The biggest threat to your business growth isn’t what you think – it’s in these five common business practices that no one else is talking about. If you’re wondering why your business isn’t growing, the answer might lie in these five crucial mistakes. In this episode, I’m drawing from my nine years as a business owner to share how I continue to show up for my business, my family, and myself—even in hard seasons.  

I’ll be sharing:

• What to do when you have less capacity for making decisions as your business grows.
• How to free your mental capacity to work on the higher level activities and hold the vision for your company—without losing your foundation.
• Why my #1 job as CEO is to be creative and innovative—and the ways I actively let inspiration come through. 

… and so much more.

I’ve been through a season where everything felt like it fell on me, leading to feelings of loneliness and overwhelm. Despite these challenges, I’ve experienced significant growth and awareness, and I’m grateful for that. It’s taught me the difficulty of maintaining authenticity and leadership during tough times when you’re expected to show up, no matter what. This is what it means to be an authentic leader.

Tune in to get direct insight into the deeper challenges you face as a multiple 7-figure CEO and what has to change to take things to the next level.

Like the podcast? Leave us a review on Apple or Spotify.

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh: 

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having an amazing week. I am coming off of like three weeks of a lot of challenges. I did a podcast a few weeks ago just saying when business is hard, but just a variety of things, not even just business. I just have had a heavier season and It has been one of those seasons of feeling like I don’t want to have to deal with all of this and handle all this and felt at times lonely, feeling like everything fell on me. But with that said, and there has been so much growth and so much awareness that wouldn’t have happened had all of the things that happened. So there’s also gratitude for it. And not yet, but in the near-ish future, I would like to do a podcast on it and share a little bit more. I think there’s a fine line of sharing something like the more details of a situation and the lessons of it too soon. But I think there’s actually a lot that I can share that people can learn from, from the different things that have happened. 

But I will say one of the things that I have been reminded of, of what is really challenging when you are a business owner and especially somebody who creates content is, and and I think a leader in general, is when you go through a harder season, there’s just so much less space for you to process it because you are still expected to show up and it’s just navigating for me. like I have such a core value of authenticity and honesty that I can’t fake the way that I show up. However, people also look to me, you know, even my kids to show up and play my role that I have. And so, you know, this is something that comes up in any hard season, but I’ve been reminded of the fact that this is a challenging part of walking the path that I walk and have chosen to walk and I’m not just in my business. I have um definitely realized that in majority of my relationships, I play the role of the one who has it all together and takes that power and takes that control and you know that that was one of my awarenesses of I don’t actually want that but yet I’ve created the environments for that. So anyways, I’ll have more on a different podcast at some point but I actually felt inspired to do this episode last week because not that these are all recent mistakes but

When there are challenges, you reflect on, oh, you know this is what I could do differently. And so these are not all something. Some of them are something that has happened recently and is something that I learned. But these are also just, if I was to be asked the question and sit down and think, what are my top business mistakes that I’ve made in the nine years that I’ve had a business, which is also so crazy to say that. Nine years. That’s a long time. It’s been almost a decade. feel It feels like forever and not that long all at once. I also wanted to talk about mistakes that not everybody’s talking about. I didn’t want to do the typical things like not taking enough action, which is not a mistake that I make. I take action. But the ones that you hear all the time, that’s boring. These are the ones that you’re not going to hear all the time. These are the ones that I really sat and thought. And I don’t think they’re ones that people really talk about. 

So there’s five of them and I want to talk about them. The first top mistake that has come up way too many times for me. And all of these mistakes are mistakes where sometimes you don’t realize you’re doing it until afterwards and you’re like, oh man, I did it again. Like these are ones that you’ve got to be really aware of and you get a little bit better each time, but you still sometimes do these. So this first one I’ve done many times, but over the years I’ve gotten better and better and better at it. And that is making a rushed decision from a place of force or pain or lack of capacity. So what I mean by this is you’re in a situation in business and the bigger your business grows, the bigger the operation is, the more complexity there is. And also the less capacity you have for making decisions and having support in your business and having something moving forward is very important because you only have so much capacity.

And so I have many times in my business made a rushed decision or forced something that wasn’t right, but I convinced myself it was right because I was coming from a place of pain or challenge or lack of capacity. So this has happened in making a hiring decision that I knew maybe wasn’t the right decision, but I really needed the support. This could come from moving forward with something like a launch or ah a company shift that you know, like you’ve got that little thought in the back of your mind. That’s like, it’s not actually the right thing and you should pause and you should think about this more, but you’re like, I don’t have the capacity for it. Somebody else is going to help with it. You convince yourself it’s fine. You do it anyway. Anytime you are sitting with a decision and you feel that feeling of force, or you’re rushing, or you’re just trying to make the decision so you can keep moving. And as with everything, there’s a balance to this because action is so important. And if you were to sit down and ask me what’s the one thing you’ve done well, the one thing that you, if you could nail down one thing you’ve done well in the last nine years, I would say it’s taking action.

Taking relentless, constant action. So there’s a balance with this because you do need to move forward. You don’t want to sit on something. But there’s also the times where it would have been better off pausing. You would have been better off waiting a day, waiting a week before you made that hiring decision because you have to constantly also weigh the long-term impact. I saw a quote the other day that said, like the reason that people don’t have what they want is because they’re always in a rush. And it kind of caught my attention because at first I was like, what does that mean? like Let me think about that for a second because it kind of messed with my head. And then I was like, oh, okay. I think that what that means is

We don’t always make decisions for the future and the actual like long game. And so much of business is about the long game. And it’s about you know making a decision today that’s not just going to impact me next week or even next month or even in the three months from now, but a year from now, two years from now. And if you want to be a company that’s going to be here for decades, You have to think about that long game and sometimes in the big scheme of things, a week or a month is such a short amount of time. But when you’re in a place of pain or lacking capacity and so you’re overwhelmed, sometimes a week feels like forever and you can’t see the bigger picture. So making those rush decisions, I’ve definitely made a lot of mistakes in that way and I’ve gotten a little bit better. 

I’ve also trained my team below me to help me keep stay accountable. If I start to be like, I don’t know, what do you guys think? Let’s just do this. They’re like, no, we’re gonna, we’re gonna pause. We’re gonna wait on this. We’re not gonna force this. So that’s number one. Number two, I have also gotten better at this, but made this mistake many times. And it’s one of those mistakes that you don’t realize you’re doing at the moment. And then you look back and you’re like, shit, I did it again. I made that mistake again, which is letting somebody change too much in my company, like letting an employee or a contractor change too much in my company, in the process and or removing myself too fast from parts of the company without proper QA, proper foundation in place while doing so. and And this is such a hard balance because you want to remove yourself as fast as possible from the day to day within reason so that you can work on the higher level activities, the vision, the strategy. You want to have the mental capacity to be able to hold the company and hold the vision of where you’re going. but you also have to make sure that as you do that you do that with a proper foundation and you know one piece i’ll share this happen to me like two years ago that i

It always happens in a way where there’s somebody really great on my team and they have really great ideas. So they earn the trust in me and then everything they say, I’m like, yeah, do it. Sounds great. And before you know it, too much has changed because what you have to keep in mind is you as a CEO, you have so much more perspective and so much more knowledge of your company than anybody else could. Like I know my company and everything we’ve been through the past nine years. I know the lessons and the seasons and the things that we’ve done wrong that we’ve learned from and we’ve changed. Somebody on my team who’s been there for even a year, two years, they don’t have that perspective.

And sometimes when we go to implement ideas, it could have been something that there’s a reason why we’re not doing it that way, but there’s no way for that person to know. But you as a CEO, you should know that and you have that perspective. So it’s always someone This has always happened to me with someone on my team who’s really great and has a lot of great ideas. And then because I lack capacity or I will choose the easier path for me so that I can put my attention in other places because I’m growing the business and it’s like they’re amazing, they’ve got it. I end up over time, it’s usually a delayed reaction, getting to a place where too much has been changed.

And I have to backtrack. I have to backpedal us. And this happened to me two years ago when everything changed. And I came back in and I was like, oh my gosh, like everything has changed. And I didn’t even know. And in my company right now, there is a little bit of that that’s happened and I’m back in some of our day-to-day operations for a time being because I became super removed this year starting in February, which there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with becoming super removed. But you have to have the right foundation in place. And if you don’t, it will show itself in about six months. And so it’s, it’s again, one of those mistakes I have to be really aware of. And usually in a company, I think change is really important. Evolving is really important. But massive change, like overhauling something,

You really have to pause and think, okay, there’s a reason we have it the way that we do and it’s not all broken ever. Because if you are running a company and you have an operation that’s working, it’s never all broken. There might be holes, but completely overhauling something is rarely the answer. But I think as humans, we oftentimes are attracted to that because it sounds more exciting. Right. When you’re in a problem, doesn’t it sound better to be like, just throw the whole thing away and restart, like refresh blank slate. And it feels like that’s going to work, but there are pieces to what you’re currently dealing with that is actually very positive and has a lot of wisdom in it.

Right? So I have a ton of wisdom in my company because I have run it for nine years. Nobody else has. Nobody’s been with me that long. And through all the evolutions and all the things I’ve learned and all the client interactions and everything I built, I built it for a reason. And when we get too far away from that core value every single time, it causes a problem. So that’s a mistake to keep in mind as you grow your business. And I think this can actually even extend out beyond the team. I mean, if you hire a coach or you start a program and you’re encouraged to change everything, throw all that away and just rebuild it or change everything in your operations, in your marketing, that’s almost never the answer.

Because there’s a reason you’re doing it the way that you are and there is good within that. When I coach entrepreneurs and women in my mastermind, I never would tell them to throw all that away or throw this whole portion of the business, the marketing strategy, the operations, whatever. It’s always choose and pull out what’s working and refine what isn’t and take the path of least resistance. Okay, third business mistake. is not investing more in developing a leadership team below me and providing enough ongoing team coaching. I think one of the real, I guess this is becoming like this one too. This one is relevant to me right now. I have realized and had the awareness that I don’t think I have invested in my team enough in the sense of ongoing trainings and actually leading that and creating just like how I do for you guys when I create challenges or I create you know webinar trainings or I do podcast series, I want to do the same for my team. And I’ve just done a lot of reflection of how it’s so easy to, you know when especially when things are going well, assume that you don’t need to do that. And then again, delayed reaction, you eventually realize it’s been missing. And another thing, like if I could go back and this is what I would say to anyone who is in the million hitting the million dollar mark.

As fast as you can develop a leadership team under you, meaning whether it’s from within or you hire external, you, it like this is the number one thing that stops someone from going from like one, 2 million to three to 10. is not having leaders below them who can support with making decisions, who can support with all things such as the team or the marketing strategy and who go from you go through this experience of having tactically tactical employees, tactical support. They check things off a box, they get things done, and you know they’re they’re supporting in the day-to-day, but you’re still the leader. You are still driving the outcomes. You are still driving the vision. You are driving a lot of decisions. What happens is you hit a point where you have complete decision fatigue. Like you can’t come up with any more ideas or solutions. That requires a leader because the job of a leader is not cut and dry. It’s not like here’s your to-do list.

Go get it done. The job of a leader is to actually lead and to understand here’s what’s happening. Here’s where the gaps are. Here’s what we could do. Here’s some solutions. It’s initiating collaboration between a team, between clients and a team. and it’s ah It’s very undefined a lot of times, what a leader does, like because it changes all the time. and It’s a completely different personality type than someone who thrives when they’re given a checklist and told to go get it done. and I have developed people who are those types of people and moved them into leadership roles. I’ve also tried doing that before and failed at it because the person just wasn’t capable, isn’t capable of thinking that way because it’s a completely different way of thinking.

But the faster you as a CEO, especially once you hit seven figures, the faster you can get leadership support below you, the faster you will grow because your mental capacity will shift greatly and you will hit a point where everything will continue to fall apart until you have that leadership team. I have a leadership team. I still have a lot of work to do to build it for me to really be where I want to be in the company. and it is to my standards. So if I could go back and tell myself when I first hit seven figures for the first time, it would be make this the number one priority, invest more in this, both resources financially and time.

All right, two more mistakes. The fourth mistake is one that I see a lot of entrepreneurs make and is one that, again, you sometimes don’t realize you’re doing it and then there’s always, always a delayed reaction, which is taking my foot off the gas when it comes to lead gen or marketing. And this is not something that’s happened to me recently. I guess it did a little bit. I guess I did like, I got a little, not distracted, but we were very focused on our event, which was super successful. And then afterwards I was so tired and needed a little bit of space that we didn’t do a lot. And we took longer to get stuff out, but it was fine. I mean, it just proves my point. And I talk about this all the time that if you are not consistently growing your list, you’re not consistently growing your audience, then you might not feel it this month, but you will feel it in the months to come because almost everybody who buys 98% of people who buy from you hang out for a while before they buy. and they have touch points, they read your emails, they follow you on social media, they engage in a live launch. And so you have to play the game of consistency in your business growth or you will struggle. 

So if I have ever taken my foot off the gas and we have gone a period of time where we weren’t growing our list, where we weren’t taking intentional action and taking initiatives to build our audience, grow our list and nurture them and create experiences and constantly be creating that environment. Eventually I paid for it and there was a delayed reaction and it usually takes about 90 days. And then you realize, Oh, I haven’t been doing this consistently and now I’m paying for it. Okay, last one is clouding my capacity and ability to think creatively and stay innovative. And this is also a delayed reaction that every single time I, for whatever reason, overpack my schedule, overpack the amount of tactical things I’m responsible for, overpack meetings, overpack myself with live launches or different ways that I have to show up. That always directly impacts my inspiration and impacts my ability to think freely, think creatively, and be innovative. and In my mind, that is my number one job. My number one job as the CEO of this company is to lead us and to lead the vision to be able to come up with creative solutions to problems, but also creative ideas for growth. The only way that I can do that is through being inspired.

And so when I hit seasons of not feeling inspired it’s very challenging you can’t force inspiration i mean if you’ve ever tried you know you cannot sit down and force yourself like be inspired be excited come up with ideas like it does not work that way and so What will happen is i’ll have a season of over packing myself or over committing and i usually do this in the sense of if there’s a problem or an issue that comes up i’ll be like i’ll be the one to step in and and fix all be the one to step in and manage that, instead of sometimes empowering somebody else to do it. But what that does is it directly impacts my capacity. It directly impacts my creativity. And then I end up feeling not inspired because I feel bogged down. And you know if you have an employee or you have a team member who’s not doing their job, that’s a problem. Well, that’s me not doing my job, right? When I do that and I’m not able to show up and be the the true visionary, the true leader in that way, It impacts the company and I can’t force it and what usually happens is I have to take steps back before I can take steps forward and I have to take a pause and I have to really give myself space that feels unproductive to allow the creativity to come back and the inspiration to come back and it always does, but you can’t force it.

All right, so those are my five mistakes. Some I’ve made recently, again, for the however many times. Some I haven’t made in a while, but they definitely are top. And my intention was for this to be something that you may not think about. like These are not mistakes you know that would make it on a list that people would talk about all the time. These are the ones that are complicated, like it’s not black and white because there’s some good in some of the things i’m I’m saying, but then there’s a balance and you get out of balance and you get out of you you know harmony within a spectrum. That’s when you start to have and a negative impact from it. And as I’ve said multiple times in this podcast, everything is delayed. So that makes it really hard to know when you’re making the mistake because our minds are also really good at manipulating us to think we’re not making the mistake.

You know, for example, making the first one, making a rush decision from a place of force, I might be doing that and then in the moment I’m convincing myself, well, you’re not doing that this time because XYZ reason and this is why. And that could be true and it also could not be true. So so much of growing a business as a CEO is around having awareness of yourself. This is why doing the self-work as a CEO and constantly working on your beliefs and your thoughts and your mind and knowing yourself and and being able to check back in with yourself is the only way because most of these things, all of these things, you don’t know in the moment that it’s a mistake until after it’s impacted your business in three months down the line. So you have to catch it in the moment and it’s complicated because there’s validity to the things that you’re like, well, I need to do this because XYZ.

So, managing yourself, your mindset, your own thoughts, that’s such a huge part of growing a business that not enough people understand. I feel like people talk about it. But I don’t feel people understand because it’s one of those things that you don’t know until you know it. Like you don’t know until you become a CEO and you realize it because you have some experience, whether it’s in someone’s content or you read a book or coaching that you shift something in your own mind and in yourself and it makes a world of difference. And you’re like, Oh, that’s actually the secret. It is. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in. I will talk to you on Thursday.