392: Why Most Small Businesses Plateau — And How to Start Growing Again

0:00Wouldn't it be absolutely amazing to have team members who are your strategic thinking partners who think like entrepreneurs who understand the importance of profitability and want to make the decisions that take exceptional care of your clients and customers and support the sweet spot growth of the business? That would be amazing, wouldn't it? Well, this is what we teach your high performers or, as we like to call them, your A-players to do in leadership boot camp. Our next leadership boot camp course is forming now and spots are filling quickly. Head on over to tapthepotential.com-leadership and get your A-players signed up. Get some thinking partners who take things off your plate. We are objective observers of what's going on in their business. We can look over their shoulder and we can point out, hey, your nose down looking over here, but are you paying attention to this situation here that's impacting your profitability and

1:03undermining everything you're doing right here? So let's solve the bigger problem first before you go into the weeds and solve this other problem that you're working on. Is your work supporting your life or is it the other way around? If you're ready to take your life back from your business, pay yourself more and grow your profit. You're in the right place. 94% of our clients in our Better Business Better Life program are achieving our promised result of more time for what matters most and more money in your bank account than ever. You get to be a fly on the wall as Melissa and I give you a glimpse of our secret sauce for making this happen. You're listening to The Profit by Design podcast hosted by Tapthepotential lead strategist and chief dream officer Melissa Kay. With me, Dr. Sabrina Starling, Tapthepotential founder, The Business Psychologist, TEDx speaker, and author of the International Best Selling Series, How to Hard the Best, and the Fully Vacation. But let's go.

2:08You know how you get into your business and you work really hard to get it going. And then as you start succeeding, the business just takes over your entire life. So you want to grow the business, but you can't work anymore and you're already feeling completely exhausted and stretched. And you're just tired of being the fixer. I'm sure you can relate to this. Dr. Sabrina, just the business owner that is the one with the fallbot plan and who just holds everything together. Well, I want to share with you today that you are not alone. And if you're like most of the business owners that we work with, you have some great revenue coming in, yet you're not profitable. You're struggling to make payroll. You're struggling to attract profitable clients that you actually enjoy working with. And this is why Dr. Sabrina created the Tapthepotential solution, which is a step by step, very simple framework that

3:10increases your profitability while you work less hours, so that you can take your life back from your business. And that is our mission. We want to make sure that you have a better life. And this is why on average, our clients experience a 716 percent increase in time off, 215 percent increase in profit, and 55 percent increase in owner's pay. And on average, in less than 12 months, just imagine. So Dr. Sabrina, our research with the Better Business Better Life assessments shows that nine out of 10 entrepreneurs are burning out. And here's the mind-blowing fact that we have proven is that working less and with fewer clients will actually increase your profitability. And this is because limits enforce innovation and creativity. And this is how our team, our entire

4:12team at Tapthepotential all work 25 hours a week or less. And the coolest thing that I love to do, the first amount for working the business owners is shave off 10 hours a week. Can you imagine just shaving off in the next four weeks, 10 hours to free you up? Imagine all of the possibilities. And we track these results. This is very rare in the coaching industry. It's just unheard of that in the first year, 95 percent of our clients are achieving our promised result. Our net promoter score, which is our client satisfaction score is 93 percent. And 94 percent of our clients renew with us for a second year. So we live something exciting to share with you today. We would love to meet with you and get live coaching time in with you in our upcoming jump start.

5:13You can join our jump start, which kicks off on April 7th. And we are going to walk you through step by step exactly how to free up 10 hours a week, pay yourself an extra $50,000 this year, and take an extra week off of vacation. So we're going to tell you more about that at the end of our episode. But we do want to give you the sign up link because what are you losing by not jumping on this opportunity with Dr. Sabrina myself head over to tap the potential.com or slash jump start and sign up today. So Dr. Sabrina, I just want you to jump in here and tell us why is it that most small business owners hit a growth plateau? Oh my goodness, this is such. It's almost a universal phenomenon where we grow these businesses and so much of our human nature as individuals go into the business. So the business becomes a reflection of our strengths and our weaknesses. And we all

6:16have strengths and weaknesses. So whatever you're good at, the business is going to excel in that. But wherever you have blind spots or Achilles heels, the business is going that's going to start to plateau the business. So that is one of the reasons for a business plateau. And what that really speaks to is we cannot do this alone. I am someone who loves to read and I consume learning when I have an endeavor that's a goal that's important to me. So whenever I was starting tap the potential and it was starting to grow, I was reading all the business books. I was going on webinars. I was following all the thought leaders and listening, taking in all their advice. And I quickly saw that while there were thought leaders out there giving good advice because I didn't have a cohesive structure to put that advice into, I was doing things and I wasn't necessarily doing them in the right order. And some things I was doing was we're conflicting with other things. So one thought leader recommended this and I would go do that and another thought leader recommended that. So I

7:19and nothing was coherent. And so that's where when I really started diving into working with our clients and developing the tap the potential solution, I saw there was a real need for taking the best business strategy that is out there that is proven that works for growing small businesses and putting it into the tap the potential solution, but putting it in order so that we know, okay, we've got to do one, two, three. And if we do step four, before we do step one, we're working in the wrong areas in our business where we have problems that we're allowing to exist at the top level that continue to create problems in other areas of our business. So the top of the potential solution is such a good tool because it totally simplifies this for us business owners. And the other piece is that as we start adding team members, we want to be intentional to hire team members who have strengths that are different from our strengths so that

8:20they can compensate for our Achilles heels in our blind spots. But we don't do that. We will go out when we start hiring. We're nationally drawn to people who are like us. So we hire people who are like us and then no surprise the problems in the business just magnify and magnify. So that's just a couple of reasons the plateau and the business. Another big reason for the plateau in the business is the revenue needed to grow. So as we start growing, we have to hire more team members because the business very quickly gets to a point where it's beyond I can individual do. And so it takes money and payroll. So the payroll starts growing as the business grows and payroll is the biggest expense. And there's a lot of hidden costs in payroll. One of the biggest hidden costs is if you're hiring C players and they're just average stand-around team members who are waiting to be told what to do. Like they show up and they do the things that they make mistakes. There's rework

9:26and they require all this guidance. Well, you think, okay, that's just costing me a paycheck. Oh no, it's costing you way more than their paycheck. It's costing all the benefits that you're paying them, the taxes that you're paying on them, plus the cost of the mistakes and the rework. But what is also lacking is they're not contributing anything strategically to the growth of the business. They are not thinking how do I increase this business's profitability. They're not thinking about the sweet spot of the business. They're not thinking about how to use their strengths to serve the sweet spot of the business. So all of that brain power is absent in the business and that is a cost. And that keeps you the business owner stock. And so the profitability in the top of potential solution, step number one, is design your business to be sustainably profitable. Every decision moving forward is around profitability of the business because if the business isn't profitable, it's going to go under. And so business is plateau because expenses grow faster than the revenue

10:34comes in when you're in a growth phase. So this is something that most business owners try to think their way out of on their own. And again, it's not something you need that strategist looking over your shoulder who can see the blind spots. That's why our clients love us so much. That's why they stay with us year over year because we are objective observers of what's going on in their business. We can look over their shoulder and we can point out, hey, your nose down looking over here, but are you paying attention to this situation here that's impacting your profitability and undermining everything you're doing right here? So let's solve the bigger problem first before you go into the weeds and solve this other problem that you're working on. That is the value of having a business strategist on your team serving the business and making sure that you aren't buying into and acting from your blind spot. And that's really, it's our blind spots that are the number one reason for

11:39we work very hard to free uptime and mental capacity for our business owners and we help you get out of your head. So right now you are probably feeling like your own own island and you're spending your wills and spending a lot of time just overthinking maybe a team member who is not performing or a client who is a PETA client, you know, those pain in the assets clients who are really not profitable and we shortcut all of that for you. We help you get out of your head, make decisions that are profitable for the business and help you stay focused on the things that are most important. And one of our clients shared that, you know, there's some level of burnout for most of our clients as they come into our program and within a couple of months with working with one of our clients, Dr. Sabrina, he shared, you know, I just no longer feel burned out, not having to continue to go through this alone and just having a strategist to show up and ask him,

12:44how might I support you and just help him think through things has completely changed his mindset. And he's just sure that alone is worth the investment of coaching with us and that the better business, better life program. And what I'm seeing now that he's experiencing his regular vacations and he's falling back in love with his business and he's leveling up his business, doing things that he had dreamed of before but wasn't able to accomplish. So Dr. Sabrina speak to like that hidden reason that revenue doesn't lead to profit always. So most business owner, entrepreneurs are like, oh, this is my revenue and it sounds great. But really, just because they have a high revenue doesn't mean they're actually profitable. No. And this is, we go into this in such depth on day two and the jumpstart Melissa and I love it because it is so eye opening for our jumpstart participants when they realize this. So we have a variety of different types of revenue

13:46that come into our business. Some of it is profitable and a lot of it is not profitable revenue. So if we apply the 80, 20 principle, that means 20% of our clients and customers are responsible for 80% of our revenue. So 20% on average across your number may be a little bit different, maybe it's 25% or maybe it's 15% of your clients that are responsible for 80% of your revenue. But if we flip this around, the inverse of it means that 80% of our clients and customers are only responsible for 20% of the revenue. And in the jumpstart on day two, we take our participants through an exercise where they list out their clients by revenue. And it is so eye opening when they see the list and number of clients that are responsible for 20% of the revenue, the 80% of those clients that are responsible for just that 20% of the revenue. And then they start looking

14:48at that list and the cringe moments happen because they look at the names on that list and they recognize those names Melissa because often those are the pita clients and customers, the pain and the assets. And then they see how little revenue they actually contribute individually to the business. And that is the big eye opener because we put all this time and effort into fixing their issues, responding to their complaints. They spend very little money in the business, but they have these big needs and big demands on us and our team. And it is a huge just from an energy perspective. It is a huge energy trainer for the business owner and the team members. It is one of the biggest contributors to burn out when business owners aren't paying attention to this. And so in the jumpstart, we teach away so that you can start adjusting your focus in the business around the top 20% that are responsible for 80% of the revenue. But what is even more interesting

15:52is in the jumpstart, I reveal a hidden secret. It is just a simple mathematical calculation. But when you make this one shift, you actually don't have to bring in any more clients and customers into the business in the next year. But you can increase the revenue from your top clients and customers and replace the revenue from your bottom 80% of clients and customers that are only contributing 20% to the revenue. So it is a very simple mathematical secret that I reveal in the jumpstart for how to do this. But this is the key to working less and having fewer clients and customers in the business, but they are more aligned with your sweet spot. They are more aligned with what you and your team can deliver on from your strengths as a team. And it creates ease. And that ease is where our business owners and our Better Business Better Life program really

16:52start shifting out of the survival trap and moving into a place of thriving. Because things that were hard six months ago are no longer hard. They are gone. They're no longer part of what the business owner and the team is having to deal with. Like we've just taken that off their plate. Their revenue has either increased or stayed the same, but profit is steadily increasing. And that means the business owner is able to pay themselves more. And there's more cash reserve building up in the business. And that's where the peace of mind really started. Man, and we hear it time and time again, most of the clients in our Better Business Better Life program just a few months into working with us. Like their stress is just falling off because of these simple strategic ships. I experienced that just this week. So one of our newest clients came into our jumpstart that we just had. And she's been in business for almost 20 years, complete plateau with her revenue

17:58in her capacity. So she began her work in the jumpstart and identified her top clients. And then we continued that into coaching sessions. And this is mind-blowing. They're looking at her top clients, looking at her current revenue the last time she had increases. What was possible just by me helping her open her mind into what's actually possible? We've created a system to almost double her revenue and give her a full day off without meeting with clients. It's creating a sustainable business, allowing her to grow that most importantly, it's giving her the life that she's dreamed of. Absolutely. You know, Melissa, one of the things that I think is so unique about what we do at Top the Potential is we are not like typical business coaches. Typically when you hire a business coach, you are getting thrown into

18:58hustle culture. They want you to do more, more, more to generate more revenue. When you come in at Top the Potential, we never say do more. We tell you what to stop doing because it's ineffective. And we tell you what to intentionally do more of, which is what you're already doing. And that's the beauty. Like you don't have to do more. We take away the things that are ineffective and say put a little more intention over here because this is what's really getting you results and profit. And that allows for the freed up time and the experience of things coming off the business owners plate immediately. Yeah, that's what she shared. She shared, I've hired coaches for years and I have never had the kind of support from you and Dr. Sabrina. She's reading a four week vacation book. And you know, it's really opening up her mind to what's possible and how

19:59she should be thinking. But I'm going to give you tough love. I'm going to challenge you. And we're going to get to the core of really what's important to you. And then I'm not going to sugar code it. And also it's a simple step by step solution. So you're not doing it alone. These are simple steps. And one of the very first thing that we start with in our Better Business Better Life program is your profit first assessment. So we take a look at what your profit actually is, what your profit percentages should be, help you get set up with profit first. And we do a deep dive into your expenses. And that is your one of the first wins that you experience because immediately you're going to free up some money. So it's incredible to see how quickly our clients just aren't able to breed again and experience success. And that's how we get you to those milestones in that first year. So Dr. Sabrina, if you could just share one last gold nugget as we

21:01wrap up about why business owners are plateauing. And what's one action that they could take today? Do less like really look at what is on your plate for today and to ask yourself what's the one thing that I can do today that is going to have the greatest impact in terms of making everything else easier or unnecessary. That will drive the profitability of this business. So what is the one thing I can do today that makes everything else easier or unnecessary. And that drives the profitability of the business. When you identify that one thing, do that one thing. That is your $10,000 an hour activity for today. And the other things are if you get to them, you get to them, but they're not important. And that really shifts how we are in reactive fighter flight mode as business owners trying to just knock out that list of all the things that we've got to do. And

22:02that's where we start becoming more strategic. And so beyond that, sign up for the jump start. Because then when you're in the jump start, you get Melissa me showing you what your $10,000 an hour activities are. You no longer have to guess because it's hard when you're in the fighter flight mode and that adrenaline is coursing through your body. It is hard to make a strategic decision about all the things that are in front of me today. What is going to be the most profitable and what makes everything else easier or unnecessary. So let us support you. So get into the jump start. Go to tap the potential dot com for slash jump start and sign up. Great friends. Thank you so much for tuning in today. We will see you next week on the proper design podcast. Thank you for spending time with us. Experience the power of high accountability from business strategists who own businesses and have coached thousands of entrepreneurs to take their lives back from their business. We get what it's like to be in your shoes. Our guarantee more time for what matters most and more money in your bank account than ever. Ready to join us in our Better Business Better Life program and experience this for yourself?

23:06Book a call with us at tapthepotential.com. Let's go. Hey there. Don't forget leadership boot camp is forming now. Get your A-Player signed up. Head on over to tapthepotential dot com forward slash leadership. Turn your A-Players into your strategic thinking partners who are taking one thing after another off your plate. You don't have to do this alone anymore.