Small Business Mistakes I Made in 2021 PLUS Lessons Learned for 2022
I haven’t had a perfect financial or business year. But online, people rarely talk about their mistakes. In hopes of normalizing mistakes, I’m sharing the things that didn’t go according to plan in my business, plus some ways I’m finding meaning in these mistakes.
Setting Work-Life Boundaries
Setting and maintaining work-life boundaries is something that is a moving target for a small business owner. Having healthy boundaries where I can rely on regular work hours, time out of my inbox and the office, and having time to engage in hobbies and self-care is a must.
Mistake: Overscheduling myself. While I had good intentions for my out-of-office time at the start of the year, I slid back into overscheduling myself as the year went on.
Lesson Learned & Correction: No more nighttime speaking gigs. While I love public speaking and sharing my knowledge on the intersection of mental health and money with corporations, organizations, and groups, speaking after working a full day isn’t the best use of my energy. Moving forward, I’ll honor my 2022 nighttime speaking engagements but make it a practice to say “no” to evening speaking engagements moving forward.
Lesson Learned & Correction: I started 2021 by going through my calendar and setting up one out-of-office or “hooky day” per month. I had them rotating the day of the week because I thought that’d be a fun way to mix up my days off. Instead, my mid-week “hooky days” ended up getting scheduled. Instead, I’ll tweak this by planning my out-of-office day for Monday or Friday, which has historically been better for me to maintain my time off.
Lesson Learned & Correction: As I mentioned above, I love speaking about shame-free financial therapy, money mindset, and financial anxiety. Because of increased interest and realizing over the past year that I’d been underpricing my speaking services, I’ll be Increasing my speaking fee in 2022.
Lesson Learned & Correction: With so many of us working from home (or living from work, am I right?), setting up out-of-office boundaries is crucial. I put up an out-of-office email responder each weekend, letting clients know I’ll be reachable during the workweek. As a therapist, setting up out-of-office boundaries also models for clients the importance of stepping away from work and taking time off.
Shiny Object Syndrome
What is shiny object syndrome, you ask? Shiny object syndrome is when you get excited about something new--as a small business and private practice owner, this could be new technology, workflow, or training certificate--that you find intriguing and want to learn more about. However, as soon as you start chasing that exciting new thing, you learn of an even more fabulous new thing and lose interest in the last thing that had caught your attention. When this happens chronically, it can make you feel scattered and dysregulated. And as a business owner, it can look like taking a million small steps in many different directions instead of coordinating efforts toward one specific goal.
Mistake: Signing up for webinars or masterclasses claiming to teach me the “one new thing” I’ll need to streamline my business and help me earn more money while doing it. The problem? I’ve been to these “masterclasses” and know that the bulk of them are long sales pitches. I’m not opposed to selling; I am opposed to having my time wasted and feeling like I’m sitting through a timeshare pitch deck. Registering for these events wasted my time, energy, and effort and made me feel guilty for having “fallen” for these webinars again and again.
Lesson Learned & Correction: Wanting to learn something new isn’t a problem; chasing shiny objects is. I want to keep my 2022 goal at the forefront of my mind and lean on the women in my Mastermind community to help me stay accountable. And, if there is something I want to invest in my business, I’ll actually invest in it by hiring a person to help me out.
Falling Behind at Work
Falling behind at work happens. But as a small business owner, when you fall behind, you have to hold yourself accountable. There isn’t a supervisor or manager who will gently nudge you to get your work done.
Mistake: As a therapist, you have to write progress notes each time you have a session. In the “olden days,” I’d do my notes immediately after seeing a client, and if I got behind, I might be behind by a day or two of notes, rarely was I behind by more than 5-10 notes. Even rarer was me heading into the weekend with any administrative tasks hanging out in the “to do” column. This year, I allowed myself to get 64 notes behind.
Mistake: Holding onto a contractor for too long when it was clear they weren’t a fit. I needed help in my practice and waited until I was already behind at work to ask for help. When I brought someone on, because I wasn’t available to onboard them the way I wanted to, they couldn’t communicate with me that they needed more guidance. Therefore, they didn’t do the additional tasks I needed help with. Simultaneously, I was too busy to let them go and search for someone new, so I kept them on longer than I should have and ended up doing double the amount of work.
Lesson Learned & Correction: When I fall behind at work, I need to ask myself a few things: Am I overscheduled? On the edge of burning out? Is this work only I can do, or can my team help me out?
Lesson Learned & Correction: When you hire someone as a small business owner, you have to be crystal clear about the tasks you need help with and trust that they can do them. Get comfortable letting go of all of the control, plan for it to take a little time to get into a groove with your new team member, and if things are going well, enjoy! If they don’t correct after three different attempts to fix the problem, it’s probably a sign that they aren’t a good fit.
Launched Offer Mistakes
As a private practice therapist with a fully booked practice and a waitlist, I started consulting other therapists to help them grow sustainable and profitable businesses. I do this in a group coaching program, Grow a Profitable Practice From the Inside Out, and slowly added on other offers over time. I had a couple of launches this year that did not go according to plan.
Mistake: Setting a goal of welcoming in twelve new clients to Inside Out and calling in six. I was excited to offer my group coaching program and grow it that I set a goal to welcome 12 people into my group coaching program but ended up with six clients.
Mistake: Launched an offer for my Inside Out alums that didn’t get off the ground. I wanted a way to continue supporting my consulting clients in a sustainable way for me and supportive for them. I got an idea about what to do and launched a beta offer within days. It didn’t take.
Lesson Learned & Correction: Six aligned clients are so much better than twelve so-so clients. I don’t consider this launch an actual mistake; I wanted to share that some things don’t always go as planned.
Lesson Learned & Correction: Regarding my offer that didn’t get off the ground for my Inside Out alums, I’ve worked with therapists long enough to know that they need time to digest offers, sit with them, and think them through. Making an offer so quickly wasn’t in alignment with my client’s needs. This mistake happened because my energy got in the way of what was in the best interest of my clients. I will try to offer an alumni group in 2022, but I’ll give folks more time to decide if they’d want to work with me in a different capacity.
We will all make mistakes in business. From making unwise investments, undercharging, hiring the wrong person, mistakes will happen. Instead of sitting in the discomfort of a mistake, I invite you to think about what lesson you learned, how you’ll correct moving forward, and get comfortable knowing that mistakes are a part of the process.
Need more guidance?
I’m a financial therapist and consultant for other therapists. When it comes to mental health practitioners, I believe that financial self-care is a cornerstone of self-care. It took me four years to say goodbye to a “good social work job” when the red flags were there from the beginning. To that end, I’ve created a 1-hour workshop for therapists who are ready to take their private practices from “on the side,” to full time. In this workshop, my goal is to help you create the full-time private practice you’ve always wanted. We’ll cover the “how” of figuring out how much money you need to bring in, choosing and sticking to the best marketing strategy for you, and ways to reframe your cognitive distortions.
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As we get toward the end of the year, what I find happen in many spheres, but particularly in the personal finance shere and in the entrepreneurial world is this like humble brag time, and I am all about celebrating your wins, reviewing your numbers,= and seeing what worked, and championing all of the amazing things that have come your way over the course of the year. At the same time, if you are scrolling on social media, or listening to people's voices in your earbuds, ah, and you're feeling like, Oh, shoot, I wish I had that, or how come that didn't happen for me? Or I'm so behind, it can feel really discouraging and I wanted to share a little bit about kind of what's been going on in my world. Yes, my business and my numbers have been pretty good, but it doesn't mean that my business ran smoothly all year, and that everything was all rainbows and butterflies, and that I didn't make any mistakes. I'm a human, I make mistakes and I'm a small business owner and I will make mistakes in my small business. In today's episode, I just want to normalize the mistakes that I've made. And I'm only going to be sharing the mistakes from this year, not because there aren't more impactful mistakes that I've made in my business, but because I want to show you that so much can happen in a year and we can also honor more than one thing. We can honor the fact that we've messed up and we can also honor the fact that we can move toward change or let things go that are not serving us. So welcome to my not highlight reel. I don't want to say a lowlight reel because that sounds like so Debbie Downer. But just like my human real, yeah? We'll go with that.
Alright, so let's take a quick glance of things in my business that did not go according to plan. To set the stage here. I started out 2021 with three words that I would run my decisions through before I said yes, when it came to my business. I wanted to make sure things were simple, easy, and in alignment and like many, I don't do New Year's resolutions, but I do annual goal planning for my business. So like many goals, you have all of this energy and motivation behind them at the start of the year and as time goes on those things kind of just like slip through your fingers a little bit or you start letting those boundaries down and no surprise, that's what happened to me. I shared with you all that last year, when I was reviewing my numbers, I realized I only took off eight days because it was one of those things where it was high pandemic times, I was working from home and I couldn't--we couldn't really do much. We didn't feel like it was a smart community decision to be out and about doing things in the community. So it was very, like isolating at home and, and the response for me was like, Well, I'm not doing anything else, I might as well work. So I made a rule for myself to build in time off by taking off at least one work day a month that was not related to like vacation, it was just solely to build in restorative self care and it could mean that I slept in and like went for a walk and read a book or it could be that I like went grocery shopping on that day. But the idea was just nothing work related. And at the start of 2021. I went through my planner or my calendar rather. And I booked off all of these days and I blocked them off my calendar and it sort of worked. I would say it was like a half win. I did it for about half the year and then like many things I just started letting things creep in. I was like, Well, I can see this one client or I can say yes to being on this one podcast, even though it's my day off, and then of course then I just started ignoring those big Out of Offices on my calendar. So note to self, I am a human and I did not uphold those boundaries. But on the on the plus side, I guess I will say I did take more time off in general. I haven't yet tallied it up. I'll do my Mind Money Balance by the numbers podcast, or email soon, I'm sure and I'll share those numbers, but I definitely took more than eight days off this year.
So along with that out of office day that I had set up for myself the other thing that started slipping around my boundaries was like a soft boundary. I'd I kind of told myself, but I didn't put it in writing, nor did I get accountability from others that I didn't want to work nights and weekends. And to be clear, I don't really work nights and weekends, I have my clients schedule and my consulting schedule that I definitely stick to, but every now and then there would be a speaking engagement that happened at seven o'clock at night or eight o'clock at night, or on a Sunday morning and it was like, Oh, they were things I really wanted to do and I really liked the cause. And so I started saying, yes, but like, I'm recording this on Thursday, the 18th of November, and Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I all had things in the evening, which means that here I am coming up on Thursday, which is my self care popcorn Bravo Night if you know me, you know and also you know, I'm watching Below Deck right now because, woo--it's good. Oh, and so is Salt Lake; Real Housewives of Salt Lake is not messing around. If you're not in the Bravo universe, can you can hit pause right now. Go binge Salt Lake City, and then come back. I will be here and I will be and then you can DM me and tell me what you thought about it. Woo--I digress. What was I talking about.. Salt Lake City rewind popcorn up. Okay, here we are.
So here I am on Thursday night, which is supposed to be my put my feet up night and watch TV night (and it still will be, you better believe) but what has happened is that I basically ended up working from like 9am to 9pm, three days in a row, which is the exact opposite reason of why I am in practice and in business for myself, because I don't want to be working 50-60 hours a week. I'd like working intentionally in a smaller amount, so I can actually be out of office at the evening time, because that's not really when I'm my best energetic self from a work standpoint. So anyway, I started saying yes to nights and weekends. And now here we are those like, oh, it's no big deal, I'll say yes to these things has happened. And now I've like worked, you know, 36 hours and three days, which is not good, that is not good.
Other mistakes, um, admin, wow, I--if you don't know, as a therapist, as a healthcare provider, you have to take notes of what's going on with your clients or your patients. That's kind of a part of the deal. You have to take notes on what's going on. And when I first started out in private practice, I would do my notes, immediately after seeing my clients, so I like to kind of work in these--I like to see three clients in a row, take a lunch break, and then see one or two clients, depending on my energy levels. And what I used to do with see three clients, do my notes, eat, see one or two client, do my notes, go home. So I would always get my notes done that same day. Maybe occasionally, I'd get behind by a day or two. But my energy levels, I don't know if y'all remember back in like late spring, early summer, my energy was just like, totally zapped, which makes perfect sense. That was like coming--it was what 13-14 months into the pandemic, right? Like, it makes sense that our energy was zapped, like all of us. That's the other thing! I think we keep forgetting that we're still in a pandemic and yes, I'm so honored and thankful that we live in a place where we have access to vaccines to help slow the spread and mitigate the, you know, rampant-ness of what's happening, and we were all still working through it, or most of us were still working through it. So of course I hit a wall after going through a year of that, just like most of us did. But anyway, so I hit a wall that was around the time that I took time off of Instagram because I was getting burnt out on that platform. And y'all like I said, I was usually on top of my notes. Maybe I got 2-5-6 notes behind almost always under double digits. So like I really don't like getting behind my notes at that point in time. I can't believe I'm going to tell you I was 64 notes behind, sixty-four. That is not practicing self care. That is being months, in my world, behind on my progress notes. Not okay. Not appropriate. Not good for my brain. So wow, that was not a win. That was definitely not a win.
Another not a win is that well, I guess I don't know if it's not a win or its mistake. I don't know what you want to call it, but I run this small group coaching program called Grow a Profitable Practice From The Inside Out, and this year, I ran it two and a half times, because I started a cohort at the tail end of 2020. I essentially I'll end up running it twice a year and each time, I basically have space for 10 or 12 people. Like that's the amount of people that I feel like I can comfortably hold space for and in this last round, I was like, Okay, I'm setting a goal of calling in 12 aligned clients who are ready to work on their money mindset, to set a sustainable fee for their practice to work on their niche statement, etc, etc, etc, I'm gonna get twice 12 clients, and I got half of that, I got six. And I don't know that that's a mistake. It's just more of a Hello, this is reality, things don't always go according to plan. And in that same vein of like a business mistake, I did a launch that didn't go anywhere. I was--it was like fall-ish. And I was like, really missing my inside out alums. I was watching what they were doing. And I knew that some of them had questions about what's next, or needing some reassurance on what was going on in their practices. And so I sent out a survey that was essentially like, hey, what do you need? How can I help, I want to be helpful. And also, I have to make it be sustainable for my end as well. So I got super excited, I got these great responses from people, I felt really comfortable and confident that I could offer some sort of alumni session or group and offer it at a low enough cost for folks to make it worthwhile on their time and also be enough money for me to feel like I was able to show up appropriately for them. And I was really excited about it. Because again, this survey was like, Yes, this is what we want give this to us. And spoiler alert, it didn't go anywhere. I made the ask I invited them in and I didn't get enough people to make it work. So unfortunately, my inside out alumni group just didn't get off the ground. And to be totally honest, I really, really want that group to work because it has been such a gift. Watching these folks who are out there in the world doing really interesting things with their mental health practices and allied profession practices. And I wanted to be able to make sure that it wasn't just okay, you get some tips Away you go, which, by the way, like to pat myself on my back, it is not just like, get some tips, you're out on your ass kind of a thing. But anyway, I wanted them to have the capacity to come back to me in a more financially sustainable way. Because if they want to work with me one-on-one, it's expensive to hire me for coaching, relatively speaking, I charge at the time of this recording $356 for one on one coaching per session, and I know that that might not be fully accessible to everybody. So I wanted to offer alums an offer that was more financially sustainable for them and I knew I could do it if I had a group, but it just didn't happen, right, and it's not the end of the world. In the olden days, I would have just been thrashing if I made a an offer that didn't go anywhere, but this time around, I looked at it and I was like, You know what, some folks told me they wanted it, some people told me it was a timing issue, and also it was my excitement and my energy that got in the way. I didn't probably sit and spend enough time making sure that the timing in the way that I wanted to deliver that offer worked for them. So if you're an inside out alumn, maybe keep your eyes open or let me know, let me know what you want or what you don't want.
Anyway, um, what are the mistakes I make this year? Woo--Oh, here's a good one. Shiny Object Syndrome. I track my data. I know what I'm doing. I know where my clients are coming from. I know where they're not coming from. I know where my energy is best spent and yet, I'm a human and I'm susceptible to marketing because that's what marketing does. It says, Hey, you need this thing. Let me help you out. I swear, y'all. I am so sick of going to webinars or master classes that are essentially, Here's why I'm an amazing person. Here's one tip, here's how you can work with me... but I did it. I did it this year I kept signing up not kept. I don't know how many I went to, maybe five, but that was five too many. I went to these things where I knew, I knew there would be nothing in them. I knew there would be fluff, but there was something so enticing about their message that I just couldn't help myself and I had to say yes to (I'm making these things up, I don't want to throw anyone under the bus) How to grow on YouTube in 30 days or something you know, silly like that. Again, that's not real, I just made that up. But we're human, right? And when you're a small business owner and you're having, you know, your feelings about a growth edge, or an area where you want to move into and somebody says, Hey, I've got a solution for you, of course, you want to learn about it, right? Like, I think that's human nature. But unfortunately, I ended up signing up for those things, and then kicking myself for carving time out of my day, only to basically be fed like somebody's autobiography, which was irritating.
Okay, so going back to this idea of like, not upholding my out of office boundaries, saying yes to working nights and weekends, not taking off those out of office days that I told myself, I would and being 64 notes behind, probably no surprise, I was doing too much shit, right? I just was and I needed some help in my business. And I needed some help with the things that I knew I could safely outsource that wouldn't impact my clients experience with me, right? So I looked for a contractor who could help me out with things like repurposing my content. So for example, taking tips from this podcast (meta), and repurposing it over on Instagram or on Pinterest, right. But the problem was, I was so busy that I didn't really have enough time to properly onboard a person and also, the person who I had come in, wasn't super assertive at saying they needed additional help. So instead of saying, Hey, I need clearer communication, that particular task wasn't clear to me, they just didn't do the work, and because I was so busy, I didn't have the capacity to let them go and bring somebody else on. So I wasted a lot of time and energy like basically double working, because I thought things were getting done that weren't getting done so that I was scrambling to do them at the last minute. And so now I have an amazing person on my team. They've been with me since the end of June, and they've been helping me out if you've been following me on Pinterest or Instagram, she's been doing all of those graphics and repurposing my emails into posts over there and making the email newsletters, so beautiful and easy to read. And it's just lovely. And just when you find a person to who can come onto your team, and is a good fit, it makes all the difference. But I was in that headspace of like I don't have time to hire the right person. So I just won't hire the right person, which then just like, added on to the chaos of what was going on in my world.
So those were those are some good mistakes. Yeah, those--that's what happens here. We make mistakes in business, we make money mistakes in business, I very well probably lost money on some of the things that I shared with you, I definitely lost time and energy and it's okay. If we can offer ourselves some compassion for being human, for making mistakes, for succumbing to marketing, and just holding a little bit of space for the human side of business, it makes such a huge difference. So I have a few things that I think I'm taking away from this year, when it comes to the things that did not go according to plan, and really trying to put them out in the universe, use my mastermind group who you all heard on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, to help hold me accountable, but I really want to get better at carving out this space for work life boundaries and work life separation. I love to having that one day a month out of office, but what I tried to do was rotate it last year. So I tried to do it on a Monday in January, Tuesday in February, Wednesday in March, etc, etc. So I had like different days off. But I realized that taking a day off in the middle of the week just isn't really conducive. So revisiting that out of office one day a month, on a Monday or a Friday, so it becomes a little bit more spaciousness and I can have a longer weekend. I have to start saying no to nighttime gigs and evening gigs if I've already committed to them. Obviously, I will honor them, but moving forward I just know that that's not the best use of my energy. Additionally, I have to raise my speaking fee. As a therapist and private practice. I didn't know how much to charge for public speaking and so I just kind of made it up and then after having done it for a long time, but especially this year, I feel like I had so many great opportunities to talk to colleges, healthcare systems, and financial advisors about the intersections of mental health and money and giving people actionable steps and tools and knowing that I really like it. I'm good at it. That's where my energy comes alive. That is really where I shine and instead of pretending that it's just like something I do on the side, I really want to step into, I'm a public speaker, and I talk about the intersection between our mental and emotional wellness and money. And so therefore, my speaking fee is going up in January of 2022. It just, it has to do and what else I think I think those are good, good lessons.
Um, yeah, so I hope I hope that was helpful. I know it wasn't like super tip heavy, but I hope that it helped you to see that you might see me on Instagram, you might listen to my podcast, you might not be on my email list and be thinking, Gosh, Lindsey really has it all together. She's this money person. She's this money mindset person. I bet she does everything so intentionally. And the reality is, I try but I don't always get it and I won't always get it. So I thank you for letting me share with you kind of what went on behind the scenes and I hope that you learned a bit more about the benefits of setting up those work life boundaries, adhering to them knowing that money mistakes happen, practicing some out of office stuff, and the reality that we all experienced shiny object syndrome. But if we can come back to a why, if we can come back to our missions, if we can come back to our values, whether you've made a financial mistake or a business mistake, it will help redirect you much more quickly and without all of that shame and despair that can come along with making mistakes. See you next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai