The Biggest Mistake I’ve Made in My Businesses

Welcome back. I'm super stoked that you're tuning into this week's episode.

And I'm freaking excited to be back doing solo shows because I have so much juicy things that I want to share with you and conversations that I want to have. And it's been a hot minute since I've had them like to myself, I've spent the last couple months interviewing some phenomenal guests, which I'm sure you're aware of if you've been listening to the show. And I'm super grateful for that. But like I said, I've got some really amazing things that I want to have a conversation around with you over the next couple of weeks. And I'm really hoping that these episodes can offer some type of clarity, maybe some thought provoking thinking, maybe a perspective shift or a different way of looking at things. Or maybe it's an outright breakthrough moment that you're like, oh my god, I never really thought of it this way. That is what my intention is, for these next couple episodes. Because I feel like there is an undercurrent, specifically in the online space and something that I've been hearing a lot about from my clients, my clients, clients, myself, the industry, my audience, friends, audiences, and communities. And I'm really starting to see a pattern of people, entrepreneurs starting to really ask themselves, is this what I want to be doing? And is this the way in which I want to be doing it? And by that, I mean, business, it could be business model, right? Is this the right business model? For me? Is this the right way to market and sell what I do? Is this the right offer? You know, should I be helping people with one to one? Should I be doing brick and mortar product space? Should I be doing online? E commerce, like there's lots of conversation and stirring happening? Mostly what I see in the online space, but like I said, it could be happening in the offline space, too. And so if you're in this season right now, where you're asking yourself, if is there a better way to do things, or there's gotta be a better way, or I feel like I've been grinding in my business for a few months, years, decade, maybe. And I'm just finding that I'm no further ahead. Or I'm feeling like there's a lot of output and producing that has to happen in order to experience some type of financial return in my business, and it just feels really hard, then you're going to want to keep listening, because I'm going to share with you two very different stories of my own journey. And the mistakes I feel like I made along the way, hoping that maybe like I said, will offer some clarity for you, or maybe a different way of looking at things or maybe an aha, like, oh, yeah, that's, I needed to hear that today. Because I can make this shift in my business now to really start to experience some ease and flow. Now. I'm not here to perpetuate that business doesn't take work, and that you can just sit back in life and things are just going to fall into your lap because it takes action does take work. But I don't think it needs to be as hard as we make it sometimes or complicated. So for those of you that have been following me for a while, you know that my first business was in the offline world, where it opened a brick and mortar, and I produced and sold wine for a living. So after my 15 year corporate career, I ditched that to open a brick and mortar. And you might be thinking right now. So what's so bad about that Catherine like making and producing wine for a living and selling wine and talking about wine like that sounds like the funnest job on Earth. And there were parts of it, believe me that were super fun, right? Dealing with the customers talking about wine, selling wine, marketing, wine, and all of that. And that wasn't the piece that felt hard. That piece actually felt really easy. It was really easy for me to sell wine I actually didn't even have to try, right, people would come into the store and have a conversation with them. And ultimately would walk out having bought or purchased some of our wine. It was just such an amazing and easy way to sell. And we didn't have a big audience. We had about 700 people on an email list. We had a couple 100 people on Instagram, we had 1000 or so on Facebook. It was a local business. And we did not do a lot of paid ads. It just was effortless selling so to speak. And I can record a whole other podcast on why that was because I have some beliefs around why that happened. But that part was easy. The hard part for me was the operational side of the business so it felt really hard to produce and make the wine in that it was a lot of labor and effort.

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For the financial return of it, right, the more we sold, the more we had to make. But the the kicker was, is that what people were paying for the wine, and then the amount of effort that went into produce, it just didn't balance out. And it didn't matter. Someone would say like, oh, just raise your prices, then Katherine, like, what's the issue? Well, you can only raise your prices so much before it's completely out of reach for people. So charging somebody $1,000 for 30 bottles of wine is probably not going to go over well, when it's a microbrewery style. It's homemade, so to speak, it wasn't, you know, a custom winery or a winery doing it. So I mean, there are certain things that are wouldn't have been in our control. And there were other businesses in the city, that we also had to continue to watch prices there, right, we couldn't out price ourselves from other people in the city that were selling and producing wine like we were. So for me, the amount of work that went into producing and selling it would never justify what we were able to sort of make profit wise in my belief, and what I expected and just it the outlet just didn't match up for me, right, it was kind of like, there's got to be an easier way or to make money and be an entrepreneur. And that's where my questioning started to happen. So operationally, it just didn't align with me in a lot of ways. Plus, the brick and mortar business, in some capacity can be restricting or feel limiting to people, right, specifically me and my personality. For some people, they're like, I love the brick and mortar, it works for me, it's great, you know, but for me, personality wise, it wasn't something that you know, was in full alignment with who I am, right, I felt they felt very restricting to have to have somebody in a brick and mortar in the retail every single day, and have to be open certain specific times in the day and all those sorts of things. Like I said, this might not be an issue for some people, but it was for me, and why I'm sharing this with you is because I want to give you some perspective, about who I am, what I how I'm designed. And what is alignment look like for me, because this is one of the biggest mistakes I think a lot of business owners make, before they ever even open their doors, whether that be physically or virtually, they don't take time. And I did this, to really get in tune with who you are, what your values are, what you know, what you see as your future, all of that. And really ensuring that when you go into business, that you are opening a business, in full alignment with who you are, so that it's a reflection of who you are right and not having a business that doesn't allow you to amplify the best parts of who you are. And so well, sales and marketing felt effortless, it took a lot of work to produce the product on the back end. So we were selling, selling, selling, selling with ease. And that was not the problem. But we were selling a ton of wine, which resulted in a lot of labor and effort.

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And for me that I couldn't see the balance there. The other thing was the business model, right. So the offer itself, for me was a really good offer. But the but the way in which we went about delivering that offer, aka making our own wine was the struggle for me to look at the cost payout and the financial payout for the amount of work. Now, the business model also felt like a slog or a struggle for me because it felt boxed in and quite restrictive. And for some people that might be totally okay, the structure of that is brilliant. But for me, it wasn't. So one of the biggest mistakes I made going into entrepreneurship, like I said, was not taking the time to really assess what type of business I wanted to open, how I wanted that to look how I wanted to feel within that, and what my sort of expectation, although I think expectation can be a killer for a lot of things, but really aligning it with my values more than anything. And what I'm here to do on this planet, right? So you might be in your business right now one like and asking yourself, you know, is there a better way or why doesn't this feel that great? Like why do I feel like it's such a struggle. The first place that you want to look at and start with is whether or not the business

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model that you've created is one that's in alignment with who you are. So if you're someone like me, and you want the flexibility, and you want the freedom, and you don't want to be tied down to something, brick and mortar probably isn't the best bet for you, unless you can outsource it and have someone run it for you straight out of the gate, or you have like a two year plan where you're like, Okay, I'm going to work it for two years, and then I'm going to outsource it to somebody else. But that is contingent on your business, making the money right to be able to hire and outsource or at least hire based on the value of the person you need in the business. So if you're hiring, like a store manager, you've got to pay them well to get quality people. So that's the first place I want you to take a look at and ask yourself, have I created a business.

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And I'm offering my products or services in a way that's in full alignment with who I am, if you desire freedom and flexibility, like I said, a brick and mortar is probably not your jam. But if you want to sell products versus services, right, then maybe ecommerce is the place for you to be because then you can do it online. And you don't need to be stuck or, you know, locked into a location so to speak. So that's the first biggest mistake I see so many entrepreneurs make and it's something that I'm seeing so heavily in the online space. And the reason why I think is because we're sold on cookie cutter one size fits all approaches. And that's not just when it comes to marketing and sales or strategy on how to sell and whatnot. But it also goes into the way that your business is structured, right we we see brick and mortar, oh, this is the way it needs to be. And this is how it needs to be structured, or we see online businesses structured in a certain way. If you're an online coach, maybe it's like, Oh, I've got to have this coaching group coaching program, I've got to sell it at high ticket, I've got to have these modules full of a bunch of information. And this is how I need to deliver it in order for it to be a value. And in reality, maybe your value isn't expressed in that capacity. Which brings me to my second biggest mistake I ever made was

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I knew I wanted to transition out of the brick and mortar world. And so what better place to go than to go into the online world.

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My biggest mistake I ever made when I entered in the online world was well, there's probably it's probably twofold if I'm going to be honest, the number one is is that I was looking at my online business as an escape from my offline business. So I was like, Plan B, okay, brick and mortar is not working. Now I'm going to start an online business. And it's kind of coming from a place of escaping, it's similar to leaving corporate and going off, like going into entrepreneurship, right, I wasn't satisfied or fulfilled in my corporate career. So I was looking for an out, I was trying to escape my reality.

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There's nothing good that's going to come from anything, when you're trying to escape something, when you're running away from the thing you're not satisfied with or fulfilled with.

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It's only going to create more havoc and problems in your life. And business down the line might not be right away. But it will have a ripple effect. Because escaping corporate to open my brick and mortar. If I had stopped for a moment and got really clear with why I was unhappy in my corporate career, it would have been really freaking obvious that being tied to a nine to five or tied to attend to six in retail was not in alignment with me that was one of the biggest issues I had with corporate was that I had to go to a physical location every day, I had to clock in and clock out. Even if I got my work done in that period of time in four hours instead of eight. I still had to be there. Right? I had to put in the time. There was there's something so unsettling within me about that is like if I can get it done in four hours, can I leave in four hours but get paid the same? That's where I battled in corporate a lot, right was the structure of the corporate world in a lot of ways. Well, basically what I had done when I went into my brick and mortar was replace my corporate job with a corporate job times two because the amount of work it takes to run a brick and mortar plus produce and sell wine. It's not like I'm selling clothing that can you know, that doesn't require production or heavy lifting or any of that sort of stuff like and production that required daily things right. It wasn't like we couldn't you know, if you had a clothing store, you could close it for a few days and kind of walk away or maybe close it for a week and go on holidays. The brick and mortar winemaking world required us to do different things in the winemaking process on a daily or weekly basis. So to go away for a holiday for a week required somebody had to go there and do the

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production of it right. So, again, if I had taken a moment, and just paused for like, I don't know, a couple months, I say a couple hours. But honestly, if I would have just paused for a moment, slow down and contemplated what I actually really wanted,

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I probably would have come to the awareness that the brick and mortar probably was not the best. A offer product and to business model, it wasn't in alignment with my values and what I desired,

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which then perpetuated into making the exact same freakin decision. When I went into the online world, I was trying to escape my reality in the brick and mortar world, to somehow fix that with another business in the online world. Well, the online world is going to be the thing that solves the problem.

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And that is probably one of the other biggest mistakes that people make is that I'll just do this other thing to fix my current reality, when in reality, that's not how it works, right? You've got to go within yourself first, and gain and garner the awareness of what is actually causing turmoil within you. What are your values? What do you believe in? What do you stand for? What kind of life do you want to create? What path are you on? What journey Do you want to have in this world? What impact do you want to make? These are all questions that we don't stop long enough to ask ourselves, which is a massive mistake that we make, which then has us perpetuating the same things over and over and building businesses that we actually don't really love building businesses that are not sustainable, and building businesses that feel like we're pushing a boulder up a mountain all of the time. And in the online world, what transpired to was the fact that sales and marketing felt really hard. Now, I sell, and my program sell, and I have one to one clients. And I've, I've experienced great success comparatively to other people I know in the industry. And I'm not here to compare. But what I realized was is that the way in which I sold in the offline world, and how effortless it was, I was not experiencing that same effortlessness in the online world.

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And it all boils down to alignment, it all comes down to alignment. And the big one in the online world, for me was the way I was expressing myself when it came to selling my offers, so do I love the offers I'm creating? And do I believe in them? Yeah, absolutely. But where I was getting hung up, was buying into the belief that I needed to invest in somebody else to tell me how to cultivate connection and community with my audience. So I invested in coaches that would show me the strategy to sell online or how to launch write, how to make sales in your business, how to market, how to write, you know, copy, conversion copy, I'm a conversion copywriter, and how to do all of these things. And that's probably the second biggest mistake that most entrepreneurs make that cost them a lot of time and money. And that's, the truth is that we invest his time and money and learning from somebody else, on how to communicate and connect with our people. That before we know it, our message that we're putting out into the world is nowhere near

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who we are and what we stand for, and what we believe in. And I found that to be true in a lot of

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marketing and sales speak or rhetoric. A lot of the communication in the online space doesn't resonate with me and doesn't resonate with a lot of heart centered entrepreneurs, to be honest, because it's very direct selling, right. And why that doesn't resonate with me, is because I feel like it eliminates my creative expression. It's not how I would communicate and connect with somebody. It's not how I would sell. In my offline business. I sold without selling. I just had conversations with people, I developed relationships with people. And I feel like in the online world, we talk about creating connection, and we talk about having conversations and we talk about intimacy with people, but I feel like that's lacking. And I know this is an undercurrent I hear with a lot of my clients is that

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they have this amazing freaking offer that can change people's lives and they believe wholeheartedly in it.

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And then they go to try and sell it and they're like, but I don't I don't want to sell it in this way. But this is the way we're being told we need to sell it like showing up every single day on social media having to be visible in that capacity.

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Are you having to sort of like pump our chests with? I'm the best. I'm I'm like no other coach, I know better than everybody else type of rhetoric that just feels completely depleting to them. And they're looking at me going, Are you telling me I need to send 600 emails a year, I had a client recently say that, to me, she's like, I went to delete my inbox, like to organize it and declutter, which is something that I often encourage my clients to do is declutter space, like your house, or your inboxes, or whatever it is create space for new things to come in new ideas, new collaborations, new clients, you name it. And she was going in to unsubscribe from all of the lists she had joined.

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And when she did that, she realized that somebody had sent her over 600 emails that she hadn't opened all year long, had sent her over 600 emails that year. And she looked at me like literally deer in headlights, and was like, please tell me, I don't need to do that. And yet, this is something that's being sold. Left, right and center in the online world is that you need to be sending people emails every single day, if not every other day for all of eternity. And you need to be posting every single day on social media showing up every day doing stories, you should go live once a week, the whole big one house tip talk is posting three times a day. And

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for me, I bought into that for a while, right, I was like, I need to follow the rules that everybody else is telling me I need to do, and I got results from it. So I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you're not going to get results. However, if you want to actually feel good in your business, which is what this episode is all about is to actually stop feeling like you're pushing a boulder up a mountain and you feel like it's like a hustle and grind to Latin clients and attract clients and sell your products and services, then we need to stop opera, we need to stop operating out of alignment and really move more into alignment. And I know that word is a buzzword.

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But what I mean by that is like full inner harmony within yourself that you are not only in integrity with the offer that you're selling, like you absolutely stand 100% behind it, especially if you're a coach and you're selling people on a method or a way of doing things or whatever, which is a whole nother conversation because that to me, is only perpetuating this cookie cutter one size fits all approach.

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And to that you are speaking and communicating in your business in a way that's in full integrity to who you are.

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And if for at any moment, you stop and ask yourself a question, hmm, I get that I'm supposed to, you know, give people a deadline and tell them if they don't buy by this date that they're not going to have access to this program and the price is going to go up, you know, 1000s of dollars, and they better get in on it. Now.

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That doesn't really feel great. But I'm going to do it because they're telling me this is the way to make sales. And I need to make sales in my business.

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That I want you to pause and really ask yourself because this is where the grind happens, right? And it can happen so subtly. You can be wondering why a sales aren't happening, you can be questioning why clients aren't coming in, in overflow. And it often boils down to offer alignment, whether you're an integrity with your offer, the business model around that, right? Are you delivering what you want to deliver in the way you want to deliver it, regardless of what everybody else says? Or regardless of how everything else was structured. And too, are you communicating and sharing that with your audience in a way that's in full integrity of who you are. Meaning you're very intentional with what you say you're not putting out content just to fill this consistency hamster wheel that, you know most people on social media are on that you're literally thinking about what you're saying before you say it. And if that means pausing for a few days, that means pausing. And this takes extreme amounts of discipline because we live in such a fast paced world where we need to just be constantly going, going, going going. So just stop for a moment. And to pause to really think about what you want to say and let that sort of marinate for a while takes a lot of inner trust and knowing and discipline. So those are two big mistakes that I made, which I know have caused sort of habit havoc in my life and in my business but also have you know, had me investing a ton of time and you know some money into

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Getting the coaching was seeking somebody else giving me the answers to how to build my online business. And for the longest time, I

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felt like I had lost my way in the online world because nothing really felt me. And it wasn't that I didn't believe in my offer, it just it was the way in which I was

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selling, it was probably completely out of alignment. Which brings me to my last and final thing is the strategy piece of it, right, it's like, to me, strategy is just the vehicle in which you're communicating. Podcasting is a vehicle to share my message with the world. Email is just a vehicle to share my message with the world, posting on Instagram, is just a vehicle to share my message with the world. So if you are employing strategies in your business, that are not in alignment with you and your natural way of expressing, for example, really long form emails, right? For a lot of my clients, they love to just verbally talk, have real conversations with people, instead of sitting at a computer and writing I love to write, I equally love to speak like this, right? So I'm total communicator over here, if you don't know by now. And so this is in full alignment to me, but for a lot of people, it's not. And yes, there's one thing of saying, well, you're gonna get better at it, it's a skill, you develop 100% I think that anything like, you know, growing and evolving, and building skill is huge. But that's not what I'm saying here is to avoid things that are going to take work or, you know, require you to build a new skill or whatever. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, is that, you know, in your own way, how you want to build your business, and the beauty of the online world nowadays is you can do it however the heck you want. There's so many ways you can grow your business. And what we need more of. And we're going to talk more about this in the upcoming shows is like, we need more creativity and innovation in the online world, specifically when it comes to the coaching industry, the consulting the service based industry. So

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from that, I want to leave you with this, you know, two big mistakes I made were

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pursuing things that were not in alignment, which ultimately wreak havoc over time, right. And so, I want to offer you this,

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I would love for you to walk away from this episode and ask yourself and identify where you are when it comes to alignment in your business. So first things first is, number one, offer alignment.

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Are you in alignment with your offer, the essence of it, the mission behind it, the work that you do, the way in which it's delivered the promises that you're making?

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Are you in alignment with that? Or have you developed a promise around what you do to meet an industry standard? For a lot of soulful coaches, heart centered businesses, it often looks like creating one big tangible result, when in reality, the work that you do is esoteric and very unique to each person, and there is no big tangible result, like 10k months, or I'm going to help you lose 50 pounds. So take a look at your offer.

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And identify

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if you're in alignment there.

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And another question I think is really, you know, important to ask is, Is this how you want to be spending your time?

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If you won the lottery?

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Would you still be doing this work? And in this way?

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And if the answer is no.

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Then there's a ton of work there for you to do around getting connected to your work, and the importance of it and the mission you're here to do on this planet.

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The second piece of this is your messaging or communication and how you communicate and how you articulate what you do. Are you in alignment there? Or are you speaking in a way putting your work into words in a way that is not in resonance with you? And a lot of marketing and sales speak doesn't resonate with people, especially heart centered business owners, but for a lot of business owners. They're like I hate marketing and sales, the language around how you're connecting and communicating with your audience. Is this how you would naturally do it?

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Or are you trying to fit yourself into the right way of doing it?

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And then the third one is strategy alignment.

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The vehicle you're using to connect with your audience

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is this the vehicle that you would use, if you knew for 100% Certainty it worked.

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Meaning is social media, the place you want to hang out with hanging out at? or is podcasting, or you want to hang out in your inbox? Or is it a combination of all of them.

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And, of course, the type of people that you want to connect with will make an impact. For example,

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if you're a brick and mortar, social media might not be as important as maybe some physical signage and different things like that, or trade shows, local trade shows or getting on the local radio or whatever that looks like, that might be your way of connecting versus spending a ton of time on social. But if you're building an online business of any capacity, having online visibility is important. So thinking about how you want to connect with your people, the type of people you want to connect with. And again, getting really clear on those people and not from like, well, if I picked this person, this will work. You know, it's like, all of these pieces have to be in alignment.

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And not to say that they have to be in alignment for you to see success, because I think you can be out of alignment, like I shared, I was highly out of alignment when it came to the business model in my brick and mortar, and I still sold hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year, right. So it's not going to like like you don't need to get in alignment all the ducks in a row for you to experience success. You're always manifesting things towards you. However, if you want to do it in a more effortless way that doesn't feel like such a slog, then when you get into alignment with offer your messaging and your strategy,

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then things become easier. It's when we're out of alignment in certain points. In our business, when it comes to offer messaging or strategy is when things feel hard, feels like we have to effort a lot, right? We're not in flow.

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So I'm gonna leave you with that with some contemplation and those questions to sort of really identify where you're at. And what will probably become aware as you do that is going hmm,

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I'm, you know, I'm out of alignment when it comes to the strategy and the way in which I communicate. And I also find that it's really hard to connect with my audience, which will make sense, right? If you're out of alignment with your, you know, your offer, if you don't believe in your offer,

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it might feel like a slog there to, to deliver it right to get behind selling it. So I'm going to leave you with those questions. And what we're going to do over the next couple of weeks is I'm going to be sharing with you how to how to get more in alignment with your offer with your messaging, with your strategy, how to really do that, because at the end of the day, how you connect and communicate with your audience

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is the linchpin to selling more and making more in your business, right? If we can't communicate the value of what we do, when it comes to offer, and do it in a way that feels good, we're gonna have a hard time selling anything. So I'm gonna leave you with that hope that's helped give some sort of clarity and also some insight into my own entrepreneurial journey and the mistakes and sort of issues that I've experienced and some aha and awakenings. I've had the opportunity of going through and coming out the other end so to speak.

So hope you guys have a fab rest of your day week, wherever you're coming in from and I cannot wait to connect with you next week. Cheers