47: What to Do When Your Business Feels Like It’s Failing

You’re showing up, you’re delivering and no one disagrees about it.  You care deeply.

And still, your numbers are low, your offer isn’t landing, and someone else on Instagram just filled their free workshop in 30 seconds.

In this episode, I’m naming a common experience: what it feels like when your business isn’t gaining traction, and how to respond without spiraling into self-doubt. When it feels like your business isn’t working, it’s not just about the numbers. It’s the self-doubt and the second-guessing that creeps in quietly that is the bigger problem.

I offer you five clear, practical shifts that will help you recalibrate when things aren’t landing the way you expected. 

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• What you might be missing when your offer flops (and how to fix it without overhauling everything)
• The most common trap that keeps women stuck in comparison and burnout
• How to stop taking your business results personally (this one’s non-negotiable)
• What season your business is in, and why ignoring this burns your energy
• A smarter way to use the data you're already getting (instead of panicking about what’s not working)

Key Takeaways

• Stop comparing apples to oranges.
• Your offer needs to solve a clear problem. 
• Business is numbers. 
• Honor the season you’re in. 
• Unsubscribes are data, not rejection.

Take Action

• Your numbers don’t define you.  Look at them as feedback, and not a reflection of who you are as a person.  
• Schedule a discovery call with Tertia if you need personal support https://calendly.com/tertia/consult 

Get the full show notes, transcript and more information here:

https://tertiariegler.com/business-feels-like-failing/ 

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• DM me your biggest insight! https://www.instagram.com/tertia_riegler_embodiment/
• Email me via my website https://tertiariegler.com/contact/

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Transcript

Tertia [00:00:00]:
How do we handle it? How do we deal with it when we feel as if our businesses are failing, not performing or doing as well as we would love them to? That is what I'm getting into in today's episode because I feel it's such an important conversation for us to have. Welcome. I'm Tertia and you are listening to the Beyond Burnout for Driven Women podcast. Let's dive in. This is a topic that I've seen come up over and over again in the last few weeks in the circles that I move in. And so I thought it is appropriate for us to talk about this today. It's a very important conversation to have because it's so easy to lose courage, to lose trust in yourself and to feel demotivated if you are putting in all of this effort, if you are doing as much as you can to get your business in front of the right eyes and it's not getting traction. I have four points which I just jotted down early this morning that I'd love to take you through. I know how easy it is to feel despondent if someone that you follow on social media shares on their on their socials that they are hosting a free workshop. They've got 250 people who signed up for that workshop and similar free event that you put forward has hardly any signups. And this is the first thing that I want to share with you is to compare apples to apples. What do I mean by this? Who are you measuring yourself against? I think too often it happens, especially if our businesses haven't really taken off. If we are either in the infancy stages of getting our business off the ground and we still finding our way around our message and how we are here to serve our people. It's very easy to then look at what other more established people in your industry is doing. And of course, if you are going to measure yourself against them, you are going to fall short. They have had a lot more traction than you because they've been in business for longer than you. And this counts whether you have newly started your business or if you have a new offer that you're bringing into the world. I bet you if you go and look at those people who you follow that seem to draw in these big crowds, more often than not, the offer that they have is already established. It's the second or the third or even the fourth time that that they are offering this. And so they already have all of this experience behind them of building it up from the ground up. I don't even know if that's proper English. But I'm sure you understand what I mean. So who are you measuring yourself against? The second thing that we need to look at is that which you are offering. Does it solve a clear problem? And this is something that I have been learning more and more about as I have been working with a mentor on my own business, behind the scenes, as I'm growing my own business. And I think the trap that I definitely fell into in previous iterations of my different offers and what I still see people do every time is we kind of use this. I almost want to say airy fairy, intangible results. And the fact of the matter is, think about yourself. The things that you invest in, whether it is investing with cold, hard cash or whether it is investing with your time and your attention, it usually is when it fulfills a need that you have. So it solves a problem that you have. It offers you a solution. It gives you something that will give you results, that will take you from where you are now to where you desire to be. And this was such a big learning curve for me, a helpful measure that I use now ever since I learned about this concept of taking my offer from something that's quite intangible and something that's nebulous and turning it into something that actually speaks to the heart of what my. My audience is struggling with. The measuring stick that I use is, can you articulate what your offer, this product or service that you are hoping to sell, can you articulate or why someone needs what you have to offer? How clear are you in your own being, in your own mind, in your own energy that you hold towards this offer, that this is the answer that they need. Because if you are not 100% sure about the transformation, because it could be this or it could be that, and it could also be something else, it's going to come through in your messaging. So in everything that you put out into the world that speaks to your offer, whether it is on social media, whether it's in your newsletters, whether it's on a podcast like this or on whatever channel it is that you use to bring your information out to your audience, unless you are crystal clear in your own mind about that transformation, it might not fully land. The third thing that I want to offer you is, is that it's business, it's not personal. And this, I feel, can be so helpful for those times where you feel like nothing that you're doing is working, nothing is landing, and you feel as if that is a reflection of who you are as a person and it's not. Business is about numbers. And even if you because if you are listening to this podcast, I'm assuming that you will fall in this category. Even if you are someone who wants to make a difference in the world, even if you want to leave the world a better place. Yes, you bring your heart to your clients, you share your gifts with your clients. But at the back end of that, remember that business is math. It is not personal. So it will be so, so helpful if you are able to create that separation between the results that you're getting and what that means about you as a person versus the results that you're getting and what that means about the way that you are communicating or talking about what you can offer. Can you see the difference? And there's such a big power shift that happens when we stand in how can I change my messaging? How can I change how I'm showing up? How can I use the data that I'm getting and make changes versus there's something wrong with me as a person? I'm broken. I need to be fixed. Because that kind of thinking keeps you stuck in burnout cycles. Because you are always going to try and prove that you are enough. You're going to get stuck in overthinking and overwhelm as you try to prove unconsciously that you have value and that you are enough. The fourth thing that I have here on my list is also to remember what season you are in. And this is either the season of your life or the season of your business. It doesn't really matter. But remember, we live in a world that sort of disregards. By and large, we've been conditioned and socialized to disregard the seasons that we find ourselves in. And I think for us as women, this is one of our power tools is the cyclical nature of our being. If you can learn how to tap into your natural resources that are higher at times when your energy is higher and you don't deplete yourself at the times when your energy is lower, can you see how this allows you to show up as that more powerful version of yourself? And it starts diminishing the chances of you feeling resentful, of you feeling frustrated, and of you feeling like you're shouting into a void and using all of your energy on something that doesn't seem to be working. And the season of life that you find yourself in, the season that your business find itself in, also plays into this. If you are in the winter season, for example, this can be a very uncomfortable place for us to be. And yet this is also a time when a lot of our inspiration is born and our creativity can start developing behind the scenes. If you are in the spring season, this is really when you planting the new seeds of what it is that you wish to harvest in the end. If you are in the autumn or the fall season, this is of course where you're harvesting in summer. You're pumping out these beautiful fruits and in each of these seasons your results are going to look different. We've been conditioned again to always be in summer, to always have like positive growth, to always have results that are growing. And this disregards our natural rhythm and our natural ebb and flow which we need to honor if we want to build a business or a life that is sustainable. If you followed me over the past year or so, you'll know that I've gotten crystal clear on who I'm here to support and what it is that my business is standing for. What is my mission in bringing this work to you. And I now support high achieving, driven women like you to inhabit more of yourself so that you can create the business and the life that you want without burning yourself out. And so when I changed, it makes sense that I needed some time to build traction again. So in the very early stages in my newsletter that I send out once a week, there were unsubscribes and going back to the whole business is business. It's not personal, it's simply math. I think often we feel bad if people unsubscribe. We make it about ourselves again. But in this case, when you have an email newsletter, you only want people on that newsletter that are really interested in what it is that you have to share with them so that they open your emails. Otherwise you have a huge big list and you have a very low open and click through rate, which basically means that you are paying your email service provider for nothing. All right, so when people start unsubscribing, when you make a change, when you go into a new season in your business, that's something to appreciate. Because now everyone who is not resonating with what you have to offer with them unsubscribing and leaving your community, it makes space for someone else to join. I see also often when we speaking about seasons that your business is in, often when we start scaling, when we go into the next level and we start expanding our business, this also can sometimes feel quite scary for our nervous systems. And you might notice that these procrastination patterns or patterns of tweaking 120,000 things on your website the whole time and actually of getting out there and doing the thing, these patterns start coming up simply because our capacity to hold this next level that we are expanding into is not there yet. So it's really, really helpful as we go through these seasons to make sure that we are resourced. Right? You want to make sure that your nervous system is resourced and that you have the capacity to enter into the next phase of where you're going. Because if you are not resourced, if you don't have this internal support structure again, it's easy to feel so discouraged if you don't see the immediate results in the outside world. And then the final thought, the final point that I want to share with you is to invite you to keep your perspective. I was thinking about this the other day. I was speaking to a colleague of mine and we were talking about how often it might happen that we sign up for work workshops, but then we don't actually go to the live event. And typically it happens as we were talking about it. The time at which the workshop is happening is not convenient for us. And so we are happy to wait for the replay. And so this takes me again back to my statement of saying that it is math, it is not personal. Business is not personal. Because think about it, you not attending that event and instead watch the replay. That doesn't say anything about them. The person whose offer you signed up for, it doesn't say anything about them as a person. Right? I don't think that you judge them and say, oh, I'm definitely not going to this live event because it's going to be such a waste of my time. But you know what? I don't have anything to do, so I'll just type my name into the list and register anyway. No, we don't do that. The moment when we sign up for something, it means that we have an interest. Right? So if anybody signs up for your lead magnet for a free class that you're offering for a free session that you are hosting, it means that they have an interest and you don't know why they didn't fulfill on that interest. It might be, as I said, because it's not at a suitable time, they might have something other coming in the way. Or it might be that they were interested in what you had to offer, but you weren't clear enough about the benefit to them, the transformation that they will get as a result of engaging with whatever it is that you had to offer. And this is you Know whether it's a free event or whether it's a paid event. If you've been in a space where you are doubting yourself, where you feel like you're not getting anywhere, you want to throw in the towel and you're feeling a little bit despondent, you're feeling that you don't know what else to do. I'm hoping that what I've shared with you will encourage you to take the data and look with a mathematical analytical perspective instead of taking it personally and try and see where are the gaps. So when you are feeling as if you are failing and you want to throw in the towel, don't use the data to go back to the drawing board. And let me just run you through these. I think it was five points that I shared in the end. The first one was to check who you are measuring yourself against. Make sure that you measure apples with apples or compare apples with apples, because you can't take an orange and compare that to an apple and then make the orange feel bad because it's not an apple. And yet we do that with ourselves, don't we? Every time that we measure our results and the outcomes of anything that we put out into the world against someone who is already further ahead of us in the game. The second point was to make sure that whatever it is that you are offering has a clear benefit. You need to explain to your mother or your auntie or your best friend, in simple language, exactly what is the transformation that you promise, the transformation that you bring. Thirdly, I hit you with this brilliant concept that it is not personal. Business is math. It is numbers, and it is not personal. You can still bring your heart to your business because this is what makes your business unique. This is how you touch your clients by sharing your gifts with them. But when it comes to the actual numbers, that is purely math. It's not a reflection of your value as a person at all. Then we spoke about seasons. So take into account what season of life you are in, what season your business is in, and find a way to tap into your energy and optimize the season that you are in. And then the final point that I shared was that of holding perspective. Think about how you engage with other people's content. Think about how you engage with other people's offers, and think about how that doesn't necessarily translate in you having an opinion about them. It brings us back to it's only business, it's only numbers. And if you can disconnect yourself, as I said, from it's a personal reflection on my worth versus there's some data that I'm getting back here that means I can tweak the information that I have so that I can improve on the way that I am speaking and sharing about my message and my offer. That's what makes us more empowered business owners. So I hope that this landed for you. If there's someone that you know that needs to hear this episode, please go ahead, be a great friend and share it with them. And finally, if you have found some nuggets that were really helpful to you, I'd appreciate so much if you could leave me a review. If you are listening on itunes or Apple podcasts, go ahead and leave me a review. And if you are listening on Spotify, then go ahead and give the podcast a rating on Spotify. I appreciate you so much. Thanks for being part of my community and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.