3 reasons my last business failed (and what I'm doing differently)

Small Business

Jun 10

Before I started Exhale, I ran a coaching business for 5 years. I built it from nothing to six figures in revenue and 100,000 followers on social media within 18 months. Then I made a few decisions that led to making effectively no money for the next couple of years, until I decided to shut it down.

So obviously, I want to talk about it.

I know I use the word “failed” in the title, but before we go any further I want to be careful with the word "failed" so you know how I use it. I have a firm belief that the only times we fail are when we quit and when we don't learn from the experience. So when I say my last business failed, I don't think I personally failed. But I do have to be factual: that business did not survive and thrive long term.

If you're a business owner worried about being a failure because your business doesn't seem to be working, I want to say this from personal experience and a lot of years of therapy: separate your identity from your business. Whether your business isn't succeeding, or you have to shut it down like I did, that doesn't make you a failure.

We’re going to talk about the things that I think hurt my business and ultimately led to my decision to shut it down so you can avoid making similar mistakes.

Prefer to watch? Here's the video!

3 reasons your business isn't growing (based on the mistakes I made in my first business)

Reason 1: I started selling a second offer before I'd proven the first one

One of the most common mistakes that service-based business owners make is confusing, clouding, or distracting themselves or their customers by introducing too many competing offers. I made this decision around the one year mark in my business, when things were going well. I was booked out with one on one coaching clients but I wanted to find a way to bring in more revenue, especially in a way that didn’t require as much 1:1 time booking. I wanted it to scale.

Looking back, I'd also fallen for a bit of the business owner to business owner coaching content of the early 2020s, the kind that talked constantly about passive offers, group programs, and growing revenue with new products. I was convinced that I just didn’t have the right offer set up yet and the business coach I was working with at the time agreed.

So I introduced a lower cost, lower touch offer and what I know now is that, the business wasn't ready for it.

Looking back, I wish that coach had challenged me to get more reps in with my signature offer before I split my attention. I also understand why she didn't. I'd partially hired her because I wanted to introduce new offers and bring in more revenue, so it would have been hard for her to turn around and tell me I wasn't ready for what I'd just paid her for. (That's a whole separate conversation about the coaching industry that I won't get into here.)

But with retrospect, here’s some ways that the business wasn’t ready for a second offer:

I hadn’t built truly repeatable systems to streamline the 1:1 offer. So much was still custom.
Converting clients still relied on a very personalized sales call. I had a solid conversion rate but it required my hands on time.
My conversion rate from content to booking discovery calls or even sales page views was good but not predictable. I couldn’t explain why each spike occurred and I certainly couldn’t control when spikes happened
I knew upfront the low cost offer required building from scratch (it should have been something that was so obvious from what I’d seen worked in my signature offer)
The low cost offer was going to take time away from my signature offer (I shouldn’t have been willing to cannibalize the main offer - the second offer should have waited until the signature offer was so locked in that I had time to invest in a second offer)
I was still manually capturing testimonials and referrals from existing clients - no systems to help me scale

But it points to something I think is true for most service based business owners: the hardest part of running a small or solo business usually isn't doing the work you built the business around. It's the decision making. Figuring out when you're ready for the next step, the next marketing tactic, the next offer. It's hard to say no to things that sound good, like more revenue or passive income.

This is something I talk about with Exhale clients constantly. They're often tempted to do a few too many things at once, whether that's upgrading client deliverables and overhauling their task management system in the same month, or adding a new marketing platform on top of one they haven't fully figured out yet. I almost always encourage people to focus on one thing at a time, like a series of short sprints, rather than running everything in parallel.

This takes discipline, because it’s so tempting to chase all the things. But I’ve lived the downside of when you let yourself try to multitask. When I split my attention to introduce that second offer, I hadn't yet locked in most of the systems to keep the signature offer running smoothly in the meantime. All the pieces that make an offer repeatable weren't in place yet. As a result, that second offer became a huge distraction, and it never got the traction it needed because neither offer was getting my full attention.

Knowing this has shaped how I'm building Exhale. Long term, I'd love to offer something lower cost for newer business owners who need help setting up their systems and operations early. But our signature offer, Bottleneck Breakthrough, is built for a more established business owner who's ready to bring in outside support to simplify their operations, client delivery, and marketing, so they can make more money in less time.

Until I feel solid that this offer is as strong as it can be, I'm keeping that lower priced offer on the back burner.

Let’s be clear, this is still a mental dilemma sometimes. I’m human and still occasionally ask myself: “What if I'm missing out? What if I could be growing faster if I added a third thing?” Those are normal questions. But because I’ve lived the downside of trying to do too much, it makes it easier to stay focused in those moments so I don’t pull myself off track again.

Reason 2: I scaled visibility before I could convert it

if you ask most business owners why they're not at their current client or revenue goals, I would bet a lot of money that the most common answers you get are "I don't have enough leads" or "I don't have enough visibility.” Let’s be clear: visibility is part of growing a business. But for most of these business owners, it’s NOT what they should be focused on first.

Scaling visibility before you're ready for it can be a huge drain of time, because it tends to bring in more bad discovery calls, more clients asking for things outside of what you offered, or a conversion rate that's way lower than you'd hoped after all that marketing effort.

I know this from personal experience. In my coaching business, I wanted more clients in the door, so I put a ton of time and energy into growing my following on social media, especially TikTok. And it worked! I grew to over 100,000 followers in 18 months, on the back of a lot of content but especially three videos that got over a million views each, including one that hit 5.2 million.

The problem was that those viral videos didn't convert anywhere close to the rate of my typical content. Worse, they brought in a lot of noise. A lot of the people who found me through those videos weren't the people I wanted to work with, and every video I posted afterward had a noticeably worse engagement rate, because all those new followers were skewing the data.

But the most painful part was this: after months of building that visibility, I couldn't convert even 1% of those new followers into clients. It put a spotlight on something I hadn't wanted to admit: I could bring visibility into the business but my conversion process, the part where someone who finds you becomes a paying client, wasn't dialed in at all. I'd prioritized any visibility over the right kind of visibility, and that's not a mistake I'm willing to make again.

For Exhale, that means I'm still investing in marketing (clearly, since you’re reading a blog for my business, after all). But I'm focused much more on dialing in my message and figuring out what converts before I go after any kind of bigger reach.

Is it hard sometimes to feel like I'm not missing out? Yes. Do I doubt myself, wondering if things would look different if I'd spent more time chasing views? Also yes. But I've seen what's on the other side of not staying focused on conversion first, and that's enough to keep me grounded.

Reason 3: I kept changing tactics before they had time to work

I I think the most common question that most service-based business owners are asking themselves is: "Why isn't my marketing working?" or "Why isn't my sales process working?" And the problem with this question is that they're asking the wrong thing, because the grand majority of service-based business owners have not invested near the amount of time and repetitions it takes to even have enough information to answer that question.

There's a lot of advice out there, especially from startup culture, about trying things fast and failing fast. The instinct behind it is fair. You don't want to get stuck in the sunk cost trap of sticking with something just because you've already invested in it.But most small business owners don't have a clear way to tell what's working and what isn't. So that fail fast mindset can lead them to quit things long before they'd see results, which means tool hopping or tactic hopping without ever giving anything enough time to pay off.

Part of the issue is timing. Business owners often make assumptions about whether something is working based on a feeling, and that feeling is usually tied to whether they're seeing the results they expected yet. What gets missed are the more subtle signs that show up before the bigger breakthroughs: an uptick in interested DMs, even if those people aren't booking calls yet, or more substantive comments from people who look like your ideal client, instead of someone just passing through.

Most business owners miss these signals entirely, even when they mean the system is working and just taking longer than expected.

This was exactly my pattern. When I introduced a new offer, I expected it to sell as soon as it launched. When I started a new content strategy, I expected a noticeable jump in website traffic within weeks. What I learned over the years of running that business is that a lot of the growth people brag about, like the 100,000 followers in 18 months I mentioned earlier, doesn't look like a slow climb. It looks like a long stretch of not much happening, followed by a sudden spike. (I go deeper on this in a video about the growth curve of marketing metrics.)

If you think results are supposed to show up faster than they realistically do, you'll constantly feel like things are failing. You try something, see no results, and jump to the next thing, or tweak what you just started before it's had a real chance. Out of confusion and impatience, I kept pulling the plug too soon.

For Exhale, I built a dashboard that tracks the more subtle signals I know will eventually compound into the results I want. I also make promises to myself and keep them. For YouTube, I committed to posting weekly for six months before making any call about whether it's working for this business.

This is probably the most common conversation I have with service based business owners: how do you know when your marketing isn't working? My answer isn't the most comforting, but I believe it. Most business owners are trying to judge whether their marketing is working before they've put in even half the reps needed to draw any real conclusion. All that effort to avoid wasting time ends up wasting far more of it, because you're jumping from one tactic to the next without ever giving anything the runway to work.

Sometimes the problem isn't your strategy. It's your business model.

There's one more reason, and it's a bit different from the other three. The other three were execution problems, things I could point to and say "I did that wrong." This one is more about selection.

Around year two or three of my last business, I started to realize I didn't like being a coach. That wasn't a flaw in how I ran the business. It was a flaw in choosing the type of business I wanted to run in the first place. (I talk through that whole realization in this video if you want the full story.

Running a business can be lonely. Every decision falls to you, and you're left trying to figure out whether the issue is your marketing, your sales process, your website, your offer structure, or just that you're drowning in emails and admin work and never get time to work on growth.

If that sounds familiar, this is exactly what Exhale exists for. We work with service based business owners to get them out from under the flood of admin and operational work behind the scenes of their business, so they have time to think and build like a CEO, without committing to 60 to 80 hour weeks to do it.

(If you're curious about working with us, book a free discovery call!)

Frequently asked questions

How long should I try a marketing strategy before deciding it's not working?

Give it longer than feels comfortable. Most strategies need more reps than business owners expect before there's enough data to draw a real conclusion. I commit to a strategy for a set period, like three to six months for something like a content platform, and watch for early signals along the way (interested DMs, more relevant comments, small upticks in traffic) rather than waiting for a big result before deciding whether to continue.

Should I add a second offer if my current one is working?

Not until your current offer is fully dialed in, including how you deliver it, sell it, and service it behind the scenes (this can be anything from financial tracking, asking for and updating client testimonials, materials, what tasks you delegate, etc.). I learned this the hard way: adding a second offer before my first one was repeatable split my attention and slowed down both. Wait until your signature offer runs smoothly without you reinventing it each time before introducing something new.

Why do I have a lot of followers or views but no clients?

Your visibility is likely outpacing your conversion process. Getting in front of more people doesn't help if what happens after someone finds you (your sales process, offer clarity, follow up) isn't dialed in. I went through this myself: a following of over 100,000 people, and I still couldn't convert even 1% of them into clients. The fix isn't more visibility. It's auditing what happens between someone discovering you and someone becoming a client.

How do I know if my business problem is strategy or fit?

If you are seeing traction in your business but still feeling off, and you’ve tried adjusting how you deliver the work and/or how you market your work for at least 3-6 months, one at a time so you can get a real conclusive read on whether it’s the offer, the marketing or something else that’s leading to the dissatisfaction, then you can start to consider that it might be fit. On the other hand, if you have been jumping between tools or strategies, there are too many confounding factors for you to be clear. Working with someone, like a coach or consultant, can help you clarify what’s going on but nothing is going to be clear to you unless you slow down and get really strategic about how you test things so you can actually come to a conclusion.

It’s important to note though, once you’ve really given it a fair shot, there’s nothing wrong with deciding you don’t want to run a business before. What would be way worse is staying with something just because you feel like you should. I’m a perfect case study - it’s better to walk away from something that’s good for something you’ll actually enjoy long term.

Where do I start if I don't know what's broken in my business?

Start by separating the categories: marketing, sales and conversion, offer structure, and time management or operations. Most business owners can usually point to which one feels heaviest, even if they can't name the exact fix yet. From there, focus on one area at a time rather than trying to fix everything at once. If you want help figuring out where to start, book a call!