766. Why Business Success Won’t Make You Feel Like You’re Enough

She runs a real product business, half a million in revenue, customers who love her, a team starting to come together, and every single morning she wakes up convinced she's about to be exposed as a fraud. And that somebody is going to find out that she doesn't actually know what she's doing, that all of this is going to fall apart because deep down she's still not enough. So if you've ever been her at $50,000 in revenue, at $250,000, at $1.5 million, I want you to know two things. You are not alone and you are not actually a fraud. You are carrying a wound that almost every woman in business is carrying. And I've had it for 15 years before I understood what it was. And once I did, everything changed. Everything changed about the way I led, the way I priced my products, and the way I built my business. And so today we're going inside of it because if we don't name the thing, it will run your business until it runs you into the ground.

Hi, I'm Jacqueline Snyder, and this is the Product Boss Podcast. I've helped launch and grow thousands of product-based businesses, even one of my own. And over the last 20 years, I've seen behind the scenes of businesses just like yours. Whether they are makers, manufacturers, artists, or food and beverage businesses, I have spent so many hours studying it all. I've discovered what makes them successful, what mistakes they could have avoided, how did they turn their ideas into a successful business, and and what are the strategies that they have used to make more sales and be discovered by more customers. And this is what this show is all about. Whether you're just starting out or you're looking to become a million-dollar product boss, I'm here to give you the permission to chase your dreams no matter how big or small. All you need is the right mindset, a little courage, strategy, and support, and you too can be the next million-dollar product boss. Let's do this.

Okay, and welcome back. Now this is an episode that I'm going to call the Mirror Series, and this is where we take one belief, one inner story, and we look at how it's showing up in your product business right now. Because here's the thing I want you to know about your business. Your business is your mirror. It's reflecting back to you every single day exactly where you have to grow next. The business will only grow as much as you do. I think you've heard me say that, but when you're looking at this, I want you to know your business will only grow as much as you do. And one of the first ones I want to talk about is the Not Enoughness Wound, because almost every other belief sits on top of this one. So today I'm going to walk you through 3 things. First, what's the Not Enoughness Wound and what it is and where it came from. Second, the specific ways it shows up in your business. Whether you're selling candles on Etsy, jewelry through wholesale, apparel, or Shopify, or running a CPG brand, right? It doesn't matter what you make and sell. It shows up in business truthfully in all entrepreneurship. And the third is the inner shift. It's the strategic move I want you to make this week and to start dissolving it. Hey everyone, I'm Jacqueline Snyder. I am the host and the founder of The Product Boss and The Product Boss Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Here is where we help ambitious business owners grow to $1 million and beyond with their product-based businesses. Alright, so let's get into it. What the not enoughness wound actually is, okay? And I wanna name this. So not enoughness is a deep, often unconscious belief that no matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, no matter how much you build, you're still somehow not quite enough. Maybe you're not quite smart enough, not quite established enough, not quite ready, not quite credible, right? Not original enough. Just not quite whatever yet. And here's what's so insidious about it. The not enoughness wound does not care what you've actually accomplished. It like really doesn't matter. You can be at $50,000 a year and feel not enough because you're not at 6 figures, and you can hit that 6 figures and feel not enough because you're not at half a million dollars, and you can hit that half million dollar mark and still feel like a fraud because you don't have that 7-figure business yet. And then, and I know this because I went through the same thing, is you can hit 7 figures, that million-dollar mark, and feel like you're going to lose it all tomorrow. And that wound moves with you. It's not solved by revenue. Trust me, I know. It's not solved by accolades. Again, I know this. I've gotten tons of awards. I mean, we were one of Inc. 5000's fastest growing companies in 2023. I mean, literally like 460 and it wasn't solved by that. And I've worked with women whose product businesses are in Bloomingdale's and Petco, Nordstrom's, Urban Outfitters, Target. They're on Shark Tank. Women whose brands have done 7 and 8 figures in a year, and I've sat across from them and on calls, and they're quietly telling me that they're still afraid that people are going to find out that they don't actually know what they're doing because not enoughness is not about the business. It's about the person. And here's where it comes from for most of us, truthfully. Somewhere along the way in our lives, we learned that we were valued for what we did, not for who we were. We learned that love came from when we performed, right? We learned that we were being chosen meant being good. We learned that if we ever let up, if we ever just stopped, achieving, the floor would fall out and maybe the love would go away. And so we built a strategy and the strategy was stay one step ahead of being found out, right? Achieve more, add more to the resume, add more products to the line, add more sales channels, add more accolades. Because if we just achieve enough, eventually we're going to feel enough. And the cruel joke is that it never works. Never, ever. The achievement is never the thing that closes the gap. The gap closes from somewhere else entirely. So how that not enoughness shows up in your product business, right? This is where the mirror comes in. Your business is showing you this wound right now. Right now, it's showing it to you every day. You just haven't been trained to see it yet. So I wanna name the specific symptom and see if you recognize yourself. Okay, so let's, let's talk about some symptoms of the not enoughness. So symptom 1, chronic underpricing. Okay, I see this come up a lot for product-based businesses. Maybe you're charging what you think people will pay, or you're charging what feels comfortable. Maybe you're charging what feels safe, but you do not charge what the work and the products are actually worth. And this is especially common in people that I see that, you know, maybe you're a candle maker, a jewelry designer, maybe you're baking goods. Really, anyone whose product has handmade, or you feel like a small business. I see this happen a lot, especially in the handmade world, okay? And I think this comes up when you're price comparison on Etsy, or maybe you're in-person markets and you're worried about what the booth next to you is doing. And when you're handmade or you're small, maybe you're feeling that, like, that that gets stuck in your mind, right? Maybe, maybe because you're on these platforms, you're selling on these channels, or the town that you're in, that you're not premium enough to charge more. And if you find yourself rationalizing every price decrease, well, my market is price sensitive, or well, my Etsy buyers won't pay that, I want you to pause for just a hot second. That is the not enoughness wound talking, not the market, cuz your buyer can absolutely pay more for a small product-based business, right, a candle, a necklace, or a cake, when she trusts that it's worth it, that it's aligned with what she wants. Remember, we usually sell the, we're not selling the product, we're selling everything around the product, and we'll talk about that in a different episode. That's the idea here, right? It's like, we really have to start to decide that we're pricing our products to turn a profit. Now, symptom number 2 is overdelivering until you bleed, like overdelivering at your own demise. Maybe you're including free shipping when you can't afford it, can't afford it. Or you throw in extras, extra gifts, extra stickers, extra whatever. Maybe you spend 3 hours handwriting a thank you note that should have been like a printed card. I get it. I know I've heard this before, but they love it. They do. And we get to really decide what does the customer really want? Where are you overperforming? Maybe you refund customers who didn't really need a refund because you don't want them to think badly of you. And I see you, right? And I see this a lot. I see that this, like, it's constantly that you're giving away your margin to prove you deserve to charge anything at all. All right, so let's talk about symptom 3, refusing to put yourself out there. Maybe you're not applying the fare yet because you feel like maybe your line isn't ready or you don't know enough about wholesale, or you don't email the Bloomingdale's buyer because you don't feel like you're ready for wholesale or the lookbook isn't perfect. In your head, right? We still wanna make sure it's good. Or you don't do the trade show because you don't believe you have that real booth setup yet. You're just like, you're unsure, so you just pause and freeze. Maybe you won't reach out and do PR to get on the Today Show because what if they reject you? What if they realize you're not big enough yet? And so what I want you all to know is wholesale, retail, and PR doors, they don't just open because you can't walk through doors you won't walk up to. Okay? So nothing's gonna just, happen for you. You gotta get up to the door and then walk through it, even when you don't feel ready. And then the last symptom I want to talk about is adding more products instead of marketing the ones that work. Okay, this is a big one for people that I work with. You launch a totally new line because maybe you think that what you've created isn't enough, or you add a new SKU because your existing bestseller isn't selling enough, or you haven't put it out there enough, or you're bored. I hear bored all the time. Your creative boredness. But the problem is not the product most of the time. The product is selling fine, and the problem is actually your relationship with what's working. So not enoughness cannot let one product be enough. It needs to be the next thing, then the next thing, then the next thing. The not enoughness wound, it's keeping you in the doing, because if you stop doing, if you let maybe someone else do it, if you just pause for a sec, what if they find out that you weren't as good at this as Everyone thought. So do you see it now? What your business has been showing you, that the business has been mirroring this wound back to you in dollars, in margins, in late nights, in the products you can't bring yourself to charge what they're worth. My friend, the business is not broken. The business is telling you the truth. So how do you actually do this work? Because hearing me name it, right? Naming the wound, it's not enough. We have to break through it. And I've gotta tell you, like, this, this is a massive deep internal wound, so it's not gonna be solved in this podcast episode, and it's probably something that you may work on for a lifetime. But the more you can see it, the more you can kind of be third person to it, the more you can start to make shifts in the day-to-day. So hopefully this episode is something that's pointing it out to you. And if this feels like it resonates for you and there's someone else you know that could listen to this episode, please just hit that share button wherever you're listening to the podcast, or if you're watching this on YouTube and share it with somebody else. Okay, because this is a massive wound for people, and especially in entrepreneurship. And so this is what we work on, right? This is what I work on every single week with my, with my clients, with my students in the collective, here on the podcast. Because again, your business mirrors back to you what you get to break through. So let's talk about 3 things that can support you here today on this episode. The first one is name the wound out loud. You can't break through something you can't see, and so we've just done it. So first move is admitting to yourself that there's a not enoughness wound there. And you, my friend, are not weak for having it. Almost every entrepreneur that I know in business has it, probably most people. And the person who's willing to break through that, they're the ones that are willing to name it. The entrepreneur who stays stuck, right, those are the ones that pretend it's not there. So tonight, before you go to bed, I want you to say this out loud. I've been running my business under the belief that I'm not enough, and I see it now. And that sentence, just said out loud to yourself alone, that's the start of the breakthrough. Okay, second thing we're gonna do is we're gonna find where it was, where it came from, like where it was installed. The wound did not just appear out of nowhere. Someone, somewhere, a parent, a teacher, a coach, a partner, a friend, told you something directly or indirectly that you had to perform to be valued. And I want you to name that person, not to attack them, not to confront them, just to acknowledge that moment, right? This is where I learned this, or this is where this belief was established. Because the moment you can see where the wound came from, you can also see it does not have to be the truth of your future. And number 3, we get to rewrite the rule. The not enoughness wound runs on an old rule: I am valuable because of what I do. And I want you to write a new rule for yourself: I'm valuable because of who I am, and what I do is the expression of that, right? Not the proof of it. So write that on a sticky note or in your journal. Put it, put it on your bathroom mirror. Look at it every single morning, and eventually— and this can take months or years— your nervous system will start to settle into a new role. And when it does, your business will breathe differently. Your life will transform. Things will feel different, especially in the body. And then you'll start to see things unlock. Now, I'm not just a mindset advisor. You guys know this. I am a business strategist, and every Mirror episode ends with a strategic move that you can make this week because the inner shift and the outer action have to move together. So here is your strategic move for the not enoughness wound. This week I want you to do an audit, and I call it the performance audit. You get to open a journal or a document like a Google Docs and make 3 columns. Maybe this is just in your journal, 3 columns. Column 1 is things I'm doing in my business that are real strategy. So this might be pricing decisions backed by margin math, channel decisions backed by data, Hires backed by capacity needs, the actual operating moves. Okay, then in column 2, things I'm doing in my business that are performance. Free extras you can't afford, discounts you didn't have to give, overdelivery you weren't paid for, refunds you didn't owe, customer requests you said yes to out of guilt, the "I should be doing more" decisions. And then column 3, are things I'm not doing because I'm afraid I'm not ready. Pitches that I haven't sent, prices I haven't raised, hires I haven't made, channels I haven't opened, wholesale relationships I haven't pursued, the doors I haven't walked through. Then, and this is the move, I want you to pick one thing from column 2 to stop and one thing from column 3 to start. Both this week, but between now and the next episode that you listen to. Both are small, both are specific. Maybe you stop including the free shipping on the entire site and you set a free shipping threshold that you can afford and that they're willing to raise their average order value to. Maybe you send the fair pitch you've been writing in your head for months. Maybe you raise your prices like by $2 based on the math. Maybe you email the Bloomingdale's buyer or that buyer that's that's just waiting for your email to land in their inbox. Maybe you tell the customer you can't custom make that one product. I want you to get one stop and one start this week because the not enoughness wound shrinks every time you act from the version of you who knows she is enough even before her nervous system fully believes it. The action is the way through the wound, not the other way around. So if you take nothing else from today, 3 things. One, the not enoughness wound is not solved by revenue. It's gonna come with you no matter where you are, so we might as well approach it now. You will not feel enough at half a million dollars, at a million dollars, at $10 million if the wound is still there. You have to do the work on the wound itself, and a lot of it is mindset and the nervous system upgrades. Okay? Two, your business is showing you the wound. Literally right now in your pricing, in your overdelivery, your refusal to pitch, your endless adding of the new products. And the mirror is honest. And 3, the way through is naming it, rewriting it, and acting. Okay? Inner work plus strategic moves, always together, never one without the other. So this week I want you to do the performance audit, right? 3 columns. Pick one thing to stop. Pick one thing to start, and both are small, both are specific, and both this week. And if something in this episode hit you, I want to hear about it. So come find me over on Instagram @theproductboss. Make sure you're following me because those messages don't go through unless we're following, and slide into my DMs the words, dear Jacqueline Snyder Snyder, and your question, right? The best ones may become future episodes, or just let me know what hit big in this episode. And two more things before you go. One, every single week, every single week, my friend, I host a free training called How to Build a Million Dollar Product Business Without Becoming the Bottleneck. This is for those of you who are reaching to your first six figures, multi-six, seven figures, and multi-seven-figure business owners. Okay? Because ultimately we become the bottleneck at every stage of business, and I'm going to walk you through the strategy, the belief shifts, and the next moves. All you have to do is go to theproductbossworkshops.com to grab your seat. It's totally free. I'll also drop the link in the show notes or whatever you're watching. Look for the link. Two, if you're ready to actually sit down and talk about where you are, where you're stuck, and where you want to go, I'm offering free calls, 1 hour with one of my product business growth advisors. It might even be me, and we'll walk you through your business. We're going to name your actual bottleneck and figure out what your next move should be. And in this way, what we'll talk about on this call is how the Product Boss can support you in your business. We've got multiple levels depending where you are in revenue, whether you're in the beginning, early stages, you wanna hit your first 6 figures, you're multi-6, wanna get to 7, 7 to multi-millions. All you have to do is click the link in the show notes or go to theproductboss.com/bookacall, okay? Because if you want our support, you want our help, we're here to help you on that. That's it for today's episode. I hope that this was supportive to you., and every single week we have the show. So make sure to follow the show, like, subscribe, comment, share it with somebody. Remember, you can— we teach every single week, so come to one of our workshops every single week or book a call with one of my product business growth strategists to see how the Product Boss can help you. All right, my friends, thank you so much and I'll see you in the next one.

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