MBA1755 Q&A Wednesday: Has my business plateaued? What can I do?

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Hey O welcome to the Hunter $100 MBA show. Powerful business lessons every single day with our 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014 and today's episode is a Q and a Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Carlos and Carlos asks. Hey Omar, love the podcast. I've been running my business for about four years now. I do group coaching, helping physical business owners be more profitable. All my coaching is done online, but I found that my business has plateaued in the last 12 months. Or at least I think it's plateaued. How do I know if my business is stagnant? What can I do to get myself out of this rut? Thanks so much for the help Carlos. Great question Carlos, because sometimes this happens in business and it happens for several reasons that we'll outline today. Where your business is now growing. You're not getting any more clients or any more customers. Maybe even your revenue is just Sort of staying at the same place for a period of time. What are your options? What can you do to change this situation? Can you even change it? That's what we get into in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Carlos is asking, is his business plateaued, and if so, what can he do about it? In a lot of ways, business is like your physical exercise, like your physical health. If you go to the gym and you start working out, you're going to start seeing results. You're going to start seeing your body changing. And if you start adding, you know, nutrition and, you know, tightening up your diet, you're going to see even more results. But after a period of time, about six months after doing all the things you've been doing, improving your nutrition, going to the gym, working out, your body starts to adapt and it starts to plateau. Basically, you start seeing the same results. You kind of maintain the results you have. They're good results. You know, you look good and you feel good, but you're not really moving into a new level. You're not really achieving the next stage. And this happens in business as well, because our business will only allow us to do as well as we allow it. Whatever we do in terms of marketing, sales, product, customer service, all the things that we do in our business, if they don't change, if we continue to do the same thing, we're going to get the same results. The only exception to this is if something happens in the market where all of a sudden people need your service or product, something like Covid or something, and everybody needs your product or service because of COVID Like, if you have a software company, like a website builder, and people started building websites during COVID they moved their business online. But barring any of that kind of demand or change out of your control, your business is going to do the same thing. It's going to churn out the same results. If you're lucky, sometimes businesses will just kind of burn out and the same things you've been doing will not be as effective as they used to. This is just the nature of, of business. But you have options. Option number one is to decide to do something different, okay. Is to change your business. So say for example, you're a coach, like in Carlos's example, and you're doing group coaching, maybe you need to scale your business with other offerings. You have a group coaching type of offering online, but maybe you want to start offering one on one coaching that's high ticket, high touch, and you only take on a certain number of clients. You're going to see more revenue there because it's a bigger ticket price, right? It's more expensive. Maybe you want to introduce an in person, small, intimate event that happens once a year. Maybe you want to offer something in the beginning of your ladder or value ladder or cycle where it's entry level, but it's low touch, like an online course where people can just consume it anytime they want. The point is, if you don't add something new, if you don't change things up, you're going to see the same results. Now sometimes even when you do this, you'll see your business to move up a little bit, change a little bit, but it'll continue to plateau. This is not impossible. This happens in markets, in business and that just means you've hit the potential of that business. Not every business is scalable, not every business. The sky's the limit. And that's okay. If you're okay with that, you've kind of hit the pinnacle of your growth. But you only know this until you try every, every single different option to change up your business, increase your revenue, to change your offerings, to increase your market space, your customers, who you serve, all that stuff. There's a lot of work involved. Four years is not it. You're talking about a decade of work where you tried everything and now you've just squeezed every last drop of juice out of this business and you've maximized in all areas, including your costs, including how much profit you make based on how much you spend. And if you hit that mark, that's okay, you have some choices. You can continue to do this business and enjoy it. You can train somebody to manage it. You can hire a new CEO to run this business for you. And you see this as an investment. It's a well oiled machine, it's making you money. But now you can step away and you can sort of semi retire or you can sell the business and a lot of people do this where they actually sell a business to a company that would really love this revenue stream or like to incorporate your product or service or your you're offering to their own offerings or Business, this is a good place to be. You should be proud. So how do you know if you've plateaued? Well, ask yourself these questions. How many times have I added or changed my offerings? Have I added new products? Have I added new services? Did I change levels or tiers or commitments? In terms of terms, maybe I do a coaching package. It's a commitment of two years. What have you tried in terms of expanding your market? Who you serve, the customers you serve? What have you done in terms of pricing? Increasing your pricing, Adding more packages to add more revenue per customer? What have you done in terms of external marketing? In terms of partnerships or guest posting or paid ads? What have you done? What have you done? What have you done? You need to ask yourself these important questions. Because if you're coming up short, that means you haven't tried everything to grow this business, exhaust your efforts and understand this takes time. I've been in entrepreneurship for over 15 years and real strong companies take a while to build. It takes a while to get momentum, and it also takes a while to build strong foundations with strong revenue. Because as you're growing, you're trying new things. It takes time to see if those new things are working. And then you try something else. This just takes some time. And if you're making money, if you're profitable, if you're living off your business, this is a good place to be. Don't get frustrated. Just try different things that can help you expand your business. One of the fastest ways to test if you've plateaued is to change your pricing. Increase your prices across the board by 15%. Most people that do this experiment find that they actually don't lose any customers. In fact, they attract more customers. And even if they do lose a customer or two, the overall benefit of the price increase increase across the board greatly outweighs the loss of a customer or two. This automatically gets you ahead of that plateau, makes you more money, more money that you can use to grow your business and make a few hires to expend on marketing and sales. You got new blood in your business. This is an easy, easy way to start invigorating yourself. It's a little bit scary. A lot of people don't like changing prices. But if you've grown, if your business has developed that's improved, then you're adding more value and therefore you should be charging more.

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Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

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To wrap up today's Q and A question from Carlos. Has my business plateaued? Is there something I can do? Well, we explained that a good way to know if you plateaued is to ask yourself all the things I was asking you to ask yourself that you've done with your business, that you've tried to pivot with your business, tried to change, try to improve all the different experiments you can do. It's endless. But I want to ask a more intimate question, a more important question. When you say plateaued, sometimes we mean I'm tired of this business. I think I've given it my all, right? Meaning I've given it everything I can give it. Right now, I'm just exhausted. And if that's the case, that's a totally different thing. Your business may have potential to grow, but you just don't have it in you right now because you're tired, you're burnt out. Maybe you've had a really rough four years building this business and you're just really, really spent. If this is the case, my first advice to you is to take a break, okay? Take at least two weeks off straight and step away from your business. Have somebody run it for you, have your team run it for you. Try not to check as much as possible, maybe once a week if you have to, but you want to shut off completely and feel what it feels like to step away and not have this business. Sometimes that's all it takes for you to feel invigorated, to feel recharged, to get a perspective, a new perspective on what to do with your business. If you come back after two weeks and feel like, you know what? I don't want to go back. This tells you you're done. You cannot add more to this business. You just are not into it. Your heart's not into it, and you want to do the right thing for your customers, you want to do right by them. What you're going to do is you're going to start thinking of an exit strategy. How can I hire somebody to replace me that really believes in this business and can take it to the next level. If I want to continue to hold ownership and be an investor, be a full time investor in my business, 100% investor. You may want to give some equity. If you want to, you don't have to. You can hire somebody full time, give them a good salary to run the business for you. A business manager, a general manager, a CEO, your choice. Or you can sell the business altogether. This is going to take a lot more time than you can expect. It could take up to 12 months, sometimes even more to actually close that deal. But you may want to start getting the wheels in motion and make sure your house is in order to sell. Whatever happens, whatever you discover and decide, these are all positive things. You've built an asset, you've built an incredible business that you're going to hand over to somebody else who can take it to the next level and you can reap the benefits from all your hard work. Be proud of that. Don't feel ashamed. Don't feel like you're giving up. It's okay to change and want something new. This is your business. You call the shots. Thanks so much for listening to the Hunter lmba Show. If you have a question you want to ask, go ahead and ask it by emailing me at omar100mba.net and I'll answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. If you love this show, the best way to say thank you is is to share on social media. Go ahead and share this episode, or any episode or the show in general with your friends and family on social media. You can even just share a link 100- MBA-NET SHOW and tell them to subscribe. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Remember, being an entrepreneur is a journey and the business you run is a means to an end. It's a means for you to have financial freedom to build great things, to have fun, to grow, to serve your people. The business is not you, okay? It's just what you do right now to achieve the goals you want to achieve. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Take care.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store. But then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico. You could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now, you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big it feels good to geico.