How to Turn Around a Failing Business -- What to do | Blair Singer

Oh my God, failed again. This is just not working. Of course you're gonna fail. On your trip from a scalable bit up to a scalable business from being solo entrepreneur. You're gonna fail. You're gonna fail. But how do you turn around a failing business? Before I forget, if you really want to learn more about this, click on the, on the, on the link in the, in the comment box below to learn more. If you want to do this really fast, go to blairsinger.com plan and one of us will sit down and talk to you about it. But on your journey to go from the purgatory sometimes or the confusion of being a solo entrepreneur to being a fully scalable business, you are going to fail. And the problem is, is that most people fail. As a matter of fact, the Small Business administration says that 80% of people of entrepreneurs are going to fail in the first three years. Does that mean you're doomed? Does that mean never start? No, not at all. Not at all. Not at all. So I'm going to give. There's two parts to this, and the second part is way more valuable than the first. But I'm going to give you how do you turn around a failing business if it's in a failure situation? Okay, so number one. So take some notes on this. Take some. Number one, what is your definition of failing? Is the whole thing failing? Is your business completely failing? There are so many parts to a business that if you get in your mind that the business is failing, then there's something going on with you, which I'll talk about a little bit later. So if your car, if you're driving a car and it breaks down along the side of the road or you come out from a restaurant, car won't start. Do you throw the car away? Do you give up on the car? No. What do you do? You're going to call a mechanic. Somebody's going to take a look at the car. You're going to find that it's got a dead battery or something like that, or the transmission. With that, you going to throw away the car? No. You're going to go to an expert, okay? It's going to tell you what's wrong with the car. The one thing, not the tires, not the engine, not the windows, not the drive shaft. All that's fine except for the battery or the transmission. And then you're going to fix it. Then you have a car that's running maybe even better than new. Same thing with your business. The problem is you are, as a solo entrepreneur, you are your business. So you have a. We have a tendency to blanket everything with it's just not working or it's heaven or it's hell or whatever it is. Okay, so the first thing is, is to define it. Your business consists of a lot of components. It consists of sales and marketing and legal teams and, and products and systems and your team and your leadership and the mission. So many things. So to be able to turn around a failing business is exactly the reverse of what we do when we're taking you from solo to scale. Right. So it is to take a look at the individual engines, the individual transmissions, and see which one is not working. Is your product good? Maybe it's great. Is your lead generation good? Probably. Maybe it's your conversion. Yeah, we're not converting. Okay, so let's focus on the one engine of the myriad of engines that's not working first and see what we can do. What assumptions are we making here? What, what's the process? Okay, and begin to rework it, retool it, rework it, fix that part of the engine and see how the rest of the engine runs. Okay. Before you throw the whole thing out the door. Okay, so again, most small businesses, what fails is their lead generation is not good, their conversions suck, and they don't have the right teams. Okay, so again, if you were looking for a quick diagnostic of what's going on with your business, I'd look at those three areas. Here's the good news. Just like when your car breaks down, go to an expert. Go to somebody that's, that's really, really good with teams or really, really good with lead gen or really, really good in sales and conversions that talk to them, analyze it, pull it apart. You know, one of the things we talk about on my website is there's difference. There are different steps to a selling cycle, maybe five, six, seven steps from lead generation all the way to close measure each one. Where is it working? Where is it not working? You know, you could have an engine that's running great and then all of a sudden, overnight it seems that somebody threw sand into the engine. Okay, so again, go back and rework it, pull it apart and see what's give up on the whole business. Rarely is the whole business the problem. The other thing that the Small Business Administration says that of of all the businesses that fail, remember I said most of them fail in the first three years, less than 20% of the only 20% of the reason they fail is because of competition or market factors. The rest of it is in their Words self inflicted. What's that mean? It means your little voice or your lack of knowledge or your attitude got in the way, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. Okay? So pull the thing apart, the quality. What happens for a lot of people is you're asking the wrong questions to the wrong people. Have you ever felt like I just can't answer this, I just can't figure this out. I just can't seem to get an answer for how to get leads, how to find my. That my target market. Okay. Why? Because you're asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. You're asking of your staff, your employees, your friends. They don't know any better than you do and they're probably struggling just like you. You are. Again, you should have an advisory board. An advisory board that can help you look at your business mentors. We talked about that on the last, on the last live that I did about what not to say to a mentor. Okay? But find out from them what's going on and get some help with it. Okay? Okay. Most people are in the wrong place at the wrong time, asking the wrong questions of the wrong people and therefore getting stupid wrong answers. Okay? So again, simple thing is just take a look. Now you, by the way, if you feel your business failing, you've got basically four or five options. Number one, and I'm going to tell you that only one of them, one or two of those are valid in my concern. You could walk away. That's one thing you could do. You walk away. You could give the business away. You could give it to somebody else, you probably wouldn't be able to sell it. Or you can assess it, which is what I'm talking about. Assess the individual parts and find the piece that's working and not working and fix the stuff that's not working. And then there's one more, there's one more which I'm going to cover now, which is probably the most important piece, particularly if you're a solopreneur. So my question to you is this. The question is this, is the business failing or are you failing? Is it you or is it the business? Look, I understand that it's a grind. It's kind of like Phil Dyer just read a great book called Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, one of the co founders of Nike. You've heard of Nike? He was a runner, you know, and, and business is like running. It's. It's hard and you don't even know what you're running for. Sometimes, sometimes your mission isn't even clear. But it's just the fact that you got to keep going. That kind of possesses you. Well, sometimes that energy runs. Sometimes that energy runs out. And you have to say to yourself, this is just not worth it. I can't do it anymore. I don't like. I don't want. I don't want to do this business. And you know what? There's rewards for quitting. There is rewards for quitting. You know what the biggest reward is for quitting? For shutting down that business? The pain stops. That's right. The pain stops. You can always quit. But as my. One of my teachers and mentors, Mac Newton, says, quitting should never be your first choice. Never be your first choice. Why? Because if quitting is your first choice, it becomes habitual because it's easy and there's big reward for it. There's more pain if you keep going. Okay, I wrote it. One of the first articles I wrote many years ago was called, when the Heart goes out, the Money Soon Follows. When the heart goes out. When your heart and passions out, the money goes away, too. So it's. It's. So it's got to be addressed. Now, the other thing that Phil Knight also said, he said sometimes. And here's another option, quitting. Everybody tells you never to quit, which I just told you never to quit. But one thing Phil Knight says, you know, sometimes quitting can be pure genius. I'll say it again. Quitting can be pure genius. Let me give you an example. Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. I had a very dear friend of mine, very successful entrepreneur from Singapore. He made. He struggled mightily. We got to the first summit, and he was not in good shape, but his mind wanted to keep going. Our mountain guide said, you're going down. You cannot go any further. Otherwise it could be very dangerous to your health. And he fought. He wanted to go, I can do it. I can do it. And we said, no, you've got to turn around and go back. And so quitting, in that case was brilliant. Had he kept going, he might not be alive today. But what happened was he went back. He started getting himself in shape. For the next year. He started running triathlons, marathons, got himself in great shape, came back the next year, and summited with no problem. So in that case, quitting was genius. Quitting was brilliant. Sometimes in your business, in the form that you set it up to, times have changed. You have to ask yourself these questions. Who's my customer right now? Are they still here? What's their appetite? For risk right now. What's my sales approach? My Another dear friend of mine, Simon Bowen from Perth, Australia, says that the whole conversation in sales has changed dramatically, particularly for high ticket items. Has your conversation changed? There are so many places that you can shift. So maybe you need to quit using a manual transmission in your car and put in an automatic transmission. Maybe you shouldn't quit driving. Maybe you should get rid of the gas guzzler and go for an electric car. But you're not going to quit driving. So quitting and failure is in your mind. And we are taught that to be to feel bad about failing, that failure is a bad thing, that if you make mistakes, you're a loser. I'm going to tell you that in business, the success in business is simply going from one failure to the next, going to the next one and the next one and figuring out a way through it. That's business. And if you don't have the heart for that, don't even start. Don't even start. So the real issue as a solopreneur is if there how do you turn around a failing business? Question is how do you turn you around? How do you turn your mind around? What do you know about yourself that you can get yourself invigorated again and get on the winning side? Okay, sometimes, like I say, wiping the slate clean, getting rid of your team, getting going to a new location, wiping the slate clean and starting over again could be a brilliant thing to do. Allow you a fresh clean start. But with good advice, with good advisors, with people that understand what you're talking about. Remember, the product is the least important thing. Mission, team leadership. What's your product? Well, who's your who? What's the legal structure around it? What are your systems? Sales, marketing, conversions. Okay, Cash flow management. Take each of these component parts and work them through. When we work people through to get to their apex to get a fully scalable business, that's how we start. But if you're already down the road and it doesn't seem to be working, back up to those steps and retool those individual engines until you get a win. Celebrate that win, then go to the next one. And I will tell you that every component of your engine, listen to me closely. Every component of your engine will break down and will fail over the course of your business. And you must learn that that's part of the deal. That's part of the game. Look, business, everybody wants to go into business and you go out on the playing field, they blow the whistle, you're out on the field, what you get knocked down. Failure. Okay, wow, that hurt. But I get up and do it again. Whack. You get knocked down again. So what are you gonna. So you learn very quickly that entrepreneurship is not so much about the money, it's not so much about the success. It's about whether you can get up again and keep going every time you get knocked down. The reason so few people go on this journey is because they just don't have the stomach to get knocked down and, and everything's a failure. No, your conversions are a failure right now. No, you don't have the right people on the right seats on the bus right now. That's all this is. Okay. And break it down to take to in order for you to get to where you want to go. Okay, so I'm going to say this. As Phil Knight said, it's like running. It's painful, it hurts, but you keep going. And the reason a runner keeps running is that sometimes they don't even know why. Just know that you've got a dream. And whatever your dream is, your dream deserves to live. Your dream deserves to exceed. Okay, so I'm so I'm going to say to you, in your path, I'm sure you've had some big failures, but in your failures have been probably the biggest learning experiences. So there is no turning a failing business around. It's a continual process because there's always something failing in the business. If you look at it that way, there's always something failing and there's always something that needs to be repaired and always something that needs to get better. So what's your biggest takeaway from this? What? What, what did you learn? Hopefully if this was valuable to you, please like it, share it with somebody else and subscribe. Please subscribe and and and let me know your comments. And if you're ready for a transition to from self employed to fully scalable business, let me know and click the little bell notification. And every time there's a new video and a new piece that will help you, we'll notify and let you go and let you know. And for sure go to blairsinger.com forward/plan so we can actually sit down and work with you. But what are your nuggets? What are the valuable things you learned today? What was it you needed to be reminded about? Let me know in the comments. Send them to me. And just remember that every failure is a learning experience. And those people that learn how to gain the learning quickly are the ones that will make it. It will require strong will of mind. It will require a strong advisory team of good people and mentors around you. It will require a diligence and a discipline and to keep learning. Not to keep going, but to keep learning. Sometimes it's okay to stop. Sometimes it's okay to turn around. Sometimes you need to do that. Otherwise the collateral damage on your family and your friends and your income and your capital will all be affected. Look, one thing I just forgot. The one thing that may be standing in the way. And you think your business is a failure. Is it? Maybe it's so successful you just don't have enough money to take it to the next level. Because. Which means you need to learn how to raise capital. And most people that don't know how to sell don't know how to do that either. Okay? So that's something you need to learn. Just because you don't like selling doesn't mean that your company should not be able to sell. Just because you don't want to learn how to market doesn't mean your company shouldn't have a brilliant marketing lead generation machine. It's you, it's not the business. Preserve your dreams. Be amazing.