The POWER of not caring

I see here. Hello, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. This is Luna Lovegood, who's decided to join me on the couch this evening. I wanted to talk to you all about the power of not caring in your business. And hello, welcome. For those of you who are joining me, I am doing this through Instagram, through the Facebooks, through YouTube, and through LinkedIn. So I love this to be interactive. If you have any questions as I'm talking through this, please put them in the comments. Also, if anything, like, pings for you and you're like, oh, crap, is something that I need to work on, then you send me a dm, okay? Send me a direct message. We will sort this out, baby. Okay? So when I talk about not caring in your business, let me just talk about what I don't mean, okay? I do not mean that you should, like, not do the work and not work hard and not try to be the best you can be in this business. That's not what I mean at all. I also don't mean that you shouldn't care about the people that you work with, okay? What I mean by this is that you, my dear, sweet, brave soul who is starting a business, need to not have any expectations for how and when your business is going to become a success. Because here is the truth, my dear friend. The universe does not give a flying fuck about what your timeline is. And I know that's really hard to reckon with. This beat the crap out of me, my first couple years of being in business, because it's so easy to figure out pricing and to add it up on a spreadsheet with the amount of clients that you say, oh, I'm gonna have these, and to think, okay, cool, well, all I need is like 10 new clients a month, and then I'm. I'm there. It doesn't work that way. It absolutely doesn't work that way. Especially doesn't work that way if you don't have a niche, if you don't have a sales process, if you aren't going live on social media, if you aren't, like, you know, doing everything that you can. And it's. Here's the thing, you don't know what you don't know when you're doing something you've never done. Okay? So this is why the universe has created people like me who can come out here and show you the ways you can do this. Now I want to talk about the things that happen. I'm just going to wave to the gazelle and to David Klein. Hello. The things that happen to you and your business when you care too much. Okay. When you care too much. I'm talking about that moment when you are absolutely desperate for someone to end up your client. Elizabeth, welcome from LinkedIn. Thank you for sharing this important, important information. Happy to share it anytime, Elizabeth. So when you're too desperate for business, this is what generally happens first. First you discount the crap out of your service or your product. Okay. What happens when you discount? Okay, so. And hi. Hi, Juana. Nice to see you. Welcome. Hearing this hurts. Man, oh man. Yeah, it hurts, but it hurts so good. It's like. It's like having to re. Break a bone that started here healing incorrectly so that it can heal correctly. It does hurt, Juana. Thank you for calling that out. But if you don't do it, you're gonna be walking funny for the rest of your life. And we don't want that, okay? We don't want that at all. We want you walking perfectly fine. Okay? So when you're desperate and you start offering discounts for your work, what this does to you on an energetic level is it starts attracting other people who are not willing to pay your real rate for your work, okay? So it undercuts you before you even get started. Okay? The types of clients that you attract who are constantly asking for discounts and deals and all that stuff, they are the most difficult clients you will ever have in your life. They will suck the soul out of your eyeballs. There may be elements of them that you love and you just love supporting them in this way. And also you need to clear your books of them. They are not your ideal clients. They are not the clients that are going to take you to a multiple six figure business. Oh, it's got a. There's a blog up in my website, by the way. My assistant just messaged me and told me. So if you want to go check that out. Katie McManus.com Anyway, besides the point, there may be elements of these clients that you absolutely adore. And yet they are not your ideal clients. They are not the ones that are going to take you to multiple six figures in your business. Simply put, like, the math won't work if you're discounting. And you figured out, if you figured out how much you needed to charge per client to get to a certain income level and then you discount half of them, you baby. The math just doesn't work on that, okay? So you need to stick to the rate that you've decided. And if you hear all No's then you need to talk to someone like me and we need to figure out what's happening there. I bet you anything that you just don't know how to run a sales call. Okay, now the other thing that happens when you start discounting your services and I know you say like, oh, that would never happen to me. I'm a professional. And like, I would never do that. And I, you know, bring my, my A game every single time. Well, let me tell you, say, say you have, you know, seven clients. We're all paying $8,000 for a six month engagement with you to talk for two hours a month. Okay. And then you have one client who you got really early on and you charge them like say half that because they asked for a discount. Right? Because you were, and you probably weren't comfortable asking for your, your real price at that point. And so you like kind of dance with them. We're like, okay, that's fine. Yes. And the gazelle. Have you ever coached friends or family? I have coached some friends. It's very, we have to be very clear about what the parameters are. I haven't coached family. I won't do it. So. But great question. I don't think we're related though. So, you know. Yeah. Anyway, but here's the thing. You stop bringing your A game for that client. That client. I just went off the map and then came back. I hope you, you followed me there. So that client who's paying half the amount because they asked for a discount because they didn't see the value in your work and you feel like you have to prove it to them every single time. You're going to get so burnt out in working with them that it is not going to be worth it to you anymore. And when you show up to those calls, you are going to resent the and energy that this person requires for you to show up and give you, give any of you to them. So don't discount your services. Please, please, please don't. And I know I speak to a lot of helpers and healers and coaches who genuinely want to help people out there in the world. And there's this question of, well, how do I make my, my work accessible to people who genuinely need it but cannot afford it. So group programs. Group programs, it subsidizes. You have 12 people in a group. They're getting some instructional version of your, of your service. Be it either you're a copywriter and you're teaching them how to do it for themselves. You're a coach and you're doing group coaching. You could. Heck, I mean, you could even batch out. If you're a photographer, you could batch out group photography sessions. And it's just a day of a photo shoot and you've subsidized having it be accessible to that many more people. There's so many creative ways that you can make your work accessible. You do not have to worry about that in your first two years. However, in your first two years, the only thing you should care about is making this business work, okay? Making it work. And by. By making it work, I mean, you're making enough money that you can pay the bills and reinvest in your business and pay more bills and reinvest in your business and have some semblance of a life, okay? And. Hi, Ben, welcome. And Uncle Joe, Mr. Barcelon. Hi. Welcome. Anyway, so, please, from the bottom of my heart, I beg you, please do not discount your services. You cannot care that much in a sales call to get this client that you will be willing to do that, okay? Caring. And this is what gets in the way. This is what fucks us up and has us discounting our services, right? Is that we care so much. We're desperate for this business and it comes across, you know, and this is my next point. So number one was discounts. Number two is desperation. Okay? We have all been on that sales call with someone, you know, maybe we're going to buy a car. There's a siren in the background. Great. We. Maybe we were buying car. Maybe we're signing up for a gym membership. And whoever was trying to sell us this thing obviously was really far away from their quota for the month, right? And you can smell the neediness. And it's almost like that level of neediness when, I don't know, like someone really, really, really, really, really wants your number and you're at a bar and they just won't leave you alone and they're trying way too hard. It's creepy, man. It's so creepy. And what happens when the guy or the girl who wants that person's number and is being really creepy and pushy and, like, all over you for it? You run away. You run away because it creeps you out. We don't like being hunted. We don't like being chased down in that way, okay? Now this is what you communicate when you are desperate to close that sale and get that client, okay? Comes across. You may think that you have a handle on it, but it comes across, okay? We don't want to be that person. We don't want to be gross and slimy and needy, okay? We want to be the cool, calm and collected person who is okay with yes or no, who is unshakable whether or not they hear yes or no, okay? When you care too much, you cannot be that cool, calm, collected, unshakable, yes or nos. Fine by me. Person, okay? So we have to not care so much. Okay? Remember I said this before, I'm gonna say it again. The universe does not give a flying fuck what your timeline is for the success of this business. You may need it to be up to six figures in the first year. Cool. Great. You know, I, I genuinely hope the universe has similar timeline in mind for you. More often than not. It doesn't. Okay, so we can't care that much. Now the third thing that happens in a sales call specifically is we care so much that we get into this mode rather than listening, rather than having a consultation to make sure this is the best thing thing, the best service, the best product that this person could possibly have, it'll solve their problems. We get into trying to push it and convince them that this is the right thing. And anytime you're trying to convince anyone of anything, you're already losing. You're already losing. Who has ever. And if you're in the comments, I'd love to hear from you. Who has ever had like a three year old that they were watching? It could be your child or someone else's. And who did not want to eat their vegetables. And then like all the arguments you make to try to convince them that vegetables are good for them, that they're not disgusting. And you know, maybe you tell them that broccoli was like their miniature trees and dinosaurs used to eat trees. I don't know. That's what my best friend's mom used to teach her when she was a kid. Anyway, no child is ever going to eat their vegetables after you've tried to convince them. I'm sorry, it's just not going to happen. The same with your clients, okay? If you're trying to convince them that this is the right thing for them, it's not going to land. And you're going to come across as manipulative and pushy in the meantime. And they're also not going to feel connected to you. And if you're someone who's watching my show, I attract a lot of people who really connection is a prime value for them. Feeling connected to the people, people around them is so critically important to their life. So you don't want that you absolutely don't want that. What we do want is we want to foster that connection with this person and have them explain all the reasons in which they need your service or your product. Okay, you can't do that. You can't. You can't sit there and listen deeply to them to hear what those things are. And if you want it too much, if you care too much, okay, if you need the money in your in their pocket, it's not happening. Okay? So these are the things that happen in the sales call. They're gross, they're crunchy. We don't want to do that. Okay, so we're not caring so much on the sales call. Now some things happen in marketing too that I want to touch on. Okay, I cannot see one more desperation post for clients and hi everyone. Hi Jess. Hi Ben. Just gonna hit the wave. So I cannot see one more desperation call for clients and, and let me explain what I mean. Occasionally on social media I'll see a solopreneur who is really, really talented at what they do and maybe they have fallen on hard times and they post what I kindly and lovingly call the pity post. And it is woe is me. Things aren't going great. My business is, is flunking and I'm desperate for clients who can be my client. Desperate, just desperate for client who can. Who can be my client. Okay, the comments in these are always super cringe because you have people who generally are genuinely want to support and help this person and yet you've just communicated to the whole world that your business isn't going well. So that brings to question, are you actually good at what you do? Also, if you don't have a lot of clients, is it that you're bad at dealing with clients? Like, it just brings up so many questions of like why is business going bad? And all things that you do not want to have be associated with with your business. Okay? So if you have ever posted one of these, I want you to give yourself a big like self hug right now and so much compassion and forgiveness. And then I want you to go into the social media that you posted it to and I want you to delete it from your feed. You're allowed to. We own our feeds. You don't have to keep it up up there forever in perpetuity or whatever. But we're not doing that anymore. Okay? What we are doing is we are doing our research, we are looking into who our ideal client is and we are figuring out what their pain points are. We are looking into what are the things they would kill to have in their life. And we are writing things about that, okay? We are writing about everything that's going on. We don't have to prove that we are the end all, be all, Smartest person in the world and expert at the thing. No one's better. That's not what we have to do. All we have to do is say, hey, you. I see you and I know things are really hard right now. And I know you're struggling with this and you're struggling with this other thing, and this other thing is pissing you off beyond all measure. And I know what you really want, and what you really want is this. And you want to do it without this other thing happening. That has happened so many times before. And if you're curious about that, book a call with me and then you see the point where, you see where I'm going with this. It's much more about our ideal clients, not about us. Okay? Now this is one side of the coin when it comes to marketing and David Wilson, welcome. Thank you. Ah, thanks. I love it when people call this a show. It makes me feel way more established than I am. And also, thank you for telling me I'm right. I love being right. Anyway, the other element of this in the marketing department is the giveaway. The giveaway. And I get it. I get it. A lot of training programs, just to be clear, I talk to a lot of coaches. I have. I have a fair amount of coaches who are clients. And it's very common for coach training schools to advise their students to go out and just coach everyone. Just give away coaching. If you're in the Starbucks line and someone's talking about, like, you know, how annoyed they are with their husband, offer them a free coaching call. Whatever. Everyone gets coaching. And this is great for their purposes. And. Hi, Tammy, welcome. Welcome to the, to the show. This is great for their purposes. Now, their purpose is to. To produce good quality coaches. Right. You know, I bet this goes the same for lawyers. Like, they just want you to be involved in as many cases as possible so you can get better at it, at whatever you know, it is that you're becoming an expert in, in the field of law. I know it's very large. Getting on tangent. Anyway, it's not business advice, however, okay. Many coaches take it and they're like, this is business advice. I'm just going to go and coach everyone and then people are going to tell me they want to be my clients. First and foremost. If you're offering Like, I've seen some posts that are like, I'm offering 100 sessions over the next month. You have to book them right now. And a. What have you just told everyone? You've told everyone that you have a hundred hours free in the next month. And if you have that much free time, okay, what are you doing? Is this a hobby for you? Is this a serious business? Doesn't sound like a serious business because it sounds like you have a lot of free time. The other element of this is people know that when they're getting on a free call, on a free coaching call, that it is probably going to end up in a sales conversation. Okay? And let's just be clean about it. If you want to invite people to a sales conversation, invite them to a sales conversation, okay? Tell them, hey, listen, I have, like, for instance, my sales call. I'll be very upfront about this. My sales call is called a generate income strategy call, because the people that I talk to on the phone, we figure out ways for them to generate income in that call. Now, at the end, if it seems like a fit, then we're also talking about what it would look like to work together so that we can enact everything that strategy that we just talked about and make it real over the next year. Okay? But it's still a valuable call. But you want to be upfront about it. You don't want to be sneaky about it. And the thing about trying to be sneaky about it is that it's not so much that they're gonna, like, be all squeamish about getting on the call. It's that you're gonna get on call with them and you're gonna feel squeamish about it. You're gonna be like, oh, that's right. I was supposed to ask them for money at the end. And I completely forgot. And just know that that's normal. It happens to the best of us. I know I. I chickened out a couple times in the beginning of my work, but having come from a background in sales, I got clean with myself real, real fast. Because when we boil it down, when you care so much, it's because you're afraid of the rejection. It's. It's. Yes, it's about the money. Yes, it's about wanting clients. It's about wanting real business. But what it actually means is that you are taking any. No, that you get as a personal rejection of you. And first and foremost, I hope you're not, like, inviting these people to go on a date with you. As. As you're. As you're, you know, asking to sell them something because then, yes, it is a rejection of you. They are rejecting you for the date. But if you're not asking them on a date, on the sales call, if you're not inviting them to dinner, if you're not saying, hey, listen, I want to be your boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, they're not actually rejecting you. You actually have very little to do with what they're rejecting. Okay. What they're rejecting is the idea of themselves after having gone through your service or having bought your program or your. Or your product. That is what they're rejecting. And. Hi, Christina. Hello. Hello, Lauren. Girls with gains. Girls with gains. I'm forgetting your name, but I know. Girls with gains, you're an amazing program. Please put your name in the chat because it's going to drive me crazy. But you're not being rejected. No one is getting on the phone saying, you smell. First of all, they're on the phone with you, so they can't smell you. You smell. You're awful. All this stuff. What they're saying is, oh, wow, you've painted this picture, or we've painted this picture on the sales call of what my life could be like if I decided to make this choice right now. Okay, cool. Great. To have that option. I don't really want that option. That option isn't me. I'm rejecting that. When. When we care so much about the. Yes. We make it about us. And it's never about us. It is about the thing that it's. It's always about who they envision themselves being if they were to choose to buy this thing right now. Okay. They're saying no to themselves. They're not saying no to you. Anyway, couple things that help, okay? A couple things that help is you need to niche down, and you need to niche down further than you think. And you need to niche down in a way like I've heard some people try to niche down in a way that they're like, well, I think these types of people have money, so I'm just going to niche down there. No, no, no, no. You need to niche down in a way that makes sense. Okay? Literally, if you're. If you're a woman who's had babies and you're now a fitness coach and you're going out and you're trying to coach, like, premier athletes and you've never been an athlete in your life, like, that doesn't resonate. But go and coach other moms. Who are you Know, recovering from giving birth, or maybe you had a cesarean, and there are specific things that you had to do to repair your body afterwards. And so you can actually go and niche down. As far as I work with moms, new moms who are recovering from their cesarean section, and we do workouts with the babies in the park, and you can have that be your niche, and that is perfect, okay? It is not too niche down. The other thing is you need to learn how to run a goddamn sales call, okay? Do it. Stop being creeped out by it. Okay? Yes, there are creepy ways to run a sales call, but you can learn a good way to run a sales call. One of the versions that I teach in my program is holistic selling. Holistic selling about the whole person, okay? And about making this work for them if it's the right fit, okay? Learn a good way to sell that doesn't skeeve you out, okay? Because if you're not selling your program, no one else will. And remember that this isn't about you, okay? This is not about you. This is about the person they are imagining themselves to be if they were to go down this road and finally own your worth, babe. Own your worth, okay? You have gotten this far in life. You've experienced some incredible things. You offer a service that they would not be able to do on their own, okay? Own your worth. The worth is actually not about you. It's about the transformation that they offer. If you want more information on that, then I would love for you to DM me and we can hop on a call together and we can talk about what the worth of your transformation is, okay? Figuring out pricing is one of the biggest hurdles many new business owners have. And if you're in that bucket, don't feel any shame about it. It's normal. But let's figure it out together, okay? So you have ways to. You're watching me on all my accounts, so you know how to get in touch. So you're going to send me a direct message and. Hi, Lauren. You're going to send me a direct message and just tell me that you want to figure out what you should be charging or how to niche down or how to sell whatever it is that you're really struggling with. And we are going to. And, hi, Nate. Nice to see you. And we are going to create a plan to help you figure it out, okay? Anyway, thank you, everyone who's tuned in. It's been so amazing to have you. I hope it hasn't been distracting. I've had Literally. I have my phone balanced up against the back of my. My laptop because I am a big believer in in hitting as many places as once. And for some reason, Streamyard doesn't also go to Instagram. So I have my phone doing Instagram right here and my. My laptop here. And the cameras are about this far apartment, so hopefully it wasn't too distracting. And if you have any questions on anything that I've talked about this evening, then please feel free to blow up my DMs. I'm always available there and I hope you all have an amazing evening. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Luna has left me at this point. She is over on the floor passed out, and I'm about to go have a glass of wine, and I hope you will, too, unless you don't drink. Anyway, have a great night, everyone, and I will talk to you all soon. And now I have to do the awkward ending, where I'm ending in multiple places. How do I. Oh, wait, my phone's a touchscreen. My. My.