Transcript

Sigrun:
You’re listening to the Sigrun Show, episode number 384. This episode is about how to start and scale your online business without overwhelm and excuses. Welcome to the Sigrun Show, I’m your host Sigrun creator of SOMBA the MBA program for online entrepreneurs. With each episode, I’ll share with you inspiring case studies and interviews to help you achieve your dreams and turn your passion into profits. Thank you for spending time with me today. Building an online business takes time, I share with you proven strategies to help you get there faster. You’ll also learn how to master your mindset, uplevel your marketing and succeed with masterminds. Online business is booming, my business has grown over 30% compared to the same period last year. And my clients are doing well in their online businesses, but there are still many on the fence about starting and scaling an online business, even if they know that they need to. What I hear from the women I speak to is overwhelm and a long list of excuses.
In this episode, I’m going to break down how easy it is to get started and scale your online business without overwhelm and excuses. But before we dive into this episode, I want to remind you of the next normal online course that are running right now. It is not too late to join us and be blown away by our speakers and the exercises that are designed to help you succeed in the next normal in online business. Go through the show notes, at sigrun.com/384, where you can sign up for the next normal. Life will never be the same again, we’re not going back to the way things were before, online is here to stay and having an online business is now more important than ever before. Most business owners understand the importance of being able to go 100% online. What if a second wave hits us? What if there’s another lockdown? Then you need to be ready and be able to operate your business 100% online.
But what is the easiest way to get started and scale your online business without getting stuck, procrastinating, overcoming perfectionism? There is a potential long list of excuses for not taking action. I’m going to walk you through a process that I have been developing and perfecting in the last years. Because what I figured out after being an online business for several years, myself, and finally creating my online signature course, is that people don’t really take action on their own. They keep on coming up with excuses. And I realized this in the summer of 2018, I had been working several years one-on-one, I had actually replaced my one on one coaching income with group coaching income. And in January 2017, I had created my first longterm online course, a 12 month online program. And I thought it had everything it needed to help people take action, but people were not. But then I heard about this statistic that only 9% of people who buy online courses actually complete them. I was shocked.
I had gone into online business with the idea of helping a lot of people and somehow in my naivety, I thought if people would buy my online programs, they would actually use them and do them and take action. Now, the way I designed my online program was the one where you didn’t really have to do every single module. You could dip in and do the parts that would be best for you. But I figured out that people weren’t actually doing it and I got upset because I did not go into online business to take people’s money and then have them not do the work. My reason for going into online business is to help women create their own online businesses. But if they weren’t doing it, I was not satisfied. And I knew I had to do something. I had to figure out a way to get women to do the work. And yes, I have men also in my programs, but my mission is to accelerate gender equality through female entrepreneurship. So I will use women even though, I mean men as well.
Basically, they were not taking action. Yes, I did have superstars, I did have those nine or 10% that would have succeeded anyway, but they were succeeding with my programs and in my one on one coaching and in my group coaching, I had seen much better results than when I had an online program, where I was expecting people to figure out what to do next and do this self study. So in my frustration, that’s where I often get my best ideas, I realized I had to do something and I came up with the idea of accountability. And I know I did not invent accountability and there are a lot of programs out there that focus on accountability. But I thought of a way, what if I add accountability, but also I give people very little information on what they need to do next?
This was a new concept, this was something that I came up with because I knew when people see all the possibilities, when people think, Oh, I need to create an online business, I need a freebie, I need a landing page, I need a sales page, I need an email list, I need a website, I need a Facebook page. Oh, I also need LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and Oh, sales funnel and launches and evergreen. People give up, that’s where the overwhelm comes in. So I was like, okay, people need the accountability, that’s for sure, that’s no rocket science, but what if I only give them tiny bits of information, so that they only know what to do that week and are not wondering what to do the next week. Because I realized the overwhelm comes from knowing everything that you need to do. And yes, maybe you need to do it, but you don’t need to do it today or tomorrow or even this week because we all have limited time.
So what I decided to do was to do a challenge within my online program. And I’ve talked about this in a previous episode, but I want to tell you how I basically help people get out of their head and stop getting stuck and stop using excuses that was creating this process. So what I did in summer of 2018, I said, there’s going to be a eight week challenge or 10 week challenge inside my program, inside my SOMBA program. And I only told people what they needed to do that week, or even less. The first time I run it, I had 26 steps and yes, when you hear 26, that sounds like, Oh, that’s too much. No, but they were really small steps, the steps were so small that suddenly it felt doable. Anyone could do it now, the feeling of overwhelm was literally gone and that’s how you solve overwhelm. You create a tiny step for yourself and that’s what I did in the program.
Now, I knew the whole path and every single step people needed to do and it was a lot, but I broke it down in such small steps and so doable steps, that anyone, even the ones that were most scared and feeling like, Oh, I can never build an online business suddenly they could do it. So I do think it’s hard to do this on your own because then you know the steps, when someone else is hiding all the information for you in a good way, and just showing the bits you need to do right now, that’s where you can really get out of the overwhelm. But then there are other excuses that come up. Some people are worried about the tech, time and money and all these other excuses that come up every single day for many of us. So there were several other elements, first of all, breaking down and basically only telling people what they need to do today, tomorrow, this week.
Over the years, I have perfected the process, now we don’t have 26 steps we have it actually as a 10 step process, in 10 weeks. And in addition to that, there is of course the accountability that I mentioned before. I have people fill out a form on a regular basis throughout this 10 weeks and it can be in a two week period or a four week period, depending on what’s happening. And that’s where I see also the magic happen. And it already starts before the whole thing even starts, where people are like, are you participating? Yes, I am. Are you in? And through group pressure, positive group pressure, people decide to participate. I get them to commit to the process. There is something important about not just signing up for an online program and then disappearing and nobody knows what you’re doing. I have people recommit within the program that they’re actually going to be a part of this program. That creates a sense of responsibility, I think we all feel a certain guilt of not doing the work when we’ve filled out a form.
Because actually buying a course, a lot of people would buy courses and never do them, we know that, but by filling out this commitment form in the beginning, I get people to commit. So I think you need to commit to yourself that you’re actually going to do the work. Then, as I said before, we have the bite size information, but then we have people recommit to the process throughout. And whenever someone is thinking of giving up and they voice that in our community, people surround them with love and care and inspiration and motivation. And we’ve seen, because we close our forms at midnight, we’ve seen people been entering at 11:59, that they’re still in, that they overcome some demons in their head or some potentional tech challenges, that were no challenge at the end of the day.
So that’s important, bite-size information for the overwhelm, but the positive group pressure to actually get it done, the recommitment to the work. When I developed my programs in the past, I avoid it having tech videos. I would do them from time to time, but as you might know, tech changes very fast and it’s difficult to keep up. And most vendors have wonderful videos themselves, so you shouldn’t be wasting your times creating those videos. Or if you buy a course, you shouldn’t expect in those videos, because if you use an email system, that email system vendors should have a great video for you to work on. But we realized that connecting the dots, understanding the processes was important one software to another. And for this process, we start to create these mini instructions fitting, perfectly to the process. So in one video, I would show exactly what you need to do now, strategically and then I would have another video where I would say technically how you do it.
Most importantly of all though, is that we ask everyone to trust the process. I think where people get stuck and start to doubt and go into procrastination and the overthinking mode, is that they’re wondering if what they’re doing is right. When you start on your journey to create an online business, you got to find a process that you think will lead you to the results that you want to have, but then stick with it. Here’s where a lot of women and men get stuck, they start to doubt, they are not having maybe the success they want to have. And instead of keeping up and trusting the process, whatever process they have signed up for, they pause, they stop, they give up. So what we say literally every day to our participants is trust the process. And then after 10 weeks, we have a celebration call, it is so important to celebrate success. So think of every 90 days, something you can celebrate and more often, of course, too, every little milestone should be celebrated. And that’s what we do with our participants.
So we created this process and in the beginning we only had it in our SOMBA program and we stopped calling it SOMBA Summer School, now it’s SOMBA Kickstart, it is the first 10 weeks of joining my signature program. But in the last three months, I download a new process. We created a new program called, Online Turnaround and I thought to myself, what if I do a different type of a process, but use the same method? The same method on positive group pressure, on accountability forms, on bite size information, both the strategy and the tech, and then celebration at the end for everything that people have achieved. Where they share what worked well, what could have worked better. We have now created two fantastic processes and helped hundreds and hundreds of women get out of their own head, stop the overwhelm, stop using any excuses and actually getting the work done. We have a 90% completion rate, there are still people that sign up and somehow disappear even though we try to get them back in, and sometimes something personal happens, something life changing and your plans change, but a 90% completion rate.
How do we know that? Because we have all the accountability forms, we know if people did the work and we check their work. So I think if you want to start and scale your online business, you need to find a way to be a part of a process like this. I think it’s very hard to do on your own. Even though I’m very self motivated myself, I wish, I still wish I would have found process like this when I was starting out in my business. A process that has bite size information, group pressure, accountability, celebration, everything in one goal. And I get up and running with my business in 10 weeks. It sounds too good to be true, but the proof is in the cutting and I invite you to check out SOMBA and see if it is for you. But now you know at least how you get out of overwhelm and stop using excuses and scale your online business.
Go to the show notes at sigrun.com/384, where you can sign up for the next normal five day online course. Thank you for listening to the Sigrun Show. Did you enjoy this episode? Let me know that you listen by tagging me in your Insta story or Instagram posts, using my handle Sigruncom and a hashtag Sigrun Show. See you in the next episode.