The #1 Reason Most Businesses Fail (And How To Fix It)
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What is the #1 reason most businesses fail?
Why do most businesses fail? It's not what you're thinking, it's not a lack of passion, it's not issues with the product or the offer or even their competition. It comes down to one thing and that is not enough quality leads that actually convert into paying customers. Welcome to the You Can Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Jolly Jarvis, and today we're going to be tackling the number one reason why most businesses struggle and consequently go on to fail. More importantly, how you can avoid it. Okay, we'll cover why leads matter so much, how to attract the right kind of customers and how to avoid the trap of scaling without a solid client base. So let's jump in. First up, we want to be looking at the foundations. Okay, so when you start out in business, every business needs customers. Without them, you don't have a business. You have a hobby and potentially a very expensive and time-consuming one at that. Okay, when you're starting out, that focus should be on the building of that predictable and repeatedly way to generate leads.
Okay, you need that pipeline or whatever else you want to call it, which refers to that journey that people go on. You need to have people in that process of getting to know you, like and trust you, to be in a position to buy from you.
Why are quality leads more important than quantity?
Now, as you get into business, as you start to get customers on board, you begin to realise that actually you don't just want leads who turn into customers, you want the right kind of leads that turn into the right kind of customers, okay? Not just any leads, you want quality leads. The reason for that is because you want those leads to be aligned with your offer and your business model and where you wanna be taking that business. You want those leads that are ready and able to buy ideally as much as possible, because then that makes your sales process a lot easier. Attracting the wrong leads that lead to poor results. It can waste your time. You can feel frustrated. The most time consuming customers you tend to come across are those which are not your ideal. You get them on board. You realise that they are going to be trickier. They are going to be more time consuming. And actually, they take up more than their allocated time. you could probably have two clients in that timescale and deliver better for them than one difficult and not ideal client.
So why is that important? Well, it's important because you don't want to get yourself wrapped up in the implementation. You've got to be working on the business as well as in it. You've also got the fact that you want proven results because proven results end up creating you more business, more work. And so you can begin to get referrals. You can begin to build a reputation. You have evidence that those individuals who purchase your offer or the outcome that you're promising or the product will go on to actually receive that and get that positive experience and get that value for money and get the outcome that they've paid for. So those testimonials, it becomes easier to secure new customers with those testimonials, with that social proof, with the evidence that you can deliver. If your time is spent delivering for people who aren't ideal, who aren't going to get results, who aren't going to provide you with that evidence. then it's going to waste your time. It's going to slow you down.
How can you identify and avoid difficult clients?
So I pick people on a regular basis who they have clients, they are busy, but when you start to look at the type of clients they've got, they're the ones that suck up all their time and won't give them that result. So I always say to people that you're not after that transaction, you're after the testimonial. So when you're doing your sales process with those individuals, remember sales is a two-way process. It's your opportunity to get to know those individuals better and to suss them out and to see what they'll be like to work with. Your gut instinct on that is normally very accurate, just to put in there. And so you begin to realise that actually this person isn't ideal.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the #1 reason most businesses fail?
0:06–1:19
2
Why are quality leads more important than quantity?
1:19–3:17
3
How can you identify and avoid difficult clients?
3:17–4:56
4
What is the scaling trap and how to avoid it?
4:56–6:56
5
How can Kinsta help manage your website efficiently?
6:56–16:26
Speakers
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