The Anguish of Expectations
3 impractical outcomes we've come to expect in business that cause unnecessary suffering
[Image Description: Screenshot of a tweet by @VodkaAndCheeze reposted by @thecrankytherapist that reads, “Live, laugh, lower your expectations.”]
The world of online business is quite different from more traditional “brick and mortar” small businesses in several ways, but one of them is how frequently we talk about our own results.
For instance, I’ve been a barista at small coffee shops multiple times in my life and they’ve never advertised how much revenue they’re making as a good indicator of how good their coffee is. Unless they’re operating on an investor model or some sort of co-op situation, they also don’t need to advertise their quarterly or annual growth, profit margins, etc.
But often in the online space we openly share results as proof we’re legit. This isn’t a post about that though. This is more on what can be a side result of doing that. To be clear, the change I’m advocating for here isn’t a complete stoppage of sharing stats. There are many instances where that can be incredibly helpful.
Instead, I think it’s important to look at the foundations that have been built in businesses to make those numbers a reality. (And I’m not just talking revenue vs. profit.)
Because when we are only looking at results in a vacuum it often sets us up for impractical expectations.
Too often people don’t realize the true picture of what it takes to achieve certain outcomes and end up assuming something is wrong with them vs. their strategy. This causes a lot of unnecessary suffering in a world where we have to contend with heaps of non-business-related suffering on the regular.
It usually looks like expecting that after a certain amount of time and/or effort that a desired result would already be achieved. That’s because they can see other people making great money with plenty of time freedom in their lives, and because so many people are telling them it’s possible, they wonder why it hasn’t happened yet.
Where I see misconceptions and expectations occurring most often is in the trifecta of: business model, marketing strategy, and sales systems. There’s often a misunderstanding of the necessary allocation of resources required to achieve the desired outcome, which results in the business owner needing to work way too hard to hit their revenue numbers. Or there’s a lack of knowledge around the averages and outcomes they can reasonably expect from certain sales and marketing efforts, which leads to huge disappointments, especially around launching.
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Business Model Expectations
Let’s start with business models, because the lack of a holistic understanding of them ends up being a real issue for so many people. More specifically, certain business models (primarily ones that allow people to heavily leverage their working hours for a phenomenal amount of revenue) seem like an absolute dream come true. And they certainly can be. But often there’s a knowledge gap there (even with more traditional 1:1 models) that leads to a ton of frustration and disappointment.
This is the expectation of:
Conversion Rates
Here’s a recent example I saw that prompted me to want to prioritize this post over other things I want to talk about:
I’m in a Facebook group for a program that focuses on money mindset; while it isn’t exclusive to entrepreneurs, there are many in there. A woman recently posted a bunch of different things she’s been doing to improve her mindset around making more money in her business, and was now wondering if slow sales/lackluster results were because she was still struggling with money mindset or if it had more to do with needing a better strategy.
As a strategist, I asked her to explain her offer to me. She said it’s a monthly membership for around $75/month, and that she’d like to enroll 100 new members each month. She didn’t mention what she’s been doing for marketing, or what she plans to do, or what her sales mechanism is (a “buy now” button, application, sales call, etc.), but at least I had some data to go off of.
I responded, “Oh yeah you’re going to need a paid ads strategy. You might be able to get that many enrollments organically once or twice with a big enough audience, but to keep it up you’ll need ads. Otherwise you’ll work yourself to death.”
I don’t blame her for her initial assumptions though, as conversion rates on scaled offers like this aren’t often shiny and sexy, so they don’t get talked about as much in people’s marketing. In fact, they’re often kind of a bummer. Getting a 1%-5% (sometimes a little higher) conversion on your marketing sounds exhausting. And it is if you’re trying to convert 100 people EVERY MONTH to something where you only receive $75/month in return through organic marketing.
To put this into perspective, at a 5% conversion rate you’d need to attract 2,000 people to make 100 sales (=$7,500 in revenue). If ads were $2/per lead, that’s $4,000 in ad spend/month. Over time it’s likely some of the people who didn’t purchase right away will later, and you can create a sort of snowball effect. There are also ways to monetize your lead generation to recoup some of the costs. But all of this takes knowledge, skills, testing, tweaking, and money up front.
There are, in fact, several people who teach scaled offers and paid ads that are incredibly honest about the realities. However, it just feels so seductive to see people with million dollar businesses who can help thousands of people at once, in just a few hours a week. And it’s truly incredible that business has evolved to a point where this is a reality! It’s one thing that makes online entrepreneurship so appealing.
But the expectation that just because you want this to happen, and because it technically can, often leads people to believe it will happen if they simply desire it enough. That’s a fallacy though.
Highly-scaled, lower cost offers require paid marketing if you want to achieve high revenue numbers. It’s just the math of it. And paid marketing requires you to be really damn good at marketing. Plus you need to have a proven offer that people want, and you have to have a sales mechanism in place that optimizes conversions.
This is stuff that can take years to get working like a well-oiled machine. The problem is that when business owners don’t know all of this, they can’t approach their business in a manner that’ll be supportive long term.
Instead they approach it with the hope that a low monetary ask of their audience, coupled with their own desires, and the skills they bring in the form of the primary thing they’re selling will be enough. If only it were that simple!
This kind of business model can work, but unless you’re really good at marketing and data, or have a lot of money to invest in experts, it’s going to be a real uphill battle.
Even for the ones who get it working well, marketing is always in flux.
Marketing Strategy Expectations
Which leads me to the second expectation:
Constancy (not to be confused with “Consistency”)
The thing about marketing is that it’s always shifting. “Marketing” is simply working with people’s natural purchasing patterns and common behaviors. While some strategies stay relatively the same over time (people will always invest in love, money, time, sex/desire, belonging/peace of mind), the tactics change as platforms evolve.
This means that an overall strategy that’s simple, repeatable, and platform agnostic can work with small tweaks for a really long time. For instance, if you know your email list grows and you make sales each time you speak to someone else’s audience, then if you keep pitching yourself, and nurturing those new connections it’ll likely keep working. Especially if what you’re offering is needed, wanted, and at a price point that makes sense for the intended audience.
It also means that if you’re running paid ads successfully, and understand the fundamentals of marketing, while lead costs may go up, you’ll probably be ok for awhile. But you will need to adjust tactics as various trends come along and as platforms evolve.
However, adaptation here is key. There is no “set it and forget it” when it comes to marketing. Nothing is constant forever. But since so many people loathe that they have to market at all, they are desperate for any solutions that provide an outcome that matches their desired expectations. (Even if it’s kinda false or misleading.)
The problem is usually these expectations are way off from what is a more common reality. From the outside it seems we should simply be able to make some social media posts and get sales, especially for anyone who’s never run a business before and has no barometer around what “normal” is to grow a client/customer base.
I’m not pointing fingers either. I mean, how would you know if you’d never done it before and nobody was being frank with you?! You probably wouldn’t.
The reality is that in order to keep making consistent sales you need to always be working on making sure new people know about you and what you offer, feel like they can trust whatever it is you’re selling, and know how to buy from you.
A lot of the elements of online marketing (opt ins, nurture sequences, launch campaigns, webinars, etc) have been created to achieve those three goals in a more leveraged, automated way. They basically take a proven model of person-to-person networking and scale it up.
Sales System Expectations
And that leads me to a third (but certainly not final) unrealistic expectation…
Content & Connections
(I know Content often falls under “marketing,” but stick with me here.)
This is a massive source of frustration for so many of the people I work with. Namely that they are always either creating it or thinking about creating it. And too often when they do create it, it feels more like they’re speaking into the void versus actually growing their revenue.
We’ve been led to believe that if we create content we’ll get clients. That’s an expectation that’s been set up. Certainly it’s true that you can get clients from content. It happens all the time.
But when we look at content creation in a vacuum and don’t look at it compared to our business model and overall sales strategy, it can be a real good recipe for burnout. However, this is the aspect of content creation that’s often spoken about less.
And as much as people loathe content creation (or even ideation), it often feels safer than income generating activities like connection and sales calls. As mentioned, a lot of online methods allow us to make better use of our time than having to connect with every individual one-to-one.
In fact, if you have a low-cost/high-volume business model you need to be more content heavy because you’re absolutely not doing virtual coffee chats to get individual buyers. You’d exhaust yourself. Instead, you’d need different sales systems in place to support your desired outcomes.
But in the example I gave above about teaching to people’s audiences as part of a simple marketing routine, for that to work you need to be making intentional connections with people who have audiences, and then pitching your signature talk. You can certainly get to a point where people begin reaching out to you and extending the invitation to collaborate, but for awhile you’ll need to be making the ask.
Between not knowing how to make the ask, fear of rejection, and an incessant drum beat of “create content” it’s no wonder people are creating endlessly and feeling frustrated when it doesn’t seem like much is happening.
But simply posting content and waiting for people to come along and purchase is akin to hosting a party and forgetting to send personal invitations. Sure, some people might see your social media post about it, but a personal ask is much more powerful.
When you have a micro-business where you only need to serve 100 or fewer clients a year, prioritizing real connection is key. You can devote a lot more of your time to connecting and inviting folks to a next level of engagement with your work, and far less time creating content and absolutely get the results you’re after.
But even people with seven and eight-figure businesses have systems in place that actively move their content consumers toward a sale. They aren’t posting and waiting and hoping to hit their sales goals.
Nor are they getting flustered over all the people who’ve decided that now isn’t the right time to buy, because they understand conversion rates and are (hopefully) focused on longer-term success, not a “hit it and quit it” business model.
It’s also important to note that making sales takes time. As much as we wish this wasn’t the case, it’s unlikely someone will find your content tomorrow and immediately sign up to work with you.
Sales is a relationship and relationships are built on nurturing and trust. When we expect to have our sales and marketing processes deliver instant results, we are setting ourselves up for a massive amount of disappointment and suffering.
Making sales is a practice. It doesn’t have to be a daily one but it should be a regular one.
How can we create change around the expectations we place on our businesses?
In my first post I mentioned radical honesty, and I feel we’re going to need that here as well. And coming from two different sides.
First, from the side of the business owner in their own marketing. One of the best ways to do this is by continually reflecting on who gets the best results from an offer, noticing what characteristics they have, and refining how you speak about that offer so the folks who enroll are the best fit.
Part of why people have been so dismayed over the years with many really large programs that people can enroll into without a vetting process (like an application or sales call), is because they didn’t have enough of what they already needed in place to boost their odds of success.
What I mean is, in the case of someone selling a course on making courses, there are several other factors that go into successfully selling a course. If you don’t already have those in place, and the program doesn’t teach you how to do them, then your outcomes likely won’t align with your expectations.
But this leads me to another way we can start to shift away from so much of the suffering that comes from our expectations…getting radically honest with ourselves.
There are a lot of programs and providers out there that are fantastic. They’re likely not as well-known, but they’re still great. And even still, nothing will ever be perfect 100% of the time for 100% of the people that participate. There are just so many factors that go into someone’s experience in a program that even when you try to make it fantastic and impactful, it’ll still be perceived slightly different by each individual.
While the criticisms often get heard more, for every program or provider someone hated, you can find someone else who’s a raving fan. I never want to paint with broad strokes about any one thing being absolutely bad or good. Because it varies by user. Especially because even what we personally perceive from a sales page can vary greatly depending on the person reading it.
However, while the world of online micro business has given me outcomes I could barely dream of even just a decade ago, I also know it’s unfair of me to put an expectation on myself or anyone else that I’d become wildly wealthy, rather quickly, in just a handful of working hours each week.
Especially for the low, low price of $2,997! (If someone is promising a lucrative, ultra part time, laptop lifestyle business and all you need are there 3 simple steps, do you honestly think they wouldn’t be selling that for way more money?!)
I think it’s important to recognize that if these outcomes were truly so simple, it would be a reality for a lot more people.
I understand why it’s so seductive though, and why we want so badly to believe in it. In my younger years when money was super tight I desperately wanted to believe it was true too. Living under the grind of capitalism, especially in a country like America where there as so few social safety nets, it feels hopeful to imagine less personal economic suffering. And I tried my hand at a lot of things that were “too good to be true,” but secretly hoped they weren’t.
The reality is that it’s never really one thing that’s the catalyst for whether your business is successful or not. Businesses, and business owners, require a lot of different kinds of support for long term success. Not just technical or strategic either. It can be so emotionally draining, and that alone can cause people to stall out or quit entirely if they don’t have the right support for those specific needs.
It IS possible to have a thriving business that’s simple, enjoyable, fulfilling, and doesn’t lead to burnout. But it can only happen when we’re honest about our current situation, our limitations, our needs, and our desires. Because from that place you can create a better, more aligned success plan that might be a tad slower but is infinitely more regenerative.
Believe me, I’m all for dreaming big though too. I think we vastly underestimate ourselves and sell ourselves short on the regular. So I don’t believe the way to make positive change here is to throw our hands in the air and merely settle for whatever crumbs come our way.
But I think we can give ourselves the gift of less personal suffering by acknowledging that good things take time, that un-rushing is a skill to practice, and desires are a beautiful thing, but they aren’t the same as expectations.
Expectations, when rooted solely in wishful thinking, can be one of the greatest hinderances to the reality you’re trying to create for yourself.
Let’s not exploit ourselves or add to our own suffering. The world around us is providing plenty of that already.