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Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
📍 acknowledging that you have to go back to work and do hard things over again when it kind of felt like your business was really running like a well oiled machine. It's not fun. It's really easy to just kind of ignore it and hope things get better and hope the market turns and your business starts growing again without you doing anything because you finally got to a point of stability in some ways, and you feel like, this is it.
We've made it, we're good from here. That's not the way the world works, unfortunately. Your business will always go through cycles and evolutions, and you need to be able to predict and pivot along with them, and that starts with acknowledging where the business is getting stuck. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show. I really appreciate you joining me for another episode. Before we dive in, if you are getting value from this show, please like, share, subscribe, send this to somebody who could use this message. It really helps me with my mission to help as many people as possible.
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That's it for the PSAs. Let's jump back into the 📍 episode.
As entrepreneurs, we tend to get used to the roller coaster over time. There are a lot of ups and downs that comes with building and scaling, maintaining a business. It's one of the things that I think separates entrepreneurs from the rest of the general population is our ability to handle extreme swings and a lot of volatility.
Because to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to be able to tolerate and navigate quantum shifts in your business or the landscape or the market or whatever it is, and see things through to the other side.
And so we get used to that rollercoaster a little bit and we get used to those highs and lows.
But one of the other parts of the cycle that I think resonates with all of us is when we're just feeling stuck. The rollercoaster doesn't really seem to be moving at all.
We're not on an upward trajectory. We're not yet on a downward trajectory, but we know that we're stuck right where we're at. And that doesn't mean we're stuck in every aspect of our business, but in some aspect of our business,
there are times when, say we're generating a lot of new business and that's great, but we're really stuck on the operational side.
We're not really able to break through and get to that next level of efficiency, so we start dropping balls and we start to get really behind, and then we start to really, really get sideways. Because the new business, we can't handle it because our operations are breaking down and that part of the business is just really stuck.
And it doesn't mean that the business starts moving backwards because we have enough new business coming in. It just means that our team is really spread thin. They're having to jump in and do a lot of things manually because the way we automated it isn't working.
They're having to work long hours. The morale is really starting to dip. They just feel like the chaos is never ending. And the opposite is also true. There are times when we're getting really dialed in on the operational side, taking great care of our clients, but we're just not growing
the things that we did to get here are not getting us to the next level that we want to be at. This probably resonates with most successful entrepreneurs. , You start somewhere and you do whatever it is that you do to grow it. Whether that's organic traffic, referrals, word of mouth, whatever your lead generation strategy is, and it gets you to a certain point. But then that thing that you used to do really well, it's not really working anymore. Maybe the market has changed.
Maybe the technology has changed, maybe the entire landscape or the regulations have changed, whatever it is, and now we're stuck in this part of our business. We're not growing anymore. And the problem with not growing anymore, or not taking more market share or not finding new ways to serve your clients is that you're always at a risk when your business begins to plateau.
One of two things generally happens over time. Either you figure it out, you find a way to break through, or the market just improves and naturally you start to grow again, or you break down you slowly start to lose market share, one client, one customer at a time, which increasingly becomes a bigger strain on the business because you have overhead that you have to handle with less revenue coming in. You have to start making difficult decisions, and eventually the business just disintegrates.
And it doesn't need to be this way, but this really is the premise for most entrepreneurs. At some point in their journey, they plateau for whatever reason, and they either need to figure it out or they eventually fade away.
And it doesn't need to be that way.
And so today we're going to talk about being stuck in your business and how to get unstuck and keep moving forward towards the vision that you have for your organization.
And so before we dive in, I really wanna lay the groundwork for what I mean when I say stuck. What I mean by being stuck is that you recognize that there are areas of your business that if you don't improve them. Will eventually become a liability for your company. They may not be, at this point, a danger to the health of the organization, but you realize and recognize that they used to be better than they are.
They're stuck right now. They may not immediately be a danger to the health of the organization, but you are at least acutely aware that if something isn't done about this aspect of the business, that eventually it's going to become a much bigger problem. That's what I mean by being stuck. In your business because if you don't solve those problems, eventually they become magnified and they become contagious to the rest of the business.
And so I think for clarity's sake, it's best for me to stick with one primary example of where we can be stuck in our businesses all throughout this episode. And so if you can apply this example to any example that you find in your business. I'm gonna stick with the example of growth today.
When your business stops growing, when you're not bringing in new business at nearly the clip that you once were, that becomes a massive problem over time because you're always going to have churn. You're not gonna retain every client forever. And so if you don't grow at some acceptable rate, the business is always in danger of shrinking to the point of infeasibility.
And so when you're no longer growing, you could say that you've hit a plateau because you haven't really started losing any clients yet. But if you're not getting anyone in the front door, eventually people will start leaving out the back door. No matter how good a job you're doing, the life cycle of a client is normally not infinite. And so you'll eventually scale down to the point where your business is no longer solving if you don't solve your growth problem.
So I'm gonna stick with that example today 'cause I, I feel like it's the most palatable.
And so what do we do when we're stuck? When we realize that we're no longer growing? And if the business doesn't find a way to get moving forward again, eventually there will be no business. Well, there are five things I believe that we can focus on to get unstuck in these areas of our business.
The first key to getting unstuck in your business is what I call radical acknowledgement. Part of the reason that businesses fail is that their leaders bury their heads in the sand for far too long, refusing to acknowledge areas where they have real problems in the business until it's too late and by too late, I mean to the point where those problems have become so magnified that now not only are they unavoidable, they're probably too far along to solve without really drastic maneuvers.
A great example of this from my lived experience would be real estate companies. I've been through a lot of real estate business cycles in my career, and we see the same pattern every single time. We have really, really, really high peaks.
And then as the market starts to plateau as transaction sides per capital begin to fall. We see a lot of leaders of real estate companies kind of refuse to acknowledge the reality of what's happening.
We'll see all kinds of chatter online around how the market is different than what we're seeing. In reality, we'll see a lot of lack of acknowledgement of what's happening,
and if these leaders were really leading, they would start to make moves in their businesses long before those problems became magnified. They would adjust their target avatar. They would adjust their lead generation strategies. They would go after vertical services and create new revenue streams. You could do this years in advance if you're able to see the signs of the market. Cycles starting to change, but a lot of leaders refuse to see that reality. And then what ends up happening is their companies start to suffer greatly because they don't slash overhead quickly enough.
They don't pivot and all of a sudden they're selling way less real estate and it feels like it's happened overnight. Really it didn't. When they're cutting jobs and they're really reigning in expenses and they're losing people and their revenue is dropping like a rock, it feels like it came out of nowhere.
But the reality is the signs were there for a very long time. If that example doesn't resonate with you, by the way, keep an eye on the statistics behind real estate brokerages nationwide as we go through our next real estate market cycle, which if you're watching this in the present day, we're kind of in the middle of a volatile one right now.
It's really interesting to see what happens to the companies that pivot well and the companies that wait too long to acknowledge that there's a problem in the first place. So this is step. Number one, wherever you're stuck in your business, it is incredibly important to acknowledge it as quickly as possible before it becomes your new normal.
This is the point that I really want to drive home. We'll use the growth example all the way through this episode when your business stops growing at what you believe is an acceptable clip. You need to acknowledge that as quickly as possible so that you can start to pivot and take the right actions.
So many of us are so hesitant to acknowledge when there are areas of business in which we're stuck because we know how hard it was to get here, and we know how much work goes into running a business. And it's like we don't want to acknowledge that the business is stuck because that means we're gonna have to go do hard things again.
And I get it, acknowledging that you have to go back to work and do hard things over again when it kind of felt like your business was really running like a well oiled machine. It's not fun. It's really easy to just kind of ignore it and hope things get better and hope the market turns and your business starts growing again without you doing anything because you finally got to a point of stability in some ways, and you feel like, this is it.
We've made it, we're good from here. That's not the way the world works, unfortunately. Your business will always go through cycles and evolutions, and you need to be able to predict and pivot along with them, and that starts with acknowledging where the business is getting stuck. So radical acknowledgement is step number one, and you need to find that acknowledgement as quickly as you possibly can.
Step number two, after radical acknowledgement is to create a clearly defined strategy that you're going to go execute on to get your business unstuck.
We have acknowledged that we have a problem in this area. We are not going to bury our heads in the sand. Here is the solution. You have to clearly define your strategy for becoming unstuck.
'cause what can really exacerbate being stuck is burning resources to get unstuck without any clear cut strategy whatsoever. So, for example, your growth strategy, if your growth strategy that you originally had in place is no longer working, acknowledging that it's no longer working is step one. Throwing the kitchen sink at the problem is not step number two, because if what you were doing before wasn't working and you don't have an idea of what will work, and you just start burning resources to try and figure it out, you're burning the candle at both ends because you're already not growing and now you're burning resources trying to figure it out.
So this is where you've got to really buckle down and learn. The next step. You've got to network. You've got to mastermind. You've got to find mentors. You've gotta find people that have been there before that can help you create a plan that gets you unstuck rather than trial and error.
Trial and error, especially in smaller businesses with limited revenue, is not your friend here. Don't go and start taking on debt and going into the red. Just to try and figure out how to get back into the black again, you need to really take time to focus on a clear cut strategy that you know has a good chance of working because you have utilized your resources, your community, the power of other people's knowledge
To really develop a strategy that is not just guesswork.
I know I just kind of rambled there for a little bit, but I really want to hammer home that point because I see this in businesses all the time. People plateau, they start losing market share and they're like, okay, let's just try every shiny toy in the book. Let's buy this lead source. Let's redesign our website.
Let's go and sponsor a ton of events let's do all these different things simultaneously, and one of 'em will work and will get unstuck. That's not the way to go about solving this problem. You need to buckle down and really learn from people who have
been there before or are currently executing on a strategy that's different than yours, that is working before you just start throwing every resource you possibly can at the problem. Because burning capital to try to get unstuck and doing it blindly can absolutely magnify the problem, and it shortens your time window to get this figured out before the business is in real trouble.
give you a real world example of this. In our remodeling company, we got really, really stuck just not generating enough new business and bringing in enough front facing jobs. We were kind of at a plateau where the business had gone from profitable to essentially break even. It's a sister company of another, one of our organizations, and so we were able to keep the lights on.
But, we had really stopped growing. We were really referral based and a lot of word of mouth and reviews. And when our network had kind of dried up a little bit, we needed a new growth strategy. And so we really took time to break down really one how big the problem was, which we acknowledged right away we had a problem.
Then what we needed to do to solve that problem. The reality was we figured that to hit our target goals, we needed to generate about $150,000 more in revenue per month than we currently were. We're basically at break, even right now. If we generated $150,000 in new revenue per month, then we would be on target for our profit goals with our hard costs and everything else.
And so we broke down what that really meant. Was that we needed about five new customers a month that we weren't generating right now. And so we took that knowledge of how many new customers we needed, and rather than just throwing everything we could at the problem, taking on all these different shiny toys and doing all these different things, we Went to our mentors, we went to people in our industry. We learned from others who were growing at the time, and we found a strategy that we were very confident would generate the five new customers a month that we needed, which isn't many because these are high ticket customers.
We're doing large scale remodels for these people. They're spending a lot of money. All at once. What would've happened if we tried 10 different things at once is we, one would have trouble measuring all of them. Two, we'd have trouble executing on them all with any sort of competence whatsoever because we're very spread thin and three.
We'll be burning money and capital and time trying to figure out which one of these strategies was going to work. And so we committed to a digital marketing strategy that's paid off very well.
And as we generate more revenue, which we now are from new clients, we can responsibly start to scale our business development strategy to other avenues. But if we tried all of these different things at once, we probably would've gone down in flames a long time ago. So number two is generating a clear cut strategy that you're going to execute on to solve the problem.
And if you execute on that strategy and you realize it's not working, now you can responsibly pivot to plan B without blowing capital on both simultaneously.
Step number three to getting unstuck is to execute immediately. Once you have done the hard work of radically acknowledging that you have a problem, which is actually work by the way, and developing a clear strategy, so many business owners stall out on the execution part. They're a little bit afraid to put time, energy, and resources into a new strategy because it's something they've never done before, and so they're still holding out hope that things will turn around on their own. They've got this plan and they're kind of keeping it in their back pocket.
For three more months. And if three more months go by and nothing happens, then they're gonna do it right? That mindset can be incredibly debilitating 'cause you're just kicking the can down the road. And every day that your business doesn't quite fall apart, you become more convinced that things will organically get better.
But here's the reality. The reality is the longer you wait, the more susceptible. Your business is to whatever the problem is, and these things, they happen slowly and then quickly. It doesn't seem like it's a big threat to the business, and then all of a sudden, within a week long span, you're like, oh my gosh, everything is falling apart.
It's because you had the ability to solve this problem a long time ago, but you were just keeping that plan. In your back pocket. Do not be afraid once you've done the work to acknowledge and create a plan to go execute on that plan. If you've really done things right, if you've rallied the right people, if you've learned from the right mentors, if you've find people that have been there before or are doing it right now and they're doing it well and you're really confident. You do have a good plan. It's just not something you've implemented before. Don't wait because every day that goes by, at the very least, you don't have any feedback as to whether or not this is actually a solution that will work until you start to execute. You can only be so sure that plan A is the plan. And so the longer you wait, if you are wrong about this strategy, now you've gotta pivot again and you're really up against it when it comes to the clock.
So don't wait. Be confident. Learn from your feedback loops, but go out and execute as soon as you have a clear cut strategy.
But we all know that execution without accountability is really, really, really hard to get feedback from. So step number four is to establish clear cut accountability for the plan that you're executing on. When you start this new strategy. Let's just say your growth has stalled out and you're going to bring on a business development manager.
You're gonna take the risk, you're gonna bring on the salary. You're gonna invest time, energy, and resources into this person. Make sure that accountability is like the number one buzzword that you use with this role. We have to be accountable to the results of the solutions that we put into place in our business.
We can't just say, I've done all the hard work. I've acknowledged the problem, I've created a plan, and now we're gonna put the plan in place.
Then I'm done. It's gonna be plug and play. We're gonna bring on this new role. They're gonna crush it. We've done the hard work to find the right person. Problem solved. This strategy needs to be radically accountable to results, and so you need to create the scoreboard.
You need to create the KPIs, and you need to make sure that your number one thing for a little while is holding this new plan accountable. A really good way to imagine this is entrepreneurs that are really great on the operational side, having growth problems.
I really wanna focus on operations and leading my operational team. I like building the machine and creating efficiencies in the machine. And making sure that we have better client service and we're doing things faster and smoother. And so when we stop growing, I've never really been a growth person. I wanna bring on a marketing strategist or a business development manager or a sales team, and I just want them to go and do the thing that they're supposed to do so I don't have to deal with it.
And so when I bring on that person. I don't wanna manage them anymore. I want to go back to managing my operations team. And then what happens is this person wanders around with very little accountability. They might even be A or B level talent, but since you are not leading them, they're almost guaranteed not to hit the standards that you've set if you've set them at all.
And then three months, six months, a year goes by and you've really never established two-way accountability with this person. They're not providing the results. That you hope they would, you are frustrated with them. You feel like they might not even be the right person for the role because they're not performing the way that you wanted them to when the reality is you never had accountability with that person in the first place.
If I feels like I'm rambling, maybe this is my lived experience and I've been through this before, but don't think that just because your team is executing on the plan that we're completely out of the woods. We've gotta imagine this problem in the business where we're basically starting over.
We've gotta develop a feedback loop. We've gotta set standards and accountability, and we've gotta make sure that whoever is in charge of owning the outcome is truly owning the outcome. That means regular time on your calendar for one-on-ones with the person who owns the result. Of this new strategy constantly measuring.
Are we moving forward? Are we moving backward? What's the score on the scoreboard? Where do we need to pivot? Is the strategy working? What's our backup plan? You've gotta have accountability with this strategy that you're executing on. For at least 90 days or until you feel like you're really getting in a groove and getting some positive momentum.
So high level accountability is an integral part of this strategy working.
And lastly, step number five to getting unstuck is measure, measure, measure, and refine. No strategy that you put in place is gonna come right off the shelf.
You plug it into your business and it's a hundred percent optimized from day one. Doesn't work that way. So let's go back to the growth example. You put a growth strategy in place and you've got new opportunities for business coming in, and they're not converting, so you're not generating enough new business.
Is that the strategy itself? Is it the closers on your sales team? Is it the messaging? It could be a lot of different reasons that you're not generating enough new business yet, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the strategy itself is bad. Your execution, might need some adjusting.
You might need to be doing things a little bit differently.
You may need to change your offer. You may need to work on your sales team's skills a little bit and get back into training mode for a while. There are a lot of things that can affect the optimization of your strategy, but you won't know that if you're not constantly measuring and looking at your results.
So for example, in that same remodeling company, we weren't just looking at, Hey, have we generated $150,000 a month in new revenue? Yet? It's how many new opportunities have we generated? how many new appointments has that turned into? How many accepted bids has that turned into? And then how much more revenue are we generating?
And so if we're not hitting that revenue number, we back it out, okay, are we running enough appointments to hit that revenue number if we're converting those appointments? If not. Then we need to generate more leads. This strategy really isn't working, or we need to get better at setting appointments.
Let's say we are setting enough appointments, but we're still not hitting our revenue number. That means that we're not getting bids accepted. So do we need to be doing something with our pricing? Are we not convincing prospects that we are the company they should be using?
What do we need to adjust, refocus on, retrain on. Where do we need to improve on our execution of the strategy before we decide that the strategy isn't working? So measuring your results is incredibly important because it's gonna show you which part of the process you need to optimize to really get moving forward with the results that you're looking for.
And the way in which you do that is to build your scoreboard and then work backwards. Your scoreboard is your number one KPI. So if we're looking to generate a certain amount of new revenue, then revenue generated per month is basically the scoreboard You are measuring how much new revenue you're generating per month as your number one KPI, and when you're not on target to hit that KPI, you're looking at all of your sub KPIs on the scoreboard. The scoreboard is essentially how many points you're putting up. But then if you think about it in terms of a football game, you've got a lot more on the scoreboard.
You've got the clock, you got what down it is how many yards you have to go. All that type of stuff is also on the scoreboard. Those are your sub KPIs. So if you're not hitting your revenue goals, then how are you doing on your conversions at appointments? How many new appointments are you generating? How many new leads are you generating to generate that number of appointments?
There are a lot of things you can work backwards through to find where the bottleneck is if you're not putting up points on the scoreboard. So first you have to figure out what success actually. Looks like what is the one KPI that you're really trying to nail, and then how do you get there? What other things need to be true for that one KPI to get hit? When you create that feedback loop, things start to become very, very effortlessly clear in your business. We're generating enough prospects. We're running enough appointments, we're clearly not converting 'em 'cause we're not hitting our revenue goal, right? Our conversion rates actually quite high.
We're doing very well. We're not hitting our revenue goal clearly, we're not investing enough resources in new opportunities. These things become very clear and tell the story of where you're winning and losing in your business. , So make sure you're constantly looking at your KPIs, holding your team accountable, and you'll get a very clear picture of where you need work.
So let's recap everything that we've talked about in this episode really quickly. We all get stuck in our business at one time or another. And the harsh reality is that if we remain stuck and bury our heads in the sand, that becomes a massive detriment to our business over time.
If you're not growing in meaningful ways, then the reality is that you're always at risk of your business plateauing, then moving backwards and then eventually dissolving entirely. That doesn't mean always growing new business.
That is nice, but I mean growing in ways that are meaningful for your business and every business is different. Client service might be the way that you're trying to optimize and maintain market share, new growth, new revenue streams might be what you're trying to accomplish. Whatever it is that's unique to your business.
But if you realize you're stuck, the first step is to acknowledge it right away, because you don't get any points for ignoring what is an obvious problem, and they don't solve themselves. Once you've acknowledged, you have to come up with a clear cut strategy, and that's gonna take some work, it's gonna take some learning, it's gonna take some expanding of your comfort zone.
But once you have that strategy, you have to execute right. If you wait, you wait, you wait. It magnifies the problem and it's harder to implement the solution. And when you do implement that solution, whoever owns that solution, you have to make sure that you are accountable to them and they are accountable to the solution.
You are accountable to their accountability, if that makes sense. You're accountable to making sure they understand what the result is that we're trying to accomplish, that they have the resources they need to accomplish it, and that they are accountable to the behaviors that will drive that result. And if this is a part of the business that doesn't feel like your strong suit, this is going to be a scenario in which you've gotta place some extra focus on something that you're not used to focusing on.
It's gonna help you become a more well-rounded leader. So don't just think that you're plugging this system and this person in and it's problem solved. You've gotta hold them accountable day in and day out until you start to see forward progress.
And the way you do that is to measure step number five. Measure, measure, measure, figure out the one thing you're trying to accomplish, the things that lead to that one thing. And then work backwards. Are we hitting our one thing? No. Where are we losing? Where's the bottleneck in this process? And make sure that, at least in the beginning, you're looking at these KPIs as often as possible because you're gonna start to see patterns really quickly where you can go and adjust the strategy when you're feeling stuck in your business.
Those are the five steps to getting unstuck.
I think this is a situation we can all resonate with in our businesses. We all feel stuck at some point. So if this is you in your business right now, hopefully this episode hits you at the perfect time to inspire you to action.
I would 📍 love to hear how you're stuck in your business right now, how you've been stuck in the past, what you've done to get unstuck, and how this episode or these tips might have been useful for you and your business. Drop a comment, get in touch with me. I really appreciate you listening to another episode, and I'll see you next time.