Earlier this year, I took on a bit too much work, hired help, took on a new marketing channel to support the new capacity, decreased prices (relatively dramatically) in hopes to increase volume and changed the service I offered so I could produce it profitably at the new price point.
Any one of those changes could have been a great boost for my revenue + sanity but doing them all in the same month spelt disaster for about 3 months.
Here's what happened: I had too much work and when I brought on new person, even though they were smart and competent, they still needed training. Because I was spending time training them, I didn't spend as much time on sales. (Lesson: You can't just hire someone expect them to know everything you know.)
We had leads but I didn't get enough time to call them. At the same time, a really interesting opportunity presented itself where I could buy leads from a competitor and be able to double the number of leads I had each month. The price was expensive per lead but one sale would pay for a month's worth of leads so I pulled the trigger. (Lesson: Don't spend time and money on marketing unless you have the time and money to dedicate to sales.)
At the same time, I had a nice chunk of change in the bank so I decided to do some experimenting with what we were offering. I lowered prices of websites we designed dramatically to focus on monthly reoccurring revenue ($300 + $30/month instead of the more $2500 + $10/month hosting) we normally charge on average. I also changed the service so it wasn't completely custom, which allowed me to deliver in a much smaller amount of time. Weirdly, sales crashed with this new price point. I can't explain it with reason but I have some theories. That's for another day. (Lesson: Don't mess with a sales formula by changing too much at once because you won't know what broke it or improved it.)
So now I had 2 heavy expenses and a product offering that wasn't selling as easily and when it did sell, it made a lot less money. Wow, what a dingbat thing to do, right? Well the decisions had sound logic behind them at the time :D.
Luckily I was able to restore my business model to the way it was previously after a lot of tweaking and ended up with something that worked better than before... but those 3 months were just plain bad.