FINALLY Finding My Voice Year 4 In My Business

Moving right along in this Trina Little Eras tour, I hope you've been enjoying it. But 2019 was year four in my business and this is when things got really serious. I can honestly look back at 2018 and realize I played it kind of safe and I got really comfortable. I basically had like a part time job working with my client and wasn't so worried about that next paycheck because I was basically working for him 20 hours every single week. And I wasn't giving my business really that much time because. Because again, that was a safety net that was easier for me to do. 2019, it was time to focus on my business and take it to the next step. 2019 was also probably when I made the worst business decision today. But looking back on my powersheets and my journaling during 2019, it was also the first time in the last three years that I had put my personal goals before my business goals. Before, it had always been business goals first and then maybe what I could figure out with my personal life. But I had put personal things, family things, health things in front of my business goals at the beginning of 2019. There was a lot of stuff that happened in 2019, and I think that's why we're gonna call it 2019, the wildest dreams era. Because so many things happened in 2019 that I would never have imagined in my wildest dreams that they would have happened. What's been really interesting over the last few days, going through this journey with you as well. I looked at goals that I set in that year. I may not have achieved it in that year, but I achieved it like a year afterwards. So I was setting goals that my two years in the future self would achieve, which is really kind of amazing because as I look back on all my powersheets, of all the goals from all of the years so far, I've achieved every goal. I may not achieved it that year, but I've achieved it now because in 2019 I set a goal to make 200K. Now, spoiler alert, I didn't make it in 2019, but I did in 2020. And remember in 2018, the year before, I had only made $77,000. And that was before all my expenses. So 2019 was my first six figure year and the very first time that I made six figures and a 90 day time period. Now you're hearing me say 90 days a lot this series because I really think about my business in 90 days. I think overall for my business at the beginning of the year. But then the Rest of the things like the moving parts all happen within every 90 days. This is also at a time that I started to feel healthier and I started to take more care of myself, like finding time to work out every day. So what the heck happened to make this transition? And what was the biggest business mistake that I ever made that I did in 2019? Promise. I'm about to tell you, I really found my groove in business in 2019. I really felt like I kind of knew what I was doing. I felt more confident in the decisions I was making and I really knew where I wanted to go. And there are three things that really contributed to this confidence. First, as I said, it was planning in 90 day sections, right? Because I knew exactly what I was focusing on, what I could get done. I wasn't overwhelming myself with too much stuff crammed into a day. I was spanning it over 90 days at a time. I also had that combination of consistent revenue coming in from clients with that reoccurring income coming in from courses as well. I started to diversify my income more in 2019. I did this more than ever, which is why I believe it contributed to my six figure year because I got more diversified in my streams of income, which I'm going to share with you here. And the third thing was having support. I mentioned about this a little bit in 2018. Having a mastermind and having people to fall back on and finding friends. But you really don't understand, understand how important it is not only to have somebody to get feedback and advice from because we're so far deep into what we're doing, we just get these blinders on and we sometimes can't see our hand in front of our face. So when we have people around us that are doing similar things that can kind of, you know, look at the back of our hair to see where it's messy. That's what really contributes to making the changes and making just the slightest tweak you really wouldn't have known to do when you have that community of people. Because it doesn't mean doing an entire new program like I did in 2016 and 2017. I wish I would've had those friends then. It just means having them look and say, what if you just tried this small thing and it could completely change the way your services or your courses are performing. So at the end of 2018, I decided to hire a one on one coach. And while it may not have been the best decision, it still wasn't the worst one. And it still allowed me to get Perspective on my business that I never had before. Even that slightest perspective told me having this in my life was important, which led me to actually investing into a program in August of this year that literally changed the game for my entire business. Okay, so after talking to that business coach at the end of 2018, here we come, rolling into 2019, guns a blazing. What's the decision that we made? That was probably the worst decision that I've ever made in my business. Doing a membership. 100. Hands down, the worst decision was doing a membership. Now, there were a couple reasonings behind memberships at the time in 2019. Like, memberships were all the kittens meow or whatever the saying is. Like, everybody was doing it. It was the hoppin business model at the time. The second reason why is I had to make a change in my signature offer. 2016, 2017, 2018, I had YouTube bootcamp. As I mentioned in a previous video, somebody had decided to take that name for themselves and also borrow the logo. We'll say, and if I want to transition to a membership site, I wanted to just kind of split ties. Like YouTube boot camp was that Course, this new program is a membership. So that's kind of why I came out with the new program as a membership. Before I dive into what actually happened with that membership, let me talk about the things that I also decided to do, guns a blazing, that first 90 days of 2019, because I also decided to bring back my mom channel again. And that meant at least one more video a week that I needed to be creating on top of launching a membership site. And I hadn't posted on that Mom YouTube channel since 2017, but it did not last very long. I think I made it about three months, posting kind of consistently on the mom channel of mine. But I just thought, you know, as I left 2018, right, deciding to go all in with my business, I was going to use the mom side of it as well as another stream of income, maybe like an influencer Stream. End of March 2019, the Mom Channel was dead again. The other things that I did in those first 90 days, which I was, like, I said, overzealous of what to accomplish in 2019, I brought on a new assistant, Aaron, who is still with me to this day. And I probably spoke on one of the biggest stages to date at Alt Summit in Palm Springs. And this was such a huge confidence booster for me because after I went there and I spoke and I saw all these women and they lit up when I talked to them. And I had so many of Them come and ask me questions and tell me how they sparked this new idea for them. I realized, shoot, this is my passion. Like, this is where I belong. I belong on this stage. I belong talking to these women. I belong giving these women the confidence that they have right now from listening to me. So that was just like a huge, almost a paradigm shift for me in that first 90 days of 2019, and really got me focusing on doing more speaking in my business because of what I saw all it did at that particular conference. Okay, let's talk about this launch of this membership because it took me years to clean up from this membership. In April of 2019, I birthed YouTube for Creatives, a 37amonth membership. And while when we released it it did pretty well, it took a little bit of a slow grow because we offered a dollar deal. I forget for how many weeks, like two weeks, you could try it for a dollar. I don't know why. I totally regret this day. Something in my gut wasn't feeling right about it and I still went with it because it was recommended by a coach. And I mean, it was a great experience because now I really listen to my gut because it's telling me something that I need to hear. But it wasn't a total bust with YouTube for Korea. We ended up enrolling over a hundred people into that membership site throughout 2019. And when we initially launched it that first month, we made about about $7,000 on it. And then the second month it totally flopped and we dropped to about just $3,000 from that membership. And then June it went back up. And by then I'm realizing this sucker is going to be a roller coaster and it's not a ride that I want to be on. I've got to figure out how to wrap this up. What is my next step going to be? Because not only was the up and down of the revenue stressing me out, but the constant content creation that goes on with a membership. Because if you're not showing up and you' constantly creating content for these people, obviously they're gonna leave. They need a reason to stay there month after month. You need to keep giving them something. And I'm an overachiever. I'm an Indian ground 3. I was burning myself out constantly dropping new content for this membership site. I knew if I stayed that way, it just wasn't gonna cut. It was not gonna be healthy for me. Now by the end of 2019, we made over $38,000 from YouTube for creatives. And there's still a few More people that pay for it. We've tried to always go through our system every couple of months to try to figure out who's paying and that membership payment off. But we also made overall for all of our online digital products courses that we sold in 2019, we sold over $70,000 in 2019. So that really gave me a boost. And okay, the programs, the digital products, the courses that I have, they're solid. There's a need for it and we need to figure out more strategically how to promote it, how to sell it, how to market it. Like I mentioned earlier, 2019 was also a year that I really enforced my boundaries. Taking more Fridays off, making sure, you know, I close up shop by 4 o'. Clock. We started to plan more family activities on the weekends and just actually start to have fun and get the momentum going again of not just constantly in work all the time. Another huge milestone that happened in 2019 was my very first Trina little team meeting. And this consisted of Aaron, my assistant, our video editor and our graphic designer as well. And as we talk about our clients, as we talked about the needs that were going on in my business, as I continue to at the time scale my membership and figure out the different digital courses that I was going to create. But like I said, by June, the membership roller coaster ride was not something I wanted to be on. Also, with the membership model, there started to become a lot more tech. I had to have a lot more software and a lot of things had to talk to each other and things just started to get super messy. And I still live by the idea that the fancy fails simple scales. So I'm starting to realize even more that doing this membership site was just not going to be it for me because it is getting way too fancy and something was bound to fail eventually. Honestly, I wish I would have just kept with YouTube Bootcamp and tweaked it and kept it as simple as it was. But then we wanted to have learned things that we didn't like, like a membership. Now, since the membership wasn't going as well by the summer, I got comfortable leaning back into my cl, working for him more and more again, feeling that comfort of reoccurring income, kind of showing up and doing my job, putting a lot of my creative ideas back into his business again, I actually started to become more visible in his brand as well. I started teaching clients for him. I started showing up on his website and even training his new employees, which at the beginning of the year I said I was going balls to the wall with trinalittle.com and here I was again falling back into that comfortable position of maybe an employee. But because things got hard in my business, I had that safety net. And I honestly think that safety net kind of caused me to slow down if it wasn't consciously, a little bit subconsciously, because again, I knew I always had that until August of 2019. You see, summer is always kind of a reset time for me. Not only is it, you know, halfway through the year, but since 2018, we had been going to the beach for two weeks. And it just gives me time to pause, reflect, get a breather from your business for a little bit, step away from it for a little bit. And it's usually where I get my best ideas. I usually come home from that and I jump into work super excited and the ideas just start coming. And that's what happened in the summer of 2019. That summer I also went back to the conference, creative at heart. Being around similar people, talking about all these business ideas and all these things that they've done again, sparked that creativeness inside of me again. So between the summer vacation and the conference, I was just like amped up, ready to go. In fact, I wanted to let you know I've been talking a lot about planning and how it's been so crucial for me to do to make sure I have the time to rejuvenate, like have the time to think and also have the time to take Fridays off and enjoy, you know, fun days with my family. I wanted you to know that I am hosting a CEO planning day on a Wednesday, December 14, where I'm literally going to show you the entire process that I go through to plan my year and then how I turn that into 90 day planning planning. You're literally going to get to see me walk through my process. I'm going to plan out my year with you. You can ask me questions, you can ask me my thoughts, you can get some feedback on it. But it's all going down December 14th. If you want to plan with me, if you want to use this process that I've used so many times, it has literally changed the game for my business. Go to treanlittle.com forward/CEO to sign up now. And if you have any questions about CEO planning day, you can either leave them in the comments below or email me personally@trinalittle little.com because I really want to show you the process that you can use to map out your six figure year for 2023, because I know it is possible you Just need to make sure you understand what you should be focusing on and what isn't as important as you think it might be. Okay, so after summer of 2019, I actually was introduced to Mariah Causes accelerator program. And I jumped in head first. And within joining her program within six weeks I was able to launch a brand new and I made $16,000 from that very first launch of video multiplier formula. Now this course has honestly been huge for my business. It's made me over $50,000 in my business that I haven't even touched since 2020 I believe. But it was the concept that Mariah teaches inside the accelerator program that changed the game for my business. This is when I started to realize you needed a revenue ratio of different types of revenue stream. I had the launch revenue stream, I had the client reven, but I didn't have this extra pieces. So I didn't have like a small offer, a self liquidating offer, a limited time offer, whatever you want to call it, something under the $50 range to just get people to buy that first thing with you, give you that first dollar to test it out. So again, at the end of 2019, I created my first $47 product, the video workflow blueprint that made me over $10,000 for a $47 product. Over the course of about allowed me to build an email list full of people who are purchasers because a lot of people get on your list for something free and you'll never know if you're going to get those freebie chasers to pay a dollar with you. So if you're creating something small for them to test out, you start to build a email list full of people who are willing to buy and test it with something small. This is when the whole idea of a value ladder and a product suite beat really smacked me in the face. And how I was going to make more money passively. It's not really passively, but how I was going to sell courses in a strategic way so I could phase out of some client work. Because you only have so many hours in a day to do client work unless you want to keep hiring contractors or employees to take on that work which minimizes your profit margin. So I realized this is the way, this was the aha moment that I had that I was going to take my business to that next level without needing more of my time to do it. So for those last couple of months in 2019, when I had that light bulb moment, my confidence skyrocketed because I knew exactly what I needed to do, how to do it. And guess what? It wasn't fancy stuff at all. It was very simple. So I knew. Simple scales, fancy fails. I was all in. I was beyond excited for 2020. I knew 2020 was going to be my year. I finally felt that I had it all figured out And I couldn't wait eight to make it all happen. And then we met. 2,022.