The Ultimate Guide to Avoiding the 'Doom Loop': Climbing Your Way to Success with a Strategic Business Staircase

By Dino Tartaglia.

Whether you’ve been in the entrepreneurial space for a few years or are a bright, shiny newbie, one thing is a stone-cold certainty. You’ve fallen prey to guessing what works and what doesn’t.

All too frequently, I find myself talking with business owners who are brilliant at what they do but who just can’t quite seem to put their finger on what’s holding them back. So they buy All The Things, join All The Programmes, follow All The Gooroos… but fundamentally, nothing gets truly better.

In short, they invest vast sums of money, time, effort, focus and trust, and 1… 2…3… 5 years later, they’re effectively in precisely the same place in terms of their understanding of what to focus on and what to leave well alone and why.

If this is you, you’re in good company. So strap in for the ride, and let’s examine why this happens and what you can (and hopefully will) do about it. 

The Staircase of Doom

At Success Engineers, we’ve found that it is entirely possible to engineer your business (and personal) success. In fact, it’s why we coined the term and, thus, the name of our own coaching business. There’s a ‘trick’ to this, a systematic method that - when applied properly - will eliminate the ‘unknowing’ and bring you total clarity and understanding of what you need to do, where your actual problems are, and how to solve them. The mechanic is also surprisingly basic and simple (as most real, grounded solutions are).

‘Stairstep’ it.

Simply put, figure out the overall objective, i.e., what you actually want to happen, and then build a staircase—a series of specific steps—to take you from where you are to where you need/want to be. Use this mechanism to build out anything and everything you want to achieve.

BUT… and this is a big but.

Don’t attempt to ’leap’ ahead and miss a step or three out.

Because that’s what you’ve probably been unwittingly doing your whole entrepreneurial life, and look where that’s gotten you. You might have built a beautiful staircase, but without a handful of critical components, it’s ended up closely resembling something MC Escher would have designed and has you caught in the grip of a neverending ‘Doom Loop’.

So, now that we’re aware of all this, how do we—literally—take the first step?

What actions do you need to take to break the cycle and make tangible progress toward what actually matters to you? 

Building a Strategic Business ‘Staircase’

In our Excellerator coaching and accountability group, we teach a handful of simple, basic things that every single entrepreneur needs to have in place before putting serious effort into climbing the staircase before spending all those precious resources on doing stuff that simply won’t work but - worse still - will mess with their head and destroy their confidence in themselves and their ability to ever build a solid business that has an impact in the world.

The process truly is simple, but don’t ever confuse ‘simplicity’ with ‘ease’. These are usually strange bedfellows. Complexity and ease as a pairing, on the other hand? Distressingly common: complexity is super-easy to create - we do it ALL the time.

Here’s how to avoid that trap. Each of the numbered steps below forms the basis of your staircase:

1. Decide what you want to achieve/have, the lifestyle you want and why all this matters to you.
2. Put a number on this. How much will it take to fund it? 
3. Decide what you want to do or provide to the world and why that matters - really matters - to you.
4. Identify what problem this solves for your initial market and why that matters for them [don’t guess this - ask them!]
5. Now, work out what initial service or product you want to provide that is useful for your target client. Not ‘valuable’ - that’s down to them to determine - just useful*
6. Then, put a price on this such that the prospective (ideal) client can get a 2x - 5x return (minimum) in terms of the currency that matters most to them right now, eg money, time, reputation, Identity, [less] effort, etc. (Note: people buy in a variety of ‘currencies’ and will always pay more of the one they value less for the one they value the most - time-poor people will pay good money to get their time back, for example)
7. Next, work out your business model, and from this, we can calculate what you need to sell - this is where SO many business owners go awry.

A business model is simply how you get paid for your work.

It’s nothing more complex than that, but we complicate the backside out of this basic principle. I’ll explain a straightforward 3-tier model below in a few mins.

* Something to chew on - and where most marketers, business coaches and ‘gooroos’ get it wildly wrong. We don’t determine ‘value’ - value is in the mind of the beholder. We produce or offer something that is inherently useful to our client and then only sell to those clients who have the capacity and the desire to extract the value from that thing and can turn this into a 2x-5x ROI [return on investment]. 

If you need a more in-depth explanation of this and how you can apply this principle, come and chat with me.

Now that we have this 7-step staircase, what else should we know about or look out for?

Beware of ‘Paint By Numbers’ Business Blueprints

It would be the easiest thing in the world to close off this article at this point and say that this is all you need. Honestly, this is exactly where other coaches and marketers get this painfully (and expensively) wrong. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a blueprint - ‘the’ way to build or do something - if it’s the same for everyone, like a house, or a piece of electronic equipment, or a boat.

However, when it comes to defining and mapping out your path to success, frameworks and models are far more useful. Why? Because inevitably, what worked for the gooroo who sells you their way is their way, not yours.

And where this becomes apparent - and why we fall prey to the paint-by-numbers, ‘step-by-step’ solutions we keep buying - is not in the steps themselves, but in the gaps in between… in the climb from Step 1 to Step 2 to Step 3, and so on.

The learning, the adapting, the understanding, the character development that comes from figuring out how to move from step to step to step, that’s where the growth and, therefore, our capacity and capabilities as business owners come from. And no blueprint will give you that.

However, a small, focused community of good people and solid guidance on testing and learning from each step can and will do this IF you’re prepared to commit to the process. You can ‘engineer’ your success, but you can’t - you won’t - do this if you keep trying anything and everything that promises success but inherently sells you the idea of shortcutting the process because, as a very wise mentor of mine once said, “The process IS the shortcut”.

But it has to become your process, not someone else’s blueprint.

And that takes commitment, focused - often uncomfortable - effort, and no small amount of care, support, accountability and guidance. 

Welcome to our world

At Success Engineers, we start with who you are, not who you think you are. That way, you learn to build a plan for you, not some future vision of you or the guy or gal who sold you the ‘guaranteed blueprint’ of how to do X or Y (like FB Ads, build a business, become a coach, attract perfect clients ‘effortlessly’ or whatever other thing that worked for them, but has almost 0% chance of working for you) which brings me nicely to Character-led Business™

This is the core of our entire philosophy at Success Engineers.

Character is an outward expression of our Identity, of who we believe ourselves to be, and how we relate to the world around us. It encompasses characteristics, or ‘traits’, like Courage, Tenacity, Composure, Consistency, and Integrity. I have a saying regarding the focus on Mindset (or ‘Mental Game’, as we call it), “Traits before States”. WHO you are determines HOW you act, not the ‘state’ you adopt. Long-term behaviours are a function of Character, not Mindset (which is your moment-to-moment thinking and decision-making). Character is at the centre of everything humans do. If you want to learn about a person, observe their Character in action.

Character drives Outcomes

So, go back to how you view your business and what you’re doing to try to force or push for growth or even (if you aren’t doing that) how you’re focused on stabilising your income; take a look at what you’re trying to accomplish, and look through the lens of what we’ve explored and discussed in this article then apply the simple mechanics of the 7 Steps I shared with you. 

Can you say, hand on heart, that you’ve diligently gone through this entire process and have completed each of these steps in a way that speaks to who you are and how you actually roll? (BTW, if the answer’s ‘No’ to that, you’re in great company; it took me SEVEN years to sort this stuff out in my businesses).

It’s ALL about YOU!

At Success Engineers, our sole focus is helping you Build a Thriving Business around being Brilliant at what you do so that you can get closer to the things that Actually Matter Most to you. We do this together by showing you how to grow better, build better, and BE better, and we support you through that growth as a business owner.

ALL change for the better starts with behavioural and personal change, and no one does that successfully on their own, not if they’re in business for the long game. Something that I hope you’ve already figured out if you’re a member of The Female CEO FB group and / or have been reading this magazine for any length of time is this…

No one wins alone.

You alone are responsible for your success, but you should never BE alone on your journey. Choose your guides and companions carefully.

The clues will ALWAYS be in the quality of the information that is shared with you, the vibe & how it resonates with you, and in how much of a hurry the business, coach or individual is to have you take up an offer or fall in line with their way of doing or thinking about things.

You must follow the Fundamentals, but your path is unique to you.

To your inevitable success.

Dino Tartaglia is a former Electronics Engineer, now a businessman, mentor, coach and troubleshooter working to help you, if you’re a coach, consultant, creative or service provider, to Build a Joyful, Dependable Business around Being Brilliant at What You Do. 

In his own coaching, and together with world-class coach Simon Hartley, the other half of Success Engineers (their joint business), he helps you to improve your thinking to ask better questions, so that you solve the right problems in your business at the right time, develop your own personal performance as a business owner and get closer to What Matters Most. 

You can find Dino in our FB Group , on his  website or on any of these other locations; Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram |PodCast - Back Bedroom to Big Business