MBA1881 The #1 Reason Your Business Is Not Growing

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Hey Yo. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Practical business lessons delivered 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 back in 2014 with my co founder. And in today's lesson you'll learn the number one reason why your business is not growing. In business, we reach certain levels of growth or revenue and sometimes we get stuck on a level we can't surpass a certain level. And many of us search for strategies and tactics and hacks, whether it's in marketing or email funnels or maybe even in our product itself. But often the problem is not any of that. I actually had to go through the painstaking process of trying to find out why my business growth was stagnating. And the answer is not that obvious. But in today's lesson, I'm going to share it with you. And I'm going to encourage you to do a few exercises so you can discover what's going on so your business can get out of this rut and move up to the next level of growth. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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This podcast for some time, you know that I like to provide practical, actionable lessons so you can actually do something to change your business. And if you feel like I've provided that in the past, then I'm going to ask you to trust me in today's episode. I want you to just put your guard down, okay? Because what I'm going to discuss today might seem a little bit out there for some of you. And I know this because I felt that way about it before. I actually realized, man, I need to change this. So I just need you to trust me till the end of this episode. And I guarantee what I provide to you is going to at least get you curious about some things you need to do to change your business trajectory. So what am I talking about here? Well, about two years ago, my software business, webinar Ninja, was kind of just coasting. It wasn't really growing that quickly. We were doing all right, but we weren't really growing at the pace that we were when we first started. And I would try different marketing strategies, and I would hire different experts and consultants, and I tried a plethora of things within my business and the way I market my business, but nothing really moved the needle. And I started to wonder, man, is there something wrong with my business, Something wrong with my product? I would look into my product and see if I can change or improve it or pivot it in some way. But then I realized, nope, this is exactly what people want. I thought, maybe I need to improve my messaging, my branding, made some tweaks. There still nothing. And then out of frustration, I started to seek out some help. I hired a business coach. I hired Dan Martell, who specializes in SaaS business. And I was like, this guy will know all the strategies. This guy has been there, done that a few times, and he can tell me why we're stuck. And I was kind of expecting him to just tell me, hey, you're doing this wrong, Tweak this, change this, and you're all sorted. I was even willing to, you know, do something that's going to take some time to fix. I just wanted to know there's a solution. And he basically told me, you know, this is very common, and every entrepreneur is going to go through this, but the answer is not external. It's actually internal. And I thought, what? What are you talking about? I want to grow I want the business to do well. You're telling me I'm the problem? And he was like, yes, you are the problem. There's something inside you that's resisting growth. And I was like, really? I'm not sure about that, Dan. But I started to reflect about it. I spent some quiet moments by myself thinking about what he said. Is there something inside me that's resisting growth? And the reason why I had to think and reflect about this is because even if you just have an ounce of doubt or thought that maybe you can do something or don't want to do something, you're body, your mind, your whole being will resist. It will do everything in its power to not have to deal with that. And it's all subconscious and it's kind of hidden from your conscious mind. I know that's what subconscious means, but what I'm saying is that it's not obvious when you're in the day to day grind of business, but there's something there. And I'm going to ask you to sometime in the near future, today, tomorrow, this weekend, to just take 30 minutes of time to think about this. Do you have any fears with your business, with the growth of your business? Is there anything that scares you about that? And this is important because a lot of us, we say things to ourselves, thinking that's what we believe, but really it's our fear talking. Let me give you an example. Many people will say, you know what, I don't want a big business. I don't want a Fortune 500. I don't want to change the world. I want a little tiny business that pays my bills, allows me to have a great lifestyle and allows me to make the impact I want to make in the world. There's nothing wrong with those statements. Okay? But you have to ask yourself the question, why are you saying that? Why do you want that kind of business? And be honest, because some of us are doing that or saying that because we want to kind of set up goals that we feel like we can fulfill. Like I can do that. And if I say that's what I want, then I'm successful if I achieve it. But maybe there's something that's hidden under there, which is I'm afraid to fail. I'm afraid to lose everything that I built. I'm afraid to stretch myself and come up short. And these are some of the things I discovered that were kind of hidden away in myself. You know, I worked very, very hard to get weapon or ninja to where it was a couple years ago. I sacrificed a lot, I invested a lot. And I just, somewhere inside me felt like I don't want to lose that. So I was kind of playing it safe, right? I was kind of just doing enough and trying to tweak things here and do strategies here. But really the reason why I was growing is because my whole mindset was kind of playing defense. I was really scared of doing something or taking a risk that might cost me the business. This is what's called a limiting belief. Your body, your mind, your whole being again, is going to resist doing something that inside you, you feel like I'm afraid of. I don't want to do that. It's going to protect you, right? So one of the things that Dan taught me and really teaches a lot of people is this idea of growth mindset. You have to have this idea of like, you got to continue to grow. You got to push yourself to do things that you've never done before so that you can move to the next level. Like they say, well, got you here won't get you there. Meaning that the things that you did to get to this point are not the same things you're going to have to do to move to the next station. Which means you're going to have to take a risk. You have to learn new skills, you're going to have, you know, work with new people. And what I realized is that just acknowledging the things that are going in my mind, the things I was feeling, really helps me address it. At least I know it exists. I'm afraid of this. Okay? Is that rational? Does that make sense? Is it going to help me? No, it's not going to help me. So let me put that aside, ignore it for a moment, Suspend that feeling or belief to move forward. It could be a combination of beliefs as well. It could be that scarcity or afraid to grow and fail belief, but it also could be something else. Some of us feel like we don't deserve success. We don't deserve to have a level of success that we might dream of. And that could come from maybe something from childhood or something from growing up, or maybe we feel guilty about something that we shouldn't feel guilty about. I know this might be sounding a little woo woo, and we're getting into a lot of psychology here, but what's between your ears, right, what's in your head really dictates a lot of the way you perform as a business leader. And it's important for you to recognize why do you do the things you do? Why do you resist? Why do you not do things that help your business instead of hurting them? Now, a lot of us don't realize inaction sometimes hurts our business. When we don't do things, when we don't trust people, when we don't empower people, when we don't try new things or experiment, we hurt our business. I'm a big believer that in business, you're either growing or you're dying. There's no stasis. You can't just coast. So you have to actively try to grow. And growth takes some pain, right? It hurts when you try to build a muscle and you stretch when you try to push yourself. And that pushing is not only just hustle and working hard, it's also pushing your beliefs, pushing your emotional state where you're like, ah, I don't want to do this. This is scary. Push yourself and say, hey, I have to do scary things sometimes to get to the next level. So why is mindset so important? Why is it important for us to explore what's stopping us? What are we afraid of? What's going on? Because these limitations, our beliefs dictate our actions, right? What you believe changes how you think and how you take action on those thoughts. For example, recently at Webinar Ninja, we rebuilt and re released a big put component of our software, which is our replay system, the recording system of a webinar. The old me would feel like, hey, you know what? The current system's not bad. It does take a little while, some minutes for the replay to process, but it's working. Let's not break what's working. And that kept me at a certain level. And this is just a small example, of course, inside my product, inside my business. But the new me, after realizing, wow, I'm setting myself up for failure. I'm holding myself back because I'm afraid. And I said to my cto, Taylor, hey, let's figure out how we can improve this. Let's figure out what we can do. To reiterate and, you know, say, hey, what's. What's the latest version of our replay system look like? What do we want? What are some of the improves we can do? Let's dream big a little bit. Let's not think about what are some of the technical limitations. Let's say there are no limitations. And we brainstormed and we're like, but we'd love to have the replay be ready in literally seconds, like in two seconds. We'd love it to be super high quality. We want it to be exactly like what the viewer the attendees saw when they watched it live. And then we worked backwards. We figured out how we're going to do this, how we're going to build this. Yes, it's scary, but you can mitigate a bit of that fear and that risk by just saying, all right, what do we got to do to make sure that when we release this, it doesn't backfire? Well, we can do tons of tests. We can make sure we have a QA engineer full time. We can make sure that we have redundancy. We make sure that our old system's there just in case as backup. And boy, am I glad that I was able to, you know, overcome that internal dialogue of, you know what? Things are not broken. Let's not try to improve. We did improve drastically, and it's an incredible system now. Our customers love it. And it's just another thing, another little example of my business is able to grow now because my customers see that we're constantly innovating. We're trying to improve, we're trying to do things that we couldn't even imagine in the past instead of just being same old, same old to stay safe.

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To wrap up today's lesson, your mindset has a lot to do with the future of your business, with the growth of your business. One of the things I learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and his autobiography, Total Recall, is that if you can't clearly see your vision and really believe it's possible, it's very hard for you to achieve it. So if you look at your business and you can't see it be a million dollar business, a five hundred million dollar business, a billion dollar business, if you don't really actually see that in your head and really believe that's possible and not have any kind of, like, cynicism or like, oh, that shouldn't be me. That's not a business I could own or I can run where it's like, yeah, I could definitely see that, then it's just not going to happen. If you can't see it in your head, there's no way you can actually manifest it. Imagine you told an architect I want to build a house and they're like, well, what does a house look like? Well, no, I'm not going to tell you. This is a one floor house, two floors. Does it have a pool? Does it deck? I don't know. Just build a house. It's going to be really hard for the architect to actually get started or even gain close to what a beautiful house for you looks like. Just having a blueprint, having a plan, having a vision, just a picture, even just like a vision board, this is what it looks like helps people tremendously in a practical sense, like building a house. But even with your business goals and your ambitions, people say, I'll believe it when I see it. As entrepreneurs, we believe if I see it, I will believe it. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app. That way you get our next episode automatically and you also get absolutely free access to all our archived episodes. Over 1800 lessons and counting. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. I hesitated a little bit sharing this episode because I don't normally talk about deep psychological mindset when it comes to business. I'm more known for, you know. Here are some practical exercises and practical tips, some strategies you can implement to improve xyz. This is a little bit more of a big picture lesson and I really thought it would be helpful because it took me so long to get to the point to understand what was going on in my own business, in my own head. And I wanted to kind of fast track you and kind of give you that gift because I wish somebody shared this with me early on in my entrepreneurial career. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free Ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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