Happy New Year, everyone! This is an exciting time of year for any business owner because it’s a season of learning and moving forward. It’s always fun to look back at where you came from or where you started, but it’s even better if you can use that time to learn about your next steps.
At the beginning of every year I like to ask myself 3 questions:
- What went well last year?
- What didn’t go well last year?
- What caused things to not go well- what barriers did we come up against and how do we avoid those moving forward?
For us, the thing that went well was doubling our numbers from 2018. The thing that didn’t go so well was losing a lot of customers that were not in our target market in the first place. I’m going to talk more about that in a second part, but for now let’s talk about how you might be answering those last two questions.
In 2019 I saw a LOT of business owners, specifically newer or smaller business owners, trying and failing to really get their brand off the ground. I can’t speak for every case, but what I noticed was that a lot of people were working extremely hard trying to build off a business model that helped someone else’s business instead of their own. Examples of this might be drop shipping or affiliate marketing or MLMS. These business models have people selling products that they don’t own to a market of people they worked hard to acquire.
Here’s the problem with that: you don’t own any part of that business model. If the product you’re selling was gone tomorrow, you would be left with little to nothing.
I call these “short cut business models” because they may seem lucrative at first, but after awhile the money stops coming in, you hit a wall, your customer base dries up. If you are in a situation like this, I would tell you to change your model and do it sooner than later. 2020 is the year to find a business model that actually works.
If you want more information about the business model I used to build my first business, you can tune into our live training next Tuesday, January 7. I’m going to be showing you the actual business model I used as the foundation for my business, as well as how to pick the perfect niche, how to create a product, name that product, price that product and more. It’s definitely worth your time and I’d love to see you over there. If you want more info on that, visit samcart.com/2020.
There’s still another part of this conversation- that’ll be coming up soon. I want to share what I learned when I asked myself the three questions I gave you at the beginning of the podcast. Keep an eye out for that and I’ll see you all soon.
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It’s one of the biggest mistakes that I see people making, and especially in 2019. I don’t know what happened in 2019, but all of a sudden everyone got incredibly excited over business models that build someone else’s business, not yours.
Speaker 1: Hey everybody. What’s going on? It is January 1, 2020. It’s kind of hard to even say that out loud. Can’t believe it’s a new decade. It’s absolutely crazy. I was hanging out at a friend’s house last night. Actually, our next door neighbor had a big party, and everyone was asking where we were 10 years ago to the day. It’s kind of nuts. I don’t know about you guys. Where were you 10 years ago, on January 1 or December 31, 2009 or 2010? New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, whatever it was? Where were you 10 years ago?
Speaker 1: I know for me at least, I had just gotten married two, three months prior. We got married Halloween 2009, nine months after graduating college. I had no kids. Now we have three kids. Had no business. I think I just started my first website, [inaudible 00:01:15] dot com. I started it kind of on the weekends. I had a full time job here in the DC area. Had no idea what I was doing online. It’s crazy what a decade can do.
Speaker 1: And I forget what the saying is, but it proved so true that we underestimate or overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can do in a decade. And I remember back then thinking, “It’s 2009. I’m going to start this business in the first year. I’m going to do $1 million bucks,” or whatever it was. And it took me a number of years to get there. But here we are 10 years later and I’ve shattered everything I could’ve expected or could have ever dreamed for back then. So it’s a fun exercise to think about where you were 10 years ago.
Speaker 1: But if you guys saw either the email or the Facebook Messenger post we put out there this morning, or if you saw the Facebook video, you should go check that out if you haven’t yet. It’s over on the SamCart fan page. I think it’s just facebook.com/samcartapp or SamCart. I forget the URL, but you can just search it. You’ll find it. But I go over the three questions that I like to ask myself every New Year’s Day, and that’s, “What went well in the last year?” “What went wrong or what didn’t go well?” And then, “How can I avoid the things that got in my way, that caused the things that went wrong to go wrong.”
Speaker 1: So for us, what went well, SamCart grew faster than it ever has. 2018 was our best year since we launched in 2014. In 2019, we almost doubled what we did in 2018. And one of the big things that went well was we figured out a couple new paid marketing strategies that really, really worked to help us take our spend up to, I think on average, in 2019, we averaged spending over $10,000 a day on paid traffic, which is huge, especially as a bootstrapped, unfunded startup, to be able to afford that amount of traffic to SamCart’s site and get people to sign up. We have a couple different marketing campaigns. We sell or send people through some free trial campaigns, some demo campaigns, our webinar. You guys have probably seen a bunch of those, but those worked tremendously well, and that’s why SamCart has grown, grew faster in 2019 than it has grown any year since we started.
Speaker 1: What went wrong was that with all that growth came a lot of churn, or refunds, or cancels, whatever you want to call it. More people than I wanted to canceled their account. We brought in the wrong type of people on the front end, and that’s something that we’re going to fix this year. So what could I have done to avoid it? That’s the million dollar question. That’s always what people … I don’t know about you guys, but I sit down and I make new goals for the new year, and everything’s kind of looking forward, and you forget to look back. And not just look back on what went wrong, which isn’t really fun to think about, but to look at, “Why did those things go wrong?” That’s for me where some of the biggest impacts, moving forward, those help me steer the ship in the right direction for the new year.
Speaker 1: So that’s me. So what are the answers to those questions for you? What went well in 2019? What didn’t go well? And then why? Why didn’t things go well? What obstacles got in your way, and how can you avoid them? And if you’re on the beginner side, and I know the audience on this podcast is mixed between there’s some people that are on the beginner side, haven’t hit that $100,000 a year level yet, which is kind of my benchmark for what would usually make somebody full time. Obviously you don’t have to hit that level, but it’s a good benchmark to hit. And then there’s a lot of people that listen that are doing multiple millions of dollars a year.
Speaker 1: So for you folks that are already at that level, ignore this next section, but for those of you that are getting started, one of the biggest things that I see, either looking on Facebook comments in our Facebook group, or the people that we talk to at events, or the customers that we talk to inside of SamCart-
Speaker 1: I don’t know what happened in 2019, but all of a sudden everyone got incredibly excited over business models that build someone else’s business, not yours, whether it’s drop shipping, or affiliate marketing, or MLMs. Obviously those things have been around for a while, but they kind of had a resurgence in 2019, and not that those things are wrong, like I’ve made plenty of money as an affiliate, but I made monies in affiliate recommending someone else’s product to an audience that I already built, that I owned. My email list, my Facebook Messenger list, my customer list. I didn’t start a business just making money selling other people’s stuff, and that’s what you’re doing. If you’re drop shipping, you don’t really own anything. If you’re an affiliate marketer, if you’re in an MLM or network marketing company, you don’t really own anything.
Speaker 1: So I would, if someone was just starting out and they weren’t dead set on something, and they had good reasons to go into one of those three business models, I would, with everything I have, recommend against those. And you can always go back and do those later. It would be easy for me to get into drop shipping now. I could go drop ship. You know, if I want to get into physical product business, we have a whole audience of folks that I have been able to build and build a relationship with because I have my own products that now I could go drop ship someone else’s product to them and probably make decent money at it.
Speaker 1: But in the end, you’re not building your own brand. And that’s why I see all of these, I call them shortcut business models, that it’s the fastest way to get up and running. “Look, just start drop shipping. Someone else already made the product. They already did everything. All the infrastructure’s done. All you got to do is start sending traffic to it.” That’s a shortcut, and shortcuts usually aren’t good. They usually don’t pan out.
Speaker 1: And one of the worst side effects for these business models that I see is they are far too easy to quit. If you’re drop shipping, if you’re selling someone else’s product as an affiliate, if you’re in an MLM, you have no reason to keep going forward when things get hard. There’s no reason. You don’t have a brand. You don’t own the brand that you’re quitting on. So if you’re in Mary Kay and you’re selling makeup, and all of a sudden it’s getting old and you’re not doing very good at it, and you don’t care if you quitting makes Mary Kay look bad. If all the friends you’ve talked to a year from now, they catch up with you and you’re like, “Yeah, I’m not really doing that anymore,” it doesn’t make you look bad. It makes Mary Kay look bad, and what do you care? It’s not your brand.
Speaker 1: But what if I just up and quit on SamCart? That’s a brand that I own. It makes me look bad because I own the brand. That is my business. So I have every reason not to quit. And in the beginning stages, the first couple weeks, months, years sometimes, that can mean all the difference. That day where you feel like quitting and you decide not to, that’s usually when things start to turn around.
Speaker 1: So anyway, if looking back on 2019, if you didn’t reach your goal of being a full time entrepreneur, or your business really starting to take root and get off the ground, and you’re trying to make one of those business models work, my recommendation to you would be change your business model. You need an actual plan, an actual business model that works, that builds an asset for you that you can then do what you want with. So if some idea, some product doesn’t work, you own the assets that you’ve worked so hard to build, the brand that you’ve worked so hard to build. You can then kind of parlay that into something else that might be more productive.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that we’re doing, you guys probably saw in the email we sent out today, is next Tuesday, January 7, we’re going to do a big live training where I’m actually going to explain the business model that I got started with in 2009, 10 years ago. The business model that I found that was the base, the foundation of everything I built over the last 10 years. The exact business model, how the business model works, how to pick the perfect niche, how to create a product in just a couple of days, how to title your product so that someone actually buys it, the perfect price for that product, how to make the product look better than your competitors. How to avoid these multi-step marketing funnels or big, long three hour webinars that you have to put together and have to be perfect before you launch. How to get traffic, and on and on and on.
Speaker 1: I’m going to cover my top 10 secrets that got me to my first $100K in sales, and that was in late 2010 into 2011 is when I crossed that mark, and I’m going to show you the exact business model that I did that with. It’s very common, but a lot of times now these days it’s overlooked, and a lot of people, I don’t know whether they get bored with it or whatever it is, but things that aren’t as sustainable, like drop shipping, affiliate marketing, getting into network marketing, these shortcut business models are kind of flash in the pan, that some people, you see them make a lot of money and all of a sudden they’re gone.
Speaker 1: Folks that dial in and commit to the business model that I’m going to explain next Tuesday, those are the folks that are still around, or they’re folks like me that used that business model in the beginning to make their first $100K or the first million bucks online to build a real brand, and that they own that brand, they own that audience, and they were able to parlay that into something else, the same way I parlayed that into SamCart. I took that first business that I had built where I positioned myself as an expert around a niche that I loved and I was passionate about, and turned it into a real business, and then wanted to build something else. Took that audience, that business, the brand that I built and use that to launch a software company five years ago in 2014, that now is probably one of the most respected in our world of e-commerce when it comes to a piece of software that you can trust to actually run your business on.
Speaker 1: So this is what started everything for me. So if you’re still in that beginning stage, go over to … I’m going to set up a URL right after this. Just go to samcart.com/2020, and I’ll redirect you guys over either right into our ManyChat, Facebook Messenger. Follow up and I’ll get you on the early bird list or I’ll send you right over to the Facebook video, where if you guys see that on Facebook, all you have to do is comment on that video, and you’ll be put on the early bird list. You’ll get a link as soon as that training is live next Tuesday. It’s only going to be available on Tuesday for 24 hours completely free. It’s not some big pitch fest. It’s not some three hour webinar that’s no content. It is … I think it’s like 28 minutes or 29 minutes of nothing but me covering the exact 10 steps that I used to make my first $100K and then that turned into tens of millions of dollars in sales. Very, very simple business model that anybody can do. All you have to have is a little bit of knowledge and something that you’re really passionate about and those are two things that almost everybody has.
Speaker 1: So anyway, that’s the scoop. I’m going to do a kind of a part two to this podcast that it’s going to cover my two biggest takeaways that I sort of realized when I did the little exercise I talked to you guys in the beginning. “What went well, what went wrong, and how do I avoid the things that went wrong?” Those three questions that I do every year. Question three: “How do I avoid what went wrong last year?” Our problem with we weren’t getting the right people in the door, and those people just weren’t sticking. They weren’t actually using SamCart. They were kind of just leaving their account blank and then canceling later on. “How do I avoid those?” Were the two biggest takeaways for me in 2019. I’ll cover those in part two, which hopefully I can record tomorrow or the next day, but they were huge takeaways, that we’re going to make massive shifts in 2020 because of these two takeaways. We’ve already started them, but I think you guys will really like those. A lot of people are making these two same mistakes that I made almost the entire year last year. Wish I wouldn’t have, but hey, it’s a new year and we can kind of reset.
Speaker 1: So that’s all I got. Go over to samcart.com/2020 if you want to get that training next week. And again, really only for folks that aren’t at that six figure mark. If you guys are at that mark, ignore that URL unless you want to go check it out just for the heck of it. Why not? Anyway, I hope you guys had an awesome new year. I hope everybody stayed safe, had a lot of fun, and I’ll talk to you guys later.
Speaker 1: If you’re looking for an easy way to launch your business online and start making sales or a simple way to get fast cash out of your already established business, then check out how I’m making $1,729 per day with a simple one page website, I break it all down over at 1pagefunnel.com. That’s the number 1pagefunnel.com. [/expand]
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