This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors in spelling or inaccuracies in the spoken words.
Shauna Lynn Simon (01:51.0)
Hello and welcome to the Real Woman Real Business Podcast. I'm your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And today I want to talk about one of the most common and most expensive mistakes that I see business owners make. I know I've talked about a few different mistakes on this show that I've highlighted that cost business owners a lot of money. But this one is something that I've really been seeing a lot lately. So I really wanted to dedicate today's episode to this. Here's what I'm seeing. So business owners, they're stuck, right? Revenue is not growing, clients are not coming in the way they should be.
And something's basically just not clicking. Now, instead of diagnosing what's actually wrong with their business, she starts improving things. So she redoes her website, she launches a new offer, she hires someone, she invests in a new course or training, and she builds out her onboarding process. Then she wonders why nothing is changing. Cause listen, she's busy every day and she feels like she's being productive because she is actually moving things forward that are important to the business, but she's not getting revenue.
And she's working on tasks that are not actually supporting that. So the problem is almost never what she's working on, right? The problem is that she picked the wrong thing to fix. So sure, she's busy. And yes, the things that she's working on, super valuable to the business. Absolutely. But today what I want to do is give you a framework for actually figuring out what's really broken in your business so that you can stop spinning your wheels and start putting your energy into the right place that actually needs fixing. So I'll start with a bit of a story. So
Had a client who came to me because she wasn't getting enough clients. Her calendar was not full. The revenue that she was getting was super inconsistent. And she was so frustrated because she had felt that she is genuinely putting in the work. And she was, don't get me wrong. But in her first conversation, she told me one of the things she really wanted my support with, and one of things she really wanted to work on was her welcome book. So this is the document that she sends to every new client when they first sign on with her. And she had been spending a lot of time refining it.
Making it more detailed, more polished, which is fantastic. I mean, this is a great document to have. I loved that she had a welcome book. So I asked her though, when does the welcome book go out? She said, after someone becomes a client. I said, okay, so if the problem is that you're not getting enough clients, why are we working on the welcome book? She's like well, I, you know, I want to be ready when they come in. Sure. But shouldn't we focus first on getting more clients in? She had been so focused on improving.
Shauna Lynn Simon (04:17.376)
That onboarding experience that she forgot that the problem was upstream. She needed to get the clients in there first. The welcome book was not the bottleneck. It was not even close to being the bottleneck. It was just the thing that felt safe and productive to work on. And yes, it was something that was on the hit list that will help to benefit the business long term and would be a valuable asset to have. Absolutely. But this is what happens when we fix what is easy instead of what is broken. When something is not working.
And we feel that pressure to do something, we reach for what's visible, what's familiar, what is the least uncomfortable thing that I can possibly tackle right now. Redoing your website, that feels like progress. Building out your systems feels like progress. Learning a new skill feels like progress. And they might all genuinely be useful things eventually. But if you are doing them while the actual bottleneck still sits untouched.
Then you're just getting busier without actually getting anywhere. And I see this constantly. Business owner that invests months into a new offer launch when the real problem is that not enough people even know that she exists. You can launch this offer, but if you don't have people knowing that you actually exist, you're not going to sell it to anyone. Or she spends weeks building out this beautiful referral system when she doesn't yet have enough clients that can actually refer anyone. Or she hires a virtual assistant to take things off her plate. But the thing that is
Actually, off her plate now is the business development that she should have been doing herself. So the work feels productive. The needle doesn't move though. And after a while, she starts wondering what if the problem is actually her. And it's not. It's just that again, we keep fixing the wrong thing. It's the order of the operations that she's working in here. So here's the framework that I want to give you. Before you touch anything else in your business, before you touch your pricing, your systems, your team, your operations, any of it.
You need to make sure that the revenue engine is working. Okay, let me repeat that. Before you touch anything in your business, you need to ensure that the revenue engine is working. You can have beautiful systems in a team that you love, but if money is not reliably coming in, none of that gets you very far. And I say that having worked with business owners at very different stages, the ones who try to build infrastructure before they had revenue.
Shauna Lynn Simon (06:40.918)
stability always end up having to rebuild it anyway once the business actually does find its footing because it wasn't serving their actual clients properly because they based it on hypothetical clients and hypothetical needs. In my experience though, most revenue problems trace back to a breakdown in one of three places. And these things work in sequence too, which means that you do need to actually diagnose them in sequence because again, if one thing's not working, that's going to travel further downstream as well.
So let's go upstream first. So the first is visibility. Are the right people finding you? Do they know that you exist? Do they understand what you do? And do they recognize that you can solve a problem that they actually have right now? That's what I mean by saying the right people. This is the foundation. Without this, nothing else works. Now the second one, all right, let's assume the right people are finding you. The second one is the conversion then. If they're finding you, are they saying yes?
Are they moving from interested to actually being a paying client of yours? I'm not talking about someone that you had a casual conversation with when you first came up with your business idea and they're like, yeah, yeah, that sounds great. I would totally buy that, but have zero intention of actually buying it. In fact, they're not even your right client. But even if they are the right person, they don't actually have any interest in moving forward with it. And so if that's the case, where are they falling off? If they're not moving from interested to being that paying client, where are they falling off?
Where's the disconnect for them? And then the third thing then is delivery. Now listen, from day one, I want someone to have a fantastic experience with you. But if you don't even get people coming in and you can't convert them to saying yes, it does not matter how fantastic your service actually is when you deliver it. So we got to fix those two things first. But let's say we fix those two things now. So people are finding you, they're saying yes. Now the next question I want you to ask yourself if revenue is still inconsistent is are they coming back?
Are they referring others to you? Is the experience good enough to create momentum all on its own? Because if they didn't have a great experience, they're not sending someone else to you. And that doesn't do you any good because then you're not getting that predictability. So the reason that this sequence matters is that you can't shortcut it, right? There's no point of spending energy on conversion if people find you aren't even the right fit in the first place. You end up kind of twisting yourself all up into knots into a total pretzel, essentially, in order to try to.
Shauna Lynn Simon (09:06.1)
Sell something to someone who doesn't actually need it because they don't have the problem you're trying to solve. And there's no point in polishing your client experience if you don't even have a steady flow of clients coming in to sustain the business. So fix the first broken link in this chain. Then you move to the next one. So let's talk about how you actually figure out which stage is yours. So let's start with the visibility. I want you to ask yourself honestly: am I getting in front of the right people consistently? Are people who
Find me actually the clients that I want to work with. And am I generating any leads at all, even if they're not converting? Is anyone calling me? Even if they're the wrong fit, is the phone ringing? And I know I'm saying that figurative phone, because let's face it, a lot of times this is text, email, WhatsApp, you know, various different ways that they're coming into your orbit, but it's not necessarily the phone ringing, but it's still, you know, it's a figure of speech. Is the phone ringing? And if the honest answer to most of these questions is no.
You have a visibility problem. And that is the most important one to solve first, because nothing downstream is going to work without it. Now, a useful way to think about visibility is not just volume, because I think we think about this with visibility. I just need to post more social media posts. I just need to get out there more. I just need to talk to more people. You can be highly visible to the wrong people and still feel invisible to the market that you actually want to serve.
So your visibility didn't increase just because you got in front of more people if they're not the right people. I had a client recently who raised her minimum project fee pretty significantly and it made a real difference. But the fee was not the real issue. Her positioning had been attracting people who could not actually afford the full scope of what she does. So we could fix the minimum so that when people are coming in, she's able to kind of sift out the ones who can't actually afford her.
Sure, that was helpful to raise that minimum fee. But then we also had to look at why are so many of the wrong people actually finding you in the first place and thinking that you're going to be the right fit for them. So her positioning had not been attracting people who could not afford the full scope of what she does. Now, frankly, for the scope of what she does, for the fee that she was charging, at no point should she actually even have to say that she has a minimum fee. Because if she's attracting the right people, they're not going to care if she has a minimum fee. In fact, saying
on her website in big bold letters what her minimum fee actually is was deterring the clients who actually could afford her services because now it looks like she caters to all budgets and they're looking for someone who specifically caters to their type of budget. Right. So she was doing the work but for the wrong clients and at a price that was just not sustainable. So once we got clear on who she was really trying to reach and make sure those people were actually finding her, everything else shifted. Suddenly the budgets were available. So it looked like a pricing problem for her.
was a visibility and targeting pricing in disguise. And I want you to sit with that for a moment. Okay. I want to make sure that this is landing with you because a lot of what looks like a pricing problem or a sales problem, even a motivation problem, can sometimes actually be chalked up to a visibility problem. The wrong people in the room will make every other part of your business harder than it needs to be. So now let's say visibility is solid. Okay. We know we're getting the right people in. They're definitely right fit.
There are definitely people who have our problem. They want it solved. So your leads are coming in, but they're not saying yes. So that's a conversion problem now. Again, you got to go back to the first part of it and make sure you're getting right people. But the visibility is sound. You're getting the right people in. Conversion usually breaks down one of three pieces. It's what you're offering. So, number one, what you're offering. Is it solving a problem they are actively trying to fix right now? Or are you solving a problem that they agree exists, but are not urgent about it? And how are you talking about it? So that's the first one. So
Shauna Lynn Simon (13:54.282)
If they've got this problem, but they don't believe that it's urgent to fix, you're not going to get them to move on it. Okay. So they have to not only have the problem, but agree that it needs to be fixed right now. And you can help to create some of that urgency, help them to understand why it's a problem that needs to be fixed right now. Let me give you a great example. One of the things that I do is I actually help home staging business owners to sell their home staging business. Here's the problem: is that if I just tell them, if I'm marketing saying I'm going to help you sell your staging business, you know who's not going to pay attention to that?
Is anyone who's not interested in selling their staging business now. Now, if I position that and I say that I help you to ensure that you have a valuable business to sell in two to three years, because that's when I need to get my ideal clients. Now I'm attracting the person who's saying, I want a business that I can sell in two to three years. Now, if I take that a step further and I say that I'm gonna help you to create a business that is so valuable that when you sell it, you're gonna make your retirement money out of it.
And not only that, but it's going to pay you right now because it's gonna be more profitable now. And of course, I'm not using all the right verbiage necessarily for this because I'm kind of winging it and I do have these conversations regularly. And it's of course it flows a lot better when I'm actually having that conversation. But this is definitely off the cuff right now. But the point is that when I'm telling them now that you might not be selling your business for 10 years, but what if I helped you to build a very sellable business? And that same sellable business actually makes it easier for you to run it now and more profitable now. Now that urgency just became
A today problem for someone who may not be looking to sell their business for 10 years. So do you see where this disconnect can happen, right? Okay, so the first part of this is what you're offering. So is it solving a problem that they're actively trying to fix right now? Or are you solving a problem that they agree exists but isn't is not urgent about them? So we want to make sure they got that urgency there. The next part of this, the second one when it comes to conversion, the second place that I see things break down is how are you actually talking about it?
So are you describing features and deliverables or are you speaking to what the client actually gets and why it matters to them? Again, going back to my example of helping people to sell their staging businesses, I am going to help you to have a more profitable and easier to run business right now. Sounds really good, but it's still a little bit vague. But if I say to them, I'm going to help to eliminate the late night stress and about things because we're going to have your systems in place in a way that makes it so that your team can easily execute things without you.
Shauna Lynn Simon (16:12.3)
And so that you can actually make sure that not a single detail gets missed on your project. That feels more like I'm talking to the actual problem they have today, right? Problem is that what we often end up doing is we talk about features of the product or like the deliverables. Let's say an interior designer, for example, I'm gonna give you some concept boards and I'm gonna do a presentation. All that is great, but what do they actually get out of this in the end? Like that's what your services deliver, but what is the end result that they're actually getting? Okay. So that's number two. So
First one is what are you offering? Is it solving a problem they actively have that they agree needs to be fixed urgently? The second one is how are you describing it? How are you talking about it? Are you describing features or are you talking about benefits to it? Are you speaking to what the client actually gets and why it matters to them? And then the third one is who are you saying it to? So do those people have the problem? Do they want it solved? And do they have the means to invest in your solutions right now? So this goes back to the fit clients, but in conversion, this is gonna matter, right? If we're not talking to the right people.
we're gonna have a conversion issue. Now, most people immediately assume when they're not converting that the price is too high. And chances are that's probably one of the biggest objections they've received so far is that the price is too high. But again, if we've got the right fit clients, that shouldn't necessarily matter because pricing is rarely the first issue. It is usually the message or the match. And if people you're talking to are not the right people, even the perfect pitch will not land, right? So if leads are coming in and converting, we now need to look at delivery.
So people are saying yes, but they're not coming back and they're not referring others. Now, if you have the type of service or product that your goal is actually to make sure people don't come back, like if you are someone who deals with healing and you've healed someone, so they shouldn't need to come back to you unless they re-injure themselves or whatever. But if you've given them the tools that they need, like they're not coming back to you. But you should be getting referral business from them. If you've done that great of a job, you should be getting referral. So not every
Business operates in a manner where they can easily get repeat business, but all the more reason why referrals are so important. If you haven't checked it out already, check out the episode I did with Stacey Brown Randall, where she talks all about referrals as a marketing strategy. And if you want to get into a bit more of a referral type of program, that's not what we're covering here today, though. But here's the thing: if people are saying yes, but they're not coming back, they're not referring people, something about the experience that they're getting is not matching what you promised. And
Shauna Lynn Simon (18:32.47)
Not necessarily dramatically, but enough that it's not creating the kind of momentum that you actually need. And this is where you look at what actually happens after someone says yes. What do they experience? What do they feel at the end of the engagement? Are they leaving with results that they can actually point to? Or are they leaving with a vague sense that it was, you know, just it was fine. It got the job done. It was good. Those are the jobs that no one's remembering your name. No one's talking about you afterwards. Whereas, like, I will tell you, I've got a sports therapist that keeps me running.
Anyone who's ever listened to this podcast, you've probably heard me talk about the fact that I am an avid runner. And one of my main goals is to make sure I'm always able to run. And to do that, I have a sports therapist that when I get the slightest injury, I'm going directly to him to fix me. One of his philosophies and his whole team's philosophy is that he would like to try to heal most injuries in three visits or less. Is that always possible? No. But I like knowing that their goal is not like a physiotherapist, for example.
No disrespect to physiotherapist if you're listening to this, but it's a different methodology. So physiotherapist is often saying, I want you to come back a few times a week. You're going to do 30 minutes worth of exercises every day, like these are the routines, yada, yada, yada. He has these very special techniques that I tell everyone about. The second someone tells me they have an injury that they can't seem to resolve, I'm sending them to him because I know his diagnostics is going to be able to help them to really pinpoint the root cause of their injury and help them solve it. Now, not only
Am I singing his praises when I'm perfectly healthy and sending so many people to him? But those people I send to him, they're having an identical experience to what I had, and they're sending more people to him. He does not need to do any marketing. I am doing most of it for him. Trust me. So this is the kind of business you want to make sure that you are delivering to someone. So you need to look at what's happened after someone has said yes. What do they experience? What do they feel at the end of that engagement? Are they leaving with results that they can actually point to? Like I am. I am being able to say,
I went to this guy with this injury. And within two weeks, that injury was completely gone. I was back to running my full distances at full stride, no problem. Right. So are they actually leaving with results that they can point to or are they leaving with a vague sense that it was fine? Like, you know, it kind of improved things. I think it got a little better. It's hard to say. Or did you simply just fail to make an impression? Okay. Because the work was done, but they weren't over the moon about it and didn't feel a major shift in their lives because of it. And I don't care what service you're offering.
Shauna Lynn Simon (20:57.152)
You can say that your service is not super impactful. It is in some way. And there is a way to make sure that you are memorable and that you are getting passed to the next person who needs your services. Delivery problems are absolutely worth solving, but they have to come after visibility and conversions are working because there is no point creating a remarkable client experience for a client base that is too small to even generate referrals in the first place. So once you've identified which stage is actually broken.
One more question I want you to ask before you start looking for a new tactic or a new approach. And that is, was there ever a time when this was working for you? Was there a time where leads seemed to come to you easier? Was there a time where people said yes more often? Most of the business owners I work with already have something that worked at some point. Maybe it was a referral approach that was bringing in steady clients. Maybe it was a networking habit that was generating real conversions. Maybe it was just the way that you talked about your offer that made people say yes.
pretty readily. And then somewhere along the way, they stopped doing it. Things shifted. Maybe they heard about a shinier strategy and they chased that. Maybe they decided that what they were doing was not scalable enough, which I understand, you know, things like networking and having some of those real conversations gets a lot more challenging when you do get more clients and as you grow. Or maybe they just drifted away from it because other things just took their attention. And because the results did not disappear immediately, they didn't necessarily notice the connection between what they were doing then versus now.
Until you know months later when the pipeline was already dried up for them. So before you build something new, I want you to look at what you might have stopped doing that might have been working. The answer to fixing these things is often not necessarily a new tactic. It's returning to something that already had traction and just giving it a little bit more consistent attention that it deserves. And that consistent attention, again, those networking things, it's not about attending six networking events in a week. Maybe you're attending one a month.
Depending on what type of business you're in, maybe that's enough for you. I actually do this in my own business. Everything that I have built has come from organic relationships, consistent presence, and showing up in the right rooms for the right people. I don't do paid ads. I don't have complicated funnels. Have I tried some of them? Yes. And I've spoken about this in previous episodes, that they never quite felt right for me. When I notice things slowing down, the first question I ask myself is where did I pull back from something?
Shauna Lynn Simon (23:18.562)
That was already working. And nine times out of 10, that's where the answer is actually hiding. And maybe you can't do that same strategy exactly the way that you had done it, but how do you apply that to a method or a scalable way that you can actually do it now? The strategy never stopped working. I just stopped working the strategy. Okay. So I did mention earlier that before we can look at all the things in your business, your pricing, your operations, your systems, et cetera, we need to make sure that the revenue engine is running smoothly. So now once we've got that running.
Nice, it's nice and healthy. So we've got the visibility, the conversion, and the delivery. All of those are fixed. All those are running nice and smooth. So we got the right people finding you. They're saying yes, they're coming back. This is now when the other layers of the business become worth addressing a bit more seriously. So your pricing, your systems, your team, your operations, these all matter. I'm not dismissing any of them, but in a lot of the businesses that I work with, there are real issues in these areas. But
Trying to fix them before the revenue engine is working is kind of like renovating your living room before you actually fix the roof. You're just going to have to redo it anyway. So there's no point in trying to build up a team that has more people on it, more overhead, if you don't have that consistent revenue. So you can hire that operations manager to take all sorts of things off your plate, but if you don't actually have people consistently coming in, that's not going to magically fix it. Now, if by hiring that operations manager that has freed you up,
To it fix the visibility, conversion, and delivery element of things, 100% that does make sense. But we want to make sure that it's actually going to contribute to fixing those things. So when money is coming in reliably, you actually have the clarity and the breathing room to make really good decisions about everything else. You can actually see whether your pricing is the issue or whether it was more of a symptom of a conversion problem.
You can figure out whether you need to hire someone or whether the real issue is that the wrong tasks were eating up your time. You can invest in systems that will actually get used instead of building infrastructure for a version of your business that has not yet found its footing. And this is where I see a lot of Accidental CEOs get stuck. They're building the business that they plan to have instead of stabilizing the business they have right now. The ambition is not the problem. The sequence is. Now listen, I get it. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.
Shauna Lynn Simon (25:36.088)
This is a saying that we are all familiar with, and I get that. So you want to start working on things and building that business, building that infrastructure to support the business that you want. I get all of that. But again, we need to make sure that the revenue engine is taken care of first and everything else comes after that. So before you go and rebuild your website or launch something new or hire someone else to fix it, I want you to stop and ask which stage it's actually broken. That one question will save you more time and money than almost anything else you do.
This year. Now, if you've been working hard and results are not showing up, you probably actually don't need to try one more thing. Instead, identify the part of the process that's failing or causing friction and address it. Now, I just walked you through three diagnostic questions that you can use on your own. And I do want to point you to something that does take this a little bit further. We have our Accidental CEO assessment, which is a tool that I built specifically for business owners like you who know that something's not working, but are not exactly sure where to look.
So it gives you a clear picture of where your business stands across the areas that matter. So instead of just guessing at where your bottleneck is, you actually know where it is. And honestly, for a lot of people who go through it, it's such a relief because you stop trying to fix everything at once and you get one clear place to start. Now the link to the assessment is going to be in the show notes, but if you go to simply aboutshaunalynn.com/CEOquiz
So aboutshaunalynn.com/CEOquiz. Again, we got the link in the show notes as well. This is free. It takes about 10 minutes and it will tell you more about where your business actually is than most of the con coaching conversations that I have had in the first session. Okay. If you take it and want to talk through what comes up, I am most happy to do that. But this is going to tell you more than what I could on a call. I don't get wrong, you and I can get on a call and I can help you to diagnose these things together as well.
But I feel like our time together on a call could be much better spent if you've already taken this assessment. And you can book a call with me directly at aboutshaunalynn.com/coachme. So if you're like, I already know exactly where I need some help, Shauna Lynn, I've already taken the assessment, or you've done your own assessment based on the questions I've given you here today. And you're like, I know where I could use some support, go ahead and book a call with me at about aboutshaunalynn.com/coachme. And we'll have a chat.
Shauna Lynn Simon (27:56.556)
Listen, that's a wrap for today. We covered a lot today. I know I've given you a lot to think about. I hope this gave you a bit of a clearer lens, though, for looking at your business, not just what needs to be done, but what needs to be done first. And of course, if this has resonated with you today, I do hope that you will continue to tune in each week. We drop new episodes every Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. Eastern time. And I hope that you will allow me to continue to be a part of your entrepreneurial journey because it is such a pleasure and honor to be a part of this with you.
Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform so that you get notified when new episodes drop. And if you've got a moment, it would mean the world to me if you could leave us a review wherever you get your podcast. It really does help the algorithm. It helps other people to find us and to see that this show is worth them paying attention to. And of course, as always, the best way that you can show your support, not only for this show, but for your fellow women entrepreneurs, is take this link to this episode, click the share button on it, and share it with someone that you know.
needs to hear this message today. You have probably watched her spinning her wheels, trying to chase the next big thing that's going to keep her productive, but it's not actually going to move the needle forward. And she needs to hear this. So share it with her. She'll be grateful that you did. And I know it would mean a lot to me as well. So thank you so much for tuning in today. Until next time, keep thriving.