The Lie Social Media Tells You About Business Growth

Good morning, good morning, happy Monday. I am Sarah Williams and I am back for another edition of our Monday Momentum. Monday Momentum was designed as the first thing you do on Monday morning to kind of give you a little pep talk to get you motivated and build some momentum for the week. So if you're joining me, I would love for you to say hi. I want to talk about a a specific topic today. Um, one of those topics that I think we internalize a lot, and I want to verbalize it today because, um, I just— I see it over and over again, and I think it's— sometimes we just need to hear it again, and we need to give ourselves permission. We need to tell ourselves we're not behind because my business hasn't exploded yet. Like, what I want you— what I want to say is that most overnight successes are 3 to 8 years in the making. Okay, so when we're going to take a look at something today, I'm going to tell you why this was a topic on my mind. I'm going to show you this picture. So I was hanging out with my husband last night, and I was working most of the day yesterday, kind of catching up from being gone last week. And, um, and I saw this picture, and I just felt like, man, like He was like, people need to see that, Sarah. And, you know, he's my little pep talker. If you, if you don't know him, he, he keeps me— he's my pep talker. He said, people don't know this, Sarah, and I think you need to tell them again. You need to tell them this, Sarah, because what they see from you now is different than what you used to be. And so I'm going to share that picture with you. I'm going to come over to the chat and say good morning real quick, and then I'm going to share that picture with you. And then I want to talk about it, and I really want your participation this morning. I want you to just talk about it with me as we have this conversation. Good morning, Lexi. Good to see you. The team is here in the chat. They're both on Facebook and YouTube. Good morning, Rebecca. Good to see you. Good morning. Hey, everybody. Hey, Myra. Hey, Mandy Lee. He is so good. He knows what I need when I need it, and he makes me think about things. And so let me share this picture with you this morning. So I was, I was working on a new ad set for Launch Your Box. We have a special promotion this month and I was setting up all my ads for it and I was just looking for some pictures. And this one we haven't used for Launch Your Box, but we've used it for my Monogram Box. And it just says how we started, how it's going. And I think that a lot of people just see me and they just see the how it's going and they don't know the brown box, Sarah. They don't know the beginning of my subscription box. They don't know how things started. And I I wanna recognize that today. I wanna talk about it for a minute because how things started is a lot of your journeys, is a lot where you're at right now. I didn't just wake up one day and have a 7-figure subscription box business. I didn't wake up one day and have thousands of students that I was coaching too, okay? My journey, like nothing about my journey started off with this big bang, right? Like nothing was like huge explosion. I'm on top of the world. Everything I touch turns to gold. Nothing about my story started that way. And I need you to understand that because if you're in a season where it feels slow, if it feels quiet, if it feels less than glamorous, then this message is for you. Because I was also in that season. When you sell those brown boxes, um, and there's an ad running right now that has these brown boxes, and that my, my husband hadn't seen that before. He said, I love this ad. It's not this particular one, but it's just the picture of the brown boxes. I'm like, that was my second box. And you can see I have enough to fill a table and a half. And I was kind of telling him like the journey of what, you know, where I had been and how things had been going. And he said, people need to hear that. And so we're going to talk about that today because what I want you to understand is that what we see on social media, the lie that social media tells us about business growth, is that it happens overnight. It's some highlight reel in our life that shows the best, you know, like I think of my daughter's an athlete and I think a highlight reel is going to show her making all of her shots, right? Our social media is the highlight reel of us making all of our shots. It's not the clips of us missing. It's not the clips of us failing. It's not the clips of us making mistakes and re— you know, gathering ourselves. It's a highlight reel of our best moments. And sometimes that's all you see of somebody else's business, and you don't see the struggle, and you don't see the pain, and you don't see how many times we've tried something and it doesn't work. And so what I want you to understand is that the early phase of our business, I call it the scrappy phase. Like, we're just really scrappy, okay? Like, we're just figuring things out as we go. And if you're in that phase, just tell me, I'm in the scrappy phase right now. Let me, let me just hear it. Say, I'm in the, I'm in the scrappy phase, Sarah. I'm doing small launches. I'm learning about pricing and sourcing and logistics. I'm making mistakes. I'm doing a lot of things manually. I call that the scrappy phase, and that's the early phase, and that's where a lot of us start. If you've seen more of my ads, they just started yesterday, but there's one of me painting in my workshop. That's early Scrappy Sarah. I was painting for hours to sell something for $40. And so what I want you to know is that we all go through that, okay? We are the scrappy— we are in the scrappy phase. So let me know. Says, call me Scrappy Girl. I love that. Um, Lexi says, I feel this. I saw you making $1,200 on your social media and I thought, if that ain't scrappy, I don't know what is. Christina says she's in the scrappy phase. Sue says she's building an audience and is so scrappy. Amanda's in the scrappy phase. Stephanie's in the scrappy phase. Mandy Lee says, I'm rebuilding and I have to go back to the scrappy phase. Now let's talk about that because we can get to a point and things stop working the way they used to, and we feel like, what are we doing wrong? And sometimes we just have to go back to that scrappy early phase that we were in. Um, Aisha says scrappy AF. You just made me laugh, Aisha. Um, but yeah, we, we've got— we've got to do it. We've got to know. We got to remember how we got out of the scrappy phase, if we ever got out of that, and then go back to what's working. Because you can pull up social media right right now. And I guarantee you, if you're a business, in your feed, you have somebody telling you you need AI, you have somebody telling you you need ads, you have somebody telling you you need to dance on TikTok, you have somebody tell— like, everybody has the answer. But in reality, we just have to go back to the basics because the basics always work. Now, some people are in the middle phase, and this is where most people quit. Okay, so you might think you're in the scrappy phase, but I want to hear if you're in this middle phase. You're not new anymore, but you're not yet successful. Okay, this might be you. You've tweaked, you've pivoted, you've been rebuilding, but what you're realizing in this middle stage is that recurring revenue changes Everything. And if you're in the middle stage, if you're, if you're in the middle stage, you're not new anymore, but you feel like you're not successful. And you're successful might mean different than my successful. It might mean different than Valerie successful. It might mean different than Stephanie successful, right? So you define that. But the moment you can really get out of this phase is when you realize This works when I stay consistent. This works if I don't give up. The compounding effect is going to kick in at some point because what we're building is not one-off sales. We're building recurring revenue and those start to compound on each other. And I've been in this middle stage for a little while. I got a lot of things going on, you know, I got a lot of things going on. I got my e-com business. I've got my coaching business. I got this little blow dry bar I'm running over here. And sometimes something doesn't get the attention that it needs. And when that happens, I feel like I'm in the middle stage. Like, okay, subscriptions have dipped over the last year. But you know what? I ended January up 13% in revenue in my subscriptions for the first time since 2022. I want you to hear that because even Sarah, who you feel like is at this, the, the end stage, the I've made it stage, I've been struggling with growth for several years and I I finally cracked the code on my subscriptions and I had a 13% increase in subscription box revenue last month because I didn't give up, because I am incredibly consistent, because that compounding effect kicks in, because whatever subscribers I got this month, I'm still going after them next month and next month and next month. This business that we're running doesn't change overnight, but we can. Because if we're in that scrappy phase, if we're in the middle phase, we're feeling like we're out there all alone by ourselves. But you can see it in the chat. You can see who's in the middle. Amanda says she might be in scrappy middle. But what we need is to keep going. I want to tell you about Launch Your Box because I think you'll appreciate this so much. I started Launch Your Box in, um, 2019, and so I had been coaching, um, a couple one-off people, and I had no Facebook page for this business. I had no website. I had nothing. But people were watching me on the framed page and they're like, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing? And I'm serving because that's just who I am. I'm like, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. And I had a couple people reach out and said, can I hire you to help me launch my subscription box? And I was like, oh, I don't know, I don't really do that. Like, I'm just doing my thing over here. And they were very persistent with me. And so I took them on for a very small amount of money. Um, back then you got a steal of a deal for my help. Um, and in 3 months I had 3 of my students launch successfully. I call them students, but they were just 3 people that reached out to me. And one of them sold out her first launch with 100 boxes, and I was like the proudest person. All I've known this whole time is retail and e-commerce, retail and e-commerce. Now I'm trying to do something different. I'm trying to build a coaching business. I don't know if I know enough. I don't know if I'm smart enough. I don't know if I have this all figured out. But I launched in August of 2019 and I got 19 members. And it was awkward. I'm just gonna say it was awkward in the beginning because when you have a small amount of people in a Facebook group, they don't talk. Um, here I had this really successful subscription box business and I had 19 people waiting for me to build out this coaching group. And I was trying to do all that work alongside building this massive subscription box business that was growing faster than I could keep up. And what I told myself was, this is really great, but this could be great too. And I want to give this my full attention and my full time to make sure it's great. Because at 19, let's just do the, let's do the subscription math here. At 19 members, I was charging $57 a month at that time. I was making $1,000 a month from my 19 members. And here I had a subscription box paying me 6 figures a month. $1,000 a month, $100,000 a month. And I knew that in order to get this to where I wanted to be, I had to pour into that. I had to show up consistently. Consistently when I didn't want to. I had to keep working on content. I had to keep building something that felt like grass, like I was watching grass grow. Well, I had this thing that was successful. What was I doing spending all my time on this? And you might be feeling that way. You might be feeling that way right now, that you're spending all your time on something that's not giving you an ROI that feels worth it right now. Now. But that's when you've got to trust and give yourself time to build it. I wanted to quit before I got started. I wanted to quit before that next launch. I was planning a launch in March of 2020, and I can see Mandy joined on my very first launch. Also, you know what happened in March of 2020? I could have shut down. I could have pulled back. I could have given myself any excuses not to move forward because of what was happening in the world in March of 2020. But I leaned into it and I said, you know what, I'm going to give this a year. I'm going to give this a year and I'm going to go all in. And this is going so well, I'm going to keep it going. I'm going to, I'm going to keep spinning the ball over here and try to juggle these balls too. And I was teaching before I felt like an expert. I was repeating myself a lot, answering a lot of questions. And the coaching business didn't grow because I had a perfect plan. It's because I kept showing up. And those 19 people became 104 people in March of 2020, and those 104 people became 500 people in July of 2020, and those 500 people became 1,700 people by October of 2020 because I kept showing up and I kept looking for something bigger, and I didn't give up on myself because at that point, that's all I was doing was giving up on myself. I didn't have the perfect plan. There was a lot of stuff I didn't have figured out, but I kept going. And that evolved from Launch Your Box to Scale Your Box. I had people with me for years saying, I love Launch Your Box, but I need more. I'm ready for more, Sarah. Tell me how you scaled. Tell me how you handle 500, 1,000 subscribers. Subscribers. And so I launched Scale Your Box for people that got past launching and had 100 subscribers. Let's start to scale this thing. And in there became a mastermind for my 7-figure entrepreneurs. Like, these are women, they're 6 and 7-figure entrepreneurs. That means they're generating 6 and 7 figures a year with their business. And it wasn't that long ago that I wasn't either. And so I want to encourage you today that if you're ready to make a change, it's time. If you're ready to go all in, it's time. And it takes time, but you have to give it consistency. You have to show up it's not going to show up for you. If it feels slow, it doesn't mean it's wrong. If it feels messy, it doesn't mean that you failed. If no one's watching yet, that's completely normal. So if you're in the scrappy phase, if you're in the middle phase and you're like, yes, I'm like, that's normal. Let's normalize this. Let's get off social media and fancy people next to their private jets telling you how you can 10x everything. Let's normalize that it's slow. Let's normalize that it feels messy. Let's normalize that it feels like nobody's watching because that's normal. But let's reframe that slow burn of a business. Your skills are compounding. There's so much personal growth here along with your business growth. Your confidence is compounding. If you knew 2020 Sarah versus 2026 Sarah, you would not even know that I'm the same person. My confidence has built 100 times over these last 6 years. Your trust from people is compounding. When you show up consistently, when you're transparent, when you're authentic, when you're real, people trust you, and that's going to compound, which means your audience is going to compound. That slow burn business is one that actually lasts. These fly-by-night, quick, I'm gonna make a million dollars this month, those struggle. You know, I know a lot of those businesses, and they sometimes need 5,000 subscribers to hit their break-even point. They're throwing so much cash into getting visible, they're not profitable, and that will burn you out so fast. What you're building right now, I want you to think about your future self in a year. Wouldn't you be grateful you didn't quit, even if that meant you have 20 subscribers right now? You could end this year with 40 or 60 or 100 if you don't quit. What does progress for you actually look like right here, right now? Maybe you're not selling Maybe progress means building your website. Maybe progress means growing your audience. Maybe progress means curating your boxes, branding, packaging. Progress isn't always sales. If you looked at this as a 5-year journey Would today feel different for you? That's what I want you to ask yourself, because building a long-term sustainable business takes time, and I want to normalize that we don't have these whiz-bang starts to everything. My brown boxes— I'm so incredibly proud of that brown box. When I see it, it makes me smile because that's my beginning. That's my beginning. That's where I started. And I was so proud of those 44 subscribers. And to look now at thousands— I did that. And all I did was show up over and over and over again. You've heard me say this before. I'm not special. I am not different. I'm a mom of 2 kids. I live in a small town in Texas, and I just wanted— didn't want someone telling me when I could go to lunch every day. I was tired of losing my job. I'd been laid off 3 times in a matter of 2 years for companies that went bankrupt, companies that were downsizing. All I wanted was to build something for myself to help pay the bills in my household, and I had no idea that how I started was going to change my whole life, my whole future. And I'm saying this because I want you to hear it, because it's possible. If you don't believe me, go listen to my podcast. Whether that's 100 subscribers, whether that's 300 subscribers, people are building real income for themselves. That's what we're doing here. And I say people, but 99% of them in my group are women. We are building businesses from the passions that we have. That are paying us, that are supporting our families, that are paying the bills. And I want you to remember that you might be seeing someone's end, but you're not seeing their scrappy season, and you're not seeing their middle phase. So I want you to give yourself a pep talk today that you can do this. And you don't have to be the expert at anything. Let me help you walk through this. I've got the map. You've heard me say the map before. I've got the map on how to do this, and I have taught thousands of people how to use the map. All you have to do is follow the map and ask questions along the way. So this is my special invitation to join Launch Your Box. And I don't know if we— Carrie, are you with me this morning? Or Allison? Can you, um, can you grab the link to join Launch Your Box for, for people? Also, Patrick has a question about the podcast, if we can grab a link to the podcast. Patrick, um, the podcast is called the Launch Your Box Podcast. You can find it everywhere. Go back to the map, and then I've got a special bonus which we'll be giving all of our members this month. But it's time to make a change for yourself. And all you have to do is start and be incredibly consistent. You don't have to be the expert. You don't have to have it figured all out. I figured it out for you. And I've taught over 7,000 people how to figure it out. And we can do this. Here's the link right here. Thank you, team. Joinlyb.com. And also, I just want to say that we have a new lesson dropping in Launch Your Box on Wednesday, and it's all about email, and it's really, really good. If you don't know what to say, if you don't know what to send, I've got you in these 4 brand new lessons. Okay. Um, but yeah, come join us. It's your time. Like, it is such a good time. You heard me say that I'm up for the first time since 2022. I saw Lexi, um, say the same thing, that she's had her best month. January has been one of her best months. And it is right here. I was trying to find it. And the best month ever, January 2026. Sarah's up 13%, and that's a lot of percent at my volume since 2022. It's our time to make a difference for ourselves, to compound our skills, our trust, our knowledge, and to keep growing. And, um, I saw someone's relaunching this month. I can't, I can't find it now, but that's what we need to do. So, um, let's go. New month, new week, new us. I want you to ask yourself, put it on a Post-it note, put it on your computer, put it on your wall: how can I be incredibly consistent today? And if you ask yourself— it was Shawna. Yes, Shawna. If you ask yourself that every day, there's no way you can fail. All it takes is consistency. So come join us over inside Launch Your Box. You'll grab the bonus, you'll grab the new lessons, you'll see what an amazing community we have. I would love to have you. All right, y'all have a great rest of your Monday, and I'll see you later this week.