Is My Business Ever Going to Take Off?
So, you are sitting in front of your computer in your home office, and you don’t know what to do. Actually, ‘office’ is a bit generous. It’s a corner of your bedroom, and if you angle your camera just so, you can keep your unmade bed out of view when you are on Zoom.
You have been at this business for six months now (a year? two?), and not much is happening. Everyone’s reminding you what a great job you had, and isn’t it time to start looking for another one? It is as if the only way that anyone will take you seriously is if you have that typical nine to five position.
On good days, the answer (you tell yourself) is ‘NO.’ Your vision is unwavering, and in your mind’s eye, you see more clients coming in like the amazing one you picked up four months ago. Or maybe in your dream, you see product orders pinging your inbox,
more than you can handle. Perhaps you will even need to hire someone. But then there are those other days, when it is hard to believe your vision will actually turn into something real: a thriving business that pays your bills and ultimately sustains itself.
From my own experience having launched multiple businesses, there’s a tipping point when that does happen, but it usually takes longer to show up then I anticipate. Years ago, when I developed and launched my online phonics program, Teach Your
Child to Read, I naively thought that parents would start buying it right away. They didn’t.
I can count on more fingers than I have the reasons why that didn’t happen—program glitches, little-to-no marketing, a ho-hum website to name a few—but I was too close to my vision to see what the issues were. What I had to do was step back and take a candid look at what was missing. I also needed to get help. I tapped into my network of friends and family, asking them to
take a look and tell me honestly what they thought. As soon as I began fixing things, the orders started coming in. But oddly, that elusive tipping point actually occurred before the numbers went up. The tipping point came when my belief changed. As I started to fix the issues, I saw my beautiful program, my new website, my ability to help parents teach their children to read at home as a valuable service that people would want.
The tipping point came when I was so far into what I had created there was no turning back. I began to think (and talk) about my program with confidence, a legitimate service the world needed. For me, being open to the idea that my first attempt needed work (a lot of it) inspired me to reach out for guidance and develop a task list. Once I started this process, it almost
felt as though an invisible hand were working alongside me, creating an onramp that would bring my product into the world as soon as it was ready.
So, if that is you sitting in your bedroom office wondering what to do, try to be objective about what’s not working. Don’t let your vision crowd out your ability to see what may be inhibiting your growth. And ask for help! You probably know plenty of knowledgeable people who would be happy to weigh in if you would only ask. As an added bonus, you will be surprised how deeply-rooted your belief will become when others start believing in you, too.