#79: How to Love What You Are Building
This isn't what I expected.
I don't know if I want to do this anymore.
I've built a business that I can't stand.
How do I know that I'm going to like what I'm building?
These are pretty common questions that entrepreneurs ask. And it's sometimes difficult to know if you are just in a challenging time in your business, or if you are working on the wrong stuff.
In this episode, I’m going to share how to know if you're on the path that is going to bring you joy at the end of the day or if you're heading down the wrong road.
Plus- I’ll talk about one of my favorite books that shaped my perspective on this very topic, The Dip, by Seth Godin.
Check out my new free training on www.yournextmillion.me, where several of my seven figure clients and colleagues share what they're doing in the next year to scale their businesses to the multi-million dollar mark and beyond.
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Laura (00:00)
This isn't what I expected. I don't know if I want to do this anymore. I've built a business that I can't stand. How do I know that I'm going to like what I'm building? These are pretty common questions that entrepreneurs ask. And it's sometimes difficult to know if you are just in a challenging time in your business, or if you are working on the wrong stuff. And here I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what it means to know how you're going to really know whether or not you're on the path that is going to bring you joy at the end of the day.
Seth Godin, one of my favorite marketing authors, wrote a fun little book called The Dip, which is a book that teaches you when to quit and when to stick. And the book summarized is winners quit the right stuff at the right time. People settle for good enough, instead of best because a lot of times we get impatient through the dip. And actually being well-rounded is not the secret to success. Doing less better, and so really to be the superstar you don't have to do anything exceptional. You just have to survive what is called the dip, which is a really, really difficult time when we're frustrated.
If I'm honest, I'm going through the dip myself right now, when it comes to my tennis game, and I get frustrated at myself. I don't want to play anymore, but I do want to play. I want to be good like I used to be, and all of the round and round we go. Right? The decision to quit or not is that real simple evaluation. Is the pain of the dip worth the benefit of the light at the end of the tunnel? The frustration of losing a great employee. The frustration of realizing that you've got to make a switch on something that you thought was done. Is it worth the benefit of what you see possible? Do you still believe in the possibility of what you're working on in order to get through the really tough moments?
Quitting as a short-term strategy is a bad idea. But quitting for the long term, meaning that you don't think that the pain that you're going through right now is going to help you get to where you want to be is an excellent idea, because it actually frees you up to excel at something else. This is the book that I read when I was deciding whether or not to shut down my old company. And I had realized that because of the long term, and when I say long game of growing a franchise business to a place of profitability, which is typically an eight to 10 year process, I had decided that it wasn't worth what it was going to take time, energy away from my family to get to that point. And I decided that the quitting for the long-term was what I wanted to do. But I knew anything I go through right now is just a tough moment to get to where I want to be.
And when you look down the road, it's important to know what the long term could be possible for you. You need to know if the long term is truly extraordinary, because for many of us we're going through a challenging dip, but we don't know whether or not there's something extraordinary on the other side of it. And that can be a really concerning thought that I want to see if I can help you with today.
The main reason why we end up on a path that we don't know that we'll love is we're following somebody else's formula. We follow their advice. They say, "You should do it this way." You say, "Well, it works, so I should do it." But without a deep understanding of what's actually behind that advice, what it requires, how much time it takes, whether it's time spent doing something that you enjoy. For example, if you love writing content and you are a more of an introverted person and you just enjoy tinkering and playing with things, then maybe building out funnels is something that you'd like. But if you're a high quick start, an extrovert, and you would prefer just to go live and launch all the time, then building out a funnel is going to feel very slow and painful for you.
And it's not one right way or another. It's just what is a good fit for you and your personality. And a lot of times this isn't spoken about in the online space because formulas tend to create great results. Right? If we know that we're on a path that's proven, we follow it, we get a great result. There's a lot of validity in that. And at the same time, I think it's really worth understanding that there's a component of this, which is you, your personality, what you like, what seems fun. Because the truth is everything works and everything is work. Funnels work, launches work, evergreen works. It all works. It's really a matter of what you enjoy doing.
Looking at what, how does this look like when I've reached the, when I've "made it." When I've gotten to seven figures, eight figures. What does this actually look like? And observe and brainstorm. What is that light at the end of the tunnel? What is that extraordinary place, and how would I spend my time? For example, certain business models will require you to build a big team. If you don't want to have a big team, then don't build a business that would require it of you. For example, any type of group coaching program is going to require you to have lots and lots of coaches. If you don't have lots of staff, that's probably not a great fit.
Some of you are drained by being around people. Whereas there's certain types of businesses that require a lot of interaction from you on a daily basis. Some of you love to create content, and you're happy to create content. You want to create content all the time. And I will tell you having anything evergreen is going to require a lot of content from you because when you're running traffic to only an evergreen offer, it fatigues quickly. You have to update courses very often. It is not a set it and forget it. But if you enjoy being at your computer and getting some things done on a regular basis, then anything that requires a lot of updating is going to be something that you may want to prioritize as you grow your business.
Anything with a high volume of customers, anything that is going to be lower ticket, higher volume is going to require you to be able to heavily invest in traffic. Not just one traffic source, but multiple traffic sources. You can see where I'm going with this. It really, really depends on what type of audience size you're up for. For somebody who's very high ticket, only needs maybe 20, 30 customers a year to get to seven figures, you don't need a huge audience size. If you're going to be selling lots and lots of $37 products, you're going to need a huge audience.
If you know that within your price point, you're going to need five to seven coaches, that's a good thing to think about. Do I want to mentor coaches? Do I want to go through that hiring process? Is that something that I will enjoy? And I think what happens is that people end up in the dip too long because they think, "I don't want to do that. And I'll move on to the other thing." Whereas every single type of business model, every single type of container has pros and cons. It's a matter of whether or not it's the pro and con for you. Thinking also that if you have a product that needs a large audience size, there's a higher initial investment to get it out the door.
Something that might be automated. It might have less of a coaching component. Might have a higher customer service component. I think again just looking at, if you're not sure exactly how to visualize what the long term looks like of what you're building, look at a few people who have built what you are aspiring to. Watch them. Look at their social media. See when they're live. Look at how much they work. Study them from the outside. With the amount of transparency on people's lives that we can see on social media, you can really get a sense of, what are they doing on a regular basis? What kind of activities are they engaging on? What's the size of their
staff? What is their staff doing? And then you could say, gosh, I could imagine myself having that kind of business, or I really can't.
And I can speak to my own experience in this in that early on in the online space, I joined a coaching program because I didn't know a lot about how the different business models work yet. And I really was just getting used to the online coaching business, and I joined it. And this was somebody who I realized worked all the time. She was live at seven in the morning. She was live at eight at night. And I realized that it wasn't the lifestyle that I necessarily wanted. When I met Frank Kern, I looked in his lifestyle, a lot of freedom, a lot of flexibility, a lot of time to tinker around and do other things as a high ticket, low volume consultant.
And I thought that sounds pretty good to me. And so I followed his path and I was very, very happy with the outcome. I love my consulting clients. I am so happy with the work that I do. I would call them friends, and it is truly a joy to run. For somebody else, they don't enjoy one-to-one. They want to get away from it. It drains them. They don't like it. Whereas the relationships that I am able to build with my one-on-one clients energize me. It really just depends on the type of person that you are.
What I have found is that when you look at it from the outside, you look at somebody who has an automated course, or you look at somebody who has a lot of time freedom because they have a huge membership. That requires a bigger upfront investment that a lot of people don't talk about, of time, of money. And it also requires a machine on the backend to keep everything running. Whereas, a one-to-one consultancy or an agency or something where you are really just delivering your genius on a regular basis takes a lot less to get up and running. That's why it's so, so important to understand the amount of time and money that it's going to take for you to get to where you want to be. And are you happy with what the final destination looks like once you get there? Are you comfortable with the upfront it will require?
How do you know if you're going to like what you're building? The first is to look at what the short-term pain looks like to get to that long-term destination. The second is to know what that reality of the day to day of that long term destination. And the third is to know yourself, to have a pretty good idea of things that light you up and bring you joy and the things that drain you. And if the reason why you want to stop or quit is emotional it’s likely time for a reframe.
I recommend making a list if you're feeling frustrated about the things you love and that light you up and get you excited, and then the things that drain you and that you wish that weren't on your plate. And even if you hired it, it's still something that you need to be responsible for.
Takes the high level of self-awareness and to a certain degree, experimentation that I recommend. If you are curious more about The Dip, we will put that book in the show notes. And here is to you building your most dreamy life ever as an entrepreneur, enjoying the benefits of the online space.
The Scale with Joy podcast dives into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company to the million dollar mark and beyond. Each week, we follow the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts and leaders - sharing behind the scenes stories of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned-all while building their multi-million dollar empires.