In March, I sent out a 1-question survey to my local women's groups in which I am a member (Women in Consulting, and eWomen Network in San Jose). Thirty-two entrepreneurs shared their answers with me. Here is what they said was their number one challenge to growing their business this year:

53% answered with some form of marketing or selling challenge, such as finding clients, prospects, and leads given economy, tighter budgets, more competition. Messaging, Pricing, Social media.

22% answers fell into planning/strategy: higher level biz dev, partnering, finding opportunities, resource management

9% mentioned time

9% mentioned staffing issues

6% of the answers were mindset-related - focus, self-discipline

Over half of the entrepreneurs, mostly women, considered marketing to be their greatest challenge, and only six percent of women felt they needed to work on mindset. I'm going to make a bold statement here and say that those two percentages should be reversed.

In other words, most people should be working on mindset, and for very few is the issue really marketing. The problem is they can't see it from where they are in their business.

It wasn't until I took a giant leap and joined a very expensive, high-end coaching problem that I saw what I needed to do in my business to gain a quantum leap. After I got behind the scenes and studied how these women got a net change in revenues of anywhere from half a million to two million in one year, I finally figured it out. I would never have figured it out on my own. And so, even though I do want more clients, I'm not working on marketing; I'm working on something else in my business.

Only a coach or someone much farther along than you in your business can help you take a quantum leap; I feel that it's almost impossible without help.

So until these women figure out that they what they really need to do is work on mindset and not marketing, time, or even staffing issues, they will continue to work on getting more clients. Are you one of them?