Mistakes I Made In My Spiritual Business - So You Don't Have To

I just had the 17th anniversary of being in business. Seventeen years is a long time to be in business. It represents a lot of effort, tweaking of message and marketing, and a LOT of mistakes. Seriously. You can't be in business and not make a TON of mistakes - and expensive ones.

1) Targeting a market of people who had no money. I see so many people make this same mistake. I wanted to take care of people. I wanted to save them. But I ended up running a charity instead of a business and I was the one who ended up needing saving because I was making no money.

2) Worrying about what other people could afford instead of just claiming the value of my work. After 17 years doing this work, I can tell you that what people "can afford" is a massively moving target. What isn't a moving target is the value I provide - and it's MASSIVE. So much more than what I charge. When I shifted my focus to my value, my sales took off.

3) Undercharging. This one goes along with the one above, but it's a half turn off from it. I wasn't truly claiming the value of my work and so I was charging too little. So people didn't buy because they either didn't believe I could do what I said I could because I wasn't charging enough for it, or they could feel the karmic debt that they would be incurring if they bought so much value for so little money and they didn't want to take it on.

4) Treating the Universe as a parent rather than a partner. My biggest problem has been that I know and do too much. So picking a direction for the business was the hardest thing. No matter what I chose in the beginning, I felt like I wasn't doing something important to me. So I would launch a new program or product, do minimal marketing, and give it a ridiculously small window to be successful (no, seriously, sometimes I gave it two weeks). If it wasn't successful (duh, how could it be?) I'd say that the Universe wasn't in alignment and it was telling me to go in a different direction. Then I would write something else and start the process all over again. Taki Moore - a coach in Australia - was the one who got me over this. He said, "Offer ONE thing to ONE target market using ONE lead magnet for ONE year". It was when I embraced this model that my business truly formed a solid foundation and started to grow year after year.

5) Focusing on the pain rather than the promise in my marketing. Old-school marketing says to focus on the pain - it is the pain that will get people to buy. Well that may be true for selling business programs or face cream, but it REALLY doesn't work for spiritual businesses. Why? Because when you focus on the pain, you energetically resonate with the people who are in their victim energy. These people will be broke, hard to work with, and draining. And I got a LOT of those people - for YEARS. When you instead reference the pain and then focus on the way it could be different, you get the doers, the people who want things to be better and are willing to do the work to make it that way. Not surprisingly, these people are also much more likely to have the money to buy.

6) Mistaking busy-ness for progress. Now you would think that after running another successful business that I would have avoided this one, but no. You see in the last 17 years, social media has happened. And it is the biggest time suck ever. I spent many hours on Facebook, LinkedIN, Instagram, Pinterest, and others posting quotes, making memes, doing videos, etc. I would spend an hour crafting a post, post it once and then start the process over again. The juice was never worth the squeeze.

7) Thinking that repeating posts was bothering people. Here's a hard truth. Very few people are paying attention to you. I got this lesson in vivid relief when we moved to Panama last year. I made well over 100 Tiktok videos about the process which I cross-posted to Facebook and Instagram and yet there were people who when I was 30-50 videos in, were shocked to discover I was moving to Panama. Read that again - 30-50 videos. With MANY comments on each video. And yet they had no idea I was moving. This is the truth of social media marketing. I spent YEARS thinking that it was too much if I posted about something 5 or 6 times - I thought I was bothering people. When the truth of the matter was that they didn't even notice I had said anything.

There are many other mistakes I've made along the way and I'm sure I'll do another of these articles later. But I think we've talked long enough today.

My message to you is this: if you're still in business, you're doing great.

According to Investopedia: "Data from the BLS shows that approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more." We all make mistakes. Some are big, others minor, but if you learn from them, you eventually find your growth point. And if you are willing to do your inner work along the way, you can keep yourself from being the pinch point in your business's growth.

If you're running a spiritual business and you can't figure out what is keeping you from reaching the tipping point into massive profitability or you need help visioning how to scale, set up a Discovery Call with me to discuss how we can work together.