And a lot of the time we procrastinate making a decision because we're worried about
making the wrong one, not realizing that not making a decision is also making
a decision. Time keeps passing, and whether we make a decision or not,
time is going to pass. And we would have been much better off
six months down the track if we'd chosen either of those options than by choosing
nothing at all. 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 dollar year. 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 even more joy. Do you want the
list to get my daily businesses? Every day, I'll send you a bite
sized prompt designed to help you grow your business in a more intentional way.
Sign up at Steph Taylor dot co forward slash DBB or at the link Inshore
notes, Hey, welcome back to My Perfect Action. This is episode eight
hundred and twenty five. Today is another Ask Steph episode where I'm answering a
listener question that was sent in and today's questions actually really exciting because it's from
one of my students who I guess has been just been a student of mine
for probably oh four years now, I'd say close to that. So it's
really exciting to be able to answer this question from Renata Bernardi and it says,
Hi, Steph, my question is this, I'm torn between a scaling
what I've achieved with my current offers or be creating a new offer to service
my existing students and clients. They I have been asking for a community,
but I can't do both right now. What would you recommend that I do?
First? And then the second part of the question was I also wanted
to know if you think investing time in writing your book was worth it.
Again, a lot of people have asked how come you don't have a book
yet, but I can't see it being a good ROI at the moment love
your work. I've launched three times using your methodology and it gets better every
time. Thank you, Nata. Oh. I'm going to start by answering
the second question first, because I think that's probably the easiest, easiest answer
for me. I found that it was worth it because actually recently one of
my students said that she came across me through seeing my book on Amazon,
and that's how she came into my brand universe. So yeah, absolutely,
though I will be honest, writing my book probably wasn't as much effort as
it would have been for a lot of people, because what I really did
was I took a lot of content that I'd already shared elsewhere, and I
fleshed it out. I turned it into longer essays, and rather than having
to structure a book in chapters, I structured it in essays. And if
you haven't seen the book, it's called ninety nine Launch Lessons. You can
grab a copy at Stephtaylor dot co slash book and really it's just ninety nine
lessons in building a profitable online business. So yes, it's been great ROI
for me, but not so much in terms of sales of the book,
but in terms of what it has led other people to buy from me,
to work with me, they've become podcast listeners, etc. Now the second,
the second question torn between scaling what you've achieved with your current offers and
creating a new offer. Now, there are pros and cons to both approaches,
and I honestly I think thinking about how you are designing your offers in
your business as a whole is very important, and that is why I created
offer Less Sell More, where you'll strategically design and refine your offer suite so
you can make more sales, help a wider range of people, and escape
the all or nothing revenue roller coaster. You can find out more and sign
up for that at at Steph Taylor dot co slash olsm. We'll also pop
a link to that in the show notes. Now, let's look at the
first approach. Let's look at the pros and cons of the first approach,
scaling what you have achieved with your current offers. The obvious pro here is
that you don't need to spend any time creating new offers because you've already done
that. The hard work is done. Now you can focus more time and
energy on streamlining them because you already know how to deliver them, likely already
have processes in place. So you can possibly start to bring in a bigger
team, a team that can help you to free up your time, which
then might give you a bit of time that you can create that next offer
when you have a bit more time available to do. So. You already
know your existing offers convert, so now it's less risky to look at other
ways to scale them, looking at things like paid traffic for example, like
Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads, because I know your audience is very active on
LinkedIn Renata. But on the flip side, now scaling what you've achieved with
your current offers means that this becomes more of a numbers game. It becomes
a matter of getting more people into your offers, which means that you then
need to reach more people and that is like a challenge for everybody Right now,
the online space is different to what it used to be, and trying
to reach more people organically it's a lot harder than it was five years ago.
Now. The more people who you have in your business universe, you
will probably also find that you have more customer support. You know, if
you have more people who are coming through your products, the more customer support
you will generally have, So you will probably need to hire somebody at some
stage to get that off of your plate if you haven't already. When you
are relyingtaying on those current offers, then your income becomes a bit more tied
to your audience growth. In a month where, for example, maybe Facebook
ads are more expensive, like November. They're traditionally very expensive in November because
of Black Friday, the lead up of the holiday season, all of that.
When those ads are more expensive, then your income might drop. In
a month where you maybe aren't showing up online as much, showing up on
social media, doing podcast interviews, wherever you are, whatever channels you are
using to grow your audience and reach more people, if you're not showing up
so much on there, then your income might drop. And I guess the
last con of you know, scaling what you've achieved with your current offers is
it doesn't help your existing students and clients. Now, that might not be
a problem. It doesn't necessarily need to be a problem. It doesn't necessarily
need to be a con. It really depends on what your bigger vision is
for your business. Do you want to keep helping them? Do you want
to keep helping your existing students and clients, maybe helping them with new challenges
or helping them in a deeper way than before, or on the flip side,
are you happy with delivering the solution to specific challenges, the ones that
you're already helping them to solve, and then letting them go, letting them
go elsewhere to get that next step of support if they need it. So
there are a few different pros and cons there, and again I'm going to
say there's no one better solution. It's really what's going to work for you
now. The second option was creating a new offer to service your existing clients.
Okay, so let's look at the pros for this. The big pro
is that you get to help those who have already had a great experience with
you. They want to work with you again, They are asking you for
ways to work with you again. So it's an easier solution for you.
It's an easier option for you than selling to somebody who doesn't know you that
well. Yet, increasing your lifetime value you from each customer is so much
easier than trying to constantly bring in new people all the time, especially in
the current online environment where it's really hard to stand out and it can be
really hard to reach new people. Ads are expensive. It's really not what
it used to be five years ago. Like I said before, So selling
to those existing customers becomes much easier, and it also allows you to help
them in a deeper way. It can It means you can deliver a better
overall client experience because now you are helping them to solve that next problem.
You're helping them to achieve that next transformation, that next step. Now I
want to say, I want to highlight something that you said. They are
literally asking you to create a community. That sounds like such a good opportunity.
And I know that you are really limited on time and you can't do
that and deliver your existing offers. But I wonder if maybe you could bring
in a team member to run this for you. Could you hire a community
manager for an hour a day, five hours a week and make their sole
responsibility running this community. I really I would encourage you to really investigate this
idea a little bit more, really find out what they want, like when
they ask you for a community, what do they mean by that, What
does their ideal community look like to them? What does the perfect solution look
like to them? What problems do they now have that your community could solve
for them, And if it's a recurring problem, like maybe they need ongoing
support, then potentially that could be a membership, and the recurring income from
the membership would then cover the costs of having someone manage the admin, having
somebody manage the community, and ultimately be profitable over and above those costs.
And then once you have created this new offer, then maybe your focus shifts
to scaling your other offer, because now you know that there's a natural next
step for somebody who completes the first one. Knowing that each time you launch
that existing offer, that first offer, you're going to be adding more people
into the overall journey, the overall pipeline, which means that their lifetime value
is going to be higher, which means that you can spend more time and
energy to acquire a new buyer for that offer. Your return on investment becomes
a lot higher because the lifetime value is higher. Now, obviously, the
downside to this option is it does take a lot more time to create and
deliver new offers than it does to simply launch an existing one over and over
again. Once we've created an offer, we've created all of the assets to
promote it, you know, the sales page, we've got, cut open
emails. All it then becomes is tweaking the marketing, tweaking the messaging each
time we launch it. But we're generally not having to reinvent the wheel,
so it's not a whole lot of work. But when you're doing something new,
now you've got to create the new offer, You've got to create the
new assets to launch it, all of that, and it can be risky.
I know, even though they have asked for it, there is no
guarantee they will pay for it. Then there's never a guarantee that they will
pay for something until they actually do. You don't know how it's going to
convert until you launch it, So yes, it's risky. You are investing
time and possibly money as well into something that isn't proven to convert. But
that is also the nature of business in general, and I think we have
to be open to a little bit of risk because honestly, if it were
risk free, everybody would do it. Greater risk, greater reward, Nothing
ventured, nothing gained, all of those things, right, we need to
bear a little bit of risk because we don't know what stands on the other
side of that risk until we actually take that step. Okay, now there's
also there's another two options that you didn't include in your question, and you
might have already discounted these options, which is fine. So option three is
to create an offer that comes before your existing offer. So it doesn't need
to be as big as a community or as big as a next step offer,
but it could be something smaller, something that solves a problem somebody has
before they can solve the problem that your existing offers solve. So they might
have a problem that needs solving before they will even be in a headspace to
solve the next problem that your offers solve. It might be lower ticket,
actually probably would likely be lower ticket. But the aim here isn't to generate
a lot of cash. It's not to generate a lot of income. It's
more there to give them a smaller win and nurture them into your next offer.
And this could be really simple. It could be a live workshop,
it could be a mini cost, it could be anything. As long as
it's aligned with your strategy. It doesn't matter so much what the format is.
It matters more what the outcome is and what the overall goal the overall
strategy is. And that's really why I created offer Less, Sell More,
because it's not about just adding in extra offer to your business. It's about
intentionally designing what do I want this to look like? What is that journey
that I'm taking people on where I can bring them back to buy from me
again and again, rather than just letting them pick and choose things and then
they go off on their merry way and I never see them ever again.
So really thinking about what is that strategy, what is that journey going to
look like? And if remember, if you want to sign up for offer
Less, Sell More, the link to do that is at Steph Taylor dot
co slash olsm all right. Option for the last one, and this is
the option I do not recommend, but I'm putting it in here because it
is still an option. Even though it's not a decision. We are still
doing this when we don't make a decision, and that is sitting in indecision
between the options. Pick one. Anything will be better than doing nothing.
And a lot of the time we procrastinate making a decision because we're worried about
making the wrong one, not realizing that not making a decision is also making
a decision. Time keeps passing, and whether we make a decision or not,
that time is going to pass. And we would have been much better
off six months down the track if we'd chosen either of those options than by
choosing nothing at all. So I just want to make that one very clear.
I know it's very hard when you're like, oh, which is going
to be the better one? Just pick one? Honestly, either one of
them will be better than nothing. All right. There you have it,
the pros and cons for launching something new versus scaling what you already have.
And remember, there is no wrong decision. If you are sitting in this
exact same challenge or a similar challenge, you can't get it wrong. Like,
even if it doesn't work out great, well perfect, we now have
a lesson. We now know what doesn't work, so now we can focus
on what will work. That is it for today's episode. If you have
any friends who are struggling with this challenge, please share this episode with them,
and if you haven't already followed or subscribed this podcast, make sure you
hit the plus in Apple Podcasts or the follow in Spotify. Thank you so
much for listening. Catch you next time