I spend much of my workdays on the phone with lots of women entrepreneurs. When you are on the phone with your clients and potential clients day in and day out, you start to notice patterns.
Here’s a pattern I’ve noticed as I’ve spent time on the phone with badass women entrepreneurs who are trying to scale from $100k to $500k or $1m:
1. They don't have a system that consistently generates leads. Almost all of the women I speak to have concerns about being the world’s best kept secret. That’s because many of them have been relying on referrals to make ends meet. They have gotten so used to other people sending them clients, that they have no idea how to set up a system that would grow their audience significantly with people who are their true ideal clients.
2. They are leaving money on the table by not having an assistant. Very few of the women I talked to had someone on their team handling the administrative tasks of the business. And even those that did have an assistant didn’t seem to have a very good one (which is worse than not having one at all). Instead of spending time on webinars, doing speaking gigs, hosting events, sending emails, having sales calls, connecting with potential JV partners, creating great content or otherwise doing tasks that will get them in front of their ideal clients and generate revenue, they are handling admin, also known as leaving money on the table.
3. They are leaving money on the table by not leveraging their intellectual property. Leverage is the key to growth and the thing that all of us already have and can leverage is our intellectual property. Yet most of the women I spoke to continue to sell and deliver one-on-one services only. This means their calendars are constantly full and they have no free time to market their services and otherwise manage their businesses. They only make money when they are on the clock and they can only be on the clock so much. That means the amount of income they can make is severely limited. Money meet table.
4. They are leaving money on the table by not charging enough. If all you offer is one-on-one services and then you also undercharge for those services, you’ve got the Entrepreneur’s Hamster Wheel of Doom. You work constantly and yet you’re still not making enough money to be financially comfortable. It never ends. Typically the reason entrepreneurs undercharge is that they don’t believe their clients will pay more. And often the reason their clients won’t pay more is because they are talking to the wrong clients. How do you solve this problem? See #1.
5. Their businesses are too freaking complicated. This is the cause of an immense amount of completely unnecessary stress for business owners. Many of the entrepreneurs I speak to are selling many different offers to many different clients. They have a workshop that they sell to corporate clients. And then one-on-one services that they sell to individual clients. And then this one random client needed that one random thing, so they invented a new package for that. And before they know it they have 7 different types of clients and they are offering 14 different kinds of services. How incredibly exhausting! How do you think things would change if you sold just one or a few offers to one type of client and focused all of your energy on selling and delivering that one (or few) thing(s)? Doesn’t that sound a lot more doable?
I'm curious — if you were to rank your top 3 challenges, what would they be?
xo,
PS: If some or all of these sound familiar and you’re looking for a better way to do business, join me this Thursday for my workshop called Seven Up. During the workshop, I’ll be showing you my model for a simpler business that makes bank and brings a lot more ease (and joy!) into your life, regardless of what stage of business you’re in. Interested?
