Business Mistakes No One’s Talking About

On December 30, 2015, I walked out on my full time job to start my own business. And I'm going to tell you right now, it has not been easy. Even from somebody who got a master's in business and has a background in business marketing and public relations. I have made a lot of mistakes in the past four years. But good news for you, I'm going to tell you these mistakes that I made so you can absolutely avoid them in your business. Hi, welcome back. If you are new to my channel, my name is Trena and normally on this channel we talk about how to build your confidence to use YouTube in your business. But today we're talking about something a little bit different. And I want to really help you avoid at all costs some of the major mistakes that I've made growing my business. Now, not only am I going to be sharing these mistakes with you, I'm going to tell you how you can avoid them. Like exactly how to avoid them. And if you stay to the end, I'm going to tell you how you can get something that is definitely going to change the way you not only get your business started, but how you can grow your your business a lot quicker. So that first mistake is goal overload. Look, when I started my business, I know what it's like. You want to set all of the goals, income goals, email newsletter goals, YouTube subscriber goals, Instagram follower goals. You have all of these specific goals that you want to set and achieve. But what happens is you can't focus on all of these goals at once and you quickly become discouraged when these goals become unmet. So when you are trying to grow your business, if you're just getting started, you need to set goals that you have to achieve, like income goals. Look, if you don't have money coming in, you're not going to be able to pay your bills. So that is a critical goal to set and work towards. You may also want to achieve goals like how many clients you want to onboard in each month, or how many social media posts you want to make each week or each month. These are things that you can control. Try to focus on goals that you can control, especially when you're going to get started. I also suggest maybe only focusing on five goals because I'm going to tell you, starting a business is a lot of work and there are things that are going to pop up that you don't even think about in the beginning. So focus on those five goals that are critical for you to keep working in your business and just Focus there. The second mistake is not making a plan. I know you're excited, you want to get started. You just want to start getting out there, posting content and getting clients. But the mistake I made was not having a plan in place to be able to manage all of that. But now I get asked all the time, how do I get so much done? And it took me about two years to really figure this out. Because when you're working at home and you are your own boss, you really need to get good at time management. You always need to have a plan when you wake up in the morning to know exactly what needs to get done so that you're not focusing on the wrong things or you easily get distracted. So I have plenty of videos on my channel that tell you how I do this. I will link them down below in the description box and I'll put a playlist right up top here that you can click on. But you want to really focus on batching your work. So for me, Mondays are client days. I focus on doing work for my clients on Mondays. On Tuesdays, I don't have any kids here at home, so I focus on my internal business. So Is that shooting YouTube videos? Is that writing email copy? Then on Wednesdays I focus on editing so that every day I get up, I know what I need to be working on and I'm not wasting time thinking about it or writing a to do list or focusing on things that aren't important to my goals that I set back in my first mistake. And unfortunately, if you don't set some type of plan in place, you're going to end up trying to do too much and you're going to burn out. Because I did it. I did it my first year in business. By May, I started my business in January. By May, I absolutely was thinking, what the heck did I do when I why am I doing this? And oh my gosh, can I get back my old job? Because I was burnt out until I started setting up this plan and this batching system. This next mistake kind of leads in from making a plan and it's also setting systems in place. Boy, if you could see the back end of my business when I got started, it would literally look like duct tape, paper clips and washi tape because I was trying to pull together all these different things to make it all work. And when I'm talking about systems, I'm not only just talking about a workflow system, but also a client onboarding system, a profit management system, like having all of these systems in place. So that when you need to pull numbers or when you need to onboard a client, or when you need to shoot a video, you have the entire system down and you're not thinking about, okay, what did I need to do next? What did I need to do next? You already have things templated. It's quick to send out, you're getting back to those clients a lot faster so that you're booking them a lot faster as well and you're not really stressed out. So for example, when I was having my second child, Cohen, I was literally in the hospital being induced and I was still physically sending out client contracts while I was laboring in the hospital bed because I didn't have a system in place that automatically sent those contracts on out. So that's just an example of one of the major mistakes at the beginning that I didn't automate this. So right now I use a client management system called Dubsado that I can easily set up a workflow there that all this stuff goes out automatically. I also have workflows for creating YouTube videos so that I know exactly what I need to do when. And we can duplicate things. We as in my team can duplicate things. So we're not constantly recreating things. There can be a lot of systems for you to set up. Just pick that first one. Especially if you're going to be a service based business, I would focus on really setting up an amazing client management system. When they inquiry with you, how are you going to get back to them? How many days? Set up a canned email response so that it's easy to just make a few tweaks to make it look customized, but you have the bulk of it already written, have contracts in place, you know, have a client gifting system in place. Because those clients that you make super happy at the beginning are what's going to help you grow your business. Especially when you're just getting started. The next mistake I made was not getting help sooner. And hear me out here, especially if you're just getting started, you need to get some help. I didn't think that I could afford help when I got started and I didn't get any help the first two and a half years in my business. But what I quickly learned was I could easily get someone to take 5 to 10 hours of work a month off of my plate. This could be Pinterest images or blog writing or posting my blog to my website or scheduling my social media. And that takes up a lot of time for me. And if I can just offload it to somebody else to do. In five to ten hours a month, it may only cost you about $300 extra. And I know right now $300 might seem seem like a lot of money, but where could you be spending your time? Could that $300 of that extra five to 10 hours help you book another client that pays you an extra thousand dollars a month? So don't think about it as, oh, I can't afford that. Think about how it's going to relieve some of your time so that you can focus on client work and get more money in that way. Which is also why it's important to have systems in place so that you can easily hand things off to an assistant. So who already knows exactly what you do and has your workflow in place so that you're not worried about, oh, well, what if they don't do it? Like me, if you set a system and a workflow in place on how you do it, it's going to be a thousand times easier for you to hand it off to an assistant. The fifth biggest mistake that I made, and this is a biggie, is money management. What I mean by money management can be quite a few things. When I started my business, I knew I was making money because there was money in my bank account, but I wasn't managing, you know, paying myself a certain amount every single week or every single month. I wasn't focusing on specifically where that money was coming from. So I had a course and client services at the same time and I wasn't focusing on what platforms was I creating content for that I was getting that money from like where my clients were finding me. Because if you clearly understand where your income is coming from, you, you can spend more time doing that to make more money. And I'm not a numbers person and I don't like talking about money a lot of the times, but it is so critical, especially in your first couple years in business, because that income flow is really going to make or break your business success. So I also suggest, which is something I didn't do either at the beginning, is paying yourself, making sure you're able to afford your family expenses that you need to, making sure you're saving, saving money in a savings account for any kind of emergencies, also saving money for retirement because coming from a full time job I had, my employer was taking a certain percentage out of my paycheck before I even saw it and they were matching it. But as a business owner, I myself have to physically take that money out and set it in another account to save for retirement. Because you don't want to be working when you're 85 years old. You want to be enjoying life, enjoying retirement, and you have to really have your money managed well to be able to do that. This next mistake is a biggie, especially for newbie business owners, and it is course overload. I know when you're getting started in your business, you think you don't know all these different pieces and you need to take a course to learn it. But a lot of the times, here's the secret, you can YouTube it and learn enough to get by. What I don't want you doing is taking all that money you're just starting to make and dumping it into courses that aren't going to help you. Because unfortunately, there are a lot of lackluster courses out there that tend to promise you the world and then underperform when you buy that course. What I suggest doing so that you avoid this is talk to somebody who's gone through that course that you trust. Make sure you get insight on what's inside of that course, because not all courses are created equally and not all of them are going to give you the world that they promise on that sales page or on that webinar. So find somebody who took it and actually get insight from somebody that's already done it. And sleep on it before you buy that course. I am an impulse buyer, and so take it from me, sleep on it. Wait till that next morning to see if it's worth it. I know my friend Ashlyn Carter, she does this too. She leaves the tab up, goes to bed to see if the next morning she still finds the urge to buy it. So sleep on it before you buy it. But a really great alternative to buying all the courses, which I didn't have access to when I started in 2016, is online summits. So online summits are a great place for you to get a little bit of a lot of information because the speakers that speak at these online summits are giving you their best content. And the best one that I would recommend is the BOSS Project Summit. And the reason why I can tell you that this one is actually worth your time is because I edit all of the summit presentations, over 25 of them. I just finished wrapping up editing them all. And I can tell you their summit on November 12th is absolutely worth every single minute of time that you're going to invest in it. You can snag an absolutely free ticket to it. I will link it down in the description box below. But what's even better is they are letting you buy an All Access pass for just $47. Do have lifetime access to all these presentations because what I find happens is information overload. And you sit there for three days with over 25 presentations of amazing content and you're not sure where the heck do you start taking action. You have a notebook full of all of your notes and your hand is cramped up and you're just like, now what? And then you tend to forget about it, you know, a week or two later. But with the All Access Summit Pass, you get full access to these presentations for life. And I've asked Abby and Emily, who are the Boss Project Summit founders, to share with us their number one mistake that they made in their business. And it's one that so many of us can relate to. And I can tell you it's probably my biggest mistake too.

Hey, I'm Abigail. And I'm Emily and we're the co founders of Boss Project. We are helping small business owners from all over the world create profitable and online businesses by taking that hustle, that thing you love to do, your passion, and turning it into a full time income, keyword income.

Our mistake that we're going to share with you today is one of our favorites. Well, that we see, honestly, like literally everyone doing. That's why it's our favorite and it's one that we've been guilty of as well. And it's the Angels Sparkly Squirrels syndrome. What happens when you get diagnosed with Sparkly Squirrel syndrome, Abbey? Well, you.

You aren't focusing, guys. You're not focusing on the thing that's going to move your business forward. And we see so many people taking one strategy and then implementing another, and then implementing another and implementing another, and it takes away the focus and the drive from your business. So we really suggest instead of that, that you take one offer and you focus on selling it one way for at least six months. And with that dedication and that focus, big things can happen for your business.

So honestly, if you're planning to start a business in 2020 or you really want to take your business to that next level, grab that ticket down below. Grab that All Access Pass before the price goes up on November 11th. And if you already grabbed your All Access Pass and you can't wait to get started on November 11th. I've pulled together some of my best videos about starting a business. So click the video that's on your screen right now where I'm going to walk you through the top 10 digital products you could create in your business in 2020 to make you lots of money. Click that video and I'll see you over there.