When you’re starting out in business, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the stories that are out there, confused by the different messages being peddled by different experts, and disheartened by the lack of results. It’s important to understand what’s true and what’s not as you work on the mindset that’s going to set you up for long-term success.
*Resources mentioned during the episode*
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Debunking 5 myths about entrepreneurship
Transcript:
Hello there, and welcome back to the Reimagining Success Podcast. My name is Anna Lundberg. Hopefully, you know me by now, but welcome if you are new to this episode. So we are getting near the end of the year. I know we do still have a couple of months left. But we’re coming up to that period of reflection, reviewing results, looking ahead. And I’m working with a personal trainer, actually. She’s amazing. Hannah, I found her on Instagram, funnily enough. That’s how the world works these days. She’s an online coach, but she also lives locally. So we just met over the weekend for a big long walk together, which was great, with a group of the girls that she works with.
But I saw that she posted, “Hey, we’re coming up to Christmas and it’s easy to think, ‘Oh, there’s no point in trying to eat healthily now. There’s no point in trying to get fit because it’s Christmas and that’s anyway a big indulgent period. So might as well just wait until 1st of January.'” And this really resonated. And it’s something that I’m sure sounds familiar when it comes to your career and your business as well. With your business, it might be, “Oh, it’s almost the end of the year. I’ll just kind of plod along. Or there’s no point in changing anything now. I’ll just get clear on sort of my New Year’s resolutions after holiday and everything over Christmas. Then I’ll look into, I don’t know, maybe joining a programme, or signing up to a course, or changing my strategy, or looking at updating my CV,” whatever that looks like for you. I updated my website, blah, blah, blah, creating new resources.
And I’d urge you, as Hannah did her followers on Instagram, not to think that way because this is really, actually as I record this, we’ve almost got three months. You’re going to get this out when there are still two months, I guess we’d say four to six weeks, let’s say, because Christmas is a bit of a write-off. But that is plenty of time to still work on your mindset if that’s something that’s important, that’s something we’re talking today, to review where you are, of course, and I’ll be helping you with that with a number of sessions and resources and thought-starters here on the podcast as well. But you do still have time. So anything you do, however small, any tweak, any background work.
We’ve just got the, and apologies if it’s very noisy, the guys are laying the tarmac just outside my window here. And I thought it was going to take about a week, “Oh, we just take away the old stuff and put the new stuff.” No, no, no. Weeks and weeks of loud drilling and digging and laying layer upon layer of various stuff underneath. So even if you don’t get to the actual laying of tarmac in your business or your career, then at least try to dig away some of the rubbish, clear away the rubble, get that skip off so that you have a clean slate almost to then hit the ground running in the new year.
With that being said, today I want to do some myth-busting, look at some entrepreneurial myths, which is something I always love doing because so many things come up and I want to talk to you about five today.
So let’s get straight in there. Now, the first one is I have to do X, Y, Z to succeed, i.e. fill in the gap with whatever strategy you think you have to do. I have to run live webinars. I have to do Facebook Lives. I have to do a five-day challenge. I have to have an email sequence. I have to have lead magnets. I have to have a funnel. I have to do regular launches. I have to have an evergreen strategy. I have to have a podcast. I have to create a course. I have to build a membership programme. I have to, I have to, I have to.
And the truth is, and I think I did a podcast episode on this some time ago where I said was the truth that no guru wants you to hear is that there is no one right strategy. I always see in my newsfeed on Facebook various people recommending whatever has worked for them, I think. And I’m sure it has worked for them and it might even work for many of their clients. But you know me hopefully by now, and if not, then let me tell you, I believe it’s important for you to define what success looks like for you. I believe that you want to design a business that works around your values, your priorities, the work that you love doing, the way in which you want to connect with clients, the clients with which you want to work, the day-to-day routine that you want to follow, the time you want to have with your family to travel, to do your hobbies, whatever else that looks like.
In order to do that, you have to first establish your criteria. Which means, okay, maybe let’s break it down into marketing, sales, and delivery. So if we take marketing, yes, it’s quite uncomfortable to do video and so on. But for me, it was something that I could overcome. I practised and practised and now I feel pretty comfortable hitting record, doing a live without too much preparation. Even these podcasts, in fact. There are things that are really engaging, really powerful tools that you might find a little bit uncomfortable, but if you work on them, then you’ll overcome that initial discomfort and you’ll master them.
However, there might be aspects and types of marketing that you really don’t like. I know in some industries, and I know I have friends in, for example, the museum and heritage sector, where they feel like, and I say they very loosely because I know a couple of people who told me, “Oh, marketing funnels, it’s so icky. It’s far too salesy.” And I think a lot of us would say that anyway. But if that’s the case, if that’s something you don’t want to do, then by all means don’t follow those tactics. I happen to think that every tactic, strategy can be done in a non-sleazy way. If we’re not sleazy people, why on earth would the strategy that we follow be sleazy. We can do it in authentic way, connecting, following up, giving value. But if you believe that’s not something that sits right with you, then you don’t have to do it. So from a marketing perspective, you can think about what you’re good at, what you feel comfortable with, what sits well with your values, and how you want to connect with your clients.
Then from a sales perspective, again, all these launches versus evergreen strategies, doing live versus recorded webinars, doing one-off masterclasses versus five-day challenges.
I have a freelancer girl working with me on social media and sort of a VA. And she hated doing these live challenges. It’s just exhausting. And in fact, me, myself as well, in the past, I’ve done and many, many times have run these five-day challenges with doing it eight o’clock in the evening for me, because that worked for my timings. I knew my boyfriend would be home from work. I knew that the kids would be sleeping, once we had kids. I knew that my clients would be home from work too if they’re in Europe. That kind of worked well.
But I began to find that really exhausting. Turning up and going live for an hour, an hour and a half every day for five days, not to mention all the pre-marketing, the post-marketing, and so on. I just ran, which you may have even joined, you may have at least heard me talk about a five-day challenge, which is very similar content, very focused content, but over five days, lunchtime for me, and half hour sessions. It felt amazing. I cannot tell you. It finally fell into place for me. This felt, and I’m sure I’ll evolve it in the future, but for me it was the model that works. I’ve not seen anyone do that kind of format in the way I did it now. And it’s taken me years to arrive at something that feels good for me, that works for me, that was really engaging, amazing feedback. I got the content across without being too drawn out. It wasn’t too exhausting. People didn’t drop off because it was too much and so on.
So from first of all, the marketing perspective, if you have more time than money, you can do lots of things which take more time. If you have money, then you can do ads and things, from a sales perspective. If you want to show up live every day for five days, then that’s great. It’s a great way to connect, to build your credibility, to engage with people. And that’s a really high-quality interaction that then can lead to high-quality conversions.
If that doesn’t work for you with your schedule, with your health, with your family situation, then try a prerecorded version, or try a one-off masterclass. When you listen to this, I would’ve just done a 90-minute masterclass a couple of weeks ago, and that is a great format for some people too. So it’s good for both you and your clients to experiment with different formats. So that’s selling. And then of course there’s one-to-one calls as well. That’s a great way if you prefer to speak to people and that’s a more intimate setting, then that’s a great way to get clients as well, to convert them.
And then finally, deliveries. We talk marketing, sales and delivery. How are you going to best deliver? Again, people will say, “You’ve got to do a course. You’ve got to do a membership site.” Well, no, you don’t got to do anything. If you want to make a massive impact on a handful of people, then maybe one-to-one work and you can go really deep. That’s the best thing for you. Charging probably more so you can afford to work with a handful of people really consistently, deeply over a long period of time. I say people, maybe even companies, if you’re working with corporations, organisations. On the other hand, maybe you have a message that you just want to get across to lots of people. Your passion is to really reach people who maybe can’t afford that level as well. But you think you can make a big difference by just helping them with a few little tweaks. Then you can work with people with maybe a course or something like that that doesn’t take as much time from your side, but then is more affordable for more people.
I’ve now spent a large chunk of the episode on the first myth, so I’ll see if I can speed up. But I hope you can see that you don’t have to follow any of these strategies. You can market with webinars. You can market with ads. You can sell with individual calls. You can sell with live launches, live challenges. You can make money with a course, especially if you’ve got a big audience. You can make money with one-to-one. You can make money with an ongoing membership programme. But a membership programme requires you to show up every month, creating new content. And maybe that’s not something you want to be doing. Maybe you want to be taking six months off, half the year off to travel and you don’t want to be showing up all year round, for example. So myth number one. I have to blah, blah, blah to succeed. No, you don’t.
The second one. I can go a bit more quickly on this one. I have to get it right the first time. Otherwise, I’m a failure.
And that’s just not the case. I was just listening to Dorie Clark’s new book, The Long Game, I think it’s called, which is so, so in line with everything I teach. And I’ve only just started, but I love it already. And she talked about how she wanted to publish a book and she had an agent and she tried to get a book deal, and nobody wanted to publish her book because she wasn’t famous enough. She spent five years, she said, writing articles, getting her message out there before she finally got the book deal. And then another five years and she then built a seven-figure business. That’s a 10 year period. It’s again, that kind of every overnight success is actually 10 years in the making.
My business coach I worked with previously, I remember very clearly that she said, “I did 11 webinars before I sort of nailed it.” These launches, I was just saying how it took me years actually to find a format that works for me. So it’s not to say you can’t make money in the meantime, but if you don’t get the 20 people showing up to your webinar. By the way, 30% live show up is quite a sort of average [inaudible 00:10:54] rate. If you don’t get more than a couple of people buying onto your course and so on, do it again. Learn, deliver incredible results for those people who do give you their time and money. And then they’ll recommend you to others. Next time maybe more people will show up. Maybe you’ll tweak it in another way. You’ll evolve it, you’ll grow it. So no, you don’t have to get it right first time. You won’t get it right first time. And if you’re going to succeed in business, you really have to embrace that different mindset of not failing, but learning and just keep going. It’s that resilience again.
Myth number three. And this is a whole other episode so I’ll try to keep it short. I can’t possibly charge whatever a scary figure is for you because of whatever your excuse is.
I can’t charge that much because of my industry. I can’t charge that much because of the country I live in. I can’t charge that much because of the service I’m providing. I can’t charge that much because I don’t have enough experience. I can’t charge that much because I don’t have the qualifications, et cetera, et cetera.
It’s not true. Something that’s a scary figure for you might seem really cheap for me. Something that is very scary for me is something that’s cheap for someone else. There will always be people who tell you it’s too expensive. There’ll always be a number that’s too high for you. I saw in a Facebook group the other day they said something like when you hit the send button on a proposal, for example, or maybe you tell the price to somebody, you’re supposed to, I think it was like send and wince or something. You supposed to have that little bit of discomfort because you’ve gone a little bit higher than is comfortable for you. And that will then stretch your comfort zone.
But it’s not true that you can’t charge a number. It’s such a subjective piece. It’s around value. It’s about having built that trust and relationship with somebody. It’s about finding a way to provide the value that actually warrants that amount of money. So it’s not true. I know it’s easy for me to say that, but that’s something we can talk about separately. And by all means, get in touch if you want to dig into that deeper. But it’s not true that you can’t charge whatever number you’re thinking because of whatever reason you’re thinking.
Myth number four. I need a massive audience in order to run a successful business. No.
As you may see, if you look on my Instagram, as of recording, I’ve got about a thousand people, about a thousand people on Facebook. LinkedIn, I have almost 10,000, I think. Podcast listeners, I don’t have 8 million podcast listeners quite yet. I’d love to get to a bigger figure. But I value and appreciate every one of you. And I’m running a successful business even with, can you believe it, less than 10,000 followers on Instagram, even with not having those millions and millions. So it’s in quality. It’s in the relationships and the trust and it’s being patient as well, and of course, building and building the momentum. I often get people who say, “Oh, I’ve been following you for years.” And then finally they decide to work with me, which is a very slow conversion, but that’s fine. You don’t need to have a massive audience.
Yes, by the way, coming back to the first one about creating courses and things, if you’re going to launch a product that costs $10, whatever, you’re going to need a massive audience to make a six-figure income. If you have one-to-one coaching for whatever it is, then you’re not going to need as many. So that’s why, of course, that’s a great way to start with more sort of high quality, low quantity, I guess, services.
And then finally, and this is one that’s close to my heart, it’s normal that I’m now working harder for less money than I was in my job. No, it’s not normal. Again, in fact, I think Dorie Clark on the book I was just listening to just now was saying that yes, in fact, ironically, in corporations, people, unfortunately, due to mindset, people who work longer hours, I don’t know, 50, 60 hours a week, I think earn on average 6% more than people only work 40 hours a week, even though all the data shows that your productivity tailors off and you become less productive after however many hours it is. So there is unfortunately in that corporate world, in our society, that perception that the harder we work, the more money we earn, which isn’t the case in business at least, certainly.
The other thing is you can’t just hustle, hustle, hustle, and I’ve said this again and again, to create a successful business because it will be a successful business based on hustle. You can’t then squeeze in family time and relaxation and exercise and work that you actually love because there won’t be any space anymore. You will have built a successful business on clients, on projects, on a lifestyle that you don’t want. So, no, please don’t let us normalise this hustle for less money. You can earn more money with your own business, certainly if you have diversified income streams, certainly over years. Again, think of Dorie Clark’s seven-figure over years. Almost anything is possible over enough time with enough effort and patience above all. So a little bit consistently over a long time is going to get you much further.
So those are the five myths I wanted to share with you today. I’d love to dig into them in more detail. I’d love to hear from you which of these or which other myths or maybe beliefs do you hold that are really getting in the way of you moving forwards with your business. So get in touch. You can, of course, connect with me on your favourite social channel or you can e-mail me at podcast@onestepoutside.com. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next week. Bye for now.
If you’re ready to start to reimagine what success could look like for you, here are some of the ways in which Anna can support you:
Get private mentoring for your business – Partnering with a business coach can help you see those blind spots and get both external accountability and expert guidance to take your business to where you want it to be. www.onestepoutside.com/freeconsultation
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Grab a copy of Leaving the Corporate 9 to 5 – After interviewing 50 people who have left the corporate 9 to 5 to forge their own path, Anna has collected their stories in a book that will inspire you with the possibilities that are out there and reassure you that you’re not alone in looking for an alternative. www.leavingthecorporate9to5.com
Join the One Step Outside the 9 to 5 Business Incubator – This is your roadmap to transitioning from a corporate job into setting up a meaningful business that will bring you more freedom, flexibility and fulfilment outside of the corporate 9 to 5. www.onestepoutside.com/9to5
Level up with The Outsiders Business Accelerator – This is a mastermind for entrepreneurs, freelancers and small business owners who want to create a long-term sustainable brand and business. www.onestepoutside.com/accelerate
