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Foreign. 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. Hello. Hello, my lovely CNC listeners. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for spending some time hanging out with me today. I'm super excited to be here. Been cooking on this idea for a little while, and when I found it, when it really crystallized in my brain, I was like, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. I'm so excited to talk about this. We are talking about how the experts who sell the most are often doing the least. Don't believe me? Let's see if I can prove it to you in the next 20 to 30 minutes. Okay. I know it's a bold claim, but I've really been thinking a lot about this, and I'm hopeful that by the end of today's episode, I will get you thinking a little bit more about how doing more is not always the answer, even though it very often feels like it is. And I think by the end of our conversation today, my hope is that you'll be able to see this as good news. Okay. It's not always about doing more, and I think simplification and decluttering, if you will, we're going to talk about decluttering is such a relief. It's a relief in our personal lives. I'm going to give you a story about that in a second, and it's definitely a relief in our business and our sales strategy as well. So my hope and my intention here is to give you something new and thought provoking, you know, and I. I don't think a lot of people are talking about this, and maybe it'll just give you a different perspective on strategy in general. I consider myself a strategist in a lot of ways, so it's kind of funny that, you know, I don't ever want this to come across as, like, I'm bashing strategy, but I think we, as a Collective in this, in business coaching, and even in online entrepreneurship. Like the strategy and re strategizing and over strategizing. It's. It all has gone abridged too far in my opinion. And there's a lot to be said for a back to basics approach, no matter what your level is. Actually, in fact, I think, you know, there's even more opportunity to get something positive out of back to basics when you are sophisticated in business, when you've had a lot of success. Okay, so I actually want to start by telling you all a little story about some things that we've been doing around my house here at the Crowder Creek in Louisville, Kentucky. We have been, I don't know, doing some spring cleaning. I have been really trying to kind of tidy and declutter over on my TikTok. If you happen to follow me over there, it's like, so it's really different content than I post anywhere else. I've been doing this little like 10 minutes a day trying to declutter my house in the course of a year for 10 minutes a day. So I've been doing that. And actually just even a week into that feels amazing. And then my husband sort of impromptu, my daughter got a new bike for her birthday. She just turned 10. And parents out there know that this sort of phase comes up where your kid is going to outgrow their little kid bike, and they sort of need that. They're on the precipice of being a whole person and they kind of need the big person bike. So anyway, my daughter went out with my grandma, her grandparents, and that was their birthday gift for her was this bike. And so that led my husband to be like, well, we got to clean out the whole garage because we need a bike rack. You know how these things tend to go. And so he's got everything hauled out of the garage. Everything's like out on the driveway. And it got me thinking that, you know, between the tidying project that I've been doing around my house and this whole garage thing, I was thinking about the urge that a lot of us have to drive to the Container Store, like, immediately. Okay. Like, I don't know how many of you all watched that viral series on Netflix. I think it was right around pandemic times. This became very popular. The Home Edit, if you're familiar with the Home Edit, I even have their book. I bought the book. And there. If you don't know who they are, I'm sure many, many of you do. Their whole thing is like this beautiful organization I mean, the bins, like, picture you open up a pantry and it's just like, everything is perfectly organized. Typically, their whole thing is they like to do it in rainbow order. Like, the items will be categorized in rainbow color just to make them photogenic and aesthetic and all of these things. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think it's incredibly satisfying. But if you are doing any kind of organization project, something a lot of people will tell you is don't go buy the bins, right? Like, the first thing you're going to want to do is to go and buy the bins and to be like, okay, I need to get the perfect organization system, right? I need to get the matching bins. I need a label maker. My husband was like, I need to go to Lowe's, right? Like, I need, like, everything's laying out on the driveway. He's like, I need to go get hooks, right? And what a lot of organization experts will actually tell you is don't just run out and buy the bins as much as you're going to have the urge to do. So why do they give that advice? Well, the truth is, you don't actually know what needs organizing yet, right? You haven't done the real work of. And I think it's. Honestly, it can be uncomfortable work of, like, sitting with the space once it's cleared out of the junk and kind of like living with it and figuring out, like, as you live with it, okay, then we can bring in some organization, right? So I'm seeing this in, like, okay, for example, in my bathroom, in our, like, master bathroom, I cleaned out this drawer, and this drawer now has, like, three things in it. It's kind of hilarious. There's like a hairbrush and I think, like, some body tape for, like, you know, undergarments. The ladies know. And maybe one other thing I can't even remember. Something really small, and it's like this big drawer, and it's kind of is awkward. It's like, shouldn't I have those, like, dividers? And certainly if you watch, like, TikTok videos, you see people, like, stalking these drawers where it's like they go out and buy all of these items to make the drawer full. And it looks really cool. And everybody saves those videos. And they're like, I want to make my drawer look like that. It, like, is so beautiful on the surface, okay? And as I was thinking about this, and I was. As I was standing in my garage, it's like, all this again, everything's just like, crap. Everywhere I realized that this is what so many of the experts that I work with every day are doing in their businesses. And this is what we need to talk about. So I'm going to call this the Container Store problem. Okay? So go with me on this. The same idea that people go out and buy these sophisticated organization systems before they even know what they're organizing. There's a business version of this, and it is, you know, I need to go get a funnel, right? I need to go make a new funnel. My business is already a mess. Let me go make a new funnel. Maybe I just need a new. A CRM to keep track of my leads. Like, what system can I build? How about AI? I mean, you know, I've been talking about AI if you've been listening to the podcast, right? Like, maybe there's an AI system that will make me feel more organized. I've been guilty of this before. AI. I mentioned this on a previous episode. It was like Google Drive. It was like, let me try color. We tried color coding all of this junk in my Google Drive, right? Maybe if I go create a new page, maybe if I come up with a new offer, maybe if I design a new challenge. Okay? Pick your poison. The bottom line is the same, the fantasy here. And the trap is if I get the right system, if I have the right idea, if I find the right strategy, everything's gonna click. Like, that's gonna be the thing that fixes me. I feel the same way about, like, buying new planners. Like, do you guys even know how many paper planners I've bought? Or, oh, this is gonna be the thing that fixes me. This is gonna be like, I'm gonna become the person who actually uses this stuff. And then you know what happens? Like, two days later, I'm not actually using it. Now. That's not to say that there's no, like, that planners are bad or that systems are bad or that any of these things are bad. The problem is that buying those things, investing your time in those things, color coding, you know, trying to. I also am thinking this as, like, strategy hunting. Let me try to find the next strategy that's going to fix this. It's not the actual work, okay? The work is sorting through the junk, okay? The work is not so sexy, okay? That's what we really need to be thinking about here. More strategy feels better than repetition, okay? Picking a new strategy has the novelty to it, so I want you to think about this. Repetition is what compounds in business. I'm talking about business now, okay? Repetition is what compounds novelty is what resets. And what I mean by that is novelty gives your brain something new and interesting. A new strategy, a new course, a new whatever, a new AI workflow that feels like we're getting somewhere. It's like, I'm going out and buying the bins. It feels like a reset. I'm going out and buying the new planner. It's like, okay, let me just, like, reset all of this. Let me try to hit the reset button. But the truth is, repetition is what you're actually looking for. Okay? So when someone, for example, is on, like, their seventh launch of a program, when you look at the people you look up to and they're, like, launching. They've launched the same offer, like, seven times. They are not reinventing the wheel every time. I promise you, they are running largely the same playbook. They have found the playbook that works for them. They might tweak some small things here and there to update it and upgrade it and fix things that break. But I can promise you that the most successful people that you are emulating, they are not reinventing and redoing and recreating every time, okay? And in some ways, if you actually look at that, you might think to yourself, yeah, I can see how you would say that. That person is quote, unquote, doing less, right? It's like they're kind of running it back. Maybe think about somebody, you know, in the business world who's been launching the same thing for, like, years and years, right? What's actually happening there is they're doing the same thing over and over while everyone else is doing different things continuously. There is a cost to continuing to switch and do different things and jump, like strategy hop. It has a cost to it. Okay? Novelty. I want you to remember this right here. Novelty is emotionally rewarding. Ask me how I know, okay? It is emotionally rewarding to let yourself buy the new paper planner. And hey, it's like, sometimes I will. I will do that, okay? And there's nothing wrong with that, but you need to have the awareness to know that novelty is. Is emotionally rewarding. Doing something new is emotionally rewarding. If you want financially rewarding, Raise your hand if you want financially rewarding. Because that's what all of y' all tell me. Repetition is what is financially rewarding, okay? If you want to be rewarded financially, you have to be thinking about repetition. And I know that, again, is not the sexiest advice you've ever heard. You have to find what works. This is why I'm talking about and thinking about Boring business so much this year. If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that my word of the year is boring. That's because I. Not because I consider myself a boring person or I'm aspiring to be a boring person. Not at all. In fact, it's quite the opposite, probably to my detriment and my peril. Right where I know and I have learned that reinventing the wheel and creating chaos just to be, you know, have dopamine and just to be mentally stimulated is the harder path. The financially rewarding path is largely boring. Or it should be worth once you figure out what works. Okay? And this is why the experts. What? This is what I mean when I say the experts who sell the most are doing the least. What I mean by that is the people that I know with the most predictable businesses are weirdly boring. Okay? Not that their personality isn't boring. They're not boring. But they are willing to do boring execution. They are willing to repeat. They are willing to refine. They are willing to repeat again, okay? And like I said, this is really, really good news because I know you're exhausted by having to chase the next strategy and keep up with the next thing and try, like, something doesn't work, oh, my God, we have to scrap it and try again. That is exhausting, right? And every time I teach this, people think I'm about to give them a bigger to do list. When I talk about my mastermind, people are like, oh, my God, it's going to be all this work. I'm going to have to, like, you know, start from scratch. The opposite is really true. The biggest opportunities that I've seen usually come from crossing things off your idea list. Okay? A lot of times my clients will be surprised when they come in. One of the first things I do is I help them simplify. I'm almost like an organizer, a professional organizer of your business, right? I'm like, okay, that closet is full of stuff. We got to start pulling things out. And I think my role in my clients businesses is we will look at each item and be like, okay, let me help you evaluate what stays and what goes. It's not about having the fanciest organization. It's about having a system for understanding what should even be in your closet so you can find what you're looking for. So when you open that closet, crap's not falling down on your head, which sometimes is how our businesses can feel, right? The other thing I want you to know, and this is so important, one of the big reasons that Repetition is financially rewarding is because your audience can't follow chaos. Okay? You might be addicted to chaos. Your brain might love it. I have been that person. Truly. I will. You can ask my best friends. I will just kind of like, chase chaos without even realizing it, too, just because I'm so good at solving problems. And a lot of us are. That's how our brains are evolved. Like, the best problem solvers out there typically have a lot of chaos in their lives, because when you solve problems, it completes the dopamine loop. It's like, look at me. I'm so good at solving problems. Wow. It makes me feel like I'm climbing a mountain. Some people do a high rocks. I solve problems, right? I'm like, I'm just like, putting out fires. You can get addicted to that. You know that. I. I know that. Again, I am proof. But your audience will struggle to follow that chaos. You need to remember that confused people don't buy ever. And people are very easily confused, not because they're not smart, but because they're very busy. And if they're remotely confused, they're going to get distracted trying to think about it, trying to understand and pick up what you're putting down, and they're going walk away. Ooh, squirrel, Right? There's something happening. The doorbell rang. Whatever. Time to go on. TikTok, et cetera. And so, honestly, I would say think of it this way. A lot of times the experts who are selling the most have audiences that can finish their sentences, really think about that. It's like there is this common language. You get to know the person. They are, like, oddly repetitive. A lot of times my clients will be like, I feel like I'm saying the same things. And I'm like, great, great. It's funny how we make that a problem. Now, that's not to say you shouldn't be introducing new ideas. I feel like, I feel like today, for example, what I'm talking about, I've said a lot of these things, but I certainly feel like I'm presenting it in a way I've never talked about before. And so you can take the same ideas and be fresh with them, but being repeatable and having repetition is what sells in your business. And for those of you who are, who are looking for clarity, I'm always hearing people be like, I just want more clarity. If you want clarity in your sales, a great way to compound your clarity is to say the same thing until people get it right. So just remember, your audience can't follow the chaos. So we gotta stop. The other thing, huge, huge, huge is decision fatigue eats up your selling time. A lot of you are like, I don't have time to sell or I can't sell or I like, I'm just running out of time, right? Well, when you're spending so much time trying to figure out what to do next and researching and listening and thinking about it, first of all, you're going to get tired. And secondly, you're going to use a lot of your time like starting over and working with AI and reading the things and doing whatever it is that you're doing. Right? So the experts who are selling the most have a lot of decisions made in advance. They're not redeciding every single time they go to launch, okay? They're spending maybe 20% of their time actually doing the stuff because of the decisions that they've made in advance. Right. Whereas a lot of people, I would say the vast majority of people who haven't figured this out, a lot of people are spending so much time even just trying to decide what to do, right? So if you think about it, your launch week, it should be execution, not deliberating. Okay? So you want to have energy left for actually selling. You want to have energy left for talking to people and for doing the work that gets you sales. Instead of spending 80% of your time deliberating, I want you spending 80% of your time on your money making activities. Okay? And that leads me to as well that the right activities are often unsexy and maybe even short. They, they don't necessarily take a lot of time, which I think that is good news. Right? So the things that drive sales, like making offers, talking to people, sending clear emails, showing up consistently, they don't actually take that much time. You're thinking they take so much time. They don't take that much time. What takes time is everything you added to avoid doing that stuff. Let me say that again. The reason it feels like this stuff takes so much time is not because it takes a lot of time to make offers, takes a lot of time to talk to people, it takes a lot of time to show up consistently. No, it really doesn't. What takes so much time is everything you added in the process to avoid doing the stuff you don't want to do. So redesigning your notion, creating a new dashboard, making a new funnel, the third revision of the sales page, that's not the work, friends. And I say that with so much love, okay? I say that because I want you to make more money. I want you to have that time back. And if you go directly to the source and talk to people and do the sales activities, you're going to get so much time back. Okay? And you know, something to just keep in mind and remember and I think I've talked about this, but I want to make sure I really hammer this home. Trust. A lot of you already know that selling comes down to trust. We always talk about no like and trust. Well, how do you build trust? Trust is built by reliability. Think about the people in your life that you trust. Like real people, you know, people that you are married to or people that you're friends with, or people that care for your children. You rely on them, right? They're consistent. It's reliability. It's not novelty. You don't want them to be coming at you with something new and different every single day. That would be scary and exhausting. Right? You wouldn't want your spouse to be a different person every day. A lot of the reason you trust them is because they're so reliable. And so the people you know, people will buy from people who are predictable. Okay? The experts who are doing less are doing the same thing reliably. And I want you to think about reliability as a sales tool. Okay? The experts who are out there trying to do more, people who are having inconsistent sales are having to reset trust every single time they launch. Think about that. When you blow it up and start from scratch, you're having to reset that trust. Okay? So the reason I've been thinking about this idea so much is because it's actually one of the core reasons that I'm coming up with a brand new free sales training class that I'm going to be teaching in July. And I'm really excited to bring this to you again. It's a brand new class, haven't taught it before. Really gonna treat it as like a closed door kind of strategy session for all of us to have together. And this training is not going to be about doing more. Okay? Consistent with what we've talked about today, it's going to be about understanding, truly understanding the handful of things that you need to do to actually move the needle. If your goal is to build a one group program, that's really what we're going to be talking about. The theme for the next month or so. If you want to hang out with me, here's a hint. The theme is really going to be 100k group programs. Whether you're trying to reach your first 100k or you want to work on having a 100k or above, like a six figure launch. Every single time you go to launch your group programs, both of those things are possible. And that's what we're going to be talking about in my upcoming free class. And we really are going to dial in on the actual things you need to be doing. So I want this class to be an opportunity to unburden you and unburden your business. A cleaning out of the closet, so to speak. That's what we're going to be doing in my class coming up very soon. I'm going to be announcing it next week, so be ready because it's going to be really great. I'm getting so excited for it. I've been outlining it. Lots of ideas that I haven't talked about in this way, and I have so much that I'm excited to share with you. So stay tuned. I have a lot of really great podcast episodes coming up. I'm going to be increasing my production, talking with you all a lot more, bringing on some amazing guests who've been killing it with their launches recently. I know we all always love to hear what is working out there in the world right now. I'm going to be bringing a lot of that to the podcast through the month of June. So I'm so excited that you're here. Make sure that you're subscribed to the show so that you don't miss any of my drops. Because like I said, I'm going to be publishing more than I typically do. So lots of good content for you. If you're going on trips and you've got summer travel, road trips, walks on the beach, take me with you. Okay? All right, my friends, I hope you've loved this episode. If you did, always feel free to let me know. Tell me what you think. You can catch me on Instagram at Hey, Steph Crowder, or feel free to reply to any of the emails that I send your way if you're on my email list. All right, I will see you next week, my friends, and until then, I'm wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.