135 – How to Fail

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 135

Intro 0:06
Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl. Stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:23
Hello, I’m Karen Yankovich, the host of the good girls get rich podcast and this is episode 135. And this podcast is brought to you by She’s LinkedUp where we teach simple human to human relationship heart based LinkedIn marketing to women, that changes your business, your life and your bank account for ever. You get to hang out with really cool people that you can’t wait to have the opportunity to chat with. We teach human to human marketing over here at Karen Yankovich land. So this is a really fun episode. I can’t wait for you to hear this and it was inspired by A quote that I read recently, before we get into that if while you’re listening, you are getting value from this or you’re enjoying it or you just feel that it’s something that more people should hear. I would love for you to just take a quick pause, take a screenshot of you listening to the show, and share it on your social media, share it on your Instagram stories on your Facebook stories posted on whatever platform you love hanging out on write, tag me I’m @KarenYankovich. And make sure that if you love this, that you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss all the upcoming episodes because we have some great shows coming up. You can check out anything we talked about on the show at KarenYankovich.com/135. That’s where you’ll see the blog for this page, you’ll see a link also to speakpipe where you can leave me a message maybe there’s a guest you think I should have. Maybe you think you should be a guest on the show. Right? Come on over to speakpipe leave us a voice message. Tell us what you loved about this episode. Whatever it is That is hope it’s an open line of communication for you to reach out to us. And we love hearing your voices. So check that out at KarenYankovich.com/135. Okay, so the quote that I came across this week that I really wanted to dive deep into on the show today, and I’m going to just I know it’s a quote, you’re not suppossed to mess with quotes, but I’m going to change it a little bit, because this was focused to men, but I’m going to change the focus to women. And the quote was, notice the difference between what happens when a woman says to herself, I have failed three times. And what happens when she says, I am a failure. Let me repeat that. Notice the difference between what happens when a woman says to herself, I have failed three times and what happens when she says I am a failure, and that’s a quote from S i higher power. So I actually haven’t checked to make sure that that’s accurate, but I’m going to trust that the source that I saw this on attributed properly if you if you know differently Please let me know. But it really was eye opening to me. Because, you know, as you’ve heard me say before on the show, I do not come from an entrepreneurial family. And, you know, failing isn’t something that my most of my friends and family are, are used to. Right? Like entrepreneurs as entrepreneurs, we’re used to it right. But if you’re not an entrepreneur, you’re not used to failing. And maybe you’ve heard the phrase failing forward. Right? You know, I mean, of course, the people in my life, my friends and family that are not entrepreneurs, they fail at things. But then that’s it, it’s over. It didn’t work. It’s over. Right. But, you know, listen, if we started doing that, if we started doing that, as entrepreneurs, we be out of business pretty quickly, right? Because we do things we send out an email that we think is gonna be awesome. And then we have we spent a ton of time on the subject lines, we get a great open rate, and it’s the lowest open rate we’ve had in two years, right? I mean, like things like that happened to us as entrepreneurs. And if we look at it That’s it, I’m done. No one opens my emails, then you’re done right, and you’re back to working in a cubicle, which is fine, if that’s what you want. But if you’ve got that entrepreneurial spirit, we need to understand the benefit of failing forward. So, you know, I needed to do a little bit of research on this. And I know you’ve probably heard some of these things before. But, you know, and some of these are new to me. So Richard Branson failed 400 times from launched companies before he funded Virgin Atlantic or Virgin Galactic, whatever it’s called these days, right. Sylvester Stallone was rejected 1500 times trying to sell his script and himself as the film rocky 1500 times. Can you imagine having a script in your hand and giving it to 1500 people that said no, before you got someone that said yes. And look at that. I mean, I don’t know you guys that are in my age group. Rocky was iconic, right iconic in the 70s James Dyson Dyson vacuums, right. 5126 failed prototypes of his vacuum cleaner before succeeded. I am a huge fan. It is the freakin expensive kind of thing. But I love my Dyson. And I am very grateful that James Dyson didn’t give up after the first failure and went 5126 times more to create the vacuum that you know that we all know and love or that I know and love. Vera Wang, Vera Wang, did you know that she was once a figure skater. But she didn’t make it to the Olympic figure skating team. And she moved on to work for Vogue. But they didn’t want to move her up. So she left to become a designer. Right? How cool is that? Arianna Huffington? Arianna Huffington had couldn’t get people to read her work. Her second book was rejected by 36 publishers. Arianna Huffington was rejected by 36 publishers, right? That’s just crazy. It’s just crazy. To me, Oprah Winfrey was fired from her news reporter gig at a Baltimore news station. I mean, there’s just can be can just go on and on. And to me the most interesting one, to me is Walt Disney. Walt Disney was reportedly fired by a newspaper editor for not having good ideas and no imagination. Can you imagine Walt Disney being fired for not having an imagination? I mean, disney world is like, Bill is worth billions and billions of dollars right now. And he was fired for not having an imagination. So, you know, we can be like Walt Disney and Oprah, right? Or we can give up or we can give up. So when you fail at something, are you saying I failed a couple times or I failed 100 times or I failed 20 times. But I’m working on it still or you’re saying I’m a failure? And you did you to take the words I am a failure out of your vocabulary. Okay, out of your vocabulary. So in case You needed to hear this, I am giving you permission to fail. I’m giving you permission to fail. And I’m gonna give you some examples now of places that it places that it’s likely that you’re going to fail, okay? It is likely that you’re going to fail in a few places. And I’m going to tell you what some of these things are. So don’t give up because this stuff works. You can be you anything will work as long as you’re willing to fail, and pick yourself up and try again. So first, let’s talk about your products and services. And you know, as women we like to have things perfect, right? We like to have things perfect before we launch. We like to have things perfect if there is one topic that I can say that I got, I have my jersey foot on people’s but it’s please just put it out there. Right? Because what’s going to happen, no matter how much research you do, no matter how many, you know, surveys you put out no matter how much how many sticky notes are on the walls of your office as you’re creating a product or service. You will fail and need to adjust it when you launch it. Because we don’t know until we start doing it. What we don’t know, right? Like, we don’t know what we don’t know, you guys, if you haven’t listened to Episode 64 with Kendrick shope you totally need to listen to her. She talks about the power of giving free calls. I think she gave away 100 or an insane number of free calls before she started putting her programs out. Because she knew that if she wasn’t talking to people, and giving out free coaching calls, that she wasn’t going to know how to position her products and services and she is extraordinarily successful right now. Her programs are extraordinarily successful. And it doesn’t mean that you have to do all this until it’s perfect because it’s still not going to be perfect. As things shift as soon as and shift. Goodness knows nothing’s taught us more about how to reimagine things. Right then the spring in the summer of 2020, when we’ve had to reimagine our lives in our businesses, right? So you’re still going to have to shift, it’s never going to be perfect. But here’s the deal, you’re in control. You can keep tweaking this until people start enrolling in your products and services. Once they start enrolling. Now you got to stop touching it, you have to stop tweaking it right if you got it right. But you can’t quit. Right? After you put a ton of pre work into something, and it didn’t work. Because the more I mean, I’m not saying I want you to fly by the seat of your pants. I’m not saying that at all. Of course you want to you want to prep and prepare and be ready for things and maybe do what Kendrick did just put a lot of hours in doing what it is you’re offering but doing it for free, right? Because then you’ll know what people want. And then you can evolve it into your paid products and services. So understand that you are going to fail in your first launch. I mean, maybe you’ll get maybe you’ll do really well right but it’s More likely that you’re going to fail, then you’re going to just nail it on the first time, it just doesn’t happen that way, or not very often anyway. So you got to be open to that, and open to creating products and services that are not going to land the way you thought they were gonna land, and then be ready and open to reimagine them until they start enrolling people. The second thing, and I want to kind of, you know, Kendrick and I talked a lot about prospecting. And I want to kind of go back to prospecting. Because, you know, you’ve heard me say a lot on the show that LinkedIn is my money tree, and you’ve got to water your money tree. And one of the things you need to do as you’re watering your money tree, is continue to connect with people. And, you know, I want you to do I would much rather you connect with five people a week, and you put an hour’s worth of research into who those five people are before you send out those connection requests than to send out 100 connection requests because it’s gonna bring you a ton of more 10% more success that way, but remember that We’re looking for human to human connection. And it’s not an exact science, right. So hopefully you’re talking to really cool people, and you’re getting a ton of value, but you very well may miss your mark, and you are likely going to miss your mark. And the only way you’re going to know that is when you start talking to people, right? You’ve got to do those connections, like send out those connection requests, and start connecting and start talking to people. And when you start talking to people, hopefully, they’re going to still be really cool people. But guess what, it’s likely that you’re going to miss your mark a little bit from the connecting to the putting money in your bank account, right? And that means you got to go back to the beginning and tweak the connecting, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean that at all. It just means that you have to tweak it and you have to adjust it. Right. I was actually just listening to Okay, a little behind the scenes of the Karen Yankovich land here. I don’t know if you guys are fans of Days of Our Lives, then let me know I probably have watched every episode of Days of Our Lives. It’s since it’s been On shows you how old I am. It is absolutely my guilty pleasure. I love it. I love DVRs now because now it takes like 1520 minutes to watch it in my day and not an hour. But I was listening to a podcast where the guy who played Sonny kiriakis was interviewing Deidre hall that plays Marlena. And what they were talking about, which was really interesting to me, the entrepreneur me Let break, they talked about the fact that they they shoot so far ahead, they were seven months ahead, seven months ahead in what they were shooting to when it was going live, right. So things weren’t going live for seven months after they do it. So what they were they would do focus groups and they would do prospect you know, they would do in research and things like that, but they didn’t know if a couple that they put together we’re gonna work for seven months, you have seven more months of episodes that you shot with that couple, right, not knowing if the if it was going to land with the audience, right. So if days of our lives and TV can overcome that Because I guess I would have to imagine that they don’t always get it. Right. Right. So we don’t have to wait seven months, we can, you know, look for our prospects, look to see who we think are a good match for our business, and then start getting on the phone with them. But if it’s not a match, then don’t worry about it and just tweak it and reimagine it until it is a match, right? until you do have that right scenario. Right? So those are two places that 100% you are going to fail, okay? And you’re going to have to tweak it, and you’re going to have to fix it, but just accept it, be ready for it and be open to the possibility of changing it up. The last thing I want to talk to you today about is the fact that you have to plan that P word that four letter word plan PL A n. You know, maybe you’ve heard the quote if you fail to plan you plan to fail. So I guess I’m a planner but on a traditional planner, I don’t you know, I definitely You know, if you said to me, Hey, Karen, I want to throw a party on Saturday for 100 people and it’s like, Wednesday, I can do that. I don’t need six months of planning to get a have a great party. Right? I sometimes like this podcast episode, I saw that quote and said, Oh, my gosh, I want to talk about that. So it wasn’t like I planted six months in advance. I mean, of course, I did a little research as well. But so I like to plan but I don’t you know, I’m not a consummate planner. But here’s the thing. People in my she’s linked up program come to me and say, it’s not working. When that happens, right? If people come to me and say it’s just not working for me, my first question to them is, how many people did you connect with last week? Because there’s a system to profitable LinkedIn networking, there’s a system to the process that I teach. And if you’re not following the system and measuring your results, you know all that sucky stuff, then you don’t know where to make an adjustment, right? So you’re just stabbing in the dark and taking what longer to reach success than necessary. But if you’re planning, right and you fail, then you can go back and see where in this process did this fall apart. So you know where to make the adjustments, right? Because while planning and measuring might feel sucky, lots of money in the bank account does not feel sucky. But if you aren’t planning, if you don’t have a plan for why you’re talking to people, what you want to get out of them what you want them to do next, then you don’t know where it’s not gonna work. I mean, even just for me, you know, like, like, we use running Facebook ads as an example, I run Facebook ads, but I plan every step of the way. And I know where I want my numbers to be at, because at the end of the day, if my ads are not converting on the far side of that, then I can go back and fix it, where the numbers and the percentages aren’t where I want them to be. But if you’re not doing that, then what you’re going to say is I spent $500 on Facebook ads Didn’t get one lead, right? Lord knows I’ve done that, by the way, many times before I started implementing this process. So yes, are your Facebook ads gonna fail? Is your LinkedIn prospecting gonna fail? Absolutely. But we don’t need it to. But the more you plan, the better your plan, the faster you can get back on track. And the faster you can convert it and get people to enroll in your products or services, or whatever it is you’re looking to do. So you’ve got to do that planning piece. So as you’re failing, you know where to go back and tweak it and you can more quickly turn that ship around. Does that make sense? So let’s recap a little bit here. The first is a couple places where you’re most likely going to fail, right? And that is going to be as you’re rolling out your products and services, you’re going to be like, but I know this would be so valuable for people and they’re like, Yeah, no, not so much. I’m not interested. Right. And it’s gonna happen. But you got to listen and tweak and reimagine and that’s the beauty of being an entrepreneur because you will never fail if you do that, if you listen and tweak and reimagine until you have people enrolling, okay, and that’s where that success starts happening. And then the second piece of it is the people that you’re prospecting for, you know, you might have and hopefully you do have a really clear picture of what your ideal client is, but sometimes that prospecting to get people from here to there is going to be, you’re going to miss your mark. Right? Like I remember at one point I was, I had something I wanted to offer. This is a couple years ago, and I was reaching out to coaches in the New York City area. And then I realized what coaches were doing a lot of the things I were doing, they didn’t want they need or want what I had, so my prospecting was off. So I shifted it, I shifted it, and then we did we’re able to do what we wanted to do. Your prospecting is going to be off. Okay? But what are that money tree, keep connecting with people get on the phone with people consistently. And the sooner you do that, the sooner you’re going to know who the right people aren’t If you’re prospecting is if you’re prospecting in the right pool. And then the third thing I wanted to talk about today is the importance of planning. You have got to plan so that when you fail, you can look back at the steps you took to see where it might have gone off the rails a little bit. Because if it’s working, if you have, let’s say you have five steps. And step one is your landing at step two, you’re landing it, but Step three, not so much. You don’t touch step one and step two, right? Because it’s already working. Step three is where you start to make the adjustments. But if you don’t have a plan, all you know is you went from step one to get the one from the beginning to the end, and it didn’t work. So now where do you make adjustments? You don’t know. Right? So this is where diving deeper into the work you’re doing. instead of always being out there throwing out new stuff at the walls is valuable, which is why I teach By the way, LinkedIn marketing in a very micro targeted way because the more micro targeted you are with this stuff, the more quickly you can have that success. The more quickly you can have the successes that you’re looking to have in your life. This is how you see the changes to your business, your life and your bank account for ever. So if you want to learn a little bit about how we teach you how to do that, we have a totally brand new on demand workshop at Karenyankovich.com/masterclass where you can learn a little bit about how you can start failing forward and start getting those calls and getting on the phone with people and putting the process in place. And listen, I am here for you we have built an insane amount of support into the our free Facebook group and the products and services because we want to hold your hand as you fail and help pick you up right and get excited as we start to see your business taking off. But as we talked about before, a rising tide lifts all boats right so I’m here to support you. I do this podcast to support you. I’ve got this free training program at She’s LinkedUp or karenyankovich.com/masterclass, we’ve got a free Facebook group where we support you, I would love for you to support us, help me help you share this podcast. Take a quick screenshot if you’ve enjoyed this episode, and share that on social media and tag me so I can share it and we can support each other. Okay, we have a couple more months of 2020 and we are going to turn this ship around. So let’s have an amazing, fallen winter. And I’m here to support you. I hope this was helpful. And I’ll see you back here again next week for another episode of the good girls get rich podcast.