Today, I’m going to talk about all the ways I have failed in the last decade or so of getting my financial life together and building my business. Many people see me on social media and on Google and think that I have my entire life together. And for the most part, I do, but people don’t see the struggles, failures, and hard work that it took to cultivate what I have now. So, I’m sharing with you the failures I’ve made in the last ten years.
I started random stuff without knowing what I was doing
A few years ago, I started this podcast not knowing what the hell I was doing. I didn’t know what the purpose was. I was just putting stuff out there. I was just slapping spaghetti against the wall. And I actually did that for years.
I got really overwhelmed because I had a busy travel schedule, my business was growing, I had all these responsibilities, all of these clients. And then, it was to the point where I got so overwhelmed, I literally sent out an email to my list.
I basically said, “Hey, this thing is going on hiatus. I’ve got way too much going on. I’m just being completely honest. This is not fun for me right now. This is actually just really overwhelming.” And back then, it wasn’t even a weekly show. I’d gone from, like, a weekly show to a show twice a month and it was just a lot because there wasn’t really a whole lot of purpose behind it.
So I went on hiatus for six months, until I went to a retreat and they told me, “Hey, you could totally do this. You just need to hire more people. You need to outsource more stuff, but you can totally do this because it’s a great show and people love it and you need to bring it back.” So I’ve brought it back ever since. But now, I have better systems in place and I understand the purpose of my podcast.
There’s a certain level of experimentation that goes on when you’re building a brand and a business. But the problem is that if you do that for too long, then you can’t build a sustainable business. You can’t build a sustainable income.
I created products that no one wanted
Another failure that I’ve had is within my first year was that I decided to create this PDF eBook and sell it for 20 something bucks. That went absolutely nowhere. I had zero sales for that thing. Didn’t go anywhere. That was another failure that I’ve had.
Another failure that I’ve had was my original group coaching, which I tried to do years ago. That was a total failure because, again, I hadn’t really built a sustainable model and back then I didn’t really understand sales as well as I do now either. I tried a membership site. That was a total failure. Affiliate marketing, I tried that. I did get somewhere with affiliate marketing but not as far as I wanted to be. I was like, “There’s got to be easier ways of doing this. There’s got to be easier ways to make good money.” And that was right. There are easier ways of making good money, other than affiliate marketing.
I’ve made mistakes with my email list
I didn’t have an email list for the first year or two of my business. I didn’t have an opt-in or anything. I just didn’t want to deal with it. And back then I didn’t understand the purpose of it because back then I was like, “Oh yeah, I am just doing this blogging thing on the side until I find, like, a legit job.”
And just this week, I almost accidentally deleted like 4,000 people from my newsletter because I misread something in an email from my email marketing system. That would have been a really big screw up. Thank God I was able to fix it, but it took me two days to fix it.
Failure happens, but it’s worth it.
A lot of people feed you bull about, “Oh, it’s so easy.” You know, or, “Everything looks so great and so perfect and look at my beautiful stylized Instagram photos and these wonderful videos and everything is so wonderful. Ha ha ha, luxury life.” And that’s great and I think. I’ve definitely gotten more on that level and it is possible for everybody. And I think there is a place for that conversation.
However, I still think that we’re doing people a disservice by not being 100% honest with them about what this takes. It takes a lot. It’s completely 100% worth it. Don’t get me wrong, I would do it all over again if I had to. I would do every single mistake all over again if I knew that it was gonna get me to where I am today. And here’s the thing, all those failures made me really good at what I do for a living.
So it doesn’t have to take you almost a decade to get to a multiple six-figure business. Setbacks don’t have to hit you as hard as they hit me. You don’t have to have to be like me and make the failures that I’ve made. It just doesn’t have to be as freaking difficult. There are still gonna be failures along the way, you’re still gonna make mistakes because you’re learning things and that’s totally okay.
However, you have a chance that I didn’t have, and that chance is that you can actually mitigate your risk and you can reduce your chances of making mistakes by hiring the help you need. Whether that’s a coach, a program, a mentor, whatever, make those investments now.