Forget Fancy & Other Business Lessons I’d Tell Myself If I Had A Time Machine

Business growth isn’t a high school line graph, rather, it goes up and down depending on the seasons.

Want to push past your current revenue? You’ve got to work with the data you got, and keep going–even when it’s messy, and far from perfect. Our ego hates that reality, especially if we’ve had success in the past.

In this episode, I’m taking you in a time machine back to the early days of my business to share everything I wish someone had told me, including where to invest my time, money, and focus. But fair warning, the dose of reality I share will body check your ego big time.

EPISODE  SHOW NOTES👇
https://heathersager.com/episode218

Chapters

• 0:00 Build a Purposeful and Balanced Business
• 13:47 Starting a New Business Struggle
• 25:49 Transitioning to an Online Business Challenges
• 32:21 Profitability and Focus in Business

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

But here's the thing you can hustle your ass off and you can make a lot of money, but I would imagine, if you are starting your business, if you are in business for yourself, if you're listening to this show, you have a desire for it to be more than money. You want to have moments that you enjoy, you want to be present in your life, you want to feel good mentally and physically and relationally with the people that are important to you. So, my friend, I'm going to encourage you to say I do not care what level you are at in business. You need to ensure that you're taking care of yourself and taking pit stops and actually enjoying the progress, even when the progress pisses you off. You hear me Like even when you are unsatisfied with the progress, even when you're not hitting your goals. We set really big ass goals. To think that we're going to hit them every time is a little ridiculous.

Speaker 1: 1:06

This is the podcast for the entrepreneur who wants to make a big impact, who doesn't shy away from hard work but also wants to enjoy life along the way. Hi, I'm Heather Sager, former executive turned entrepreneur, and I've spent the last 20 years working with premium brands on sales, marketing and communication and I've learned that when you become a magnet with your message, you only need a hint of hustle to achieve your goals. Get ready to be inspired and ignited each week with tangible strategies on sales, speaking, marketing and so much more. This is the hint of hustle podcast. Let's go Well. Hey friend, welcome back to another episode. I hope you enjoyed last week's episode with my friend Ann Quick update. Right after we did that episode it was maybe two days later she gave birth to her beautiful twin babies. Everyone is happy and healthy and they are just soaking up the moments and whilst she is recovering from delivery, she's still getting sales in for her digital courses. It's incredible. Anyway, if you missed that episode, please go back and listen to it. It was two business owners talking about how to plan for unexpected changes planned or unexpected in your business, whether that's paternity leave, whether that's someone getting ill or just wanting to take time off. I just loved how organically that conversation evolved this week.

Speaker 1: 2:48

This is the episode today that I wish I would have had back when I started my business. So this episode is the one for you if you've been feeling like things are not moving fast enough or if you're really especially for you if you've been feeling very frustrated seeing other people succeed and knowing that you're smart, you have the skills, you have been successful, but for some reason, that next breakthrough for you maybe you've been sitting at maybe you've been sitting at 100,000 a year and you're trying to break into two. Or maybe you've been sitting at just making a few hundred dollars here and there and you're trying to get consistent with your income Wherever you are. If you've experienced great success in your career in the past, whether that was with another business that you're now trying to bring online or in your corporate career, but you're finding it to be a 10 more challenging than you anticipated, then you anticipated this episode is most certainly the tough love pep talk that you didn't even know you needed and you will be so, so grateful for today. So I have some rough and dirty notes in front of me that we'll get into a minute, but let me just give a quick update because I know my community inside the Speaker Society always loves when I give behind the scenes, and I did that last week with them on one of our live calls, so I figured I'd share just a couple things with you. So, if you are, if you're a new listener to the show, hello welcome. What an episode to be diving into. If you're a long time listener, you'll know that the last month or so I've been in launch mode.

Speaker 1: 4:31

Now the name of the show is Hint of Hustle, which stands for this belief that I know there are going to be seasons where you hustle hard and it should not be an all the time type of thing. We create our businesses not to hustle all the time, to hopefully one day let it all pay off. We build our businesses with intentional sprints of hustle. We're going to sprint, we're going to make things happen and then we're going to ease off and ensure that we're creating a business that's going to sustain our life, so that we can live our lives.

Speaker 1: 5:00

So what I, what I like to think about is, if you were looking at a, what's that called a like a graph, so an a line graph, if you will, you know graphs. Let's go back to mathematics when we were all in high school or college, middle school, whatever. You have a y-axis and an x-axis, right? So you have your up and down and you have your side to side. And if you see a graph and let's say that it's sloped a lot of times in business they talk about this hockey stick effect, which essentially means that, like your revenue over time is like the handle of a hockey stick, where it's like all kind of plateaued and or barely sloping up, and then the hope is one day you hit it and that hockey stick, the end of the stick, shoots up and everything goes wow and that's all. I mean that's a great idea, but I don't know about you. I haven't had a hockey stick moment. Mine is in blips, mine's a little bit more of a roller coaster, and I say roller coaster as there are going to be ups and downs.

Speaker 1: 6:07

But what I want you thinking about is in business, what we're thinking about is every time there is an uptick, when it goes back down, whether it's I'm going to use two, I'm going to give you two kind of parallel things to think about. I'm not just talking about revenue here, I'm also talking about time and intensity as you hustle in your business. There are going to be seasons where it goes up, sloping real hot, like you're, like steep hill to climb, and then it should drop down and the hope is is every time that we drop, we're not dropping back down to the basement. Our baseline is slowly growing over time, and what I mean by our baseline is whether that's our revenue slowly growing over time, consistently and sustainably, without us burning out. I'm also talking about when we hustle. Every time we come back to quote unquote baseline, our quality of life and our sanity and our survival is better than it was before. So seasons of hustle for me is I sprint so that my new normal is better than it was a month ago or six months ago or a year ago. So all that little slight tangent here with hockey sticks and line graphs and weren't really line graphs, I don't remember what they're called, but whatever visual, graphical representation.

Speaker 1: 7:28

What I want coming back to is so I just had a huge hustle season and hustle for variety reasons. If you've been around, y'all know I found out we've had a big year right. So I, my business partner and I, after getting together on a whirlwind romance last summer, got together, quickly, merged our companies, then untangled our companies. In January I completely blew up and retooled my program. In March found out I was pregnant. In April we moved across the state three and a half hours under the process of still trying to sell our old house.

Speaker 1: 8:04

We've had a lot of things going on this year and typically in the summertime I would really go into rest mode a lot of time with my kids, a lot of time off, a lot of space. And this year it was not possible for me to do that because I need to make sure that I have all of my business affairs in order so that I can take some time off over the holidays because I will have a new baby in the world. I share this with all of you is because, out of necessity and desire, I intentionally chose to lean in the summer and hustle hard. So this, by the way, this episode wasn't about to be a debrief of my launch. I could do that if you're interested but I wanted to share with you of hustling hard in all of August to get our new website up into September for our big launch event, and then last week we just had cart open. It was intense, but the reason why I tell you all of this one we had a great launch. We have about 30 business owners who will be participating in the Signature Talk Accelerator coming up in just a couple weeks. We'll start it live Very excited for that. So congratulations for each of you jumping in. For those of you who didn't, don't worry, I'm still cheering you on and we're going to have some other options for you here for your learning soon. You're not going to have to wait until 2024. We will have some options for you for learning, especially while I am taking a step back in the business a bit to recover from birth and take care of this little baby.

Speaker 1: 9:38

Anyways, I share this with you because this week I am on my intentional rest week. When I scheduled this whole rush of hustle for my launch, I specifically scheduled last Friday, the day after cart close as a quote, unquote, off day, no scheduling, and then this entire week is blocked off on my calendar as rest week very minimal commitments. Now I do have two calls coming up on one day this week later in the week, and that was by design. I had a very specific reason why I wanted to do those two calls. But other than that is I'm calling this work optional week that if I have a couple things I want to get done, I will, but none of it is urgent or on fire.

Speaker 1: 10:24

And I share this with you is because a lot of times in business we, even though we know we need to rest. We excuse it away and say, oh nope, just onto the next thing. Onto the next thing. When I get to X level, then I will rest. When I get to Y progress, then I will have deserved to take time off.

Speaker 1: 10:44

But I can't take my foot off the gas pedal and, quite frankly, there's a lot of gurus and a lot of personalities in the space saying hustle harder. It's those who continue to hustle and show up consistently. It'll continue to pay off, and I'm not going to actually argue with that. I do. I do agree fully that if you hustle your ass off and you keep showing up and you were going to put in 70, 80 hour weeks, it will pay off. My friend, I did that for years in my corporate career. I was working, I mean 70, some weeks, 110 hours when I was running live events. It was just insane. I don't recommend that for anyone. But it paid off. I mean, I rose to a VP role in my company. I had the opportunity to speak on stages all over the world. I paid off all of my debt and had a huge surplus of income. I it paid off. But the question is is what is the payoff and what is the sacrifice that you have for that. So for me, for example, my sacrifice was my health, my sanity, my presence.

Speaker 1: 11:53

I actually have a lot of issues with remembering things in that time period. I my husband and I joke all the time that my memory is terrible. I know a real big reality. My brain was in a constant state of only focusing on what was critical and so little. Everyday conversations are really fun. Experiences that I had along that crazy rocket ship I don't remember, because my short-term memory was like we don't have time to remember this. This is not critical to our success. Therefore, delete never made it to long-term memory. I don't know if that's ever happened to you, but here's the thing you can hustle your ass off and you can make a lot of money.

Speaker 1: 12:30

But I would imagine, if you are starting your business, if you are in business for yourself, if you're listening to the show, you have a desire for it to be more than money. You want to have moments that you enjoy. You want to be present in your life. You want to feel good mentally and physically and relationally with the people that are important to you. So, my friend, I'm going to encourage you to say I do not care what level you are at in business, you need to ensure that you're taking care of yourself and taking pit stops and actually enjoying the progress, even when the progress pisses you off. You hear me, even when you are unsatisfied with the progress, even when you're not hitting your goals which I'm going to be honest here, friend, if you're an entrepreneur, you're probably going to struggle hitting your goals, because you're probably like me, where you set some pretty big, outrageous goals. So when we don't hit them, instead of being pissed we go like, all right, let's just recover a bit and batter up again. We set really big ass goals. To think that we're going to hit them every time is a little ridiculous. Case in point did we hit our launch goals on our team? Not even close. Not even close.

Speaker 1: 13:47

My friend, I'm going to tell you this is a very vulnerable share and probably a TMI, but I'm pretty transparent. We did not hit our numbers and this launch was my maternity leave plan and we didn't hit it and I had a moment of holy crap balls what am I going to do? Followed by okay, that's what we hit. Now where do we go from here? So it actually created a really big gift for me in looking at my numbers and looking at the opportunity that created to then look at additional revenue sources that can be offered that do not require my physical time in attention. So more to come on that, but here's the thing it happens. So I don't want you to see online from other people thinking like, oh, look at them, they have all their ish together. No, y'all, we're all trying to figure our ish out.

Speaker 1: 14:40

So that, like, please do not compare yourself to others or evaluate your quote, unquote success by what you see in other people's Instagram stories or posts or emails. I know you know this, but it's only a slight piece of the story. So be sure that you're surrounding yourself with mentors and creators and peers of people who tell you the full reality and help you reconnect back to why you're doing things and remind you that it's not always going to be easy and it shouldn't always be a piece of cake. Otherwise, you're probably not setting goals that are big enough in my opinion. But just make sure that who you're surrounding yourself with and proximity within programs that you're in, but also who's in your feed, if it's making you feel less than edit your feed, edit your surroundings, edit your list of people that you're talking to frequently. Make sure that you are around people who are encouraging and empowering you to do your best work. Not coddling you right, not telling you to do an awesome if you're not actually showing up for your accountability that you need to be. You got to put in the work, my friend, but make sure that you're around people who are going to cheer for you but also challenge you when those moments come up.

Speaker 1: 16:00

Okay, that's my pep talk that we didn't know we needed today, but let's dive into it actually dovetails really nicely with what I wanted to share with you today. So I have okay, this is a. I want to phrase this. You know the same do as I say, not as I do. I don't love that phrasing, but this is going to be one of those situations and hear me out Over the last six weeks, we've been talking a lot about intentional messaging and be really, really disciplined and being really intentional, and there are going to be times when you have something that you want to share and it might not make any sense, it might not fit into your content plan, it doesn't fit in with your pillar messages and you're going like well, should I share this, heather says, if it's not strategic and intentional, that it doesn't belong, and today's message hopefully you're gauging this here is my message is not part of my quote.

Speaker 1: 17:05

Unquote pillars. This is a something that has been on my mind and on my heart. That has come out of a couple of coaching calls I've had over the last few months and it's been something that I've been sitting with and I struggled with a lot when I started my business full time. So hear me when I say this when it comes to really strategic messaging with your signature talk or what you're talking about in business, no, there is a time when you need to be really intentional, aka if you're doing speaking gigs where you have goals to drive audiences to your email list and to your programs, if you are gearing up for a launch, if you're an intentional like where your goals are, I really want this to have a return. So remember a few weeks ago when we talked about strategic talk objectives. That is the time and place where you want to be really intentional with your messaging.

Speaker 1: 17:56

And just a shout out if you are newer to the show or if you are still trying to connect the dots between what you're talking about on any kind of stage virtual or in person or even social media. If you're trying to still connect the dots between what you're talking about and how it quote unquote pays off for you and your business and your audience, be sure that you've downloaded my profitable and purposeful speaking guide. It is a relatively new resource we just loaded up on the website here within the last two months. It is invaluable. It is so simple and so necessary for business owners to be thinking in that way. So you can grab that. We'll put the link in the show notes. You can always get the links to my latest resources at heatherssegarcom, so just head on over there and you can poke around a little bit and grab that resource or any other of the free resources I have on my website. But can I get back to here?

Speaker 1: 18:53

Sometimes you are going to want to share messages that are from the heart. So this comes from me saying do as I say, not as I do. If you want to be intentional and have a strategic payoff with your message, I mean you need to think about what the messaging is. But sometimes and you're going to hear this a lot from me is I'm going to talk about things that are on my heart, on my mind that I know that you need to hear, and for me it's all part of my messaging. But is it guiding to help you create a signature talk or to uplevel your speaking skills? Maybe it around about way, but not on the nose. So I'm not breaking my rules today, but just to take the pivot from. We've been talking so much about intentional messages. Today's message is not necessarily about speaking. It is not about your messaging, it's not about using your voice. It's about you body, checking your ego. Let's talk about it. So here's the, here's the conversation. This is where it comes from.

Speaker 1: 19:53

A couple of years ago four, four years ago, I don't know a while ago, I was at a conference and I saw someone. They were doing a Q&A with the person on stage and this person was struggling so much in growing this new leg of their business. They had a very successful business and they were starting a new business that was in more of the coaching, consulting, digital course space, this information space, right where we help, support and coach other people through online education of some sort and this business owner was really frustrated because they weren't making progress and the person on stage asked some questions and then said something along the lines of it got this person moved. And the one thing that was really strange is howyll he didn't. Did you struggle with this when you started your other business? Tell me about that business. The other business was very successful and they grew it by learning, growing, going through the hard work, going through the hard times.

Speaker 1: 21:01

She had pretty much gut check the guy of going. Why do you think you can skip the line? He looked at her like why? And she goes? Just because you have been successful in one business does not give you the right to skip the line in this other business. You still have to learn about your ideal client. You still have to learn how your messaging lands. You still have to learn how to hire and train team members in this different space. Just because you've done it somewhere else doesn't mean that you get to shortcut that pain or shortcut that struggle.

Speaker 1: 21:42

And it was interesting because at that moment it was just a really simple kind of one-off conversation in the audience. But it struck me real hard and I've seen this same or similar conversation pop up over and over and over again with clients that I have worked with over the years and business owners that I've talked about or talked with and programs that I've been with, and it's this concept that if you have a successful business let's say offline business, whether you have a financial firm or a yoga studio or a therapy practice or a shop let's even say you have an Etsy shop, maybe it is online, maybe you have a digital product shop or a physical product shop, or maybe it wasn't a business, maybe you were very successful in corporate, in whatever capacity. That was my background. There's this idea that when we start thinking about OK, I've been successful before, I have this incredible skill set, I have all of this extensive knowledge, this online thing yes, I love the idea of freedom, flexibility, all this. So we make the leap and say I think I could do this and we believe in ourselves.

Speaker 1: 22:55

Then we start learning about OK, so what does it take? Right, we got to start the business. We got to figure out the email list. All, right, we got to dig around on social, whatever that means, build the website, put together an offer. Ok, we start uncovering and we look at it more. I'm going to say we, because, if you're in this category, this was me too. When we look at it, we think a little bit more pragmatically or logically, we think, ok, what are the steps? Because we know there are steps required to get to the part where you start making money. And what happens is, because we've been successful in another area, we think and we believe, of course we can be successful in this area, which is true. However, what? I don't know if this is true for you, but this is what I found when you are successful in your past life.

Speaker 1: 23:51

So let's say, for example, in corporate, I had built up my career to the point where I had a very large team. I was a vice president. I had an entire team of doers and strategic thinkers and managers underneath me technically, right. So my job was no longer the doing, it was the leading of people. When I jumped into the online space, there was a lot of doing I didn't want to do. I wanted it to be done. Therefore, I was like, oh well, crap, let's just throw money at it to make it go faster. So I did things like my first program well, not my first, but my first like bigger investment program. I spent $5,000 on a program that I actually didn't need, the full giant coaching support. But I'm like, oh well, if I spin it a higher level, it'll go faster. Right, it's going to click, I'll be able to get there. Or we do things like outsourcing outsourcing your digital course creation. You think you can just hire somebody and let them put it together for you so it can be on the market faster. Or you hire a copywriter to outsource your messaging, because if you can just get your sales page up and the email is written, then you can get to profitability faster. Or do things like outsource your Pinterest.

Speaker 1: 25:18

My goodness, I saw somebody post the other day and it broke my freaking heart. She was trying to figure out how she had another business and she was trying to figure out how to manage all of her contractors. She literally goes I have somebody for Pinterest. I have someone managing my Instagram. I have someone managing my LinkedIn. I have someone managing my email. I have someone this is like seven platforms of all of these contractors. She's hired to manage all of these things and she's like I don't have time to manage them all. How do I manage the people managing the stuff? And this was, by the way, it's just a program.

Speaker 1: 25:49

I mean, I saw this post in a group and it broke my freaking heart, because this is fundamentally the problem is we think that because we've had experience in the past and we've delegated in the past and we've been leaders or whatever your scenario is insert the blank here that we think this is what they mean by say throwing money at the problem. We think you can shortcut this shit by hiring someone else who's a quote unquote expert in that area, so that you can get through the part that's like annoying and in the getting everything ready for the first time mode or the next phase mode or the more professional mode, we want to appear as professional and quote unquote fancy as we did in our past life or other business. If this is resonant with you, buckle up, because the reality is we are in this phase right now is when you pivot to an online thing. We're sold and you're probably heavily sold online through other marketers that there is a shortcut. There is a faster way to do it, there is a simpler way, there are systems, there are methods, there are all these things and everyone's selling you their shortcut right, but the reality is you can't shortcut the shitty process of figuring out this new business, who your ideal client is, what your offer is, how you position that offer, how you drive traffic to that offer.

Speaker 1: 27:25

You can't shortcut that shit because you can't outsource to someone else what your offer and your messaging is, and I can tell you from working with hundreds of entrepreneurs the messaging piece it is the thing that is the most annoying to figure out, because, really, what I've been talking about the last month is you can't read the label from inside the jar. When you're so close to it. It's hard for you to identify how you talk about your stuff in a way that resonates with others, and it's annoying as hell when you can't figure it out, when you can't get people to respond to your Instagram stories, or you can't get people to convert on your webinar, or you can't get people to book a call with you so that you can even talk about your offer. It can be frustrating as hell, especially and I would say even more especially when you have experienced success before. Because here's the interesting thing I noticed this last week and I thought this was the most just the most free and frustrating thought I've had in a very long time. So here we go.

Speaker 1: 28:33

Isn't it interesting how, online, a lot of the quote unquote success stories, you see, are people who have very little experience and they say something along the lines of I had no idea what the hell I was doing, I was just making an episode go, and then, on the other hand, you have people with incredible experience I mean epic expertise banging their heads against the wall, going why the f? Can I figure it out? And this very freeing and frustrating thought was shit when you know, it's harder to take action. And let me, let me say that a different way, the thing is like, you know, this idea of like dumb or young luck, I would say, is this is going to sound weird.

Speaker 1: 29:34

I don't know if I don't know if I should be saying this or not, but it might feel at times that when you're an expert and you have great success and great experience, it might actually feel like you're at a disadvantage because you know too much. And I don't mean like you know too much as in you. Well, no, you know too much. You know what it, like quote unquote, should look like at the end, or you know what questions to ask, and you start getting way too into the strategy and try to over engineer it and it prevents you from fumbling through and making a mess and figuring it out versus someone with less experience. They don't know. It's just like they're freaking happy just to generate a few hundred dollars here and there and then just do it again and be like, well, interesting, that work, let's try that again. So the the young luck or the dumb luck and I don't mean that by they're dumb by any means, but it's the the lack of experience and the eagerness to learn along the way is a really beautiful gift.

Speaker 1: 30:36

And when you are sitting here as someone with experience trying to take this over online and you are frustrated, your ego and your experience is starting to take the driver's seat, trying to tell you how to be more strategic with this, how to be more intentional, because you're thinking six months ahead, you're thinking 12 months ahead, you're thinking 10 years ahead, you're really trying to engineer this thing so it'll be sustainable over time. And here's the thing you can't predict what's going to happen in six months or 12 months, and what you really have to figure out for yourself is how can you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and allow yourself to make messy progress? That is the. That is the message I wish I would have had straight out of the gate, because and great I don't regret my path. I'm not a huge, I'm not a, I'm not a regrets person. I only have two regrets in life. Neither of them have to do with career or business, and I'm just not a regrets person. I am a learn from it kind of person. So I don't regret the path. I'm very grateful for the path that I've taken in my business and I have been able to be successful. By how I measure success might be different from you, but I wish that I would have embraced being messy and doing it more scrappy from the start, versus making investments in things like forgive me in branding, in web design, in I I don't know outsourcing things like certain things that I've outsourced. I highly, highly regret it.

Speaker 1: 32:21

One of the best investments I made Side track here one of the best investments I made early on is once I figured out my messaging. So I figured out my messaging. That was me driving the car on my messaging and my offer. I did both of those things. Then I hired my friend who was a copywriter she Caitlin. She's incredible. She lives in New York. She now teaches other copywriters how to get started in the copywriting space. But I hired Caitlin. I didn't have much money to spend at the time. But I hired Caitlin to write a series of open cart emails Didn't even have a sales page, but open cart emails for my promotion and I will tell you I use those as my base and I reused versions of those emails for two and a half years. That one investment paid off in spades. So that was a really strategic, smart investment that I did.

Speaker 1: 33:15

But other things around, like trying to outsource people to manage your Instagram so you can get traffic, but, my friend, if you don't have an offer set in place, a way for people to pay you money, and if you don't have a way to sell that offer, you should not be focused on trying to grow your Instagram and trying to become famous online because eyes on your business when you do not have a way for that to actually be monetized. In my opinion, that is a waste of energy and resources. We live in this world where people are like audience, audience, audience. Build your audience, build your audience and then sell. I'm going to say BS. I'm going to say focus on fewer and start selling earlier, whether that's higher ticket or whatever price point you feel comfortable with, but sell earlier so you could understand what a true paying client who gets results, what they're like, what they say, what that transformation and that process is. And it doesn't feel as glamorous because it's a lot of times behind the scenes and you can't really show it off because it's one person here or there. But by spending the time doing that and then starting to expand it to work on how you talk about your business, how you talk your offers, and then, once you have your sales engine down, you start adding traffic to it. That it's slower, it's not as fun and showy online, but that's how you get to profit faster.

Speaker 1: 34:43

So I share all of this with you because what's interesting is in a lot of my conversations with business owners, this is something that I talk about often, often, often in my membership, the Speaker Society. That's where we help you market, monetize and refine your message after you have your initial talk messaging done. One of the frequent conversations that we have is when someone is struggling, trying to figure out how to unlock the next phase of their messaging, or they're trying to figure out, okay, what angle do I take this specific part of my message? Or I'm trying to figure out this pitch here, or if there are any kind of way of stuck, I always come back to purpose around. What are we trying to do here?

Speaker 1: 35:25

And my level set is always asking, first and foremost are you currently profitable? If the answer is yes, then I move into a line of questions to start walking through. What do we do next? But if the answer is no, that is the gut check level set moment that you have to have to say is this thing that I am exploring or asking about, or wondering about or working on, is this ultimately going to impact my profit right now? Or is this something that me in my other business or other career knows that I'll eventually need their forts telling me focus on that now. So it's done, but it's preventing me from doing the work that I need to do to get to profitability now. And I will tell you eight out of 10 times statistic I just made up, but it feels good, so we'll say it marketing math.

Speaker 1: 36:30

Most of the time, the questions that we're asking come from a place of our previous experience where that strategic brain wants to jump in to start shaping what the future looks like, versus taking actions now that are necessary, that are messy and annoying because it's not moving as fast as we want. But that area, the latter is where we need to focus our brain and our actions I was going to say our brain and our bones I mean, that feels like a that was a little aggressive, but that was a little BB thing brain and our bones on the things that actually need to get done. So all this to say is, if you are feeling frustrated on your pace, at your speed of which you are moving, the blind spot that's blocking you from a breakthrough is you know too much. And that sounds weird to say and I don't mean that you know too much, but it's the this like you want more knowledge, you want more learning, you want more and more courses. I just need to know all these things.

Speaker 1: 37:42

And I'm just going to say for a moment you probably know what you need to know for you to be profitable now, for you to hit to that next breakthrough now. It's just that maybe you're distracted by wanting to get all fancy, and fancy isn't going to make you more sales. Fancy is just going to make you feel better, that at least you look legit, even though you're not making the money that you want to be making. If that was a bruise I just poked, I I'm going to tell you. That was me too. My whole thing. I'm like I just want to look polished. I don't want to look scrappy, I want to like. I want to look like I have my shit together as I'm building the plane, as I fly, and that I mean it was helpful. Right, it does make you look a little more legit. So I'm not saying be totally casual and scrappy all the time.

Speaker 1: 38:35

You do want to have cohesion on your brand. You do want to communicate that you are not just some buddy online who just made this up yesterday. You do have experience so you can have your credibility bleed through whenever and wherever you show up. But don't let that desire to come across a certain way have that dampen the impact that you could be making if you just focus on putting one foot forward every day at a time. Okay, that was the message that I wanted you to hear today. I know there was somebody who needed to hear this message Again.

Speaker 1: 39:14

As I said two times already on this podcast, I wish I would have had somebody shake me by the shoulders and share that earlier, instead of just the narratives of you can go faster. You can do it too. You can. I don't know all the crazy marketing talk things, which was inspiring and got my butt moving, but I wish somebody would have told me that I needed to be willing to wade through the muck in order to build the business in the way that I want. So if you find yourself trying to take shortcuts and those shortcuts aren't having a return, aka you've invested in a lot of courses that haven't paid off for you. Aka you keep outsourcing areas of your business because you're avoiding and you're hoping somebody else will do it, because you want it to go faster.

Speaker 1: 40:06

Unless you have identified what your offer is and what your messaging pillars are, please do not outsource that to someone else, because you know your offer and your ideal client better than anyone else. If you need help putting those things together, that is a really, really good investment of learning how to message, learning how to package up your offers, learning how to talk about your stuff in a way that sells your stuff. But please do not because you're intimidated by all the copy that needs to get written or intimidated by all the things to do. Please do not let that distract you from how simple sometimes business can be. Don't overcomplicate it because you think that you need to. All right, my friend.

Speaker 1: 40:55

I hope this was the message you needed to hear today.

Speaker 1: 40:57

If it wasn't, well, sometimes we hit, sometimes we miss, but this was the message you needed to hear, I'd love to hear from you. So, as always should be a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. So, voice notes are great, text messages on Instagram are great. I'm at the Heather Stegger and I will see you next week for another great episode. Bye, friend. ["hustle oh, we All"].

Speaker 1: 41:28

Well, thanks for listening to another episode of the Hint of Hustle podcast. That flew right by, didn't it, gosh? I hope I didn't say anything super embarrassing today, but if I did, it's pretty much on brand. If you love today's episode, be sure to scroll on down wherever you're listening from, and if you haven't yet left a review, it would mean the world. Hit those five stars. Tell other people who are prospecting podcasts how awesome this show is. Give us a little love. We would appreciate that. And hey, if you're hungry for more of what we do here on the show, you can peruse all of the past episodes, grab the show notes and find out the latest free resources to help you get seen, heard and paid for sharing your expertise. Head on over to heathersteggercom. You can also grab the link. Wherever you're listening to this episode, and we'll see you in the next one.