What's breaking in your business did not happen overnight. It's been slowly unraveling in the background behind the wind, behind the big launches, behind the revenue, behind the growth, it isn't new, it's just no longer avoidable. And when you trace it back, you'll realize that the cracks were formed by decisions made months, maybe even years ago. That felt necessary at the time, but never were built to last and be sustainable long term.
What I've been noticing with a lot of conversations I've been having with clients lately is that this is a slow build of avoidance, catching up. I think this is just something that, is really important to talk about as business owners. A lot of what you are experiencing is not just inconvenient anymore, but it's unavoidable.
I really wanna talk about this because it is something that I have been having some really intimate, in-depth conversations with, with some of my clients recently about what they're noticing in their business, incongruence in the results that they want to be seeing and honestly expect to see based off the. Actions that they're taking, and where this dissonance is coming from.
One of the first places that this shows up where we start to see the evidence of something needing to change is in the results of our launches, our messaging, and our sales As business owners, that's one of the first places where we really start to. Not just feel the discomfort, but notice the severity of the impact. And that's usually what leads many of us to be willing to actually do what's required to change things.
And that's really what I want to dig into today, in today's episode is really where the different places where we start to see these breakdowns as a result of decisions we made six months, a year ago, two years ago, and what are the questions we can be asking ourselves to help lead ourselves through this?
Because at the end of the day, no matter what's going on in this world, no matter what's going on politically, no matter what's going on economically, no matter what's going on in your personal family dynamic at home, you have full body control to make new decisions to help lead you to the direction of where it is that you want to go. I regard of maybe the mess it might feel like that you need to clean up today.
So like I just mentioned, I think that one of the first places that we really noticed. Where things need to change is when we start to see a pattern of results as it relates to our sales and our launch performance. And especially this is really for these more mature business owners.
I'm really trying to speak to at from a contextual level right now, because I do think that when you experience either fast success, meaning things happen very quickly, maybe your business doubled or triple in revenue at a very fast time period. Um. And that's one dynamic I wanna break down. The other dynamic is just when you've been in business for a very long time, seven years, nine years, 10 years, 15 years, they always say it can be really difficult to move a big ship in a new direction.
And there's. Truth behind that. So these two dynamics, what happens is if you're in the dynamic where your business grew very quickly, that is something that I personally experienced. When you have very, very fast success and things are just growing quickly, I think what can happen is you have all this external success. You've made all this money. Typically what also happens is you end up hiring a lot of team members quickly to help sustain the fast growth that took place.
And a lot of the time, the decisions that you are making when you are, are moving at that speed or moving at that fast of a pace. Those decisions were not very deliberate. Those decisions usually were not coupled with risk management. Those decisions were really oftentimes made with a shortsighted lens because you were trying to deal with the impact of something happening very quickly.
And then as things start to stabilize, as you realize that, oh, every year in business we are not going to grow by 50 or a hundred percent every single year, there's this identity catch up that has to happen because I think. At least for me, I'll speak from experience.
And what I've noticed with other clients who've grown in a similar pace as me is that they really start to question themselves and are really lacking a lot of self-trust because it's hard for them, and myself included, when this happened with me, I could not really understand why my success came so fast. And what I hear a lot of clients say is that, yes, I made a lot of money. It happened very quickly. I really don't know why.
And what a lot of the time we were doing in those situations is that we were like, our naivety actually played to our benefit because we didn't know what we didn't know. And in those situations, you just do a lot of everything. You are doing a lot of different things. That it led to a lot of great results, but you really don't know how to pinpoint which one of those activities or which few of those activities actually led to the success and which ones of those activities really were.
Yes, you did them, but they really are not. Sustainable, or they're not repeatable or they're not necessary for the continuation of where it is that you're trying to go. So there's this one bucket you can find yourself in with this fast success, with this very quick pace, this, very loose lens that you were applying to make pretty impactful decisions and now you're in a position where it's okay. I can't avoid like my quote unquote ignorance to some degree anymore.
Like I have to get a better strategic understanding of why the success that we had happened, and not only how to make it happen, but how do we learn from that success so that we can actually replicate it over and over and over again in the future. I think that's a huge thing here is like when success comes quickly, it's very difficult to replicate long-term sustainably.
Like you can do it once, maybe you can do it twice, but doing it 3, 4, 5 times when your energy is no longer the same, when your cognitive load is no longer the same. When your responsibilities that you are managing and what you are holding changes, it's very difficult to replicate that type of success without knowing how it actually happened and not knowing the.
Full breakdown, in the lens behind what was influencing those decisions and now what needs to be influencing the decisions that we make to replicate that. I think on the flip side of what happens is when I see other business owners that I've coached and worked with who have been in business for a long period of time, I'd say like eight to 15 years. And they've been selling to a pretty niche or a specialized audience.
They've been doing the same thing for a very long time, and maybe their success didn't come very quickly in the beginning, but they've been able to sustain themselves over a very long period of time. They've had gradual healthy growth. Over time, maybe not. Nothing massive or nothing huge, but sustainable, steady. There has been, gradual growth over time. What I notice with them as it relates to this topic is that there can be a level of contentment.
And I don't wanna use the word complacency, but a high resistance to change because they are so comfortable in the groove that they've created for themselves. It's like, yes, I've been doing this for eight years. I know how to make X amount of money on repeat. Like we've been doing this over and over and over and over again. Nothing too wide swings in either direction, but we've been able to stabilize and steady our revenue for this long. I know how to do this and I know how to do this well.
I dunno how to grow beyond this. And when it comes time to decisions that we've made, and I think in this, in both dynamics here, the question that I think is really important to ask is, what is the thing that you have been resisting? What have you been resisting? What have you been avoiding?
And oftentimes, I don't care which category of business growth you are in that slow and steady I. Eight to 15 year bucket or that quick, fast paced success bucket is that oftentimes there is something that we know how to name. Because we have been avoiding it or resisting it for a very long time.
And the thing is about business and when many of us have this type of steadiness or growth or success historically, is that it can take one year, sometimes two years for the impacts of our decisions to show on our cashflow balance line items. It can take time for the result of our decisions, the impact of our decisions to actually show face in the business.
And I think that is something as you mature as a business owner, you have to realize is that the decisions that you make today are not just for short term impact. The decisions that you are making today will have long-term implications and sometimes those long-term implications. Outlive and last longer than it takes for us to learn the lesson, which I'm like, that's like adulthood, like 1 0 1. It has been something I've been learning hardcore in this season of life.
Just personally, it is just like big dog. God, I got the lesson, but I'm still dealing with the consequences of decisions that I made. From a year ago, two years ago, even though I've already learned the lesson, I'm still dealing with the consequences of those decisions and paying the price of the consequences of those decisions. And that thing is also true in business. So when I, when we start to think about this and you really start to get clear on what is the thing that you've been avoiding.
That can come up by way of a couple of different avenues and where I noticed this is either within our messaging, I see a lot of business owners who get to a point of. I'm gonna just name it as complacency, because that is what it is. It could be complacency for a lot of different reasons, but we get very comfortable, maybe that's a better word to use.
We get very comfortable in the rhythms that have always worked, and we run the risk of relying on the success of yesterday to produce the success of tomorrow, and that is a very dangerous trap and a common one that business owners run into because it's like you had to work so hard to get the success that you had yesterday.
You telling me that I gotta keep quote unquote working hard or keep putting forth a good amount of effort to not just replicate the success, but be to be able to sustain it for tomorrow, the day after, three years from now. And the answer is yes. That's the real difference between business owners that come in and business owners that shut down, versus business owners that come in and they end up staying in business for 20, 30, 50 years.
That is, it's not really about how smart you are or whether or not you're lucky. But it's really about are you willing to maintain that resiliency? Are you willing to. Maintain that growth mindset that lets you know that, yes, this might have worked yesterday, but I am willing to still be a student no matter how much success I've had, and I'm willing to evolve and pivot based off of what my audience and what my data and what my market is telling me. And I think that is a big differentiation.
Like you really have to ask yourself as a business owner, is it, are you in a position where you are willing to always be a student? Where you are willing to always be a learner of your audience, a learner of what you are hearing and listening to? Are you willing to evolve, and adapt?
And that evolutionary characteristic trait that I'm talking about, that is what leads to sustainable success long term is your willingness to change, your willingness to evaluate your decisions and look at them from a new lens. Your willingness to gain new perspective on maybe a situation you feel like you already know, like the back of your hand, but maybe when's the last time you flipped your hand over and spread your fingers and looked at things from a different perspective.
And also, you really have to ask yourself, where are you putting yourself in spaces? Where you can gain that new perspective. 'cause if you've been doing the same thing the same way with the same people, you're gonna end up usually thinking the exact same way that led to the decisions that you've been making that have caused you to be in the situation that you are in. So a few different places. I wanna share of like how this might look.
And when I, when we go back to that question is what is the thing that you've been avoiding? What have you been resisting? When I'm working with my private clients, it usually manifests itself in a couple of different ways. One is that many of my clients, the first place that we might notice this is there's a resistance or avoidance around our model or our offers, and I think this is a really, really tough one because.
When you have locked yourself into certain offers or certain business model structures, it can feel very difficult to unwind because maybe you have team members that you are paying that now feel like family, that have become friends, that you know their kids. You know that what you're paying for is supporting their family and supporting their lifestyle. Maybe they're going through stuff and the team that you have was really great for the business model that you had.
But the resistance and the avoidance that is coming up for you is your intuition may be telling you it might be time to shift the model. It might be change, the change the offer. It might be time to scale back the multiple options and the multiple layers that currently exist in our business model. 'cause maybe again, that might have been a decision from two years ago.
And you did it and it made money, but you started to, now you're seeing the impact of those decisions and it's maybe this is too bloated. Maybe there's too many layers, maybe there's too many offers. Maybe there's too much complexity in the business model. Maybe there's too much overhead that is required to support this business model or to support this offer that literally does not make financial sense anymore. And you're at a point right now where it's like a decision has to be made.
Avoidance no longer is an option. We cannot ignore it. So maybe the model, or maybe the offer has to change, but sometimes there can be that can that might feel difficult to do. I. The other place I noticed this again, is with team and with overhead.
Coupled with the, model and the offers dynamic is when you have team in place, depending on what type of team support it is, whether it's full-time team members, whether it's contract or project base, and how ingrained these team members are into your client relationships. Maybe have program coaches leading things in containers that are running for another 12 months, but you know, good and well, something has to change.
The cash flow isn't really cash flowing the same way it used to, and how do you do that without causing disruption or breaking promises that you've already made, or contractual agreements that you've already made with clients. And then the also the dynamic of what do you do now when you have these team members that you feel responsible for?
That have built you up and now you changing your mind about how you wanna run your business, how you wanna lead your offers, how you want to manage overhead now might require you letting them go like that is not an easy conversation. It's not an easy decision to hold. The other place I see this come up is within launches and sales, and I think this is really probably the first place it comes up. I think a lot of the time these intuitive hits or this.
Thing that we know we've been resisting or this thing that we know we've been avoiding. When it comes to offers or team, I feel like those like things will lurk in the background, but oftentimes what I notice is people will delay making decisions on that. But when it starts showing up in your conversion rates, when it starts showing up in your sales reports and your launch debriefs and your monthly cash flow, that is when.
It. You can't avoid it anymore because maybe you can't make payroll next week May. That's where it shows up and you can't avoid it anymore because. You are taking out business loans, you are relying on credit card debt like you are stretching yourself from a financial perspective to the point where you know that something has to change. And I think that can be a really scary place to be in as a business owner.
Because again, going back to what I mentioned earlier is what is influencing your decision making when you are making decisions from a place of fear? When you are making decisions from a place of scarcity, and I don't mean scarcity in the sense of You have a low level mindset. I just mean scarcity in the sense of you feel very afraid and very activated because maybe you can't make payroll or maybe cashflow is really, really tight or whatever it might be.
Like. I just want you to think about the neutrality. That is in that is informing the decisions that you are making and honestly how important it is to be in a space, especially if you are in one of those tight, restrictive moments. How important it is for you to have a space, you to have a sounding board, you to have a thought partner, you to be somewhere where you can reduce the noise on how big the emotions actually feel right now.
Because that is a really, again, tough place to make decisions from, and those are probably decisions that you made years ago that you're in that you're seeing the impact of today. So we don't wanna repeat that pattern again. Part of this maturity as a business owner is learning how to create patterns, habits, routines, be build team, be resourced to the point where you can.
See, you know, allow yourself to feel the big emotions, but also have a process to help you bring you back down to neutrality when it comes to making strategic decisions on how you decide to take action and what choices you choose to take to change the direction of your business. But those are the three places I typically see it. The other thing that I noticed that this is probably an overarching one, I've seen across the board is that when this is happening, it's like, what do I do?
And one of the things that I tell business owners and have to coach business owners on, and this is something I've had to practice myself in my own business, is when you are dealing with the impact of decisions that you made years ago, and you are now experiencing the consequences of those decisions, not only asking yourself what have you been avoiding? What have you been resisting? But I'm like, where have you leaned out so far that you need to lean back in? Okay. I'm queuing Cheryl Sandberg.
Where do we need to lean back in? Because oftentimes what I notice with business owners is that we have leaned so far out of certain departments. Certain areas, we've allowed our team to make decisions and if somebody were to ask you some questions about what they're doing, you might, you probably don't know, and there is a level of insight that you no longer have.
There is a pulse on your prospects that you no longer know because somebody else is writing your content, somebody else is doing all of your marketing, or you just step so far behind it, like you're just like, I don't even know anymore. I have no idea what my audience feels. I don't know why they're churning at the rate that they are right now. I don't know why. We have really qualified leads, it looks like, but they're not converting.
I don't actually know what a qualified lead is outside of their coachable. They're, they really desire to wanna make this change and they can afford the price tag on the sales page like.
If you are, if you've lost pulse with your prospects and you are, there are certain questions you cannot answer specifically about the contextual nuance of what they're experiencing, the specificity of how they are approaching buying decisions today, that's probably one huge area where you need to lean back in and take control of your messaging. Take control of your customer journey, get back into the weeds. And this is not you micromanaging.
This is not a sign that you are being a bad business owner. This is a sign that you are being a responsible one. The other place where I notice it is when there people, business owners, and CEOs have leaned too far out from actually leading their team. And the reason why I wanna say this is because I tend to work with clients that hate managing other people, and I am one of those people as well. Okay? So I'm not saying this to throw shade, honey, I'm saying this from peer to peer. I get it.
Many of us do not like managing other people. We don't like micromanaging. We don't like being an adult babysitter. You, we are like, you are a grown af. If you've been assigned this responsibility, you need to take full ownership of it. And I hear you. But there is a very big difference between micromanaging your team and not leading your team. 'cause what I see happen oftentimes is people will put individuals in place. There's poor direction.
There's very little, if any, process, documentation. There is very little transfer skillset that is happening. There's no transference of knowledge that is happening, but you've hired this individual because you were probably burnt out. You were probably exhausted. You grew very quickly, and you needed somebody fast, and you threw somebody in. And they were good enough. On the rare case, you might be listening and you might have a unicorn on your team.
Okay. I wanna, you're in like the, in the 22% bucket, okay? Where you found somebody who was absolutely a rockstar and you've really been able to cultivate a beautiful relationship with them. I'm gonna talk about that situation here in a second. But the other situation is you probably have somebody on your team that's doing maybe 60% of the job well, maybe at best, and you are at a point where you know that the performance that you need from them is not hitting.
But you have not taken ownership or accountability of why the results are what they are. You've leaned so far out where you're like, I have no idea what's going on with the funnel. I have no idea what's going on in those client calls. I have no idea. And if you have no idea. That's not a sign that you are great like that you're doing the job well. It is probably a sign that you have checked out for probably a multitude of reasons.
Maybe the emotional labor that you're dealing with is just too heavy, and it's like that 60% they're given is good enough right now. We're gonna keep riding the wave. Maybe the cognitive load that you've been holding is just too much for you to bear alone because the responsibilities have grew so much because of the success of your business. You have not yet put people and things in place to help share that cognitive load. That you're not holding all of the responsibility by yourself.
There could be a lot of different reasons why that might be the case, but those are usually the two places where you need to lean back in. It's not, again, you are not micromanaging and it is not a, it's not a sign that you are a bad leader if you have to get back in and understand what's happening because at any moment in time, A CEO, you should know enough information to inform your decision making. I think that's really a good gauge of like, how involved do I need to be?
You need to be involved enough where you may not know all the intricacies of the how, but you know what questions you need to be asking, and based off the answers of those questions, you can use that information to inform your decision making. And if you don't have any idea, you ain't got not a clue that of the information that you need to inform the decisions that you make to continue to lead the business forward, that is a sign that you gotta lean back in.
And when I noticed that these are two of the things where this CEO is step is stepped too far out of their messaging, they no longer have a pulse on their prospects and nobody else in the business does. Their prospect has changed how their prospect is making and buying decisions. How their prospect is in is in approaching buying decisions. How your prospect feels and perceives risk associated with hiring you if nobody knows that information and knows when it's changing.
'cause knowing that data is what will inform what your messaging needs to be. That informs then. Not only your messaging, but your messaging is what are the words that you are using and the language that you are projecting out through all of your marketing assets, through all of your launch events, through all of your, you know, campaigns. So that's a really important thing.
That's probably one of the first places I would tell you to lean back in, is you need, you can delegate the distribution of your marketing. You cannot delegate your messaging. And this is really in particular to individuals who are selling intellectual property. You are selling coaching. You've created a, a curriculum. You create online education. You are offering done for you services. You're selling an actual deliverable, but it's based off of your ip.
It's based off of your experience, your knowledge, your skillset. If that is a type of business that you run, part of your job, that will always be part of your job, is maintaining control of the messaging. You can delegate the distribution of your messaging, but it is 100% your responsibility.
To maintain control of your messaging because honestly, the reason why your clients are hiring you, even if you have team that is supporting the delivery, but they're still choosing you and your company to be the person they hire, is because of your perspective. It's because of your point of view and your lens on these things as it relates to how you approach helping them get results. That is what they are investing in. That's why they're choosing you versus somebody else.
So that is something that you cannot. Delegate, 'cause you can't delegate your opinions, you can't delegate your perspective, you can't delegate your point of view. Like those are things you can't delegate. The other thing, like I said here is the team piece is that it might be time where you need to go do a round robin, call session with your, with your team members and start asking the questions you've been allowing to slip and slide by.
I feel like I just laid a lot down right there, so I just wanna take a moment to pause because if you need to catch your breath, I'm just here in this with you, but I'm not trying to call you out. I'm trying to call you up because if you are in a moment right now where you were experiencing the impact of decisions that you've made a couple years ago, and quite honestly probably the impact of decisions you've been avoiding.
For months or years now, this is a huge opportunity for you because the disruption that you are now seeing in your business is a clear signal of a misalignment that has been happening. And I think that if you are a lifestyle based business owner, you have your business because you wanted freedom, you wanted options, you wanted choice.
The level of freedom, optionality, and choice that we desire to experience in our personal lives oftentimes is created through the congruency and the alignment of what our business is able to produce for us. 'cause our business is our vehicle. Our business is the vehicle that creates the options in the choice for us in our personal lives. So there needs to be harmony between the two. And if we start to notice disruption in the business, it is not a sign that you are failing.
It is a sign that, hey, that intuition that you've been avoiding, that little voice in you, that you've been abandoning that trust in yourself, that you have not been activating, you're, you can't avoid it anymore. We gotta step up. We gotta lean in. We gotta start taking back control of the very thing that is giving us freedom in our personal lives. Hopefully it is. So I just, I really hope that this is landing. If you wanna continue the conversation, send me a DM on Instagram.
I would love to hear from you, I wanna take a moment here to reground us. And give you some practical things of what you can be doing next, what you can be asking yourself. This is the exact same things that I'm leading my private clients through right now, is what do you do when what's not working is finally too loud to ignore. So again, ask yourself, what have you been resisting? What decisions do you know you have been avoiding?
What do you need to do to create the cognitive space for you to feel like you can step back into your marketing and regain control of your messaging and be more directive? Vocalize your perspective? Articulate your opinion again, back into your public marketing and in your public messaging. Where do you need to check for your leadership leaks? Where have you been overly dependent on team? Where have you been overly relying on others to manage your messaging? Where have you been?
Not allowing your voice to be heard across the board. And lastly, really ask yourself, what do you want moving forward? Where is this leading you? All of this evidence that you are getting right now is giving you insight into what the new opportunity is.
If we allow ourselves to listen to it, and if we allow ourselves to trust ourselves enough to know, to make the decisions, even if it feels scary, even if it's uncomfortable, even if it's very different than what our definition of success was when we built this thing, your definition of success might be changing. You're allowed to give yourself permission to evolve and for your business to evolve alongside you. And lastly, I want to let you know that this is not the end.
Sometimes we can feel like when we get into these parts of business, it's like, how did I get here? I need to burn everything down. Like I'm a terrible business owner. This is absolutely horrendous. This is diabolical, and I wanna just let you know this is just a very natural part of business. If you've reached this point in business, that means you've reached a level of success that is a good indicator that you are capable of the next decade ahead for you in business.
cause most people don't make it to this point in business. Most people quit before they make it to this threshold. This is a threshold for the what the next 10 years is going to hold for you. Your business might look totally different. Your business, a whole new business might get created from this.
A whole new vision might get created from this, but you're at a really critical threshold now where it is your chance to stop building from old assumptions and start creating from who you actually want to become, for where you're leading yourself into, and what this new vision is. So name it, face it, lead from it, because distance between the success that you've created and the success that's available for you. That's the real perception gap that we need to close.
Thank you so much for tuning in for listening. If you enjoyed this, like it, make sure to subscribe. Please leave me a review, and as always, if you wanna continue the conversation, send me a DM over on Instagram. I'm at Geisha Hawk and I can't wait to chat with you in the next episode.