Collapse, Pivot, Stay, or Scale: The 4 Spots Every Business Owner Faces

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie Chenell, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there.

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Million Dollar Grit. It's been a minute. There's been a lot going on. I launched my book and then went right to Disney World for the 16th Digital Insiders Mastermind. I got back last Friday. It was a crazy reentry, and now here I am finally getting back up on the mic to share with you one of the things that I brought up during the mastermind that I think is really relevant to all business owners. And it's about the 4 possible scenarios or spots you might be right now as we end 2025 and going into 2026. And it's important to be able to identify where you are in this framework I'm about to give you because it changes significantly how you plan for 2026. So I am going to give you the 4 possible mindset spots or logistical spots you're in, and then we're going to go through them one by one. Number 1, you might be in the position of collapse. You feel like you are collapsing. We'll talk about what that means. Second, you might feel like you're in a pivot or a change season. You sense that there's an incoming pivot. Maybe you know what it is, maybe you don't, but whatever used to work isn't really working anymore, or perhaps your passion is changing. That's the second spot. The third spot is, you know that what you're doing is working and you need to stay the course and you need to just keep doing what you're doing. But things like shiny objects and FOMO and fear and boredom could be playing against you there and causing you to doubt whether or not that's the right move. And the 4th spot you might be in is, you know that you're ready to grow, but you are not sure how fast to scale. To recap, the 4 possible spots you might be in here at the end of 2025: in collapse, sensing an incoming pivot, Knowing that you need to stay the course, or growing but not sure how fast to scale. This specific podcast episode today, you know, some of you might be listening and say, well, what if I haven't even started yet? There is a, a spot zero, I suppose, but I'm not really focused on that today. I think the best advice I could give you as you're listening to this episode is if you do not have a business yet, Follow number 3. You need to stay the course. Just make sure you have someone to help you build that course to stay on. All right, let's go into collapsing, right? Collapse mode. When and how do you know if you're in collapse mode? You'll feel emotions like panic, exhaustion, shame, which may or may not be realistic. It just depends on how good your emotions are at attaching to what's really going on. But in reality, you have no reserves left, and there is a lot of survival thinking. And the goal in the collapse mode is that you need to stabilize cash flow quickly. The right actions to do if you find yourself in this position are high cash, low complexity tasks. Okay? Sometimes it's easier to know what not to do. This is not the time to do a major pivot, complex funnel building, building out a new brand. We want to stabilize cash flow. That's really important in the collapse mode. Many of you might actually be nodding your head and going, yeah, I feel like I'm in this phase. But I definitely want you to check the math because you may not actually be in collapse. You may just have unrealistic expectations or you're not paying attention to the math. This year has been absolutely just brutal for so many people and very destabilizing. And, you know, I always want to make sure that, like, collapse mode means significant debt, very little income and rising expenses, right? It's really crunch time. What are you going to do if you are in collapse mode? Well, the first is that we have to stop all magical thinking. Okay? If you say something to yourself like, oh, if I could just get, you know, a room of 500 people to do this webinar, I'll sell 25 units and get my cash going. When you've never gotten a room of 300 or 500 people ever before in your life. Right? Or this, you know, blank funnel, fill in the blank, is going to change everything. Even if that's possible, that mindset is magical thinking and it will set you up for disappointment. Or something like, you know, if I could just get another business loan, it'll be, you know, it'll provide relief, but you're already very deeply in debt. So magical thinking is not helpful in collapse mode. Another thing you might want to do is separate debt from your monthly profit and loss. I notice this when people are in collapse mode. Let's say they need $10,000 a month to like keep the lights on and pay themselves. But because of mounting debt, they actually need $20,000. And that number is so big and so far away from— for them that they can't even get there from here. So I want you to psychologically just put the debt as like, that is a mistake, or that is the past. I'll figure it out as best I can. I love the saying, you know, if you owe the bank $1,000, it's your problem. But if you owe the bank $100,000, it's their problem. You know, just like psychologically separate from it. The entire United States government is like $38 trillion in debt. Okay, we've got to remove the shame from the debt. Instead, your, your job is to just make the actual bottom line amount of money you need to pay your expenses and pay yourself, right? In the case of this example, that's $10,000. If you make more, great, throw it against the debt. If you don't, fine. But setting yourself up to try to make $20,000 to pay down mounting debt is going to just mess with your head psychologically. And it's not going to make you a better marketer in this phase. Also, if you are in collapsing, do not build elaborate courses or brand new funnels. You want to use Zoom links, Stripe invoices, emails, and Google Docs, right? You do not want to focus on these expensive long-term buildouts thinking that's what's going to make you money. If you have existing funnels and you're in collapse mode and you can't afford the ads, you can keep them on and try to do what I call pound pavement. Get people in the room for your webinar organically, make personal personal invites. Don't spend money on ads thinking it's going to be the magical savior if you're truly in collapse mode. And that leads me to my last comment here in this phase. You're going to have resistance when it comes time to doing things in collapse mode because you're going to feel like it's beneath you. And this happened a lot for a lot of people who were in one-on-one coaching or they were in done-for-you services, and then they scaled out of it in 2020 and 2021, and They did things, you know, more at scale, and now if you have to cut contractors or you have to do private outreach, you might feel like, "Well, this is beneath me. I already like retired this stuff," and that is not going to help you. Our attachment to how we think things should be is often the number one reason we don't do what needs to be done because we're stuck in our own ideas of what it should be, and that is very common in collapse mode, especially if you've made a lot of money in the past, and doing things like, warm outbound sales and marketing, DMs, cold outbound door-to-door pitching, you know, that kind of stuff. People don't want to do it, right? And they think they shouldn't have to, and that's going to get you caught up, and that's not actually not going to solve the problem. That's the collapse mode. If you are in phase 2 or spot 2 where you feel like there is an incoming pivot, you're probably feeling maybe a combination of frustration of whatever you're in right now, but also hope about what could be coming. You know that what used to work doesn't, or possibly you're aging out of your market, right? You're moving on. And what we need to do is in this phase, you need to keep what's working working. The urge to like burn it all down, erase, start over, that is like our perfectionism talking. And you don't want boredom or unease or anything like that cause you to self-sabotage. So the pivot needs to be based on math, not just your gut. So it's math and gut, not just one. So we're going to keep whatever's working working. And then we want to look at where the pivot actually is, right? Some of you just need to pivot your position, right? It's the same offer, the same problem, you just need to talk about it differently. Some of you need to pivot the container you're in. Maybe group coaching worked before, but it doesn't work now, so you got to go back to one-on-one. Or maybe you want to do a course, or you want to do AI, or what have you, right? So sometimes it's just the offer container that needs to pivot. Sometimes it's the traffic. A lot of people having trouble with Meta now that they can't target more accurate— accurately. They need figure out ways to get new customers. A true pivot, like when you're actually opening up a new business, is if the problem that you want to solve changes, okay? That's when it's a full business pivot. Most of the others—marketing, offer container, traffic, right?—those are just pivots in the existing business. And same advice: keep everything that's working working, and then you can start to figure out what the pivot looks like. For marketing position, for example, like You may know that it's a market pivot because you know the offer works and you know the market still needs it and people are buying it from competitors, but for whatever reason it's not working with you. That's a market positioning pivot. If you have noticed that you need a different structure in order to actually get the transformation, for example, let's say, you know, the group coaching isn't getting results the way one-on-one coaching did, plus you have to like sell in cohorts and Launches aren't doing as well, so you need an evergreen 365-day sales system. That's an offer container pivot where you're going back to one-on-one coaching and setting up your offer so that you can get paid every day. Another reason you might change the offer is like if you notice that the price point isn't selling as well anymore, and that can also be, you know, driven by market conditions. Traffic sources is pretty obvious. Your traffic sources aren't working, but you notice that when people do get to your offer or your funnel, they do buy, right? That's an example. And the true pivot where changing the problem being solved is if you notice the market doesn't need it the same way it used to. And that could be an example of like copywriting, right? AI is taking over a lot of copywriting, so there's not as much need. Or maybe you are changing, right? You were a copywriter and now you want to become a business coach and you want to focus on different problems. So you're either aging out of your market or have a different mission. The third spot was the 'you need to stay the course,' okay? Things are working, you need to stay the course. I also said if you're a beginner and you don't have a business yet to pay attention to what I say here in this spot. Patience, patience, patience. It's very easy to get bored. It is very easy to get impatient and think that it should work faster. Impatience creates more false alarms and false crises than anything else. Discipline is really important. Following the plan, improving conversions slowly, adding small things, and chasing novelty is your biggest risk right here. The big question I want you to ask as you're looking at your course, your plan, is does your nervous system and bank account match your plan? Here is what I mean. Let's say I, and this is very common in like a webinar, they're like, okay, my webinar's working and I need to do a weekly webinar, but they don't have tons and tons of money for ads yet. They have to kind of scale slowly, which means they may go 5, 6, 10 weeks with only one sale. Nothing's broken. Everything's working. Conversions are good. It's just small audiences. Does your nervous system and your bank account match your plan? The math says you're going to get 1 sale a week for 10 weeks. Does your nervous system like that? Right? Do you get nervous and then bail and self-destruct or self-sabotage? Secondly, does your bank account match the plan? Right? Can you handle 1 sale a week, which is perfectly normal in this condition? And if you can't, You need to make sure that your nervous system and your bank account can actually handle the plan that you are walking. This is very, very good advice for people who are just starting a business as well, because you say, okay, I want to start a membership. Okay, well, can you handle not getting to $5,000 MRR for another 18 months? And if you can't, then maybe you need to do one-on-one coaching. You need to do some of that higher, higher income stuff while you're building your membership. Okay, so you want to look at your nervous system and you want to look at your bank account and make sure that you stay on course because most plans will work if you stick to them and you can match your nervous system and bank account to it. Last, let's look at the spot of people who are in growth mode, but they are not sure how fast to scale. This might be, uh, you might feel excited, nervous, maybe impatient, but you're going to notice that your bottleneck is going to be your people, your systems, or your reach, right? You don't have enough people to scale, your systems break if you get too many people in, or your traffic breaks because because when you spend a lot more money on ads, you don't have as much creative, and therefore your ad CPMs tank. Okay, the goal in this phase is going to be really about system, systemization, documentation, and delegation. This is things like hiring, making sure your processes and process design are in place, looking at, for example, okay, if we're going to scale ads and we're going to double our budget, do we have a system in place to provide new creative every single week? Do we have an ads manager that will even be willing to update creative every single week. Okay, breaking things because you scale too fast, one of the worst problems in the world to have. It is so much easier to scale slowly. Think of it like going up a set of stairs versus jumping off of a trampoline with a jetpack on your back. We love that if we're risky, and we love risk and adrenaline, but it actually can just— you can self-destruct gloriously. You want to look at where the gaps are and the holes and the wasted efforts. Focus on your operations. Continue to amass testimonials. And the reason I say this is because as you grow in scale, people hate you more. And the more proof and reputation building you have, the better. You want to make sure, like I said, if you're scaling with ads, that you have a creative ads SOP in place to continually add new creative. That's one of the reasons why funnels break. And work yourself out of the roles that are not ideal. If this is something that you feel like, wow, this really helps, I have a business MRI scorecard that can help you figure out what phase you're in. It's not perfect, but if you want to DM me on Instagram, Julie C. Chenell is my handle. You can go ahead and, um, DM me on Instagram and I'll give you that business scorecard and you can go ahead and take a look. It helps you identify whether you're in that collapse, pivot, stay the course, or growth. That is the big thing that I wanted to share with you from the mastermind. It was one of presentations that I did right at the beginning, because everybody who came into the room really was carrying a lot of baggage over the years. And I want— over the year, this feels like years— and I wanted to help people really understand it's a very different solution depending on what spot you're in. As always, I appreciate my audience. Thank you so much. If you want to get my book Million Dollar Grit, it is free at milliondollargrit.com. If you have already gotten the book and you can spare 99 cents I would appreciate it so much if you go over to Amazon, purchase that version, and leave a review. I'll talk to you guys soon.

And there you have it, folks. Another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.