Business Observations: Finding Friction

Episode 79 transcript: Business Observations: Finding Friction

Hey there, and welcome to Episode 79 of your fun and profitable online business. This is the podcast that helps you build a business that feels as good as it looks. I’m Wendy Muzzy, and I help women entrepreneurs create fun and profitable businesses by reducing friction, simplifying the way they work, and making decisions based on what actually moves the needle forward for them. Over the last couple of episodes, we’ve been putting our detective hats on. First, we talked about why observation comes before optimization. Then, last week, we turned that detective work inward and looked at ourselves, our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. And today, we’re taking one more step. We’re investigating the business itself. Because here’s something I truly believe. Your business is constantly talking to you. It’s giving you feedback every single day. The question isn’t whether your business is communicating. The question is, are you actually listening? All right, let’s dive in. One of the easiest traps to fall into is assuming you already know the answer to a problem. Sales are slow. I need a better offer. People aren’t buying. My prices must be too high. Someone doesn’t finish your course. They just weren’t committed. Maybe that’s all true. but maybe not. These are all conclusions, not observations. And if you’ve listened to the last couple of episodes, you already know where I’m going with this. We don’t want to jump straight to the verdict. We want to gather evidence first. Because businesses leave clues everywhere. Imagine walking into a room after a party. There are dirty dishes everywhere. There’s half-filled cups, a birthday cake, a pile of presents. Now, you can start to piece together what happened without ever having been there. But you might be wrong. And business works the same way. Every click, every question, every abandoned cart, every testimonial, every client conversation, every sale, every one of these leads evidence. The goal isn’t to collect more information just because it’s interesting. The goal is to become better at recognizing the patterns, because patterns tell us where to improve. They also tell us what’s already working. All right, let’s go over the four clues to following your business. Clue number one, friction. Let’s start with one of my favorite things to observe. It’s friction. Everything in your business either creates friction or removes it. And friction isn’t a failure. It’s just feedback. Let’s say people keep abandoning your checkout page. That’s not automatically a pricing problem. It’s just a clue. Maybe the checkout process is confusing. Maybe there’s something technical that isn’t working. Same information, different possible explanation. Or maybe you notice that every time you sit down to write your newsletter, it takes you three hours. That’s friction too. Here you could get curious about what part of the process feels heavy. Is it deciding a topic? Is it writing, editing, formatting, choosing a subject line, or just sending it? The more specific your observations become, the easier it becomes to remove any unnecessary friction. Because friction usually isn’t hiding in the entire project. It’s hiding in one small part of it. Clue number two, your systems. And when I say systems, I don’t necessarily mean fancy software. I mean, it’s the way your business operates. Your calendar is a system. Your onboarding is a system. Your content process is a system. Your website, your offers. Every one of those systems tells a story. For example, if multiple clients ask the same question over and over again, your onboarding is talking to you. If you’re constantly searching for files, your organization system is talking to you. If you miss following up with leads, your follow-up system is talking to you. The goal here isn’t to build perfect systems. The goal is to notice where it’s making life easier and where they’re making life harder. Because systems should reduce your decisions, not create more of them. Clue number three, your customers. One of the best sources of information in your business is your customers. They’re constantly telling you what matters to them, sometimes directly, but sometimes indirectly. Pay attention to the questions they ask before buying. Pay attention to the questions they ask after buying. Notice the words they use to describe their problems. Notice the emails they get replies. Notice which offers get people really excited. And notice what gets ignored. Your audience is constantly giving you clues about what resonates with them. The more you listen, the less guessing you’ll have to do. Clue number four, your numbers. I totally get that this is where some people want to run away because numbers can feel like a report card, but they’re not. They’re just observations, revenue, profit, website visitors, downloads, open rates, click rates, conversions, bookings. None of these numbers are trying to make you feel bad. They’re simply answering questions. They don’t have emotions. We do. If your email gets a low open rate, it isn’t saying you’re a bad marketer. It’s simply telling you that not that many people open this one. That’s all. Now your detective brain gets to ask, I wonder what’s happening here? That’s a much more useful question than I’m just terrible and awful at email. And don’t stop at the first number. This is where I think entrepreneurs get into trouble sometimes. We stop investigating too soon. Like imagine you launched a new offer. You make one sale. It is very tempting, and I totally get it, to say, well, I guess nobody wanted it. But if we look deeper, we can ask ourselves, how many people saw the offer? How many clicked on the sales page? Did people say they wanted it but needed more time? Did people say they didn’t understand what it was for? Every answer points to a different opportunity. Maybe the offer wasn’t the issue at all. Maybe it was visibility or your messaging or people love the offer but just were confused. One result can have dozens of possible explanations. That’s why observations matter so much here. Because if we assume the wrong thing, we’ll start solving the wrong problem. Also, look for patterns. One event is rarely enough information to make a big decision. One unsubscribe, that’s not a problem. One refund, not a problem. One quiet launch, not a problem. But three launches where people stop at the same point, that’s a pattern. Multiple clients saying they loved one specific part of your process, that’s a pattern too. Remember that success leaves clues too. Sometimes we become detectives only when something goes wrong. But when something goes really, really well, stop to ask yourself why just as often as you do when something doesn’t go well. It gives us clues just as often a struggle does. When an email gets an unusually high open rate, ask what made it different. When someone buys immediately after reading one paragraph on your sales page, that’s evidence. Collect it. Because if you understand why something worked, you can intentionally do more of it again. Let’s get to your action step for this week. I want you to pretend that you’re a detective assigned to your own business. Every time something catches your attention, write it down. When a client asks you a question you’ve never heard, write it down. When you avoid the same task three days in a row, write it down. When someone replies to your email with a phrase you’ve never heard before, write it down. You notice yourself smiling because a client call felt incredibly smooth? Write that down too. Then at the end of the week, read through your notes. I have a feeling you’ll start seeing patterns you’ve never noticed before. All right. Over the last three episodes, we learned how to become better observers in our business. We observed ourselves and we observed our business. Next week, we’re going to talk about using observations to ask better questions. Now, if you’ve loved this conversation about noticing areas of friction in your business, but you’re not sure where to start, come join us at the next CEO Hour. We host them most every Wednesday and we spend an hour making meaningful progress together. It’s a chance to step out of reacting and to intentionally moving your business forward one focused work session at a time. You can save your free seat at wendymuzzy.com/ceo. And if this observation series has been helpful for you, I’d be really grateful if you’d share it with another entrepreneur who could use the reminder that the answers they’re looking for might already be hiding right in front of them. All right, that’s it for today. Until next time, happy building your fun and profitable business.