9 Myths About Scaling to Multi-Six Figures Debunked

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 168. 

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic under-earner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach. And then, on to multiple six figures as a full-time money and business coach. 

I help entrepreneurs create money-making businesses and build wealth using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let's dive into today's show.

Hello my friends and welcome back to the podcast. I have a very juicy episode for you today, all about myths. Things that people think that are incorrect, thought errors, lies even, or just fears that people have about scaling their business. Because what I've noticed among many of my clients is they want to grow big businesses. They want to get to $100,000, $200,000, $500,000 of income in their business. They want to grow to a million and beyond, but fears come up, nervousness.

I was meeting with one of my clients this week, and when we were thinking about her big income goals and how she wants to establish her brand and really go all in, there was like a tremor in her body, a nervousness, and that experience can shut people down and then they will find all sorts of thought errors which will justify their fear of going big. So we're gonna get to that today. I have nine myths about growing your business to multi-six figures. We're going to debunk each one of them.

But before we get there, I want to let you know about my masterclass that is happening February 24, 25, 26. And if you can't, by the way, be there live, you will definitely get the recordings. It is called From Burnout to Making Bank: How to Double Your Income by Working Less and Leading More. So you can see this masterclass is perfectly aligned with this podcast episode.

So I wanna make sure that you go to my website, debbiesassen.com/makebank. Sign up for this masterclass. It is going to be three days of awesomeness, juiciness, everything that you need to know in terms of your CEO leadership, how you will change the way you think about your business, money, how you will think about managing a team. 

Today we're gonna touch on that just a little bit, but this is a big topic. Wanting to grow a big business requires big mindset shifts and you need to do things a little bit differently. So right now go to my website, debbiesassen.com/makebank and join me February 24, 25 and 26 in the masterclass. All right, friends, let's jump into nine myths that I'm going to debunk so you will really have smooth, clear thinking as you grow your business to multiple six figures.

So the first one is probably the most obvious, is that scaling, growing and scaling your business means that you have to work more hours. And so many entrepreneurs get themselves into the situation where they're already maxed out. They're feeling like their business has a stranglehold over them. They're exhausted, they're not taking vacations. They're missing like soccer games that their kids are playing in, or they're missing recitals that their daughters are dancing in.

And I want to let you know that scaling does not mean that you have to do everything. Not only that, if you want to be a well-rested, well-resourced CEO who is in charge of her business, who is thinking clearly, who's thinking creatively, who is thinking about her clients, she has the brain capacity to be thinking about her clients and how she can best serve her clients, then you absolutely cannot be working more hours because you're just going to be brain dead. Right, you're gonna be tired and you won't be putting good, clear thought.

The most important asset that you have in your business is your mind. The way you're thinking, the way you're showing up, the finesse, the nuances of your messaging. And if your mind isn't clear and free to be thinking clearly about your clients in your business, then you absolutely will not be able to scale and maintain that.

So we do not want to put in extra hours. There's no such thing as working like 20 hour days, week after week after week. There might be periods of your time that you have to do that. Like I remember when I was working at the Bank of Israel and there was that annual report, I was always in charge of writing the annual report when I joined the economics department, and there were the deadlines, and sometimes when you have deadlines, you do put in a few extra hours, but that's just a normal thing that most people do as employees and when they're running their own business. But that is not the kind of like consistent 20-hour days over months and months and months.

The way you actually grow your business, you scale and grow, is to be more sensible, be more thoughtful, intentional about what you're doing. You look at what's happening in your business, you get rid of things that are not profitable. So you're actually looking at your numbers, you're managing and you're leading, and you also have people on your team who will be able to support you so that you stay in your zone of genius.

All right, myth number two is that in order to grow, you have to offer more services, right? You have to have a whole group of platform ideas and classes and lives and different things that you're doing in your business so that if you're not doing a lot of things, you're not gonna be able to make a lot of money. Like your clients have to have multiple ways of dealing with you and working with you, otherwise you're not gonna attract more clients. 

And what I really believe is that when you are very specific, you hone and refine your expertise in one two three areas, that is when you become the one who is most sought after. And I want you to think about it, like think about in medicine, there's the general practitioner, the GP who does a lot of medicine, generalist, but who gets paid the most money? The specialists, someone who is a very specialist cardiologist, someone who is specialist in lungs, in kidneys, in orthopedics, someone who has a specialty in ENT. 

And if you're a pediatric ENT, or you're working only with the elderly, you're a geriatric psychiatrist, you have a very specialized niche, then there are going to be people who are like, oh, I know that if I need this special doctor, I need to go to this person. And that way you are able to have a very refined, defined clientele, and you can charge more because you're the only person or you're one of only a few who are doing what you're doing.

So don't think that you need to have like 27 different offers in order to grow your business. And then you're also - your mind is gonna be spinning. Find out what is the thing that you love to do and specialize in that. What you say no to with your time, with your offers, in your business is just as important as what you decide to say yes to. Focus on what you enjoy doing, what's highly profitable, and what serves your clients well.

Number three, if I raise my prices, my clients are going to leave. So here's the thing. Number one, the easiest way, depending on how comfortable you feel asking people to pay you higher prices, but really the easiest way to make more money in your business is to raise your prices. And I bet that if you and I sat down together, I would probably tell you that you're undercharging. So if you wanna make more money, raise your prices. But I don't really say that glibly.

If you do, let's say double your prices, if we imagine that you have 10 clients right now and they're all paying you $1,000. I like to do easy math. So 1,000 times 10 is $10,000. Now let's say that you raise your prices to $2,000 and you feel confident and you feel that the delivery that you're giving to your clients is worthy of $2,000. You raise your prices, some of your clients will love you so much that they will stay with you. And if five clients stay with you, five times 2,000 is $10,000. So what happens, you make the same amount of money and you work half time.

But there are also other clients in the world who probably will love your services when you're more specific and your messaging is refined so they know exactly what you do and they will also come and work with you at your higher prices and you don't have to go back to the hours that you were working when you had 10 clients at a thousand, but if you had, let's say seven or eight, you can be working now 70% or 80% of what you used to be working and you can be earning more money. So that's a simple math example, but it works in real life also.

Number four, I have to do everything myself to maintain the quality of my work. And this myth that only you are gonna do it the best way, it is your business, you love it like nobody else, and that is true. And depending on what kind of business you run, number one, you can have systems, processes, standard operating procedures that somebody else can follow. 

So you can have like checklists, you can have Loom videos of exactly how you do things so somebody can follow in your footsteps and do exactly what you do. If it's a more creative work, or if it's not very, very specific, let's say like accounting can be like numbers, it's much more specific. There are of course accounting rules and sometimes it can be interpreted differently.

But if you are in more of a creative space where your mind, it can even be in coaching or in healing, your intuition, the way you think, the way you interact with your clients. If you're thinking that it's you specifically that they want, I just wanna tell you that what they want is the results that they're going to get when they work with you.

And unless somebody really, really, really wants to work only with you, maybe you have a long-term relationship, five years, 10 years, 20 years, whatever it is, and they want to keep working with you and they're willing to pay, we can't ever think that we're irreplaceable, that nobody can fill our shoes. Because you can train people to do a lot of the work that you do, and they might not do it exactly like you.

Do you know what? Maybe they're even gonna do it better. If you're doing design or you're doing coaching, they might do it differently from you, and the results will be as good. So you have to believe that you can be replaced and as you grow to become the manager, the visionary of your business, you can have people underneath you who can also service your clients.

So if you're believing that you have to do everything yourself, you're never going to get yourself out of that sort of freelancer, solopreneur mentality. You will never be able to grow your business. So I really want to bust that myth for you.

Myth number five is that more clients equal more revenue. So this is a little bit like, you know, what we said before about, you know, raising your prices. It's kind of looking at it a different way, but sometimes more clients does not equal more revenue because you end up burning out.

So if you're thinking the only way to scale is I have to get more clients, and then you're always on this hamster wheel, more, more, more, more, more, and you're adding a lot of different offers, right? You need to have retainers, and you need to have VIP days, and you need to have passive income and you need to have live income, like different ways that you're working with your clients, you are not going to be that well rested that we talked about before. Well rested, well resourced entrepreneur who has capacity to think, to slow down, to quiet her mind, to really think about what is the best thing for the long-term of her business and how she's going to serve her clients well.

You will never have days that you can work on your business to think because you're always gonna be working in your business, taking on more clients. And I had this with one of my clients a few years ago that she was always scheduling business development days into her calendar, and then somebody else would call and she'd wipe out, cancel out her business development days and she would put another client in. And she could not scale her business until she put boundaries around the number of clients she was willing to take so that she could actually do business development for her own business. So she could grow and she could scale.

All right, now we're going to get more specific about what it does or doesn't take, like when we get into the weeds of what it takes to run your business. So another myth that people think about is I need to have a big email list, or I need to have a big social media following in order to grow my business. And so they go and they create lots of different lead magnets.

And one of my clients said this to me recently, I need more free resources. I need to go and create something. I need more people on my list. I asked her how many people were on her list. She said 300. I said, for what you want to do, 300 is enough people on your email list.

Let's say you took 10% of the people on your email list and you were able to turn them into paying clients. That would be 30 clients. Do you even have room in your calendar right now for 30 clients, and she admitted that she didn't. But the one thing that was stopping her from turning the people on her email list into paying clients are the quality of the emails that she's writing, the messaging.

Her people are reading her emails on a weekly basis and they're getting inspired, it's very nice, it's great content, but they weren't feeling activated. They didn't feel like she was the one who they wanted to work with. And this is something that I work on with my clients very specifically. 

It's so important that your messaging speaks to your people and not just in a, here's a nice email where I'm going to inspire you for the day and you're gonna walk away feeling like, wow, that's so much better, I feel better. You want your people to really feel that you have the answer. 

Because listen, none of us have perfect lives. You might have good lives. But some people have a really good life and they just want to up-level it. They want to go to the next level. They want to elevate. And some people really do have issues that they want to solve, that they want to overcome. 

But if the people who are reading your content, whether it's in your email or on social media, are not feeling activated to work with you, they're not feeling like you are the one who can help them to find that solution or result that they want, that is your problem. It does not have anything to do with your email list. 

And what happened to me recently was somebody reached out to me. They asked me if I would participate in a summit for on money, entrepreneurs, money mindset. They wanted to make sure that I had a 5,000 person email list. I'm like, I don't, my email list is about 2,000 people. And they're like, nope, really sorry. 

And as someone who was following me, loved my content, thought it was great, really wanted me to participate in the summit. I'm like, okay, that's fine. If that's what you're looking for, you just want reach? Like there are people out there who have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. They're going viral and they're not making money. 

Of course, you don't know because you're just looking at their numbers and you're thinking that the numbers that you see in their social media following translate to cash, but that is not always the case. You are not here to be an inspiration. You are not here to be somebody's best friend on social media. You are here to create a profitable business. So you need to run your business for profit, not for likes.

Number seven, myth number seven is that you need to have money in savings in the bank to invest in coaching. And this is for people who are thinking about investing, they wanna go to the next level, you really want to, you know, you're maybe you're close to six figures, you want to break through that barrier, or you're already at $100,000, $200,000, and you want to double your income and go for the next level, you do not need money in the bank.

In fact, most savvy business owners already have their money deployed in sensible places in their business. They're already investing in maybe a little bit of staff, an assistant, somebody who will be helping them with social media, but they don't leave money hanging around in cash.

My clients who have worked with me and they worked with me for a long time, many of them started without money in the bank to invest in coaching and they had to pay in payment plans and payment plans are perfectly acceptable or they had to take out a business loan, they might've had to borrow from parents, and there's nothing wrong in borrowing money to invest in your business to grow.

Every factory, every company, like Coca-Cola, who wants to build a new bottling factory, they don't usually have like the millions of dollars it takes to build that bottling factory hanging around in cash in their business. They have that money invested earning interest or in investments so that their money is going to compound. When they want to grow, they will find places, whether it's a bank or it's a consortium of lenders who will lend them the money at an attractive interest rate so that they can grow the business. That is what savvy business owners do.

Don't wait to have money saved up to invest in coaching. I mean, occasionally people will pay in full and that's great, but you don't have to wait for an inheritance, you don't have to wait for a big lump sum of money to invest in coaching. What you do is you invest because you're ready to go to the next level and you take where you are now and you put yourself in a place that is going to get you to your future self, where she wants to be.

Let me just give you a more tangible example. I went shopping this week. My daughter had mentioned to me about a month ago that her four-year-old daughter needs a winter coat. I was in the States at the time and she said, if you go shopping and you see something, please get me a winter coat for my daughter. 

I didn't find anything, but this week I was in the mall and Children's Place was having a sale and I walked in and I got my granddaughter a winter coat for next year. But I didn't buy it for a four-year-old. I bought size 5/6 because I bought the coat for my granddaughter for where she's going to be in a year from now.

It's the same thing with coaching. Put yourself into a container for where you want to be in a year from now. Don't put yourself in a container for where you are today. If you want to be bold, if you want to be courageous, if you want to grow your business, if you want to double your income, triple, quadruple. And I'm not saying you can quadruple your income like in one year, but if you have a future vision of where you're going, put yourself in the container now that is going to get you where you want to go. Don't wait, and definitely don't buy yourself a winter coat that's gonna fit you now if it's not gonna fit you next year. Buy next year's winter coat because that's where you're going.

Myth number eight, my clients who are currently making multi-six figures, they started working with me when they were already at six figures. And that's a lie. Most of my clients who were doing really, really well in their business, they have been with me for a long time. Some of my clients started with me when they were only earning a few hundred dollars a month, and we grew their business. 

We have that long-term vision that I was talking about, that future like winter coat. They put themselves in a container so they would stretch, so they would learn how to make better CEO decisions, so they would start now becoming the person that they see themselves becoming in a year or two or three years from now. And I really watch my clients grow and develop, and then we develop a very good relationship so that I know them. I know what's going on. I help them with their businesses.

When things are going as expected, when things are going not expected, when things are going not like you expected, that's when we need the real problem-solving skills. That's when we need the mindset skills. That's when we really need to focus because hey, let's be honest, nobody's business is going to be a straight upward slope. 

There are going to be ups and downs in every single business and when everything's going great, that's wonderful and you wanna see how much you can make that a repeatable process and there will be times when you have a launch and it flops and nobody buys.

There will be a time when you put out webinars and masterclasses and you think, oh, this is it, I found exactly what they're looking for, and two people sign up. And there will be times when maybe if you're running ads, I don't run Facebook ads, but you'll put out ads. And from what I understand, it's very, you know, there's, you have to learn it. You have to learn how to write your ads. You have to learn what's working, what's not working. So you'll put out ads and it won't be working and your ad campaign will flop.

That is when you learn so much from your business, when you look at your failures and you tweak them and you refine them and you hone them and you go back into the world and you implement the next iteration and the next iteration. But so many people wanna wait for perfection. So many people want to wait for their business to be working before they invest in coaching. But when your business is not working, that's actually the time that you want to invest to get yourself to the next level.

I mean, if it's working, you can also invest in that. I'm not going to say that that's a bad decision. That's an amazing decision. Ride the wave, go and help yourself and grow and double, triple, et cetera, your income, go for a million dollars and beyond. But if you're in a down stage when your business isn't working, you have no idea how important it is for you at this exact point not to give up. Don't let yourself sink any further. This is exactly the best time for you to invest in coaching because there's only one way to go.

So really ,my clients who are doing the best, we've been together a year and a half, two and a half years. I have clients that we've been together for four or five years. And those clients, we just have such a good working relationship that everything's out there, business, personal, and it's an excellent relationship. 

So really think about the coach that you're gonna hire in your business. Think about the mentorship. Think about the times that your guys are gonna have together where you're gonna grow, you're gonna scale, and she's gonna know your business like inside out so that you will always have somebody on your side.

And the last myth that I want to debunk is that you need a large team in order to scale your business. And that really depends on what kind of business you have. If it's a very hands-on business, like a massage, like a massage studio, you might need, you know, if you're running with multiple rooms, you might have multiple people doing massage.

But the kind of businesses that my clients are running where they're mostly service-based businesses, I do have some businesses which are like hybrid service and product-based businesses, but most of my businesses that I work with my clients are running service-based businesses, and you can run your business with you as the main person in your business, and you might have a virtual assistant.

I have two virtual assistants, ones who does more like invoicing, bookkeeping, and she does a lot of the work in Hebrew. And then I have an assistant who helps me with some of the technical details and a little bit of the social media posting and some of the other things in my business. But neither one of the assistants that I have are full-time.

And my clients who are growing and scaling, they're also not working with people on their teams who are full-time. You can grow to multiple six figures, even into the millions of dollars with a very small team. It might be that you need to up-level the caliber of the person who's on your team, who's helping you, so that they can do different things, more things. You maybe actually want to have more people, but just doing very small specific activities, but you don't need to run a team of 10 people in order to make millions of dollars. So that's it, my friends.

Those are the nine myths that I really, really wanted to debunk because there is so much opportunity out there in the world for you to show up, serve, serve more people, help more people in your field. When you stop being afraid of scaling, when these thoughts that are not true, these myths that I would call them, when you're thinking that you're going to have to hire a big team, or you're gonna have to spend a lot of time growing your email list, or you have to go and do silly Reels on Instagram in order to get people to like you. As I said, likes don't create paying clients.

You wanna be very specific in your content, in the messaging of what you're offering. You want to be very specific and really whittle down the offers so that you're not doing everything because you're not going to have the time and the energy. And you want to really go out there with a big servant's heart to serve your people. And when you make more money in your business and you have more for your family and you have more to give and you have more to share and you're more rested and resourced, then the world benefits.

So go out there and do your thing and share it with the world. And as I said, come into my masterclass on February 24, 25 and 26, and really let's go deep into the strategies and the mindsets that you need as a business owner to go from burnout to making bank in your business, how to double your income by leading more and working less. Go to my website, debbiesassen.com/makebank, and I will see you in the masterclass.

All right, my friends, and I will see you next week on The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. Bye-bye for now.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth. 

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.