Mindset, Sales, and the Truth About Why Businesses Fail

Recently, I interviewed with a TV station in the South. This company owns several stations, so stories are shared quickly across its network. One story that kept circulating was about a woman in North Carolina who won over $50 million in the lottery about 6 years ago. Today, she is flat broke and roughly half a million dollars in debt.

During the interview, the young man asked me the question everyone always wonders: How does something like this happen so often?

My answer was simple: mindset.

If you have a broke mindset, you will continue doing what broke people do. Money doesn’t fix a mindset. Money exposes it. If your thinking hasn’t grown, your results won’t either. That conversation reminded me of something I see often in business: people stepping into entrepreneurship with the wrong mindset right from the start.

I was thinking specifically about a building in Lafayette, Louisiana. It sits in one of the most prime locations you could ever ask for. Close to fifty thousand cars pass by that building every single day. That is about 1.5 million cars a month. You would think any business sitting in that kind of traffic would thrive. But every company that has occupied that building has gone out of business, every single one.

What do they all have in common?

They don’t advertise.

Some of them put up a sign so small you can barely read it from the street. Others open their doors with an “if I build it, they will come” mentality. That mentality is a one-way ticket to shutting down. Business is not magic. Success is not automatic. Sales are the lifeblood of every organization. Nothing in business happens until a sale occurs.

People who say, “I’m not a salesperson,” should not go into business. That mindset alone predicts failure. Everyone in business is in sales, whether they want to admit it or not. The people who underestimate the power of sales or don’t take the time to understand the sales process are the ones who get blindsided.

Sales is a process. And once you understand it, that knowledge becomes gold. Not understanding it becomes poison.

Today, the number of people calling themselves influencers has exploded. But now many are learning the hard truth: popularity does not equal profitability. A pretty girl with four million followers may look impressive, but if those followers won’t buy anything, then what is the value? Will people spend forty-five thousand dollars on a Cadillac because Ashley danced to a Nelly song on Instagram? If they will, great, that’s conversion. If they won’t, then it’s fluff. You’re not paying for influence; you’re just paying someone to be cute on camera.

Real sales happen when trust, understanding, and connection exist. Customers come in all shapes, sizes, cultures, and backgrounds. You have to know how to connect with them—being liked matters, and being trusted matters even more.

And here’s the truth that too many ignore:

You are not going to win without sales. And you will never win at all if you don’t advertise.

Look at the biggest brands in the world. Coca-Cola is one of the strongest brands on the planet, yet it still spends millions and millions of dollars on advertising, especially during winter, when soda sales traditionally slow down. Why do they keep advertising? Because they understand that visibility is survival.

On the other hand, look at RC Cola. Fifty years ago, RC was one of the top soft drink brands in America. Then they slowed down and eventually stopped advertising because they believed their position was strong enough. You see the result: they faded from the public’s mind. Today, with new ownership, they are trying to reinvent and reemerge, but they are fifty years behind.

Mindset is everything. The right mindset understands that growth requires consistency. That business requires visibility. Customers need reminders that the world is loud, competitive, and constantly shifting.

Your mindset should be one of abundance, growth, sales, and advertising.

It takes work to maintain that mindset. It takes discipline to stay focused. But it is a full-time job worth doing, because it determines whether your business thrives, survives, or disappears.