Help! Why is my business so clunky?
Many of my summer days as a kid were spent in my Papa's hot, dusty autobody shop. The air was always thick with the sharp tang of motor oil and paint thinner, a smell that clung to my clothes and hair long after I left. I'd watch him hammer out dents, sand away rusted edges, and give old cars new life.
A few years later, I sat quietly in the corner of our garage as my mom rebuilt an entire transmission because we couldn't afford a new one. Every piece had to be taken out, cleaned or replaced, and carefully put back together before it could work again.
I didn't realize it then, but those hours watching them work taught me that things we love could be rebuilt into newer, better versions of themselves.
Lately, I've been thinking about how much that same principle applies to business, especially for female founders who've built multi-six- and seven-figure companies. Many have thriving, growing businesses that should be running smoothly, yet behind the success, something feels off.
The systems that once made everything click are now grinding under the weight of growth or the need for change. The work that used to feel fluid now feels strained and sluggish, a sure sign the business has outgrown its original design. It's subtle, but they can feel it.
A tune-up is not a transmission rebuild
As I was writing this, I started comparing my mom's transmission rebuild and my Papa's bodywork. They are not the same job. In my mom’s case, she had to pull the whole system apart. With Papa, it was really about finding the dents or the rusty spots and fixing them.
Often, we don’t need to do a full rebuild or rip the system apart. When we get under the hood and get honest about where the pain point is, it’s much easier to swap out the bit that’s broken, fine tune the system, or smooth out the rough edges.
That's what Refine actually is. Something isn’t working quite the way it should, and it needs attention before it gets worse. That’s not a sign to deconstruct the whole thing.
What Refine actually looks like
When you’re in the Refine stage, it can show up in a handful of familiar ways.
A process that used to run itself now needs constant babysitting. A client used to have a simple intake process, someone filled out a form, it triggered an email, and they were booked. Now that she's added three service tiers, that same form routes people to the wrong calendar half the time and someone has to catch it manually every week.
A team member who's stretched beyond capacity or is being asked to do things that exceed their skill level. A client hired her first ops person to handle scheduling and client communication. As the business grew, that same person started handling billing, light copywriting, and customer escalations, none of which were ever part of the role. Now small things are slipping, customers aren’t happy, and nobody can figure out why.
Automation that made sense when you were smaller and now creates more work than it saves. A client set up an email sequence years ago that nurtured leads over two weeks before they ever talked to sales. Her offer has changed twice since then, and now she's manually pulling people out of the sequence and writing one-off emails because the automation is still selling the old version of the business.
A business model straining under the weight of the growth it created. A client built her business as 1:1 coaching, and it worked well up to about 8 clients. At 12, she's still the only one delivering, and she's turning away the exact kind of clients she used to be excited to work with because there's no room left on her calendar.
Your messaging is still pulling people into your pipeline, but they are no longer the "right" people. A client's messaging was built around a client who wanted fast, done-for-you results. She's since shifted to a more collaborative, DWY offer, but the marketing still speaks to the old client. Half her discovery calls end in "this isn't really what I'm looking for.”
None of these mean the business is broken, but left unchecked, those aches and pains turn into much bigger problems down the road.
Refine vs. Reinvent
I think it’s important to distinguish between these two spaces. It’s easy to look at something in your business, especially when it’s a critical lynch pin, and catastrophize. I see this a lot with business owners who are experiencing a slow down. The spiral begins and the next thing you know, they’re redesigning offers, changing their message, tweaking their audience…
That spiral results in changing things that don’t need to be changed, and then you’re dealing with a different problem. I tend to think of Refine as digging into the symptom, making a small change, and things shift.
Reinvent is usually multi-system failure, where urgent help is needed, and it requires a much deeper diagnostic and a clear, prioritized way to tackle the problem.
The list vs. the actual cause
I know we’re heavy on the car analogies today, but I think they do a good job of explaining why it’s important to figure out what is actually wrong vs tinkering.
Recently, we took my daughter’s car into the shop. It was running rough, the check engine light was on, and she kept saying it wasn’t accelerating very well. The technician ran the diagnostic and it came back with a long laundry list of things that needed to be addressed: brakes, belts, fluids, the works.
It would have been easy to just start working down the list. There were definitely things on there that needed to be fixed, but the thing actually causing her problem wasn’t even listed.
As I got into a deeper conversation with the technician and explained that I didn’t think any of these things would actually address the sluggish feeling and the way the car was running roughly, he took another look. That’s when it became clear the problem was actually the spark plugs.
If we'd gone with the obvious repairs, we'd have spent the money and the time and still had the same underlying issue.
Founders and business owners get handed their own version of that list constantly.
Add more content.
Raise your prices.
Hire a VA.
Post more consistently.
Network more.
Tweak your offer.
Create a digital course.
Some of it might even be true, but none of it tells you which one is actually the drag on your business. Working down the list instead of finding the actual cause means you can do a lot of "fixing" and still feel the same friction six months from now.
What should you do?
Find where the friction actually lives, not what you assume it is. Go beyond the obvious answers that you hear everyone telling you, like we did with the spark plugs.
Once you've found the real cause, fix that before touching anything else. Resist the urge to overhaul everything at once, that's how a Refine turns into a self-inflicted Reinvent, and ain’t nobody got time for that!
Revisit Your Business Design
This is a step straight out of my S.T.R.A.T.E.G.Y. method, the one I use with my own clients and in my own business. Revisit Your Business Design is where you stop and ask whether the way your business is built still matches what it actually needs to do now, and if the right systems are in place to make that happen. Ask yourself:
Where did your clients actually come from this year vs where you assume they came from?
What was your biggest money maker, and does your time and energy actually reflect that?
Where are the gaps between how the business is designed and what it’s really doing?
Are the tools and systems you're using today ones you chose for this stage of the business, or leftovers from an earlier one?
Where an outside eye matters here
With Refine, founders often can't find the friction point because they’ve built a lot of workarounds in order to keep things running. When you bring someone into your business with fresh eyes and lots of questions, they can help you quickly hone in on the root problem.
It's easy to get caught up in your own laundry list of things that need fixing… but it's better to find someone who can help you cut through the noise and figure out it's the spark plug. That same outside eye is also what keeps you from swinging too far the other way, catastrophizing a loose part into a full teardown you never needed.
Next week, we’re going deep into Reinvent, where it’s not just one part that’s dragging but the whole system that needs an overhaul. If you haven’t yet taken the diagnostic to figure out which bucket you’re navigating, you can do that here!
