We get this question from clients quite a bit – generally using the exact words “It just feels like I’m hemorrhaging money, and I don’t know what to do.”
(To be completely honest, we often hear this from other people who don’t even have an ittybiz, so it’s probably safe to say that this feeling falls under “the human condition” rather than just those who decide to join the ranks of the self-employed.)
Having been in the position of hemorrhaging money myself at one time or another, I have some advice for you when you find yourself in this unenviable – but not uncommon – position.
Check to see if the language you’re using truly matches the situation you find yourself in. It might be on the money (oh, bad pun), but it might not. The average busy person says they have “no time”, when that’s generally not the case. The same goes with money.
If you’re telling yourself you’re broke and losing money hand over fist, look at how much money you do have. The number of times someone has told us they’re broke when they have three months savings in the bank or in some financial vehicle is legion. The number of times people have told us that they’re losing money left and right when what they really mean is they’re not hitting the numbers they’d hoped they’d make, equally so.
That may not be the case for you. You may be about to lose your house, or your spouse, if you don’t start bringing in the money. But the first thing you have to do is look at how you’d describe your situation if you were only allowed to use numbers and not dramatic metaphors. You might realize you have a lot more than you’re saying you do and a lot more wiggle room than you think.
That might not make your situation better, but it can get you to stop making it scarier and more intimidating than it needs to be, and hell, that’s a start.
This is very similar to point number one.
Running your ittybiz is very much like running your life. It’s more demanding than you may have ever signed up for. There will be times when it feels like you have been worn down to a raw and painful little nub and you have nothing left.
But do you have nothing left, or do you have almost nothing left?
Do you have nothing left, or do you feel like you have nothing left?
Maybe you really do have nothing left. That happens, and there’s no shame in that. A lot of very smart and successful people have let go of a business or a life situation that’s drained them down to nothing, only to rest and heal and recover and start fresh with something or someone else.
Maybe that’s you. But you need to make the distinction between truly having nothing left to give, and feeling like you have nothing left to give. Once you do, you can make peace with whatever you do next, whether it’s ending things gracefully or doubling down and giving it your all.
Everyone has their old fallback, that thought of, “If it ever gets really bad, then I’ll do X”.
X may be getting a second job. X may be getting a second mortgage. X may be selling off your furniture and going to live with your mother. We all have a worst-case-scenario plan for when things get so dramatically bad that something drastic has to be done.
And we come back to language again. If the problem you’re saying you’re having – in this case, hemorrhaging money – is truly that bad, then the time has come to do X, whatever your X is, to save your business.
If you haven’t done X, then you have to ask yourself why not. Desperate times call for desperate measures. If you’re unwilling to engage in desperate measures, either times aren’t desperate or your heart’s not in it.
(Incidentally, if your heart isn’t in it that doesn’t mean that you’re not trying hard enough. It usually means that you don’t actually want this business anymore. There’s no shame in that, either.)
But if things feel really, really bad, like the ship is sinking, and you’ve been putting off doing those things you said you’d do if the ship started sinking, then you have to ask yourself why. Or, at least, talk to someone you trust and get them to help you figure that out.
This is kind of like number 3, but a little different. Pretend you didn’t have an ittybiz in the first place. You’re just a regular person, who finds themselves hemorrhaging money because of medical bills or a lawsuit or because you lost your job six months ago and there’s not another one on the horizon.
If that happened to you, you’d probably know exactly what to do. You wouldn’t be thinking about your “business” or your “dream” or your “passion”, you’d be thinking about your cashflow, and you’d do whatever you needed to do, whether it was call a relative for a bailout or put everything you own on eBay and find the nearest couch to stay on.
But for some reason, people running their ittybiz think that financial emergency is different when you have a business than it is when you don’t. It’s still financial emergency. When things get so bad that they’re really, really bad, you don’t sit around waiting for things to get better like you would if you were just having a slump. You hustle your ass off.
Sometimes just taking your mind off your business and thinking about what you’d do about money if you didn’t have it will open up things for you.
This means “hustle.” In the vast majority of situations where a client has hit serious financial trouble, the problem boils down to being spread out too thin to get traction.
Marketing activities are taking place across the board – some frantic social media action here, a few blog posts there, some scattershot schmoozing and guest posting, et cetera.
The problem with this is the same problem you’d find yourself in Vegas if you were running out of money. Spreading your last cask between the blackjack table and the slots and the scratch tickets at the corner store isn’t going to help you recover anything. Sometimes you’ve just got to put the house on red. You’re losing anyway.
When fully executed, we’ve never seen this fail. If you pick just one marketing channel and work that with every ounce of hustle you have, you’re bound to get traction. You’re going to pay extremely close attention to your results, and you’re going to be doing it so much and so often that you’ll rapidly see what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll simply get a hell of a lot better at it.
And that might just turn things around.
If you feel like you’re hemorrhaging money, then you need to figure out why you feel that way first and what you’re going to do about it second. But as long as you let that feeling just float around as a feeling, you’re going to bleed out.
Get out of your head. Talk to someone about all five of the points above. Sell your Firefly DVDs and hire someone if you have to.
At least then you can get some peace about it.
Naomi writes more things like this in The Letter. Get it for free today. (It also comes with free marketing courses. You can’t move for free here.)
