4 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Building an Online Business
There are many mistakes that we make during our journey building a business and these are the four mistakes that resonate the most with me at the stage I’m in.
Translation: the four most common mistakes I’ve made (and keep making) as I build my business.
I just want to point out that it’s ok to make mistakes when creating and growing a business. If anything, the willingness to make mistakes and learn from them will accelerate your growth and help you hit your goals faster.
Not asking for or seeking out help
A big mistake people make is not asking for or seeking out help in their business. Carrying that feeling that you need to go at it all alone isn’t a helpful one.
It's important to realize that there are a lot of people in your life who want to help you and see you succeed.
It’s not a sign of weakness or failure to ask people for support. It’s likely that they’ll be thrilled to help you in any way they can.
And that help comes in a lot of different shapes and forms, help can look like:
Signing up with a coach to help you accelerate your business growth by working on your mindset and marketing. Note: don’t wait for things to be perfect in your business before investing in yourself. It’s amazing the insights you will gain by working with a coach.
Asking friends to send you referrals or share your posts on their platforms.
Asking people who are a few years ahead of you to share their experiences.
Talking to someone when you’re struggling. Yes, not everyone is a good fit for this one. But most of us have someone that we know will listen, not judge and help you think of possible solutions to your problem.
It feels vulnerable to ask for or admit that you need help. But people around you and people that you hire - like a coach - want to help you, even more than you could possibly know.
It’s not easy, but ask them or seek them out. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Not sticking to boundaries
I can’t even begin to explain how many times I’ve not stuck to my boundaries and still struggle with boundaries with different people.
As a people pleaser my brain keeps offering me thoughts like:
“If you don’t do this extra thing that wasn’t in the original scope, they’ll hate you”
“If you don’t lower your price, they won’t work with you”
“If you don’t answer this email immediately on a Saturday, they’ll think you’re unprofessional”
So I keep doing things I don’t want to and have a really hard time saying no.
The impact of saying yes when I want to say no is that I harbor resentment towards those people. When in reality they might have been TOTALLY ok with me saying no or offering an option that works for me.
Because of the assumptions I make about how they will react, I don’t communicate my true feelings around their request. From their end they think it’s all good, when it’s not. But they simply cannot read my mind.
It’s not their fault but mine.
For the longest time, I placed the blame of breaking boundaries on others. To be honest, it was easier than having a possibly uncomfortable conversation with them. I finally realized that I and only I can control and set expectations around my boundaries. Other people are not magically going to set boundaries for me nor should I be expecting them to.
I’ve had instances where projects blow up in my face because I agreed to an unrealistic schedule and the end result was me being extremely stressed out, not doing my best work and the other person being disappointed in the end result.
One particular instance resulted in me feeling a LOT of impostor syndrome around my work for months, which caused me to sign zero clients for a long time.
Lesson learned: it’s simply never going to end well when you don’t stick to your boundaries.
During times when I’ve set healthy boundaries and stuck to my price, stuck to my schedule, stuck to the scope - I feel SO much better around my work, enjoy what I do so much more and have a much healthier relationship with the other person.
Because I’m being honest and authentic.
It’s not easy for me to always stick to my boundaries but I’m working on it.
The boundaries you’re looking for are on the other side of one conversation. It may be a hard conversation to have, but totally worth it.
Not evaluating results
By evaluating results, I’m not talking about simply looking at high level numbers here.
You do need to look at how many consults you’ve had, or how many clients you’ve signed. That’s important to look at, but a more thorough evaluation is also necessary and something that I don’t always allow myself time for.
Take the time to dig a bit deeper.
In January of this year I asked myself “how quickly was I able to make $5000 last year?”. This came from a question that my coach Samantha Siffring has asked before.
So I got curious. I looked at my income throughout the year and identified blocks of time where I’d made $5000.
I had a lot of different ranges of time, spanning from 141 days to 8 days. What?! 8 days! I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed that before.
That led to the question “what was I doing differently during that time?”
I looked at my Instagram profile. Nope. Nothing different there.
I decided to look at my journal - which was pretty empty at the time. Bingo! That held the answer.
During that time I had listened to my coaches podcast episode ‘How to Be Consistent in Your Business’ where she talks about a tool called ‘The Belief Scale’ - listen here.
I had decided to try out the belief scale and had been journaling for about 2 weeks during which I had made those $5000.
Looking back, I suddenly remembered feeling more bold and curious about what I could accomplish. I had made simple requests:
Asked people who had reached out a while back if they were ready to start working with me.
Asked clients who had been unresponsive about their projects that they had a certain number of days to get back to me or their project was closed.
Asked clients who hadn’t paid yet that they needed to pay their invoice.
These all resulted in me receiving the influx of cash from signing new clients and closing projects which allowed me to hit my goal.
Had I not taken the time to evaluate my results, I never would have learned all of this. It’s resulted in me using the belief scale regularly and helped me find more people interested in my services.
Take time to look back and learn from your mistakes and successes.
Chasing shiny objects
Ever notice that when things are hard your brain suddenly goes “squirrel!” and you start going down a different path?
You’re trying to avoid discomfort and find reassurance or the thrill of checking off tasks or doing something fun and new that comes with a shiny object.
In my experience shiny objects can be all sorts of things, some common ones are:
1 - Online courses
It’s taken me YEARS to learn that a course or more information is not necessarily going to fix anything in my business.
I’ve spent thousands of dollars on courses where I didn’t really learn anything and/or my business results didn’t change at all even when I followed their process or steps.
Why? Because I invested out of FOMO, to feel reassured, to feel like I was doing the “right” thing. All the wrong reasons.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s necessary to invest in your business to learn more about something specific. I’ve spent money on other courses that were EXTREMELY helpful in my business.
You simply need to evaluate WHY you want to make the purchase.
Ask yourself “am I doing this because it seems fun and exciting?”, “am I doing this because I’m afraid I’m doing something wrong?” If the answer is yes then you probably don’t need to buy it.
Your brain is trying to distract you from what it knows you need to do to grow your business. Odds are whatever that is, is uncomfortable and difficult which is why you’re chasing the feeling of fun and excitement or placing your trust in what others are offering vs. trusting yourself.
2 - Editing graphics, website or systems
“SQUIRREL!”. This is a big one for me.
I’ve spent so much time nit picking at graphics and updating my website and systems when I’m trying to avoid something.
That thing I’m avoiding is sometimes writing captions. I have a lot of negative thoughts about writing captions for social media. The feeling of being on display or potentially being judged around what I post is what holds me back.
Or I’m trying to avoid having a conversation with someone who wants to work with me but hasn’t signed yet because deep down I’m worried they’ll say no.
“SQUIRREL!”
My brain wants to avoid discomfort so it chases the feeling of fun that comes with playing with editing graphics, colors and other elements in Canva.
When in reality my graphics, my website and systems are good enough. No magical results will come from making these changes. But my brain convinces me otherwise so I don’t have to do the hard things.
Changes in my business will come from putting myself out there and being vulnerable: asking friends for referrals, having conversations and building connections with new people - which as an introvert seems hard sometimes (ok, all the time).
3 - Changing your plan or strategy
When you’re testing out new strategies, it’s easy to get frustrated when you don’t see growth quickly.
Everytime I try something new I secretly hope that it’ll go viral, I’ll book tons of calls within the next 24 hours, or something else equally awesome. When that doesn’t happen I immediately think “Shoot, it didn’t work. Change of plans!”
Your brain has an idea of what things “should” look like. It thinks that growth should be happening at a quicker pace. And when your results don’t match what you think “should” happen, you immediately think that something is wrong and start changing your plan or strategy.
Growth takes time.
It needs you to stick with something long enough to actually get insights and data to truly understand if it’s working or not.
I’ve committed to 6 months of trying a new strategy in my business. Sometimes I’m ok with how things are going and other times I’m ready to throw my plan out the window because I feel that it’s going a LOT slower than it should.
“Should” is the problematic word in this case. It means I’m comparing my results to others and that’s never a good thing.
Nobody else has my business. Only me. There is no blueprint to follow.
I need to trust myself and know that I’ll figure it out. I’ll fail a whole bunch of times along the way (I already have plenty of proof of that) but I will eventually create what I’ve been envisioning in my mind.
Stick with it.
Growth can get boring.
It requires you to do the same thing over and over for a stretch of time, which means that what once seemed fun and exciting may no longer seem fun and exciting after you’ve done it so many times.
So you start to toy with the idea of changing plans because that means you’d get to do something different - which seems fun and exciting.
I love new and exciting. Learning new things. So I constantly have to remind myself why I created the plan that I’m following and remind myself to stick with it.
It comes back to trusting myself and believing that my plan or strategy will deliver the results I want.
Trust yourself enough to stick with it.
I guess I had a lot to say about all this. I realize that I wrote a much longer blog post than usual.
Hopefully learning about my mistakes and experiences will help you on your journey.
Remember that making these or any mistakes is part of the process. Nobody will ever create a business that is sustainable and successful without messing up at some point.
You got this.