← The Product Boss with Jacqueline Snyder
The Product Boss with Jacqueline Snyder
690. Every Action Is Feedback: What Your Business Is Trying to Teach You
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Jacqueline Snyder
Hi, I'm Jacqueline Snyder and this is the Product Boss podcast. I've helped launch and grow thousands of product based businesses, even one of my own. And over the last 20 years, I've seen behind the scenes of businesses just like yours. Whether they are makers, manufacturers, artists, or food and beverage businesses. I have spent so many hours studying it all. I've discovered what makes them successful, what mistakes they could have avoided, how did they turn their ideas into successful business, and what are the strategies that they have used to make more sales and be discovered by more customers. And this is what this show is all about. Whether you're just starting out or you're looking to become a million dollar product boss, I'm here to give you the permission to chase your dreams, no matter how big or small. All you need is the right mindset, a little courage, strategy and support, and you too can be the next million dollar product boss. Let's do this. Oh my goodness. Friends, if you are anything like me, you probably spend more time running errands than running your business. Am I right? Like, everything needs something, we gotta run around. And I knew that this was like a major issue for me back in the day, which is why I decided to get help where I could. And I decided to let Instacart handle all of my grocery shopping. So I no longer had to worry about running all the errands and having to run out and get more almond mil for my lattes. Rather, I was like, you know what? We're just gonna let Instacart handle that. So I want you to imagine skipping the store and getting back to designing packaging, orders, making, or maybe actually taking a break, even a nap. Remember those? Okay, so with Instacart, you can get groceries and essentials delivered in as fast as an hour, so you can focus on growing your business without sacrificing a meal. Plus, less stress and more focus. And here's a tip. I've actually used Instacart before to order gifts from my daughter's friend's birthday parties because I haven't had time to run out and get presents. And I've been able to get the packaging, like the gift bag and the g, like hello, Sephora, delivered to my house while I was in the middle of coaching sessions so that I could have the present right. It's like having a personal assistant without having a personal assistant. So if you want to do what I do and get the help where you can, you can try it now if you head to the Product boss. Com Instacart Hey. Hey. And welcome back to the Product Boss podcast, my friends, where we get real about what it takes to build a business, a brand and a life that you actually want. Are so excited to be in and live in. And today I'm going to talk to you about something that I've actually been going through. So this is going to be like a little bit more of a personal episode slash inspiring episode because it's something I've really been considering and I've been doing a lot of work. A lot of work. I think that this has been a incredible year of actually probably the last year of death and rebirth. I think that personally, I mean, I've experienced loss. Loss my dad last year. And I think for anyone who's lost a parent, there's this sort of. My friend Kathy Heller said this the best. She's like, someone told her that part of your identity dies when. Especially when a parent passes or someone very, very close to you. And I think that's so true. Right. It's that part of identity. You also know that I bought this business from my co founder two years ago and it was, you know, we're not at full two years yet, but there's just been this shift in change where it was taking on the business and trying to. She entrusted me with the product boss, right, and the community and everyone here and. And making sure that I was able to keep it going, right? Like keep holding the torch because she trusted me to take the business over. And then as I've been going through the last, you know, I would say a year and a half, almost two years is okay. How do we. How do we have the product boss just sustain and go? Then the next section was okay, how I start to shift the identity of the product boss to match me, Jacqueline, and my single voice and. And what do I want it to be? And I'll tell you that a big part of last year was still holding on to the way we were doing things versus the way that if I were to clearly see forward of what I imagined for this business and this community and this podcast and everyone that we pour into every week, it's actually shifting and changing and I am so excited about it. And you've seen some of the changes, especially if you've been a student for a while, you've seen that we've renamed programs. There's even some things I've brought in that I've taken out. There's all this stuff that's kind of been this test and try and trial, but through all of this, whether it was personal, personal loss or that I'm in Los Angeles and we had the fires in the beginning of the year and just all of this stuff that we all need a nap from, it's caused a lot of like, internal reflection, right? And what I've realized is that our businesses are mirrors to our own personal growth. And I have been on this transformational growth journey for a while. And I'll say that as much as I can learn strategy and talk to experts and gurus and people who are like, tell me what to do in my business or tell me what, what's working now. And while that strategy is fantastic, I think at the same time my biggest growth has come from being around people who lift me up, who help me shift my mindset, that help me transform into the version I am, into the next version that I'm going to be. And I think a lot of that comes with like, heart centered leadership and emotional intelligence and mindset shifts. And it's a journey. There is no end here. There's no end. This is life, right? And we get to ride this beautiful ride of life. So what I want to talk about today is something that, you know, actually came up for me recently. And my friend Nick, Nick Carey said this thing to me and I was like, it, like, hit me. It hit me in my gut. It hit me in this way that I was like, oh my God, no one has ever said it that way before. And I was like, I need to do an episode on this because it is just so powerful. And I'm going to start it like this. This is your reminder, my friends, that every action you take in your business is an opportunity to learn something about either yourself or the market. Okay? Every action we take in our businesses are either something to learn about ourselves or the market. Now let's talk about that for a sec. Let's just break that down. If you've ever been in a position where you feel stuck or you're like, I tried all the things I, I listened to everything she said. I took the course, I, I went to market, I did this, this, this and this, and it didn't work. I think a lot of times we could say like, oh, like, and I felt this way too. Where it's, did I fail? What's wrong with me? What's broken? Am I broken? Maybe I shouldn't do this. Like, all of the noise and the nonsense that goes on in our heads versus what is it showing us? And I think there's two things that it's showing us I think one is, hey, let me take a second and think, I am perfect and wonderful and incredible, and I am a whole person. Whether or not my business succeeds, right? I am enough. Whether or not I made sales today the way I plan to make sales or not, whether or not people bought, whether I made the money back on that booth rental or, you know, I reached out to those stores for wholesale and no one got back to me, I am enough. I am wonderful. I'm amazing, right? These affirmations to ourselves, but when they come up, those are triggers to our own feelings of inadequacy and mindset junk that I'm sure that. That. That is reflected in other parts of our life, right? So I think one powerful part is like, okay, I get to say, like, thank you for this challenge. That I can either say, okay, Jacqueline, your brain is running a little wild right now with all these thoughts that are just simply not true. And what do I have to look at? And then I think the second part of that, right, Is either a reflection of yourself or your business. The second part or not say business, but the market. Let's talk about the market, because it's not your business, it's the market. And you've heard I've had episodes on the customer centered approach, and really, that we're selling. We're humans selling to other humans. And so if we think about the market, it's like, what does the market actually need or want? So much of this is positioning. So much of this is how do we make what you're selling make sense in this moment to your ideal customer? So the truth is, is no matter what's going on in business or in life, but since this is a business podcast, we'll stick with that. The truth is that every action you take in your business is trying to show you something. And whether it's working or not, it's feedback. And so what I want to do today and in this episode is I want to change the way you look at business forever. Does that sound good? You ready to jump in? Okay. If you're loving this show, if you're like, oh, this sounds real good, and you want to save it, you want to follow the show, you want to forward it to a friend, please do. It'd be so amazing. But let's jump in now to this idea of what we're taught. And a lot of times, most of us are taught that to see success, success is binary, right? It's win or lose. Win, lose. You launched a product, it either sold or it didn't. You post it on Instagram, it either went viral or it flopped, right? And you're like, oh, I won. It's awesome. Everything feels really good in your body and you're excited and all the dopamine and all that, or you've lost and you're like, ugh, I suck. What do I not know? I should be better at this. I'm never gonna be good at this. All the junk that comes up in our head, right? Good or bad, that binary, win or lose. So what we want to think about here is, like, what is the lesson to learn? What can we see, right? It's either, okay, this worked, this aligned, this did a good job, or what is a lesson I can learn from this so that I can dig deeper and go, thank you, universe, for giving me this opportunity to work through this. If there was an I've tried and give you all the easy button as much as possible. But truthfully, in real life. So I'll give you the easy button. You're like, how do I get on Amazon? I've got that in a program. What emails do I send to buyers at retail stores? I've got that in one of my programs, right? Those are easy buttons. Those are the how I can teach you inside of my courses and my programs. That's all in there. We've built templates and trainings and just hours and hours and hours of all the hows. That is the easy button. But you want to know what I can't give you as an easy button? Is the feelings that we have or are the feelings that we have when we're operating in the day to day. And when I'm like, here you go. Here's the template. Here's the. You know you're going to market. Okay. This is how you set up your booth, or you need to write messaging or branding that stands out or. Or you want to really figure out who your ideal customer avatar is. Here are all the ways to do it. But what. Where you all get stuck? Where I get stuck or we all get stuck is when we do it and we're like, but I did it. Why did I not see the results? Like, wait, where is the literal. Where is the result? Immediate button. Like, immediate. Immediate. Immediate. Right? Because we were very impatient. This is a world right now that, like, impatience is probably very high. Patience is probably very low. We're in a place where we can order food and have it delivered in seconds. And it's not just a pizza place, right? We can get immediate dopamine hits. We can See our best friends in a second on, you know, on our phones. There's so much immediacy of stuff and the waiting. Right, the results. And the other thing my friend Nick said was, like, the extended timeline just because I said I wanted it to happen this week or this weekend or this day. And I'm disappointed that it all didn't work out today. That's my impatience with the lesson being presented in front of me. So what I want you to remember when things like this happen and if you can have this reframe, is that you're not failing. You're not failing, my friend. You're learning. And you're listening to a business podcast, which means I know that you are willing to learn. You're literally here speaking, spending your time, your beautiful, amazing, precious time listening to this show. So I know that you are willing to learn. So if you're willing to learn here and you're looking for the strategy, what about looking to learn from the results or the things that are happening around you, right? Because if you're not willing to learn in real life, right. I go to market, it doesn't work. I post on social, it doesn't work. I call a retail store, it doesn't work. I launched my product, and it's crickets. If you're not willing to learn from that, then you're going to repeat the same patterns until you do. So the real question here and to ask yourself, is when you're in these moments of feeling this way, you could say, what am I actually learning? What am I learning in this moment? What am I learning about my messaging? What am I learning about my offers? What am I learning about my energy or my emotions? What am I learning about my audience or my DL customer avatar? What am I learning about myself? Right? Because when we get into that level of curiosity, we start to ask those questions in curiosity. Our brain goes from feeling womp, womp, as my son says. And my daughter goes, don't say womp, womp, but the womp womp to, huh, curious. What am I learning here? Our brains. Your brain is beautiful and smart and incredible and like a function that greater than a computer. I mean, our brains are magnificent. It is your greatest asset. It is my greatest asset. And so why not get curious with it and say, all right, brain, what's up? What are we doing here? So I'm going to give you an example in real time, and I'm glad to give you this example in real time, because the last podcast episode I did was about something that this Episode is going to say it's no longer happening. Okay. Hey friends. Okay, so I don't know if you're anything like me, but sometimes it feels like my self care routine is slipping through the cracks because when I'm juggling and wearing all the hats in my business and doing all the things, I mean the last thing I have to do is like really fulfill that self care routine that my daughter's talking about. She's like, mom, so listen, so when it comes to running a successful business, you can't really pour from an empty cup. And a lot of times that self care is like one of the first things to get yourself recalibrated. So that's why I want you to meet Glossy. Now Glossy is my favorite daily beauty supplement designed to transform your skin and gut health from the inside out. And I'm actually an investor in this business because I so believe in this idea of science backed ingredients for digestion and skin hydration. And Glossy makes it really easy to look and feel your best without that whole 10 step routine in the mirror. The thing I don't actually have time for, all I have to do is simply mix a stick into my water and I'm good to go. So if you want to try this because I so believe in this business, I think it's amazing. It's done so many wonders for my skin and my gut, which are two things that I need help with. And you want to simplify your wellness and your beauty. All you have to do is click in the show notes and you can use the code Jaclyn Snyder. So it's my full name, use the code Jacqueline Snyder. And I'm hooking you up with 15% off your order. So cheers to glowing skin and a thriving business. So over the last few months we have been working on programs. I've been rebuilding all of my programs. I've been, there's been so much like, I'll say for the last year, a little more than a year, I've literally been rebuilding things where my kids believe that I live at my computer. My son goes, mom, you need to go to sleep. I'm like, I know, but I'm in meetings all day and then the time to do the deep work is at night. So I've been rebuilding all of our curriculum, all of our programs to make it like best in the world helpful to you. The how? Okay, so one of the things we've been doing over the last few months is looking at the programs and you know, we, we shifted Multi Stream machine to Becoming the sales accelerator and the product boss. Sales accelerator has also been redone and it's just an incredible program. The students in there are having amazing results. We have a membership that we created. But last year I built something called Standout Society. And in Standout Society, which you guys like, it's probably one of the programs I'm the most proud of. I knew it so deeply in terms of what I knew my students needed. And it's hard to tell you all, like, hey, I know that this is what you needed. I've been living off of this quote lately, so I'll just say it to you really fast. Henry Ford said that if he had asked the customers Vs People what they wanted, they. They would have said they wanted faster carriages. He was making an automobile. You can't really always ask. And this is for you too. You can't really ask people what they want because they don't necessarily know what they want. They're going to go off historical what they want. So with Standout Society, I was like, this is. I literally see this on repeat. You hear me coaching every week on this podcast. I have so many other coaching calls and sessions that aren't even aired. So I'm. I'm talking to hundreds and hundreds of people a year. And these are the things that I see that are getting in the way of standing on a crowded market. But I listen to other voices. I wasn't listening to my gut. And I decided to take the whole thing and work on it, change it, and be like, you know what? Maybe they don't need to know how to stand out at crowded market. Maybe they need to know how to fix their business. Maybe that's what they need. Maybe I need to come in with positioning and say, hey, something is broken in your business. We have to fix it. If we fix it, this is what it is. And you heard me talk about the fix and you heard me talk about Stuck to Sales, which was a workshop that I was going to do that I'm building from scratch again, completely brand new. I built out all of these frameworks, which I'm like, I'm like, maybe this is all gonna end up in a book. And I'm not kidding how many hours I've spent on messaging my podcast team, the curriculum we're creating literally everything around a program called the Fix and the Workshop that's called Stuck to Sales. And we decided to kill the whole thing yesterday. We're like, done, dead done. Now the Fix is going to be Standout Society repackage in a Way that the customer that you all would understand, oh, this is here to fix your business. But what I realized is, like, most people aren't even thinking that their businesses are broken. They're just like, how do I do this thing? And truthfully, what I knew last year was, I just want to teach you how to stand out in a crowded market and get more sales. The program last year was incredible. The students results are incredible, like literal game changers. And I was like, so yesterday we were just like, huh, okay, this isn't working. The messaging isn't working. We were running ads that wasn't working, sent you all emails. It wasn't working. And so we decided to kill it, shut it down, be like, all right, we're going to refund people or offer them something else. I have massive loss in terms of ad spend, but it is what it is. And a version of me before could have gone into a spiral. I suck. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not a marketer. I don't know what they need. Why do I mess everything up? Why do I overcomplicate it? All of my things? Or I stopped and said, you know what? What is this teaching me? This is teaching me that one. What does the market need? What does my customer actually need? What is. What do my listeners and the community at large need right now in this time, in this moment with their businesses? And this is not it. And instead of saying like, ooh, I suck. I don't know what I'm doing, all the noise that I'm telling you to also goes through my head. And I. And you know, some of my masterminders are really close with me. The people that are in my insiders group and my masterminders, and they hear me talk like this and they're like, thank you for saying this. So I'm going to say it on the podcast. I have had great success in business and I've had great loss in business. I have mindset junk just like the rest of us. Like, let's talk about it. I'm so tired of the Instagram presentation of perfection. It's not accurate. I have other language for it. But this is a clean podcast, so it is not an accurate presentation. So can we actually just talk about it, how it actually is? So how could I have felt? Right. First I felt shame, right? First I felt like. And then the over complication and feeling like I have to apologize to my team and sorry for the whiplash and why can't I just get this right? The first time. And then I realized I'm just not. I'm not serving the best way that I can, right? This isn't speaking to who I want to speak to. This isn't helping who I want to help. And so I could have identified this or internalized this as I'm bad at this, but instead I said, what is this moment trying to teach me about what I market, how I teach, what I can give? And what is this showing me about my habits when I panic or when things don't feel like they're working out, right? Do I freeze? Do I overwork? Do I retreat? And so looking at that and then reflecting this back, and my friend Nick had said this to me, and I was just like, you're right, Nick. Like, you're so right. And he said, sometimes it's about the timeline. Sometimes we just have to extend timelines. You know why? Because my thing was, we got to get this done. Summer's coming. This is what I want to teach in this month. This is really important for them to know, you know, because we're rolling into summer markets and there's all this stuff that's happening. But what if instead of feeling disappointed and shame and all these terrible, no good thoughts, I just extended the timeline? Okay, so it didn't happen this week, it may not happen next week, but at least what we're building right now is exceptional world class programming. Is it marketing and messaging and positioning that brings in the right people? It's connection with people in a time where we feel so disconnected. And so I really need to take that reflection and not only will it make me better in my business, but it'll be make me better at just being. So let's bring it back to you and the business side of it, all right? If you're not getting the sales that you want, right, let's look at it and see. Is it the pricing? Is it the positioning? Are we marketing the right customers? Are our customers even where we're supposed to be or where we are? Or is it the voice in your head that tells you no one wants what you have? Right? What is it? Or is it all of it? You're like, well, it might be my pricing and it's the voice in my head, okay, cool. What do we learn from that? How do we learn? How do we look at that and then figure it out? What do you need to do? So if it's pricing, then what do you need to do and know so that you can test your pricing? Do you need to know the right Pricing strategy? Do you need a cost sheet? Do you need to understand the psychology behind pricing? Do you actually not know who your customer is? And so you're not even connecting the pricing with them? The other side is no one wants what you have. Well, is that true or is that just a noisy voice in your head that comes up in other places in your life and that you're like, you know what? Actually, I'm just probably not in the right place, selling to the right people, position the right way, pricing the right way. Because guess what? I don't know about you, but I went to fashion design school. I. I say that I feel like it's like beauty school, but it was the top three schools in the United States for design and art. Shout out. Otis College of Art and Design, but Parsons Fit and Otis, four year degree. They gave us a quarter in our last year of entrepreneurship or business. I don't even know if it's entrepreneurship. They don't even teach you entrepreneurship. And if you went to business school, it's still not entrepreneurship. So guess what? You know how entrepreneurs learn? They learn by doing it. They learn by doing it and failing and learning from those mistakes. And sometimes it's out of the park, wins, and sometimes it's not. But you know what entrepreneurs do do? They pick themselves up and they do it again and again and again and again. We're not masochists. We are so freaking excited about these businesses and what we have the potential of building and doing. It lights us up from the inside. It makes us feel alive. That is what entrepreneurship is to me. So if you are in a place that you feel stuck, I want you to think about your business as a mirror. Right? You can either beat yourself up in that reflection or you could start to understand it. And that's what I want you to look at, right? I want you to look at this and be like, okay, what's up, Jacqueline? Let's look in the mirror. Okay. All right. This thing didn't sell. I sent out an email and nobody signed up for the workshop. I mean, people did sign up, but in my brain, it's like, nobody signed up. I sent out ads and we were in massive loss. Well, okay, I could be like, okay, you suck, or all right, what do I have to learn from this? Okay, one, let's learn from. The results are not a representation of me. I'm still an awesome mom, an awesome human, an awesome friend. I'm still an awesome coach. I still know the things that I know. And I also know that I don't know everything. Second part is. Is all right. This didn't fit with the market. This didn't fit with what they need to know right now. This didn't align with their hearts and their feelings and their needs. So that's what we're supposed to look at. And so I want you to start to reframe. Reframe this into. It's not a win, lose, right? This is another thing I learned this weekend was it's a win, win. When we see what happens, we are either like, okay, cool, I did this thing. This worked. This was the result. It worked out really great for me, or I gotta learn something from this. And that is where the growth starts to happen. Every action is really a conversation and a reflection between you and your business. And so I want you to ask you, are you listening? Are you listening? So this week, I want to invite you to do one thing, and if something goes wrong, okay, look at what didn't work and ask yourself, what is this trying to teach me? What is this trying to teach me? It will shift the way that you feel, and that's where growth starts. That's how we build businesses that last, brands that last entrepreneurial spirit that lasts. That's what we do here. So, my friends, as we are recalibrating, we will be having a workshop coming up. It may or may not be on this episode. Who knows? Because in, you know, the next few days, I could. Between me doing this in real time and posting the show, I might have like a, hey, come here and join. But what I do know is it's going to be awesome. It's going to be something that is what I believe you need to hear in this time. And I will. I'll have an offer for you at the end. Why? Because that's literally how we run our business, right? We have this podcast. It's free. We educate, we have freebies, all the things. And then we will run things from time to time, whether they're paid or they're free, to support you in learning and mindset shifts and gems and jewels. And then at the end, we might be like, hey, I can only go so deep here. So if you want to go further with me, if you want the how, which I'm telling you, I've worked on for the last year. So all of the how, like, I don't even know that, you know, it's like all of the how is is there and waiting for you. The templates, the workbooks, the strategy, the coaching, the mindset, all of that amazingness is there waiting for you. And I am here in real time, whether it's in one of my live, you know, workshops, sessions, boot camps here on the podcast to lift you up, to inspire you to say let's freaking go. Let's do this thing together. Let's do entrepreneurship together. And not only entrepreneurship, building physical product based businesses together. That is what we are doing. That is what I'm here for. All in. And if you go deeper with me, you want to go a step further, let's do that together too because again, it's a clean podcast. But let's freaking go. Yeah. Okay. My friends, I hope you love this episode. Make sure you're following the show, which is subscribed back in my day. And I can't wait to see you in the next episode. All right, thank you so much. Bye bye for now.