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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.

00:36

Hello and welcome to the show. Sometimes I just have a moment where I have a fleeting moment of inspiration and think I need to sit down and record this, because I have words that need to be heard and things I can say that will support you right now, particularly if you are having a wobble in your business. And maybe this could even be an episode that you just simply save or bookmark or whatever it is that you can do in terms of, you know, download it, whatever it is, so that you can, with ease, dip into this when it can be supportive to you. Could even earmark the moment where I actually go into the piece around what to do if you are not seeing the results in your coaching business and what to do with that wobble. This is not going to be an episode about strategy. This is more an episode about who you need to be in these moments so that it doesn’t negatively impact your strategy. Okay, I know what am I talking about. It’s all coming. But one of the reasons why I was inspired to record this episode was yesterday. I was speaking with the wonderful Quajo. If you haven’t heard of him and the art of online business, do go check him out. And I told him that this month February, this is what I’m recording. In February had been a really tiring month for me, which is embarrassing to admit, as a cushy business pioneer. But you know me, I’m also very I’m going to be honest, because I’m human, and we’re all humans, and it’s important that no one ever pretends to be something they’re not. And I had a lot of sales calls. Now, obviously I was kind of saying this slightly ashamedly, because it indicates my systems aren’t as good as they could be, that sales calls knocked me over the edge, but Quajo very beautifully reflected what a lovely problem to have, and as is always the case in online business, or, you know, growing your own business, we’re often too close to our own businesses, sometimes to see it the way someone else can see it. And that reflection really reframed everything for me, and I found myself saying to him, Well, it’s not the result of what I was doing in January or February that bought in all those sales calls. It’s the work I’ve been doing for the past year, and it is now all starting to pay off. And it’s, you know, really accelerating at a speed that you know just about keeping up with at the moment, you know, we’re behind the scenes, optimizing and changing systems so that I don’t have non cushion months moving forward, and I can still be of service to people. But that’s enough about me. I like to add a little bit of context as to why this has come about, why this conversation felt necessary.

03:06

He and I both reflected on the fact that back in 2024 a lot of people had a really challenging year, and if you’re listening to this episode because you are still in online business, then I freaking salute you, my friend, because you came out the side of what was a year that unfortunately knocked a lot of online businesses off their feet. I have never seen so many announcements about people shutting down their businesses. So if you are listening and you still have an online business. Whatever you know, if you’re having this wobble right now, please take a moment to celebrate yourself, because it takes a level of courage, a level of resiliency and a shit hot offer to still have been to have made it through 2024 so I salute you, friend. Now, let’s get into the Why am I not seeing results yet, kind of mentality and how that can actually well, how we have to be really careful when we find ourselves saying that okay? And I want to help you with how I would support you if you were to bring that question to me, because here’s the thing the online business space has done you a massive disservice. Social media, more importantly, has done you a massive disservice, in that there has been a lot of messaging all the way up till today, where there is an indication that it gets to be easy.

04:38

And if you are looking for high ticket clients or people who are going to invest 1000s of pounds in working with you.  It isn’t easy. Some people can make it look easy, but they have done the difficult thing, to get to the stage where it can look easy, and that can be one of the challenging things when you are.

05:00

For example, a mentor who has got a business where finances are flowing, and other people think, wow, that woman makes it look so easy. But believe me, there will be, in years and many moments where it has felt difficult that they have kind of navigated to get to that stage. And the problem is, I would say about 80% of coaches simply aren’t willing to do the difficult thing to get to the stage where it feels easy.

05:28

Now, I know that may feel really triggering to hear, but I also want to be honest with you, because if I were to say any different, then anyway, let’s get into what I mean by that, right? Because you might be thinking, but what does that even mean? How do I know if I am that person who wants it to be easy? How do I know if I’m like, walking down some garden path that’s taking me in totally the wrong direction? Here are the signs. Okay, if you are not seeing the results immediately, what do people tend to do? They can go down two different paths. Is what I’ve observed. The first path is the path of, I’m useless. I’m never going to make it. I’m not as good as that competitor over there. Maybe my offer just isn’t good enough. And there are a few things that can kind of come out of that kind of head space. One is it just really shadows and blurs our judgment where we may be succeeding in various ways we can instead be clinging on to all the evidence as to why we are not succeeding. And if there’s one thing I’d say about the entrepreneurs I’ve supported who have succeeded, in brackets, air quotes, the most ease are the ones who have always been the most positive, leaning in how they have perceived their situation to be. So to give you an example, I recently started working with a marketer to help me with my social media messaging, because I wanted to kind of remove myself slightly from Instagram so I could be more present on other platforms and more present in terms of supporting my community. And as it turned out, during sales calls, and one of the things that I shared with her was that I had a launch where I spent 1000 pounds on ads. 500 pounds went towards one funnel, and I made 20k 500 pounds. Went to a different funnel, and I made nothing. And what’s really interesting is my perception of that event was, Oh, I’m so glad I learned what didn’t work, and I’m really grateful for the 20k that the first 500 made. I mean, that was already a phenomenal return on investment, so I was really happy with that. But when she read that, she was like, Okay, so a great marketing slant on this is how I lost 20k and it worked. It was one of my most popular carousels in the past month. I’m really grateful for her, because ultimately, a hook is a way to get people to kind of jump in and read more and learn more. And people wanted to know about how I lost 20,000 pounds. And it’s really important to say that’s not how I perceive the world of online business. I don’t see failure as something that means I’m not good enough. I see failure as okay. So we took that detour on the map, and it’s not heading anywhere good. We need to back up and go back down the path we were already on, or maybe we need to look at a different way. I just see it as guidance. I don’t see it as and actually, if anything, I pat myself on the back for well done, you Polly, rather than assuming you have remained curious and you’re trying different things, and that particular thing just didn’t work. Let’s move on to the next thing. Like entrepreneurial brains do not dwell. They take the learning and they move forward quickly, and they do not make it mean something about them. That is how some of the most rich, white ass men in the world are like, crazily bankrupt and go on to be billionaires, because they don’t make it mean something about them that they became bankrupt. They don’t make it mean that they’re a failure. They’re already thinking about the next thing. Now I’m not saying we want to be like crazy, narcissistic, sociopathic, white ass men, but I do sometimes wish that we wouldn’t be the absolute extreme opposite of that, where we can end up making these things mean so much about us that it kind of, you know, I kind of see it like a fog. It’s a fog that kind of descends on us and clouds our judgment, and people pick up on that energy. If you’re in that energy of like, I am not good enough, please validate me from by buying from me. People are going to run to the effing mountains. Okay, so instead of kind of looking at yourself and thinking, oh my gosh, I failed. This means I’m awful, instead, give yourself a pat on the back and say I dared and I didn’t win this time. But let’s keep on moving forward. As long as I’m moving forward, I’m getting closer to where I want to be. Okay, so momentum plays a pivotal role in our success. You know, again, the entrepreneurs who I see succeed the soonest are the ones who implement.

10:00

And act the soonest, and don’t spend too much time in a headspace, hypothetically wondering if something’s going to work. They learn by making invitations. They learn by making a kind of simple funnel, whatever that is required for that particular test, but they do the minimum viable method of it to get some validation before investing any more time and money in it. So in the scenario where it doesn’t work, or the invitation is ignored, or the funnel flops, it’s not like they’ve just lost a lot of time and money and effort, sometimes people make the mistake of equating putting time and energy and lots of research into something as being the equivalent of this is going to make sure that it’s robust and it’s going to succeed. And that’s not how marketing works, and that is the challenge. I’ve come from a marketing background. I used to work in a marketing agency. I know how much time and energy and money we spent on market research, on having people going out and speaking to ideal clients, the amount of time and energy we spend around is it Salt and Vinegar crisps, or is it Salt and Vinegar bites? Like, do people want bites? Or do they want crisps? Like, honestly, people would wrap that, you know, they would go nuts over two freaking words. And yet, in the online business space, people are trying to map out a whole effing funnel and wanting it to work from the get go without recognizing you will need to tweak and refine. Everything you do in your business will need to be tweaked and refined, not burnt down. Okay, so I told you there are two things. The first one is making it about you. And when you’ve made it about you, and you feel horrendous shame around what’s going on, it will incapacitate you from moving forward. It will like blur your vision around what is the right or wrong thing to doing moving forward, and it will just essentially slow you down. And in the meantime, if you’re looking to make sales, people will smell that desperation on you, that sense of, I’m not good enough. Please validate me by buying from me, and they will run for the mountains. Okay, so that’s the first bit you need to understand. If you’re making it about you just please. The thing I try and do when I see myself going into that place, because I’m not pretending to be immune to any of this, I’m equally guilty. This is why I always have a mentor. I can say, ah, please. But most of the time I coach myself through these things, and I do it through the lens of, you know, what does the compassionate, curious side of Polly. Think about this rather than the shameful or vengeful. You’re not good enough when we apply compassion and curiosity to the situation, what did I and I’ll be like, Oh yeah, I did it in that month when my daughter wasn’t sleeping for an entire month. Oh yeah. I did it in that time where I was actually doing this other project that was way more time consuming than I imagined. I was then tired and made poor judgment. So I can then kind of understand it from a kind of almost scientific perspective outside looking in. And I can be like, okay, so knowing that that’s what happened, what can I do to prevent that being a thing? Moving forward, I don’t sit in the shame of how and why it happened. I learn from how and why it happened, and I make it my mission to improve and do better moving forward. And sometimes that might look like lowering my expectations around how much I can do week to week.

Often that looks like slowing down. Often that looks like delegating or ditching things that don’t serve me. So it’s almost like taking a moment to audit your business activities and your business habits. You know, it could be as simple as, Oh yeah, I don’t need to get up that early in the morning. Or I do need to get up that early in the morning and journal and have a cup of tea and have a moment to myself. This is where outsourcing your power to somebody else, telling you what’s going to support you best can also be detrimental, because ultimately, you know what will support you best. Some people need to do yoga and meditate in the morning. For somebody like me, a run is much better. So find what works for you. Okay, so that wasn’t the number one thing. What number one of the two different routes we can go down when we’re thinking, Why isn’t this working for me? The other thing we can do, which is very much connected to number one, but a slightly different kind of symptom of number one is where we have those uncomfortable feelings around what’s happened, and we don’t want to be with those uncomfortable feelings, and we want to feel like we have more autonomy and more control over the results. Is we can decide, well, that strategy obviously doesn’t work, or that mentor obviously doesn’t have the best ideas, or that I don’t know, a team member obviously doesn’t know what they’re doing, and to kind of essentially totally change tact, to decide, actually, I’m going to go launch this thing over here, or I’m going to go sign up with another mentor over there, or I’m going to, you know, I don’t know, create an entirely different funnel. And every time you do any of these things, you’re essentially working from the ground up again. You’re basically like clearing the boards and starting afresh. Now that can feel really exciting. How many times have you had in your life it’s time to start afresh? But have you ever noticed in those moments where you tell yourself, I’m starting afresh, that you’re still there. Whatever the thing you’re doing afresh is you’re still bringing yourself to that same party.

15:10

And so the thing that you may be trying to get away from by starting afresh is a, coming along for the ride, and B, you’re now starting from the very beginning again, which means you’ve actually positioned yourself even further away from your desired results. And the only thing that’s making you feel like this is the thing that could work for you, is the dopamine of doing the new thing. It’s like, oh, but this is really exciting. That mentor seems really vibey, or that strategy looks so much easier than the one I was trying to do before. Okay, it’s all these distraction tactics, which recently I was interviewed on a podcast. And someone said to me, if I could go back in time and like, tell myself to do one thing differently to support my success moving forward. This is essentially it. I said consistency. I wish I hadn’t got so distracted in the earlier days. I wish I hadn’t been in a position of wanting everything right now. I mean, obviously I will also caveat that with you know, any any client I ever support, we always have a balance of like, revenue now and revenue later activities so that your cash flow continues to flow. But we also look at things like your expenses to ensure that you are not up to eyeballs with expenses and actually suffocating your ability to grow. So we review all the pieces to see that they are supporting you best. And we look at, you know, how few sales can you make for the most profit, so that you’re not putting yourself under pressure to make lots of sales while you get the funnel part of your business working. So there are various things we review which work really effectively. But, you know, it’s really important to recognize that, you know, that those things that work effectively now often aren’t sustainable. They often require some kind of hassle. They often require you to be in the driving seat of the activity, like direct outreach, for example, or networking or getting on stages. You know that stuff’s all good,

17:05

but mainly it’s invitations, and mainly it’s conversations and having as many of them as possible. And what you want long term, I would imagine, if you care about having a cushy business, is to not need to be doing all those things all the time. You may want to take some time out. You may want to have a sabbatical. You may want to grow a family and or you may want to be supporting an elderly parent. I don’t know what your motivation is, but also you may just want to have career security, which means that if you have a bad day, if you suddenly get ill, if something happens to you, you are not in a predicament where you have to just close your books and stop working. You know, I’m in a position, for example, where I cannot afford to do that, because my business is literally what supports my entire family.

17:51

So, yeah, so like I said, they’re the two ways we can go. We can go into a place of shame, which just puts us into a place of inaction, or making really poor judgment, which actually probably then leads nicely onto two, which is the poor judgment piece can be that we jump into action, which we perceive to be being proactive, but actually what we can often be doing is avoiding those difficult feelings, avoiding the moment of like, let’s just look at the data. Let’s like, do a launch debrief. Let’s dissect what didn’t go well here, so that we can learn and do better moving forward. But if you’re afraid of the discomfort around that, if there is a whole story you’re telling yourself around like, oh God, the longer I sit with this failed launch, the more it’s easing me up inside, I just need to move on and do something different. That habit, my friend, if you have that really, and I say this with, like, all my heart, it is not serving you. It really, really isn’t serving you. So to finish on a high, like, what does serve you? What is the thing that when you’re having that moment and it’s not working for you? Obviously, I’ve talked about the compassion and curiosity lens and being compassionate and curious, but the other piece is, hopefully you can see from what I’ve shared, the flip side of that, like, what’s the antithesis of doing those things? The antithesis is slowing down, looking at the data, looking at your habits, looking at your business activities, if you have a team, looking at your team activities, and figuring out what needs to change. And you know what’s really exciting, what can here’s the silver lining of what I’m sharing here is it’s often a tiny tweak that makes all the difference. So that webinar I referenced earlier, where I lost 20k

19:30

the Tweak I made which didn’t work. On the flip side was I changed the name of the webinar. The difference between the webinar that made 20k and the one that didn’t, the only thing I changed I didn’t change the emails, I didn’t change the opt in. I didn’t change the webinar. The only thing I changed was the name of the webinar. You could be one name change away from entirely different results. So rather than kind of throwing out the baby with the bath water and I, yeah, I think there have been other pod.

20:00

Cast episodes where I’ve spoken to this, but I feel like I need to come back to it every so often, because there’s always somebody new who needs to hear it. And I guess now that I share this, five years into running my business, five years into having a similar focus, helping a similar type of client, and five years into kind of, yeah, waking up to well, not five years into waking up sales, I’d probably say about 18 months into waking up to sales, no longer than that, because it’s been three years since going evergreen, but I only created my low ticket funnel recently, so that’s been a relatively new thing to wake up to sales there. This has only happened for me because I have allowed myself days to be frustrated. I’ve allowed myself some moments to want to check it all in. Sometimes that meant spending an afternoon walking down at the beach, getting myself a big fat brownie, and having a coffee and just being like we start again tomorrow.

20:52

You know, I’m not saying we have to ignore the difficult feelings we’re feeling, but they shouldn’t be the CEO of your business, okay, the cushy Pioneer is the one who’s the CEO of your business. And the cushy pioneer inside you is not thinking about the business you want to be running tomorrow. They’re thinking about the cushy business you want to be leaning back into in two to five years time. They’re thinking about the version of you who’s on the beach seeing another sales notification coming in. Okay? And that doesn’t happen overnight, but it will never happen if you keep on changing direction. Okay? Commit. Commit to being a leader. Commit to giving the very best to your ideal clients. Commit to being the best leader of your team, no matter how big or small it is. And commit to, you know, delivering industry leading experiences, and it will start to feel embarrassingly easy at times. And I will also say a bit like being a parent. While some bits get easier, there are other challenges that come along the way. So, you know, don’t ever sign up for this because you just want to live in a hammocks the rest of your life, because that ain’t gonna happen, and you’d probably get bored if it did. But do know, if you want things to feel better and easier, look at all of the biggest coaches in the coaching space. They have all been known for the same thing for years now. So if it’s working for them, and if it’s working for me, it can work for you.

22:22

So not seeing results yet, that’s okay. Keep on doing what you’re doing. Be consistent, be persistent, and you will get there, my friend. And if you ever need any help, you can always jump into my everyday sales Guide, which will give you the outline how to create a business ecosystem that enables you to attract new clients on the daily and be supporting them for what could be in my case, it has been years to come. Some of my clients have been working me for three years now. So it is amazing what can happen when you apply intention, consistency, perseverance and bravery and resiliency to how you grow your business. I hope this has been helpful. Sending you so much love, and next week, I will be back with a fabulous interview. There’ll be more on that to come check up my Instagram socials. If you want a teaser of who’s coming, because it is a big one, and yeah, I’ll be in the Euros. Then if you enjoyed the show, please do rate it. Please do share it. If you know anyone who’s having a wobble right now. Stick this in their DMS. I know it really make a huge difference to their day. All right, see you soon.