10 Truth Bombs to Understand about Your Business

Good morning, happy New Year! It's our first Monday Momentum in the brand new year, and today we're talking about 10 truth bombs to understand about your business so that you can thrive in 2023. Y'all have been doing a lot of reflecting, uh, over the last week as we kind of wind down a year and we're starting a new year. It always feels like a fresh start. And so I want you to take this time right now, this week, to just get a fresh start on things. Whatever was weighing us down in 2022, I want us to let that go. We're going to talk through some things today. I definitely think you should have your notebook or a pen or paper or make some notes on your phone, whatever you want to do. I think you need to jot some of these down today as we talk through them. These are things that we're going to talk about today that we're really going to work on inside Launch Your Box and Scale Your Box this year. So these are 10— I call them truth bombs because sometimes they're right in front of our face and they're just going to hit you hard. And just a warning as we get started, I may get my ranty pants on today about some of these items because I need you to hear it. It's like It's like my kids, right? If I can say, say something to them and they just ignore me because I'm just saying it. If I yell at them, I will get their attention. So I want to get your attention today with some of these items, and I want you to feel good about the ones that you understand in your business. And I want you to feel encouraged and inspired about the ones that you need to take into this year. So we're going to jump in. Let me know that you're here. The goal here is to help you get a big picture of your, your business this year. Fresh start, new year, new week, new month. All of it's wrapped into today. And I want you to carry that into what you're going to do for your business this year. All right. Let me come over here and say hi. Good morning. I see Andrea's here. Good morning, Andrea. Thanks for joining me every single Monday. I really appreciate it. And also, I only text the people that are on my Monday list. So if you're watching right now and you're like, I didn't get the text, Sarah, I stopped texting everyone. And so if you want to get the reminders for Monday morning, all you have to do is text the word Monday to my text number right here, and I'll send you the text every Monday morning to remind you that I'm going live and to come join me. Okay, so just get on that, get on that list if you want the reminder. Um, let me come back over here. Good morning, Courtney. Hi, Angel. Good morning, Carrie. Good morning, Amy. I'm excited about 2023 so much. Hi, Siobhan. Hi, Misty. Good morning, everybody. Hi, Rachel. Hi, Heidi. Amy's here. Fresh start. Fresh start. Um, I think it's like in the middle of the night for you. Maybe it's evening for you in Australia. Good morning, Beth. All right, let's get into it. Make sure you've got— you know, I need a big cup of coffee this morning. We got, we got big things to talk about. These are big picture things I want you to talk about. I want you to jot them down and I really want you to think about them. And here's— I want you to put them in a place that you can go back and look at them throughout the year. Okay. So I want you to put them somewhere that you're going to reflect. Maybe they're going to be on a, on different Post-it notes on your computer. Maybe you put them on a list and you post them on your bulletin board by your desk. But I want you to think about these not only today, But I want you to think about— I want you to think about them all year long. We're going to focus what we're training on in Launch Your Box and Scale Your Box this year around these 10 things. Okay. Courtney says, I drove 4 hours yesterday listening to your podcast the entire time. I feel like you should be sick of me right now if you listen to me for 4 hours, Courtney. But I appreciate the love. Okay. Number 1, listen. I want you to listen and maybe close your eyes so that you can truly hear this from me. Okay? 20% of your customer base generates 80% of your revenue. All right? 20% of your customer base generates 80% of your revenue. Stop trying to please everyone. Stop it. It is not serving you. It is making you chaotic and exhausted. 20% of your customer base generates 80% of your revenue. I want you to think about that. I want you to think about how many things that you're doing, that you're doing for a handful of people that are taking a lot of your energy. Okay. I want you to think about, well, I can do this because I can and I'm creative and I can do that. But is it really worth my time? If I just looked at my best 20% of my customers and I did everything that I did in my business this year was for that 20%, how would that make a difference in my business? I want you to think about it. Stop trying to be for everyone. Stop trying to focus on someone that sends you a DM that says, can you make me one in this color? Can you do this for me because I like it this way? Can you? Can you? Can you? No. Yeah, you can. No, we're not going to because we're spinning our wheels for one-off things when we need to think about that top 20% of our customer base. What is driving the top 20% of your sales? Who is the top 20% of your customers? That top 20% of your customer base generates 80% of your revenue. Stop doing all the things for the other percentage of people that aren't your loyal customers, that are not going to repeat buy. It's going to bring back so much sanity. Into your life, we're going to reduce burnout. What we saw in 2022 was business owners feeling the burnout, and it wasn't just burnout from 2022. It was burnout from 2020, 2021, and now we're in 2022 and we're taking all the crap that we've been dealing with for the last 3 years. It's all piled up on us and we are burnt out. We have been dealing with so much stuff over the last 3 years. We don't even realize what we've been through. And people are more burnt out than ever. Business owners are more burnt out than ever because they just keep taking it on and taking it on and taking it on. And no one's saying no. No one's looking at the data to realize what they're spinning their wheels on. We're just taking it in. I'm like, sure I can, yes I can, let me do this, let me do that, let me do that. And it's not serving us, and we're going to burn out faster than ever. We're going to continue to burn out if we keep doing that. We cannot be all things for all people. Focus on your top 20%. Your top 20% of your customer base generates 80% of your revenue. Focus on that, and let's get rid of all the 80% of crap that is no longer serving us. Okay, it goes in with number 2: protect your peace and energy at all costs. Write it down. Protect, protect your peace and energy at all costs. It goes hand in hand with number 1. If it's no longer serving you, let it go. We don't need to do things because we've always done them. We don't. Why are you doing that? When you think about what's taking your time and energy today alone, I want you to think about why you're spending time on that. What is it doing for you and what is it doing for your business? And not only that, let's talk about customers real quick. How many times have we gotten tripped up in our head about a negative review? A cancellation, a shitty comment on our social media. We can quit them just the same way that they can quit us. Never in my life have I had negativity on my social media ever, and I think it's because I have a small audience. But man, I have this one subscriber— let me just talk about it for a minute because it irks me, and this is what I'm trying to prevent for you— that one one person that is never satisfied. You can never please them. They always have something crappy to say. And here's what was happening to me. They were saying it on my, on my posts all the time. And I was like, I'm canceling your subscription. I don't think it benefits you or me for you to be a subscriber. I don't want to waste one more cent of my peace and my energy on this one subscriber that no matter what I put in the box or what I do for her, It's not good enough. She's not only taking my energy, she's taking my customer service energy. She's making negative comments about what we do on social media, yet she won't cancel. She'll in the same sentence tell me how much she loves my subscription. No more. No more. We're going to protect our peace and our energy. At all cost. Her $60 a month is not worth the bullshit that I put up with from her. And I'm sorry if there's kids in the room, put your headphones on because I feel, I'm feeling ranty today. I want you to do the same thing. If something is taking your peace and your energy, I want you to eliminate it. Okay, maybe it's these one-off pieces that you've been doing for customers for years, and you sell one here and there and one here and there, and the time it takes to do that is just sucking all the energy that you could be giving to your top 20% of your customers. Let's let it go. If you're upset every time you have to do this one activity in your business, it's time to let it go and hire someone to do it. Okay, so I want you to think about what is stealing your peace and what is stealing your energy in your business right now, and we're going to let it go this year. We're going to get our peace, we're going to protect our energy. If it's no longer serving you, let it go. Stop trying to do all the things. We don't need to, and we shouldn't, because we're going to be more burned out than ever. All right, okay, sorry, got a little ranty on that one. Number 3: fad marketing strategies are like fad diets. Okay, fad marketing strategies are like fad diets. They won't last. They will not last. Consistency is king, and it will trump any other one-hit wonder strategy that you think will replace it. You might come up with a great new strategy. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it might work one time. Consistency will trump all of the fad marketing strategies that you're going to see out there. You guys probably have your social media feeds covered in I can do this, I can do this, I can do this ads for you, right? One-hit wonders. You're going to spend a lot of money doing a fad marketing strategy when we know, when we know that we just need to be consistent. And here's what I learned about myself in 2022. I want to do things on social media that I enjoy so that I don't hate social media, so I don't feel like begrudged to go do some social media content. And I notice what I like to do and what I don't like to do. What you don't like to do, you need to hire out. What you like to do, you need to lean into and be consistent at it. It did— it served me no good to try to do this, this, and this when I didn't like doing it because I won't be consistent at it. Okay. Consistency trumps everything. Social media needs to be social. I want you to flip your mind frame because so many of you tell me, I hate social media. Man, social media is amazing. They're like, I'm going to— I'm really aging myself, but I'm going to take you back to old school when Sarah used to do commercials and on TV. And like, I'm just going to tell you, when I was in college, marketing was about billboards and newspaper and magazine articles. That's how old I am. Okay. Social media. Is amazing. And I want you, as much as we loathe it sometimes, I want you to remember that there's no better way to get in front of your ideal customer than on social media. So let's find something that we like about it. I love interacting with my customers, my subscribers on social media, and that is the best platform that I can have to do that. So I want to connect there. So I don't look at social media as this tasks that I have to do every day. I look at it as what I get to do, how I get to interact with my customers. And I want you to flip your mind frame about that. Okay. Fad marketing strategies are like fad diets. I want you to be incredibly consistent at a few things this year. You don't have to be— do everything. I want you to get consistent and I want you to enjoy what you're doing. Okay. Okay, that's going to lead into number 4. Companies relying on paid traffic will shift to more organic traffic in 2023. We saw this shift in the third and fourth quarter with this, the industry, um, but you need both. You need organic traffic and you need paid traffic. So many companies relied solely on paid traffic for so many years because it was cheap and it was easy and it worked. And then it didn't. We saw in 2021 the shift of the iOS changes, and it increased our cost, and we weren't having as much visibility with paid traffic, and we're spending more to get less results. And so people that had relied on building their business with paid traffic only saw a huge loss of profits and a decrease in their business. So we've talked about organic traffic so much over the last few years, that's what we're going to continue to talk about. We're going to talk heavily about organic traffic. I'm a firm believer that you need both organic and paid traffic to run a successful business. Okay, but relying on paid traffic only is gone. It is gone. And you will be on a rat race trying to keep up with it if you solely rely on paid traffic going forward. So we need both, and we need to focus on organic traffic. And organic traffic means a lot of connection. It means good content. So we're going to focus on content quite a bit this year. We need compelling content to draw people into our businesses. Okay, we're going to talk about this this year in both Launch Your Box and Scale Your Box, but I want you to really take a hard look at your content. Organic user-generated content is really thriving right now, but we need to have content that's engaging for our customers to get them over to our sites. Okay, and content is going to be more than just product selling. So we really have to figure that out this year if we've relied heavily on paid traffic that sells stuff. Okay, we're going to work on that. Number 5, systems and processes will serve you. We got to get more efficient with our everyday workload so that we can open some white space for us to grow. We need to get systems and processes in place, and I'm not saying automations. Automations are great, but we're after connections, systems, and processes. How do we do things more efficiently? How do we create routines? How do we create systems and processes? Whether I'm the only person in my business or I have one person or I have a team of people, we need some systems and processes in place so that we can be more efficient and create more space for us to think big picture. If we're constantly in the rat race of everyday tasks, we're never going to grow. And that's just being honest. So we have to free up some of that space for us. It could mean hiring, but it also could just mean let's get some systems and processes in place for our businesses. So that what I'm doing that's taking me too long, I can streamline and I can repeat that process and I can get better at it and I can feel better. And then I can create the white space in my business, in my calendar, in my day that I need to work on future things, to work on growing, to work on building and expanding. And I'm not just tasking it out all the time. I'm not just going to work, task, task, task, task, task, go home, cook dinner, and I'm done. And tomorrow I come to work and I task, task, task. No, I need clear white space on my calendar so I can think ahead, so I can plan things, so that I can be more efficient and use my time better. We all have ways that we can do this, including me. All right, so we're going to work on that. Systems and processes will serve you. All right, this next one, number 6. I didn't number these. 1, 2, 3, 4. No, is this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? Number 6. Number 6 is going to be a hard one to hear. It might also be relieving to hear. Number 6: Sales do not mean profit. Period. Sales do not mean profit. Sales are a vanity number. Sure, you can have $1 million in sales this last year. Great. What's your profit? I have met so many people that have millions and millions of dollars worth of sales but have so little profit. I'm just blown away. I'm just— it blows me away. We're going to focus on profit. I want you to have a profit goal this year instead of a sales goal. And that means we have to know our numbers. We have to know what we're working with. We have to know where we're at. We have to know where we're going. We have to know those in number sense. Sales do not equal profits. I could have $2 million worth of sales and be broke. Why? To say I have $2 million in sales? I'd rather have $200,000 in sales and paying my mortgage and my car payment and going on vacation than saying I have $2 million with sales and I got nothing in my bank account, right? Sales are a vanity number. It kills me because bro marketing, you know, they're all about, oh, 10x, 10x, you know. I don't know, it kills me, but it's been so eye-opening to understand people with really big businesses don't have any cash flow in their, in their business. They have no profit. Their profit margins are so thin they have to have tens of thousands of subscribers to make a profit. We're not doing that. We've never done that. You can be profitable with 10 subscribers. You can be profitable with 100 subscribers. You can be profitable with 1,000 subscribers. I want you to focus on profit instead of sales this year. All right, so we got to know our numbers. It's the first thing that we're going to talk about in Scale Your Box, and we're going to really drill down on the numbers that matter. All right. We got to be profitable. Sales are a vanity number. On the same line of sales and profit, number 7, cheap is not creating value. Okay, cheap is not creating value. People will spend money where they see value. Value is connection. Value is loyalty. Value is uniqueness. Value is quality. Cheap isn't loyal. Cheap is not loyal. Cheap is going to bounce from shop to shop to shop to find the cheapest Bargain. Cheap is not loyal. Your subscribers want quality over cheap, and they will pay you more for it. Cheap is not loyal. Why are we going after cheap customers? Cheap is not creating value. The value is in the whole. The value is not necessarily the items. It's not the quantity of items. It's the the quality, it's the experience, it's the connection, it's the packaging, it's the whole shebang. That's what creates value for our subscribers. We can continue to get cheap products, to price things low, to cut our profit margins, and that customer will never be loyal. They'll be looking for the next cheap thing. They'll be looking for the next value that they see in products. We need to find a way to create value through all the other things and really create a unique, unique experience for our subscribers that is loyal. They will stay. Your lifetime value of that subscriber will always be higher than cheap. Cheap's not creating value, so stop it. And it's going to go back to the, the previous one about profit margins. We got to focus on that this year. And speaking of profits, profit margins, number 8, I want you to hear me. I've said this many, many times, but I want you to truly hear me. I want you to write it down. It is more profitable to maintain your subscribers than to acquire new ones constantly. It is more profitable to maintain your subscribers than acquire new ones constantly. We get so focused on acquisition. We get so focused on getting new subscribers, getting new subscribers, getting new subscribers, we forget about the ones we have. I want us to spend time this year really intentional on surprising and delighting our subscribers. I want to get super intentional on making them feel important and that we're just not on to the next, we're not on to getting new customers, that we're really, really making them feel loved and making them feel important and make them feel appreciative that we're appreciative of them. It's more profitable to maintain the subscribers than to keep acquiring new subscribers constantly. I'm not saying that we're not going to keep working on getting new subscribers all year long, because absolutely that's what we do. That's what we're going to do all year long. We want to grow. We have to get new subscribers to grow. But if we're solely focused on getting new subscribers all the time and we've got this leaky bucket and they're just coming out as as fast as we're putting them in. It's not serving us. We're wasting too much energy, which I told you in number 2, we're not going to— we're going to protect our energy. We're not maintaining them. Sales do not equal profits. We're spending more money to acquire a customer than all we had to do is retain them. And that's going to be cheaper because we've acquired them once. All we have to do is keep them now. So that's automatically putting more profits back in your business because you don't have the acquisition cost of going and getting new customers all the time. So it all ties together. All 10 of these tie together. But we're going to focus on that. It's more profitable to maintain your subscribers than to acquire new ones constantly. We're not replacing them. We're growing. And we're keeping. All right, number 9: what gets you started may not get you to scale. What gets you started may not get you to scale. So the things that we do in the beginning to start and launch our business are great, and we want to continue to do those things as long as they work, okay? But at some point, we need to shift what we're doing. We need to go deeper into what we're doing to scale. We need to test and try things, but we also need to maintain that consistency that I was talking about in number 3. We've got to get creative. We've got to change things up. I don't want you to get so creative and change things up that we squirrel into these other directions and we drop the consistency. Okay, but what gets you started may not get you to scale. I saw that firsthand when I hit the plateau of my subscription box business within about 9 months of starting it. I had to change what I was doing. I had to be incredibly consistent with what was working and also test and try some new things. And that's what I want you to do. We've got to try new things. We have to test them, but we have to maintain this consistency. So it's a balance that we have to find. We can't be like, oh, let me try this new cool thing. I want you to do that. But I also don't want you to drop the consistency to go run off and do this one new thing because it's fun and new and interesting and I'm bored with the consistency. Okay. What gets you started may not get you to scale. So I want you to remember that what worked to get us our first 100 subscribers or our first 300 subscribers may not get us to 1,000 subscribers, and that's okay. We're making these milestone marks, but we need to continue to work on more things, going deeper, learning about our business, understanding our numbers, having a multichannel marketing plan, understanding and streamlining our fulfillment and our shipping process, having a customer service concierge to take care of our customers. Like, what you're doing right now is great, but it also may not continue to help you grow. Okay. And then number 10, and I put it at number 10 because I wanted to talk about it last. Um, and I really want you to think about this because we've had a challenging, we've had a challenging few years if you've been in business for longer than this year. This last year. We're already in a new year. If you don't challenge yourself, you won't change yourself. How many of you watching right now are kind of stuck in a rut? You're kind of stuck. Things are okay, you'd like things to be better, you're not sure what to do, but you're kind of stuck in a rut. And we get stuck in a rut in our businesses, we get stuck in a rut in our personal lives, we get stuck in our everyday rut with what we cook for dinner. Like, we get kind of stuck in ruts, right? If you don't challenge yourself, you won't change yourself. Personal growth and business growth go hand in hand. You need both. You need both to grow. If it doesn't scare you, it won't change you. So I wanna— I want you to think about like what's scaring you. Like, I want to do that, but I'm scared. That is what you need to do. I want to do that, but I'm scared. If you just stay in the comfort zone, you're never going to get here. If you live in the comfort zone, it's fine for a while, but if you have your eyes set on this this isn't going to serve you. You have to step out of that comfort zone and you have to challenge yourself. Okay, you have to do something you're scared to do to have personal growth and business growth. Growth. Can't talk today. If it doesn't challenge you, it won't change you. So I need you to push yourself and I'm going to push you this year. I'm going to push you to step past your comfort level. I'm going to push you to step outside of the box. I'm going to push you to grow both in here and in their business, because your business growth, your business growth, it starts here with us. And as your business grows, you're going to have a lot of personal growth. And as you have personal growth, your business is going to grow. You need both of those. To continue to grow. All right, so these are my truth bombs, and we're going to work on them all year long. It's not like, okay, go do your to-do list. That's not what this is. These are things that I want you to understand on a higher level so that we can change and we can grow and we can push past anything that's keeping us stuck right now. And that's my goal for 2023. It's my goal to help you get to where you understand these 10 things and you do what it's necessary to make progress with these 10 things. And it's not going to be like a quick, you know, training that we're going to do all these things and we're gonna be great. We're going to learn and we're going to get better this year. And this is what I'm focusing on all of our training in Launch Your Box this year. I'm focusing on our training for Scale Your Box, and with my mastermind students, we're going to take these things and really dig deep and really think about why we're doing what we do, what we love about it, what we hate about it, and how we're going to change that to be better at the end of 2023 than where we landed at end of 2022. But it starts with really understanding these things, okay? And so I'm just going to encourage you to keep stepping one foot forward in your journey, whether you're just beginning or you're years down the road, okay? It's, it's a journey. The journey doesn't end. We continue to take one step forward, all right? That's what we're going to do this year. We're going to do it together. Because there's an amazing group of people here, and we're going to continue to do that with each other. So thank you for spending your time and your energy, your positive energy, with me today. And we're going to grow this year, and we're going to have the best year yet. I really truly believe that. So let's get going. It's a fresh week, fresh month, fresh year. We got big things to do this year. All right, I'll see you guys soon.