The TRUTH About My First Year In Business...

All right. It feels like I am doing a true life documentary here, like the true life of growing your business. Because I want to take the next five days to share with you what it's really like to start a business from zero and get to this year we're going to make over $600,000 because it was not clean, it was messy. And I don't think many entrepreneurs that we look at or that we hear from really share the nitty gritty messiness that goes on when you're growing a business. Because to get your business to making consistent monthly income is freaking hard. Getting that consistent reoccurring revenue is even harder than actually hitting that six figure mark, like making $100,000 in your business. And I'm here to be totally truthful with you and tell you that while it is hard, it's not impossible. And I know because I've been able to do it and I've been helping other business owners figure it out and do it as well. And listen, there was nothing really special about me that helped me get my business to where it year seven of my business. In fact, when I started my business, I thought I was something special because I had a background in business and I had an mba. But those things really hardly had anything to do with growing my business. And I didn't do any like secret tricks to grow my business like spending money on Facebook ads, getting a shout out, getting a super awesome podcast feature. In fact, in my very first year of business in 2016, my first kid turned one. We sold our house in three days unexpectedly and had a baby. All in that first year of my business. So did I mention we didn't even have a house to move into when we sold that one? Yeah. And on top of all of that, all year, knowing that I had a baby at home, knowing that I was pregnant with another one, I was so stinking jealous of all the cute little female entrepreneurs that were out there like doing their thing. They were hustling, they were working, they were grinding day in and day out. And I was so jealous because I couldn't do that. I was a mom, I couldn't work like that. And nobody was really talking about what it was like to grow a business while being a mom to little kids, like a one year old and being pregnant. And I just thought if I didn't have kids, my business would blow up. Like I'd have the time to work 24 hours on this business. And not the answer either. The thing is, when I started my business, I only wanted to make back the income that I left in my dream 9 to 5 job. I was making around $80,000 a year, but that place was toxic. And after I had my daughter and dealt with just trying to get maternity leave from this place, I knew like I could not continue to go and work at this place. Here's The Spoiler alert. 2016, my first year in business, I made a total of. Drumroll please. $10,000. Yes, that's for the entire year, all 12 months. But six years later, while I'm looking at my profit and loss statement for 2022, I'm going to be making well over $600,000 in my business and I've hired three full time employees this year and more this year than any other year. I've been talking to so many of you who are struggling in your business, who are struggling to grow your business to that next level that feel like they're constantly working in their business and not on their business. They're doing their client work. They just feel like you just feel like you can never break out and get to that next level in your business that you've been trying to get to. You're making money, but you're chasing client after client to continue to make that money. And you thought you would have been further along in your business by now. Those of you that I've been talking to, you're just not sure what isn't working, what's not clicking. You think like buying this mastermind or joining this course is going to tell you that secret that's behind the scenes of successful entrepreneurs. Well, I'm here to tell you there is no secret and you're not missing out on anything. So much so that over the next five days, I'm kicking off a brand new video series. And I thought, how can I make this video series fun? And what better fit than to play on the one concert ticket that so many of us wanted to get that so many of us are not getting. That's right, the Taylor Swift Eras tour. So welcome to the Trina Little Eras Tour where I'm going to take you through the last six years of my business and share with you the eras I've gone through, going from making $10,000 in my business to well over half a million dollars this year. And because I pride myself in being completely transparent with you, spilling all the business growing tea, I'm going to be sharing with you all the mistakes that I made along the way, all the mindset shifts that I had to do in the real actions like not the surface level actions that everybody talks about to hit six figures, but the real actions, the changes that I had to make to get to this point in my business. So if you're ready to dive into the Trina Little Eras tour, make sure you are subscribed because these videos are dropping every single day this week, and you're not going to want to miss the twists and turns or the ups and downs. That has been my journey as an entrepreneur. All right, so I left my job, like, literally walked out the last day. New Year's Eve, 2015, about nine months after having my daughter, I actually started to figure out what I wanted to do before I left. I had got on a webinar learning about passive income and thought, shoot, if I just follow this course, I can make passive income and I can be, like, sipping my ties on the beach by the summer of next year. You know those webinars that many of us saw back then? If you miss that time in online entrepreneurship, consider yourself lucky. But I figured it wasn't going to be that hard. Like I said, after all, I have a business degree in marketing. I have my master's degree in business. How hard can this really be? Now, the husband was a little bit more skeptical and didn't really believe that this could actually happen, but he knew I could not go to that job anymore. It was just way too toxic. It was just taking me down. And fortunately enough, we live in an area that has a small cost of living, and so we could live on his income even if I made nothing. So I was fortunate enough to have that safety net in addition to the savings that I had had, you know, over the past eight years of working that job. Now, honestly, I can't rem remember much of 2016. It was an incredible blur. But when I decided to do this series, I got digging around in my closet and I found all of the planners and all of my power sheets that I've been filling out since 2016. So I've gone through all of these and recapped the last six years of my business, and I'm here to share with you everything that I learned. So the way I want to break this up is the first thing I do is I want to talk about all the things that I did do that first year in business. Remember, I found out I was pregnant in May of that year, so pretty much half the year I was pregnant. So I was doing these things while being pregnant. Then I want to share kind of the feelings that I had by the end of the year. Because that is the year I did power sheets. And I wrote a lot of this down. So I, by reading that, I started to remember different things. And then I want to share with you, like what I wished 2016 Trina would have known. So if you're at this stage of your business, really what I wish you would know as we go into a new year. So the first things first. I started 2016 basically being a business owner and a YouTuber. I got sucked into the YouTube world while I was pregnant with my daughter. And my marketing brain just clicked with this whole YouTube world. And I realized like an influencer was going to be a thing. It wasn't called influencer at the time. They were actually called YouTubers by 2016. And I thought with my marketing brain, I could totally market products and become like brand deals and get sponsorships on my YouTube channel that I was, that I was seeing other mom vloggers do. So I had that kind of branch of my business. And then I was going to start creating courses on what I learned about creating videos. Because prior to even starting my business, I edited videos every time that my friends and I would go on a trip. I would video everything that we did and then I'd splice together, you know, a recap. And we all love looking back at that and laughing at our journeys as late 20 year olds. And so I knew a little bit about video editing at this point in time. So I literally wasted no time at all in 2016. I had my first webinar going out in February. I do remember at this point in time I was leaning a lot on Pinterest and Twitter and a little bit of Snapchat in addition to my weekly YouTube videos. I knew I was going to Double down on YouTube from the start. The other things that I was doing because so many people have asked me, like, what did you do to catapult like to success or what did you finally do to start growing your email list? I didn't. I did what I could to grow my email list and I immediately started reaching out to people, making connections on Twitter, Twitter, asking people if we could do JV webinars together or if I could do a training for their audience and just networking as much as I could online to get in front of as many audiences as possible. As I was digging through this, I didn't even realize this. But by like April, I was doing a JV webinar for somebody where I was pitching video coaching packages. Now I had been doing my mom channel for over a year. By now So I had understood how to create videos, how to edit them. I knew the back end of YouTube and stuff, which was a lot more than many business owners in 2016 because business owners weren't really looking at YouTube as a platform to build their audience. At this point in time, Facebook ads were in the gold mine stage where businesses were pumping money into Facebook ads and then they're making a boatload of money back. So they weren't Even looking at YouTube as a valid lead source generator. While I was doing that, I was also building out my very first course. Remember I bought that thing on my webinar that told me I was going to do this and make buttloads of money, money. So I started building out my course and I can remember one particular night, it was like one o' clock in the morning and I was staring up at all the post its that I had on my purple office wall at the time and you know, I could hear her rustling on the monitor and I just thought, oh, how much longer can I do this? Like this has to make it. I'm putting all this time in it. If I can't pull this off, there is something wrong with me. So by May of that year is when I hosted my first very official big launch for a program called Brand Boosting Video. I actually went back and found as many things as I could from that launch. So here's the sales page that I created. It was created right into Teachable. So it's completely different from where I'm at now on fgf. Here's the course on Teachable as well. I did the full on webinar style launch and I got three sales. One of those sales was a friend of mine who felt bad for me. So I literally had two sales from that course launch that took me about five months to prepare and get out the door. Looking through my calendar, I honestly can't believe how I got through that first six months late nights with a one year old newly pregnant. That launch in May, it really defeated me. I thought it was going to do much better because I was on video. So I was starting to get recognized places like in Facebook groups when people would ask about YouTube or video, people were referencing me at the time. I was one of the very few women on YouTube talking about YouTube and video. And so I was becoming like the video girl, the YouTube girl and a lot of Facebook groups. So when I only got two real sales I pretty much felt like a failure and that I wasn't meant to have this business. Fortunately we had planned vacation In June. And so I had, like, a minute to take a beat. But during that vacation, I had my first official client reach out to me. Her name is Jessica Rasdal, and we are still friends to this day. In fact, not only did I hire her eventually as my speaking coach, but she now works with me again in my agency. And I really accredit her becoming a client as the life raft that saved my business, because I was honestly six months in thinking about leaving it all behind. I'd put everything into that launch and thought I was crushing it to get three sales. But I brought her on as a client and I started doing her YouTube content. I started editing her videos, I started creating her speaking reels. She started to introduce me to a whole nother world of this online space. I started to get into the creative entrepreneur space and make even more connections and friendships because of her. I honestly didn't realize it till I was flipping through my calendar, seeing how many phone calls I got on how many coffee chats I was on, really networking and meeting people and learning more about people. And I don't do that as much anymore. And I really regret it. I look back and I'm like, I need to start doing that more. Because not only did it introduce me to more people, but it broadened my perspective to different types of businesses and what other people are doing out in the world. Now, after getting back from vacation and having that boost of confidence because of Jessica, I kick things right back into gear in August. And you can see right here the amount of webinars that I hosted the second half of 2016. Now, remember, I'm going into like six, seven, eight months pregnant by this point in time. And I even found this post it of all my social media numbers six months into my business. Which is wild to think my problem was at this point in time, if something didn't work, I thought it was just that was the problem. So I began recreating the wheel every single time, starting from scratch, which is highly, highly not what I recommend to do. So when I look back at all this, I'm like, trina, why? Why are you doing so many webinars? Why are you creating so many different webinars? And while it was a lot of work, these webinars do contribute to me growing an email list. In fact, when I looked at my email list, I had gotten to about a thousand email subscribers that first year in my business, it was like 997. But that was the primary way I was doing it. Hosting these webinars and I didn't use any Facebook ads at that time. So I was even looking at different things that I thought would be fun to show me during this time and for you to see, you know, kind of this journey I was going on. This is a screenshot of a webinar that I was hosting in October of 2016. I was like seven months pregnant at 8 o' clock at night. Night. Because I was just on a mission. I was going to make this work. I was just going to keep doing webinars until I found one that like sold a lot of courses. I was literally making myself run a race that had no finish line. I had no idea what I was running towards at all. Which is why when I look back at my power sheets that I did for 2017, it forced me to reflect on 2016 and that's where I was really to see how I was feeling during this point in time. Nine months pregnant with no house, we eventually did move into a a small two bedroom apartment. But this really allowed me to get into where I was at mindset wise. When I look at these, I see how exhausted I was. And this was just my first year in business. And unfortunately a lot of the same things that I struggle with in 2016 I ended up struggling with for the next three following years because history kept repeating itself every single year until I figured out what was missing. So I got that click. But when I look at 2016 Trina, I would say it's my Taylor Swift our song era because she was so young and naive. I mean I was 30 at the time I started my business, but I was so naive. I was so positive and inspired and motivated and I was just like, yes, let's do this. Until by the end of that year she was totally crushed. The funny thing is though, when I look at what goals I was setting at the end of 2016 for 2017, I met met almost all of them by today. 2016 Trina just wanted to make $60,000 a year. 2016 Trina just wanted to have three reoccurring clients. She wanted to have one employee and she wanted to speak on a stage. Oh, there's one that I'm not still doing and that's making my bed every morning. But that's a me thing. But what a wake up call. Thinking about 2016 Trina in that our song eras really being crushed by the end of the year. How would she Even imagine where 2020 Trina is? With an agen with 10 clients, with employees in the agency making over $600,000 this year. But I didn't just fast forward from 2016 to 2020. No, absolutely not. And I don't want you to think entrepreneurs are fast forwarding because there's a lot of gunk that goes on in between. In 2017, Trina became a whole new vibe and that year had a major mountain to overcome. Now make sure you hit subscribe because this era's tour is continuing tomorrow and I won't be running out of tickets tomor tomorrow. I'm going to share a big milestone that happened in 2017 that really changed the way I would do business for years to come. If you enjoy hearing this kind of behind the scenes journey that I'm taking, let me know what is your biggest takeaway down in the comments. So some of my biggest lessons learned looking back on this is first of all, 2016 Trina was a mess. She had no idea who she was focusing on. She was really fracturing her audience. Am I a youtuber, Am I a business owner? And what am I wanting to be known for? And I was just literally all over the place trying to do everything. Also, lesson learned, don't keep recreating the wheel. We're going to talk more about this in tomorrow's video. The 2017 era of recreating the wheel and why that was a terrible thing to do and why you shouldn't be recreating the wheel and what you should be looking at instead. Also, I need to take more time for myself. 2016 training was just go, go, go. I was looking at my calendar. I was literally doing things on on Sundays. I do not do that now, but it's taken a while to get there. All right, I will see you tomorrow.