READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I have spent almost the most amount of time preparing for this podcast than I have ever spent preparing for a podcast. I usually have bulleted notes, but I’m pretty good at free talking on my podcast, so I don’t prepare a lot. But this one is going to feel very… it does feel very vulnerable for me. I’ve spent about the last 25 minutes, convincing myself to record this podcast and messaging a team member and friend of mine saying, “I don’t know if I could do this. Is this a bad idea? Is this too much?”

 

 Of course, I can always take it back after I record this and not release it, but once I do it, I know it’s going out there. So this is probably the most transparent and vulnerable podcast I have ever recorded, and I am terrified to do it.

 

The only reason I am doing it is that I know that when I share this, and when I share these stories and when I share this behind the scenes and I become this transparent and real with you guys, it will make so many of you feel less alone. I know that when I went through last year, I felt so alone. I felt like I was carrying such a huge burden that nobody understood in my life, my family, my friends, and my husband loved them all, but they didn’t understand what I was going through. And I also didn’t even try to let people in because I just automatically was like, well, they don’t even understand. So talking about it, is it going to help me? I will take all of this on myself. I will take all of the burden and the stress of this.

 

And so I know that felt really scary at times. There were many days that I felt like, can’t do this, but I did it. And so this is the very first podcast episode you’re ever listening to of mine, I would listen to a few behind as well, just so you know who I am…  Because we’re going all the way in this episode and I’m not holding anything back again. I probably will never go re-listen to this, but I’m doing it for you guys because I think it’ll help you. 

 

So just to give a quick context, I’m doing a reset series. The Great Reset is what it’s called. It’s a podcast series. We’re going to do it all the way from today through next Thursday. So there’ll be six episodes. I’m not doing Saturday and Sunday, but we’re going to release a daily episode. And what I’m going to do is share with you guys about last year.

 

I’m going to share with you the reason I’m calling it, “The Great Reset” is because I reset my company starting about October of last year when we changed our full done for you agency offer. And now this month, when we’re about to relaunch our new program, which will replace our done with you offer. I’m going to go back and share how hard last year was, but that pushed me to do these things and the why behind them and the strategies, because here’s why I’m ready to talk about it. And that’s just the reality… I think some things are just too raw to share in the moment. So if I got on here, I actually did get on here when this was happening and share parts, but not the details of it. It was too raw.

 

Now I’ve gone through it. And I feel that I’m on the other side, obviously not completely…  it was just last year. So I still have room to grow and improve things, but we just had the best month out of the whole year in December, we did $75,000 more than we did the previous month. And that’s before we even launched this program. So this month is projected to be even bigger. So I feel that all the work I put in while this was happening last year is starting to pay off and the numbers prove that. And so I feel I’m on the other side and able to speak about it in a more complete way. And so that’s why I’m choosing to share it now. And also ultimately bring that inspiration for you guys who are struggling right now, maybe, and you haven’t been able to find that other side.

 

And so this first episode, what I’m going to do is share how 2021 was the hardest year in my business and give you the backstory and I’m going to be really vulnerable. I have this Voxxer message that I might take back and decide not to play in this in this episode, but I want to share it with you guys to really put you where I was at, and I’m going to share the backstory. And then moving forward in the series, I’m going to share what we did, the exercise and the actual strategies that we executed, and how we got out of it because that’s the important part. I need to give you the backstory, but let’s also take my lessons and allow you to learn from them if you’re experiencing something like this. 

 

Okay. So that’s the first episode today. And over the next week, we will have daily episodes except around the weekend around this series. It’ll be right here on the podcast, so all you have to do is come here and tune in. 

 

Okay, let’s go, guys, are you ready for this? This is going to be fun. So like I said, 2021 was the hardest year in my business. Now it wasn’t the worst year revenue-wise. I’ve been in business for seven years and we did almost the same amount we did about $50,000, less 2020. So really like almost the same amount. But the problem is, is when you’re growing a business, you’re building for growth. So my expenses are way more than they obviously were when I started my business and had no team. So my gross revenue was still okay in 2021, but it was the hardest year in my business because I had and have a team of over 21 people. And at times we were up to 25 and then we have contractors. That’s full-time employees. I had a team that, that large so I automatically have a massive payroll expense– to me it’s massive. In 10 years now, it’s probably not going to be massive, but a massive payroll expense every month to carry the burden of. 

 

So then when things get harder in business, I still have to pay my team and carry that burden. And so it was the hardest year in business because of the burden and the stress and the pressure that I felt. And I did share this in, I believe it was like September last year I shared how business was hard and how I just was feeling so much pressure. And I had some outside pressure as well that I’ll talk about, but it was the hardest year in my business.

 

And to date, so you know, last year we did a total of two and a half million in revenue. So that’s not bad, right. And still, have a multimillion-dollar company. And like I said, before, it was about the same as the year before, it was about $50,000 less. But when I ended 2019, I was at– sorry, 2020– I was at a 3 million run rate. So I was doing about $256-270 was like where we would go between that last quarter in 2020. And I thought 3 million run rate a month to $250,000 to $70,000 a month. That’s where we ended. So I had the team to support, that large of a business, right? And I should have continued to grow. I should have been at over 3 million this year because I was ending the year before in 2020.

 

I was ending that year at a $3 million company monthly run rate. I just got my December numbers in all of 2021, we did 2.5 million, which is almost the same as what we did all of 2020. So it’s not bad. But again, we went into the year having the team to support a $3 million-plus business. That’s also where my expectations were. And if you’ve experienced this, once you build your business to a certain level, your lifestyle, your expense says your team costs operating costs, essentially rise to that level. So if you go down, it sucks. Let’s put it that way. 

 

Okay. So let’s look at last year. So that’s the overall numbers January and February and March were great. We had great numbers. We actually maintained close to that run rate. We cover 2 to 5, at least over that every single month in our gross revenue, our margins were good. 

 

I had 20%, 30% as my average margin of profit in my company, which is relatively good. And so I had cash. I had savings and I will preface this. The only reason I survived this year is because I had savings. I don’t know what I would’ve done without the savings. And so those were good months. January, February, and March were great. 

 

The iOS updates came out in March and started to hit in April and that impacted everybody, right? And that impacted all of our clients. And it impacted the overall viewpoint that somebody had on Facebook ads and marketing. 

 

Why? Because number one, there was less trust for Facebook and its data. Number two, people were losing data that made it so that their marketing wasn’t as impactful, their results were impacted.

 

Number three, ad costs were going up significantly going up and they’d been going up, but they were starting to really hit that point where they were getting really expensive, which ultimately pushed out businesses who previously could have afforded to mark, could have afforded to mark and now no longer could. So obviously when our clients are impacted– potential clients, current clients, you name it — are impacted because of increased costs or lost data, or just an overall mistrust for Facebook and wanting to go do other things… which is not a good idea, that’s another story…  

 

Anyways when that happens, obviously can impact my business. So April and May we’re okay. We, we were declining a little bit, but not enough for it to be like, oh, this is like really an emergency. It’s not good. I very much still believed we can easily rebound. We don’t have to make any big changes. That it’s normal because of iOS updates. 

 

And so one of the other things with all of this is that I’ve never been through it. I’m young, right? I’m 27. I’ve had my company for seven years. I’ve never been through a recession. I’ve never been through a hard economic time as an adult and especially not as a business owner. So one thing I’ve learned through this is that you don’t necessarily see what’s coming unless you’ve been through it before. I think a lot of us convince ourselves that everything’s fine when we know deep down that it’s not, but we don’t take fast enough action. So looking back, I wish that I took fast action and I was more real and not naive to the fact of like, we’ll be fine, you know, like revenues going down a little bit, but it’s fine. We’re going to rebound. We can keep doing the same thing… Which is ultimately like a big lesson I learned that I’ll talk about throughout this series. 

 

And I think, I mean, I know that for sure looking back it was easy for me to know this at the moment, I definitely couldn’t know this, but I knew…  I mean, I can look back and know I should have taken action faster and I just was naive. 

 

I convinced myself that I made it through 2020. And that was supposed to be the really hard year. That was when I was more scared of what’s going to happen because of COVID. And I had a good year in 2020… we grew from 2019 into 2020, so that’s good. And everything was going well and going into this year, it continued to go well.

 

And so I thought I was like out of the woods of it, and iOS is totally separate from COVID, but it happened all in that year. And I do think the previous year, how many people had PP money impacted, that 2020 was good. And there was like so much extra money for people. And then they didn’t have that in 2021. So April and May were okay. Declining, but okay. Still okay. Then the summer, June, July, and August were terrible, like awful. And if you have a big team, you know, there’s two months out of the year where there’s an extra pay period and all of your employees get paid an extra time, which is amazing for them. And as an employee– I’ve never been an employee– but I’m sure you love those months.

 

You get a whole extra pay period as a business owner. That’s a huge expense that you have in addition to your month. And our payroll at the time was like $60,000 to $70,000 in payroll. And so, so that month that we had three payrolls, which was July. I had to come up with an extra 62 thousand dollars just to meet the normal business expenses. And that happens twice a year. It also happened in December. So for us, it depends on your payroll, but it’s usually like December, January, and July, August, or because they’re long months. 

 

So June, July, August sucked. The summer is historically slower in the online industry. Not always. And I think anytime you say that it’s an excuse. Like you could always do things to make it not slow. You might just have to work harder, but it has been in the past for me, historically slower in the summer, people are traveling and the fall is really big.

 

And then the spring, January, February, March is also really big for us. So June, July, and August were awful… and July is a three payroll month. So our company lost a good amount of money that month. And that was hard to rebound from. So because of the extra payroll, we were in the red by about $60,000. I feel so like exposed, sharing this, but I just told you my payroll is an extra, like $60-70,000. And so if my payroll was probably closer to 70,000, then I had to come up with not only…  it wasn’t a good month for us, plus there’s an extra payroll that I have to come up with all of that extra money for. And it’s already not a good time. Like, how do you get out of that?

 

It’s difficult. So that was the worst month. After that happened, because that took away… obviously I was able to make payroll, we have not had to lay off a single person and I was able to make the payroll because I had the savings, but that cut into my savings, not all of my savings, but in a very scary way. I imagine just that week, now you have to take out that much from your savings. And what I have realized through all of this, that is the scariest part of being a CEO. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but the burden that you carry and you realize how fast everything can be gone… You realize when you have payroll, and when you have a team to support, there are so many variables of things that can happen in a business from one day to the next, and even from week to weeks. Things change so quickly when you realize that and you realize, wow, a hundred thousand dollars is nothing… that’s freaking crazy.

 

My dad’s an entrepreneur. And during this time I was actually staying at his house in the summer. I was talking to him and I admittedly wasn’t sharing at all what was going on because I don’t do that very well, or ask for help. And honestly, I probably could’ve asked him for help and he would’ve helped me if I needed it. And I just don’t do that. I don’t, I just take it all on and that’s something that I need to work on.

 

I was talking to him and I said, “you know, dad,” I remember this conversation. And, it’s so weird how I can think back to seven years ago when I didn’t have my business. I was working as a nanny and my husband was working as a personal trainer and he would make… I think he charged like $40 an hour, something that’s really low for him. Now he charges way more than that. But I remember a thousand dollars was so much money. And I remember that our expenses every month, I don’t think was more of than like $3,000. Like we lived really inexpensive and how crazy it is now the volume it is. 

 

I only have a 2.5 million dollar company, a 3 million dollar company when you look at our current run rate. And I can’t imagine people with a hundred million dollar plus company, the burden that you have with your expenses is because what you realize is like $30,000, $40,000, $100,000 is nothing like it can be gone tomorrow. So getting a savings that’s going to actually like create this big runway for you is essentially impossible because as your business grows the need for that.  

 

Let’s say, I three months runway for my business to know, okay, no matter what happens, I can pay for three months worth of expenses. I’d have to save like $500,000. And so how do you do that? Plus pay for the expenses plus support. I’m the breadwinner. I fully support our fee. Plus during this time we were going through a remodel, which we had committed to when my business was doing really awesome in January, February. So it was a lot. I remember having that conversation with my dad and just saying it’s so crazy how in a day I can get $25-30,000 of payments coming through. And then I can have $60-70,000 come out of my bank account in one day. 

I don’t know if you guys feel that, but that’s one thing I’ve learned this year is just how fast things can change and how fast you can lose it all. You can, and this can happen to anyone.

 

And I think I still have a lot of judgment around myself for thinking that I was failing throughout this. I have a backstory and a history of where I started my business. There was a lot where I had to prove that I was making the right choice. I was having a baby at 20. I was leaving college for my business. So I carry that with me. I think that is why I don’t tell my parents if I was struggling. Because all along my business had to be like, “See, told you I could be successful and have a baby at 20 and drop out of college and still be successful.” So this year I had to accept that, wow, you actually could totally still fail. You haven’t made it and you never will because you can lose it so fast… if that makes sense. And so I think for me, one of the harder parts was having to accept feeling that way. And then I did keep it a lot to myself. 

 

So June, July, August, July, we were in the red and not just a little bit in the red, we were a lot in, From there, it was difficult to rebound. It was really stressful. This is where I felt the worst. I felt the most alone. I couldn’t…  I obviously told my husband, told people, but they just don’t get it. And they don’t have the solutions. You have to have the solutions. I have an amazing team, but obviously, I can’t share that much with them because I want to make sure they feel secure. And, again, we didn’t have to lay anybody off through this.

 

The only reason I was okay is because I had significant savings. I had PPP money plus savings, and I was okay. I’m going to play this message for you guys. This is the part that I’m like, is it too much? But I want you to feel what I was experiencing six months ago and understand, and you know… here’s the other piece of this. I hope that I can get my savings up, to never have to….  I always had personal savings that I refused to tap into so that I could make sure my family was okay no matter what, but I also know that what I went through last year is not going to be the last time. I know that and that, and I still choose to show up and go through that.

 

So I know that it won’t be the last time, but the pressure to make payroll and keep up with business expenses and fully support a family… I’m going to be honest. You can’t have a really nice lifestyle and then just say, I’m going to give it all up. You know, I’m not going to do all those things. So our expenses are not small. Every month we have a full-time nanny and we have expenses that I support and guess we can cut back some things, but they’re already there. Car payments, mortgages, all those things. So I have to keep up on a relatively significant monthly expense. Plus we were remodeling our house, which was very stressful throughout this and the pressure.

 

 I’m going to share this message that I sent to a friend and somebody high up in our business who knew what was going on. I want you to… I just felt like I needed to share it because if you’ve ever been here, you’re not alone. And also, I have since talked to a lot of friends who have been through this many times and understand that pressure. I will say other people like that who go through this are the only ones who can fully understand it for us. People who don’t have businesses every day, employees… they will never understand the pressure that equals having to make a payroll and not knowing how you’re going to necessarily. So I’m going to let you guys listen to that message:

 

I’m going to literally cry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to do. I really don’t. I don’t… I know how much payroll is and I don’t have any more savings. I can’t pull from my family’s personal savings. So I don’t know what to do because I don’t even know who we would consider.

 

All right. I can’t believe I did that, but I wanted you to feel that and I’ll continue on with the story. So June, July, August was really rough. September and October started to improve. Those are our better times of year anyways. So naturally, we started getting more sales and we started making some changes, but it still wasn’t where I wanted to be until about the end of September and into October. That’s when we made a big change. 

 

I’m going to talk about that in another episode in this series, which is the big change we made to our agency offer. That is actually what started to improve it because August, September, it was still not improving. And then we did a big thing end of September going into October. I’m going to share that in the next episode, cause I wanna be able to go into a lot of it. We changed our offer and I’m also going to share how we got to the point of changing our offer and what we did when, when we were like, I don’t know what else to do.

 

I don’t know what else? And so we had like one lot more thing to try and it worked. So then moved forward in the year and thankfully started to improve. We changed our offer. It was really successful. We had a lot of new clients come on. And since then our retention rate has been like 96% because all these clients are bringing on are the right fit, but we’re able to serve them in the right way because we now do everything for them. We do the funnel, we do the copy, we do content and things that we didn’t do in the past. So now, and then going into November and December, things started to really improve in December. We did $75,000 more than the previous month in November. But every month after August, so September, October, November, December, the revenue was increasing a small amount, but it was increasing.

 

And we were back in the positive. Now December though… we shot up $75,000 more than the previous month. It was a three payroll month, so I knew that I knew that months and months before I had to prepare for that. That’s part of the reason why we had a big push, but it was successful. I’m going to share the strategies behind that. But I want to share that trajectory of the first half of my year was okay. And then it started to slow down and I didn’t take action fast enough. The middle of the year was awful. And then from there, with our change, it started to improve. And by December I was able to turn that around. And this month we were really projecting. Once we signed clients on our roster, we know and are able to project more revenue than the month before, as long as we continue to sign more clients.

 

Like I said, our retention rate has been amazing, which is a huge contributing factor to our revenue. I think that’s because of our new offer. 

 

So in summary, what I want you to know, to take away from this year is that it was the hardest year in my business because of the pressure, because of the burden that I was carrying many, many days. I just wanted to quit. I felt so alone. I think that the one thing driving me to continue if I think about it because there are days that I really didn’t even want to do this. I’m working so hard and there’s not even leftover money to pay myself… but that is the reality of business. I’ll sign up for it any day. 

 

Because on the flip side of that, I have an incredible team who’s able to pull out of problems… pull out of things that are not working well, and turn it around. I could not have gotten through this without a few of my team members, specifically. I pulled up these old Voxer messages I spent so much time doing this…  There’s more I want to share in the series. My team going back and forth with me, they are the only reason that I don’t feel alone, and having that support is worth it. It’s worth it. Even in the hardest times, I also know what kept me going the most through this is I knew that if we were struggling like this, so are so many other companies and we can come up with the answers because we help you market. And that’s the problem is if your marketing isn’t working, if your marketing got too expensive, if you have to change your strategy, to make sure that you can achieve your goals, and it’s affordable, we have the solutions to that.

 

And so I knew that we still have so much value and that what I built wasn’t on such a crumbly foundation that it could disappear. We’re going through a rough patch. We went through a rough patch. And now I’m going to share more as we go through the series of why I think this happened. But ultimately the industry went through a serious rough patch last year, big changes that forced my business and many of your businesses to go through big changes. I also think I personally lacked the experience to really know how to manage that…to manage a massively pivotal time, because I hadn’t been through it before. And we learned from that. I learned a lot from this last year that I can take with me moving forward.

 

But I think that this industry, the digital marketing online industry was massively rocked last year… ad costs marketing in general, the saturation in the industry, consumer behavior changing. So when that happens, all the other businesses are experiencing that. What kept me going was knowing that if I could come up with the solutions that if I could adjust our offer to still serve these entrepreneurs and clients’ problems, we’d be okay. I was not willing to give up in order to not achieve that. 

 

And, you know… one other thing that’s really, really difficult when this happens– and you may have experienced this too– but my experience last year is when things get hard, you learn who your true friends and players on your team are. I did have a few instances where team members go… and you know what?  it’s fully their right.  it’s their career where they want to go.

 

But team members saw that it was getting really difficult in the world of digital marketing and Facebook ads and just quit. They were like, I don’t wanna do this anymore for my career. A few people who had been on my team for a long time were like, I don’t wanna do it anymore. It’s not my business and left me. That sucks even more. It’s like, you’re going through a hard time. You have key people who you count on as friends, but also team members… and they leave because they don’t want to go through a hard time with you. They don’t have to. That’s actually the reality of it is, they don’t have to do it. It’s your business. Nobody owes you staying there and helping you solve the problem.

 

Like, honestly, that’s like the core of why it feels so difficult, and why you can feel so alone is because number one, you are the only one who really understands the extent of the problem. You carry the burden, have to solve the problem. Nobody owes helping you and they can walk away tomorrow if they don’t want to deal with it. Hopefully, people won’t do that. I have also learned the hard way over the last several years that most people are out for themselves. And you know what? That’s that’s reality. So if the best move for them is to go explore a different career path or they want to feel more stable where they’re at and the industry that they’re in, then they have that. Right. They do not care about me because they don’t have to… because they care, but not enough to stay.

 

Again, it’s a lesson that was hard. Sometimes I felt angry about it, but at the end of the day, it’s, it’s fully there. Right. And as I reflect on it, I feel proud of those people because I think that it’s good that they can make those decisions and feel that strength and choose themselves. But it doesn’t make it easier for me. And, you know, that’s the reality when you’re going through something challenging and you have to solve a problem and it’s your business. you can get help and collaboration and you can lean on people to talk to them. But in the end of you’re the only one who can solve that problem and it’s on you to solve it. You have to, and we have to get up the next day and we have to make it work because if not, what are we going to do? We’ve gotta keep our business. 

 

So that was another piece that was hard because I felt like I was slapped in the face sometimes in, in a single month, multiple times where it was like, wow, I’m, I’m frustrated about the business growth or goals or, or our, our net profit. I’m feeling this burden. Then this team member leaves and it’s like, wow, I wish, I think I said this to one of them who, again, I totally respect. And we still keep in contact actually. But you know, I wish I had the freedom. I wish I had the freedom to quit and walk away to the next job. But I don’t. And I also get the benefits of that. You know, I get the benefits of having a massively successful company. And when we have really great months and years and have an amazing net profit, I get the benefits of that too.

 

But I have to also sign up for the hard times. That’s the reality. I’ve signed up for the good times, I’m in both of them. And I can only do the best with what I have and continue to make good decisions. I do feel really good about the things that we changed. And so that’s what I’m going to be sharing with you guys. As we go through this series, I hope that this episode… I will publish it. It was probably my most vulnerable, but I think through private conversations that I’ve had over the last several months, that so many business owners, so many people that you even look up to had hard years… last year was hard in our industry. if you have a team and you have business expenses and you’ve already built and established business in the year before you were doing well.

 

And so you built the business for that, it was hard. It was hard no matter what… even if you didn’t have a team, because you’re trying to get it off the ground and it’s hard. So my purpose with this episode was to make sure that you guys don’t feel as alone and you know, that that was normal. 

 

The most important part of it is that you can turn it around. If you are willing to not give up, you will turn it around. I think that if look back and say, what’s the one thing that got me through this, I wouldn’t say the strategies we implemented, which I’ll share with you, the actual tactics and things that we did, the changes that we made, the launch that we did, the different things. I can name all those things and I will, but I’ll tell you this.

 

The one thing that got us through this, got my entire company through this was my grit was my determination to not give up, no matter how many times I was knocked down. You have to have that. I believe that we build this up as we get bigger. I was at the 3 million cusp and people talk about being right there as a business anyways, and it’s challenging. So I was there and I think that we are given only how much we can handle. I had to go through something like this so that I can become the CEO who does eight figures, nine figures. And I will become that CEO. And I will go through more times like this and I will not give up.

 

 If you have that grit and that doesn’t mean that you can’t massively change your business.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t quit what you’re doing and change it and do something different or pivot your offer as we did. You can make big changes, but you cannot say, I give up, I failed. You can’t do that and walk away. If you have that willingness, no matter what to make sure that you create that success, you will be successful. That is the most powerful thing that you can have. 

 

All right, you guys… so tomorrow I’m going to share the next piece of this story, which is moving into how we changed our offer and the realization that I had about the industry. I might share another behind the scene message in there, but we are doing this series all the way through next Thursday, every day, except for the weekend. There will be six total episodes.

 

Tomorrow I’m going to share kind of the big realization that I had about the industry that we are in and the changes that we made throughout the series. I’m going to announce why it’s called the reset. The reset of Hirsh Marketing is officially here,  and this is the why behind it. So, all right. If you guys got anything out of this episode, or the series, one thing that I would love is if you share it with somebody who may not be listening to the podcast, share it on your social media. The more people I can get to listen to this, to normalize what they may have experienced last year, the better. And that’s why I’m creating this content. That’s why I’m willing to be this transparent, be this vulnerable, and be the one talking about it. I think there’s a lot of people who only share when things are really good and successful, which makes you think when you are not like that, that there’s something wrong. 

 

So share this on your social media. Send me a message on Instagram. If you got something out of this episode and share it with a friend. Thank you so much. I’ll talk to you guys tomorrow.

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