The mistakes I’ve made in business and how they’ve changed me

Today’s episode of the podcast is a solo episode all about my reflections on 2022 and what I have learned this year. This year has been a big year of learning for me, with lots of changes; and taking time to do this episode got me thinking about the mistakes I have made over the years in business and what I would do differently, if I could. As always I’d love to know what you think, and please feel free to share your own reflections and learnings with me, by connecting over on my social media. KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST ● What went well, and what didn’t go well for me this year ● The mistakes I have made over the years in business ● What I would do differently, based on what I know now THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE One of the most important things you can do in business is to get really confident about who you are and what you stand for.. LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE Nicole Aquila Website   Transcript Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How are you doing? So, what are we gonna talk about today? Now, we're nearing the end of the year, and as you know, because I talk about it every year, because I have consistently been doing this for a long time, I do goal setting with my amazing community, with my club, with exec Club, and part of that goal setting, there's many parts to it because this isn't just a case of, okay, everybody sit down. What do you wanna achieve next year? That doesn't, that's not how it works. But part of the goal setting is that we reviewed the year before and I just had, we just had our saw event, which is our members only event, and we had an amazing speaker called Nicole and Nicole Quiller, coach Nicole. Go check her out. I will link to her in the show notes and she said she had this great saying that basically what gets measured gets improved. So that's why we look at what's happened. That's why we track back and go, okay, what happened? What did we do? How did it go down? What did I learn from it? So that's one of the things that we do obviously in the goal setting, is we go through and go, what went well and what didn't go so well in the last year. And again, the aim of the didn't go so well isn't about beating yourself up. This isn't about going. Well, you've rubbish, aren't you? And you just don't achieve your goals. Probably should give up. That is definitely not what that's about. What it's about is giving yourself space to think about what didn't go so well and what can you take from that. What can you learn from that? What comes to mind and how does that then lead you into doing your goals, because obviously we can learn by those things. And like I said, I, it's a very, the space I create for people to do this, it's, it's safe. And it's also, what's the word, am I trying to think of? It's, it's a positive space. This, you know, it's not a space where we sit down and go, oh, this is awful. And if anybody's feeling like that, I managed to kind of move them through it pretty quick. So, one of the things, like I said, that I've done is I've gone through and I've listed what didn't go so well for me because obviously I practice what I preach. I do all this stuff that I teach and I've written loads of different things there, and I'll tell you a few of my things that I've got on my list. So I spent too much money. That's what I did this year. Now I have to say in all the areas of my business, the finance one is the one I'm not brilliant at because I am one of these people and I'm having, I work very hard on this, so this is definitely something I'm working hard on, but I am one of those people, I have been one of those people that sees money in the bank and thinks, oh yeah, no, I'll just, I can buy that, that's fine. And will invest and spend and do various things. Also, I have my VIP events that didn't make me money. They didn't make me enough money. They, the second one made a profit. However, it was not enough profit to warrant the work and the time that went into it. So I'm re-looking at how that might look this coming year. And that's what I mean. So like, if I hadn't, it's a perfectly example actually. I'm so glad that randomly came to my head if I hadn't looked at that event after I did it and reviewed it and looked at what well, and what didn't go well, and what I made and what I spent, then I wouldn't know that actually Teresa, don't do it the way you did it before because it's not bringing you enough profit, profit in. So that's the reason we look back. So yeah, I spent too much money. I didn't grow my audience as much as I'd liked, but again, when I look at it, I go, well, where was I focusing on that while I wasn't? So that might be wider either I, what else forgot down here. I'd liked more people in the 90 day program and I think now I, I think that realization came quite late in the year that actually one of the things that really lights me up is people achieving and succeeding. And one of the easiest ways that people can do that is working with me one-to-one. And I think I had made the mistake at the beginning of the year thinking, I want to just grow the kind of more, want to many programs and not my, not my one-to-one. And then I changed my mind, so that'll be why I didn't have enough. And then I spent money on things I shouldn't have. That was part of the spending many things. I did a launch for bill my List, and I didn't sell. Anywhere near what I thought I was going to, but it did something completely different, which was actually brought people into my world who had never spent time with me and then realized that I am who I say I am, and I show up the way I say, I show up, and they then joined the membership off the back of it. So that was really interesting. So yeah, so like I said, I go through, but it got me thinking about what mistakes have I made in my business or what things have I done over the years that are just you know, things that I, I don't wanna use the word regret cuz regret's a horrible word, but, you know, kind of think I would not do that again and maybe should have done that differently. And one of the things that I've got down is the fact of when I first started, I listened to everyone else. I listened to all the experts, I watched all the webinars, I did all the stuff. And back then, cuz bearing in mind I've been in this industry a long while. Back then it was very much, this is the way we became successful. This is what you should do. And bearing in mind I'd come from a world of marketing where I'd marketed every different product that you, not every different product. I mean, there's a lot of products in the world, a lot of products in a lot of industry. Bear in mind, I had done that and I knew that there were, even though I would use common marketing threads through every single client and every single company I ever worked with, I knew that some things worked better for that industry and some things were better for that industry, and everything always had to be tweaked. So why on Earth when I came into the online space did I think and I'm not angry at myself, although it sounds like I'm being here. But whyy enough did I think that I could literally cook a cutter, someone else, and that would work for me. I'm not entirely sure what my brain was thinking, but I looked at what they had, I looked at who they were, and I looked at kind of, you know, the money they made and I just went, I want that. And therefore I did the thing that so many people have done and it's now my life's mission to try and stop anybody, anybody else from doing this? I went and bought their stuff and signed up to their programs and did what they said and, oh hell, that's weird. I am not the size of those businesses and I don't earn the money they earn because that doesn't happen. Now, yes, there are successes, but it doesn't happen the way they say it happens. So that was a mistake. I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have gone and thought that copying someone verbatim would make me as successful as they are. The other thing I made a mistake up with at which actually this leads into another, another of my points actually that I was gonna mention is getting involved with the wrong people. So with some of these big experts, I didn't do my due diligence. I didn't do my research. I didn't check what they had done, how they had created, you know, what they had created. So some of these people now have had, back in the day, they had capital investment. They had, they had a partner that paid. They invested in them. Well, yeah, they're gonna be able to, do things. If someone goes, here's a chunk of money I didn't have that. They had key relationships, which are very closed relationships in the online space, and it is very much a who's who club of if you are in, you're gonna fly, and if you're not, then you blocked out. And I didn't pay attention to actually, yeah, this person said they grew this way, but when I look at it, they actually were part of this person's world and they helped them by being an affiliate for them or whatever it is. So, I didn't...