The problem you think you have might not actually be the problem.
Spoiler alert: most of the time, the problem really isn’t what you think it is.
The problem might actually be the symptom.
“But Lois, I know my business and I know this isn’t working” I hear you cry.
And I’m not disputing that you do indeed know your business. In fact, you probably know it better than anyone. And that, oddly enough, can be the start of the problem.
When you have been running a business for a while, you are so close to it that it becomes incredibly difficult to see what is actually happening. You know every decision you’ve made, every client you’ve worked with, every offer you’ve created and everything that has gone wrong along the way. You know the business inside out.
But you can’t see the label from inside the jar. Thanks Sophie Lee for this wonderfully apt phrase
Take sales. The problem might look like “I need more sales.” Of course you do, we all do.
But more sales isn’t really a standalone business problem. If you had the right offer, targeted at the right audience, at the right price, with messaging that connects with them, within a business model that works for you, and you were doing the things required to get that offer in front of the right people and have conversations with them, you would expect to make sales.
That doesn’t mean every month will be brilliant or that every offer will sell immediately. Business doesn’t work like that. But if sales consistently aren’t where you want them to be, something isn’t right.
The interesting question is what.
It might be the offer. It might be the positioning. It might be the pricing. It might be that you are talking to the wrong people. It might be that people like you but don’t quite understand what you do. It might be that they understand the offer but aren’t getting any further down the customer journey. It might be that your customer journey itself is making things harder than they need to be.
Or perhaps you actually have a perfectly good offer, the right people are interested and you simply aren’t doing enough of the legwork required to close the deal.
The sales are the symptom. They are telling you that something else needs looking at.
We are very good at fixing the thing we can see
This is completely understandable. Our brains are very good at making the obvious connection. I’m working hard, I’m not earning as much as I need to, therefore I need more sales.
So you try to get more sales.
You change your offer, you change the price, you offer a discount, you post more or you stop posting altogether. You watch what everyone else is doing, you start copying them, you buy something that promises to show you the answer and ultimately you start wondering whether you’re an imposter.
And all the while, you’re still running the actual business. You’re making the decisions, delivering the work, talking to clients, creating content, looking at the numbers and trying to work out what you’re supposed to be doing next.
Eventually, you can find yourself in that horrible place where you’re doing loads, nobody can question your work ethic, but you’re still sitting there thinking, “I just don’t know what’s happening.”
That’s when the hamster wheel starts.
You become so focused on fixing the thing you think is wrong that you become increasingly tunnel visioned. The more you do, the more difficult it becomes to step back and ask whether you’re actually working on the right thing.
Someone said something to me recently and I thought, “Hmm, this is exactly the problem.” Essentially, she said that she wasn’t interested in growth or alignment or clarity or even her home life at the moment. She was interested in sales. And I completely understood why. If you need more money coming into the business, that matters. You can’t pay your mortgage with alignment. But if you stay on that hamster wheel, focused only on sales without stepping back to work out why the sales aren’t happening, you can spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to force something that isn’t going to move until you deal with what’s underneath it.
And eventually, you’ll run yourself into the ground.
Sometimes the answer is much simpler than we think
I’ve been guilty of this myself.
There have been periods in my own business where I’ve looked at what other people are doing, listened to clever strategies and assumed there must be some sophisticated answer I haven’t figured out yet. Sometimes there is, and sometimes we have simply overcomplicated the life out of something that was sitting right in front of us.
I was reminded of this recently when I was working alongside a group of people on a client’s business. We were all looking at different aspects of the business, but ultimately we were all there because we wanted to help her become more visible and, by proxy, grow the business.
She said to me, “We’ve all been at this a year now and I need to start seeing some ROI.”
It was a completely reasonable thing to say. She had invested time, money and energy into the business and wanted to see something coming back from it. But we’d all become so deep in the business that we had started talking in increasingly highbrow terms about funnels, positioning and implementation.
So I asked a very simple question: “Does anyone actually know what your business does?”
It wasn’t that I instantly had some genius revelation and knew exactly what needed to happen next. That’s not how this works. I don’t sit there thinking, “How can you not see this?”
I know why they can’t see it, they’re too in it.
The answer came through digging and questioning and listening to how she was actually talking about the business. But that one simple question cut through all the cleverness. Because if people don’t understand what you do or who it is for, you can spend an awful lot of money and energy trying to solve a problem further down the funnel that you haven’t actually created the conditions for yet.
That is the kind of thing I’m looking for when I work with someone. I’m not interested in telling them they’re wrong about their business, I’m interested in understanding what the thing they are experiencing is actually telling us.
“I’m exhausted” is another symptom
The same thing happens with capacity. You might be thinking, “I’m burnt out. I’m working too hard. I need to slow down.” And perhaps you do, but exhaustion doesn’t necessarily tell you what needs to change.
I know this one particularly well because I lived it.
18 months ago, I was charging £35 an hour for pretty much everything. I was doing strategy calls for £35 an hour, visiting clients in person for £35 an hour and doing increasingly valuable work, but I was still treating every hour of my time as though it was worth exactly the same. Then I wondered why I was knackered and why I wasn’t making any more money.
At the time, the obvious answer felt like more sales, more clients, more hours, more work. But I didn’t need to sell more hours, I needed to stop selling increasingly valuable work for £35 an hour. The symptom was real. I really was exhausted. I really did need more money. But the answer wasn’t to work harder, it was to look underneath the symptom and recognise that I had outgrown the model I was using.
That can happen in all sorts of ways. You can outgrow the number of clients you can personally serve, you can outgrow a business that relies entirely on your time, you can reach the point where you need a team, a scalable offer or a higher value offer.
The important thing isn’t to decide in advance what the answer is. It’s to be willing to ask a better question.
And sometimes the market really has changed
When I started my business almost four years ago, LinkedIn was in its absolute heyday for me. The VA industry was in demand. I could show up as myself, post on LinkedIn and land clients. I didn’t need to worry about an email list, I didn’t need a lead magnet, I didn’t need a secondary platform and I didn’t need to get into people’s DMs. I was landing clients easy peasy, a lot of us were.
But things changed.
Business became harder. People became more cautious and more selective about where they spent their money. The online business world became noisier and, unfortunately, a lot of people got burnt by people selling things that didn’t deliver what they promised. That changes how people buy.
It doesn’t mean your business is broken, it means the environment has moved. And successful businesses have to move with it.
For some businesses that might mean changing the offer. For others it might mean changing the messaging, where they put that messaging, or how proactively they get in front of potential clients. It might mean accepting that people now need to see you in several different places and get to know you before they’re ready to buy.
The answer isn’t necessarily to throw the whole business away, it’s to understand what has changed and work out what your business needs to do differently as a result and, ironically, that’s exactly the kind of thinking we need when we’re tempted to say, “I just need more sales.”
But what if the business has changed because you have?
This is the one I think we often overlook.Sometimes the business model is working beautifully. The numbers are good, the clients are good, the team is good and yet something still doesn’t feel right. That was me. I adored being a VA, and I still think it is a massively underestimated profession, a good VA is worth their weight in gold.But over the years I had grown.
I had learned an enormous amount about business, built a team, become a woman heading towards a multi six figure business. I was paying the wages of seven other women and had helped to transform multiple clients’ businesses into six figure businesses too. And I realised how good I was at reading people and how much that translated into a business context.
Eventually, when people referred to me as an assistant, it gave me a physical reaction. “Oh my God. That’s not me.” And that was a strange place to be because, on paper, the business was working beautifully. Six figure turnover, a team, a functioning business model.
But I had changed.
That disconnect very quickly turns into “I can’t be bothered”, because your heart isn’t behind promoting the thing anymore. And if you leave it too long, you can end up in a weird flip flop territory where you know something isn’t right, but you don’t necessarily have the confidence to work out what comes next.
I was reactive.
And that was a mistake.
Being proactive gives you far more options.
We change. Our businesses have to be allowed to change too.
This applies to far more than a business pivot. If you have children, their needs change. We get older. Our health can change. We might suddenly need to care for someone. We might move house. We might have a renovation going on that takes up every spare ounce of energy we have.
Our ambitions change, our priorities change and sometimes we simply wake up one morning and realise that the thing we wanted five years ago isn’t the thing we want now. And if we don’t allow our businesses to move with us, we end up with a massive disconnect between our life and our business.
That’s particularly important for women because our businesses can become such a huge part of our identity. For our generation, there is something really significant about the fact that so many of us are creating businesses, becoming the main breadwinners, creating abundance and building something we can genuinely be proud of. That is wonderful, but sometimes our businesses can swallow us whole.
A successful business that leaves no room for the life you actually want is not necessarily a successful business for you. And that is why I don’t think “growth” should ever be the only measure of whether a business is working.
So what is the problem?
I don’t think the answer is to stop looking at the problem you’re experiencing, if you need more sales, you need more sales. If you’re exhausted, you’re exhausted. If the market has changed, the market has changed. The point is to stop assuming that the thing you can see is automatically the thing you need to fix.
Instead, ask: What is this problem telling me about my business?
If sales aren’t where they need to be, look at the whole journey. Look at the offer, the positioning, the pricing, the audience, the messaging, the customer journey and what happens between someone discovering you and actually buying from you.
If you’re exhausted, look at the model you’re running. Look at what has become too dependent on you, what you’ve outgrown, what could be delegated and whether the way you’re making money is still appropriate for the business and the life you want. And if the market has changed, don’t waste your energy wishing it hadn’t. Look at what has changed and ask what your business needs to do differently as a result. Perhaps most importantly, ask yourself whether you have changed.
Take yourself outside the business
This is probably the simplest piece of advice I can give you. Take a day. Get out of your usual environment. Stop answering emails. Stop looking at Instagram. Stop reacting to whatever happened yesterday and properly look at the business. Not just the thing that is annoying you most, the whole picture.
What is working? Where are you making money? Where might you be leaving money on the table? What are you spending your time on? What have you outgrown? What has changed around you? And, perhaps most importantly, what do you actually want the business to give you now? Then ask yourself: Is the problem I think I have actually the problem I need to solve?
You might discover that the answer isn’t to do more. It might be to change the thing underneath it and that can be a much more powerful move.
This is ultimately the work I do with my clients through The Next Move.
I spend a day getting deep inside a business, looking at the whole picture, asking the questions that are difficult to ask when you’re too close to it, identifying what actually needs attention and then working with the business owner to decide what happens next.
Because sometimes you need someone who can see what you can’t see from inside the jar and sometimes, the biggest move you can make is simply finding out what the problem actually is.
Lois Bates—Stubbs is a strategic consultant and founder of Mavenly, a VA and EA agency based in Manchester. She works with women in business who are ready to stop carrying everything alone.