Episode 439: The Real Reason Your Business isn’t Growing
Successful business owners understand that diligence alone is insufficient to fuel growth. If you are a business owner feeling rather stuck despite your relentless endeavours, you may be making one or more of these five critical errors.
In this episode, Adam Stott delves into the five critical mistakes business owners frequently make that hinder their growth potential. Adam shares his wealth of experience and expertise to assist business owners in avoiding these pitfalls and optimising their operations.
Through strategic focus on marketing, sales, and brand-building, Adam advocates for making data-driven decisions whilst maintaining patience and discipline to achieve long-term success.
Show Highlights:
- Business owners ought to concentrate on marketing, sales and brand-building to fuel growth and avoid stagnation.
- Consistency and simplicity in one’s business model are crucial to avoiding chaos and ensuring sustainable success.
- Focusing one’s efforts on a single business can accelerate growth, rather than spreading resources thinly across multiple ventures.
- Persistence is paramount, as success often comes to those who remain steadfast and committed to their objectives.
- Engaging mentors or coaches who have traversed similar paths can prevent costly mistakes and expedite the achievement of one’s goals.
Links Mentioned:
Get your Business Growth Secrets SUCCESS PLANNER for FREE and profit like a pro: https://adamstottplanner.com/free-book47315172
Adam’s website: https://adamstott.com/?el=Pod
Watch the Episode on Adam’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/adamstottcoach?el=Pod
Connect with Adam on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adamstottcoach/?el=Pod
Join Adam’s network on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-stott-coach/?el=Pod
Coaches, consultants, and business owners – lower your marketing costs, increase ticket prices, and get more high-ticket clients: https://3daybrandbuilderworkshop.com/start-here?el=Pod
Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
Adam Stott: Most business owners work really, really, really hard. They work so hard in building their business. They put the hours in, they put the effort in, but they’re often left feeling like they’re standing still. And the reason this happens is not because they haven’t got the right work ethic, it’s because they’re usually making one of five critical errors.
[00:00:25] In this video, I’m simply gonna break down the five biggest errors I’ve seen from training thousands and thousands of business owners. You don’t know me. My name’s Adam Star, that 156 million pounds worth of sales, and I’ve certainly made these five critical errors by self, and I’m gonna show you how you can avoid them so you can get rid of the barriers and step into your greatness.
[00:00:48] We’re gonna start off with error number one, which is a lack of. Focus on the three critical drivers of a business when it comes to growing any business, and you might be watching this. You might have a recruitment business, you might have a finance business, a salon business. You could be in construction.
[00:01:10] It doesn’t matter what business you are in. Every single business needs to focus on these three critical drivers to get themself in a place where they’re growing. Now the error that we see with business owners is they don’t put enough time, attention, and effort into these areas, and when they don’t, it means that they remain stuck.
[00:01:27] So if you have been stuck for a little while and you’re looking to break three, these are the three areas of focus initially that we want to get our focus in to see you grow. It’s very simple. If you want to grow any business, we need to make sure that we are marketing our business. Now what marketing does, ’cause a lot of people get very fixed on market.
[00:01:45] Well, you market my business, we talk about social media, Adam, I don’t wanna do videos. Looking at myself going, oh my God, look at my teeth and all this kind of stuff. So they get all these ideas. About what marketing means to them. But what I mean is that if you wanna grow your business and you are stuck or you’re standing still, it’s actually really simple.
[00:02:02] You need to speak to more people. The more conversations you have, the more your business will grow. And where a lot of businesses get stuck is they don’t focus. So one of the things that you wanna do all the way throughout your business in order to get it unstuck, is to get focused on this and start to KPI, the numbers.
[00:02:21] So what do I mean by that? I. If you were really focused, you would know exactly how many people that you were gonna speak to a week in order to get your business moving. You would know how many conversations you’d have a target for that. And whether it’s just you, you are a one man or one woman army, or there’s 50 of you in there, you would say like, how many outbound conversations are we having?
[00:02:43] How many people are we speaking to about our products or services? And you’ll be tracking, monitoring, and measuring that. Every single week if you did that alone, and that’s all you do on this video, this video is gonna be packed with value, but that’s all you did. Your business will grow. Why? Because the more people you speak to, the more conversations you have, the more sales you will make, the more cash you will make, the more you can reinvest your business, and the more you can grow.
[00:03:07] So number one, you’ve gotta focus on how many conversations you’re having. Secondly, we’ve gotta focus on sales. Speaking to people is not enough. Is one, one critical thing that we need to do. But the second thing is we’ve gotta make sure that we are making offers consistently. And making offers is what turns our conversations into income.
[00:03:27] So you’ve gotta go out there and you’ve gotta sell more. So when you measure the amount of conversations you’re having, which is number one, you then need to measure the amount of sales that you are creating. From those conversations so you can start to understand your conversion rate, which is gonna help your business to grow.
[00:03:42] Then we’ve got number three, which which is the third area you need to focus on, and that is building your brand. What brand moves are you making on a consistent basis? Who is saying you are great other than you? I’ll give you a few examples about what we do. In one of my businesses, every single week, we’ve got our clients coming in, we’re interviewing them, we’re getting their success stories, we’re getting their case studies.
[00:04:05] That’s a great brand move ’cause you just have proof and evidence of what you do works. We’re getting awards for the business consistently all the time. We’re having celebrities come and spend time with us, endorse the business consistently. We’re always looking at how can we build the profile of the business, and this is something you can do too.
[00:04:23] So if you have been feeling like you’ve been stuck or you’ve been trying hard, but the business has not been moving forward, you probably haven’t been focused enough on marketing, sales and branding. Because they are the three activities that can literally, rapidly increase the speed of your business, and that is the critical error that most businesses make.
[00:04:43] So if we get rid of that critical error, we can move forward into number two. Hey everyone, hope you’re enjoying the podcast. We’ve got a free training that I’m doing right now online from the comfort of your own home called Standout Brand. What this does is it shows business owners how to get noticed on social media standout.
[00:05:03] Out, get more leads and get more sales. So if you want to make more money in your business, head over to adam.com/sob. That’s adam.com/sob and join us on the free three-day workshop standout brand. Now this one’s really simple. Most businesses don’t have a clear business model, which means they end up in this place where they come up with new products, new services, new offers, new widgets all the time, and they’re doing all this new stuff.
[00:05:38] Because they keep coming up with new stuff, it creates chaos in the organization. So one minute they’re focused on really cool stuff and they’re building a project, and this project could be successful. And then they take their focus off and they go and work on something else. And because the business model is not simple and the business model’s not replicable, it means that we make some progress, go off over here, make some progress, go off, and like literally constantly going in different directions.
[00:06:00] So one thing you get want to get really, really clear on is what is your business model? And when you are really clear on what your business model is, this is how it looks, you will know, and this is how you can get super clear. First of all, where are your leads coming from? That will be the first thing you’re aware of.
[00:06:17] Secondly, you’ll be understanding how are you gonna nurture those leads and get more information and start taking through the client journey. You’ll then understand what is the first option they’ve got. To do business with you. What’s the first product or service? How are they gonna do business with you for the long term?
[00:06:34] And we’ll understand how we can keep this going again and again and again where you keep bringing new clients into your business. When you have a consistent business model, it’s not about doing loads of random things. It’s about doing the same thing over and over and over again. Your life is gonna be so much easier.
[00:06:51] So get really focused on the customer journey, the business model that you have, and move people through that business model. The more you do that. The more success that you are gonna create within your business. That leads us to number three, people getting too easily distracted. And what you often see is a business owner will come in and they’ve got a business and they’ll be telling you about their business and talking to you about what they’ve been doing with it and how it’s been going.
[00:07:18] And you go, oh, awesome. It sounds like your business is really cool. Sounds like it’s really good. And they go, yeah, that’s one of my businesses. And you go, okay, what do you mean one of my businesses? And so I’ve also got this business. We’ve got another business over here, and this business over here does cakes.
[00:07:32] So we’ve got a cake shop over here, and this business over here does lawn mowing. Right? I’m just giving you some random examples, and we’ve got. Okay, so you’ve got a lawn mowing business, you’ve got a cake business. It’s not like they’ve not got anything to do with each other. Like, yeah, and, and I’ve got another business over here and, you know, this business, we do property here.
[00:07:50] So we do, you know, I do a bit of property investing. Oh, uh, also I do stock shares and you know, this kind of thing over here. And all of a sudden as you’ve got a business owner that’s just got lots of distractions in their life and they can’t progress anything they’ve got because they’re, they’re completely distracted.
[00:08:07] Now, imagine this, imagine that this business here. Let’s say this business is a hundred K business. It’s a hundred thousand pound business. Uh, the Lawnmowing business is doing 20 grand. We’ve got the property business is at zero, it’s not got off the ground, and they’re doing a couple of grand a year worth of, uh, shares, like a couple of grand a year worth of profit in shares.
[00:08:26] So we’ve got these four different businesses, and then we look at the time allocation. So you’ve got the time allocation here and say, right, we’re spending 20 hours here a week. You know, we’re spending 20 hours here a week. We’re spending 10 hours here a week, so on 50 hours already. We’re spending another 10 hours here, so got 60 hours.
[00:08:48] That’s disappeared into these different projects, and frankly, this one don’t barely make any money. This one don’t make any money. This one don’t make any money. And if, and I’m only spending 20 hours here, if I put three times the amount of effort into this vehicle, I’m gonna get more growth and I’m gonna be more successful.
[00:09:06] This is like the, like a huge critical error. I see this all the time and I, I always say, you know, I’ve got people come into our events, we’d run a three day training call, business Growth Secrets. I’m always saying to me, say, Adam, I’ve got these five businesses. I was like, focus on one. Let’s get one to be really successful, and when we’ve got that one really successful, then we can look at reinvesting the profits from that business into something else.
[00:09:28] But I think a lot of people get multiple streams of income confused. Multiple streams of income means you’ve got multiple projects that are successful, that are paying you. And that’s also, I’ve got nothing against that. But the problem is your average Joe business owner has just started out, hasn’t even got their first business successful before they get confused and they’re looking at this and this and this and this and this, and they never get where they need to be.
[00:09:48] So go all in on one, make it successful, redistribute the profits so you can keep growing, and that is the critical error. That’s number three, that gets people stuck, right? The next one is a complete and utter symptom of the last one that we just talked about. Most business owners lack. Patience. And that’s why they go all over here because they’re just not satisfied with how quickly things are moving.
[00:10:15] And because of that, they get very, very close to the goal, but they never quite get the gold. I’m gonna give you another quick diagram to illustrate this point. Imagine that you are working, you’re working on a project, you’ve got your shovel. This is where the gold is down here. There’s loads of gold we can go digging for gold.
[00:10:33] And we dig a little bit and we realize that the ground’s quite tough. And we’re digging away. We’re digging away. We’re digging away. And then we keep digging and we keep digging and we keep going and we’re just like, oh, there’s no gold here. I haven’t seen any gold here. I’ve not seen any gold here. Like, and you’ve been told there’s gold down here.
[00:10:49] You’ve got metal detector sitting here saying, there is gold there. There’s definitely gold. But you give up here. Because you have the patience to keep going. And this is when people move on to the next project, which is what we’ve just been talking about, and they pick up this shovel and they dig here.
[00:11:04] And guess what? They had a bit of patience here. But because they tried that, because they did that and it didn’t work. Their patience starts decreasing even more. So they get into the new bit and they dig a little bit and it, it doesn’t go anywhere. Like, oh, you know, the metal detector said there’s gold here as well.
[00:11:20] And they go, oh, that’s not good enough. So they move on and they go, right, okay, there’s definitely gonna be gold here. So they dig a little bit, no gold here, and they keep traveling. In the same direction where they’re not actually getting to any gold. So how much gold do these people have at this stage?
[00:11:37] They have none. Had they combined the efforts, guess what? They would’ve hit the gold in the first place and they would’ve been down here and they would’ve had all the gold they needed, right? Because you can go that way and then they can go that way. ’cause now they’re down here. Oh, well look all this gold here.
[00:11:53] Now we can go across all the other way. Now the problem is, is you have no patience. You can’t get any gains. So success comes from patience. It’s a critical error to quit before the magic happens. So if you feel like you’re working hard, you’re giving it your all, and it’s not quite happened for you yet, I just wanna say to you, you can’t beat a man or woman that doesn’t quit.
[00:12:13] So keep on going. You’ll get there eventually. Now finally, critical error number five is you are paying. The dumb tax, and this is one that I picked up from a great guy called Keith Cunningham. He says it all the time. It was something that I remember when I went to a seminar with him and it stuck with me forever, is that many, many people, they run enthusiastically in the wrong direction and they literally traveling in the wrong direction where you could.
[00:12:42] So I explained this for you. This is the right direction, this is the wrong direction. A lot of people have what’s called a DIY mind, like, okay, you can be successful, you can grow a business successful, and it can take you a decade, right? So you’ve gotta spend 10 years and you go in this way, which means you’ll make error, mistake, error, mistake, error, mistake, error, mistake, error, mistake, error, mistake.
[00:13:05] Eventually you get to success. The problem is all of these errors and all of these mistakes, they’re costing you money. And sometimes in business, they cost you. A thousand, 10,000, a hundred thousand, a million pound. Now we call these big mistakes, paying the dumb tax. The reason people pay the dumb tax is you don’t know what you don’t know.
[00:13:26] And if you don’t have anybody to tell you that actually I won’t do that, I’ll do this instead. And you don’t have strategic advice, that means you are just guessing. So if you don’t have a mentor, you don’t have a coach, you don’t have a friend, you don’t have a partner that’s walked the path before. Yeah, you are gonna end up paying that dumb tucks a lot.
[00:13:45] So you’ve gotta find the right coaches. You’ve gotta find the right mentors that have done what you want to do so they can take you in that direction. Because one piece of advice, one move, one conversation, can change absolutely everything for you. Now imagine you did it like this instead you said, no, Adam.
[00:14:01] I don’t want to go and get advice from someone. I don’t want to know how to get there quicker. I don’t want to know how to get there faster. Just imagine what it’s costing you. You go and start a business, you make some mistakes, you lose a hundred grand. You learn your lesson, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off you go again.
[00:14:16] You lose 50 grand. Then you’re going, oh, business is really hard. Business is really tough. Then you do it again. Then you do it again. How many shots have you got? How much dump tax can you pay? Before you’re outta business. Now you might be really smart, which means you make way. Let’s imagine you are super intelligent.
[00:14:31] That means you make way less mistakes, but you’re still at some point gonna pay some heavy dumb tax. This is the biggest error, the biggest critical error is running your business. By trial and error. I’ll try this. Did it work? No. Okay. I’ll try this. Did it work? No. That’s what I call paying the dumb tax.
[00:14:50] So they’re the five critical errors that stop you from getting the growth that you want and allowing you to grow your business. Now what can you do? To learn from this? Well, the first thing is you simply have to make sure you do the opposite of the mistakes you’re making. So find the right mentors, find the right coaches, stay focused, stay disciplined, be patient, and eventually everything that you need from your life and your business is gonna get you to where you want to be.
[00:15:21] Well, you’ve got all the way to the end, which means you are an. A player. So go over to the comments and type A player. I love to see the business owners that are getting a massive amount of value from these videos. Of course, we make these videos because we want to help you, and if you are a business owner that’s felt stuck, frustrated, you’ve been working really hard and not getting the results you want, you know this one really was for you and I hope you’ve got some massive value from it.
[00:15:48] So what I want you to take from this video is I want you to get ruthlessly. Focus now on taking the right actions and executing. You can have everything you want, but what you don’t need is a bigger to-do list. What you need is a stop doing list. So if you are making some of the critical errors that we’ve discussed in this video, it’s time to get rid of those bad old habits and start stepping into your future success and greatness.
[00:16:14] And if you have enjoyed this video. To get more videos like this, don’t miss out. Make sure you go and subscribe. It’s crazy that over 80% of the people that watch these videos are not actually subscribed to the channel, and that might mean that you are not. It will take you 30 seconds and your future self will.
[00:16:31] Thank you when you are watching your next great business video full of business tips.