Five Big Pitfalls of Business to Avoid

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In this episode, we're talking about the five pitfalls of business to avoid.
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Welcome to The Expert Unrivalled Podcast. My name is Jen Hall. I'm your business positioning coach and market leadership expert. Today we're talking around five of the biggest pitfalls in business to avoid. Now, there are many pitfalls I'm just going to put it out there, not just five. However, these are some of the biggest ones that I really believe that are going to make a true difference. If you can avoid and change. Before we dive into these five pitfalls, I just want to mention that I've opened up another spot for my evolve and elevate strategy session, which is happening on the 15th of July. The link is in the show notes. Now, if you're new to my podcast, you may not have heard of these before, but basically these are strategy sessions, which takes you through my process for creating market-leading businesses. It also goes into some of the campaigns and strategies that we've used for both ourselves and our clients that have also bought in over half a million pounds in the last quarter.
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So if you're interested in hearing about those campaigns, their strategies and my process for creating a market leading business that is seen as the number one choice in your market, then please do make sure that you hit the link in the show notes to get yourself booked on. These sessions are only 20 pounds to hear all the juicy stuff behind the scenes. So I'm really looking forward to seeing you in there. There's already people booked on, and that means that there are only limited number of spaces left. So do you make sure not to sit on the fence that if you're really interested in finding out more about that than do make sure you book onto that session, it's going to be fantastic as always. So the five pitfalls of business let's crack on with number one. So number one, unsurprisingly is actually being generalistic.
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So I've talked about this and lots on the podcast. I'm not going to bang on too much about it, but generalizing in your business and not embracing niching is a serious pitfall. Now I spent the beginning parts of my business career failing because of this one element. And it really is the first element that you need to take a hold onto in order to have success in your business, financial success. And it's also not only does niching and getting more specific help you monetarily, but it massively helps with your clients as well. I've been recently working with a seven figure client of mine. Who's recently started to get more specific and articulating what she does. And she was saying to me, not that her coaching sessions were bad before, but she said since really nailing down what it is, she helps people with what problem it is that she solves.
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She's massively found that it's accelerated the power of those sessions because they're more focused, they're more driven and people almost have that agenda to work on. And so not only does it help monetarily, but it massively helps when terms of getting results for your clients and making that more tangible as well. People know why they're buying from you. They know what they're aiming for, and therefore they're more committed to getting those results. So you'll actually find that you get more clients success through niching as well. So you just think it's about the monetary success. It's also about the overall success of your clients, but it's really important because people do not buy master generalists. We have the ability to tap into experts all over the world, using the internet. So they're not going to be buying into generalists. And if you're generalizing your messaging, won't be hitting anyone in particular.
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You're going to be reliant on referrals. You're going to be relying on other people saying how great you are, but not really being able to articulate why and therefore you're going to find business a lot slower than if you were to actually start embracing a particular niche to actually start saying, this is specifically who I serve. This is the problem I help them with and this is the specific outcome I help them achieve. If you can really nail down those three elements to give it context, that's not fluffy that people really understand that your services fit them like a glove, and they know exactly why they are buying into you and why they need to buy into you. That's where you're going to find success. I spent so long running businesses that were far too generalized. For instance, I was a massage therapist for many years, but if only I realized why people enjoyed coming to me for their massage, because, you know, when they came away from my massage sessions.
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They, they used to rave about, you need to go to see jam, but they couldn't really articulate why, but, you know, when I really delved into that, why? And the reason why people enjoyed coming to me so much over everyone else was because of the strength of my massages. They were deep tissue that wasn't just a relaxing experience. It was relaxing, but more than that, it was targeted to get rid of specific tension specific knots. And so if only I had recognized that at the time and pulled that into my marketing, I know that I would have made way more of a success of that business. Had I really niched down into really explaining what made me unique and what it was specifically that I was good at because when you're an apple compared to another apple, you are always going to be compared against price.
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And that's what you don't want, which brings me on to my second pitfall, which is undercharging. And again, it doesn't help when you can't articulate what makes you the best? What makes you unique and what specifically it is that you do? The more general you are, the more generalist that your prices will be as well and the lower they will be. As soon as you actually understand the value that you bring to the table, you will find that you're able to charge much more for your services and not only that's when you become I'd like to call it like an innocent smoothie instead of an apple, you will find that you will want to charge more and people will be happy to pay more because they can see that they can't find what you bring to the table anywhere else. And so they're willing to pay for the best.
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They're willing to pay for an expert and they're willing to pay for the exact result that you're promising, you know, and when you have that confidence and when you have the articulation behind what you do, you're going to make a lot more. And the thing is undercharging can seriously harm your business financially and energetically and energetically, because you will find that you will have to work twice, three times, four times, 10 times harder with clients than you would if you actually just charged the right amount for your services, because it takes the same energy to sell something at 10 pounds, a hundred pounds, a thousand pounds, a million pounds. You know, all it is is the how you articulate it. And also the ideal client that you target. So you have to make sure that your business is profitable and your business is lucrative, and that you're charging the right amount for what you're doing.
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And this is something that we actually cover. And as well as the niching side of things, we look at all of this in the evolve and elevate strategy session. So again, make sure that you book that in using the link in the show notes, but that's really important, make sure you're charging your worth. Now, I use that term carefully as always because it's not necessarily about charging your worth is about charging what the product is worth, but until you understand that niching piece and articulating the specifics, it can be very difficult to quantify, to make it tangible and to really understand the full impact and value of what you're bringing to the table. When you know all of that, when it's really specific, really niche, you can really understand how much that impacts your ideal client. And you can start to charge a lot more for your services than you currently are, because I do find like the mind set stuff is great and you know, that's something I always cover with my clients and it's something that we work on, but, you know, what's better for me to see is the actual physical evidence.
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And I find that actually articulating things nodgicly really, really, really helps to actually see the reality of a situation and go, well, hang on a minute, that is worth more. What was I thinking? You know, rather than just kind of like smoke and mirrors and affirming that you're worth more and you must charge more, actually let's justify it logically because when you could justify logically your brain cannot make sense as to why you are undercharging so much. And the next natural step is to charge, you know, what that product is really, truly worth. So I always liked to work in that way, because then there's no way you can really go back on it. You know, you can't really have a mindset slip because you know, the reality is really showing that the fact that you are totally undercutting yourself by charging the current prices that you're charging.
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So don't undercharge, make sure you are charging what it's worth, but you won't be able to do that until you deal with pitfall. Number one, which is moving away from being generalistic and really finding that super articulate way that you can describe the value and the tangible results of your services. Now, number three is an interesting one. It's all about the one size fits all approach. Now the one size fits all approach. It's kind of an obvious one, right? But the problem is this happens when we buy into something specific and I've seen it happen recently with very clever marketing, where people have been kind of sold this dream on like this magical webinar funnel, that's going to generate thousands of thousands of pounds. They need, you don't need to focus on marketing anymore. Guys, according to this, all you need to do is concentrating on serving your clients.
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You know, you don't have to worry about being a marketer. This particular funnel is going to do everything for you. Now, this categorically is a lie. If you are in business, you have to be a great marketer. And those funnels will not work. If you haven't learned the basics of marketing. If you haven't got the right copy, if you haven't nailed down who it is that you are helping, if you haven't nailed down the exact product that you're going to be sending people, and that you've actually validated it as an option that people truly want on the markets, then why on earth would that funnel work? So I'm just letting you know, guys that if you have been sold down the river on this idea of this magical funnel, that's just going to produce money without you really having to do very much.
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It's categorically a lie. And the other thing I want to say around this one size fits all. It's not just the fancy, sexy funnels that we're hear about, but it's also about picking the right coach as well, because you know, a lot of business coaches help people when they've started one business and found a kind of like a method or a secret or a way of doing it, that's worked for them. And then they start teaching that same thing to every business. Now I'm not saying that they are fraud because they have absolutely creative success from that method a hundred percent, but that doesn't always mean that that way is right for your business. So that's really key to understand as well. So when you are looking to hire a coach, it's actually looking at their business model and either saying, is that business model right for my business.
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And another thing that you can look at as also for instance, there are a lot of coaches out there who spend a lot of time on social media. I'm not one of them, I'm on social media, but I'm very strategic with my time. I don't want to be on there all the time. Personally wise, it just drains me. I'm an introvert and I don't enjoy being on it. I much prefer strategic visibility that gets me results quickly in a very short space of time, instead of having to constantly be online all of the time. Now you have to have a look at the different types of coaches that you're looking at and go hang on it. If that's how they're making their money, do I want to make my money like that? If not, then don't hire them because they are probably going to be teaching the same kinds of methods.
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Now that's not necessarily true across the board. It's true for lots of coaches that they've had success in one business, and now they want to teach everyone the same thing. And again, if you're lucky enough to have a similar type of business and a similar type of personality, that of course, yeah, go ahead. But if it's not in alignment, if it's not at a genetically working and if it's not strategically working for you, that I wouldn't go for it. Look, the coaches who've had results with different types of businesses or the one that, that much as you as closely as possible that have shown that they've got results across the board, rather than just teaching the same method to, to, to every business. Because you'll find that. And like I said, you've got the actual match. It will not work. You know, it just won't work and will work as well.
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It just won't work for you. You know, you'll end up either getting burnt out from the methods or you'll find that, you know, it doesn't work. Let me give you a core example of this. We run a Facebook ads competitions every year and one of my businesses. Now, the reason why these competitions work really, really well is because they're very aspirational, but it won't necessarily work for a business that isn't as aspirational, whether they're more problem focused, you need people. Aren't going to share a competition where they're sort of announcing to the world that they have a serious issue and a serious problem. Let me give you an example. Let's say you're a gut health coach and you're helping people with IBS. Competition's not going to go down very well. So there's a very extreme example. It might sound very obvious, but this is the kind of thing that you can't bank on working for every business.
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It works for some businesses, not all businesses. So again, be really careful. Look at who you're hiring. And look at these one size fits all approaches and go, okay, fine. Would this fits my business? If it wouldn't then just proceed with caution because it's not always the case. And you know, so many business owners have wasted a lot of money investing into things that are either a blatant lie or are a one size fits all approach that wasn't, you know, right for their particular business. Now, number four is all around being unwilling to fail. This is a really tough one for me to talk about. And the reason it's really tough is because this is something that has held me back for so long. I used to describe it as the fear of looking stupid. I didn't want to get it wrong. I didn't want to look like full and say, therefore, I procrastinated on so many different things or I didn't try things out because I was so scared.
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Now this ties in a little bit to what I've just said, and it might sound slightly contradictory to the last point, because I'm asking you to proceed with caution when you're spending big money with something, when you're investing a lot of money, you need to proceed with caution. You need to do your due diligence and really research what it is you're investing in. But there are ideas and things I wanted to implement that I didn't implement because I wasn't sure it was going to work out. And the thing I have to kind of say to you is would you rather be where you are right now next year? Or would you rather try something out and it fail to know that, okay, that's one thing ticked off the list that we're not going to try again, move on to the next thing, because the thing is, the quicker you can do that, the quicker you can get used to failing forward and actually going the only way to find out the right things is actually to try out a few duff things.
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First, the quick you're going to make progress. And again, I'm not saying to you go out and just try out a random coach because you know, you never know, you know, nothing gained. If you don't give it a try, because at the end of the day, you're investing in possibly losing a lot of money. What I'm talking about here is perhaps cross industry ideas that you've seen work across another industry that you thought, actually, let's get this ago, let'sget this strategy go over it in my industry because that might work well over here. And it may not work well. You know, you have to really think about these things and just give it a go and give it a try. If you think it has grounds to, it's all about taking that calculated risk. You know, I'm not saying don't ever invest anything.
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I'm not saying don't ever try anything that might not work. There is a little bit of you looking at things from both perspectives. It's a bit like the whole the six basic human needs, one of them is certainty and one of them is uncertainty. And so sometimes it can feel a little bit contradictory, but, you know, in terms of the basic human needs, you know, we need certainty because as humans, we need that security, but we also don't want to be in a humdrum. We enjoy positive uncertainty. We like enjoyable positive surprises. We like to get excited about the unknown and what might happen next, but we don't necessarily like negative surprises, do we?mSo I'm saying there, there are gray areas to this. There isn't necessarily kind of like a upending black and white rule here.
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You will, as an entrepreneur need to take risks. And particularly as an entrepreneur, who's going to be successful, you have to be able to take risks to in order to move forward and you have to be willing to fail in order to move forward. So don't procrastinate and sit still because no man's land, isn't going to get any better. The longer you stay there, it just gets more dull, more frustrating. You've got to move forward with something, okay. It doesn't necessarily need to cost you loads of money, it might cost you lots of money, whatever it is, but you cannot stay where you are right now. You need to move forward. And so learning that ability to fail and engineer something that I deal with my daughter, you know, particularly when she was at school, when she was at school before lockdown we would talk about, you know, the things that were really great during our day, but also the things that didn't work out so well, because I really do think that we've been taught from a very young age, that failing is bad.
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And that's something I really wanted to turn around with her to know that actually, you know, making mistakes and things not going quite as well and learning from that is the only way we're going to evolve, it's the only way we're going to move forward. So start doing the same with yourself. Start getting comfortable with failing, because the more comfortable you are with failure, the quick you're going to move forward and the quickest success is going to happen for you. And just not trying something through scared of it, not being scared of it, not working. Like I have clients who have sat on whole like outreach campaigns that we've put together because they're too afraid to start it, you know, and they're over it now. And that's great, but there was a period of time sometimes where you get given the thing, you get given the strategy and everything's ready to go, you know, the car's parked and you're, you're ready for holiday, but you don't start the engine because what happens if I break down halfway?
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Well, we're never going to know that. And would you rather at least try to get there than stay in the same place that you are, because that's your option. You either stay where you are or you start and take a chance and see where it leads, you know, and if it doesn't work, Oh, well, you know, even money can be replenished. You know, the only thing that can't be replenished is time. And so if you're wasting it by doing nothing, then you're going to be in a worst position. So you have to start moving, you've got to fail forward, give these things a go. And so what if it doesn't work out, it just gives you that Intel to know, okay, well that didn't work. Let's either tweak it or scrap it and move on to something else, because then you can start to go through more ideas and eventually you'll hit on the right one.
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And my fifth one, my fifth one guys is a really interesting one again, and that is self discipline. Now I had a real issue with this word for so long. I don't like firms structures that don't like rigid ways of doing things. I like flexibility. And to a certain extent, you know, I was comfortable with kind of floating along, going with the flow. That was a lovely as that comfort zone is, it's not going to get you very far at all. And it's a word that I've had to kind of get used to. I tried to kind of like change the words self-disciplined to something nicer, but I was like, actually, do you know what? I just need to get used to the word and realize that without discipline, without actually really going okay, I'm going to make start, and I'm going to do this thing.
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I'm going to sit down pen to paper, finger to keyboard you know, send out the stuff, you know, you'll never going to move forward. So it kind of feeds back into my last point around failing forward. But in terms of productivity, you've got to have self-discipline because if you don't, you will always remain in a lovely, happy comfort zone that will hold you back. You've got to have discipline around your time. You've got to have discipline around doing the things that need to be done, or at least outsourcing those things that need to be done and having discipline around, you know, even to the other extent of it not affecting your business, not affecting the rest of your life, of having the discipline of putting the boundaries in place to go, this is what I'm going to stop working. Cause that's another one of my problems.
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And that doesn't make for a very good business. And it also doesn't make for a very happy relationship with your loved ones either. So you've got to have boundaries, you've got to have self-discipline, you've got to, you know, understand that, you know, those boundaries are good. They're working for you, not against you. And that you're going to be far more productive because the procrastination and all of those things, you know, I call it this nice, nice, happy comfy comfort zone, but actually it's not because when you're floating along like that, all of these things that, you know, you should have done or should be doing right now is sitting like a massive weight on your shoulders. And until you learn to go, okay, I'm going to start time blocking. So an hour and a half to two hours, I'm gonna be focusing on these things I know are going to make my boat go faster.
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Or I know that it's going to bring huge amounts of value into my life. You know, that actually going to bed at a certain time, I'm going to wake up brighter for my, for my calls in the morning, but I'm going to be able to focus a lot more than maybe I'm gonna be able to get up earlier for your miracle morning or, you know, knowing that it's this time now it's time to stop working pen down, keyboard, down, laptop clothes. It's now time to spend some time with my family. You know, you've got to have that self discipline. Otherwise you're going to end up in a very messy relationship with the rest of your life. You need to make sure that you embrace that word and actually create boundaries, do create schedules, do time block, and start being a lot more organized with your life.
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If you want to make progress in not just a business area, but in your life in general. It's so important. And I see so many people being so undisciplined in their work and it seriously affects them. And again, that can happen because they're scared of failing forward. They're scared of making these mistakes. And so you find other less important things to do in order to kind of fill the time, but it's not going to work. The only way you're going to be able to move forward is by eating that frog, just doing the things be self-disciplined, hold yourself accountable and get the things that you know, that need to be done. Otherwise you're just going to float along and life is going to control you rather than the other way round, you know, self discipline. I think it's Brian Tracy that, you know, talks about this a lot about this whole act of self discipline.
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Jack Canfield as well. It's, it's the success habit that you need to really take on board. If you don't have that self discipline, you will find that business will not be a successful. Your life will be messy. It's something that I've really embraced over the years and it's made a significant difference to my happiness by just being more disciplined about embracing the word self discipline and putting in those structures in my day in my business and in my general life, it's made a huge impact to how I enjoy it. So there we go. Those are my five very quick pitfalls in business. I really hope you enjoyed them. And again, if you would like to really find out some more about what I've been talking about, not only in these pitfalls, but like I said about some of the campaigns and strategies that we're putting in place that have brought in over half a million pounds in the last quarter that are gonna help you to understand how you can start from where you are right now to create a market leading business.
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Then please do make sure that you get yourself booked into my evolve and elevate strategy session. The link is in the show notes. So do you make sure you go down and click that to get yourself booked in for the 15th of July. And I will. I'm really looking forward to seeing you then, and I'll speak to you very, very soon in the next episode. And I'm sure we'll be doing another pitfall episode at some point in the future as well, because like I said, there isn't just five, there are a lot more mistakes that we can make, but these are the biggest ones I really want us to talk about today because I truly believe that if you can get over those and you can start really niching really harnessing, charging your worth, you know, being more strategic about how you work in your business in terms of the strategies that you're using. If you can learn to fail forward, if you can learn to be more self-disciplined, they're going to make huge, significant leaps in your business and your personal life, life will change drastically. So I'm really excited to speak to you again in the next episode. So take care, have a fantastic week and I will speak to you then.