I presented this to a room full of incredible female founders at Ladies Who Talk in Lisbon recently, and the feedback was so wonderful that I wanted to share it here too, because I know this lands for a lot of people who are stuck in the same place. If you prefer to follow on in the workshop format, you can watch the video below.
Why Working Harder Is Not The Answer
Start here: two lists
Grab a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle.
On the left, I want you to write down everything that working hard looks like in your business right now. All the activities, all the tasks, all the things you are doing that drain you. The busy work that keeps you occupied but doesn't show you progress.
On the right, write down what progress actually looks like. How does it feel when you are genuinely moving forward? What are you doing? What is happening?
Then be really honest with yourself. What percentage of your time is spent on the left side versus the right?
There is a saying I heard once, and I don't know who to attribute it to, but it has always stayed with me. Little stuff kills the big stuff. When you are caught in all the little work, the urgent things, the things that keep you busy but don't build anything, that is where the vision starts to shrink and the progress starts to stall.
Working hard sustains the current version of your business. Working on the right things changes the trajectory.
The plateau most founders hit
Here is a pattern I see over and over again.
Founders start a business because they want freedom, autonomy, the chance to do things their way. In the beginning there is real energy. Lots of referrals. Good momentum.
And then at some point, you hit a plateau.
On that plateau, the founder becomes the bottleneck. The business only really works when you do. And that is a heavy, difficult place to be in, because what is actually happening is that momentum is slowing down just as you are working harder than ever to maintain it.
I was asked on a podcast recently what the main reason is that businesses stall. If I had to say it in one word, it would be momentum. Most startups don't fail because the product is bad or the founder isn't talented. They fail because they are starting from scratch, standing still. Getting out of startup phase and into momentum is hard. And once you have it, losing it is devastating.
But if you are on that plateau, spinning your wheels, feeling like the bottleneck in your own business, I want to offer a different perspective.
The myth that keeps founders stuck
I hear variations of this all the time. "When I get to a certain revenue, things will be easier." "I just need more clients and things will settle down." And what actually tends to happen is that you hustle to get sales, the sales come in, and then you switch entirely to delivering for those clients. Then you realise you need more sales, so you switch back. It is a seesaw. Back and forth.
Here is the honest truth, and I know it is a bit painful to hear. If getting more revenue or more clients solved the problem, you would have already fixed it by now.
More clients is not the root cause. It is a symptom. The root cause is generally more foundational than that.
The three ways to actually grow any business
There are only three ways to grow any business. I don't care what the business is. This is not complicated.
The first is to get more clients. This is generally where we spend most of our time and attention.
The second is to increase the transaction value. Upselling, creating bundles, adding more value to existing clients.
The third is to increase the frequency, how often clients buy from you. And if frequency doesn't apply to your model, swap that for referrals.
I do an exercise with clients where I say: what if you grew the number of new clients by just 10%, increased what you charge by 10%, and increased the frequency of sales by 10%? Because of the way compound growth works, that combination actually grows the business by around 72%. A well-rounded growth strategy has all three.
But before any of that can work at scale, the marketing needs to be right. And specifically, it needs to stop chasing the 3%.
The stadium analogy
Imagine I filled the Benfica Stadium with all of your ideal clients. Every single person in there is a perfect fit for what you sell.
I get on the mic and ask: who is actually looking to buy right now?
About 3% of hands go up.
Your competitors are targeting that same 3%. So you end up in a red ocean of competition, all fighting for the same tiny slice of the market.
Now layer on social media. If only 3% of your audience is ready to buy, and only around 6% of your followers actually see any given post, picture that as a Venn diagram. The overlap is tiny. You are essentially trying to win the lottery every time you put something out.
The rest of the market, the 97%, are not thinking about buying yet. Some aren't even aware of the problem you solve. And if your marketing ignores them entirely, you are leaving most of your potential clients untouched.
The goal is to build what I call a marketing pantheon. Get one strategy working really well, maximise it, optimise it, systemise it, and then add the next one. Over time you build a marketing system that is so stable that even if one pillar gets knocked out, you still have other lead sources bringing in work. In 2011 when I had my digital marketing agency, a Google algorithm update wiped out the SEO results for countless businesses overnight. The ones who had built multiple channels survived. Those who hadn't didn't.
Get the full guide to creating Marketing Momentum here.
The framework for working ON your business
When I had my agency and I was growing, I hired a business coach who kept telling me I needed to work on the business. I kept asking him what I should actually do. And he could never tell me.
So I went and figured it out for myself. And it gave me the business that gave me my dream life. This is what I want to share with you.
I call it the Seven Pillars of Business Mastery. The idea came from a visit to Rome, where I saw the Pantheon. This building has survived wars, floods, earthquakes, and hundreds of thousands of tourists. It is still standing. And I thought, if you can make all the pillars in your business that strong, your revenue targets become an obvious result.
The seven pillars are: Messaging and Marketing, Selling and Sales Systems, the Business Model, World-Class Client Delivery, Systems That Scale, Financial Health and Legal, and You and Your Mindset.
These are the same seven pillars in every service business, agency, or consultancy. And problems are progress. Every single problem, big or small, that you solve in your business is one step closer to where you want to be. And once you solve it, it doesn't come back. That is how you start to get your time back.
The weekly CEO meeting
Here is the practical application.
Write down the seven pillars. Under each one, write your top three to five challenges, obstacles, or things you know need attention. Not solutions. Just the problems.
Then schedule a weekly CEO meeting with yourself. Sixty to ninety minutes, same time each week. Pick one pillar. Work on one issue within that pillar. One practical action to move it forward.
Next week, move to the next pillar. Then the next. After seven weeks, you come back to the beginning and repeat.
If you do this consistently, by the end of the year you will have spent a meaningful number of hours genuinely working on your business. And the magic is that as you solve problems in each pillar, more time gets freed up. It compounds. The business gets stronger, and you start to get your headspace back.
Pause the video. Go and put it in your diary right now.
When I delivered this as a live workshop in Lisbon and the response was incredible. One of the attendees, an interior designer who almost didn't come because she was too busy, sent me a message afterwards saying that on her way home she could hear old ways of thinking falling apart and new ones forming in their place.
That is what this does when it connects. It doesn't just give you something to think about. It shifts something.
And if you want the full 7 Pillars framework, you can download the guide here: https://workwithsian.co.uk/shop/7-pillars-of-business-mastery
