 women entrepreneurs worldwide. A former chair of the Visiting Women’s Executive Exchange Program at the Yale School of Management, Eleanor has won national awards for her achievements in entrepreneurship, leadership development and business journalism. She lives in Nova Scotia with her husband and two sons.