[social_warfare]

SHOW NOTES

Are you afraid of failure?

In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with being afraid of failure.
I’m willing to bet that the majority of people in this world are afraid of failure too.

As you and your company grow, you find things that work.

You get in a groove of doing the same thing over and over and as a result, you get:

– Afraid of failing.
– Afraid of wasting money.
– Afraid of trying something that might not work.

But in failing, you learn and you continue to grow.

And there’s a lot of value in putting a percentage of your time and money and energy into just trying something.

That’s what the formula to successful marketing is all about.
Testing
Refining
Repeating.

No matter what level of business you are at, you must be willing to learn from your trials, errors, and failures.

So that’s what this episode is all about, the value in failure and how if you’re not willing to fail, you’re doing it wrong.

Key Points: 

[2:04] Today I’m going to talk about failing
[3:01] I think there’s a lot of value in putting a percentage of your time and money and energy into just trying something.
– a lot of times we’re looking for answers and guarantees.
[6:20] There’s value in trying this because if I don’t try this, I’ll never know.
[10:36] I just think that is so important as a reminder that no matter what, as you grow and as you find things that work, you don’t get stuck in a groove of doing the same thing over and over and over again.
– Yes, do the same thing and have focus, but be willing to add in little elements and little things that you can try and you can shift and you can use to make things better.
[12:11] So you can’t change everything but be willing to try something that you might fail at because in the failing you learn and you continue to grow and that is so important.
– No matter what level of business you are at, that you’re still willing to fail and you’re still willing to put yourself out there…
[13:18] So that means you have to be willing to have space to be creative and to try things.
– Nobody, not a coach, not a program, not a mentor, not somebody putting content out there has the answer for what you should do with your business.
[16:45] Don’t try 50 ideas at once, but be willing to try an idea that might sound a little crazy or it might not work, and see what happens
– change one variable at a time and see what you can push in your business, especially if you have something working already.

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Emily Hirsh: 

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today. I hope you’re having a great week, a productive week. I have a little bit of childcare help this week and it feels like heaven. I haven’t had that in a couple of months with young kids and I definitely took it for granted before, because we cannot do this alone. We were meant to be in tribes or something, you know, raising kids. It’s really true that it takes a village and today parents are expected to do this by themselves as the norm, which is very hard. So if you were in that boat in the last couple of months, I am with you and there were a lot of silver linings. I got some more time with my kids and quality time and we’re going to change some things and not go back to the way we were before because of it. But there were also some hard days in there. So I see the light at the end of the tunnel right now by starting to get some childcare help and house help again. I’m so thankful for that. 

Today I’m going to talk about failing and I was reflecting on this actually, sometimes podcast ideas come to me when I’m falling asleep. It’s the weirdest thing. A lot of things come to me when I’m falling asleep. The brain is so cool, but I like I’ll be literally half asleep, like falling asleep and I’ll be like, Oh, we got to do this. We’re like, Oh, this is a great idea. Or Oh, this is a podcast topic I needed to talk about and I will pull my phone out, pull my notes out and write it down. And that happens to me like a lot. And so a lot of podcast episodes have come from this. This is one, that I was reflecting on because, because I was going through this. So I think as you grow, you grow your company and you find things that work, you get in a rut of like not a rut, but you get in a groove of like doing the same thing and, and you’re like almost get afraid of failing, afraid of, of wasting money, trying something that might not work. And I think there’s a lot of value in almost putting a percentage of your time and money and energy into just trying something. Because a lot of times we’re looking for answers and guarantees. 

I get questions all the time where someone’s like, well, like, should I do this or is this the right option? Or is this, you know, the strategy I should use or the audience I should target or the Facebook ad I should do. And I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know until you try it. I don’t have the answer. The data always has the answers. So at my company we’ve been doing more frequent live webinars and they’ve been working very well for us. But what I was reflecting on was how cool the process is of test, refine, repeat, which I’ve talked about the formula to successful marketing and how that never stops and the process of like trying something and then you have like so many awesome things that came from it, but you’re like, but I could fix this one thing and then you do it again. And it just keeps getting better. And that’s one of the real benefits of focusing on one strategy, one funnel, one offer. Because you can keep improving what you’re doing instead of starting over at square one. So I want to tell you a story of what we did and it was very much like we could totally fail and waste money or it’s going to be really awesome and we don’t know until we try it.

So on one of my most recent webinars, we changed up the application that we have for clients. So the call to action on the webinar is to book an application, in order to go through an application to book a call because we’re selling high ticket agency services. So we changed up the application and I just had this idea talking to someone and I was like, what if we reframe the application to an assessment? What if we change it to an assessment? And after somebody goes through they get like an assessment result. So they go through their marketing assessment, and they get results, but we’re positioning our application as an assessment and we had to change the questions in the verbiage and everything in order to do that. And let’s just see if we get more applications. But the thing is they still have to be quality because we’re filtering a lot of people out because we don’t want to do calls with the wrong fit people cause it’s a waste of time for them and it’s a waste of time for us.

So we did a webinar and we changed up. We’re like, let’s do it. My team’s great at being like all in and we had to do a fast turnaround. This is where the urgency plays. I talk about this a lot, but where you have to just jump on something. And here’s the thing. We did this with like no idea if it was going to work or be worse than the last one. What we knew was my webinar converted. We knew that we were getting a good cost per lead to the webinar cost per registration. So we kept a lot of things the same, but we’re like, let’s test this thing. And we didn’t know how it was going to work. We also didn’t know how those leads would convert until they went through the process, until we tried it on the webinar until people booked calls.

And then until we had those calls and we saw the sales results. And so I want to point out I spent $6,000 on that webinar and I don’t think I would have wasted like all $6,000, but I definitely could have lost money. And I was willing to be like, there’s value in trying this because if I don’t try this, I’ll never know. And it could be like a genius idea or it could be a terrible idea and we could get poor quality leads who don’t end up booking calls. Like I didn’t know. And I was willing to fail. I was willing to do something that I maybe lost some money on or, and tried it and it didn’t work. And let me tell you the result of it and then I’ll tell you something else that kind of inspired this too.

So the result of it was that it worked and it did work really well. We’re actually going to shift it just a little bit for the next webinar so we’re not going to keep calling it an assessment. We’re going to reposition it as a qualification because we did feel like that worked better in terms of getting quality people and were able to shift our questions around a little bit. But we’re still going to include the emails that we had put in there that do assess people with where they are and what their next steps need to be, and then where they should go both working with us, but also with their own marketing and we give them resources and stuff. So we’re going to do a hybrid. But we learned from and it worked. But there’s things we still want to change to make it even better.

So it didn’t fail, it didn’t knock it out of the park, but it could have totally failed and I could have wasted money on a webinar that didn’t convert, so I was willing to fail. Also at the same time, I am in Inner Circle with Russell Brunson and he was talking about how he was trying to be more content based and create content basically like kind of like, I guess Jay Shetty, but where you just put out content, it doesn’t really have a call to action and it’s just meant to like inspire people and go viral or be really sharable or just reach a lot of people, but it doesn’t have like a point to it. And he was like, it felt really weird to me because I’m so used to like doing videos that have a call to action and they have you know, a place that I’m sending them to.

And it was, this was more of like an emotional video and you might’ve seen what he put out, like it was out there. And so he came back to Inner Circle and was like, this is what I tried. This is what I learned, you know, here’s what I would do when I do it again. And I was like, that’s so cool. I mean, look at Russell who has a, you know, tens of millions, a hundred million plus dollar company. I don’t even know the evaluation right now, where he’s still coming up with things and ideas that he’s willing to fail on. And I reflected back to their, um, viral commercial they created like, I don’t know, it was probably two and a half years ago, if you remember that, where they worked with the Harmon brothers who co-created the poopery commercial and those different marketing angles.

So they worked with the Harmon brothers, created this commercial to try and create this viral video to reach people who had no idea what a funnel was. That was the premise behind it. And again, he spent a lot of money on it. For him, it’s like a purse, you know, he was, they were there making a ton of money. So to spend a lot of money, to me, I think they spent like a million dollars or something on it, but that would be a ton for me. But in perspective to his size of business, it’s, you know, a good amount to spend on something like that, but spent a ton of money on it and he really didn’t know the results of it. He didn’t know if his video was going to go viral. He didn’t know if it was going to work and he knew going into it like I’m going to learn from this, I’m going to try this. I’m going to see how it goes. 

I just think that is so important as a reminder that no matter what, as you grow and as you find things that work, you don’t get stuck in a groove of doing the same thing over and over and over again. Yes, do the same thing and have focus, but be willing to add in little elements and little things that you can try and you can shift and you can use to make things better. And so don’t get confused with how much I talk about focus and the importance of having, you know, one thing that doesn’t mean adding in little tweaks and shifts to your actual funnel and strategy to see if it works better than what you were doing. You should still stay open to those possibilities as long as you’re not doing like 50 things. 

So here would be like a bad thing I could have done for that webinar I was referencing, so we tried, the only thing we changed was the actual assessment that we were sending people to. So instead of an application, we changed the questions, we changed the way that it was delivered and we changed the way it was positioned on the webinar. Okay. What I didn’t change was the webinar title, the webinar messaging, pretty much the webinar presentation. I did change a few things just because I was like, I know this could make it better from my last presentation in terms of content, we didn’t, you know, the offer, we didn’t change all the factors. What would have been a mistake is if I would have said, okay, let’s try the assessment and I’m going to sell a new offer, different webinars, title, different content, fully different messaging because then if something worked, I wouldn’t know what was it, what’s the different webinar title was it the different content was the offer?

So you can’t change everything but be willing to try something that you might fail at because in the failing you learn and you continue to grow and that is so important. No matter what level of business you are at, that you’re still willing to fail and you’re still willing to put yourself out there and have an experience where maybe you lose some money or maybe you embarrassing yourself or maybe it doesn’t work and you feel like, dang, I just wasted that time and energy and money. That’s okay because in that comes something good. And so anything we do and, and you know like this example of Russell where he came back and was like, I tried this video. I don’t, we didn’t like go viral with it. Here’s what we’re going to do better. You know, he had an experience where it didn’t work out exactly how we maybe planned it too, but he still learned from it and was able to have growth from it. And at the end of the day, that’s what we’re continually trying to do is grow. We’re trying to be better tomorrow than we were today in our business and you know, the way we do things. So that means you have to be willing to have space to be creative and to try things. And you, I just want to remind you that nobody, not a coach, not a program, not a mentor, not somebody putting content out there has the answer for what you should do when you are business. I want you to really hear what I’m saying because so often people come and they’re like, should I do this or should I do this? Or what should I do? Tell me exactly what to do. And you might take that person’s advice and throw another idea away. And that person with the best intention is giving you the advice of what they think is going to work best.

And you know, I do that, right? Like I’m like, here’s my advice, but I don’t know. Because at the end of the day, we all have different businesses, different offers, different audiences. What works for me might not work for you or what works for you may not work for me and I only have my perspective that I’m sharing with you. So you have to be willing to find the answers on your own about what works. And if you’re at the beginning of the stages of your business, that means buying data, that means trying funnels that might fail, trying a webinar that might flop, trying ad copy that you think is awesome, but then it doesn’t convert. All of those things are part of the process and the only way to get to the other side of things converting. And then even going beyond that and having even better conversions and better luck and better success is by doing. Is by testing and then refining and then doing it again and again and again.

And as you grow, you keep doing it on a smaller scale. But at the beginning you’re testing everything. You’re testing your webinar title, your offer, your messaging, your funnel, your strategy, all of it. And you have to be willing to fail. So you must, as you grow, continue to be willing to fail. And there’s a lot of times where I’ll have a team member come to me with an idea where they’re like, Hey, you know, I had this idea, here it is, and I’m like, great, let’s try it. Let’s try it. It’ll tell us if it works or not. We’ll see from the data we’ll see from the result. And because I don’t have all the answers. Your job as a CEO and a leader is not to have all the answers and not to go find all the exact answers for you. Because I’ve seen things work for one business that do not work for another, and this is especially true in marketing because everybody has a unique business and a unique offer.

So that is my message to you about you have to be willing to fail. You have to continue to be willing to fail because pushing ourselves outside of that comfort zone, outside of that place of like guaranteed success or guaranteed that it’s going to work is where we find the growth and where we find those golden nuggets of things that I was like, man, if I didn’t try that thing, it would have never led to this and this and then this wouldn’t have happened. How many times have you been in that situation where it’s like, I didn’t see all these things that you know had to happen in order for this to happen, but it did have to happen this way and I had to try those things. And so you’ve got to be willing to fail and if you’re not, you’re holding yourself back from probably opportunity.

All right guys, thanks so much for listening. I’d love to hear what you thought about this and if this gave you any inspiration or ideas in your own business. Remember focus is important. I don’t want to take away from that in this episode, so stay focused. Don’t try 50 ideas at once, but be willing to try an idea that might sound a little crazy or it might not work, and see what happens and change you know, one variable at a time and see what you can, what you can push in your business, especially if you have something working already. What can you add to just do it even better to just get it working even better. Thanks so much for tuning in today, guys. I will see you in the next episode