Breaking the Cash Flow Ceiling in a Small Business

Dear reader,

I have lately observed some things in several small businesses I’m working with that I want to share with you.

I’ve just completed a conceptual rebrand process with one business where we’re now moving into marketing strategy, and just started working on another re-brand and growth strategy with a skin care company. Seeing the similarities between what has been needed in these two examples prompted me to write this article for those who are founders of small sized businesses.

I’ve always been fascinated by business, doing all sorts of ventures over the years of my own — freelancing as a classical musician, a health product business, an child care program, my first life coaching business, real estate investing, co-founded a consulting and training business, and years of executive coaching with leaders in multi-stakeholder teams, non-profits, and consulting, design, real estate, manufacturing, and other sorts of companies.

And of course the stakes are different for founders, owners and leaders of different sized enterprises, but the INNER dilemmas are often similar, if not the same.

Let’s focus on really small business today and explore what tends to bog them down. I have noticed some basic problems that show up when a small business tries to scale up:

Gets stuck at a cash flow ceiling. Can’t make enough money to invest in building.
Current idiosyncratic ways of doing things are no longer serving.
Coping mechanisms, beliefs, and inner wounds are playing out in the business that are creating burn out, frustration, and confusion with no clarity for how to grow out of them

The issues appear to be relentless and unbreakable.

This is because you have to work on the limits in you that are creating the limits in your business.

Here are the main issues I have seen:

1: An inconsistent and amateur level of branding.

A brand refresh and creating a simple “brand bible” is the solution. This will help you get the visual look and feel and the tone/feel of your business consistent. This process will also spark important questions about mission, market fit, and relevancy of your business. This can be quite challenging as it brings up the aforesaid wounds. Which leads into the next point.

2: Vision and mission of the company not aligned with the owner’s real dreams.

Creating a future vision and mission that is not what you THINK you want or SHOULD do but is attuned to your true heart’s structure. No easy thing. We have to get through the lies we tell ourselves about what we want, whether we are good enough, and whether we deserve it — to the truth. Otherwise you’ll not have the resiliency nor will you have sufficient intuition to guide you.

3: Learning to think in terms of systems.

Building systems into your business is critical to growth. Systems for production, marketing, sales, managing the small admin tasks, legal, and whatever else there is. Systems, rhythms, and batching tasks are all ways to streamline the daily activities. This is under the umbrella of “efficiency”. You’d be amazed by how much inefficiency is present exactly where your psychic wounds and unexamined inner life issues are.

4: Discovering where the bottlenecks are.

What is a bottleneck? A place where the way through is too narrow for all the tasks that need to happen. For example, if someone has too many mission critical tasks on their plate to handle and they aren’t delegating them, then they are the bottleneck. Usually bottlenecks reside in your emotional life or subconscious life of beliefs first, then get represented in some way in the outer world in your business. Theory of Constraints introduces you to this concept.

5: Relevance.

This is working on the market fit of your business idea. One of the big reasons why people fail in business start ups is they don’t do enough research to make sure they are building in a market already hungry for their offers. They assume interest without really knowing if it is there in sufficient numbers and if it’s strong enough.

I see earnest people wanting to build a business around their values, but in reality you have to find the “implicate intersection” between what you want to bring to life in the world and what the world is hungry for and ready to buy. By implicate intersection I mean a delicate dynamic truth that exists between you and your destiny, and the world as it currently is — its reality.

You then have to find a powerful way to build the bridge to the customer if the conditions are conducive. This issue, relevance, is the biggest predictor of the ability of a business to succeed. That and the next point…

6: Marketing and sales.

I find that for some, sales and the sheer amount of communication that marketing demands becomes a direct reflection of a business owner’s “inner child” wounding. This means, putting aside feelings of antipathy toward selling for the moment which many feel (I’ll get to that), getting to see your own tendencies in communicating to the world your products or services can be illuminating about how you communicate everywhere in your life.

Chances are, you believe you are shouting but in reality to the world you are whispering inaudibly. In music, for example, when you get on stage and begin to perform, you discover early on that you are not bringing out the contrast, nor playing loudly, nor projecting far enough into the performance space — at all. It’s even shocking how much louder and more expressive you actually have to be in reality. Imagine how much you have to project into an auditorium that fits 500 people!

You are at volume 1 when you need to be at volume 10.

And, more to the point, if you tend to be mitigated and unclear in life because you have a safety mechanism in place — to speak your truth meant you’d be punished when you were a child — then you’ll be mitigated and unclear in your marketing and sales.

And this is one big reason why marketing and sales seems so sleazy to business owners: you have to actually make the ask to get your needs met and that feels dangerous, selfish, and ugly.

Any one of these issues can trigger multiple protective mechanisms or wounds in you. For example, an old and unresolved trauma response could be to create a degree of chaos in your business because it’s what you grew up around and you feel “safe” in such an environment, despite the stress and collateral damage to you and your business.

Or, you must maintain complete control of all aspects of your business because you can’t let go sufficiently to let someone else do it instead. You might have beliefs that people won’t do the work as well as you and so you have to do it all yourself. You might not know how to delegate, or understand how important it is to give over control.

Here’s another: you find yourself in co-dependent, caretaking relationships with your partners and can’t admit to your resentment, disempowerment or beliefs that you are carrying more than is acknowledged and are unable to communicate your unmet needs because of fears of conflict and upsetting others.

And one more: you are unable to hear feedback about your behavior, dismissing it as a misunderstanding, or weak employees. While I do have issues with feedback in general, I think that if your life is holding up a mirror showing you that your behaviors are undermining efficiency or performance, you need to pay attention.

You are not growing so long as you are defensive. On the other hand, in order to tell the difference between someone else’s projection (my main criticism of feedback in general) and something real, you’ll need to be able to self-reflect. And I mean in more disciplined ways than just allowing thoughts to flow around in your head while you drive.

I think its actually much better when you can write those reflective thoughts down because then you are forced to externalize those thoughts. They become more objective once written down.

This is the hardest thing about self-reflection: becoming objective about something that is so subjective. But it’s important because otherwise how do we find an inner orientation to what is actually true? This is where we build an organ of perception for the truth, inwardly as well as outwardly, through building an ability to be ruthlessly objective about our subjective opinions, feelings, and behaviors.

So what are the solutions? Here are three things you can do to diagnose your challenges:

1: Study where the bottlenecks are.

Get started, if you haven’t already, on your inner work. I know I harp on about this a lot. Start with assessing where your bottlenecks are. And what do they tell you about where you are stuck, inwardly?

You could ask yourself a series of “why?” questions. For example, I get stuck and can’t move forward with hard and boring tasks. Why? Because I feel overwhelmed. Why? Because I don’t know how to get started and also see them through to the finish line. Why? Because I doubt myself and my abilities. Why? Because I am afraid I’ll be disappointed about one more thing I fail at. Bingo — there is the belief that drives the outer conditions, that sets up the bottleneck.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and it no longer has the same degree of power over you. You will find you’ve got more will power available to you to find a way through the inner resistance that causes the bottleneck.

2: Interrogate your relevance in the marketplace.

Study the relevance of your offer and market fit. Are you living in reality about the ability of your offer to help your customers? Or are you living in fantasy? Have you done the research to explore the degree of market fit and whether there is enough customer demand for you to grow?

This is a place I’ve seen a lot of businesses flounder, especially in the services world where entrepreneurs are trying to support spiritual/psychological problems. If you don’t belong squarely in the sphere of the economy, meaning, you are providing for the material needs of others, then you may have a harder time with building the bridge to your customers.

I may write about this important distinction in the future between an offer that is more of a cultural nature than economic, and how you need to adjust your business accordingly.

3: Questions to ask yourself – and answer – about efficiency.

Do you have systems, or does chaos reign? Have you set up systems that are idiosyncratic, or are they based on best practices?

Do you hate being locked in by repetitive tasks, and the discipline that you know you should have, but don’t?

Do your employees get things done, or are they hampered by bad boundaries or an inability to give them clear systems and direction?

Have you hired people whom you like, but who are not really capable of pulling their weight?

Are you communicating clearly, or do you tend to be unclear in your expectations and instructions?

What does the state of work getting done reveal to you?

This is a general diagnostics plan for exploring what might be holding up your business and your growth.

If you are interested in getting some more help, then you can apply for a free consultation with me. Simply go here, answer some questions and you’ll be taken to my scheduler to find a time that best suits you.

Don’t wait until conditions are more favorable, get help if you really need it.

Warmly,

Louisa