What I learned this year (part 2)

This morning, Steph sent us a voice memo thanking us for being part of her biz world this year and how grateful she was for the two of us.

This is my new favorite thing! It took her 45 seconds to send a voice memo, and it’s the easiest networking touch point that makes someone’s day.

Before the end of the year, I challenge you to think of 3-5 of the people who made the biggest impact on you this year and send them the modern-day equivalent of a thank you card - a 60-second voice memo.

Last week, I wrote part 1 of this series (with things 1 & 2), go back and read that after you finish this email if you missed it.

TLDR: I’m looking back at a few of the major things we launched/did this year to compare why we did them and what I learned.

#3 Marketing Agency - the most expensive ‘stable income’

In 2022 we launched a marketing agency, signed on a sunglasses company for just shy of $10k, and rapidly learned we hadn’t set ourselves up for success at all… and amicably ended our contract one month early.

So… why did we choose to try again?

• Sub-contractor: one of our big lessons from the first time is we loved the strategy side, but creating & posting on a daily basis was draining for us. This time, we partnered with a coaching client of ours who was expanding her Social Media Management company to do the management, and we’d do the strategy.

• That elusive ‘stable income’: as a business with its origins in the wedding industry, we’ve almost always fiscally operated a business where any dollar we made was a new sale. The idea of consistent or recurring income is very enticing as we’re thinking about growing or more ambitious projects that take time before you see income results.

The stats:

• Months running an agency: 3

• Number of clients: 2

• Average monthly rate: $1400

• Session upsells: $5000

• After paying a contractor our per hourly rate: Not great

What I learned:

• Admin is time-consuming: The way we set it up we’d only be doing the strategy at the beginning of each month, then passing off the creation & management. But every week we ended up being looped into content reviews, answering clarifying questions about the strategy, and routine client communication. This could have all been fixed by reworking our responsibilities & pricing.

• The client came first: Creatively we’d find ourselves pouring into our clients’ strategy and content ideas each week, at the cost of our own socials. We would just be worn out and the thing that used to be creatively fun just became a draining task. It was minimizing what used to be a differentiator for our brand.

• It could have been a great biz: Within weeks I knew exactly why a lot of people love running agencies, it wouldn’t be that “hard” to scale to a 6 figure annual business within a few months. If you’re the type of person who likes turning out content for clients, super organized, and happy to make other people shine. Sadly this also meant that I saw fairly quickly that scaling an agency (personally) didn’t align with getting us to where we wanted to be long term.

• Every day builds towards something: if you imagine your life as building towards something. Every day, you can imagine you’re placing one brick on the building that will be your life’s achievement. During those three months, I felt like we were building the wrong building, and we just ended up having to rebuild most of that. We got way more granular on what our 12-month and 5-year goals were after this.

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#4 Cancel the launches - one offer Nov & Dec

Coming out of winding down our agency V2 in June, we were full of ideas. We were back to pouring our creativity into our own business, and we were slowly marching toward clarity on what we wanted to do.

We were still iterating Capturing Luxury (that we talked about in part 1), but we had a clear idea that we were moving into our educating and coaching era. So why did we cancel everything to focus just on our new coaching offer Your Big Shift?

• I burnt out: By the end of October, I had spent literal weeks building out, revising, practicing, and recording PowerPoint presentations for 2 courses, and an in-person speaking event. That in total netted us a couple hundred dollars…

• It was the winning horse: In two weeks, Your Big Shift sold more income for the year than we had in two whole months of launching something new almost every other week. Why not double down?

• It’s what lit me up: At the end of the day, I love coaching. I’d been wanting to focus on it ever since I joined the company. And it felt like our amazing clients were already seeing measurable impact. I wanted to double down.

The stats:

• Slides in the deck for Irresistible Offers (course): 127

• Total Income from first 2 weeks of YBS launch: $10,500

What I learned:

• Balance matters: We frequently tell our coaching clients that it’s okay to pace yourself, and make sure that they’re doing things in a sustainable way. But it’s oftentimes easy to be blind when you’re not doing things yourself. I’ve now started using Jo as a sounding board about how I’m doing to prevent getting “lost” or not listening to our own advice.

• Good enough is better than perfect: It’s a cliche statement, but to some extent, we were launching a bunch of stuff to build the “perfect” offer. But seeing traction on an offer was a good check-in point, that maybe we could slow down and do this for a bit before moving on.

• The world didn’t burn down: During the pandemic, it felt like the business mantra was “momentum”, as long as you kept going you’d stay in business. You couldn’t slow down. When we slimmed down, honestly not much changed. But Jo did get to do a 30-day content challenge, and we got to pour into our amazing clients, and help family move across the country.

What did you learn this year? Hit reply I’d love to chat about it

Lyndon

Ps we’re in prepping for the 2025 season - have you considered a biz coach to help you achieve your goals? (or even figuring out what your goals are…) We’re offering the first coaching call for free so that you can ‘test drive’ coaching with us before making any commitment. Hit reply, let’s chat about your big plan for next year!