5 things I never do in my business as an online business strategist

Some of the things that I'm going to share in today's blog might be things that I have previously done in earlier stages of my business and through trial and error, I've come to learn that maybe these things weren't serving my business, weren't serving me, weren't serving our growth, our team. And I want to share these with you as some mini lessons of small things that you can begin to tweak ─ in your business, in the way that you show up for your business to start to build that next level of your business as we move into 2024.

 

Don't wait until your idea is perfect before you put it out into the world.

This one. ─ I used to do this a little bit where I would sit on an idea and wait until I had all of the moving pieces in place and everything felt ready before I would publish the content or put the new lead magnet out there or upload the course and make it available for sale. I can think that it's perfect.

I can spend all this time making something that's perfect. And then I put it out there and it still flops. ─ So I've realized that what is perfect or what I think is perfect, isn't necessarily what's going to actually work. And the only way to get that real feedback is to put it out there into that real-world environment, and see how our audiences, our ideal clients, see how they respond to it. And then once it's out there, only then can I gather the feedback, the research, the information that I need to improve it and make it perfect. This is one of the reasons why I love launching an online course before I've created it, because I will never know if the content is perfect until I've had some students go through the course and especially as the expert in your topic, it's really hard to put yourself in the shoes of your students, of someone who doesn't know what you know. So until you've actually had somebody go through the content and watched where they get stuck, what questions they have, where they struggle to implement, you won't be able to make that course perfect You need that real life feedback to uncover the knowledge gaps, the challenges, the sticking points to improve the content. So that's why I love launching new offers before I've created them before they're perfect, because otherwise you could spend months, years creating a perfect offer, but it still doesn't get results for your ideal client because it's never been tested in real life.

I love co creating with my students for this very reason, and it helps me to make it way more perfect than if I'm sitting at my desk, thinking my own way through it, outlining it as if I'm the expert who knows exactly what they need, when I won't know it until it's out there in the real life. 

 

Don't waste time on low-value decisions that can be easily reversed.

Decisions like which template should we use for our carousels? What should we name this podcast episode? Should we post this to LinkedIn or Instagram or threads? Or what software should we use to host our online course? What software should we use to build our email list? ── These are all such low value decisions that do not have a measurable impact on your business, your growth, your revenue.

And I noticed so many newer business owners obsess over these things. And I used to do it as well, but these decisions can take 10 seconds for me now, or I outsource the decisions to my team to make. I trust them to make these kinds of decisions because I know they're not going to make any real difference to the business and they're not permanent.

They can be changed so easily. The number of times that we have changed email marketing platforms. I think we're on to our fourth one now and hopefully never changing again, but it can be changed easily. The number of times I've changed the templates that we've used for social media posts. The number of times we've put a post out there and then three days later, I think, Oh, actually, I don't like that. I'm going to delete it. 

These things can be changed. They can be reversed and they're not going to impact the direction of the business or the business success, higher value decisions. These are a much better use of your time as the leader of your business decisions like what other offers can we sell?

What is the strategy behind our content topics? What is the launch strategy? For our next offer. How can I communicate this offer in a way that makes it a no brainer for my ideal client? What do we need to do to move to the next level of business? These are all things that are worth your time a lot more than what template should we use? What software should we use? 

 

Don't freak out if you have a slower-than-usual month.

 It is so normal for your business to ebb and to flow that sometimes it's going to be busy. And then there will be months where you're like, why are there crickets? What's going on? And these times will depend on your ideal client and on your industry.

I often have people ask me, Oh, is it a bad idea to launch in November or should I launch in January? And it really depends on your ideal client, what they are doing. For example, November and December, if you're in e commerce or retail, those are going to be your biggest months of the year. If you are in the online business space, I've noticed certainly with our business and with a lot of our students, businesses who work with other online business owners, these tend to be slower months. Because everyone's winding down for the year. Everyone's got a lot going on. So they tend to pull back from investing in themselves and in their businesses in these months. But then January makes up for it. My first few years in business, every time November, December rolled around, I freaked out and I was like, nobody's buying.

My business is failing. It's a slow month. And then I remembered that my business works with real humans, humans who have other things going on in their lives outside of just their businesses. And this impacts how much time and budget that they have to invest in their business at any given moment. Going into freak out mode is unproductive.

It doesn't help your business at all. All it does is make you really reactive and probably, puts you in a space where you're not making decisions from the best state of mind. So instead, how can you be proactive? How can you plan ahead for those slower months? I also love looking at slower months as a great time to test new offers, see what else we can do to generate cash injections, see what else we can do to work on the business.

There's always going to be other things that we can do. There's always going to be other problems that your ideal client also has that you can help them with. And perhaps some of them are quite pressing in those slower months. Perhaps they have problems that they really need help with right now. So it's a matter of just getting creative with how you can solve these problems for them at this point in time.

 

Don't hesitate to increase your prices in line with the value that you deliver. 

Over the years, my prices have gone up. Quite a lot. And every time I put the price up, it's always been a logical decision, not an emotional decision. I asked myself, is the price still reflective of the value that is in this offer?

And as I learn more and grow, as my team gets better at doing their jobs as well, the value that my students get increases a lot. One of the reasons that I'm always very willing to invest in my own learning and development, is it means I can deliver more value to my students. And as a result, charge more, and our prices can go up as well, but I see so many business owners making pricing decisions, an emotional decision, which it really isn't making it a question of, will someone pay this and what does it mean about me? If somebody tells me that I'm too expensive to work with, they can't afford to work with me. What does that mean? Does that mean that I'm not valuable enough? Does that mean that my offer is not good enough? It becomes this emotional thing when it really isn't. It's a logical decision.

So if you haven't put your prices up in a while, maybe it's time to consider doing that as we head into the new year. 

 

Don't wait until you have complete clarity on every single step. 

Before I take action, you don't need to know what every step is going to be before you can start to take action. And as you start to take that action, that is when the steps reveal themselves. All you need to know is where you want to go. That end goal. And that very first step in front of you, the very first thing you need to do in the direction of that end goal, the rest of them will appear, the rest of the steps will appear as you start walking through it.

This applies to little things and to big things in my business. When I'm launching an online course, I don't always know exactly what each module and each lesson is going to be before I launch the course. And then I co-create it with my students based on what they need. ─ Or when I was starting my podcast, I only knew what the first 10 episodes were going to be.

I had no idea that I was going to get to 737 episodes. ─ And if you'd asked me to come up with 737 topics, there's no way I would have been able to, because it's evolved so much over time. So I only had the first 10 topics, and I trusted that by taking action and starting the show, the rest of the topics would reveal themselves over time.

Now, if you end up overthinking and overplanning everything, it just creates extra overwhelm. And you look at this list of things you have to do and you're like, I don't even know where to start, so I'm not going to do any of it. ── So imperfect action is the only cure to inaction. ─ And as you know, like, I am a huge fan of taking imperfect action.

You can always course correct. You can always learn from the action that you take, but you can't learn from the action that you don't take.