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Emily Hirsh:

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are crushing it this week and having a fabulous start to your week, going into the holidays soon. Lots to do. I know for me, every year I am like, okay, things are going to slow down and I will have a slow month. But actually this time of year is very busy for us for a few reasons. Number one, of course, with the holidays there’s Black Friday, there’s holiday promotions with advertising, that makes it very busy. And then number two, it’s usually a very busy time for our business. We actually get a lot of new clients and students during this time, which I kind of shared on a past podcast of where you can actually do really well in business right now. It’s not a slow period, just because it’s the holiday.

As people are still buying, people are still signing up for services. People still are evaluating their life, and their business, and their health, and making decisions based on where they’re at. So it is always a very busy time and I have to be very intentional with my time because of course I don’t want the holidays to just fly by, and all of a sudden it’s the new year and I didn’t enjoy them. So I’m very intentional with making time to be with my family, to take some time off, to reflect, to give myself some time and space. I think we’re going to Santa Cruz for Thanksgiving, so I am excited for that! For those of you guys who haven’t been to Santa Cruz, it’s awesome because it’s in California and it’s like a mix of mountains and beach, which it’s almost impossible to find that.

So it’s super beautiful. We’re renting a house there and meeting most of my family there for Thanksgiving. And then we’re staying here for Christmas, three kids and traveling, Christmas, has just become impossible. All the presents, all the things that you have to haul, just, no thanks. My family is all in California, which kind of makes me sad. I don’t want to be living in California, but I do wish I was closer to my family for the holidays, but we are going to be together for Thanksgiving. So I have maybe a little bit of a rant podcast to talk about, but I think in the end, this is going to be really helpful for all of you guys. And I’ve definitely talked about this before on the podcast, but I’m going to be really bold with it today and blunt. This is something that I think I’m going to talk about in a little bit different of an angle and also share how this has impacted me recently.

So one thing I’ve talked a lot about is the fact that there’s no such thing as cookie cutter marketing and templated marketing, where you could say, “oh, this strategy, or this blueprint, or this funnel, or this offer, or this business model is exactly what I should do in my business, and I should go take that cookie cutter template and go apply it.” And the problem is a few things. Number one, that’s what most business owners want, right? Because that’s the easy way. If only there was a cookie cutter template that would guarantee it would work for you in your business. If you just implemented it, we would all be very successful easily with not a lot of effort. That’s one of the problems. The second problem is, there’s a lot of people out there teaching that this is possible. They sell courses, they teach programs, they have masterminds and they teach you that, “I am going to give you my blueprint and you should go copy that exact thing.”

And while I understand the intention behind it, and there is a lot of value in understanding someone’s blueprint, or process, or foundation, what needs to happen is everybody needs to pivot from saying, “I’m going to take this exact blueprint, and I’m going to take this exact process and go replicate it in my business. But instead learn how to think like a marketer, think like a CEO, think strategically and take ideas and then mold them to your business. And my experience when I coach our students and I talk with clients around this. A lot of times the questions I get asked are, “here’s a strategy or here’s something I heard was a good idea.” Or, “I saw this, do you think I should do it in my business?” And then they usually follow it up with, “I was thinking I could do X, Y, Z, or I could shift it this way, or I want to do this, or I don’t think it’s going to work because of this.”

So most of the time you guys have the answer, you guys don’t trust yourself enough to make marketing decisions. But at the end of the day, marketing is connection with your audience. It’s building trust with your audience and at least you should know better than most people know. Now, does that mean, of course there’s expert marketers and there’s people who are going to help you. If you hire, for example, our team, we’re going to help you make more strategic marketing decisions, but we would never say, “Hey, we’re going to use this template. It’s what every single one of our clients is using, and you should use it exactly.” That doesn’t exist. And when you go analyze any successful business owner, when I look at friends that I have who have 30 plus million dollar companies, when I read books around, I just finished the book written by the Nike founders shoe dog.

So good. You guys, so good. It was his memoir. I don’t always like memoirs, but because I like to have value, I want to be taught something, oh my God, such a good book. But when you look at books, or you look at stories, or you study success, right? It’s never from a template. It’s never from a cookie cutter template. They made it their own. They took foundational concepts and I read a ton,  so you’ll start to realize that there are themes and there are foundational things that work across multiple companies that you should implement. But every single success story that you’re going to see has made it their own. And so what’s killing your success is a few things. But the biggest thing that I’m talking about here is taking ideas, taking templates, blueprints strategies, funnels, marketing, hacks, and going and implementing those exactly in your business.

And I’ve talked about this before, but I want to back it up with one other thing. Now, if you’re anything like me, this is what happens to me when I hear of a good idea. If I hear of a good idea, and someone comes to me and I have team members who do this, and obviously it’s always with good intention, if someone comes to me and says, “oh my gosh, I just saw this idea. I saw this thing that so-and-so did, usually another successful marketer or business owner, we have to do this.” I feel instantly overwhelmed because I am an implementer. When I hear a good idea, I feel like I’m missing out every day forward where I don’t go implement that idea. So I don’t know if you guys feel like that too, but that’s how I feel. So I feel instantly overwhelmed and I find myself, if I’m not intentional and conscious around this, I will start.

I’m such an executor. I’m such an implementer that I don’t always give myself the time to slow down and be like, “that’s a good idea, but let me sit on it. Let me think through it. Let me think about the factors that could contribute to that idea,” which I’ll share with you in a second. Let me decide if that is actually something we should implement, I will jump into, “oh, that’s a good idea. Let me get it on our planning. Let me figure out what it would take to get it done.” And I’m moving so fast that I don’t actually consider how to customize that idea. Or if that idea is even good for us. And a lot of times with ideas, I’m going to give you some hard examples in a second. So you can bring context to this, but a lot of times, ideas you’re getting like the idea, because it was successful and you’re seeing it from the outside, but you’re not getting the context around that idea or that strategy.

So yes, it is not good to take a blueprint or a template strategy or somebody’s exact process and go implement that exact thing in your business without thinking about it. But also maybe you’re not even going and executing that, but you’re actually letting it take away your time and your focus just by trying to start to execute it or feel like you are running around in circles. Like that shiny object syndrome of, “oh my gosh, I need a Facebook group. I need a podcast. I need this type of funnel. I need a webinar. I need a lead magnet. Emily said that we should do this. So-and-so said I should do this.” And it’s actually taking your focus and you’re not implementing anything. So I think some of us think, well, “I don’t do that. I don’t implement cookie cutter templates and strategies into my business. I always make it my own.”

Maybe you’re not actually implementing it, but maybe you’re allowing it to take up your brain space to actually start to implement it and let those ideas kind of flood your mind, which takes away from your focus. So that’s something that I recently experienced and if I’m experiencing it, you guys are for sure experiencing it cause I’m very good at being focused. So before I talk about these exact ideas, I want to share some things you need to take into consideration. When you hear of a good strategy or a funnel or a process or a blueprint or whatever it is, you need to pause and ask yourself, “what is the audience that this offers strategy blueprint was put towards? What’s the offer? What’s the price of that offer? What’s the structure of that offer? Was it warm traffic or cold traffic? Does that business already have a following or were they brand new?”

Those are all very important factors to consider when you’re looking at a strategy. I have seen many times, so many times, successful influencers and entrepreneurs teach a strategy that worked for them purely because they already had a following. And that’s the only reason. They could have done a lot of other things and it would have still worked. And then they teach that strategy and somebody who has no following and is just starting their business, goes to execute it, and it doesn’t work for them, and they’re like, “why? I followed the exact strategy! “I’ve seen people teach a strategy that worked for them, but they have a completely different audience. So if you’re targeting business owners compared to stay at home moms, you have to create a different experience. You have to create a different strategy.

You can take foundations, but then you have to ask yourself, is this what my audience wants? Or maybe they have a completely different offer. Maybe they have a $9.97 course, and you’re selling a $10,000 high ticket program, or maybe it’s e-commerce compared to a small price, digital product. The strategies are going to vary depending on those things. They’re going to vary depending on, is it warm traffic that they’re marketing this to> Of course warm traffic is going to convert better. And you could probably do a lot of different things to get warm traffic to convert well, and a lot of different strategies would work. So maybe it wasn’t even the strategy, maybe it was the messaging. So when you hear a good idea, when someone says, “you’ve got to do this,it’s working so well for our business” or you’re in a program that’s like, “this is exactly how you have to create this marketing strategy or execute this funnel or run your business.”

There’s so much around evergreen or live launches, or the formatting of how you do your offers. You have to consider these factors because they make a difference. And all of the people teaching this have been on a journey that you can’t see, you can’t see their failures. You can’t see what worked for them, what didn’t work for them. And therefore the formula of how they graded success is not really accurately represented in this final blueprint product of process, right? Not to say, there’s no value in the foundational components of that, but you have to have the flexibility to customize it for your audience. And you have to have the ability to say, “I’m not doing that right now. I think that’s a good strategy for my business,” or “it’s going to take away from other things that I want to execute.”

So here are a couple of examples of how this recently happened to me. One was, talking to a friend of mine who has a Facebook group, and he’s totally crushing it with this Facebook group and appointment setters. He might even listen to this podcast. He’s absolutely crushing it. He was nice enough to do, we sometimes do catch-up, calls you do to catch-up, call with me. He explained his whole strategy. I think it’s a great strategy. I instantly felt myself go, “we have to do this. We have to do this next month. I want to implement this and I want to try this.” And it’s a good strategy. And then I sat on it for a day and it IS a good strategy. Let me be really clear about that. He is crushing it with this strategy and he has got this formula that he’s set up to create this success.

And I know his numbers are legit and he’s doing a really good job. And I know that I probably could replicate that and create success. But when I sat with it and said, “first of all, his audience is different than mine. Second of all, his offer is different than mine. Third of all, the way he shows up online is different than I do.” And there’s no right or wrong. We’re just different. We have different personalities. We have different ways that we show up with our content. Then his audience being different is a big one. Also I have a lot of other things in the works that are working and that we need to put effort into. I have a YouTube channel launching. I have the updates of our offer launching. We have new lead magnets launching. I already have things going.

So if I was to say, “oh, I want to derail my team and go implement this next month.” I would be taking away from all of that. And I probably couldn’t create the same amount of success he has by following exactly what he did. I would need to adjust it and I can do that. I probably will create that success if I was to do that. But that takes a lot of time and effort. And I may test this, you guys might see a Facebook group in the future, but it’s not going to be until next year. And if I was to jump on that and I see people do this all the time, I have good friends who do this, and I have to call them out on it where they hear a good idea. And like that day or that next day, they’re going to their team.

They’re saying, “hey, we gotta do this. We gotta do this right now. I just heard of this idea. This is a good idea. How can we get it done?” And then they derail their whole team and their team’s working on something else. And they abandoned their project over here. Your job as a leader is to be guiding your team in the right direction. You might mess up and you might choose the wrong thing, but you have to be focused. So if you don’t even execute it, you’re letting the ideas take away from your team’s attention. There are some people who, that is what they do. They just generate ideas. It can be very overwhelming if you don’t rein those in. And so also I find, when I’m working with and around people who generate ideas, ideas, ideas, I’m such an executor that I feel like, “okay, I have to organize all these ideas to go execute it.”

But the real power is in me, pausing and deciding what to move forward with. Another example that recently came up was around payment plans. We don’t have a really low priced payment plan for our “Done With You” program. And I don’t want to do it because I’ve tried it in the past. Somebody who doesn’t have a thousand dollars to sign up, that’s our lowest payment plan to sign up for our “Done With You” program. They don’t have money for ads, so they’re not going to pay their next payment. So, I’m just basically going to be letting them in for a super low price to get value that other people would pay a higher price for. And I just have had such a bad experience with doing that. So many of the payments failing the second payment and having to chase those that I’m just like, I don’t want to do it.

I had someone come to me and say, “oh, like, so this person recently launched, she has this payment plan of $370 and her program is only six weeks.” I think those were the details. “We should do a low payment plan.” And I was like, no, “I don’t think that’s the strategy for us. And I also don’t think that we know her numbers. We don’t know how many people are failing those second payments.” Obviously she’s done it multiple times and she’s a successful entrepreneur. So she’s figured out what outweighs those failed payments, but you don’t have to go take what somebody else does and then implement that into your audience. And it is maybe not the right choice. So that’s kind of the big moral here, is that when you hear a good idea or somebody tells you, “you should go do something or there’s a blueprint or some sort of process, somebody is trying to teach.”

I’m not saying that what they are saying is wrong. They’re probably like my friend with the Facebook group, he is extremely successful. Everything he told me was extremely valuable and good strategies, but I have to step in and be the leader and say, “we are doing this or not doing this, or this is when we’re doing this. And this is how we’re going to change it, to make it our own.” Anytime I hear of a good idea, or I see something cool that somebody does, I always run it through the filter of how do I change it? How do I make it better? How do I make it better for my audience? How do I make it my own? Because also as a personal brand, you have to make sure that you’re acting constantly and authentically to yourself, or it will show and it just won’t convert.

So those ideas that people are teaching and trying to share with you and give you that value are good, but the real value comes in. You being able to say yes or no, I want to execute this and how do I shift it and change it. It’s relevant for my audience, for my offer, for my business and for  what stage of business I’m at. That’s also a huge one. Somebody who’s just starting out should not be replicating somebody who has a multimillion dollar business. I think somebody who’s just out, thinks they should, because you go and find the million dollar business owner. And you’re like, “if I do what they’re doing, I’ll be successful.” But what they’re doing today is not what they were doing when they were where you are. So you have to be doing what is going to be relevant for your business today and the level that you’re at.

Here’s another piece. I think that there’s a fine line between balancing how you have to move really fast and be really innovative right now, but also be intentional with your time and your projects. So, unfortunately, I think the days are gone where you can just have a single, I don’t want to say single funnel because you can have a single funnel, but you have to put new wrapping paper on it more frequently. So, if you have a webinar, you have to update the webinar title once a quarter where it used to be able to go for years. So, you do have to pivot faster. You do have to have new, innovative ideas. That doesn’t mean though, that it has to be completely new strategies every few months. It means you can have a solid strategy. Let’s say it’s a webinar and you can put that new wrapping paper on it.

That is going to feel new and innovative for your audience. But it’s not requiring you to build the whole, rebuild the whole backend or pivot strategies every couple of months or every month. So you do have to move fast and you do have to be innovative, but you also have to be intentional with your time and your projects as a marketer. And so that means saying no to certain things or pushing things out a quarter or a couple months, and making sure that you are creating that space to put that new wrapping paper on things that do already work. So if that webinar works for you, but you find that your registrants are getting too expensive or you are having a hard time, getting people signed up for the right cost, do a new webinar title, do a new webinar description and promise and attract people that way versus say, “I’m going to switch to a challenge or I’m going to switch completely to a Facebook group strategy” or whatever it is.

Sometimes the new can come from the wrapping paper versus actually a whole new strategy. So you have to balance that because I will say you do have to move fast and be innovative, but you also can’t let seeing something cool or somebody telling you about this great idea and explaining to you how they did it, distract you from what you need to do. And I mean, even if you’re not even executing it, but if you are thinking about it and you’re exploring it, and I don’t know about you guys, but for me, that causes the overwhelm because when I hear great ideas, I feel like I’m missing out until I go execute that idea. Then I start taking action to be like, okay, I’m going to task this person with this and I need to organize this, and this is what we have to do. And then that completely derails, not only you but your team. 

So your job is to put that through a filter and choose what you’re going to go after, and then constantly choose how you are going to make what you do your own and your business specifically. I hope you guys found this helpful and resonated with this. I think it’s a big problem. And as I mentioned in here, I think that it’s not the fault of the people teaching these strategies at all. It’s all coming from really great, really positive intentions. And they do have really good strategies. It is your job to think like a marketer, to think strategically, and to be the filter that your business needs you to be and to be the innovator and spearhead the strategies that make the most sense for your business. Thanks so much for listening today, guys, I’ll talk to you next time.

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