If Your Business Is Draining You, Look at Your Clients First

If your business feels heavy lately — like every task takes more effort than it should — there’s a good chance the problem isn’t your work ethic or your strategy.

Most capable business owners don’t wake up one day “bad at business.”
They don’t suddenly lose discipline or intelligence or drive.

What usually happens is quieter than that.

The business slowly becomes misaligned — with the clients it serves, the offers it sells, or the systems holding it together. And over time, that misalignment turns everything into friction.

The work starts to feel harder than it needs to be because the structure no longer fits.

The Misdiagnosis (What people think the problem is)

When people come to me, they usually say things like, “I just need someone who understands how to do social media for what I do.” The reason for this is because they think the reason they’re getting problem clients is due to their marketing.

I mean, after all, everything we do in life is centered around marketing right now. So, it only makes sense that we’d think that in our business, too.

Another thing I hear often is, “I keep hiring morons.” Or “I just don’t think I can hire anyone because I’m not good to work with.” I mean, sure. There might be a little of that going on. I mean, I’ve met what we have in the work force, but the number of true morons I’ve worked with and met are few.

Or I hear - and sometimes find myself saying - “I just need to hustle harder.” Hon, no. No. No-no-no-no-no. In most cases, that’s not the answer. You’re already doing the best you can.

The Real Issue (Structural misalignment)

So, what’s the real issue? It could be a lot of things, but in almost 80% of the situations I’m presented with, the number 1 root cause was a misalignment with the ideal client.

Think of this way. If you’re building your business off the experience of clients who complain about your work, fight your invoices, fight your scheduling, and make your work harder, are you feeling good about your business? What about your workers? Are they?

If you’re crafting offers or services that support people are difficult to work for or assist, is it making it easy to pay your bills on time? What about your pay roll?

No. The most important person in your business is your ideal client profile. Everything you do builds around that. The services you offer. Your onboarding process. Whether you invest in a receptionist or use your website. Your price points. Your content. How you structure your estimates and proposals. You are not the most important person in your business. You might be the most important person in your operation, but the existence of your operation is dependent on your ideal client. Without clients, you don’t have a business. Without her, your business struggles to sustain itself.

The Cost of Ignoring It (Energy, money, confidence)

What does it look like to ignore this?

I’ll tell you. It looks like pay roll checks that routinely bounce. It looks like bills you can’t pay because your clients won’t pay you on time or at all. How do you stay in business when your outgoing funds surpass your incoming funds?

But it’s more than that. It’s about your energy. You have a finite source, even if you’re a “generator” type person. If there is more energy going out than coming in, eventually, you’re going to burn out. When you burn out, it can take up to a year to recover. Do you have a year you just take off and recover from burnout?

You also slip into this loop of overexplaining and second-guessing, both of which eat up time and energy. And, I might add, leads to a lot of emails that get stuck as drafts instead of being sent. This leads to confusion and frustration because you will swear you handled something, when you didn’t actually hit send to handle it.

This is how a business slowly bleeds to death.

The Reframe (This is solvable)

The good news is that this is fixable. I mean, it takes a little work, but it’s feasible and the fixes are usually pretty easy.

This is the kind of clarity work I teach inside Find Your Damn People — but it starts with simply noticing where the weight is coming from and then saying it out loud.

If you’d like to learn more, click on the link below. The class is easy, takes a few hours to complete, gives you actional items to put into place same day, and can be done at your own pace.