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Welcome to Make More Money Without Selling Your Soul. The podcast for bold entrepreneurs ready to simplify scale and reclaim their time. I’m Polly Lavarello, Evergreen scaling strategist and cushy business pioneer. Join me and my occasional guests as we explore the themes of wealth, selling and well-being, because building a business that works for you changes everything. Let’s dive in.

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Hello and welcome to the show. Lovely listener. Okay, let’s get into it today. We’re talking about the pivot I didn’t see coming, and how to stay profitable. Now, if you’ve been listening to my show since it first began, goodness, I think it might have been in 2023 or maybe even 22 anyways, it’s been a while. If you’ve been listening all that time, you will know that I have not pivoted from Evergreen in all that time. So that’s not the kind of pivot I’m talking about in the show. I’m talking about when the landscape shifts and what used to work no longer works anymore, and adapting to that. Because what is the point in complaining, what is the point in panicking? What is the point in blaming everything externally and just hoping on a wing and a prayer that it’s going to change anytime soon? These are all things where we are externalizing our hope and our opportunities, and ultimately, hope and opportunity lies within you, and the better we remind ourselves of that, the more resilient you will be in how we approach these things. But that’s not enough. There’s more to it than that. And actually, I have so much to say on this subject, I’ve actually broken it down into three separate episodes. So this episode, I’m going to be talking to you about the foundations I put in place to create the breathing space to create the adaptations I needed to to meet the changes that were happening, the slower buyer cycle, the fact that clients weren’t getting results as fast or as easily as they used to, and all the other pieces I’m going to go into more in depth in just a moment.

The next episode I’m going to share, which will be punctuated with a guest episode. So Sol, so you’re going to have to wait a bit, but when it does come I’m going to be talking about mastermind days, mini offers and my new business model talking about how I still have a super simple, streamlined office suite, and that I still work with Evergreen systems, and I still have the same profit margins in my business, and I still have a very cushy business with very minimal hours in delivery, maximum spaciousness For working on the business and having a life around it. But what I’ve made that not just works for me, obviously, most importantly, works for my clients, because they’re not Abby. Then what’s the point? And equally, just works across the board. My goodness, sorry, my room is really hot right now. My brain just totally frazzled there. But yeah, works for me, works my clients, and works in alignment with my values of having a cushy business. And then finally, episode three, we’re going to be talking about what’s working right now, visibility, volume and why ads are more essential than ever. So we’re going to be breaking it down in three different ways. A, how to create breathing space. B, what that looks like as a business model, and C, what do you need to be focusing on in your marketing efforts to create a super resilient business? So I see at the moment a lot of people sharing a lot of hot takes about what’s working look, I’m not here for hot takes. I’m not here for short term solutions. I’m here to help you create a sustainable business. I’m here to help you do things with simplicity, and I’m here to help you know that, no, you do not need to burn everything down. There is so much of my business that has not changed to stay afloat, and you’re going to learn more about that in episode two.

But for episode one, let’s talk about how I even created the breathing space. Because what is one of the biggest fears we have when we create any change in our business, it’s how do we cope with the potential fallout where we may end up not making money. And most of you, well, my regular listeners, will know that I am not even the main breadwinner. I am if I’m not earning, not only we not going on holiday, we are, you know, my kids aren’t eating, we’re we’re in trouble. Basically. We’re in trouble. So it’s not, it’s not a possibility that I can earn less money. And I’m going to pause for a moment there and actually say that one of the most powerful elements as to why my business does as well as it does, is when you recognize in your body that something is not even a possibility. It is amazing what you make possible. In fact, if there’s one thing you take away from this episode is this, when you know something is not a possibility, it is amazing what you make possible. Any strategy can work, any offer can work, any of these things can work. When you are clear on what is not a possibility for you, you will find the possible, and hopefully, by listening to today’s episode, I will play a role in helping you find the possible, right? Okay? Because it’s not luck that I’m here. Yes, I have certain privileges from, you know, race and upbringing and various other things, but there are a lot of other people with equal privileges who are not succeeding in this environment, okay? And it partly it’s because there’s an element where they are already allowing themselves to understand that they may fail, and rather than looking for what is possible, they’re already looking for the nearest exit sign, okay? And I really want to encourage you not to do that, okay, because the second you start looking for an exit sign, you are going to see all the reasons why things cannot work for you, when you look for what is possible, you will see things that you couldn’t see before that will give you opportunities to succeed.

Okay, I know this is real. I know it’s raw, but let’s dive into it. You’re safe with me. Okay, so let me talk to you a little bit about what happened for me, and maybe it might relate to you and the situation you’ve been in in your business. So for me, back in 2023 my mastermind was at its kind of heyday. I think at one point, I had up to 30 people in there at a time, and so that meant my months were looking at like 30 sometimes 40k months at worst, maybe 20k it was delightful. There was lots of spaciousness in there. But I will say that. I mean, it’s a whole other episode. But I definitely reinvested a little too over enthusiastically during those days as well. But something changed. Something changed. The funnel that I was running no longer worked as well as it used to work. I had a very simple funnel. I ran ads to a webinar. It was pre recorded. People would then simply book a call and I would convert them into my core offer. Now I’ll admit I probably got a little too nervous too early on, but at the same time, it wasn’t just me experiencing it. Other people who were running similar funnels started experiencing similar challenges. Now, don’t get me wrong, I had clients at the time with Evergreen funnels that were killing it, and I remember saying to them, This is hilarious. I’m so glad I’ve helped you create this. I wish mine was still working as well. So it’s not to say that all evergreen funnels suddenly stopped working as well, but mine certainly took a hit, and I had to recognize why. And obviously it didn’t take long to start recognizing that there were various people in the space highlighting that for them too, the buyer cycle had become longer. People were not converting as quickly as they used to, and thank goodness when they started saying all of that, because I no longer felt like what’s wrong with me, because everyone else started feeling the same, please tell me I’m not alone with that. We did you feel similarly when you heard that it’s not just you. Now, of course, on the one hand, it’s reassuring to hear that the buyer cycles got longer, and it’s not just you. And at the on the flip side of that, there’s a question of, and what do we do now? Like, do we just accept that everything’s going to be slower? Or how? How can we create momentum so that slower buying cycle doesn’t impact us as strongly, and obviously I had to kind of go back from something I started claiming very strongly, which is, we get to have one offer. Which, to be fair, again, I have various clients who have just one offer, and again, are still doing amazingly. So as I say, when you are committed to a way of doing things and you want it to work, you can. But in my mind, it wasn’t really just about, can I make it work with one offer? There was a lot of me who trusted that was possible.

There’s a lot of me who’d witnessed enough people doing that effectively to know that it was viable. And not only had I seen that, my bias cycle was getting longer, but equally, of course, as somebody who helps people with Evergreen funnel. Funnels. I was seeing it for my clients too, and not just evergreen funnels, launches. It was happening across the board. I could see that launches weren’t converting the way they used to. I could see that evergroup evergreen funnels weren’t converting the way they used to. I could see that story strategies weren’t doing what they used to. I could see that many chat funnel I mean, everything that used to work wasn’t working as effectively anymore. But there was one part of the market that still seemed to be pretty buoyant, and that was the low ticket market

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that still seemed to be doing pretty well. But let’s also highlight an issue here. Yes, the low ticket end of the market was doing well, and people like myself, I’m still investing high ticket. I still want high ticket mentorship, and I know I have a lot of peers who still invest high ticket like that hadn’t stopped happening, so I wasn’t going to walk away from the high ticket model I’ve built in my business, because A, it works. B, people like I say, were still, in many cases, getting better results than I was. And also, you know, it’s where my zone of genius is, helping people scale beyond six figures. Is literally like, all the resources, tools, experience, knowledge I have, is shaped around that. So I wasn’t walking away from that, and I had no interest in helping people with their super kind of basic beginner business challenges, because I know that it wouldn’t be fair on them. I would not be motivated to help them with challenges within Canva. That’s just not it would be a waste. I mean, I my my skills and knowledge would be so wasted in their area and and they would feel that resent, resentment for me. So no, not a good idea, but something needed to be different, and I needed to find time to figure out what that different was going to look like, what it was going to be. For those who are working me right now, you’ll know what that ended up being, but what I needed to do was to create some breathing space. And so the way I created that breathing space was initially looking at, you know, one thing I said to my coach at the time was like, Yeah, I have really abundant months in terms of what I’m making revenue wise. Why doesn’t it feel that way? And that was because I was pretty aggressively reinvesting back into the business. It was just too much fun to do that. But it was time for me to kill that habit of just signing up to three programs.

As I say that out loud, I realized how ridiculous that was. I mean, what was I doing? Oh, now I never sign up to more than one thing at a time, because I know that not only is it just so much money, but I wasn’t showing up to any of those in the capacity I should have done and could have done, and the amount I could have gotten out the other side if I’d done one thing at a time, I was just, I was, you know, it was there. I was spending it. So I cut back on those kind of things because they just weren’t necessary. I still have a coach or a mentor always, although, at the moment, I’m on the hunt, but generally speaking, I always have somebody in my corner supporting me that wasn’t going to change, and there’s always a budget for that, but I wasn’t going to have all these additional things. You know, I love learning. I’m a forever student, and I had to cut back on that because it didn’t make sense to be doing quite so much all at once. The other piece I needed to do was look realistically at my team now that we weren’t dealing with so much fast kind of action and momentum, did I need a team that was ready to respond, you know, at the drop of a pin to absolutely everything? And actually, was that ever really necessary? You know, we’re not, we’re not in, er, we’re not the emergency room. So I equally decided to let go of team members now that, of course, I mean, we have enough time has elapsed now that I can say it with no feeling in my heart. But at the time, there were tears, and it was hard to imagine, see now I’m feeling the emotion. It was hard to imagine that my business would be my business without them. They played such a pivotal role, and some some of them, have been there with me since almost the very beginning. So that was emotional and hard, but I did have to recognize where my emotions were kind of calling the odds and where my business had to be prioritized. And what was most uncomfortable was the fact that I was choosing to be ahead of things rather than wait for things to get worse and then cut back my team. I was getting ahead of it by cutting back my team before it even felt entirely necessary. So of course, there was that question mark at the back of my head, what if you’re making the wrong decision?

Fortunately for me, what I since have learned is that actually my lean team are better and more on it than ever, because I’m not juggling so many of them, because I can deliver upon the things, the deliverables they need from me in time, because I’ve learned how to be less and less of a bottleneck in the process. So that they are able to operate autonomously. And now, you know, my business feels lighter and leaner than ever, so it’s turned out for the best, and that’s so often the case with adverse situations, right? Like when adverse circumstances come along, so often they teach us the thing that we really needed to learn, even if it didn’t feel great at the time. So yeah, lean team systems all over the shop and constantly going in and tweaking, refining. Because if I’ve learned something the hard ways, unfortunately, systems are never as simple as set them up and then let them be they’re like an engine, and you need to go in and be the engineer that you know keeps an eye make sure they’re all ticking over the way they’re meant to. Otherwise they can very quickly self implode or just break and you don’t notice until, until something happens, which is preferably something you want to avoid. So Systems team and the other piece I still needed to create was I knew with the size of my goals and the level of impact I want to have, and the number of people I wanted to support, and the integrity within which I want to do it, in terms of being known as the business mentor who truly delivers 110% to keep those amazing retention rates I have with my clients who stay because I do deliver well above industry average, and I know that because it’s reflected to me regularly, I wasn’t going to rush into what the next stage of my group program looked like. I just didn’t have the capacity for it.

So my man, you know, my coach at the time said, You know what? What could you create for your business right now that is simple, lean and streamlined, that will give you the breathing space while you figure out what this next phase is, what this next pivot is. And I decided to take on eight, one to ones, with one hour session per month with a weekly check in on a Monday as well, so that they’re always, always supported, and a VIP day at the beginning, or fun and games. And that, you know, if you think about it, eight hours per month, that would be two four days of each month, where I’d have two to three calls per day, very manageable. And I’m really pleased to report that the majority of those one to ones now have completed their year with me, or one or two are approaching the end of that year, and they all hit their goals in that time, which is gorgeous, so less really can be more in terms of the time you spend with your clients. But anyway, that’s by the by that’s a little tangent, but yeah, so they all hit their goals anyway. But the point is, choosing an offer that was a total no brainer, where people were signing up for 12 months to work with me, either at 10,000 pounds pay in full, or at 1000 pounds per month plus VAT, having those people show up and sign up for 12 months at a time. Meant that once they were in, once they were on boarded, once we’d had their VIP day, and they were settled in, I then had the capacity outside of my time when I was in delivery to them, which, as I mentioned, was very few hours per month I could then be road testing. Well, actually, you know what? I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s what I’m going to be going into in the next episode, where I talked about how I read redesigned my office suite to match the slower buyer cycle that we’re seeing in 2025 and started seeing in 2024

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and how to create those additional touch points that people need to feel confident, to jump in all without feeling like we’re having to create new offers every single month. You know, you know, if you’ve been in my world a while now, the thing I was choosing to get away from, I was choosing to get away from busy offer suites, live, launching complex funnels. And I’m happy to report that that has not happened. Things are still incredibly simple. Things are still, in fact, more profitable than ever. What was really exciting a year later was to recognize, even though my revenue took a bit of a dip, that I was more profitable because of all those cutbacks I made in areas where I really didn’t need to be spending. But was spending because I never made that kind of money before, so and a lot. And to be honest with you, there were investments that I don’t regret, things like my photo shoot was a hunker, chunker kind of investment, but at the same time, something that’s still holding strong over two years later. So there are various things I invested in, very confidently, very boldly, in a way that I’ve not seen many other online business owners do, and it really paid off. But I guess the reason why I wanted to share this as its own individual episode is I want you to take a moment to think about this too. If you are seeing change in your business right now, I want you to think about where you don’t need to burn everything down, because if you’re. Like me, and you’ve come really far, and you’ve got amazing client case studies, and you’ve got a crazy amount of valuable resources, and you know, you fine tuned your ability to be amazing coach or mentor.

Don’t allow that to be wasted. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s a big difference between what’s going on externally, in terms of the economy and buying cycles versus what’s going on internally. If internally, you’re feeling a call to do things differently, then that’s an entirely different subject, like then, then, you know, go, go to you, babe. But if, if it’s because of what’s changing in your business and you’re thinking about what to do next, don’t assume you need to burn everything down and start from the ground up, because that’s, you know, that’s a long way down to then work all your way back up again. And while you’ll never, ever go right back to where you started, because that’s impossible. Let’s not make things unnecessarily difficult for yourself, and one of the ways we can do that is by creating breathing space, because I talk about it all the time. To grow our business, we want to have a regulated nervous system. We want to feel calm. We want to feel safe. We want to sell from a place of, Oh, that’d be nice. I wonder what that’s going to buy me on holiday and not need. Oh, my goodness, if I don’t sell today, I’m not paying the bills this month. There is a very different energy between the two, and when people pick up on that need energy, they run for the hills, because that is not a safe space to invite people into. It’s not a safe space to sell from. And we can end up in this awful, self perpetuating cycle of just panic. So taking a moment to think about, how can I create breathing space in my business? You know, sometimes people come to me and they’re like, Polly, I’ve got this low ticket offer. I need to make 5000 pounds this month, and it’s 50 pounds. I’m like, Well, do you feel like it’s going to feel good selling 100 of those this month. Or where you have your two and a half 1000 pound offer and you sell two of those, how many conversations do you need to have to sell that?

And when they recognize the time invested making 5000 pounds selling two offers is way more lean, way more aligned, way more, just way more, just better. In every regard, they drop the idea of trying to make 100 sales of a 50 pound offer when they’ve just got an organic audience that’s already been pretty rinsed already. Okay, so sometimes we do these things because we’re like, oh, that person’s got a low ticket offer that’s selling. Or, oh, people have already heard about this. I can’t talk about this again, and we create unnecessary pressure for ourselves. So I want you to take a moment to take a deep breath in, through the nose and out, and think, What can I do in terms of my buying selling activities this month, or even in terms of how you run your business, that’s going to allow you to be breathing like that and feeling like that all the time. Don’t worry, I’m not suddenly becoming a breath right practitioner, but I do know the power of just breathing and connecting to oneself when deciding what to do, because that person who’s making panic decisions, they are not regulated. Okay, so help yourself be regulated. Nothing is ever as bad as you think it is in your head and your body will remind you of that. Okay, you are much safer than you already know. So think about through your team, through your investments through your buying. Well, you’re selling, not your buying, your selling strategy and the offers you’re selling, where are you creating space for breathing so that if you do want to adapt and evolve anything else in your business, that you have the abundant capacity to do so, because squeezing it in the last hour of the day, ain’t gonna get you anywhere, any, anytime, fast. Okay, breathing space. This is one of the things I always do with my one to ones. When they come to work with me, if they want to see significant change in their business, and they are stuck in unhealthy patterns with their business in terms of how they’re showing up to it, and the hours they’re putting into it, and the over delivery that they’re stuck in. We undo all of those pieces and look at how to create breathing space before we even think about embarking on any large project like a funnel, because none of it’s going to go well if you’re doing it from a reactive, constricted space, right? Okay, so next week.

Well, in two weeks time, after next week’s guest episode, I’ll be sharing with you how I rebuilt my business with more clarity, more impact and more calm, and what that looks like in terms of my offer suite. It’s going to be a really juicy episode for now. I hope I’ve given you permission to breathe, permission to be permission to understand that it’s. Not your fault that things are changing and that actually, you have so much power over how things get to be different and to not be overly influenced by all the things happening around you externally, and now is the best time ever to be connecting to your data and understanding what works specifically for you. I know various businesses who’ve been marginally, if at all, impacted over the last two years, and it’d be a waste of your time to be changing anything when everything is already working. But similarly, I know businesses who are being impacted and who are being influenced by what they’ve read last on Facebook, and that is not a strategy. Okay, so there breathe, and I will be in your ears in two weeks time. I’m looking forward to it. And as always, if you enjoyed this week’s episode, please do subscribe. Please do share it with your business bestie, and if you’re listening in real time, I currently have space one more space for a one to one if you’d like help with creating that breathing space. I’m having the best quarter to wrap up this year with. Then. Now is the time to have the conversation with me, because I am off friends with no calls for the entirety of August. So now is the time to jump in.