#23 - 13 lessons from my 13-year bizaversary (part 2)

They all are coming in with different time frames, different amounts of experience, different preferences for how they like to interact with you with new brands, how they like to receive information and digest that information, and how they like to buy. And some people want the journey. They want to be warmed up. They want all of the good, you know, warm, fuzzy stuff. Other people are just like, get in, get out, get it done.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur, six and seven figure funnel, strateg 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.

Hey, hey, everybody. It is Kate McKibben here again and welcome to episode 23 of the Doing It Online podcast. Now Today is the second part of our little two parter, funnily enough, which is the 13 lessons from my 13 years biziversary. So yes, a bizversary is a thing. What it means is it's my business. Birthday is another word for it. So basically it means that on the publishing of this episode, my business will be a whole 13 years old in, you know, in a very different form than when I first started it. But over that time, over, well, technically having three different businesses trying all different business models, all kinds of, you know, wins and losses, I've learned a lot of things and that is what this little series is about. Because every year I like to sit down and really think about, you know, what the major lessons have been for me over that time. And the funny thing is that they change because as you, you know, as you evolve as a human, as you sort of move through different stages, different things are what you really remember. And I like to try and think back to, you know, all the way back to the start of my business. And the lessons that come up for me each year are quite different, which I think is quite interesting. So anyway, it was interesting to me. Anyway. I hope it's always. It's also interesting to you. But today we're kicking off the second part of this. So if you haven't listened to part one, you know, hit pause, go check out the last episode and then jump on back. But today we're kicking things off from number eight and the eighth lesson that I have learned, well, the eighth most important lesson that I have learned from the last 13 years is, and I think this one is going to be a game changer. So grab your Pen, grab a notebook, is that everyone buys and engages with your business differently. And it is actually our job as business owners to provide them with the options and not to try and force them to do what we want them to do or behave how we want them to behave. So being a person who loves funnels and loves automation and, you know, loves nerdy stats and all this kind of stuff, I've spent a lot of time over the last 13 years, you know, mapping out these beautiful ascension models or perfect funnels and, you know, overly complicated. You know, a person will come. They'll come in here and they'll do this, and they'll do this. They'll see this content, they'll get this offer, and then they'll complete that offer, and then, you know, we'll give them this next offer and, you know, creating this wonderful but totally fictional, you know, customer ideal customer journey. And I spent so much time getting so frustrated because, you know, I'd map out this amazing thing, which made total sense to me, and, you know, I'd build it and we put it out into the world, and then people would just do whatever they wanted, whatever the hell they wanted. They jump all over the place. They'd opt in for four different things 1 day, and then they'd go from a $27 offer to a $5,000 offer in 24 hours. Not over the three to six to 12 months that we, you know, had planned to nurture them and to be, you know, giving them, you know, key bits of information and key offers at certain times, or there's people who go the other way. You know, it's. You can't. People are human. They are not robots. And they, you know, they all are coming in with different time frames, different amounts of experience, different preferences for how they like to interact with you with new brands, how they like to receive information and digest that information and how they like to buy. And some people want the journey. They want to be warmed up. They want all of the good, you know, warm, fuzzy stuff. Other people are just like, get in, get out, get it done. And the thing that has been quite freeing to me, actually, was when I realized that you can't and shouldn't be trying to force people to follow these journeys. And that actually, what works so much better for both your sanity and for your bottom line is to be able to step up and provide multiple different ways for people to engage with you, to connect with you, to dip their toe in the water and to start that journey with you, or to just fast forward straight to the end if want to and now, you know, fully believe. And I've seen how powerful it is and how, you know, much better businesses tend to do and how many more sales they tend to make when you stop trying to force people into following your idea of what they should do and start instead giving them options and allowing them to take the journey that they're going to take anyway. But now you're just doing it without the resistance. So that was a big one.

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And it sounds a little high level right now. If you kind of go, I don't really understand what you're talking about. Don't worry. As soon as you start getting into funnels, which if you're hanging around my part of the Internet, it's only a matter of time, you know, you'll start to really see how this comes to play then. But it is, you know, it is one of those lessons that you often have to, you might go, oh, that's not for me. That, that's not, that's not how my people work. But then I bet you'll come back in a couple of years and go, actually Kate, you're right. Okay, onto lesson number nine. And that is that marketing strategies are kind of like diets. So bear with me here in that, you know, they actually all work as long as you stick to them. And the only way to make sure that you stick to them is to find one that actually works for you for the long run. That actually is something that you can implement again and again. And it's not, you know, so intrusive or so, you know, it doesn't require so much from you that, you know, you almost know from the start you're not going to be able to keep it up. So, you know, and this again, because I think a lot of people, particularly as you're going through that initial stage of growth, you know, you've got some things set up and you're now like, okay, now I just want to go, I want to be one of the, I want to blow up overnight. I want to be one of those big success stories and we start chasing those shiny new marketing strategies like, oh, she's doing this, I should do that, she's doing this, I should do that. We jump around all the time. And that's kind of like people who go from Weight Watchers to Atkins to Paleo to this to that, and they do it for a few weeks, see some results fall off the wagon, go, oh, that didn't work onto the next thing. Now I'm not here. I'm actually kind of not into diet culture at all. But I just thought it's probably analogy. A lot of people kind of understand it's that to get the results, like if you wanting to get, make a big change, make a big impact in your business, then it is a long term goal. Yes. You want to start seeing those results quickly. And that's I think, where a lot of people get discouraged and will start going after those shiny equivalent of, you know, the seven day juice fast or whatever it is kind of marketing tactics. But really, if you're wanting, you know, if, if you're able to just step away from that craziness and from all that stuff that shows up in Instagram feed and just think about like, okay, I'm here, I want to get there. Yes, I'd love it to happen tomorrow, but if it takes 12 months or 18 months or 24 months, it's okay with me as well. So what can I do and what can I put in place that I'm going to be able to do for 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, that is going to, you know, I'm going to not hate doing. That's not going to take over every portion of my life and you know, make me resent my business. What is something I'm going to be able to do? Something that is achievable and realistic and that I can do again and again. As boring as that repetition is as boring as eating the, you know, the grilled chicken and steamed broccoli is.

And you know, and be okay with getting incremental improvements so that 12 months down the track, you turn around, look back and go, well, this is just kind of natural to me. Now I just do this, this just feels almost easy because I've done it that often and I've done it that consistently and wow, look where I've come. So that's, that is a big one, guys. Marketing strategies are like diets. If you agree with me, make sure you DM me akemckibbon over on Instagram. Feel free to send me the craziest diet you've ever tried as well. We can convert, compare notes. Lesson number 10 is know your numbers and ignore most of them. So again, this is another thing I learned the hard way. Most of these lessons I learned the hard way, guys. Um, but as a super nerdy person, I freaking love me some data. I love a spreadsheet. I have, I love to have reports on everything, reports on reports and reports. I love to have all the information, but then I don't really necessarily do anything with it or when I do, it can actually become overwhelming. And I think this, this happens for a lot of people. We kind of think, oh, we need either. Well, actually there'll be one or two people. One person is like, oh, I don't know too hard. Numbers, spreadsheets, yuck, gross. I'm going to ignore that. The other type of person is like, is like me. And it's like, I want to know everything. I want to know how many views are on this, how many clicks are on this, how long they stayed on this page. You know, I want to know the number of days someone's on my email list when they buy this product and this product and this product. Like, and then you get all this data and it's actually kind of useless. Like it is good to have and to be recording and to have somewhere that you know, if you do need it one day you can, you know, go and find it. So but, you know, but most of our tools do that for us like Google Analytics and things like that.

But what is, I think is really, really important is to figure out what are the numbers that matter. What, like maybe three to five numbers are the ones that give you a, like a temperature check of the health of your business, are ones that show you if you're moving towards your goals or not like all the rest, they're just overwhelming. They're just taking up brain space and time and Google Drive space. So as much as you know, I think you need to be, you know, to know that your, your tools are tracking these things for you in case there is a decision that you need to make or in case you want to do want to dive into your data. As far as a day to day kind of prospect of what you need data wise and numbers wise. I think that I said three to five numbers and I think is it going to be very different for every person out there?

Some of mine, you know, that I found the best of like, you know, and these are ones that you go, oh, that's a bit low or, oh, that's gotten gone up. I wonder why. Like, that's what you kind of want to know. So for me, it's daily ad spend, number of new subscribers, daily sales, daily return on ad spend, and daily projected return on ad spend. This is what we track on a day to day basis because, you know, we're finals. People, like, know we are constantly out there promoting and testing and trying new things. And those things, to me, if I have, you know, I can know them pretty well, then that gives me a really good temperature check, a really good health check. Of what? Of the activities that my business is doing day to day. If anything needs to be tweaked, anything has stopped working.

And that's what you need to know for day to day. So think about, like, see if you can come up with 3 to 5. Feel free to steal mine. That's totally fine.

But yeah, it's really good to know. And this is, again, is a brilliant one of those first jobs that you can outsource to a VA and get them to be checking for you. So how we do it is I'm not in there checking this stuff, but we have a Slack channel called Stats, and every day she jumps in there and she pops these, these numbers for me. And if we're doing a launch, then we have another set of numbers that we get popped in there as well. And then I can literally, you know, 30 seconds glance over it, go, yep, that's all looking good or awesome. That's gone up, you know, or, you know, oh, what's happened here? Someone go have a look at that. And you know, and that's how we kind of keep everything rolling, Know everything's working still. Well. All right, you guys hang in there. You taking lots of notes. Good. Let's jump into number 11. We've just got three left to go. So lesson number 11 is to make more offers more often. Yeah. So if you just come out of a launcher, if you're in the middle of launching or something right now, or creating a webinar or one of those things, you're probably, you know, want to just skip to the next podcast. You're like, no, don't tell me that that is terrible news. I do not. These are not the words I want to be hearing. But. And I want to frame this for you because this is something that I would say is one of. Probably one of the things that I think keeps a lot of people stuck at the start is that they sort of, they look around and they try and model their businesses off, you know, other businesses they see around, which isn't a bad tactic. But the problem is that they try to model their businesses off businesses who are at a different stage than they are businesses who have different resources, who have, you know, a lot of other different things in place. So I know a lot of people who see like, you know, Marie Folio's B school, and she launches just once a year. So they're like, hey, we'll launch once a year. Or, you know, it's really common for other big, you know, maybe they do. They launch once a year, they launch twice a year, or they launch quarterly. Like that seems to be the real sort of most. The common launch schedules of the big, you know, the big players out there. The problem is that the reason they can do that is because, first of all, they know their stuff. Converts. Like, they've tested it, they've done it a hundred times, they know it works. So when they say, all right, we need to earn a year's worth of revenue in a month, what are we? What does that look like? They know how to figure all that out. They know how many people they need to get have on their list and all the activities, how much they need to spend on ads, and they are happy to do it, and they have the budget to do it. So they, if they're like, oh, we want to make $3 million off this launch, we're going to have to spend a million dollars on ads. They're happy to do it. Most people aren't either able or happy to, or willing to, or shouldn't, you know, be going, I'm going to spend a million dollars on ads for something that's not at that stage yet, that doesn't have the level of staff, and there's many things dialed in. So, you know, the reason that I say it's so important to be we should be making offers more often is when you are getting started, there are so many moving pieces, so many elements and assets that you are creating. And most of them, you're creating them new, which means they're not going to be their best yet. They're going to need a few iterations, a few updates, a few tweaks. Some of them are just flat out not going to work and you're going to want to change them. But every time you launch, every time you make an offer, most people, majority of that is new stuff. And then if you are only then launching again another six 12 months later, if there's things that you're wanting to update and improve. Well, you know, you, it's going to be a long wait in between. The other reason is that when you're launching really infrequently, it puts a lot of pressure on that launch. You have to, the launch has to do really well because all that time and effort you're spending, you know, and the fact that you're not sort of expecting revenue again for such a long period, it, it's a lot of pressure. And it means that if something does go wrong, and it does with launches, with anything, you know, there could be tech problems, there could be an election like we just had, you know, Facebook ads could do something crazy and block everyone's accounts or shut you down or something like, things happen. Launches can flop. You might put the wrong links in your emails, like, who knows? I don't want to jinx anybody. But it happens. And if it hasn't happened yet, it probably will and I apologize.

So again, if you're only doing it twice a year, man, that's a lot of pressure. Whereas think about it, if you're doing it like every 60 days, which is that my recommended launch schedule for someone who is, you know, yet to kind of crack the, you know, the high six figure mark is that, you know, you, oh, well, if one doesn't work quite as well as planned or something comes up and something goes wrong, it's okay because you've got another one coming up and it means that, you know, you can. Instead of going, okay, I've got to make, you know, 50% of my revenue in this one launch. You have that spread out across six launches. And yes, it probably sounds like that's a lot of effort, but the way that I encourage people to do launches is that everything that you do once, you know, you do it once. And if it works, like, you've got to know what the benchmarks are you wanting to hit and things like that. And that's something that I chat about my clients a lot. But once you have something that works, then it's like, okay, well reuse it. So the next, your next launch should actually be easier and actually take less time because you should have assets and things that you are able to reuse. So for example, we're now running our challenge, our sold out success success challenge again actually we just, just would have closed the doors as this is, as this is going to air. So. And the reason we decided to run it again was because people loved it so much the first time. It went so well. But we spent a lot of time and effort creating Everything, you know, writing out the videos and filming them and writing all the emails and the posts and everything. Like, there was a lot of effort and work went into creating that challenge, and the challenge was great. I'm like, well, why don't we just use it again? And I tell you what, setting it up to go this next time has been so easy. We just had to go in to a few key places and update the dates. We're even using the same Facebook ads to recruit it. Like, how crazy is that?

So, you know, it just. It might seem like it's more work, but it actually can be less. And it allows you to test things faster, to improve things faster, and to ultimately grow faster and just have less stress, not more. Even though that might seem counterintuitive. But, yeah, you have to match your launch schedule and things like that to where you are in business. And the other thing is, when you have a small list or a small following, you're doing more. Regular launches will also help you to grow that faster. So it's just a win, win. But it's one that I think a lot of people try and hide from is they try and they want to follow these. These plans. And maybe, you know, that could be an aim of yours, like, maybe to have everything so dialed in and to work so well and to be so well tested and improved and refined that you know how that it converts this, that you only have to, in the future, launch twice a year, and it'll be amazing. But if you're getting started, if you're still going through the growth phase, I highly encourage you to launch a little bit more often than probably what you are right now. All right, so lesson number 12. I told you to look. There's mostly geeky ones today, so I hope that's all right. I hope you've got your thick Coke bottle glasses on. I know I sure do.

Number 12 is put your profit first. So this is all taken from one of my favorite business books, which is called, funnily enough, profit first by Mike Michalowicz. If you haven't read it, go and read it immediately. It is one of those books that, particularly if, you know, when we're talking about numbers and stuff early, if you were kind of cringing and things like that, or even if you weren't, if you're like, I love spreadsheets, let me at them. This is going to make both of you very happy. It just helps you to understand numbers and budgeting and things like that in a really, really simple way. Like, I love Spreadsheets. But accounting breaks my brain. It is just not my zone of genius. I had to do it in uni. As a uni subject, I got mostly like high distinctions in uni and I nearly failed accounting. I was like one point off failing accounting. So for, you know. And it annoys me because I'm a very logical person and I'm pretty intelligent in that, but it just doesn't make sense to me. But this book, it helped me understand the numbers that I needed to know. The numbers are important. And also more importantly that literally from day one, you can start, you can make your business profitable. You can start putting profit first. And it's like a really, really simple concept. I won't give away the ending. Go read the book. But you know, I think a lot of people think that profit is something that comes later. It's like when you get to X point in your business, then you'll start being profitable. But actually if you aren't consciously making the effort to be profitable from the start or as soon as possible, that later it just never comes. Just like you, you know, it's the same later that, you know, having all this free time and all these other things that you just think will happen when you know your business comes to a certain point, if you're not being proactive and conscious about creating it, it doesn't happen. And you will always spend however much you earn, possibly a bit more if you have, you know, some bad your money habits and money beliefs. But this will kind of help you put in a bit of structure and easy to follow structure that's going to help you to end up in a much better financial position no matter what what you're earning or how long you've been in business. So definitely go read that book. Okay, Lucky last, Lucky last lesson from the last 13 years is, and this one is you might roll your eyes and you're welcome to, but I fully believe it is that funnels change lives. They really, really do. So I used to think that it was just a bit of fun what I do because, you know, I love geeking out on tech and marketing and this lets me do both. But then when I actually step back and start to look at the much bigger picture of what a funnel really does for someone, how it relieves so much stress because they know they're going to make, you know, x amount of money every month and all of their expenses and salary are covered, how it lets them, you know, show up and be more present with their clients and more importantly, with the people they love as well. How it frees them up to do more, more of the things that they really love in both their life and their business. How it gives them the space and the resources to invest more back into their business to work on the bigger projects that help them grow even faster. How it helps them to serve more people and make more of an impact and change more lives. Yeah, it's so much more than just having fun and nerding out and helping people make more money. And this is why I'm so damn passionate about it and why I'm so excited that the doors to my 5K Funnel Formula program are open one last time this year right now for awesome course creators just like you. So you can jump in, get your funnel done and start to see all of those amazing benefits and rewards for yourself as your funnel supports you in making your 2021 the best year ever for your business. So if you are ready to jump in and join me to be able to have me on call in our support group to share more of these lessons with you to actually get that funnel done like I said and you know, kick off next year with an amazing bang, then head to hellofunnels co or just grab the link out of the show notes, come and join us inside the 5K final formula doors are closing very soon. I can't wait to kick it off with you. You will be doing a big live round in January so you can jump in now and get all these amazing bonuses guys and then you know you can get started over the holidays if that's how you roll. I know some people like to hustle through the holidays and you know I'm okay with that if that's what you're doing or take a break. And then in January we're going to hit the ground running. We're going to have extra support goals, all kinds of really good stuff there to support you in getting that funnel set up and ready. So I said head to hellofunnels co guys. Come check it out before the doors close. I can't wait to see you inside. And as always guys, until next time. Until next week, keep doing what you do and I'll see you all the next episode. 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.