41: The ADHD entrepreneur product launch rollercoaster: what you can learn from my bounce back, Amy Schumer's comedy and Jen Sincero's book!

Transcript for: "The ADHD Launch Rollercoaster"
00:00:13
A few weeks back, I shared about being a business strategist who is literally screwing up her
own business program launch. In episode 35, I went through everything that was going wrong in
this launch, how I screwed it up, how my executive dysfunction got in the way, and how my
overcomplicated plan set me up for failure. Because the further behind I fell, the less dopamine I
got from doing the next task on the list.
00:00:46
We are a few weeks out, and I am again mid-launch, and it's going okay. Immediately after
recording that podcast, what I did was I literally emailed my list and I fessed up and I told them
that I was screwing up my own launch. And I called a takeback and I got some emails telling me
that's not actually how takebacks work, but they were very supportive emails. They weren't like
angry emails telling me like, no, you started the launch, you have to finish it. Come on.
00:01:15
The funny thing about screwing up that launch is that I was convinced that people would be
making fun of me, even though I know that my audience wouldn't do that. I was convinced that
people would see me as a failure, even though my audience would never do that. I have a
whole podcast on ADHD. Me fessing up to having an executive dysfunction problem is actually
really on brand for me, and yet my rejection sensitivity dysphoria got so activated by admitting
that I did something wrong. I want to update you on how I recovered from that and how I am
relaunching the program.
00:01:57
After recording that episode, I really gave myself a week off. One of the problems was I was
exhausted. I was a little burned out. And when you're exhausted, a little burned out, you're not
creative, and it's really hard to make plans and come up with creative ideas for promoting
something when you don't have any creative juice. I also needed to regroup and find a strategy
and a plan that wasn't going to be too complicated for me, but that would still be effective in
bringing in clients.
00:02:28
Now the BYOB build-your-own-business group program has re-launched. The doors opened
yesterday as of this recording, and we already have several people signed up. And I'm so
excited for these humans. They are the perfect clients for this program. They are going to get so
much out of it.
00:02:46
They're in the exact right part of their business. They're just starting or they're wanting to kind of
redesign how they get clients. And The doors will be open for another week at this point. I have
my to-do list every single day of the things that I need to get done posting to LinkedIn, creating
content for Instagram and TikTok, even though those are not my primary locations for promoting
my stuff. And I have daily, sometimes multiple daily emails going out.
00:03:14
The thing that surprises me the most is no one noticed that I relaunched it, or if they did, they
haven't said anything. It's amazing how we think that the world revolves around us, right? We
assume that everyone remembers every single thing that we do. And I don't know if I should be
offended that you guys don't remember because I think I'm pretty no, I'm kidding. I don't think
I'm that important.
00:03:40
But I think this is a great lesson that no one remembers your mistakes, and if they do, it fades
really quickly. One of the things that my clients tend to worry about, especially in the early
stages of their business, is picking a niche. Picking a niche feels so final when you're just
starting out because you're telling the whole world, I only work with this type of person, with
these kinds of problems. And what's scary about that are two things. It's like, okay, well, if you
narrow it down, then you're going to be sending potential business away.
00:04:11
And we know that's false. We know that someone who wants to work with you, if they want to
work with you, they're going to say, hey, listen, I know you don't typically work with people like
me, but I want to work with you. Would you work with me? Okay. That's happened to me
numerous times.
00:04:25
The other side that they're afraid of in picking a niche is, what if I get it wrong? What if I pick a
niche and it either doesn't work or I am so miserable working within that niche after a year or so
that I want to change right? Now, I tell this story a lot. I picked three wrong niches before I found
the right one. There are only two people who've ever remembered what my first niche was
without me prompting them.
00:04:53
One was my friend Raz, who was just delighted that I was going to be a dating coach for men.
He was just so excited for it. He introduced me to all of his friends. None of them hired me
because I didn't get any male clients when I was a dating coach for men, which is why I
switched niches, obviously. And the lesson I want to bring to you today is that you have full
permission to screw up a gazillion times to get it wrong, to change your mind, to screw
something up, call, takebacks and relaunch something.
00:05:28
It's actually kind of fun when you do it. Email marketing has always been one of my biggest
struggles for me, and I think for a lot of folks with ADHD, if you're doing something consistently,
it has to be something that you do consistently pretty much every day or you forget about it. So
those activities that you have to do once a week. For me, I find those to be the hardest thing to
follow through on, especially if it doesn't involve me showing up to a call with people. So a
notification on my computer going off that you need to write your newsletter every single week.
Not good enough.
00:06:02
It's not enough to get me to actually write the newsletter. So, I mean, if you're on my email list,
you'll notice that my newsletters have changed dramatically over the years. They've had
different themes and different layouts, mainly because I forgot what the old layout was. But I
remember all this to say is, when I first started doing newsletters, I remember sending one out
and realising that I had written a sentence and then decided midway that I didn't like how I'd
written it. So I rewrote it, but I didn't delete the first half of that sentence.
00:06:37
It just looked so stupid. It was like half a thought and then a full other sentence, and it didn't
make sense. And I sent this out to my list. Of course, at the time, my list was really small. I just
started and I remember getting the email in my own inbox because I always have myself on my
own list, so I can see what people are seeing.
00:06:56
This is something I learned when I was in sales, and if you don't do that yourself, I highly
recommend it and reading through and realizing my mistake. And I can still to this day feel the
burning heat that rose to my face and the prickle of sweat on the back of my neck and just the
panic at, oh my God, everyone's going to think I'm a moron. Everyone's going to think I'm a
moron, or they're going to think that I'm drinking and writing newsletters. And I remember calling
my business bestie, Kelsey Letco, and having this whole panic on the phone with her about this
basically large typo in my email and getting it wrong and having her talk me off the edge. It took
her about 20 minutes to talk me off the edge.
00:07:40
I was so mortified at this now. One person noticed, right? And then I sent an email following up
saying, oops, there was a weird sentence in there. This is what I meant. And then I sent, like, a
funny GIF along with it.
00:07:53
And more people responded to that. More people thought that was funny. They connected with
that. They connected with me correcting the mistake. So, like I said, I'm still mid-launch.
00:08:04
There are still so many opportunities for me to screw up this second launch. Like, who knows, I
might have to do this again. But what I've learned more than anything throughout this process of
screwing something up publicly, admitting that I screwed it up publicly, taking it back publicly
and restarting, is that, oh, what am I going to say next? Well, you'll have to keep listening to find
out. But first squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.
00:08:34
But what I've learned more than anything throughout this process of screwing something up
publicly, admitting that I screwed it up publicly, taking it back publicly and restarting, is that
admitting that you screwed something up actually builds so much more trust than getting it right
the first time. So when I worked for Cisco Systems in one of my many jobs, because I changed
jobs a lot before I started my own business, a metric that I found really interesting was that they
did a study of who our most loyal clients were. Our most loyal customers, the people that not
only stayed with us forever, but they always increased their headcount. They referred new
business to us, and they were the ones who were most ready to write, testimonials and do case
studies for the success of our products. And everyone assumed that these were going to be the
people that we did the most perfect demo for, and then had the most perfect trial run, and then
had the most perfect onboarding process in the first two months and had never had a problem
to come up.
00:09:33
No. Those clients usually only stayed for about a year or two, and then they'd move on, and
then they'd come back, and they had no loyalty to us. The people who are most loyal were the
ones that we had screwed up with during their trial. We had screwed up with them in the first
month or two of onboarding them onto the service. The reason they became loyal is because,
yes, we screwed up, but they got to see how we handled the screw-up.
00:10:01
They got to see how we fixed it. They got to see how we took ownership and made it better and
held their hand and went above and beyond to make it right. Everyone's so flipped out about
starting a business because they think, okay, well, I'm going to get it wrong. I'm going to screw
up, and I'm going to look silly, or I'm going to look stupid, and people are going to see me fall in
my face, and I'm not going to be able to do it perfect, so I'm just not going to do it. And honey,
like, if you're waiting to do stuff perfect, you're never going to do anything with your life.
00:10:32
Also, just want to point out, no one trusts perfect. I don't know about you, and I'm not calling her
perfect by any measure of the imagination, but Kim Kardashian. And it just dawned on me, like,
why am I so concerned to make everyone else happy and not myself? Squirrel. Squirrel.
00:10:54
She's always perfectly put together. If I were going to talk to someone and bear my soul and
have a vulnerable moment and admit that I'm not perfect or share that I had a blemish once on
my face, I'm not telling her, no way. Like, I'm not even going near her, because I just assume
that there's no way she can empathize, no, I'm going to go talk to someone like Amy Schumer.
We're all just home, just staring at each other, judging, waiting to criticize each other. Squirrel,
squirrel, who's publicly just a hot mess all the time.
00:11:33
She owns it. In episode 40, I called out that you probably have some self-help books in your
house, and I asked you to go and look at them and look at the introduction or that first chapter,
right? Squirrel, Squirrel, Squirrel, I want you to go and pick one up off the shelf. I know you have
more than one, and I want you to read the introduction or the first chapter. 95% of the time, the
first chapter of the introduction are about the author fucking up their life royally.
00:12:03
You might think that that's where they, they build all their credentials and they tell you how
impressive they are and how smart they are and, wow, look at me and everything I've
accomplished. That comes later. They need to show you that they started off worse than where
you are now to give you hope so that by the time you get to the point where they're trying to
convince you that you can do anything, you actually believe them because they're far more
credible in your eyes because they came from a worse situation than you did. Squirrel, squirrel,
squirrel, squirrel. That introduction, that first chapter, we have to just constantly go back and
read those in these books, because it's always about how the author royally screwed up their
life, how they made all the wrong choices, how they had a drug problem, a drinking problem,
how they married the wrong person, how they failed at their first career and their second career.
00:12:56
And then the rest of the book is about how they've come back from that or how they've
succeeded after, and trying to convince you and all in the name of showing you that if they could
do it, if they could come back from the depths of despair like they did, you can do anything. My
favourite example of this is Jensen Chero in the books. You are a badass, and you are a badass
at making money. She's not trying to make herself look good at all. She's so self-deprecating.
00:13:24
She admits to going out to dinner with friends when she was so broke and telling everyone, oh,
no, I'm not hungry, and then just devouring the whole basket of free bread and then being like,
oh, no, I'm doing a sugar-free cleanse, and then just drinking all the water. No one wants to
admit that. And yet her sharing that with her people built so much trust. The thing that is most
challenging for those of us who have ADHD is we've been punished for our mistakes. You know,
it's been a while since I've thrown one of my teachers from my school life under the bus, so I
think we're due for a story, the classic story that I always think of, because I screwed up a lot in
school.
00:14:04
I thought I read all the instructions, and I didn't. And I missed, like, a really key part of the
instructions that changed the entire scope of the project. I got things done late. I handed them in
late. I've talked about this situation before sophomore year biology.
00:14:21
There was this massive project that we had to do, and the instructions were designed to catch
you out. The instructions were designed to give you one set of instructions, and then there was
one line in there that reversed one of the ones above. Right. As you can imagine me with
ADHD. I thought I was following the instructions perfectly.
00:14:46
And when I showed up to school that day to hand in this project, I looked around, and everyone
had done something completely different to what I had done. And I remember the smirk on my
biology teacher's face when she looked at my project. It was not kind. It was, “Oh, I caught you
out. You screwed this up.
00:15:07
You didn't follow the instructions.” It just wasn't a Neurodivergent friendly project. Yes, it proved
the point, but you know who it proved a point with? All the neurodivergent kids. The
Neurotypicals didn't have a problem with it.
00:15:22
Growing up with those kinds of situations throughout our life, of course, we're afraid of making
mistakes. Of course, we think that we have to strive to be perfect. And let me tell you, the world
doesn't expect you to be perfect. There's no grading scale in the world. There are no teachers
that are out to catch you out.
00:15:41
There's no one hoping that you're going to get it wrong. Actually, the world, the whole universe
is there for you to succeed. This is going to sound like I'm a weird conspiracy theorist, but there
are forces at play that are out for you to be your most successful. There are people who are on
their way into your life who will help you be more successful. The universe really does have
your back, and the universe doesn't need you to be perfect to deserve that level of help.
00:16:10
Being mid-launch right now, there's already a bunch of stuff that I know I'm going to want to
change for the next one. And so I want to remind you of this one core principle that you're going
to have to live by in your business and in your life, that everything is data. Everything is data.
You could launch a program and have no one sign up, and that does not mean anything. We're
so great at attaching meaning like we are meaning-making machines, right?
00:16:38
Our ability to attach meaning to anything is the source of all of our most beautiful art. Our
greatest songs, poetry. Shakespeare wouldn't be a famous name if we couldn't attach meaning
to stuff. But in your business, meaning doesn't help you, because meaning tells you that no one
signed up for your program because you suck. Meaning tells you that, oh, well, this is never
going to work out for you because you didn't get a single client from it.
00:17:07
No, that is just data. Maybe you launched a program at the wrong time of year. That's data.
Maybe you screwed up the launch. That's data.
00:17:19
Maybe your landing page or email copy have to be edited to be more interesting to your people.
That's data. This is one of the benefits of honestly working with a business strategist or a coach
is that they have this objective point of view where they can see your business and they can see
the activities that you're doing and they can help you transition away from, oh, my God, this
meal means I'm failing into. Okay, cool. What about this didn't work?
00:17:48
And what about this? Can we change that? It works next time. And if you're at the point in your
business where you're not sure why it's not working, but you know you can be successful, you
believe in yourself, you're just not sure of the ingredients and the instructions, I invite you to
book a call with me. Now, I always offer a free 30-minute generate income strategy call to
anyone who's curious about working with me.
00:18:12
How these calls work is we're going to talk about what your goals are, what's your big dream
that you're building towards. We're then going to talk about all the things that you feel are
getting in the way of you getting there on your own. And then if, and only if it's a fit for both of
us, we'll talk about different ways to work together. And if we're not a fit, then I will be sending
you in the direction of some really amazing resources that will help you on your way better than
I can. And if you want to check that out, then go to www.weeniecast.com/strategycall.
© 2022 - 2023 Katie McManus – Business Strategy For Weenie ADHD-preneurs