Get Unstuck: How Small Steps Lead to Big Wins

And Level Up Creator School. I am our Director of Operations, and Amanda Northcutt is our CEO. Okay, we're just giving people a chance to jump on. In the chat, you can tell us where you're tuning in from, and also if you have any questions for us, we're happy to pause what we're talking about and answer any questions that you have. Okay, today we're going to be talking about getting unstuck. And we're so glad to spend a few minutes of our day with you. Again, if you have any questions, feel free to drop them at any time. If you haven't met us, there are 2 ways that we help thought leaders build rock-solid recurring revenue businesses. First, we have Level Up Creators. That is our done-for-you white glove consulting firm. And then second, we have Level Up Creator Academy. Creator School. This is where we help a global group of thought leaders build businesses through a done-with-you model. Creator School includes access to our consulting team and our methodology in a way that we used to reserve for our consulting clients alone. Okay. We're going to jump right in. First off, Amanda, where do you think creators get stuck trying to make things perfect? And how can they shift to an into-action, just-get-started mindset?

I love that question. And we hear this so often, just, I don't know what to do next. I don't know what to do next. I don't know what to do next. And especially if you are, if you have perfectionist tendencies, or, you know, have seen the thing that you were trying to build toward, you know, someone you're trying to emulate, another business or creator you're trying to emulate, and you just don't have quite what you need to get there. That's a really, really frustrating, icky spot to be in. And so there's, you know, we have like a formula at Level Up Creators for increasing your confidence. And that is to increase your competence and take action every day. And you will naturally become more confident. And you will not only have— it'll be earned confidence, not a false sense of confidence or bravado or, you know, facade or anything like that. It'll actually be real. And so learning about business is really important. Having a basic understanding of how businesses work and what it takes to operate one successfully— super, super important. I mean, we're doing this live on LinkedIn, Twitter, X, whatever, YouTube. People watching this, y'all are subject matter experts, even if you've never been called that before or not. Like, you have taken the time to develop some level of expertise in something, whether it is self-improvement, relationships, marketing, could be sales, it could be networking, anything. You can be an expert in anything. And if you're trying to monetize your knowledge because you've been sharing about your expertise online through, you know, your social media following and hopefully an email newsletter for some time and you're ready to make some money off of it, there's a formula. Uh, and it is battle-tested, tried and true, you know, business fundamentals level of formula to take your knowledge, package it up the right way. And that's not the right answer for everyone too. I want that to be super clear that the right answer is not just, oh, I'll build a course and then I'll make, you know, 6 figures and da da da. Um, that is almost never, ever, ever how it goes. Like 98% of the time it does not go that way. And so How do we package up your knowledge into something resembling a methodology or a program that takes someone from this painful place that they don't want to be at, to this place of clarity, confidence, enlightenment, self-actualization, whatever the case may be? And then we're kind of like reverse engineering what needs to happen in the middle to bridge the gap to get your customers from here to there. So that's kind of, that is the answer. And that is at like a 50,000-foot level of kind of what you need to do to get unstuck. But it is having a growth mindset and learning, and then having mental models so that you can make, you can level up your decision-making at every opportunity, every time you need to make a decision.

Yeah. If somebody is new to working working in smaller steps, or maybe breaking down a larger goal into smaller bite-sized goals. What is one mental model or thought process that you use in those, or you would, you would recommend to somebody?

Yeah, so, um, the one we talked about in our newsletter this week is perfect, and it's really, really, really simple. It is the one-way door versus two-way door framework. And so, you know, as a business owner, creator, if you're a creator who's trying to monetize, like, you are a CEO, you are a business owner. And you got to be able to think like a CEO, think and act like a top CEO. And so CEOs use these things, mental models. We talked about this last week. It's sort of just like a lens through which you can view a situation, and you can change out the lens and look through a different mental model. But one-way door versus two-way door is It helps you sort of delineate between decisions that are big, permanent or semi-permanent, very hard to walk back, right? That's a one-way door decision. You only want to walk through it once. You really don't want to have to walk back through it, because that would be a painful, probably very expensive process to undo. And so a two-way door decision would be one that requires less scrutiny and thought and oversight because you can walk back through the door. You can walk the decision back if you need to. And so the image we are— the examples that we use in our newsletter this week, 2 decisions like real life, actual decisions we made in our business this year. And one was the decision to move Level Up Creator School from the platform that we launched on to to Mighty Networks. And y'all, that is an undertaking. The Mighty Networks team was great and very helpful, but it's a huge commitment. It is a different way of doing business than what we were doing and what we have been used to doing. And you're involving your customers, right? We've got a bunch of members in Level Up Creator School. And so this isn't a decision that we could just make that only affected our team. There was like significant churn risk when you do a migration like this. And so it's something you have to handle with kid gloves and be like, really freaking intentional about it. This is, this is the biggest decision that we made this year, at least from a technical standpoint and product standpoint. So we have no desire to walk back through that door. I'm very happy with the decision that we made. And I am so pleased with the level of scrutiny that we put on that decision. I mean, we looked at it from every different angle. We tried to think about every possibility, you know, if this, then this, that's 2nd, 3rd, 4th order thinking. That's another mental model. So that was our one-way door decision. And our two-way door decision is we're going to go, we're preparing to go through a very significant brand refresh. We're not changing our name, but we're updating color, logos, imagery, iconography, all sorts of like visuals, you know, that represent our brand and our methodology. And that is a two-way door decision. It's a big decision because like, it costs a lot of money to go through a rebrand. And it costs a lot of— Time. time. And there's an opportunity cost to everything you do decide to do in your business. Because if you do this thing, you don't have time or the budget to do another thing. And so this was an important decision that we did give an appropriate level of scrutiny. But at the end of the day, if we're not happy with what turns up in this brand refresh, although I'm very confident that we're, it's gonna be like awesome, because we're working with an amazing partner. But— We can walk back in a couple years and say, OK, we're ready for the next refresh, you know, whereas I don't want to change membership platforms ever again. So that's a really, really important way to think about decisions, especially if you're stuck and overwhelmed. If you can just think about the right next thing that you can do, and is it a one-way door or is it a two-way door decision? And therefore, what level of scrutiny do you need to Have over that decision.

Yeah. So when you are looking back and making those decisions, you're obviously analyzing data and results. When it comes to that reflecting and tweaking, what are the common pitfalls you see as creators are in that kind of like looking at it, trying to analyze and tweak? And how can you make sure that those reflections actually lead to Actionable progress.

Yeah, I really, really like the saying, you don't learn from experiences; you learn from reflection upon experiences. And this is fresh on our minds because we started our annual planning cycle this morning with our team. And so the first thing we do is a retrospective. What happened this year? What went well? What didn't go well? What did we learn? And what learnings are we going to carry forward? Those are the questions that we all answered this morning on a 90-minute call. And we have laid the foundation, surfaced all of the data. We always have a lot of data at our fingertips, although we did come up with a missing piece of data for us to make the right, like absolute best decision next. And so we came up with a plan to bridge that gap, right? So reflection upon experiences is super, super important. You cannot predict the future. And there are only so many things under your control. And so in business, you are trying to learn from past mistakes— never make the same mistake twice. Right. hopefully. And then we're trying to identify and capitalize on our strengths. How can we take this momentum that we have and parlay it into something much bigger? We call this our exponential lever. Like, what is our exponential lever? And for us right now, our consulting firm is doing great. I mean, the work that we're doing, I am so incredibly proud of it. I'm more proud of it than anything that we've done Well, that I've done in my career, literally. And we're getting real results for our clients that are quantitative and big, and we're changing people's lives. And like, that is everything to us. That is why we're here. And so how do we turn that into an exponential lever, right? And so we're running this— I think I dropped a little bit of information about this— we're running a 7-month MRR Accelerator starting at the end of January of 2025. And we're choosing only 5 creators to go into this. And this is like what Amanda Goetz has gotten and more. It's a group coaching program. It's a mastermind. And you get this ridiculous suite of done-for-you services that we have over the last 18 months of our business's existence realized that like, OK, here's the customer journey that our customers need to go through. And here's what needs to happen in order for them to have predictable, scalable MRR, monthly recurring revenue, in a business that they freakin' love. And it helps fulfill their long-term vision and gives them a great sense of meaning and purpose. And so our decision is to move forward with an MRR accelerator. And it's an iterative test. We're not like, we're doing, we're gonna take 20 people through this program. Like, that would literally sink our organization. So having a dataset— from which you are making decisions, and then working within what's under your control, while being aware of outside factors and how those may influence. And so this morning, we talked about, we talked about writing our annual goals in pencil, and updating those on a quarterly basis. Not to like reduce the target if we're not, you know, oh, well, we're not gonna make our revenue target, so we better reduce that so we feel good about ourselves. No, that's not the vibe at all. But business is a very iterative process. And it's like you're working in a marketing laboratory, basically a marketing and sales laboratory. And it's all about running experiments to the end of optimizing conversions throughout your funnel. So that's kind of like a lot to put together. But if you can just understand how your business works, and we teach this on a bowtie funnel, it is such a simple, simple thing. But when someone lays it out for you in a way that you can understand, it will click, you will increase your competence. And the people who work with us in our consulting firm and in Level Up Creator School get to talk to me, to Erin, to Natalie, to Katie, to Bruno, to Caroline, and get all of the help that they need, exactly when they need it, with the exact problem that they're having. It truly is like one-on-one help in a small group setting. And the results we're seeing are incredible. So we're leveraging all that is going well into this MRR Accelerator at Level Up Creator School. It's continuing to grow and be amazing. But that's how we're making decisions for this year. That's how we're thinking about it. We're putting our decision-making set— we also do a premortem. This is another weird thing. Make your goals, and then like, figure out what can go wrong. Think about all the things that could potentially go wrong, and the likelihood that those things will happen, what level of control you have over those things, and then potentially make adjustments based on that premortem, which is sort of— Morbid. But that's the way that smart businesses work. You're looking ahead, and you're looking behind. You're making the best decision with the information you have at this time. And you're overlaying the correct amount of scrutiny to the decision based on how impactful that decision is— the outcome of that decision is going to be.

Yeah. Yeah, it's been a wild ride of like tweaking and adjustment and refining and Figuring it out, but it's been amazing. So when you are personally building something, how do you balance time to pause and reflect and then times when you realize like, nope, that's just overthinking, go forward? How do you balance that?

Following a process, honestly. In that way, it's a definitive process. And so, okay, did I do that? Yes, I did that. OK, done. And if you're working based on data, experience, intuition, you're kind of like combining all of those things. And you have the competence, right? You have the right information in your brain from which to make the next right decision. And that's all we can ever do is the next right decision based on the information we have now. And when we learn more, we can make a different decision, right? If we learn something different, we can do something different. So I would say, Follow a process, and then decide at some point, you've got to just make a decision and stick with it and move forward. Decisiveness is, it is very important in business. But it's really hard if you don't have business experience. And so that is literally one of the reasons why we're here, to help you make the tough calls. I mean, we are, we are making extremely consequential decisions on a daily basis for our clients. And we take that really, really seriously. And we also have like been there, done that, got the T-shirt. We have seen Every possible business scenario. It has been a few years since I've seen something new, and that is a very helpful experience. So when you combine that experience, intuition, and data about your specific business, magic can happen. Right? Like putting putting our brains together, we are the ultimate shortcut for all of our clients and all of our creator school members, and we are reliable and accountable and trustworthy. So get help. Stop operating on an island. I mean, one of the number one problems that creators talk about is loneliness. Being a solopreneur kind of sucks unless you're just like a total lone wolf. But if you're like the rest of us, then, you know, it's kind of nice to have someone have your back and someone who has a different type of experience that brings something different to the table. So stop trying to do it all by yourself.

Yeah. Which our last question was, what would you say to creators Creator who's nervous about taking that first step. So what I'm guessing that would be along the same lines, but do you have anything else in addition to that?

Find someone like do enough poking around to where you find a community or an advisor or a coach that is going to vibe with you and understand you. So do your due diligence and. Look at their landing pages, schedule calls, and go with your gut. And whoever that person's like, their demonstrable track record of success— what have they actually done? What do their real-life clients saying about them? Can I talk to a real-life client? Is this testimonial real? Like, do a little bit of investigating to make sure that they have what you need and also that you know, like, and trust them. It's very important. for kind of an advisory type relationship like that, that you have affinity for that person.

Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Don't just go with the trendy landing page, but the actual proven result and the people that they're working with are talking and speaking highly of what they're producing too. So thank you guys so much for joining our livestream. Be sure to follow us for more tips and insights on building a successful recurring revenue business. Have a good one.