Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: Being an entrepreneur means living in uncertainty. On any given day, you could have phenomenal news, challenging news. You could start the morning off, unsure and end the day feeling hopeful, and then you do that all over again and again and again. That is what it means to be an entrepreneur. But when you start taking L after L after L, when you feel like you haven't closed deals for a while, you have a cold streak.
[00:00:30] Ken: When you feel like what you're trying, none of it's working. and when you see failure start to pile up, You begin to doubt yourself and your business in ways you hadn't previously. Do I even have a real business? Does anyone even care what I'm doing? Am I just kidding myself? That is when we move from uncertainty to doubt. And eventually to despair,
[00:00:55] Ken: and those are very different things. Uncertainty. Yep. [00:01:00] You signed up for that. That's called being an entrepreneur. You knew that when you decided not to collect a paycheck from someone. And bet on yourself. That was the game. But doubt and despair, that is a place where you start making decisions that can actually hurt your business. And that is what I want to talk about today.
[00:01:18] Ken: I, because the way that we respond in these moments, whether you respond with doubt or with data, that is what determines whether you can grow without hiring.
[00:01:30] Ken: Now the minute that we begin to doubt, We start throwing the kitchen sink at problems. We start changing our positioning. We start thinking about logos, we start thinking about branding. We start changing all of our offers. Sound familiar. Maybe you even start changing who you target.
[00:01:49] Ken: That all important lighthouse client, and this also happens. You start jumping around platforms.
[00:01:55] Ken: because before you know it, you're actually not doing anything that's driven by [00:02:00] data. You're driving solely by emotion, solely by how you feel. That is the problem with. Doubts versus data, and here is the part that's most troubling. Having worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years
[00:02:14] Ken: when you're in that spiral. You might be abandoning offers that have reliably worked for you for years that just need tweaks. you might even be giving up on a certain lighthouse client or market segment that allowed you to reach new levels of revenue or that you felt good about just months ago.
[00:02:32] Ken: All parts of your business where you actually have data behind those choices.
[00:02:37] Ken: And now you start jumping from thing to thing to thing. From change, to change, to change. suddenly, you don't even know what you're doing anymore. You have a business that's not based on data And you've tried so many things, you don't even know what to try next or what is left to try.
[00:02:54] Ken: And the thing is sometimes, and even as I talked about in our conversation [00:03:00] around the two economies last week, which was episode 36, changing any number of these things doesn't matter if this is happening. The market simply isn't buying. The market isn't gone, it's just hesitant.
[00:03:12] Ken: And I said in that conversation that data is power. And now we come back to knowing the data. By paying attention to the data, you can realize what you really need to change, and perhaps it's a bigger change. I'm not saying it is, and this is not contradicting what I said a moment ago. It's not changing 27 things,
[00:03:33] Ken: but whatever you do change definitely needs to be more disciplined, more structured. You need to actually know what you're testing
[00:03:41] Ken: because if your market segment is pulling back is more uncertain. If consumer confidence is low. If your buyers are hedging, no amount of changing anything is going to fix that. It's not an offer problem. It's definitely not a branding problem.
[00:03:58] Ken: That's a [00:04:00] macro reality,
[00:04:01] Ken: and again, knowing this is actually powerful. Because it tells you, and it should help you feel better, that maybe the problem isn't you.
[00:04:09] Ken: When you're operating from doubt, you can't see that. All you see is that things aren't working and you feel like you have to do something, anything, and maybe in certain cases you just need to go take a walk or spend more time doing something you enjoy.
[00:04:24] Ken: I absolutely work with clients through this, and it's a cycle I've experienced and seen from both sides. Sometimes a client comes in, we start working together, and the business feels like it's in a good place. Maybe there's a solid retainer in place.
[00:04:40] Ken: The offers aren't great, but they're working. The lighthouse client makes sense the, and we go through the work and looking at the targeting. We rework the offers and we feel really good about where things are headed, but also, and you know, you feel this yourself.
[00:04:57] Ken: One to two clients demand [00:05:00] attention. They're squeaky wheels and they require a lot of energy. And as a result, the other parts of the business that we talk about don't get prioritized. Maybe something like pipeline generation. All of the sudden, this challenging client becomes a churned client. And pipeline generation was, you know, maybe a nice to have, but now it's a necessity.
[00:05:21] Ken: you have to hustle, you have to put more elbow grease in, that's when the spiral starts. Oh my gosh, I really need leads yesterday.
[00:05:30] Ken: You start stressing and you wonder, is any of this going to work? Doubt takes over the data.
[00:05:38] Ken: And sure. Sometimes people come in when they're already feeling a bit challenged. Maybe they're stuck in delivery. Hell already, maybe they don't have a go to market strategy to land your next 100 clients, as they discussed in episode 15, and we have to come back to the data just the same.
[00:05:54] Ken: And this is where I tell my clients, and I'll tell you the same thing right now. Even [00:06:00] with data, it doesn't mean that everything's going to work. But what I know my clients are doing, and I hope is true for you as well, that what we're doing is based on data. It is based on what they've historically done.
[00:06:14] Ken: It is based on making a decision on a specific lighthouse client and a certain set of offers. It's also based on the kinds of clients they've closed, what's unique and specific to them, what gives them a differentiated competitive positioning.
[00:06:30] Ken: So when you. Have data behind it. It's based on you being an expert at what you do. And no, it doesn't mean that tomorrow you land something. It might be that we look at a market segment and it's just not working, or it could just be that the messaging is off or the channel is off, and that is okay.
[00:06:51] Ken: But we gotta come back to the data first. We gotta make the decision from the data, not from doubt. And I talked about this before in our [00:07:00] conversation around business therapy in episode 21. Again, make sure that it's linked up for you in the show notes while on paper, I'm not your business therapist. Yeah, sometimes you need business therapy and that business therapy, ironically, is not just based on how we feel, but on the data.
[00:07:19] Ken: Did we make decisions to go use a certain channel because we know that's where your lighthouse clients hang out? Or did we just go tool shopping and use a bunch of tools, slap together some copy generated by AI and hope it would all go to plan. Those are two very different starting points, and only one of them gives you something to build on.
[00:07:40] Ken: So yeah, as we discussed last week, sometimes it's about realizing there is a macro element that you simply can't change.
[00:07:48] Ken: Other times it's about making a specific and purposeful change that you can give reps to. That you can give time to and that you can give sufficient energy to before you abandon that work, before [00:08:00] you abandon that data. Because if you don't have data in your business, if you don't have something grounding your decisions, then you're operating solely from this an emotional standpoint, and you're gonna be bouncing around like.
[00:08:14] Ken: A pinball inside a pinball machine. If you never played pinball, you missed out, but I still don't want you to be that ball. The point is this doubt will show up. That's part of being an entrepreneur. It's why not everyone can be an entrepreneur.
[00:08:32] Ken: but when you let those doubts drive, when you let the emotion take the wheel of your mind. You lose the one thing that actually helps you make the right next move the data. So I'll leave you with this. Think about the last change you made in your business. Was it driven by data or was it driven by doubt?
[00:08:53] Ken: And if you can't answer that easily, come back to the data.
[00:08:58] Ken: Because that is how we [00:09:00] grow without hiring.
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