Ep #205: Relaunching

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey coaches, welcome to episode 205. We’re talking about relaunching today but first of all, how are you? I’m so excited to record this episode and just be talking to you today. I don’t know if you know but when I’m recording these I just imagine that we’re all sitting together having a conversation. So I love getting to record these because I’m thinking of us, thinking of you, thinking of us having this conversation. So it feels like there is engagement that really isn’t there. There is engagement.

There’s engagement from me, the same way that you feel like you’re maybe in the room with me and I’m saying these things directly to you when you listen. I have that experience too. I always say how people said things directly to me as if we were having a conversation but that’s what I feel what I’m saying it to. I feel that same exact feeling. So I like the idea of just we’re meeting together, and that feeling right now while I’m recording and then while you’re listening. And we’re just having a conversation together, so fun.

So I just got back from my coach, Brooke Castillo’s event, Life Coach Live where I spoke on creating new beliefs aka how to create wealth and abundance. How you do that is by creating new beliefs. And I just had so much fun presenting. I feel like being on stage in front of thousands of people, I think there were 3,000 people total with virtual people. I really believe that’s what I’m meant to do. I am really looking forward to creating rooms that size for me. It just feels like who I am. And I’m so grateful that I was asked to be a part of it. It was a lot of work, it was so much fun.

And what I did on stage is I actually took the audience on a before and after of my life. I actually started my talk with a demo just like when I was selling mops in Walmart. It was as my friend Chris Goodman likes to say, a riot. It was a riot. I came in from behind the audience and I brought them to the stage with me and demoed this juicer, the world’s smallest citrus fruit juicer that we used to give away for free if you watched our shows. And I literally bought these juicers for everyone in the crowd. There was 1500 of them shipped to the hotel to give all the participants.

And we had no idea how the crowd would react or if it would work in a room that size and it did. I have never had so much fun. And I told the audience something that I will tell all of you which is, if I can go from giving away $8 plastic juicers for free in Walmart to $10 million in sales, so can you my friend, so can you. So that’s what I’ve been doing. That’s what I’ve been up to. We also just finished our 200K open enrollment. And this episode today has been inspired by that launch.

So today we’re diving into a concept that you may have never considered as an option when you are selling. This may be the first time this idea has ever been offered to you, which is the idea that you can always relaunch. Relaunching is very much as it sounds. It’s launching again. So I’m going to tell you what happened when we opened enrollment the first week of November and why we are relaunching. And then we’re also going to just talk about and dive into relaunching, the idea, the concept.

And I want to share throughout some of my thoughts and my processes for decision-making and how I navigated this particular relaunch and some of those in the past that I’ve done so that you can borrow all of my thoughts, and my process, and the way that I handle things. You can just borrow all of it and really learn to tackle things like this in your business when things don’t go as expected. So we opened enrollment for 200K Mastermind for our January 2023 class, our next class that’s coming up at the beginning of the new year.

We do a week of prelaunch where we share really powerful before and after stories from coaches in our mastermind. And then we do three days of open applications. And on the fourth day we decide who gets in. And then we send acceptance letters. And then on the fourth and fifth days we receive and process payments for those that are joining. And on day one of open applications I was flying that day back from Two Million Dollar Group in New York. But I immediately knew something was wrong within the first few hours.

Normally when we open, we’ve done this a lot. This was maybe our ninth opening. We get 20 applications in the first few hours. And by the end of the day we have anywhere from 14 to 16 applications from new and returning students. But this time six hours in, by the time I landed in Kentucky we had four applications. And I think there was one just in the first hour. This didn’t feel like low sales to me. We have been running the 200K Mastermind sales machine for four years now. And our launches are extremely predictable at this point.

There aren’t a lot of surprises that happen during an open enrollment. So 10 total sales on the first day was a problem. It definitely wasn’t what we expected but again it was just so low that it really did indicate that something was wrong. And so I told my team to check delivery of everything, emails, ads, check the sales page and if it’s loading correctly, and our application page. I told them to just make sure every part of our process was functioning properly. And after several checks the answer came back that everything was working.

And it wasn’t until the final day where our current students started telling us that they hadn’t received any sales emails. And that’s when we found the problem. Our marketing team had copied an automation from a past automation, not realizing that that particular automation had excluded our waitlist for our 20K and our Two Million Dollar Group and all of our current students. It was from a pre enrollment where I had written separate emails to our main or general list, whatever you want to call that.

And then we have a specific waitlist that’s just designated for people who have signed up that say, “Hey, I want more information for 200K or Two Million Dollar Group. I want to get weekly emails from you guys about this mastermind.” We have a separate list for that. And I had written separate emails to these lists. And so our general list is comprised mostly of people who are new to us, who came in from one of our evergreen funnels that’s geared more towards 2K students.

And our list is so big, we have about 75,000 people on our list that when we checked the delivery it looked about right, or at least my team said when they checked the delivery, it looked about right. They didn’t notice a difference of about 5,000 people on our waitlist. So I got the call late on Wednesday about what happened. The tech of that seems complicated. The only reason I even say it is because I think it is helpful to know exactly what could possibly go wrong or that things like this do go wrong.

So that if you ever find yourself in this space, even if it’s years from now, you’re like, “Oh, Stacey talked about this.” Or any situation similar, a lot of your things will not be this particular thing until you get to this level where you have all of these automations and all of these different lists and different people working for you and all that. So the details really don’t matter but I did think it was worth just telling you.

Okay, so I got the call late on Wednesday about what happened. And I made the call in that moment to finish the launch as it was, close it down as per usual, as normal as to what we said would happen. And then take some time and relaunch the following month. And I’m going to tell you the sales perspective I had about this decision but first let’s just talk about what relaunching is. And really what I want to tell you is what it’s not. So relaunching is not continuing a launch.

So I actually taught an entire day on launching at our last 200K Mastermind live event. And ironically when I made the materials for relaunching I had the thought, I haven’t done this since 2017, the irony. But in this segment I taught a lot of launch mistakes. And one is when coaches open their enrollments with no set end date, no clear closing not even in their mind. And they just kind of keep selling indefinitely trying to get the sales they want. And at some point they maybe even just stop selling completely and hide from their launch, frozen, and what to do next. This isn’t relaunching.

And relaunching is also not extending a launch. We had ironically also talked about this with my bookkeeper on our bookkeeping call the week before we opened 200K. I swear it was like the universe was sending me signs and I did not see them. So we had talked about this because some marketers use this as a strategy, they almost do a fake close to their launch and then the next morning they will extend their offer. Because the offer was just so good or because my team forgot to close the cart and turned the links off to buy.

So hey, let’s just tell you about it and then keep letting you buy for even longer as part of their promotion. I personally don’t love this sales tactic, it’s just not for me. And I’ll tell you my thought about that, is just that I think when you do that, especially if you do it a lot, people stop believing you when you say you’re closing. And so for me the open and close for 200K has always been serious. We never change that. We open when we say we are, we close when we say we’re going to close.

That link never stays up. If it does stay up for any reason and people slip in and then we still just close it. We would never email them and be like, “Well, we accidentally let you keep buying so now you can keep buying for even longer. We’re going to keep it open for another day.” It doesn’t even really make sense. If people slip in I’m like the universe had your back and it’s still closed. Now it’s still closed. So we just don’t do that. I just think it doesn’t create trust with the buyers. And I think not honoring your word will hurt you rather than help you in the long term.

So neither of those things are relaunching. Now, we could have extended the launch knowing that the people who had raised their hands the highest, saying, “I want to join,” many of them planning for the last six months to be in our January class, knowing that they had been locked out. We could have extended it. We could have just started the sales sequence right then. Or another idea that had been floated on the table was just send them the remaining few emails. But to me this would not have been ideal for them and really for us.

I didn’t want anyone having to rush. I didn’t want students missing important information. Our emails are designed to answer literally all of your questions throughout our email sequence. So trying to shove it all in at the end felt messy to me. And extending, I also didn’t feel gave the students the same opportunity to experience the whole launch. And our launch really is an experience. It takes our students on a journey of belief in their own minds. And I didn’t want to take away from that experience.

So relaunching, what relaunching is, is when you actually close down your launch and you just redo the whole entire thing as if the first one never happened. So we will be starting our prelaunch and open enrollment all over again. You do this so that you have time, so I recommend not doing it back to back, giving yourself some time. You do this so that you have time to get your head on straight, manage your emotions, any thoughts, decompress, evaluate. And in this case for our team to fix the problem.

That whole automation has to be changed, and then tested, and then go through all of our checks and balances. And also for our team in particular we work so hard in these launches. It really didn’t feel sustainable to ask my team to keep going, just none of that felt like it would have been ideal. So we decided to take enough time to notify our current students and our waitlist students, and for our team to really get ready to just do it again. So that’s what we’re going to do.

We’re going to open 200K enrollment December 12^th, 13^th, and 14^th. So let’s talk about why we relaunch, what the reasons are and how to know if you should or you shouldn’t relaunch. So when you’re faced with a launch that didn’t go as planned for whatever reason. Here are a couple of reasons. You may find that you didn’t really give it your all and actually commit. Maybe you froze and hid during your launch. Maybe you lost steam because you were endlessly launching with no clear close date.

Or maybe you had something major come up after you already opened. And this is going to be really important, so just remember I said that, after you already opened, like you fell ill, you had a death in the family, something came up that really prevented you from being all in on that launch. Now, my only note on this would be, before I go any further, check in with how often you’re doing this because I do see coaches often who don’t ever take an open, close date serious and will just push back a launch to give themselves more time. That is also not relaunching or what I’m teaching.

And if you do abandon your launches frequently or push them back, that is a mind management and time management issue, and you want to solve for that. And relaunching should not be the thing that helps you solve for that. I asked my Two Million Dollar Group recently what they would do if they could not ever push a launch back. What would they do if they told the dates of their lunch to their people way ahead of time and no matter what, honored that like we do? We tell people for 200K, “You know the next launch date most often six months before we open.”

So we give people a lot of time to prepare. We would never change that for basically any reason ever. And it’s really interesting, I was telling them, “When you start creating your business in that way where you say that you’re going to do something and then for no reason do deviate from that. You create a lot of safety for your clients, a lot of dependability. People feel like they can count on you because you do what you say when you say you’re going to do it.”

And also I will say, the reason this happens, when you just push it back is because it can be easy if you let yourself push it back, it can be easy to just not get your launch materials done, to let circumstances make it feel like a good idea to just hold off launching. It can be easy to decide to relieve pressure by giving yourself more time to launch. And again just none of that is what relaunching is. Really all of that is you not wanting to be with yourself when you don’t like how you feel. And then wanting to push things back to give yourself relief of your emotion.

It’s not what I love for my students to do. I want them to just work through that, it really has your subconscious brain dictating your business and what happens in it instead of you intentionally creating it. So just none of that is relaunching. Relaunching happens only after you have actually launched. And then you make sure there are very clear reasons, and you love them. So one thing I taught my 200K students during the live event is relaunching should never be your punishment for not hitting your numbers.

It’s not more work you have to do because you failed. It’s very important, if you ever do a relaunch that you don’t feel this way, that you don’t choose those thoughts that you made a mistake or you failed, so you have to do another launch, you have to do more work than you would have had to have done if the mistake or the fail never happened. We just don’t say that to ourselves. It feels terrible, and disempowering, and victimy. And then that’s where you will be doing your relaunch from. You don’t want to do that.

It should never be anything you have to do for any reason, just the mentality will not create the result you want. So you really want to get coached and coach yourself well before relaunching. So for me I knew right away for this particular relaunch exactly what we would do. It was a tech error.

If it hadn’t been a tech error on our part and our entire audience and all the people wanting to buy had actually seen all the sales emails and they just didn’t buy from those sales emails, and it was an issue with my sales emails. With where we are now in our business I would have likely just moved on and worked on better sales emails for the next round and just gone in with lower numbers in my mastermind.

But I also remember a few times years ago where I relaunched because number one, I quit halfway through an open ended launch, meaning there was no close date, so it had sort of trailed off, trust me, I know these things. Everything I talk about I talk about them because I’ve done them. I’ve done all the fails that you might possibly do. So that was the first one. And then the second one was I miscalculated the amount of selling that would be required.

So the first one was a Diva Business School mastermind group. My goal was 20, I sold six. And I had planned on just going with it, but we got on the calls and the energy just felt low. And I really wanted 20. I just desired 20 students. I love the energy of a big group. And so I think we were four ish weeks in when I decided to relaunch. And it took me two weeks to launch. And so we were six weeks in, but we ended up with 22 people.

And because I had made the decision so late and we were already six weeks in and some of my thoughts were people have already missed the first couple of calls. I don’t want them to have less calls for the same price. So I just gave the people who initially signed up all the early calls as a bonus and started the entire mastermind over with all new people. And the second time it was a retreat I sold. And the way I sold it I was capped with the number of participants by the number of rooms the house held which PS, I don’t recommend. Never cap your sales because of a house you chose, makes no sense.

And so I sold it quickly and a lot of my clients said, “If you open another date, I’m in.” And enough of them said this to make me think, and here was the thought error, this will be easy, I won’t even have to sell it, famous last words. Be careful if you ever have this thought. So all of those clients after I paid a deposit for the next weekend as well for this house, for this retreat, it had to be at this house. All of them came back, every single one of them and said, “Well, actually.” And then, “No, sorry, I changed my mind,” for all various reasons.

So I had to decide whether to forfeit the deposit or really sell it. And this is probably subconsciously, the moment another 200K concept was created, the concept of overselling. I shouldn’t have opened another weekend if I wasn’t going to sell it with the same energy as the first one. And really sold it as if no one were preemptively saying yes. It should have been a full sales launch to everyone. I should have created demand for it and been really choosy with who got to come.

So I felt a lot of frustration and disappointment about that particular fail. And it took me two weeks of allowing and working through shame and disappointment. At the time I was telling myself, “I’m a business coach, people shouldn’t see me fail.” But after I worked through the shame and the disappointment and chose different thoughts, I decided I wanted to relaunch. My thought was, I can sell better than that and I want to do the second retreat.

And because I didn’t relaunch in resistance to feeling disappointed and I waited for that to be clear, my energy and my problem solving skills were back up. And I sold 8 out of 12 spots for the second one. So I just want to offer your energy and your reasons for relaunching matters. So for this one I have been very calm. My thought is tech errors happen, actually employee errors happen. I think this is my main thought, we don’t really have a lot of tech issues anymore. I mean there was a tech problem, but it was human error that created it and humans will error.

And I have to say, I’m really proud of myself because I have really suffered with a thought that when my team messes up that I’m the one that people think actually messed up. And then it looks poorly on me. And I have to be responsible for it and it’s going to make me look out of integrity for what I coach and who we are in the industry. And that thought for the last two years has been very painful and not a useful thought at all for me. And at least I knew I had it. So I would have these really, really strong reactions to it and be very triggered whenever there was any human error for our team.

And I would have to do a lot of coaching to calm down and not take it out on them. And I’ve been working on just a higher level CEO mindset which is people will make mistakes and it is on me as a CEO. People might think it’s my fault and it’s okay. Being strong enough to handle other people’s mistakes. And being okay with like, I have been thinking so much about this. It’s like, yeah, I am going to make mistakes. I am going to make them too.

I’m going to make judgment calls, not every decision I make is going to be the greatest decision I ever made. I’m going to have judgment mistakes. I’m going to have all of these things because I’m human. And I have been just having so much peace within myself for that, especially as I’m trying new things and we’re growing really quickly or we’re breaking our systems and processes and we’re building them back up. So I’ve been working really hard on this.

And my reaction was very surprising to my COO. She called to tell me what had happened, and I just laughed. And I said, “Oh, well, it all makes sense now.” And then when I told my students what happened, I said, “Watch me relaunch calm and precisely, with calm, and ease, and precision. Watch and see how it’s done. I’m going to give you a masterclass in relaunching.” Imagine just that energy. Your energy matters. Your thoughts matter.

If you take scattered thoughts into your relaunch you will create scattered results. If you take disappointment into your relaunch you will create more results to be disappointed about. So you really want to make sure you love your reasons. Don’t take punishment like I have to do this because I failed or because I didn’t hit my goal so now this is my punishment. You’ll just create more things to punish yourself about. So make sure you love your reasons, they come from abundance or sufficiency at the very least. Make sure those reasons are in service to others.

And really I want you to try on the idea that a relaunch can be the most incredible opportunity. I actually told my team that both the first launch and the relaunch feel like such amazing opportunities for me. When we saw the numbers coming in and they were low I said, “Hey, let’s host a call. I need to be able to get their thoughts.” Because I really think selling is not about us and our skill at selling. We just have to find the thoughts and I’ve said this before.

I gave the example of the Fendi sweater. We have to find the micro thoughts that people are having that keep them from taking action. That’s all our job is when we’re selling is finding people’s thoughts and helping them overcome them to say yes to themselves. So we did, I had the time to coach a lot of people on that call and to talk to them. And it just seemed like they hadn’t really ever heard of 200K, not all of them but some of them seemed like they’d never really heard of 200K, or they had a lot of basic questions.

And so it really showed me how I need to be selling to my biggest audience the people of my main list or our general list. And then I need to be selling differently to the people on the waitlist because they already know what’s up. And it really is a big difference if you’ve been on the 200K waitlist. And we write an email every single week with what we’re talking about in the mastermind. And so you really know what’s going on if you’re on the waitlist.

And if you’re on the main list you don’t get any of those emails. And I don’t do a lot of my Monday emails which is our weekly emails. I don’t do a lot of those on 200K concepts. That whole list is focused on getting people into 2K for the most. So it really made me think about needing to sell to both of those people separately and that I need to sell more simply, and more clearly, and really cover the basics for the people who may have been on my list for just a few weeks. And from the belief that I could sell people a 25K masterminded if they just found me.

I came up with the thought or this occurred to me that because they may have just found me, that doesn’t matter, they still want to make 200K and $2 million. If they found me yesterday, they still want to make 200K and $2 million. So this particular fail I decided to believe was an opportunity. And I decided to feel really engaged, excited, committed, and purposeful. My students were telling me how much this was such a transformation to watch me handle this.

I told my 200K students first, they were the first people I told because they were who helped us figure out the issue. And I told them, I really shared a lot of my thoughts with them, and they kept telling me, “I love watching you be so calm about this.” And I want to offer that in order to be so calm about this, if you were approaching a relaunch, you have to believe that nothing has gone wrong, and people still want to buy. This is my predominant thought around all of my decisions for this relaunch, as I was telling my team. This is an amazing opportunity. It sucks that we made that mistake but also I don’t know.

Will we look back in six months and be like, “That mistake was the best thing that ever happened to us?” Because I don’t think I would have gotten this realization about my main list. I wouldn’t have gotten on a call first of all, to figure out what was going on if sales were just rolling in as expected. So the fact that I did that, the fact that it revealed to me that I need to be selling differently to my main list, which I’ve never had to do. We’ve sold out our mastermind every single round for the last eight rounds without ever selling people differently.

But what can we do now that we do that? Look out. It’s going to rock. I’m so excited for that. So I just have that belief that nothing really has gone wrong. And I know people still want to buy, my entire waitlist and all my current students were excluded. So the best buyers, the easiest people to sell, the people who want to be in the most haven’t even had the opportunity to.

Some of our students I told them I was so impressed by their resourcefulness and them hunting down the link to be able to apply when they weren’t sent it. Because typically our page is closed and to get to the application page, they wouldn’t have that. So they had to be really savvy or email in. Some of them still did it. And I was like, “Hell yeah, I’m here for that. I’m here for you figuring it out without ever receiving a sales email.” But I told them as well that it’s not meant to be a scavenger hunt. It’s not that next level.

It shouldn’t be very, very extraordinarily difficult because many of them are making hundreds of thousands of dollars. They have full client loads. They’re busy, they can’t be hunting down email links or application pages and things like that. I need to make it easy for them, they’re busy. So that’s another thought of mine is I didn’t make it easy for them, but they really, really want to buy. So now I just get to make it easier for them to buy.

So check your energy. I’m going to say it again, I’m going to keep saying it, the energy of your relaunch matters. Leave frantic, urgent, confused, disappointed, dejected, disengaged, mad. Don’t get mad when people don’t buy. And definitely leave entitlement behind. Leave all of that energy behind. We aren’t entitled to results in our launch no matter how much money we make, no matter where we’ve arrived. We have to work for those results.

So that’s what I’m doing, I’m relaunching. I am super pumped about it. And I just have to say one final thing, the universe is really conspiring in my favor. I had also told my team about a month ago that I wanted to do a different live event than ever before. I wanted to spend three days on what to do when things go unplanned. We spend most of our time planning for things to go well. But I have really been thinking about why I make so much money. I mean it’s ridiculous how much money I make.

And I’ve been thinking about my special skillsets other than selling and the way that I think. I’m just so good at dealing with things when they go unplanned. My brain is so laser focused, I have such amazing thoughts. I have such amazing feelings about it. And if I don’t, I’m able to get myself out of the not amazing feelings very quickly and into a productive place to create more productive results. So I really want to teach my students how to do that. I just think it’s better to plan for losing than winning.

If you can get really good at planning for losing, you’re going to win. I’m not going to say you’re always going to win. You’re going to win a lot. And then when you stop winning you’ll be really good at figuring that out and then you’ll get to winning again. And so I really want to do that event, so this is perfect, isn’t it? With that statement I told the universe to just send this mistake my way, send this relaunch my way.

So now I have fresh new relevant experience to teach relaunching, to teach when things go unplanned, all of the things, along with years of experience working through when things didn’t go as planned. So that’s what we’re doing, come join us. Your final chance will be December 12^th, 13^th, and 14^th. You’ve got to be on the waitlist. It’s www.staceyboehman.com/200kwaitlist. You can join us live in Cabo, San Lucas for our January event or virtually.

And I do want to say this, if you’re thinking you’re going to wait to join because you can’t make the trip live, that’s the worst excuse ever to not make 200K or $2 million. That’s just how I think. I want to offer that to you. I’m getting what I need to make $30 million regardless of any circumstances. And I want to offer for you to join me in that thinking. I’ve created a $10 million business, it’s worth it to have that thinking. You’ve got to be like ride or die for your business no matter what. Be your own ride or die for your business.

So January 200K live event, when things don’t go as planned, let’s go, I’ll see you there.

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program where you’re going to make your first $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.