How to tell if you are in survival mode or growth mode

I wanted to share a little bit of tough love from me. This is by no means criticism or things you may have been doing wrong. I'm just hoping to shed a little bit of light on what you might improve on or how you can focus on moving out of survival mode into growth mode. And I will talk about the two different modes shortly, but I just wanted to preface this by saying I'm not trying to criticize, and I do understand that everyone's situation is different and there are going to be periods of time when you are in survival mode. So there's nothing wrong with that. It's just noticing when you're in survival mode and when you're in growth mode. So having said that, let's move onto what survival mode actually is, what growth mode is, and some signs that you're in either one of these modes and how you can move to the other one.

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What is survival mode?

Survival mode basically is prioritizing the short term things in your business. So that would be focusing on client work because it pays the bills. That's totally fine. To a certain extent, we do have to prioritize the short term things, because otherwise you can be growing your business, but you're not actually delivering anything. The key is to notice when you are focusing on client work to the exclusion of everything else. So you're so busy in the client work that you're not marketing your business, you're not growing your business, and you end up only marketing yourself when the client pipeline runs dry.

I see this quite a lot with service-based businesses, where they'll have a flurry of clients, they'll be booked months in advance, and because they're so busy on client work, they don't post anything on Instagram. They don't publish any podcast episodes. They just don't do anything growth-related in their business. They don't do anything to get clients in because they don't need to, because they're already booked months in advance, and then something happens and the client pipeline runs dry. And then it's like, oh no, I'd better go and start marketing myself again.

So another thing I've noticed actually, which is quite common with particularly service-based business owners, is they'll say, “Well, I'll launch a digital product when I have more time.” And that's really good, but the problem is when you're focusing all of your time on client work, you're never going to have that more time to create that digital product. So it's noticing when, okay, actually, maybe I have a bit of space in my budget this month to work with one less client and start to focus on creating a digital product so that I can add that form of leveraged income to my business. When I say leveraged income, I mean it's an income stream that you can sell more of without putting hours into it. That's basically what I mean by leveraged income from a digital product. And when you're saying, “Well, I don't have the time to do that,” then you are prioritizing the short term income from client work over the long term income potential that a digital product can bring in.

 

What is growth mode?

So growth mode, on the flip side, then, is prioritizing the long term things in your business. And often it requires taking a step back so that you can move forward. So, like I said before, it could be working with one less client and saying, okay, I'm going to have a slightly lower income this month, but I know that in the future, I'm going to have a higher income because I've created and launched this digital product that will bring me a leveraged income in the future.

Back when I was working with clients and I realized, actually, I don't want to do client work anymore, I want to make most of my income from digital products. So what I did was I fired my clients to focus on building all my digital products and launching my digital products. And let me tell you, there were months there where I was broke, more than one month where I was broke, but I kept that long term vision in my mind. And I thought, one day it's going to be worth it, when I'm actually going to have this money coming in from digital products.

And finally, I'm there. I'm at the point where I'm can say, okay, this is good. I can take a month off and go and travel around Australia in a van just as I've been doing, or I can focus on writing a book. I can pick and choose which clients I want to work with and only work with dream clients. I can help more people because I don't have this cap on the number of clients I can work with, because I'm helping people through digital products instead of one-on-one.

So it's really, it's powerful what you can do in the longer term when you focus on these things. But it does mean making short term sacrifices. It also means prioritizing the things that will move your business forward. So that means, you know, like launching that podcast that you've been wanting to launch for a long time. It means creating the digital product. It doesn't necessarily mean posting to Instagram or doing things for the sake of doing them, but it's thinking, okay, well, what can I do that's going to move the needle on my business, rather than what's going to feel like I'm moving the needle on the business but isn't actually moving the needle?

Now, I do want you to remember, the growth mode activities don't necessarily bring in a return on investment straight away. And that can be a return on investment on your time or a return on investment on your money. But even though they don't bring in that ROI straight away, they are setting you up for long term success versus taking on a new client, which is great for short term cashflow. And we need short term cash flow because, without cash flow, we can only run our business for so long before we go under. But taking on a new client isn't going to bring in cash flow in 12 months time necessarily. I mean, it might, if it's like a long term retainer client, but you know what I mean, whereas when you're creating a digital product, that could still be bringing in cash flow two years down the track, three years down the track, longer potentially.

So those are a couple of different signs that you're in either survival mode or growth mode and a little bit of how you can move from survival to growth mode. Like I said, it is natural that there are going to be ebbs and flows in your business. There are going to be times when you're thinking, I just need to bring in cash right now, and you are going to be just working on client work. That is fine. But just being aware of when you can afford to take a step back from survival mode and then start to move into growth mode and focus on that, because there's never going to be this magical time where you're suddenly ready to launch a podcast or create a digital product.

 

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