00:00

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.

00:36

Hello, and welcome to the show. I’m recording this in another heat wave with humid massive curls and no makeup on, because quite frankly, it is just too hot to give a damn. I also have Invisalign in, so I’m hoping I don’t lisp too much throughout this episode, but I’ve also decided that just needs to be part and parcel of these episodes until it’s done, because it’s too much hassle otherwise. And today I want to talk to you about the business advice I ignored that made me more money, and one of the reasons why that felt super relevant is because it’s the summertime, which can be associated with sales in some scenarios, in some industries, for some service providers slowing down, certainly. When it comes to social media, we always hear people complaining this time of year of people not engaging with their content as much, because guess what, it’s sunny. 

So people are spending more time outside, more time with friends and family, more time socializing, which, yes, means less screen time, which then also means less engagement. So let me just get that one out of the way. If that’s happening for you, do not stop panicking that your content is no longer landing, and take a moment to think about human behavior and what they, you know, what humans are human, how humans are humaning. So, yeah, that doesn’t mean we stop, that doesn’t mean we give up, it just means we perhaps are a little bit more compassionate with ourselves. But anyway, because the land that we are building upon is constantly shifting, whether it’s the algorithm, whether it’s trends, whether it’s AI, you know, there’s not been a period since I started in digital marketing where things weren’t constantly shifting and evolving, I mean, when I first started out in my own kind of adventures in online, I was, I was a blogger, and I was a mummy blogger, and I was being sent stuff by companies to blog about, because blogs were so prolific back then. That was before Substack was even a thing, at least I think it was, anyway. But blogs were, you know, having a blog on WordPress was the way to make money online, and again, online magazines were a thing, collaborations, community type stuff, which again I see less of these days. It’s much more about individuals than it is about collaborations, communities, human beings. Anyway, it’s a whole thing, right? I’m going off piste already, but the point is, you have got to know yourself, you have got to know what you are available for and not available for, and you’ve also got to be willing to test yourself a bit around those things, because ultimately one thing that is required when you choose to be your own boss, when you choose to run an online business, is learning to be adaptable, learning to be looking at the horizon and what is coming before it’s even arrived, because oftentimes by the time it’s arrived, you’re already too late. Is that kind of tiring? I’m not going to lie, yes, it is. I guess it’s one of the advantages of working with somebody like me, because every time I talk to my clients, or anyone like that, I will be highlighting tech trends and things that I’m seeing in the industry that they’re like, God, I hadn’t even noticed that, Polly, and I’m like, well, I do, my neurodiverse brain is a pattern seeker, and I spot patterns before patterns can be spotted themselves, and one of the things about online business is that by the time something’s really popular, it’s already about to become distinctly unpopular, and some things fall in and out of popularity so quickly it’s deciding whether it’s worth engaging with at all.

04:10

So, let me talk a little bit more specifically about the business advice that I’ve ignored that has made me money, but that context is kind of everything, because it’s why we can be so susceptible to business advice, because in a business where there is a lot of uncertainty, in a life, in a world where there is a lot of uncertainty, what is one of the most sexiest things? Certainty, and so we can jump on somebody’s confident words, where there is very little basis behind that confidence, but they know they understand that when you can say something with conviction, when you can back it up with some kind of receipts, people will pay attention, even if those receipts have very much been cherry picked, you know, and that’s what we have to be really cautious. Soft, because ultimately your personal brand, if you are swaying in the direction of every trend and fashion that comes your way, a) your personal brand will become diluted, b) people will trust it less, and see you yourself as a human behind the personal brand is going to be exhausted, overstretched, and chances are doing none of these things well. So let me share with you some of the things that I’ve ignored, and I’m so grateful for it. So one of the things I did, let me see if I can find this. Hold on, I’ve made notes, and I’ve already lost them. The first piece of advice that is still relevant to this day, that I still hear shared regularly, is you need to be everywhere. 

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Be on all the platforms. I inherently disagree with this. I think it’s actually quite challenging, you know. If you want to make Instagram work for you right now, for example, I’m finding even established accounts now need to be posting daily, or, you know, at best three times a week, but even if you’re only posting three times a week you’d want to make sure those posts are like have viral potential to ensure that your account’s actually going to work for you. Pretty much all platforms require real regular engagement, whether it’s you posting or whether it’s you engaging with other accounts. It’s a big thing to do, and it’s also something that’s very challenging to outsource. A lot of people just cannot be you, and so therefore it’s really, really worth understanding social, the social platform that you’re on, and being dedicated to becoming a master of it, like it really, really is. And so that is where trying to be on multiple platforms all at once just makes that exceedingly challenging to do. So my encouragement is to choose one and actually just really master it. Now, you might be hearing this thinking, but Polly, you’re on a podcast as well as social media platform. This is true. So, I’m just going to address that quickly. I am predominantly on Instagram. I do have people from, like, business who engage with me and, you know, become my friend on Facebook. It’s slightly pointless as an exercise, because I may need to share Father’s Day photos and Mother’s Day photos and kids’ birthday photos on there. I rarely talk about business on there, but I do sometimes, if I’m, if the mood strikes me. But I mainly, and similarly, LinkedIn, you know, I have it, I have a presence there, but I’m not present there, so again, connecting with me there, almost pointless. If you want my attention, Instagram is the platform to find me on, but it took essentially me getting to the stage where I had good engagement, good sales coming through Instagram, where I then layered on top a podcast, because a podcast is just a very different way to connect with people, it’s well, it’s more in depth, isn’t it, it’s just more raw, more unfiltered, more ability to bring depth to certain concepts that I want to go to, you know, like I could do. I probably will do a carousel based on this episode that I’m releasing this Friday, because why not? You know, it’s easy, it’s such carousel material, but equally the experience of the carousel and the experience of listening to this podcast will be entirely different, so in my mind Instagram is how people find me, and my podcast is how I nurture people who find me.

08:09

It’s not a platform that I regularly get discovered on, but it is a platform that, where people find me on Instagram, they will often then go to my podcast to get more connection to my brand, to get more of a feel for how I mentor, how I work, what my values are, etc. etc. So, yes, podcasts, I think, are brilliant, but I would bring them on as a second layer. Once you’ve got social media well under your belt, I kind of feel like there would be very little point in having nurture content like that if you haven’t got first a kind of volume mechanism in your business, which is what Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook can be brilliant for. So those are the two I focus on. I could be on YouTube, I’m not. I’ve got clients who are absolutely killing it on YouTube, but equally they do not have a podcast and they barely show up on Instagram because YouTube’s really doing it for them, so I’m not by any means saying you need to have my particular platform stack, let’s call it that, but I am saying that when you choose one and it’s working for you, don’t distract yourself feeling like, how do I add another layer of something new that I need to learn and get good at, and instead double down on what you’re already good at, you’ve probably heard me reference similar premise before, because I’m so passionate about it, like we’re already with 70% there. Why not bring yourself up to 90? Like, there’s absolutely no reason to start again at 1% on a different platform. The other thing that I have ignored is you need a bigger audience. 

So, one of the things I’ve been ignoring for a long time is the industry’s obsession with having huge mailing list and a huge number of followers, like, yes, I’m approaching 5000 followers on Instagram now, but I mean, it’s been six years, guys, it’s been a slow burn. I have never gone viral, it’s a very, very slow kind of progression over there. And then, similarly, with my mailing list, I do run ads, so that has grown, like, it is probably I. Know it’s several 1000s now at this stage, but equally I cull it really regularly because there’s absolutely no value in having someone on my list for like over six months if they’re not actually engaging or clicking through or buying, so that list is regularly culled as well, and I’m much more interested in how can I engage with, how can I nurture, how can I convert a smaller audience over just focusing on volume, you know. You don’t need to have a huge mailing list or a huge following when you know how to make offers that get people’s attention and make, make them want to buy from you. I’m not by any means, by the way, saying that, like, let’s give up on any of those things, but if, like me, earlier on in business, it just wasn’t happening for you, regardless, as to what you did. I don’t want you to assume that means that success is really far away, like when I had two and a half 1000 followers, that I think that was around the time I was having like 30 to 40k months, which was well above what I saw a lot of other people with similar size followings experiencing, and actually a lot of people I saw bragging about the 30 to 40k months would have, like, I don’t know, 250 k followers or a million followers, and I’d be like, God, I’m so far away from that, but it didn’t matter, because I had a high ticket offer that people that solved a really valuable problem that was clearly positioned towards exactly the right person, and so, while on the surface my business didn’t look particularly fancy. I was able to generate results well above and beyond what I was dreaming of with a small audience. So, don’t give up just because you’re not going viral, you know. I’m not saying by any means give up on trying to create content that you know, because obviously I’ve got clients who’ve managed to create like 10,000 followers within a week with a post that’s gone viral and has that massively improved their launch.

11:44

Yes, it has, particularly because that content was hyper relevant to the launch that she was about to do. I’ve also heard of people going viral and it making sweet fa difference to their launch. If anything, it’s actually diluted their following, so going viral for the right reasons or the right kind of content matters too. But what I am trying to say to you is, if you are in a similar predicament to me, that it just hasn’t happened for you yet. Oh my god, six years in, even with hiring various experts, and so on, so forth, like that is not a reason to give up. Okay, it’s not a reason to assume you can’t make money, and there are so many other things you can be focusing on your business that will ensure that you can be profitable and successful. The other thing I’ve ignored is the need to have, like, a really expensive tech stack and a really complicated funnel. While I am massively into funnels, my funnels are incredibly simple, and I actually think the simplicity of them is why people engage so confidently and happily with them, and why they work. So, you know, you don’t need to have, I remember, like Click Funnels and all these other expensive platforms, or go higher level, and all these things that just are just entirely unnecessary. I have, like, a very Billy Basic tech stack, but it works. That’s the most important thing to me. I don’t even have the prettiest landing pages, but again, if your messaging works, if your personal brand is strong. Again, it just doesn’t matter. And the other thing that I think is really important to say is, like, yeah, you need to follow the proven strategy. You need to follow the strategy that’s hot right now. I think there’s always something being sold, you know? At one point, I mean, I was ahead of the time with Evergreen, like nobody was talking about Evergreen and everyday sales when I started helping people with evergreen, and I purely did it because I was sick of launches, and turned out other people were too. And so that, that then took off, though, like that then became a thing. Just around the same time, I was like, I’m not going to talk about evergreen anymore, I’m going to talk about everyday sales, because nobody knows what evergreen is. Suddenly everyone was talking about it, and I was like, and again, everyday sales. I started talking about it again, few months later. Suddenly, I see lots of other people using that same term. So, anyway, but the point is, you know, they’re different now. At the moment, I’m hearing a lot about volume, a lot about going viral, a lot about, you know, just being prolific on Instagram as a way to make more sales. I think it’s really important to know, obviously, AI, AI is the other one, but I think it’s really important to know that you know when it comes to these things, that there will always be a new thing, and there’s a real value in being the person who zigs while others zag. 

The other thing that I referenced earlier, about how whatever is popular now is likely to be the thing that people are entirely bored of, in probably the next month or two, I mean, the online space things move really quickly, so talking head videos that were like proliferating my feed, probably about two weeks ago, suddenly now I’m seeing a heck of a lot more carousels, and Instagram themselves have announced that they are pushing carousels, so like you know, every time you think I know what’s going on, I have a read of this, it can change, so this is where the work around self leadership, this is where pure coaching, this is where somatics, and all of these things play such a pivotal role, because there’s something incredibly refreshing about going to a brand and. And knowing what they stand for, knowing what you can expect from them, and not being surprised, being like, “Oh, I thought this brand was really chill, so why are they suddenly dancing in a real? or “I thought this brand was really authentic, so why am I suddenly getting AI-generated emails?

15:13

Like all of those things can really kill your personal brand perception, and as I’ve said time and time again, your personal brand and the trust that is generated from it really is everything, you know. I’ve got clients who’ve come back to me time and time again for years now. I just recently finished a one to one contract with a client who’s been in my world for six years now. She came to me with on and off one to one coaching clients, and since then has built a strong personal brand, a strong niche. Her new podcast, she’s published a book. We’re about to publish a book. She now has a group program, two group programs, the group program and a mastermind, both of which are filling. She has events which sell out every single time she runs them. She is going to corporate talks and is in demand for corporate talks, is getting regular referrals for how brilliant she is. She has a hyper niche that no one else can compete with, and that has set her up for some brilliant collaborations already. I mean, things have changed phenomenally for her, but she’s been in my world for six years, and now I can’t remember perimenopausal brain plus heatwave, why I’m mentioning that, but no, that’s it. The value of having a way to work with people well beyond where they’re at when they first arrive is really powerful, and so much of that comes back to trust. If they were to kind of have one experience of you on one end and then see something entirely different on the front end, that is not a positive thing, and obviously we’re not just doing it for that one client, but we’re doing it for all of them, all of those people who are in your world, who bought from you previously, who are watching what you’re doing, ready to jump in again, but if they feel like you’ve had a personality transplant between the first time, the second time, it isn’t going to happen, and the statistic I say time and time again is that when you look at million pound coaching businesses, 70% is repeat clients, 70% is repeat or retained clients. Please don’t ever forget that, and that also really actually perfectly sums up all of the other bits of advice I’ve given you about chasing trends, about worrying too much about numbers. Ultimately, it comes back to you, your relationship with your ideal client, what you stand for, what you’re inviting them into, and being consistent, you know. Yes, you get to evolve, but bring them on that evolution with you. Okay, because if you’re constantly changing personalities with your marketing, people will not be able to keep up, and there’s a real power to understanding what you are, what you’re not available for. So, if you’ve not done it for a while, I’d like to encourage you to take a moment to think about your marketing, think about what you really love doing, think about where you’re in flow. I love recording these episodes, if you can’t tell already, but take a moment to write this down, think about the non-negotiable elements of your marketing that you adore and that work that bring in clients, then perhaps take a moment to think about the areas where you don’t feel so brilliant. Perhaps some people have given you feedback.

18:10

I definitely went through a little mini phase, if you’re on my mailing list, of getting a little bit too carried away with AI, thinking, “Wow, that’s better than I could write, and then recognizing even if it is better than I can write, people want to hear my voice, so I’ve gone back to doing that over the last few months, and now now I’m getting people who respond to my emails because they hear my voice in those emails, and they feel moved by those emails, and that is so much more meaningful than pumping out more content just for the sake of pumping out more content, and just because I could do these with AI doesn’t mean that’s what I needed to do, so take a moment to think about where is there a disconnect, you know, particularly when you think about it, you know, if we’re looking at a pyramid and at the bottom of the pyramid is all your marketing activities, the peak of that pyramid is your personal brand, how is your personal brand influencing your marketing choices, where is the connection there, and where is there any disconnect? What do you need to change to get everything working cohesively together, so that when someone thinks about your brand name, they have a really real clear association, and your marketing just leverages all of that rather than stamps on it. Brilliant. I hope I made sense, like I say, recording this in a heat wave, no makeup on. My cat’s just left, even he’s too hot and bothered. I mean, it’s just one of those days. Next week, I’ll actually take some time to think about what I’m recording, but I hope this one was good. I hope this one was helpful, particularly at a time of year where we can be thinking about the year ahead, thinking about what we want to achieve, you know, September onwards, and what’s often the strongest quarter of the year, while we go into summer, where some of us might take some time to slow down and contemplate all of those things. The questions I asked you today are a really valuable thing to reflect on too, because they have a way bigger impact than you perhaps have given them credit for so far, particularly when it comes to sales. All right, I’ll be in your ears next week, as I mentioned, I am approaching two. 200 episodes, so I am inviting guests on the show. I’m really, really excited for it. Again, if you think there is someone you’d love to hear on the show being grilled by me on how they do it, then please do DM me at Polly Lavarello and tell me who you’d love to hear me speaking to on the show. We are sending out invitations still, so yeah, hit me up. I’ll be in your ears next week.