How To Save Your Business – Proven 5-Step Process

Probably the number one most mission-critical question that clients ask me is “Lucas, my business is starting to fail. How do I save it?”

I’ll be covering that in today’s video.

I view what I do in two frameworks

1. Doctor – Fix What Is Broken
   • I am like a doctor working on “acute problems.”
   • In this case, something is incredibly wrong.
   • Clients need a direct intervention to solve their problems now. It is an emergency.
2. Gym – Make It Less Likely To Break In The Future
   • I am also similar to a gym, which focuses on longer-term healing and results that will create resiliency.
   • Creating resiliency makes it less likely to have “injuries” or “sickness” in the future. There are no immediate threats but getting the business in shape helps reduce the likelihood of future problems.
   • For more information on some of the skills that can make you a more resilient business owner, check out my post on the 8 Key Skills an Entrepreneur Should Master.

Framing The Response

So when someone comes to me and says, “Lucas, my business is starting to fail, how do I save it?”

I view that as an acute pain response. They need me to come in there and give some support right away help them get right to the root cause and help them fix things.

Once the business is stabilized, we can start to work on some strengthening exercises (such as focusing on the 8 Key Skills an Entrepreneur Needs To Be Succesful) to reduce the risk of them ending up in that same position again, but first and foremost, there’s not a lot of time to waste.

If this is something that you are currently worried about, or worried about in the future, I’m going to outline this video my 5-Step Proven Process To Save Your Failing Business that you can either

• work through it on your own
• or with professional help

to work your way out of this scary loop that you might be getting stuck in.

How Did We End Up Here?

The first thing I’d like to recognize before I dive into these 5-steps is that your current Actions and history are what have gotten you to where you are right now.

Keeping up those same Actions is unlikely to change anything.

It will take new, adjusted Actions to have a new result.

I believe it was Albert Einstein who said something like “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.”

As the entrepreneur how do you know what types of Actions to actually adjust?

That’s going to be the focus of this video, providing a framework for evaluating where your Actions need to be adjusted.

How To Follow The 5-Step Proven Process

Defining The Problem

When someone asked me the question, “How do I save my failing business?” I want to first of all define what I’m talking about here.

This is a business that has been succeeding and is starting to show signs of losing that traction and growth.

That is a different question than “I’ve started a business. It’s not quite taking off.” That would be a different set of answers and a different approach and I will address that in a different post in the future.

There is some overlap, but in this video, I’m answering. “My business was working. It is working less well now. What do I do about that?”

Order Of Operations

Here are the specific processes and steps to follow.

They are in a very specific, clear order.

This order matters because, if you start with Step 1, and you get the problem figured out there, you just get to skip the next 4 Steps! Resolving Step 1 might put you right back up on track.

If that didn’t restore success properly, doing 1 and then 2 will get you there.

If that didn’t do it then 1-2-3 potentially will.

The Steps are in a specific order for a very specific reason.

So if you’re doing this self-diagnostically, start off at Step 1. Don’t skip it. Then work your way through each of the rest until you are back on track.

If you skip over following this, you’re going to create lots of extra work and problems for yourself.

The 5-Step Proven Process To Save A Failing Business

All right, so what are the five basic steps?

1. Don’t Panic
2. Double-Check Your Math Homework
3. Take Off Your Rose-Colored Glasses
4. Check For Holes In Your Bucket
5. Fill Your Bucket

I will go over what each of these means in order

1.) Don’t Panic

This 1st Step Don’t Panic is a key Step.

Because when things stop working, we can get very emotional.

I have felt this emotion myself in my business plenty of times.

Whenever we have some concerns about whether this business is going to work or not that fear kicks up – that overwhelm, that anxiety, that feeling like we’re just trapped!

In this state, we are likely to have our vision clouded by these emotions, and it’s hard to make our best decisions.

The worst thing is we are also incredibly vulnerable here, which means that a bad actor showing how they can potentially help us is very likely to result in us wanting to give them money and false hope that they can save us from our problems. (Pro-tip: The more their answers sound like a shortcut the more likely it won’t help do anything but fill their pockets. The more it sounds like a longcut and a directed path through the hard work the more likely it is to actually improve your situation.)

Oftentimes by the time a client talks to me, they have actually fallen victim to a few different “helpers” (i.e. con artists), where they’ve ended up giving money that has just made the problem even worse.

So the 1st Step is to step back from the problem.

This is a problem like all the others in your business.

You can solve it with a step-by-step approach, and having your emotions clouded by fear and anxiety just takes energy away from actually taking the Actions to make things better.

Check in with your emotions first and foremost.

Another great double-check to make your emotional state more steady is to ensure your basic human needs are being taken care of.

Make sure you are getting enough

• sleep
• water
• good food
• physical activity
• socialization
• rest and recovery time

Step away from the problem enough to be focused on the actions that are required.

Step 1 is Don’t Panic.

If you are a geek like me you can remember this step as the words printed on the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

2.) Double-Check Your Math Homework

Here’s the thing – if your business works out on paper

• your profit margins
• the amount that you’re charging
• your costs

then it can work out in the real world.

But if it does NOT work out on paper, the chance that it works out in the real world is almost ZERO!

Oftentimes, entrepreneurs need to Double-Check Their Math Homework.

Sometimes they know how to do this.

Sometimes they don’t.

But this is non-negotiable!

I have found most business owners are not great at this step.

If there’s one place that you’re going to bring in a professional early on, if you are not clear on how to do this yourself, you should definitely reach out to me and schedule a phone call to discuss what it takes to get this money math put together for your business.

This is what your entire business is based on after all.

Even if you’re thinking that you can’t afford the help you also can’t afford not to at this stage.

• It shows you how much profit you’re making per sale.
• You will know how many sales you need to make the money that you need to be making.

Without that information, you could just work really, really hard and never have success.

I’ve actually worked with people in this stage before who were losing money every single sale, which meant the more that they sold, the worse their problem actually got!

Most entrepreneurs are just making less money than they thought that they were and they realize there’s no way they can ever sell as many things as they would have to in order to make the money their business needs and that their business model needs to get adjusted. Once their model is adjusted, they can have the success they desire by working towards it.

Step 1 was Don’t Panic.

Step 2 is to Double-Check Your Math Homework.

3.) Take Off Your Rose Colored Glasses

This is a Step where we need to double-check the Value of what we’re offering.

We are so close to what we’re offering. We’re so proud of it.

It’s kind of like our kid’s artwork. Our kid’s artwork is beautiful to us and we tell them “Hey this is wonderful”, but to the rest of the world it might be some scribbles on a piece of paper.

Our business is the same way.

What we do through our business, we are so proud of it. Maybe our family and friends are proud of us too.

We can start to assume that the entire world is really happy with what we’re doing.

But in reality, sometimes the Value isn’t there for the rest of the world.

We need to take off the glasses of looking at our own kid’s artwork and put on the glasses of the general public looking at what we’re doing.

It is easy to get lost here in our feedback and hear what we want to hear.

People say things such as, “Oh, that’s nice.” “The service was fine.” “I was happy.” “That was good.”

Those are “peaceable moving things along comments,” and we oftentimes are going to hear those as a business owner and think, “Wow, things are going really really well. I’m on the right track!”

Rarely will a customer say “Hey, you had bad communication and your response time was slow.” They will rarely do that. Unless things have gotten really, really, really bad. They would rather avoid confrontation and just never use you again and tell their friends not to as well.

The main step to Take Off Your Rose-Colored Glasses is double-checking your Product Market Fit.

I know that you probably are focusing on offering a quality product, but double-check that it lines up on all the levels that the customer cares about.

I have other videos and content I can talk more about which include talking about

• value
• surplus-value
• and an offering grade card.

All of these tools offer ways to double-check that what you’re offering is highly compelling.

Because if it is, you have a higher chance of repeat, loyal customers who also are referral sources.

And if you don’t, you probably will have someone that you sell to one single time and then they’re done.

They will not use you again. (Or if they do, they’re not loyal to you and they’re just waiting to be stolen by someone else. There’s a giant risk factor in trying to grow a business that’s fallen off.)

Now we’ve checked our emotions with Step 1 Don’t Panic.

Step 2, we Checked Our Money Math Homework to make sure we’re making enough profit margin per thing that we sell

Step 3, we make sure we have a compelling product that we are selling by Taking Off Our Rose-Colored Glasses and looking objectively at what it is that we have to offer our clients.

4.) Check For Holes In Your Bucket

Oftentimes I find that entrepreneurs have giant holes in their Sales Process. (If they even have a Sales Process at all.)

In this case, the “bucket” is the Sales Process.

You have potential prospects or leads come in that you’re talking to and they need to be ushered all the way – from the beginning, all the way to the end where they become a client.

Oftentimes what I find is that you sort of have this maze set up, and some clients can walk through all the way to buy your offering (which we ensured in the last step is a valuable offering).

These are the lucky ones who made it happen, but there isn’t enough guidance on how to get there to help more people benefit from your product.

Let’s say you have 10 people enter your maze. One finds you and you’re thinking, “Hey, I got a customer!” But the other nine are just wandering the maze unnoticed.

If instead, you had a better process to help direct them from the entrance of the maze, all the way to your offering then 1-out-of-10 changes to 3-out-of-10, 5-out-of-10, or 7-out-of-10 really really fast! That would be seven times the sales!

Having a proven Sales Process to get leads from the beginning of the maze to your offering is key!

If you don’t have a proven Sales Process, you have a hole in your bucket. You are leaving so much money on the table for your efforts.

Fixing the hole in the bucket is very, very key.

Another thing is even having a bucket to begin with!

Many clients I work with not only don’t have a Sales Process yet, but they don’t even have a list of anyone that they are considering as a prospect or a lead in their sales work whatsoever.

They don’t know who they could even follow up with much less what actions to take.

So fixing this hole in your bucket is the next step in the Proven 5-Step Process To Save A Failing Business.

You’ve checked your emotions, and your money, math works out really well, and you know what you have is a valuable offering that they’re going to really appreciate.

Now your job is to make sure that you help make it easy for them to get to that step where they can actually buy from you and appreciate what you have to offer them.

Now is the time to Fix The Hole In Your Bucket

5.) Filling Your Bucket

This is a hard step to do. That’s why I’ve saved it to last.

Typically the other steps will help start to solve the problem more and more.

Step 5, Filling Your Bucket is a bit different.

It takes extra

• time,
• energy,
• and money

Oftentimes those are 3 things a failing business does NOT have in abundance.

Many people attempt a shortcut and try to skip the first 4 Steps and go right to Filling Their Bucket. This is a mistake

They try to hire a marketing firm or someone to send them more leads, but

• their money math doesn’t work out
• their offer isn’t very compelling
• and they have holes in their bucket.

They are going to be wasting so much money losing so many opportunities.

It is not cost-efficient.

Whenever you get all those other elements in place, now we can look at how to keep that bucket filled.

Common Marketing Problems

And there are a few problems I see here that are quite common.

I have talked about Marketing before but as a reminder, I want Lead Generation Marketing.

These are activities that bring in actual leads that we can talk to which become part of our Sales Process we can follow up with.

We’re not just doing Brand Awareness general marketing, we’re trying to get Lead Generating Marketing going.

No Actions

Number one is people are actually doing zero marketing.

The first problem is that we’re not doing any of it oftentimes, and that’s because

• “I don’t like to do marketing I don’t want to post on social media.”
• “I don’t want to make content.”
• “I don’t want to go to networking events.”

and that’s okay.

But if you have that mindset, HOW are you filling your bucket?

There can be a million right answers, but the only wrong answer is to “do nothing”.

If you keep doing nothing, you’re going to have nobody entering your bucket.

You are going to have the same problem that you have now, that same Einstein quote again, right?

You have to find something that you like to do – that you can do that will help you keep that bucket filled over and over again.

Don’t do what you’re “supposed” to do, but do what’s right for you. The more “you-ness” you have within your business, the more likely it is to succeed and resonate with the people that you’re working with.

Lumpy Marketing

Another common filling-the-bucket problem I see is that things get lean in the business and you’re desperate, so you do really good marketing outreach and follow-up efforts and you fill the bucket up again.

But now you’re busy delivering on what you filled up and you’ve stopped doing any marketing whatsoever.

Then as those clients’ fulfillment wraps up and they are done buying from you, you’re back down to this panic stage.

This ends up creating this up-and-down roller coaster, which is really, really stressful.

It would actually be better if you did slightly less marketing, filling up less capacity and you kept constant marketing going and it was more of a straight line.

That’d be a lot less stressful. It takes some balance to keep that going.

Recap

Okay, so to recap, the Proven 5-Step Process To Save Your Business,

1. Don’t Panic
2. Double-Check Your Math Homework
3. Take Off Your Rose-Colored Glasses
4. Check For Holes In Your Bucket
5. Fill Your Bucket

Each of these involves much more in-depth processes.

There are consultations I offer to help dive into these deeper if you are lost or stuck or want to fix things quicker.

This process should hopefully at least help you focus your efforts – out of all the things you could work on you should know where to start if you’re trying to save your business.

Have questions or comments? Please reach out below.

Best of luck. Have a great day.