MBA2338 Q&A Wednesday: I am about to give up. I'm working hard with no results. Can you help?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. No fluff, just the good stuff with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenhom. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday. On Q &A Wednesdays, we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Walter, and Walter asks, I'm incredibly frustrated. I'm about to give up. I'm working hard on my business day and night with no results.

0:44Can you help? This is such an important question that Walter asks. And I also want to recognize the fact that it's not easy asking for help. Walter is asking because he's stuck. And many of us get stuck and do nothing about it. Maybe we just keep it to ourselves. It takes a lot of courage to say, hey, I'm losing. I need to turn things around. How can you help me? So thanks for asking this question because I'm sure a lot of people are in this position. I've been in this position so many times. I cannot tell you how many times where you feel stuck. You feel trapped. You feel like you're spinning your wheels.

1:17You're stuck in the mud. You're working so hard day and night. You're putting everything you got into this thing and it's just not working or it's not working enough. Maybe you're getting traction. Maybe you're making money. Maybe you're making sales, but it's not enough for you to stay afloat or be profitable. So in today's lesson, we're going to talk about how to get unstuck, how to start seeing your efforts pay off, and what to do in this situation where you're just frustrated, you've had it, and you want to quit. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I first want to say that it's natural to feel frustrated.

1:48It's natural to feel like you want to quit and you've had it. This is the equivalent of ramming yourself into a wall over and over. Your shoulder is bruised. Now it's broken. Now your other shoulder. you are in pain. You just keep ramming into that wall, ramming into that wall, and the wall won't budge. You're working hard. You're doing everything you can. You're exerting all this effort to get through this wall, and you're in so much pain now. You're like, I can't keep ramming. What I found in my 20 years of experience, when you're stuck, when you're hitting a wall, when things are not getting better, when you're working super hard, there's something wrong when you're not getting results.

2:27Here's the hard truth that I've learned that is kind of hard to swallow, but you have to because it's the truth about wealth. It's about money. It's about business. This is the truth. It's not about how hard you work. Hard work is great only when you're working on the right things. What you work on, who you work with, these things are more, more, more important than how hard you work. There are plenty of people working paycheck to paycheck, working hard, exerting a lot of effort, busting their rear end, right? And they're not wealthy. They're not living in Scrooge McDuck's palace swimming in money, right?

3:03But they're working hard, right? Shouldn't they be rich? No, it's not about working hard. Now, the most successful people in the world, the people that are the richest people in the world, if you look at the Elons and the Jeff Bezos of the world, love them or hate them, they actually combined working on the right thing and working hard. When you combine those two, it's a nuclear, right? It just expands and compounds in an incredible way. But in this situation, when you're up against a wall and you're about to give up and you're tired, you've worked so hard and nothing's working, that means what you're working on, what you're doing every day is not the right thing.

3:38You need to change strategy. You need to change course. You got to do different things. And this is hard because sometimes what you do is you just kind of go with the flow. It's easier just to keep on trucking, keep on going, keep on doing what you're doing and just hoping, hoping that things get better. But that's not how it works. The marketplace rewards value. And right now, the truth is, is that your business is not producing enough value for the customer. Some way, somehow. And that's the really tough pill to swallow. This is the tough pill I had to swallow several times where it's like, I got to get better.

4:11My product's got to get better. My offer's got to get better. My sales technique's got to get better. I got to do different things. I got to try different things. I got to change up what I'm doing. So if you're feeling this way, it means it's time for a change. Now, the change can be as drastic as changing your business model or even changing the whole business. But oftentimes it doesn't need to be that drastic. It could just be changing who you serve, changing your offer, changing your pricing, changing the product itself in a slight way that has a unique selling proposition. You got to change, right?

4:42Meaning you can't do the same thing over and over and expect different results. I think it's Einstein who said that's the definition of insanity. Now, I want to stop for a second and we're going to reflect for a second. What is the point of all this? Why are you running this business? Why are you building this thing? Why are you working so hard? It's probably because you want financial independence. You probably want to be free. You probably want to have a better lifestyle. Basically, it means you're trying to get wealthy. Because money is going to afford you to have time. and time is quality time with your family or friends or whatever it might be.

5:13But the point here is that if the goal is to have greater wealth, then everything you're doing is a means to an end. Meaning, if this business, if this version of your business is not working, then you need to change and sacrifice that so that you can be able to get to the ends, which is being wealthy, right? Don't get romantic about your businesses. Don't get romantic about your ideas or your implementation. You might need to change things up. There are so many business stories that talk about this all the time. This is how they became successful. Instagram is one of those stories. Instagram was not what you know it as today, but because one of the features became popular, which are the filters that you can put on photos that you share in the social network and made your photos look professional, it then just turned the whole product upside down and they decided, let's just focus on this one feature and make Instagram all about photos.

6:04They were smart enough to know, hey, what we were doing before isn't working. This is working. This is getting traction. Let's double down on this. Some of us, we ignore what's working because we're so stubborn and romantic about our business idea. They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's not what the business is. No, the business is what the customer wants. The business is what the market wants. Don't make it hard on yourself. Don't push the boulder up the hill. Push the boulder down the hill. Now, you might be saying, well, how do I know? Well, you have to try different things. in order for you to know.

6:35This is why I always say you got to experiment with price and offer. You don't have to revamp your whole website, but you can offer specific segments of your email list or customers or an audience or somebody you're targeting on paid ads, a specific offer. You can just create a simple page and say, hey, this is the offer we're selling. This is what it includes. This might mean you're raising prices or you're offering a more valuable product or a different version of your product. Experiment, see the conversion rate, see if this works. oh, this actually worked. I'm making money here. Oh, no, it didn't work, but I think if I make this little tweak, it might work.

7:09Oh, there you go. Now it's working. Now that that experiment worked, let's apply it to the rest of the business. The point here is that when you're stuck, do something different. Keep moving. Change things up. Just like a four-by-four that gets stuck in the mud, right? And it's spinning its wheels. You go forward, it keeps losing grip. You go reverse, same thing. Are you just going to keep doing this back and forth? No. What's going to happen is you're going to get further and further stuck in the mud. You got to do something different. You know, get out and push the car, go get a winch, put it into neutral and let it slowly roll down the hill and take a different path up.

7:42Duh. That's what you do in life. And that's what you do in business. You have to apply the same principles. Something's not working. If you're stuck, you're banging against the wall. If you're trying hard, you're working hard, you've done everything and it's still not working. Stop doing that. Change it up. Now, if your business is in a situation where you're thinking about quitting, this is actually an advantage because you have nothing to lose by changing things up. It's all upside because the other option was closing it down. Now, I know I've been giving you some tough love today. It's been a bit passionate, but because I've been there, I know the pain.

8:13So many times I've had wake-up calls. It's like, oh, I got to do something different. I got to change my strategy. I got to change my product. I got to change what I'm doing. And it feels a little overwhelming because it's like, I got all this work to do. But at the same time, it's exciting because I'm not doing the same thing. It's something new now. And I can check out the results and see how it goes. Listen, when you're losing and things are not going well, the advantage is that it's hard to go much worse, right? It's hard to lose after you've already lost. By trying something new, you are opening up the opportunity of an improvement.

8:45So let's talk brass tacks. What are some easy things you can do to experiment and turn things around? Well, I talked about an exclusive offer, a private offer, testing out different packaging and pricing. Another way is changing how you sell the product. Sometimes people don't understand your product very well, so you might have to do sales calls or maybe do a course that teaches how to use this product, sell that course that leads into selling the product. This is why a lot of people do boot camps or challenges is because they're a great way to sell products. Maybe you've got to change your product itself to make it something that is more of a solution to a bigger pain point.

9:25Maybe you're solving a pain, but it's not painful enough. and maybe you got to pivot a little bit and say, hey, what if I change it a little bit and address this problem and make it front and center on my website, see how that converts. It could be how you manage your team could be different. I know a friend of mine who just decided no more meetings. He felt like he was spending too much time in meetings. All the team members were spending too much time in meetings and they just decided no more meetings. They're not doing any meetings anymore. Everybody's going to work on what they're supposed to work on, whether it's writing blog posts or selling products or doing customer service.

9:59That's what they're going to do day and night. No more meetings. Sounded extreme and sounded crazy, but they communicated asynchronously with their project management tool and gave video updates and things like that. What he found is that the velocity picked up all of a sudden. And in his particular business, this worked. You can experiment something like this in your business for a week or a month. See if that helps. You can always go back if it's not working. Now, a word of warning. When you're making changes like this in your business, sometimes it means making hard decisions. meaning changing your personnel, changing your team, changing who you serve, your customer.

10:32Those changes are hard because we've built to like these people. We have built a relationship, whether it's a customer or a team member or a vendor or a supplier or whatever it might be. And it's going to be a little bit difficult. And that's natural. You're only human, but it doesn't mean you don't do it. It means that you do it despite that's how you feel. I'm not asking you to be, you know, a reptile and have no feelings. I'm saying appreciate those feelings, but understand you as the business owner's job is to serve your customers and do what's best for the business. Thanks so much for listening to The$100 MBA Show.

11:05I hope that helped Walter and everybody else who's listening. If you've got a question you want to ask here on Q &A Wednesday, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. I'll make sure to answer it right here on the show. If you want to keep it anonymous and not mention your name, I can happily do that, no problem. I can help you and others who have a similar issue or question that you have. Don't forget, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app right now. Whatever you're using right now, whether it's Spotify or Apple or Stitcher or Overcast or whatever it might be, hit follow or subscribe on the app so you get the next episode automatically.

11:38Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Change is hard. As human beings, we like comfort. We like the norm. We like doing the same thing over and over again. Routine gives us comfort, gives us safety. When things change, when things get uncomfortable, we get uncomfortable, right? We start to get a little agitated. It's hard. But here's the thing that we have to recognize. Everything's changing around us. The market's changing. The economy's changing. The people that we serve change, right? We all change in life. Their needs change. Their wants change. Everything's changing. And if we don't change with it, we're going to be left behind.

12:12So get comfortable getting uncomfortable. Thanks so much for listening. And I'll check you in Friday's episode for Red Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.