You’re Great at What You Do—So Why Aren’t You Getting More Clients?

In this episode, Laura is unpacking a frustrating reality many entrepreneurs face: being incredibly good at what you do… while still feeling like your income doesn’t reflect it.

She explains why expertise alone is not what drives revenue, the business systems many women are missing, and the key areas to focus on if you want your business to generate more consistent income.

If you’ve ever wondered, “Why isn’t this working the way it should?” — this episode is for you.

In this episode you will hear:

00:00 – The disconnect between expertise and income

01:35 – Why so many talented women are under-earning

03:03 – The myth that more skill automatically means more money

04:17 – The 3 things that actually drive revenue

05:21 – Offer clarity and why communication matters

06:45 – Pricing mistakes that keep entrepreneurs stuck

08:01 – Why a full client roster can still lead to burnout

09:04 – Creating a repeatable client pathway

10:35 – Revenue visibility and understanding your numbers

11:46 – Why this is a systems issue, not a personal failure

12:32 – A practical exercise to identify what’s missing in your business

13:10 – Support available through the Inner Circle & Ambition Mastermind

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Transcript

Laura Sinclair (00:02.328)
Welcome back to another episode of This Mother Means Business. I want you to do some math with me today. And I want you to think about how long you've been doing this work, not just running your business, but doing the actual work. And whether that's coaching or consulting or designing or writing or whatever it is that you do, think about the years of experience that you have over your entire career. Now I want you to think about the results that your clients get.

the transformations, the outcomes, the things people say when they wrapping up your time together. Maybe it's some of the testimonials that are sitting in your inbox right now that you haven't even used because you forgot where they were. Guilty of that. Now I want to look at your revenue number. Okay, does that match? And for a lot of women that are listening to this right now, I know that the answer is no. Okay. I know that there are many of you out there that are feeling like I am so good at this work. Why is it that it's not working?

Why is it that I'm not seeing the revenue that aligns with how damn good I am at it is what I'm doing? And I think this is really significant. I know for a lot of you, can feel like really confusing and probably a little insulting because you've done everything right, right? You got better at your craft. You listen to feedback. You probably invest in your skills. Maybe you've hired coaching. Maybe you just keep showing up on the days where things really feel hard and you probably have a lot of evidence that you do know what you're doing.

but it often can feel like it's just not working the way that it should. And that's what I want to get into in today's episode. Okay. And the answer might not be exactly what you expect. And so let's go on a journey together. Here's what I see so often. And it's interesting because I've just come off the backend of looking through a whole bunch of applications for the CIBC TEMMB mentorship program that we did, where women had to send through their stories about why they wanted to be gifted this mentorship.

And this is a theme that came through over and over and over is that there are women that are really objectively qualified, right? On paper, you're good, okay? Which doesn't mean that she thinks she's good, but she gets her clients results, right? That's a whole other conversation around mindset. But you probably have real documented, repeatable results. You know you're good at what you're doing, okay? But somehow you're still under earning and often like really significantly under earning.

Laura Sinclair (02:26.942)
And when that happens, we start to look for the missing piece, right? We start to think, OK, maybe it's our pricing. Maybe I should charge more. Maybe I need to raise my rates. But then we second guess ourselves the minute somebody hesitates. It could also be a confidence piece, right? There's like a whole industry, we know this, of people that make money convincing women that their money problems are actually mindset problems so that you literally never stop buying because there's always one, the next piece of mindset that's in the way.

It could be your niche, could be your offer, it could be visibility, the algorithm, the economy. We start to run these diagnostic tests essentially on ourselves when oftentimes you're not actually the problem at all. And the thing that breaks my heart quite a lot is when women start to second guess themselves and think maybe I'm not good at this just because we don't have the revenue in place, right? Then we lose our confidence and it all just kind of like comes out as this big

kind of messy cycle. And if that's you right now, if you're sitting in this gap between you know what you're capable of, and you also know what's showing up in your bank account, I want you to hear this really clearly before we go any further. The problem is not because you're not good at what you do. Okay. The problem is that being good at what you do and how to make money in a business are not the same thing. And not enough people have told you that they're not. Okay. And so I want to say something that might feel a little uncomfortable.

And then I'm going to explain why it's actually really good news, but being good at the work you do is the minimum requirement to be in business. Okay. It is not what drives revenue. And I know that sometimes feels backwards. like, oh, we just need to get better. We need to develop our expertise to prove our results, but it's rarely the person that is best that is making the most money. Right. It is often the person that is known that is making the most money. listen, it's important to be good at what you do.

That matters. We're never going to dismiss it, but that's table stakes. That's how you get in the game. If you aren't good at what you do, then you definitely need to go learn to be better at what you do. But most of the women that I work with, not most, all the women I work with are incredible with what you do. But revenue, how do we actually drive revenue is the thing that nobody's being taught. What we know is that revenue is driven by three things and none of them have to do

Laura Sinclair (04:42.892)
with how good you are at what you do. And so if you're in a season of your business where you're feeling like maybe I'm not good at what it is that I do, here this, okay, you make money based on how you're positioning yourself, right? How you've packaged your work and whether you have a clear pathway for people to walk through on the way to becoming your client. Okay, that is three P's unintentionally, positioning, packaging and pathway. And most of the people that I talked to don't have this, right? You don't have it set up. You haven't built a framework. You haven't

figured out how to get there because nobody's teaching you. What they're teaching you is how to post on social media. They're teaching you how to make better content. They are not teaching you how to actually position yourself in your market to be successful, right? To actually generate revenue. So if this is you, if you're in a place where you're like, okay, I'm really good at what I do. Why isn't that I'm working? I'm willing to bet that you are lacking

the foundational systems that are actually required to bring people into your business and make the money that you deserve to be making. listen, having mentored hundreds of people, having worked through a number of businesses myself, when I think about what's actually required to get to a place where your competence can turn into consistent income,

The first is that we need really, really good clarity around what it is that we're selling. Can a stranger understand exactly what you do, who it's for, and what changes for them when they work with you in under 30 seconds? And some of you are doing this, right? You're really good at talking about the what, what you do. And not all of you are good at talking about when. What is the moment that has to be in place for me to...

get somebody to make that decision, right? Like where are we meeting them? At what moment do they come in? Do they hire you? We need to be clear on that. It is super important that people know what you do, right? You need people can talk about what you do at length. The test really needs to be can someone who's never heard of you, never met you, never been in your world before, can they look at how you talk about your work and immediately understand what problem you solve, who you solve it for and what their life would look like after you've solved it.

Laura Sinclair (07:00.152)
Okay, if the answer is like, well, it depends, or they need to get on a call with me first. That is an offer clarity issue. Okay, it is not a reflection of how capable you are your work. It just means that you have a very big communication problem. And that can be fixed. Okay, we can build systems to fix that. The other thing that we need to do is pricing that works, right? So does your pricing actually support the life and business that you're trying to build? And it's not about charging more. It's often not.

I want to be really clear about that because I think telling people just to charge more is really lazy, meaningless advice because it doesn't really tell you anything about whether your pricing model actually makes sense. And I have worked with women who have full client rosters that are still very stressed out about money. They weren't necessarily undercharging because their rates looked reasonable. But when we sort of start to break it down in terms of like what they're actually earning per hour of time invested, looking at admin, the prep, the back and forth, the emotional labor, it was significantly less than what appears to be on paper.

Pricing that works means that your business, your pricing model, pricing that works means your pricing model, not just your number, but your structure actually maps the income you need and the hours that you have. So for women that have really constrained schedules, which is most of us, that is a non-negotiable and a full client roster at the wrong price point does not make a success story. It is a ceiling that a lot of us have built for ourselves. so understanding your pricing and not just, this is what the vibes feel like, I'm going to charge this.

but actually knowing like how much money are you making there, especially if you are having to outsource to other folks is super, super important. Okay. We also need to know, is there a clear design pathway that takes someone from discovering you to becoming a paid client? Okay. Or does it happen differently every single time? And I think this is what surprises people the most is that most businesses are getting clients, right? You're getting clients, you're making money, but most businesses don't have a very clear client pathway. There is a huge difference between people just finding their way to you.

through referrals and DMs things like that, which we want. And you having a designed repeatable process that you can count on and improve over time. When your client pathway is ad hoc, so is your revenue. Every month you're going to start from zero, right? And then you're dependent on this sort of organic, essentially luck. And when things slow down, you don't really know why, because you haven't looked at the data and you don't understand how to fix it, because there's no system to diagnose. And this is the work that I'm doing with my clients every single day, is working on building

Laura Sinclair (09:28.258)
the system so that we're not feeling like I don't know where money is coming from. A repeatable client pathway means that someone can discover you, warm up to you, and move towards working with you through a sequence that you have designed, okay, that works the same way every single time. It doesn't have to be complicated. It is really just like building your web, right? The web through which people are going to move, they're going to learn about you and they're going to come in, they're going to absorb more of your content, they're going to dive into your website, they're going to listen to your podcast if you have one, they're going to listen to your content, read your blogs.

and they're going to know that you are the person for them. And then the other thing I would think about is like, do you know at any given point what you're on track to earn this month and what leverage you're to pull if you needed to change that number? Because having visibility into your actual revenue is about whether you are running your business or the other way around. Okay. And it's not about you having to become a spreadsheet person if you're not a spreadsheet person. It's really about having enough of a handle on your numbers that you're not supposed

at the end of the month. That you know what's coming in, what's likely to come in, and what you would do if you need to change something, okay? Because when we don't have visibility into our revenue, you end up in a super reactive mode. You probably take clients you don't need, because you think you need the money. Or you take on clients that you don't want. Or you're going to undercharge because you're scared, right? You make decisions from panic instead of strategy. And I see this so, so often. The women that I work with that have the most peace in their business...

regardless of their income level is because they know their numbers, right? And they know it clearly and not because the numbers are great all the time. They're a great lot of the time, but not all the time. but they're not guessing. Okay. So if you're in a season where like, I am so good at what I do, why isn't it that I'm working? I'm willing to vet. It's one of these issues, right? It's offer clarity. It's pricing, repeatable client pathway, and it's visibility into your revenue. Now for a lot of people, sometimes

It's actually visibility, right? People don't know that you exist and that's going to be a whole other episode. But, for those of you that are making money, that you are, you have people in your email list, they're watching your content, they're commenting. Like these are the issues. If people know that you exist and this is not happening, like this is why it's happening. This is what's going on. Okay. If your competence, like is a nine out of 10, which is most of you for most of you, is right. But your revenue doesn't match. I'd be willing to bet that you're missing one of these things. Right. And that is what's costing you. good news though, is that.

Laura Sinclair (11:53.814)
You don't have to become a different person. This is just about refining some of the skills that you have, getting the support to put the real systems in place. And I think that's just like, it's all fixable because at end of the day, you probably never learned any of this. Nobody taught you. You went to school or maybe you are self-taught. You became good at the thing that you're good at and people didn't teach you the business side of it. And that's why I exist. Okay. So before I close out, I do want to give you something practical because I think that it's also very important. Okay.

I want you to just kind of gut back to some of these things that we just talked about. The first one being offer clarity, right? Could a stranger understand exactly what you do and who it transforms in under 30 seconds? Your pricing. Does your current pricing model actually support your income goals? Repeatable client pathway, right? Do we have a design consistent path? And then revenue visibility. Do we know how much money we're making? Okay. You can just rate yourself on one to 10 if that feels, if that feels good. And then write down the number that feels the lowest and that's your starting point and go from there.

Yeah, if you need more help, all good. You know where to find me. This is support. Support is available to you inside of the inner circle and certainly the Ambition Mastermind. If you are looking for a deep dive into the support, we are building these types of systems for our clients inside the Ambition Mastermind every single day, creating these sales systems, looking at our offers, making sure we're diving into our revenue visibility and really narrowing down and finiting this client pathway. These are the things that we are addressing.

I'm going to continue to put out episodes that support you. If this is your season, if this is your season, if you're like, gosh, I'm so good at what I do and it's just not working. I wish that would land, me a DM, say hi, let's talk about it. I'd be happy to support you to get out of the season because I believe that women that are damn good at what they do deserve to be making all the money in the world, all the money that they want, all the money that they need. So send me a DM at it's laura Sinclair or at this mother means business. And let's chat about it. Hope you have an amazing day. you in the next one.