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EMMA: There's a stretch in business that nobody really warns you about. You've done the hard work of getting off the ground. Revenue is coming in, and you're not a startup anymore, but somewhere between a hundred grand and 500 grand. Things get messy. Really messy. The stuff that got you here stops working. The stuff you need next isn't obvious and you're stuck in this weird middle ground kind of like limbo where you are too big to wing it and too small to have a team that handles everything.
Oh my goodness. I call it the messy middle. And I see it constantly in my coaching clients, in my revenue raiser program in the women who come to see me and they say, Emma, I'm working harder than ever. And it doesn't feel like it's translating. So today I wanna talk about what actually happens in that stretch, and more importantly, how to move through it.
because the messy middle isn't a dead end. It's a growth phase, but you need to treat it differently from the phase that came before it. Let me paint you a little picture. [00:01:00] At the lower end of revenue, let's say 50 grand, a hundred grand, you can hustle your way through. You're doing everything yourself. You're doing the sales, you're doing the delivery, you're doing the admin, the marketing, the invoicing, probably your own bookkeeping. Stop it and it works because the volume is manageable.
You've got five clients, maybe eight. You know them all by name. You can hold the whole business in your head. Then something shifts, revenue starts to grow. You get busier, more clients, more delivery, more admin, more decisions, and suddenly the business needs systems not just effort. And I see a real pinch point.
Around the $360,000 mark to the $500,000 mark. That's where complexity increases, and the cracks start to show. Your calendar might be a mess. You might be dropping balls. You're so deep in delivery that you've stopped doing anything that resembles business development. And you know what happens next. [00:02:00] A few months later, the pipeline dries up and you are scrambling.
I lift this myself. In my first year of business, I generated about $400,000 in revenue. Sounds great, right? But the delivery load meant I had less time for sales or relationships, and that created the familiar peaks and troughs we all know and hate. Busy month, quiet month, busy month, panic month. It's exhausting and it's completely avoidable if you build the right habits early. A pipeline problem is a big issue, and I bang on about it a lot because I see it every single week. When you're busy delivering business development slips relationships slide, you tell yourself, you get back to everything. When it calms down, things don't calm down, and then three months later you're staring at an empty diary wondering where all your clients went.
I had a call. Let's call her Sharon. Because that's her name, and she came to me in exactly this position. She'd had a brilliant quarter, fully booked, great revenue, and [00:03:00] then nothing. Her pipeline was empty because she hadn't made a single business development call in 12 weeks. She'd been so focused on serving the clients that she forgot to find The next one, we went back to basics.
I asked her to list every single person she worked with in the last two years, everyone. Then I asked her to put a tick against anyone she hadn't spoken to in the last six months. There were dozens, dozens of warm contacts she could reach out to. Not with a sales pitch, but with a genuine check-in.
How's the team going? How are you doing? How did the project land? Is there anything I can support you with? That's it ladies. That is building relationships. That is business development. It's not cold calling to strangers. Ugh. I hate that. It leaves vomit in my mouth It can be as simple as picking up the phone to someone who already knows you, likes you, and trusts you. In my business development Sprint, I get people to start with this on day one. Reach out to your current [00:04:00] clients. Just check in. Be human. Say thanks for the business. How's it going? It could be a phone call.
It could be a text message, a voice note. It's the warmup stage. Then we look at people you've had conversations with who maybe weren't ready at that time. Go back over your diary. There will be follow up. There might be follow up, sitting right there on the table that you've completely forgotten about.
Chances are that is true. I also use what I call the three, two, one approach. Three reach outs a day, two follow ups, and one social media post. That's it. It's not overwhelming, but if you do it consistently five days a week, that's 15. New conversations started a week. That's 60 a month, and some of those will convert.
The problem is never that women in business can't sell. The problem is that they stop building relationships when delivery picks up, and then they wonder why revenue is lumpy and it feels desperate. And building relationships from desperation is not great. Here's another thing that happens in this stretch.
You realize you're under [00:05:00] charging. When you started out, you probably set your prices based on what you felt comfortable with, what you thought people might pay. What your competitors were charging. Maybe you even Googled, how much should I charge? Golly, I hope you didn't. But anyway, and whatever came up, that's what you charged.
And at the time, that's fine. It's not really fine, but it's fine. You needed the runs on the board, you needed the clients, you needed momentum. But now you're busier than ever working long hours, and the revenue doesn't reflect the effort. That's a pricing problem. I had a client who was charging 150 bucks an hour for consulting work.
She was experienced, she was getting results and her clients loved her, but she was maxed out on hours and still not hitting her revenue goal. And when we did the maths, she would've needed to bill another 40 hours a week every week to hit that goal. That's not business, that's a treadmill. So we had the difficult pricing conversation.
And I'll tell you, the pricing conversation is never one and done. It builds over time. We talked about [00:06:00] value-based pricing. What outcome does the client get from working with her? What's that worth to them? How to ditch the hourly rates and give the best possible service. And I'll give you an example from my own business 'cause I think sometimes that kind of helps.
I had a coaching session once that lasted 13 minutes. 13 as in 1, 3, 13 minutes. The client jumped on. She asked a couple of sharp questions. She had her breakthrough, and then she said, right, I'm going, I need to spend the next 40 minutes implementing what we've just spoken about. She saw immense value in those 13 minutes if I'd been charging by the hour.
That would've had me stuck at, but we've got another 47 minutes left for you to get the value. But the insight that she got that was worth thousands plus, she moved really quickly. They're the type of people we work with. That's why I don't charge hourly. Hourly caps. You, when you're really good at what you do, you get faster.
And if you're charging by the hour, getting faster actually penalizes you. I want you to think about that it [00:07:00] actually penalizes you if you're faster. People want and need to pay for outcomes, not time. So if you are in the messy middle and you're feeling overworked and underpaid, have a look at your pricing.
Are charging for time or for the result, is there a way to restructure your offers? So the price reflects the value and not the hours. And here's the question I ask my clients. What's your average client value? If your target is 250,000 and you're working in the B2B space, you don't need a hundred clients.
You might need five or six really solid engagements. And if your current average is 30 grand, how do you push that up to 50 grand? Sometimes the path to your revenue goal isn't more clients. It's deeper, bigger work with fewer clients. In the messy middle. You also hit the point where doing everything yourself stops being brave and starts being a bottleneck.
Lord, he knows. I know I had a client who wanted to do some podcasts. I've spoken about this on another episodes, but she was [00:08:00] putting it off because she didn't know where to start, so we just hatched the plan. We looked at sites like Fiverr and Upwork, and we found someone who was an expert at podcast research.
The result, she got an Excel spreadsheet with 200 podcasts in her target market. Each one had an email address to contact a link to the show so she could listen and a note explaining why it had been selected. It was delivered within a week, and the best bit probably cost her about a hundred bucks, a hundred dollars.
If she had done that research herself, it would have taken her weeks. Weeks she didn't have because she was busy delivering client work. This is just one example. It's a really simple example, but it makes the point. There are tasks in your business that someone else can do faster, cheaper, and better than you.
Your job is to figure out which ones. Here's a simple exercise, grab a piece of paper, a four. Draw a line down the middle on the left. Do a brain dump of everything you need, support with business stuff, [00:09:00] home stuff, all of it. And on the right, write down where you could get that support. Who could do it? How much would it cost?
Simply doing the left hand side of that exercise. We'll open your eyes and the right hand side gives you a plan of choice. Lovely. You know, I outsource a lot. I even outsource this podcast. Brianna, who is my head honcho, sits and listens to me. I have a podcast production team. I have people who handle things I'm not good at or don't enjoy, and that frees me up to do the work that actually generates revenue, the coaching, the speaking, the relationships, the programs, the stuff that only I can do, the podcasting.
if you are in the messy middle, let's get that right. Messy, middle or middle whistle. And you are still doing your own graphic design, managing your own inbox, and editing your own videos. Oh, we need to talk. I know this sounds basic, but calendar management and financial literacy are two of [00:10:00] the most common gaps I see in businesses at this stage.
Calendar first. Even experienced business owners struggle with this. You've got client sessions, you've got networking events, you've got content creation time. You've got thinking, you've got admin. Somehow business development or building relationships is supposed to fit in the cracks, except it can't fit in the cracks because it needs to be the priority, not an afterthought.
And I ask my clients to book Out Time for Business Development like it's a client appointment. 'cause guess what it is? It's an appointment with your future revenue. If you don't protect that time, it will disappear every single week. Now numbers, and I'm not talking about revenue. Everyone knows their revenue number, do you?
Or at least a rough version of it. I hope you do. I'm talking about profit. what are you actually keeping after expenses, after paying yourself? One of the things I did years ago was spend an hour every Friday going through every single line in my zero account. I know the [00:11:00] accountants bookkeepers out there will love me saying that it was a bit boring, but it did give me a really good understanding of where my money was going.
Not a vague sense, a line by line understanding. If you don't know your numbers, block out an hour on a Friday and go through it. What are you spending on subscriptions? You've forgotten about. What's your actual cost of delivery? What percentage of revenue are you keeping as profit? The target I give my clients is 40% profit after all expenses, including paying themselves a proper salary.
That's the number that means you get to have a sustainable business and invest not just a busy one. 40%. Sounds like a lot I know. You can work up to it. It's okay. And I wanna talk about something that doesn't get enough airtime in the messy middle mindset. When you are in this stretch, it's easy to feel like you are failing, which sounds ridonculous revenue is growing, but you don't feel enough or you are working harder, but things feel messier.
[00:12:00] Other people on Instagram seem to have it sorted, and you're over here with a to-do list that never ends. I've been there. I am human. I am not superhuman. There are days I don't feel like showing up to record my podcast. Love you, Brianna. There are weeks where the to-do list feels impossible, and in those moments, I lean on my systems and my team to keep things moving, but I also think about my mindset deliberately.
If you need to listen to an uplifting podcast, do that. If you need to stop watching the news for a bit wholly moly, do that. If you need to call a business friend who is upbeat and energetic, do that. Sometimes the one thing you need to shift from, meh. To, yeah. Is the conversation with someone who gets it.
That's all. I talked about this with Dr. Lucy Burns on her podcast or and on my podcast, both of us, and she said something I really like. She said, nurture your audience and then when you're ready to sell something, they'll buy. They'll be ready to buy because they know that you are the real [00:13:00] deal. You gotta keep showing up.
And I think the same applies to nurturing yourself. If you are running on empty, your business feels it, your clients feel it, your sales conversations feel it. I noticed that when women in business tell me, people just aren't buying right now, nine times out of 10, the issue isn't the market, it's their energy.
The follow up has dropped, the sales process has gaps. They've shown up tired and scattered, and people can sense that. So if you're in the messy middle and everything feels hard, check in with yourself first. What's your energy like? Would you buy from you right now?
This is where the messy middle starts to become the exciting middle. At some point, you realize that trading time for money has a ceiling. If every dollar of revenue requires you to be in the room, you're gonna max out. There are only so many hours in the day. The shift is from one-to-one, to one to many group programs, [00:14:00] workshops, events, master classes, anything that lets you serve multiple people at once without multiplying your hours.
And this is how we've built our business. Now, I do have my one-on-one coaching clients, high touch, limited in nature, very intimate. But I also have revenue raiser, which is a group program. I have master classes. I have my podcast, which reach hundreds if not thousands of people each week without me even being in the room with them.
The pathway matters too. We have a downloadable on the website, the Female Entrepreneur's Business Growth Report, and then that leads to the Create Your Offer Masterclass, which then leads to revenue raiser. People in my current program came in through that exact pathway. we know it works if someone goes here.
Then what do they do next? You need to think it through. For my clients in the messy middle, I often ask, what's the group version of what you can do one-on-one? Can you run a [00:15:00] half day workshop for 10 people instead of 10 individual sessions? Can you create a program that takes people through your framework
in a cohort? Can you host an event where you demonstrate your work to potential clients? One of my clients started doing breakfast showcases where she'd present work she'd done with a client and kick it around the room. There were her clients in the room and also potential clients, social proof sell, so she had 15 potential buyers in the room, some of them doing advocacy she didn't meet, need to meet them over individual coffee.
That's leverage, and it's how you move through the messy middle in the next phase of growth. So if you are sitting in the stretch right now feeling like things are harder than they should be, I want you to know something. You are not stuck. You're growing and it hurts. The business is asking for something different from you, and the discomfort you're feeling is the gap between where you are [00:16:00] and where you're headed.
And here's what I want you to do After listening to this. One, look at your pipeline. When did you last? Do any proactive relationship building or business development? If it's been more than two weeks, block time in your calendar this week and reach out to five people, past clients, warm contacts, anyone who already knows your work.
Two. Take a look at your pricing. Are you charging for time or outcomes? Is there room room to increase your average client value? Three, look at what you're still doing yourself that someone else could do. Pick one thing and outsource it this month, even if it's small, even if it's a hundred bucks on Fiverr.
And number four, look at your numbers. Actually look at them line by line. Know your profit margin, not just your revenue. The messy middle is temporary, but only if you're willing to change how you operate Now. The hustle that got you to a hundred grand, 200 [00:17:00] grand, it won't get you to 500 grand. Different phase, different approach.
And if any of this has hit home and you're thinking, I need some help to help me work through this, that's exactly what we do in our one-on-one coaching. 12 sessions over 12 months focused on your business. Deep dive, your numbers, your next move. You can book a clarity call with me through the link in the show notes.
We'll have a conversation about where you're at, what I can do to help, and whether coaching is even the right fit. No pressure, no pitch, just an honest chat.
