About 20 percent of small businesses fail in the first year. By year five, half are gone. By year ten, only 30 percent remain. I’ve spent 25 years working with entrepreneurs, and I can tell you: the failures rarely come from bad ideas or bad products. They come from internal patterns that never get examined.
I call them saboteurs. Not because the people running these businesses are sabotaging themselves on purpose—but because these patterns operate just below the surface, quietly undermining momentum while the conscious mind searches for an external explanation.
Here are the seven I see most often. Read through them honestly. The ones that sting a little are probably the ones worth sitting with.
Saboteur 1: Undervaluing What You Offer
This one shows up early. Before a client even asks about price, the entrepreneur starts mentally discounting—offering sliding scales, free sessions, deep cuts—driven by a fear that no one will pay full price.
The fear feels like pragmatism. It isn’t. It’s a belief about your own worth wearing a business hat.
The shift is to anchor your pricing in purpose and vision rather than fear of rejection. Know what your work is worth. Stand in that. Then focus your energy not on discounting, but on getting your offer in front of more people who are ready to receive it.
Saboteur 2: Living in Other People’s Opinions
This is one of the most formidable saboteurs I encounter. It shows up as fear of reaching out, fear of rejection, a constant need to be liked—and underneath all of it, a belief that your worth is determined by what other people think of you.
It can also flip into its shadow form: They don’t understand me. They don’t see the problem. They’re not my people. Either version keeps you from actually connecting with the people you’re meant to serve.
The shift is to root yourself in what you know to be true about your work. You have a gift that is genuinely valuable. Some people will recognize it immediately. Others won’t, and that tells you nothing about the gift itself. Stay focused on your own truth and keep moving.
Saboteur 3: The Shiny Object
Building a business requires a significant amount of repetition. Social media posts. Follow-up calls. Tracking metrics. Consistent outreach. None of it is glamorous. And for many creative, visionary people, the moment it becomes routine is the moment a new idea starts calling.
We live in a culture of constant stimulation. When something stops being exciting, the brain reads it as a signal to move on. But in business, the boring work is often the most important work. The ability to be consistent even when you’re bored is not a personality trait—it’s a skill, and it can be developed.
Self-discipline, at its core, is choosing what you want most over what you want right now. You already have this capacity in other areas of your life. The work is to locate it and transfer it here.
Saboteur 4: The Technical Wall
Many deeply talented, creatively gifted people hit a wall when business requires technical skills: managing social media, learning CRM software, running email campaigns, editing video. The overwhelm is real. And for some, it becomes the reason they never fully launch.
The solution is straightforward, even if it isn’t always easy: outsource what you can, learn what you must, and don’t let a skill gap become a story about your limitations. Technical skills are learnable. Once your mindset is solid, you become more resourceful—more willing to ask for help, more resilient when something doesn’t work the first time.
Don’t let the tech stop you. It’s a tool, not a gatekeeper.
Saboteur 5: Perfecting Instead of Delivering
One more slide. One more tweak to the website. One more version of the sales page. I’ll reach out once this is finally right.
Perfectionism is often mistaken for high standards. But in most cases, it’s a very sophisticated way of avoiding the moment when someone can say no. As long as the thing isn’t finished, it can’t be rejected.
The truth is that nothing is ever quite right at the outset. Real improvement happens through feedback and iteration—through actually putting your work into the world and seeing how it lands. The solution is to start, deliver, observe, and improve. You cannot improve something no one has seen yet.
Saboteur 6: Wearing Too Many Hats
When you start a business alone, you do everything. That’s necessary and normal at the beginning. But at some point, being the center of every wheel becomes a ceiling. You have genuine strengths—and you probably have real gaps too. Trying to do it all yourself means the gaps go unaddressed and the strengths go underused.
Growth requires delegation. That means trusting other people enough to let them do work you would otherwise do yourself. It means believing in your product and mission enough to invest in building a team—even a small one. As you develop your communication and leadership skills, help will come. The key is to be willing to let go and let others shine alongside you.
Saboteur 7: Coasting on Comfortable
This one is sneaky because it looks like success. You’ve built a stable client base. Things are steady. You stop actively prospecting because, well—things are fine.
But “fine” is not a growth strategy. Clients leave. Life changes. Markets shift. If you’ve stopped building relationships and acquiring new clients, you’re not maintaining your business—you’re slowly losing it.
The solution is to keep a balance between nurturing existing clients and actively building new ones—from the very beginning. Don’t wait until you need new clients to remember how to find them. It’s always easier, as I like to say, to attract the living than to revive the dead.
Insight Isn’t Enough
Reading this list and recognizing yourself in it is a start. But recognition alone doesn’t change behavior. The patterns above are deeply wired—many of them formed long before you started your business. They don’t dissolve from a single moment of awareness.
What changes them is consistent practice, honest accountability, and the kind of support that helps you catch yourself in the pattern—not just understand it in retrospect.
That’s the work I do with clients. And it’s available to you.