What Does Startup Mode Look Like?
Recently I was talking with a friend, a fellow business owner, about the state of her business.
After starting her coaching business 3 years ago and celebrating multiple successes:
- 5-figure months
- 6-figure weekends
- Back to back 6-figure years
- Having her own high level mastermind group
… she announced she is still struggling financially.
On paper she looks like she has it all.
But behind the scenes she has amassed thousands of dollars in debt by joining high-level masterminds to learn how to keep growing her business, hiring staff and teams of staff to plan her next few projects, and putting down payments on marketing strategies geared to help bring in more clients.
Every dollar that comes into her business is already spent. The business itself has become her boss.
So although it looks like she should have it all, she is barely surviving and definitely not living.
She said that every month she felt like she was starting over—looking for clients, dreading picking up the phone, and desperately searching for or creating the next opportunity to bring in cash fast.
Because it isn’t happening, she keeps working harder while simultaneously blaming herself for being a business failure.
Her mind and body are feeling the effects. Her health is suffering—she’s not sleeping at night, her eating habits all over the place, and she feels tired all of the time.
Her client relationships are strained. She is questioning how well she is doing as her clients’ mentor and she’s starting to wonder who she is to help them.
Her relationship with her husband is at a point that he is no longer willing to be on the financial rollercoaster her business has put them on.
Exhausted and exasperated she is at a loss for what to do next. She knows if she doesn’t figure it out soon she will be forced to go back to a JOB. Returning to work for someone else would be the nail in the proverbial coffin for her. She can’t imagine it. But even though her business earns money, it is not paying the bills.
As I listened to my friend, I empathized, knowing what it’s like to have big financial gains only to have to “do it all over again”.
As exhilarating as it can be, it can be as equally exhausting. At times it can feel like a merry-go-round, looking at the same scenery over and over again.
Up and down, month after month.
At some point you just want to get off of the daggone ride!
She asked me what I thought about all that she said, so I told her, “You are stuck in Startup Mode.”
You would have thought I had slapped her.
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