The #1 Reason Most Businesses Fail (And How To Fix It)

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 UCAN Podcast. I'm your host Sarah Do 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.
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 want to 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 time scale 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 individuals who purchase your offer or the outcome that you're promising or the product will go on to actually receive that and 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, 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. 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 very accurate just to put in there and so you begin to realize that actually this person isn't ideal um this person is going to take up that time and so you know during that sales process it is a two-way vetting scenario and and sometimes it is a lot more sensible and sometimes i totally understand this is really tricky to do but it's easier to let a non-ideal client go or you know to be more specific to let somebody go who who is going to take up too much of your time they can they don't have to be your perfect client but if you can get those ideas that you know what this person is going to take up a lot of my time they're complaining they're they're they're absorbing a lot they're taking a lot from me and they're not making as much progress as i'd like for example if you're an expert if it's a product and they're not necessarily going to be using that product in the right sort of way they're not going to get the best sort of outcome for you to be able to advertise and so let those individuals go and use that product for the right people use your offer for the right people so you've started out you've got those foundations there you're leads in, then it comes the next bit which is the scaling trap.
Okay so you've got different times within your business that actually leads and the amount of leads coming through may become a problem. So the next kind of key bit is the scaling side of things.
When your overheads start to increase, you start to take on members of staff even if that is on on a sort of temporary or contract basis that if you scale too soon once you've got some success that temptation is to scale quickly you have to hire more people to get people into those roles to be doing the things that you don't necessarily enjoy that much to be doing the implementation and when we were growing the agency you know we were had to be very um mindful and we found ourselves in a position where we had people on the the payroll who were not customer facing who were not income generating for example you know with that with the agency that we had um you were taking on staff as media buyers and so the thing is a media buyer meant that you could increase your capacity. Other supporting staff, somebody to edit videos, somebody to do the admin side of things, they, whilst they could help things run more smoothly, they were not income generating.
And so you were better off looking at those income generating opportunities than you were

looking at those um looking to fill roles where it's the admin side of stuff you know you can get

a va in you could get a pa in um on a on a sort of temporary basis to help you with those sorts of things and see how it goes but don't overstretch yourself particularly on people who are not income generating roles so you know you end up increasing your your expenditure on hr for example you might invest in more tools you might increase your marketing spend but this is the problem if you haven't nailed down that system for consistently attracting and converting those quality leads if you're not if you're relying heavily for example on testing on referrals then you're not in control of that pipeline and those how those quickly those individuals are coming through what you want to be able to do really with your pipeline is to understand right i do this and this increases the amount of interest and then i can scale that back when i don't need anybody and then i can scale it up again when i do and so you want something that you can be in more control over a bit more like a tap that you can switch on and off. Between juggling client meetings, managing your website, keeping up to date with everyday tasks, who has time to stress about website security? Well, with Kinsta, they take care of the technical stuff so you can focus on what you do best, which is probably not website security.
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And that is where we really needed to kind of take a check on that and also to be fair figure out what direction we wanted to go in and and where our our skills lay and where we actually wanted to be spending our time so why leads still matter at this stage is because more revenue comes from those more of those conversions okay um the takeaway on this is like if you haven't got a proven predictable lead generation system in place then i would hold off the scaling as much as possible put temporary stuff into positions etc etc to fulfill what you've got but be in a position where you can easily um you know you can easily do something about it if you find yourself um missing uh those those. So I talked about the problem and you're like, yeah, okay, Sarah, I get that.
I definitely have one of those problems. But what do you do about it? Well, you know, you know that I love ideal client, okay? And the first step in this process is to look at your ideal client, okay? Get super clear on who you want to be working with, the problems that they are facing, the problems that you are solving.
Where are they hanging out, okay? Because that's really key. That's where you can tap into that resource.
It's your little happy hunting ground. Where can you go and find customers? Where can you get in front of them and show them that, you know, you are the answer to their their problems show them that you understand their problems how can you do that and then what are they willing to pay for the solution that you are offering and where does that fit for you and I think sometimes there can be an inconsistency there so you know yes they do have a problem but your pricing just isn't right and it's not positioned correctly for that problem for those individuals.
The next thing to then look at is your offer. It needs to be an attractive offer.
It needs to be something that speaks directly to the problems or the outcomes that those customers are looking for. Okay, you want to make it easy as possible when you dangle that opportunity in front of them for them to say yes.
Okay, a decent offer, itself without all the bells and whistles okay so people saying oh you know i need this and i need that i need this landing page i need this branding doing at the end of the day absolutely you need people to be aware of your offer in order for it to sell okay there is no way that you can a decent offer will sell itself if it is being sold to an empty room if it's not being promoted if it's gathering dust somewhere maybe if you're getting it out there even if it's imperfect even if the branding isn't quite right even if the look and feel of it isn't quite right a decent offer will sell without those things being totally up to scratch um that you know people who are getting the outcome they're looking for from an offer from a product they will overlook the absence of those bells and whistles in order to get that outcome they don't really care that much it's the icing on the cake it's the things that make you look professional but they will still go for things that are imperfectly presented as long as they are made aware of it and it's a decent thing that actually meets their needs so when you've got that understanding in place when you've got a decent offer in place that is attractive to those individuals that you're trying to target then it's about building that consistent lead generation system you need a predictable and scalable way to bring in leads that might take all sorts of different formats okay it might be email marketing it might be a funnel off of social media it might be paid ads on a on a social media platform it may be your seo and working through that side of things it might be referrals and partnerships if you can consolidate those up if you can get enough of them then actually you can be less reliant on single individual people and and you know you've got you're spreading that risk you're making sure that you have got number of channels where people can feed in potential customers to you the leads thing you know i have my husband and i we martin and i we run the lead generation that outside of things as a business and they are leads are really important they absolutely are but actually leads are only the starting point these leads have to convert okay we talk to clients and we're like you know what's the conversion rate how are they doing what sort of quality of lead are you getting and you need to focus on that conversion it's not enough to be like oh people are coming into my world they're doing inquiries are they buying okay so you need a strong sales process you need to follow up however good something is your marketing doesn't need to be spot on but you need to have a sales system in place to enable those individuals to buy from you it is busy out there and so people are easily distracted a good sales process will help you make the most of those leads. Client onboarding that builds trust will help you to retain those customers and give them a good experience and get them referring other people into you.
Check out your numbers. Look at what's happening.
Are you converting? What percentage are you converting? What is happening? Why aren't more people converting? Those are the sorts of conversations you want to be having. So in summary guys, you know, businesses fail because they don't have enough quality leads that convert into the paying customers.
That's the crux of it. That is the number one reason I see businesses fail.
Address your lead generation system. Know your ideal client.
Craft an offer that is so clear to them what outcome they are getting okay give them something that they really want build a reliable lead pipeline off the back of that and then convert those leads as effectively as time efficiently as possible if you want a deeper dive into building a scalable lead generation system then then drop me an email at sarah.ucan.online

or drop into my Facebook group, UCAN Women in Business.

And you can find out more around the different types of support that I provide.

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Remember, you can build a thriving business. Bye for now.