Business Has Changed. Have You?

I opened Instagram last week and saw three very successful, long-term business owners talking about having some of the worst months they’ve had in business. One of them said he’d lost everything, and it got me thinking about what happens when you’ve been in business for a while, you know you can make money, you’ve got evidence that what you do works, and then suddenly the results aren’t there.

Recently I’ve heard things like, “My marketing isn’t working like it used to,” “Clients are leaving because they’re going through personal or health challenges,” and simply, “Numbers are down.”

And when that starts happening in your own business, it’s very easy to react. Sales are down, so you start questioning the offer. Leads are down, so you wonder whether your marketing has stopped working. Something doesn’t convert, so you think the messaging needs changing.

Or you go completely the other way and decide there must be another money block or something within you that needs fixing. Or you open Instagram and someone’s telling you it’s a worthiness wound, a visibility wound, or your nervous system can’t hold your next level.

And maybe there is something deeper going on. But maybe your leads are just down.

And this is where I see business owners start changing ALL the things before they’ve actually worked out what changed.

Because when your results aren’t what you want, it tells you something needs your attention. It doesn’t tell you what the answer is.

So before you change anything, there are two things I want you to look at: What has changed in the business? And what has changed in the way you’re operating?

Because sometimes the answer is practical. Sometimes it’s the way you’re responding to what’s happening. And sometimes it’s both.

And one of the first things I want you to understand is that the numbers you’re looking at today didn’t start today. The month you’re living right now is largely the result of how you were operating over the last 60–90 days.

This is where lead and lag indicators become really important, because once you understand the difference, you stop waiting until the end of the month to decide whether your business is working.

Your revenue is a lag indicator. The money that came into your business this month is the end result of things that happened before it. Your number of new clients is a lag indicator. Even the number of sales you made this month is the result of actions that happened before the sale.

But before you ever see that end result, there are things happening in your business that tell you whether you’re on track to create it.

How consistently are you marketing? Audit your social media. How many offers have you made? How many new people are coming into your world? How many conversations are you having? Are you nurturing the people who aren’t ready to buy today? Are you consistently doing the things daily that you already know create clients and income?

Those are what I want you paying attention to because they give you information before you get to the end of the month and look at your bank account.

Think about it this way. If you get to the end of the month and realise you didn’t make enough money, you can’t go back and change that month. It’s already happened.

But if you know you need a certain number of leads to create a certain number of sales, and halfway through the month your lead numbers are way down, now you have information you can actually do something with.

Which is exactly what I did with one of my clients last week. She’s just hit $50k months and her goal by the end of the year is $65k. For her, that means 25 leads a week and 7 sales. So then we looked at her lead strategy and determined what numbers she needed to hit there.

Now she doesn’t have to wait until the end of the month to find out whether she’s on track. She has something she can measure and respond to while there’s still time to do something about it.

And this is why looking at your business purely through revenue can make you incredibly reactive. You wait for the lag indicator, decide something’s wrong and then start changing everything.

Instead, I want you to understand what actually creates the result.

If you had a record month three months ago, what happened 60–90 days prior to it? How many people were seeing you? What were you talking about? How often were you making offers? How many conversations were you having? What was converting? What were you consistently doing?

Then compare that with the 90 days leading into the results you’re getting now.

I personally keep an A4 notebook and write down exactly what I do mindset-wise and strategy-wise so I can look back. Over the 25 years I’ve helped thousands of women to six, multi-six and seven figures, and it’s very easy to forget what you were doing 30, 60 or 90 days ago.

It’s easy to look through social media or your email platform to see your marketing and offers, but I find the notebook really handy because I also write down how I was feeling and what was going through my head.

And that brings me to the other side of this, because it’s not just about looking at the numbers. It’s also about what you make those numbers mean.

The circumstance is just what it is. Your sales are down. You didn’t get the clients you wanted. Your marketing isn’t generating the leads it used to. That’s what’s happening.

But the resistance, stress and worry we create around that isn’t necessarily because of the way things are. It’s because of how our brain is interpreting them.

The minute you look at your business through the lens of, “That’s not the way I want it,” you’re in resistance to what is. Now it’s not simply, “My sales are down.” It becomes, “This shouldn’t be happening. My marketing isn’t working. People aren’t buying. Something’s wrong. What if next month is worse?”

And the more you think it, the more you feel it. The more you feel it, the more you start reacting from it.

You pull back, change the strategy, change the offer, stop making as many offers, or go the other way and start forcing more action because you desperately need something to work.

And now you’re reacting to what’s happening instead of actually looking at what’s happening.

This is why I think you have to separate what is actually happening from what you’re making it mean.

Accepting that your sales are down doesn’t mean you like it. It doesn’t mean you sit there and do nothing about it. And it definitely doesn’t mean we ignore the numbers and manifest our way out of the bloody spreadsheet.

It means you stop fighting the reality of where you are long enough to actually look at it.

Is your marketing really not working, or are fewer people seeing it? Is your offer not working, or are you not making enough offers? Are people genuinely not buying, or have three people said no and your brain has turned that into “nobody is buying”? Has something changed in the market? Or does your strategy work when you consistently do it, but you haven’t been doing it consistently?

Because your current results are information. The question is, what are they actually telling you?

There’s a difference between using your current reality as information and using it as instructions for who you’re going to be next.

But don’t let a quiet month become instructions to panic, stop selling, change everything or decide the business isn’t working.

Use the numbers to decide what needs your attention. Don’t use them to decide who you become.

And I think that’s really important because if you keep looking at what is, deciding you don’t want it, feeling the resistance to it and then making your decisions from that place, you can very easily keep creating more of what you don’t want.

But — and this is a really important but — I also don’t believe the answer is simply to keep doing the same thing forever because it worked once.

Business has changed.

The way people buy has changed. Marketing has changed. The amount of content people are exposed to has changed. The way people find businesses, consume information, make decisions and decide who they trust has changed.

So there are two mistakes I think we can make here. One is panicking after a couple of crappy months and changing everything before we understand what’s actually happening. The other is refusing to change anything because, “Well, this worked for me for the last five years.”

Something working before is evidence that it worked then. It doesn’t automatically mean it’s the best way to create the result you want now.

And this is where being an experienced business owner can actually trip you up, because experience gives you evidence. You know what worked. You know how you built the business. You know what created clients before.

But sometimes the business you have now is asking you to operate differently.

That could mean marketing differently because the way you’ve been reaching people isn’t creating enough leads anymore. It could mean getting much better at your messaging because generic content that used to get attention is disappearing into a sea of other generic content. It could mean changing the way you sell because people are taking longer to make decisions. It could mean following up better instead of assuming people will come back when they’re ready.

That’s why I keep saying: work out what actually changed before you decide what needs to change.

If your offer is converting brilliantly but not enough people are seeing it, leave the bloody offer alone and look at your reach and leads.

If plenty of people are enquiring but nobody is buying, getting more leads isn’t going to fix that. I want to know what’s happening in the sales process.

If your strategy works every time you consistently execute it, I’m not going to immediately tell you that you need another strategy. I want to know why you’re not consistently executing the one that works.

And that is where we might start looking at whether there’s a pattern or block underneath it, because sometimes there absolutely is something else going on.

You know what works, but you stop doing it. You start getting momentum and suddenly find ten other things that need your attention. You have a Higher Month and instead of repeating what created it, you take your foot off the gas.

Now we’re looking at something different.

And this is where the way you operate becomes so important, because you cannot keep looking at what is happening right now, reacting to it and expect to create something different.

If you’re looking at a quiet month every day and thinking, “Sales are down. Marketing isn’t working. People aren’t buying. This is getting harder,” you’re no longer just looking at the numbers. You’ve created a whole story around what those numbers mean.

And then you start making decisions from that story. Maybe you decide you need to work harder, create more content, change your offer or completely rethink your strategy. Maybe you start watching every post to see whether it’s working, checking your sales constantly, or questioning things you were completely confident about a month ago.

The problem is, now you’re trying to fix your business from a place of fear and urgency instead of actually diagnosing what needs fixing.

And this is what I mean when I talk about operating differently. The same numbers can create completely different actions depending on what you make those numbers mean.

You can look at a quiet month and think, “Everything’s going wrong,” or you can look at the exact same month and ask, “Okay, what is this showing me?”

One has you reacting to the result. The other has you using the result as information.

It isn’t pretending your numbers are amazing when they’re not. If your leads are down, I want you to know your leads are down. We don’t manifest our way out of looking at the bloody numbers.

The numbers are information.

But if you want a different business 90 days from now, there are things you need to start doing today before you have evidence that they’ve worked.

Because results don’t happen overnight. The action you take today might not create a sale today. The content you post this week might bring someone into your world who buys from you two months from now. The conversations you’re having, the relationships you’re building, the offers you’re making and the consistency you’re creating now can take time to show up in your revenue.

And I think this is where people get themselves into trouble. They do something for a week or two, don’t see the result quickly enough, decide it isn’t working and change direction before they’ve given it enough time to actually work.

That’s the uncomfortable bit, because sometimes you have to keep doing the right things before you have the external evidence that they’re working.

And that is where the reps come in.

I talk about doing the reps a lot becauseYou don’t decide on Monday, “Right, I’m going to operate differently now,” and by Friday your entire business has transformed.

You practise it.

Because operating differently isn’t something you decide once. You build it through hundreds of these small decisions.

If you want a different result 90 days from now, you have to start operating in a way that supports that result today, before you have the evidence that it’s working.

That doesn’t mean ignoring what’s happening now. It means acknowledging what is without allowing one post, one no, one quiet week or one crappy month to dictate what you do next.

You make the offer before you have the sale. You market consistently before you have the leads.

You keep doing the things your numbers tell you are working long enough for them to compound, and you change the things your numbers are genuinely telling you need to change.

Those are the reps that create the business you’ll be looking at 90 days from now.

Because if you keep responding the same way every time something doesn’t go to plan, you’re going to keep making the same decisions that created the business you have today.

If a quiet week always makes you panic, if a post not converting makes you change your messaging, if a no makes you pull back from selling, or if a Higher Month makes you take your foot off the gas, those reactions become part of the pattern.

And unless you change the pattern, it’s very difficult to create a different result.

That’s why doing the reps isn’t about blindly repeating something that isn’t working…

It means knowing what creates the result you want, understanding the indicators that tell you whether it’s working, and then giving the right things enough repetition to actually create a result.

That is completely different from doing the same thing for six months while your numbers are telling you it isn’t working and calling it consistency.

And I think this is where your Higher Months really become your new normal.

It doesn’t mean every month will go exactly to plan. Markets change, clients leave and things happen in business that you simply can’t predict.

It’s because you know how to respond when they do.

That is a very different way to run a business from panicking every time your revenue moves in the wrong direction.

And there’s one last piece I want you to look at, because this is where your focus matters.

Those thoughts you keep thinking, particularly the ones that are charged with emotion, don’t just stay in your head. They change how you feel, and how you feel changes the way you operate.

If you spend all day thinking, “I’m stuck. I’m confused. Nothing’s working. Why aren’t people buying? What if next month is worse?” think about the decisions you’re likely to make from that place.

What you make those numbers mean changes what you do next. You might start forcing things, doing more or changing things that don’t actually need changing.

Or you can look at exactly the same numbers and think, “Okay, this is where we are. What are the numbers actually telling me, and what needs my attention?”

One keeps you focused on the problem. The other gives you information you can actually use.

And this is why I don’t want you using mindset to ignore reality, but I also don’t want you staring at your current reality all day and allowing it to dictate every thought, feeling and decision you make.

Look at the facts without creating an entire bloody story around them.

Look at your leads, your sales, your conversion, your marketing, your visibility and your consistency. Work out what the numbers are actually telling you.

Then look at yourself. What have you been focusing on? What have you been making those numbers mean? How has that changed the way you’re showing up? Are your actions today supporting the business you want 90 days from now, or are they reinforcing the business you have today?

Because 90 days from now, you’re going to be looking at the results of what you’re doing today.

So if business has felt different lately, don’t panic. Get curious.

Go back 90 days and look at what created the numbers you’re seeing today. Look at your leads, your offers, your conversions, your visibility, your follow-up and your consistency. Work out what has genuinely changed and what actually needs changing.

Then look at yourself.

What have you been making these results mean? How have you been responding to them? Have you stayed consistent with what works, or have you been reacting to what you see in front of you?

Because business HAS changed.

And the way you built your business three years ago, five years ago or even twelve months ago may not be the way you build the next version of it.

The months that don’t go the way you wanted can tell you just as much about your business as your record months. Look at what changed, what’s still working, what isn’t working anymore and what your business needs from you now

Because all of it is a lesson. And I really believe we keep getting the lesson until we actually get the learning from it. Until we see what it’s trying to show us, make the change and move forward differently.

And Higher Months becoming your new normal doesn’t mean everything works perfectly forever.

It means that when something changes, you know how to read it, respond to it and move with it without blowing up everything that IS working.

So this week for all you women in business, I want you to look at your last 90 days and ask yourself:

What actually needs to change — the strategy, the way I’m operating, or both?

Because if you want to make Higher Months your new normal, you can’t always operate the way you did to create the business you have today.

Work out what actually needs to change, change it, and do the reps.