3. Riding the Waves of Business Without Drowning

Every business has ups and downs. How do you make it through the low spots without throwing in the towel and quitting?

Your job ISN'T to never have a slow period or a rough day. It's to get good at sustaining through the trough while you're riding the waves.

This episode will help you zoom out, reframe your business highs and lows, and go deep in your business — in all its phases and stages — without drowning.

Mentioned in this episode:
• Episode 2, "The FAFO Method: Why and How to f*ck around and find out in your business" (https://fckyeahpod.buzzsprout.com/2198615)

Prefer video? Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/_Q6HUV7FPQw

*****
I’m Kristen King, and I’ve been a business coach since before business coaching was cool — since the early 2000s after my first solo business hit six figures less than 2 years out of college. Now, I teach coaches, therapists, healers, and other brilliant service-based entrepreneurs like you how to build their own unique fuck-yeah business.

There's more to me than being a multi-certified coach for kickass entrepreneurs. I'm also a certified hypnotist and a certified mental health and wellness facilitator with an MBA, a master's in publishing, and 15+ years of multi-industry experience.

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Transcript

0:02

Hello friends, welcome back. I am super excited for today's episode because I want to talk about misconceptions about business growth. I know that we have all seen that motivational poster that's like a line, like a straight line that goes from the bottom to the top. It's like what we think growth looks like. And then next to it, there's like a squiggly line that's all tangled up like a ball of yarn. And it says what it actually looks like. We've all seen that. We know Intellectually that the road to financial success to business success to life satisfaction to personal growth to business growth. All the things that we want is not a linear process. However, we still think that it is. We think that like for other people, it's not a linear process. But for us, it's actually supposed to be. And so I want to clear this up because this misconception, this belief that is simply not true, is one of the biggest killers of businesses and hope that I have seen in my entire career. And I've been doing this stuff for almost 20 years. And so I want to remind you to think about this in the broader context of how Life actually works in life. We are not always awake or always asleep. We do some of both looking outside. It's not all dark or all light. It's not all sun or all rain. There's some of both always. And that's how it is supposed to be. We have a water cycle where rain Falls from the sky or other precipitation falls from the sky. It pools on the ground. It seeps in, then it comes back up, it evaporates, and then it goes back up into water vapor and condenses. Things are constantly moving in a cycle, and we forget that when it comes to our business. We'll look at you know, just from month to month and say, well, last month I made this amount of money and this month I made half that. So obviously my business is failing. So I want to invite you to keep a couple of things in mind. One of them is that everything is constantly cycling. And everything is constantly expanding and contracting. And so your business is going to do the same thing. There's always going to be an expansion and a contraction. And sometimes they're going to be bigger or longer. Sometimes they're going to be smaller or shorter. But this is just how it goes. So nothing has gone wrong. So that's the first thing to keep in mind. The second thing to keep in mind is that it's a lot easier to see those expansions and contractions when you're looking at the big. Picture if you're comparing one day to the next day, one week to the next week, or even one month to the next month, it's really difficult to get any kind of kind of meaningful comparison there because it's such a short period of time. You don't actually have enough data. To identify trends to see if something happened to be true in that moment, or if it's something that is reliably true and reliably works. And so if you listen to the episode on the FAFO method, you know that I recommend that people do things for a minimum of 90 days in order to get enough data to even start. Drawing conclusions about stuff that's happening. So if you're looking at your business trajectory over a period of less than 90 days, stop, stop doing that because it's going to be frustrating and it's not going to allow you to zoom out and see the larger trend line. So imagine for a second that there's a graph in front of you. Those of you who are watching the video don't have to imagine because I'm going to gesture, but those listening to audio, just imagine there's a graph in front of you. We have on the vertical axis. We have money on the horizontal axis. We have time and as we move forward in time, the plot points of how much money we have brought in or how many clients we have or whatever you want to use. If it's not, if it's not money. Those things are gonna move up and down in terms of their placement on the vertical axis as they move forward in time across the horizontal axis. That's normal. It's it's more of a scatterplot than a straight line. But when you look at all of those points and where they are in the chart, you can also start to see the trend line that runs through them. And that'll tell us if things are moving forward. Increasing or decreasing. If they're going faster or slower. If you know, we're making more money or less money over time. Those individual data points aren't enough to give you actual information is when we look at them in context. So again, keep in mind, this is all a cycle. Everything expands and contracts. Everything comes back around again. And if we want to see that happening and be able to get any meaningful information from it, we need to look at our business and anything else we're evaluating over a long enough period of time that we can actually see what the trends and patterns are. And a really useful way to look at this is just to look at the economy. I'm located in the U S. So that's the, the touch point that I go by. But you know, it's basically the same everywhere. Sometimes we have periods where we're going up, up, up, up, up, and then we dip and maybe it's just a little dip. Maybe we go all the way into a recession, but then we rebound and it goes up again. We see it in the housing market. We see it in jobs. We see it in the gross domestic product. Is that what it is? What we, yes. So the. Earnings overall for the country. I mean, these trends, everything goes up and down. It's like a wave, right? It's like a sound wave or like an old telephone cord. These things are not a straight line. And what we can see from that over time is that what goes up must come down. But then when things land, even if they land hard, they usually bounce and they go back up again. So your job is not to never have ups and downs in your business. It's never to. Not have ups and downs in your relationships, in your marriage, in your parenting, in how it goes with your neighbor. It's not to never have those ups and downs. It's to get good at sustaining across the trough. It's to get good at noticing the pattern. Something went up, so now it's going to start to come down. And then eventually it's going to go up again. And so your job is just to get yourself across that low point. Rather. than bailing just because it's the dip. Imagine if like, think of the tide at the ocean. Imagine if the tide only ever came in, it would just flood the land, right? That's not how tides work though. They come in to a certain extent and then they go back out and then they come back in and they go back out. And this happens all day, every day, all around the entire world. That's how all of this goes. So you don't need To panic when it's low tide, and you also don't need to panic when it's high tide because the tide is going to keep moving. The cycle is going to keep going. The economy that went up is eventually going to dip and then it's going to correct and it's going to go up again. And that's just how this always goes. So don't. Try to force an outcome. Don't decide that the world is ending just because the tide is out and it hasn't come back in yet. Keep your eyes on the prize, whatever that is for you. Maybe the prize is that you're fully booked and fully booked as 10 clients. It's okay if you get a couple knows it's not a big deal. The only way you're not going to hit your goal is if you stop before you get there, and if you can remind yourself of that through these ups and downs through your energy cycles through illnesses through things that are happening in the economy and the markets, it's going to make it a lot easier for you to surf. Those waves instead of trying to force an outcome or be looking for immediate linear results, looking for immediate linear results is one of the most frustrating ways to run a business. It's one of the most frustrating ways to learn new things. It's one of the most frustrating ways to grow. So when we get into this ebb and flow, when we start to feel it as a cycle, that's what allows us to not horrible eyes and to actually make it. Fun that these things are changing all the time because what is constant and what is consistent is that things always change and you get to decide how you show up to that. So let it be fun. If you're in a downswing, what would be a fun thing for you to do with the extra time that you have? How do you want to redirect your energy? Is there something you want to regroup around? Do you want to get rid of something that's been annoying you anyway? Because right now you're in a little bit of a lull and you have time to replace it with something else. Is there some Something that you've been wanting to do that like a new, a new service offering a new product, a new activity or event that you could actually have time to do right now when things are a little slower. And then use that to kind of help springboard you outta your own trough into your next upswing. So really feel, feel. around how this can be for you. If it's not a crisis every time the tide goes out, if it's not a crisis every time the sun goes down because the tide is coming back in and the sun's going to come back up tomorrow and you're going to enjoy everything a lot more if you don't panic. Every time you start to notice those natural cycles. In fact, the more you notice them and the more you pay attention to them, the easier it's going to be for you to recognize them and anticipate them and plan your own energy and expectations and activities around those cycles. So go forth. Have fun with it, practice cultivating the skill of sustaining through that trough and let me know how it goes. I'd love to hear from you on the socials or feel free to shoot me an email and all my info is in the show notes. I'll see you guys next time.