The 4 Biggest Reasons You’re Having Trouble Scaling Your Service Business

Speaker 1: 0:00

Are you feeling the weight of your business is falling completely on your shoulders? That means that probably you have the marketing piece, you have the mindset piece, you have the profit piece, but you don't have team. When the whole thing is falling on your shoulders, you can have marketing, mindset and profit, but if you don't have team, it's all going to rest on you. Welcome to the Soulpreneur's Show, a podcast for a new generation of leaders, visionaries, disruptors and trailblazers who want to do business better. Our goal is to provide you with stories and insights into the strategy, systems and soul behind scaling service-driven, impact-first, human-centric businesses to help you create time, financial and lifestyle freedom. We want you to have a business that you not only love and pays you well, but that prioritizes what you want for your life, so that you can take actual unplugged vacations, you can step away from social media and you can spend your time doing things you love with the people you love. Let's get to it. Okay, let's talk about scaling your business and why you might be having some trouble doing this right now. I do want to be clear. When I say scaling, what I mean is a very traditional definition of this word, and scaling means more input with less output. You're making more but you're spending less. You're also making more, but maybe spending less of your time. You're spending less of your resources in general. So that's scaling to me. If you are not to the point where you are already making consistent revenue, there's nothing to scale yet. Go figure that out first. This is not going to be helpful to you. Or also, if you were at a point in your business where you are wanting to make more but you're not really in the place yet to quite have less output, that's okay. This will also help you grow. But I do want to make that. I just wanted to make that distinction of like. If you are not at the point where you have consistency in your revenue yet, this is going to be like. That's the reason you're not scaling yet because you've got to figure out how to make money consistently first. That's the episode. That's the episode. Guys, we're done. That's it. If that's you, that literally is the episode. You can listen to this because it might be aspirational, but it's not going to be that much help for you. But if you are not in that place, if you are making consistent revenue and you're having a difficult time scaling something, you're having a difficult time growing something either growing or scaling. I've got you.

Speaker 1: 2:27

We're going to talk about this. So what I want to make very clear is if you've got a big mess in your business before you scale it, if you're already feeling burnt out and exhausted or tired or like the weight of everything is on your shoulders, like, and then you go to scale it, you're just going to have a bigger mess. You're just going to have more of the same. The problems that you have in your business before you scale it are. You're going to have the same problems, but bigger. You're just going to amplify them when you scale it. So we're going to talk about those things, because if you are feeling some of that, it means you are missing one of the four key ingredients of sustainable growth.

Speaker 1: 3:03

So this is the way that I define these things, and so the four key ingredients of sustainable growth are mission-driven team, marketing and visibility optimization, visionary CEO mindset and profit-driven systems. So a lot of this comes back to systems, but it also comes back to people and it comes back to resilience. So mission-driven team speaks to people, marketing and visibility optimization and profit-driven systems speak to systems. That's not shocking. Profit-driven systems are systems. How about that? And then visionary CEO mindset speaks to resilience.

Speaker 1: 3:34

So, to be more specific around this, so when I look at mission-driven team, the three components of this are your mission-driven team should be comprised of people who keep the day-to-day functioning so that you don't have to. Now, if you have a lifestyle business, which is where you are making all the money and more that you want to be making, but it's not like it's taking very little of your time and you don't really have a big team and it's just all pretty simple, Like you've just got a really super simple model. That's, I consider that, a lifestyle business, which is totally fine that this mission-driven team still applies. It just might only be like one person, or maybe two people. You might have a lifestyle business with no team, but I think that at some point that's going to become difficult and I'll tell you. I'll explain why at the end.

Speaker 1: 4:20

So mission-driven team number one is having people that who can help keep the day-to-day functioning so that you don't have to. Two, it's that you've got people who aren't checking in and asking a bunch of questions on how to do something, so that you're not being interrupted with what you're trying to do with. Like hey, what font should I use? Or hey, what color do you think this should be? Or, hey, do you like the way that this looks? So, people who are not checking in to ask a bunch of questions because you might have delegated something off your plate but you're still having to make the decisions, and that is challenging. And then, lastly, people who care about your mission and your clients basically as much as you do. I understand that they might not be 100,000 percent there, that's okay, but they're going to be really, really bought in and this is the key to mission driven. It's not just building a team, it's building a mission driven team because we want people to care about what you are trying to serve, Like your big, why we want people. We want for people to be really bought into that and so that they care about your mission and your clients, like so much, so so much.

Speaker 1: 5:17

The second component of this is marketing and visibility optimization. So this is about having systems that create awareness, create awareness of offers to both your new and your repeat clients. This is also going to be about systems that propel your thought, leadership and authority and then, lastly, about systems that do the heavy lifting of making you more money. So it's essentially your sales machine. So marketing and visibility optimization also goes back into a little bit of like sales mechanisms. So it's about creating that awareness for people who either have worked with you before, so you're building retention and referrals, or for people who have not worked for you, so that you are gaining new clients. Systems that are going to propel your thought, leadership and authority are things that, like, continue to get your message out there, that are continuing to build, like, your unique value proposition, the thing that makes you unique, the thing that makes your solution unique, based on the way that you provide it and your thoughts and your thought process around that specific thing. And then systems that do the heavy lifting of making you more money so that you have a way to generate revenue on repeat without having to do everything, without having to do almost anything manually. That's the goal is we want that process to be done as little as possible. We don't want anything. We don't want things manually done.

Speaker 1: 6:27

Then the third part of the four part sustainable growth system is having a visionary CEO mindset. So this is about having resilience. So resilience around your evolving identity, because you are going to change. There are very few people who ever know what it's like to have a business that generates six figures. And if you get to that point, that means that something like 13% of the entire population of business owners ever get to that point Only 13%. That means that half of the people in the country in the world maybe ever choose to start a business. So 14% of those half of the people, so like 7% of the rest of the world understands what it means to not just make six figures but make it in your own business. That is a massive identity shift unless you have been around people who can model that for you.

Speaker 1: 7:23

Massive identity shift. I talk about this a lot and then especially like a million dollar business. Like do you know how many women get to the point of having a million dollar a year business? I think it's something like two or 3% and that's a business owners. So if you look out, if you're a woman and you look out in the rest of the world, Only one, maybe one person out of a hundred and I think even then that's probably generous is going to have any idea what it's like to run a million dollar a year business. That is a massive identity shift.

Speaker 1: 7:52

So this is about having resilience around that, evolving identity, taking on the identity of being someone's boss, taking on the identity of being a next level leader, taking on the idea. It's just a lot of identity shift. So having resilience around that, having resilience around your business, is evolving identity because the bigger your business gets, the less of you your business is going to be. When you first start your business, you are your business. You are your business's biggest asset and the more your business grows, you should not be your business's biggest asset, not at all. So it's going to start to shift away from like. For me, like Adrian, it's Adrian's business. Adrian is the business. It's going to shift away from that and become it is the business, it is the business entity as a whole. And as that happens, there's going to be a lot of this happens for, like, the resilience around this is about ego death. There's a lot of ego death when it comes to building a bigger business and being able to navigate the identity shifts. There's a lot of ego death around building a business and growing a business and being able to navigate the shifts in identity of your actual business. It's so much ego death.

Speaker 1: 8:58

And then resilience, lastly, about around other people's thoughts, feelings and actions. So thoughts and feelings makes up beliefs. You got a neutral. You ever heard me talk about CTFAR. Ctfar is circumstances, thoughts, feelings, action, results. So you've got very neutral circumstances like I'm a business owner, that's either true or it's not Be proven in the court of law.

Speaker 1: 9:18

I guess you could say, oh no, maybe that wasn't a good example. A business owner who is like, not making any money, like is it a hobby? Okay, I guess it's a thought. Like you own a business. Actually, I'm going to, I'm going to, I guess I'm going to clearly say if you own a business, you own a business. If it's not making any money, the feeling might be such that this is not good. Maybe it's just a hobby, Anyway, I'm going to get off. This is not what I'm intending to talk about. But so you've got a neutral circumstance and then you've got thoughts around that neutral circumstance that influence your feelings and then that influences the actions you take and that's what creates your results.

Speaker 1: 9:53

But thoughts and feelings are what create beliefs. So other people are going to have thoughts and feelings about your business that are going to create beliefs around what that means. Other people are going to have thoughts and feelings about you as the business owner and that creates their beliefs about you. Other people are going to have thoughts and feelings about the evolution that you have experienced, about all of a sudden, like all of a sudden, Jane has money. Like who does she think she is? All of a sudden, Jane's buying Chanel bags or Birken bags or Louboutin's oh, she thinks she's so good. They start to have thoughts and feelings and that influences their beliefs. And let me tell you how many people like if they thought about what it meant to actually be like a millionaire which having a million-dollar business and being a millionaire are not the same thing. But how many people are like, I want to be a millionaire, but when you think about what comes along with that, how many of you are willing to think about, like all of the family members that might come out of the woodwork to ask to borrow money when they find out that all of a sudden, oh, you got a net worth of a million dollars. You're a millionaire. Give me some of that, Break me off a piece of that pie. Like, there's a lot of stuff that comes around money, money, money.

Speaker 1: 10:58

I didn't intend for the bulk of this episode to go around mindset, but I think it's just because, like it's so ignored the mindset piece of things like, if you ignore it, you can have all the money in the world and your mindset is going to be trash if you are ignoring this stuff because it can be difficult to navigate. So other people's thoughts, feelings and actions because, again, once they have the belief, it's going to influence the actions that they take. So if other people are saying things about you, if other people are thinking things about you, if other people are treating you in certain ways, you've got to have resilience around that because it's not helpful to anyone or anything to start to go into like shut down mode or freak out mode or panic mode or whatever that looks like for you. So that's visionary CEO mindset resilience Resilience around your identity, your business's identity evolving and other people's thoughts, feelings and actions.

Speaker 1: 11:44

And then the fourth part of the sustainable growth system is having profit-driven systems. So this goes back to systems. I just had systems so many times in the last 10 seconds. So profit-driven systems are about having systems that help you keep more of what you make. It's not just about making money, it's about keeping it. Having systems that help identify where your money is going, so that you have a better understanding of how to keep more of it. So systems that will help you identify what that looks like, and then systems that help integrate with other areas of your business to help you optimize financial viability. So I'm going to say that once again and then I'm going to get to where I'm going with this. So profit-driven systems are about having systems that help you keep more of what you make, to help you identify where your money is actually going, and then systems that create integration with the rest of your business so that you are able to optimize financial viability.

Speaker 1: 12:32

So those are the four components of the four key ingredients, the four stages, the four whatever you want to call it of sustainable growth. It's my system, it's my system. I'm like, oh, do you call it a? The component, the ingredients, the whatever, doesn't matter, Semantics. So I guess it's not semantics because it's not stages. It's not like you have to have one and then the next, and then the next and then the next. It's not a phased system, it's not a, it's not lateral progression. This is like you just need all four of them and you work on whichever one you need to work on at them in the moment. So let's talk about that.

Speaker 1: 13:00

The reason you are maybe not growing or scaling the way that you want to, or as fast as you want to or as effectively as you want to, or that you're having trouble in some way, shape or form, is probably because you are missing one or more of these components. So here's how you can. I needed to explain all that to get to. This is what we were getting at is if you are having trouble scaling or growing, I want you to think about these four things and identify which one is happening to you. So are you feeling the weight of your business is falling completely on your shoulders? That means that probably you have the marketing piece, you have the mindset piece, you have the profit piece, but you don't have team. When you, when the whole thing is falling on your shoulders, you can have marketing mindset and profit, but if you don't have team, it's all going to rest on you. If you have team mindset and profit, but you don't have marketing, invisibility, optimization means that you are going to experience growth, but you're going to be time poor. You're going to be on the hamster wheel forever. So if you're growing but you've got no time because you're on that hamster wheel. You, you really want to start looking at marketing, invisibility, optimization. You want to create that machine.

Speaker 1: 14:04

If you've got team marketing and profit but no mindset, then it means you're probably making bank, You've got lots of money, but you, your mindset is trash. You're, you are constantly in a state of like what is happening? You are in a state, you're in a state of scarcity all the time. You're in a mindset spiral all the time. So that's the question If you're making lots of money but you're in a mindset spiral all the time, you probably need to work on your mindset. Or even if you're if it's not constant, even if it's sometimes like, that means work on your mindset when you start to experience mindset spiral, mindset.

Speaker 1: 14:35

And then, lastly, if you've got team marketing and mindset but you don't have profit, it means that your business probably feels all right but you're not keeping any of the money that you make, Woof. And when that happens, especially if you're not paying yourself to begin with, because keeping extra money and paying yourself are kind of two different things, but if you're not paying yourself, that goes beyond just like not keeping it, Like that's a big oof. So if everything seems like, well, it's going fine, but I've got no money left over at the end of the day, then we need to work on some profit driven systems. So that's probably where things are coming into play around the reasons you are having trouble scaling that service based business. If this sounds like, yeah, that's maybe me.

Speaker 1: 15:16

Maybe one or more of these things are going on with me that I would like to work on, then I would love to invite you to consider looking at Sustainable Growth Lab, which is my 12 month group consulting program, which essentially helps you with all four of these things, where we will go in and work on creating marketing and visibility optimization.

Speaker 1: 15:33

We're going to build a mission driven team. We're going to build your visionary CEO mindset. We're going to work on profit driven systems so that, essentially, your business can run without you, because that's the goal is, we want you to have sustainability in business, which means I want you to be able to have a business that is self sustaining, where you are not the biggest asset, so you have a well oiled machine running behind you. If you want to learn more about it, you can go to solepreneurco slash lab or you can send me a message and we can just chat about it, but I hope this was helpful. I hope it illuminated what might be going on with you and your business, and I'll catch you in the next one.