You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 184.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove Podcast, your calm space for practical help to get your dream business up and running while being authentically you and taking care of your mental health. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you're here!

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Hi My Strong Friends. 

 

Hey, how was your Thanksgiving? Were you able to be fully present to enjoy it? Did you have the peace of mind that your business was doing great? You had plenty of revenue and a spacious amount of time to do everything that you wanted to do during the holiday event?

 

Well, did you even take a break? That's probably a better question. I'm four years into running my own business. And this year, I took the whole week of Thanksgiving off. 

 

In fact, this year, I took up several weeks of vacation, and I had my highest revenue year yet. This was possible because I optimized my sales funnel and service delivery processes. 

 

I'll give you one guess with how I did it. It's the Secret Sauce. If you've been listening to the November podcast episodes, you know the Secret Sauce by now. It's the Clarity Steps. That simple seven step process that helps you on everything in your business. 

 

The Clarity Steps help you work in your business as you help your clients and it helps you to work on your business.

MORE TIME AND MORE REVENUE?

 

In today's episode, I'm sharing how to use the clarity steps to work on your business. This will help you to create more revenue and time. It also helps you get more peace of mind. So you can actually celebrate and enjoy your holiday seasons. 

 

So first, remember these seven steps of the clarity step process are:

1. Vision
2. Metrics
3. Customized Step
4. Obstacles
5. Experiments
6. Lessons Learned
7. Wins

 

In this episode, I'm going to present this in two different ways. First way is going to be the quick to the point version. It's for those of you that just want the meat so you can go out and implement right away. And then the second way, I'm going to share my story through those steps. I'm going to pull back the curtain for a bit of a behind the scenes action. So you can see where I started in year one, where I'm at now at year four. 

WHAT IS A SALES FUNNEL?

 

Now, before we jump into the meat, let's define a sales funnel. Your sales funnel is going to be your critical process. If that's not working, the rest of your business won't matter. You won't have enough clients or revenue and you'll probably be exhausted from too much work. 

 

A sales funnel is a set of repeatable process steps to take a potential client from not knowing about your business to becoming a paid client. That's a pretty big jump right? They don't know your business even exists, and then they’re a paid client. 

 

When you have a specific set of steps that work really well, you can finally relax. Your nervous system is calm, your brain is calm, and your bank account is pretty happy. When you have measurements on those steps, you can see what's working and what's not. It gives you pinpoint accuracy on what to fix. 

 

Once all of the measurements on those steps are at their targets, you have planned Predictable Revenue. Once you know the exact tasks that go with those steps, you can look for ways to automate them or batch them. And this will create more time in your schedule. So you actually have time for vacations and holidays. 

 

In Episode 127, I go over some of the different types of sales funnels. So if you're not familiar with them, or you want to reevaluate what you have, that's a good one to go check out. The title of that podcast episode is #127: Decrease Overwhelm with Sales Funnels. 

 

And within my Unshakable Business Co-Lab membership, I also have an online course called Smooth and Scalable, and it talks about ten different sales funnels. It gives all of the details, example metrics and project plans on how to make that happen. 

 

I work with a lot of my one-on-one clients also with our sales funnels so they get access to that course complimentary plus we're doing all the hands-on work. 

 

CUT TO THE CHASE

 

Alright, so let's get to the just the meat part of this podcast episode. 

 

This optimization method is something that I developed while I was working in biotech, a company or a department when I was there would come to me about their core process. This is what we would call their critical path process. If that process wasn't working, nothing else would matter. So we had to make sure that it was optimized, everything was running smoothly, and it was cranking out all of the widgets that it was supposed to crank out. 

 

So this applies to any process. But it definitely works really, really well in the entrepreneur world, with sales funnels, and then our product and service fulfillment. 

 

First, we would get together to understand their current process, we'd map out their steps, the time and money investment and measurements about the flow of the widgets through the process. 

 

How long does it take to get through that process? 

Are there any bottlenecks? 

Are there errors? 

Is there any rework?

 

For My Freedom Grove clients, we do this using sales funnel maps and simulators where we plug in the actual numbers to see the conversion between each step. And then for some businesses, this is the first time that they're learning about sales funnels. 

 

So the clarity everybody gets, just from this step, is launching them lightyears ahead of their starting point. It's pretty exciting when you can see your business in one map, and know exactly where everything is working or not working. 

 

All of a sudden, you're like, Oh, this is how everything ties together. This is why things are working overall or not working overall. 

 

So we post this map, with the measurements, somewhere where everybody can see it. If you're working in a team environment, all team players have their eyes on this. If you're a solopreneur, then it's me and you, we've got eyes on it so that we know what's happening. 

 

In biotech, we tape this process up to the wall, and then everybody was able to stand in front of the wall and see everything. With My Freedom Grove clients, we embed your sales funnel map into a custom made dashboard. We use this map for all of our discussions. And then we focus on improving that critical path process. And so how we do that is with applying the Clarity Steps.

 

THE “QUICK” VERSION - STEP ONE: VISION

 

Step one, the vision. 

 

How do you want your company to operate? 

What results do you want for this critical path? 

How will you feel once you are achieving the goal with that critical path? 

What experience do you want to have for your people that are going through that critical path? 

If it's a widget that's going through, what experience do you want for the widget? 

 

THE “QUICK” VERSION - STEP TWO: METRICS

 

Step number two, metrics. 

 

Now, we already established some baseline metrics, we've got the process map, we've got some metrics that are there. We know the resources that are being used. And we know the hands-on time it takes to execute the tasks of each step. And we also have some of the measurements of the widget's experience or the person's experience as they go through. 

 

So I want you to look at the vision. 

Which metrics need to change in order to meet the vision? 

Are there metrics that haven't been used before that need to be incorporated? 

Or do you already have everything there, and you need to just select which ones are significant? 

 

Maybe you don't need to look at all of them, maybe there's just a certain set that needs to be improved. Now you're going to set the targets. That's why the funnel simulation software helps us because then we can run scenarios to see, okay, if we change this one step, and this number or this conversion rate, what's the end result, so that helps us to set the most appropriate targets. So then on the map, we have the target above this step, so we know exactly what we're shooting for. 

 

THE “QUICK” VERSION - STEP THREE: CUSTOMIZED STEPS

 

Step three is your customized steps. 

 

We already know some of the high level obstacles that get in the way of achieving those targets, which obstacles need to get resolved, and in which order. 

 

We're going to create a first pass project plan. Project A resolves the first set of obstacles. And we also decide which metrics that will improve. Project B resolves the next set of obstacles and moves even more metric needles. And then Project C resolves the next set and moves even more metrics. 

 

This is customized because every business has different obstacles.

 

And this also helps us to constrain the focus. It's so hard when you're trying to work on everything all at once. time. So it's important to move the metrics that matter first, and then move the next one and the next one. So that comes from prioritizing those obstacles. 

 

THE “QUICK” VERSION - STEP FOUR: OBSTACLES

 

Step four, obstacles. 

 

We already knew those high level ones, but now we're constraining the focus to that very first set of metrics that we're trying to change. 

 

Which step in the process or multiple steps are we trying to resolve? 

 

We're looking at every step on that main map. And within each of those steps, I actually like to have an obstacle list for each one. Now we know if we're trying to work on step one, what are all of the obstacles that get in the way of step one? And then we write those ones down. 

 

Some of those obstacles are going to be mindset obstacles. And we have mindset tools to help to resolve those. Some of these are going to be process obstacles, we're going to have other tools on how to resolve those. 

 

And then we decide the priority of all of those obstacles based on their impact and urgency. And I also will use an impact and urgency grid, so that it's a lot easier to be objective in coming up with the priority. Sometimes that grid, really eye opening, because things that we thought were important. 

 

Once we're comparing it against the different categories in this grid, we realized it was actually a priority three, and something else was a priority one. So getting the right priority, very important.

THE “QUICK” VERSION - STEP FIVE: EXPERIMENTS

 

Then we go on to the experiments, we design structured experiments to resolve those obstacles, we get specific about which desired outcome we want, which metrics are we trying to move. If we haven't defined our metrics, then we're just kind of doing random experiments. And it doesn't necessarily tie back to everything that really matters in our business. That's the desired outcome, it's tied back to those metrics. Which ones are we trying to move?

Then we define what are all of the requirements for a successful solution, because you may find something that moves the needle. But if, all of a sudden, that thing is super expensive, or costs a lot of your time, or it's just super difficult, that might not be your best solution. So define ahead of time what your requirements are for a successful solution, and then design the experiment. That way, you're going to have a lot better high quality experiments that give you exactly what you need. 

 

Once we design the experiment, then we create a to do list of all of the different pieces and assign some due dates. If you have a team, this might also be assigning who all of those tasks belong to. And you want to make sure that your team is there looking at the task to make sure they're qualified to do those tasks, and that the due date fits in with their available bandwidth. 

 

THE “QUICK” VERSION - STEP SIX: LESSONS LEARNED

 

Step six is the lessons learned.

 

This is after the experiment is run, we come back, we discussed the experiment, we evaluate those results, based on the desired outcome. 

 

Did we actually move any of those needles and against the requirements? 

 

We might have moved the needle, but maybe the requirements didn't get met. That's going to be a decision. Okay, do you want to do another experiment so that you can get those requirements? Or is that requirement really something that you have any wiggle room in? 

 

Now, we don't want to compromise your requirements. Make sure that you're being honest with yourself, when you look at this. We also discuss what worked, what didn't work and evaluate if this is the final solution. If it is, we update the map with that next step and the instruction. It's a new version of that one step. 

 

We gather metrics for a while and we update the current state of the metrics. And if it meets the target, then we're complete on that part of the critical process. We don't have to change anything else about it. 

 

Now, if the target is not met, we continue the lessons learned. What would you do differently for the next experiment? And then repeat step five of the clarity steps, which is the structured experiments. 

 

Now it's possible that your experiment resolved some of the obstacles for that process step and it moved the needle. And that that isn't the part that needs to get experimented on. You need to look at the other obstacles that are still there for that process step. Those might be the things that need the experiment so that you can move the needle the rest of the way.

 

THE “QUICK” VERSION - STEP SEVEN: CELEBRATE THE WINS

 

And then step seven, we celebrate the wins. 

 

We celebrate the heck out of every win along the way. This helps to keep our engagement up our motivation. If we're constantly thinking nothing's working, it creates all of that emotional spin. And when we have a heavy emotional load, it slows us down. Because it's like we've got this fifty pound heavy backpack on us. So of course, we're not moving as fast.

If you're celebrating the wins, you don't have that heavy backpack, it's a lot easier to move forward. Keeping a visual of all of the wins can really help keep that motivation up. 

 

When I was in biotech, we'd actually have a winner's circle on the wall, where we would post little postcards about all of the wins. And we'd all clap and celebrate for the person that had the win, or for the team, collectively, if it was a team win. 

 

In My freedom Grove, we have a Facebook group where we're celebrating the wins at least once a week. But oftentimes, we'll do it throughout too, because people will get wins at different times of the day. And then we also are celebrating the wins during the coaching calls, whether that's a membership call, or private one on one call. 

 

We keep celebrating those wins, and sometimes people don't recognize that they had a win, because they're so focused on the parts that didn't work. That it's really helpful to have your independent third party coach, look at it and go, Wait a minute, here's a win right there. Let's celebrate that. And all of a sudden, it's like what that was a win. And they don't understand why it was a win. 

 

Then I have to explain why it was a win. And all of a sudden, it's like, Oh, I didn't know how important that one part was. Yeah, that part is really important. 

 

Celebrate the wins, because it does more than one thing, keeps your motivation up, but also educates you on what's most important. 

 

Okay, that's the meat. If you're a “meat” kind of person, and you want to go implement, I give you full permission to turn off the podcast right now. Go out there, implement, you're going to map out your critical path. And then you're going to start to apply the Clarity Steps to it. 

 

BEHIND THE SCENES OF MY FREEDOM GROVE

 

For those of you that would love to have the behind the scenes view of how I got to where I am. Keep listening. 

 

Remember, I've been in business for four years now. It's fully self-sustaining. And I'm able to take vacations with my family now. It wasn't always like that. I'm gonna give you some of that behind the scenes so that you can see maybe some of yourself and where that is. 

 

I'm going to share a bunch of my lessons learned along the way so these things might help you like These might be things you're going through right now. And you go, Oh my gosh, I didn't even think about that. 

 

Okay, so here we go. 

 

In my first year of business, I was totally exhausted, and I was emotionally depleted. I was trying so many different ways to meet and get clients. And my revenue, you're not gonna like this answer, was about fifteen hundred dollars in that first year. Oh, that hurt. 

 

It was a huge shock to my nervous system. After all, I was used to having a six figure salary every year from corporate. I always had plenty of work to do. I always had plenty of clients. I had all sorts of money, like my family and I, we could go on vacations because we had the money and being that it was a corporate job, they already have that vacation time built in. 

 

Now, instead, first year in business, only made fifteen hundred dollars. 

 

Now people, I was the breadwinner in my family. To go from a six figure salary every year to take care of my family to fifteen hundred dollars in a year. To say I was stressed out was an understatement, nervous system in full overdrive. 

 

I had other things that I was using to help us get through those times. But, whew, that was a lot. 

 

I was trying everything that I could think of. My Facebook feed, of course, was filled with all sorts of bits and pieces of try this and try that and do this and do that. Of course I was going after everything. 

 

DROWNING IN ALL THE THINGS

 

The problem was that all of these were bits and pieces of sales funnels. Nobody actually showed me how all of the pieces fit together. 

 

It was,

Just go out, and build an email list. You'll get tons of clients. 

Offer a challenge. You'll get tons of clients.

Do social media posts. You'll get tons of clients. 

 

Reality is, an effective sales funnel uses several pieces, not just one. So here I was grasping at straws at all of these different things. And it was a whole bunch of stuff that didn't necessarily fit together and it also left a whole lot of missing pieces or missing holes in my sales funnels. 

 

What it was doing, though, was having me work tons of hours. There were times I would even work till midnight and I would take some interested potential clients. I was taking consultation calls or virtual coffee chats at midnight, because I was so desperate to make money. I had a family to support after al. 

 

I was wearing myself out. And then I had some stuff that was working. Obviously, I'd made fifteen hundred dollars. Now, I wasn't doing one-on-ones back then, I was only selling membership. That was only one hundred forty nine dollars per month. 

 

Fifteen hundred dollars, you might be thinking, Oh, okay, she just signed one client. No, that's not the case. I actually signed several, it's just, I was only charging one hundred forty nine dollars a month. So it doesn't add up very fast. 

 

I had a lot of different pieces that did work. But I also had a lot of stuff that didn't. 

 

TAKE A STEP BACK TO SEE THE WHOLE PICTURE

 

So one day, I just told myself, Gretchen, sit down and map out your processes. After all, I'm a Business Process Coach. Processes are my strengths. 

 

So friends, let me tell you it was shocking. I had fifty four different processes for trying to get clients. 

 

It's no wonder I was so exhausted. Fifty four different ways is just exhausting. 

 

It also meant that I wasn't focused on optimizing any of it. It was kind of like jumping into the deep end of the swimming pool, when you don't know how to swim. I was seriously flailing my arms and legs to keep my head above water. 

 

When I stepped back to actually map out my processes, I saw that seven out of those fifty four were working. All of a sudden, I could stand up in the water. I realized that I wasn't in the deep end. I was actually in the shallow end. And I could stand up the whole time, because I had some processes that were working. I was safe. 

 

I could use those processes and make sales. And that's really important, especially for our nervous system. We have to establish that sense of safety. I thought I was in the deep end, really, I was in the shallow end. It's just I was freaking out flailing all around. And I didn't realize I had seven ways that were actually working. 

 

The processes that were not working, had a bunch of pieces missing, I was just doing the latest opportunity that was presented to me. And truth be told, I just wasn't very good at a lot of those pieces. I mean, there's still some that I'm developing my skill set, and also developing my appreciation and enjoyment of them. I mean, because come on, we know there's a bunch of stuff that we just don't really enjoy doing. That's a lot of mindset work to try to find what is the enjoyment in it so that you do some of those. 

 

But it also makes sense on why I was hopping around and trying everything. If I couldn't master any one of those things, if I didn't feel good at it, and I didn't want to spend any more time on it, I'd go try something else. Well, maybe I'll like this one better, or maybe I'll be better at this thing. 

 

I was really just trying to figure out what I even like in trying to do any of this stuff. I decided that those forty seven processes that weren't working, that I was just going to scrap them. I mean, it doesn't make any sense to keep doing all of these things if I didn't enjoy it. And it wasn't working. 

 

Why keep doing any of it if there's no payoff?

 

PRUNE THE ROSE BUSH

 

All right, forty seven processes gone. 

 

Focus on the seven that were working. 

 

Now I looked for the steps that were in common for those seven processes. Could I consolidate any of this? And the answer was yes. The last four steps were always the same. We're going to call those the core steps that included everything I would do once someone said they were interested in a consultation. 

 

The front steps of each sales funnel were totally different. The front steps included everything I would do to go and try to create the consultation. 

 

Now we're going to start applying the Clarity Steps to those seven different processes. 

 

Step number one was my vision. 

 

I wanted to be able to have three different sales funnels that we're working on instead of seven. I wanted to get it down to three. That meant that the front steps of those sales funnels needed to work really well. 

 

In my vision, I'm optimizing the core steps of three of those sales funnels, so that I could get a process that worked every single time. And I also wanted them to convert really high so I'm looking at that back part the core steps so that I could get the highest conversions. 

 

If you listen to Episode #183 High Converting Consultations, you already heard how I optimized that back part of it. 

 

My focus was then, How do I optimize that front part of three of these funnels? 

 

I evaluated all of those seven processes. First, figure out which ones were taking a long amount of time, which ones were easiest, all of the things. 

 

Here's what I found first, the front end on one of my processes that worked. It included seventeen hours of my time. So hands-on time spent with one person to create one consultation. 

 

Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck. Seventeen hours. That's not sustainable just to get one consultation. 

 

So I cut that one out. 

 

Next, I looked at one where the front end only took one hour of my time every week. Okay, well, that's not bad, right? It's just one hour. And it's with a group of people, not just one. That sounds pretty good. The problem, though, was that it took a year and a half until any of the people in that group were ready for a consultation. That's a long time to spend with people just to get them ready for a consultation. And even at the consultation, we don't know if they're actually ready to sign up for the product or service. 

 

Instead, I was meeting with them every single week, for a year and a half. And we had a great relationship. And they were getting lots of benefits, but my business was suffering. You know, a whole year and I only made fifteen hundred dollars. Just I couldn't. it was heartbreaking. I didn't want to walk away. But I also needed to take care of my family. 

 

I looked at some of my other processes. And some were very effective, I could get consultations right away. I got really good. I mean, that's part of why I have that course called The Connection Factor, is how you can create a consultation within five minutes of meeting a stranger. 

 

I was excellent at this. But one of the things that I found was that once I got them into the consultation, that they weren't always my ideal client. They had stuff that they wanted help on, but it was always something totally different. 

 

I might have ten different people come for a consultation. But it was on ten different results. And it would take me ten different processes in order to help them get to that same result. 

 

In the beginning, of course, I said yes to that, because I wanted to help them. But it wasn't really helping me to optimize that back in service. I want to be able to help people get a certain result, have a track record with it, and be really good at it, so we can get those results fast. If I have people that have all of these different goals in mind, and I have used different processes, it's not gonna work so well. 

 

I had to take a look at that funnel, it was good. But I needed to go to a different location, where it was people that all had kind of the same result that they wanted to get that I could use a very similar process on. 

 

hat's how I started to look at the measurements. I started to realize I wanted a way that I could create the consultation, quickly, not a year and a half. I wanted ways where I could create a consultation where it wouldn't take me very long. Those seventeen hours, not going to work. Being able to create a consultation in five minutes was pretty great. But I also wanted to make sure that I was creating a consultation within five minutes with someone who was actually my ideal client. 

 

Those are some of the measurements that I was basing my decision off of. 

 

DOUBLE DOWN ON WHAT’S WORKING

 

I came up with customized steps. 

 

There were so many things to learn and do and develop. I mean, you know what it's like, we get overwhelmed, because we just, we feel like we have to do all of it all at once. But honestly, we're just one human and one brain, we have to give our brain a break. Otherwise, we're gonna get that black screen to death. We don't want that. 

 

We want to be able to learn something all the way through. If we're task switching between all of the different things. We're learning a tiny bit here or there. And when we switch to five other tasks and then come back. Most often, we’ve forgotten what we already learned. And we have to go back to the beginning and start over. We want to try to constrain our focus and develop one set of skills at a time, master it and then move on. 

 

I had to figure out what was going to be the right set of customized steps for me at the time. 

 

My very first one was I needed to establish financial safety. Fifteen hundred dollars in a year is not financial safety. Now I had other ways of coming up with money. But I also needed to generate money, not just deplete the sources that I had.

 

I had to get really clear on what my minimum math number was. And was that minimum math number absolutely necessary? Was there anything else that I could cut temporarily? Any of those extras, so I could get that number as small as possible. 

 

I wanted to determine all of the easy ways that I could create that math number that could be for my business, or that could be supplemental in a way that wouldn't derail my business. 

 

Something that came out of that was me deciding that I would also take one-on-one clients, because one-on-one clients, the price point is definitely not one hundred forty nine dollars a month. If I allowed myself to take one-on-one clients, I could create more of that minimum math number. And I wouldn't need a lot of them. But just enough to keep going. 

 

Step number two, I wanted to decide which of the funnels I would keep. I had decided on three sales funnels. And in a little while, I'll tell you why I chose three, because really, you only need one really good sales funnel to sell one of your products. 

 

At this point, I now had one-on-one and membership. I also had to factor that in the sales funnels. What was appropriate for both of those? Could I have one sales funnel that went for both? Or did I need something different? 

 

Step number three, I had to get really good at those sales funnels, so I could create that minimum math number the easiest way. That's also going back looking at the metrics, and knowing, how do I improve this? How do I optimize this so that I get really good, and I can hit my targets? And then I was improving those most important process steps so that I could get the quickest results. 

 

Those were some of the customized steps. I had a lot more, I mean, I've been doing this for four years. So the number of steps that I focused on is quite a bit but high levels were what were getting me out the gate. 

 

Step one, establish financial safety. 

 

Step two, decide on the funnels I was gonna use.

Step three, how can I get really good at those so that I establish my minimum math number, and I don't need any other supplemental stuff?  

 

And then step four, was improving those most important process steps so that I could get even better results. 

 

WE ALL HAVE OBSTACLES

 

Step Four in clarity steps is always to identify the obstacles. 

 

Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness, I had hundreds of obstacles. 

 

I have some clients come to me and they start listing out their obstacles. And when we hit around twenty. They're feeling awful. They're thinking, Oh, my gosh, there's something wrong with me, I have so many obstacles. Yeah, I had probably like three to five hundred.And I have been slowly resolving all of them so that I could be where I'm at now. 

 

Just because you have twenty, honestly, it probably means you have two hundred.. And that's okay. That's kind of the point of the whole thing. We have to uncover what are the obstacles that are getting in the way, so we can actually resolve them. And then it gets really easy. 

 

If you only have a couple of obstacles between you and your dream life or your dream business, then things are a lot easier. But yes, some of us will have a lot more obstacles, and I was one of those people. 

 

I also noticed that some of my obstacles were really obvious they were business ones just on knowledge and capability. But I also had a lot of hidden obstacles that I wasn't even aware of. So these fall more under the personal development and healing kind of obstacles. 

 

Just to give you an example of what some of these look like the obvious obstacles, these were more of your business once. 

 

I didn't know all of the different sales funnels that existed. 

 

I didn't know how all of the pieces of those sales funnels connected. 

 

I didn't even know what all of those intricate pieces were and that they needed to go together. 

 

I didn't have a business card, and for some of my funnels, it was important because I was meeting people out in public. They needed to have a way of getting in contact with me. But also I needed to have a way of getting in contact with them. So both of those were obstacles. 

 

I didn't know how to clearly articulate who I helped and what I did. I remember I joined a program way too early in my entrepreneur journey because I thought Oh yes, collaborations and joint ventures that's exactly what I needed. But I get in and the first thing you're supposed to do is introduce yourself and say who you help, how you help them.

 

Oh my gosh, I could barely get out that my name was Gretchen, let alone anything else. So I had spent all this money on a program that I wasn't ready for yet because this was really more for people that were more advanced. They already had their house in order. They already knew exactly what they were doing. And now they were ready to do collaborations and joint ventures. 

 

So yeah, that was an obvious one. It wasn't obvious at the moment. But now it's pretty obvious to other obvious obstacles.

 

My graphic artistry skills sucked. I was good at sharing other people's beautiful posts and their graphics. But when it came to my own, I was pretty challenged. So Canva has definitely become my best friend. I've spent a lot of time developing my skills. And now I have really high quality graphics. 

 

I do all of the graphics myself. Anything that you ever see of mine, whether it's podcast stuff, website, stuff, things in my products and services, any of my social media posts, everything. All of that it's done by me. It took a long time to develop those skills. And I'm glad that I did. But that was one of my hang ups in the beginning. 

 

I also didn't feel comfortable on video. That was tough, because I was used to being up in front of large groups of people and doing my thing. I mean, even hundreds of people, but stick me in a room by myself with a video camera. I couldn't do it. 

 

One of these days, I'm going to share some of the early videos of me. And you'll see how awkward I was. It was painful. So I had to do a lot of experiments to get over that. 

 

Now some of the things that weren't as obvious. I had hidden obstacles that got in the way, big time. And I may not have known what they were called at the time, but I could feel the pain of everything. I needed some people to help me to figure out what exactly that was. And then, how do you resolve that? 

 

Some of my hidden obstacles, codependency. And I'm going to tell you more about that as we go along so that maybe you can also see if that's an obstacle that was happening for you. I also had quite the hero complex. I had worked for over twenty five years in biotech, where we were making life saving medicines. It was always about saving a client's life. Well, twenty five years of that carried over into my business too. And that can run into a lot of problems. 

 

I also had unresolved trauma from some stuff with an old coworker. So that got in the way, I had some relationship dynamics that I haven't totally admitted out in public. But here you go. I was honestly fed up with being the breadwinner. I had been the breadwinner ever since I was in high school, because I grew up poor. I decided I didn't want to be poor. I always had jobs and I was always making money. 

 

Well, what happened is that anytime I started dating someone, I would be the breadwinner, so they wouldn't need to have any money. So they quit their jobs. Or if they didn't have jobs, they just wouldn't get one. And this started to extend to other people. As I got more and more successful, I had plenty of money. People always kind of expected me to help them out. And I felt like I'd be a horrible person if I didn't. But honestly, my resentment was just sky high. 

 

I was the one working my butt off and making it and I didn't even get to keep the money for myself, it was always giving it to other people that I was being kind of judgmental, that they weren't making their own. But they didn't necessarily need to if I was always there giving that money out. 

 

I had a lot of relationship dynamics that I had to work through because I found myself resistant to actually making money in my business, because then I just have to give it to everybody else. 

 

Ouch. Ouch. 

 

Now, that is seriously a hidden deep one. Here I was like, oh, no, I need to make money take care of my family. But hidden way under the surface is, this shouldn't always be me, it's time for somebody else to do all of the work. And I don't want to do all the work if I don't get to have the reward of it.

 

These are some of those hidden things. I needed to resolve all of that. So it was safe for me to make money and I wouldn't feel resentment. And then one of the other ones and many of you can relate was mom guilt. Now I know some of you are dads, and you have dad guilt. So there's a lot of that and I had to resolve all of those obstacles so I could move forward. 

 

PRIORITIZE AND FOCUS

 

So knowing which process step was impacted by these obstacles helped me so that I could prioritize which obstacle would I resolve. If I didn't have a way of objectively prioritizing these obstacles, then I might be fixing an obstacle that doesn't really move the needle. Or it could move the needle, but it won't, because there's other obstacles that prevent it. 

 

I needed to make sure I was solving them in the right order. 

 

One example is I would think, Oh, well, my sales page, I need to spend a lot of time on my sales page. And I focused on getting extra training and learning how to do it and getting templates and making it pretty and doing all of the things. However, in the very beginning, when I looked at my sales funnel map, once I finally had one, I realized that people wouldn't be looking at that sales page until step four. 

 

If I looked at my metrics for steps one through three, I didn't even have enough people going through step three, for them to even get to step four. It didn't even make sense to do all of this work and effort on step four, if I couldn't even get people there. And I didn't even really know if that was an obstacle or not because I didn't have any data points testing it to see if there was a problem. 

 

By having that sales funnel map, I knew that, No, I actually needed to focus my efforts on step one. And what are all of those obstacles and resolve those so that I could get step one working. I have some people going through. Even if I wasn’t all the way to my target, that's okay. I just needed enough people to go through to step two and enough people from step two to go to step three, and ask people to keep going through the step four and the other ones. 

 

First, I'm focusing on just getting the flow to go all the way through. And then I'm working on optimizing to get the right numbers and the right conversions between. Once I realized that it's step one, now I know that my priority obstacles lie on that obstacle list from step number one. So I'm writing down what are all of those obstacles of step one. 

 

I'm going to start doing experiments on those, even though it might be easier to do experiments on something else. Like, Nope, you gotta kiss the frog, even if you don't want to. Resolve those obstacles, where it's most important. 

 

Step five is experiments.

 

One by one, I experimented to resolve my obstacles for step one of my three sales funnels. It only really takes that one good sales funnel. Remember, I told you that however, I had three that worked equally well. 

 

I liked having the flexibility of having three that I could alternate back and forth through. All three did really well. Something that was different is that one of them required travel. And travel wasn't always available to me. But it was my highest converting funnel. 

 

I found that I was always my best lead magnet. And so I could meet someone and convert them over to a consultation within about five minutes. Right. So, five minutes to get from someone who doesn't know you to a signed up console is pretty freaking amazing. Travel was always my favorite one. But it's not always available to me. That's why I needed those other two funnels that didn't require travel, so that I could do those in between all the time that I was traveling.  

 

I had to focus my experiments to resolve the very specific obstacles on whichever funnel I was using at the time. And most people would automatically assume that I would go straight to a business coach to help me to resolve those obstacles. 

 

But what if the biggest obstacle wasn't necessarily to be solved by a business coach? 

 

Remember, I had mentioned that codependency one. That wasn't necessarily the skillset of all of the different business coaches out there. You don't really see anyone saying, Hi, I'm a business coach, I help people with codependency so that their sales funnels work. I mean, it just doesn't happen, righ?. 

 

I actually had to turn to other types of coaches and healers and books and things to help me with some of those hidden obstacles because those were the things that were starting to get in the way. Codependency was a serious obstacle for me. 

 

I cared about my clients' results as if their life depended on it. My head was consumed with getting them on the bus of doing the work and getting their result. This is what contributed to me having that sales funnel where it took a year and a half until someone was ready for a consultation. I didn't want to give up on them. I wanted to get them on the bus because they were suffering. 

 

It was creating a huge problem for my business and ultimately for my mental health. I decided that the obstacle was so big I needed to hire a grief coach. Now, there's a lot of reasons why I hired her. But this was part of it. 

 

She helped me with my codependency, and so many more of my hidden obstacles. It was eye opening, like the impact was huge. That really was a make or break decision. For me, when it came to my obstacles, my obstacles were that important to resolve for my business and also for my mental health. Investing a lot of money in a one-on-one grief coach was the very best decision for me. I wouldn't have known that she was the person that I needed. And her process was the process that I needed. 

 

If I had just stuck with Nikes, Just Do It approach, we all know, just get out there and do it, don't have any excuses, just do all the stuff. Well, that's not gonna get you your result. I mean, it might in the short term. But you're probably burn yourself out, you might end up having even more mental health challenges. We're seeing athletes all the time now that are starting to talk about their mental health challenges, because they were in that just do it goal approach. 

 

But when you use the Clarity Steps, you're uncovering the real obstacles, and then you're fixing those, you're resolving them. So that all of a sudden, you can achieve your goal and super easy and mental health so much better. And your goal, your success is inevitable. Because if you've cleared out all of the obstacles or only left obstacles, the size of a pebble, it's really easy to just go from point A to point B, there's nothing in the way. 

 

LEARNING FOR BUSINESS GROWTH

 

Okay, so step six lessons learned. 

 

There are so many things that I learned that helped me to decide on my path forward. I wouldn't have had any of those specific learnings from a book. 

 

And here's why. I've got so many books, and they tried to teach me those lessons. But I didn't connect with it. 

 

In the beginning, I didn't understand why the lesson was important. So there was a bunch of stuff that I just waved off as not important or not applicable to me. I might have even skipped a lot of pages. And of course, there were a bunch of books where it didn't even cover any of this stuff. 

 

What I found was that I was wrong with some of these books in thinking that it didn't apply to me. It did. It's just I hadn't gone through that set of experiments yet to uncover that I actually had these obstacles. 

 

I had to get out there and fail a bunch. I had to scrape my knee so that I knew, Nope, don't do it this way. Because I thought I knew exactly how to do it. I had to go out there fall down and then get a little bit more humble and go Oh, yeah. I don't know. And, Maybe I'll go back. 

 

And now I get it. Why they say that your relationship with your spouse is so important when you're an entrepreneur, and that you should take time to do things with them. Ah, now I know why. Right? I mean, there's a bunch of stuff in these books. And it might not make sense, but once you go through, you're gonna realize, Yep, there was a lot. 

 

Let's talk about that relationship. What if in your business, you have a huge win in your business, but all of a sudden your relationship started suffering? I had that. Remember, I told you that traveling was one of my highest converting sales funnels. 

 

I would travel to exactly where my ideal customers were, it was exactly when they were going to make this kind of purchase. I would go mingle, walk away, I'd have clients like within five minutes, it was amazing. But this actually started to be a loss for my relationship with my husband and with my daughter.

 

So I'm not in business just to have a great business. I'm in business to have a great life. And my life includes a wonderful relationship with my husband, my daughter, and all of my kids. They didn't like that I was gone for so long. It made life a lot harder. Because I'd be gone for like five days, that's a long time to be gone. 

 

If I went on four or five trips in a year, that made it really tough too. While my business might be doing great, everything else wasn't. 

 

My lesson learned from that was that I needed to experiment with a different funnel to replace my travel funnel. It was a hard decision. I love my travel funnel because that one converts at the highest, but it's not worth sacrificing my relationships over. 

 

Now I'm experimenting on how to replace that. This also reinforces why it was so important to me to have more than one funnel. I still have two other funnels that work really well that don't require travel. And I'm still able to keep my business thriving with those funnels. 

 

So you might ask me, Why would I still want to experiment with a third funnel? So here's why my first two funnels work exceptionally well with my one-on-one product. T time investment is worth it, the ROI, (the return on investment) is really high. These funnels also work great for my membership product. 

 

However, the return on investment is drastically different. Because the price point on the membership is significantly less. So I want to develop a funnel specifically for my membership that has a high return on investment. Lesson learned here, pick sales funnels that align with your product's price point to ensure the highest return on investment. It's okay to have more than one funnel that is different and just goes to specific products. It might make a whole lot of sense based on those price points. 

 

Another lesson learned I had was to develop the sales funnel for your highest price point product first, that way you can meet your minimum math number with fewer sales. This will give you the time and emotional bandwidth to develop your sales funnel for your lower priced product. Because that funnel needs to support a larger number of people that go through it. And it's going to take a bit longer in order to optimize it. 

 

So the first year of my business, I was only offering my membership. Can you imagine that I invested seventeen hours in one potential client just to sell a product priced at one hundred forty nine dollars a month? For the other funnel, I spent a year and a half to get people ready to purchase a product that was only one hundred forty nine dollars a month. 

 

None of that made any sense. But that goes back to that codependency issue. I wanted the results for them. And I wanted it to be accessible because I really wanted them to have it. Some great advice that I had when I worked in biotech was don't work harder than your client. The client has to actually want the result. The coach is there to help them once they actually want the result. And they want help to get it. 

 

It's not the coach's job to convince them, they want the result. And that's what I was doing. I was spending my time convincing them of a result that I wanted for them whether they wanted it or not, I was just hearing them express some pain. So I was like, here's the result that you want. I had to convince them, they wanted that result. I had to develop them all the way through to the point where they were ready. 

 

Like yes, I actually do want that result. I'm motivated for that result. And I want a coach to help me get that result. Yeah, not so good. And for a low price point, no not gonna work. 

 

Find the clients that actually want a result. And then offer to help them to get that result, It works so much better. And if you're doing this at the higher price point, then you can just customize to that one person like customize your messaging to that one person makes it so much easier to get a paid client right away. 

 

Having that higher price point helps it so that you can make your minimum math number. And then if you leave enough time in your schedule, to then experiment with developing the funnel for your lower priced offer, then that gives you a lot more peace of mind. 

 

And you're not in a rush to get it done. You can do this in a way that works with your nervous system, because you're still safe and you're meeting your minimum math number, and you're able to enjoy life and then you can develop those other funnels. 

 

CELEBRATE ALONG THE WAY

 

Okay, the wins. 

 

I had so many wins along the way. A lot of things that didn't work, but I also had a lot of wins. 

 

Some of the things I do is celebrate a new skill set that I developed. Like when I started getting better at graphic design. I was celebrating that. It's amazing. So much has opened up for me because I'm better at that graphic design. 

 

I celebrated when I figured out a new process step. Or heck even when I cut out forty seven different processes. That was a win. 

 

Recently I'm running tests with Facebook ads just to collect data. I mentioned that I was experimenting with creating a new funnel. So that new funnel will use Facebook ads instead of me traveling. I wanted to know which omages and audience liked best. This is an interesting thing. I'm not using a Facebook ad to try to create a sale right now. I'm trying to create data so that I know which image they like better. I'm going to present a whole bunch. And then depending on the reactions, I'll know which one to use. 

 

I ran some images, some before and after images, and even a Venn diagram. So I'm going with things that I would have never tried before. And much to my surprise, the Venn diagram worked. This was a huge win. I thought for sure that the other things would work. And it turns out that I was wrong the whole time. So I'm celebrating learning that I was wrong. 

 

Why is this a win? 

 

Because I was so attached to this one particular image style. And I just kept using it over and over because I was convinced this is what would work because it's what appealed to me. And it turns out, that's not what actually appeals to my ideal customer. So I'm celebrating that I was wrong. And that I learned, and that now I know exactly the image that does draw them in, because that's going to help me to have a better process. Going through Facebook ads, and even on my sales pages and things, trying different things. 

 

And even celebrating that I've learned a different way of testing, celebrating my wins is helping to keep me motivated. In fact, all of this testing that I've been doing the last few weeks with the Facebook ads, I've done one hundred sixty tests or so, at this point, and a bunch of them won and a bunch last. But I'm so excited about finding out what's winning and what's losing because I'm seeing both of those as wins. 

 

I'm waking up early, because I'm so excited to go and see the results. That's really strange, right, because sometimes we're like, Ah, I don't want to get up and go to work. But if all of a sudden you're like, Whoo, I'm super energized. This is fun. Totally different approach. It keeps your motivation up, it keeps your drive up. And you're just you're more engaged, you're laughing a lot more, you're having fun. 

 

These are some of my smaller wins. 

 

And then of course, the ultimate win is that I had plenty of revenue to enjoy the holiday vacation with my family. And I have peace of mind and excellent relationships with them. My life is really good. 

 

The Secret Sauce, my friends, is the Clarity Steps. It gives you the structure for success in your business with your clients. And it gives you the structure for success working on your business, everything else falls into place with it. 

 

If you haven't had a chance to listen to all four of the episodes in November, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to them. It's showing you how you can use the clarity steps in multiple ways in your business. And when you know one process that works in a variety of ways, life and business gets so much easier because you always know the next thing you're supposed to be doing. 

 

It's keeping you focused and getting you traction and helping you to actually get that result that you want the Clarity Steps, Secret Sauce. 

 

When you're ready to optimize your revenue and time in your business, I encourage you to reach out to me for a free consultation call. The spots for 2024 for one-on-one, they're getting filled up really fast. 

 

If you want to have my help next year, let's go ahead and schedule a call now so that we can determine what time and we can reserve that spot for you. We can make 2024 a fantastic year in your business. 

 

You can go over to my website at myfreedomgrove.com. Go to the Contact Me tab and schedule your free consultation call.

 

Alright my friends, happy end of November. 

 

December is about to be a fun whirlwind. 

 

So let's have some fun together. 

 

I'll talk to you soon. 

 

Bye. Bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. When you are ready to make your dream business a reality and take care of your mental health, I invite you to join the Unshakable Business Co-Lab. This is the mastermind membership you've been waiting for. There's no limits on your imagination, nor your timeline. We're with you every step of the way. To learn more, please visit www.myfreedomgrove.com/join. I'll see you there!