Welcome back to The Scalable Business Show.
In today’s episode, I want to talk about something I believe the majority of service-based business owners experience at some point and that is the feeling that your business just feels… messy.
I know this is something I’ve experienced in my own business. That feeling that something feels off, but you can’t point to one specific problem. Nothing is technically “wrong,” but it doesn’t feel quite right either.
More than likely, you’re busy. You have clients. You’re probably making good money. And yet business still feels heavy and it feels harder than it should. You might even find that you’ve lost some of the excitement you once had for your work and you’re questioning whether you should just throw it all in.
Before you assume you’ve lost motivation or that this isn’t the right business for you anymore, I want you to listen to this episode. Because in most cases, this stage has nothing to do with you falling out of love with your business and everything to do with the fact that you’ve evolved faster than your business has. And do you know what, this is good news.
It’s good news because you’ve grown, but your business model hasn’t caught up yet.
This stage of business isn’t a sign that you’ve failed. It’s a sign that you’re ready for your next level and how exciting does that sound?!
This episode isn’t about fixing everything today. It’s about understanding why things feel messy, what this stage of business is really telling you, and what actually needs to change for things to start feeling simpler again.
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Let’s start by talking about what “messy” actually looks like because unlike a messy house where you can actually see the mess, it’s not always obvious where the problem is.
WHAT “MESSY” ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE IN A BUSINESS
When people tell me their business feels messy, they’re rarely talking about one big, obvious problem because to me that isn’t a business that is messy. That’s a business where a problem has been identified and once a problem is identified, it makes it so much easier to fix it. But when your business is messy, it can be hard to know why.
It’s the feeling that nothing is technically broken but nothing feels settled either. That messy feeling might show up as constantly feeling behind, even when you’re working all the time. Or feeling like your offers don’t quite make sense together anymore. Or noticing that every new idea feels exciting… until you remember you have no space to actually do anything with it.
And the tricky part about this stage is that it’s hard to explain because if someone looked at your business from the outside, they’d probably say you’re doing really well.
You have clients.
You’re booked out or close to it.
You’re making money.
So it feels dramatic to say, “Something feels wrong but you can feel it and it’s only something you can feel. It’s not one thing. It’s the accumulation of lots of small things that no longer fit together neatly.
What I will say about this, is don’t try to push past it. Lean into that feeling because that is your mind and your body telling you something.
WHY “MESSY” IS ACTUALLY A SIGN OF GROWTH
This feeling is that you are ready to grow. Your business feels messy because it has grown beyond the structure it was built on.
Most service-based businesses are built reactively. When you start out in business, you rarely have an idea of the types of clients you want to work with. The types of work you enjoy doing. You just know that you have a passion and that you want to turn that passion into a business.
It’s only when you are in that business and you have the experience of working with clients behind you that you begin to know exactly who you do and don’t want to work with. It’s only then that you understand what work lights you up and what work drains your energy. So building a business reactively isn’t wrong, it’s normal.
Something else that often happens is you get shiny object syndrome. You see what offers your peers are putting out there and you feel like you want or should do the same. You see them testing out various marketing strategies and you think “I’ll try that too”. You download endless freebies, buy course after course, listen to advice from a variety of different mentors. Because in the beginning, you’ll try anything to make it work. You’re in experimental mode.
The problem with doing all of this is that you will reach a point where you are now, and that’s the messy feeling that you’re experiencing.
It’s like buying multiple jigsaw puzzles and trying to make it into one puzzle. It just won’t work because the pieces don’t fit together and the pictures are all different.
What you’re experiencing right now is down to years of experimenting and adding new things to your business.
None of this is wrong. It’s how businesses start and grow in the early stages.
But what happens is that over time, you grow faster than the systems, offers, and business model beneath it. You end up with a business that is pieced together. You find that you’re stretched for time and you don’t have the capacity for growth.
And this is where growth begins. Honestly, whilst it might not feel like it right now, this stage is exciting. I like to think of it as your business 2.0. You’re now in a position to grow from experience. You’re not starting from scratch.
You now have the opportunity to redesign your business to fit the version of who you are now and what you want your business to be.
I’ve been in business for coming up to nine years now and my business has seen version 2.0, 3.0 and possibly even 4.0. So believe me, I understand exactly what you are feeling right now.
THE REAL REASON THINGS START TO FEEL HEAVY
So we’ve identified what the messy feeling is, how it happens and why it’s a sign of growth. Now let’s look at why it all feels heavy.
When a business starts to feel heavy, most people assume the problem is workload. They might even attribute it to feeling burnt out. But I like to reframe that burnout into misalignment. I’m not saying that burnout isn’t a thing because it 100% is but misalignment can also be disguised as burnout too.
You might be thinking you just need more time. You need to be more productive. You might think you just need rest so you plan some time off but when you come back, that feeling still exists. And that’s because the deeper issue usually isn’t time. It’s capacity.
You’re only one person and I’m going to hazard a guess that you’re already working more hours than you would like so more time isn’t an option. What you need is more capacity and that means redesigning your business to give you that capacity.
Once you’ve done that, you will have more time. But not only will you have more time, you’ll have more mental space. You’ll have more creative energy. You’ll get that excitement back again.
This stage of business comes when you have no capacity. Because every part of your business relies on you – your brain, your presence, your energy.
There’s no room to think, no room to create, no room to step back and ask bigger questions so everything becomes reactive and when everything is reactive, your business starts to feel messy.
WHY SCALABLE OFFERS FEEL SO HARD AT THIS STAGE
Something I want to talk about in this episode is scalable offers and that’s because I often find that when business owners reach this messy stage of business, they’ll usually decide that they need a scalable offer. And on paper, that makes sense.
You want to grow. You want to make more money. You want to impact more people with your expertise but you have no time. So surely packaging up what you know into an offer that you can create once and sell over and over again makes sense right?! Hmmm, yes… but not just yet.
Because here’s the part that often gets missed:
You can’t build something scalable inside a business that has no space to hold it.
Think about it. You already feel stretched in your business and like you barely have time to work ON your business so bringing another new offer into a business that is already bursting at the seams, isn’t going to fix the problem.
Sure you can reframe it as you just need to put the extra work in in the short term in order to reap the rewards long-term but unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Scalable offers require ongoing commitment just like your done-for-you offers do. I learnt this the hard way,
Back when I created my first proper scalable offer which was my Showit website template shop, I was fully booked with done-for-you design and website projects. I knew I wanted to create something scalable but I didn’t have time. So I made time… I forecast some time in the future where I didn’t book any client projects for 4-6 weeks and used that focused time to work on creating the website templates and launching the shop.
Don’t get me wrong, it worked. I did indeed launch the template shop but what happened straight after that was I went back into client work and my usual business model of having no time to work on anything else. So my template shop got neglected.
What I should have done was redesigned my business model so I could free up capacity long-term in order to build the template shop AND ensure it became a part of my business that I had focused time to work on and grow it consistently.
The other side to this is if your calendar is already full, that scalable offer that you want to create, doesn’t feel like freedom, it feels like pressure.
It becomes something you try to work on late at night, or in between clients, or “when things calm down” and because it never gets the time or energy it deserves, it stays unfinished.
This is why so many scalable offers live in notes apps, half-built folders, or abandoned course platforms.
It’s not because the idea wasn’t good or that the person creating it wasn’t capable. It’s because the business model wasn’t ready for this new stage of business.
Scalability doesn’t start with building the offer. It starts with creating space for the offer to exist. This is exactly what I have come across after years of helping clients build their scalable offers and this is exactly what is going to ensure that your scalable offer and your busines model works long-term.
WHY THIS STAGE CAN FEEL LIKE AN IDENTITY CRISIS
One of the hardest parts of this stage is how personal it feels.
You might start questioning yourself. You may wonder whether you’re cut out for this anymore. You may think that you need to burn everything down and start all over again doing something completely different.
It’s very easy in this messy middle stage of business to assume you’ve lost your passion for it and you’re never going to find it again. But most of the time, that isn’t what’s actually happening. What’s happening is that you’ve grown and your business hasn’t… yet.
The version of you who built your business was willing to do everything it took to make your business work. That meant late nights, working weekends, taking on every client even if your gut told you they weren’t going to be a good fit. Boundaries were pushed and the amount of time you spent working didn’t matter much early on because you told yourself that it’s temporary. Just while you’re building this business.
But now? Now you’ve realised that it’s not sustainable to keep going like this. You’ve realised that you don’t have to (or even want to for that matter) say yes to every client that drops into your inbox. You want your freedom back. You didn’t build this business and leave your 9-5 to work 24/7 for yourself.
This is your time. This is your time now to rebuild your business from experience. From knowing what you do and don’t want. From know what does and doesn’t work.
But how do you do that? That’s the big question.
WHAT ACTUALLY NEEDS TO CHANGE
So, let’s look at what actually needs to change at this stage.
We’ve already established that you don’t need to burn everything down and start again (unless that’s something you want to do).
What you need to do is make changes but before you make changes, you need to figure out a few things first.
Firstly, you need to figure out how many hours a week you want to work. This is your time to build a business around your life, not the other way around. You’ve spent the last however long putting your business first and that’s great but also not sustainable long term.
Next, you need to identify who you do and don’t want to work with. Look back at past clients. Which clients have brought you the most joy? Is there a particular industry or industries you want to work with?
Now it’s time to do the same thing with your projects. Which offers do you love to deliver? Which ones get the best results for your clients? Which ones would you rather put in the bin? Which ones are bringing the most return on investment? All of these questions will help you when it comes to make decisions for your next level.
Once you have the answers to these questions, it’s time to start strategy planning. There are many different things that can be done to free up capacity in your business so I won’t list them all in this episode but some examples are:
- Increasing your pricing – this is an obvious one. A great way to take on less projects without losing out on income is to increase your prices. Let’s say you currently work with 5 clients at £3k each. This makes you £15k, but you want to work with 3 clients instead. Losing out on £6k isn’t a sensible business decision, even in the short term but by increasing your pricing from £3k to £5k, you can now make that same £15k with 3 clients instead of 5. I am massively simplifying things here for the example and it’s not as easy as that as there are other considerations to take into account but you get my drift.
- Simplifying your offers – Let’s say you work with a client over an 8-week period. What if you can get the same results but in two weeks? This is why so many service providers turn to VIP days or weeks. Clients love that they can get things done quickly and business owners love the quick turnaround. And because of the speedyness of how quickly they can have their project completed, you can also charge a premium. Again I’m simplifying here to give you examples of changes you can make.
Now making these changes isn’t as simple as increasing your pricing or whipping up a new offer. With these changes come messaging tweaks. Marketing focuses might need to shift. This is why when I do this work with clients inside my 1:1 mentoring program – Next Level, Please, it’s not something that we change in one session together. This work is done over a longer period of time to make sure that the changes we are making are the right ones.
WHY THIS STAGE FEELS SO UNCOMFORTABLE
This stage of messiness and growth can feel uncomfortable but my clients have also told me it feels exciting.
It feels uncomfortable because you’re in the middle of two versions of your business. The one that got to you to where you are now and one that in a lot of cases, still technically “works” and the one that hasn’t been built yet.
It feels exciting because growth is ahead. Changes are to come and those changes mean new versions of your business. That’s where the excitement that you once felt at the start of your business journey begins to come back in.
It can be tempting at this stage to push harder inside what you already know OR burn everything down and start again because a clean slate feels like the only option. But if you take away one thing from this episode, let it be this… you don’t need to burn it all down. What you need is to make changes, one at a time to rebuild a new version of your business.
WHAT TO DO NEXT (WITHOUT OVERWHELM)
If your business feels messy right now, here’s what I want you to take away from this episode:
- The stage of business you are in right now doesn’t mean you’ve failed. If anything, it’s the opposite. This stage is the beginning of growth.
- You’re rebuilding from experience, not from scratch. The messy feeling you’re experiencing right now. Use this as information to rebuild. Don’t see it as a problem.
- Remember that you don’t need to fix everything at once. We are not burning it all down. We are also not needing to change everything today. Answer the questions in this episode and give yourself some time to reflect.
- Stop trying to scale inside a business model that is already at capacity. Create the capacity first and then scale.
If this episode felt like I was speaking directly to you then I’m glad. Not because I want your business to feel messy but because hopefully now you understand a little more about why it feels messy and you have the beginnings of an idea as to what you can do about it. It’s important to remember, you’re not stuck, you’re at capacity and you’re on the edge of growth.
The work that I’ve talked about in this episode is exactly what I help online service-providers do inside my 1:1 mentoring program – Next Level, Please. If you’re feeling like you could do with someone alongside you whilst you enter this next level in your business, then pop me a DM on Instagram or fill out the application form and I’ll be in touch.
