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Perseverance in business
Transcript:
Hello there and welcome back to the Reimagining Success Podcast. Now, last week, if you caught last week’s episode, we were talking about Grit and Angela Duckworth, who wrote the bestselling book Grit, talks about two elements, which is the passion and perseverance.
And I focus a lot on perseverance, and it’s something I talk a lot about in my business, and the content I put out, in the teaching I do with my clients. I really believe, and I’ve believed this for some time, that one of the key drivers to success in business to successfully escaping the nine-to-five, which I’m always talking about, and not having to go back to a full-time job or having to work with clients perhaps you don’t want to, your having to choose or not being able to choose, in fact, the work we do because we’re so desperate for the clients and the money and so on.
I strongly believe that one of the key drivers is persevering. And I talk about being resilient through the inevitable ups and downs, learning from the so-called failures, showing up consistently, persistently. And this is something that if you’re one of my clients, you’ll know that I talk about all the time, and it’s something, if you’re on my clients, that you will have seen a lot of success with. I just had a client the other day say “Oh my goodness, I am fully booked.” And she’s been working consistently implementing the things we’ve been working on. She’s been working on her mindset. She’s become so much more resilient and confident. And she’s been doing the work showing up, and guess what? It’s now paying out. She is getting the results. So the perseverance, sticking with something longer than everybody else, does is really key to your success.
Now, there are all sorts of gurus out there who tell us a particular formula is going to work for our business, a particular launch formula or way of marketing, way of selling, way of running our business, right?
And I, again, strongly believe that pretty much any of these formulas is going to work as long as we stick with it. So as long as we, of course execute it with excellence. We have to really understand how it works. We have to stick with it. And we have to do it properly, show up, do the work, follow the steps and so on. And it can absolutely work.
So I think of a few of these gurus. Jeff Walker popped up on my Instagram recently, funny enough. He’s been around for a long time, with a PLF, the product-launch-formula blueprint, which he’s now condensed into a mini-class which he’s teaching. My coach from the previous years, Kelly Roach, has gone stratospheric recently, thanks to what she calls the live-launch method, which is a version of the five-day challenge that a lot of people do in their Facebook groups, for example, and which is and has been hugely successful for her and for our clients in taking her business to just an incredible level.
And we’ve got Russell Brunson who does his funnels.
We have Amy Porterfield, who’s a big fan of webinars to sell courses. On perhaps a smaller level, just looking through my Instagram feed, I’ve recently started following Rose Radford, who was a former McKinsey consultant. She has been really talking about, okay, why are you just doing one launch a year, four launches a year? You should have this evergreen model. Great. Fantastic idea, right? You’re not leaving money on the table. I’ve been following someone else for some years, Rebecca Tracey, who does Uncage Your Business. And she really pushes and in fact does her own version of her launch, I think it’s only once a year. I saw that her programme came up the other day in my Facebook feed. And the reason for that is that that’s what works for her. And that’s what works for her clients. That’s what she teaches, right?
So I believe that all these gurus are successful in their own business. I believe that they are successful and their clients are successful. Many of their clients at least are successful if they follow those steps completely. There’s no reason to doubt them, right? Of course, there are some phones out there who are trying to teach you just based on what they’ve heard from someone else. They’re just copy-pasting and so on. But we’re going to have some trust and faith and integrity and put those people aside for a moment and think of these real experts who are teaching something that has worked for them. Fantastic. It has worked. Pick one, go with it and it can work for you too.
The danger is when we chop and change. When we create this kind of piecemeal-strategy patchwork quilt based on different ideas from different people. I’ll do a couple of webinars. Didn’t quite work. I’ll try some email sequences over here with a lead magnet and opt-in. Oh, no, people aren’t quite reading those. Oh, I’ll do a live session. I’ll do a challenge. Oh, it didn’t quite. And they’ll stop that.
Kelly Roach, for example, talks about you have to keep doing those. I think she said something like once a month or something in the beginning, right? Webinars. In fact, Kelly, when I worked with her some years ago, she told me, look, it took me 11 or 12 webinars back in the day to get those to work for me. So we just have to keep trying, keep showing up, learning for our own sake to get better to master this particular method, but also for our audience to get used to what we’re offering, to warm up, and for you to become known as the person who offers this particular thing.
So the examples are given.
There are means of marketing your business, right? So webinars and emails and live launches and so on, really great strategies. I reckon they can all work if you learn them and apply them properly, right? They can all work. That’s in terms of marketing and selling a business. In fact, some people really push the one-to-one, right? There’s the B2B crowd, LinkedIn messaging, direct messaging, social selling in your DMS, and so on, and Instagram, right? Great. That can work too.
Then there’s the whole question of how you actually run your business. How do you deliver the service? Are you working one-to-one, one-to-many, do you do courses? Lots of people really pushing courses as sort of the evergreen, completely leveraged, passive income stream. There are many people who push the membership model. You have a consistent subscription revenue from people rather than just the one-off peaks that you have to then fight to get people back. You have people consistently in there. So courses, memberships, group programmes, high level masterminds, VIP high-ticket client offers, whatever people call them, right? Again, lots of different ways of coaching, consulting. They can all work. They do all work. So pick one.
So persevering, sticking with, being consistent with a particular strategy is what’s going to get you the results. However, and this is the crux of it maybe, we’re only talking about coming back now to what I talked about last week and at the beginning of today as well, coming back to the grit.
There’s passion and there’s perseverance.
So look, doggedly just being disciplined and showing up and doing the work every day, is that going to be fun? That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. It’s great that we’re disciplined. It’s great that we’re working hard and showing up, but what if we’re completely on the wrong track in the sense of this isn’t something we’re enjoying. This isn’t something that’s going to create the business that we’re after. We’re just copying someone else’s vision of success, someone else’s mechanics to get to that vision of success.
And when we get there, if we get there, it’s not going to be particularly meaningful.
It’s not going to be fulfilling.
It’s not going to be enjoyable. It already isn’t enjoyable, right? So if you’re finding yourself just slaving away, pushing through, slaving through whatever the terrible painful verb would be, through this process. And yes, you’re doing the work, you’re showing up for being consistent, as I’m telling you, as I’m sure other people are telling you too, if you’re not enjoying it. If you don’t have that clear sense of direction, purpose of what you’re trying to create and why that’s so important to you, then I would urge you to stop right now, take a step back, and really think about, but hang on a second, what are you trying to create? What it is you want to do? What kind of business do you want to run? Is it a lifestyle business? Is it an impact, purpose-driven business? And is it more about growth and wealth creation for you? There’s so many questions.
And in fact, we’ll look at these next week to really help you ask some of those questions to choose the right business model for you. But the key question here is what is it that’s going to work for you? What’s going to help you to stick with this particular model, whatever you choose over not just days and weeks and months, but years potentially. Now your business can and will evolve with time. And that’s amazing. But in order to get results, you are going to have to persevere and be consistent and resilient and all those amazing catchy words that we have been digging into the last few weeks.
But you do need to keep showing up, do the work, persist.
However, make sure that the thing that you’re persisting with, make sure the thing you’re persevering really is what you want to do, is going to be a good fit for you, is the right business model for you. Again, if you’re just blindly grinding away. If you’re, let’s say following this amazing live-launch formula, right? I have a colleague who really struggles with or has tried and doesn’t enjoy, feels drained when they do the live-launch model. This idea of showing up and it is quite intense, right? Whenever I do a live, this podcast is recorded, but if I’m showing up live in my Facebook group, I’ve done so many now that it feels natural, but my goodness me, if I do five nights of an hour and a half every night, plus the whole pre-launch, post-launch following up with people and so on, that is pretty exhausting. And if you’re not an extroverted person, if you don’t enjoy that showing up, talking on camera and so on, that probably isn’t going to be the right marketing strategy for you.
Likewise, if you watch these slick, super, well-oiled machines of webinars, that of course give you lots of value.
They tell you why this is important. They tell what you’re supposed to be doing, but they don’t tell you how. Then right at the end, they say, of course, I’d like to invite you into my world. And I’ll give you this course so you can buy this. And if you buy now, there’s that fake-urgency scarcity. There’s only five spots, and you have to buy within the next 24 hours, otherwise the price will go up, et cetera, et cetera. If you find that sleazy, uncomfortable. If you’re trying to copy that model in your business, guess what? You’re not going to enjoy it. It won’t sit right with you. You won’t feel aligned. You’re not going to stick with it over the long term, and therefore you’re not going to see results. You’re not going to be successful.
So the key message here is that pretty much, I’m going to put my neck out here, pretty much any strategy can work, if not will work, if you stick with it. But then the question becomes, what is it that you’re going to stick with? What’s going to be enjoyable? What’s going to be aligned with who you are, your strengths, your personality, your preferences? And what’s going to really get you to where you want to be? And guess what, of course the key question there is, what is it you want from your business? What kind of business do you want? What is the business model? And in fact, what we’ll talk about next week is, hey, why do I need a business model?
I’m just a solopreneur. I’m just a freelancer. And I’m a coach, consultant. I don’t have a team or even a co-founder. I don’t need this whole structure.
I’m not going for VC funding, et cetera. But believe me, and we’ll dig into this next week, there are a lot of aspects of your business where you can and should make choices about how your business operates. Because at the end of the day, your business model is basically how your business makes money, and we’re all hoping or planning to make money, aren’t we? So really key questions around how you’re going to market? How you’re going to reach your clients? How you’re going to convert them and sell to them so they become clients in the first place? And how you’re going to deliver the service and making that work again with your strengths, with your personality, with your lifestyle, with your desired lifestyle, with your family situation.
And of course, yes, all those things that we always have to look at, the market potential and competitive landscape, the value proposition and so on, which is yes, work that we do.
But there is this really important element.
Again, coming back to that second part of the grit, the passion, the sense of purpose, the sense of direction of where you want to get to.
So before we go ahead with next week’s episode, I’d really encourage you to take a step back, to look at the strategies you’re following at the moment. Do you have a coherent strategy? Do you have a really clear plan as to why you’re doing what you’re doing? Or are you just doing it because somebody once told you that you should be doing Instagram stuff. You should be doing LinkedIn messaging. And you should be doing live videos or launches. You should be doing. You should, should, should. Right? What is it you’re doing? Is it working for you and working in the sense of first getting you results in terms of financials, of course getting new clients and money, but also working in terms of your energy, your enjoyment, how it feels for you?
So what are you doing? Why are you doing it? Is it working for you?
And then of course, if not, or if you think it could work better, if you think there’s an opportunity to optimise or pivot or realign or get more clear on what your purpose is, your passion for your business, to get that sense of direction, then again, reflect a little bit about, okay, what do I want my business to look like? Which of these many strategies and gurus that I see, do you feel good? Which sit really well with me and which ones feel a bit sleazy and uncomfortable or draining or just not something you want to engage with, right?
You are the CEO, whether you’re one person or you’re a team of many, a boss of many, you’re the one who’s making the strategic decisions for your business.
And so, you’re clever. You’re competent. You’re experienced. You are the expert in your business. You’re certainly the expert on yourself and your life and what you want from your life. And so you’re the one who needs to make the decisions and should make the decision on the kind of business you want to run. So it doesn’t matter how persuasive someone’s copywriting is in terms of making you think that you should be jumping on this latest evergreen or non-evergreen or whatever marketing formula, or you absolutely have to have a course. You absolutely have to have a membership. Take a step back. Ask yourself some critical questions and think, okay, hang on. Is this the right thing for me? And if not, what would sit better for me?
So already a few questions that we’re sort of bleeding into next week, but the key message again, is look, most things are going to work probably at some point.
The question is just what are we going to choose? How are we going to stick with it?
How can we make sure we stick with it, execute with excellence to get those results that we’re after, and of course, make sure that when we do get those results, it’s meaningful, it’s fulfilling, it’s enjoyable. It gives us the lifestyle that we’re after, the freedom, the flexibility, fulfilment that I’m always talking about. And of course the financial security, the financial freedom as well.
So I hope that gave you a little bit of a glimpse into, I guess, what we’re going to be talking about in the coming weeks really around business models, how you can make the right strategic choices for you. That’s really what I’m so passionate about is helping you redefine what success looks like, big picture life, but also specifically of course, with your business and then go out there and decide on the right strategy that’s going to get you there.
So looking forward to talking about this in the next few weeks with you.
Of course, as ever, you can get in touch to book a call with me. If you’d like to discuss already, you know that you’re excited about maybe pivoting in your direction and discussing how you can make the right choices for you, then you can book a call with me at onestepoutside.com forward slash free consultation. Onestepoutside.com forward slash free consultation. Just fill in a few of your details around where your business is at now and so on. And then we’ll chat about, okay, what are you doing right now? What’s working. What isn’t working. And how can we help you to get to where you want to be.
So thanks so much for listening. I look forward to discussing this again in the next few weeks with you, and I’ll see you next week when we’re talking about how you can go about choosing the right business model for you. Thanks so much for listening. 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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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
