Kate McKibbin (Doing It Online podcast) explains common mistakes entrepreneurs make when trying to scale beyond mid-six figures and offers alternatives. Major points: over-reliance on paid ads as the sole scaling strategy (ad costs rise and convert less as reach expands); obsessing over small optimizations (A/B tweaks that only move metrics by ~1%); dependence on large, frequent launches instead of evergreen or repeatable funnels; chasing overnight "magic bullets" instead of building foundational systems; and being overly protective of short-term profit instead of investing time/money/team to grow. The episode is coaching-focused and encourages reaching out via DMs or comments.
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When you are just stuck in that cycle of quarterly launches, when you're spending two months setting up the launch, one month running the launch, another month recovering from launch and then doing it all over again, it will keep you stuck. Hey guys, and welcome to the Doing it online podcast. I'm your host, Kate from hellofunnels. Co. And today we are talking about the other side of scaling to seven figures. Last week we talked about the things that you do need to do, the things you need to make sure that you are doing or it's going to be a really hard, slow, long road. If you haven't listened to that episode, go and check it out. But today we're talking about things you need to be not doing. You need to make sure that you are avoiding. These are the really common traps that people fall into that slow their progress down or keep them stuck entirely. So lots of juicy things in there today. I hope you've got a pen and paper ready and let's go. First of all, common mistake, slash common incorrect belief is that a lot of people think that at the way that you grow, the way that you scale, like once you sort of tick those first boxes of, okay, coming up with an offer, yep, people like it, selling it, a few, yep, good people getting good results, great, got a good sales page, blah, blah, blah. Like, okay, so this is, this is working like, you know, I do a launch, people buy great, ticked all those first boxes, right. And they'll get you into the six figures, mid six figures. Now you want to grow. Well, surely we just pump more people through that system. Right. And the best way to do that is to spend on, on ads. That's kind of usually what people's plan is. It's like, it's like 15 steps to get to there and then just one step to get to from, you know, mid or low six figures up beyond that. And sadly, that's not the case. Actually. This is where, you know, as I said, a lot of people get stuck here because they do that and it's part of it. Like, you know, scaling up, spending more on ads. It's absolutely a piece of the puzzle of how you grow. But you will find there is a point and it is different for everybody. It's different for everybody's offer market, et cetera. But there is a point where you will just max out, where all of a sudden spending more on ads actually costs you more. I mean, you're getting less profit even though you might be making more sales. So maybe at the start you had to spend $100 on Facebook ads to sell your, your program and you doubled your ad spend. And then it was $200 to sell a program and then you increase it again and all of a sudden it's 500. There's a little bit of black voodoo magic going on with Facebook. The best explained to me is that think of Facebook like a dog, a puppy dog, and they want to please you. So they usually serve up the best and most likely people to purchase first. So you kind of get that pool first. And so those people most likely to purchase, which means that they're going to be cheaper to purchase. And then you go, great, get me more. They then need to go to a bigger pool and those people are less likely to purchase, might be less ready, less ideal. So then all of a sudden you have to spend more to probably get the same kind of pool of people. So we could go down a whole rabbit hole talking about that, but basically you may have already experienced this yourself, or if not, it's highly likely you will soon. If your only strategy for scaling is to spend more on ads, that's mistake number one. Number two, and this is what people usually then do, right? So they've gone, just spend a bunch more on ads. Okay, that's hit a point. Now it's costing me lots of money, but I'm still not making any more sales. Obviously they go back and they think, oh, there's something wrong. There's something wrong with what I've got set up. It's obviously I need to optimize. Like they jump on that word. I've just got to start optimizing things. And they start getting really obsessed and going down this rabbit hole of okay, which button color is going to change things? Should my button be orange or red or blue? And they start getting really obsessed with these tiny little tweaks, thinking that one of these little tweaks is going to make the difference. And sure, doing these kind of tweaks and doing this kind of optimization, it's never a bad thing. But it's usually it's going to start increasing things by like 1% here, 1% there. And that's not going to get you doubling tripling your sales. Like, that's just going to again, have you spending months getting frustrated and, you know, hyper focused on small, small tweaks when what you need to be doing is doing things and putting things in place that are going to make a big impact, get you a big jump. So that's number two. That is the getting obsessed with the subject lines and the open rates and stuff. Like I'm all for. My caveat on that is I'm all for benchmarks. It's part of what we teach inside our program. It's like for each step as you're setting it up, you know, there, there are certain benchmarks, but as long as you're hitting in that range, it's good enough for now, it's good enough to move on and start focusing on a bigger thing. Cause I think it's more important that you go, yep, I've got that piece working. It's working well enough. Know that you know this is a good open rate, that this is a good click through rate, that you know this is a good opt in rate. Like know those. And if you're hitting those, stop obsessing and start focusing on what is going to be a bigger needle mover. For me, the next thing that I see again is people kind of get really hung up on this idea of they just need to be perfect at launching or spend more on their launches or go all in on their launches and then they're going to have this like one launch that changes everything. Because you've heard stories about this, right? And again, often those stories are what I call unicorn stories. They're the, if it was going to happen, it would have already happened that they're like the 1% of people, but they get bandied around the Internet because they sound so lovely that like someone just accidentally did a thing one day and it made them a million dollars. That's not what happens for most people. Most people who you look at, who you admire, who are successful in your industry, they've been chipping away at it for years. There's very few people who have some meteoric, you know, rise from one launch. Usually what happens instead is again similar to that getting obsessed over the button colors or the open rates, or whether you should have emojis or not, or whether you should active campaign or ConvertKit because it's going to get you a fractionally better open rate or whatever. Right? Same with spending all your time obsessing over your launches is again, it takes up all of your time, it takes up all of your energy, your resources, your team, and it doesn't leave you the time, the headspace, the potentially. I said resources you need to invest in the other pieces that are missing that are actually going to grow you. So we are all about what we call evergreen launching here. That's one of the things we take our clients through. It's almost like weaning people off this addictive thing of like the rush and the stress of a big launch and getting them instead to do smaller, more regular, more dialed in, very repeatable launches and doesn't have to be for everyone but for like for the majority of them it's going to still turn over. Similar amount of sales, add a funnel in there, it's even better. And you can do then more one or two big launches a year and just have it be a fun thing that doesn't have the stress behind it. But when you are just stuck in that cycle of quarterly launches, when you're spending two months setting up the launch, one month running the launch, another month recovering from launch and then doing it all over again, it will keep you stuck and maybe you will luck out, maybe you'll be a unicorn and you'll find that magic combination of everything that comes together and your launches go from making you 50k a launch to 500k a launch. Most people that's not the case. It's 50k, 55k, 40k, 30k, 50k. Like you kind of stay in this similar kind of range, just getting more and more frustrated and again not having the time or the resources to actually spend on the bigger picture stuff you need to be doing. The next mistake that I see a lot of people making is that they expect it to happen overnight, that they start looking for the magic bullets, because again, they've probably gone through this process. They've tried scaling with ads, didn't work. Tried getting obsessed, optimizing everything, didn't work. Tried spending all this time, you know, doing all these launches over and over again and they're like, well, there must be something, I'm clearly doing something wrong, there must be some magic thing that I'm not doing. So they start looking for the overnight, they take their focus away from doing the boring, foundational, unsexy systems that actually is what helps you to scale and they start looking for a magic bullet. Then they kind of go almost back to beginner mode because they're just throwing out untested thing after untested thing after untested thing looking for that magic unicorn bullet and usually don't find it. So again, people kind of get stuck in this phase. It can last a while. And this is where I kind of usually ended up stuck with my previous businesses before I figured out the pieces that you actually need to scale. That is where for me at least you say gone through these things and seen stuck in all of these phases for long enough, you kind of go bugger it. Maybe I'M no good at this. Maybe I'm never going to figure this out. Everyone else must be smarter than me. Blow it all up, start again, and then you go back to the start and then you have to do it all. So if this is a loop that sounds familiar, I would love it. You know, come share the pain, like. Cause I understand it. I was in it myself. DMS over at HelloFunnels. Or leave a comment below if you're watching the video. Have you been stuck in any of these loops? Have these been strategies that you've been using which actually ended up being mistakes? And then the final thing that I think a lot of people get really stuck on and is a bit of a mistake is this mindset of really being overly protective of their profit. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but you might have heard someone say that, oh, you know, a good business in this industry should be doing 30% profit, 40% profit, 50% profit, whatever, right? The problem is when you are growing, the way businesses grow is it's kind of, it's not a straight line. It's kind of goes up and down and blah, blah, blah. But when you are in a growth phase, you usually have to, if you're, if you're getting more clients and things like that, you might need to bring on more team to help to service those clients. So there's usually usually a phase as you're growing where your profit percentage is gonna go down. You need to invest more to do that growth, and then you're gonna hit a little plateau and things are gonna even out and you're gonna then be more profitable and you're gonna systemize everything. And then to get to that next phase again, you'll have to invest some more and jump up and have again, a less profitable phase. Now, I'm not saying spend money you don't have. I'm not saying get yourself in debt. I'm talking about is when some people get just really, really scared to spend anything. They're like, well, I've only ever spent this amount, so I shouldn't have to spend more to grow. And just that is crazy. Like, you do have to invest more to grow. And you can either invest more time or you can invest more resources, or you can invest more money, or you can invest a combo of the both. But you are not going to be able to jump up to that next level unless more investment is made. And usually at this point, if you are at that mid, you know, low mid six figures, you're probably investing all the time that you have, right, Is usually a very time intensive place to be. So to think that, okay, the way I'm going to grow is just to work twice as hard is insanity. Because you're going to burn out. It's not going to last. You're going to need to find the balance that works for you. But not investing is again, it's going to keep you stuck.
