This Is Why Your Business Isn’t Growing

Alright, so I’m going to describe to you a certain cycle of behavior that I see recur over and over and over in my students and in entrepreneurs. And it just happened again on a recent call that I had with one of my students. And I want you to ask yourself, okay, does this resonate with me in any way? Do I see any part of myself in this? And it might not be in the specific details of this story that I’m going to share with you, but more holistically, do you ever notice this pattern of behavior? So the problem that my student was having is inconsistent lead flow. He has a funnel that is only ever completely full or completely empty. There’s like no in between. And part of this is due to the fact that he does a cohort based coaching program that’s every twelve weeks with a launch and then fulfillment period, right? So every twelve weeks he goes hard at the marketing, he fills up his pipeline, he gets all these customers, he closes them, and then he goes into fulfillment mode for the next twelve weeks and doesn’t pay attention to filling up the pipeline. So by the time that cohort ends, he has to go back to the beginning. He has to start putting out the content again to get more leads, right? So it’s this kind of just push and pull, push and pull.

Start, stop, start, stop process. And he’s sitting down with me last week in a call and he’s like, okay, how do I make this more consistent? I want to get more consistent in creating my content for social media. Does that, what do I need to do there? Do I need to hire somebody, a video editor, somebody do the copywriting, somebody more consistent and all this stuff. And at the root of it, yes, the systems, the processes, the team that you surround yourself with are going to help you execute the thing more consistently, no doubt. But that’s not the root problem. That’s not the root issue at play here. The root issue is that he has not created a standard of expectation, a standard of behavior for how he approaches his marketing. Right now it is, marketing is only a priority when it’s a priority every other time when he’s full, when he’s fulfilling on students, he stops doing the thing.

And so the example here to tie this to another pursuit would be your health. This is the example of, I only ever get fit in the summertime. I get beach ready, but then during the fall and the winter and the spring, I let myself start to go, I eat a little bit more, I stop going to the gym quite as frequently. And then when the summer comes around again. It’s time to get fit. So I start going to the gym six times a week, I start eating healthy. I get fit for three months and then I let myself go again. This is the cycle that most people are on.

And then they spend 80% of their year not in the physical shape that they want to be in, but they’re not willing to do the work and create the standard of expectation that they would show up every single day and do the thing to change is not yet greater than the pain of just staying the same. And this is what happens so often with marketing, is that we have this feast and famine approach where it’s like, oh, I need to pay my bills this month. We need to get out there, start prospecting. I need to make the cold calls because the pain of not bringing in money that month is suddenly greater than just going with the status quo. And just like that, voila, customers start coming in. Because the marketing works. We know it works. It’s just a matter of applying the system consistently, right? If we do that, we know it works.

But marketing can be hard and it can be laborious. And it’s not necessarily the thing that you enjoy doing, which is probably around the product or the service that you’re delivering, and you’d like to spend more of your time there. But the truth is, as the owner or the founder, the CEO of your business, your most important job is sales. It is bringing in more customers and evangelizing for the brand and bringing in more team members so that you can continue building the people that build the business. Now, for this particular student, it really just came down to, you have not set the standard in your mind that every day marketing is your most important job. And so you need to be dedicating 2 hours every single day, even when you don’t need more customers, even when you’re already at capacity, you need to be spending 2 hours a day on that process because it’s a flywheel. And the flywheel only ever goes faster and faster and faster as you continue pushing on it. But if you stop, stop pushing, it’s going to come to a stop.

And then when you go to push it again, it’s going to feel really, really hard. It’s going to start getting going again. And then as soon as it does and you start getting those customers and you stop like that, that’s a wildly inefficient use of your time and your energy, right? And yet this is how most people are building their businesses. They’re marketing to fill the demand, and then they stop until they need to fill it again. You need to create an engine that is always working so that you always have a surplus demand. And when you have that surplus of demand, some magical things happen, right? When you have limited supply and you have more demand than you have the ability to fulfill, then you can start charging more. Suddenly your margins increase. Right now you have more room to spend on building out your team.

Now you can bring in more people to help on the fulfillment side. Now you can start building out these other aspects of your business that make it an actual business, rather than just a job where you’re fulfilling everything yourself. And so this is a beautiful place to be. But it only occurs if we have more demand than we have supply. And that is a function of your marketing engine, of putting out content, of doing your paid advertising or whatever the mode is that you’re deploying. To bring in leads, you have to make it a daily discipline. It has to be a non negotiable. And the main reason I see people struggle to make the jump from six figures to seven figures is because they have not figured out yet how to show up every single day and continue to move the marketing flywheel forward to continue bringing in leads.

Because if you could double or ten x your leads overnight, you have different problems to solve in your business suddenly. And those are all really good problems to have, am I right? So go back to the root of whatever it is. Maybe it’s not marketing in your case. Maybe it is the product design, maybe it’s building out the team and hiring, and you’re just putting that off where you only ever hire when there’s enough pain, and now you’re falling behind all the time rather than hiring for the future and hiring forward to solve for future problems, right? Whatever the aspect is, there’s so many case studies where this plays out inside of our businesses, where the reason we’re in this start stop type of motion is because we haven’t raised our standards of expectations that we are going to consistently be applying force over time. And that is truly the way to win the game of business, is to apply force consistently, not necessarily with intensity. So I hope this brings you guys some value. I’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.