Stop Asking What You Should Do. Ask What Creates Results.

One of the questions I hear constantly from ambitious women in business is, “What should I be doing?” What should I post? What should I launch? What should I focus on? What should I do next? Usually, those questions come with a very long to-do list and the feeling that there must be something else they should be doing.

But before you add another task to the list, I want you to ask a different question: What creates the result I actually want? That shift takes you out of constantly looking for the next thing to do and puts you back into strategic decision-making.

Strategy Is Not a To-Do List

Strategy isn't a list of productive things you could be doing. It's deciding which activities are most likely to create the outcome you want. Every business has inputs. That might be content, emails, networking, events, partnerships, ads, client delivery, or sales conversations. Then there are the outputs you actually care about: revenue, sales, retention, referrals, and profit.

The goal isn't to maximize every input. It's to understand which inputs are most likely to create the outputs that matter to your business. This is where I see business owners get stuck. You can post every day for a week, send four emails, or spend ten hours creating content and still not have made meaningful progress. The activity happened, but what did it produce?

Activity isn't automatically progress.

If your goal is to make more sales, I don't want you measuring your strategy by how many times you posted on Instagram. I want you looking at the actions that are actually contributing to sales. Those are two very different questions, and the second one gives you something useful to work with.

Stop Measuring Your Business by How Busy You Are

This becomes even more important when you don't have unlimited time. If you're a parent, have a team, work with clients, or simply don't want your business to consume every waking hour, you need to know what actually matters.

I'm not interested in a strategy that works because someone else has 70 hours a week to devote to their business. I want to know what matters most for your business when it comes to generating leads, making sales, retaining clients, creating referrals, and increasing profit.

Maybe 80% of your clients come through referrals, but you're spending 80% of your time on Instagram. Maybe your podcast generates your highest-quality inquiries, but you keep pushing it aside because you think Reels are more important. Maybe your existing clients are asking for another way to work with you, while you're spending all of your energy trying to find new people.

Those situations are worth paying attention to because they tell you something about where your effort is going compared to where your results are coming from. You don't need to do everything. You need to understand what is actually working.

Your Strategy Won't Look Like Everyone Else's

This is also why copying someone else's business strategy can be a problem. Someone else's highest-value marketing channel might be YouTube while yours is email. They might have a business model that depends on hundreds of smaller sales while you need ten high-value clients. Their business might thrive on volume while yours grows through relationships, referrals, and close client relationships.

There isn't one universal strategy that every business should follow. Your business has its own audience, offers, capacity, strengths, and goals. Your strategy needs to account for those things.

This is why generic advice can become so frustrating. There's always someone telling you what you should be doing, but the more useful question is whether that particular action makes sense for your business. Stop asking what everyone else is doing and start asking what your business needs.

Stop Treating Data Like a Judgment

This is one of the hardest shifts to make, especially when you've put a lot of effort into something. You spend weeks preparing for a launch and it doesn't hit your financial goal. You create an offer you believe in and the response is quieter than you expected. You publish content consistently and it doesn't generate the inquiries you hoped for.

It's easy to turn that information into a story about yourself or your business: Nobody wants this. This offer isn't working. Maybe I need to do something completely different. But a quieter launch can teach you something. A sales conversation can teach you something. A piece of content can teach you something. Even a lack of response can give you information.

Business gets easier when you stop treating data as judgment and start treating it as information.

Instead of saying, “My content isn't working,” get more specific. What was the content supposed to accomplish? What metric are you looking at? What result were you expecting?

The same goes for a launch. Rather than deciding that it failed and immediately creating something new, look at what actually happened. Who showed up? What did people respond to? Where did they hesitate? What did you learn?

Every month isn't going to be growth on top of growth. Sometimes the most valuable thing you get from an effort is a clearer understanding of what needs to change.

Choose the Lever That Matters

If you're feeling like you're doing a lot but aren't sure what's actually moving your business forward, take a step back and choose one goal for the next 90 days.

Then ask yourself: What are the three things most likely to create that goal?

Once you've identified them, look at your calendar. How much of your time is actually going toward those three things? Then ask yourself two more questions: What am I doing because it genuinely works? And what am I doing because I think a serious business owner is supposed to be doing it?

That second question can expose a lot of unnecessary work.

As your business grows, you need to become better at listening to feedback, paying attention to data, and making decisions based on what you're actually learning. You need to be willing to change direction when the information tells you to, without assuming that every disappointing result means you need to start over.

You may not need another idea, another offer, or another platform. You may simply need more focus on the things that are already creating results.

And if you're ready to stop spinning your wheels and start building a business with more intention, The Breadwinner is where I'd go next. It's for women who want to build a business that actually works for them, with the strategy, focus, and support to make better decisions about where their energy goes.

Join The Breadwinner and start building your business around what actually creates results.