10 Years Of Painful Business Lessons In 20 Minutes

10 years ago, I had just graduated from college. I was working at a consulting firm and building my business on the side.

I was 23 years old, so when I quit my job to become a life coach, everyone laughed in my face, including my girlfriend. And I can't blame them. I had no idea what I was doing.

But somehow, I sold a million dollars of coaching and courses before I turned 30.

Now I make 6 figures a year, working about 25 hours a week, doing what I love

But the journey to get there was just me getting punched in the face over and over again

I'm going to compress 10 years of painful business lessons into this one article so hopefully you can avoid my stupid mistakes

Lesson #1: There are no shortcuts in business, just tradeoffs

I wasted so much time trying to find a magical system that would get me clients on autopilot so I didn't have to think about it anymore.

I kept buying programs and hiring agencies thinking, "This one is going to be the magic bullet I need." But every time I switched my focus I had to start from scratch.

It's sort of like looking for the perfect strength training program, but every time you switch programs, you end up starting from scratch.

I remember hiring a facebook ads person hoping they would just take it off my plate. But you can't truly outsource marketing as a business owner. You can only hire people to take certain components off your plate. You still need to understand what works for your business. And I didn't really understand what made facebook ads work, so I couldn't assess that person.

The one thing that ended up working really well for me was SEO blogging, and it's because I created content every week for years. I enjoyed it and so I got really good at it. I was consistent enough to accidentally hit on some stuff that worked. Eventually, I was even able to quit social media completely because I didn't need it anymore to get clients.

Then I tried to teach my system to other people. I was like, "Hey, if you do this and your articles start ranking, you can get free traffic for years to your articles and really warm leads because you just educated them on your topic." And everyone wanted that.

But then when I taught the course, even though everyone loved it, very few people actually created the blog post they were supposed to create. Because it's hard work. You might love the result but unless you're willing to do the process it doesn't matter. Ads are expensive to figure out. Organic content is free but you have to spend a lot of time to create something exceptional. Referral partnerships are great but you need to network and follow up with people and give more than you take.

Every marketing strategy has a hard part. The only shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts and commit to something for the long term. Assume you're going to have to invest 6-12 months in something before it starts to pay off.

The same is true of starting another business thinking it will be easier than your current one. Several years ago, I started a fitness coaching business alongside my main one. I built it quickly to about $10k a month, and then I stopped. I got there faster with my second business because I knew what to do, but I could only grow it to the same point as my other one because I hit the same constraint that I didn't know how to get around in the first business. The grass isn't greener.

If you're just totally lost and have no idea how to find clients, I created a little 2 page PDF with 21 ways to find potential clients. Especially if you're a coach or consultant, it has some great ideas. So click the button below to get that:

Lesson #2: Scaling up is not always the answer

There's this story of a wealthy businessman who goes on vacation to a small Brazilian village, where he meets a fisherman. The fisherman is just hanging out drinking a beer and the businessman asks, "Why aren't you fishing? And the fisherman say, "Well I caught enough fish for the day. I'm done."

And the businessman asks, "Why don't you stay longer and catch even more?"

The fisherman says, "Well, this is enough to feed my family. I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and then at night I play guitar and sing with my buddies."

And the businessman says, "What you need to do is stay out longer and catch as much fish as possible. Then you could buy a bigger boat and hire other people to fish. And then you could move to the city and have your own headquarters and production plant where you can the fish."

The fisherman says, "What would I do after that?"

And the businessman says, "After that, you can hire a CEO to run the company and take it public. You'll make a ton of money."

And the fisherman says, "What would I do after that?"

The businessman laughs and says, "After that you'll finally have enough to retire. You can move out of the city and wake up early, catch a few fish, return home to play with the kids, nap with your wife, drink a beer, and then sing and play music with your friends."

The fisherman looks and him and says, "Isn't that what I'm doing now?"

A year or two ago I launched this new program called Full Client Roster where I hired a coach to work with clients. I thought, "This is how I'm finally going to scale up and become a real entrepreneur." The first round of the program sold out, but then what I realized was that I was spending all my time managing my team and not coaching, and I actually had less freedom than I had before. Plus my expenses were higher so I was more stressed about money having to pay my team. And what I realized was that I didn't actually want to scale up and build some big empire badly enough to go through that phase.

Then I saw this quote from the writer Edward Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” And it really hit me that the only reason I was scaling up was because I thought it made me a better entrepreneur somehow. And that's not enough to get you through the hard parts.

I ended up letting all my team members go, which was incredibly painful, and going back to a really simple business where it was just me and the occasional contractor.

I have other clients who have a good reason for scaling up and they really want to have a bigger impact and they love the adrenaline rush of building a company. One of them does $100k a month in revenue, but $50k of that is payroll and expenses. So they are on the line for that each month.

It's worth thinking really hard before you try to scale up and asking, "Do I already have the thing that I'm seeking?"

Lesson #3: Repeat clients will save your life; one-time clients will kill you

When I was going through the financial stress of trying to scale up my business, my wife had just quit her job, and we were fostering a teenager. So I felt so much pressure to figure it out, and things got really tight in the business. Then my lead flow slowed down.

The thing that saved me was having over 50% of my 1-1 clients be repeat or returning clients. So I was literally able to send a few emails to people I worked with in the past and re-enroll them. If I was churning through my clients and having to find new ones every month, that would have been really hard. Repeat clients just make everything in business so much easier.

It makes me think of an interview I saw once with Marshal Goldsmith, the grandfather of executive coaching. In it, he says, "Coaching is basically all about client selection." And what he meant was that you want to choose clients who are actually going to get results because they're the ones who will stick around and tell other people about you.

Case studies and referrals end up being your best marketing. Because when you say you're great, no one believes you. But when someone else says you're great, that's much more credible. And any time you start to get imposter syndrome and think you suck, you can look back at your repeat clients and their results and referrals and have proof that you actually know what you're doing.

One of the things that really helps filter for better clients is being expensive. I did a Pay What You Want experiment a few years ago where I gave a bunch of courses away and people could pay as little as $1 to get them. 170 people bought the course bundle, but I didn't make much money and I only got one email from someone later on saying she had put the course material into action.

The other thing that helps you find great clients is being picky. One of my coaches, Charlie Gilkey, has this philosophy that there are three types of clients you can work with. Nothing to something. Bad to good. And good to great. It's much easier to help people go from good to great because you know that they're proven. They're going to succeed anyway, you just help them do it faster.

Finally, you don't want to overpromise on sales calls. Sometimes you'll be on a sales call with someone and you'll see that you could technically convince the person to sign up if you tell them what they want to hear, but they are going to be a ball of stress and a pain in the ass for the entire program. It's just not worth it. The client will end up hating you and then they'll damage your confidence and your reputation. Sometimes you just need to walk away.

But it's not just about choosing the right clients. It's also about creating a great experience for them. Which brings us to our next point.

Lesson #4: Every offer you create should be an act of love

Years ago, I launched a new group program called High Ticket Coach. It was a fucking disaster. And the reason it was a disaster was that I created it out of fear.

At the time, I was in a mastermind with people who were making a lot more money than me. I'd go into the Facebook group, see how much they were making, and feel insecure. I'm naturally competitive so I think being around people more successful than me made me feel like I was behind and it made me rush.

So I started selling this new program, I think for around $5k or $6k, and I made a bunch of money. But a few weeks in, I had a member leave the group. He didn't ask for a refund, he was just like, "This isn't for me." And that night I couldn't sleep because I could feel that something was not right and I felt like a total fraud. So the next day I wrote this blog post about what to do when you feel like an imposter and want to refund all your clients. And I sent it to my list with the subject line, "Is Greg Faxon a Fraud?"

One of the people in my group program replied and they were like, "When I saw this email subject line, I was like 'Yes, Greg Faxon is a fraud.’" And he ended up asking for a refund, which I gave him. And the weird thing was, this guy had actually gotten good results from the program. He got a new client right after he enrolled. But the point is that people can feel your intention. They can feel when you're acting like an insecure greedy bastard who is trying to make money. And on the flip side, they can tell when you really care about them and you're offering your product or service as a way to help. You'll always have some people who love you and some people who hate you. But only you will know when you look in the mirror whether or not you did your best.

The program actually wasn't a total failure. One of the people ended up loving it so much that that they went on to work with me as a 1-1 client and he made an extra $50,000 as a result and we had a great relationship. But I still I ended up basically taking 3 months off of my business where I wouldn't take on any new clients because I was scared that I was a bad person and the feedback from that one client who asked for the refund was so brutal.

On the flip side, I'm thinking of a program I launched earlier this year with Gemma Gilbert called Weeks That Work. Obviously we wanted the program to be successful and make money. We had a minimum revenue goal that we were aiming for to make it worth our time and attention. But the reason we created the program in the first place was because we saw this gap in the marketplace where people were teaching different ways to get clients and grow your business, but no one was actually teaching how to implement this stuff, on a weekly basis, for your own life. How to be disciplined, how to manage your time and energy, how to develop a strategy that works for you and be consistent with it. When we launched that program we did it at a lower price point just as a beta test, and we got 86 people sign up in the first round. The feedback was amazing.

So the takeaway here is that you need to be brutally honest about why you're creating this new offering. Is it a just money grab or are you genuinely trying to serve an unmet need and create something you're proud of and have fun with it?

And here's the thing - you an create an offer that you think will really help people and still have it be a total flop. I just reviewed the book $100M offers by Alex Hormozi and I wish I had read this book earlier. Go check it out if you’re interested.

Lesson #5: You're probably doing better than you think you are

Every year, for the last 10 years of business, I've had many periods of wanting to quit. Probably once a year I want to quit. These are usually just phases where I'm not as excited about my business and I feel like I'm failing and I look for other businesses to start that seem easier. At one point I even applied for a job at a non-profit and got rejected. And basically what I realize now is this:

The internet can make it seem like everyone is doing better than you. But when you actually look at the stats you realize:

More than 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years.

Between 86-94% of entrepreneurs pay themselves less than 6 figures a year.

So for every entrepreneur you see making six figures in income, there are about 9 others who don't.

For every entrepreneur you see making $500k a year, there are about hundred who don’t.

For every entrepreneur you see making a million a year, there are about a thousand that don’t.

You just never hear about them. And so it's easy to beat yourself up for not being as successful as everyone else when you may actually be doing better than other people. And if you feel like you're failing, you're more likely to quit.

Comparing yourself to the most successful entrepreneurs is like comparing yourself to Michael Phelps - these people are literally built to be entrepreneurs and they've committed their life to that. So unless you are just as gifted and just as committed, it's not a realistic expectation that you'll be making what they make

The same thing is true of your level of enjoyment at work. You're not always going to love what you do. There's this quote from Jeff Bezos that goes:

"If you can get your work life to where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing. Very few people ever achieve that.”

If you're expecting to love your business 100% of the time, you'll get frustrated and jump to the next thing or quit.

The best thing for the longevity of your business is to assume it's going to be an unprofitable, miserable grind for years and then be pleasantly surprised if it isn't. And expect that your energy is going to comes in waves. Sometimes you'll be really motivated, and sometimes you won't be. So it's all about having low expectations.

As long as you’re in business, and you live to fight another day, you're succeeding. Entrepreneurship is not a finite game, it’s an infinite one. The point is just to keep playing.

If you don't quit, you eventually win.

But here's the thing. Sometimes you do have to quit. Maybe not your entire business but a specific offering. Watch this next video called Successful People Know When to Quit to learn more.