~by Haley Lynn Gray~
The good thing about owning a business is that you’re in the driver’s seat. You decide the speed, the direction, and when to brake.
That’s also the problem. Nobody tells you to go, which means you can spend a remarkable amount of time stationary while feeling extremely busy.
There are two ways this happens, and they look like opposites.
The first: waiting for a prerequisite
I see this constantly. Entrepreneurs who have decided they can’t make progress until the website is finished. Until the branding is right. Until they’ve done the course, incorporated properly, got the business cards, worked out the packages.
Almost none of those are actually required. The website does not need to exist before you can call someone who might want your service.
These roadblocks exist purely in our own minds, and they’re seductive because they look like work. Choosing fonts genuinely is a task. It fills a day, produces something you can look at, and requires nothing uncomfortable of you.
Calling a prospect requires being told no by a real person. So the website takes eleven weeks.
The test: could you get one customer without this? If yes, it isn’t a prerequisite — it’s a preference you’ve promoted, and it can be done later, badly, while you’re already earning.
The second: switching before anything could have worked
The opposite failure and the same underlying cause.
You try a channel. It produces nothing for six weeks. Someone mentions a different platform that’s apparently excellent. You move. That produces nothing either, and by then a third option has appeared.
The reason this is so hard to resist is that the early results of everything are indistinguishable from failure. Nothing works for the first couple of months. So at any point, the evidence supports switching — and switching feels like decisiveness rather than avoidance.
But a channel worked for two months and abandoned produces nothing, and five channels worked for two months each produce nothing five times over, having consumed a year.
The test: have I done this consistently for long enough that it could have worked? For most marketing, that’s six months of regular effort. Below that you don’t have evidence, you have noise.
Committing properly
Pick one or two routes and drive some distance down them before judging.
Choose on two criteria. Where your buyers actually are — not where the activity is, where the people who pay you are. And what you’ll sustain, which matters more than effectiveness, because a moderate channel worked weekly beats an excellent one abandoned in March.
Then decide in advance what you’ll measure and when you’ll look. “I’ll do this twice a week until September and then assess” prevents the weekly re-litigation that eats so much energy.
And when you do assess, look at whether the leading indicators moved — conversations, enquiries, people recognising your name — not only at revenue. Revenue is the last thing to change and judging on it alone means killing things that were working.
There are many correct ways
Something I remind people of constantly: there is very little in the way of absolutes in business.
If marketing online hasn’t worked for you, market in person. If networking is miserable, write instead. If one platform feels unnatural, another will suit you better. The advice that says there’s a single right way is usually being sold by someone whose single right way happens to be their product.
And the genuine freedoms are yours to set. How many hours you work. Where. Whether you answer the phone at ten at night. Whether you take on that kind of client at all.
Those are decisions, not conditions. Most owners never make them explicitly, and then feel trapped by arrangements they could have chosen differently.
The short version
We are our own best allies and, frequently, our own most effective obstacles.
If you’re not moving, work out which version you’re in. Waiting for something that isn’t actually required, or switching before anything had a chance.
Both feel productive. Both are the same thing wearing different clothes. And the cure for each is the same: pick the smallest real step and take it today, then keep taking it for longer than feels reasonable.
More on what’s usually underneath the delay and choosing where to put the effort.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
