Overcoming breaking points: An ADHD entrepreneur's Guide

Hey new listener, thanks so much for checking us out and there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Hey new listener, thanks so much for checking us out and there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please, please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. In this episode, we're going to help you move past your business plateau. Squirrel. Squirrel. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast. Squirrel. One of the best moments about starting a business and, and running it and scaling it and growing it and being able to help a ton of people is the point at which you start making between 150 to $250,000 a year. That moment when you look at your revenue for the year and realize just how much of a difference you're making in your clients lives and in your own life is absolutely magical. But let me tell you, there's a whole new set of problems that come up at that point. Okay? So usually my clients are super ambitious. They want to grow their business to multiple, multiple six figures. Hitting that point feels great. It's also where they realize they need to look up from the grindstone and look forward to see what the next big goal is. There's usually a solid year after you've hit that 200,000 ish mark where your business will naturally plateau. And if you've already hit this in your business and you're wondering, is it me? Am I broken? Do I not know how to do this? Take a deep breath. It's not you. It happens to so many business owners. All right? You're not broken. There's nothing magically up about you. Welcome to the club. There are just really natural, typical breaking points that happen in service based businesses. Especially if you have adhd at that 200 ish thousand dollar a year mark. Okay? And today we're going to go into what those breaking points are so you can be aware of them, you can identify them when they happen to you and you can hopefully overcome them. And also, if you're hearing this and you're thinking, oh my God, that's happening for me, I have no idea how I would even begin to tackle this. I just want to let you know I am designing a group mastermind for for ADHD business owners who are past six figures in their business but want to take it to that next level. This program is going to be launching in July of 2023. So if you are curious I ask you this small favor. Please go to the link in the show notes and answer the two simple questions in the survey I have there. This mastermind is designed specifically for ADHD business owners who are already making about a hundred thousand dollars a year in their business and really want to ratchet that up to multiple six figures. So what are the typical breaking points in an ADHD business that is scaling to multiple six figures? Let's get into it, shall we? So this first one is really uncomfortable for me to name because I am so guilty of this. I have a real hard time handing things off in my business because I'm a little bit of a perfectionist. I'm a lot of a control freak. I'm fairly good at a lot of things. So I'm pretty convinced that I can do it all. And this belief that you can do it all and that you should do it all because you're the owner of the business and you know better leads to a very dangerous disease that it can be the death toll for your business. And it's called do it all itis. This is very similar to the other disease that I talk about often, which is canduitis. Canduitis is usually what we say we can do for other people. Do it all Itis is what we say we can do for ourselves. Now, the fact that you built your business to anywhere close to 100,000 to $250,000, congratulations. You had to do a ton of of stuff all on your own to get here. Okay. You've had to wear so many hats, you've had to shift gears, you've had to learn new skills that you never had before to get to this point. Okay, well done. I want you to give yourself full credit for getting yourself to this point. And also, here's the point where you have to let some of that stuff go. You cannot do it all yourself. Okay? What got you to this point will not get you to the next point. I just love the metaphor of weight loss just because it's a very similar journey to growing a business. If you're really trying to lose weight, there will come a point where your diet that you have given yourself and your exercise routine will stop working. You will naturally hit a plateau. And when you do hit a plateau. It means that something has to change. Because what got you to this point in your journey will not get you to the next goal in your journey. It's really, really common for business owners, especially if you have ADHD at this point in your business, to think, okay, cool, I just have to work harder now. I have to work longer hours. I have to do more of what I'm already doing. I'm guilty of this myself. I will get into fits where I'm like, okay, cool. I have conquered LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where I get a lot of my business, right? And I start looking to the other social media platforms. I'm like, okay, cool. I'm going to add them all into my social media strategy. I'm just going to do them all and I'm going to do them all on my own because I figured out LinkedIn, I can figure out these guys, too. That is the wrong way to approach it. Okay, so I'm telling you about this. I'm not perfect at it. Okay? If you go and follow me on TikTok, which if you would like to, it's Katie KDHD spelled out, and we will put that in the show notes. If you want to go, check me out and follow me. Squirrel Pop Girl summer is canceled. This is the summer of the hot dog suit, and I need your help. Oh, and hi. I help ADHD business owners make more money in less time with fewer distractions. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach and massive weenie, and I'm here to tell you to stop being a weenie in your business. And to prove the point, I'm doing the stop being a weenie challenge this summer that I've just made up, and I need ideas of what to do. By the way, I only need, like, 350 more followers before I can start doing lives. And I fully intend on doing lives wearing the hot dog suit where I'm doing tarot card readings for your business. Okay? That is the carrot I'm dangling in front of you. Okay? So go and follow me. And I don't know what you have to do to turn on notifications on TikTok, but whatever it is, go and do that too. And you'll be notified when I do a live in my hot dog suit doing a business tarot card reading for you. Because we're here to have fun. We're not just messing around doing serious stuff all day. No, we're calling on spirit guides of the hot dog land. So you can stop being a weenie. Like when you started your business. You don't know what you don't know about being effective in things that you've never done before. So now the only difference is you are working full time. You have clients to serve. You have daily tasks that you have to keep up with because you know that they're effective. Now you're trying to add in stuff that you don't know what you don't know. So you're not sure if it's even going to be effective onto your already full eight hour day. Honey, that's unreasonable. Don't do that. And I'm talking to myself right now, but I'm also talking to you. I know I say this a lot, but half the time I do this podcast, I'm talking to myself because I need these pep talks. I need to be reminded of the shitty habits that I'm falling into. Right? Because I'm an ADHD person running a business, I don't have it all figured out. I'm not here being perfect and telling you how you can do it perfect, too. No, we're in. We're in this together. Like, no one should be alone on this journey. And I bring you along in mine. You have to get really real about what kinds of things you can start letting go of. And the beautiful thing about being at this point in your business is hopefully you have some extra capital to play with. You have some money that you can turn around and hire the ultimate expert to take that thing on for you. Now, I don't know if it's writing posts for LinkedIn, if it's creating assets for Instagram, maybe you're outsourcing email marketing, your newsletter, whatever it is, you have to hand something off. And if it helps you discern what you need to be handing off and what you need to be keeping for yourself, the only things that you want to keep are the things that no one else can do for you that directly generate income for you. Meaning you cannot send someone else to a networking event to get you clients. That just doesn't work. It's weird. If you're going to go to a networking event to get clients, it has to be you who's going. You cannot outsource someone being a guest for you on a podcast. That would also be weird. Squirrel. Hi, I'm a representative for Katie McManus. You want to ask me questions about her childhood? Hold on, let me look at the notes. She says here that she hated doing homework. Cool. Does that answer your question, Squirrel? Squirrel. Squirrel. That does not build trust. That does not inspire people to want to work with you. Okay? If you're running your own sales calls, which I highly recommend you do, until you get to a certain point, you cannot outsource that. And honestly, like, there's a point in your business where you wouldn't be able to compensate a salesperson well enough that they'd be able to do it well enough that you'd get clients, right? You will get to that point, I fully believe in you, where you'll have to hire a salesperson and another salesperson until you have this massive team, but you're not there yet. That is not one of the breaking points here. You should still be running most of your sales calls yourself. Unless you have some low ticket stuff that you can have people just buy online. I want to name that. Some of this stuff is going to be scary to let go of. You're going to be incredibly uncomfortable. It's going to feel like you're handing over your firstborn to someone who you don't know. Maybe you haven't done a background check on them. I want you to take a deep breath and I want you to know that no one can do this as good as you would do it. And they don't have to. What they have to do is they have to do it 80% as good as you can do it. And that's it. 80% will be perfectly fine. Because guess what? That's going to free you up to do a bunch of new things that will help scale your business to that next level. You will not be able to do those bunches of new things that will scale your business to the next level. If you're still doing the things that you're doing. They have to be handed off. You have to free up time, you have to free up energy, and you have to free up brain space. Now this brings me to the second breaking point that you're going to run into. Oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find out. But first. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. You're a dangerous. Join the weeniecast hyper focused community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls. Turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals, and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this. At the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game, let's do this together. Go to weeniecast.com hyperfocus all one word, that's weeniecast.com hyperFocus I want to send a quick thank you to one of our listeners, Peter, who left an amazing 5 star review on the Weeniecast, saying that you appreciate my anecdotes, all the weird stories and metaphors that I bring up, and the off the rail sound effects. We have so much fun making this for you all and this feedback is so helpful for us to continue to create stuff that you enjoy. Also, Peter, I stalked you on Instagram and your baby's adorable. And if you're also enjoying the podcast and you want to leave us a review, Please go to weeniecast.com forward/reviewme we appreciate any and all feedback and we love hearing that people are enjoying the podcast. The second breaking point that you're going to run into, and this is your comfort zone now, I want to remind you that the things that are in your comfort zone right now, Maybe posting to LinkedIn, sharing selfies of yourself, writing a newsletter every week, inviting people to a sales call. All this stuff used to be terrifying to you, right? I know it used to be terrifying to me. The idea that I had the right to post something on social media that would be helpful to other people. Like, are you sure? I don't know, like, what do I have to say? Like, if you go back, I post a lot on social media. I have a lot to say. It's been a game changer in helping me grow my business. Right. I had to get over that fear at one point, until it was no longer a fear. It was just, well, like, firmly planted within my comfort zone. The things that are in your comfort zone right now, however, were the things that could get you here to this point in your business. They are not the things that will get you to the next level in your business. Now, I'm a big believer that we should not be staying in our comfort zones too long. We should always be putting ourselves a little outside of it. And just so you know, I know I've mentioned this before on this podcast. If I haven't, I'm sorry. I was terrified of starting a podcast. The idea of an audio only medium where I don't get immediate feedback from people was terrifying to me. Okay. I don't know if you, I mean, you probably never were in a clubhouse room with me because I hated clubhouse, but for some reason when it's audio only, I lose all of My charm, I actually lose my ability to put sentences together properly. I stutter, I stammer, I'm super awkward. I am that person who's on a date who has the flashcards under the table of what do I say next? I don't understand. Okay, I'm not that way. In video, my producer Neil, he tried switching platforms where we record this podcast, but we couldn't use it because I couldn't see him. I was too awkward just being by myself in a recording room on my computer. There are moments where thinking about the fact that I have a podcast, there are people all over the world who listen to makes me massively uncomfortable. Whatever this is for you, whatever that thing is that you're worried about or freaked out about or, you know, it scares you a bit, go and do that. Maybe it's a speaking tour, maybe it's writing a book, maybe it is creating a group program that next thing. The thing that scares you is the thing that your intuition knows will grow your business the most. I know I mentioned that mastermind that's specifically for ADHD business owners. The program's called Hyper Focused. We're going to be highly focused on pushing you beyond your comfort zone. If you're accepted into that mastermind, we're going to be identifying the that scares you and holding you accountable until you go out and do it. And until you go out and do it well, it starts generating more and more business for you. And if it helps motivate you, I want you to start looking at your comfort zone as the place that all your dreams die. It is a graveyard of dead dreams. You want your dreams to come true. You want to reach any of your major goals. That all happens beyond that border of your comfort zone. But the beautiful thing, you know this from getting to this point in your business, that each time you do something outside your comfort zone, your comfort zone expands. It gets bigger. There's less and less stuff that scares you. But staying in your comfort zone will be a major breaking point for your business. Because even if you don't want to grow your business beyond what it is right now, guess what? The world changes. Social media changes. What's effective in marketing and sales changes. You are always going to have to move outside your comfort zone in some way, shape or form. Even if you just want to keep everything the same. Because what you're doing now may not work in five years. Hell, it may not work next year. Before the pandemic, had Anyone heard of TikTok in the United States? I hadn't it was a brand new thing. It was something that the kids were doing. And I finally got into it when I had no social life. On Saturday nights, I would just sit, like sit on my bed and just scroll. It's not until recently that I realized, oh, I should probably do that for my business. There's always going to be something new like that. So get outside your comfort zone. Do shit that scares you. Next, we're talking about your money mindset. And I know I'm always telling you that you should be raising your rates and you should be raising your rates and your rates are probably too low, so you need to raise them. Yes, you probably do need to raise your rates, but also there's a point at which you can no longer raise your rates and serve the people who you are best suited to serve. For some of you, the breaking point around your money is going to be that you're afraid to ask for more. Depending on your industry and your ideal client, many of you can probably raise your rates dramatically to be able to push past this plateau. But for everyone, there will come a point where you can't raise your rates and get the clients that you usually get. I mean, for instance, if I were to raise my rates for to $100,000 for an absolute beginner coach to start a business with me, how many clients would I get? I like, there's just a point where you price yourself out of what the market will hold, right? So you have to start looking at your business model and shifting it. If you want to take a quarter of a million dollar business and turn it into a million dollar business, what you did to get here will not get you there. Now there are many ways you can do this. If you're a coach and you work with clients one on one group programs are an incredible way for you to scale your income and make more money for less time doing digital products. I know we all that all those Instagram influencers talking about passive income, blah, blah, blah. Digital programs are not passive. Like you still have to update them, you still have to market them. There's still a ton of work that goes into them, but it does allow for you to serve more people in a more approachable way with you having to spend less time on actually delivering. Okay, that's the magic of it. You can also look at the franchise model depending on what your business is. Is there something that you can standardize about what you do with your clients? Create an SOP that you could license and then franchise that out to other people who want to do A similar thing. Yeah. Spin studios do this. Yoga studios do this. There are even some coaching programs that do this. Now you can also hire people to work under you who do exactly what you do, and you can step up into being more of a CEO, strategic thinker of the business. Now this, if this is the way you want to go, if the franchise model or this model are the way you want to go, here's where you're going to need to upgrade your branding. So I can't go around and sell the Katie McManus experience and then some send some guy named Phil to coach you. That would not work. Okay. I would have to create some kind of brand that is standalone, away from me, that is a big part of me, but isn't solely me. If you want to do something similar in your business, you're going to have to create a separate entity of a brand. Now this is counter to the advice that I give new business owners. Okay? Because when you're first starting and you're out there and you're a solopreneur and you're the only person in the business, I highly recommend that you use your own name. Because people are going to remember you. They're going to remember your voice, they're going to remember what you look like. And if they're on the Google machine after talking to you, they're less likely to remember the name of the business and more likely to remember you. That works up to a point. If you want to create a business that you can hand off to other people in some way, shape or form, it's going to have to become a brand. Now, along with all of these changes, this takes us into the next breaking point, which is your systems. Now, when we talk about systems, I think everyone thinks about like your tech stack. So like how people pay for stuff, your online communities, like what your website is on, all that stuff. And yes, that absolutely goes into systems, but it's also people. So you know how I previously mentioned you're going to have to hand some stuff off to people? Well, you have to first assess what roles you need to create within your business and what types of people you're going to have to fill in those roles. For some of you, hiring a couple VAs that have different specialties will be enough to take enough off your plate for you to scale to that next level. For some of you, you may have to bring in a partner in your business. If you're running a law firm, you cannot be in three different courtrooms on the same day. You may have to bring in other lawyers. If you want to scale your law firm, actually, you'll definitely have to. There's no way. That's an absolute. Now, bringing people in and assigning them work is one thing, but you're also going to have to create systems and procedures for when things go wrong. How do they make decisions on their own? What are they allowed to make decisions on their own without coming to you? What kinds of things do you absolutely need to be the bottleneck on? What projects are they going to handle and how are you going to assess if they're doing it well or not? This is one of the things that a lot of business owners struggle with when they first start hiring people. I know I did. You also have to think about how are you going to be training these people? What's the onboarding process going to be like? There are two ends of the spectrum, really. So there's the. We'll figure it out on the way. I have no idea how I'm going to onboard this person. Hopefully they know how to onboard themselves and you can guess how that goes. And then there's the opposite end of the spectrum of I need to know exactly how this person who has a specialty that I don't have is going to do their job every single day. I'm going to micromanage, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know how that goes. We needed to find your correct space in. In the center of that spectrum. Right. Because like we've talked about, what's gotten you here, the skill set that's gotten you here won't take you to that next level. You need to be hiring people who have expanded skill sets to your own. You're not going to know the best way for them to do their jobs, but you also can't feed them to the sharks. Okay. Trial by fire is not a nice way to bring someone into a business. Which, I mean, honestly, now that I think about it, every single one of my sales jobs in the past was all trial by fire. And I always got burnt out and I always left. So there you go. Now, one of the things that we're going to be assessing in the mastermind are all the things that should not be on your plate. The things that should not be on your plate become a job description for what you need to hire for in your business. And finally, the thing that all ADHDers have a hard time with is time. Time management. If you're not managing your time well, it will become a breaking point not only for your business, but for your entire life. And I want to call out that I know you're passionate about doing this work. I know you love it. I know there are days where you can work 14 hours like I did yesterday and not feel depleted in any way, shape or form because it just lights you up to help people. It lights you up to do creative stuff in your business, but you can't do that every day. I know we expect ourselves to be able to, but it just leads to us running ourselves ragged and divorce or breakups or children who don't speak to you anymore. None of which are the ideal. One of the activities that I have my clients go through when they get to this point in their business is I have them map out their ideal week. I'll literally have them draw out a calendar that has from 5am to 10pm hours all blocked out. And before they even look at what they want to do, work wise, I have them go through and put all of the personal things that they want to have in their ideal week. Now this is workouts. This is when you have breakfast. This is when you take your dog for a walk. This is picking your kids up from school. This is date night with your spouse or your partner. This is your hobby time. This is your bedtime. This is when you watch trash tv. I see you. Those of you who watch Desperate Housewives, anything, I see you. I'm not one of you, but I want you to have your Desperate Housewives time. And I've seen a couple episodes. It is crazy. I would get sucked in. That's why I can't watch it. By the way, I've recently started watching the Mindy Project. I low key thought I would hate it. I thought I would find it annoying. But it is just a bunch of people with a lot of ADHD who are very smart and make some really stupid mistakes. And you know what? I find it really reassuring. Even though they're make believe people that if they can do stupid shit like that, that I'm okay. I'm fine. Squirrel. Squirrel. I always wanted to try this. Looks easy enough. Take. Oh God. Oh no. Get a bucket. Hold on. Give me a bucket. No. What? I'm helping you cover it. I'm dying. Squirrel. Squirrel. Okay, so once you've mapped out that week with all your crappy TV and your personal care and your relationship stuff built in, then that's when you're allowed to go and put in your workday stuff. That's when you're allowed to put in when you speak to clients. That's when you're allowed to put in your marketing efforts. That's when you're allowed to put in meetings with your team. Now, you're not going to get this perfect on the first try. You're probably going to draw up like 17 different ideal weekly schedules. And let's be real, you're probably not going to stick to it, right? Like you're going to get sucked into one thing and blow off the rest of the day. Or you may be bad at setting boundaries around client calls. That is okay. But what we need to start getting you good at is setting boundaries around your personal life, right? Because we're not going to trip and fall into the perfect business that makes us tons of money and allows for us to live our ideal lives. That doesn't happen. We reverse engineer our perfect lives and we design businesses that help us get there. This is the first step of that. This is also something that we're going to be doing a lot in the hyperfocused Mastermind. And again, if you wouldn't mind doing me a solid, go to the link in the show notes and answer the two very simple questions in that survey, I'd super appreciate it. And lastly, the biggest breaking point of all is you not believing that you can do this. That's it. If you don't believe that you can grow your business beyond what it is now, it's never going to happen. But I want to remind you that you had no proof whatsoever that you could do this when you started it. You started with zero clients, with zero revenue, with zero followers on social media. At some point, and look at you now. You went from absolutely nothing to where you are right now. Okay, if you could turn around and talk to you back then and reassure you, what would you say? And here you are. Now I want you to imagine you five years from now is turning around and telling you all about the successes that you've had in the last five years and reminding you that you can do it. This is a really fun exercise that I have my clients do. Usually I usually ask them, you know, what is you five years from now want you to stop doing? What does you five years from now think you need to cut the bullshit on. The answers are always amazing. If you ask yourself that question and you're comfortable sharing it with me, Please go to www.wanycast.com, scroll to the bottom and leave us a voice note because I'd love to hear what you need to give up the bull. I need to lubricate this chair. It's so creaky, makes so much noise. Okay, Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. Are you an entrepreneur? Are you struggling to stay focused and organized while juggling a million tasks? Are you looking for ways to improve your productivity but finding it hard to stay motivated? Then you need to get access to my Weenicast product, Winners show that's exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I know you might be thinking, I've tried everything to stay on task and nothing works. But I'm enjoying the advice I'm getting here on the weeniecast, and let me tell you, I'm delighted to be able to help you and thousands of listeners just like you, my friend. But the Weeniecast for Winners podcast is next level, and I'd hate for you to miss out on it. For just $1.99 a month, Winnie Cast for Winners delivers in depth and actionable advice that's specifically designed for entrepreneurs, including those with adhd, whether diagnosed or suspected. I'll talk you through how to increase your sales conversions, keep your mindfulness on point, and even offer practical tips that can help you be more productive and successful in your business, all while catering to your unique needs of being an entrepreneur who might be struggling with adhd. With weeniecast for Winners, you'll get practical tips and strategies that you can use to drive your business forward without the frustrations and setbacks that often come with adhd. So if you're ready to start seeing real Results, subscribe to Winniecast for winners today at winicast.com winners for just $1.99 a month, you'll gain access to the valuable insights and strategies that can take your business to the next level. Weeniecast for Winners is a show that's worth every penny for entrepreneurs who want to succeed. Subscribe now and start enjoying the benefits for yourself. Join the weenacast Hyper Focus community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls, turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals, and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses, and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this at the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weenicast.com hyperfocus all one word. That's weeniecast.com hyperfocus or.