MBA2593 Why You Are Stuck & Not Growing Your Business

0:28Why isn't your business growing? I realized was I was wrong and I didn't get it. Now that I understand, I want to share it with you. If you are stuck right now, you cannot afford to miss today's episode.

0:43Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Today's episode is all about why your business is stuck right now, why you're in a rut, and how to get out of that situation, how to get growing again. Let's start with why businesses get stuck in the first place. At some point, every business hits some sort of plateau. Revenue starts to flatten. Maybe your leads are starting to dry up. You run out of hours in the day to take more on. Does this sound familiar?

1:18When this happens, most entrepreneurs look for external fixes. They start asking questions like, should I adjust my pricing? Should I rework my funnel? Should I hire more people? Now, don't get me wrong. These are valid questions. But in my opinion and in my experience, they're not always the right ones to start with. The smartest move in my experience is to stop looking at your business and start looking at yourself. Now, I'm going to tell you right now, this is uncomfortable, okay? It doesn't feel great to say, maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm not enough. Maybe I can't do it as I am right now.

1:59It's okay because everybody goes through this and you can get through this if you recognize this and change. You have the ability to change. You've already changed in your life to get to the point where you are right now. So what are some better questions, the real questions you should ask yourself? A really golden question I like to ask is, what could I change about myself that would solve this? So whatever problem you have in your business that you see, what about myself that I can change that would solve this? Here are some other ways I would rephrase this question. Maybe it will hit differently for you.

2:34Who would you be if you weren't stuck anymore? What's holding you back from taking the next step? Here's the truth. Your beliefs, your mind is the biggest obstacle to your growth. And what you believe is who you are, right? Whatever you believe, the things that you believe about yourself is who you are. That's the reality. Let me give you an example just to make this super clear. Let's say you're a freelance writer. You've maxed out on your clients. You've hit your revenue ceiling because you simply don't have the time to take on more work. The external fixes might be charging more for your services or hiring another writer to help you scale or maybe using AI to streamline your workflow.

3:15But here's a really important question. Why haven't you done those things yet? Maybe you're afraid to raise your rates, aka imposter syndrome, that old friend. Maybe you're hesitant to hire somebody because you don't trust anyone else to do the work as well as you will do it, fear of delegation. Maybe you're avoiding AI because you think it's fake or it's lazy, or maybe it's going to be so good you'll start to question your own skills. Get under the reason why you haven't done the things you should in your business to move forward. The internal solution is more powerful than any external one because it unlocks your ability to act.

3:53It solves the root problem. So you don't have this problem again. Let me give you another example. The founder who loves creating their product but hates selling it. Their mindset around sales is that it's some form of manipulation or it's sleazy. The result, they don't sell enough and their business stagnates. The external fix is simple. I'm going to wait until I can hire somebody to handle my sales for me. And basically you're going to be stuck until then. But how are you going to afford them if you're not making more sales? All right. But the internal fix, if you went internal, it's far more transformative.

4:29Get comfortable being proud of your product. Recognize that your product has value and that there's a transformation it brings to your customers. Understand that you're educating your customers on the value. You're educating on why this is a good decision to go with you. And you're proud of it. There's no manipulation in selling something you truly believe in. If you go to a great restaurant that you absolutely love, you can't help but tell other people you've got to go to this restaurant. You're not manipulating them to go to the restaurant. You just feel compelled that this is a valuable experience.

4:58You should do this. You should go. So the bottom line is you can't grow if you're afraid to champion your own work. So how do we break free from this? How do we get unstuck? Here are my steps, steps that I like to take anytime I hit a plateau. Step number one is to identify the mindset block. What belief is holding you back? What do you believe about yourself or about the situation or what's going on that is stopping you from doing what you need to do? For example, I can't charge more for my product. Step two, challenge the belief. Challenge it. Is there actual truth behind it? Is there evidence that this is true?

5:40Because you're telling yourself a story without any proof. Could you charge more if you demonstrated there's more value you can bring? If you increase the value to your product, or maybe you showed how valuable it is, the return on investment for the customer, wouldn't that be enough to justify a higher price? One of the things I like to do is I like to detach myself from the business. Imagine I'm talking about another business, another founder. What advice would I give them in this situation? And most likely it's advice I should take on. And again, this exercise of pretending it's somebody else is proof that what I'm telling myself is a false story.

6:17So after I identify the block and I challenge the belief, the third step is I take one small step forward. I test my assumptions. I raise my rates for one client, for example, or I raise it on my sales page for a month. And I try it out. I see what happens. If I'm afraid to delegate, I delegate one task. Fourth step, I reflect and I adjust. I ask myself the question, did the world end? No, it did not end, right? Great, keep going. Let's make some adjustments. What else can I do? What's the next step? What's the next way I can lean forward and lean into this a little bit more? And step five is you learn from this experience and you say, okay, there's a lot I need to change about myself if I want to get better and better.

7:02So you need to make mindset growth a habit, a part of your daily life. And the way to do that is through information, is through your environment. Read books, take courses, surround yourself with people who challenge the way you think, make you think bigger. Let me give you an example. Let me give you a story. Last year I was in Tokyo, Japan, and I had a couple dinners with a friend of mine, Ramit Sethi. Ramit Sethi is a New York Times bestselling author of two books. and he's a star of his own show on Netflix, How to Get Rich. Ramit is a lovely guy and we had a great meal, but my biggest takeaway was I'm not thinking big enough.

7:40This guy is thinking big and that wouldn't happen. That unblock of I'm thinking small, I need to think bigger would not happen if I didn't surround myself with people like Ramit. If I didn't accept the fact that, hey, I gotta be around people that are doing big things. That means putting yourself out there, inviting people to dinner, networking, working, going to conferences, asking for introductions. It's not going to happen by accident, okay? You have to make an effort to be around people that are doing big things. Almost every business challenge that I faced has some sort of internal solution.

8:12When you change who you are in your head, you unlock the ability to do all kinds of things in your business, whether it's raising your prices confidently, delegating and trusting your team, embracing tools and technology that come up like AI, sell your product with pride like we talked about, All these things don't happen just because I decide to. I have to believe in my head first that this is something that I should do and have to do. I got to remove the beliefs behind it that are stopping me from doing it. That's why challenging your beliefs is really important. You can't grow your business until you actually grow yourself, right?

8:51Your business is only going to grow to a certain level. Beyond that, that's who you are. You got to change. You got to grow so they can keep growing. Otherwise, how else will it grow? Who's making the decisions? Who's making the hires? You are. And if you want to improve the quality of your decisions and your hires, improve who you are. So if you're feeling stuck, if your business is stuck, start looking inwards. Ask yourself, what could I change about myself to solve this? Remember, external fixes are great, but internal growth ones is where the magic happens, where you don't actually have to worry about how to fix something external because it's going to happen naturally because you've already fixed the root problem.

9:30Almost every hurdle I've found in business starts and ends with yourself. Listen, who you are right now has gone to where you are right now. And that's great. You've done a good job. You've made a lot of progress in your life. But if you want things to change, to improve, you guessed it, you got to change. You got to improve. Thanks for tuning into the$100 MBA show. If you want to go deeper, if you want to learn week by week with me, I have a weekly newsletter that is absolutely free. And it's my way to kind of coach you from afar. I give you three things to do every single week, something to think about.

10:03It's like a thought exercise, something to do and something to learn. It'll help you take action every single week. All you got to do is go to our website, 100mba.net and sign up for any of our freebies. Give your name and email address and it'll be part of our weekly newsletter. If you found today's episode valuable, don't forget to subscribe, share with other people that you know. Make sure you're following the show on any podcast app you're using or if you're watching on YouTube. That way you get our next episodes automatically and have access to our archive episodes of over 2 ,500 business lessons.

10:33I'm Omar Zenhom, and I'll see you in the next episode.