What To Do When Business Is Slow

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So it's always good to know that Granola's got my back and I can just ask it after the meeting what I need to do next. Head to granola.ai/mba and get 3 months free with the code MBA. That's granola.ai/mba and get 3 months free with code MBA. For small business, a high-speed fiber connection is only one piece of the puzzle. You need the total solutions advantage from Comcast Business. It's a first-ever combination of the largest, fastest fiber-powered network, gig speeds with equipment and security included, plus a 5-year price lock. Learn more, get started for $60 a month for 12 months when you add an advanced solution to a qualifying internet package. Limited time offer, restrictions apply, new customers only, requires 300 Mbps internet, Security Edge, and additional qualifying service. 1-year agreement, paperless billing and autopay with bank account required, taxes and fees extra. Does this sound familiar? You're working harder than you ever worked. You're trying new things. You're showing up every single day and nothing is moving. Numbers are flat. The leads have dried up. And every morning you wake up and you do it all again. Every night you go to bed, you think to yourself, am I losing at this game called business? Listen, I've been there. I know how this feels. But here is what I know after 20 years of building businesses. The thing that most entrepreneurs do when things slow down in business actually makes everything worse. If that's where you are right now, I need your full attention because I might help you save your business right now. It might change everything and save your sanity while you're at it. I'm going to show you exactly how to figure out what's happening and the specific steps to turn it all around. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. I got a quick favor to ask. If this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review. You could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no-fluff, practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey. Right off the top, I gotta tell you the worst thing you can do right now. When business starts to slow down, there is no response that feels completely logical and it's almost always completely wrong. This is what makes it so difficult because the most intuitive thing to do is usually the wrong thing to do. I'm talking about putting in more hours, just working harder, doing more of the same thing that just isn't working. I understand why people do that, because when you're scared, you just default to what you know. But I need to tell you something that I need to drill in your mind. Whatever results you are getting right now is directly correlated, is directly related to the things you are doing. So if you are doing something, it's getting you a specific result. If you don't like that result, you got to do something else. So say, for example, I look at myself, it's like I'm out of shape, I'm not healthy. I'm overweight, whatever it might be. I got to look at what I'm doing. If I'm not exercising, if I'm not eating right, if I'm snacking on things that are unhealthy, that is probably the reason why I'm getting the result I'm getting. The reason why people don't really think about this is because it just seems too simple. But is that simple? People are putting out content on social media or on YouTube or whatever it might be, and it's not going viral. So they just continue to put out more content. But they have the same strategy and the content is the same. They're not really iterating. Iteration is the name of the game in business. You got to change what you do with every repetition so that you can learn what's working. This is something I learned, unfortunately, the hard way. Here it is: working hard is not a strategy. It's not a strategy. It's just a default response to things not working. I'm just going to grind it through. I'm just going to force this into existence. And really, it's a stress response, and you should not default to this. You should always stop and think, what is the right move here? What do I need to change to get different results? One of the best questions I've asked myself over and over again in my career is, why is this not working? This question forces my brain to be more strategic. It forces my brain to think, Well, I'm not getting the results I want when I do this. It has nothing to do with the amount. It has something to do with the actual product, with the actual thing itself. Why is this not working? I have to change what this is. I got to change my approach. I got to change my strategy when it comes to whatever I'm putting out there in the world. So we started this episode talking about when business is slow. So what is a slow period? How do we define this first so we know that we're actually in this period? Because not every bad week in business is a slow period. Not every dip in revenue is a signal that something is broken or you need to change something. In my opinion, a slow period is a minimum of 3 months in a row. When your trend is 3 months, a quarter, where things are not going in the right direction, the graph is not going up. And by the way, flat is down. Okay. Flat is not progress. So That's a trend. You got to pay attention to that. This is your business telling you something's not working. You got to do something different. Remember, one bad month is maybe just noise. Every business is different. The market might be in a lull responding to something that happened in the world, whatever might be happening. Two months is a little concerning. Now you got to have your radar on. Three months is bad. You need to make sure that three months in a row, if things are not moving in the right direction, you need to make some big changes. Now I'm not saying blow up your business, but whatever you're doing to provide your product or your service, or the way you're providing your product or service needs to be analyzed. You need to start changing your strategy. I'm not asking you to panic here. Okay. We want to have a strategic response. And here's what that looks like. Step 1, look who's actually buying. The first question I ask when business slows down is not what's broken. It's who is actually buying, what is actually working. Look at your customers right now. Who is buying? Who is getting the most value from your offer? Who pays on time? Who refers other people? Who leaves reviews? Who causes zero headaches and actually gets results with what you provide? When things are going south, you got to look at what's actually winning in your business. You look at the other side of the coin. Why? Because often, more often than not, I would say your issue is an audience problem. You're not serving the right people, people that really value what you have. And sometimes the best thing you could do for your business is just cutting out all the people that are a wrong fit for your product, for your price point, for whatever you offer. Here's what I found in my own business. Very often the slowdown is not because the market disappeared. Okay? It's because the wrong customers are eating all the time and energy that should be going towards attracting the right customers. You have to remember that your business and yourself have a limited amount of resources, time, money, energy, ideas, patience, all that stuff are your resources. It's not infinite. You have a finite amount. So you need to spend those resources, those valuable resources on the right people, the people that actually help your business grow, that actually love what you have, not the people that really don't see the value. By doing so, you start to improve your margins because you can start to go upmarket. You start raising your prices and now you start to breathe a little bit of relief because you're not desperate for every customer. You're only going after the customers that actually want what you have. That single shift of saying, These are the people that actually are my perfect ideal customers. The idea of just saying, okay, these are really the people I need to serve, not all these people that are wasting my time. That shift has pulled more businesses out of slow periods that I've ever seen in my 20 years. It's more powerful than any marketing campaign or any promotion or any sales offer or anything else. One of my favorite examples of this is ripbody.com. If you go to their website, their homepage, This business is run by Andy Morgan, a good friend of ours, and was a guest on the show. So you should check that out. Andy runs a fitness coaching program, but he doesn't serve everybody. He doesn't serve men and women. He only serves men because this is the demographic where he can get the best results. Nothing against women, but this is who he has discovered over the years. Actually, he is best to serve. He's also not serving every single man. Okay. If you go to the website, you'll see Hey, we only serve people that actually know how to exercise. You've been to the gym. If I tell you, you know, incline press, you know exactly what that means, how to do an incline press. So he's not for beginners. He's also not for advanced. He's for people that have been frustrated by all the gimmicks and all the supplements out there and really just wants some accountability. See how niche he's getting? And because he's so niche, he's sold out. It's very hard to get coaching from him and from his team. Because he gets incredible results because he's able to focus on a specific customer or type of customer that is going to get incredible value from him. Whether you realize it or not, so many customers slip through the cracks if you don't have a system. Missed calls, follow-ups that never happen. It all adds up fast. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business communication system built so you never miss a call. This is the system you need so that you don't miss those precious customers. With QWO, calls, texts, voicemails, transcripts, and contact details are all in one clean view. So your team always has the full picture and can show up for every customer conversation, ensuring a seamless and more personalized experience. This is what excellence looks like. Everyone on your team sees the full thread, replies are faster, and customers actually feel taken care of. And QWO works wherever you are, right from your phone or computer. Keep your existing number, add teammates in minutes, sync your CRM, and let the call routing handle itself as you scale. Money's on the line. Always say hello with QWO. Try QWO for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to qwo.com/MBA. That's qwo.com/MBA. Today's episode is sponsored by Upwork. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that I've been banging on about how the fastest growing businesses aren't doing more, they're delegating smarter. Good news, Upwork helps you bring in expert freelance help fast so you can delegate and keep moving. I've been using Upwork for over a decade, and the reason why I love it so much is that it's a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, business operations, and more. It's free to sign up, and posting a job is easy. Upwork helps you grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across more than 125 categories, so you can fill in skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. And with Business Plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on Upwork, and with AI-powered shortlistings, you'll get matched to the right freelancer in under 6 hours. No endless searching required. This is why I love it because you get top talent quickly so that you can keep growing your business. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com, upwork.com. Step 2, if it's not an audience problem, you need to diagnose whether you have a product problem. And here is where you're going to have a harder conversation. Sometimes a slow period is not about who you are or who you are serving. It's about what you're selling. The world is changing very fast. Markets evolve very quickly. Customers' needs evolve. What solved the problem completely 2 years ago might only solve half the problem today. And if your product hasn't kept pace with what is happening and with the evolution of the market, you are losing out to your competitors. Ask yourself honestly, is what I'm selling today the most complete solution to my customer's problem? One of the worst feelings as a customer is when you buy something and it doesn't actually do what you hoped it to do. It didn't actually solve the complete problem. You still have, "Oh, I still got to do this. I still do that. I got to buy that to make that work." It's really frustrating. And you know this as a customer. I personally watched this happen in the webinar space when I was running my software company, Webinar Ninja, before we got acquired in 2024. The market's expectations around features and integrations and the experience shifted dramatically during COVID because this part of the market, virtual events, evolved and changed very quickly and you had to change with it as a company that's serving this audience. The businesses that survived are the ones that recognized that shift early on, very early on, and evolved their product. And the ones that kept selling the same thing to the market day after day, regardless of the shift and regardless of the demands of the market, they struggled and many of them went out of business. Listen, the biggest stakeholder is not your product. Your product is not sacred. It needs to change for your biggest stakeholder, which is your customer. Your customer is the reason why you get paid. If the market is telling you it needs something different, listen. Step 3: When you are in a slow period, when you're in a slump, you got to go on the offense. You got to change your mindset. And this is what's going to change everything. Most people, when business is slow, they go on defense. They cut costs. They pull back. They wait for things to improve. They hope that miraculously the market will change. And I understand that instinct. But here's the problem with playing defense when you are already losing. You are already behind. Defense doesn't change the scoreboard, only offense does. Let's say, for example, playing a basketball game and my team is down 20 points and we have one quarter to get back in the game, 12 minutes. Yes, defense is part of basketball and a part of winning, but the main problem here is that we need to score more points. We gotta go on the offense. I'm not asking you to be reckless. I'm not asking you to panic. I'm asking you to be aggressive. Create something new, test a different pricing structure, test a repackaging of your current products, open a revenue channel that you've never tried before. Let me give you some concrete examples. Say you run a restaurant and you serve lunch and dinner at this restaurant. Your dining room is full as often as it's going to be full. There's only a certain capacity that you can serve in your restaurant. It's a physical space. You hit a ceiling on your reservations and your walk-in customers. The slow period is not because your food got worse. Okay? It's because you have exhausted your particular market, the particular market that you're serving. So go find a new one. Get into corporate catering, serve people where they are, go to private events, private dining experiences. The customers in this space, like businesses, have larger budgets. They plan ahead. They bring 20 people plus instead of just 1 or 2. One catering contract can be worth more than a week of dining service at your restaurant. The product is the same. The kitchen is the same. The team is the same. But a new market unlocks growth that the old model structurally just could not deliver. That is offense. That is you thinking laterally. And that's what slow periods are for. This should be kind of exciting. It's like your chance to just go and do something that will shake things up. If this episode is giving you the clarity you're looking for, I highly recommend you subscribe to the channel because I have an upcoming episode you do not want to miss. It's called Don't Make These Mistakes When Starting a Business from Home. Many startups start from a living room, from a spare bedroom, from a garage, but there's a right way to do it and there's a wrong way to do it. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. It's coming out very soon. I want to make sure you get it as soon as it drops. I want to tell you that as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, you have autonomy. You have a lot of power. And there are 3 levers every business has that they can pull to help grow their business. This is a simple framework that will immediately give you some clarity of what your options are when your business is slow. One of the things I love about business is that it's pretty simple. And there's only 3 ways you can grow a business. Just 3. So these are the 3 levers you can pull to get things moving. Lever 1 is the obvious one. I just need more customers, people say, but that's just one lever. Let's get to lever 2: higher prices. Most people would just ignore this lever. They just pretend it doesn't exist. No, charge more per customer, go upmarket. And here's the secret: you could do it by just simply adding more value to your product or service. If you give more value, if you give more to the customer, they're going to be willing to pay more. You don't believe me? Anytime there's a recession in the economy, the businesses that do not go out of business are the ones that are high value. Four Seasons does not go out of business because people feel like they're getting more for what they're spending. So just add more value to your product so that you can increase your prices and have higher margins. Lever 3: More per customer. Increase how much each existing customer spends with you. We're talking about upsells, add-ons, premium tiers, retention. This is also known as average revenue per customer or lifetime value. Over the lifetime of their customer, how much do they spend with you? That's it. Those are the 3 levers. More customers, higher prices per customer, or how much they spend with you. Each customer, more per customer. Each growth strategy in the history of business pulls one of these 3 levers, maybe sometimes more than one lever. When you're in a slow period, your job is to look at all 3 and ask yourself, which one of these are the most untapped potential right now? Which one of these levers that I can really pull and really have the most exponential effect to pull me out of this trough of sorrow? Then go and pull that lever. Not all 3 at once, but just start with one, with focus, with consistency for 90 days, and then see what moves. I want to get even more specific here because I've been through this multiple times. There was a period at Webinar Ninja, my software company, where we were not growing. Competition was increasing. Costs were rising like crazy. We couldn't afford the talent that we needed to compete. It felt like we're fighting forces we just could not see. And here's what I did. First, I stopped reacting and started thinking. This is the most powerful computer that you have. I looked at our customer data and as I'm looking at this data, I asked myself some questions. Who was churning? Who was leaving us? Who was staying? Who were our best customers and what did they all have in common? Now with AI, you can actually pull this data and you can get this on a silver platter. So simple now. I didn't have AI back then, but what I found changed our direction. We were spending enormous amount of energy serving customers who were a wrong fit for us, who were actually not making us a lot of money. Enterprise type businesses who needed more handholding and more customization than we were built for. Our best customers were small business owners and creators. Simple use case. They had high satisfaction because their expectations were pretty low versus a big enterprise company. So we had lower churn. So we shifted our entire focus on that niche. New messaging, new positioning, new product priorities built around that specific customer. Then we went on offense and boy, that was fun. We built features for those core customers the features that they've been asking for. We doubled down on the customer support that they loved. That was one of our biggest competitive advantages already. We looked at the 3 layers that I talked about and identified that the increasing the value to each existing customer and reducing churn was our fastest path forward. That means we kept more money. We had less of a leaky bucket because customers continued to get value. We're not chasing new customers. We're serving the right ones better. The business started to turn around, not immediately, but within 2 quarters, 6 months, we were growing again and growing rapidly because we were finally building for the right customer. And honestly, it took a bit of courage to say, we got to say no to all these people that are paying us money so that we can serve the right customer and make more money in the long run. So what do you do right now if you're in a slow period? Well, let me make this as practical as possible. If your business is slow right now, here are the exact steps. Step 1, define it. Is this a trend? Is this actually happening? Is this 3 months flat or declining, or is this just a quick dip of a couple of weeks or a month? Be honest and use the data. Don't just use your gut. Step 2, audit your customers. Who are your best customers right now? If you use Stripe, this is actually quite easy. You can look at your top customers and it shows you The customers that spend the most with you, and you can just basically pull out their emails, get maybe your EA or even AI to help you with this. And you can just simply learn what the domain name of that email is, is usually their company. And look at what they do. Learn more about this customer. Find out what is the commonality between all the top 20, 30, 50 customers you have, or to make it simple, look at the top 10% of your customers. And find out what's the commonality. Step 3: Audit your product. Has your market evolved beyond what you're offering? Be honest. Is your product still the most competitive solution out there? Step 4: Identify your lever. Which lever are you going to pull first from the 3 levers? More customers, higher prices, or more per customer? Which has the most untapped potential right now? Step 5: Go on the offense. Listen, when you're slowly dying, you're having a bad quarter, you have nothing to lose at this point. If you do nothing, it's going to continue to go south. So you might as well go for the offensive. Pick one thing, some new initiative, an experiment, one channel. Look at the customers that are working and go for it. Give it 90 days of real focused effort, not scattered energy. One thing, 90 days, go. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you're in a slow period right now, I want to just tell you right now, the fear is normal. The frustration is normal. Feeling like you're hitting your head against the wall every single day. Been there. Every entrepreneur who has ever built something that is real has been there. So this is a rite of passage. You're in good company. This is the chapter that determines whether you're building something real or something fragile. This is going to really test, are you built for this? If you get through this, You best believe you can get through anything. You could do this. Have an honest look at your business and start going on the offense. You can do that. You can take those steps and turn this business around, but it doesn't just happen by listening to this episode or thinking about what you're going to do. It takes you doing it. So start today. Even if you take a small step, even if that step is writing on your to-do list what you're going to do tomorrow. And I'm here to support you on this podcast and on our newsletter. By the way, if you're on our newsletter, you can email me anytime and I reply personally. And you can sign up for one of our freebies, like our templates over at 100mba.net/templates and be part of our newsletter. And I'm here to cheer you on and be your coach from afar. If this episode has made you feel empowered, a little bit more pumped about your situation, I'm happy for that. But there's more to learn. We recently published an episode called The 5 Silent Killers of Success. How to avoid them, and what to do instead. This is the mental game of business. If you want to learn more about that, check out that episode. It recently was published on whatever app you are listening to, watching. We're there. So make sure you check out that episode. It's called The 5 Silent Killers of Success. Go ahead and check it out. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode. Liberty Mutual.

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