What to do when it's not working

Sam. Hello and good afternoon. Or good morning. We're not at afternoon yet today just feels like it's very, very long. Anyway. Good morning, everyone. I'm Katie McManus, your practical business strategist and money mindset coach. Coming to you live multiple different places where we are on the Facebooks, on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and over here on my phone on TikTok. Hello and good morning, everyone. Today I wanted to talk about something that everyone bumps up against. And honestly, if you do not know how to deal with this one thing, you're never going to make it. You're never going to make it in being a business owner, you're never going to make it in a job, you're never going to make it in relationships. Hell, you're never going to make it in your hobbies. Okay? Like, there is no way to bypass this in your business and to bypass this in life, because things don't always work out, okay? Doesn't matter what, what you're doing. Sometimes things just don't work out. Not just sometimes. Guaranteed there are going to be things that do not work out. And one of the things that I see so often with new business owners is they hold themselves to the standard that everything that they need that they do has to work out. And let me tell you, that is a great way to fuck yourself up, because more often than not, things are not going to work out, okay? You're going to post something on social media and no one's going to like it. You're going to launch a group program, and I'd say about 50% of the time it's not going to work out if you have the right program and you're pricing things correctly, like, 50 to 75% of the people that you talk to should say no to working with you. And hi, Jess. Hi, him. Hi, Manny. And hi, Jalas. Welcome. So things will not work out, and it's guaranteed. And what happens often for new business owners, especially if you haven't built this resilience to things not working out yet, is when things don't work out, you can start attaching that not working outness as failure, as your own failure and as your identity. Like, people who bump up against, oh, this one thing didn't work out, then this next thing didn't work out, and then this other thing didn't work out. When they bump up against that and they're not prepared for things not working out, they start just saying, oh, my God, well, I'm failing. I'm a failure. This is like Failure is me. Hi, Lex. Welcome. And let me tell you, that is so far from the truth. We have a delivery person dropping something off, and the dogs are going a little nuts. Hi, Malt sticks, welcome. Hi, Brianna. Welcome. Things don't always work out in your business and in your life. I know. One of my hobbies is baking. Okay. I love baking. I think it is so soothing and calming, and it makes me feel like I'm being productive. It's also very, very, like, gratifying at the end when you have a tasty treat. But, you know, sometimes in baking, things don't work out. Sometimes, like, you forgot an ingredient or you combine things in the wrong order, or, like, maybe you didn't let the butter soften, you melted it and that didn't give you the right result. Like, there are so many ways in which things don't work out. I'm also a knitter, right? I can't tell you how many times I have screwed up a knitting project, right? And of course, because it's my hobby, because it's just something that I'm doing for fun, I don't attach that failure to me being a failure. And yet when we're starting a business, it's so easy to, like, launch a program or launch a service and have no one sign up for it and be like, oh, my God, I have failed. This is me. This means something deep about me. No, babes, it does not. You are fine. Actually, you are better than fine. You. Because here's the thing. You actually did succeed. You figured out a way to not launch, right? I had. I had a mentor a long, long time ago when I was first starting, who told me something that I will never forget, and it's this, that marketing always works. Especially when you're a business owner, right? Like, when you're a business owner, owner, marketing always works. Cause it either gets you clients and it's worked or it shows you what doesn't work to get clients, okay? Your marketing always works. And what we do is we take this data that, like, this worked or it didn't work, and either way, we attach it to ourselves, right? So if it works, we're like, oh, my God, I'm a success. I'm great, right? And if it doesn't work, it's like, oh, my God, I failed. I'm the worst. I suck. I have to, like, hide because no one can figure out or find out that I am this massive failure. Neither is true. I'm sorry. I know. I know. If you've been, like, killing it and getting clients and you feel like you're this major success. Like, you know what? Let's not attach your business identity to your identity. Let's not attach the numbers of your business to your identity. Hi, Amber. Hi, Emily. Welcome. Because you know what? It is massively unhealthy, right? And it may feel good, especially when things are going great in your business, to be like, to be all pumped up and be like, I'm a success. But let me tell you, that is a slippery slope because every season comes to an end, right, you're going to have an amazing season where you're getting tons of clients and making a lot of money. That is going to come to an end. You're going to go then go through a rough patch. And if you have tied your identity up in the success or failure of your business, that's going to be a massive, massive, like, foundationally damaging hit to your ego and self confidence, okay? We don't need that. We absolutely do not need that in your life. Okay? So before we get into, like, what do you do when things are not working out? I'm going to be talking through the options you have. We have to acknowledge the elephant in the room that any failure you experience in your business. Hello, Jamie and. Hello, Daddy. Pinhead and H.G. welcome. And Janessa. Hello. Any success or failure that you experience in your business has nothing to do with your identity, has nothing to do with your success or failure as a human being. Okay? You are, you are irreplaceable. The things that you can do, no one else can do with your pizzazz and your chemistry, right? Your business is a project. It is separate from yourself. And again, if you take on all the successes and failures of your business into your identity, you are setting yourself up for a lot of pain. And I don't want that for you. Okay? So whenever we have a failure, we have something that's not working out in our business. It's important to give yourself that distance, right? Because it's not you, it is something that you are doing. It's something that you're putting out in the world. And there are a lot of things that go into it. Okay? So for instance, I will share just an example from my own business. All right? So I, when I, when, when I started doing business strategy, I found that I was getting all these clients that have adhd, like, clients that have ADHD that either knew about it and were late diagnosed or just resonated with what I had to say because they were undiagnosed adhd and Once they started working with me, they went and got diagnosed, right? And so I, I figured, okay, well, the world is telling me that I work with ADHD people because it's all, all the, all that I'm working with. I think I had like two neurotypicals within two years. And I was like, okay, well, if they're the weirdos, no offense, guys, then, you know, I should probably niche down further. And actually, and I did that for about two years, I really niched down into being an ADHD business strategist. And you know what? Like, I loved it and it was great. And also I started attracting a lot of folks who had ADHD to a degree that I was not able to help them. Right? I started attracting people who were really struggling on a human level to even function in their day to day lives. And me, like, declaring that I was the ADHD business strategist, I was attracting people who, like, genuinely needed more like occupational therapy for their ADHD and not to start a business, right. Even though it sounded like a great idea to start a business. Right? Because we all have ADHD and they're like, you know, get shiny object syndrome. We think this will be great and that'll be great. Hi, Christopher, welcome. Hi, Chris. And hi, Jamie. Right. And honestly, like, it took me a while of, like, really committing to this and changing over my marketing and my messaging and giving it two solid years to discover that this actually wasn't good for me and it wasn't good for my audience, right? Because it wasn't good for me that I was getting on these conversations with people that I genuinely could not help. Like, they needed to go and invest time in an actual ADHD therapist before and learn how to, like, do life again before they could even consider tackling something as big as starting a business. All right? And let me tell you, as a helper, as someone who genuinely wants to help people, it was devastating. It was devastating getting on the phone with someone who was genuinely brilliant and also just had so many much trauma that they'd experienced from life that they could not get out of their own way and I could not help them. Okay? It was really frustrating for me as a coach to talk to someone who I saw so much potential in and I could not help. Right? And then, of course, my clients, you know, it, you know, when you, when you think that starting something new is going to be the solution and then it just creates more problems, like, that's not helpful to anyone. Um, so really, after two years of being an ADHD business strategist, and declaring that I actually backed out of it, right? I had to look at the business model. I had to look at, like, the people that I was attracting. I had to look at my marketing. I had to look at, you know, the efficacy of my programs because something just wasn't working, right. My enrollment rate was down. You know, honestly, like, my success rate for my clients because I was getting some people signing up who weren't prepared to commit to the work, right? And it was just like they had other stuff that they had to do a deep dive on right now. I absolutely could have made this about me. I could have been like, oh, my God, I failed. This is like, I'm the worst. This sucks. When in actuality, like, I did exactly what all my clients do, right? I did exactly what any business owner does. You kind of follow the yellow brick road until you get to a point where you've gone too far, all right? And then you have to back out, all right? And of course, like, all signs pointed to you're attracting ADHD people anyway, so you might as well niche down into that because there's not a whole lot of business strategists that speak to that specifically. Well, guess what? Like, I still attract ADHD clients, right? But I no longer name it. And I already attracted ADHD clients before I named it. And the clients that I attracted before and now have adhd, but they're either not aware of it because they've been able to kind of, you know, hack their life and figure out ways to. To compensate, or it's not as much of a problem that it limits them in how they can live their day to day life, right? It's not a leading point of their personality, right? But of course, like, it feels bad when you have to change your mind when something doesn't work out. It's natural to assign that failure to you. Okay? So it was hard. It was. Honestly, I teach this shit. And I. I felt an ego hit and I. Banksy, welcome. I held. I felt an ego hit when this happened to me. And I had to change my mind and I had to, like, back out of that niche, all right? And so, like, if you're in your business and if you're starting something or in the middle of a launch or, you know, something's just not going the way you want to want it to go, I want you to take a step back and I want you to take a deep breath and I want you to identify that this thing is separate from you, okay? This is not your identity, all right? So your business has multiple things going on, and we have to identify the different things that could be going wrong to make this thing not work out so much. Like, I had to kind of back out of that, that deeper niche that I went into. You may have to change things, right? And really you have three options. Whenever you realize that something is not working and I, you know, have opinions around, like, which ones are better. But it really depends on the situation, on who you are, how long you've been at it. But the three options are really, you can double down and work harder and push through. The second option is you can dig into the data and see what's not working and change it. You can also change directions altogether, right? If you have ADHD like I do. Hi, carob girl. Welcome. If you have ADHD like I do, then chances are you're really tempted to, like, throw the baby out with the bath water and just start over and start a new thing and then start a new thing and start a new thing. Not always the best course of action, although we're very, very good at abandoning ship and then starting something new. But it really does depend on a lot of factors. I mean, especially when you're first starting a business, you know, you really do have to give it longer than you think is natural, right? If you're trying to build a following on LinkedIn, for example, and you're trying to get clients there, it can take anywhere from like, three to six months to start to get clients on LinkedIn, right? So if you do it for a month and you're like, well, this isn't working. I'm not getting any clients yet. Ah, babes, you have not tried long enough. You have to double down. You have to continue going. You have to push through, right? That is the time when you have to commit to doing more work and doing it on faith that it will work out all right. By the way, showing up always works. Showing up and putting yourself out there and telling people how you're useful to them always works. All right? So that's not something you ever want to give up on. But let's say you've been doing that for a year and you've barely gotten any clients, and the people that you've gotten on sales calls with, like, they aren't your ideal client, then absolutely something needs to change. It might be your niche, it might be how you're marketing your stuff. It could be your program, it could be your pricing, right? But you have to dig into the data. You have to dig into what's the feedback you've been getting from people. Hi, Chastity. Welcome. Because you're not going to know what to change if you don't dig into the data. You know, and another thing that a lot of people. Hi. A lot of people, you know, get sucked into is like, oh, well, this isn't working. I'm going to change absolutely everything. No, no, no, no, no, no. Don't change everything. Because here's the thing, it might not be everything that needs changing. What we want to do when something's not working is we want to change one small thing at a time. Because it might be that one small thing that makes a world of difference, right? So like for instance, if you're an executive coach and you're trying to get clients who are director level at different companies and you're just not having an easy time, you know, it could be your marketing, it could be your sales process, it can also be your pricing. I've had multiple clients who, when they started working with me, they were having a really hard time getting clients at the level that they wanted, right? So they're executive coaches and, you know, they want to work with clients who, you know, are director, vp, you know, maybe even the C suite. But the problem was that they weren't charging enough. So they were getting on sales calls with these potential clients and they were talking through all the problems and all the challenges and all the things that they wanted to get better at. And at the end they're saying, cool, I charge $200 an hour. And the person that they were on the phone with was like, huh, okay. Because in their mind they're thinking, well, every other coach that works with people like me charges $30,000 for six months. So if you're only charging $200 an hour and I'm speaking to you two times a month, that's $400 a month times six. I, you know, they start thinking, well, you must not be that good. You're charging a fraction of what the other coaches would be charging me, right? And it actually does hurt your credibility because you know what, here's, here's a weird truth. As humans, we associate price with quality, right? And so it sounds completely ass backwards, but once we, once we raise the rates to something that was a little more competitive for their space, they started getting clients, right? Now imagine, imagine if on top of changing their rates, they also change everything about their marketing. They also change their program. They also change this. Like, ah, there's too many factors to change to see what worked. Now if we had Changed their rates, and they still weren't getting any clients. Then, you know, that's great data, and we, we need to augment it from there. But really, like, if you get to the point in your business where you're. You've been doing things for a very long time and it's still not working, there's something about it that's not getting you the results that you want. We need to look at the data. We need to see what exactly isn't working, where are people getting to and then dropping off, and we need to start changing from there. We need to start making small, little iterations to your program and to your business. All right, now, now, when do you give up? When do you say this is not working? None about, nothing about this is working. It's never going to work. I need to quit and go and try something else. Now. I. I have a much more aggressive stance on this than many business coaches and business strategists. I think if you're thinking about quitting, you've already quit. If you're thinking, this isn't working and I need to try something else, then you have already made the decision that this isn't going to work. Right? And there's nothing about it that's going to change your mind. And if nothing's going to change your mind, then you're not going to believe in it enough to actually buckle down and do the work and see it to success. All right. I'm a big fan of quitting. I think quitting is one of the most powerful things that we can do in our lives, Right? Because every single thing that we say yes to is a no to something else. Right? And oftentimes, especially for the people that I tend to work with, tend to be people pleasers who want to make everyone else happy, have a little codependence going on. I'm one of you. I get it. It's really tempting to want to just say yes to everything that people ask of you. But what ends up happening is you end up having to say no to the things that you don't even realize matter more to you. Right? But when you start realizing this isn't working, I don't want this. This is something that I want to walk away from. And you quit and you say, you give it the big Q. No, I quit. No, no, no. Piss off. And you move on to something better. So something that is a better fit for you, that lights you up when you do it, that you have a better market for, you're gonna have so Much more energy to actually do the work and get results for it. So if you're thinking about quitting, congratulations, you've already quit. You need to move on. You need to move on. You need to find a new thing, okay? And that's not bad. Quitting is not bad. Quitting means you tried an experiment and. And you didn't get the results that you thought you might, so you go and try another experiment, right? And we need to think about it this way. So if you were doing just a random experiment, you're, like, playing with chemicals and you had, like, test tubes and shit. I obviously did not do well in chemistry, so don't judge me. And you're doing all this stuff and it doesn't work for whatever, you know, result you were trying to get. Who's going to be more successful in their chemistry project. The person who just sits there is like, this didn't work and I'm sad and, oh, mama, and I'm never gonna make it work, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But let me just sit here and try to make this thing work even though it's already a mess and blah, blah, blah. Or the person who's like, cool, that didn't work, like, clean it up, get it out, start over. Do another thing that doesn't work. Clean it up, get it out, start over, right? Who's going to experience success first? The. Not the person who gets so wrapped up in the experiment failing, but the person who just moves on to the next thing and just moves on to the next thing and just moves on to the next thing. There's that whole thought, thought leadership, thought process around, like, fail fast, right? Fail forward. As a business owner, your success does not lie in avoiding failure completely, because that's impossible, okay? It's impossible in any area of life. Even in relationships, you cannot not fail, okay? You're going to fail. It is the only guarantee in life on top of death, right? You're going to fail. But if you want to be a successful business owner, it's not in avoiding the failure that you're going to find success. It is in how quickly you recover from that failure, okay? It is in the speed of which you fall down, you get back up, you dust off your knees, and you go again, all right? If you can fail fast and start over and start over and start over and get back out there, it's going to be far more powerful for you at the end of the day, and you are far more likely to have success. Hello, Pamela. Welcome. Hi. The Frenzy app. Welcome so. So as you're thinking about your business or business ideas and as you're kind of plotting out how this is going to go and you're setting your goals and you're starting to manifest and you start taking action, I want you to remember that this is an experiment. A lot of what you're going to try is not going to work out. A lot of what you put out there is not going to get you the results that you want. Right? None of that determines your worth as a human being or determines your success and value as a human being. What it does tell you is what works and what doesn't work. Hi, the Gazelle. Welcome. And the thing that is going to make you more likely to succeed is when you do fail, you get up and you try again and you make small changes and you get up and you. And you try again, you make small changes. And when you get to the point where you realize no matter how many small changes you're making, it's still not working, you have the courage to quit. You have the courage to say, you know what? Nothing about this is working. I've lost my juice around this. I've already mentally quit. I'm going to move on to something else, and I'm going to try that. All right? That is the only way you are going to be successful as a business person. Okay? It's painful. It's not a walk in the park. It is a hit to the ego. Anytime something, something doesn't go well, but it gets easier over time, okay? It gets way easier to manage and it gets way easier to recover from. All right? So go out there and fail. Go out there and have things not work out. All right? I cannot wait to hear about it. I want to thank Chastity and let's see, who else. Oh, my God. And, hey, it's Gina and Beatriz and Carib Girl and Banksy and Hats and Levy and Christopher and Jamie and Daddy Pinhead and Janessa and everyone over on TikTok for joining me today. And then over. I can't see. I wish I could see who was watching on the other platforms, but it just doesn't show me the Gazelle. Hi, Katie. People pleaser here. Yeah, I figured we're amongst good company, at least. Us people pleasers, we tend to run together in a pack and attract each other to each other. Anyway, I hope this is useful. I hope this inspires you to not get in your head when things don't work out and to just keep going. Because, I mean, here's the thing. You have dreams for a reason. I am a firm believer that if it is something that you deeply want, it is because it is deeply possible for you. If you have a dream of having a certain amount of money, of having a certain lifestyle, of having a certain impact on the world, you're having that dream because it is available to you. Okay. You don't see a whole lot of people who are 5:1 who have a dream of becoming a pro basketball player. Right. You know, they might be involved in basketball, sure. They might, you know, be in the business of basketball, but they're not going to be training their whole life to become a basketball player because they, like, you know, there's a height requirement there. Right. The fact that you have a dream for something means that it is uniquely possible for you even if you can't see the path forward right now. Right. But the only way forward, especially if you don't see. See a clear path there, is to start working towards it, is just start trying and putting yourself out there. Because generally, the universe rewards the brave. The universe loves seeing you just putting yourself out there and trying something and doing it again and failing and trying again. And for those people who do that, they're the ones where the path finds you. They're the ones who have opportunities just kind of arrive on their doorstep. Right. But what it takes is it takes you showing up and being brave, trying stuff, being willing to acknowledge when it's not working and acting accordingly. Anyway, I hope this was useful to you. Hi, Jack. Hi, Chef T.J. i'm going to be going live again tomorrow. If there are any topics that you have a question about when it comes to starting your business, growing your business, you know, growing a pair, and actually doing the thing that you want to do, then DM me. I'd love to hear your questions. So I can base my live on that tomorrow. But Anyway, I'm Katie McManus, your practical business strategist, coming to you live on the Facebooks, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thank you for being here. I hope this is valuable, and I will see you all tomorrow. Okay, bye.