The Hayley Lloyd Show

3 Things You Need To Build A Stable & Unfxckwithable Business

• Hayley Lloyd • Season 3 • Episode 62

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Could your business weather any storm? Irregardless of what is going on in the market & the world?

In this episode, we explore the 3 things you need to MASTER to develop a fully stable business that can provide for you for years to come.

A robust product suite, effective marketing strategies, and inner resilience. 

Tune in for valuable tips that can help you achieve a grounded and calm sense of stability in your business.

If you’re ready to start attracting clients that are READY to move, say yes & work with you (without the money objections) 

This is exactly what you'll learn to do inside of The House Of Authority

This is a 6 month mastermind designed to help you expand your Authority, elevate your messaging & attract high ticket clients

Earlybird is now open to start in September. If you join in August, you get access:

  • Immediate access to the coaching & content (including content to cash, brand-thority & programs that sells)
  • $1000 OFF to the 
  • Private 1:1 Content Elevation Strategy Call (valued $1500+)

Read more here: https://hayleyjunelloyd.notion.site/Your-Invite-The-House-Of-Authority-Mastermind-db0fcc06190644c0bd97fef692a106c7

Apply here: https://forms.clickup.com/6918926/f/6k4re-7661/Q83JU3LSIY8D3TYHG4

Speaker 1:

Hello everyone, welcome to this podcast episode. Today, I wanna go into how to actually start to find stability in your business. With all of the changes that are happening in the online space whether that is the changes in marketing, the changes in buyer's behavior or the changes just in the algorithm that seem to be pretty constant these days a resounding thing that I have heard people talk about is stability. How do I find stability in my business even when the world is going through something? How do I ensure that my business is set up to succeed and create money even if things are shifting and changing? And there are three things that I believe that you need in order to create real stability in your business, and, of course, these things could be up to debate whether everyone agrees with them, but from my experience, these three things really help to create stability, and without one of them, the rest of them kind of fall over. So we're going to talk through all of them. I would say that one in particular is the most important, so I'm going to spend the most amount of time talking about that. The second two are a little bit more strategic, so I'll leave those till the end, because I know that you guys love the strategic stuff as well. And, by the way, if you hear construction noises, someone is tearing down their house directly next to my studio. Oh my God, so much fun. And yeah, it's very loud and it's literally shaking the entire building. So, just in case that happens, that is where that noise is coming from.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so if you have ever felt like business can be unstable like month to month, you don't know what is going on and you start to feel like this bubbling of feeling of like am I ever going to be able to make this work for me, am I ever going to be able to make this easy, even if you're making a lot of money and you know I think this is the interesting part is like this isn't a problem that beginners just have. Like it can be feeling maybe a little bit more rife at the beginning, in the first like one or two years, but like this is something that even people that have made seven figures, multi seven figures they still deal with, because there is this consistent drive to find a harmonious balance with what you want to do and creating stability as well and also making your money work harder for you. Oh, I can already see that this is going to go off in about seven different directions, but it's okay, we'll go with it. That's ADHD for you, but we know that we're going to get some good things in here. So if you have any of those thoughts, then the likelihood is maybe you haven't set up your business for stability, you haven't even thought about it, or it's just something that oh, we just got a sale. Who knows what that was for, but exciting times anyway. So if you have had any of those thoughts, we really need to go back to the basics of what really creates stability.

Speaker 1:

So stability is created in two places. It is, first of all, created in your body. It is created in your being and how you are feeling. If you are dysregulated in your body, there is no way that you can have a stable foundation, even if what is around you is stable. And the second part of stability is the outer stability. It's the foundations that we grow on.

Speaker 1:

If you think about a house, stability in a house is literally the concrete that it's laid on. It's all of the foundations underneath the house that create the stability for the rest of the house to be built on, and so we need both of these aspects in order to create stability. One without the other it really doesn't work, because it's the masculine and feminine. If you have the feminine stability but you don't have the masculine structure, then the feminine is going to be trying to weave around something that isn't very strong and can't hold it, and vice versa. If you have the masculine structure but you don't have the feminine flow, then there's going to be nothing to be able to utilize this stability that you've created tangibly because there's so much going on in the energetic field of the feminine. You've created tangibly because there's so much going on in the energetic field of the feminine. So we need both of these aspects.

Speaker 1:

So the first part of creating stability is that more feminine aspect. It's how you feel about yourself, and this is a huge part in business. You guys have heard me talk about this a lot when I talk about inner authority. Your inner authority is your ability to create stability within yourself, and my assumption is if you have the thought of like, how can I make this more stable? It's because you're potentially looking for stability in the wrong places. So you are looking for stability in a program that you're invested in, in a coach, in a strategy. You're looking for stability outside of yourselves and you're trying to try all of these different ways to find stability. If I just try this, this will be the thing that makes me stable. If I just try this, this will be the thing you know. It's in resources, it's consuming, it's in the way that someone tells you what to do, or the people that are around you.

Speaker 1:

And when we outsource that sense of stability, it means that we aren't creating it inside ourselves. We are continuously locked onto someone else for their stability, for other people to basically ground us, which isn't a sustainable way of building a business when you are the person that has to be steady and have to steady the ship for the entire business. So we need to be able to first of all, steady within ourselves without actually asking anyone else for support. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't lean on mentors, but it means that we don't depend on mentors. We come into mentors to help and alleviate, not depend on, and a lot of the stability factors that I've seen when people lack stability in themselves is because they are consistently putting their stability on someone else and they're being like this person.

Speaker 1:

When I'm around this person, it makes me feel stable. Or, as long as I have this coach, then I know that I'll be stable, or something like that. I need this strategy and I need to go forward, and it creates a stability that is outside of yourself, when really you need to take responsibility and bring back that power. You know you're outsourcing it. You're making that decision yourself to give it to someone else. You need to take that responsibility back and bring it in yourself. When you have stability inside of yourself, it means that you are unwavering.

Speaker 1:

When you don't have stability inside of yourself, you'll often experience more self-doubt. So that means that if, from month to month, things go up and down which they do that is just a natural part of business. Things will go like this. It is so, so rare for things just to go up and up and up, and I know that there is a lot of dialogues in the online space about just like strength to strength to strength. But just remember that people are only sharing you the highlight reel of what is really going on behind the scenes. Business growth in every single industry is much more up down, up, down, up down. So the one thing that we want to get to is so that it's less up down, up down. Up off a cliff, up off a cliff, and more just like gradual up down, but like gradually going up as well.

Speaker 1:

And the way that we can really do that is by trying to navigate these ups and downs within ourselves and create resilience that when the downs inevitably happen, when we don't make as much money one month, when our income dips, when something happens in our family and we need to take a step back, when we go on a holiday and it takes us a while to come back online, whatever the situation, you give yourself space to do that and you don't make it mean anything about you, because if you have consistently put your marker of success of I need to be performing and everything needs to be going up in order for me to feel worthy, in order for me to consistently feel like I'm doing well, it means that when the inevitable down comes, you will feel like you're crumbling and it will create so much self-doubt which stability cannot be built on self-doubt. It just can't. If you are consistently looking for evidence of why you aren't capable and if one low month or a down month which is going to happen makes you question everything, no stability on the inside can be built from that place. You need to be able to expand your ability to hold those periods when shit comes up. You know, I typically go through a cyclical nature and I was talking to a friend of mine about this recently where, especially as women, we are much more cyclical in nature.

Speaker 1:

We have cycles and we go through seasons and it's very normal in business sometimes, especially when you are the business owner, for a woman to sometimes have a few months where you're just like I'm just not feeling it, and so my seasons of being on and really like firing into the business are usually from like September to like January or February, and I think it's because my birthday is December and so around that time I'm in my Sagittarius energy and I'm just so excited and I just have so much energy. But in the other part of the year like this isn't a definitive statement by any means, but I just feel like it's more like hibernation way of doing things where, like I'm not pushing as hard and that's normal. So it means that usually my cash months are way higher in the months where I'm like really, really on and firing on all cylinders, whereas the times where I'm not, they can be a little bit lower. That doesn't mean anything's wrong, you know, and there may be a season where that completely reverts and that will be the season then. But it doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 1:

I don't doubt myself and think, oh my God, I'm a terrible business owner because this happened and because, you know, my results have dipped or whatever. It's all within myself that I just trust that I am always enough. I'm a good business owner, I can always pick it back up and I trust myself to have the resilience to get back up and overcome that doubt up and I trust myself to have the resilience to get back up and overcome that doubt. And that gives me a huge sense of stability because I know that, irregardless of my income, irregardless of my output, irregardless of what is going on in my life, I don't doubt that I can make this work, because my belief in myself to make this work isn't dependent on anything outside of myself, it's not dependent on a result, it's not dependent on the amount of money that I'm making. My belief is within me that I can always make it work, is not attached to anything else. So that creates a level of stability, so that then, when inevitable life stuff happens, or even within the business stuff happens, like client stuff happens. You get feedback.

Speaker 1:

One of your posts gets some negative comments. Something happens personally and it puts you in a state of I just need to be able to deal with this right now. Like, the amount of polarity that we need to be able to hold in business is huge. You could be having a huge cash day and simultaneously be dealing with something really, really difficult in your family or navigating an argument with your partner. One doesn't cancel out the other. We need to be able to have space to hold both, and if you can't hold both, if you feel like you're crumbling every single time that something happens, it's going to always create a lack of stability.

Speaker 1:

As a question to you, how can you feel stable if, in the moments where it feels things aren't going well, you question everything? How are you ever going to create stability there? It's really hard. It's really hard, and so this is just an awareness piece of like, what's your baseline of stability and trust in yourself that you can always bring this up, no matter what is happening outside of yourself. As business owners, we need to be able to deal with a huge amount of pressure, responsibility, and we need to be able to hold that, no matter what is going on and there are some days where it feels like a lot. And you'll go through this journey, whatever level that you're at, and experience new level, new devil. You'll get to a different income level or a different capacity of people in your containers and experience different problems. It's a new energetic ceiling and it may bring up old fears and discomfort that you haven't experienced before and it all kind of feels like a little bit icky and you may have a couple of days where you're like, can I really do this?

Speaker 1:

Like I had a client experience, you know, not too long ago that there was something, it was a theme that was coming up, and in other areas of my life too, and for about a weekend I was just like fuck this shit, like I don't want to do this if this is what I've got to deal with, and I just allowed myself to feel the feelings. I didn't allow it to mean, you know, dealing with this situation, that there was anything wrong with me, that I couldn't hold it, that the discomfort and the anguish that I was feeling was anything other than just evidence that I couldn't hold it, that the discomfort and the anguish that I was feeling was anything other than just evidence that I cared and so I just allowed myself to feel, I allowed myself to move it out, I transferred the feeling and the trigger out of my body and then come Monday I was grounded again and ready to pick back up speed. But I've seen some people that they'll have a situation with like a client and it takes over their entire nervous system. And that's no shade if it's happened to you before. All it means is your nervous system doesn't have stability in that area. So you have to build it. You have to build the sense of inner authority that you could hold whatever the business is going to throw at you. That is the only way that you can create stability on the inside for whatever is happening on the outside.

Speaker 1:

When in the book Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert I'm talking about this book all the time inside my container at the moment there's this one section where she talks about the shit sandwich and she's like whichever job or career you go into, there is going to be a certain level of shit sandwich. You know, if you're in corporate, you're going to be dealing with the shit sandwich of like working for someone else, having to do tasks that you don't particularly want to do, having to go in even when you don't feel 100% and you want to just have a sick day. You're going to be dealing with all of that and that's what you decide in order to have a stable salary. However, when you are an entrepreneur or a CEO, you are less dealing with that problem, but you're more than dealing with, okay, the pressure, the responsibility, the money stuff that comes up, you know, needing to pay rent, having a mortgage, as I've just bought this house, and everything. It's like a whole new dynamicness of pressure and responsibility that I'm expanding myself to hold. And that's the version of the shit sandwich that I want to hold where I get to do all of the creative stuff. I get to do podcasting for literally part of my job. But then I also have to deal with the discomfort that this business brings me.

Speaker 1:

New level, new devil, and we just have to decide what the shit sandwich is that we want to eat. Or the flavor of shit sandwich, do you want the shit sandwich that comes with corporate or do you want a shit sandwich that comes with entrepreneurship? There is always going to be shit, you know, and I remember when I was working as a designer in my very first job and I had all of these expectations that I was going to go into this company and just design all the time and it was going to be the most creative and incredible thing. And although it was really fun and I learned a huge amount, I very quickly realized that the design element that we were doing was maybe like 30 percent of the role and the rest of the role was project management, file organization, prepping meetings, like there was just so much stuff that wasn't designed that I was really shocked and that was honestly the shit sandwich of that, because I had come into this to be creative, to be in flow, to not have to talk to people, and here I am having to basically be in meetings all of the time to present my work, to give constant check-ins, to deal with clients, to be doing emails, to summarize, to create presentations for buy-in for clients, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1:

And that was a shit sandwich and it was one that I ate at the time, but it was a discomfort that I didn't particularly enjoy. Is it an easier discomfort than the discomfort that I feel now? Not necessarily, it's just different, and so at the time that discomfort felt very big. I think the only difference was, I could turn that discomfort off. I could come home and then not think about it, whereas when you have a business, it's kind of this constant, like you know, experience that you have and what happens with business is you just get better at holding it. You know, I really don't experience anxiety anymore, as someone that used to be a very highly anxious person. I feel the pressure sometimes, but I just get better and better at dealing with that and you get better and better at being able to hold a larger part of it.

Speaker 1:

So that's why I feel so stable in my business all the time, because I am just so neutral inside. I don't see anything that is happening outside as a reflection of what is going on inside. So if I have a really high month, amazing doesn't mean that I'm more successful than I was. So if I have a really high month, amazing doesn't mean that I'm more successful than I was before. If I have a really low month, it doesn't mean anything, and the same goes for you. You know we want to create this stability that's not dependent on the amount of money that we're making, that's not dependent on the things that we are doing or achieving, but it's just like this baseline of whatever happens, I trust myself to always be able to pick it up. And that's the first aspect of building stability inside of yourself and creating stability in your business.

Speaker 1:

The second part of building stability in your business is being able to have a program that you love to sell, ideally at least one high ticket program. Now, the reason that I say that is, especially if you have a small audience, the inconsistency that trying to sell a low ticket offer gives, like it's just, it's so hard to, you know, find a hundred people to come into a $297 offer, whereas if you just had a slightly higher ticket one, you just need to sell one. And it's much easier to find one person in a small audience than it is to try to find 100. Because it takes the same amount of effort for you to sell one high ticket thing to one low ticket thing. You still need the same amount of marketing materials. You still need sales pages, landing pages.

Speaker 1:

You know each product that you have, each program that you have, is essentially its own business, right? So it's like, would you prefer to have like five different businesses that you are managing and like launching and they're all low ticket and none of them really bring in that much but you're still exerting the same amount of effort into each of them? Or would you prefer to have one to two businesses that, like you, really understand you know how to sell? They're both, you know a high ticket margin and you can funnel people into those. And even if you sell one of those, it can take a low month to a high month in literally one day. And that's what I love about the high ticket product.

Speaker 1:

Now, this isn't a shit on like low ticket, like. I know some industries where low ticket is like a necessity, like fitness, for example, like the base rate for fitness is much lower oftentimes and so it can be much easier to go at scale because it's a much broader topic. Facebook ads can work really well. Anyway, I digress, different industries need different strategies, but again, it's like having a way that you know that this is going to scale, that you know that you're going to be able to make consistent income from, and, from my perspective, the high ticket model really does give that, because it just means that you are always going to have a baseline salary coming in. So even though, like, if I decide like not to work for a few months, I know, because of the masterminds that I run and the private coaching that I do, I will always have income coming through, even if I take three months off and I don't sell a thing which usually doesn't happen but it's that thing that it creates the stability because of the recurring revenue that the high ticket payments create, and that's what we want to create.

Speaker 1:

So if you don't have a high ticket offer in your product suite whether it's private coaching or a mastermind or a group program I highly recommend starting to build that out now, because it's something that will serve you so well in the long term. And my invitation for you is to really try to see this as something that you don't just launch once, but you are going to launch over and over and over again. You can't really see the success of a program until you've launched it three times, so you really want to have like a run up. If you come into my program, the House, the way that I suggest doing this is, if you're creating a new high ticket program, you launch it once as a beta offer. Get some people in for a discounted price. I literally give you like an entire beta script that you can just use a cash injection script. It's very, very high converting and we'll just get the first few people into a program.

Speaker 1:

The second time that you do it, it's more of a traditional launch. You're experimenting with a couple of things and the third time is where you're really starting to see okay, how is this going? How can I improve the program? Is this a hungry audience Like, how do I feel about this offer? And you really want to kind of stabilize it in that way. But having at least one of those high ticket spaces like that will really just allow you to create stability in your business, so that you're not consistently at the start of every single month being like oh my god, now I have to send another, sell another hundred spaces in order to make like whatever it is that you're trying to make.

Speaker 1:

The high ticket option just provides you with so much more space to create more money. It's so much easier to create a hundred k month from high ticket than it is from lower ticket, unless if you're using things like Facebook ads, and then you've got to just factor in that you know you're going to be investing in Facebook ads and that will take away from like the profit Again, everything is possible. But from my experience having a high ticket offer. Even if you have a low ticket offer and then you put Facebook ads to it, it can still funnel into a high ticket offer and then you have an option to make even more money it just seems like such a no brainer for me. So that's the second part of stabilizing your business If having a premium high ticket offer that gets people results that people really love, that you are prepared to build out over a period of time. If you want help in building that, that's exactly what I help you do inside of the house to create signature high ticket offers that you can sell through your content alone. So that brings me to then the third part of stability, which is a core skill. The core skill is marketing.

Speaker 1:

If you do not know how to market or if you are not versed in marketing or if you just feel like marketing is a drag or it's a part of the business that you just hate and you resist. This is such a big part of business building and I know that a lot of you guys are experts in what you do. I seem to attract a lot of people that have a huge amount of expertise and corporate experience and are transferring that into the online space or have had various businesses for a period of time, and the thing that you guys really need to remember with this is that marketing is the lifeblood of your business. If you are not marketing, if you are not creating a very clear message, no one's going to be able to experience your genius. You need to become so comfortable with marketing becoming a part of the service that you offer so that you can love what you do.

Speaker 1:

I think the biggest issue that people experience is that they don't learn to love marketing or learn how to make it work. So then they're like oh my God, half of the business is marketing, when, honestly, running a business is probably like 60, 70% marketing. It really is to keep the business going and getting new clients in, and then you obviously have like a large portion of client delivery and really enjoying that, but there's a huge portion of that which is just marketing figuring out what words are going to sell and being open to experimenting. Whether it's Facebook ads or organic. You need to see business as like a massive experiment, and that's where the inner authority comes in. You need to have the stability to experiment and not if something doesn't go well, because you've experimented with it. It can't make you feel less stable on the inside, because if that happens, like how are you ever going to feel stable in a business that requires experimentation? Because the market is shifting, because the algorithm is shifting, and I know that people get very comfortable and they're like this is the one way I've been doing things and this has worked in the past. And then there's a resistance to change. But if you have a resistance to change, to pivot, to try new things, to experiment, you are going to be left behind.

Speaker 1:

So you need to have like that willingness to experiment, like with your marketing, with the authority angles is what I call them like going into your programs, the way that you launch things and the way that you actually angle your programs and how you talk about them. This is all really important stuff and it literally dictates whether people make money or not, and the people that are brilliant service providers but don't know how to market and don't know how to convert. It's a very frustrating path and there's almost no stability there because it does feel like a guessing exercise where you're crossing your fingers and hoping that the universe delivers you the client, but you cannot predict how it's going to come in, and that's a really difficult way of doing things, and so, you know, over the past year, we've been experimenting a lot with evergreen ways of people coming in, but I can always predict that otherwise, as long as I do like a long, multi-day training, I know that that will get people in. I just know it, and so I know that strategy very well, but I'm also willing to change and experiment with different things. So the underbelly of all of that, though, is marketing, is words, is an ability to know exactly who it is that I'm talking to, and be able to speak to them with a level of precision that they then feel like I am in their minds, and that is what creates buy-in. That is what makes people want to invest high ticket, because if they don't feel like I understand them, they aren't going to make a buying decision, especially in this market.

Speaker 1:

And the other part of marketing is then being able to demonstrate your authority in your marketing. If you don't know how to articulate the value of what you do and put it into words and package it into whether it's program messaging, whether it's the sales page you do, whether it's your content, people are going to scroll straight past, because they aren't going to see you as an authority. So you need to have a very grounded understanding of like why is this program different? Why am I different? What is my way of doing this, what are my methods, my methodologies, the way that I do things, and how can I then demonstrate that in my content. If you have no idea how to do that, how do you create stability? It literally then becomes a luck exercise, which is not a strategy for building business. You need to have the skill of marketing, and the reason that my business grew so quickly when I came into the online space was because I'd had an eight-year corporate career in organic marketing specifically. So I already had this skill and I know that.

Speaker 1:

I've told you guys this story before of when I started up the first business seven or eight years ago now, and I started it, made the website, got the photo shoot, did all the things that you're meant to do tick, tick, tick and then launched this new program to help people design and market themselves to absolutely crickets, because I hadn't marketed. I'd done a couple of posts about logistics, but no one cares about logistics. People want to know that you're in their mind, that you're going to help them solve a problem, that you understand where they want to go, and they want tangibility. They want to see that you can see the symptoms that they're dealing with and that you have a solution for that. I didn't do any of that, and so it completely flopped.

Speaker 1:

And then again coming back to that first part of the stability process is, I didn't then have the inner resilience to be able to hold people rejecting me as those I called it, and so I shut down the entire business and went back to corporate, which was ended up being the best thing that could have happened, because it allowed me to expand my breadth of skills and deepen my knowledge and craft of organic marketing even more, which then, by the time I launched my next business almost five years later, it ended up being very successful, very, very successful very quickly, which I think a very important thing to know is like that skill building takes time, and so if you aren't carving out that time to learn to communicate, this always will feel like a guessing game for you and there will never be that consistent stability you need to know in your mind I have the skills that I need to be able to make money whenever I want, irregardless of what industry you teach in. This is not just for business owners that are teaching business. This is for the naturopaths, this is for the spiritual business owners, this is for the people in the fitness space, you non-tangible ROI people. You need to have that ability to market yourself even more. There's actually, I would say, almost more tangibility in your non-tangible ROI space. You've just got to find the granularity of the symptom and be able to communicate that. So instead of saying, you know, oh, everyone people pleases, and I'm helping people to stop people pleasing, that's so broad. You know like when's an exact moment that someone would people please, and create a hook around that. You know you can't speak up in an argument with a partner in case there's going to be massive conflict. Okay, you can create a piece of content specifically around that, and then you want to weave it back to the program that you're delivering on, and I teach this in detail in a program called Content to Cash Academy, which is all about going very, very deep into conversion content specifically.

Speaker 1:

Not all content is created equal. There are lots of different types of content and each one can have a different portion inside of your brand. There's a narrative content. There's Creative content, there's analytical content there's so many different types but conversion or persuasive content is really the thing that gets people to take action. If you don't know how to write that kind of Content, you will amount a lot of people in your audience. I think you're very inspiring that love your stories but aren't taking action and are not buying. So you'll get a lot of tire kickers. People may be engaging oh my God. I love your stuff, you're so inspiring but no one actually taking action. This all comes down to a skill of marketing, and I learned that skill during my corporate career and you can learn this skill by going through a program like Content to Cash and actually learning how to apply it. Of course, if you come into the house, the bonus is that you then get coaching. We have one content call every single month, alongside all of the other Q&As that we have. Specifically, we're going into content to help you guys get feedback on elevating your content, to speak to high-ticket audiences, to sell out your high-ticket services.

Speaker 1:

These are the three aspects that create stability in your business.

Speaker 1:

If you don't have one of these aspects, if you don't have a product suite that you feel comfortable selling or a program that can actually generate the amount of income that you need without selling your soul to the devil every single month.

Speaker 1:

If you don't have marketing to be able to explain the value of your program, your program's gonna be invisible for people. No one's going to buy it. And if you don't have that sense of inner resilience, that inner authority, and you can't create that stability inside of yourself, no matter what is going on outside, you'll always feel harder to stabilize. So the thing that you need to focus on is building those three things and really focusing there. And when you master each of them, you will just find the sense of stability that is so calming and grounding, like I could literally have anything go on in my periphery and I feel grounded, I feel calm, like I feel so stable in what I've created that I nothing could really shake me, because I have the tools, I have the skills, I have the product suite and I have this sense of calm inside of myself that I have built. I have expanded my capacity to do that.