Building a successful business takes patience. Results rarely appear immediately, and there is often a gap between the effort you put in today and the outcomes you see in the future. Consistently showing up, even during quieter periods, helps build trust, strengthen relationships and create opportunities that may not become visible for weeks or months. Keep planting the seeds through steady action, because today's work is laying the foundations for tomorrow's growth.
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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.
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I want to just talk about the gap between effort and results and the patience that it basically asks of us, because this is one of the hardest things about running a business, and almost nobody warns you about it. When you do something in your business, you naturally want to see it work. You want that kind of instant feedback. So, for example, you write the post, you send the email, you have the conversation, and some part of you is watching for the result. Did it land? Did anyone respond?
Sumantha (:
Did it bring anything in? And when the answer appears to be no or not yet, it's very easy to conclude that that thing didn't work and then to stop doing it because you don't feel motivated. But businesses, they don't run on a kind of immediate cause and effect. There's a lag built into almost everything, a delay between the work you do and the moment it bears fruit. And that delay can be long enough to make you doubt yourself completely if you don't understand that it's there.
Sumantha (:
I've certainly felt it. Fortunately, I've usually pushed through and trusted the process, and I've seen that pay off time and time again. So I'm really speaking from a place of confidence here because I have experienced it so many times. I think about it like planting. When you put a seed in the ground, you don't stand over it the next morning furious that there's no plant or tree. You understand instinctively that there's a season between the planting and the growing.
Sumantha (:
And you understand that what's happening underground is invisible for a long time before anything breaks the surface. You'd never dig the seed back up just because you couldn't see it doing anything yet. Your business works in much the same way. The email you send today might do its real work in three months. The relationship you nurture now might turn into a client next year. The quiet consistency of the summer, the showing up when it feels like nothing's happening, is laying down roots that you won't see for a while.
Sumantha (:
This matters enormously for how you feel during, especially during slow stretches. Because if you judge a quiet week purely on what came back that week, you'll be miserable and you'll keep abandoning good things just before they're about to work. So much giving up happens right at the edge of a result by people who simply couldn't see how close they were. So I would love you to hold a slower, more trusting view of your own efforts. Of course.
Sumantha (:
Consistency and strategy matters as well, but so does just showing up and putting in the effort, even when you're not quite feeling like it's worth it. Because often that's that's when you are on the cusp of of that of that result accumulating over time and compounding. The work that you're doing now in these quieter weeks isn't disappearing, it's going somewhere, it's settling in, it's taking root, it's getting ready.
Sumantha (:
You won't always be able to trace the line between what you did and eventually what came of it. But the line is there. So keep planting, trust the season. Because what you do when things are quiet or when you're not feeling like you're getting that return has a way of showing up later, often when you have kind of half forgotten that you ever did that thing.
