Before You Change Strategies, Find What Breaks First

Every few weeks, an owner sits down with one of our coaches and announces a new plan. The website isn't bringing in enough business, so they're going to rebuild it. The ad agency isn't working, so they're switching agencies. Networking feels slow, so they're going to try workshops. The sales hire didn't work out, so they're going to hire a better one.

Look, I get the instinct. I've done it myself more times than I'd like to admit. When something isn't working it's uncomfortable, and the fastest way to make that feeling go away is a fresh start with a new channel or a new person. It feels like progress.

But most of the time, what broke is one skill in the middle of the strategy, and that skill follows you into whatever you try next.

The job at the end doesn't change

A business coach I know told me recently that he was going to drop his podcast and start running workshops. He'd recorded more than 25 episodes with local owners. Two turned into a real next meeting. His conclusion was that podcasts don't work.

So I asked him what his job was at the end of a podcast conversation. Invite the person to a next step. At the end of a workshop or a networking lunch, it's the exact same job. If that invitation isn't landing, moving from one-to-one to one-to-many just means you miss it in front of more people.

He had 25 owners willing to sit down and talk about their business with him. Something was breaking at the end of every one of those conversations.

"Let me talk to my son"

This is what that skill looks like in real life. A second-generation owner of about ten restaurants sat down with a coach and talked for 45 minutes straight. When he was asked what he'd want to improve if they worked together, he said, "I can think of ten." At the end, he said, "Let me talk to my son."

Most people hear that as a brush-off and move on. I'd push back on that. Forty-five minutes of talking and ten problems on the table are buying signals. The better move is simple: "Great, what are the top three?" And then, "Why don't I come in and walk you and your son through it together, so you don't have to sell it to him yourself?"

Hearing that signal and making the next step easy to say yes to is the whole skill, and he didn't need a new strategy to learn it.

The five ways

At ActionCOACH we teach growth through what we call the five ways. Leads times conversion rate gives you customers. Customers times the number of transactions times your average sale gives you revenue. Revenue times margin gives you profit.

Five levers. Almost every owner wants to pull the first one, because more leads feels like growth. It's also usually the most expensive one to pull.

Take a simple example: a hardware store with 4,000 leads a year, a 25 percent conversion rate, customers buying twice a year at $100 a visit, and a 25 percent margin. That's $200,000 in revenue and $50,000 in profit.

Now improve each of the five levers by just 10 percent. Revenue goes to about $293,000. Profit goes to about $80,500. That's a 61 percent jump in profit, and four of those five levers have nothing to do with getting more people through the door. They're about what happens once people are already there: how many you convert, how often they come back, what they spend, and what you keep.

What breaks first?

The question we come back to with almost every owner is this: if you got 10 times more leads tomorrow, could your business handle them?

For most, the honest answer is no. Follow-up would slip and quotes would go out late, and someone would call on Monday and hear back on Thursday. That's actually useful, because it tells you exactly where to look, and it's almost never at the top of the funnel.

The same logic applies to money. A machine shop owner I coach came in wanting to buy two new machines because the shop was slammed. My push back was this: I don't want us buying machines because we're busy. I want us buying machines because we can prove they'll produce more cash than they consume. Was the bottleneck really equipment, or was it labor, quoting, scheduling or cash? We modeled three scenarios and started with one machine and a 60 to 90 day test. Find the real constraint before you spend money on the one that's easiest to see.

Information isn't the problem

AI has made the right answer cheap. You can ask any tool what your sales script should say or what your follow-up email should be, and get a decent answer in seconds. I use it every day.

But information was never really the bottleneck. Everybody knows how to lose weight: eat a little less, move a little more. Roughly seven in ten American adults are still overweight or obese. That isn't an information problem. Business works the same way. Most owners don't need another strategy. They need to get very good at the one they already have, and they need someone holding them to it long enough for it to work.

What to do this week

Before you change anything, try this. Pull up your last 10 real conversations with prospects (actual conversations, not names in your CRM). Count how many ended with a clear, specific invitation to a next step, with a date on it. "Let me know if you're interested" doesn't count.

If that number is low, you've got a skill problem, and skills are fixable. Practice the move from listening to inviting. Role-play it with your team. Run the next 10 conversations the same way and track what happens. After that, you'll know whether the strategy really needs to change.

The owners I've watched grow picked a decent strategy and stuck with it long enough to get good at it.

If you'd like a second set of eyes on where your business is really leaking, our coaches work with owners across Central Texas and South Miami every week. [Apply for two weeks of free coaching](APPLY_LINK) and we'll find your first fix together.

Tanner O'Brien is CEO of ActionCOACH Benefic Group.