I've spent so much time creating it. I don't want all that time to
have been a waste. But the thing is that you have already invested that
time. You can keep investing more time into something that's not serving your business
long term, or you can completely change tech and you can say, well,
I'm going to put my time and energy into something that is going to
work, that is going to serve my business long term. Welcome to Imperfect
Action. I'm Steph Taylor. For years, I read all the books,
downloaded all the freebies, and did all the courses, but it wasn't until
I started taking imperfect action that my business had its first million dollars. Here,
imperfect action is about doing things before you're ready, prioritizing consistent action over
perfect action, and moving forward even when you're not sure you're doing it right.
On this show, you can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing tips and
strategies to build a business that brings you more profit, more freedom, and
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slash DBB or at the link in the show notes. Hey, welcome back
to In Perfect Action this episode seven hundred and seventy eight. Today, I'm
sharing a couple of ways to know if it's time to retire and offer that
your business sells. It's really easy and really tempting to just always create more,
add more offers. You've put one on your website, and then just
add another one, and then that one lives on your website forever, and
then you add another one, and you end up with so many different offers
that your business is selling. And sometimes to grow you actually need to take
a step back before you can move forward. You need to create that space
for something new, for something different, even if you don't yet know what
that is. So that's why in today's episode, I'm going to run through
a couple of questions to ask to decide whether it's time to retire an existing
offer in your business. Now. I've done this before a couple of times.
I did it with my very first course that I created way back in
twenty seventeen, so quite a while ago, and that was a course about
Facebook ads, and ultimately my decision to retire that course was purely because I
wasn't passionate enough about Facebook Ads to keep learning and staying up to date enough
to then be able to pass on all of the changes that were happening in
the course. So every time the Facebook updated something in the ads platform,
then I needed to update the course. And I just wasn't that interested in
Facebook Ads and the amount of work that it took to keep updating it.
I realized, actually, this doesn't really this doesn't excite me. I don't
want to keep selling this, so I retired it. I've done that with
several other offers, and most recently was my Digital Product Creator's Vault, which
was a twenty seven dollar offer that I created back during the low ticket offer
craze in twenty twenty when everyone was creating twenty seven dollar offers and there was
so much value in it. Like I genuinely loved this offer, and I
thought that if people could see how much value I'd included, then it would
make them want to join Launch Magic, which is one of my signature offers.
But they couldn't get through all of the content in the Digital Product Creators
Vault because I'd put so much in there. And then It ended up essentially
cannibalizing Launch Magic because when I launched Launch Magic twice a year, people would
say to me, well, I'll join next round because I haven't had enough
time to go through the Digital Product Creators Vault yet. I want to go
through that first, and then I will join launch Magic next time around when
I'm ready to launch it. So, even though there were two very different
offers, it was stopping people from buying the offer that I knew would really
be the thing that they needed. So I retired it. It's obviously it's
still available for everyone who bought it. It's still available as an upsell for
one of my offers, but I no longer promote it to my list.
I no longer talk about it on social media or this is the first time
I've talked about it on this show in years, because I knew that it
would stop people from signing up for Launch Magic, which was ultimately holding them
back from having profitable launches. The thing that they really really needed was Launch
Magic. The Vault was awesome and full of value, but the thing that
was going to get them to that next level they weren't buying that. And
it's really it's so hard retiring an offer, especially when you've put a lot
of time and effort into creating it, like I did with the Vault.
But it comes down to sun cost fallacy, right, And you know,
I had to google what it actually what the definition was, because I kind
of vaguely know what it was, but I didn't know like the technical definition
the Google tells me. Sun cost fallacy is the phenomenon whereby a person is
reluctant to abandon a strategy or loss of action because they have invested heavily in
it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial. We
see this happening in so many areas of life, and especially when it's something
in your business that you have created, you know, especially when it's an
offer, and you're like, oh, well, I've spent so much time
creating it. I don't want all that time to have been a waste.
But the thing is that you have already invested that time. You can keep
investing more time into something that's not serving your business long term, or you
can completely change tech and you can say, well, I'm going to put
my time and energy into something that is going to work, that is going
to serve my business long term? Okay, So I'm going to run through
some questions to ask yourself to decide whether or not to retire your offer,
And at the end, I'm also going to share two ways that you can
retire it because I know, like when it comes to actually going about the
process of retiring it, it can be a little bit daunting, especially if
you've never retired an offer before. Okay, So the questions to ask number
one, does it serve your long term vision for your business? Is this
something that you still want to be selling five years from now? And does
it allow you to build the kind of business that you want to have five
years from now. So, for example, if you want to have a
one hundred percent online course based business, but you are too busy delivering one
on one client projects to create that first online course, then something needs to
shift, and something needs to change. For something to change, your office
suite is a great place to start making these kinds of changes. Intentionally designing
the things that you sell in your business can shift. The direction can shift
everything can shift, the amount of time you have, the amount of money
your business makes. A small small shift here can create a huge shift,
a huge ripple effect throughout your business. Number two, does it fit in
with the other offers you sell? So, does it fit in with the
rest of your offer suite? Does it play a nice part in the journey
that you are taking your ideal client on. So often I will see a
business with one offer that's like, here's how to grow a house plant,
and then they've got another offer that's like, here's how to build a plant
shop. They are completely unrelated. They are two completely different ideal clients,
and it's going to make their messaging and their positioning really murky, really unclear.
Right, So are you then, if you're selling both of those?
Are you the house plant expert or are you the building a plant shop expert?
And now if you want to sell both of those, now you need
to attract both houseplant enthusiasts and plant shop owners, and you need to work
to grow your audience with both of those people, and your content needs to
speak to both of those people, and it just becomes really messy and a
lot of extra work. The easier way to do it is to just pick
one of those and serve them with multiple different offers. So, for example,
how to start your plant shop, how to grow your plant shop,
how to franchise your plant shop. I don't know the different things that they
might be experiencing, the different problems and different desires that they might have at
different stages of that journey. So then you're only focusing on attracting that one
ideal client and you're taking them on a journey over time with different offers.
Okay, Number three, Is it easy to sell? Or does selling it
feel like a struggle? Now, if you are struggling to sell it,
it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the wrong offer. It could be the messaging
isn't quite landing. Maybe you're not communicating it in a way that resonates with
your ideal client. This can happen if you're not very specific with your messaging,
if you're trying to talk to too many different ideal clients. Then it
could be that it could be that your sales process for it isn't working.
So the journey that you are taking that potential buyer on before they buy,
that's not quite a line. It's not quite effective to sell them into that
offer. Or it could be that the offer itself isn't really something that they
want. It's not solving a problem that they have or a problem that they
experiencing badly enough they want to spend money to solve it. Or maybe it
doesn't do a task that's on their to do list, or it doesn't deliver
for a win that they want. There's something there that's you know, they're
not really seeing why they should invest in it. And if you've tested different
messaging, different positioning, you've tested different sales processes, and you're still struggling
with it, it could be that it's time to retire it and replace it
with something that does solve a problem that they will pay money to solve.
Right, Okay, Number four how much of an income hit would your business
take by retiring this offer? And this one is hard because sometimes or often
you do have to take a bit of an income hit to create that space
and time to create a new offer. For example, when I started shifting
from pretty much all client work to building a business that was online course based,
I started letting go of clients one at a time, so I didn't
fire them all in one hit. I know you hear this quite a lot.
Like I fired all my clients, it was one at a time,
so I still had a little bit of client income coming in, and I'd
let go of one and then try and replace as much of that income as
I could with online course sales before I then let go of the next client.
But it was something it was still a risk that I had to take.
I still had to let go of those clients before the income came in.
And it's scary. I know, it's really scary, but you also
kind of have to back yourself and trust that you can figure it out,
trust that you will be able to get that income in if you let go
of that client. And if one offer, look, if one offer is
one hundred percent of your income, I probably wouldn't recommend that you retire that
offer until you have other income streams because that would be very risky. But
is there a way that maybe you could scale it back a little bit and
free up your time then to go and create other offers so that your income's
not reliant on one income stream. And then, on the other hand,
if an offer takes a lot of time for you to deliver but it's not
a huge percentage of your income, that's probably a great place to start with
an offer to retire so then you can free up more of your time to
focus on creating an offer that's not going to be as dependent on your time
to deliver. Okay, Number five is delivering this offer limiting you from having
a bigger impact in other ways. If you are working one on one with
clients and you know that you can serve more people in an online course program
format, you know, like a bigger group for example, but you don't
have time to create it because you're too busy with clients, then that might
be a sign that it's time to retire it and look at how you can
start to shop differently, how you can start to serve your audience in more
scalable ways, or even starting to dial back the amount of one on one
or other time intensive offers that you sell. So for example, putting up
your prices for one on one and working with fewer clients and then using that
time to create those offers that are scalable and that allow you to help more
people in one go. And then last question number six, do you enjoy
delivering this offer? There is only so long that you can keep doing something
you hate in your business, because if you don't enjoy doing it, if
you don't enjoy showing up and delivering this offer. Ultimately you're gonna end up
hating your business. You potentially might burn out. It's not great. So
when we look at this, though, I want to differentiate between two things.
Is it temporary boredom or temporary pain? Like you just at the moment,
you're going through a bit of a rough patch with this offer. You
don't enjoy it because maybe you've got one painful client, or you've been delivering
it for six months now and you're like, ah, this is a little
bit repetitive. I'm a bit bored. I wouldn't retire an offer because of
a temporary pain. But if it's something that you really just it doesn't feel
aligned. You can't see yourself doing it in your business a year from now,
five years from now, then it's probably worth retiring or at least considering
retiring it. So one of the things that I really want to reiterate is
intentionally designing your offer suite is the one thing that's going to determine who your
business attracts, how much you make in sales, how consistent those sales are,
and how much freedom you have in your business. If you don't have
the right office suite, you're gonna be limiting your freedom from the get go.
Now, I have a short course called Offers Sell More. It's a
self paced course and workbook to strategically design and refine your office suite in three
hours so you can make more sales, help more people, and escape that
all or nothing revenue roller coaster. To get all the info about Offers Sell
Moore, send me a DM on Instagram. I'm there at Stephtaylor dot co.
Send me olsm or head on over to Steph Taylor dot co slash olsm.
We'll pop the link to that in the show notes as well. Okay,
so let's say you've decided now to retire your offer. That's one offer
that you're looking at. You're like, oh no, I'm gonna stop telling
this. You have two options. So the first option is to tell your
audience about it and use that retirement of the offer as a way to almost
run a limited, limited time launch campaign for a couple of days, maybe
three days, maybe seven days, whatever it is, where it's their last
chance to buy this offer. I would do this if you just want that
one last cash injection and you still enjoyed the delivering the offer. You just
don't want to do it long term. On the other hand, if you
do not ever want to deliver this offer ever again, then option two might
be the better way, and that is, don't tell anybody about it.
So unless obviously, if it's a client offer and you've got clients that are
doing that work with you, let them know obviously, but don't tell.
You don't need to tell the rest of your audience that you are retiring that
offer. If you don't want to ever offer it again, great, you
can remove it from your website, remove the check out page, remove whatever
needs to be removed, remove all references to it, do a Google search
for it, and just make sure it's not still showing up in the search
results. All of that, and that's it. You don't have to it
doesn't have to be this big fancy like, ooh, I'm retiring my offer,
and you don't have to explain yourself or anything like that. All right,
So there you go a couple of questions to just check in about whether
you need to retire a particular offer or not. And if you've learned anything
from this podcast so far, please take thirty seconds to leave a quick rating
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you so much for listening. Catch you next time.