The big mistake I made when my business hit $1 million in annual revenue – and what you can learn from it

Learning from our mistakes should be a business owner’s mantra and today I am sharing with you the big mistakes I made at a crucial time in my business. Plus the 3 key learnings you can take from it.

In today's episode I’m sharing:
– Why fast growth has a tendency to highlight the missing pieces in your business's foundations.
– How failing to have a series of offers for continued customer engagement is a missed revenue opportunity!
– Why a lower volume, higher price point offer is not always the ‘get rich quick' scheme and the benefits of delivering a high energy product to a lower volume audience at a higher yield.

 

Today, I am sharing all about the big mistake that I made in the year that my business hit a million dollars in annual revenue and what you can learn from that. And also what I have learned from that. I'm a big believer in learning from your mistakes.

One of the big messages behind my blog and podcast about imperfect action, in general, is that there's no such thing really as making a mistake, as long as you are learning from it. And I know that being open to mistakes in your business is a really great way to grow because if something works great, we have that outcome and we want it. And if it doesn't work, now we can look at why it didn't work. What happened? What went wrong? 

And it's only now with about two years of hindsight that I can look back at 2020, and I can say, ok, I could probably have done that differently. Maybe that wasn't the best thing or the best way to handle this is in my business. 

 

Why fast growth has a tendency to highlight the missing pieces in your business's foundations.

So, the lesson that I learned the hard way. I want to talk a little bit about quick business scores because I had that in 2020 and generally if your business grows really quickly, it's not going to be sustainable unless you have all of the foundations in place. Which I did. But now everybody wants quick growth. And that was me as well. 

But the problem is that most of us and I'm including myself in this. When we're on that edge of that quick growth and we really want it. We're not willing to put the time and the effort in to put our foundations into place, to build those foundations that will create a sustainable business. 

And like I said, this was me as well, but it's not just me. I noticed this time and time again with people in my audience who are like, oh, what is the right thing to say to my audience to make them buy, how can I get my course in front of thousands of people? How can I grow this? How can I grow that? But yet they're missing those foundations and this was a lesson I really had to learn the hard way. 

So let me break down exactly what happened and what you can take away from my mistake. 

So back in 2020, my business grew really quickly. I remember it being early. I think it was about March 2020, and everybody around me was talking about this massive pandemic and the impending recession that was going to happen as a result of this. 

So I was sitting there freaking out. I was thinking, why, what's going to happen? Am I going to make any sales? Am I going to have to close my business down? I actually had a job in insolvency a couple of years prior to that. So I thought, oh, well, if the world goes belly up, I suppose I can always go back to that job, because then they will be needing lots of people in insolvency. But what happened was from March to April. My business went from about 10,000 in monthly revenue to $350,000 a month. 

Literally from April to May or from March to April. I can't remember the exact dates. And all of this was thanks to one product, the Podcast Launch Plan in the space of 12 months, I sold over a million dollars worth of this one product which was $197. 

I could talk a lot about how selling high volumes of a product creates a lot of new issues but I'm not going to right now, that's a whole other topic on its own. It's one of the reasons I would rather sell fewer products at a higher price point than loads of products at a lower price point. 

 

How failing to have a series of offers for continued customer engagement is a missed revenue opportunity!

So what happened then with that high volume, I didn't have the systems and processes in place for customer support. And I very quickly found that I had to put these into place because otherwise it was going to take up all of my time and energy and customer support is a very energy-draining task, particularly when it's your own business, it's your own product. 

You get a little bit defensive when somebody is angry at you or they're like, oh, you didn't do this. And it's really exhausting. So that was one of the mistakes, but actually made a bigger mistake that took me a while to realise. And this one, the biggest one probably cost millions of dollars in sales. 

And I don't think I'm overestimating that when I say that's probably how much it cost. That mistake was not creating other offers for the people who were interested in the Podcast Launch Plan, the people who were buying it, and also those who weren't buying it, but who had other related problems that I could solve. 

 

Why a lower volume, higher price point offer is not always the ‘get rich quick' scheme

Let me explain a little bit about the podcast launch plan. It's a self-paced step-by-step guide to launching a podcast. That's essentially what it is. But to sell that guide, I had a free webinar and I had over a hundred thousand people who watched that free webinar in the space of 12 months, over a hundred thousand people watching that webinar consuming my content. 

And they were all people who were interested in podcasting in some form, but not all of them were wanting to buy the Podcast Launch Plan because some of them already had podcasts and they were simply watching my free webinar to learn how to grow their podcasts better. There were some who maybe weren't quite at the stage where they could launch a podcast yet they had other problems that they needed to solve first. 

There were those who had, or who wanted more one-on-one maybe, or they wanted some small group support rather than an entirely self-paced product. Now I had more than 4,000 students in that time in 2020, who bought the Podcast Launch Plan, and many of them had new problems that arose after they launched. 

For example, how do I keep growing my podcast once I've launched it? How do I stay consistent in creating that content once I've launched it? How do I find guests for my interviews, et cetera? And in hindsight, I kick myself because I think I could have helped so many more people in so many different ways and generated a lot more sales as well. But this is a mistake. You have to learn the hard way. 

 

Three things you can learn from this mistake.

1. Firstly, make sure you have your foundations in place as early as possible. They're not sexy, but really systems support processes. They are so necessary. Even if you don't have a team yet. I think a lot of people think, I have to wait until I have a team before it's worthwhile documenting my processes because it's just a process and I'm going to have to do it.

But documenting them early means you can easily delegate those tasks when your business starts to grow and you don't have the time to do it anymore because once your business grows, you're going to have less time than you have now. And suddenly you are going to have to find this time to document processes. 

I know it's time-consuming, but if your business grows, you'll not have more time than you do right now until you get those things off of your plate. And that means you have to document them so you can delegate them. Customer support was the biggest one. And I suddenly had to scramble to put processes in place. 

It wasn't something I had already in place. And suddenly I had to find the time to put together this process. And it took me a while and I had a few massive meltdowns before I managed to get that off my plate because it was intense.

Now if most businesses spent half the amount of time that they spend on Instagram, documenting their processes, setting up solid systems, et cetera, they would feel so much less burnt out. They would have the time, they would be doing way more to prepare their businesses for growth. But they don't unfortunately. Now your foundations also include things like your brand strategy, your messaging, and your numbers, but none of these things are glamorous and sexy. So people skip them. You don't see people posting the behind-the-scenes shots of them doing their weekly cashflow budgeting, because it's just not glamorous, but it's one of those things that is so important.

2. The second thing you can learn from my mistake is your offer. What you sell, how much you sell it for who it's for, what problems it solves, et cetera. These are so important, your offers are so important. When I hear business owners complaining that they're not making enough sales it really frustrates me when I then have a look and I see that either they've never actually told the audience what they sell. It's just like on their website and they're relying on people going to their website and inquiring. Or they only have one way to work with them which frustrates me even more. 

Now, you can't just solve this problem by throwing more offers at it. It's not a case of just adding more ways to work with you. Think of how hard it can be to choose what to watch on Netflix. There's just so much to choose from. And it's a difficult decision process. So there's a bit of a strategy, a bit of an art and a science to choosing what to sell and how to price it.

3. Then mistake number three, which you can learn from, is to consider selling a lower volume, higher price point offer. I think if I had known how many people would buy the podcast launch plan. I don't know if I would have created it. I created it as a guide that I could give to my friends and clients who asked me how to start a podcast.

And I never intended to sell thousands, and of course, because it is a fairly low price point. A lot of people who've bought it haven't even looked at it. Like there are people who have bought it who literally have not opened it. They're thinking, one day I'll launch a podcast. 

Now, those who have been through the entire thing, they've completed it. They tell me it's amazing. They've launched their podcasts. They love it. But I also know that some people need more accountability than what a self-paced course can give them. And the very first time that I launched it before I turned it into a self-paced guide, it was actually a group program that I launched. And that flopped, I think I sold two spots and I refunded them in the end because I said, well, it's not really worth your time or my time to have a group program with two people. So I knew that a group program wasn't what my audience wanted. 

I personally believe it is so much easier to deliver a better experience to fewer people at a higher price point than it is to deliver a good experience at a low price point. And I know you might say, yes, but I want to help people who can't afford a higher price point and that's fine, but chances are that even if the content in your $10 product is as good as the content in your $1,000 products. 

They won't get the same level of result because they don't have the accountability or the support that comes in that $1,000 one. And if you say, well, I'm going to give them that accountability and that support for $10. Then your business is not sustainable. There's no way you'll be able to run that business ongoing where you're giving that amount of your energy to somebody who is paying your business $10. 

This is a metaphor. I know that sounds ridiculous. But you won't be able to give that much effort and energy to somebody who's paying you the lower price point. And then you do not have a sustainable business because you do not have the money to pay your bills and then you can't help anybody. So that really a bit of jamming on price points with offers. 

 

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