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Uncomplicating Business with Sara Torpey

Business gets WAY less complicated when you keep it human. In the Uncomplicating Business world, we use a simple, flexible four-part framework—ground, plan, connect, sell—to help you simplify decisions, set (and keep!) effective timelines, and show up consistently without burning out. You’ll hear bite-sized solo episodes and thoughtful interviews that turn messy challenges into actual actions, from pricing with confidence to building trust with yourself, your offers, and your community. Come for the clarity, stay for the momentum. Let's create *functional success* - where successful businesses are one part of our successful lives - together.

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Uncomplicating Business with Sara Torpey

How to Plan Your Way to More Clients

September 29, 2026 • Sara Torpey • Season 4 • Episode 17

0:00 | 16:41

This episode is for you if you're not getting the clients you want - and you're starting to wonder if the problem might be in how you're planning (or not planning).

This is part two of a series on what I look at as a coach when someone tells me they don't have enough clients. Last episode we talked about connection. This week we're talking about planning - because sometimes what's standing between you and more clients isn't effort. It's friction. And a lot of that friction is self-created.

Three things you'll walk away with:

**A goal is a direction, not a stick to beat yourself with. If you've given up on goals because they've never worked for you, it's probably not the goals - it's what you've been doing WITH them. Knowing where you're headed makes everything else simpler.

**Are you giving it long enough? Most offers need at least 12 weeks of consistent, diligent effort before you have enough information to know if something's wrong. If you're changing things every three weeks, you're not giving anything a real shot - and that's the problem, not the offer.

**Your actions need to actually match your goal. It sounds obvious, but it's one of the most common things I see: great goal, wrong actions. If your goal is getting to the grocery store, doing a workout isn't going to get you there. Same idea.

If planning is where you get stuck - making the plan is fine, doing the plan is the hard part - the Lab is exactly where this work gets done. 30-day free trial available through November 15, reach out directly to grab it.

Join the Uncomplicating Business Lab: https://www.torpeycoaching.com/thelab

Grab your free masterclass: https://torpeycoaching.kit.com/freemasterclass

Hi, welcome to Uncomplicating Business. I'm Sara Torpey. I am glad you're here. This week we are talking about what to do when the problem in your business, the core problem, is that you don't have the sales you want. Right, last week's episode, or two weeks ago, we were also talking about this problem. In when I have a business owner come to me for coaching, who says, "Hey, Sara, my real problem is that I don't have enough clients. The first set of things I do is look at sort of four core components.

The first one of those is connection and connectedness, because that's the easiest, simplest, most straightforward, fastest thing to fix. Right to not that it's broken and needed to fix, but to change. Right. The second thing that I look at is people's planning and how they're spending their time and how they are working towards goals. So, what we're going to talk about today in this episode is planning and the planning aspect of business as it relates to more clients, because as a business owner, everybody's goal ultimately is to create income and grow that income.

Right, like that's the base sort of expectation as of a business, and so we have to plan in ways and structures that allow that to happen with minimal friction. Sometimes I don't know. Maybe you know someone like this. Sometimes what we do instead of creating minimal friction for ourselves is create so much friction we don't get anything done, and then that's why we're not getting clients, because we're doing 50,000 tiny things instead of three big ones, and the three big ones that matter, or we're doing 50,000 tiny things and never the three ones that matter, right? So, if this is like, oh well, okay, and you are like, oh no, she's talking to me. Let's talk through some of the questions that I think about when I'm talking to someone about planning, where I suspect that that's the issue in their business. First, do you have a clear goal? Can you say to me, Sara, my goal is X thing in Y amount of time, and I understand so many of us have been burned by goals. Often, when people come to me, they say, "You know what? I just don't set goals anymore because they don't work for me. Listen, they don't work for you because you're using themselves using goals to beat yourself up. That's what's not working. Goals are just simply directional arrows that we can use to guide our actions.

If you know where you're headed, it's a lot easier to get there. It's not a stick that we used to beat ourselves, friends. So I understand, and I, you know, have my own relationship with goals and having a goal, and having a direction matters. Having a line in the sand that you're trying to reach matters. It's like if somebody, my daughter, just started her first week of cross country running. It's like if they said to her, "Here we're going to drop you off on this road. Just run until forever, until we come to get you, she would be like, "What the actual heck? Instead, they say, "Okay, you're starting here. Here's where we're ending up. Do what you need to do in between there. She knows where she's going. She's got the map. She's got an endpoint. It's way simpler for her brain to hold on to that with an endpoint. The same is true for you.

The second question is like, what kind of data do you have? And I don't mean like when I say the word data, people immediately think like spreadsheets and formal things. I'm talking qualitative, quantitative data is great. I like numbers, but qualitative data, like you know how many new people you've met, how many you know where you're spending your time, how you're spending your time, what kind of marketing efforts you're in, what happens when people do come to you for your support? Like, are they following through? Where is the process breaking down? Do you know where those places are? Because oftentimes the fixes aren't that complicated if we can use the data to identify. The spots in the plan that aren't holding up, right? The next thing is, do you know what's working?

Because I know, even when you're not getting the stream of clients you want, there are things that are working, and you are so focused on what's not working. This elephant in the room that is money and clients, that you're missing all the things that are, and often, what I see in businesses is, if we take the things that are working and turn the volume up on them, like let's say you are a really fabulous writer, and people connect to your writing, and you do well on Substack, for example.

But you don't know what to do with that. Well, we can turn up the volume on how you're using Substack, right? Let's say one of the things that you're really good at is connecting people to resources, except, and so when you meet people, you're like, oh, there's this, there's that, there's this, there's this. You do a ton of connecting when you meet people and they need something, and what you don't do is offer your own business in the mix. Well, that's got to be part of the plan. I recently had one of my one-on-one clients. She was saying to me, you know, I feel like when I send the proposal to people after we have a meeting, because she has like a service and she listens and then she sends proposals.

Actually, not anymore, but because of what she said to me, she says then they feel like they go into a black hole, like people don't respond. And what was happening? What we realized was when people got her proposals, it is a technical service that she offers. They were getting a little sticker shock, and then not closing the loop with her. And so what we are doing instead now, what she is doing instead now, is having that sharing proposal meeting with people live, instead of over email, they're getting a second touch point. They get to ask all their questions, and her close rate has gone up. Gosh, almost 75% Right, three out of four people now are saying yes, where it was like one out of four before, and it was just a simple change in plan. What does you know? That was an example of the next question, which is where does your plan break down? What my client in the last example knew was that the listening meetings were working.

She understood what people wanted and needed. She knew the proposals were good and clear. People told her that, but for whatever reason, what was breaking down was them closing the loop to say yes, and really responding to her. So we changed how that's done, right? We found a broken spot in the plan, or just a spot that wasn't working right, and adjusted. That's that's what we do here. The next question you don't like this one, no one likes this one, is are you giving it long enough? Because here's the thing. This is a good example. I am. I have spent the last 18 months on like a workout plan that was like one day I work out, 10 days, I forget it exists.

One day I work out, 10 days I forget it exists. I a couple weeks ago was like, okay, it's time, it's time, it's time to like get this together. And I literally on paper wrote myself a workout plan with check boxes that I have to like go downstairs and check off the workout and do the thing. I know. in building this habit, it's going to take me a couple of months to a get the habit and b see the results, or at least start to see the results. It is not a two week thing, right? Working out is not going to change the 18 months of ignoring it I've been doing in two weeks. So for you in business, we you know it's it's wild in workouts. You get it. You're like, of course, you don't like instant results. That's not how it works with food. Instant results not how it works with business.

We're like, well, but I tried it for two days and it didn't work, and I don't. I'm now I'm gonna do something different, right? And I actually had a client in the lab yesterday say to me, we jumped in a breakout room and co-working because she said I have this offer.

I've been sharing it with people. I think I need to adjust something, but I don't know if I actually need to adjust something or I just am being impatient, which was such a smart question, right? Because oftentimes the answer is we're just being impatient. We haven't stuck to it long enough for it to work. Think about how many times you see a Coca-Cola commercial, right? They keep telling you the same thing over and over and over again for days and months and weeks and years.

If you're out in the world and you have an offer and you've been sharing it really diligently for three weeks and nothing has happened yet, that doesn't mean anything's wrong, right? You gotta hear that. I often ask people to commit to an offer, to selling an offer, to learning to sell an offer, a particular offer, a specific offer, for six months, right? I'm giving myself 18 on the offer I'm working on now, right? Sticking with it really matters. That doesn't mean it won't get adjustment.

The client in the lab I talked to yesterday, we did actually not adjust her offer, but we adjusted who she's talking to, because she was feeling like the people she was speaking to was too general, and it was. So it was a really smart adjustment, but the offer itself didn't need changing. Just the people she was, the specificity of the people she was talking to needed changing. So we made that adjustment, and she was like, "Oh, so much better! And off she went, right? So for you, are you giving it long enough? Are you sticking with it long enough? It's you know, for most of the things you are doing and selling, the minimum is really 12 weeks. Doesn't mean you won't adjust in there in little bits-one degree, two degree, five degrees.

But if every three weeks you're like throwing out the baby in the bathwater and being like, "New baby, we there's a reason something's not working. The last questions are about actions. So if you know your goal, think about it this way: if you were, if your goal was going to the grocery store, right? If your goal is reaching the grocery store, the actions you aren't gonna take are doing a workout, sending emails, laying in the sun, like the actions that get you to the grocery store are putting your shoes on, getting in the car, driving the car, or walking to the store.

Maybe even remembering to bring your list. Sometimes what happens is we set a goal, and then the actions on our list are just the same actions that we do all the time, but they aren't actually relevant to our goal, or they're not the most relevant to our goal, right? I had a client say to me this week. She was like, "Well, I want this thing to be my goal, and then I'm going to do a webinar. I was like, "Well, but actually, does a webinar fit that goal? Ultimately, we decided it did, but initially it was a worthy question because she was like, "Oh, I don't know. We had to sort of work backwards to make sure the webinar she had been planning on doing a webinar all along wasn't just webinar for the sake of webinar, and that really matters. So for you today, what is your plan? What's your goal? What data do you have? What's working? What do you need to stick to longer? And what are the actions that actually match to the goal you have right now? What are the things you can put down that don't, and you can move forward from. This is all stuff we do in the uncomplicating business lab.

Planning is a core tenet of the lab. We ground, we plan, we connect, we sell. The there's a reason. This is part of what I talk about most when people come to me with not getting enough client issues because this is a core part of it. Planning matters, implementing matters, and for me, planning and implementing are the same. Right? You're doing the plan because a plan without doing is paper. If this is stuff, you're this is where you're like, yes, I make the plan. I'm great at making the plan. I'm not great at the implementing. I'm not great at knowing when I'm changing too soon.

I'm not great at knowing which actions fit the goal. I'm not great at setting the goal and staying accountable. Come into the complicating business lab. It is for you. That is why it exists. We sit down at the start of every month and plan. We sit down at the end of every month and evaluate and look at our data. We sit down once a week and co-work, and you can ask questions and ask for help and get direction, just like people did in co-working yesterday about the offer she was thinking maybe to adjust or not. All of this happens. Also, in the lab is a mini course on planning on like how actually to approach this in a way that might make it simpler for you, all of that is part and parcel of what happens in the lab.

Right now, through November 15, there is a 30-day free trial that you can have access to. It is not publicly available. It's available to people on my email list, to you listening. The podcast to people that I'm seeing at conferences in the next couple of weeks, and that's it. If it's something you'd like to try for 30 days, and then decide if you like and if you want to stay for free, come do that.

Please send me a note at sara torpeycoaching.com. Send me a LinkedIn message, whatever. Send carrier pigeon, however you want to do it, and I'll get you the link to start. I would love to see you there. I would love to do this work with you, and if it's work you need, doing it for free and getting some help would be great, right? Here's to planning in a way that is really effective and really supportive for what you're doing and actually works. Have a great day. I'll see you guys in two weeks.