The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 154: My Mistakes in 2021
Today, I am going to be sharing with you some of my biggest mistakes that I’ve made so far in 2021. I will be diving deep into these mistakes, what I learned from them and how you can use what I learned to move the needle forward in your business too.
My Mistakes in 2021
By: Melissa Lin
We are diving into another episode, and this one is a little different than others in the past, because I am going to be sharing about some of the not-so-pretty sides of Entrepreneurship, of growth learning opportunities, and so much more today. I want to always be able to share all sides of my business for you and how you can take what I've learned and Implement these things into your business. Today is about some of the not-so-pretty mistakes that I, to be honest, I've made so far in 2021. So you might be thinking to yourself, “Well, Melissa, How did you let that happen?” or “Shouldn't you be experienced enough to not make some of these mistakes?” And a big thing that I've learned over the years is that, as you continue to grow your business, and continue to move into the next levels, your business continues to grow into the next level as well, new challenges are typically faced.
So something that I know is so true for me is the things that I did in my business to grow to six figures are not the same things and the same challenges that I face as I scaled to six figures and beyond that. I actually have an older podcast episode about some of the mistakes in my earlier days, like way, way, way, in the beginning, like, first year doing business, and this is definitely something I want to start doing on my podcast once or twice per year because there's a lot that happens behind the scenes that you can always see. Because I'm just not on camera every moment of every day and I'm not able to capture every single thing like that, which is why I'm really looking forward to today's episode, where I can share some of these moments with you. Some of these not-so-pretty moments that aren't always super fun to share. However, there has been so much learning and so much growth from these not-so-pretty moments as well.
So today, we are talking about my top three mistakes that I have made so far in 2021. I'm going to go into what I've learned from some of these mistakes and how, at the end of the day, those mistakes. They actually led me to exactly where I'm supposed to be at this moment. Something that you've probably seen me say before, if you follow me on any of my social media platforms, Is that I truly believe that the universe is guiding me and that it has guided me and already has a plan for me, right? I'm always doing the right thing, at the right time, at the right moment. Even if it might not feel like it at that moment, right? It doesn't normally feel like it at that moment. However, things are always happening for us.
Feel Your Feelings
I have had so many, and I truly mean that, I've had so many moments, and I'm sure every business owner and every entrepreneur can say this too, in my business where I truly felt like everything was going to crumble down. Now, I know that at the end of the day, nothing can realistically burn my business down. I know that everything is always going to be okay, and I know that everything is always happening for me and everything is happening exactly as it's supposed to. To add to that, something that's also true is that when these events or when these moments are happening, there are going to be a lot of feelings that come up as well. What I want to share with you is that you get to feel through those feelings too, be in the moment. Something that I did years and years ago was that I used to ignore some of these feelings. I would ignore some of these feelings and felt that, you know, as a CEO, as a business owner, I needed to stay strong and not let whatever happened affect me, and that it was a sign of weakness. I definitely know now, It's the complete opposite. I have grown so much over the years as a business owner and as a person, in my emotional intelligence. I know now that I get to feel those feelings. I definitely do now.
So, for example, when some of these moments happened, I had some pretty big crying moments and some big moments where I wanted everything to just shut down, I thought everything was going to, and I had some breakdown moments, and it definitely happens in entrepreneurship from time to time. And I want to be so real with you, and sure, there are ups, there are downs, and it's all so, so, so amazing and so worth it because all of those downs do come with learning experiences, and breakthroughs and growth. So, as you grow and as you level up as a business owner, you will face new challenges, at the end of the day, no matter what, you will face new challenges. As I mentioned at the beginning of today's episode, you know, the things that got you to where you are now in your business, they are not the things that are going to get you to the next level, and that means you're going to encounter new things. You are going to encounter new challenges that you didn't see six months ago, or maybe you didn't see them 12 months ago because you're at a different level.
Everything’s Going To Be Okay
As I start going through and sharing some of my mistakes that I've made this first half of 2021, you know, since we're still just a little over halfway through the year, I want you to know that everything’s going to be okay. It's going to feel like things are burning up and that your business is crumbling down. Everything’s going to be okay. Even me, as this business owner and somebody who's been in the industry for years and years and years and somebody who is known as one of the female business coaches to be looking at, things like mistakes do happen. I am human and things come up that aren't expected and things come up that aren't always in my control. So I want to share some of those things with you. That way, you don't beat yourself up too much when and if this happens to you. Also remember that just because these things happen, it doesn't mean your business is going to burn down, right? Everything is going to be okay. I promise.
Hiring Mistake
Now, let's dive into my first mistake in 2021. In last week's episode. I shared about my team, who supports me, the roles on the team, what they support me with and all of that. So, yes, definitely go check it out, but what I want to share about it is that something that does come up as a business owner is the fact that yes, you do get to hire and yes, you do also get to fire and release team members if they are not a good fit. So earlier this year, I actually hired somebody for my team that I thought was going to be an incredible fit. However, it turned out to be very different than expected. So normally when I get ready to hire somebody, I like to hire very early on and what I mean by this is I like to hire and have plenty of time to onboard, train and to welcome them to the team. I had been looking for somebody earlier this year to fill this position for quite some time, but I just hadn’t found the right person for it.
So, instead of me taking a bit longer to interview more people and get some more references from those people I was interviewing. I decided to hire somebody that I felt a good feeling about. My team and I, we spent a lot of our energy into training this new person in this new position and, you know, teaching them or walking them through our systems and how we do things in different things, not necessarily teaching them what to do because we did hire them for their expertise, but we did spend a lot of our energy into bringing them into the team, ensuring all the ins and outs of how our business runs. And it turned out that the person that we hired was not nearly as qualified as they claimed they were on our interviews and other forms and different things like the pre-qualification process that we take our interviewees through. And since I needed support in that role, instead of me spending more time looking for the right person and somebody that was a better fit and taking the time to check their references. I made a quick judgment call to hire this person and give them a shot. I definitely don't have any bad feelings towards this person. So what happened was, this person claimed that they were experienced and that they could do XYZ and had the experience to do some of those things and turns out that they actually could not. So, we were given misinformation. We were hiring them for this role for the expertise that they supposedly had.
So definitely a lot of learning lessons here. I would say our biggest learning lesson from this specific mistake was to check references. There really are no big shortcuts, follow procedure as we normally would. This is why we have procedures. That's why we have processes. It's why we have SOPs. If I'm ever feeling that a person may be a little under qualified and maybe not the right fit, I can always give them a test project, which we've done in the past with potential hires, to see what their qualifications really are. So, even with this mistake, many blessings did come from it. I learned about some of the gaps that we had in our hiring process. And it also brought me to my current team member that eventually replaced this person, who is an absolutely incredible team member and such a great fit for our team. They bring so much to the table. Again, every mistake you learn something, there is growth, there is opportunity, there are breakthroughs. So, that was mistake number one, bad hire on my part.
Don’t DIY For Too Long
Now, mistake number two is something that I did share a little bit about on social media and I'm definitely going to share more about today. This next mistake was one that happened pretty early on in the year. So, earlier in 2021 at the very beginning of the year. It's something that happened where, in that moment, I felt like my business was on fire again, like, went through the feels, feeling through the feelings, it’s gonna be okay. What happened was my Facebook ads account got completely shut down. I know that this is something that has happened to quite a few in the industry, and to this day, we still don't have any answer for why it happened. So you might be asking yourself, “Why Is this a mistake then? So Melissa, like, what's the mistake here? Facebook shut your ads account down, what was it that you didn’t do correctly?”.
So up until that point, I had been running either my own ads myself or internally, we had a team member doing it and had support internally, not necessarily bringing in someone from the outside who was an expert in that field. So up until then it was me, and I remember we didn't have an agency or somebody that could contact Facebook directly if anything like this happened. So basically we were locked out of our account forever and ever and ever. Hiring a Facebook ads manager was on my list to do in early 2021, and the universe was just telling me when this moment happened that I took too long to do so. Once this did happen, I knew very, very quickly what needed to happen and what needed to shift.
So if you've never used Facebook ads before, I will share a little bit with you here and actually it takes a bit of time for Facebook to learn your pixels and start to create patterns, and time for your audiences and different things like that. So, I had already spent quite a few months on that and really teaching or ads account certain things, and basically overnight, just like that, snap of your fingers, we lost all of the data and all of the patterns that our account was creating. Luckily for me, I mean, Facebook ads did not bring in my sole income, It was not a sole income generator for us. I have plenty of traction organically and I share so much of value on my Instagram, through my podcast, and in my free Facebook group. I have dozens of ways that we have leads coming in daily to our business. So It did not necessarily affect how the business was currently running back then. However, it did slow down our scalability and some of the projections we had for 2021.
So what was the mistake here for me? My mistake was not hiring an expert in this field early enough. So, you bet that I hired my Facebook ads manager who is my current Facebook ads manager, and we absolutely love her, right away when this happened earlier this year. It's taken us a few months to get my new account to a similar spot to where I was before my older account shut down, so it didn't affect me at that moment, no. However, it did affect some of my projections and caused us to make some pivots in the business that we weren't necessarily planning to make so early on in the year. So I would say that one big takeaway from that mistake for you, is to not try and DIY anything your business for too long. Even if it's running fairly well, even on autopilot, things still come up. There's always tech things. We had another tech issue, completely out of our hands, that happened with something last week in our business. Things still come up, challenges still come up.
Stick To Your Boundaries
So now it's time for mistake number three. The past year and a half, I've got to say, has been absolutely wild and not what any of us could have expected. I'm definitely one that thrives in routines and something that I noticed earlier in 2021 was that I had not been holding true to all of my boundaries very well. I started noticing that, my partner started to notice it as well, to be honest. I know, for example, I started to scroll a bit more while on the couch after work hours. I myself started noticing, I was going into email and my slack channel and my other social platforms more than once or twice per day. To help give you some background, if you're newer to my audience, that's a big boundary I try to stick to and one of those big boundaries is having certain times throughout the day where I go into these containers. So, for example, I go into my slack channel to support my clients normally two or three times per day. I don't normally have my slack channels open all day long and notifications coming in all day long. I noticed myself going in there closer to 5, 6, 7 times per day instead of my normal 2 or 3, which can definitely have an effect on efficiency with intentions and productivity at the end of the day. So, some of the other boundaries I was starting to not hold true to was self-care also. As a business owner and as an entrepreneur, one of the biggest things we get to create for ourselves are boundaries and I didn't stick to some of my boundaries for a little bit. It was about two or three weeks that I was falling out of my boundaries, before I caught myself and went back to holding better boundaries on my boundaries and being more strict around those, because at the end of the day, your boundaries really should be non-negotiables, or close to them. What I've learned from that mistake, those two to three weeks where I was kind of falling out of habit, was that it is so important to hold ourselves accountable. It's so important to have people in your life, whether it's a support system, a partner, family, business bestie, just somebody to hold you accountable to some of these things. All because boundaries are so, so important.
One of the reasons I actually wanted to share this specific mistake is because I feel like so many of us are so hard on ourselves when we fall out of habit or when we don't always hold true to some of the boundaries that we originally set in place, right? Sometimes we’re hard on ourselves and we don't always hold grace for ourselves and tend to give up completely. And that's not what I want you to do. I want you to get right back into it, start to lean back in, right?
So, for example, I had somebody ask me the other day, you know “Melissa, I haven’t posted on Instagram for 2 weeks. What do I do? How do I get back into it?”. Just start, simply start, and start to create the habit that you want to create. Something that I also shared quite often on my Instagram and other platforms is that I believe that boundaries are absolutely incredible and also necessary. Boundaries are set in place not to offend anybody, but to help protect your energy. So for example, when my energy is protected, I can serve better. When my energy is protected, I can better show up for my clients. I can better show up for my team, I can better show up for my audience, I can better show up for my relationships.
Something that you can ask yourself today is, “How well are you sticking to your boundaries?” And if we are not speaking to our boundaries very well, know that it's okay. And it's time to shift back into them and lean back into those boundaries. So if we need a habit tracker, or if we need a planner, if we need some Asana task to help hold you accountable to some of your boundaries with some habits as well, that I definitely, definitely recommend doing so.
So today, we touched on three of my mistakes so far in 2021, my learning experiences from them and some things I would have done earlier or differently and so much more. Thank you for hanging out with me today. I'm always going to be your biggest cheerleader, so you taking time out of your day to hang with me truly means the world to me. I'll see you next time.
Topics we cover include:
Feel Your Feelings
Everything Will Be Okay
Hiring Mistake
Don’t DIY For Too Long
Stick To Your Boundaries
And so much more!
Times to check out:
(8:13) Feel Your Feelings
(11:32) Everything Will Be Okay
(13:25) Hiring Mistake
(17:48) Don’t DIY For Too Long
(22:08) Stick To Your Boundaries
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