4 Lies Keeping Your Business STUCK

Summary

• Challenge the belief that your market is too small.

  • If you think your market is too small, consider you might lack the skills to effectively market, sell, or retain your customers.
  • Instead of blaming the market, assess if your pricing and packaging align with your target audience's expectations and ability to pay.
  • Research your actual market size; often, the issue is a skill deficit rather than a genuinely small market.
  • In a growing market, it's unlikely that market size is the limitation, especially if your revenue is in the lower range (like $100,000 a month).

• Recognize that most services can scale; it's often a matter of training and systems.

  • Before pivoting your business model, consider if the issue is a lack of ability to train your team to deliver at scale.
  • Review your employee value proposition, including competitive pay, benefits, and clear career growth opportunities.
  • Aim to pay competitively, align performance with compensation, and ensure that full coverage benefits are provided if they're important to your team.
  • A detailed growth plan can help employees envision their career trajectory within your company.

• Understand that you can duplicate yourself; it's crucial for scale.

• The belief that you can't train someone to perform as you do is a limiting mindset common among small business owners.

• Use a simple three-step training method: 1) Demonstrate the task. 2) Have the trainee observe and document the process. 3) Have the trainee perform the task following their documentation, and then refine the process based on this experience.

• Training others in your expertise is non-negotiable if you want your business to grow beyond being reliant on you.

• Don't let fear prevent you from firing an employee when necessary.
  • Holding onto an employee who's detrimental to team culture can be much more costly in the long term.
  • Make the tough decisions to protect your business culture and ensure long-term success.
  • Before letting someone go, plan how you'll redistribute their responsibilities to minimize disruption.
  • Accept that taking on additional work temporarily may be part of your role as a CEO to maintain the right business culture.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest looking at your business and seeing if you really know your market. Maybe you need to learn more about marketing, selling, or keeping your customers happy. Try to see if your prices are right for the people you want to buy your products or services.

If your business offers services, think about if you have trained your team well enough to grow bigger. Make sure you pay them fairly and tell them how they can move up in their jobs. Good pay and a clear future in the company can make your team stronger and better.

Remember that you can teach someone else to do what you do. Don't think you have to do everything by yourself to succeed. Show them how to do a task, watch them try it, and let them improve the process. This helps your business get bigger without just depending on you.

If you need to fire an employee, don't be scared. Keeping someone who is not good for the team's spirit can hurt your business more in the long run. Plan how to share their work with others to keep everything running smoothly. Sometimes, as the boss, you'll have to do more work for a while. But it's part of making sure your business culture stays healthy.

So, take these steps:

1. Research your market size and think about your skills.
2. Pay your team well and show them how they can grow in their career.
3. Train someone else in your job so your business can grow.
4. Make hard choices for the good of your company's future.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"It's taking control from yourself and it's giving it away"

– Leila Hormozi

"Is this a market problem or is it a skill deficit"

– Leila Hormozi

"If you don't know how to work it, it might not be working"

– Leila Hormozi

"The belief that somebody else cannot do what you do in your business is only that of small business owners"

– Leila Hormozi

"You have to protect your culture at all costs"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

I just finished running 4 days of workshops with businesses doing anywhere between 250,000 and 20 million in Revenue what I want to share with you is the four lies that I'm keeping them stuck so if you're new to my channel my name is Lea horos by the age of 28 I reached a net worth of $100 million sold my businesses start acquisitions.com which I'm now the CEO of where we try to make real business education available to everybody so the first lie keeping you stck is that your Market is too small so I had this woman who came up to me at this workshop and she's like listen I've got a weight loss business doing like $100,000 a month and we're only in European countries I'm not able to get past $100,000 a month I think the issue is my market this is something I hear from a ton of business owners because anytime a business gets stuck and they can't grow the number one thing that inexperienced business owners go to is they say it's got to be my market it's taking control from yourself and it's giving it away a lot of people just use it as a cop often times people say hey my Market's too small when in reality there's one of three things that it usually is okay one you lack the skill of knowing how to Market to find your customer so if you're not good at speaking to your ideal customer and knowing what platform they're on and knowing how to Target them then it's going to feel like there are none of them it's not that is there's none of them it's that you don't know how to find them the second piece is that they lack sales and packaging ability to actually get their ideal customers to say yes so this would be if you can find the ideal customers but then you're like listen everyone's saying no I think it's a shitty Market is it a shitty Market or is do you have a shitty price point with shitty packaging for your customer right and so what that looks like is again you're getting people through the top of funnel but they're not converting on the sale whether it be they hit a page or they talk to a salesperson and then the third piece is that your customers are turning way faster than you want them to meaning you're losing people at a faster rate than you're gaining people I gave her this Frame and I walked her through it for herself so it turns out she was issue number two okay so she had the wrong pricing and packaging to facilitate a sale for a customer that had come in through her funnel so let me explain her product the entire funnel the ads everything the copy it all would lead you to believe that it was a lowcost product it had no air of exclusivity of scarcity it didn't talk about being premium it was positioned even the graphics looked like a lowcost product but then when people got on the phone with the salesperson it was $8,000 so she looks like every other lowcost weight loss blueprint out there right which might be like 30 bucks a month if even and then when they get on the phone with somebody it's an $8,000 sale they had no payment plans they had no financing and it was a 20 minute phone call so she has two options at this point either she changes her marketing or she changes her sales or conversion process and so in this case I suggest that she change her marketing why did I suggest that because I do think that scaling a very lowcost offer is going to be much harder for this person and it takes a higher level of skill than just changing the marketing slightly to call out somebody with more purchasing power so what we did was we just tried to mirror the pricing in the messaging we made it exclusive we called out what type of people we're looking for what character traits do they embody what are they looking for what types of jobs do they have right and so instead of looking for just women in general who want to lose weight we start looking for when she explained what type of women she wants executive women who have careers who are unable to get in shape and those women happen to have $88,000 and so let's make our ads speak to them so here's the thing if you can relate to that problem you have to do the work I would suggest right now if you're watching this and you're like I have totally tapped out my market go Google how big your Market is like seriously go Google it because most people haven't even taken the time to Google their total Market size and then at the end of the day what you have to ask yourself is is this a market problem or is it a skill deficit and if you're a new business owner and if this is the first time you've done it and you've never scaled a business this big before is likely a skill deficit is it top of funnel is it conversion or is it bottom of funnel I would say narrow in on which piece it is and then determine what you need to adjust to make sure that you can get the throughput you need something worth considering before you start a business is like is this Market growing or declining if you're talking about okay I'm in a growing Market but then you're saying I think it's too small but you're only doing like 100 Grand a month the likelihood that that's true is very low it's probably that you have a skill deficit a declining Market hard to fight against it's going to be hard to market sell convert no matter what unless you have a very Superior product in positioning in price point the market size is less relevant until you get you know multiple eight figures if not more the second lie that many are told is that your service cannot scale so I met this guy and he had an SEO business so his delivery was SEO marketing and as he's telling me he's basically saying he's going to change his whole business because he can't scale it I was like dude do you think that the product is the issue or the fact that you lack the ability to train your team and he was like ah you know I do think maybe it's that I was like have you even tried like put any effort into learning how to train a team the answer was no so then we walked through his employee value proposition which is essentially the offer that he gives to his employees to work at his business right so basically what this guy was doing was he was paying as low as possible and asking for the skills of somebody who's paid top of market and also not providing growth opportunities mentorship many benefits at all and so basically his offer was Shi so we adjusted three things one pay which because he's a small business we made it a low base with a high variable meaning they can still get their annual ot to be where it needs to be to be market rate but it's flexible based on performance and so for a smaller business that is worried about cash flow but needs High performers I suggest do a low base with a high variable the second is that he actually did have benefits but he didn't have full coverage and so we looked at the difference between full coverage benefits and what he currently had and it made absolute complete sense to switch so then we added that in because it turns out that the best people that he has on his team all have families they're of the age where they have families and so having full coverage is very important to them and the third thing we did is we created a three-step growth plan because essentially what's happening is that when people come into his business there's no vision for where they go with their career we put together basically like these are the next three steps um to go from a you know SEO marketer to a senior level to a VP of so that we could paint the career path for the people coming in so what this caused me to reflect on is that a lot of people when something isn't working the automatic response is I should change it but the reality is it might not be working because you don't know how to work it it's like if you take a 14-year-old and you put them in a car and nobody's taught them what the gas does what the brake does and what the steering wheel does and then they say it doesn't work and they're just hitting it honking the horn not knowing why it's not driving it's the same thing happens with business people like it's not working and you're like you're just pulling the wrong lever and so for him he was trying to change his entire product just due to the fact that he didn't know how to trct top talent I do not want that for you so you have to ask yourself what would have to happen for this to scale what skills would I need to acquire for me to have to scale this system to scale this company to scale this delivery and then you got to go find those skills that's how a business grows you grow as the founder by collecting those skills over time and then you confront those problems headon trying it for the first time I think a lot of people avoid it because like I haven't done that before that sounds really hard I've never had to do that in my business you're always if you're growing a business going to be coming up against against new problems that you've never had before but you can't change your whole business because of it third lie is that you can't duplicate yourself okay so I had this woman that I was talking to and she essentially has two very interesting cosmetic dentistry offices and basically within those offices she sells anywhere between a package that's like on the low end $10,000 on the high end like $60,000 in terms of redoing someone's what do they called veneers her locations were killing it one of the locations almost 2 million year in profit which like from a single location dentist office is insane but she said she's like hey I'm actually going to franchise because I just can't scale this and I was like can't scale this why she's like oh I just can't get anyone trained to sell like I do like nobody can do it just nobody can close the packages like me so instead I'm just going to franchise the issue was not that this product is too hard to sell the issue is that she didn't know how to train people and so when I asked her I said how do you train somebody she did not have an answer she actually doesn't know how to train people so she was like I just tell them what I say and so I walked her through the framework of basically how to tr somebody because the belief that somebody else cannot do what you do in your business is only that of small business owners I just want to be very clear it is only from people who have small businesses nobody with a big business is like oh yeah only me can do it it's like they're like no no no there's thousands of us for a reason like we have to have more people who can do it the reality is is that a lot of people are very good at doing business but they're not good at teaching people how to do business and in order to grow your business you have to get good at teaching people how it's just not YouTube it's teaching your te it's very simple how to train somebody if you want it in three steps just do this okay first do it and have them watch you do it simple as second is do it and have them write down how you do it they're watching you again and now they're writing down what you're doing and then the third is that you're going to have them do it based on what they wrote down so they follow the instructions they wrote and then at the end you're going to say would you edit those instructions did you think that those be comprehensive and then you're going to have them self edit those instructions for the next time that they go to do it so what this might look like is if you have a sales rep like she did the sales rep's going to watch herself then the sales rep is going to watch her sell and make the script while she sells then the sales rep is going to sell in front of her using the script that she built based off of what she did and then you just repeat that's how you teach somebody something and I would say repeat it as many times as you need to to hone in that skill for that person but that is the fastest way to train somebody and it doesn't take hours and hours of your time because this way is actually most beneficial because for someone to learn quickly if they're given instructions they are actually going to learn less than if they make the instructions themselves and here's the thing if you have the belief that you cannot duplicate yourself in your business right now understand that your business will never be a durable business that can sell or that can run without you and so you don't want that belief that belief does not serve you in any way you don't want to be a slave to your business you want to be a business owner I think it's taking a step back and asking yourself like realistically like how hard have you tried to replace yourself and the reality is like most people haven't even tried like they really haven't or they tried once it didn't work cuz guess what they didn't know how to do it and they never tried again and so don't fall into that trap because those are the people that stay stuck forever those are the people you see at a conference 2017 2018 2019 doing the same with the same problem the fourth lie you've been told is that you can't fire that employee so I had a guy who said hey basically I need to figure out how to scale my company but I can't fire this guy he doesn't give me any context but if he brings in these people he needs that guy's going to get really mad because those people have to get paid more than him and so this guy is basically saying he's essentially holding the owner hostage by saying like if you bring these other people in pay me more otherwise I will leave and so the guy's question to me was like how would you get those people to come in and stay given the fact that this guy's going to want to get paid more than them again and I just said let's chunk up for a second why the is this guy on your team and he's like well he just has so much tacit knowledge and he drives so much revenue for the business and like there's just no way that the business can function without him and this is a really typical belief of people that are starting off in business which is that you cannot fire that and the thing is is like I'm not going to say that I don't fall prey to it even that size I'm at CU you can laugh some people and like they're great for a year or two and then it gets this point you're like what is going on and they might become that right and then you think to yourself oh gosh I can't fire them all these things rely on them here's the thing your brain's making up all the reasons why you shouldn't because it's afraid the reality is is that if you don't fire that then you set the example for everybody else of what is acceptable in those moments that is where you shape your culture of your business if you have any interest in having an enjoyable place for yourself or others to work you cannot keep people on the team who do that because you train everybody else that that is acceptable and that's what we do here and so the frame I took with him is I said what if you do nothing and you don't fire the guy what happens in 5 years will you retain good teammates if every person quits because of him will you grow the business if this one person holds all this tacit knowledge and won't help train anybody will you genuinely be proud of yourself and show up like a leader if you're acting like a coward here's the thing it's always costly in the short term to fire somebody but it is much more costly in the long run to have a dysfunctional business due to one person I've never in 8 years I have fired people that I was like there's no way this person and they do I can give you example you know we start our software company the guy that built the whole thing got rid of him the day before I thought everything is an explode and everything was fine it was a little bit of a show for like a week or two but like we were fine and here we are I think there are areas for you to improve as a leader in learning that you have to protect your culture at all costs at the end of the day it's not that you can't fire that employee it's that you're too scared I'm more scared personally of my business not growing for the next 5 years than I would be scared of what happens if that person leaves and you just have to ask yourself which one are you more scared of so if you want to mitigate I would say the effect of firing that I'm going to make a list of all their stuff they're doing and then who each of those responsibilities can go to in the interum so yes the whole team's going to have more work but it's for the better of the culture so people are happy to take it on and I think a lot of times too people say and this guy said to me he's like well I would have to do it if he's not here and I was like yeah that's what it means to be a CEO what happens when Lea gets rid of an executive somebody underneath me in my leadership team you guys see me on YouTube but like I'll be running that department too I done that so many times but I will always do that and I will always pay that price because I know how important it is to maintain the culture in the long run