MBA1681 Is Your Business Failing…or Just in a Dip?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Because the better. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100 MBA net and in today's lesson you will learn how do you know if your business is failing or just in a dip? Sometimes a business will go up and down like a roller coaster. Sometimes your market just is in a slow month. Historically, for example, B2B businesses often are very SL December. But what if it's not? What if it's not in a dip? How do you know for sure if your business is in a slow time or is actually failing slowly? And you need to make a change. You need to pivot. Well. In today's lesson, I'm going to give you a few signs to look out for to know if your business is actually failing instead of just in a dip. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. If you're like me, you obsess with the numbers of your business. You're looking at your profit and loss sheet, you are looking at your revenue, you're looking at sales. You're making sure you're always growing. But sometimes you'll have a month where things are down, where sales are down, where revenue's down. And many entrepreneurs go into a panic. They start to worry, is my business over? Is it failing? Is a gravy train over? Am I going to have to close it all up? First of all, your first line of thinking should not be it's all over. At the very worst, you're going to pivot. You're going to change, you're going to adapt. But many times your business is just not failing, just not having the best month. It's in a dip. And it could be for many reasons. Reasons outside of your control. In most businesses, in most markets, it's very difficult to have every single month growth to do better this month than you did last month, month after month, year after year. Typically you'll have a couple months in the year that are down, and every market is different. For example, the months of March and April are often very slow for people that are in the snow sports. If you sell snowboards and snowboard gear, March and April is no longer the winter in the Northern hemisphere and it's not the winter yet in the Southern hemisphere. So you're not really having much business. It's a slow time. So here's a few things you should do to know Is it just a slow time? Is it just a slump? Is it just a dip in the market right now, or is your business failing? Number one, trends matter. You have to follow trends. You have to know the trends of your market. You have to understand the trends of your audience. This is why it's important to network with other entrepreneurs and have, frankly, friends in the space. In the same market space. They don't have to be competitors. For example, I could be selling, you know, snowboards and snowboard gear, but I might have a friend in the travel industry, and they're a travel agent. They can tell me historically, even if I'm in my first year of business, when's the slow time for the snow season for snow sports? What else can you check? Well, take a look at when you had some success. What were you doing in your business? In your sales, in your marketing, in your customer service, in your product or your offering itself? What were you doing? Are you doing things differently? Anything different? If you're doing exactly the same thing, that means the other things outside your business are affecting your actual results. But often we stop doing what works. We often stop doing the right marketing or stop doing the things that brought in our customers. For some reason, we just forget. So a good way to evaluate is just to do the things you know worked in the past. Next Business growth and lack of growth is not something that happens overnight. If your business is failing, you should see a trend going down more than one month. We're talking about two, three months. If you see that, then something's going wrong. Okay, things are not getting better. They're going down. One month is worse than the next. You need to start thinking about changing your business model, changing your offers, pivoting in your marketplace. But if you are just seeing sales go down and it's just been a week or a few days or even a month or two. You may want to wait it out before you make any drastic changes. Another tip to know if your business is actually failing versus in a slump is to collect information when people either cancel their subscription to your business, if you're a subscription based business, ask for a refund or leave your website without buying. Data is so powerful. So get this information. Why? Because you'll know why people no longer are paying you. They will tell you and then you can categorize these reasons. We do this at Webinar Ninja and it's incredibly helpful because we know, hey, they're canceling because of these reasons. Are we working on improving these things? If we are, we know that we're just going to be in a slump. As soon as those improvements are made, made, we'll rebound, we'll bounce back, we'll solve that problem. Maybe one of the reasons is just again, seasonal. Hey, I'm not using the product now, but I'll be coming back next month to use it. But you don't need to guess. Ask your customers. Find out why they're not buying, why they have canceled, why they're no longer customers. Not all customers will give you feedback, but some will. And that will be enough for you to draw some conclusions, to know if you are working on the right things and if you are, if that's something that you can come out of very soon. Speaking of data, make sure you're looking at your numbers like the traffic to your website. Is the traffic to your website the number of visitors to your website the same as last month? Are you just not getting the same number of sales? Is your conversion rates going down? That is a problem. Then if you're getting less sales but the traffic is less, that means less people are coming to your website. That can be easily solved by running some paid ads or doing some content marketing. Or again, you can take a look at the trends and say, hey, maybe this is just a slow time of year, but really what's important here is your conversion rates, not anything else. Everybody worries about, hey, I got less sales. Well, I asked you, well, what's your conversion rates? Have they gone down? Your conversion rates matter most. If you're getting less people to your website, obviously you'll have less sales. Find out why that's happening. It could be a seasonal thing. It could be a lack of focus on your marketing. It could be you stopped doing something that was working. But you don't know this. If you don't look at the analytics if you don't look at the numbers. Lastly, I want to talk about if you're a new business and you're just not winning, where your business is just not taking off, you're not having a good month and you haven't had one ever, this means you need to really, really look at your business closely. If you've gone six months in business where you're not making any profit, where you're not making more revenue over one month, so say for example, you know you made just as many sales in month one versus month six or less, we have a problem here. This means your business doesn't have traction. It doesn't have product market fit. You have to tweak it. You have to improve it. Whether it's your offer itself, whether it's the product, whether it's the price, whether the way you deliver the product, whether it's your support, whether it's your marketing, whether it's the way you present your product on your website, something has to change because you need to get some traction. Even if this means month one was down, month two was better. Month three was even better. Month four is worse than month three, but not as good as two. Month five was just as good as month four. But month six is the best month ever. Even if it's up and down like that, there is something happening. Something's working. You can take a look at that and you can analyze that. But if you're not doing well month after month for six months, something's wrong. Okay, your business is failing and you need to change it.

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To wrap up today's lesson. It's easy to panic. It's easy to worry when you have a down month. But take a look at your trends. Take a look at your numbers. Take a look at what worked in the past. Are you doing the same things now make adjustments if needed. But also not all down months are equal. Okay, say for example, you made $30,000 in sales one month and the next month you made 28,000 DOL in sales. Yep. That's around a 6% dip. But it's not a catastrophe. It's not 40% less, it's not 70% less. Right? That's a blow you can absorb. Your business is still functioning. You're still making money. Okay? A lot of us panic even if we're making $0.01 less than last month. No. And remember, profit is king. How much money you're actually keeping versus how much you're making. So if your second month is more profitable, you lowered your expenses than the first month, you actually had an up month. So make sure you take a look at that as well. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. Just a quick reminder. If you have not checked out our new Homepage over at 100 MBA NET, we have a brand new roadmap that you can download. It's called the Breakout Business Roadmap. It's the step by step guide. You need to know what to do first, second, third, to build an amazing business. A pathway from your nine to five to full time entrepreneurship. It's absolutely free. So go ahead and check it out at 100 MBA net before I go, I want to leave you with this. Listen, I'm the first to tell you that business is challenging. But one of the things that keep you calm, keep you sane, is having factual information, having data. So track everything you can. Data is power. It's like what Peter Drucker said. What gets measured, gets managed and allows you to really feel a sense of ownership and a sense of control. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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