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July 25, 2024 20 mins
Running your own business can be very satisfying and rewarding. But, it's never smooth sailing—there will always be setbacks that can knock you off course. In today's episode, I share 6 of the most common challenges I've experienced in business and my strategies and tips to overcome them.

- How persevering through the slow income growth phase of your business is easier with these 4 steps.
- Why growing your audience is a slow burn and the 2 options you could consider to speed up this growth.
- Why understanding that business ownership is a financial rollercoaster will help you to deal with those unexpected burdens (like tax bills!).
- The importance of trademarking your products to protect them from digital "copy cats".
- Why prioritising YOU is super important to avoid burn out and how to overcome it when you do.

SHOW LINKS:
- DM me “OLSM” on Instagram (@stephtaylor.co) to find out more about “Offer Less, Sell More” or visit https://stephtaylor.co/offer-less-sell-more
- Do you have a copy cat? Check out the "Copy Cat Kit" here: https://founddlegal.com/products/the-copycat-kit

- Get my Daily Biz Booster emails: https://stephtaylor.co/DBB
- 5 Simple Tweaks to Boost Your Launch Profits: https://stephtaylor.co/tweaks
- Want me to spend a day working on your next launch? Book a VIP intensive: https://stephtaylor.co/vip
- Get The A-Z Podcast Launch Plan: https://stephtaylor.co/plp-ig
- Get a 30-day free trial of Kajabi: https://stephtaylor.co/kajabi

Let's be Instagram friends: https://instagram.com/stephtay...
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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Once you are already feeling burnt out. You can't push
your way through it. You can't just muscle your way
through it and hope that it goes away on its own.
Trust me, I have tried. You can't push through it.
You have to do less. You have to rest, You
have to allow yourself to be bored. We don't like
to feel bored these days, but sometimes you need to

(00:21):
allow that space before you can start to feel creatively
inspired again. Welcome to Imperfect Action. I'm Steph Taylor. For years,
I read all the books, downloaded all the freebies, and
did all the courses, but it wasn't until I started
taking imperfect action that my business had its first million
dollars year. Imperfect Action is about doing things before you're ready,

(00:45):
prioritizing consistent action over perfect action, and moving forward even
when you're not sure you're doing it right. On this show,
you can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing tips, and strategies
to build a business that brings you more profit, more freedom,
and even more joy. You want the list to get

(01:05):
my daily businesses. Every day, I'll send you a bite
sized prompt designed to help you grow your business in
a more Intentional Way. Sign up at Steph Taylor dot co,
forward slash DBB, or at the link in the show notes. Hey,
welcome back to Imperfect Action. This is episode eight hundred
and thirty eight. Today we're talking about setbacks and obstacles

(01:29):
in business because I think it's pretty much impossible to
run a business and not face a lot of setbacks
along the way. I think back, oh my journey and
all of the highs and all of the lows, and
even now when things are going good, I'm like, hmm,
what's the next thing that's going to go wrong? So

(01:49):
I know they are pretty much impossible to avoid, and
even if you try your best to avoid them, you're
probably still gonna end up facing various setbacks along the way.
So today I'm talking about six of the most common
ones that you may face as a business owner and
what you can do to overcome them and in some

(02:09):
cases even prevent them. So the first setback is slow
income growth, very common. This one. You're doing all of
the things and you think you're doing them right, and
yet your monthly income just isn't growing. And this is
so totally normal because growing a business can take a while.

(02:30):
But then we're shown all of these beautiful overnight success
stories that this leads you into believing otherwise. And this
is one of the hardest places to be because this
is that point where you've got a business. It's running,
but you're probably not earning as much as you would
be in your job, or you are earning as much,

(02:51):
but you're working much harder than you were in a job,
and you might be questioning, is this worth running my business?
Or am I just wasting my time? Would it be
so much easier if I just got a job. The
ways to overcome this, firstly, I would say stay focused
on your vision, because chances are you started your business

(03:11):
for a reason other than as an income source. It
might be that you wanted the freedom to travel. Maybe
you wanted the freedom to be at home with your kids,
the freedom to spend more time with your family. Whatever
that reason you started your business for, tune back into
that and remember that when you feel like you want

(03:32):
to give up, when you feel like you're getting nowhere. Next,
identify the source of your slow income growth. Is it
that your business simply isn't reaching enough people, or is
it that you're not converting those people into buyers? A
lot of the time when we think our growth is
because our audience growth is too slow, it's actually not
an audience growth issue. It's actually a conversion issue. People

(03:55):
are coming into contact with our business. They might be
visiting the website, but then they're not buying, or they're
not inquiring, or they're not signing up to work with you.
And then also with the clients that you do have,
how well are you getting them to come back and
buy from you again and again. You can do this
really well with a strategic offer suite right. You can

(04:18):
ensure that you are selling the right offers to the
right people and getting those people to come back again
and again, which increases that lifetime value, increases the amount
that they're spending with you over their lifetime. It also
means that you can help them at different stages of
their journey. And this is what I teach inside offer
Less Sell More, which is like a three hour course
to completely redesign your office suite to have that strategy

(04:41):
in place to speed up your income growth and make
it more consistent. You can find at Steph Taylor dot co.
Slash OLSM will pop a link to that in the
show notes as well. The next way to overcome that
is to get really good at budgeting. So slow income growth,
You've got to be really good at budgeting. You've got
to be really good at minimizing your operating expenses. You've

(05:02):
also got to be really good at minimizing your lifestyle expenses.
I don't think we talk about this enough, but especially
when you are a one person show in your business
and you feel like you can just dip into your
business account and withdraw it spend it, and that's when
you can you can run out of money, you can

(05:22):
find yourself in a bit of trouble. But because it
doesn't feel like it's a business expense, it's not showing
up in your profit and loss, it doesn't you don't
feel like it's really impacting your business's growth. But by
minimizing your operating expenses and your lifestyle expenses, that means
you can invest a little bit more back into your business,
investing into something like paid advertising, or working with somebody

(05:46):
who can help you to be really strategic with your
messaging or your positioning or your marketing so you can
or your sales so you can reach more people and
convert those people into paying clients. Buyers and then grow
your income that way. The second common setback is slow
audience growth. This is similar to the last one, but

(06:07):
not quite the same. Slow audience growth. Maybe you are
posting to social media, maybe you've got a podcast, you've
been growing your email list, but it's all just feeling
so slow, and you're ready to start growing faster, but
it's just not happening fast enough. And that's because organic
audience growth is slow. I've often said this, Instagram is

(06:29):
not an audience growth tool. It's a nurturing tool for
your existing audience. A podcast is the same. It's not
an audience growth tool, it's a nurturing tool. So to
speed up your audience growth right now, you have two
main options. The first one is paid advertising. I probably
wouldn't recommend doing this one until you've got clear messaging.

(06:49):
You know that your sales processes convert, you have a
strategy for taking somebody from cold to buying from you,
and you know all of this is working. You're not
just blindly throwing money into paid ads and you're like, oh,
three people clicked. I don't know if that's good. I
don't know if that's bad, because you really don't until
you have some way of knowing that people are going

(07:10):
through this process and how many of them are converting.
The second way to speed up your audience growth, and
this one you can do for free, and that is
getting yourself in front of other people's audiences. Partnerships and collaborations.
These are really effective. They sound really lame because everyone's like, yeah, collaborations,
but there are really effective way to grow your audience.

(07:32):
Pitching podcast interviews that's a collaboration. Pitching to teach to
somebody's online course or membership, that's a collaboration. Speaking at
somebody's event that's a collaboration. Pitching the media with a
story idea. That's a collaboration of sorts. These all get
you in front of other people's audiences, where then you

(07:54):
can send them back to your audience. Setback number three.
You might face running out of cash even if your
business is technically profitable. Your business can be making money,
it can be super profitable, and you can still have
no cash in your bank account if you haven't retained
enough cash to pay your tax bill or your GST,

(08:15):
or your sales tax bill, or your pay as you
go withholding, which we have to pay here in Australia,
if we have employees, these things can be a little
bit of a surprise and you can suddenly end up
with not enough cash in your bank account, or maybe
if you've been withdrawing money from your business account to
pay for lifestyle expenses. Those lifestyle expenses aren't a business expense.

(08:38):
They're not showing up in your business profit and loss,
but they are coming out of your bank accounts, so
they're affecting your cash balance. And if you don't know
the difference between profit and cash, please google difference between
profit and cash because that's one of the most fundamental
concepts you need to know as a business owner. It's
more important than how to get more Instagram followers, I
promise you. So how to overcome this, get really good

(09:02):
at budgeting for cash flow. Find a spreadsheet. You can
google templates for cash flow budgeting, cash flow forecasting and
use this spreadsheet every week. Update it and it'll allow
you to forecast your cash inflows and your cash outgoings,
so you can see what your bank balance will be
into the future. And if you see that three months

(09:23):
from now, your bank balance is going to hit zero
because you paid that tax bill, well now you know, okay,
you need to do something to make sure that you
are bringing in enough cash now so that in three
months time you're not going to run out of cash.
Set Back number four Unexpected tax bills kind of related
to the last one, but very unfortunately, very much a reality.

(09:45):
When you start making money, you also have to pay tax.
I know it sucks sometimes, and you might already have
spent this money by the time your tax bill is due.
Here in Australia, if you're a company, our end of
final actual years at the end of June, and I'm
pretty sure we don't have to pay the tax until
May the following year, that money might have already gone

(10:07):
by then. Now Here in Australia, the ATO, they're really
good with small businesses. They'll let you pay it off
on a payment plan with fairly minimal interest, and it's
really easy to set up. That's one great option for
managing cash flow. If you're not in Australia. I don't
know what your local tax departments do, but I would
recommend always get a good accountant, make friends with them,

(10:31):
ask them, Hey, what's my tax bill looking like for
this year? Seriously, because then you can start to budget
for it. Start putting away a percentage of each sale
that you make into a separate account for tax only.
That money is not your money, that is money that
belongs to the tax department, tax office. And then at
year end, if your tax bill ends up being less

(10:53):
than what you saved, great, Now you have a surplus
amount of cash that you can invest in something like
a group program or some coaching, or some marketing for
your business, or you can pay yourself a little bonus.
But at least you know you've got enough to cover
that tax bill. And if you haven't read the book
Profit First by Mike mccullowicks, I would highly recommend it

(11:16):
Profit First. He teaches a really great way that you
can start to manage where you're allocating the different amounts
of money that you get from each sale, and it
makes it so much easier. You don't end up with
these unexpected bills that you just don't have the cash for.
Set Back Number five copycats and impersonators. I get a

(11:37):
lot of impersonators on Instagram where somebody's literally just copy
my entire Instagram account and they're pretending to be me
and then they DM my followers. So just as a
heads up. I will never DM you and be like, hey,
you should buy my core or you should buy this
thing unless you have expressly said that you would be
interested in it. So just be mindful of that. And

(11:59):
also so never click a link that looks really weird,
because that is how you get scammed. So that's impersonation.
Copycats are more somebody who is copying your intellectual property,
your IP. And that might be your business name, it
might be your course name, your course content, your podcast name,
your ebooks, your designs, your logo, anything that is your
property that you have created. It's like digital property that

(12:23):
is theft. If you think back to the two thousands
early two thousands when they had those wonderful ads, you
wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal this, you wouldn't
steal that at the beginning of like every DVD that
you hired or every video that you hired IP is similar.
It's property that you can't physically hold on to and

(12:44):
keep and somebody can go and copy that and it
is still stealing. So if your business name isn't trademarked
and somebody goes and copies it, most of the time
there's not much you can do now this very from
country to country, so always talk to a lawyer in
your country. My general understanding in Australia, I'm not a lawyer,

(13:07):
but my general understanding is that your course content, your ebooks,
content that you've created on social media that is all
under the Copyright Act, so you don't need to go
and trademark the actual content. But if your course has
a really cool name, like launch Magic, for example, I've
trademarked that name so that nobody else is going to

(13:28):
go and create a launch Magic. But if you have
a course and somebody goes and copies all of your
course content and then start selling it to their audience,
that is copyrighted content, and then you can take action
against them. That is my general understanding. Talk to a
lawyer if you have a copycat. But prevention with this

(13:50):
is always better than having to deal with it when
it happens. So trademarking brand names really really important. I
know it's it's not cheap. It's kind of annoying when
you're like, well, I'm spending, however, many hundreds of dollars
doing this thing and I'm not really seeing any kind
of result from it. It's one of those things. That's
like insurance, right. We don't pay for insurance because it's

(14:13):
giving us a win. We pay for insurance to cover
our butts when something goes wrong. And if it could
be expensive if somebody copied you, Like if somebody copied
launch Magic, it would be really annoying because I would
have to go and get a new logo done. I've
built up a lot of brand equity around Launch Magic.
People know the name, so if it would be expensive
for somebody to copy you, it would be expensive for

(14:34):
you to change things, then go and trademark them. Get
legal advice as well. My friend Riz from found Legal
that's found with two d's found d. She and her
team have created this fantastic copycat kit. I'm pretty sure
if you even just google copycat kit you'll find it.

(14:55):
But we'll also include a link to it in the
show notes. And essentially what it is is it's a
little kit of legal things for if somebody has ripped
off your trademark or has copied your things, and what
to do and all of the templates and things that
you need to fix the situation. Okay, set back number

(15:17):
six burnout. I've experienced this a few times in my business,
and I've seen this happen to a lot of my
business friends over and over again. And it's a big spectrum.
Like on one end, on the extreme end, burnout can
look like severe depression. But on the less extreme end

(15:38):
and maybe like the earlier warning sign is when you're
experiencing a creative lull or you're not feeling inspired, you're
not enjoying what you do anymore, super super common, especially
in the missy middle stage of your business, when you
might be working really hard, spinning your hamster wheel and
you feel like you're not getting anywhere and it's exhausting.

(16:00):
Now with burnout, preventing it is much easier than fixing it,
but it's really hard because it goes against what most
business owners naturally what then natural tendency is, which for
most of us, the tendency is to work harder, the
tendency is to be overachievers. But preventing it means prioritizing rest,

(16:24):
it means doing less. It means prioritizing exercise, connection with
friends and family, eating well, not living off coffee and
adrenaline NonStop, which I have gone through stages in my
business where I have literally been living off coffee and adrenaline,
and it's not good for your body, it's not good
for your mind. And then that's when you stop feel

(16:47):
feeling inspired, you stop feeling creative, because you are literally
in fight or flight. You're literally in survival mode, and
it gets to this point where your body's like, I
actually cannot do anymore. And that's when burnout sets in.
So once you are already at that stage where you
are burnt out, and I know that some of you
listening to this will be because this is a question

(17:07):
I get a lot of the time, like how do
I deal with it? Once you are already feeling burnt out,
you can't push your way through it. You can't just
muscle your way through it and hope that it goes
away on its own. Trust me, I have tried. You
can't push through it. You have to do less. You
have to rest, You have to allow yourself to be bored.

(17:27):
We don't like to feel bored these days, but sometimes
you need to allow that space before you can start
to feel creatively inspired again. If you can try to
cut back on your work, take time off, if you
can maybe bring in some support, maybe hire an assistant
to help take some things off your plate and then

(17:47):
create some time to do a few things that you
love each week, catch up with a friend, or do
a pottery class, or do yoga, whatever it is that
you can put in your calendar, so you've got something
there that you enjoy and you look forward to that
isn't related to just the monotony of every single day,
and it's not related to work. Okay, So prioritizing those

(18:10):
things they are so important. You know, we talk about
we talk about self care a lot in our society,
and we talk about putting your oxygen mask on first
so you can help other people, But how often do
you actually practice that? How often are you prioritizing yourself
so that you can show up for everybody else in

(18:30):
your life, your clients, or your family or everybody who
depends on you. So I mean this is like this
warrants an entire episode on its own. I've talked about
burnout a bit in the past, but this is really
just an overview, like you need to prioritize yourself otherwise
you will burn out. You need to rest otherwise you
will burn out. Okay, So there you have at six

(18:55):
very common setbacks that you may face as a business owner.
I hope you don't face all of them at the
same time, but it's not uncommon to face a couple
at once, and it can feel really hard, and you
can feel like you want to give up. But I
promise you they will pass, and you will become stronger,
and you will learn lessons from them so that they
don't happen again. But in the meantime, I hope this

(19:16):
episode really helped you to overcome these stepbacks. Thank you
so much for listening. If you haven't already left a
rating and a review, please do take two minutes to
do so, probably even less like thirty seconds. Hit the
little number of stars for however many stars you think
this show is and write a little sentence about what
you enjoy about this show. I really appreciate every single one.

(19:39):
I read them all, And if you're not already subscribed
to the show, hit subscribe or follow and it'll just
mean that you get every new episode straight to your
podcast app every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thank you so
much for listening. Catch you next time.
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