Welcome to March 2020 my Charmed Ones!
Today I am bringing back a series that used to be part of my monthly editorial calendar: Entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial is my monthly entrepreneurship journal entry that I make public to give insight to my community, and lead by example for fellow entrepreneurs to see the highs and lows of running an online business. Each month, I generally have a topic that I want to share on that relates to the state of my business or my current priorities. This month we are going to talk about how I plan to revive my stagnant business.
Over the last few years my business has felt like it hit a ceiling. Now I fully understand that this ceiling has been the manifestation of my own limiting beliefs around my business and truly has nothing to do with my business itself and it’s scalability. Although I make a great income from my business, and a mostly passive one at that, I’ve been wanting to take my business to the next level financially for some time, but I’ve made a bunch of mistakes along the way to find what my next level version of business success looks like. Hence, feeling like I’ve hit a ceiling.
I think its normal for people to hit a ceiling like this in their business and perhaps to, like me, feel trapped or boxed in to certain achievements and expectations. If you’re not careful though, hitting this imaginary ceiling can cause you to actually start declining if you aren’t careful, and I feel like my business has been declining in some sense but I know it doesn’t have to. I know that the decline I am feeling has come from a rut I allowed myself to get into.
I spent so much time thinking and researching on how to get myself past the ceiling I felt like I hit to make it to my next level that a few negative side affects started popping up. First, I was doing way too much researching and thinking and not enough executing on what I had learned. Ugh! I know some of you can relate to this. Not taking action because you feel like you don’t know enough to make the best choice yet, or starting down a new path based on information you learned but then finding conflicting information that leads you to continually change course. Double ugh! I definitely spent the last few years in this cycle. Knowing I needed to make a plan for the next level, doing the research, coming up with that plan, and then either chickening out or changing the plan so many times that I started things but left them incomplete. This was disastrous for me and it definitely lead me to make some poor decisions with my business that ended up hurting my revenue, not growing it like intended.
The second negative side affect I experienced was massive burnout. What is interesting about this side affect for me was that I had been working and creating content at a feverish pace for a long time before the burnout hit. And when I think about it, it wasn’t the pace or amount of work that ended up causing the burnout, but truly I think it was a symptom of the overall problem that I wasn’t growing. Anyone who creates any sort of content online can probably relate that when you are creating a lot but getting a lot of great feedback or activity on your content, it fuels you to want to create more. But when you are creating and not seeing the feedback you expect, it can be disheartening and draining. That’s where my burnout came from. For a while there I was creating content but not seeing the response I wanted over and over and over again. Because of that I burned out and became disillusioned by certain platforms.
Despite all this however, I have to remind myself how freaking grateful I am to even be in this position and that I still have a functioning business that earns me a full time income from home. The fact that despite these issues my business is still working and new customers and community members are still finding me is such a testament to the power that great passive income foundations can have in a business. My top performing content and existing funnels have been shouldering the marketing load for my sales and keeping my income consistent as I research, plan and experiment with ideas, even bad ones!
So, it’s with that gratitude and perspective in mind that I consciously decide to keep moving forward and turn to a fresh page with my business. Here are some things I’ve been doing recently to revive my stagnant business:
Back to Branding Basics: I’ve been asking myself a series of foundational brand questions to get super clear on my direction moving forward.
- What do I want to be known for?
- How can I be of service to others?
- Who are my people?
- Why do they come to me?
- What do I do?
- What do I NOT do?
That last one is very important because it’s easy for someone like me to feel like I need to be and do everything for my audience, but that will spread me thin and it already did!
Auditing my Business: I’ve been reviewing different aspects of my business processes over the past few years to understand my strengths and weaknesses, and where investing my effort has or hasn’t paid off. As you may know, I’m a solopreneur and although I’ve worked with a virtual assistant in the past, I’m now considering how or where I might actually need more support in different areas.
- What worked for me in the past, what didn’t?
- What was I doing very well?
- What was I avoiding that I may need help with?
- What was I doing poorly out of expectation that I may just need to let go of?
Reviewing my Funnels: Finally, I’ve been reviewing my funnels to see what content, calls to actions and products have been most successful.
- What content was I producing at the height of my growth?
- What content had the best reception, which did not?
- Which products have been most successful?
- Where are my sales coming from?
So, those are some steps I’ve been taking to revive my stagnant business and create some solid plans to help me push through that imaginary ceiling blocking me from my next level of success. Realistically, I know I also need to do some mindset work to bring down the blocks alongside doing the work of identifying and executing on my next set of business plans. For now, I would just like to cultivate the vision for where my business is going in 2020 as a first step and get those essential plans laid out. I’m also committing to thinking and researching less, and sticking to the plans I make moving forward. Hopefully, I have some positive updates for you in next months installment of this series!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this first new installment of Entrepreneurial and that it gave you some food for thought if you too are a business woman like me! I’d love to hear more about the things you have been working on or struggling with in your business so that I can create some content geared towards providing you solutions based on my experience.
xoxo,