Your business plan is solid. Clear positioning, good offer, you know your market. And yet revenue hasn't moved in months. So you start questioning the strategy. Maybe the offer's wrong. Maybe you need to pivot. Except here's what I've noticed: when a business isn't growing despite solid strategy, the strategy is almost never the problem. The behaviour is. You're saying yes to the wrong things, undercharging, avoiding conversations, or recreating the same constraint in different packaging.

If you're googling "how much should a business mentor cost?" you've probably already tried the cheap options. The £50/hour coach. ChatGPT. The courses. And you're still stuck. Here's what I've noticed: you're asking the wrong question. The right question isn't "what should I pay?" It's "am I the person who needs someone to spot patterns I can't see?" Because if you've got strategies you don't implement, that's not an information problem.

She had terrible imposter syndrome about sales calls. Every time she got on a call, she felt like a fraud. "I just need to get over it," she said. "It's all in my head." Except it wasn't. She didn't have a sales process. No structure, no clear questions, no way to qualify prospects. She wasn't experiencing imposter syndrome – she was experiencing the accurate sensation of not knowing how to sell. The difference matters because one needs therapy and the other needs training.

She kept hiring the wrong people. Not once. Five times in two years. Different roles, different skillsets, same outcome. She's not stupid – she runs a successful business, she's strategic and thoughtful. But she couldn't see the pattern in her own decisions. Intelligence doesn't protect you from patterns. Smart founders make bad decisions repeatedly because the decision feels different each time. Different client, different context – but underneath, same pattern. And you can't see it from inside it.

You have a brilliant business plan. Clear positioning. Solid strategy. You know exactly what you need to do. You just don't do it. Not because you're lazy or lack time – you'll spend three hours reorganising Notion but can't find twenty minutes to email a prospect. This isn't procrastination. It's self-sabotage. And the difference matters because implementing would force you to find out if it works. What if it doesn't?

You've got the content strategy. You know what to post. You've probably got a list of ideas in your notes app. But you still don't post consistently. And every time you realise it's been two weeks, you blame yourself for lacking discipline. Except that's not it. The problem isn't discipline. It's capacity. You're cognitively maxed out, and posting is the first thing that drops when your brain is full.

Most founders try to fix burnout with employee solutions: better boundaries, more time off, improved work-life balance. Then they wonder why they still feel exhausted. Here's what they're missing: employee burnout is about overwork. Founder burnout is about cognitive load. You can take two weeks off and come back to find nothing has moved – because you're the single point of failure for everything. Rest doesn't reduce what you're holding in your head.

You left corporate to get away from unreasonable expectations. But you brought them with you. And now you're enforcing them more strictly than any manager ever could. In ten years of mentoring founders, I've noticed something uncomfortable: most of them are the worst boss they've ever had. To themselves.

You've spent thousands on business coaching. You have brilliant strategies you haven't implemented. You know exactly what's wrong with your business – you just can't seem to fix it. Here's the pattern I see constantly: founders hiring coaches when they need solutions, or hiring mentors when the real problem is behaviour. The difference isn't strategy vs psychology. It's knowing which tool to use when.