162 - What to Do When Your Business is Not Working
Is your business stuck in a rut? Ever felt like you're putting in all the effort but not seeing the results you desire? I've been there with some of my clients too. As a coach, I understand the importance of having open and honest conversations about the obstacles that hinder your progress. If you've recently found yourself saying, "My business is not working," or if you've shared these words with others, then this episode is perfect for you.
This week, we’ll dive deep into the challenges that many coaching businesses face and some practical strategies to help you break free from the rut and rekindle your business spark. Learn to prioritize useful work, optimize your time, and manage expectations effectively. Leverage the power of self-coaching to help you create thoughts that will make your business grow.
If you want to make a living through serious life-changing work, make sure to tune in until the end of the episode. Stop wasting any more time. Are you ready to take the leap toward a journey of growth, success, and unlimited possibilities? Let's do this!
👉 Create a profitable business that that looks good and sets you up to be respected through the Fast Track Business Building Boutique Program
👉 Check out my FREE Canva Workshop and learn how to create stunning graphics for your coaching business!
Transcript
Preview: Check in with yourself. Maybe the reason why your business is not working is because you are not allowing it to work with the way you're thinking. Maybe your business is not working cuz you don't even believe it's possible for you. Maybe your business is not working because you have guilt over leaving a job that you shouldn't have lost, because you have guilt over taking time away from your family to build your dream, because you don't feel worthy about being able to do what it is you want to do, because you've spent money out of your family's investment accounts and you think, uh oh, I shouldn't have done that. Whatever those things are, clean that up.
Intro: Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.
Hello. Hello. How are you? I wonder if you have said recently to yourself, my business is not working. You guys said that to yourself or told somebody else, your business is not working? Well if this is you, this podcast is for you.
I first wanna start out by asking you to check in with yourself and let's be honest. Are you actually working on your business? And maybe you are like a lot of the women that I talk to and you say, well, my God, yes, I'm working on my business seven days a week. I suspect if you're working seven days a week, your family and your friends are super aggravated with you. They probably are saying things like, what in the world is she doing in her office all the time? I have to tell you. I know that I've been in that same position where my husband was saying, what is it that you do up there all day long? So let me ask you, are you really working? And I wanna define work as busy work or real work.
Yeah, let's get honest here. Are you studying and calling that work? Studying on things that you don't actually need to be studying on? What happens is, is that people are studying and they're preparing, but they are not marketing, they're not looking for people. That's the difference between busy work and real work. Once you know how to coach and you've been through your training, which probably you have, probably more than one training, then the real work starts. The real work is where you are actually looking for people to talk to where you're actually doing the marketing consistently that you need to do. The real work is when you're actually teaching somebody the concepts that you either learned in life coaching or whatever modality, whatever coaching style you do. There are so many different certifications now, so many different kinds of coaching, and in fact, you guys know you don't need a certification to be a coach. So are you actually teaching or are you just studying?
Are you actually learning or are you actually executing on what you've learned? Are you actually watching things on how to do Instagram? Are you actually doing it? You're either gathering opinions from your peers, from your friends who know nothing about coaching. Don't ask your family and your friends what they think because they don't know about the coaching industry.
Ask yourself, you probably know or get an expert that can answer the question for you. Then you wanna check truthfully, check in on your time. I would recommend that you do a time study. So if you think your business is not working, look and see where you're spending your time, and I suspect you're gonna find out that you are spending a lot of time on things that probably are not producing you the right results, or you are giving yourself too much time to do something.
I always tell people that I want you to be coaching on something that you already know so well that you don't have to read anything about it, right? Don't try to get a niche or teach on something that you have to go verify to make sure the information is correct or that you have to go look up all kinds of statistics and extra information to be able to support what it is you wanna teach.
Teach on things and coach on things that you already know. The reason for this is because your marketing is easy then. Then when you go to write an email, writing the email is not the problem. Now, maybe you still have to learn the technology. That's where I come in. I'll help you with that. But do things that are easy for you.
So you might be wasting a lot of time right now, like reading lots of books, looking for quotes to do, all kinds of evidence to add to something that you wanna do in your marketing. Just do it. Don't look anything up. Just talk from your heart. Talk from the knowledge that you've already learned and put your marketing out there to the world.
Your social media posts, your email, your workshop, whatever it is you're gonna do. That would be the first thing. Then we wanna look and see what is necessary work and what is the work that you think you should do. And I will tell you, I just caught myself doing that. I have had this list of things that I wanted to accomplish that I thought were so important, and even in the stage of business that I'm at, some of the things that I thought were important were actually almost just buffering, right?
They were keeping me from doing more marketing, from asking for more coaching opportunities, for doing more workshops, for doing more of those things where I would be in front of people, I actually thought that things like writing an email series for my clients would be the thing that should take priority over talking to more people.
That's not it, you guys. You have to check and see was that necessary work or was that just work that sounded like it was good? In my case, my clients have always been working with me without these emails. So yeah these emails that support their growth in my coaching will be helpful, but it's not necessary.
So just check and see what you're telling yourself is necessary and what's not. So that could involve, like, I have to keep working on my website updates. I have to create a, fancy worksheet where you could just do a simple checklist. Now it depends on where you're at in your business. Maybe you have a full client load already and these fancy worksheets are gonna be helpful. But if you are in the growing stage, which I know you are, cuz you're listening to a podcast to learn how to do that, then all of the fancy stuff is probably just excuses that are keeping you from building your business.
I want you to be thinking about the social media that you do. Some of you guys are spending so much time working on reels that are not actually getting you any further. Now, maybe you have had a reel that you've done that you spent a lot of time on that did produce great results, so congratulations. But I would rather have you consistently exposing yourself on social media than spending so much time and effort working on one social media reel.
And what happens is most of my clients who kind of go all in on the reels, they're basically spending their whole week trying to create reels, and that is only one tiny part of your business, right? You guys know that I talk about wanting you to be in multiple places, not just social media, but I also want you emailing, doing workshops, working on opt-ins, networking, meeting people, all those other pieces are part of what you're doing, your marketing. Then I want you to be assessing the marketing that you're doing, really considering what is actually working and what's not.
Look, if you are just doing marketing and checking it off your list, like, all right, I wrote my email this week, done. I wrote my social media, done. That is not probably effective marketing. You wanna make sure that you're writing it and taking the time, not over time, but taking enough time to write something that is actually interesting and that's gonna make a difference. It's not just a task to check off the list. So when you assess your marketing, look and see what's really working. Look and see the mindset that you had when you created the marketing. Mindset is a big piece of whether your business is working. Look and see, what needs to change. And you only change one thing at a time in your marketing.
Let me tell you if you wanna make changes to your website, you change one thing, like the headline. That's it. We'll never know what's gonna create a better result for you if you change everything. You wanna document what you change so we can see how it works. And let me just tell you a change that you make in your business like a niche change, narrowing your niche or changing your mind on something, you don't find an answer to that in a week. You find an answer to that in 90 days or in six months after you have made the change, and you're doing something consistently for a long period of time. So we can get evidence on whether something is working.
And the same is true if you're just starting your business, you guys. If you're starting your business and you're saying it's not working, And you have not done 60 social media posts and you've not done 10 emails, then I would say we're doing something wrong. You gotta do more of those. What's not working is you haven't done enough.
Let's do enough marketing to see if your niche is right first. And let me tell you, I think just about any niche is probably right. What needs to get right is your marketing message. What needs to get right is where you're marketing, how often you're marketing what needs to get right is your mindset. Probably your niche is right. It's just all the ways that you're speaking to your niche that isn't right. I want you to stop looking for answers everywhere else. And again, I want you to start trusting your own instinct. So often you are given this little God given nudge of what to do, and you don't do it, right?
You guys know. You're standing in the shower and you've got a moment to yourself and you're like, wow, I have a great idea. I'm gonna go write this social media post, or I'm gonna go live and I'm gonna do this, or I'm gonna send this email and then you don't do it. You are given what it is you need to do. You just have to decide to take action on it. What happens is that you come to your office after that shower moment where you know what you wanna do, and you start overthinking it. You overcomplicate it. You think, oh, I'll do it tomorrow. I'm not made up yet. I'll do it tomorrow instead of today. Or I'll expand on that idea. Or maybe that wasn't such a good idea. Stop it. When you get a good idea, take action on it.
I want you to be willing to spend money on coaching. If you are not building your business, it's because you don't know what to do. It's because you need accountability. It's because you have doubts, you've got questions that need answers. Another course will not give you answers. Most of you guys are waiting for somebody to give you the specifics and tell you what to do and look. I do that all day long with my clients. I don't guarantee a home run, but when I give somebody an answer, it usually gets 'em moving.
It gets them from stuck into action. Maybe it is the self coaching that you need to be doing. Like let's do some self coaching and look at what you're thinking about your business. Maybe deep down you're thinking like, I don't really know if I can coach on what I wanna coach on. I'm not even really sure if people will pay me. I'm not even sure if people value me. Sometimes I have clients, we do all of the work together and they're not getting to where they want to go, and then I have that candid conversation about what do you think is going on? And then they'll admit to me that they're just not really sure about their own coaching.
They're just not sure if people should really pay 'em what they're asking for. And guess what you guys, if you have thoughts like that, you're human first of all. But if you have thoughts like that, that is destroying your chances for making your marketing effective. So you can do all the things that I tell you to do ,but if we don't get the mindset piece straight, you're not gonna have the results that you want.
Now, if you work with me, we have a mindset coach that looks at those thoughts, and I am looking at your thinking all the time too. So I'll call you out on what an issue said so that you can have awareness of how you might actually be blocking all the marketing that you're doing by some thinking that you have about your inability or about you deserving to be paid or about, you know, what you think other people think about you being a coach. All right, so I want you to look at your thinking. I want you to spend time working on yourself coaching. I want you to work on creating thoughts that will make your business work.
So if you think your business is not working, guess what? It's not. What you think about, you bring about, so what you decide how you want to be thinking about your business, what thoughts you can practice every day. Not unbelievable thoughts, but believable thoughts.
I've said it many times on this podcast, but I'm gonna tell you again that word possibility. That is what really fills the gap for me, and maybe it will for you too. Instead of saying, I'm gonna make a million dollars, you say, you know, it is possible that I could learn how to have a business where I make a million dollars. I suspect if you start saying sentences like that, like it's possible that what I'm doing right now is working, you will feel like less restricted.
We wanna have a feeling that aligns with what we're saying. We wanna feel inspired, like it's possible. Say that to yourself and just check in and see if you get kind of a bubbly sensation and excitement in your chest. I don't know how it's gonna show up on you, but check in and see if possible, like it's possible. It's all working. See how that makes you feel? Whatever the thoughts are that you need to be practicing, find thoughts that make you feel excited and start practicing those every day. And then do the self-coaching.
If you do a thought download or a brain dump, and you get all of the thoughts that you have about why your business is not working onto a piece of paper, and you start to look at those thoughts, I am going to guess that it could be that half of your page is filled with crappy thoughts. I actually had a client do that for me this week, and when I read the thoughts that she was thinking, and I know when she read the thoughts that she wrote down, right?
When you write 'em down and you look at them, it's like, dang, if I'm thinking that, is that even true? If I'm thinking that and I'm being honest with myself, how could I grow a business? So look at your thoughts. When I looked at your thoughts, I was like, oh my gosh. Like I can't even teach you anything about growing your business until we address these thoughts right here.
So check in with yourself. Maybe the reason why your business is not working is because you are not allowing it to work with the way you're thinking. Maybe your business is not working cuz you don't even believe it's possible for you. Maybe your business is not working because you have guilt over leaving a job that you shouldn't have lost, because you have guilt over taking time away from your family to build your dream, because you don't feel worthy about being able to do what it is you want to do, because you've spent money out of your family's investment accounts and you think, uh oh, I shouldn't have done that. Whatever those things are, clean that up. You will not be able to build your business if you think you made a mistake by doing what you've done.
All right? You cannot put positive thoughts on top of that. You've got to work through that and get to the point where you're deserved to invest in yourself, that you're worthy of having the opportunity to build the business that you want to build. So I suspect that more than anything, your business is probably not working because of your thinking.
Let me ask you now about your expectations. Maybe your expectations are too high. Maybe it's like too high too soon based on the fact that you've never been in business before. So many of the women that I work with, they never imagined once that they would ever be in business. I have conversations with them and they say, guess what? I'm in business. I have an LLC, and it's like, no, that's not a business. That's just a piece of paper that you got from you know, the state of wherever you live. That piece of paper is not a business. A website is not a business. A business is many pieces and parts put together.
But what a coaching business is, is you telling people about your coaching. It's you connecting with people. It's you meeting people, it's you talking about your offers over and over. That is what business is. It's the energy of you doing it. It's not a piece of paper. It's not the website page. It's not your social media post. You bring the business right with the way that you show up. So maybe your expectation is too high.
If you have never been in business before, my goodness, you have to learn how to be in business. You have to learn the skill of business. You have to learn what it takes to build a business, to market a business, to have profit in a business, to make smart CEO business decisions. So many of the people that you look at in your online business sort of arena that you're measuring yourself against have been in business for years. They did not make a million dollars overnight. If you go back and look and see what they've done, they've been in business for a long time. so you've got to give yourself that same amount of time.
I suspect that you're being impatient. I'm not sure why you think it would be different for you, and I'm sorry I'm giving the hard truth here. I'm not sure why it would be different for you, like you should be able to get to hundreds of thousands of dollars in no time when it took everybody else several years to get there. So let's be truthful. Can you build a business? Absolutely. Can you build it fast? Absolutely. Anything is possible.
All right, let's talk about your niche. Maybe you need to narrow your niche. If you find yourself wanting to be available for everyone, and you're saying, I just wanna be a general coach and I wanna help everyone, let me tell you what, you're not gonna be able to help anyone, right?
You have to narrow your niche down enough so that you're not just selling something that's unrelatable to somebody. Remember, I say that I want people to raise their hand, like, oh my gosh, she is talking to me. They've read your marketing message, and they're super clear that you're talking to them. If your marketing is not that clear and it doesn't show 'em what the problem is and you're not able to share the solution, then you need to narrow your niche down smaller than what it is.
Also, I want you to be honest. Are you selling to a niche that's fluffy? Like they don't really need to buy coaching to solve that? It would just be fun, all right? If you're selling something, that would just be fun, you better sell it to people who have just for fun money, who have just for fun time, that they're willing to give you their money and their time to do something just for fun.
All right. If you wanna make a living and you're going to do serious life-changing work, you have to tune into your message. You have to double up or triple up on your efforts. When we talk about going all in, it really is going all in. So take a moment right now. I want you to take a moment and think about the things you've accomplished in your life.
And I want you to think about what it took for you to accomplish it, cuz I want you to apply that same concept to what you're doing in your business. For some of you guys who have wanted to lose weight, you've been trying your last 20 years to lose weight. You've tried every single kind of diet, you've lost the weight, you've gained it, you've lost it, you've gained it, right? And at some point, maybe you conquered it.
That's the same way with building your business. Investments, I can give you so many examples of what is up and down, up and down, up and down. Investments are. If you go and you look at the stock market, it goes up and down, up and down. But over time, when you play the long game and you go and look, if you guys have stocks, investments, you'll see it actually goes consistently up.
There'll be dips down and dips up, but it actually has this angle that goes consistently up. The same thing can happen for your business. Think about paying off your home. You have this mortgage that you're taking all these years to pay off your home. You consistently pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, pay it off.
Why are you not doing that in your business? When you build a home, you start with a foundation. You put up the walls, you start picking things out. You start taking steps. That is the work that we do inside the business building boutique. We start with the foundation, we put up the walls. We put it up in order, step by step, so it's solid, right?
So it can withstand anything. Then you start picking out the interior. Then you start, you know, inviting people to come in. It's the exact same thing as building your business. You do not build a home in a few months, and if you do, it's probably gonna get blown over. If you build a really good quality home, it takes time, but that quality home withstands the test of time. That's what's gonna happen with your business.
Now I wanna talk to you about the 50-50. This is one of my favorite concepts from the Life Coach school that I learned, and that is just the reminder that life is 50-50. We are not meant to be happy a hundred percent of the time. And if you are, it's completely unrealistic and the same applies to your business. Your business is not going to be like, Blowing up day after day after day because you know why? It's not sustainable for you even. So if life is 50-50, 50% of the time, things are incredible, 50% of the time things are okay.
That's the balance of life. 50% positive, 50% negative. The same goes for your business. Half the time, you're gonna be super inspired. You're gonna be taking strides, everything's gonna be working. Half the time, you're like, eh, it's kind of working. I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe when you say your business is not working, if you are truly working in your business, maybe you're just on the 50% of the time that's kind of like, eh, it's not working great right now. And nothing has gone wrong.
Now I wanna challenge you, get some help. If you think your business is not working, get some help. Stop spinning. Stop wasting any more time. Do not be that person who reaches out to me two years from now and is still in the same place that you were today. You can get this solved literally in just a few weeks time. You can be on your way to knowing exactly what you're doing in your business. You can be on your way to marketing your business to hosting workshops like I do, right? To building your audience, to launching group programs, to be having more paid clients. So work with me, stop spinning, get the help you need.
All right, you guys, that is it. If your business is not working, I'm gonna help you solve it. So let's have a conversation. You guys have an amazing week. Be honest with yourself and do the self-coaching you need and I'll see you later. Thanks guys.
Outro: Okay, ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week. I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.