185: The Hidden Trap Killing Your Business Growth

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Before we dive into today's episode, I want to ask you an important question. Are you wondering why your hard work isn't reflecting in your bank account? If so, I've got something that could change the game for you. With my digital product accelerator one on one coaching program, I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs like you bank consistent revenue without sacrificing your time, time or sanity. Imagine shifting from 90% client facing work to enjoying consistent revenue from your digital products, all while reclaiming your time. You already know that you don't need another course and a one size fits all approach isn't going to cut it. What you need is a strategic long term plan tailored just for you. So if you're ready to build the profitable, freedom giving business you've dreamed of, apply to work with me by going to destinycop.com apply. I cannot wait to learn more about you and your business. Welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your.

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I hope you enjoy our episode today. Hey there, Destiny here. And today I want to talk about something that we all have faced at some point and that is the irresistible pull of the next big thing. And you know what I'm talking about. That exciting new social media platform. Remember Clubhouse? The latest marketing tactic that everyone's buzzing about? Or that shiny new tool or course that promises to revolutionize your business. Welcome, my friend, to the world of the shiny object centrum. It's like being a kid in the candy store, but instead of candy is full of business ideas and tools and courses and a lot of different things that you can just, you know, dip your toes in. And just like a sugar rush, chasing every shiny object can leave you feeling dizzy and unfocused. But don't you worry, we're going to break down what this means, what it's all about, and how you can stay on track to really grow your business. And I really want to define and dive into the shiny object syndrome and basically why we're so attracted to it. And that's because it's the business version of the fear of missing out. It's when you find yourself constantly jumping from one new idea or tool or another course without giving any of them a real chance to work their magic. So in our digital product world, the shiny object syndrome Might look like trying out every new social media platform that pops up. Threads, clubhouse, all of them. Swishing your marketing strategy every other week, buying every new tool that promises to change everything, or completely changing your business model because you heard about a cool new trend. Now, don't get me wrong, I do think that being open to new ideas is great. It's one of the things that make all of us entrepreneurs so awesome. And that's why we do what we do, because we're open to new ideas. But when you're always chasing the next big thing, you might find yourself running in circles instead of moving forward. And I'm going to talk about why this is bad for your business. And the first thing is you lose focus on what really matters. When you're always looking at the next shiny object, you're not paying attention to the main goals in your business. It's kind of like trying to watch five TV shows all at once. You end up missing the best parts of all of them. The other thing is when you chase after every new shiny objects, it's a time and money pit. So every new tool, every new course, every new strategy, all of that takes time and often money to implement. So if you are constantly switching things up, you are investing in a lot of stuff that never gets a chance to pay off. The other thing is your brand gets confusing. If you are always changing direction, your customers might get whiplashed or your audience might get whiplash trying to keep up with you. One day you're on Instagram talking about this, the next time you're on TikTok talking about this, it really makes it hard for people to know what you're really about. The next thing is, is you might burn out always being in startup mode and is exciting, but it's also exhausting. It's hard to enjoy your successes when you're always chasing the next big thing. And then you might miss out on something to be really good at. True expertise comes from sticking with something long enough to master it. And if you're always moving on to the next thing, you never get to see what you could achieve if you double down in one area. So before we talk about how to avoid this, let's look at some of the common shiny objects that tend to distract all of us. And I'm sure you can relate to some of these. The first one is the newest social media platform platform. And I just want you to remember back to Clubhouse. And remember when everybody was rushing to Clubhouse, they were trying to get their invite because it was invite only. You know, I don't hear anything about Clubhouse anymore. I don't know about you. The other thing is the latest marketing trend. So influencer marketing, that could be. That was a big thing that was kind of everybody was buzzing about. Then the next thing was you got to do a TikTok challenge. And there's just so many. I could go on and on, quite frankly, about this one. The next one is fancy new software that promises everything. It promises to do everything for you except make your own coffee. So, I mean, there's tons of new software out there. I get notices from AppSumo all day and I go there and I look at them, I'm like, oh my gosh, I might need this one day. But then, you know, you gotta dig into it, you gotta figure it out. It just takes so much time and energy to dig into new software. And I'll put courses in this category too. So new courses, new software, when you're buying all of that constantly, it just takes time away from what you should be focusing on. The other thing is completely changing your business model because you heard about someone making it big with a new approach. And this one probably hits home, I think, to a lot of us. So you hear about, well, you should be, you know, selling your digital products this way. Maybe you need to be doing them on a Shopify store instead of, you know, selling them on your website. Or maybe you shouldn't be doing funnels. Maybe you should be doing funnels. I mean, there's just so many marketing strategies out there and quite frankly, they all work. All the stuff I'm going to talk about today works. SEO works, email marketing works. You know, all of this works. But when you're constantly changing what you're focusing on because there's only so much time that you have in the day, none of them are going to work for you. So if you're asking yourself, Destiny, I really want to self assess here and figure out, am I doing this? And here are some things to think about. So if you are doing any of these that I'm going to mention in just a second, you probably have a case of the shiny object syndrome. And the first one is you have a graveyard of half finished projects.

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So go back and look at some of the stuff that you've started this year. Maybe it was a marketing project that you were going to do, maybe it was a collaboration, what you were going to do, but you just didn't get around to finishing it. Maybe it was a webinar that you were going to put together to launch your course to your audience and it never got finished. So think about that and go back to some of the goals and objectives that you had earlier this year and really do a self assessment and see did I actually follow through with this? Did I actually give this the attention that it deserved and quite frankly the attention that it needed for me to get results from it? The next one is your business strategy changes more often than the weather. So think about your business strategy. When I'm talking about business strategy, I'm talking about how you are delivering your offers to your customers. Did you start out doing freelance services and they said, no, that's not working. Let me try coaching. No, that's not working. Let me do an online course. No, I can't sell it. Let me do a membership. Think about your business strategy. How are you delivering your offers? How are you making money in your business? The next one is you find it impossible to say no to to new ideas or opportunities. I get emails almost every single day in my inbox from people wanting, you know, do you want to collaborate on this? Here's an opportunity. Do you want to participate? Do you want to travel here? Do you want to do this? Do you want to participate in this bundle? Do you want to participate in this summit? Do you want to sponsor this event? Do you want to do a lead magnet collaboration? Sometimes I say yes and sometimes I say no. It really depends on what my strategic goals are and does that opportunity fit into those goals. And I'm going to talk in just a second about how to assess those type of opportunities and stay on track. The next one is you're always more excited about your next idea than your current projects. And I get it. You Know, sometimes the things that we're working on is hard, it might be boring, we might not want to do it. I actually had to spend my day and a lot of my days last week working on a webinar presentation that I'm going to be doing next month. And I'll be quite honest with you, I really didn't want to do it. I'm not looking forward to the live webinar. I actually don't enjoy doing them, but I know that it's necessary to get the results that I need and that I want in my business. So I just, you know, had to buckle down and do it and focus on that to get it done. The other thing is, and I think this is probably one of the best, biggest ones, quite frankly, is you're always busy, but your results aren't improving. I'm going to say that one more time. You're always busy, but your results aren't improving. Now that would suggest that you're focused more on those shiny objects than your goals that you had put in place. So if you're knotting to any of these, I don't want you to worry, quite frankly. We've all been there. And the good news is there are ways to overcome the shiny object syndrome and get your business back on track. And now I want to talk about how to keep your eyes on the prize. Now, your prize will be your business goals. The first thing is, is to get crystal clear on your vision. So think about where do you want your business to be this time next year, this time in the next three months? What impact do you want to have? So having a clear vision and goals makes it easier to spot those distractions for what they are. The next thing that you need to do is to set very specific and measurable goals so you can write down your bigger vision of where you want to be so next year at this time into concrete goals. So instead of saying, I want to grow the business, you can make it a little bit more measurable by saying, increase my monthly recurring revenue by 25% in the next 10 months. It's harder to get distracted when you know exactly what you're aiming for and what you want to achieve. The other thing that you can do is create a decision making framework. And I kind of talked about this a second ago when I was talking about all the opportunities that come into my inbox and my DMs on a regular basis. I always think before I say yes or before I jump on that next big thing, or before I buy that tool or before I buy that course, I ask myself, does this align with my goals? But also, which is just as as important, quite frankly, is what do I have to give up to pursue this? So having a set of questions to ask yourself can help you make these type of decisions. The other thing I want you to do is to implement what I call a cooling off period. So when you come across a new idea or a new tool or a new opportunity, don't necessarily act on it right away. I want you to give yourself a set amount of time. It could be 30 days, it could be two weeks to really research it and think it through. And I'll give you an example of this. For some time, I have been wanting to do something with both of our Shopify stores that some type of a membership. So I want to have like a section of the store, like a collection in the store where members can go in and we'll have like, you know, 30 or so resources there. And every single month they can go in and download those resources from one set price. Now I know for me to implement this, I got to technically figure out how to do it, but most importantly, I have to market it. So if I'm marketing something like this, that's going to take away from other things that I need to be doing in marketing in my business. So I've kind of been sitting on this, quite frankly, for about three months now. I think I'm getting really, really close to implementing it and launching it. But I didn't do it right away because I knew that if I did this offer, and this is a new offer, this would be a membership for hello content and we're going to do it in the hobby school Shopify store. Also, I knew if I implemented something like this that I would have to spend a good amount of time marketing it, putting together the marketing materials, you know, the messaging, communicating it. And I knew that was going to take some time to do that. So I wanted to make sure that even though I was excited about it initially, I wanted to make sure that it could really move the needle in our business. And you know, quite frankly, I'm not even 100% sure that it will. I think the audience will be interested in. I've done a little bit of research there, but you know, at some point I'm going to have to pull the trigger, launch it and then get some, you know, get some feedback from that. The other thing I want you to do is focus on making what you have better. Instead of always looking for something new, try to improve what you're already doing, can you make your course better? Can you optimize your current funnel? Is it. Maybe your funnel just needs some tweaks here and there to make it work. A lot of times it is focusing on what you're doing today. Improving that I could tell you in hobby school and in my personal brand, we ran almost the exact Same events in 2024 that we ran in 2023. We actually reduced them a little bit. We got rid of some of the events that didn't perform as well as we would have liked and wasn't giving us the results that we wanted. But. But the ones that did, we doubled down on those and made those even better. So focusing on what you have that you've already done and improving that, you can really, really see some results there. We've done some of the things in our current funnels. So in my personal brand, we have three. Well, actually now it's four. Four main funnels that we run. One for our newsletter, Profit Club, which is one of our new offers. And I did sit on that for, quite frankly, about six months too, before I launched that one. I had the. The idea for it and said, you know, I really think I can make something like this work. And, you know, spent some time researching the market and then finally, you know, launched it, launched our, what I called our minimal viable offer there, our minimum viable product. So we have that funnel that's working. We have the funnel for Course in a Box. Course in a Box. That's a product that's been out there since 2018. So that product's been out there. That particular course has been out there for a long time. So we focused a lot on that particular funnel getting that strong. We have our funnel Cure, which is our offer where we help people put together the Tripwire funnel. So we have our funnel for that that's working well. We double down on that. And then the other one that we have, which helps people put together an evergreen funnel for, like, their signature offer is called the Evergreen Funnel. We have a funnel for that. So we have very specific offers and funnels that we have in our business. So focusing on those and making those better definitely has been, you know, something that has helped us succeed. Now, if you are ready to kind of kick the shiny object syndrome to the curb, here are some steps that I want you to take. Right now, the first thing I want you to do is do a business audit. So take a good look at your current projects, your current strategies. Which one of those are really contributing to your goals? And which one of those might be distracting from them. And it could be that you're saying that you look at this and then you say, you know what, I'm going to put this one on the back burner right now. I might come back to it later, but right now I'm going to put it on the back burner because I don't think it's really helping me meet my goals for this year. The next thing I want you to do is define your North Star. So your North Star is your long term vision. What do you really want to achieve with your business in the next year? Where do you want your business to be this time next year? And then I want you to set those quarterly objectives. I like to think about it, you know, in chunks of 90 days. So break down your big vision into very small, specific goals for the next three months. And then I want you to create a decision making checklist. So write down the criteria that you're going to use to evaluate new opportunities and this will help you make, I think, more objective decisions. When somebody contacts you and you're faced with this new potential shiny object, whether it's a course or program that they want you to buy, whether it's, you know, a new tool that's out there, whether it's a new offer that you're thinking about developing, have a decision making checklist and then implement a project management system. Now mine is super, super simple. Honestly. I use Google tasks, so I have all of my goals for the year and what I want to achieve in every single one of our brands there. And I have specific tasks that I'm working on to achieve those goals. Okay? So that's going to help you keep track of your initiatives and make sure that you are finishing projects before starting new ones. The other thing I want you to do is schedule regular strategy reviews. So set aside time each quarter to review your progress and adjust your strategies if you need to. The other thing is to keep learning, but stay focused. So instead of trying to learn everything about everything, focus on deepening your expertise in your core business areas and then build a support system. You want to make sure that you have mentors, you have coach, you have somebody who can give you honest feedback and who will help keep you accountable. So just to wrap it up here today, I just want to say I get it. You know, I've been there with you too. It is very tempting to chase after every new trend, every new tool, every new program, every new offer, every new marketing strategy. But the truth is, your success isn't going to come from always being the first to try something new. It's going to come from consistently executing your core strategies and improving them over time. So by developing a very clear vision for yourself and for your business, setting very specific goals, and creating systems to evaluate new opportunities objectively, you can avoid the shiny object trap syndrome. So I want you to focus on optimizing what you're already doing well. I want you to double down on strategies that work and also becoming a true expert in your next so I want you to remember that the most successful business owners aren't the ones always jumping on the latest bandwagon. They're the ones that excel in doing very few things really, really well. What is the one area of your business that you're going to commit to and you're going to focus on it and you're going to optimize over the next few months? I'd love to know what that is. So here's to your focus. Shiny Object Free Success. Bye for now.

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