Why is it that only nine percent of all entrepreneurs ever make it into seven figures? And how come 98.3% of women entrepreneurs stay stuck in a six-figure hustle? From my vantage point and experience, there’s no clear path laid out for entrepreneurs to follow to make it into the million-dollar business. Think about it, getting a company started is hard work, no doubt, and growing it into multiple six figures is no small feat by any measure. But it’s not hard to figure out what you need to do to be successful in the startup stage of business. It’s marketing. The more visible you are, the more you worry less. The more offers you make, the quicker you’ll make it to six figures.

There are tons of business mentors showing you how to get there step by step. Lead magnets, website design, email automation, funnel building, paid advertising, and usual tactics. And then it’s just about working it. But once you get into the multiple six figures, it’s no longer going to be enough to just hustle harder. Doing more of the same is not what will get you into the seven-figure space. And even though top influencers talk about scaling, there’s so much misinformation out there that can lead you astray. But it can even keep you stuck in that endless hustle mode. And that’s not what you want.

You already worked so hard to get to where you are right now. At some point, it needs to get easier. It’s okay to work hard for some time, but at some point, you have to get over the hump, crease the top of the hill are you’ve been climbing, and enjoy riding down the hill with more ease and more flow. So I’ve made a quick list in no particular order of the ten biggest scaling mistakes that I commonly see. 

• Taking your one proven offer and turning that into an ascension model

An ascension model is multiple offers lined up to create a step-by-step ladder that goes from a minimal ticket offer to a very high ticket item. The whole idea is to lead them to purchase up to the high ticket item. The goal would be to make a lot of sales in many different ways all the time. But the reality is that it takes so much more time and energy to sell all the offers in your ascension model than your original offer that sold well. It takes time and effort to get each offers’ messaging and sales tactics suitable. 

• Going from one on one sales to a launch system

It seems like a launch would lead to many sales at once, which it can. But sometimes, we don’t think about all the details that go into a launch, which can go wrong. If you put all of your “eggs” into a launch basket and fail, that takes up money and resources. 

• To go from one on one offers to group offers.

Sometimes this just means splitting up and reformatting your current offers, but any time you’re tweaking your sales process and price points, it needs to be done very intentionally. If you go from one on one to a group, you’re selling to a different audience. So now you need to edit your messaging, who you’re marketing to etc.

• Focusing on marketing tactics

Many six-figure entrepreneurs believe that if they just do more marketing, more sales, and more investing, they will eventually just be able to replicate the success they did in six figures, and that will propel them into seven figures. But that’s not true at all. There are capacity blocks at each stage in business, and if you’ve hit one of these, marketing won’t help you until you do some restructuring in your business. 

• Missing the freedom switch moment

The Freedom Switch Moment is a magical time between the startup business and the scale-up business stages. You’ve got to pay attention to the momentum in your business to see when it’s time to switch your focus from primarily marketing to scaling. 

• Not recognizing business bottlenecks and trying to tackle them with brute force

It would be best to start focusing on different things to get different results. And once you start realizing what you need to focus on, growth happens so much easier and with so much less effort.

• Hiring the wrong people

Most six-figure business owners hire people to step in and do some of the back-end tasks like the tech stuff or maybe have somebody building them a website. They have people to help them out to delegate random tasks to here and there. Perhaps they have a virtual assistant who helps out in the business. But when do you do that as the leader of the company? What ends up happening is that you get sucked into your business to manage those people, manage the projects you’re working on together, and make sure that things are doing well. So you might not be doing those tasks anymore, but you basically just traded the same amount of time to now manage those people and manage the projects. And here’s the thing visionaries, leaders, are not meant to be managers. That’s not a good use of our time and energy. What I tell my clients is the first hire needs to be an integrator, somebody who can run and manage the operations of your business.

• Relying on emotions, not data

In my business, I’m always looking to identify the numbers and the facts that tell me how are we doing in our business? Are we on track to meet the goals that we are after? Once I started to eliminate the emotions and started relying more on data numbers, it took a lot of stress, worry, and anxiety away. And it allowed me to trust the process that I was putting in place.

• Hiring someone before you have a standard operating procedure for tasks you’re delegating

I cannot drill this down enough that we often get overwhelmed and want to bring in a virtual assistant to take things off of our plate. Maybe you have a recommendation from a colleague about a fantastic assistant, but when you bring them on, it feels like a mess. You’re not sure when they’re working and when they’re available. And you feel like you’re just wasting money and time dealing with this incapable helper that was supposed to help you. But if you have standard operating procedures that tell them exactly what needs to get done, how often that needs to get done and quantify what success looks like in completing the task. You have a separate agreement with the person you just hired, and it’s much clearer what is expected of them.

• Relying on your team for support

It can be pretty lonely in the entrepreneur world. I started leaning on my team and venting about the stress as a CEO. I think over time. This breeds resentment between your team and you. I know that sounds super strange, but what happens is that your team they don’t have the authority with a responsibility to make changes about the things that you’re complaining to them about.

Could you recognize some of the mistakes you are making right now, or maybe you’ve done some of these in the past? It’s nothing to be ashamed of! We are constantly learning and growing!

I would love to get connected on Instagram or The 7-Figure Freedom Club Facebook Group so we can chat about your takeaways from this episode. If you’re interested in learning more schedule a call with me today or visit my website!

And if you want to take the next step, take the business assessment quiz to get started.