12 Business Growth Mistakes Keeping You Stuck — And How to Fix Them

11+ years coaching women entrepreneurs — here are the top mistakes capping growth, income, and impact (and how to move past them).

Today, I’m sharing a quick, but potent round up of some of the things I wish I’d known on my journey scaling this business.

Because while there’s truth in the adage that we don’t know what we don’t know, I also appreciate just how unhelpful it is to hear that, so my intention today is to share two things with you…

Some of the ways you may unknowingly be blocking yourself from stepping into that next season of growth, but also nuggets and things to consider to help you get there via the path of least resistance. 

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We often assume our challenges are unique. That we’re the only ones struggling with these things because of our specific circumstances. But after well over a decade of coaching women to start, build, and scale their businesses, I’ve seen how universal these roadblocks really are.

Business is relatively straightforward and the challenges that come up in different phases are largely the same.

What the most successful entrepreneurs know is the value of leveraging solutions that have already been created to free themselves up to build momentum and apply their energy in more nuanced ways

So let’s dive in:

Here are some of the reasons your income and impact may be capped below your fullest potential right now:

1. When sales are slow, you create new things rather than spending the time to get better at selling what you already have. It means you end up going deep, having a lot of things, but nothing that actually moves you bottom line forward in a meaningful way long-term.

1. Your confidence in your offers is contingent on how many people are buying. Slow periods make you second guess offers that you know work and have already validated. Instead of refining your messaging and the way you sell, you simply add to your offers to make them ‘seem’ more valuable, which only compromises your profitability and the client experience (hello, overwhelm 👋🏾) and does little to address the underlying slow sales issue.
2. You’re clear on where you want the business to go and how you want it to support you but it’s causing you to skip steps. Instead of focusing on creating repeatable, reliable methods for attracting and converting ideal clients, you’re thinking about big picture scaling strategy, complex funnels and things that don’t actually stabilize the business you have today. Don’t get so swept up by the vision that you forget to attract and sell to your ideal clients today. Prioritize cash flow. Without consistent sales, you will be forever playing whack-a-mole and fire fighting when your cash flow dries out. The only reason that the business owners you’re looking at are able to spend more time in visionary CEO mode is because they have a team and structures that sustain the business while they’re off thinking about what’s next.
3. Which leads me to the next point: you’re trying to follow blueprints rather than getting clear on how you want to do things, what’s best for YOUR clients and what the data in your business is telling you to prioritize. Stop looking externally to source your ideas or to validate what you want to do. In those moments, go inwards. A big part of building a business is about cultivating your ability to lead. You can’t lead if you’re delegating your decision making to people and factors outside of yourself. Take your power back, create space to hear yourself think and orient your business around what success looks and feels like for you. If you don’t like how your business feels right now, that’s on you. Find mentors and coaches that align with how you desire to do things but take radical responsibility by proactively deciding what you implement and is for you, and what isn’t.
4. You haven’t learned how to switch from leveraging your time to leveraging your money and it’s making you spend time doing things that, while important, are not the most impactful uses of your time. Just because you can whip up a sales page or address that student inquiry doesn’t mean that you should and it’s probably compromising your energy, too. Working hard is what got you here, but exercising strategic restraint is what will get you to the next level. Remember, investing in team members is like investing in a revenue stream. Protect your time for revenue driving tasks by delegating anything that doesn’t require you or your expertise to someone else. If you wouldn’t pay a team member your salary to do it, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Simple.
5. You’re not using leverage. The quickest way for me to explain is using an analogy, so think of a farm. One person uses a tractor for their work, the other doesn’t. What do you think the difference of output is going to be? That’s the power of leverage. It allows you to get 10x results from the same amount of work. Team is a form of leverage. But you also want to think about leverage with selling and marketing. Having 1:1 sales calls, for example, isn’t the most leveraged way to make a sale. Why say something to one person that you can say thousands. Start challenging yourself to think about ways you can create intimacy (the marketing piece) and make people feel safe and confident to buy (the sales part) at scale and without you. Nail that and the opportunities are endless.
6. You don’t have a real business model yet. What you’ve been likely doing is responding to opportunities and being reactive. People want X? Let me give it to them. Someone asked for Y kind of package, so why not. It’s a sale, right? Well, no. Making one-off sales helps in the beginning – it gets you working with clients and building evidence that you generate sales – but it’s not what creates a sustainable, life-first business. Doing so requires intentionally thinking about things like income potential and scalability of certain offers, your capacity and season of life, your skillset and where you want to spend the majority of your time within your business. Put simply, you need to know what you’re building and why and a business model will help you create that North Star to focus your efforts.
7. You haven’t learned how to manage your money. Most people I meet want to make more money but don’t actually know how to “hold” the money they have right now. If you haven’t got a firm grasp on your cash flow, operating expenses (meaning how much it costs you to pay yourself and keep the lights on), profitability and things like your monthly recurring revenue, now is the time to get intimate with the numbers. What you don’t look at or understand cannot grow and there gets to a point where you can simply outearn the skill gap in the money department. You’ll find that no matter how much money you make, you won’t be able to hold it. 
8. On that note, you’re unable to sustain more money because the infrastructure isn’t there. First things first, where would the slew of new customers come from? Is that piece dialed in? And what offers are they coming into? How scalable are those offers? Do your working hours scale as those offers scale? And who’s taking care of these customers? How are you guaranteeing a seamless customer experience and delivery of the offer promise? It’s one thing to achieve a result once; it’s another thing entirely to have the infrastructure and systems to do it again and again – with or without you.
9. You want business growth but you also want to remain comfortable. It usually goes something like this: you’re working towards a revenue goal or enrollment number, which requires you to think about your business differently and uplevel (which, by the way, is the magic behind big goals). In the very moments you should be leaning into that growth edge, you make decisions in line with the business that you currently have, rather than the version you’re desiring to step into. You contract, when you should be expanding. Your need for comfort is stronger than your desires. It’s in these very moments that we need mentorship. Our brains will always default to what feels safe and comfortable, which is why we need a container that will lovingly lead us through these initiations so we can think clearly and strategically. 
10. You’re living for results, rather than becoming focused on the process. I know it’s annoying to hear but when you sign up for entrepreneurship, you’re signing up to continually do hard things. If you’re only interested in results, you will spend more time having to motivate yourself to keep going after every blip than using the data and feedback to refine your process moving forward. In business, there really is no such thing as failure; there’s only feedback. We fail forward by collecting those data points and utilizing the insights. Only then can we create the outcomes we want. So the question to sit with is: how long can you remain committed to a goal without telling a story about why you haven’t hit it yet or abandoning it altogether but it triggers you. I’ve shared this before and I’ll share it again: It took me almost 2 years of actively working towards a six figure month before it actually happened. Two years! Could you do that? Falling short of your goals will always happen. We will always be in the “messy middle” in some area of our business. Take the pressure off, set and forget the goal and commit to perfecting the process.
11. You’re only using one way to attract clients and drive sales and most likely it’s posting on social media. Client flow is unpredictable and you may feel like you’ve exhausted your existing audience. You’re waiting for a unicorn to come out of nowhere and DM you to buy or magically find a link and purchase and posting more or selling harder feels like the only way to handle the unpredictability of it all. Therein lies the problem. While there’s a lot of power in refining your social media strategy, simply waiting and crossing your fingers that someone is going to find your post, follow you and buy feels disempowering and it is. It leaves you in that pending, “choose me” energy. The solution? Diverse where your client flow is coming from. UNCUT members, check out the training all about traffic sources as I go into in detail in those episodes. I said this to a client recently so I’ll offer it to you, too. If {insert revenue goal} was your 0 (in other words, your financial baseline), what would you be doing that you’re not doing right now? Would you be hoping that someone discovers you and buys or would you be approaching your marketing differently? What would that look like? Play in that energy and see what comes up. There’s a whole world outside of social media that you can use to grow your sales in sustainable but effective ways.