Behind the scenes: the big Pivot, light bulb moments and why I've taken a 6 month break from the podcast.
What’s this episode about?
It’s been 6 months since the end of season 1 of the podcast and in that time there have been some big changes in my business. I wanted to kick of season 2 with a glimpse behind the scenes at what 2022 was like for me and my business to share some of the big learnings I had which you might relate to!
In this episode I cover:
1) Why I totally changed a business that gave me flexibility and consistent income.
2) What drove me to apply for a corporate job over the summer
3) What I wanted to do after my group programme launched for the first time (and luckily my coach stopped me doing!)
4) How it’s all working now and the brand new way to work with me 1:1
You can find out more about working with me here: Take a look
Not on my email list yet? Ready to grow an email list of dream clients? Click here and I’ll send the checklist along with some common mistakes to avoid!
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Read the transcript:
NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Sophie: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Growing Pains. Wow, it's been a while, hasn't it? I didn't intend to take a six month break, but that's what it turned into. And in this podcast, I want to give you a little bit of a behind the scenes on why I didn't bring the podcast back when I intended to. What's been going on.
I'm gonna give you a bit of an overview of. 2022 as a whole, actually, like what happened last year because I had a big pivot and it was definitely a bit more bumpy than I had anticipated it would be. I wanna give you a bit of a behind the scenes on that and what happened and how I got to where I am now.
And then I am going to share a little bit about what's coming up for me and this podcast as well going forward. So, oh my gosh, let's jump straight into it. So, 2022 was quite the year for me. Some, some good, some bad. But it was definitely a massive shift in my business and I'm really feeling it this year.
Just how different it feels compared to where I was last year. So, just to give you a bit of a background, bit of an overview of where I was in January, [00:01:00] 2022. So I was doing mostly monthly management for clients, so running their Facebook ads for them. I had nice consistent income. I had quite low kind of client hours because.
When you run ads for people, we have a monthly call, but other than that, it's not a huge amount of client hours. So I had a huge amounts of flexibility. I could do my work whenever I needed to do it, which was amazing. And Eliza, my eldest has started school in the September before, so that was really nice.
I was available to settle her in and my youngest utterly She started nursery in the September as well, and frankly had been ill for for pretty much the whole of the winter. So it was nice to have that flexibility for her as well. So we got to January and like on the face of it, my business was doing really well.
I had a good consistent income. I had lovely, lovely clients and I had huge amounts of flexibility. However, and this might be something that people can relate to. I just didn't feel like I'd built the business around what I really wanted to do. I actually built the business [00:02:00] around what was really good for my family.
And it was working. The kids were happy, I was flexible, I was available. My husband can focus on his work. But honestly, the business just wasn't doing it for me. And it got to a point, I did a session, I think, at the beginning of January that was like, you know, goals and vision and like, what do you want your life to look like?
And my business just didn't align with what that vision is that I wanted for my life. And I think probably there were a few key things missing for me. The first was interaction. Like I was actually quite lonely. I didn't really enjoy just seeing a home every day on my computer doing ad stuff.
As I said, limited interaction with my clients because that's what they pay for. You know, they pay me just to do the ads. I didn't feel like I was part of a team and that just didn't really light me up. I've always loved being part of teams. I love when, you know, I was in corporate.
I loved the buzz of the office. I used to work at Heathrow Airport. I love being around people. And actually I was finding it quite hard, being alone all the time at home. So that was one thing I had to think about. The other thing was that as much as I loved doing the ads work, Throughout my whole career, I've [00:03:00] always ended up coming back to this training, teaching, coaching.
It's just I love, love doing it. I've always done it. Again, I had a lot of experience in corporate. I had big teams and I was always really passionate about that side of you know, managing them. So those are the two core things really. I really needed to work out how I could make it work for me as well as my family.
So the first thing I thought about was, right, how can I get some more human interaction into my life? So I set up some co-working days with a few friends, and that was really nice. I also joined the local David Lloyd because they have an area where you can go and work and they're like, cafe.
And I thought, well, that'll be great. So I can go and work there, just be around other people, get out the house. I also then teamed up with a couple of other business owners to launch an in-person women's networking group. So that's been really amazing. We launched that in March last year and we've had five events and we do regular co-working sessions and, that's going from strength to strength and it's continuing to grow this year. So that was really great. So I kind of started to feel like, okay, there are [00:04:00] ways I can get more people into my life. And then the biggest shift really was deciding that I wasn't going to grow the ads management side of my business.
And generally in ads management, there are two kind of directions you go.
So either you create an agency if you want to grow your business where you take on more work and then you outsource the work to other ads managers so you have more capacity, essentially. And you can have more clients. I've always known that isn't the way that I wanted to go. However, the other route is training.
So whether that is a membership, whether that is training courses for, you know, other people who want to. Offer ads management to their clients or training courses for people who are businesses who then want to do their own ads. So I decided that really the training for other businesses was the way that I wanted to go.
I loved working with businesses. I loved being able to show them what ads could do for their business, and I really wanted to grow that side of my business. So I decided that one-to-one would be the best way to do that. And as part of building up my audience, because I knew from experience of previous business, [00:05:00] As well as working with clients that to grow that side of my business, I really needed up my lead generation
I've always been engaged on Instagram. So Instagram was where most of my leads came from. However, I was inconsistent and I actually find Instagram quite overwhelming sometimes and it burns me out. So I knew that I didn't want to just rely on Instagram. I really wanted to grow my email list, but I hadn't put a huge amount of focus on it because to be honest, when you've got monthly management clients, once you've onboarded them, they stay with you for quite a long time.
Like most of my clients stay with me at least six months. If not, I mean, I've got a couple of clients that have been with me for years, so you don't need so many leads compared to if you're running a training business where you are obviously working with people for much shorter periods of time. So I knew that I'd have to grab my email list and I decided that a really good long-term strategy to do this would be a podcast arah. Here we are.
So I really put huge amount of time and energy. I did a course, I did lots and lots of engagement on Instagram and asked people's opinions and, [00:06:00] and got loads of great feedback on it and eventually launched it in. Last year and it was really, really successful and, but I decided to go real hell for leather with it.
I decided to do two podcasts a week, which was really, in hindsight, ridiculous. But at the time I was just so excited and I really wanted to do a solo episode every week. And then I had all these incredible interviews I'd recorded. I really wanted to make sure people were hearing like I was just so excited to get the podcast out there.
And pass on the information and give people the knowledge. So yeah, so I committed to two episodes a week, which was really quite bold and realized pretty quickly that doing a podcast pretty much all on your own. With two episodes a week was really a big time commitment, and I was really happy with that.
What I didn't realize was that by shifting all of my attention onto the podcast, thinking longer term, like Youness is gonna grow my audience, I'm gonna get one-to-one training clients from this, you know, this is a long-term strategy.
What I didn't really appreciate was that I totally took my off the ball with short-term lead gen [00:07:00] strategies, so I wasn't really actively building my email list. I was on Instagram, but mostly to promote the podcast. I wasn't really talking about what I was doing, and to be honest, I didn't really know what I was doing.
I think I had massive imposter syndrome. I really struggled to promote myself as an expert in Facebook ads and give people reasons to want to train with me or, have one-to-one training with me. I did do training, so I did power hours and I. You know, nurture packages, which is three hours split, over three or four weeks.
And what I realized quite quickly, which I already knew but it came, became apparent pretty quickly, is that actually you need about three months to really see the impact of Facebook ads and doing these short-term trainings. Just. Showing these businesses how amazing Facebook ads could be for their business.
It was giving them like the skills and the training, but the real the real art of Facebook ads is actually the running of them. And that's where people needed support. Like you can follow a [00:08:00] tutorial on how to set up a Facebook ad. It's just a piece of tech. I mean, it might be. Overwhelming and really annoying piece of tech, but it is just a piece of tech.
The art really is Then once you've got the ads up what do you do with them? What do you do when they're working? What do you do when they're not working? What do you change? How do you test things like how do you optimize them? How do you get the most of your money? And that's really what I wasn't able to do with, with kind of short one-to-one training.
So I decided to join a coaching program. It's a nine month program with Gemma Gilbert whose whole ethos is taking people from working one-to-one through to having a group program. And that's really what I wanted to do. And honestly, her program is so good. So I joined that in March and realized pretty quickly that I needed to look at my niche. Now, my niche was parent and baby brands, and I loved my niche. I was really good at targeting parents using ads and also getting that messaging right with the ads as well.
So I loved doing that. However, the ads I was doing for my management clients were so varied. So there might be engagement campaigns and for econ we [00:09:00] might be running conversion ads. And then for a service businesses, we might be doing email signups. And there were so many different types of ads. I realized pretty quickly that if I wanted to run a program for people to learn how to do ads themselves, I couldn't try and teach them everything.
They just needed to know what was gonna work for their business. So, . Honestly, I found it really, really hard to decide whether to niche into e-com or into service businesses, and I went back and forwards and back and forwards on it so many times.
In the end, I decided to go for service businesses for the program because I think using Facebook ads to grow your email list is such a powerful strategy and it also doesn't require a huge budget.
And this really was my main focus. Like I really, really wanted to show businesses that you don't need to have huge budgets to run Facebook. , you don't need an Ads manager. You don't need to wait until you can afford an Ads manager until you can afford a big ads budget to run ads.
So [00:10:00] that's where I decided to focus on service businesses and growing your email list. So at this point we're sort of third of the way through the year. I've been huge amount of focus on my podcast, a big amount of focus on the background stuff of my group program.
I'm really starting to think about how I could deliver an amazing program to people that gave them the skills to run Facebook ads for a really specific purpose that was gonna have a positive impact on their business pretty quickly.
So that was my main focus. Then, I don't know if you guys remember, but April, may, June last year were pretty dire in for small businesses, especially the econ businesses. So much going on and the online space just really, really struggled.
And I think a lot of a lot of my audience and a lot of my clients really struggled. Two of my clients actually decided to close their businesses, which was really, really hard to see. But they just could not make the money side of it work. And then another two of my clients decided to pause running ads and decided to focus on different strategies to see if they could decrease the amount of cash [00:11:00] leaving the business basically.
So, Suddenly I was thinking that I had this baseline of management clients that were gonna take me through this period while I built up my training and launched my program. And then suddenly I was down to literally two clients. And honestly, that was really, really scary and part of me just really wanted to go out and get more management clients. My income massively dropped. It was really not very comfortable at all.
However, we were about June by this point, and I knew that I was gonna launch the course in September, so I was really focused on that and I was like, actually, , you know, I know the management clients stay for quite a long time and by the time I've onboarded them, I actually, I need to create space for these, for this training that I really, really want to do and for this business I want to create for myself.
And so I decided not to onboard any more management clients. I decided to really focus on the training. So that's what I. , and I'm not gonna lie, it was really tough. I struggled mentally with mindset wise. I tried to get some [00:12:00] one-to-one clients before I launched the program. However, with the niche that I was working in obviously school holidays come in July.
And to be honest, I think from about may half term, you know, it's really tough. There's so much going on at school. I think a lot of us as parents, think about trying to dial our businesses down over the summer so that we could spend more time with the kids. And actually people weren't really focused.
on running ads over summer. They wanted to kind of start them in September when they were refocused on their business, which I totally understand, but was so brutal from a business perspective. And really it was at this point where I. Totally second guessed myself and wondered if, honestly, if it was all really worth it.
Like the, the anxiety, the stress, the constantly posting on Instagram. I just found it really, really tough. I actually applied for a job at EasyJet. So I used to work for British Airways and I saw a job. and it was pretty much the job that I used to do for BA and I can't tell you the surge of confidence I had when I read the job description and I was like, oh my God, I can do that job.[00:13:00]
I'd be really good at that job. And it really surprised me how confident I was in myself as a sort of corporate person compared to how confident I was running my own business. They were like miles apart. It was quite a big eyeopener for. Anyway, applied for the job. I thought, well, I may as well apply for the job and see what happens while I try and kind of get through this period and just get Decept, Emma, basically, and launch my, launch my program.
So I went through rounds and rounds and rounds of interviews. I got down to the final two, and honestly, I loved my corporate job. I loved my corporate life, and I never really had any desire to work for myself, to be honest. Until I had kids and I didn't want to go back to that corporate life but it did massively remind me that the grass is not always greener. The the waiting, the time it took for everything to happen.
The red tape, the lack of flexibility. I mean, there was so many things that drove me mad about the whole process. That was such a good reminder for me. . And then I got down to the final [00:14:00] two and I didn't get it. And I'd love to say I got it, but I decided that actually, no, I wanted to work for myself.
No, I didn't get it. And actually I was fine with it. Like obviously my ego was a bit bruised and I was a bit disappointed. But I realized pretty quickly that my biggest disappointment was the regular income. I wasn't really disappointed about the job. I wasn't really disappointed. The thought of not having to go to a stead twice a week and commute and, you know, sort out childcare from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM actually, it was just this consistent income element that I really, really risked and it was such a light bulb moment for me.
I can't tell you how many mindset shifts I've had since I didn't get that job. I launched Bloom. The people in it are amazing And they're just getting amazing results, which has given me a huge confidence boost in terms of stepping into that expert space.
I'm doing talks for people. I'm doing [00:15:00] masterclass. I'm promoting myself as an expert on Instagram, and it hasn't really. Come at easily and you might think looking on Instagram or reading my email list, that it's come really easily and I am really comfortable with video. I'm really comfortable and you know, generally I am and I've had lots of experience being visible.
But honestly being visible. in this way where you are constantly talking about selling. You are constantly talking about what you offer, what transformation you offer, what you can offer people like why they should work with you, why you are the best person for them. Honestly, like it does not come easy to me.
I had to do a lot of work on it. But quite a pivotal moment came for me when Gemma my coach had sent out an email to her list. It wasn't like just to me or anything. And it was all about planning in 2023 and actually really you should be thinking about 2027 and then thinking about what you need to be doing in 2023 to reach your goals in 2027.
And I realized that the first thing [00:16:00] that came into my head was , I won't be working for myself in 2027. I'll be in a corporate job. And it wasn't even, it wasn't even a fully formed thought like that. It was just this assumption of, oh, I don't need to think about 27 cause I won't be working for myself then.
And it just hit honestly, like hit me like a ton of bricks. I have never really. Bought in to me, working for myself as a long-term plan. I have always thought I'll just do this while the kids are young, while it suits the family. Like, you know, I just need to do enough. I just need to bring enough in, enough income, get by and at some point I will go back to my corporate career cuz that's what I'm good at.
And it just made me realize that I have never really backed myself when building my own business. I have always thought it's just temporary. And because I've thought it's just temporary. I haven't really committed to long-term strategies. I haven't really been able to step into like owning my new business and being a business owner. And yeah, it was just such a massive [00:17:00] light bulb moment for me. I also realized that I have this limiting belief that everything will come to an end and there's a lot that sits behind that, but it's something I've been really working on because I did the first round of Bloom my program, and I had this massive resistance to launching it again because I just thought, well, I've launched it once. Everyone who's in my audience is going to have seen it. No one's gonna buy it again. Like that was, I may as well just.
Do something different, offer something different. Because the success of Bloom, the success of the podcasts, the success of my business will probably end and I'll have to pick myself up and start again. And that really has been the cycle of my life working for myself. So far. I have three different businesses and for, for one reason or another, they've all come to a natural end.
And I've picked myself up and I have started something. Partly that's cuz I'm a manifesting generator and I love new things and partly it's cuz I don't back myself through the tough times and I think, okay, I failed. I need to try something different. So positives and negatives, but [00:18:00] overall, The massive, the massive difference and the game changer this time really was having the support, like the calls I had with Gemma after launching the first round of Bloom to pick myself up and not burn it to a ground and start something totally different, but to keep going.
instead of putting my energy into thinking about doing new things, actually put that energy into promoting Bloom and making sure people see it and fundamentally growing my email list. So I've been running my own ads now for about nine months where I hadn't ever before cause I needed to. And it's been such an education in in what works in testing things, in being able to input all of that, experience and knowledge on top of what I do for my clients.
But it's so interesting when you run yourself the different things that come up, the, the nervousness about spending money, you know, when it's not working. That feeling of like, oh, I'm just gonna turn them off. Like I, like I'm wasting money. Yeah, it's been so helpful both from a great email list perspective, but also in supporting my clients.
So I launched [00:19:00] again, bloom again in November and then again in January. And every time I've had wonderful new businesses come in and have mega shifts, not just in the ads. And this is something that I'm not very good talking about and I need to make sure I get better at.
So Bloom is not just how to set up Facebook ads. Bloom is how to create successful Facebook campaigns that grow your email list of dream clients. So what that involves is creating, looking at your messaging, looking at your dream clients, and then creating a lead magnet that then will attract those dream.
It's then about building your Facebook ads, creating the right audience, getting the copyright, the messaging, the creative, all that stuff you'd probably expect. And then once they're on your email list, it's all about having a killer welcome sequence to then welcome them into your world.
Connect with them and start to build that relationship so they turn into clients. And don't just sit on your email list. So that is what Bloom does, and it's over 12 weeks and we are having huge shifts [00:20:00] at the moment. Lots of my clients are having amazing shifts in their messaging. They're realizing there's such a halo effect from understanding your messaging at this level.
Being able to grab people's attention, like dream client's attention on Facebook ads is such a great skill for your email content, for your social media content, for the way you speak to clients, for how you position your programs. And that's what lots of clients are really seeing the benefit of at the moment, which is amazing.
So. . Tricky pivot if I'm honest. You know, I kind of decided I wanted to do one-to-one training and, and maybe launch a program in March. I ended up launching it in September with a shit load of fear surrounding it, and I felt like it all really clicked into place in December. So I'm gonna say it was a whole year of a big slow Titanic pivot.
At this point, I feel like I have finally come through the other side, and I'm loving bloom. It is going from strength to strength. I have just recently launched a new one-to-one [00:21:00] offer, which is three months, and if you don't run ads already, I will build your campaign for you and then test it for a month.
and then we do two months coaching so that I can actually teach you how to run that campaign. Or if you're already running ads, then we will just do three months coaching on your ads, making sure that that campaign is optimized and really coaching you on how to use a strategy.
gives you that foundation in your business where ads are the engine and you get to do all the other stuff on top. And I do still have a couple of monthly management clients who I absolutely love and they are like the foundation of my business and give me that reassurance that there is income there.
But I'm not looking to grow that side at the moment because the training stuff is just going so well. So, that's a bit of a download of where I've been. I've also had a bit of an epiphany recently on the fact that, so Bloom helps people who want to. be fully booked. They want, often, they want one-to-one clients or they want their classes to be full. They want something to kind of be full. Then my one-to-one clients tend to be the [00:22:00] ones that are at full capacity and then want to scale their businesses. So that often is with a group program. And I'm just so excited to support other people going through like what I've been through the last year and understanding what that looks like in terms of the amount of leads you need to be having to come into your business to successfully run a program whether that's a membership or a course.
You know, being able to scale your business in that way is just so amazing. But you have to have your lead gen in place to get that working and rolling and also working with the other business owners in Gemma's program. Like I've seen, like they have these amazing programs and often like the initial launches go quite well. But if you don't keep up the lead gem, that engine to your business underneath growing your email list, getting more people over on your social media you can dry up your pool of people quite quickly. So that's really my, my one-to-one is focusing on at the moment is how I can help people go from having one-to-one to more of a group program or membership, or some model where you have a lot more people coming into your.
So [00:23:00] that's where I am. I will put, obviously details of all the different things I've talked about in the show notes, but in terms of specifically with the podcast, this episode is the first in a mini bonus series. There's eight episodes. This one and then seven interviews. I've done all different topics. We've got Shopify we've got Pinterest, we have got two money ones. So one is from my wonderful accountant, Anastasia.
So that's a really, really practical money one. And the other is much more about money mindset. Then I've got three on branding and I just was so excited to record this series. So One is about branding from more of a graphic design perspective. One is about being your own personal brand and how important that is. And the last one is about visibility and branding, photo shoots.
And that's with a brand photographer Vicki. I'm so excited to bring those seven episodes to you over the next few weeks. So we're gonna have quite a short, sharp, intensive podcast, few weeks, then there'll be a little break.
And then at the beginning of March, I am gonna be launching a new podcast. So this is not gonna be massively different to now. There's gonna be [00:24:00] solo episodes with me, there's gonna be interviews, it's gonna have a new name, new branding. And partly because I'm not focusing on parent and baby brands anymore specifically, and I'm really focusing on service businesses.
So there's that niche issue. Also because I'm really focusing on using Facebook ads as a positive like growth strategy, which I'm really excited about. And I feel like growing pains is just a little bit like negative. I wanna just put the positive out there. , I want to help you use Facebook ads to grow and scale and get those amazing businesses that you've built out there to more people. Whether that's cuz you just want consistent clients and income and you are very happy with your one-to-one or if you want to scale and grow and launch a group program, I want to be able to help you do both of those things.
So yeah, very exciting times coming obviously come on over to Instagram. I feel like I bed my soul on here, which is slightly, slightly nerve wracking. I'm sure I'll have a vulnerability hangover once I've recorded this and it's out there. But yes, come over to Instagram and say, All the information on the programs that I run and on my Instagram are in the show [00:25:00] notes, and yet I will see you my next solo episode will be in March with the new format and the new podcast, and I am so looking forward to it.
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