Why do 90% of businesses fail in their first 4 months?

The real question is:

Why are the majority of online business owners not making the money they desire to make?

Isn’t that the magical question?

The question that over 90% of coaches and online business owners want the answer to?

Statistics show that over 90% of businesses fail in their first 4 months!! 

I’ve been at this whole online business thing for years, so at least I’ve beat that statistic! 😉

I used to work on strategy 90% to 100% of the time and on mindset 0-10% of the time.

That was a very backwards way for me to function.

Now, I know my way is more like 20% strategy and 80% mindset and alignment, where alignment is ALWAYS first.

So why aren’t more business owners making the money they want to make?

I’ve done A LOT of sales calls over the past few months. 

I’ve had the opportunity to research this by asking potential clients why they feel they haven’t been successful yet in business.

I heard things like:

It’s the economy. 

It’s where I live. 

People just don’t have the money. 

I’m not really sure, if I knew I’d fix it. 

I don’t want to be rude or insensitive, but most of the reasons for not succeeding in business are connected to limiting beliefs, fears and doubts. Mostly from this life, but these things can also be karmic from past lives or your ancestry.

If you look at successful businesses, like the ones that have not only been thriving all through covid but expanding during this time, they had the ability to succeed no matter where they lived or what was going on in the world. 

What do successful businesses do differently?

Successful businesses provide services that their clients WANT while also secretly giving them what they need.

Successful businesses share the value of their services and offers so their potential clients understand the exchange for their investment. 

Some business owners even make their offers such a no-brainer that people feel a bit silly NOT investing in it.

I didn’t see the most successful business owners chopping their prices and offering the same value.
Did you?
Maybe they created lower priced offers, or even higher priced offers, but they didn’t discount what was already seen as valuable.

I’ll tell you the TWO things that have kept me stuck in business over previous years. 

  1. Self doubt. Can I really and truly do this? Little old small town Canadian me?!
  2. Lack of commitment. What if I fail? What if I’m the laughing stock? What if I make it and then lose it all? Or worse, what if I succeed and I’m not satisfied or fulfilled? What if I do all the work and I don’t love the end result?

Whoa! Those are all big limiting beliefs. I’ve had them, and I bet you have them or have had them, too.

I used to like to dig into these things when I journaled.

I’ve actually been recording myself talking to my Spirit Team recently on video rather than writing. I’ve filled up dozens of journals over the last few years and writing just feels like a gargantuan chore these days.

I needed to find a way to allow it to be easy.

Now, I call in my Inner Being, Spirit Guides, the Council of Light and my Galactic Council and I just talk it out. 

Sometimes that leaves me feeling like I’m a freak who talks to herself, and other times I get the most profound wisdom I wonder why I haven’t been using this technique more over the years.

How do I know what to talk about or ask my Spirit Team? (I prefer to call them Magenta. I know when I use this term, I’m talking to the whole lot of them, and they know it, too.)

Oh you’ll know exactly what to ask. If you’re stuck or feeling scared or doubtful, or non-committal like I was, then you have a ton of things to ask about.

Recently, my coach asked me: Why are you afraid to commit to your business 100%?

Aww poop. She was calling me out on my crap.

She’d asked me this several times before I actually committed to finding the answer.

Eventually, I turned the question over to her: Why am I not committing to my business?

I’m almost surprised she didn’t say: Not my monkeys. Lol. She wouldn’t have. But she did flip it back to me.

We coaches are good that way. We know what you need even when you don’t. We know how to push all the right buttons just enough to get you to take some kind of action.

We know you already KNOW the answers and you’re capable of finding them.

I’d obviously been skirting the issue of ‘commitment’.

But at least I was aware.

I’d been accused of seeing my business and treating it like a hobby rather than a business in my past.

Argh. I really do want a successful business, not a hobby. So why wasn’t I committing?

The cool thing about things you’ve been ignoring is that they can create life altering transformation when you do finally look at them and decide to shift them. 

I did what I would expect my own clients to do, and what my coach expected me to do. I did some digging…

Well, in all honesty, I was on the toilet and the answer hit me. Lol.

I’ve always been the person who had several jobs at one time. Even when I was only 16. Even when I had a 9-5, I taught 7-10 hours of fitness classes a week.

I’ve ALWAYS felt the need to over fill my plate. 

As a Projector in Human Design, that often leads to burnout if you do it too long, or in my case, you call in an auto-immune disease. 

Something happens to trigger your body to SLOW DOWN and stop trying to work as hard or harder than everyone else.

I’ve kept up that same pattern of having multiple sources of income even while running my own business. 

I’ve even stopped my own business several times and worked a J.O.B. of some kind instead.

That certainly doesn’t say: I’m committed to you, Business!

In recent months, I’ve been selling packages for other coaches in addition to working for myself. 

My reason for this was because I felt I wasn’t good at selling. Honestly, I felt I sucked at it.

And I knew I wanted to be better.

In order to get good at something, you need to do it over and over. (Have you ever read Malcom Gladwell’s book The Outliers?)

I think it’s been a way for me to AVOID committing 100%, even though I have gotten better at asking questions on sales calls and digging into the real reasons why potential clients have not started or not yet succeeded in business.

If potential clients are getting on sales calls with you, they know they need help. The question is: Are they committed to getting the help?

The big question I really had to answer was: Why have I been I avoiding getting my transformation soul-aligned work even more into the world?

Why the heck would I do that? Why would I not choose to commit 100% to build my business and help more people thrive and create freedom in their own lives?

*Head scratch moment.*

Well, what came through is this:

I’ve committed to a lot of things in my past that didn’t work out. 

Ahh crap. There it is.

Too many relationships to count that didn’t work out.

Jobs that I quit, got fired from, or hated that didn’t work out.

Network marketing businesses (bye bye DoTerra and Melaleuca) that didn’t work out.

I’ve invested in trainings, workshops, courses, coaches, and higher education that I never really used. I consumed most of them, but didn’t really USE them. Those things didn’t work out, either.

Why not? Why would I commit to the LEARNING, but not the DOING?

Sometimes we do things we think we should do, or we do them to honor or please others, but we’re just not ALL IN. Your heart and soul both need to be all in. Like 100%. No hokey pokey-ing.

Do you agree with me here?

I know that people can be really good at and succeed at things they hate, but they’re not fulfilled by them.

I don’t know about you, but I strive for fulfillment.

What about this commitment thing?

I know I’ve committed to things that haven’t been soul-aligned. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

I’ve forced myself to commit to things I didn’t want to do. 

I’ve even committed to things that I hoped wouldn’t work out! (I’m sure you, too, have gone out with people that you had zero intentions of seeing long-term. I’m not alone here.)

After all of that unsuccessful commitment, my subconscious mind had said:
Enough is enough! No more committing and then feeling like a failure because it didn’t work out!

So I then found it really hard to commit. Impossible even. To almost anything.

I couldn’t commit to dating, to friends, to exercising, let alone to my business. It got a little crazy there for awhile.

I finally had to draw some lines in the sand, one at a time.

I had to stop giving my energy to things that I didn’t want to nurture, even if that meant turning away non-ideal clients.

I had to decide what to give my energy to and consistently do it. Yes, I had to commit.

Something like exercising, I’m no longer available to do it whenever. It’s not a maybe anymore, or only when I feel like it, its a must.

I’m committing like a PRO over here. Lol.

So… How do you get out of old self-sabotaging ways of thinking, shift out of lack and get into abundance and love?

You need to start fighting for your desires instead of your limitations.

Instead of: I don’t know if I can. What if I suck? What if no one likes me or wants what I offer?

You need to allow yourself to sink into and embody something like:

I’m valuable. What I do in the world is valuable. I can do this. I’m doing this. It’s as good as done.

But… How?

There’s a gazillion tools to choose from. But you need to actually USE them. 

You can think about using them, intend to use them but never actually use the tools. That will take you no where but where you already are.

What I’ve found is that you need to do the work, but you need to allow the work to feel easy.

Umm? What?

It means you need to follow your heart and your intuition and allow yourself to be led. Guided.

For myself, I couldn’t offer to help other business owners and aspiring business owners to re-jig or create their own business to be soul-aligned if my own business wasn’t aligned with my soul. 

You have to walk your talk.

Step 1: ASSESS IT.

I took a look at my entire business, the names of my programs, my pricing structure, what was included and really had to ask myself:

Is this me?

Is this aligned with who I really am?

Does offering this light me up?

Would I buy this for myself? Because if I wouldn’t invest in it, why would my clients?

Step 2: ALTER IT.

Of course, next was making the changes required to feel aligned.

That’s why I now run my business based on my soul details that I’ve gleaned from my Personal and Business Numerology, my Human Design and who I am at Soul Level based on my Akashic Record. 

I won’t lie. It’s been a challenge to do things based on who I am rather than what I’ve been taught. It’s hard to go against what you think you know. But you have to align your business with your soul or you won’t be fulfilled. (You can learn more about how I help clients with this here.)

Step 3: CHECK IT.

Then it’s time to do a fear/doubt limiting belief review and re-program. It’s actually more like CHUCK IT than CHECK IT. (I talk about some limiting beliefs in this video on YouTube.)

I have feared reliving my past in business and in relationships. 

I don’t want to make the same mistakes, or waste more time. Which is a bit lame when I type it as I know that all time is either spent growing or learning.

You could fear being seen, failing, succeeding and more.

We all know that when we live from fear, we repel love and all things that match love. 

We have to choose: Am I going to lean into love OR lean away from it?

If you have a ton of limiting beliefs, or other fears or doubts, you’re going to have to see them, feel them, and disprove them in order to overcome them and move into a place of thriving.

You could flip the order of step 2 and 3 if you wanted. I didn’t because the limiting belief piece can take a bit of time to sort through. Days, weeks, even months or years.

Why not set-up your business to be soul-aligned and then commence the digging? You can always re-jig your business after the re-programming process, if needed.

Let’s do a little review. Why do over 90% of business owners NOT succeed?

  1. They set up their business based on someone else’s recommendations and wisdom instead of listening to their own inner wisdom and aligning with their soul.
  2. They offer things they don’t want to offer, that don’t feel good, that don’t light them up, that they wouldn’t buy, usually because they feel they have to.
  3. They’re afraid of all kinds of things, like failing, succeeding, being seen, being ridiculed, being rejected or abandoned and more and they don’t allow themselves to get past the fears.

If you’re ready to create a soul-aligned business that’s guaranteed to be fulfilling BECAUSE it’s soul-aligned, I’m ready to help.

You need to:

  1. Have a business or want to create one.
  2. Be willing to understand and align with your soul.
  3. Be willing to allow your intuition to guide you.
  4. Have the time, energy and money to invest in yourself.
  5. Actually want help and support.

If you do, I’d love to work with you. Read more here and see more longer-term programs here.

May you create the most satisfying and fulfilling business with ease and speed.

Namaste.

Sherri. :O)

BTW – I’d love to hang out with you in my Facebook Group. Join me here.