Why Is It So Hard To Reach Six Figures In Business [How To Get There Quicker]

Why Is It So Hard To Reach Six Figures In Business

You may have heard a lot of people who have managed to stumble across massive amounts of success talk about how getting to their first six figures was a nightmare.

They say that it takes months, even years to get to that six-figure mark, yet the time between the first six figures and the first million is almost 10x quicker.

Currently, you might be doing everything you feel is in your power to get to that six-figure mark.

You might be working a job and coming home to an endless stream of things to do for your online business.

You might be spending dozens of hours per week lodged in front of your computer doing things, building a business, and seeing minimal results.

Everything you could be trying is coming to a swift pause and you simply don't understand what you could be doing differently to succeed.

Why is this the case?

There are plenty of reasons why this could be, however, we're going to be talking about 3 of those reasons today.

These 3 reasons will show you that it's normal to go through all this failure on the road to six figures and that you're right on track.

Here's why it is so hard to reach six figures in business and how to get there quicker.

Mindset

After starting my first eCommerce business almost 2 years ago, I gave up not long after I started.

I had the niche ready, the product chosen, the accounts and website up and running, the first Facebook ad campaign launched, yet I failed to see that business through.

To this day, I see people advertising the product I had chosen to sell as my first product, and it kills me inside knowing that my first business could have been a success had I not given up so fast.

After running my first Facebook ad campaign, I realised that I was getting a ton of views on the ad, yet I had no sales yet.

I had spent a whopping £11 with no results! I had to give up!

That was my fresh entrepreneurial mind speaking, the one that knew nothing about risk and reward, the one that only cowered into its comfort zone when things got remotely hard. 

Following my first ever business, this side of me didn't shy away - business after business, it would poke its head whenever things got difficult, or I was ready to step out of my comfort zone.

I was stuck in the wrong mindset, a fixed mindset where failure was a test of my overall ability, and so I feared failure more than anything.

This fear of failure has the ability to put us in a state of inertia where no progress is ever made for the simple fact we don't want to try something new and fail.

Trying to avoid failure is almost like trying to avoid success because the real lessons are disguised in failure.

Better yet, I've never known anyone who's been remotely close to making a six-figure income, and so it was difficult to believe that I was any different from the people around me.

"Why would I be able to make six-figures, even 7 or 8, if no one before me was able to make anything close to it?"

This same mindset is the trap that almost everyone falls into at the beginning.

We've all got deep-rooted thoughts about success and making money, that becoming entrepreneurs is very difficult for us.

If we've been around poverty our whole lives, or been around people who struggle to make ends meet, then that's how we perceive our lives.

It becomes almost impossible to change how we think about money because we've had people telling us how hard it is to make money, and how scarce this resource is.

That's why I've started to focus my articles a lot more on mindset than anything else - the mindset is the factor that separates the successes from the failures.

Those who spend time nurturing their mindset and working on improving it, are usually the ones who end up succeeding.

However, those who simply try to hustle their way to success without working on their mindset are usually the ones that work 100x harder to see mere hints of progress.

If you feel that your mindset is the thing holding you back, there's a lot you can do to change this:

• Start to read books that challenge your thinking
• Talk to others and network with successful people
• Watch success stories on YouTube
• Build out your ideal persona (who you need to be to succeed)

There's a lot more to it, but this is a good starting point.

You can even keep a journal of what you're doing daily to improve your mindset, and how it's helping you.

Lack of experience

Another likely reason why a lot of people struggle to reach six figures quickly is because of their experience.

When we go to school and learn, we're likely going there to learn how to fit into the status quo - not how to challenge it.

We learn various methods of learning that do not work outside of the educational system, making it hard to adapt to learning in the entrepreneurial realm.

When I started trading forex, the first thing I did was learn all about how to do it - this is great, it's logical, however, I spent too much time learning and not enough applying.

My whole school life, that's all I did - just learn, learn, learn.

Therefore, when it came to learning something for myself, I adopted the same methods and techniques I used in school.

It was the same thing when my friends and I decided we wanted to start a marketing agency.

The first thing I did was go to Skillshare and look for SMMA (social media marketing agency) courses.

I spent the first week or two following a course and taking notes, a course I found overly depressing because the teacher's voice was dull and demotivating.

After a few weeks, we realised that everything we've been learning is completely useless - in fact, you can start an agency without a clue how to actually do marketing.

I teach you how to start an agency within a week on my blog.

Instead of learning how to do everything ourselves, we can leverage our time by hiring people to do the marketing, or the prospecting for us.

It was a daunting task which we, yet again, had no experience with.

However, that's the whole point of learning - it's to learn how to do things, constantly reinventing the way you do things, the way you learn, and challenging the way you think.

Growth only comes from being determined to improve.

It's the fact that following every failure I've encountered, that I've managed to reach a point where my mindset is constantly changing and helping me get closer to my goals.

Had I given up after realising I don't know how to run an eCommerce business, then I wouldn't be here.

Had I given up after realising I wasn't cut out to be a forex trader, then I wouldn't be here.

Had I given up after miserably failing as a marketing agency owner, even though  I spent almost a year doing it, then I wouldn't be here.

Everyone starts with a lack of experience.

No one is born a natural entrepreneur or businessperson.

You mold yourself into one the further you venture into the realm of business and entrepreneurship.

However, not a lot of people make it that far because all it takes is one failure, one loss, to derail them and knock them off course.

Lack of planning

I've always said that "If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail."

I don't know if there's been another person to coin this quote, however, it's been something I say to a lot of people who don't plan what they do.

When we hear the word 'plan' or 'planning,' we immediately start to think of a very long and tedious process of strategically creating a fail-proof plan.

Planning for something doesn't always mean spending days or weeks writing out the perfect plan.

It's the same in life as it is in business.

A plan can be a very rough, very short set of things you will do outlined on a napkin that give you clarity on what it is you're ultimately going to be doing.

When I dove deeper into the realm of tech businesses, I was starting a company called 'Condensr.'

It was a book summary app that turned the biggest ideas and insights into short and detailed 10-minute narrations.

Everyone I spoke to was telling me I needed a business plan - a 60-100 page document that outlined every nook and cranny in my business.

The thought of sitting there and writing this document horrified me until I realised there's a much simpler, much better way of doing this.

I discovered the one-page business plan that essentially does the same thing as the 60-100 page plan, but it was 1000x simpler and faster to write.

After all, plans tend to change, and it would be a massive waste of time writing a 100-page plan that will inevitably need to change.

See, many people have a plan to reach six figures.

However, what people don't have is the plan of execution - the roadmap which they'll follow to reach six figures.

Whatever business you're building to reach six figures, you're able to put a plan in place to reach it.

Without the plan, you'll see that a lot of the time, you're just 'in between' - unsure of what to do or where to go from here.

Let's assume you're starting a marketing agency.

Reaching six figures can be very easy - all you need are 2-3 clients paying you $3k-$4K per month to reach this.

How do you get 2-3 clients on retainer?

You first need to have your infrastructure set up.

You'll need your A-team made up of a virtual assistant, a service delivery person, and a closer to help you run the daily operations of your business.

From here, you'll be reaching out to 50 new businesses per day, meaning you're reaching 1500 new businesses per month.

Out of this 1500 per month, you only need to close 2 clients.

So, after putting together the team, you're then going to put together an outreach strategy to reach up to 50 businesses per day.

What will your VA do to find and reach 50 new companies per day?

Once you've got this set up, and are setting appointments, how will your closer close the deals?

Finally, when you've got the clients, how do you ensure your media buyer/service delivery person delivers good results to keep the clients for a long time and have space for more?

Build a short plan that goes over each part of the process.

That's it - you don't need 100 pages worth of planing to have a 'good' plan.

In fact, a 100-page business plan is terrible, no one will read it or refer to it.

However, when you have one page with all the information you need on it, you're a lot more likely to use the plan, change it when necessary and succeed.

Those were the 3 reasons why it is so hard to reach six figures in business and what you can do about it.

Of course, there are some other reasons I may have missed, but a lot of the time, you'll find they fall under the 'mindset' category.

Did you find this article helpful? 

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Till next time,

Mohamad