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Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
944: The Business Advice I’m Actively Ignoring Right Now
00:41:15
There’s no shortage of business advice out there, but let’s be real, some of it just doesn’t work for me. And I’m guessing it’s not all going to work for you either!
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Abigail Pumphrey
I know you've seen these businesses, especially on social, where you just feel like you're loved and hyped and like, given all of this attention. And then the moment you buy, you feel like you got ghosted. You're like, what the heck happened? It's because they have to love bomb their audience to keep growing it. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host, Abigail Pumphrey, and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way, whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Breaking news Strategy Hour needs your vote. We're thrilled to announce the Strategy Hour podcast is officially nominated for the Webby People's Voice Award. Recognized as one of the top five podcasts worldwide in creativity and marketing. This is your chance to help us take home the gold. But hurry. Voting closes Thursday, April 17. It takes less than 20 seconds and your vote truly makes a difference. Head to bossproject.comvote right now to show your love and help us snag that Webby. Seriously, Pause this episode and go vote bossproject.com vote. I'll wait. Thank you so much for supporting the Strategy Hour. There is no shortage of business advice out there, but some of it just doesn't work for me. And I'm guessing it's probably not all going to work for you either. I have learned the hard way that not all advice is created equal. And in today's episode, I'm talking about where I am purposefully being a rebel, which sounds a little out of character for me, but I am intentionally choosing what aligns with me, my values, and giving myself permission to evolve. I hope this episode helps you do the same. We're going to knock these out one piece of bad advice at a time, and I'm going to break down why I'm not doing that. All right, so let's start with number one. Do less to make more. I hate this. I think this advice can feel so toxic and premature, especially when you're still in the build phase. I think it gives a lot of people a complex that what they're doing is ineffective because they're not getting to their goal fast enough and they think they should be doing less, that's just like, not how business works. Business requires action, intentional action over minimalism. And you're not going to know what works until you put in the reps. So I know people talk about quality over quantity, and yet that isn't helpful. You do need quantity. You do need to just do it again and again and again and again and again to learn from it. And then over time, you can do more of what's working and ultimately do less. But that takes time, and business keeps evolving. So even if you get to a season where you feel like, okay, I got the hang of it, I can do this, and I know what results I'm going to get, something could change literally any second. And it could be something that's in your control. It could be something that's completely out of your control. It could have nothing to do with you personally and be happening in the world or the economy or your city or with your taxes or whatever. It doesn't matter what it is. But we are going to constantly be thrown new curveballs, and I would rather you put in the mindset that you're going to do exactly what you're capable of doing in that season and get as close to your goals as possible with the energy and the resources that you have available to you. Perhaps a little bit too long and not as sexy, but I really think that's a lot more healthy of a way to look at it. This next one may feel a little bit odd to you that I'm ignoring this because you may think I'm past this point and valid, but I'll explain why. So I think it's really unhelpful for. For people to say that you need a huge audience to make real money. Does an audience help you make more? It can, but not necessarily. They have to be engaged. They have to be an ideal fit for what you're selling. And those don't always align. Some people will get a big audience from one viral moment, and they might be supportive of that specific thing that went out into the world. But if the rest of your business isn't around that topic or they're not interested in those other things, then you just have a fake follower number, essentially, like they're there. But are they actually moving your business forward? So, yes, at this point, I absolutely have an audience. I have a large audience listening to this podcast I have a large email list. I have a decent size social media following. Though I find it incredibly odd that all of my other platforms are actually bigger than including my web traffic. Nonetheless, I wanted to start something new and you guys have heard about it. Crater Diary. And I'm actually starting several things new this year, which I literally said I was not starting anything new this year. I am so bad at following my own advice. I did good for three months and then I couldn't help myself. I had to pursue some things anyway. Nonetheless, Creator Diary, brand new, no audience. It needs momentum, right? It needs people. It needs that grassroots effort of sharing and all of those things for it to grow. I purposefully have it as a completely separate list. So it's a separate URL, separate email list. They get separate emails from Boss Project. Will Boss Project occasionally hear about Creator Diary? Sure, but that's not the primary focus of Boss Project. Boss Project's focus is education, small business education. Creator Diary, the focus is on giving people a space to tell their story and ultimately get out all the feels that they got trapped inside. Because working in the online world is super isolating. I needed that to make money in order to justify spending time on it. Not because, not because I wasn't willing to do it for free. I 100% was, but I knew that the amount of time I wanted to give it would negatively impact my current business and so I would lose potential sales by distracting my focus. And so I needed to fill the gap. And I have. Not completely, but I've already stated, started making money from that project. And it's brand new. And I'll tell more about that later in the episode. So if it's not all about having this big audience, then what are you actually supposed to focus on? You need to focus on things that are going to connect with the right people, the right solution for the right people. It doesn't matter how many people there are. I've seen people make gobs of money with teeny, teeny tiny audiences. Okay? You can have a small but mighty list and it's all going to determine what kind of offers you pursue, how you go about selling them. When I started, I wasn't selling on social. I was reaching out to people via email. I was connecting at networking events. I was putting boots on the ground and finding out who needed me and how could I be in their world. And it got to the point where I didn't have to go find them. Now the people find me, which is amazing. I love that. For me, took 10 years to get here though, you can start small and even if that means you emailing your current network to start, that's how most people start. They start with the people that are closest to them and say, hey, I have this amazing idea, I want to pursue it. Do you know anyone who's willing to support that? Whether that be a client or a sponsor or insert anything right, you tell the people you care the most about. That's still true. Anytime I have something new, I start with the people I care the most about. And they are usually the most helpful. Now, they don't always steer me in the right direction. You still have to use your own discernment and follow your own intuition. But the audience is a nice to have, not a necessary. Okay, this next one like kind of makes me want to vomit because I absolutely believed this for a while. And it's true to an extent, I'll give them that. But there's this thought that to scale, you need to grow your team. You have to have more employees and you have to continue to make the business bigger by infrastructure in order to make it bigger financially. Yes, that's true to an extent. Depending on the kind of service or product you're selling, you need bodies to fulfill the thing. So if you're running a design agency, you only have a capacity to take on so many design clients before you are literally out of time. And you couldn't sell another minute because there's not another minute to sell. And so the way you fill that gap is you hire people, you bring people in to do the thing. What I don't think people realize is that the bigger your team gets, the more complex your team gets, the more cost it takes to run the thing. And emotionally it's way more involved. It gets a lot more complicated, a lot more nuanced. It's different problems for sure. But if the goal is profit or like take home pay, I've seen people with a $250,000 business take home more cash flow than $3 million entrepreneurs. I'm just saying the 250,000 business with higher profit, like an actual dollars, like I've seen a $250,000 business make 200,000 personally and a $3 million business barely pay themselves for a year. Truly, to have all of the vanity of it looks amazing. It's not worth the emotional toll that it takes. Not to mention it stressed me out so badly to have our overhead as high as it was. At one point, our overhead was almost $70,000 a month. $70,000 thousand dollars a month to Break even. That was twice as much as my first job. Like, that's a lot of money. And while we were capable of doing it and bringing it in and making it happen and still being profitable, and the business still grew and we were still managing people. And it's just not the life I wanted. It's not the life I wanted. And things evolved over many years. Like, this wasn't. This wasn't a grow it and then drop my whole team. Like, that's not how it happened. I grew to a team of 10. And then as people kind of moved on for various reasons over time, we got to four. And I just wasn't rehiring. I wasn't backfilling positions as people left and people weren't necessarily leaving on bad terms. Like many of them were going on to pursue incredible other things. And I was so supportive of them transitioning. So by no means was there a sour taste of my mouth over all of that, but it didn't match how I wanted to show up in the world. And I am fully aware that I could make as much or more than I was making previously by keeping things lean and simple and choosing to build a business that supports and fits my life, not someone else's empire fantasy. I've spent years watching Shark Tank and thinking about the people they like come on as guest sharks because their business just like turned into this massive thing. Like Kendra Scott, for example. Billion dollar Empire, right? And I asked myself, do I really want that? And I think there's some element of me that still says yes. I still see the sex appeal of it all. I still see the desire of the fame and the notoriety and all the things you get to learn because it is really, really, really, really cool. I will give them that. The bigger your business gets, the more complex your business gets. But the opportunity for you to learn more is huge. And so if you're someone who thrives on learning and you like managing, which is a whole other story, I see the appeal of keeping, growing and keeping, keep challenging yourself to new levels. And I'm just at a point in my life where, like, I don't need my business to be a challenge. I want my business to support other people, to help them reach their goals and allow me to live a life outside of work where I get to love my family and spend time with them. Ironically, I think it was yesterday, my sister sent a text and she's an architect. And it was a photo of a letter from her boss telling her she got a raise and a title change. And I'M so proud of my sister. She is an incredibly talented interior architect and will go on to do incredible things. And I sat at my desk thinking I was a little jealous because if I want to raise, I gotta work harder for it. And not to say that she didn't work hard for it. She absolutely did. She put in 10 years of service and worked on a ton of projects and got underpaid for many of those years. So she is finally getting her due, so to speak. But when you're a business owner, if you want to change how much money you make, you have to put in the work. And I just like vaguely mentioned something to my spouse and he was like, why do you care? He's like, her life is nothing like our life. The amount of time freedom we have is incomprehensible to other people. He's not wrong. I have so much time freedom, I have so much flexibility and I have so much opportunity to change and evolve my business to match the point in life that I am. So while the grass can seem greener on the other side, all of this to say simplicity can absolutely work. You can totally still make the money and you don't need a big team to scale. Now, this one I don't hear as often anymore, but I think it's still worth talking about. The if it's not hard, you're doing it wrong. It's so problematic. It's so problematic. It glorifies burnout and makes ease somehow feel like a failure. When you can aim for simple, sustainable and aligned. And that's my goal every single day. Simple, sustainable, aligned. I'd probably add on maybe systems to that, or even something like routine. I want a flow and I want it to feel easy. And if I'm in a hard season that doesn't end, my body will pay for it. I know some people can handle their stress way better than others. I would like to think I'm good at it, but the reality is I am good at it. From a functional perspective. I will get all the things done. I will still make everything happen. It'll still happen on time. I won't disappoint people most of the time. Occasionally I still disappoint people, I promise. But for every time I push through, like out loud, so to speak, inside I'm holding onto it. I'm very bad at letting things go. And so it brews. It brews inside of me. And I've struggled with a lot of chronic illness over the years and do I think it's all brought on by stress. Absolutely not. I got some stuff going on, okay, and that's fine. But I don't want to create an environment for you or for anyone else that it has to be hard. Life is hard all on its own and your hard is going to be different than my hard. We don't need to make our job just as hard. It can be fun, it can be simple, it can be sustainable. Is it still work? Sometimes? Yes. Is it still going to be hard? Sometimes? Yes. But it's not wrong if it's not hard. And that's the difference. You're smart, you're talented, you've got the vision. So why does running your business still feel so hard? Success isn't about working harder, it's about working smarter. And that's exactly why I created the Co op. Inside you'll get instant access to 12 plus courses, hundreds of templates and real strategies that actually drive sales without all the trial and error. These are the exact resources I've used to build a seven figure business. So stop spinning your wheels and join me inside. Head to creative templateshop.com membership and make running your business easier today. That's creative templateshop.com membership do you really understand your business numbers? FreshBooks takes the stress out of bookkeeping. It's your financial BFF. With FreshBooks you can automate invoices and expenses, process payments seamlessly and get real time insights into your business finances. Build invoices in seconds and get paid twice as fast. Create reports that allow you to instantly see the health of Your business and FreshBooks grows with you with features like team management, payroll and accountant access when you need them. Switch to FreshBooks for a better accounting experience. FreshBooks is the user friendly accounting platform for your business. Switching to FreshBooks has never been easier. Even if you're coming from another accounting tool. FreshBooks makes migrating your data simple and their support team is ready if you need help. Feel more confident about your numbers? Switch to FreshBooks today. Visit freshbooks.com to get FreshBooks 70% off for four months. That's freshbooks.com get started today and thank yourself tomorrow. I think some people would fight me on this one that you have to niche down to one thing. Does niching help? A hundred percent focus of any kind. Regardless if we're talking about niche or business model or pricing structure or whatever, less absolutely gives you more focus. And when you have more focus, the thing that you're pouring your time into is going to grow faster. But most entrepreneurs I know are multi passionate and if they're constantly being limited in their creative evolution, they're going to get real stuck, myself included. It will prevent long term growth if they don't get to chase those wild hairs every now and again. You have to be willing to listen to those nudges even if they feel goofy, even if they feel like a sideline. And do I think sometimes it has made me look less put together? Maybe. But I think more often than not the comments I get in private are that people are jealous that I have been willing to what it looks like from the outside, sometimes put down this business, which I'm not. I always am sustaining this business. It is my livelihood. It is how I make the majority of my personal income. But I have pursued lots of things that I'm passionate about. I have built pop up businesses with my sister. I have blogged about food and home design. I've done my stint as an influencer. I did videos and TikTok shop and and now I have other things going too though I I would like to think that Creator Diary and Click Copy AI are two things that are going to stick around long term and I think will be a big part of what my future looks like. At least I hope so. What I do instead is niche. My messaging. I talk to a lot of people about a lot of things, but when I'm talking to them about one of them, I get very specific on who I'm talking to, why I'm talking to them, how I'm going to help them, what it's going to look like. And I give myself space outside of that to evolve and change and explore and have fun and be creative. And it's amazing when you apply those same principles to your life or your marriage, it will also enhance those other areas because we can get stuck in this rut of it has to look one way. Like when's the last time you sat down your partner and told them where you were feeling stuck in your relationship? Or where you were feeling unheard? Or where you were feeling like you were missing something? Have you given other people an opportunity to step up? I don't know. And I realize that sounds entirely different than niching down, but is it all that different? You're assuming things about your audience. You're assuming that they're not willing to evolve with you. You're assuming that they're not interested in this other thing you're also interested in. We're all people. We all have lives. I know it's really hard to see it sometimes when you're living yours and Then you just watch other people online and all you're seeing is the highlight reel. But shit hits the fan, I promise. Give yourself room. Allow yourself to see new opportunities. So this next one, I want to put like 17 asterisks at the end because I do think I want you to be thinking about this a little bit different than I'm thinking about this. But I still want to give you my perspective first. So the thought either only sell high ticket or you have to sell high ticket can sometimes come up. And I very intentionally sell low cost digital products in a reasonably priced accessible membership. I made that out of a choice. I have sold on every end of the spectrum. I've sold things from $11 to $45,000 and everything in between. So I'm not scared of selling high ticket. I know its purpose and where it makes sense and when to bring it up and all of those things. As for my day to day, that's not how I want to show up in this season. The higher the ticket, the higher the expectations. And I would much rather have people that have lower expectations and me wow them all the time than feel this pressure to like accommodate people, individuals over and over again when doing so is often distracting from the kind of life or the kind of business I want to build. So I'm not afraid of high ticket. It has its place. Now, how does this apply to you? I think for most small businesses you have to have something at least initially that's on the higher end. It doesn't have to be $45,000, it could be a couple thousand, it could be 5,000, it could be 10,000. But those items, regardless of what they are, I don't care if it's a one on one service, if you're implementing something, if you have some sort of high end course or group coaching offer, it doesn't matter what it is. But to make the income that you want to make. People generally don't have a large enough audience to make enough low ticket sales to sustain their life on only low ticket sales. So instead of saying only sell high ticket or you have to sell high ticket, look at high ticket as an opportunity to make profit in a different kind of way. And honestly, if I really think about it, I think it's a little bit deceptive. I'm not, not being deceptive on purpose by any means, but I don't have high end offers publicly. But it doesn't mean I don't sell high end. What do I mean by that? So everything I sell to my audience, my actual Audience is low ticket. Everything's under $500. The majority is under 100. Okay, that's true. But I do make chunks of change at a time, and those are all through sponsorship and partnership. So I'm still selling, quote unquote, high ticket, but they're to brands. With my goal being at some point I want brands to be paying me enough to sustain this business, to sustain my staff, so that I can make all of my education free. That's the goal. I don't know how long it's going to take, but over the years, I've gotten a heck of a lot closer. The fact that a guy can have everything low ticket now is only because I have the sponsorships on the other side that are helping fill the gap. Because I still don't, even at this stage of business, have enough of an audience to exclusively sell low ticket. Thought you should know. Okay, one more piece on this and then I. I promise I'll move on. I think what this advice is missing is that you don't really get into the psychology of buyer behavior. And ultimately, like, you need some impulse options, which is why you should have a low ticket offer on your menu of things. I think you could have as little as three things, though. You could have a low ticket, a mid ticket, and a signature offer. And that could work because they're layered and it allows for relationship building and it allows for trust building, which absolutely leads into the next thing. I want to say that I don't follow the advice of. And it's not to say that it doesn't work. This one in particular, this is not me saying this won't work. This will 100% work. I don't want that for me. So having one offer, one offer to rule them all, it can work. Again, if you don't have a big enough audience to sustain one offer, it can get really challenging because once you sell to one person, you have to move on. And so it can get into this, like, churn and burn culture where you see someone. I know you've seen these businesses, especially on social, where you just feel like you're loved and hyped and like, given all of this attention. And then the moment you buy, you feel like you got ghosted. You're like, what the heck happened? It's because they have to love bomb their audience to keep growing it. And they're not actually building relationships on the back end. They're just trying to make the initial sale because there is nothing else. There's only the one thing. So do I Think this can be done ethically? Yeah, a hundred percent. I've seen many people do this successfully. It does require you to consistently grow your audience, though. Having something in your pocket that offers more flexibility is definitely going to make things easier. There are going to be seasons in your business where it is so much easier to sell a new thing to your current audience than hunting for new people. And I know that that can sometimes make you look a little bit all over the place, but you just have to have some intention around it. You don't want to sell a new thing in 17 different industries over two years. That's not going to work. But if you're selling complimentary things to the same person and building trust over time, that is a way to invest in the people that are there and have them benefit from your knowledge. Having this in your back pocket is helpful, too. There have been seasons where I'm like, oh, my gosh, we are not going to make overhead. We need to do some sort of, like, blitz flash sale thing. And sometimes it's not a new thing. Sometimes it's like re earthing. Unearthing something you've done before and just kind of put down and haven't promoted in a while. Having the multiple things is helpful. Again, not to say that you can't just have one. Okay, my last piece of advice that I'm ignoring before we get into wrap up, and this one is a little spicy. Don't monetize passion projects. I get the advice. I totally understand why people say this, but I do not follow this rule. And it's not to say I don't. I don't monetize every passion project. That would be exhausting. That would be unsustainable. But I absolutely will monetize passion projects, and I want you to reframe it. So instead of turning your passion into work because you're monetizing it, like, don't look at it like that. Don't look at it like, by monetizing it now, the thing that was amazing is now not going to be fun anymore. What if you saw it as funding a project you want to pursue? I think instantly your brain just had, like, fireworks going off. I know it. I know it. That's how this podcast exists. It initially started as something we wanted to pursue, a passion project. We weren't sure how it was going to help build income. We weren't sure how it was going to monetize. We didn't know, but we made the goal, how can we get this funded? So it wasn't how can we make money from this? It was. How can we get it to pay for itself so it's not wasting our time, so to speak. So it's not costing us to pursue this. Because most passions cost money, most of them very little. Unless you're, like, running. But even still, if you're running outside, you have. You have to get good shoes. You have to change those often. If you don't have the right clothing, you're going to get, like, chafed and chapped and, like, that's miserable. Name a free passion. I can't think of a single one. You come back to me if you think of one. I would love to know. But when you look at it as funding a project you want to pursue, things change. Because then all of a sudden, there's not this pressure to have it make all this money and to have it do all these things and be this big giant thing to reach all your goals and yada, yada, that's where it gets complicated and typically will lead you in the direction that is just going to make you feel frustrated. So a real example, a very recent one at that I wanted and had this vision for creatordiary.com okay? And like, literally just in the back of my head, because this is how I do everything in the back of my head, I'm like, I wonder how I could get this paid for. I didn't actually, like, consciously have that thought. It wasn't even there. And then I was on a call with a potential brand partner for Boss project, and I was like, going through the spiel of all the various ways we could work together and how I'm willing to be creative and work towards their goals and really trying to figure out what they wanted or needed. And then I was like, at the end of the conversation, I said, all of those things can happen. Totally cool with that. We can come up with a proposal that makes sense for that. Great. But if you want to do something, like, a little bit off the wall, I have an idea for you. And they're like, what? And I was like, here's the idea, here's the concept. This was still in concept. The site wasn't done. It wasn't live. I hadn't announced it yet. I said, here's what I want to do. Here's why I think it needs to exist. Here's why I think you sponsoring it is a good move for your company. And they immediately said, we're in. And I was like, oh, what just happened? It was so incredible. So I am so grateful to have FreshBooks as the official sponsor for Creator Diary. I hope to continue to grow the sponsors for that community because I do want to see that space grow. And I think it's going to be. It can be so much more than it is right now, and I'm excited about that. But I get to create because I love it and I get to monetize because it supports my ability to keep going. And that couldn't be more true with this project. So I hope that hits you with a little bit of encouragement. That if you are multi passionate and you do have things that you want to pursue, just think through it. Some things personal, keep to yourself, make them just for you. Some things deserve the limelight and they deserve to be out in the world. Okay, to wrap it up, I just have to tell you, you are allowed to outgrow advice. Maybe it was something we talked about today and you used to believe that thing or you used to prescribe to that thing and you're over it. Okay, maybe there's something else on your mind and you're like, I don't know about that anymore. I don't know if that works for me anymore. You're growing, you're evolving, you're aging. You're at a different point in life than you were two years ago. Think about how different your life was 2, 5, 10, 15 years ago. Guarantee you're like, oh, yeah, it makes sense that I would follow different advice because you're probably not acting the same in your day to day life. So why do you feel this pressure to act the same for the rest of your life? In your business, it makes no sense. You don't have to follow rules that don't make sense to you. There are no rules. The only rules that are there are the ones that you prescribe to, that you decide to believe in. They're your limitations. Now. Some of those things can be good. Some of them allow you to put in boundaries. They allow you to put in restrictions that feel right for you. Rules aren't bad, but rules are yours, not society's. I want to encourage you to build your business with alignment, not obligation. You have your own set of values. You have things that are important to you. You have so much energy. You have one life. You're not obligated to anyone but yourself. And when you build a business that's aligned with your values, all of those other things I just mentioned, it will grow faster because it will feel right. You will start resisting, putting off or even sabotaging a business that it's out of alignment you will. So I do want to hear from you though. I'd love if you would send me a DM over at Abigail Says. You can find my profile by going to Boss Project on Instagram. My profile is linked there. I'd love to know a piece of advice that you ditched lately or something about this episode that really hit home for you. What are you no longer subscribing to? Let me know? And be sure to subscribe to this podcast because in the next episode we're talking about what AI can't replace and what you should be automating. Anyway. Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway, or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me at Abigail says and ossproject so we can share it. Okay. Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from Boss Project. I'd love if you join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.