Episode 281: Bouncing Back After Business Failure
Sky News reported this week that business failure is at the highest rate since 2009! With financial support becoming difficult to acquire, it is vital that business owners are doing all they can to ensure their success. Don’t worry, we’ve got you!
In the latest Business Growth Secrets podcast episode, Adam Stott shares the 7 common mistakes that unsuccessful business owners make and (CRUCIALLY) how to avoid them to attain success. Adam discussed finances, effective marketing strategy, taking calculated risks, and effective team building as well as examples of how to implement them. Listen to learn more!
Show Highlights:
- Why is there a rise in business failures in 2022
- 7 ways to avoid failure and ensure success including understanding your finances, effective marketing strategy, taking calculated risks, and effective team building
- How mindset can affect how business owners face challenges
- Importance of spending money on marketing
- Learning how to raise your margins
- Cash flow is KING
- Understanding the need to build and grow a brand
Links Mentioned:
Join the Ultimate Three Day Business Event and learn more Business Growth Secrets
Be part of our Facebook Group Big Business Events Members Network
Connect with me on Instagram @adamstottcoach
Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
Adam Stott: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Business Growth Secrets podcast. You are with your host Adam Stott. I think you’re gonna find a lot of value in today’s episode. I was reading an article on Sky News and it was talking about the fact that business failure is up more now than ever. Except in the time of 2009, which was after everything that happened in 2008, it really in this article, talked about the pandemic, things that have gone on, and reasons and support that business has been given, and then they’ve seen businesses fail because of that support.
But I feel really passionate that the only reason businesses fail is that we make the wrong decisions. And what I’m gonna walk you through today are seven things that businesses do wrong, that keep them stuck, make them fail, and stop them from getting the result. I think you’re gonna find a lot of value in this episode.
I hope you enjoy it. And if you do enjoy it, please remember to share this with another business owner. It’s the only way this podcast grows that can get some real value from this. I’m on a mission to help as many business owners, as I can, grow and this podcast is the vehicle. So the more you share it, the more you help other entrepreneurs and put good karma out into the world. So I hope you enjoy the episode and get tons of value from it and I wanna say a big thank you for continuing to subscribe to these episodes and be a massive part of the movement that is business growth secrets.
Sky News recently reported that the most business failures have occurred in 2022, since 2009. So you’ve seen a massive increase in failure in businesses over this period of time, and they put lots of reasons in the article as to why that happened. A lot of it was about the support and the financial support given, but I wanted to make this quick video for business owners out there that are looking to attain more success. And the reason I wanna make this video is I know exactly what it’s like to work every hour under the sun. Work your heart out, give your all to your business. Be thinking about it all the time and just not see it succeed. I’ve been there a hundred percent. I also know what it’s like to work really hard on a business and see it have massive success, so I wanted to break down.
The seven things that you need to make sure you are not doing to make sure that your business succeeds rather than fails. So if you want to be a successful business owner rather than an unsuccessful business owner, this is what we need to do. If you don’t know me, my name’s Adam Stott. I’ve been running businesses for the past 15 years. Businesses that I’ve run combined have done over 75 million pounds in revenue. During that time, I’ve had my ups, I’ve had my downs. I’ve had companies that have failed and I’ve had companies that have had massive, massive success. So I know what it’s like to be on both sides, and I can tell you what, it’s a lot nicer being on the side where your bank account is growing, you’re making more money, you’re enjoying business, and you’re having a happier journey. And this video that I’ve created for you today is all about that. It’s like, how do you get it right? And what are the signs that the things that we are doing wrong that stop us from getting success. And I’ve boiled these down into seven easy, simple ways that you can make sure you don’t do these things to get the success that you want.
So let’s jump straight into it. And the first one, this is where it all starts. If a business fails, it usually starts with the business owner themselves. One thing that we find with business owners, having trained thousands and thousands of them, where they really struggle is on the mindset side. And you would’ve heard lots of mindset stuff if you’re a big YouTube fan and you’ve been watching YouTube a lot, you’ll hear about what you believe you can do, you can do; what you don’t believe you can do, you can’t do. And the reality about this is it’s a hundred percent right. Your business will only grow in direct proportion to the amount as you grow as an individual. And the thing is, as a business owner, you carry all of your strengths into the business and you carry all of your weaknesses into the business. So what a lot of business owners don’t realize is their businesses growing. If they’ve got money mindset blocks and they’re worried about investing in their business, they’re worried about spending money.
That’s gonna impact the business. If you are somebody that’s really afraid or take a long time to make decisions, that’s gonna affect the business as well. So we’ve really gotta make sure that if it’s meant to be and your business is gonna be successful, it’s up to me. It’s up to you in order to make sure that our mindset is in the right place for success. So a couple of tips on that. The first one, businesses is a game. It’s an intellectual sport. You don’t need the biggest muscles to win. You need the highest level of intellect, so you’ve gotta keep growing yourself on a continual basis. You gotta work on your weaknesses and really capitalize on your strengths in order to see that business grow.
And what we see from unsuccessful business owners. Is they don’t do enough work on themselves. They get caught up in the business. The business ends up carrying them along and they get caught up in the day-to-day. So they, in the power of paperwork, they’re going back to everyone and they forget that really you are the business’s greatest asset, and if you want it to grow, you’ve gotta keep growing yourself.
Number two. The second one is you’ve gotta have a marketing budget. Businesses that don’t have a marketing budget, and don’t attribute and spend money on marketing invariably fail. Why is that? Because as you want to grow, let’s say you have no marketing budget, which unsuccessful businesses don’t have.
What that means is you are typically getting new business from recommendations and referrals, which is slow growth. It’s not fast growth. It’s actually very slow growth. As you try to invest in the business and build the infrastructure of the business, hiring new people, bringing new people on, you find it very hard to sustain them because you can’t get enough leads, enough inquiries in order to help the business grow. So we’ve gotta understand that marketing is the fuel that fires up a business and helps it to grow. And if you are not fueling up your business with marketing spend, then we are really gonna see our business struggle in the long term. Now, the difficulty with this is, You might be watching right now and you’re like, ah, but I don’t know what to spend my marketing on.
Well, what you do is you start with a very small budget, and with that small budget, you do what we call test. You gotta go out there and test. Maybe you need to test some Facebook ads, maybe you need to test some YouTube ads. Maybe you need to test some direct mail. Maybe you need to test some expos, but you’ve gotta test, and you’ve gotta really measure what is the return and investment from your marketing efforts.
But if you don’t start marketing, you can. Best product or service in the world. If no one’s ever heard of it, they ain’t buying it. And what I’ve seen from unsuccessful businesses is they don’t have marketing budget. They don’t test, they don’t look for new avenues. And if you want to change your business, that’s something that you gotta do.
Now the third thing, right? If mastering you is the first and mastering your mindset, which is critically important, and marketing and having a marketing budget is the second. The third one is what I see business owners massively struggle with. If you can’t sell and if you don’t attempt to go out and sell and do deals and build your business and ask for the business and close business, you’re gonna see your business struggle.
Now, the biggest problem is that when most business owners go and start, they don’t consider themselves to be a salesperson. They consider themselves that perhaps they had a different role in their career. So when they start in their new business, they don’t wanna then go and be a salesperson. They’re a business owner, but every single business owner is a salesperson. You’ve gotta be able to sell yourself. You’ve gotta be able to sell your product, your service, and you’ve gotta be able to sell your company. Why people should do businesses with you. You know, it’s really, really important that you start to invest in sales and invest in sales, in terms of sales people invest in sales in terms of your mindset, sales, training and become a better salesperson. And the first person that you ever have to sell is you. You’ve gotta sell yourself. You’ve gotta sell yourself properly. Because if you don’t do that, your business will stay stuck because hey, say that you go and get the right mindset. You start putting in place, you start making the right decisions, you start investing in your business. And then you start testing. So you start generating leads. If you can’t close any leads, your business also doesn’t grow. So you’ve gotta zone in and focus on sales. Critically important.
Now, number four. Is your business strategy actually having a product that makes money? What I’ve seen from many unsuccessful business owners is they have a product or service, and a product or service doesn’t have any margin. And if you don’t have any margin in the product, let’s say you buy own for 10 pounds, you sell it for 20 pounds, you’ve got 10 pounds in the middle, that’s your gross profit. But then you’ve got your office expenses, your staff, your different people. That erodes very quickly. You need to learn to make your margins bigger.
And this really comes with selling higher ticket products and services. Now, many of you watching like Adam, I can’t do that cause I’m e-commerce. You gotta get creative. You know, recently, I trained thousands of business owners. I have a mastermind called Gold Circle. Recently I posed them this question and I said, Hey, if you could offer a product or service to your clients where they pay 10 times more than the highest price product or service you offer right now, what would you have to do and what would you have to make this product or service to have your clients become deliriously happy about it?
And that’s a question that’s gonna make you think it’s gonna pose a challenge to you. And then we’ve walked them through the process of understanding how to do that. But what I would say to you at this stage is you’ve gotta look, how can you build a higher margin product? Critically important. After we’ve started to get higher margins and, and why do businesses fail that don’t get higher margins? That’s really important too. The reason that they fail is they’re obsessed with marketing and selling new product, but the new product and the service that they sell doesn’t make enough money. And when they don’t make enough money, it all goes out on expenses, which means there’s not available cash left in the business to keep investing.
And when you run outta cash, cash is the blood. You know the blood in the business when you run out of cash, your business. Starts to fail, so it’s critically important that you build higher margin products or services. After we’ve done that and we’ve got higher margin products or services, what else could stop us from succeeding?
Well, this is not knowing the numbers. Most business owners that I’ve seen don’t have a real grip on their numbers, and this is critically important as well. And businesses that failed don’t know their numbers. Now imagine you have a marketing campaign running, bringing you new clients, making you tens of thousands of profit, potentially long term or hundreds of thousands of profit, and you switch the marketing campaign off cause you dunno if it’s working.
I have seen that more times than I can count, like seriously, because business owners don’t understand their market numbers. They don’t understand their sales numbers, their conversions. They don’t understand their margins from their business strategy, and they actually don’t understand how collectively they can look at the numbers and make good decisions from ’em.
So this is the, the lesson, very numbers. In business tell you the story of what you’ve done, the activities, when you look at a profit and loss, that’s telling you historically what’s happened in the business. And really what that does is it allows us to go back and go, okay, well we made really good money this month.
Well, what did we actually do? What activities, what did we put in place so you can keep making the right decisions and keep growing after. The next real failure for business failure point that businesses struggle is branding and not understanding how to get themselves branded. You want to make sure that you elevate your presence, you become more known.
You start attracting clients to you, and you do that by building a brand, by getting known for being really good at what you do in the uk. If you’re a UK based business owner and you’re watching this, you’ll know. It’s in our culture not to shout about how good we are. It’s in our culture not to go out there and you know, celebrate our successes.
But you’ve gotta be different than that. You’ve gotta show your success. You’ve gotta show your growth. And the reason, you’ve gotta show that success attracts success. You want better quality clients. You need to show that your high quality in what you do, and then the final one which is what I see from businesses that don’t succeed, businesses that fail, is that they don’t have mentors. If there’s anything in my life that has really changed my life, as I said, done massive amount of revenue over multiple different businesses in multiple different industries, and trained thousands of people to succeed by showing the mechanics of how you run a business, right? For those people that fail, they don’t have mentors.
They want to figure it all out themselves. And look, I’ll tell you, I was there when I started my first ever business. I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder. I wanted to go out. I wanted to do it all myself. I almost wanted to do it the hard way, which frankly is stupid, but that’s the kind of mentality that I had when I went in. It was only when I realized that if I surround myself with people, I get mentors and I really. Build relationships with people that are more successful to me, then I can get the critical lessons I need to succeed. So you really gotta make it your absolute must to go out there and find people playing at a higher level.
Build relationships so you can start looking up rather than looking down those seven things combined. Are gonna see you change your results. And hey, look, I make these videos because I really wanna inspire business owners, motivate them, and actually give them the tools that they need to succeed. And if you’ve enjoyed this video and you really wanna start to understand marketing better or branding better, I’ve got some free virtual events, which completely free, which you can click the link in the description. And come and join us. Get four or five hours training. Give yourself a gift where you can start to grow too. If I haven’t met you at this stage, I look forward to meeting you in person at some stage and supporting you. Drop a like for us and make sure to subscribe so you can be the first to be updated on what’s coming next.