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Welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go.

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Hello. Hello, my courageous listeners. Welcome to the podcast. Today we are going to go a little bit behind the scenes. I want to talk to you about the outcome of my recent Year on the Wall training, which I hosted live just a couple of days ago. This was a really interesting launch and I started to get some questions from some of my clients about how it went and what I learned. And as I was answering that question for my mastermind, I was coming up with so many interesting insights that I just had to share on the podcast. I actually was in the process of writing an email to my email subscribers when I talked to myself. I just have too much to say about all of this to fit into one. And that's when I decided to record a bonus podcast. Really walking you through what I did, because this was definitely a different kind of launch. It was very successful in a different way than like a typical launch that I've talked about on this podcast previously. And there are so many learnings that I really want to share with you. I think this is going to be especially relevant as we think about heading into 2026. I know a big, big goal for many of you, as it should be, is increasing your visibility. That's a big goal for me as well. And that is something I was really able to accomplish with the specific strategy that I used for my Year on the Wall workshop this year. So I want to tell you all about it, break it all down, and give you some insights and ideas that you can take for yourself and use them and apply them to increase your visibility as we head into next year and beyond. So setting the scene a little bit. In case you don't know, Year on the Wall is an annual training that I teach every December. And. And it is a paid live workshop with a replay. You know, sometimes people, a lot of people come live, but then Plenty of people either catch it on the replay or maybe even buy the replay after the live opportunity has passed. But it's a $47 ticket. And I started teaching Year on the Wall years ago. I think it was 2018, 2018 or so, and over 2,000 people have taken the training. It's very popular and it's really fun. It's one of my favorite things to teach because if you haven't seen the imagery for a year on the Wall, it's these, just these giant calendar pages and this sticky note system, these colorful sticky notes that we use to help you plan your life, figure out what you want next year, and then display it visually on your wall so that you can understand what you're doing and kind of remind yourself what you have going on with just one glance. If you're somebody who's keeping track of a lot of different details and wearing a lot of different hats like me, then this is a great system for being able to conceptualize all of that again with just one look at these pages on your wall. And so I teach it every December. It's become a tradition in my business and it's been really successful, but in a different way than what I would call a typical launch. When I'm launching something like my mastermind sold out group programs or even my foundational sales training program, which is called same day Sales, you know the goal. Those are my biggest revenue drivers in the business. That is the revenue for the company. Year on the Wall, quite honestly, is not. I'm at a point where it's not really about the ticket sales. I don't factor that in when I'm doing my, like, where is my revenue going to come from when I'm planning, doing revenue forecasting? Year on the Wall for me is what I would call primarily a lead generation tool. And what I mean by that and what I've seen in previous years is when I attract new people. I love when my current audience comes to Year on the Wall as well, and my clients come. And that's awesome. It's. It's incredibly valuable. So I want as many people to come as possible, but I also really want to use it as a way to attract new leads. And what I have found in previous years is those people who come. My new people that come to Year on the Wall in December end up helping me fill up my launches for the upcoming year. So I really see it as a lead generation tool, as a way of getting myself out there and finding new people. So I knew I wanted to do Year on the Wall. Mostly for that purpose, of course. Like, honestly, it's a few reasons. One of them was, like, thinking to myself, well, I want to do this for my clients because they get to come to Year on the Wall just for being a client of mine. And I know this. I do this process for myself. I know how valuable it is. So I want my clients doing it as they're set, better set up to have a great year. And if I'm already going to be teaching it for my clients, my thought was, like, how do we get as many people to come to this thing as possible? This year I was in a little bit of a pickle because my launch for my sold out group programs Mastermind was a little bit later in the year than it typically is. We wrapped up in mid November. On top of that, I was getting ready. Literally, like two days after my wrapping up that launch, I was headed out of town on a transatlantic flight to go to England for a coaching retreat with my best friend. And so I, you know, knew that Year on the Wall was going to be coming up. We like to do it in the first, if not like pretty much the first week of December. We did it on December 8th this year, which ended up being the second Monday in December. But, you know, I needed to have promotion going out for this event. And I was like, how? I really don't have time or space or bandwidth to muscle my way to getting lots of Year on the Wall tickets. So, you know, how am I going to do this? Was really the question. At the same time, go ahead and fast forward to how it all turned out. I walked away from that training class when I taught it live on Monday with, I had noticed over at a certain point, over 150 people were there live in the Zoom room with me. 150 people. I'm telling you, even though I've been a business coach for 10 years now, over 10 years, it will never stop. I refuse to stop being in awe and just feeling the wonder and feeling blown away by the visual of, like, if I picture me in a lecture hall and there's 150 people packed in there who every single one of those people has paid $47 to be there. Every single one of these people has a busy life and things going on and they've taken the time to come be in my room. Right? I think sometimes because we're on Zoom and you don't see everybody's face, you forget just how incredible that is. But again, I refuse to let myself forget that I've really spent time just letting myself bask in that success. Like, over 150 people came live. That's not even counting the people who are gonna benefit from it in the replay. And I've just been thinking about that, and, you know, one of the things I wanna share about it is one of my greatest aspirations and goals is to take up more space with a bigger stage, Right? Like, I have a message to share and tools to share and strategies to share that I know because I've helped so many clients. I know that what I have to teach changes lives, shapes lives, helps people share their genius with the world. And so when I've been given this opportunity to have the stage that I've really dreamt of, I mean, I'm just. I'm just blown away and so grateful. How did I manage to do that when I also was in England, was not working on my launch, and essentially went away and came home to a live webinar room with 150 humans? Really, I did almost no work for this result. What is the answer? The answer is ads. Okay? That's what we're talking about here today. Ads. Specifically Facebook and Instagram ads. And that's primarily how we created this result. This stage was created, and I did not have to hustle for it. I simply have spent time learning how to turn on ads. Before you go running away, some of you are like, I don't want to hear that. Just hear me out, okay? Hear me out. Because I avoided ads for years, okay? And we're going to talk about all the reasons why. And truly, ads have ended up being the reason that 150 people showed up live to hear me teach, okay? So I want to share with you how I was able to create this and also, like, the reasons I avoided it for so long, but also the biggest lessons that I've learned. And if you are somebody who's hearing me say this right now and for any number of reasons, you're automatically thinking, well, that's not for me. You might be thinking, I'm too much of a beginner, or, I tried that before, or I'm not willing to learn that, or I don't want to give Mark Zuckerberg my money, or, like, whatever version of the thoughts are that you're thinking. I want to encourage you to listen to this episode with an open mind, because no one is more resistant to ads than me or has been in the past. I'm growing and evolving past this. And I think it's. If you are someone who is trying to increase your visibility and you want to have a bigger stage, you need to know about this strategy. Okay. Because. Well, we're going to get into all of the reasons why. But what I will say off the bat is it doesn't, it is not going to take you nearly as much as you think. I know for me, I thought I was going to need this like ginormous budget and I was going to have to like sacrifice so much of my revenue in order to do it and it wasn't going to be worth it. What we're going to talk about in the strategies that I've used, you can get started on any budget. Now I will start by saying that I want to say this at the top of the episode and I'll. Well, I guess we're 10 minutes in now, but somewhat towards the beginning. I'm going to say this now and I'll also share again at the end. But the, one of the reasons why I wanted to record this podcast right now is number one, because it's very timely with what's happened to me with you're on the Wall. But secondly, my very best friend CL pals it. The ultimate irony is my best friend is the industry's best ad consultant and expert. Right. And yet I have really like she has helped me with ads over the years for year on the Wall. But I still have had so much resistance. And let me just tell you that if, like, if Claire could get me the most resistant person to actually be open minded to ads this year, then I'm telling you, you're going to be just fine. Because I have carried around so much stuff about ads and so I wanted to record this episode now because Claire's foundational program that teaches you how to do ads is called Absolute Facebook Ads. And at the time of this recording, it is open for enrollment right now. She has an amazing bonus going on as well. So you've got to check it out. If you go to stephcrowder.com afa you can check out all the details and get yourself signed up. It is the only ad program that I recommend. This is what I personally use. It's what I recommend for my clients. I am an affiliate for the program, but I'm also a client, right? Like I've paid with my own money to be Claire's client and I highly, highly recommend her strategies. She is the real deal and everything I'm going to talk to you about today I learned from being in her world. Okay, so that's stephcrowder.com afa give it a look. It's game changing. And I know one of the big things that she's teaching right now is how you can get amazing results. Increase your visibility with ads by only spending $5 a day. Okay? We can't even get a good coffee for that price anymore, folks. $5 a day. I think it works out to $150 a month that you can invest for your visibility plan. Okay? And I'm talking about ad spend. That's not the cost of her program. I'm talking about ad spend. Right? So if you're somebody who's been concerned about like, yeah, I don't have the money for ads, though, think about that $5 a day. And we're going to get in this episode too, about what you're getting back in return. So it doesn't even end there. But if the budget's been freaking you out, I want you to give it a look because you don't even have to have a big budget in order to take advantage of this. Okay? So let's talk about why I avoided ads for so long. For me, I always thought they looked really complicated. I'm going to be totally honest with you. I still can't really go into the ads manager without wanting to tear my hair out. I don't get it. I don't like it. It's not really how my brain works. But I just have decided to stop letting that be an excuse because my business. Because I want my business to grow more than I want to keep that excuse, plain and simple. Okay? But for years, I've always assumed I would mess it up. I have definitely always thought that they were for more advanced people than me. And I certainly have underestimated, way, way underestimated how much visibility is possible through Facebook and Instagram ads. Because if I'm being totally honest with you, I've always been able to just use brute force to sell organically. I'm proud of my scrappy selling. I have kind of just had the thought, like, I don't need it. I'm good. I'm doing fine. I'm hitting my goals. Here's my truly, like, I'm gonna take it. I'm get really honest with you, okay? Like, maybe I even had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about it. Like, maybe I've prided myself on being able to do things the hard way. Okay? There's no metal for never using ads. I just want to go ahead and let you know, sometimes I talk to people and they're like. And I Created all this success with no ads. And it's like, okay, but why is that a thing? Why do we care about that? Right? Like, what's the. What's the shame in using ads? It's so funny. It reminds me of a story that I have to tell that I. With my. With my second child. My first child, I had via natural birth. Okay. I don't know if that's the right terminology. Unmedicated birth. Let's call it that. Okay. Unmed, medicated. And for my second child, I really did not want to do that again. Okay. More power to you if you have done that and repeated it and loved it for yourself. I did it and was like, that was more than enough. And I was wrestling with this decision with my second child to receive pain medication. And I'll never forget, my OB looked at me and said, there's no medal. You're not going to receive a medal for doing it this way. And I was like, wow. So, like, I laughed. But I was like, it's so interesting that.