CwL EP 159: A story about an expensive mistake

And we are back for more stories and I have a doozy today off. I actually, when I put the call out for what you’d like to hear more about, actually quite a few people asking for business-related content and I just look, I have been on a whole ride since it was, well, I’ve worked for myself since 2009 when I was contracting. Anyway, we’re not going to go into the whole story of this. It’s just, I think it’s the biggest trip to be a business owner because you just bump up against yourself all the time and there is no one telling you what to do. There’s just, it’s fully self-directed and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve found myself in a place where I’m like, I really don’t know what to do. I would say probably for seven years I’ve had a consistent line and that’s been amazing when I get clarity around what I’m going to do, which might sound surprising to you, but it’s true and I’ve done lots and lots of different things to try and get that clarity.

I mean lots, but today is a story about the most expensive way I tried to get clarity and the heartbreak and huge, huge monetary loss from making this decision. So I was at the point, I mean the business was doing very, very well at this time. Goodness, I can’t remember what year it was. Probably 2020 maybe. Oh, maybe 2019. Oh, look, I don’t know. Those years are a little hazy for Lisa, so I’ve been looking around to try and find someone or an agency or something to help me get clarity around my messaging. By this stage, I’d done a few different things. There was all the small step stuff, so all the whole foods type things, the simplifying life and decluttering. I mean, I had a tech freedom course about habit change around our tech habits and all sorts of things, small steps back to you had done very well by this stage. I was also doing Ready for Change, so I was bloody subconscious

Stories and all these things. I mean, I was also teaching people how to create videos online and running business masterminds and creating events and retreats and it was huge and amazing and I still wasn’t clear about what I actually stood for, what my main message was. Was there an umbrella theme that I could create? Was there something that I was saying that could pull everything together so it didn’t feel like I was just riding a whole load of different horses and so looked around and found this agency that seemed to be amazing, and at this time, we were needing some extra support in the business too, from a very practical point of view. The woman who was working for me was in the middle of her baby-making years, and so we just needed some extra hands-on support, and they seemed to tick all the boxes.

The onboarding, the sales process was really, really slick. And so I thought, yeah, I’m going to jump in. I mean, it was a huge investment and it was a six-month process and I paid upfront. I mean, we’re talking here about $60,000 and I’d say from about week two or three, I started to get a very funny feeling in my tummy that this was not going to be the experience that I thought it was going to be. They were doing big, deep dives, we were nutting stuff out and also trying to get some practical things underway, and it did not feel good kept going because I always give people the benefit of the doubt. We jumped in and I needed to allow for things to feel a little bit different and I was open to everything.

And then we received this big report. It was a big deal. They put together this document and it was everything that they’d been working on behind the scenes based on just hours and hours of teasing stuff out and learning about the business. And I looked at this thing and thought, wow, I have never been more underwhelmed by anything in my life. I mean, sentences were incomplete. It was a shambles, and that golden thread that they tried to find, it was just very pedestrian. It was so bad. And so I’m like, okay, alright, look, let’s just give some feedback. Let’s just say maybe we’ll need to keep working on it. And they were open to that and like, yep, let’s keep working on it. And things never got better, and I realised that they weren’t going to be the solution for what we needed on either front, the help in the business because time was ticking and nothing was actually happening.

And then also this just trying to get some clarity. So I communicated to them that I’d like to end the contract and if they could please refund me for the months in which we won’t be working together. Then it started these full gaslighting in terms of nothing’s wrong here, so no, we won’t give her a refund. I’m like, no, hang on. I’m telling you that this isn’t good. And so then I got a letter from a lawyer and I had to lawyer up, and I literally couldn’t believe what I was experiencing. Now we ended up getting a portion of the money back, a very small portion, but I lost months of potentially working on other things months then in a lot of stress and anxiety and around this money and then lawyers conversations and spending money on that, and it was just a mess. I learned so many hard lessons in that it was hard to lose a huge amount of money. It was also hard to realise that I had tried to outsource something that was probably mine to do. Now, I absolutely think that there are branding and marketing people who are genius at coming up with concepts, but I think I wanted someone else to tell me what my next step was. I wanted someone else to just make sense of me and my many different passions and ideas and all of that sort of stuff.

And for someone like me, it’s never ever going to come from outside me, and it was hard to learn that it’s going to be my work to figure this out. In fact, when I try to do someone else’s version, it just flops every single time I learn through that process that I will always hold the vision. I will always be the one who comes up with creative concepts, and I’m probably going to be a person whose vision is changing and who is interested in many different paths and ideas and clarity is actually for me, allowing myself to pursue what I want to pursue, when I want to pursue it, and that the business that I’m creating is not going to look like someone else’s. Creating that style of business, having one thing that I talk about and one thing that I talk about only, it’s just never going to work for me.

I think learning about my neurodivergent brain really helped me figure out why and not fight against it. But back then, I just wanted one thing. I’ll never be a one-thing person. That’s a hint. If I’m ever offering any kind of course or any experience, I just jump in because you don’t know when I’m going to get bored and stop, oh dear. Oh gosh, it was an expensive mistake. Someone else, please tell me who I am and what I stand for and what this is all about. No, it was never, ever going to happen like that.

Also, really learn to ask different questions when I’m sussing someone out, something that looks fancy and that kind of woo you, like, really look for the substance, really talk to past clients of theirs because I felt like we’d done our due diligence, but I know for sure we weren’t the only ones who didn’t have a great experience with them. And it’s tough. Oh, business is tough, and when you’re doing it as a pretty small business, it falls very, very heavily. Anyway, I learned lessons. I learned to ask better questions and also learned what’s mine to do in this work and what’s someone else’s?

I’d love to know. You can write to me and let me know if you’ve ever done similar things. I think it helps us, business owners to know we’re not alone in this stuff. I’ve made some brilliant investment choices over the years, but that one sucked balls. Anyway. Now listen, because we are in storytelling mode, the doors close to what’s the story? This next round is about to kick off and we are closing the doors actually tonight, Monday the eighth. We kick off on the 9th of April, so make sure you’ve jumped in. If you also want to be able to connect and share stories and content that matters, I would love to see you inside. You do not have long.