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Emily Hirsh:

Hello my friends. Happy New Year. I am happy to be back here recording. We took the week off last week, not intentionally necessarily. I never miss podcast episodes, but I didn’t have my voice so that poses a problem when I need to record podcast episodes. So really miss this and actually have a lot of content planned because it was coming to me during that week. I actually got COVID. So I was pretty sick for like four days. I’m actually still sick. I still technically have it. I don’t think I’m contagious anymore because after the fever’s gone you’re okay. But I feel like I’m sick for at least another week before I’m a hundred percent. 

It was not fun, but yay for the natural immunity and my body’s ability to fight it off. I did a lot of vitamins. I got an IV drip here in Austin. Which if you’re ever sick, those are seriously like magic. If you’re sick with anything get an IV drip that’s packed with vitamin C, vitamin D, magnesium, all these things in it and it putting it right into your bloodstream every time I’m sick, no matter what it of it. It helps me so much. So I got that and I doubled the like two extra doses of vitamin C into that IV drip. I really think that helped me a lot. Is I had the time, and they aren’t cheap, but I would go every day right now and get those because they help so much. Then I took a ton of vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, lots of sleep. I was sleeping like 10 hours a night for three nights, but it’s super weird. 

When you have a cold, I feel like you’re sick for a couple days, and then all of sudden and you wake up and you’re like, I’m way better today, like I’m better. With COVID, at least for me, I’ve only gotten better like a tiny bit every day. My husband every morning will ask me, “how are you feeling?” And I’m like, “I don’t know yet, give me an hour and I’ll let you know,” because the symptoms just kind of linger and you still feel like lethargic, I guess every day. So wasn’t fun, but really thankfully my kids didn’t, I mean, I don’t know if they were carrying it. We couldn’t get tests here. Everything was sold out, at home tests, all the like actual tests were booked. I wasn’t gonna wait four hours at a testing site. So I don’t officially know if my kids had it or not, but they had a minor cold, so they were fine.

Then crazy, my husband didn’t even get it. He tested negative with that. The test that we were able to get and then he has no symptoms. So I hope for him that he’s gonna remain healthy. I got it the worst. I think that I was doing too much. I was working too hard. I was stressed and my immune system got weak and that’s why I got it. So it has not been fun, but I feel like the week between Christmas and new year’s was the longest week of my life. It was so long. All I did was sit on the couch. It feels like it’s was forever ago, but it’s only been a week. I don’t know. It feels like every day was kind of long. 

So anyways, I am back. I am excited, and today I have a podcast on four strategies that I want you to take into your business into 2022. This is coming from things that I’ve been reflecting on. I have been reflecting on what am I gonna take into my business? One thing about this week was I was planning on doing more work and I ended up not really working at all. Especially once I felt pretty sick, which was like Wednesday of last week, which made a lot of time for reflecting. One thing I’m continuously taught a lesson on is when you step away, when you get space from your day to day, whether that is your business or your job, or your kids, or your family, or your habits, or your health, like it doesn’t matter your day to day grind nd we’re all creatures of habits, so we do the same thing every day, a lot, right? We’re in these cycles that sometimes we don’t even realize that we’re in and when you change it up and you step away, whether that’s vacation or you end up canceling all your calls for the week and you just reflect, or you just step away, you get out of that pattern. 

I always am hit with the reality of how much I learn and the different perspective that I have, and when I do that a lot of time, a lot of problems or things that I was like, “this is terrible,” or “this is so urgent,” or this stress that I’m creating and that voice that’s constantly there telling me, like, “you need to do this and you need to do this,” it just quiets. That’s where so much learning happens. So this last week I found myself in a lot of reflection and a lot of just like quiet time resting, but also, it allowed me to get out that day to day, get out of that grind and to reflect.So here are the four strategies that I want you to take into your business in 2022. 

One is I want all of you guys to set a specific revenue goal, but not just… That sounds really obvious. I want you to set a specific revenue goal, and then I want you to know exactly how you’re going to achieve that. I want you to break it down to the month, to the week, to the day. So for example, if you set a revenue goal of a million dollars, okay, how are you gonna achieve that? How many sales does that mean of your offer? Divide a million dollars by the price of your offer. How many do you need to sell? And then if you have an application or you put people through a webinar and you have leads, maybe guessing, but estimating what your sales conversion is, how many leads do you need to get? How many applications do you need to get? How are you going to do that? What is that equal per month? If your goal is a million dollars, you need to make $83,000 a month. Okay, that’s your goal going into January?

So we set a big revenue goal. I have like two goals. So I’ll actually share this with you guys. I have a goal that I set with my team that’s very realistic, because I like to set my team up to win and I like to set them up to crush the goals. Then I have my own revenue goal. That’s like double and it’s like, we could do this, but if everybody else knew that this was the goal, they’d be stressed out about it because that’s how it works usually with employees. So I have my own one and my own one is definitely a stretch, it’s really big. This year we’re gonna go for eight figures. That’s that’s the goal. So I have broken down from there exactly how many of our done for you, how many of our done with you, we need to sell, ow many applications, what it means per month, all the way down to the day of where I wanna be. 

Then I even broke down where I want ot be in net profit, where I want to be in savings after this year for several different things that I want to save for. We’re going to invest in a second home at some point. My goal is within two years to be able to buy a second home in the mountains, and so I have like the exact amount per month that I need to save for that to get there. That is the only way that goals are going to come true.You can’t just say, “I wanna make a million dollars,” and then hope that it happens. You need to know how much that equals per month, exactly how you are going to do it and then put action into place. 

The other thing that this does is if you set that goal and now, okay, I wanna make a million dollars. I need to make $83,000 a month. Now if the first month goes by and you don’t make that, you know how much you need to make up, right? Then you can take action to do that. And so my how-to’s might adjust a little bit. We might sell a little bit more to our done for you than our done with you, but I made up for it. Right? So you can adjust as you go, but as long as you are taking the action required to get there. This will also allow you to see that your goal is possible, that you’re able to get to that level if you take those actions. Of course you can pivot and adjust, you will have to pivot and adjust throughout the year. But if you don’t break it down that specifically a goal of, “I wanna make a million dollars” or “I wanna make $10 million,” or “I wanna sell a thousand of my product,” doesn’t really mean very much unless you know exactly how you’re going to achieve it in numbers. So that’s the first strategy. 

The second strategy for you to take into 2022 is the concept, and I’m constantly reminding myself of this, but simplicity scales and complexity fails. So I want you to sit for 10 minutes and just ask yourself, how could I simplify? How could I simplify my strategy, the effort that I’m putting out. my resources? I see this so often that us entrepreneurs feel like we have to create something really complicated and cool to be successful. I’ve seen a lot of people who are like, “I have this crazy funnel, it has 92 steps, and if they do this and they do that, and it’s super complicated.” And they think that equals cool, and they think that equals successful. But really, the most successful strategies I’ve seen and we’ve executed are super simple and impactful. 

So you have to simplify not only your strategy though, but also as a CEO, where are your efforts going? Where’s your resources as a company going, financial resources, time resources, team resources? How do you simplify it? Because that is what’s gonna scale. So if your goal this year is to scale your revenue from the year before, you’re going to have to continually face yourself with how do I simplify? I don’t think I grasped the importance of this importance of this for a long time. I think I heard this concept from entrepreneurs that are really successful that I know, and I was like,  “yeah, whatever. I know that that’s true, and I’m the exception. I could actually do more than the average person,” or whatever I would tell myself.

Ultimately, the more I’ve grown and when I look back at all the successful months, like for example, last month was our biggest month of the whole year. December was our biggest month of all of 2021. What we did was really simple. So when I look at what it is, what happens is we create some level of success, then we complicate it and then we’re like, why isn’t it still working? Why am I not growing? Why am I not getting more sales? And it’s because you didn’t just scale what was simple. 

This comes up a lot for people when they have a successful funnel, like “I got this successful webinar or this opt-in or this strategy that’s working, I’m gonna go build a brand new funnel, a brand new strategy, a brand new product, and totally change everything.” That is not going to allow you to scale. Scaling your business and growing your business is sometimes boring, right? I have a friend who says do the boring work, and it’s so true because scaling what’s working isn’t feeding that like new, we need new type of stimulation that we’re looking for. It’s doing what’s working and making sure you don’t go away from that. So ask yourself, how can I simplify? 

The third piece that I wanna bring to you is over deliver with value always. So one thing that I would say is if something isn’t working, if your free offer, isn’t working, if your paid offer, isn’t working, if what you’re trying to do with your marketing, isn’t working, I want you to ask yourself, how do I make this more valuable? How do I make this better? How do I make the deliverable better? Start there before you go to like the marketing strategy or the messaging, honestly, because if you have created a free or a paid offer that is so enticing that people cannot say no to it because it’s so good, it has so much value inside of it, it’s better than anything else out there, you will be successful. 

I have a lot more content coming around my lessons from last year, and last year was a tough year in business for me, but the last quarter we turned around a lot and we learned a lot about what we were doing wrong the rest of that year. I can tell you one of the biggest things that we shifted and changed was our offer, and the value we were delivering, and connecting back to what our ideal customer wanted and overdelivering. I just had a conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago who was struggling. She was like, “our business is like half the size, this month is half of the month the year before, and I don’t don’t know what’s wrong.” She was trying to go into like, “it’s my salesperson, it’s our marketing strategy.” I was like, “honestly, I think it’s your offer. I think you haven’t changed your offer to deliver the level of value that your audience wants.” And you know what happened? They went from having a $38,000 sales the previous month to $140,000 thousand dollars by making that change, by focusing on value, by making her offer more enticing.

So if something isn’t working, instead of trying to look at the bells and whistles and  the ninja hacks that you can do in your marketing, or doing what we were doing, which is trying to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, go look at the core of it. How do you add more value? How do you become the best? How do you create something that’s so enticing that nobody can say no to it? Because if you can do that, you’ll be successful this year, a hundred percent. No doubt about it. If you’re struggling selling, or you’re struggling getting people to sign up for your free offer, how do you make it better? That’s the question you have to answer. 

The fourth strategy I want you to take into this new year, and this is something I was just reminded of. I kind of touched on it in the beginning of this episode, but I was just reminded of it again, and I think this is for all entrepreneurs. I want you guys to really listen to this because I constantly find myself in this situation where I am creating overwhelm and stress for myself and for my business. When we are so consumed in the day to day, we think that problems or situations, or scenarios that have come up with team members or whatever it is, we think it is the end of the world. I convinced myself in my head like, “oh my gosh, this happened. So that means I have to work tonight,” or “I have to do these five extra things and I better do them today, and if I don’t do them today, we’re screwed.” Right? 

I’m continually reminded that if you have a problem or you’re frustrated about something, it’s gonna feel like the opposite thing you should do, but what you should do is get space from it, is just let it sit there. Let it sit there for two days. Obviously, if something like crazy is on fire and you need to help a client or something, you need to do that. But I have found so many times this last year, and I am committing to remembering this going into this new year, that if I have a problem or I’m frustrated about something that feels like it’s super urgent, or I can’t fix it, or I’m just creating this stress and overwhelm in my day to day about it, I’m gonna commit to say, “I’m gonna come back to this in two days. Or I’m gonna take tomorrow off, I’m gonna cancel my meetings, and I’m gonna go for a long walk and I’m gonna create space from it.

I have found every time that when you create that space, when you pull yourself out of the day to day, when you pull yourself out of that barage of Slack, and email, and this problem, and this fire, and all you’re doing is going around and putting out fires, or trying to like solve problems, or get people to get on the same page with somebody or whatever it is, or you’re trying to meet this deadline that you set. And it’s like, what if you don’t meet it? What if it takes another week? What does that mean? When you step away from that, you realize that the problems are not really there. That we’ve created those problems, for the most part, in our head. We’ve put these deadlines on things. 

At least for me, if I commit to a deadline, I am gonna meet that deadline even if it kills me. Here I am with, COVID. Probably did this to myself because I was doing this, because I was like, “we have to do, we have to launch this thing by this day.” And I was making things harder and I had problems that it’s like, once I stepped away, I was like, “it’s really not that bad. It’s really not. Things are going well, and this is not as big of a deal as you’ve made it.” When you simplify, going back to the other one, when you simplify and you’re really create that simple strategy that doesn’t require that complexity, where you’re creating that overwhelm, you’re gonna succeed more. 

But if you’re experiencing and you’re, you know, this might not be happening now, because we all just had break hopefully from our business. But let’s say in two months from now or in a month from now, you were feeling that feeling of overwhelm of like, “I can’t catch up, I’m drowning. I can’t meet deadlines. I can’t. I need to hire a team, but I don’t have time to hire a team.” You guys all know what I’m talking about. That overwhelm where you’re like, “I’m failing, I’m holding back my business’ growth. I’m the bottleneck.” Whatever happens, just step away. Step away for two days, and you’ll realize the problems are not as big as you think they are and the answers will come to you. 

There’s so much value and space and reflection. This is something, again, I am like slapped in the face with over and over again, and I know it’s true, but in the moment I don’t do it and I still convince myself, “well, this time’s different. This time I need to work at night. This time I need to work this weekend. This time I have to hit this deadline because here’s why.” And it’s like, is it really true? Is that really true? What would happen if you just stepped away for two days? Or if you have a really hard decision to make, don’t make it right away. Just wait. Just wait a day or two.There’s so much power in that space in that reflection, in that slowing down. 

I think for people like me, if you’re like me, that’s really hard. I make decisions really fast. I want things done yesterday. I have a massive level of urgency, which is a great strength of mine too. Our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness, but it is also my greatest weakness where I sometimes think I create overwhelm and then that bleeds into the team and problems that just don’t exist because probably we’re addicted to it, right? I probably thrive off of that energy, but as soon as I step away, I realize how much I don’t want to thrive off of that energy. So if you get to that place, just remember this. Write a note for yourself for the rest of this year, if you get to a place where you are overwhelmed or you have so much stress, you’re stressing about a deadline, or a decision, or something happening in your business, it’s gonna feel counterintuitive, but I want you to just walk away, give it two days, 48 hours of space and reflect and then see where you land. Because you’re probably gonna realize it’s not as bad as you’ve convinced yourself that it is.

Alright you guys, those are the four strategies I’m gonna be taking into my 2022, and then I recommend you do the same. I’m excited to be back. I’ll talk to you all on Thursday.

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