EP 371 - The Real Reason Your Business Hit a Wall + How To Regain Momentum

MarketingCoaching Lifestyle
Written By Debbie Shadid
 

If your business felt like it was humming along one month and completely stalled out the next, hear this right at the top. It's not that you're not smart enough. You just took your foot off the gas. Nothing has actually gone wrong, and that's good news, because the pedal is right there. You can press it again.

If you're new to my channel, my name is Debbie Shadid. I'm a Business Growth and Life Coach and the founder of the Business Building Boutique. For over two decades, I've helped women learn how to become coaches, get clients, grow their businesses, and create meaningful income doing work they love.

In this episode I'll walk you through the real reasons coaches lose momentum. Not surface-level stuff, the actual patterns I see over and over. Then I'll give you one simple daily practice to keep you steady, even on the hard days.

Momentum isn't something that happens to you. It's something you create and protect. You do it with a plan, by running your business like a business, and by doing the work instead of avoiding it. Come back to the basics, anchor in your why, and get back to work. The world needs what you have to offer.

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  • A daily mindset practice built for women in business. Five questions in the morning, five at night, five minutes each. Do it for six months and your business won't look the same, and neither will you: https://debbieshadid.com/take5

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TRANSCRIPT

If your business has ever felt like it has been humming along one month and then the next month you are completely stalled out, I want you to hear something right from the very start of this episode. It is not that you're not smart enough. You just took your foot off the gas nothing has actually gone wrong. And that, my friend, is totally different because the gas pedal is right there for you. You can press it again. That's what we're gonna talk about in today's episode. I'm gonna walk you through how you maintain real momentum, and I'm gonna help you identify the reasons why coaches lose momentum, and it is not surface-level stuff, the actual patterns I see over and over. And then I'm gonna give you one practice that you can do that will keep you steady, even on the days when things feel hard. I'm Debbie Shadid. I help women build beautiful boutique-style coaching businesses. If you are over 50, I'm here to help you build a business without paid ads with simple tech, so you can do exactly what you know you are meant to do. I have been self-employed since 2000. I have done millions of dollars in business without complicated funnels, and I have done this because I know how to maintain momentum. So I'm not talking in theory. I'm talking about what actually keeps businesses alive year after year. You guys ready to go? Let's get into it. The first reason that you lose momentum is the simplest one, and this might sting a little bit. You are not treating your business like it is a business. I want you to picture the boutique down the street, and you are the owner. Look, you have regular business hours. You keep the doors open. If you have a shop like that, and I always use this example, you have to pay rent. You have to have clothes on the rack. You would be paying attention, and here's the deal. You would not stay home if you had a bellyache, if you had cramps. You would go to work anyway because it is a business that has regular operating hours. You might feel terrible all day long, but you would be there anyway because you're a person who owns a business. So many coaches treat their business like it is a hobby and they only show up when they feel inspired. And my friend, that is why it remains a hobby, right? A hobby is a business that never makes any money so if you wonder why you feel wobbly, we're gonna get into it. So you might be wondering why your business feels unsure, right? What is happening when things go down? It's up to you to maintain the momentum. Having a business means that you show up on time, you keep regular hours, you watch and assess what's happening. You pay attention to what clients are saying, how they are finding you, what marketing is working, and what marketing isn't. You adjust constantly. That alone will change everything for you. But before we go one step further, I wanna ask you something. Honestly, are you running your business like a boutique down the street, or are you running it like something that you do, or are you running it like something you do when you are in the mood to do it? Which one is it for you? This is the question that you have to answer. So I wanna go into my second reason why people lose momentum and why you might be losing momentum, and this one actually is the thing that drains you more than anything. You wake up on Monday mornings trying to figure out, "What is the next thing I should do this week to get a client?" And I'm gonna tell you right now, momentum will not be maintained when you are deciding on Monday morning what you are going to do to get clients. If you are scrolling, looking for inspiration, that is not a plan. That is a distraction that is a distraction that costs you a bunch of time and gets you nowhere. You know what happens, and I've done it before, you scroll and then you do nothing, right? Planning ahead of time is what will set your business on the right path. We do quarterly planning. We do annual planning with our clients. We sit down and we build an entire marketing plan for the entire year, and it's so simple. It takes a couple of hours. When you know what your content categories, when you know how to talk about your offer, when you know what those pillars are, the core topics that your client is interested in, when you know where you're gonna market, how often you're going to market, the momentum will get protected because you have a plan around it, okay? It's like building a fence around your property. There's safety in that. When you know what to do, you can do it. Then there's the other part to this. Once you have a plan, guess what you have to do next? You have to do what the plan says. Managing your time is one of the reasons why a lot of people don't get things done. Even though you have time to do it, we all lose time doing things that are unnecessary. I like to tell our clients, we need to find the one thing that moves the needle every day, and that's the first thing you should do. What is the thing that actually creates clients? What is that? That's the thing you should do first on the list every single day. We're all guilty of pushing things off that we don't wanna do, like taxes. Sorry for those accountants out there. But if you don't love taxes and you're a creative person, you know what happens, we push it off, we push it off. But if you're in the US, the IRS gives us a deadline, so we have to do it. In your own business, you should be the one to give yourself a deadline. This is the problem. There's nobody overseeing what you're doing. So create deadlines on the important things, and then keep your word to yourself. And I'll tell you what happens. When you have a plan and you don't find the time to do the marketing consistently, to do the social media, to do the editing, to do the tech, you know, all those things, those are the things that you put off. Those are the things that are the most important things to do. So often you need to be onto yourself. We are all guilty, I'm right there with you, of doing the things that are the dreamy, fun things. We love creating programs and plans and mapping things out, right? Thinking of the name of our next program, all the stuff that does not get you where you want to go today. While those things are important, those can wait. Right now you need clients. Right now you are desperate to build a business and maintain consistent momentum. That business, to pull it off consistently and to create consistent income and a consistent flow of clients, you have to be doing what it is that is the thing, whether you want to do it or not. So if you need to record a video every day and edit it to go on Instagram, then that's what you do, right? That becomes the first thing you do. Now, number three, this one is the sneaky one because it feels very productive, but you keep changing your offer. You decide very quickly, like, " Oh, it's not selling. Nobody wants it. Nobody's interested." And I have been guilty of this too. Back in the day, I would change my offer and then I would realize, wait, I didn't actually offer it to anyone, or I offered it to very few people. I can tell you after helping people over two decades, the offer is not the problem. The problem is you are not talking to enough people. I hate to tell you this, but business is a numbers game, right? The more people you talk to, the more opportunity you create, the more likely it is somebody's gonna say yes. So if you are always tweaking it and always kind of in the relaunching mode, the redesign mode, you're always starting over. You cannot build momentum when you are always starting over. So the real problem, always keep in mind, is not the offer. The real problem is you have not told enough people. Here's what I wanna challenge you on. Your offer is the offer that you are going to keep until you are so good at it. I have essentially been doing the same offer for almost 10 years, almost 10 years. There's tweaks inside of it. Of course, AI has changed what we're doing some, what we're teaching, marketing trends change, but my offer to help people get clients and the path to do it has not changed. What I have done is gotten better and better and better at selling it, delivering it, getting client results, all those things. That's the same thing for you. Your only job is to be the best at delivering that offer and selling that offer and ensuring that your clients get results, and that they love it, so they keep coming back for more. So let me ask you this. Have you ever bought a program that you never looked at? No, you didn't. Every program that you clicked on the page and looked at, every checkout page that you landed on, of course you didn't buy all of them. There are things that you wanted and you still didn't buy. This is the point about your offer. If you are not putting it in front of enough people, right? Enough people that land on your page or that look at your offer so that some of them will say yes, and most of them say no or don't say anything, right? That's the percentages. If you think about your own experience, how many times do you go to a sales page and you don't actually purchase? We have to allow enough time for our offer to be in front of enough people. Are you guys following me? It's a numbers game. You gotta show your thing or offer your thing, or have 20 conversations in the beginning to get one person to say yes, or to get two people to say yes, or if you're super blessed, to get five people to say yes. The more offers that you make, the more people that will say yes. This is just the way it works because you will get really good at what you're talking about. You'll have days and weeks where everybody says yes, but in the beginning, that is not the case. In the beginning, I closed one out of 20 people. So if your offer is not working, it's not the offer, it is you, the way you're describing it. It is you, your belief level about it, and it is you learning how to sell it and how to market it. So getting better at selling is one of the ways that you get better with your offer. You work on perfect delivery, you repeat the message, and you keep making offers. Now, the next one is where a lot of women, I don't know, they get all weird, right? And in fact, all of us get weird. If you do not have a price that you love for your offer, you will feel pushy, you will feel salesy, you will not make offers, and that could be the thing that's killing everything for you. You have to think your price is the best price. You can't be in the middle of a conversation and be having an argument with yourself about like, " Oh, should I offer this price or that price?" No. You pick a price, you own that price, you practice delivering that price along with your offer, and you don't second-guess what you're doing. Because the people who second-guess what they're doing, they do not get the results that they want. If you are discounting on the call, you know what that says? Desperate. Yeah. When somebody is like, " Oh, you know, I really wanna work with you. I'll give it to you for half price," that says, "I'm desperate for a client." That's not the way that you sell your coaching. So here's the truth about pricing. The only thing that matters is whether you believe that the price is of good value. It is not about what anybody else thinks. It is about how you feel about what you're doing. Let me give you a real example that I know to be true. There is a coach out there who delivers really what we do, and I would say actually delivers less than what we do. She does not have the same level of commitment, and I'm not bragging on myself, I'm using this as an example. She does not have the same level of commitment. She doesn't do, the work that we do for our clients and with our clients. She just doesn't give the same kind of coaching, period. She charges $30,000 for her program, and I'm telling you, I know for sure that we do more for our clients than she does for her clients. The difference is she loves her price of $30,000. She loves it. She thinks that she is the best thing out there, and you know what? She sells it. Because of her belief about what she's doing, she sells her coaching$30,000 and she has people buy it. When people work with us, I wanna sell something to you that is affordable and accessible to so many people, because I wanna make a difference. I wanna help thousands and thousands and thousands of women do what it is they want to do. So you can work with me for a couple thousand dollars and get still this high, high level of support. I even sell one-off sessions. So there are many different ways to work with me, right? From a beginning price of just a little bit all the way up to done for you services. But we find what works for you, and I love that. I love that about what I do because I believe there's nothing comparable to what we offer, and I believe I can help a lot of people. The point here is, That person believes $30,000 is the right price. I believe a couple thousand, some offers less, maybe a done-for-you hire. Like, I have ranges that fit everybody, and I believe that's the best for me. That is the best for the women I want to serve. And so guess what? I sell a whole bunch of coaching. She sells coaching too. So we both sell our offers because we both believe in our price. That's the whole thing. So if you are constantly working on your pricing, constantly moving that, that's not strategy. That is a confidence problem. The work isn't about finding the perfect number. It is about believing in the value that you deliver. Now, this is a really big one, so I want you to think about this one. This final one that might catch a whole bunch of you is your niche. If you keep changing your niche, none of anything that I've just said is gonna work. You don't need to worry about your price or your offer or anything else because if you're changing your niche constantly, you are basically removing the cornerstone of your entire business over and over again. You, you are, like, breaking the foundation of your business down. You know, in a house, they have to put those little piers to hold the house up. That's what you need. So if you are tweaking that or waffling around, all of that is what is killing your momentum. People start listening to you, and they're excited about something, and then you change your mind, and they're like, "Wait, what?" Like, "I thought she did this." And maybe it's not conscious, but they cannot follow what you do. Nobody knows for sure what you stand for. Nobody knows exactly who you help, and every time you rethink it, it stalls you out, and you will lose weeks of progress. So I wanna give you a way to think about your niche that will set you free. You are already the top expert in the world at your niche. Now, don't, don't click off 'cause I, I really want you to hear this. You are the only one who does what you do. Even if you went to a certification and everybody else does the exact same thing as you. Your life experience, all the experiences you've had that you have lived through and come out the other side, everything that you've read, watched, learned, the careers that you've had, the relationships you've had, all of that impacts your thinking and the way that you coach somebody on the exact same topic as somebody else. This is what makes you the top expert at what you do. It makes you incomparable to anyone else because there is only one you. That is the most incredible news, and I really want you to hear that. You are in a niche of your own. Yes, again, other coaches can help people with the same pain point. They can help people with the same desired outcome, but you are the only one who can deliver coaching your way. You're the expert, so stop waffling around. So stop overthinking your niche. Stop changing your mind. Decide what it is, and that's it. Like, draw a line in the sand. That is it. I know what my niche is. Pick your person, make your promise, and stay there long enough, long enough, in fact, I say for a lifetime, that people really know what you stand for. Consistency is what builds your business name. Constant reinvention is what buries it. So let's line these things up. Treat your business like a business. Make a plan and protect your time. Stop changing your offer, believe in your price, and commit to your niche. Those five things are the key reasons why people lose momentum. But I have to tell you, over all those five things, there is one overarching piece that will really ruin your entire business, honestly. It's the one overarching theme that is keeping your business together, it is causing you to get off track on every one of those things. You guys ready for this? It is managing your mind. If you cannot manage your own mind, and what does that mean? What am I saying? It means your thinking around your business. If you don't know how to navigate the ups and downs of business, and if you're not realistic about that, then you're never gonna make it in business. I want to give you an example that some of you will completely understand because you've seen this diagram. Others of you, you're gonna have to go with me. The stock market. I don't know how many years there's been a stock market, but a long time, okay? If you look at this diagram about the stock market, it starts and it goes up and down, up and down, up and down. Sometimes a big dip, sometimes a big high. But eventually, over years, the line keeps going up. Even though it's still up and down, still an up and down, even though there is still those ups and down, the line keeps going up. This is exactly like your business. This is why people who invest in the stock market and stay there long term, like over decades, they always win. This is why people can say, you know, you can be in the stock market and be 10% ahead always, right? Yes, there's times when it's like," Wow, I practically lost it all." Then before you know it, you recover. This is what happens in business. If you cannot manage your mind around that, you're not gonna be able to make it over the long haul. You have to know what is really happening and stay anchored in what you wanna do. So about half the days, your business is gonna be like on the downside. About half the days, things are gonna be on the upside. Some of the days, things are gonna be just right in the middle. It's gonna be like, oh, you know, things are okay, right? Or things are so-so, right? That even feeling that you have. If you understand that, then when you are on the downside, it's not a big deal. That was the best gift that I gave myself over two decades ago. When I started my business, I understood there were gonna be days and months and weeks and maybe even a year. I've been at this 26 years, so a year that was like, ugh, that year wasn't very fun when I looked back on it. But oh well, there's been so many years I literally have done millions because I have not quit. So when you come up with a day that's not stellar, what will separate you from everybody else is learning how to manage your mind. This is not something that requires a bunch of coaching. It doesn't require you going to a therapist. What it does require is you deciding what your goal is, keeping focused on the goal, and anchoring in your why. I call that the why that makes you cry. Why are you even building a coaching business? Why are you doing this? Go to work for somebody else, right? You could, but you don't want to do that. You're here because you have a dream, you have a vision, you have a purpose, and you know that you are meant to do this, right? There's no two ways about it. This is what you're supposed to do. So you have to keep going no matter what. Those women, those are the ones that win, not because they're the most talented, because they are steady Eddie. They keep going. So if there's one thing I want you to take from this whole episode is this, momentum isn't something that happens to you. It is something that you create and you protect. You create and protect that momentum by having that plan, by running your business like it's a business, and by showing up to work and doing the work that you need to do instead of avoiding it. This is exactly why I want to give you something to help you with your mindset. And then, as I mentioned, mindset is everything. I want to give you something that will help you stay on track with your mindset. Now, we could spend all day every day journaling and thinking through our thinking, all that, and I love all that coaching stuff. But I had to find a way for myself to be able to maintain the momentum, to work on my mindset every single day, and to make it quick. I didn't have time to sit around and write about my thoughts or look at my thinking or all the things, the morning routine. I don't have time for that. So I created something called the Take Five Method. It is a daily mindset practice specifically built for women in business, just like you coaches, to keep yourself on track. I'm going to leave the link below. I created this so that you can start in the morning five questions in five minutes. You open up your phone, you answer the five questions that are there from the take five morning questions. Five questions, five minutes. You set a timer, that's it. You will get to where you will answer these very quickly. This will set the intention for the day. It will remind you of what you are doing. You're gonna anchor in what you need to be thinking. You're going to make today the day that you intend it to be. You are choosing how you want to show up, and that is as the future successful coach, the woman who has already built an incredible business. At night, you go for round two. You close out the day strong by looking at what went well. You give yourself gratitude for what you have done, right? You acknowledge that you are doing something that other women only talk about doing, and I want you to hear me on that. You are building a business and other people aren't, so congratulations on that. But at night, you do five minutes, five questions, that's it. I can tell you, grab this in the comments, do this for the next six months. Commit to it. It's five minutes in the morning, five minutes at night. Make a reminder on your phone so an alarm goes off and reminds you to do this. Six months, your business will not look the same. and you will not be the same. debbieshadid.com/take, and then it's the number 5. Not spelled out, but the number 5. debbieshadid.com/take5, the number 5. So next time you are feeling like your momentum is slipping, don't reinvent anything. Don't change what is happening in your business. Don't drop your price. Don't change your offer. Don't start in a whole new niche. Just come back to the basics. Show up like you have a business make your plan, work your plan, keep your offer, believe in your value, stay in your own lane, and manage your mind. The world needs what you have to offer, so get yourself back to work, and I will see you next time. Make sure you subscribe so you do not miss the next episode. I'll see you then. Have a beautiful week. Bye-bye.

Debbie Shadid https://www.DebbieShadid.com
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EP 370 - Building A Coaching Business That Fits Your Life