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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. I’m excited for today’s episode because I’m talking about something I have never talked about on the show before, and it’s going to involve a bit of my backstory. But I’m also going to be speaking to one of the biggest challenges I have seen experienced entrepreneurs face that I have been so incredibly frustrated by, and unfortunately, I think a lot of people are still making the same mistake, and it’s such an easy mistake to make. So I wanted to talk about it today, but before I start speaking about it, I feel like context really matters, and that to understand a bit of my background will help you understand why, why this came to my attention, why I now do do things differently, and what you need to know. So essentially, I used to run, I used to be an ads manager. I was about to say I used to run a Facebook ads agency, which I did, but that came later in 2018 I think it was, you know, the first, the same year that I became a single parent of a one and a half year old and a three and a half year old. I had years of digital marketing experience behind me, supporting startups, supporting businesses, but I went along to a digital marketing conference, and when I was there, I heard somebody talking about Facebook ads, and I was blown away, blown away by the incredible results they get, how predictable those results are, how measurable those results are, how targeted they get to be. Because I’d been in marketing long enough that, you know, I’ve been in Gibraltar, where I was selling billboard space billboards. Who even hears of those anymore? 

And people like, still, you know, there was a yellow pages. I mean, like, you know, you can imagine so Facebook ads. I’ve been living in Gibraltar, which is a very small country, and it’s kind of behind the times. And sorry to any Gibraltarian listeners, but it compared to the UK when it comes to marketing, it was a big wake up call coming over here. And so yes, I was introduced to ads, which I had already been in existence for a good while, but they were new to me, and I immediately recognized the opportunity there. I could see how my existing skill set combined with Facebook ads knowledge would be, I don’t want to say dynamite, because I wasn’t that confident in myself back then, but I could definitely see that as a single parent with limited hours available, that having ads knowledge, which you know you can charge well for, was going to work in my favor. So that’s what I did. I skilled up in ADS. And to begin with, you know, when you first start out running ads, it’s very hard to get any client because you know who’s going to trust someone who’s just qualified but doesn’t actually have any case studies behind them to be able to demonstrate that they do know what it is that they’re doing. So my first few clients were econ clients, and I didn’t actually get started with coaches for probably about 12 months, and it was in 2020, actually, where it all kind of started to happen, in terms of the beginnings of what was to become an ADS agency for personal brands. And actually, it wasn’t my goal. It wasn’t my goal at all. The group program I’ve often spoken to that, you know, spoken about that I launched in 2020 that was meant to be my pathway away from being a service provider and moving towards being a mentor. But, you know, as I mentioned, single parent on benefits and also something I speak to about often with my clients. You know, when you’re starting out in business, there’s a bread and butter revenue, and then there’s the things you’re building for where you want to be long term, right?

And it’s really normal to do both alongside one another, like, I think it’s actually really jarring for the nervous system to go all in, you know? I know there’s some manifestation books out there that will say, remove anything that’s low energy and just focus on the high energy stuff. But, you know, I was a single parent with two small children to support. You know, I was going to do what I needed to do. So I was running ads for clients alongside building up my group program, which, I mean, it’s now been, it’s 2026, it’s now been, at least, I really wish I could remember the. But I think it’s been at least three years that I’ve been all in just on my mentoring business. So it was for the first three years that I was still balancing ads management. Now this bit isn’t so interesting to you, really. You’re probably thinking, why am I listening to this episode? Why do I need to hear this backstory of Polly’s? It’s not very sexy or very exciting, but it’s what I learned in that time that has proven to be invaluable in how I support my clients now. I mean, for one, I still run ads. My clients run ads. I’m able to support them with their ads and ensure that they’re running them effectively. So that background has obviously been really helpful, but it taught me something much more powerful than that, and it’s also the thing that essentially, eventually forced me to change everything you know. My first group program was based on, well, what do I think there’s a demand for by the time I created the program? You know me for now, the everyday sales accelerator. That was a reaction and a response to a need I could see was enormously desired from my experienced, profitable clients who were running ads but burning out with launches or making the mistake I’m about to speak to today that I like I say I do not hear people speaking to enough. 

So let me tell you the pattern I kept on seeing, as an ad specialist, I could always see whether somebody’s funnel was going to succeed or not. But here’s what the journey with it, like a client would come to me saying that they wanted to run ads, you know, they’d be like, Wow, I just had a 5k launch, or a 10k launch, or, in some cases, a six figure launch. And I know I’m in a position to scale this. It’s time to start hiring a team. It’s time to start optimizing all my marketing assets. It’s time to go all in on this. I mean, what an exciting place to be, right? And usually they’d come to me already having heavily invested in their business, usually anywhere between 10 to 20k in some kind of mastermind, another 10k on top for a funnel build, potentially five to 8k on copywriting. They’d have, you know, the expenses of a social media manager that they were, you know, paying each month a VA, you know, that they were they had, you know, in a pretty significant tech stack, so it wasn’t like fun for them. This needed to work. They were all in, and they’d paid all the appropriate specialists to help them get there. You know, they were taking that aligned action. They’d hired a positioning coach for messaging, a copywriter for their sales page, a funnel builder for their tech and now they wanted me to run ads to this new funnel. And they’d come to me and say, can you make this work? I’ve seen you don’t do that. I mean, because obviously one of the things that kept me in employment and kept me in demand was the fact that I was supporting multi six figure, six figure launches, seven figure evergreen funnels, and so I had the case studies to back up that, yes, you bring me the right funnel, I can make you the money. And I don’t like to say I can make you the money, because, as I’m about to explain, what makes ads successful is so much more than the ads. And if you don’t have those things in place, it can be a massive, I don’t want to say, waste of money, but a very expensive learning, which most people obviously don’t want to have to make. Because if you’re hiring an agency, if you’re spending money on ads, then chances are, if your agencies between, I don’t know whether it’s half a K all the way through to like 3k a month. You know, there’s massive differences as to what agencies charge to the money that. You know, most decent ads managers will insist that you’re spending at least 1000 pounds a month for you to be able to get any actual valuable learnings. So you know, you’re already going to be spending a minimum one and a half 1000 pounds a month, usually, more usually it looks more like two and a half to 3k a month. And month. So it’s a big commitment. And a lot of ads agencies, I don’t know if they still do it now, but they’ll usually tie you into a three month commitment as well, which means that you know you really want this to work for you. And the slightly painful thing about ads is you’ll often only learn if it’s working for you once you’ve switched those ads on, or at least that’s what people can believe.

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Here’s the problem I found in this situation, is I would look at what had been built and I could immediately see the issues. The positioning was off for their market. Their sales page wasn’t structured for cold traffic. So yeah, it could do well with their existing audience, but if someone was brand new to them, this sales page was not going to do what it needed to the funnel was missing key nurture sequences or key, you know, sales psychology that would support people to feel empowered to buy again, often more geared at a warm audience rather than a cold audience. The offer. In itself, wasn’t traffic ready, or, you know, it was a huge leap that they were expecting people to make with no kind of bridge in between. But here’s the challenge, very often My hands were tied. I say my hands were tied. They were tied earlier on in business. What I will say is, towards the end of my time being an ads manager, I simply would turn away people who wouldn’t hear me when I would start to share these things with them, because I always had people say to me things like, I have a 30 pound offer. I want to spend 30 pounds a day. And I’d have to warn them that with that kind of budget, and that kind of, you know, the desire to make money from that, for it to be profitable, that it was a really challenging thing to do beyond the summer of 2020 but the thing is, it did feel like my hands were tied, because they would have spent 1000s on other specialists, and there’d be that energy of, if it’s not you that I hire, I will hire somebody else to do the same thing. So they were going to move forward with this regardless, which is really hard, but I get it. Nobody wants to hear all those 1000s of pounds you spent. You’re still not quite there yet, because there was that desire that, you know, intention of like but I’ve already invested in this. This needs to work for me. I don’t want to have to go into my own copy or messaging or my own sales page and make tweaks and amendments to get it to where it needs to be. I want it to be that someone else can do all the thinking for my business for me. Can you see how that’s a challenge already? 

Just in hearing that sentence, I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, nobody will ever care about your success as much as you do. So build your business in accordance to that right. And here’s the challenge as well. Each specialist had done their piece in isolation, unaware necessarily, of what the other person was doing. So you’re positioning a messaging coach might be looking at your organic business thinking, well, this is what your you know, your existing audience needs to hear. Your messaging pass and maybe unaware. I mean, there, there’s so many ways that these things can all be disconnected. So nobody had seen how all the pieces needed to work together, and now this client’s simply saying, just run ads to something that is fundamentally broken. And here’s my frustration. I could tell them what was exactly wrong, but I couldn’t fix it without essentially rebuilding everything, and that would be outside of what I was charging as an ads manager, and they often didn’t want to pay that, which meant telling them that they’d wasted over 10k often, and needed to, I wouldn’t say, start over, but refine those pieces to get them working the way they needed to, or try and make The broken pieces work and watch the ad spend hemorrhage, which is not fun. And here’s the challenge. Like this is what you know, obviously, as I mentioned earlier on, as an ads manager, and the early stages, you just want to get clients. And I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t as good at spotting What did and didn’t work right at the very beginning. And like I say, to a certain extent, it was a baptism, baptism of fire, where I learned to be epic at understanding what didn’t didn’t work, because if it didn’t work, I’d have clients who didn’t want to pay me, clients who’d be dropping working with me the moment their three month contract was up. 

Some clients even trying to break the contract before it even reached three months. And it was rarely worth my effort to kind of chase them up on it. I mean, there were so many, so many icky situations that happened to me really early on. And, you know, obviously, again, with my situation, that wasn’t viable. And also, I didn’t want to end up falling out with every single bloody coach on the internet. Can you imagine? So I learned to get really good at recognizing where the positioning was in place, where the offer was validated, where the demand was there, where the messaging was hitting, exactly where it needed to hit. And you know, those skills ended up being beautifully transferable. Because here’s the thing, for the people that didn’t want to hear it, it was really hard for them to understand why or what was going wrong. Because when their funnel didn’t work, which it usually didn’t, everyone would blame everyone else. The VA would say, Oh, I didn’t get the messaging updates on time. The positioning coach would say, well, the copy was wrong, the positioning was perfect, but the messaging didn’t carry it through. The copywriter would say, well, the funnel is obviously broken because the messaging is on point. The funnel builder would say the ads weren’t targeted properly, and they must be bringing in the wrong person. And the ads manager would say, Well, you know, it’s the offer like, you know, if you get 1000 eyeballs on something, 1000 eyeballs on something that 10 people don’t want, then chances are those 1000 people won’t want to either. And so the client was left with no clarity on what actually needed to change. And it really broke my heart, because those people would often end up being the people going or maybe I should just sack it all in altogether. I’m just not made for this. I don’t understand this. I’m here as an expert, you know, around nutrition. Health, wellbeing. I’m not a marketer, and I’ve paid all these brilliant people who’ve got phenomenal results for other people. But why is this not all adding up together? But it was never going to all add up together, because it was always designed in a way that it was never built to work together. So there was a moment where everything changed. I realized I couldn’t just be an ADS person anymore, because here’s the thing I you know, would recognize that either I would be massively over delivering for my clients, sitting down talking to them about strategies, talking to them about positioning, talking to them about how to create an offer that actually meets a demand that people are proactively seeking,

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and all of these pieces, and it would take hours of my time, and yes, it meant that ads would be working, but they needed a lot of hand holding, which could have been avoided if they’d invested correctly in the first place, and usually By the time they’d found me, they’d already wasted 1000s, so their budget would be really low and they wouldn’t really have anywhere to go, which is just the worst, right? You know, the thing is, I really quickly recognize that this wasn’t happening to one or two coaches or wellness practitioners. It was a pattern brilliant practitioners with genuinely life changing offers were investing heavily in their marketing, but ending up stuck in no man’s land with no clarity. So it’s really easy to understand. You know, I hear people often saying, I don’t like ads, I don’t trust them, I don’t like funnels, I don’t trust them. I don’t like marketing. I don’t trust it. And ultimately, whatever we’re doing with our voice and being visible with is marketing, whatever giant journey we have for our clients right now is a funnel, okay? We get to do it our own way, and I guess that’s also one of the other challenges, right of hiring a specialist. I’ve been there too, where I’ve hired a specialist. I probably didn’t do the homework that was required, and I’ve quickly recognized, oh, this specialist wants me to do things in a way that just does not align my values. But when I raised that with a specialist, they’d say, Look, this is what’s working for all my clients. Do you want to make money or not? And that is not a great position to be in, right? So it’s really easy to understand how people often get burned in hiring specialists in, you know, between the whole finger pointing, it’s not me, it’s the other expert versus including, you know, the whole values alignment piece. There’s a lot of reasons why having a funnel built for you, having messaging done for you, can go wrong. And by the way, that’s I mean, I work with a host of brilliant copywriters and positioning experts and all the rest. So it’s not, I’m not snubbing any of those professions. I think they’re brilliant. And I will say that ultimately, when you’re in early stages of building a funnel that you want to work for you, it really pays to work with someone who can see all of the pieces and ensure that they are adding up together correctly, because if you don’t do it that way, like I say, you can be stuck in this no man’s land as to my funnel isn’t working, and I don’t know why, and I don’t feel like anyone’s giving me an honest answer as to what’s going on and how I can do things differently. So that was my own evolution. I started taking on fewer clients, but going deeper. I was helping them with positioning, first, then funnel, then ads. I was making sure all three pieces work together from the start, and the results were completely different. That is when I went all in with scale, with the power of one. And that’s something I really want to speak to as well, like one of the other mistakes people can often make as well when it comes to funnels and growing their business is they feel like there is safety in numbers. 

The more funnels, the more offers, the more ads, the better, as I’ve just highlighted to you, the more people you are dependent on to grow your business, the more risk there is involved where you have a really simple funnel with one, you know, like one ad campaign that is running to one funnel that you are monitoring, that perhaps has a freebie, a mini offer, and your signature offer with perhaps a kind of, you know, maybe it’s not even at the front of your business, but behind the Scenes, some kind of retention offer or premium offer. Keeping your business simple isn’t just about brand authority, which yes it supports. It’s not just about leveraging your time, which yes it supports. It’s about ensuring that you also operationally are not spinning so many different plates that you never understand why one is suddenly dropped and the others aren’t, because that is the thing that is slowing you down. So, you know, one thing I recognized really early on in my ads journey was that my most successful clients were the ones who had the simplest offer suites the strongest brand author. Authority and the best understanding as to why people were choosing to work with them, and they were able to speak to that over and over again without diluting it, because they weren’t starting each month going, oh goodness, what do I need to promote this month? Because it was always the same customer journey, and the only thing they needed to be doing was refining what that journey looked like, updating the ads, you know, every week or so, or, you know, less often, depending on how well the ads are doing and what your budget is being spent, you know, looking at sales page performance and perhaps making minor tweaks there. I mean, believe me, there is enough to keep you busy when you only have one funnel. 

You know, you will not be kind of sat in your hands doing nothing. There is still work to be done, but it is way more predictable, way more effective. And one of the reasons why I don’t, you know, I was sharing in a post recently that I don’t use some massive project management tool anymore. I do have one, but we barely log on to it, because my business is so rinse and repeat. You know, sometimes things change a bit, but it’s nothing that can’t be managed with a few projects slotted into my calendar and a bit of communication in Slack, it just becomes so easy. So yeah, my invitation to you is to be careful when hiring specialists, and ideally when you’re starting out building this funnel that’s going to support you to leverage what you’re making, and I don’t want to say passive income, but essentially, be able to make sales in your sleep. You know, I woke up this morning and I saw there were two sales on my mini office system this morning. It’s a really nice feeling. It’s really beautiful to be welcoming new people into my world every single day. And if you’re interested in learning, you know, what is the sustainable, scalable way to make money in 2026 that is a match for our slower buyer cycle, which is a match for that kind of lower confidence people have in buying and investing right now. How do we meet that and still run sustainable, profitable businesses? Well, I’m running a masterclass on the 18th of March, where I will be talking to you about how you know, basically, how to run a business that attracts premium clients, how to create that bridge so people can enter your world with confidence. I’ll be touching on some of the themes I spoke about today and last week, and we’ll be diving deep into what the solution is. On the other side, I really hope you can join me. It’s the first you know, if you’ve attended previous workshops, this is the first time I’m running this particular workshop, and I am lit up the hell about it, because it’s really something that so many people need. If you’re looking at your existing marketing assets thinking they are not converting the way they used to, if your lead magnet is not growing your list the way you wanted it to. If your low ticket offer is sat there, not making new sales, and if your premium offer feels harder to sell than it ever has before, this workshop is going to have the answers for you. Okay, because my clients aren’t struggling in that regard, because they’ve put these changes in place. So I’m not just sharing theory with you, I’m sharing the very same practices I myself and my clients are using to still have even more profitable businesses, even more spacious businesses, and businesses that are unaffected by the slower buyer cycles, because we’ve designed our businesses to meet people, to create these touch points, to create the confidence, but from a place of simplicity and ease, I hope to see you there. The link is in the show notes, and I’ll be in your ears next week with a guest episode.