10 Years Of Painful Business Lessons In 20 Minutes

Ten years ago, I had just graduated from college, I was working at a consulting firm, and I was building my business on the side. When I quit my job to essentially become a life coach, everyone laughed in my face, including my girlfriend. And honestly, I can't really blame them. I had no idea what I was doing. But I ended up selling over a million dollars worth of coaching and courses before I turned 30. And these days, I earn six figures, working about 25 hours a week and doing work that I love. But the journey to get there was me literally getting punched in the face over and over again. So I'm gonna compress 10 years of painful business lessons into this one video. And that way, hopefully, you can avoid making the same mistakes I did. Lesson number one, there are no shortcuts in business, just trade offs. I wasted so much time trying to find a magical system that would just bring me clients on autopilot so I could focus on coaching and a lot of marketing plays on this idea, right? That there's some magic bullet, that once you find it, you won't ever have to worry about marketing and sales again. I h agencies hoping that they would be this quick fix that I was looking for, but every time I switched my focus, I had to start again from scratch. It's sort of like looking for the perfect strength training program, right? And you're hopping between one program and the next, but you never stay consistent enough with one of them to actually make progress. I remember hiring this Facebook ads person. I spent like over $10,000, and I was hoping that she would just take my marketing off my plate completely, but that was delusional. As a business owner, you. You're in charge of marketing your business. It doesn't mean that you can't hire people to help, but you fundamentally need to understand what's going on. And I hadn't taken the time to understand Facebook ads for myself, and so I couldn't really assess whether the person was doing a good job or not. Not to mention that it's not just about running ads. You actually have to run ads to a funnel that's working, right? To something that actually converts. So after trying all this different stuff, the one thing that ended up working really well for me over the years was SEO blogging. So creating really detailed blog posts that ranked in Google for terms that my ideal client was searching for. And the reason it ended up working for me was because from day one, I was creating a weekly blog post every single week. I was consistent with it. So I got better at it. I learned what worked? And I basically stumbled upon the SEO side. I basically stumbled upon something and realized, oh, I could actually do this in a more intentional way. And the key part was it was something I enjoyed doing. That's why I was able to be consistent with it. And so eventually, once I built an email list, I was able to quit social media completely because I didn't need it anymore. And I kept having people ask me, okay, how do you go off social media? How are you getting clients? So eventually I said, fine, I'm going to build a course. I'm going to teach this system that's worked for me. And so I basically created this course and said, hey, if you learn how to create articles in this way and you do the keyword research and you figure it out, you could have one article that brings you clients for years. You're not paying for ads, you're not paying. You're not doing a lot of work. You're just creating a blog post every week or every month. But I was actually falling into the trap that I had gotten attracted to from the other gurus, right, hey, learn my system and it will work for you. But the truth is, I went through the course, I ran this small beta round through it, and I got great feedback on it. People learned a lot, but they weren't actually, for most of them, writing the blog post, right? Because it takes actually a ton of work to write these detailed blog posts that are really valuable. And. And I realized, oh, this is why you can't just teach someone the system that worked for you and expect it to work for them, because they're going to have to be consistent with it, which means it's going to have to match their strengths and personality. And only a small part of that cohort was it actually a match for. They liked the idea of it, they liked the outcome it would get them, but they weren't willing to be consistent with the process and commit to it. They were looking for a magic bullet. So every marketing strategy has a hard part. The only real shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts and commit to something for the longer term. Honestly, you should assume that you're going to invest 6 to 12 months in any new strategy just to learn it without expecting anything to come from it. The same thing is true of starting a whole other business, thinking it's going to be easier than the business that you're in. A while back, I built a fitness coaching business on the side of my main business. And in the back of my mind, I think I thought you know, this will probably be easier than the business that I'm running now. And I built it up really quickly. I got it to about 10k per month pretty fast and. And then it just sort of stalled out, which at the time is what I was making in my existing business. But now I had two businesses I had to run at the same time. And what I realized was the grass isn't greener. It may look easier in a different niche, a different business model, a different industry, but you're going to hit the same constraint, which is the constraint you're experiencing your current business. Until you get through that, until you learn that skill, change that belief, you're not going to progress in the new business. So ultimately you're in charge of marketing and you're going to have to find something that works for you. So if you want some ideas, if you just need a jumping off point, I actually created a little two page PDF and it has 21 ways to find potential clients. So go down to the link in the description. You can download that if it would be helpful for you. Okay, Lesson number two, scaling up is not always the answer. There's this story I love of a wealthy businessman and he goes to visit a Brazilian village and he sees a fisherman who coming in pretty early in the day. And so he asked the fisherman, hey, why aren't you fishing right now? And the fisherman says, well, I caught enough fish, so I'm done. And the businessman asks, why don't you stay out longer and catch more fish? And the fisherman says, well, this is enough to feed my family. Most days I wake up early, I go out, I catch some fish, and then I can basically relax. I have a nap with my wife, I hang out with my kids, and then at night I go play music and have a drink with my friends. And so the businessman says, here's what you need to do. You need to stay out longer and catch more fish. And that way you could afford to hire people who could fish for you, and then you could buy all these different boats, you could move to the city, you could have sort of like a headquarters in Sao Paulo, and then you could can the fish. And then you scale up, go public and sell the company for a lot of money. And the fisherman says, okay, what would I do after that? And the businessman says, after that you'd really be financially free. So then you could retire and you could move out of the city. You could wake up, go fishing in the mornings, you could have a nap with your wife, you could hang out with your Kids, you could basically like have a drink with your buddies, play music and do whatever you wanted to do. And the fisherman looks at him and says, isn't that what I'm doing now? A year or two ago, I launched a program called Full Client Roster. And the idea, the vision was this is going to take me out of client delivery. I won't have to work with clients if I bring in a coach and train that coach in my system and they can work with clients. And. And so that's what I did. I hired a coach. I promoted my virtual assistant to operations manager because there was going to be all this extra admin of the new clients we were taking on. And then I sold out that first round. I got 20 clients in on the first round. So the program's going. And I quickly realized I don't have any more freedom than I had before. I'm still spending just as much time, but I'm spending time managing people, the coach and the operations manager, instead of working with clients, which is actually the thing that I enjoyed in the first place. And I was making way less money because even though the program was really successful, I was paying the coach, right? And now I was paying the operations manager. So I had way less margin. And each month I was stressed out about needing payroll. And what I realized from the whole thing was that I actually don't want to put in the work that it takes to build a big business, to build a big empire. I enjoy working with clients. I like having things be simple. And around the same time, I read this quote from the writer Edward Abbey. And it basically says, growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell. And it really hit me that was the only reason I was trying to scale up is because I thought that I should. It was growth for growth's sake. I thought that that's what a good entrepreneur does, is build a business that works without them. But that's not a good enough reason to get through the hard parts, right? Just because I should. So I ended up letting both my team members go, which was incredibly painful and incredibly embarrassing. And I ended up back where I started, which was a very simple business, just with me working with a handful of high end clients. This isn't to say that you shouldn't scale up your business. I work with clients all the time who actually enjoy the process of scaling up. They have an impact that they really want to spread and it requires that they scale up. And the market is telling them to scale up and they're willing to put in the work to do that. But one of the clients I'm thinking of, for example, he makes 100k a month, but his payroll and expenses are over 50k a month. So every single month he needs to hit 50k just to make sure everyone gets paid. And that can be stressful. So you have to be willing to take the good with the bad when you scale up. And it's worth thinking really hard before you do. Is scaling up going to get me something that I don't already have now? Okay, lesson three. Repeat clients will save your life. One time, clients will kill you. When I was going through the financial stress of that whole program trying to scale up my business at the same time, my wife had just quit her job with, we were fostering a teenager, so we had these extra expenses and I was stressed out of my mind. Like the business was really tight financially. I wasn't budgeted out as much as I wanted to be. And then midway through my lead flow started slowing down so we weren't attracting as many clients as usual. And the thing that saved me, the thing that got me through that year was the fact that over 50% of my one on one high paying clients were repeat clients, right? So they either were signing back on to work with me or, or they were clients from the past who came back on board. And I was literally able to just send a few emails out when I needed clients and say, hey, I've got a spot open, do you want to come back and re enroll those clients? But imagine if I was churning through the clients I was working with or if I didn't have clients come back, that would have been really stressful. I would have probably run out of money. And so that's when I really learned the lesson. Repeat clients are everything. Repeat clients make business so much easier. And a lot of getting repeat clients is about choosing the right client in the first place. So I remember this interview with Marshall Goldsmith, who's like the grandfather of executive coaching, and he basically says in the interview, client selection is everything. That's the whole game. Because what you need to do is find clients who are going to get results, right? Because if those clients don't get results, they're not going to refer you, they're not going to stay on. So part of it is actually about picking the winners, the people who are going to be successful, but you can help them get there faster. Those are the people who are going to create great case studies for you, send you referrals. They're going to keep signing on with you and those things become your most powerful marketing assets. Because when you say you're great, everyone thinks it's just marketing and they don't believe you. But when someone else says they're great or they have tangible results that you can point to, that is very persuasive in the marketing and sales process, never mind for your own mindset. When you start to feel like an imposter, you start to feel like a fraud and you're like, do I even know what I'm doing? You can go back and see, oh, people keep signing on with me. Or, oh, look at these case studies. These people who have achieved real results with my support. So how do you actually find these clients? The first thing you want to do is to be expensive. And obviously you're not going to start off from day one charging $50,000 necessarily. But ultimately, being at the higher end of the market is a great filter for serious clients. Last year I did an experiment where I bundled up a bunch of courses on my birthday and I said, hey, this is going to be a pay what you wish bundle. So you can pay me $1, you can pay me $100, pay me whatever you're able to, whatever you think it's worth, and then you'll get access to the courses. And what was interesting was 170 people bought the bundle. So it was pretty successful. A lot of people, but I didn't make that much money because a lot of people were paying almost nothing. And I only got one email from someone months later who was like, hey, I put this into action and I got results. Thank you for offering it in this way. Everyone thanked me when they bought it, when there was like, hey, this is a great deal. But what I realized is that people didn't really have skin in the game. They weren't really committed. I'm not saying you need to charge a ton of money just to get people results, but it does help filter for the right client. Another thing that helps is auditioning clients. So one of my coaches, Charlie Gilkey, says there's three types of clients. Nothing to something bad to good, and good to great. Right? So nothing to something clients are like, you're taking them from 0 to some result, 0 to 1. So in my niche, if I'm helping someone grow a business, it's like, I don't have a business at all. No clients to. I've gotten my first few clients and now it's a thing. Then there's clients that are bad to good. Like, I have a struggling business and I Want to turn it around. And then there are clients who are good to great. I already have a successful business. I just want to be even better. I want to make more money or I want to get some time back in my day. And so what I realized is like, I can help everyone, but I really enjoy helping people go from good to great because these are people who have already proven themselves as winners, right? They just want to get there faster. They just want some support and. But they're going to be successful one way or the other. The final thing you want to do if you want more repeat clients is to under promise on sales calls. It can be really tempting if you have someone who's on the fence and you really want to enroll them to kind of tell them what they want to hear. But the more you promise on a sales call, the harder it is to over deliver. When you actually work together and you end up with a client who's needy, who's stressed out, there's a lot of pressure on the engagement. It's not super fun, and in the worst case scenario, the client ends up hating you and then you have a bad reputation. So when you we want to avoid this, even if it means we close slightly fewer sales. But it's not just about choosing the right clients. If you want more repeat business, you also need to create a great experience for the people who pay you. So that takes us to our next point. Lesson number four. Every offer you create should be an act of love. Years ago, I launched a group program called High Ticket Coach. It was an absolute fucking disaster and I wish I had never done it. The reason why it was such a disaster is because I created it out of fear. At the time, I was in a mastermind with people who were making a lot more money than me. And I'm pretty competitive. So every time I'd look in the Facebook group and I'd see some of the numbers of like, hey, I had this record month, I made this much. I would start feeling insecure about myself. And honestly, it made me rush. So I started selling this program. I think it was for like 5k or 6k. And I got people into the program and I made some money. But a few weeks in, I had one of the members leave the group and he didn't ask for a refund or anything. He was just like, hey, I realize this isn't for me, so I'm gonna not continue. And I remember that night, I could tell something was going on and I couldn't sleep. And the next day I wrote this post about, like, what do you do when you feel like an imposter and you wanna refund all your clients? And it was sort of like, okay, you wanna make sure that what you're offering is useful. Go back to your case studies. Remind yourself that you know what you're doing. But it was really because I was anxious that the program wasn't going well. And I remember I sent this email out to my email list with that blog post, and the subject line was, is Greg Faxon a fraud? And one of the people in my program replied to that email and was like, hey, When I saw this subject line, I thought it was from someone else. And I was like, in my head, yes, he is a fraud. And he went on to complain about what he didn't like about the program. And I was absolutely horrified. Like, I was totally gutted, partially because I knew that he was somewhat right. Like, I knew this program had been rushed and it wasn't my best work. The weird thing was he actually got good results. I remember this guy got a bunch of clients, like, pretty early on in the program, right after he enrolled. But he could obviously tell that my heart wasn't in it, that I wasn't coming from a place and an intention of wanting to serve the people in the group. So people can feel your intention, right? They can feel when you're being a greedy bastard and you're just looking for quick money. And they can feel on the flip side when you really care about them and you want them to succeed and you're going that extra mile to make sure that it happens. In business, you're always going to have some people who love you and some people who complain about the thing that you provide. But what matters is that at the end of the day, you can look yourself in the mirror and know that you did your best. The program wasn't a total failure. I remember I had one client. You started off in that group program, ended up hiring me again, one on one, made a bunch of money. We had a great relationship, we. But the point was, my intention was off the whole time. And I ended up basically taking like three months off from my business completely. Like, just working with existing clients. I wouldn't let myself take new clients on because I was convinced that I was a horrible person and I wasn't helping people. On the flip side, I launched a program with my client, Gemma Gilbert earlier this year. Totally different program and our intention was completely different. Right? Like, we had both taken a lot of marketing programs. We've taught a lot of marketing programs. And we kind of noticed this gap in the market where people weren't being supported and actually implementing this stuff and actually, like, how do I structure my week so I can be productive and I can actually take action on what I'm learning and set boundaries and manage my time and my energy? And so when we created that, we were like, let's have fun with this. Let's provide something for people that they don't currently have. And the program was a huge success. I think we enrolled like 86 people in that first round. We offered it at a lower price point, just as a beta round. We got great feedback. Why? Because our hearts were in it. We were trying to create something to help people. So the takeaway here is you need to be brutally honest about why you're selling the thing that you're selling. Is this just a money grab or are you actually doing it out of love? And only you can know that. Right? But people will feel it. It's okay to want to make money, but you need to actually be proud of the thing that you're creating. And here's the thing, you can actually create an offer out of love. Your heart can be in it and it can still flop. Like, you can still have people not buy it. So if you are having that happen, what I'd recommend is reading a book called $100 million offers by Alex Hormozi. I did a video that summarized my key takeaways from the book. Would highly recommend it. Wish I had read it earlier. So go to the link in the description if you want to go deeper on that topic. Lesson number five, you're probably doing better than you think you are. Every year for the last 10 years of business, I've had times when I've wanted to quit, when I've just been totally unmotivated, gone and researched other businesses that I could start. This is very normal. I even had a time when I was really low where I applied for a job, which is like, I can't believe I would want to work for someone else. But in that phase, I did. I remember applying for a job, I didn't even get an interview, and I just felt embarrassed. And then a few weeks later, I got motivated again and I started working on my business. I and here's what I realized is the Internet makes it seem like everybody's more successful than you. And that can be really demotivating. If you actually look at the stats of small business, 50% of businesses fail in the first five years. And between 86 to 94% of small business owners actually pay themselves six figures a year. So think about that, right? And we're not talking about revenue. We're talking about the actual income that they make. For every entrepreneur that's making 500k a year, there's 999 who aren't. And for every entrepreneur who's making a million dollars a year, there are 9,999 who aren't. Like, when you really go look at the stats, business is not easy. Most entrepreneurs don't make a lot of money. Most entrepreneurs fail, but you don't hear about them because no one brags about failing. And then you beat yourself up when you feel like you're not doing well just because you're seeing the small percentage of entrepreneurs who are really killing it. A lot of these people who are making a bunch of money, these are like the Michael Phelps of entrepreneurship. Like, these are not normal people. They're people who are wired for entrepreneurship and they've committed their whole life to succeeding in it. So if you're not wired that way, and if you're not as committed, you're not willing to spend the number of hours they are, it makes sense that you're not going to get the results that they're getting. And the same thing is true about your level of passion, your level of enjoyment at work. There's this quote from Jeff Bezos, which is like, if you enjoy about 50% of your job on most days, you, you're doing really well, right? You shouldn't expect to be passionate about your business all the time. And I think that our expectations are often what makes us burn out or want to quit. We think, oh, we should be making more money, we're behind, or we should be really passionate about our work. And this week, I don't feel like working. I feel unmotivated. That's normal. You're not a robot. You're going to go through periods of being motivated, being unmotivated, making a lot of money, having dry spells. As long as you're in the game, you're winning, right? Entrepreneurship is an infinite game. It's not a finite game. So if you don't quit, you win. But here's the thing. Sometimes you need to know when to quit. Sometimes it actually makes sense, and it's often when we least expect it. So go ahead and watch this next video I have called Successful People Know when to Quit to learn more about that. Thank you so much for watching the video. Hopefully I get to stay in business for a little bit. Longer learn more lessons and share them with you.