26 - I Thought I Would be Further by Now

Be the Anchor – Strategies and Support for Small Business Owners

“How many times have you said to yourself, I just thought I’d be further by now?”

That’s the question that this episode examines. Maybe you thought you’d be at a different financial stage by now or maybe you imagined you’d have a much larger team. But somehow you’re not feeling that you’re at the place you want to be or getting the results you want to get. There’s something important I want you to do when those doubts take hold: pause and realize how much you’ve accomplished to get to this point.

I had this question rise for me when I reached my 250th workout. The gym I go to celebrates that, they take a picture and give you a prize, but the first thing I thought when I saw the picture was “I thought I’d look different by now”. As much as I hated having that thought, it happened. But the instructor taking the photo introduced me to the statistics that only 12% of people in Canada have a gym membership and only 1% use the membership to get to where I was that day. I was in an elite group. Now let’s apply that to your business.

I’ll share small business statistics with you that will show you exactly how much you’ve accomplished just by still being here, by being in business, by surviving the last four years with your business thriving. And I’ll ask you to pause right during the episode to write down how far you’ve come. To combat the feeling that you haven’t done enough, you need to give credit to the resilience you have that’s brought you this far. How much have you overcome? Then ask yourself, what keeps you going? What is it that drives you forward? What do you want to learn to help you progress into the future? These are the things we’ll tackle together today.

Key Moments

03:24 Statistics on how many small businesses fail in their first, second, and third years

06:04 How to pause, think about your accomplishments this far, and write them out

15:12 Questions to consider about what keeps you going and what drives you

• Consider the statistics on small businesses and how much they contribute to hiring overall
• Have you found a community, a camaraderie, in a group of people with similar goals?
• How the Anchored Leadership Program can take you through the next phase: leadership hurdles

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Resources mentioned in this episode:

• WINTER PROGRAM ANCHORED LEADERSHIP ACADEMY
• Reference: Stats on how many businesses appear and disappear each year
• Reference: Small Business Statistics In Canada

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Contact Kari Lotzien | Be the Anchor:

• Website: BeTheAnchor.ca
• Facebook: BeTheAnchorLtd
• Instagram: BeTheAnchor.ca
• Linkedin: Be-The-Anchor-Ltd

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Transcript:

Kari Lotzien: [00:00:01] Welcome to Be the Anchor, the podcast. I'm your host, business and leadership coach Kari Lotzien. When the seas of life get stormy, and they always will, it is not up to us to captain anyone else's ship or to try to calm the waters of the ocean. It's up to us to set our own destination for what we really want, and to learn how to navigate those waves of life together while finding that place of security and stability with others. I call this being an anchor.

Kari Lotzien: [00:00:38] Hello my friends. I'm so glad you're here. How many times have you said to yourself, I just thought I'd be further by now? Whether that's related to your business and thinking that you would be at a different stage of revenue by now, or that maybe you would have your team developed to a bigger place by now, or maybe it's related to that New Year's resolution that you made at the beginning of this year and now that we're getting closer to the end of February, you're feeling I just am not seeing the results that I thought I would have. Well, I'm with you, my friends. I just celebrated my 250th workout at my gym, and this is a big deal for a lot of people, that finding a place of consistency and showing up and doing that over an extended period of time.

Kari Lotzien: [00:01:25] But here's the thing. When my gym came to me and they give you a little prize and they take a picture and they do a social media post, at first glance, when I looked at that picture, my immediate thought was, I thought I'd look different by now. Now I'm all about body positivity and I'm all about being self-accepting. And I keep telling myself, you know, it's not about the way I look, it's just that I want to be stronger and I want to age better, and I don't want my joints to hurt, and I want to be able to enjoy my life for many more decades. But that little voice of I thought I'd be farther by now kicked in so fast, and it just immediately made me feel a bit ashamed and less than. But here's what's pretty cool. The instructor that was taking the picture that day, I don't know if she saw it on my face or what came over her, but she looked at me and she said, welcome to the 1%. Pause, and I'm like, what? She said, welcome to the 1%. She said, 12% of people in Canada have a gym membership. 1% actually use them consistently over time and are where you are right now. And that made me step back a bit and go, why are you being so nasty to yourself? Because suddenly I felt like the group of women that I was comparing myself with in that gym, who have also been consistent all the way through, I was comparing myself to a very elite group of people, that these were also the one percenters who were showing up consistently, who were taking control of their health and actually doing the work that it takes to change their health. And this is what I want to apply to your business and your life today.

Kari Lotzien: [00:03:17] Let's dive in. And I wanted to start off, I know you've heard these stats but I want to bring them back to you again. In Canada, which is where I'm living, in 2018, they did a study and 20.6% of businesses failed in their first year. Didn't get past that 365 days of business. This raised to 31% in their second year. And many of us have heard the statistic that 48% of businesses, almost half of businesses, don't make it past their fifth year. Here's another maybe not so great statistic. But between 2015 and 2019, in Canada, just over 100,000 businesses were started and in that same period - so that's 100,000 per year, just over 100,000 per year - and in that same time frame, about just over 90,000 per year disappeared. Now, this might make you feel like, my gosh, why do I even throw my hat in the world of business when it sounds like it's just so hard to succeed? But here's the thing.

Kari Lotzien: [00:04:26] Most of my clients have made it past those first few years in business. You found something that works. You have the grit. You've done the work. Just like me, showing up at the gym on those hard days where I didn't feel like it, where I was tired, where the voice was in my head, where I just didn't want to go anymore, and I thought it would be so much easier. I know that if you have been in business for more than that 365 days, you've thought at least 100 times it would just be easier to go work for someone else, to collect a paycheck, not have all the stress. But you've done it, you faced it, and you have overcome the challenges that most business or that many business owners don't in those first few years. And here's why it's important. Because I can almost hear you telling yourself, well, I'm a small business and I only employ a few people. Like I'm not really all the way into entrepreneur world. I don't have a big corporation with, you know, 700 employees. But here's what is also really interesting to me: did you know that 74%, 74% of Canadian businesses have under ten employees? And small business makes up in hiring 67% of our workforce. This is really important, the work that you're doing in your small business, if you have a couple of employees or you have under ten employees and you're telling yourself that this is really no big deal, I'm kind of a small fish in a big pond. No you're not.

Kari Lotzien: [00:06:04] I want you to just pause and say, if you have made it through that really challenging start up phase of business, if you have found the grit that it takes to have a few employees and to keep going, you have joined an elite group of people who are doing incredible work that is really important in feeding our communities, our overall performance in how we are surviving, how our economy is looking. This is really important work, and I want you to keep going. With a lot of my clients and myself included, I will tell you that high performers are often looking ahead. We're often looking for what's next. What challenge do I need to overcome? What problem do I need to solve? Where do I need to be ahead of the curve? And we're really terrible at pausing and just noticing how far we've come. I want you to take a minute right now, pause this podcast right now, if you're in a place where you can do it, I want you to grab a piece of paper or a journal, and I want you to look back from the time you started, whether this is your business or this is a goal that you set, I want you to talk about when you started, when this thing was just nothing more than a thought in your mind.

Kari Lotzien: [00:07:20] And I want you to list, brain dump, how far you've come. What are all of the things that you have accomplished in that amount of time, whether it's a couple of years or maybe it's a decade? List them out. And ideally, I want you to actually write these down because there is something that happens in the process of taking action. In writing something down it gives it more space in our minds, and it gives it that power to say this is important. We write down things that are important. I want you to write it down. How far have you come? What things have you accomplished since you started this journey? And then I want to go a little bit deeper, because I think that we all know when we start we have a vision, we have the passion, we have the grit, we have all the ideas. And then life happens. It happens to all of us. Whether that is we all of a sudden come up against a financial challenge that is just really hard and we have to really dig in. Maybe you cut into your personal finances to help fund your dream or your business. Maybe there was times where everyone around you was saying, this is crazy, you need to just, you know, admit your losses and move on. Maybe the voice in your own mind was so powerful that you had so much self-doubt and imposter syndrome and just not being sure if this was ever going to work.

Kari Lotzien: [00:08:47] And I think we've all been through that, myself included. There have been so many nights where I would lay awake thinking, am I crazy? Am I being egocentric, thinking that somehow my dream is going to work out? When other people were telling me, when I would look at other businesses struggling and I would think, is this ever going to work? I think about the times where the cash flow was tough, where I would have been making far more money if I was working for someone else. I think of how many things that I overcame when it came to knowledge, just not knowing what I'm even supposed to do and all the things I needed to learn in my business. So the second question I want to give back to you is, what are all of the things that you've overcome? What are the challenges that you faced as you progressed towards your dream? Was that, you know, did you go through a change in your family, a change in your marriage? Did you have kids? Did you move? Did the market change? I want you to list out what are all of the challenges that you faced, that you found a way through, or that you overcame?

Kari Lotzien: [00:09:57] Let's give credit to that. Let's give credit to the grit and the resilience that you have. Again, I think as high performers, we often start thinking ahead and we go, Okay, here's what I'm going to need. Here's the hutzpah that I'm going to need to try and find to move forward through the next challenge that we come up. But we don't sometimes pause and give ourselves credit for what we already went through. And if you are on this planet right now, you've gone through some really big things in the last four years. If your business survived that, that really difficult time in our economy, you are doing amazing things and give yourself credit for the fact that you stuck with it, that you likely pivoted more times than your head knew how to manage, that you felt like you were just spinning around. If you did that, give yourself some serious credit in how you made it through that time. Because there was no guidebook, there was no map to say here's how this could happen. Pause and give yourself some credit. What things have you learned? How have you overcome financial challenges? How did you overcome the naysayers and the doubters and the voices in your own mind that made you doubt? And then what were the situations or the circumstances that you overcame along the way? Pause. Write it down. Give yourself some credit.

Kari Lotzien: [00:11:15] And I would suggest like even set a timer for like five minutes, because the things that come to your mind first are going to be the things on the surface. But when you sit there long enough and you think, oh yeah, but there was also that time where a family member felt ill or fell ill, and I was able to kind of pivot and support them while I was going through this hard time or, oh yeah, there was that time where all of a sudden we needed to pivot and change because we had our team change or somebody moved or something happened. Let yourself kind of sit with it for a little bit and dig a little bit deeper than just what comes to the surface at the beginning.

[00:11:55] Gillian is an incredible entrepreneur who is going through a time of scaling her very successful business. When she offered to record a testimonial about her experience with the Anchored Leadership Academy to go on my podcast, I was so honored. Have a listen to what she had to say. My name is Gillian and I just finished the Anchored Leadership Program with Kari Lotzien. I'm a financial planner. I've owned a practice for eight years and I'd hit a space of exponential growth. Everything was going great, but I always struggled with, um, the management of team, how to hire, how to fire, how to have those yucky conversations. And that was a huge takeaway from the Anchored Leadership, where I got tools and practice as to how to implement those things into my business so I can continue to grow and continue to thrive. It was an exceptional experience that I would highly recommend to any business owner who is looking to push through their discomfort to that next level of success. In the Anchored Leadership Academy, we combine weekly live sessions for one hour that focus on a key area of leadership, and then participants have the ability to work through all of the content in the modules between sessions. This allows a nice balance between accountability for really busy entrepreneurs to keep moving forward with the program and get it done, while also having the ability to flex their time a little bit and make it work for them. An added bonus, all participants get lifetime access to the videos, the audio, all of the resources in the course so you can keep coming back to it again and again when it applies to that specific time in your business. If this sounds like an interesting thing to you, click the link in the show notes, book an inquiry call, and let's see if the Anchored Leadership Academy is right for you at this stage of business. Thanks so much. Back to the show.

Kari Lotzien: [00:13:56] Now I want to ask yourself what keeps you going? You've come through some of these challenges. You have accomplished so much since you started. But now is the time to kind of have a look and go, okay, so what keeps me going? I'll take it back to my experience with the gym. I will tell you that I've come a long way. I've gotten stronger. My knees don't hurt as much. I can do different movements at the gym that I couldn't have even dreamed of doing before. And I overcame a lot. I overcame a lot of self-doubt. I overcame that thought that I'm too old for this, this is for people who are young and strong and healthy, and it's just too difficult. There was times where I was really doing a sprint in my business, and I would've been so easy to make the excuse that, well, that's what needs my attention right now, so I just don't have time for this. And what really keeps me going is the camaraderie, the community. I've met a whole new group of people who are aspiring to live a similar life that I do. They want to also age well and they want to not have pain, and they want to be strong, and they want to be healthy as they move into these next years of their life.

Kari Lotzien: [00:15:11] It's the same in business. Think about what keeps you going right now. Have you found a new place in the business that maybe unfolded a new light for you and just gets you excited? Maybe you've moved into being more of a mentor. Or maybe, like me, your whole business pivoted, and you went from running your own business and being front line and doing all of that, and now you're moving into being more of a coach or a consultant and helping other people to grow and to do the things that you've already done. But you're at the stage, maybe in your life, of giving back and not being maybe as attached to the front line service. Or maybe you found a new market or a new business idea, whatever it is. What keeps you going now? What keeps you in the game? I think the other piece of this is give some credit to what is helping to keep you there. So like I said, with my gym people, a lot of the thing that keeps me there is the people that are there who are like-minded. I want you to give some credit to who have you met along the way that keeps you going? Are your clients or your customers inspiring you to push a little bit harder, or to find a little bit more from you, or from your team, or from your business? Are you pushing boundaries? Are you exploring new opportunities in business because you really want to provide something exceptional for these people that you just really care about? Have you met some people, maybe in different businesses, who are also running small businesses that are inspiration for you, or that you've been able to network or create collaborations with, and you're so appreciative of that opportunity because maybe that was something you didn't see at the beginning when you were just slugging your way through, and that what keeps you going now is recognizing that when we join together, there's just so much more to this. And that when you're feeling a time of doubt or you're uncertain or you don't know how to handle something, maybe now you have a network of people that you can go to and ask questions and build together that you feel really understand you.

Kari Lotzien: [00:17:16] So leaning into that, what keeps you going? What keeps you lit up and your foot on the gas? Because I want to get to the the next stage that just because you've made it to the stage of business where you know that you have something that works, most business startups fail for two reasons. It's so simple. Either they didn't do their market research and they're trying to sell a service or a product that people don't want. There's just not the market for it. Or they're charging too much for something that people don't want to pay that much for or maybe they could even get free somewhere else. Market research is one of the key reasons that small businesses that start don't make it past that first or second year. The second is cash flow. They are in a situation where they're spending more than they're bringing in, and it's just not sustainable. They've maybe funded from their personal accounts to try and get this business off the ground. Because, let's be honest, getting funding for small business is not always easy.

Kari Lotzien: [00:18:17] These are the two things that sink businesses early on. So when I'm thinking of mentoring early business owners, A) I always want them to focus on market research first, and B) I want them to be really cautious of their spending so that they are building on a foundation but it's not gambling. You're not taking a risk with things that are too big that you may not recover from if this doesn't work. I'd rather it be a slow, steady build than a big risk and then potentially a big fall. But now that you're here, you've made it past that spot. You know that people are willing to buy your product or service. You know that you have something sustainable. You can't stop. Because the other, maybe not great statistic that I want to share with you that's really important, is the other major reason that businesses fail. 70% of businesses fail because of poor management. This comes back to us. In those early startup phases, we got grit. We are showing up and often doing all of the jobs in the business, and that taking this next step to scaling your business, to employing people or outsourcing to others to help grow your business and maybe explore new opportunities, requires a different skill set than the one that you had when you started your business. You need to develop the skills of management. You need to know how to delegate well, how to give feedback, how to have a good onboarding or training program so that when you bring people on, it turns into a great investment that you get a return on over time.

Kari Lotzien: [00:19:53] These are skill sets that leaders need to move their business forward, and I think it's something that we often overlook when it comes to moving our business forward past that start up phase. I think sometimes we think that once we've been in it for a few years, that then we'll just hire people to help us and things get easier. I'd love to tell you that. There's one more step. There's one more piece where you got to dig deep and do the grit work so that you can develop the skills of leadership and management. Once you have those skills, that's when it gets easier. But there is one more step that you need to take. Now, this is my passion. I'll tell you that when I started my company and then I built it over 22 years, I hesitated. And I don't think that I moved into developing the skills of leadership and management early enough. I know now it actually hurt my business. We could have grown so much more smoothly and without quite as much turmoil if I would have gotten real with myself and recognized that there was a shift that I needed to make, I needed to shift from being really frontline, customer driven, and really revenue generating in the business, to having at least a dedicated time where I was focusing on supporting my team and building my team and having systems in place to move that forward.

Kari Lotzien: [00:21:16] I've done it, and this is where my passion is right now, in building my coaching programs and working with other small businesses at this stage. It's a really critical piece of the puzzle to make it long term in your business, so that this becomes the flywheel that does get easier. The thing that you're craving right now, that's my tagline: create the life you crave. But you can't take your foot off the gas too early, or you'll lose that momentum. And it's developing a new skill set. You got to do it. I think when you can do it by joining with other business owners who are at the same phase of business that you are, they're facing some of the similar challenges, they're having a hard time maybe letting go of some of the tasks in their business that they're good at or that they enjoy doing. And it's sometimes hard to admit the things that you just don't want to do anymore or that you're really not good at. And maybe you're the bottleneck in the business and you're preventing the growth, just like I was.

Kari Lotzien: [00:22:17] This is where I'm moving towards the Anchored Leadership programing that I've created an incredible program. I'm not going to be shy about this because it really is amazing. I took ten key topics that are critical to becoming an effective leader, so that you don't become the 70% that say, Well, difficulty with management skills was the thing that took my business under after we had overcome this really difficult time of startup, and we made it through those hard pieces, I dropped the ball and I didn't do it. I took ten key parts that are critical. And then I created a group of small business owners, just like you, who are past that initial start up phase, who are looking to develop their leadership skills. I made it a combination because I know you're busy, and I know that it is difficult to find time to do all of this, so I've balanced it out. There's online modules that you work through in your own time, so you have time and space to really apply it to your business and to be flexible about working through the program when the timing is right for you. And then I added in weekly one hour meetings where we get to meet as a group, you get to ask your questions, you get to share your challenges, we get to talk through it together. What I found when we went through this previously is this was the perfect balance. That my participants had freedom to explore those modules on their own, which they also have lifetime access to, so they can come back to those modules around giving feedback, delegating well, hiring and recruiting, how to build a strong team culture, strategic planning.

Kari Lotzien: [00:23:55] They can keep coming back to those again and again, but they also get the support in real time to keep moving through the program. Because let's be real, I know that you have bought leadership books that you never read. You have bought programs that you never completed. This program, I've set it up so that it's not like that for you. You can work through it in your own time and have the support to move through it together, and to get really good accountability during the time that we're together. The next module, the next cohort, is starting March 7th. I don't want you to miss it. If this feels right for you, just click on the link, book an inquiry call, we can chat through it together to see is this the right fit and is this the right time for you? And I'm going to be really honest. I don't want you to waste money on programs that you don't have time for, or are not a good fit for the stage of business that you're in right now. I will be very honest with you. If it's not the right time and you need to maybe do a couple of things in your business before you're ready, I will tell you, I promise. I will not talk you into something that I don't think is a good fit. But the feedback that has come from the people who were the right fit and who really invested and did the work in the program, the results have been incredible.

Kari Lotzien: [00:25:10] Thank you so much for being here. I want you to save this episode because when you go through times of doubt in your business, and you will, I want you to be able to come back to this and that quick little exercise that we did together to acknowledge how far you've come, the obstacles that you've faced along the way, and the resilience that you have demonstrated, that you have data for. To give yourself credit for that and to revisit what keeps you going right now? What are you excited about? This is something you can come back to again and again. And if you are inclined to share this episode with someone who you think might just need a little reminder or a little boost right now, please don't forget to like and share the podcast with a friend. Thanks so much my friends. I'll see you next week.

Kari Lotzien: [00:25:58] Please know that this podcast is meant for entertainment purposes only. It is not a substitution for medical or professional mental health advice. If you require support, please do reach out. Thanks so much.