Episode 66: A behind-the-scenes of my biggest shifts in 2021 (Part 1)

Get ready because everything is about to change. There's a new way of living life and doing business that will blow your mind. This is a podcast all about the timing of life and the timing of success. It's what we call the Right on Time Life. And you are listening to the Right on Time podcast with Amber McHugh. Hello. Hello. I hope that your 2022 is off to an incredible start. I have been reflecting a little extra into the new year on last year. So what I want to do in today's podcast episode is I want to share what I've been ruminating on, what my reflections include. A little bit of a 2021 debrief, looking back with a whole lot of lessons learned, in fact, have captured those key lessons learned and milestones throughout the year that occurred that were impactful to me and that may also be helpful for you to hear on your journey to grow and build your business in an aligned way that supports the life you want to live and the values you hold. So that's what we're diving into today. It is a massive behind the scenes and we may have to split this up into two episodes. So we are going to see how long, how long we go as we move through this behind the scenes. And I don't want to take too much of your time up in this episode. So if we hit about that 20 minute mark, then I am going to pause and we are going to flip over to a second episode. So I Hope that your 2021 started differently than mine. I rolled into 2021 not feeling great about what was happening. There was still a lot of chaos. There was still a lot of change happening. There was still a ton of uncertainty. And I say still because 2020 was a year of massive uncertainty for so many of us as things rapidly changed with the global pandemic that we're still experiencing today. And for me, 2020 meant moving back from Ethiopia to Chicago, not knowing if we'd stay in Chicago, go back to Africa, if we go somewhere else. We had no idea. And in 2020 we ended up staying in Chicago. We found out about mid. Actually, it was about mid year that we found out. Okay, we found something for you specifically. My husband, he is the reason that we are. He drives his job, drives where we move to in any given season. And so they said, hey, we found a project could work on in Chicago now and then it would be a two year run at least. And then after that a little bit tbd, which I have news on as well. So we landed here in March 2020, found out we'd be here for two years in about June of 2020. And then we went out finding our temporary housing. We got settled, we had to get furniture because we had sold all of that before we moved to Ethiopia. And there were a lot of things that we needed get grounded in in 2020, not to mention the impact that the global pandemic was having on the business. In my photography business, things came to a screeching halt, of course, because we couldn't shoot our clients as expected in person, as in person, activities were completely halted in our space. And and then in my consulting business@ambermchugh.com Things were changing there for me and for everyone, of course. So we've got travel consultants in our community. We have online business owners who are coaching and consulting and designing. We have nonprofit business owners and consultants. So we have a wide variety of businesses in my experiences and programs that Amber McKee.com and things are changing for everyone. So we adapted our programs to align with the support that people needed, real time. We added more calls, one part for emotional support and one part to navigate the rapid, consistent, ongoing change in 2020. And so, as I said, I rolled into 2021, thinking, oh my gosh, this is like nothing has changed. Things are feeling a lot like they always have been. And I was really hoping for a shift of some sort, even if that shift was just how I felt, because it was a new year and an opportunity for a fresh start, because we can get those fresh starts at any moment that we decide. But it wasn't quite happening for me at the beginning of 2020. And as I rolled into 2020, I had my goals set like I do every year. I set my goals on a goal card where we map out what am I focused on working towards, what will I give to receive, what's the financial target or the KPI associated with that goal, and what is it going to look like when I bring that to life? And so I created my goal card because I want to have my goals in front of me all year long, every day where I sit down and work, or if we're on the move, it's right there tucked in the front of my planner so I can always look at it very clearly and very quickly so that my subconscious has a quick reminder of what are we working toward today so that everything can align and I can get my subconscious on board so that I don't have to do the heavy lifting front and center in my brain every single day. What's the Goal. What's the goal again? What are we doing? No, it is. There it is front and center. It is decided. My subconscious is capturing that information so we can align our actions every day with that goal with a little bit more ease. But in March of 2021, I looked at my goals and I said, huh, I don't think that's the right goal. I think that we're going to meet that goal, no problem. So I want to increase a little bit. This is the first year ever that I paused mid year that I paused anytime in the year happened to be March, and said, you know what, let's change this goal a little bit. So I bumped up my goal a smidge and I will definitely let you know if we meet those goals or we did not meet those goals in 2021. But first, there were some other variables at play because when we set our goals, we don't always know if we're going to reach them or not. We don't always know if they're the right goals or not. We're sort of making an educated guess and a hypothesis. Now, I've been running my businesses for over 10 years. I've got a goal card for each year, except one year, 2016 to 2017, I used the same goal card and it says on here, redo. We're going to redo that goal in 2017. So I met my goals every year that I created a goal card, except one. And there's of course a story to go with, but I'm going to save that. So as we set our goals, we're making educated guesses. And like I said, I've been doing this for over 10 years. So I've got some data to pull from to know what a good estimate is or what a good bump is. Right. There's been an increase many and most years as we've created these goal cards year over year. But if you're just starting out, you may not have a sense of what that revenue is going to look like, especially if you're stepping into a new space, a new opportunity, and you haven't played there before. So you don't have that data. So, yes, what you can do is look to colleagues, look to mentors, look to best practices to make some educated guesses and hypotheses. We actually, for our clients, share a marketing activities calendar to help you see, okay, what if I do these things throughout the year? What will my potential revenue be? How many people will I reach? What will my potential conversion be to move people from prospects or leads to clients. And then as a result, we plug this into a calculator where we determine what your revenue may be as a result of these activities. Now, like anything, certain things have to line up if what we put into the marketing activities calendar and calculator is going to become reality. So there's a bit of massaging of it throughout the year, which is exactly what we did throughout 2021. We set our baseline, we set our goals, we bumped them a little bit, and then we identified what we needed to do if we had a chance at reaching those goals. Now, one of those activities that we were doing was revamping a program that we created. I created, let's say it was 2016, it might have actually been 2015, called CEO school. And over the years, we haven't really leveraged that program or shared that program too, too much. We've done a couple of things with it, shared it as bonuses in friends programs. We have gifted it to clients who are coming into other programs of ours. But there is a lot of value in that program called CEO School, that shows us how to run a business that aligns with the life we want to live. So we went on to revamp that program, make it current, and pulled together all of the things that we saw in running a business from 2016 to 2021 that we wanted to upd that program with. And we changed the name of that program to the Modern CEO. That actually used to be the name of this podcast, but we wanted to shift it and repurpose it a little bit. And so the Modern CEO program was developed as a part of CEO School, as a part of what we had been creating over the years. And the key difference of what we'd been creating over the years is that when we did CEO School, I was definitely more focused on the running of the business. Activities, financials, hiring, KPIs, we want to track how to run meetings, how to manage our time as CEOs, how to really step into that leadership role in our businesses strategically and with the team. But I left out the marketing piece because when I came into the online space over a decade ago now, oh my gosh, when I came into the online space, there were a lot of courses on how to market your business. There were a lot of programs, there was a lot of coaching on how to market scale your business. And I saw an opportunity for me to play in that CEO School space without heavy focus on the marketing. But over the years, I've done a lot of marketing, I've learned a lot about marketing, I have some strong opinions on marketing that are differentiated in the marketplace. And I have a way of doing business that is different than a lot of ways that things were done in the market. So yes, we looked when we updated the Modern CEO and we moved it from CEO school to the Modern CEO to update that content and that material and that really, it's a playbook. What we do in the Modern CEO is create a playbook for how you can run your business again from that aligned place where you can get freedom or you can scale it and you can grow it. And now we have woven in the marketing elements. So sales and marketing are of course a key piece of running the business. But I resisted that. In the past, I had a strategic marketing background in corporate. I had done consulting in the marketing space with Fortune 500, maybe even some 100 companies. And I wanted to separate and differentiate. But now I saw, oh, you do do things differently. So there's a way to differentiate in that space as well. So the modern CEO was revamped by June, end of June 2021. And I put my pedal to the metal on that in really a lot in June and in May as well. And in May, we also created a video series for the Modern CEO program. And we did things. Oftentimes I will create the content, then do the marketing. But what I often find is that I'm creating the content and the project gets delayed and it's pushing into the time I want to spend creating marketing and being creative around my marketing. So we flipped it this time. I did the marketing for it first. We created the sales page content first, the enrollment page content first. We created the video series first and wrote those scripts. Then I went in to do the heavy lifting around the Modern CEO redesign, which includes comprehensive workbooks for those of us that don't love videos. It does include videos for those of us who still want the video. And it includes implementation kits and so many other bonus resources to support business owners and scaling and growing and looking at their business differently. So we did. I also did the outline before I stepped into marketing, so I knew what we were marketing. And of course I had a lot of the content already because we've created it over the years, we are reorganizing it and upgrading it. So I did that, recorded that video series, finished content, and we launched for enrollment in the Modern CEO using a brand new video series, brand new marketing messaging in summer 2021. And so I mentioned before that we make an educated guess, we have hypotheses, but things Change. And yes, in summer 2021, July, June, end of June, moving into July, certainly August as well, there were iOS updates happening. Apple was making changes and Facebook ads did not perform as they typically do. For me and for many of my clients and people I spoke to and colleagues who were doing launches or enrollments who had promotions going at the same time, we're not performing like usual. So we noticed that, oh, our cost per enrollee into our marketing event, the free training series that we had prepared was not doing what we would typically see. Our cost per lead was very, very high. It was actually at one point like $100 cost per lead. And we had an incredible ads person on the case. What is that like if we are typically paying five or seven dollars per lead, it shot up to $100 per lead at one point. We got it back down to 50, we got it back down to 47. We were working it, we were working it, we were working it well. But we had to pause that ad spend because I did not have the budget for 50 to $100 a lead planned for, for this campaign. So we slowed our roll on that. We spent about 30% of our ads budget. So what is that going to do? It's directly going to impact the number of people that see this product that we have, the modern CEO that see this program. And this experience that we have dropped way down, which meant less, less eyeballs means less people came into the free video series that we had prepared. The free all new training that is so good, I can't wait for you to see it later this year if you haven't seen it already. And it, it's so stinking good. And we did not get it out to the people that we expected because our ads didn't perform as we expected. So of course we were still doing organic, but it was a real challenge. And so because we had less people saw it because less people came through that free experience, certainly at the end of the day, less people enrolled in the modern CEO than what we planned. So we had no idea how it was going to go if when we launched that program the next time. This was sort of our baseline program. Now our baseline enrollment. Right. We, it was the first time we were doing it in this way. So this was our data collection. It was a, not a beta program, but was a bit of a beta marketing experience for us. And we didn't have the volume that we expected. Right. Because of that ad change. But we did have some other numbers. We were able to see that, you know, although less People came through this experience and this funnel. Truly, we saw great conversion. Like, okay, we were able to get less people through it, but the message is still resonating. The message is still right, which was shown by the conversion. And we saw that in July was the ADS activity. And then in August, we really had the final data on the conversion. And that is when we began the Modern CEO experience. And it was incredible. We ran it uniquely, we ran it a little bit of a test to try some new things that we may bring to other programs and experiences that we offer to support business owners. And it was intimate. It was lovely. I'm getting feedback regularly on the caliber and the quality of what we have included in the Modern CEO. So it is just talking about it. I don't know if you can hear it in my voice, but I am feeling so much relief that we put all of that work in and it paid off because people are getting huge value and they're getting results and they're getting clarity. And we are moving forward in so many different businesses through what we redesigned in the Modern CEO. So, wow. Right? Even though things didn't go as planned, we have data, we have outcomes, and we have information to pull into our next enrollment. In addition, I was working my buns off from really kind of February is when this redesign of the Modern CEO started, including our work on the messaging all the way through to the end of July, first week of August, when our enrollment for the Modern CEO came to an end. And then I took a road trip. I was working, working, working, working, knowing that at the end of it, I would be going on a three week road trip with my family. We were headed out to see my oldest daughter Lily in California. So we stopped along the way. We stopped in Minnesota, we stopped in South Dakota. Oh my gosh, the place we stopped in South Dakota. If you were looking to do a road trip, ping me on Instagram because we stopped at the most incredible place in South Dakota, Cow something. Cow Creek, I think. But ping me and I can give you the exact name if you're looking to do a road trip. And then we went over to Yellowstone. I don't think there was a stop between South Dakota and Yellowstone. Then we stopped at a super cool bouldering place in Idaho, City of Rocks. Then we made our way to Lake Tahoe. And then we made our way to Lilly in Santa Barbara. And we stayed in Oxnard before we headed down to see my sister in Scottsdale. And then we made our way back up to Chicago, where we are currently staying, going Through New Mexico and Oklahoma and Missouri. I think that's the route. And we kind of sped home. We went home a little bit faster than we made our way out because we had a really great time on the way out. But then on the way back we're like, I don't know that we need to do more stopping. So we missed some incredible stops on our way back up to Chicago from Scottsdale. But the road trip was flipping incredible. And at the end of every year, I take time to organize my photos. And I was sitting there over winter break, also take a two week winter break at the end of every year to reflect and recharge and renew and spend time with family. And it was reflecting. Like I was wondering, you know, what do we do this year? It's winter, it was cold sitting inside Chicago in my. Actually probably sitting in the basement with the kids watching a movie and like, man, you know, what did we do? And then I start looking at photos and I start in December and there's not as much happening in December a little colder or hunkered down. November, October, okay. There were some Halloween activities and then I backed it up. I'm like, oh man, we did such good stuff this year. And I have the photos to look at and I organize those into their albums and their categories digitally at the end of each year. So I am all caught up rolling into the new year and ready to make new memories. But I skipped ahead a little bit on you because there were a couple of other things happening before we got to December and reflection time after that. Modern CEO enrollment, we were. I went on the road trip. I was still hosting calls for my clients on that road trip. And we then started preparing for our annual planning event, the Planethon. And because our Modern CEO enrollment ads were a little bit funky, we wanted to start preparing for the Plan A Thon ads sooner so we could test more, so we could experiment more, so we could see what might be working for our audience so we could sort of get a better prediction on what our costs might be for the Plan A Thon season versus what it was over the summer. And we were hoping it would come down a little bit, and it did. It didn't come down to the typical 5 to 7 I usually see for the Plan A Thon, but we were in that 7 to 12 cost per lead on the planet on enrollment ads. So we felt really good about that. Rolling into the Plan A Thon and then during the Plan A Thon again, we have an incredible ads person that we partner with who's been on the podcast many times, and so that was really a big relief. But we also found this year our Plan A Thon is hosted in a Facebook group. In years past, we had put it on YouTube. People weren't really watching it on YouTube, so we just moved it all to Facebook. I think that has shifted a little bit. Typically, we see 67% engagement in our Plan A THON group. During Plan A Thon season, there are more than 20,000 people in this group. So it's a big number to look at percentages and really have reliable data over the years. And this year, for the first year ever, we dropped below a 60% engagement in the Facebook group. And I think there are many things that play that impacted that. I think people are not on social as much right now, and we're shifting social platforms and how we engage and show up on social. So I think, you know, we used to have the videos on YouTube. I think this would have been eight great year to put the videos on YouTube again. So we're tucking that in the back of our head and we are thinking about that as we move into 2022. Plan A Thon, that's a little ways out, but we start to think about it in advance so we strategically and directionally know what we want to do. And then when we get there, we can execute and implement a little bit faster. So we're starting to ruminate on that. I'm thinking YouTube or something else. A different space and structure altogether for the planet. Not predetermined. So I don't. I'm not holding back on you. I don't have anything there to share that I'm not saying. But there needs to be a little bit of a shift there too. So you can see that we're observing what we're seeing in the market. We're pulling that through into our strategies and the pivots and the changes that we make. And sometimes they're ever so slight, but they can have all the impact that you need. So we're just looking at what are those tweaks that we can make? Because another big goal of ours in 2021 was to streamline. Streamline everything. You know, I am hoping, I was hoping fingers crossed to move back overseas in summer 2022 or summer 2023. So I really have in my head that I want everything to be streamlined and clean and organized and all the revamp need to do buttoned up before we go back overseas and live again. So we have this gift that we're here in the US Right now I'm in the same time zone as my team. We're working hard, we're working together. I've got access to more. Many of my colleagues and the connections that I have are here in the States or in Europe, so it's easier for me to sort of set the foundation here. And then when I go to Africa, I build new connections. Right. Like when we were in Ethiopia, I worked with a videographer in Ethiopia. So we find and we connect with the local community. But my existing connections were here, so it was really easy to pull those things together faster versus creating new connections. Yes, incredible connections. But I have to find them and rebuild them. So we wanted to get a lot of things in place before we make the move. Now I have a few more things to share with you as we think about this 2021 reflection and wrap up and I'm going to pause here and we're going to put a To be continued on this episode because there was already a lot in this episode and we are not done yet. I have some big things still to share with you, including how some things I learned about my health this year that have impacted and will impact how I run my business and how I do life in the future. Our photography business expanded and changed in 2021 and what I learned and what didn't work so well. So I can share a bit of those cautions with you so we can take those through as we have incredible 2022s together. So for now, let's wrap this baby up and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and I will see you in the next episode of the Write On Time podcast where we will dive deeper into findings, lessons learned, and this journey of growing a business and how sometimes we can get slowed down when we just want to keep on driving to our destination. So more on that in the next episode. I love you. I hope you have an amazing day. I will talk to you soon. Sam.