The Danger of Taking Action

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey, everyone.

Welcome back to Million Dollar Grit. Today, I want to talk about the hazard of taking action. And I did a reel on this this morning, but I need to unpack this in a lot more detail than I can in a 2-minute short-form reel. I want to start by saying that action-taking is a personality trait that's extremely valuable in entrepreneurship. We can look at a lot of successful people and say that their action-taking nature is part of their success. Money loves speed. Idea to implementation, failing forward, all of these things are action-taking strengths of this type of personality. The problem happens when it's time to grow and scale, or you're hitting some sort of plateau. That propensity to taking action can become really hazardous, and there are a few ways that I'm noticing that this shows up. in coaching. The first is AI. I want to talk a little bit about AI because the speed at which we can drum up new plans, new pivots, new angles, ideas, offers is growing exponentially. What used to take us weeks can now be done in hours. And this is a great feeling for people who are action takers because they're like, oh my gosh, okay, this didn't work. Cool. I'm going to try to launch this program instead. And I have the outline and the slide deck in 2 hours, and it's ready to rock. And ChatGPT or Claude says it's a great idea. And there's no natural constraints on ideas anymore, which is cool and also bad because now— You start to feel uncomfortable with like a poor revenue month or a launch not going as you expected, and your instinct is to what? It's to take action. And so you sit down and you talk to Claude or you talk to ChatGPT and you say, okay, this launch didn't go well. And again, it's all dependent on the prompts that you give it and the context and the wisdom you give it. And then it's saying, okay, here's what we can do. Here's how we can change. Here's the new offer. Here's the pivot. Here's the structure. And the planning itself soothes a feeling of like, okay, I'm doing something about the fact that my revenue isn't doing well. And a lot of action takers will deceive themselves because they'll actually go take action. It's not like the perpetual planner. There are people like that who perpetually plan, who turn their action towards endless planning, and they never— Do anything. Actually execute. That's not what I'm talking about today. I'm talking about the people who actually do execute and implement, and they switch things around, they try new offers, maybe they get some cash in the door, but they are not adequately measuring the revenue in relation to the energy and effort. And okay, you know, maybe they Stopgapped, you know, a $10,000 revenue loss by running this cash injection offer that Chat said was a good idea that they implemented. They made some money. Everything on the outside looks like what looks like it's working. Although what's happening inside of the entrepreneur is they're getting tired because now that worked, but now they got to think of something else, and then they have to think of something else, and this cycle of. It's not quite what I need. Run back to ChatGPT, create a plan, execute that plan faster and cheaper than I ever could before, make some money, but then it doesn't fully solve the problem. That is what I'm seeing. And I want to speak to that specifically because If you have felt that where you are a fast action-taker and you don't resonate with the people who just stay in planning mode, and yet you're not where you want to be, you could be like, well, what the heck, man? Like, how do I not— how do I not get where I want to go? Action-taking when you scale is a hazardous personality trait. What I have observed and experienced both as an entrepreneur as well as a coach is that scaling often includes subtraction, simplification, persistence, testing, strategic focus— all things that don't really feel like that productive action that we crave. Let's take simplification as an example. If you want to scale, I mean, just think about this in manufacturing. If a company wants to scale quickly, it behooves them to only sell the things that are making good money and to retire the things that are not. If we think about like a clothing company or a tech company, you've got, you know, 10 SKUs and 2 of them are making great money for you and the other 8 aren't. Well, the cost to manufacture and the labor and the shipping for all of those 8 things is disproportionate to the amount of revenue that it's bringing in versus the 2 items that if you just focused on those 2 items, you would probably get faster assembly, lower costs, more scale, and then you would ultimately make more money. In that example, that physical manufacturing example, we take away the 8 things and we just focus on 2. In the digital world, it's harder to do that because we're not clearly measuring the energetic cost of those 8 things because we're not actually paying out an invoice every month that shows our energy and our labor and our attention and the amount of reels or emails, right? We're not— excuse me— we're not attaching a number to that. It seems like, oh, well, it's fine. I'll just do this little thing, or I'll just keep that on the side, or I'll just, you know, slip that in here in an email sequence. And what we're doing when we do that is we are slowly and quietly neglecting the 2 things that if we just focused on those 2 things, we would see the growth and the scale that we want. And Using a webinar as an example, I'm going to take Funnel Gorgeous as an example for the company. You know, at the end of 2024, I recognized that we had a lot of products that were not really contributing meaningfully to the bottom line, but we were often kind of stuck in this grind of launching things that were things that our audience had come to expect from us. And I said to Kathy, we really need to focus on our FG Funnels subscriptions. That's really where a lot of this leverage is coming from. And it took probably 5 months for us to get our webinar out the door, even though I knew its power. And I think about how much money we lost with the procrastination of 5 months, because of course there were always other things to do. But once we got that webinar going, It has contributed more to our bottom line than almost any other activity, and in order to stay focused on that, we've had to stop launching so often. And you probably noticed this inside of Funnel Gorgeous, we haven't done a lot of launches, and that's an example of subtraction, understanding that even though we could launch, and there are a few things we're launching, but our big launches that we tended to do, we've redirected that bandwidth and energy and money. Over to the one thing that's making the true difference, and if we have a bad webinar or a bad month, it's really really tempting to be like, okay, let's quick pivot. Let's do a launch. Let's get a cash injection. And I know better that yes, we could do that. But I also know that that will take our eye off the ball on the thing that we really need to focus on improving. And instead of launching this cash injection thing that will give us you know fifteen twenty thousand dollars. What if we redirected our energy to better creative and angles for ads to get our cost per lead down? Another example in the webinar space, I had a client who came to me. She'd been doing her webinar for about 7, 8 months. She's like, okay, Julie, I'm ready. My cost, my ROAS, which is return on ad spend, is going down a little bit. I want to make it better. We looked at her KPIs, key performance indicators. Everything looked good on the funnel, the offer. She did take out 3 slides that she shouldn't have. And when she put them back, her conversion rate went back up again. And, but that's besides the point. That's, that's sort of a side, a side quest there. But I said, hey, you know, your, your funnel, your offer looks great. She's like, well, what can I do to make it better? I said, it's already great. But I want to make more money. I want to be better. There must be something we can do. And this is a different client from the one I talked about in my reel this morning. And I said, Sarah, there's nothing that you can really do to make this better. You're going to try to alter, like, the laws of human nature to make this better. She was getting, you know, somewhere between 20% and 30% conversion rate on a live webinar. And the math says that once you hit a 30% conversion rate of a live room, it's very hard to get— I mean, maybe you can get a tiny bit more, but you're not going to get 50%, 60%, 70%.

Why?

Because human nature. And we know this. Like, it's futile to try to sit there and make 50% to 60% of the room close when you're already so high. When the average room closes at 10%, you're already at 30%. I said, what you want to do is take all of that action-taking energy and strategic focus and focus it here on your ads because your ads. You need more creative, better creative. You need a better flow for that. If you really want to scale, that's where it has to go. And she didn't love that answer just because ads feel like the thing she's the least good at. It's the thing that requires you to create more content, but that's the answer. And she could accidentally take action on all of these different things, all these different levers, Trying to make numbers better that are already amazing, and then get frustrated that she's not growing, and then take action by being like, "Well, let me just launch this cash injection offer." Now Sarah wouldn't do that because Sarah is very she's very focused. She doesn't tend to launch things, but I see a lot of other clients who launch things in the name of cash injection, in the name of well that launch didn't go well, instead of directing that energy towards the thing. That will scale. Subtraction, simplification, testing. I want to talk about testing for a few minutes because, again, action-takers feel best when they're taking action. Now, testing, if we go back to the scientific method days when we were taught in science class that in order to understand what is causing a change in an experiment, we have to just isolate one variable at a time. And if you change multiple variables at one time, then you have no way of knowing, was it variable A or B or C? When you're doing launches and a launch doesn't go well, you have to isolate what variable didn't work, and then you have to change that variable for the next time. But if you change all the variables, you have no idea what's actually causing the change in conversion. And nobody wants to wait 4 months in between launches to test one variable and then wait another 4 months to test the next variable, right? I mean, you're waiting for a year to like try to make these strategic decisions. That's painful. That's very painful for an action taker because they feel like, well, I should be doing something right now to make, make money happen. This is one of the reasons why I really like the weekly webinar funnel. Because it allows us to do experiments every single week. And it's very hard to do in launches when you're having to launch every 3 or 4 months. But even in the webinar funnel, when we're doing experiments, I like to see if something works over 4 webinars or 6 webinars. And that really requires like 4 weeks of testing. Incredibly difficult if you are an action taker. And what I've narrowed it down to as I'm talking about this is I think action-takers don't like to feel helpless. We have gone through life taking the bull by the horns, problem-solving, not being afraid to fail, and this feels safer to us than waiting or sitting on our hands. And when you're in testing mode, you're trying to isolate variables, you're having to be patient, This can feel like a very helpless feeling, especially if your revenue isn't doing great. And that feeling, as uncomfortable as it is, I think action takers have to learn to sit with that feeling a little bit so that they don't haul off and break stuff that isn't broken. And I remember Ryan Deiss talking about this. He's the former owner of Digital Marketer. He was like a big name back in the day. I don't really know what he's up to now, but he talked about this in a mastermind group I was in a couple years back about how many entrepreneurs he's seen get to $3 million in sales and then completely sabotage their business and go back to the beginning because the amount of strategic focus, simplification, subtraction, testing, and I don't know that he said it in that way, but that was required of that person in order to get to $10 million. They were so much more comfortable in that grind, hustle, like, experiment, you know, that newbie energy, that they would inadvertently sabotage the business and go back to the beginning because that's where it felt safer for them. It felt safer being the primary person testing, experimenting, going, you know, grinding it out, new offers every month or, you know, whatever. And that felt safer to them because action equals safety, and waiting equals helplessness and danger. And I thought that was really fascinating because you see it happen a lot. You'll see people say, well, I'm shutting down my business, or I'm taking a sabbatical, or, you know, I'm I'm simplifying things, or I'm switching my business around. It's honestly, I think a lot of times it's packaged up as a positive, but what's really happening is the personality trait that got them there is now the personality trait that's sabotaging them getting to the next spot. The last example is the one that I brought up in the reel this morning. New new client. She's amazing. She's Very strong action taker, knows how to grind, knows how to get shit done. And she sent me a webinar landing page and she said, hey, my marketing agency wants to make these changes. What do you think? And I looked at the page and I noticed there were a couple things that needed to be changed, but these are what I would call micro-optimizations, very, very small changes that are going to take 10, 15 minutes and then you're going to go on your way. The marketing agency actually didn't mention either of the micro-optimizations that I saw on the page right away, but they did say, hey, let's completely redo the copy on this page so that it feels new to your audience. I looked at the KPIs and she was already at the upper end, higher than the upper end of what I'm seeing across all my clients. And I said to her, do not do that. Why would you break a page that's working as well as it's working? And she said, well, there's got to be something we can do to make it better. And I said, well, from a micro-optimization standpoint, there's always things we can try to do to tweak like a little number here and there and do this and do that. I gave her a couple tips. I said, but we're not going to take a high-converting opt-in page at 27%, 30% and get it to 60%. We maybe can get it 1%, 2%, 3%, but Again, that's going to take 5% of your energy. I would rather you spend 90% of your energy over here. And it's that response, well, there must be something we can do, right? That action-taking, I'm going to feel better if I'm doing something actively to the page. In this case, I would argue that doing something to that page will put that page more at risk than if you just do the little simple micro-optimizations and then leave it alone. And take that action and put it in a direction that's actually going to move the needle. And I said to her, maybe we need to look at the bottom of your funnel, but I'm going to tell you that if the bottom of your funnel is looking really good and those KPIs are high, we are not going to spend a lot of time there either. We're going to have to go out into the traffic side and look at that. That's where the strategic focus needs to be. And, you know, the problem is that the marketing agency's angles and ideas didn't sound bad, but they are operating in this false belief that they have to change the page in order to excite an old audience, and they're ignoring very good, strong key performance indicators that I would say that is not where you want to focus right now. Those are examples that I can bring to you today. And, well, what is the takeaway? What is the advice? Number one, if you don't have a business coach or mentor that's been where you are, you need to find one if you're scaling, because these kinds of mistakes are really easy to fall prey to because you are taking action. And a lot of the advice isn't bad advice, it's good advice, but for the wrong moment. And the second thing is, be really honest about your personality. If you are this type of personality and you notice yourself constantly taking action and getting yourself in a cycle where, like, you've got a new plan, you run the plan, it makes a little bit of money, but it doesn't really solve the problem, then that is a clue that you are probably In this people group that I'm talking about, and it's going to require something really uncomfortable, dare I say dangerous, to your nervous system. Your nervous system is going to feel like you're in danger when you start simplifying, subtracting, waiting, testing, strategic focus. It's going to feel like the bear is chasing you and is going to catch you if you don't quickly do something. And that is an internal work. Again, that's one of the reasons why I work alongside of my nervous system and leadership coach, Helen. She's been with me from the beginning because I recognize that so many problems have an external solution but also an internal solution. And there have been clients who have left my world and stopped coaching with me because they didn't like The fact that I was not feeding that action-taking. Well, there must be something. I've got to try this. And I'm thinking of one person who left about 6 months ago, and she didn't like that my advice was to stay the course and make these changes. And I found out through a mutual friend that she went and she hired somebody new, and she did a new thing. She was very excited about this new thing, and now this new thing isn't converting the way She wants it to, and how many more new things is she going to chase? And I'm not saying this in a judgmental way. I'm saying this in a— she doesn't recognize that her subconscious nervous system danger signals are running the show because she isn't trusting a strategic plan or a strategic voice, and she's jumping from action to action, which feels very productive, but meanwhile— Money and energy and time are bleeding away. Anyway, this is a little bit of a longer one, but I hope this helped. I hope if this is something that you're struggling with, that you take what I say to heart. And of course, if you are looking for a coach, I'm currently running on a waitlist, but you can reach out to me and maybe work together in 2027. All right, guys, chat soon. Bye.

And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey. entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.