Why your business is NOT GROWING...3 things to FIX RIGHT NOW!
In this video, Shanli Liu, CPA, CTP, explains that the primary reason businesses—especially online ones—fail to scale is not market or product issues but people-related problems. She outlines three critical areas leaders must address: communication, motivation, and training. For communication, she stresses the three-step process of saying, writing, and reinforcing messages to ensure understanding and adoption. Regarding motivation, she emphasizes placing employees in roles that match their strengths, aligning incentives with desired behaviors, and ensuring team incentives are not contradictory. In training, she advocates a "sell, don’t tell" approach, making training transparent, purpose‑driven, and tied to business impact, such as teaching staff to read a P&L. By mastering these three areas, leaders can move from being bottlenecks to enabling scalable growth.
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What I want to share with you today is why you can't scale your business, specifically online business, but this could apply to literally any business that you're thinking about. I just happen to have 3 that I have built myself that are online businesses, and that is why it's relevant to me. And so the reason I want to share this with you is because I think that this is probably the most painful thing as an entrepreneur, because I think most of us got into this because we want growth, we want progress, and as long as we're making progress, we feel like we're going in the right direction. But when we're not Feels like crap. And what I've seen a lot of the time is that when people are talking about why they can't scale their businesses, and I say this after coaching thousands of people and also calling myself on my bullshit many times, is that it's never the thing you think it is, right? We tend to point to the things that are comfortable for us to talk about, right? And so for a lot of entrepreneurs, that might be the product, the market, the acquisition, right? But we don't want to point to the things that we're not good at or don't understand. Which is people, right? And so that's why I want to talk about the 3 reasons that you can't actually scale your business, because they don't have to do with your niche, they don't have to do with your market, right? And here's what I'm going to tell you to break your belief. Sarah Blakely, for example, made an entire business out of underwear for women, right? Like underwear, hosiery. Nowadays you might see that and be like, oh, it's just a little Amazon business. But why is it that she was able to scale that and other people aren't, right? And yes, you can talk about market opportunity and things like that, but there's always a place in the marketplace for a good product. That has a good team with a good strategy behind it. And so if you think about it, there's really no reason that one product can't beat the other if you have a team of really smart people who understand what they're doing behind it. And so that's what I really want to dissect, because over the last 5 years, this has probably been the thing that I have thought about the most. It's the thing that keeps me up at night. It's the thing that I think about on an ongoing basis, which is what can I do to be a better leader, to lead my team to success? And that's why most people can't scale, is because they think, How do I become successful? And it's not how do you become successful, it's how does your team become successful, right? And it took me a lot of pain to realize that. You know, you might feel like you're in a high-paying job, but in reality, you are a leader and you should be helping others in high-paid jobs go towards the success that you need for the business. And so that's what I want to share with you. So there's 3 things that I figured out, right? Okay, the first one is communication. Right? And so that may seem very obvious, but I want to tell you the 3 things that go into communication that allow you to actually clearly communicate, because I think that we all know that we believe that we communicate much of the time, but what happens on the other side is not the result we're looking for, which then shows us that we didn't effectively communicate. Right? The second one is motivation. Right? And there are a lot of things that go with motivation. I think that the fallacy is that if somebody is not doing their job well, that they're not motivated and that that is on them. They're just unmotivated person, right? Reality is that there's a lot more you can do about that than you think you can. And that's what I'm going to share with you about that. The third one is training, right? And so I think that, again, there's a misconception of what training is versus what it isn't. And so like what I used to think training was is not what training actually is. And so that is what I want to break down with you today. So let's hit it with the first one. Okay, let's talk about communication. There are 3 pieces to communication that I have figured out that you need to ensure success on your team. Right? And so here's the first one, right? You've got to say it. This is where pretty much everybody stops. They say it and that is the end of it. They might say it twice. Maybe if you're lucky, they say it 3 times. This used to be me, right? And I was like, why the heck is it that I'm saying things to people and they're not actually doing what I'm saying? Like, I would blame it on them. I'm like, are they— I can't get through to them. Like, are they stupid? Like what? Like those are the thoughts that really went through my head, right? I'm not proud of them by any means. And then I realized, I was like, my gosh, you know, I say, I can't even say something to myself a couple of times and then remember to do it or remember the right way to do it. Right. What do I do for myself? Right. Well, a second thing is I always write things down. Right. So why is it that I would expect other people to hear something and not need it written, but be able to act upon it when I myself have to write down the things that I think and say to myself. In order to do them, right? And so that really blew my mind because there was a meeting I was on one day and it was a project plan to roll out essentially a new technology system in one of the businesses. And I remember going through the meeting and at the end of it, I asked everyone to put their action items into a document. And I think I got like 3 and I was like, help me, you know, like, what do I have to do? And that's when I was like, you know what? What I'm expecting too much of people and I'm expecting more from others than I expect I expect from myself. Right. And so that's when I realized that you can't just say it. You've got to write it too. And you can't always rely on everyone else to do that because they're going to write their interpretation of what you said, not what you actually meant. Right. Here's the third leg of the wheel though. And this is the one where you can get these two down. You know, you can have a meeting where you clearly explain your expectations to people and then you can clearly have somebody who's taking notes, writing them. You audit them before you send them to people. So everything's clearly written. But where people miss out is the reinforcement. Okay? So you've got to say, you've got to write, and you've got to reinforce. Reinforcement is repetition, right? That is how you embed something in your brain. And so what I want you to understand is this, right? What I realized for myself was that how can I expect other people to believe something I say once, right? Do I believe a thought I have once, right? Think about if you have a negative thought about something and you're trying to change it to positive. Or if you have been doing something a certain way for a long time and now you're trying to change how you do it, how many times and how many thoughts do you have to think to really ingrain that behavior in yourself? Right? Like it takes all day, every day, it feels like. And so if you're trying to get your team to do something differently, if you're trying to get a person to do something differently, if you're trying to clearly communicate new expectations to people, whether it be they're new in the role, they're new in the job, it's a new role in the company, or a change in expectations, you've really got to go out the reinforcement. Which means there's a, there's a few ways I do this, right? One is I'll keep it on top of mind for my one-on-ones I have with people. So when I'm meeting with everyone on my team, I keep what's top of mind that I need to continue to reinforce for them, right? What's the one big rock I've got to continue to clarify for them? And then the second is I remind myself of this, which is that the average employee does not believe that something is going to happen until you've said it 7 times. And so this is why if you're looking at how you really institute change and you really clarify expectations, it's absolute repetition, right? They should just— when they look at you, they should think of the thing that you continue to say to them, right? They should associate you with that thing. And so that is how you do it. You have to remember, you've got to say it, you've got to write it, and you've got to reinforce it. Okay, that's just the first part of the equation. Here's the second part, right? We're talking about motivation. And I think that a lot of the times, like I said, we think that someone is not motivated because they're not doing their job. So we're like, oh, they just lack motivation. Like, They're just not right for this team. Right? And that's like typically what we think. Uh, the reality is, is that most people aren't motivated because you haven't created an environment or the conditions to allow someone to express their motivation. Okay. Here's what I mean by that. Um, I'll tell you the story is that we had a teammate and I thought he was fantastic. When we hired him, I was like, this dude's a killer. He's going to crush it. And he came in and I think in the first couple of days he did well. And then after that, it was like months of just like mediocre performance. And I kept thinking to myself, like, I don't understand why. And one day I sat and I actually really thought about it and I was like, what are the strengths of the role? What are his strengths? They are not aligned. And I was like, you know what his strengths are? They're more like this role over here, but he's in this role. How can you be motivated when the entire thing you're doing every day is something that you 1, are not innately good at, 2, don't like, right? And so that is my job, is to get the right butts in the right seats. That's your job as a leader, right? And so that's when I realized the value of making sure that people are aligned in terms of where they sit in the organization. And it's so funny because you watch what happened after we moved him. He completely accelerated even at things that he wasn't good at, because what he was doing majority of the day was stuff he was good at and liked. His motivation was through the roof. He wasn't clocking out at 5 PM. He was staying working weekends, working nights. It was just like, it was a night and day difference. And so that is probably the first reason that people aren't motivated. Here's the second reason people aren't motivated: misalignment of incentives. Okay? And so I think a lot of people try to get really fancy with incentive plans, and I have made that mistake. And let me save you the trouble of trying to make some complex incentive plan. You want to align people with the behavior that you want them to do. It's as simple as that. And so if you look at a lot of people and you talk to teams and you audit, sometimes what you'll notice is a couple different things. One is that their incentive plan does not actually align the outcome behavior that you want, right? So you can align someone for, say, it's upselling customers, right? Say you align them with upselling customers and you're like, you get a bonus and you upsell, right? But what about if those customers don't stick? Right? So do you actually want them to upsell everybody? Or do you want them to get a certain percentage of people to stick on the backend? Right? They're two very different incentive plans. Right? One is saying, I just want you to sell people into this thing. The other one is saying, I want a certain number of people sticking and retaining in this program. So you have to make sure that their incentives are aligned. The second place where I see this, and I've done it many times, is you misalign the teams. So the people that work together.. And so what that looks like is you're incentivizing one person to do the upsells, right? But then that person who's retaining has no incentive to retain, or maybe that their incentive instead of retaining is upon a survey, right? It's an NPS score or something. And so these two actually have contradictory incentives. One's incentive is to sell as many people in this program as possible, which then is harming this person's incentive, which is to have a great NPS score, which if you're just selling anyone and everything, then you can't get that because you're just kind of like throwing— it's going to be turn and burn. And so you'll see then those people start to have misalignment. And so that's when you misalign incentives between teams, employees, etc. And so that's why motivation comes from making sure you've got the right people in the right seats and you also have the right incentive plans amongst the right people in the right teams. The third piece to this, the last one, is training. And this one is probably the most underrated. And I think that people go about it the wrong way. Right? And so what I see a lot of times and what I used to do all the time was I could be very charismatic and I could train clients, right? I could train clients. I could train people who paid me, but I couldn't train my employees. Right? It was like I was telling them what to do, but I wasn't training them. Does that make sense? Okay. So what that feels like, right? I say train, don't tell. Okay, you could also say it like this: sell, don't tell. Think about it. When you are training someone on something that's new, what you have to do before you train anyone on anything is you've got to sell them on why that is so important to retain this information, right? And so what I learned over time was that I needed to be— rather than training my clients, right, and selling my clients, I need to be doing that with my employees all the time. Right? And so I started structuring how I train my employees as somebody would for how they would break beliefs of their clients, right? So it's like, all right, we've got the hook, we've got the story, we've got the supporting argument, we've got the frameworks, right? That's how I'm going to train my employees. And that is what works. Because the thing is, is that people— stories stick with them, but facts don't necessarily always. And it's saying that we can always continuously get better. Even in doing this video, I could tell you there's 5 other things I'll do differently next time to just make it a little bit better in terms of how I teach. But the point is that you have the intention. You train, don't tell, or you sell, you don't tell. And most of the times we expect that we just wanna tell people exactly what to do rather than sell them on why. And I think that the root of this is you have to be able to be transparent with your team, right? And so the more information that you can give them that you have, the more they will understand why it's so important what they're doing. Because you're desperate. You're like, I need them to get this. I need them to understand their job because you know how important it is because think of the information you have in your brain, right? And so then what information do you have that they don't have that if they had, they would be so much more incentivized to do their job, to absorb this training, to really pursue excellence, right? And so that's partially, um, when you're training someone, it's conditioning, creating the right conditions for the training, right? It's selling them on the concept of why this training is important, and it's also exposing and being transparent about how they truly affect the company, right? One trick I'll tell you for this is that I find it very useful for a lot of employees, particularly in mid-level management or junior positions, to teach them how to read a P&L for the business. And then I show them on that P&L what they should be looking at. What do you affect? What numbers do you have control over in this P&L?. And I'm telling you, like, it makes a huge difference for everybody on the team. And so if you haven't tried that, I suggest you do. So to recap, there are 3 things that we have to do in order to scale our business, right? We want to scale our business. Remember this, it's not about your market, it's not about your niche, right? It's about how you're training your employees, how you're communicating with your employees, and then also how you're motivating your employees, right? It's those 3 things. Otherwise you will always be the bottleneck of your business. And that sucks. I've been there and it's horrible. And so, um, I hope you found this video useful. If you did, go ahead, hit the subscribe button. I will see you on the next one.
