Making the right decision about where to focus and what investments to make can be difficult when you grow your business.
Shannon Mattern, host of the Pep Talks for Side Hustlers Podcast and the Web Designer Academy gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how she navigated her relationship with money and how she built her business by leveraging key relationships and focusing on strategies that brought her results.
Read on for key gems from her business story.
Change Your Mind about Money
Learn to Invest in Yourself
I remember having a messed-up relationship with money when I first started in business.
I had the skill to build websites, but I didn’t know how to find my ideal clients. I didn’t know how to charge appropriately because I was self-taught, and I didn’t value what I brought to the table. It was easier for me to spend my time trying to solve a problem instead of spending my money because I felt like, “if I spend my money and it doesn’t work out, then I’ve failed.”
My mindset changed when I stopped thinking about things as “expenses” and started thinking about them like “investments”.
Know the Value of Your Skillset
That’s when I realized that when I charge somebody $5,000 for a website and it enables them to get one more client, the worth to them is invaluable. I finally broke free of the mindset of exchanging time for money.
It was no longer about me; it was about my client and what was possible for them.
Marketing Your Offer When You're First Starting Out
Build key relationships and generate leads
When I created the free Five Day Challenge, I wanted to get in the hands of people just like me. Women who are working at a day job, who want to leave corporate and have freedom, flexibility, and financial independence. And there weren’t a whole lot of resources out there for women at the time. But I don’t even know how to find these people.
Somehow, I ended up in a Facebook group, and they encouraged me to share my freebie. And I realized that if you share something valuable, people will sign up.
This gave me the idea to find people who serve my ideal audience in a completely different way.
I started connecting with business coaches that had audiences. And I’d reach out and say, “Hey, I would love to interview you for this blog series that I’m doing called Women to Watch. I would love to interview you, ask you some questions about you, your business DIY and your website, what you would do differently, and so on.” When I published the blog post, I also sent the coaches a link, so they could share it with their audience as well. And they always did because I made sure the blog post made them look good. The link to my challenge was always in the sidebar for my blogs and that’s how I got traction with lead generation for my business.
Don’t give in to shiny object syndrome
I wish I could say that I continued on this path, but I admit, I experienced some shiny object syndrome. I bought all the courses and trainings and I felt like I was doing something wrong because none of those strategies were working. What was working was what I was doing before, and it also started to gain some momentum because people started sharing it with other people and sending more contacts my way.
So, I started paying attention to what was happening and started saying “no” to new courses. I realized that the answer was not outside of me. And the faster I tried to go, the slower I was going.
Learn when to switch strategies
Even though my original blog lead generation process was working, and I had successfully transitioned my blog into a podcast, I found it difficult to let the other programs go.
Pivoting and experimenting was no problem in a lot of areas in my business, but there was a limiting belief in this area specifically. I felt like I needed to fix my programs that weren’t working because I didn’t want to fail and let people down. My clients paid for this program, so I felt like I could never end it. But I realized that I was no longer operating from a place of passion but from one of desperation.
Not everything works out the way you want it to. There may be another lesson for you to learn in that.
Don’t sweat the small stuff
When the challenge took off, I was invited on a webinar to talk about how I monetized my WordPress skills. And a very insightful business coach challenged me to register people for my own webinar and invite them to do a coaching program with me.
So I did. And I called it “The Group Coaching Program”. I had six people pay $600 for a twelve-week group coaching program. I kept offering it, and the program grew. And it made $300,000 in my business this year.
Of course, it’s no longer called “The Group Coaching Program”, it’s now called Web Designer Academy.
Resources
About Shannon
Shannon Mattern teaches web designers how to create profitable, sustainable, and scalable businesses. She started her business as a freelance web designer. She decided to pivot her business and teach people how to build their own websites. In this episode, Shannon shares three important things she learned on her journey to profitable business growth.
