A Bad Economy Doesn't Create Financial Problems. It Just Reveals Them

This one might hit a little deeper.

Because when things tighten… when clients slow down… when pressure builds…

It’s easy to point to the economy.

But what if the economy isn’t the problem?

What if it’s simply showing you what was already there?

In this episode, Sharon unpacks a powerful insight from The Road Less Stupid — and why pressure doesn’t break your business… it exposes it.

Structure.
 Money.
 Leadership.
 Time.
 Confidence.

The cracks don’t suddenly appear.

They were always there.

Pressure just turns the light on.

In this episode we cover:
• Why pressure is a spotlight, not the cause
• The hidden cracks in your business structure
• What cash pressure reveals about your pricing and decisions
• How leadership shows up under stress
• Why time pressure exposes poor planning (not lack of time)
• The truth about confidence when things feel uncertain
• How to prepare in the good times so you’re not scrambling in the hard ones

This isn’t about fear.

It’s about clarity.

Because once you can see it…
 you can actually fix it.

🎧𝗟𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁𝘀.
https://www.sharonfrancisco.com/podcast
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👉  Also: The Entrepreneurial Bookkeeper — grow your business without sacrificing your health: sharonfrancisco.com/program

Connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook.

Have a question for the podcast? Email hello@sharonfrancisco.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello and welcome to the Sharon Francisco show. I'm reading a very cool book at the moment. It's called The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. I'm actually not reading it, I'm listening to it on Audible. I was driving to the gym the other day and he said a line that just made me stop in my tracks. I literally stopped the car and and um took took a screenshot of where the the book was up to because I wanted to share it with my clients and I did. I came home and I actually put a workbook together with some exercises to be able to use just based on this one line. It just really hit me. So the line a bad economy doesn't create financial problems, it just reveals them. Well, that hit me like a rocket. So let that land for a minute because this isn't about fear, it's actually about truth. Pressure doesn't suddenly make a business fragile, it actually exposes where it already is. When things feel uncomfortable, it's actually tempting to blame things like blame the economy, blame the market, clients pulling back, or uncertainty in the air. But pressure is not the cause. Pressure is actually the spotlight that it puts on it, the problem. And what it shows actually really matters. When pressure increases, the first thing that it touches is the structure, the structure of your business. So the things that you're going to notice when pressure starts to come on is whether work relies heavily on you, meaning that you're kind of the bottleneck for all the work that comes into the business, whether the knowledge lives all in your head, so meaning you're not systemized, whether you're solving the same problems over and over, so the same problems are rearing their ugly heads over and over and over because you haven't addressed it, and if stepping away would actually cause disruption. So, how long can you step away from your business and not take the work with you before there's absolute mayhem or disruption? So that doesn't mean you've actually failed in your business, it means something was never built to stand without you. Pressure just tells you the truth. Then we'll think about the other areas. So money then comes into focus. So not because money is the problem, but because clarity disappears first. You notice where you hesitate instead of decide, where you justify your fees instead of stating them, where your resentment might creep in with certain clients. If certain clients are a bit needy and that resentment sort of starts coming in, and where you avoid conversations, you know you need to have, so you might feel like I'll do that later. So that discomfort didn't appear out of nowhere, it was always there. What happened was the pressure just made it impossible to ignore. So if you're following me, following me with that, so whatever's happening that's the pressure before you were able to kind of just manage it or deal with it. As soon as the pressure comes on, that exposes that pressure and it does things like you know, avoiding conversations, resentment with clients, and things like that. Then the next thing that shows up is your leadership. So under pressure, when you're when your business is under pressure, clients start dictating the urgency. I mean, come on, chop, chop, lollipop, get this done fast. You say yes when you probably should have said no, you respond quickly to feeling responsible or needed, and you tolerate behavior that absolutely drains you because you think, man, I've got to make this work, or you know, I'll just deal with it, whatever. And again and again, this is what can happen over and over if we don't actually put the structure in place to be able to withstand this kind of pressure. And again, it's not judgment, it's just information. If you look at it like information, that's where you can practically approach fixing it. Pressure also reveals how well you lead yourself and how well you lead others, and then there's time, so not the lack of time, the truth of it. And this is a big one in businesses. You realize you don't actually know your real capacity, so you don't know how much more work you can take on. You just used it by the saying yes or you might have just set started saying no to work altogether, but you're not really sure exactly how much you can take on board or lose for that matter. You're busy, but you're actually not strategic if time is the pressure. Your diary is reactive, you haven't planned it out, you haven't thought about how it's going to unfold. And somehow client time is always protected more than your time and more than your business's time. So you'll take care of your clients more ahead of you and your business. And pressure doesn't steal time, it actually reveals how it's being used. And finally, the big one that I love to talk about is confidence. This is one that people usually don't expect. Pressure doesn't remove that confidence, it actually shows where confidence was conditional. Interesting, huh? So you second guess yourself, you discount before you've been asked, or you say, look, you know, if especially if you're selling higher services, um, you'll you'll sort of knock down the price if you feel like oh that's a bit much, I shouldn't ask for that amount of money. Selling feels actually personal, so if you get a no or something like that, you think they're saying no to me, and they're not, they're just saying no to your service. And but quite often when sales, I've been in sales for many, many years, a lot of people take it very personally. That's one of the big things that needs to be addressed if you're taking that personally. You play small instead of leading when confidence is the issue, and not because you're not capable, but because your confidence was tied to the things feeling safe. So you tie your confidence to the safety. So here's a cool way to look at it in a different way or a reframe. Pressure is just feedback, it shows you exactly what needs strengthening, so it's like a gift. This pressure. I learned this years ago. As you know, I grew up in a sheep and cattle station in the middle of nowhere and out back Australia and New South Wales. Uh, and on that property, obviously, growing up on the land, there's fires, there's droughts, there's good times, there's problems left, right, and centre on the land. And yes, there's great money you can make on the land, but also in those hard times, and you just don't know how long a drought's going to last for. You don't know how much of a fire is going to wipe out all your um land, so you don't have feed for your animals and things like that. So that really the indication is you kind of know that it's going to come. You just know there's no sort of resisting that, and that's when you know in droughts you've got no water to feed your animals, and animals die, and then you've got to find adjustment for your stock to be, and you're paying massive money and you're trucking them up somewhere else to be so that they've got feed and water. So this is where I think maybe unconsciously, I've learnt these lessons. So we you just don't wait for the bad times before you're ready. You in the good times, and there are good times on the land, in the good times where you go, right, this is a good time, but I know this won't last. So I'll make sure I have a bank account here, and when we have a good wall clip or sell some cattle, we're going to put some money away for the bad times. And I honestly probably didn't even see all that happening there, but there was a subconscious thing that I knew that there's a cycle. And pretty much every business faces a drought, faces a fire, faces problem times. And when we think about that, we just go, wow, why why didn't we prepare or set things up before then to make sure that when that hit that we were ready? So taking it back to also the maintenance on the on the land, you know, some of that money that you make in the good times is built to is used to build fences and um more tanks or clean out tanks and things like that. So you're reinvesting in it. And in business, um it's systems, it's processes, it's hiring team, it's professional development, all those sort of things need to be bolstered so your structure is a lot stronger. Business works exactly the same way. So systems are built in calm times. Pricing confidence is set before the cash tightens, so you're getting really confident around your prices and things before cash tightens. Leadership is established before clients push, and capacity is designed before burnout hits. Bad times don't create the cracks, they actually reveal them. So here's the only question that really matters. If things stayed exactly like this for the next two years in your business, what would have to change in how you run your business? Not what you'd hope for, not what you'd wish away, but what you'd actually need to do differently to prepare to make sure your business has got that stability. Because pressure isn't asking you to panic, it's actually asking you to think. When that pressure comes on, it's actually an indication. It's like, oh, maybe I should look at this. What needs fixing? What are the what am I worried about when that pressure happens? What am I actually worried about? That's your indication, that's your beacon of what needs fixing. And thinking done properly will change everything. That planning, the thinking, the strategy, and getting really clear about, and it's so overused, but it's that working on the business, ensuring that you're taking the time to work on your business. So then when the hard times hit or tricky times happen, or some health concerns happen, you've got all your little ducks in a row and you've got that backup to make sure that everything will be uh you'll be able to glide through the trickier times when you've got that all set up. Hopefully, that's been helpful. That line in that book absolutely hit me like a rocket, and I really wanted to share that with you. A bad economy doesn't create financial problems, it reveals them. I'd love your feedback on that one. And if you decide to get the book, I'm sure that you won't regret it, and I'd love to hear what you think. Thanks. Bye.