Nov. 28, 2024
The Worst Business Advice Ever
Consistent content creation has long been hailed as the holy grail of audience engagement, but what if it's just a fast track to burnout? On this episode of the Jason Moss Show, I flip the script on conventional wisdom, sharing my personal journey from a rigid content schedule to a more intuitive, impactful approach. Through this transformation, I discovered that treating audience relationships like personal ones leads to genuine connections and spontaneous interactions, rather than content churned out from obligation.
Why does offering your expertise for free often backfire? I recount a telling experience where a free course failed to ignite engagement, shedding light on how people undervalue what's given away. Building on insights from my time as an audio engineer, I explore how free coaching can dilute the perceived value of your services, making it harder to transition clients to paying ones. The key takeaway is clear: maintain the integrity and worth of your offerings to attract clients who are truly committed.
The rush to close deals with new leads might feel rewarding in the short term, but there's a deeper game at play. Inspired by my mentor Scott Oldford, I discuss the power of nurturing trust before making the sale, especially for high-ticket services. By fostering long-term client relationships, we shift focus from one-time transactions to enduring partnerships, ensuring business sustainability. Forget the myth that a website is your ticket to success—visibility and direct engagement are your true allies. Instead of dividing your efforts across multiple offerings, concentrate on a single powerful core offer that speaks to your audience's needs.
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Chapters
00:03 - Terrible Business Advice
08:49 - Why Coaching for Free Is Ineffective
16:52 - Building Relationships Before Selling
26:06 - Simplifying Business Strategies for Success
Transcript
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Welcome to the Jason Moss Show, where established online business owners go to increase their income, freedom and impact.
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I'm your host, jason Moss.
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Let's dive in.
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There is an epidemic of terrible business advice out there.
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Well-meaning business coaches who want to help you.
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They want to do the right thing, but when I look at so much of the advice that online business owners are getting, it just doesn't work.
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And if this is you, maybe you're feeling like you're stuck at a certain level of income or revenue or clients are inconsistent.
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It might be because you're following some of this bad business advice.
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So in this episode today, I want to share with you five of the biggest, most common terrible pieces of business advice that I hear in the online business world, as well as how to avoid them and what really works when it comes to growing a business based on what I've seen to be most effective for me my own business, as well as the hundreds of clients that I work with.
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Super pumped to share this with you, cannot wait to dive in.
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So let's get started.
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The first piece of terrible business advice this is something, I'll be honest, I used to teach people.
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This is something that I was taught and it's something I still hear all the time out there in the online business world, which is post consistently.
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You might've heard this, this idea of like okay, in order to build relationships with your audience, you got to post on a consistent basis.
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So maybe it's Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, and generally the advice is create some kind of calendar or schedule that you can stick to and commit to and show up every day in your business and post on that kind of consistent, scheduled basis.
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Now here's the thing I've been doing online business for close to 10 years now really 20 years.
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I've become my first official online business when I was like 13.
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And for years, I showed up and I followed this advice.
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So I had a content schedule.
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I would show up and I'd send a certain number of emails per week and every Friday or every other Friday I would record my YouTube videos and I'd release on this very structured, regimented schedule, and this is the way that most people teach content creation.
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I mean, here's what I found in my own business After a couple of years of doing this I got burned out and I felt like I was so boxed into this rigid way of showing up in my business that I was completely disconnected from this idea of wanting to actually engage with my audience.
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It was just like, well, it's Thursday and I've got a time block on my calendar, so I got to create some content where we have a video that we publish every single week on our YouTube.
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So I got to have a video ready to go.
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But here's the issue with this the relationship that you have with your audience is a relationship, and a relationship just like if you look at any relationship in your life, you think about how crazy is it if I were to maybe my significant other, if I were to create some kind of system where every day at 9 am, I would have to text them or call them and have some kind of a conversation with them.
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It would completely cut off all of the flow and the spontaneity and the genuine sense of connection and engagement that you have with that other person.
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You can't schedule out relationships.
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That's not how relationships work.
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So why are we doing this?
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When it comes to building our online businesses, you know when I let go of this idea of rigidity around how I showed up and communicated and connected with my audience and I started seeing it like any other relationship, which means I share something when I have something to say, when I'm excited about offering something and that might mean it's 10 o'clock at night and I'm about to go to bed and suddenly I get this idea that pops Into my head.
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So I grab my laptop and I go, you know, bang out an email and I send it out to my list.
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And other days I wake up and I have nothing to say and I'm like, well, I'm not going to, I'm not going to share a post today.
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When I started shifting to this more intuitive, more free, flowing way of creating and engaging with my audience, the first thing is I felt a lot less pressure.
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The second thing is, paradoxically, I actually ended up creating and releasing a lot more content.
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And third, the content that I created was so much more engaging, so much more exciting, so much more of the type of content that, when you see it, you're like, oh wow, like I wanna actually read this or I wanna watch this video, because it wasn't like something I was forcing myself to do from a place of obligation.
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So many people and I see content out there all the time that is created with this energy of obligation it's like oh, it's a Thursday, I got to create a piece of content and it's like you're forcing yourself and willing yourself to do it.
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It's like all that energy is just baked into the content that you create and then you send it out to your list.
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And it's like I mean, it's like I used to do this and I was like you know, I'm selling business coaching, helping people grow their businesses so they can create more freedom in their life, which is what people really want when they're growing their businesses.
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It's like I don't want to feel like I'm chained to a desk and I got to work all the time.
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I want to feel like I can build a business that supports me and my lifestyle so I can live the life I want to live and travel and experience more joy and fulfillment and connection with my family.
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And yet every piece of my content was infused with this energy of like.
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Oh, this feels like an obligation, and so it's like I'm on video talking about freedom.
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Now, how great would it be to be free and to be your own boss, and blah, blah, blah, all the things.
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But I'm saying it with this energy of like, obligation, because it's Thursday and it's 9am and I got this time block thing on my calendar that I feel like I have to do, even though I really don't want to do it.
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So this idea of consistency being this like mechanistic scheduled thing doesn't work for personal brand-driven businesses.
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Most of the thinking around this, if you look at this on a deeper level, comes from the relic of the industrial revolution, where, basically, human beings became factory workers that were taught to operate in a very mechanistic way.
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Where we exist as part of this kind of like assembly line system, and when you take all of that thinking and you bring it into a personal brand driven business which is what I help people build and teach people how to create the issue is that you are a human being at the center of all of that and if you don't honor your natural rhythms and the natural flow of your inspiration, you're going to burn out or you're going to create a bunch of stuff that is not particularly engaging because you're not creating in alignment with your life force.
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Now, does this mean that consistency isn't important?
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No, consistency.
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What I think of as consistency number one is I am making a commitment to show up and build relationships with my audience, and that means I am active, I'm creating lots of content, I'm sending lots of things out.
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I'm building those relationships.
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So there is a level of consistency in the sense that I'm showing up on a frequent basis.
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It's just that consistency is not this like mechanistic, regimented thing in my business.
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It's not like Monday at 9 am and Tuesday at 9 am and Wednesday at 9 am.
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It's more of this like free flowing sense of consistency that works much better for me.
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Sense of consistency that works much better for me.
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I also feel like consistent energy and consistency, in a sense, where I'm showing up embodied with this commitment around what I'm here to do, the people I'm here to serve, the types of content I'm here to create, and having a consistent energy behind all of that.
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That that is so much more important to me than this idea of consistency being this mechanistic thing.
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So posting consistently if what that means is creating some kind of like regimented schedule, I think is honestly one of the most terrible pieces of business advice out there.
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It just doesn't work.
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It doesn't work for me and it doesn't work for so many of the clients that I'm here to serve.
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Hey, friend, hope you're enjoying this episode of the podcast and, before we get back to it, if you're an established online business owner who's serious about unlocking your next level of income and impact and growth in your business.
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I want you to watch my free million dollar online business training where I walk through a four-step roadmap.
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I've personally used to sell well over a million dollars of coaching, consulting and courses online.
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It's going to make the journey of growing your business so much easier.
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I want to give this to you for free.
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All you got to do to access it is go to jasonmosscom forward slash growth.
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That's jasonmosscom forward slash g-R-O-W-T-H to get free access to this training right now.
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Now back to the episode.
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So that is terrible piece of advice number one.
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Number two this is something that you know.
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There are books out there that teach this and I just have not seen it to be effective ever, really in my own business, as well as the people that I serve.
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This second piece of bad advice is coach for free.
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So there are some very popular books out there and replace coaching.
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If you're not a coach, you're a consultant, you're a course creator, whatever it is, replace it with give away your core offer for free as a way of getting more clients.
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There are books out there that basically recommend hey, if you want to get more clients, the best way to do it is to you know, maybe if you're a coach, you go out there and you just give away a bunch of free coaching and people have this great experience where they're like, oh my God, that was incredible, I got so much value, and then they're going to want to hire you.
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It makes sense in theory.
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It sounds like a good idea, but I learned something very interesting several years back in my first coaching business.
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One year I had a new course that I was launching and I was really excited about this.
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It was the launch process.
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So I reached out to my personal network and I picked a small group of people that I knew would get a ton of value from this course and I reached out to them and I said, hey, I'd love to give you this course for free, and all I want in exchange is a testimonial.
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And so I sent out this course to everyone and I was like, oh my God, they're getting so much value for free.
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They're going to love this, it's going to be amazing.
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So I sent this thing out and maybe like two weeks later, I started checking in with people.
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I was like, hey, you know, did you have time to go through the course.
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What'd you think?
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And they said oh you know, I haven't gotten to it yet, I've had other things on my plate.
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I checked in again another week and, honestly, after like several weeks, very few people even went through the course, and I was so.
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First of all, I was frustrated.
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I was like how, how does it, why does it feel like I'm pulling teeth to get people to go through this incredible thing that I know is going to change their life, and they didn't even have to pay for it.
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But what I realized through that experience was something very important.
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This is a lesson I've learned so many times in business, which is people do not value what they don't pay for.
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People do not value what they don't pay for.
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And if you give your best coaching away to someone for free, what you are essentially doing is training them not to value your coaching.
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So it's very difficult to take that person who basically has gotten coaching from you for free, and turn them into a paying client.
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You know, when I was a audio engineer, I used to do mixes for people and people would pay me like 500 bucks or, you know, later on more than that.
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But I started out.
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I was doing, you know, mixes for a couple hundred bucks.
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And what I found was, as I raised my rates, the people that would pay me $300 or $400 or $500 for a mix those people would not 99% of them would not be the same clients that would carry forward with me at the higher rates they would drop off.
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What I learned was the people who are used to paying a certain price for my services.
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It's very difficult to go to that person and to basically say, oh, now you're going to pay more for the same thing, basically.
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So the same principle applies when you give away coaching for free and I see so many people doing this.
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They're frustrated, they're discouraged because they're giving away their best stuff and yet these people are not buying.
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The other thing that's really interesting about coaching for free is and this is something I learned when I really got into sales.
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I was a director of sales, I was leading a sales team in a coaching business for a while, and what I learned was that coaching and sales are very different.
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They're like two opposite things.
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Coaching is all about helping somebody alleviate their pain.
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When we get in a coaching conversation with someone, or when you're helping someone through your service, whatever it is that you do.
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When you get on a call with someone, your job is to help them basically feel better or to get closer to where they want to be.
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That's a coaching conversation, whereas a sales conversation is basically the exact opposite.
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My goal in a sales conversation is not to solve someone's problem.
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My goal is to help them feel the extent of that problem and to really face that fully and to feel the magnitude of the pain and what impact that's causing on their life and what they really want and the tension of the gap between where they are today and where they want to be, want to be.
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And when I do a good job in a sales conversation, helping somebody connect to those things, they are much more likely to want to buy.
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Because that tension, that feeling of oh, there's a distance between where I am today and where I want to want to be and I feel the pain that that's causing me and the impact that's having on my life and I'm not where I want to be.
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And I know that I need to invest in this coach or this whoever it is, consultant, this program, whatever it is, to solve that problem, to close that gap.
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That's what motivates people to buy.
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But when you give someone coaching for free, you take that pain and you actually make it smaller.
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You take the gap and you make it go away.
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You give someone what they need to alleviate that pain.
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So you're doing the exact opposite of what you actually need to do in order to sell.
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I had a client of mine I remember a while back.
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Her name is Bonnie and she came in and when she first started working with me she wasn't really signing many clients and someone had taught her a discovery call process.
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That was basically she would get on a call and she'd do these like two hour coaching sessions with someone, and she was so discouraged because she'd have these like two hour sessions with people and no one was signing up.
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One of the first things I did with her was I gave her our sales process that I use with every single one of my clients that I work with.
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It's incredible.
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I mean it really works.
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It's a series of questions that when you get on a call with someone, you can ask to help them connect to that gap, and what happened afterwards was pretty insane.
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She was like, oh my God, these conversations are going way better.
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She started signing clients and she cut her selling time in half because she didn't have to do these like crazy two hour long coaching sessions with people.
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She could do a sales call in 45 minutes that ended with someone paying her.
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So, all this being said, coaching for free in my experience I've just never seen it to be effective.
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And I know there are other people out there who teach this, you know, and maybe some people have had some success with it, but I just don't think it's good advice and I just haven't seen it to be effective in my own business as well, as you know, really, the clients that I work with Now.
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Is there a place for free content?
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Absolutely.
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I mean, you'll notice I create a lot of free content in my business, but I think there's a big difference between creating content and giving someone away your core service.
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I'm not doing coaching for free.
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Like if someone wants to work with me, they want coaching to help them grow their business, that's a paid offer.
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So I might create a lot of free content and a lot of free videos and maybe emails and things like this, but there's a very big difference between what I'm able to deliver for someone in this context through a pre-recorded video versus what's available to you if you work with me.
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You know inside my higher level one-on-one programs.
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So I think there is a place for free content in a business.
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It's a big part of what generates leads in our business and I'm not saying don't create free content, but what I am saying is your core thing, whatever that is, don't give that away.
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That is the thing that people pay you for and that should be the thing that really we keep gated on the back end if someone chooses to sign up and work with you.
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Business advice that I hear quite a bit this idea of selling sooner.
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This is something that, honestly, I believed for a long time until that bubble really got popped.
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For me, the basic idea is when someone, let's say, joins your email list, that moment is when they're most engaged and that's the moment that you should sell.
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So you should sell basically as soon as possible.
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When someone gets into your world, the goal is to make that sale as soon as possible in the first, let's say, few days or even the first few hours or someone actually coming into your world, because the longer someone's on your list, the more likely they are to unsubscribe, and so it's better to sell upfront and to sell sooner Very common advice.
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Here's the issue with this.
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I think in some industries, when you have more of like a commoditized type of product, we're not selling like a high touch, high intimacy, high ticket type situation Maybe this advice works.
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You know, if the goal is just to get somebody to buy, like a low ticket offer or something like this, I think there are places in a business where this might make sense.
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Here's the problem the people who join your list who have no idea who you are, who are basically just getting to know you.
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Those people in many cases are not ready to buy because they haven't built that relationship and connection with you.
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They also don't know enough about you to be the type of buyer that you probably really want.
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So you know, we look at like.
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I have a mentor who is named Scott Oldford.
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He's a great business coach.
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He talks about the idea that in any market there's people who are in the slow lane, the sidewalk or the fast lane, and you've got the fast lane, which is the people who are just ready to go at any moment.
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Maybe there's like 3% of people in your niche who are just ready to buy and those are the people like I had a client of mine who signed up this week to work with me one-on-one who found me on Saturday it's a Tuesday or Wednesday today and he signed up yesterday I think to work with me.
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This is a very rare circumstance for me.
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Most of the people who sign up to work with me they've been in my audience for three to six months minimum.
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Now, why have I set my business up this way?
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Number one because when I set my business up this way, when someone does come and they reach out to me or they submit an application, they've been following me for a while.
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That person doesn't in many cases really need to be sold, so I can, and oftentimes I can just text them an offer or we can get on a sales call and we can have a short conversation.
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And because there's so much trust that's been built through that connection and that relationship upfront through my marketing, I have to do a lot less heavy lifting on the backend.
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The other benefit to this is because when someone comes to me at that moment they have already been exposed to so much of me that they know my values, they know what I'm about, they have a connection with me and they've had that moment where they go.
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In many cases, you're my person, you're the person I want to work with and when someone has that moment, you become decommoditized, even if you're offering the same thing as many other people in your market.
00:20:06.355 --> 00:20:16.426
If you're a business coach like me God knows how many business coaches are out there but the truth is, if someone's been following me for six months, they don't just see me as a business coach.
00:20:16.426 --> 00:20:24.932
They see me as a business coach who also shares their values, who they feel connected with on a deeper level, who they've built this relationship with.
00:20:24.932 --> 00:20:28.782
And when someone has that experience, they don't see me as a commodity anymore.
00:20:28.782 --> 00:20:30.467
Versus the person who comes in.
00:20:30.467 --> 00:20:34.221
Maybe I have a conversation with someone who's like one or two days in my audience.
00:20:34.221 --> 00:20:37.047
That person is like I don't care who you are.
00:20:37.047 --> 00:20:41.378
If I need help growing my business, I just want the cheapest option.
00:20:41.378 --> 00:20:42.923
I'm not connected to you on a human level.
00:20:47.355 --> 00:20:54.359
So the people who sell this way up front end up attracting a lot of what's called transactional buyers, people who are just interested in the surface level thing that you do.
00:20:54.359 --> 00:20:55.503
They don't care about you.
00:20:55.503 --> 00:21:00.926
They're not here because they have developed some connection with you as a personal brand.
00:21:00.926 --> 00:21:06.596
What they care about is basically just can you help me solve my surface level problem and are you the cheapest?
00:21:06.596 --> 00:21:17.712
So you end up in kind of like a race to the bottom when you sell upfront because you have to have basically the best offer, which in many cases is like the cheapest offer.
00:21:17.712 --> 00:21:31.204
So we're just in this like offers arms race basically with everybody else in your market because you haven't leveraged the power of your personal brand and your marketing to build that relationship and that connection with people Versus.
00:21:31.385 --> 00:21:32.249
You know, look at my business.
00:21:32.249 --> 00:21:39.487
You know someone might take longer to actually warm up to me, but by the time they come to me they've made that decision they want to work with me.
00:21:39.487 --> 00:21:47.036
Price is kind of like a secondary thing, you know, so I can charge more than other people and I'm not the cheapest business coach out there.
00:21:47.036 --> 00:21:48.200
I'll tell you that.
00:21:48.200 --> 00:21:50.145
There's a lot of people out there who are a lot cheaper than me.
00:21:50.145 --> 00:22:06.147
And the other benefit is someone is coming to me not just for that surface level thing that they want help with, but they feel like there's a relationship and connection with me, which means I attract people who want to work with me on a deeper level.
00:22:06.147 --> 00:22:09.415
Those people generally stick around for longer.
00:22:09.415 --> 00:22:13.586
They're more likely to renew and be customers not just once, but for life.
00:22:15.736 --> 00:22:16.499
I love this quote.
00:22:16.499 --> 00:22:18.505
I heard this the other day from this guy, dan Locke.
00:22:18.505 --> 00:22:23.261
He said a first-time client is really just a really good prospect.
00:22:23.261 --> 00:22:27.614
If someone buys from you once, they're really just a prospect.
00:22:27.614 --> 00:22:31.673
Successful businesses are not built on the first sell.
00:22:31.673 --> 00:22:34.833
Successful businesses are built on the repeat buyer.
00:22:34.833 --> 00:22:37.971
So I don't want just people to sign up for me.
00:22:37.971 --> 00:22:39.055
You know, work with me once.
00:22:39.055 --> 00:22:49.484
I want to build relationships with people who are going to be around for the long run, who are going to renew, who are going to stick around for years, and if someone sits in my audience for longer, they can build that relationship up front.
00:22:49.484 --> 00:22:51.911
Our expectations are more aligned.
00:22:51.911 --> 00:22:53.997
When they're coming to work with me, they know who I am.
00:22:53.997 --> 00:22:58.255
There's so much more likely to have a good experience inside my programs.
00:22:58.255 --> 00:23:04.435
There's so much more likely to renew and there's so much less likely to have issues.
00:23:05.076 --> 00:23:34.057
You know, when I was a director of sales before I became a business coach, we were running a business where, you know it was very much like the marketing was like we'd run the ad to the webinar and then you get on the sales call and we had this big sales team taking all these calls, because when people are super new in your world, you got to have like a really solid sales process, because you got to like drag people through the fire on the sales conversations because they're not ready yet, they just found you like two days ago or three days ago.
00:23:34.057 --> 00:23:39.076
So we were getting all these calls and, honestly, our refund rate was pretty high.
00:23:39.076 --> 00:23:40.558
It was like 17%.
00:23:40.558 --> 00:24:00.688
Because when someone comes in they don't really know you, they're much more likely to have that kind of whiplash experience where it's like oh, I sign up for versus you know, if you spent six months dating someone and then you end up in a relationship with them, versus like one date and then you get married, aren't you so much more likely to be happy in that relationship?
00:24:00.688 --> 00:24:03.594
Same principle applies to marketing.
00:24:03.594 --> 00:24:09.119
So I think I've I've kind of beat this over the head, uh, quite a bit in this episode today.
00:24:09.119 --> 00:24:26.518
But really, this idea of selling sooner, I just don't think it makes sense for a lot of personal brand-driven businesses, particularly folks who are selling higher intimacy, higher touch experiences, where that relationship and that personal connection with the person, the client, is really at the center of what you do.
00:24:26.518 --> 00:24:36.788
So consider, if you are running a business, how you might lean out a bit more on the front end and let more of your marketing do more of that relationship building for you.
00:24:36.788 --> 00:24:54.259
It's just a more effective model, and really it's the core of what I teach when it comes to helping people grow and build online businesses, because I think it's what I've seen to be most effective, not just in my own business, but in the hundreds of online business owners that I've had the privilege of helping and serving, who also do very similar.
00:24:54.259 --> 00:24:56.107
You know, personal brand driven work as well.
00:24:57.290 --> 00:25:01.866
Alright, so that brings us to number four, which is you need a website.
00:25:01.866 --> 00:25:07.018
Bad business advice the only people who tell you you need a website.
00:25:07.018 --> 00:25:18.047
By the way, generally, if you look at the people who are telling you this, it's usually web developers or web designers or people trying to sell you some kind of service to help you build a website, like Wix or Squarespace or all these services.
00:25:18.047 --> 00:25:19.170
Here's the truth.
00:25:19.170 --> 00:25:29.538
I have seen so many successful entrepreneurs who have zero website but are making millions of dollars or their is like kind of janky.
00:25:29.538 --> 00:25:32.273
That's probably what I'm thinking of when I think of these people.
00:25:32.273 --> 00:25:38.255
It's not that they have no website, but it's like a super janky website that hasn't been updated in like five years.
00:25:38.255 --> 00:25:42.652
That's like all the information is out of date and yet I look at how they're doing in their business.
00:25:42.652 --> 00:25:43.891
They're making like millions of dollars.
00:25:43.891 --> 00:25:46.480
This is so common, you'd be surprised.
00:25:46.480 --> 00:25:49.175
This is so common, you'd be surprised.
00:25:49.175 --> 00:26:01.173
Yet I see a lot of online business owners who spend hours and hours and weeks and months of their life and thousands of dollars investing into creating this great website and then they wonder why they're not getting clients.
00:26:01.173 --> 00:26:02.997
Here's the truth.
00:26:02.997 --> 00:26:05.291
A website is not gonna get you clients.
00:26:06.045 --> 00:26:12.010
I'm not saying it has zero value in a business, but honestly, in most cases, you can do really well without a website.
00:26:12.010 --> 00:26:21.911
The most important thing when it comes to growing a business is you got a way of being visible to people who are in your niche and making invitations, basically selling to those people.
00:26:21.911 --> 00:26:23.756
You can do all of that without a website.
00:26:23.756 --> 00:26:31.827
You can literally run a multimillion dollar business with ads in an email list or a YouTube channel in an email list.
00:26:31.827 --> 00:26:34.233
Your website doesn't even matter.
00:26:34.233 --> 00:26:35.938
You really don't need that much.
00:26:35.938 --> 00:26:44.253
So I see so many people wasting so much time building websites and, honestly, it's the first thing that most people do when they start a business.
00:26:44.253 --> 00:26:50.316
It's the biggest time suck and biggest time waster that so many people are spending and investing so much time into.
00:26:50.316 --> 00:26:56.298
And if I look at this on a deeper level, what I find and this is normal, this is human.
00:26:57.125 --> 00:27:19.009
You know, so many times in business it's so easy to do the things that feel like work because it's like, oh, I feel like, if I'm working on my website, that feels like work to me when in reality, it's just a convenient way of hiding from the real work, which is often the uncomfortable, vulnerable work of putting yourself out there, making invitations, connecting with people in your audience, having conversations.
00:27:19.009 --> 00:27:21.877
That stuff is hard, so we avoid it.
00:27:21.877 --> 00:27:26.631
And I will throw my hand into the ring and say that I am also in this camp.
00:27:26.631 --> 00:27:29.357
You know it's hard for me to reach out to someone and sell.
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It's hard for me to actually, you know, open up a conversation with someone.
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