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Are you working harder than ever but still feel like your business is going nowhere fast? In this episode, Samantha Riley gets brutally honest about a stage of business that almost every entrepreneur hits, and almost no one talks about.
It’s not a strategy problem, a marketing problem, or a leads problem. It’s a you problem. And understanding that distinction could be the most important shift you make this year.
Samantha introduces the concept of the “messy middle”. The frustrating in-between stage where you’re no longer a beginner, you have clients and revenue and maybe even a small team, but growth still feels stuck.
The path forward isn’t hustle, but there is a very important change that needs to be made.
WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER IN THIS EPISODE:
- 0:03 – The wake-up call every business owner needs to hear
- 0:22 – What the “messy middle” actually looks like, and why it’s so dangerous
- 2:03 – The hard truth about being the bottleneck in your own business
- 3:10 – The story that will make you cringe (and finally see yourself clearly)
- 4:08 – Why hiring a team can actually make things worse before they get better
- 5:40 – Why chasing more leads is the worst thing you can do right now – and what to do first.
- 6:23 – The shift that needs to happen to move from the Constraint Stage to the Scale Stage.
Free Resource:
Click here to access the Bottleneck Audit, and in under 2 minutes you’ll discover the constraint holding you back, and the next 3 moves to make.
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
TRANSCRIPTION
Samantha Riley 0:00
Would your business slow down or completely stop if you stepped away? If it doesn’t run as normal when you go out for a day with the kids, let alone taking a holiday, you don’t have a scaling problem. You have a dependency problem, and most of the time that dependency is you. I’m Samantha Riley, and welcome to the Business Growth Lab, where visionary entrepreneurs come to experiment, evolve and expand what’s possible.
Welcome to today’s episode of Business Growth Lab. I’m your host for today, Samantha Riley, and today we’re going to talk about the real reason your business isn’t scaling, and it might not be what you think, because we’re going to talk about a stage in business that is exceptionally painful. There is no way out that I know of. I’ve never spoken to someone that knows a way out. You do need to move through it, and that’s the messy middle.
Now, the messy middle is where you’re not a beginner, so you’ve already got clients, you’ve got revenue coming in the door. Maybe you’ve even got a team, a small team, but you’re still doing everything. Every decision comes to you. If you’ve got a team, they’re often just sitting around waiting for you to give them something to do, or they’re just waiting for you to approve something. So instead of taking ownership for it, they’re like, Oh, well, I gave it to you. You haven’t approved it, so I’ll just sit around doing nothing. You can have leads coming in, but they might feel inconsistent. Generally, you are busy all day, but it feels like the growth should be going a lot faster than it is, and you can’t fully switch off. Now, when you’re in the messy middle and you’re here, it’s not because of a lack of effort. Like if you’re in the messy middle, you will know there is a lot of effort, there’s a lot of time being spent in the business, but there’s a bottleneck.
So let’s talk about what being the bottleneck actually means. Now, it doesn’t mean that you’re bad at business. It just means that your business is still built around you. So when you’re a startup, you are everything you wear, all the hats you do, all the things you do, the thinking and the creating and the marketing and the sales and the delivery, everything flows through you, everything, but there comes a point where it can’t be around you anymore, because all of that works until it doesn’t.
And I remember in my first business, the first time I went through the messy middle, and it was a really exciting time, because we hired our first part time team member, and then we got to the stage where we had multiple full timers. And at that point, my husband and myself were still there every day, and I was still opening and closing. This was a traditional business where we actually had to show up.
Now we sat down one night, my hubby and I, we had a good chat about this, and we were saying how crazy it was that we were both still working every day. We were still going in, we were still opening, closing, and that we were paying staff because we’d taken staff on, because we knew that we needed the help, but we hadn’t actually changed anything else. So we made the decision that we would each take a day off, and at that time, we were both working six days a week, so we would move down to just five days each a week. And you know what I did for the next two months after we made this decision, I still turned up every single day, I still opened, I still closed, I still did everything. And that’s why this stage, the messy middle, is really dangerous, because things can get messy fast if you don’t shift your perspective and step into a new identity as the CEO, the problems don’t actually stay the same. They multiply. Your team starts feeling like they’re being micromanaged, which means they feel disempowered. And when your team feels disempowered, they will stop taking initiative, and that’s even if they started in the first place, because they’ll be waiting for you to tell them what to do, they’ll be waiting for your approval.
Samantha Riley 4:24
They’ll feel unable to make decisions. So all decisions will defer back to you, and they become reactive instead of responsible. So if this happens, now you’re working just as hard, except now you’re paying wages too. Now you hired staff because you wanted to grow. You hired team because you wanted freedom. But what happens is, instead, you end up with more moving parts, and you’re still in the middle of all of them, and you’re still controlling them. So now, instead of wearing some hats, you’re wearing way more, many hats. It’s like you’re a, you know, a circus monkey with the plates spinning and the symbols crushing, and it’s exhausting.
And what happens at this point, and it happened to me, is, naturally, you start to think, Oh, my goodness, I just need more leads. Because what you’re thinking is, I’ve got this team now, and we’re still not growing. So you start to think, I just need more leads. Now, at this moment, if this is what people are thinking, they post more, they might create more offers. They’ll chase referrals harder. They’ll tweak funnels, create new funnels, try another strategy or a shiny tactic. You know, the new YouTube thing, the new Instagram thing, but more demand on a business that still depends on you will create more pressure, more chaos, way more mistakes, way more frustration, more fires to put out. So growth won’t fix a bottleneck. It actually exposes it. It really helps you to understand that things here are not working. This is the stage when you’re in the messy middle. This is the stage where hustle stops working and structure becomes everything. Okay. It’s not about putting in more effort, more content, more ideas, more offers, all the things that we talked about before.
So this is where you really need to step into the identity of the CEO, so that you are making better decisions. You have better systems, better ownership, not just for you, but for your team. Everyone needs to have ownership of what it is that they’re responsible for. You need better flow. You need to create your business so that it seamlessly flows from beginning to end of every single system in your business. Now if any of this hit a little too close because you’re thinking, oh my goodness, this is me, then good, because it means you’re not stuck. You’re just at a stage most people don’t understand how to move through. So over the next few episodes, I’m going to break this down, because there’s five stages of a business cycle. And Leon and I are going to help you get really clear about what stage you’re actually in, because it might not be the missing middle. Some of these things might have resonated, but it might not actually be the stage that you’re currently in. So we’re going to help you get really clear about what stage you’re in, why most businesses get stuck in that stage, and then how to build something that actually scales without you being in the middle of everything. So if this episode hit home, then the next step right now, before the next episode drops, is really simple. I’ve created a bottleneck audit to reveal the bottleneck that’s stalling your growth right now. It takes just two minutes, so it doesn’t take long. It reveals your number one bottleneck, and it gives you your next three moves. So it’s not about more information, it’s just these are the next three things to do. It’ll show you exactly what’s slowing growth in your business right now. It might be team. It might be systems, sales, marketing, or just you being in the middle of everything. So go to samanthariley dot global forward slash audit, or click the link in the show notes below wherever you’re listening and get access to that audit. I really look forward to joining you over the next few weeks and really helping to unpack the constraints that are holding your business back so that you really can grow and scale to 50, 100k, 200k and even more months. It is possible. I have done it. I’ve done all the wrong things. I’ve figured them out, and I’m here to share these lessons with you. So thanks so much for joining me today, and I will see you next week on another episode of Business Growth Lab.
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