Why Your Customers Are Frozen: Business Strategy Guide

The following is a transcription of the podcast episode. Listen Here.

Why Your Customers Are Frozen (And What Business Owners Need to Do About It)

Today, I wanna talk to those of you who are business owners or work in business. I know it's kind of a strange segment to call out, but I think there's some really important things to be talking about as we navigate our way through the day-to-day in our work week and trying to understand why are human beings behaving the way that they are with their money? What's happening?

And for those of you who aren't in business or are already retired, this might actually help you understand kind of some of the fluxes we're seeing in stock market performance as well.

So let's go ahead and dive in.

The Jobs Report: Your Greatest Asset Under Pressure

Now, this is gonna sound super geeky, and I know, I know, I'm a nerd, but this week, the jobs report came out. And the reason that matters is it talks about employment.

Your job or your income is your single greatest asset. Your house is not your greatest asset. Your ability to make money is your biggest asset.

So when we take a look at our nation as a whole, what we are finding from the jobs report is that the job market has weakened a little bit. In fact, job availability has reached its lowest level since March of 2021. So what that means is that people who have jobs aren't necessarily thinking about changing jobs or asking for a raise or doing those things.

So people with jobs kind of feel stuck. And that has a lot to do with the psychology of what we perceive is happening in the world around us.

The Customer Psychology You Need to Understand

But if you own a business or you work for a business, then you're going to find that the human beings that have jobs are also the human beings that have money to spend. And what they're doing when they feel like maybe the job market is iffy, or if they feel stuck in their job is they freeze.

Then on top of the jobs report, we also got the Conference Board of Consumer Confidence Index released to us this week. Blah, blah, blah. What does that mean? It means what are Americans really worried about? And so if you work in a business or you own a business, this is an important thing to consider because if you want to understand what your customer is thinking, then this helps unpack that a little bit.

The Fear and Freeze Cycle

So consumer confidence is really, really down. And because consumer confidence is down, and you couple that with the jobs report where people are frozen, it means that we are in a place where we're thinking that the job market is tighter, the tariffs are making everything like everyday goods more expensive.

And so there's just this element of, "I don't know if I should spend money."

We're seeing that as well in the business environment where businesses are feeling like ripped around from right to left because one day the tariffs are on and then they're off. And so it's like businesses don't know how to plan.

So that means that they aren't signing big contracts with software companies. It means they're not buying big pieces of equipment. It means they're not hiring.

The 360-Degree Impact of Fear

So there's this impact kind of all around, this 360 impact of fear. And that in that fear state is frozen. And from that frozen state is a whole bunch of indecision.

And that has a huge impact on the business community in particular, because we are not a nation that by and large has an economy run by what we produce. We have an economy that is run by what we consume. We're a consumeristic economy.

So consumer spending money is the single largest stimulus for our economy. And so when we're in fear and we're frozen, that stimulus feels really stagnant.

Time to Reevaluate Your Business Strategy

The reason I wanted to bring this up is because as I work with business owners as a business coach, I'm hearing them talk about what's happening in the mindset of their customer.

And now more than ever, it's time for business owners to take a step back and reevaluate: How do we make money? What do we ask for what we sell? Should we look at different products and different services?

This is a wonderful time to take a step back and consider who you are in the marketplace and what you want your business to do.

Don't Let Fear Win

If the sole purpose of your business is to make money, you're gonna be really stressed out right now. But if there's another angle, if there's some encouragement I can give you here is to not let this kind of data scare you, but to let this kind of data inspire you to think differently about your pricing model or to think differently about the services you can provide or maybe think differently about how you manage the money of your business.

And if you need my help, I'm surely here to help you.

The Bottom Line for Business Owners

But I don't think just because we see a little bit of a frozen job market and because we see consumer confidence down that that means we need to shut the doors and say, give up. It means we need to become more efficient as businesses and we need to be able to iterate and think about different ways to accomplish our mission and serve our customer.

The key is understanding that your customers aren't avoiding you personally—they're just frozen by economic uncertainty. The businesses that will thrive are the ones that adapt their approach to meet customers where they are emotionally and financially right now.