21 Ideas for What to Do Next When You Feel Stuck in Your Business
The brain capital required to make good business decisions as a female entrepreneur can feel daunting. Analysis paralysis is a very real part of running a small business. While most people become entrepreneurs so they can be their own boss, it can also be challenging to know what the right next move is.
When perfectionism sets in, remember this wisdom: "Done is better than perfect." In entrepreneurship, perfectionism is often the antithesis of progress. The sheer ability to execute and move on is what gets rewarded time and again in small business. Forward momentum is more valuable than pausing to get every detail exactly perfect.
When are brains are confused about what to do next, the result is often meddling in the familiar. For example, you don’t have a comprehensive marketing plan so you spend an entire day hashing out every agonizing detail about your social media posts. Social media is familiar to you, so whether you get profitability results from it or not, you meddle and agonize over every word of copy and image.
In the United States, our education system rewards perfect. The closer you get to an A, the more highly you’re praised. The closer you get to a 4.0 GPA, the more capable others thing you are. That’s not how life works and it’s certainly not how to get results in entrepreneurship. Done really is better than perfect.
How to overcome perfectionism as an entrepreneur
So how do you combat the perfectionist mindset? Aim for a B and move on. Why? The Law of Diminishing Returns says that profits or benefits gained from doing something will yield a proportionally smaller gain as more money or energy is invested in it. That means you’re actually worse off in proportion to the time you invest in something. Weird, huh? That’s not how you and I learned to be valuable growing up in a traditional education system. The extra hour of studying got the results we wanted.
As an entrepreneur, your time is your most precious resource. Where you put your time can’t be taken lightly.
It’s important to be able to discern the few instances in entrepreneurship where the extra effort actually counts and when it’s just a time waster. As you strengthen this muscle as a female small business owner, I urge you to err on the side of aiming for a B. Do the thing and move on.
Here are 21 ideas for what to do next in your business when you don't know what to do next:
1. Write your "elevator speech" five different ways and practice each so you become confident clearly explaining what you do and who you do it for naturally.
2. Batch one month’s worth of content so you can focus on other tasks in your business. For so long, I resisted maintaining a blog because it was incredibly time consuming. Now, I created an SOP that helps increase the efficiency of creating content, including allowing myself only a single pass to edit. Again, do the thing and move on.
3. Reach out to three other businesses like yours and ask if they’d like to grab coffee (virtual coffee still tastes as good!). #CommunityOverCompetition
4. Attend a community networking event. If your client list isn’t full, challenge yourself to attend at least one networking event per week until it becomes full. Focusing on mutually beneficial relationships is key! Remember the three month rule in small business: It takes about three months from the time you start really networking for leads to come in and it takes about three months after you stop networking for the leads to drop off.
5. Write down the exact experience you’d like each customer to have any time they come into your business "ecosystem" (social media, inside your shop, hearing about your business through word of mouth, etc.). The experience - how people feel when they come in contact with your brand - can’t but undervalued.
The nuanced details will make for a strong brand and in turn, encourage repeat visitors and an increase customer lifetime value (how much customers spend with you over the course of their lifetime).
6. Spend 30 minutes setting up your Google Business Profile. If there were one basket you’d want to put all your eggs online as a small business owner, Google is it because it has the largest share of search market share (80%+). When you’re trying to figure out where your ideal client spends time, the answer is Google.
7. Dream about the difference you want to make in the world. Let it take hold of your heart and guide your vision forward. Be able to articulate that vision. It’s crucial for your subconscious to understand the vision because your brain sets to work creating that vision every minute of every day, whether you realize it’s happening or not.
8. Clarify why your business matters - your mission - and how it will impact your customers positively. Turn that into simple language your audience understands. People vote with their time and dollars about how they want the world to work. When you give them a reason to care, they will.
In addition, when you view problems through the lens of your mission, you can’t go wrong. It’s a surefire way to head off analysis paralysis.
9. Take a half hour and thought download everything you can think of related to the small business ideas whirling around in your head. Then, mark items on your calendar to take action pushing your business forward. Reverse engineer the process of bringing those ideas to life, starting with what you can do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to create results.
Remember, taking action is key. There is no substitution for the ability to execute when you own a small business. You can dream all day and have the best ideas on earth, but if you can’t execute, you don’t have a business.
10. Create or revisit your goals for this month, year, and for the next five years. Then work backward step-by-step. What will it take to get there? Currently, I’m reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. While I’m a goal-focused person, that book reminds me that it’s actually the processes you use that create results. So make the goals, but more importantly, decide how you’ll achieve them.
11. Take an hour to write out three likely scenarios where your business growth doesn’t go according to plan. That's right. Plan to fail! How will you take action and pivot in an intentional direction? Your business will have many iterations if it’s going to succeed. You’ll need to be a figure-outer and pivot when things don’t go exactly as planned.
12. Reach out to local business owners and ask if they would like to attend a Founding Females Meet Up with you where you help each other through challenges in your business. Meet Ups are monthly in-person gatherings where women get together to help one another through current business challenges. At Meet Ups, we ask "What's your current challenge and how can we all help push you through it?" Then members take turns sharing insight, experience, and advice.
13. Take an unbiased evaluation of the quality of your thoughts. Are they serving you or hurting you? What assumptions or expectations aren’t working for you? What can you do to change them? (i.e. Positive affirmations, changing your social circle, meditating on the person you want to become, setting firm boundaries, etc.)
14. Get clear on what success means to you. It’s not always the amount in the bank but rather the impact you make with your business or the freedom you're able to enjoy that creates success through business ownership. What does that look like to you? For me, success means freedom of time and money to make the impact I was put on their earth to do. We talk extensively about developing your vision of success inside the Founding Females Mastermind Community, which is an online space for female entrepreneurs to grow their businesses and evolve into the best version of themselves.
15. Craft a professional email signature with your title, offering, and a short sentence defining what people should know about your business. Link to your website if you have one. The people you email most regularly can become your biggest advocates. Don’t underestimate the value of repeat touch points that lead to conversion.
16. Take control of your time management. Read up on time blocking. Set up do not disturb periods on your phone. Use five minutes each evening to plan the next day’s work schedule. Small habits that lead to efficiencies with your most precious resource - your time - can add up to massive progress.
17. Schedule a mentoring session. Look up your local business counseling or business incubator and schedule a mentoring session. Your local Small Business Development Center, local chapter of SCORE, a local cowering space, a local chapter of 1 Million Cups, and the local Chamber of Commerce are great places to start.
In my experience, the small business community is incredibly generous with their time and talents, wanting others to succeed through knowledge sharing. Guidance is an abundant resource in entrepreneurship if you’re willing to position yourself in front of people who have value insight to lend.
18. Consider your business model. How will you drive revenue into your business? Do the math to calculate how many units of your offering you’ll need to sell to make a decent living. Then calculate the amount of time required to produce that many units. Are the numbers adding up?
If not, how can you change your offering so that the numbers make sense? There's an entire chapter on profit strategies in Dream, Build, Grow: A Females Step-by-Step Guide for How to Start a Business (or purchase here on Amazon).
19. Write down three positive affirmations about you as a business owner and post them someplace you’ll see them daily. Seeing yourself as the successful person you want to become is the first key to getting there. How would a successful entrepreneur live her day? Scrolling the internet mindlessly, or taking massive action toward her goals? To become her, you must first become her in the small moments every day.
20. Rent from the library or purchase a business book and dive in! Ideas: Selling Sunshine by Tony Hartl, The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley & William D. Danko, and Dream, Build, Grow: A Female's Step-by-Step Guide for How to Start a Business by yours truly.
21. Research “marketing basics” and dive in! As a business owner, you can never know enough about solid marketing strategy.
22. Bonus - Just go be a good human. Do what you say you’re going to do. Adopt a give-first mentality. Give people grace. Help other people toward their goals. People want to business with people who are self-accountable, kind, willing to admit mistakes, do what they say they're going to do, and who care about making the world a better place. When you are that person, people want to see you succeed and beautiful connections happen when you take the high road.
Female business resources
Meet the author, Francie Hinrichsen
Francie Hinrichsen the founder of Founding Females®. She is a business sage empowering female entrepreneurs to breathe life into the business dreams God called them to.
After feeling like a misfit in the corporate world, Francie discovered a life she loved waking up to through business ownership.
Francie is the author of Dream, Build, Grow: A Female’s Step-by-Step Guide for How to Start a Business, a guided journal helping hundreds of women start and grow their businesses.
She’s a passionate entrepreneurship hype girl, female leader, public speaker, and community enthusiast.
Her MBA and 10 years in a corporate career and in business ownership positioned her to teach women forward-thinking strategies for starting and growing successful businesses.
As a community leader, Francie realized other women could thrive with the right guidance and support. She created the Founding Females® Mastermind Community that provides a safe space for women to build better businesses.
She believes that anyone with a dream on their heart can pull up a seat to change the world through entrepreneurship.
About Founding Females®
The mission of Founding Females® is to help build a better future for female entrepreneurs through education, encouragement, and shared wisdom. We create safe spaces for women to share business challenges and receive peer support.
In addition, Founding Females offers an online female business mastermind, a how-to guidebook for female entrepreneurs called Dream, Build, Grow: A Female’s Step-by-Step Guide for How to Start a Business, and in-person events, like an annual women’s business conference and local Founding Females Meet Ups.