Overdelivery is strangling your business: 3 steps to break the cycle
Overdelivery is good for business because it keeps clients coming back.
Right?
Wrong.
When you’re trapped in the cycle of habitual overdelivery, 4 things happen – and between them, they’re strangling your business:
Time creep: your work consistently consumes more of your time, than it pays for.
Stasis: business development stalls, because you can’t make space to think
Scarcity mindset: you convince yourself that you MUST keep overserving, to retain those time-hungry clients
Plummeting self-worth: you stop believing that your actual service is ‘enough’
It’s the toxic cocktail of logistical problems (the time creep, the stasis) and mindset problems (the scarcity, the low self-worth) that keeps you stuck – so if you want to break that cycle you need to tackle both.
Here’s the most important reframe to embrace, so you can break that cycle for good:
Overdelivery is strangling your business because it keeps THE WRONG clients coming back.
These are the three steps that will break your overdelivery cycle and create the space your business needs to flourish:
1: Take responsibility
Your first task is to accept that the root of the problem lies with YOU: not with your clients.
If too many people have built up unsustainable expectations in terms of what they get from you vs what they pay for, it’s because you’ve allowed them to.
It usually starts in the early days of your business:
You were excited and grateful to take on your first clients.
Your time wasn’t (yet) in high demand so you could afford to do that little bit more for them – you didn’t mind if it took a little longer (or a lot longer)
You wanted to make sure they have a great experience working with you –
So you kept giving more, more, more.
Meanwhile, in your mind, you created the idea that this more, more, more is what your clients ‘expect’ from you, and that you must, therefore, continue to overdeliver in the same way for the next client, the next client, and the next.
The original equation:
Client pays X, you deliver Y
Gradually creeps into
Client pays X, you deliver Y+
Client pays X, you deliver Y++
Client pays X, you deliver Y+++
And so on.
And before you know it, you no longer believe that X is worth Y. You accept that when a client pays you X, you need to deliver Y+++++. Even if that is running you into the ground. Even if you’re starting to resent it.
You have conditioned yourself and your clients to expect this level of overdelivery from you. You did it from a place of kindness – but now it’s strangling your business.
2: Create clarity
If you didn’t set clear boundaries at the start of your business, it’s time to do so now.
When I help clients break free from their overdelivery cycle, we start by getting really clear about the situation they’re in right now.
Overdelivery usually goes hand-in-hand with a lack of visibility around where your time REALLY goes: and as a business owner, your time is your most precious asset.
Commit to tracking your time over a week, with an online timer or timesheet – because only by doing that, will you truly see:
Exactly HOW MUCH you’re overdelivering right now
Exactly WHERE your time is really going
You can now determine exactly where your future boundaries need to sit, to grant you the space and time to take control of your business and your client relationships, so you and your business can flourish again.
3: Find Focus
To break free from overdelivery for good, you will need to accept this:
Some clients are bad for your business and you cannot keep working with clients like these.
You need to change the way that you and your business show up, so that you attract ONLY those clients who recognise the true value of what you do – and repel the rest.
This will be a huge challenge to your scarcity mindset: your overdelivery habit has conditioned you to believe that you are not enough; that money is hard to earn and that fundamentally, you need to give more than you get.
You have fallen into a way of thinking that says anyone who wants to work with you is a ‘good’ client: but in fact, thanks to your overdelivery habit you are consistently attracting the wrong ones:
People who are buying your (too-low) price tag and not your true value.
Practically ALL of the work I do with my clients, hinges around building and consolidating a really clear sense of who are your IDEAL clients and what they want and need from you: because your IDEAL client is the person who appreciates the worth and value of your work.
This is a deep piece of work: it demands that you:
Dive into your own superpowers and your WHY; tackle your imposter syndrome head-on to embrace your zone of genius;
Buy back in to your own true value: OWN the transformation that you deliver, so that you can express it with clarity and believe in it.
Get really clear on the belief systems, the ambitions, the outlook and intentions that make someone an IDEAL client for you: someone who wants and needs that transformation, right now.
Refocus your offer, your pricing and your message for that person, to create a perfectly clear, perfectly balanced value exchange where BOTH parties win.
It may feel counter-intuitive to you right now, to focus on attracting a particular type of client, when you’re already overdelivering to retain the mix of clients you have right now – but until you do it, you will keep on attracting more and more of the WRONG kind of clients.
You will keep yourself trapped in overdelivery and overwhelm, serving people who don’t recognise your true value; who expect to get more than they pay for. People who are living in the same kind of scarcity mindset that you are in right now; believing that they can’t afford to invest fully in the support they need; buying the price tag and not the value.
This is the work that I do with my clients, both 1:1 and through my small-group programmes.
Book a call with me to see how I can help you do the same.