Why Your Business Isn’t Making Money (And It’s Not What You Think)

You might wonder why your business isn’t making money, and it is often because something specific in how the business has been built is broken. It’s not because you don’t have enough followers or enough luck.

Most businesses that aren’t profitable have a leak somewhere in the foundations that the business owner might not even be aware of, and until that leak is identified and fixed, working harder just pours more effort through the same hole. I help business owners identify the fixes needed that then help them make more sales.

the conversation

I hear a version of this most weeks.

A business owner tells me they’re not making enough money, and in the very next breath they’re talking about needing more followers, more content, more hours on Instagram.

But I’ve sat with enough businesses now to know that more eyes on something that’s broken at the core doesn’t fix it.

This is exactly why your business isn’t making money – you’re already busy, you’re already showing up. The leak is somewhere else

Why “I need more customers/clients” is almost never the real answer

This is often the first place I see why your business isn’t making money – everyone starts to chase more customers of clients before fixing what’s already leaking.

More clients or customers might feel like the obvious fix, so it’s usually the first thing anyone reaches for.

But if things aren’t working properly behind the business – with its set up and the way it is being run, more customers or clients are likely to drop through the cracks, without the business owner being able to make enough money over multiple purchases from each customer or client.

Before any of the business owners I coach make more money, we have to make sure that the business is set up to not only grow and attract more people to it, but to then be able to make more sales to each of those interested people as they come along.

There are four key places that the foundations of a business crumble, that cause money to stop coming in.

The four places money quietly goes missing

Having worked with hundreds of business owners over the past eight years, here’s why your business isn’t making money – it always comes back to one of four places..

1. Pricing: You may be charging a price that was set out of fear rather than out of what the work is actually worth, which means you could be selling product or be fully booked but still not have enough revenue coming in.
   
2. Offers: You may have the wrong offer – perhaps something you enjoy making or a service that you felt excited about building, but your target audience isn’t especially hungry for that thing. If the offers are not aligned to the one priority thing your audience wants help with right now – selling those offers might feel really hard.
   
3. Marketing: You may have exactly the right offer to put in front of your audience, but you’re not selling it consistently, because marketing feels optional the moment life gets busy, or selling feels uncomfortable for you, so income becomes something that happens in bursts rather than something you can rely on, because your audience is not hearing about what you sell often enough. This is one of the most common places I see money quietly going missing when I work with female business owners.
   
4. Single Unit Sales: You may have people buying a single offer from you, but then nothing happens after that – there’s no natural next step you can guide them to, no follow-up with emails and/or messages, no reason for them to come back – so you’re constantly trying to refill a bucket with a hole in the bottom by chasing new buyers all the time, instead of building on what you’ve already got – which is people who have already spent with you.

What’s actually happening when the money isn’t coming in

One of my clients (a coach) came to me convinced her problem was that not enough people knew about her business.

She was posting daily, taking every booking she could get, and still ending most months wondering where the money had gone.

When I looked at her business, I could see her pricing hadn’t moved in two years despite her both her skill and her costs going up, and she had nothing at all for a client to buy once they’d worked with her the first time – there was no onwards journey in place.

What I identified was that she didn’t need more clients. She needed to create better strategy around the clients coming in to keep those clients on board and buying from her multiple times moving forwards.

Once she changed her approach by building a much better client journey, she made more money from fewer clients than she ever had from being fully booked. Her issue was single unit sales. When she created multiple offers through a focused client journey, the maths changed in her favour.

How to find out what’s actually wrong in your business

Before you touch your marketing thinking that you have to immediately show up and try to sell more, first, sit down and look honestly at four things:

1. What are you charging? Does the price reflect your actual costs and time invested? If what you realise is that you need to make a price change to increase the potential for profit – make that change. This is something you need to be bold enough to take a stance on, without the whole ‘my audience won’t pay that’ – yes they will, if they are the right audience.

2. Marketing alignment. Is what you’re selling something people who are your ideal audience genuinely want to buy? If you can’t answer this, it’s time to do a little research to figure out the most pressing need your audience has and to align your offers to that need to provide the solution they’re looking for. This should be done before you start selling.

3. Marketing. If 1. and 2. above are correct (or have been corrected) only then do you look at how often you’re actually showing up and marketing your offers in a normal week – if you don’t have strategy every single week to sell something in all of your spaces, your marketing is off. It’s time to add ‘selling’ as the number one priority in your business each week.

4. Creating journeys. Ask yourself ‘what do I offer a customer/client immediately after they’ve made a purchase from me?”. What else can you put in front of them that is aligned to their first purchase that would have additional value to them. Even doing this one thing can double revenue, because the best time to sell to a customer is when they have just made a purchase. That is when they are in buying mode – from you.

If you take action to correct these four foundations, you’ll immediately have a business that is in a better position to be able to sell.

HELP

If you’re still asking yourself why your business isn’t making money, and you want real support with this rather than working it out alone in a notebook at 11pm…, come to my free Business Fix Live. It runs once a month, and there’s no pitch and no slides – just an hour where I help female business owners work through what needs fixing in their businesses. You can save your seat at iamjennylane.com/businessfix.