This Is Why You're Stuck | 054

Profit doesn't happen by chance. It happens by design. Let's dig in. If you've ever set a goal for your business, a really big goal, and you've not hit it. You've missed it once, maybe twice, maybe even three times. This episode is for you. Most business owners think that they have a motivation

problem. If I could just make myself do it, I know what to do, if I could just do it. Or they think they don't have this shiny thing over there, or that system that someone else is using. They actually don't have these problems. They actually have a systems problem, and here's the truth, you do not rise to the

level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems, and a business cannot outperform its foundation. Today, I'm going to talk about all of this. We're going to dig into what happens with goals and systems and how that relates to your business, and see if your business is built on goals or on structure.

I didn't learn this by theory. I learned this the hard way. A few months into my business, I almost lost everything. I was dangerously close to losing it all, and it wasn't because I didn't work hard. I worked constantly. It wasn't because I didn't care. I had goals, big ones. I had revenue goals. I had

vision, growth goals. I had vision. What I didn't have was systems to put all of that to good use. Everything depended on me. I was the person wearing all of the hats and doing all of the things, and because I was doing it out of my head most of the time, how did I do it this way? Oh, I'm just going to do it this

way now, because that's efficient for the moment, and I didn't have any consistency to what I was doing. So my sales were inconsistent. I wasn't, you know was they were only happening when I pushed for them. I was not doing follow up. I was remembering that I needed to do follow up and then not

actually doing the follow up. Because I would forget. I would think about it on my drive home and not do it whenever I got to my desk, there wasn't a clear structure for the clients to come in work with us and then get their jobs back and pay us. There wasn't a clear system for that. So financially, everything

was up in the air, because nothing was consistent. So our results were inconsistent too, and that was the moment that I realized that this is not an effort problem, this is a structure problem. And then once I started building real systems, replicatable tasks, ways that I could do things consistently.

And this is how you know that you have a good structure in place, that it's consistent, that it's repeatable, and that it will make you money, is if you can take that system and give it to someone else who's not done your job before, and they can do it, that is a reliable system. So once we put

those systems in place, we went from less than $22,000 in the bank account to 22 we went from less than $2,000 in our bank account to six figures in 24 months, and multiple six figures in 48 months. And then eventually we sold that business for a profit, not because I suddenly became more motivated.

It wasn't about me being dedicated and motivated. It was about putting together a foundation in our business that made it strong, that made it replicatable, and that created the legacy. So what I say now is that you don't rise to your goals, you fall to your systems. Now I can hear what you're

saying, but Sharon, you say goals matter. Goals are important. You're always talking about goals. You love goals, absolutely. I absolutely love goals, yes, and I do think that they're critical. They're critical because if we don't know where we're going, we will never know if we've arrived. And

you know how it's like to run on a treadmill and you don't get anywhere. You could run for 10 minutes or an hour or two hours, and you can't judge how far you've gone, because you stayed in the same place. And the only thing that can tell you how far you got is the measurement that is available on your treadmill.

It will tell you how far you've run, right? That is a system. The goal is to run for 20 minutes. If you want to know how far you ran, you need the measurement on the treadmill. So that is the piece of the system. Goals are important. Goals are your motivation. They give you direction. They give you

something to aim for. But systems, systems determine what's going to happen on a Tuesday afternoon when you're tired, distracted or busy, and you know that it's true that those are the times when you forget to do what you know you're supposed to do, or you just don't feel like it, or you

get overwhelmed and you don't know where to start because you have so many things to do that you just can't make that first step. And that first step is the peace that will get you through the next step and the next step and the next step. Sometimes it's that starting point, right the starting line. Making that

first action is critical to moving into what you need to do. So if you have a system in place that you know you can say, Aha, all I need to do is step one, and then I know everything to do past that. That is powerful. That is what will get you through the tough times. That will get you through the

distraction and the busyness. Goals you see are aspirational. Systems are operational. Systems are foundational. You know, I once asked a whole room of business owners who would like to have more referrals, and you guessed it, every hand in the room went up. And then I asked, How many of you have a system in

place to consistently get those referrals? And you know what happened? Almost every hand went back down.

We all want results, but very few businesses have built a structure in place that produces those results consistently. You don't hit your revenue goals because you wanted it badly. You hit them because your business is built to produce it consistently. I worked with a business owner who was slammed

all the time. She was super busy. She was working really hard. Her calendar was full and she was exhausted, and she was not making a profit, but what she thought she needed was more time. She was like, if I just had more time to get these things done, if I had more time to to get sales in the door, if

I had more time to do the work, if I had more time, she also thought, Well, maybe it's clients. If I just had more clients, if more clients came in the door, then I would be able to be profitable. And then she thought, you know, maybe I just need to be charging more for what I do. Maybe my prices are

not right, but what she actually needed was more structure, because she wasn't tracking any of her work by profitability. She was quoting out jobs for different prices every time she quoted them out. She was doing custom work, and she did anything that anybody wanted. You have a job for me? Yes, yes,

I will do it. She was in that phase of her business where she just said yes to everything, and so she stayed busy all the time and didn't earn any profit when we cleaned up just two systems, we worked out a clear offer structure so she wasn't making it up on the spot. She had parameters around what she was

doing. And then a weekly Money review where she was consistently looking at her books. I know there are a lot of business owners out there who do not consistently look at their books. It's one of those things that we we kind of have that I don't I don't know what it's, right. I don't know what to do.

I'm going to hire a professional to look at them. Let me tell you what. You do not have to be a CPA to understand your books in your business. We can break it down to something really simple, so that you can consistently look at your books and be in in a place of knowledge of what's going on in your business

without having to be a CPA. It is not does not have to be that way. It does not have to be overwhelming. And I encourage you to be looking at your books. So we put those two changes in place. We cleaned up her offer structure. We got her weekly, looking at her, at her money, and her profit went up without

adding more clients, same person, same effort, stronger foundation. So a business can be very, very busy. You can have lots of work coming in the door, and you could still have an unstable business. And this, this is where the foundation comes in. The foundation is a collection of systems that hold

your business steady. And in my world, I call that the Seven Pillars of profit in your profit path, if you don't know your numbers, what? One slow month can feel like a crisis in the relationship journey, no follow up or referral systems mean that revenue is resetting every single month. In the thing that

you do, if every brought project that you do is custom, delivery becomes chaotic quickly in the joy quotient that is taking care of you. If the owner is exhausted and resentful, the business suffers and becomes fragile. The mission map, without clear direction, you chase anything and everything

and nothing can come back. Pound and you cannot make any traction. The connection compass, if your marketing only happens when you feel like it, leads, will be inconsistent. The Alliance engine, trying to do everything alone works until it doesn't and when the foundation is strong across these seven

areas, your business holds when it isn't pressure will expose it. Here's a simple question for you, where in your business are your results inconsistent, and what system is supposed to support those results? I was once working with a client, and I asked her why her sales were inconsistent, and she said,

because my leads are inconsistent. And so I asked her, please tell me about your lead system. And she looked at me, and she paused for a moment, and she said, I guess I really don't have one. That is where your frustration as a business owner comes from it comes from being inconsistent in doing

everything that needs to be done. There's no continuity. There's no rest in the structure. When you have a structure in place that actually creates confidence, rest and efficiency, when you don't have those things in place, you struggle, you're frustrated, and you get overwhelmed very, very

quickly when you when you expect consistency and have no structure, you have nothing to base that on. So here's what I want you to do this week. Don't set any more goals. You've set the goals. Let's for this week be have those goals in place, and those are the goals that you're going to work on. But

strengthen one system. Take a take a goal that you already have. Look at your systems and strengthen one thing, one follow up system, one referral process, one weekly Money review, pick one thing and do that and strengthen one system at a time, because small structural upgrades create big stability.

Remember, you don't rise to your goals. You fall to your structure, and a business will always perform at the level of its foundation. This is actually really good news, because systems can be built and foundations can be strengthened. So build the structure that holds the results that you want.

Your future business depends on what you put in place today. Build with clarity, lead with purpose, and I'll see you next time.