#140 - How to QUIT launching (but still sell more!)

Like I said, way less stress usually works even better just because of the change in energy. And then that's it. You've got these lovely systems in there making your marketing, making your sales just happen like a little machine running the back of your business. And you get to have fun and play with new clients and potential clients a couple of times a year. And your business is totally bloody different.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur six and seven figure funnel strategy and super nerd Kate McKibben, where every week we're here talking nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier, and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello everybody. It is Kate here from hello, funnels, and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast podcast. And today I am going to talk about quitting, not smoking, not your business, something that's far more beneficial. Well, maybe not more beneficial than quitting smoking, but it's up there. I'm going to talk about quitting, launching, and more importantly, how to quit launching and still sell just as much, if not more, but without the freaking hassle and the freaking stress. You ready to go? Let's dive right on in. Alrighty, guys. So first of all, I wanted to tell you about a big decision that we made back in 2022. And that is we decided it was time to quit launching. Like after the two years prior to that, with everything just being so upside down, so crazy. And the, the number one thing really for me was, was finding it really, really hard to commit to anything that was live and bringing the energy needed to anything that was live. Because I had a toddler who was home from childcare more than he was there. I was sick all the time. And just the thought, like, it just gave me absolute dread having these things in the calendar. I was like, but what if I can't do it? What if I'm sick? What if I, you know, I didn't want to do it? I was tired. Like, even if it had been best case scenario and you know, my son was in childcare and I was, well, I was just, I just like, oh my gosh, I don't want to do it. And, and I've never really loved launching. I mean, I love funnels. That's what my whole businesses are out. And I'm like, I was kind of looking at my team going, how did we end up doing so many launches? My gosh, it's just so like, we fell into this pattern. And it ended up becoming this, like, addictive, stressful, horrible loop. I'm like, let's get off. Like, we don't need to do this. We are. Hello, funnels. We do funnels. We do things in an evergreen way. This is so against everything that I value. So we decided to quit. We decided to quit launching. And I tell you what, it was the best thing I ever did. And, you know, it's not just us. It's not just people who love funnels. I think that this. With the way the world is now, I truly believe that live launches and more importantly, relying on live launches is just dumb. Like, sorry, I like to call it how I see it. So why would you want to quit launching? I mean, if you're listening to this episode, obviously the titles grabbed your attention, and you're probably seeing that going, you know, I freaking hate launches, too. They suck. They take up all of my time. They take up all my team's time. It means it feels like it's all I do. And this is not why I signed up for a business. And if you break it down and look at, like, the facts, like, time and time again, I'm hearing from even some of the biggest names in the business that their launches are just not working as well as they used to, that getting new leads than the number that they need to get. Their conversions is becoming so much more expensive.

That, you know, they're not. A, they're not converting as well, and B, it's costing them more when they do. They're also really stressful. There's no. I don't care how streamlined you have it. Doing a big live launch and all singing, all dancing launch, whether it's a challenge or whatever you're doing, it's stressful. And one of the reasons it's stressful is because it has to freaking work. Because you spent the last year, you know, most likely at least two months setting it up. It's is the. It's the way that you make your sales. If it doesn't work, you're screwed. Right? The other thing that I. You know, another reason why you might want to consider quitting launching is they're not that reliable like we did. We had a launch that worked beautifully the first three times we did it. And we just kept optimizing and tweaking. And then all of a sudden there was one. You know, something. Something happened. There's like a tech issue or I can't remember what happened, and people weren't coming into the right place. And it was like A disaster. And that's so easy for that to happen. And again, if that is how you make all, if not most of your money, and yet there is some crazy thing that's crashing the tech or, you know, know something else happens, which it can, you get sick, your child's not at childcare. There's so many things that can kind of go wrong and interfere and then where are you at? You know, it's not great. Another reason is, like I said, they take up all of your time, they take up your team's time, they take up all of your energy and it kind of, it keeps you stuck at this level because you can't be reinvesting that into making your product as amazing as it could be. Because if your product was so freaking amazing that it just was like the best thing out there for your solution in the area you work in, you probably wouldn't even need to launch because your word of mouth would be so powerful. But you don't have time to do that. You don't have time to show up and you know, give the most to your clients because you're tired, you're exhausted. Like, how many times have you looked at your calendar going, oh, we've got a launch. Let's make sure we don't have many client calls that week. Who should be coming first? Your, your, your current clients, your or these people who are doing a free thing who you're hoping will become current clients. I would rather spend time with my current clients. And of course, like I've said, you end up stuck in this loop. They become addictive if they are like you kind of, if they are the main way that you're making money, but you're spending so much time and resources to get them. Usually a lot of people, it's like that, that week or so before the launch, they're completely out of cash. So the launch has to do really well. But you probably dig into the credit card to get the launch across the line and then you know, the first however many sales, they're paying back your marketing, they're paying back that credit card. You come out the other end, you're like, oh, cool, this will get me by for the next couple of weeks. And I go launch again. And you just go round and round and round and it sucks. So what are the other options? Well, if we are practical about it, of course option one would be to launch even less. So just do maybe one huge launch a year, like a B star, B school style launch or something like that. But come on, the Risk of that. The stress of that would be insane. So much more risky. Don't recommend it unless you're the kind of person who likes the business equivalent of jumping out of airplanes. I'm not a fan of it. Second option would be don't launch it all. Just go a hundred percent evergreen, which might be what you think we did, but it's actually not. Now this can work and does work really well, but it's usually a bit of a slow build. So Evergreen is not a flick to switch and all of a sudden you're getting tens of thousands of dollars. It's something that takes a bit time to set up, needs a bit of, you know, testing. It's works really well over time, but it's not like, okay, not like a launch where you go, all right, I need 20 sales tomorrow. It's I'm going to get 20 sales over the next two months. Okay. Usually people do not have the cash flow to be able to switch from big influxes through to small dripped ones, which, which is why again, we don't recommend people cut off the way that they're making revenue until they've replaced it, even though the funnel will probably actually make you more revenue over a long time. What's the third option? Well, that is to combine an evergreen funnel with what we call evergreen launching. So when we say we quit launching, what I mean is we quit big, stressful, expensive, unreliable launching. We swap them out for instead smaller rinse and repeat, much more reliable, much more dialed in, way less of investment in time and revenue, much more profitable launching. And that's what we call evergreen launching. So this is what we recommend. This is what we help people to set up inside ecoursempire. So you get your funnel set up and of course has to be the right funnel for the right offer and set up in the right way for your business and how you're going to do things. Please don't just go funnel hack because that's usually ends in tears. And so you're going to get that up and running and that's going to bring in one layer of your monthly income. Remember, it's going to be that consistent drip, drip, drip of sales. Not very exciting, but over a year, when you look at the numbers, actually very exciting, particularly if you're nerd like me. Then on top of that to mean that you come out at this with at the same level of sales as you would have from doing your launches. But they're just, they're spread out over the months rather than being in one Big burst. And you're not having to put in like even a tenth of the time or investment to make it happen. So on top of that, you're gonna run what we call evergreen launches. And these are repeatable, smaller promotions that run both to cold audiences and also to your list. And it's something that you can set it up once and run over and over just like an evergreen funnel. So it brings in, yes, a smaller amount of sales, but every month. And it will grow as you dial it in, more as you grow. And then you can still have, you know, once or twice a year, what we would call an event launch. But because all of your revenue and, sorry, all of your expenses and everything is covered and you have this lovely reliable flow each month. And usually, yes, it will always alternate and go up and down a little bit. But you able to know that, yep, I'm going to make roughly this number of sales every month. I've got everything covered. I don't need to stress, I don't need to worry about like, if this one thing doesn't work, I'm not going to be able to pay the bills. That pressure is off. Then you can do these event launches just as like a fun thing to do. Wouldn't that be nice to be able to go, what'd be really fun to do for my audience? What would be really fun thing I was wanting to try? Let's go see if that works. And it's just something you can go out there, get people re engaged, get them excited, you know, get some new people on your list. But there's no pressure there. You don't have to then convert at a certain percentage. And I'm sure you will still convert really well, particularly because your energy is going to be so different because that sort of like neediness is removed. You're just like, hey, I'm just showing up. I'm bringing value and I'm loving it. That's way more magnetic than when you're in there going, I must sell, I must, I can't over deliver. I must do this correctly. Otherwise you know, I'm not going to be able to pay my staff. But yeah, you can have those a couple of times a year. Like I said, way less stress usually works even better just because of the change in energy. And then, then that's it. You've got these lovely systems in there making your marketing, making your sales just happen like a little machine running the back of your business. And you get to have fun and play with new clients and potential clients a couple of times a year and your business is totally bloody different. So if you want to actually see how this looks and like the plan for how to roll this out, we have a free, we call it our funnel six figure funnel calculator. But it's so much more than that. It's more like a, a six month business plan for adding funnels and evergreen launches to your business. And if you just go to HelloFunnels Co Calculator, you can just pop in your basic numbers, like how many subscribers you get roughly a month, the price of your current programs and it'll kind of like magically go through and go, this is what this is going to look like for you and the impact that it has. And you can see literally side by side. If you're doing your full launches a year, this is what's going to look like if you're doing moving to this model. I'm building this in piece by piece over the coming months. This one, the numbers, it's night and day. It can be quite confronting when you see how different it can be. Knowing that also it's going to feel so much better when you do it. So go grab that HelloFunnels Co calculator, pop your numbers in. If it blows your mind, make sure to let us know. DM us @hellofunnels. We love hearing that. And that's it for this week, guys. So if you love this episode, if that resonated, if you think that you know someone else who could find this really useful, who is a stressed out launcher and who needs to not be, please leave us a review. Share it any and everywhere. We really appreciate it. It's how we get the word, how we get to help more people and it's how we get to do more of what we do. Until next week, guys, keep doing it online and we'll see you all then. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing It Online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@StealMyFunnel.com.

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