Inside the Mind of a 7 Figure Entrepreneur: Annual Planning, Decision-Making & Lessons Learned with Shay from Bucketlist Bombshells
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Most business owners struggle to hit their goals and maybe even run their business into the ground because of one really common mistake.
They focus on the stuff that does not matter.
The antidote to that is obviously to make better decisions and pick better things to focus upon. But when I see new business owners chatting and giving advice to each other, I often cringe because the advice and the thought processes and decisions are often really not great. So today I wanted to bring in a fabulous business friend of mine, someone who has built and scaled a million-dollar business, Shay from Bucketlist Bombshells!
Today we're going to chat all about…
making better decisions
Shay's annual planning process which helps her make decisions
what to focus your efforts on for the new year
and a never-before shared story on a bad business decision and exactly why it flopped for Shay!
If you are excited for the Bucketlist Bombshells Shop of Merch which never launched, Shay spills exactly what happened and it’s defs worth hearing about!
So let’s do this thing!
Shay, thank you so much for being here!
Yay! Thank you so much for having me and I can't wait to nerd out over planning and decision makin
Okay, you have coached literally hundreds, actually maybe even thousands of business owners and you see the decisions that they make for their online businesses. What would you say the most common bad decisions are that you see business owners making which you just wish you could just stop them from making and just save them all the hassle?
Yeah, absolutely. So we work with a lot of members at either like the launching or the growing and then a smaller amount at that scaling stage. So the two mistakes I really see are kind of in that initial like launching a business and then growing it.
So the first thing that I see with business owners who are launching an online business is that they are not choosing a consistent marketing strategy.
And I know this is something that you talk about as well when it comes to what is the best way to get leads for your new online business. And it's really about choosing one marketing strategy and going all in and really getting to know it and being consistent.
Because the biggest area that I see is when we're on TikTok, we're on Instagram Reels, we're on Instagram in general and we're scrolling and we see, oh this new strategy, this new trend. This person is making six figures from this. Now this person is making six figures from that and it's putting the cart before the horse and it's creating a lot of anxiety and a lot of shiny object syndrome.
I just see people then bouncing from one strategy to the next. They'll try it for less than 30 days and they'll be like “it doesn't work because I didn't get leads or it doesn't work because I didn't get opt-ins or it doesn't work because I didn't get a sales call”. And when I actually asked them, we dive into them, I'm like, okay, well tell me what you've done. And it's like, okay, you posted one time on Instagram with a freebie with a call to action link like once a week or something like that.
It's very minimal and then they jumped to a different strategy and then they're like, well then I created like a webinar, then I sent out only five pitch emails or I joined three Facebook groups and commented on posts or I applied for one job on Upwork.
When you're starting out, you need a high volume of consistent activity or marketing activity to really create the snowball effect that I promise will happen when it comes to getting leads.
Because I think the biggest issue in the launch stage is they're just like, I need my first client, I need my first client, I need my first client, which is absolutely correct. You need your first client and then you need to get referrals from that client and you need to snowball off that.
And they're also taking advice online from people who are at a different stage in business than they are.
So they, when they've launched, they're taking growth strategies or they're taking scale strategies and they don't realize that they're not at that stage of business yet. Cause I think it's hard to really understand when someone just posts a 90-second reel as to, you know, what, what stage of business they may be speaking to or in. And so I think it's really important.
My advice is to counteract that in the launch stage is to pick one thing, whether it's blogging, whether it's cold pitching, whether it is in Facebook groups or on Upwork or whatever the strategy is. Pick one, get to know it really well. Like then go research and find, okay, what are people doing really well with this one strategy? And then be very consistent at a high volume.
I'm talking … if you're sending out pitch emails, like I want you sending out like five to seven a day. Or if you are in Facebook groups, I want you interacting every single day. I want you scouring their finding leads, posting about your knowledge or experience and just doing that for like really consistently for 90 days. I bet you will get a, for your client and more in that 90 days.
That would be my advice for the launch people.
(Paige) I could not agree more with everything!
(Shay) So once we've gotten clients under our belt, we're getting pretty consistently booked out. We've got revenue coming in and we're at that stage where we're wearing too many hats and we can't take on more client work without hiring.
And I think that people reach the stage and then they end up hiring way too fast, way too soon with no strategy.
They're just like, okay, well, I have all this work. Let me just find a VA to take it all on. Like, doesn't matter what it is. We always throw the poor VA's. I was talking to a VA the other day and she was like, “I do so many things. I only want to do this one area. But when someone hires me, they expect me to do so much because we have this umbrella term”. And I think that's great. And there's lots of personalities out there for that.
But I think when we're trying to figure out what would be the best hiring process for us or like what would be the most helpful, you want to look at like your full plate of like everything you're doing and then start to create and bundle them together into similar-ish areas. And then what are the areas that you want to be in?
So for example, sometimes I have members that they want to be in the doing of actually say executing the work, their graphic design work, their website design work, their social media management.
They're like, I still want to actually produce the work for the client. But I really just do not want to have to deal with closing a client getting leads or doing the customer service side or even the client management side.
Great hire for those things that you don't want to do. And just hire like one at a time for like just try out five hours a week, you know, look at your forecast, look at your budgets. Make sure you can, you know, have a runway of about six months if you were to work with this person, but just start small. There's hire contractor. There's no need to hire a social media manager, a VA, a sales assistant, a junior designer, whatever it is.
And then on the other side, there's people that they actually don't really want to do the client work anymore. They realize that they're actually just really good at running a business really well.
And they'd rather outsource the client side of the work and they want to do the sales, the marketing, the customer service, the customer experience. And so great, let's start subcontracting out your client work. And this is kind of gets into an agency model. But again, we're not hiring a bunch of junior designers. We're not hiring a bunch of junior VA's. We are just starting with one, start out with a really small amount of hours, and just be really clear with your expectations of the deliverables.
And that's why the first step in the beginning was write out every nitty gritty thing that is just overwhelming you at this stage. And then you categorize it and then you say, okay, these are the first things I want to hand off. And then you have this outline. And you basically share that with the person you're hiring and saying, these are the expectations I have for you.
I want you to manage my inbox. I want you to manage all of the post-sales call processes. Here's exactly how I do it. Here's an SOP. Here's my expectations. Bring them in. If they have expertise in this area, great. Get their opinion and advice. But I see a lot of people make the mistake where they go out, they hire these experts in every single area of these businesses they want. They end up paying crazy amount of money. And then it just doesn't work out because they weren't really clear on what they wanted. And they made this really big investment that then leads to potentially like negative profits or not or investing in something you didn't really need at that stage in business. I'd say that's kind of the next level is scaling is investing in these coaching or these bigger programs or something like that.
On that growth scale the biggest mistake I see is just people going out and just like hiring and not really having any idea what they're actually trying to get off their plate. So that would be my advice for that stage.
(Paige) Incredible advice. I hear you on that one.
Another thing which I see a lot of business owners do or struggle with is that they've got their clients coming in and they're like, okay, cool. They then give themselves 97 projects that they need to do like this month or this year. They think - I need to create a new option. I need to create a course, I need to add a new service, I need to start a new marketing strategy, I need to buy this course or get that coaching program and they just have so much - that they just can't pick what they should be doing or spending their time on. Can you give some advice for when someone's trying to pick like projects or things to be doing? How do you know how to choose the next way that you should grow this business?
Yeah, such a fun question. And I feel like my advice now is based on a lot of trial and error and experience. And the two things that I focus on now, and that I encourage especially my members in our mastermind program to to focus on is time freedom. And money freedom.
So those are kind of like the baselines.
So money freedom is obviously having the money that we want personally as our salaries, as well as the money that we need to invest into the things that we want to invest in in our business.
And then time freedom is basically outside of your business. How do you want to fill your time in your life? You know, most of us want that work-life balance.
But we end up not realizing that shiny object syndrome again is kind of coming into play when we're thinking about it. And I also want to say that not every year has to be a growth year. And I think that's a really big misconception is that we sit down say at the end of the year and we're mapping out next year and we're thinking well, okay, I did this amount, or I did have these amount of projects, I had this amount of recognition. And we look and we say, Okay, well, I only have two courses, maybe I should add three or I only have or I don't have a coaching program yet. And that doesn't always have to be the case. But I think it's presented that way. I think even in I went to business school in traditional teachings, it was always like you need to grow year after year. That's what a business does.
And like, yes, maybe if you have shareholders and you're paying shareholders out, absolutely I think that that's kind of how that comes kind of comes with a territory like yes, you need growth. But as a small business owner, and as someone who wants more time and money freedom in their life, something has to give and something we can't always be in a growth year.
But it also doesn't mean we can't have a growth year.
So let's say that we've decided, okay, yes, next year, I do want to bring some of these new projects that are on my heart, we're all passionate, we're all creative visionaries. But sometimes I think we're taking on too much because we're not really evaluating.
So I know your question was basically how do we decide how to evaluate these projects?
And so I come back to time and money freedom. So I look at what are the things that I have to do next year. And by have to I mean we have a standard amount of services or products on a product ladder that you offer every year.
So for example, we offer a mastermind coaching program, it's six months, we offer it twice a year. And now we kind of will evaluate that. We kind of will evaluate how much time and money in a second that that will bring.
And so then we go down the list, okay, well, there's other you know, is that what other products and services? Do you want to bring in next year? Because those are kind of our baselines, right? Like those are the things that's how we're making money. And then you look at, okay, well, I want to help what worked in the past. Okay, the opt-ins worked really well. For this offer, the marketing strategy worked really well for this offer, the sales process worked really well. Do we need to tweak it?
Now, if we want to tweak something or change something, or we have some new idea that we're like, again, shiny objects engine, we saw some other coach doing or some other service-based online entrepreneur doing. I want you to ask yourself, will it be more time freedom or money freedom? Or the third one is kind of a caveat. Is it like something you were so passionate about? Like you want to bring into this world because it's going to bring you a lot of fulfillment regardless of what you're doing?
And then you basically decide using that cost analysis, essentially.
There's no right or wrong answer here, which is kind of annoying. It's kind of like you decide. Great, I want to give up my time for that money and because I want more people in the program, so I can serve more people.
It's not just about time and money. I'm just making it really simplified. So that's kind of how I started.
And I apply that process to each in the areas I would say of like marketing, sales. So when it comes to new products and services, there's a third variable that is, is this product or service going to be super fulfilling to me?
And I'm willing to give up time or money freedom as a goal, either it's going to break even or it's only going to make a small amount of profits. And I'm okay with that because I really just want to bring this project into the world. And it's going to fulfill me on a deeper level.
You're also probably giving up your time in that sense as well. But you are because it's a path that you're going to be able to do. And I'm willing to give up your time and money.
Giving up time or money is not a negative thing. It's a choice. It's a decision.
Now we do need to evaluate your capacity. And that's where you then decide, well, if I want to bring this passion project in, that means that I might not be able to do that. And that's where you then decide, well, if I want to bring this passion project in, that means that I might not be able to do new marketing strategies or increase enrollments for this product or service or increase sales or leads here.
Then you start to evaluate all of the projects as a whole.
And that's how you look at your year and you'd be realistic. You start to understand how many projects can you take on per month and that equals out to the year. So that's when you really need to look at your capacity for like, there really is only an X amount of time in a day that you can get stuff done. And that's kind of like the third layer when it comes to new products and services. I don't want you just evaluating it off with time and money. I do want you to think about…
is this going to serve the people in my community?
Is this going to be something that's really fulfilling to me?
Is this something that I just feel called to bring in?
Great. Make room. But that means saying yes to one thing is saying no to another thing. So there's only an X amount of time. And if you still want to maintain a really high volume of time freedom outside your business, then you're going to have to think about what you're going to be doing.
And that's how you're going to be doing it. So I hope that was easy to follow when it comes to like how I make decisions. So I hope that was easy to follow.
So if you're going to be doing a new product or service, that means that this fulfillment project, this new product or service is going to have to replace something that you already are doing or you or replace the amount of time or money you will spend amplifying something else. So it's just kind of evaluating like that.
And the last thing that I do want to say to this and then I will wrap up my response is that not everything that you want to bring into this world is going to be something that needs to be monetized and needs to be in your business.
So this is something that I had to learn and I see this happen a lot with members and I'm coaching them is that when we're as passionate and we're good at selling and we're good at like serving in the online space as entrepreneurs, every single new skill or passion that we develop, we immediately try to monetize. It's crazy to me.
I was like I was learning how to like digitally illustrate for fun for no reason at all. And then all of a sudden I was like, I need to monetize this. You're learning these new skills for fun or you take a course for fun or you like, you know, have been doing a lot more like fitness stuff. I'm like, should I become like a fitness influencer?
And it's like, no (laughs)
Just because you are skilled at something, passionate about something, enjoy something, have a new, especially someone like me have such a thirst for knowledge, you don't have to monetize everything.
Some things can just be for you. They can be a hobby. They can be something that you do for that pure enjoyment, and fulfillment, and then you give to friends and family.
You know, I can make my candles, I give them to friends and family or because once you start monetizing something, it becomes a job and not that it loses that freedom or fulfillment because I feel like a lot of us online entrepreneurs, especially women, we do work this very fulfilling, but it adds that extra layer onto like the, okay, well now I need to…
Forecast out how many of these candles can I sell?
How many of these digital prints can I sell?
What is the marketing strategy?
These things are two things that are completely different from what I currently do. And that's fine, but then evaluate like, is that really where you want to spend your time? And does that extra income really make that big of an impact on your overall lifestyle and way of life?
Because usually you can just simply double down on marketing and sales in your current service offering to make whatever it is, if it's like a financial thing that you want from this hobby to make those extra finances and not at something that you already have.
You already have an audience for so that was the last thing I wanted to say is like, we don't always have to monetize every single skill we have. And I think that because a lot of online entrepreneurs were personal brands. And so we're like, I'm a personal person. I can add whatever like because I like it. It's part of the brand. And it is so I've like dabbled and other things. And I have learned some hard lessons that it's very, it's a long hard road to be known for one thing to then become known for another thing.
(Paige) I was trying to a mastermind friend the other day and she was saying, you can't try to do a new offer to a new audience like that is when things just you can do a new offer to your same people. Or you could do the same offer to different people but trying to do the new offer and the new people is when things just do not really go super well.
I thought that was very interesting.
(Shay) Like a personal brand, I think that that's really where it comes into when we're the face technically of this brand people buy from us because they like no trust us and our knowledge and our experience and our personality. And I think that it got to a place where I wanted to try to monetize every aspect of who I am as a person and that just became really stressful and something I didn't want to do which as anyone who's followed Bucketlist Bombshells knows we know we haven't monetized any of those aspects.
This is a very much behind-the-scenes thing that I think I struggled with for a long time whenever I learned a new skill I thought well, I should bring I should now be an expert in this skill because we're personal brand we can put anything under the umbrella of this company.
(Paige) I think that's so interesting that you say that because people don't realize that you actually had all of those zillion ideas that you decided to not bring forward and it can really confuse your people when you have like 20 million different products or different arms of the things like it's not great it's really confusing.
I love also you said it could literally be easier to make more money just doing more of the thing you're already doing like that could be is pretty almost guaranteed significantly easier than launching something new.
(Shay) Yeah, a lot of the stuff we do with our mastermind members is talking about converting your current or past clients like people who have already purchased from you it is so much easier. There's a stop with a certain conversion, but it's so much easier to convert and increase the lifetime value of a customer than it is to go out and find a new one or like or create a new product and service and launch it. It's for the same audience, but it's also for an audience that is like a second person. So for an audience that is like a second layer that they've already purchased from us so they already have been a customer. And so like, that's really the sweet spot to when you're evaluating. That is a sweet spot.
Okay, I want to hear about you personally. So, New Year's coming. You are planning for 2024. Are there questions you ask yourself & what does your planning process look like?
Yeah, this one's so fun because for those of you who don't know I have a business partner and her name is Cassie and she is the other half of the Bucketlist Bombshells and so what's really fun is that we like to do retreats when we go and plan for the new year or really any time we're doing a new idea for products and services for marketing for anything that we're changing inside the business. And Cassie was actually here in the summer with me on Vancouver Island and it was so fun because we were doing that again and sort of looking and reevaluating things and we had a little retreat.
And so what we do is we have these founders quarterly retreats and we've done these for years. So even when we lived in Bali when we lived in Mexico when we were in the States when we were over in Europe, we always regardless of where we were actually living which it's like okay we're already technically living in this beautiful place. We usually have beautiful space. We were like no we need to go and book like a hotel getaways. But I think what is really key is that we shake up our environment and we kind of get out of like we're not in our home office. We're not in the co-working space or we're not the cafe where we are doing our regular day to day work.
We are shaking up the environment.
I think as visionaries & creatives with a lot of ideas. It's just fun to have that environment. So if you can not everybody can but if you could book like especially getting out of your kind of day-to-day routine or if you're balancing family just having some like space and time to yourself to really allow you to ideate is something that I highly recommend if it's possible for you to do.
If not, I do just recommend maybe going somewhere different for the day.
But first we start with a reflection.
So we're looking at what worked really well this year.
What maybe didn't work so well and then we secondary work.
We secondarily say well do we want to continue doing this?
No, or if we do we feel strongly we want to continue this strategy or offering this product and service. But it was it was kind of like not maybe not working alignment is probably the better way of saying it. You're just like I'm not passionate about doing this anymore. So if you are not passionate about it or you are not really present with a marketing strategy a product and service and a back end experience your team managing your team.
Whatever it is if you're not like engaged aligned and in it, it just kind of comes across flat no matter if it's an external business thing or an internal business thing. Just let it go. It's okay. It's okay if you had spent so much I do give myself so much grace in this area you spent so much time on a project or on a certain system and process you're on something and then you just are like this isn't working. And it's not really it's just more of a feeling that's not working.
It's okay to let it go and don't berate yourself. it's like sunk costs already in a sense. It's just it's what's done is done.
So each of our projects have a couple different phases.
So the first one is idea phase where it's just an idea. It's a concept. It's a thing. It's probably in a Google Doc somewhere.
And then it moves into the learning phase. Where we're like more outlining it have a name. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but it goes into that phase where we're actually like outlining it. We're saying like, yes, we want to work on this.This is where I'm like researching tech platforms, Cass is doing marketing strategy sales, the front end stuff. I'm thinking about back end stuff. Whatever it is. It's like the learning phase. It's like what do I not know about how either to make improvements on this thing. I want to bring forward or if it's a new thing. What what do I need to learn because that's just that's our first place at least for me for sure. I’m a such a nerd. I'm like, I gotta know everything at my perfectionism.
Then it moves into the creation phase where you're actually taking everything that you learn and you're creating the thing, whether it's creating content, whether it's creating the system map, the funnel map, whether it's creating a job description or role, and then we're in execution phase.
And then we're executing all of those things right in like the doing, you know, you're putting it out there, you're making it or you're doing it. It's out there. It's in the world and you're implementing essentially.
And then we go into evaluation phase. So whatever metrics or qualitative or quantitative you've put around it, you start to track that and then you evaluate it for us. We evaluate things on a quarterly basis and then make improvements or like I said, stop doing it or it's working really well. We amplify that. So kind of going back to the thing, if it's working really well, you want to bring forward, we want to amplify it.
So that's really how we structure our projects and how we make decisions about bringing things forward or not.
And so when it comes to going back to the year and annual, because I got kind of nitty-gritty there, the year annual overview is we're looking at each quarter and how many projects, our capacity between the two of us and our team can handle. And then we're looking at what is the money this is bringing in the revenue expenses and profits. And we're like, great, awesome. Love this.
Or we have different financial goals and we haven't hit them yet based on, forecasting. And then the second one is the time freedom. It's like, okay, well, how much time do we have outside the business for ourselves, for our friends, families, passion projects, that kind of thing. Are we feeling good about our balance there? If not, then we do evaluate the workload or we start, we hire or we delegate or we make those decisions there or we make a decision to not bring a project in. So maybe this year is not the year that that project gets implemented and released. We then just go quarter by quarter. And then we have our quarterly founders meeting to kind of keep us on track and make decisions from there.
(Paige) That sounds very fancy. You have phase names, which I do not have! I have the same system, but without the fancy, like I'm in this phase now. It's more of like a project management side.
(Shay) I need my team to also know what phase they're at. And I can picture them in like Airtable in Asana. So I'm like, it's like definitely on my brainworks. It's like, I think some of my creatives on the team would be like, that's not how we think.
Can you talk about if someone's launching for the first time how do they figure out how much this money this thing's going to make? Can you talk about like, have you gone through that and what do you kind of do in that situation?
Yeah, such a good question. So I think that going into my learning phase, what I would want to know is based off whatever the product and services, what is the industry standard conversion rate for that? So for example, if you are service-based, what I see in that world is a 50 to 95% sales call conversion rate.
Okay, so if you're launching a new high-ticket offer, let's try and aim for that.
Then you would need to work backwards on basically how many sales calls would you take and you kind of do good, better, best goals. So like the good would be the 50% conversion. Let's say 75% conversion is better. 95% conversion is the best.
What is the price point of your service?
And then how basically working backwards, how many leads do you need to get on a call to hit that conversion rate to get the amount of people booked into your service? You do have to know that when you launch something new, you are now figuring out where you fit into the industry, where your product and services meet the needs. Maybe you don't have a big enough audience just yet, or maybe you don't have the right marketing messaging just yet. I just use Google or I reach out to my network of people in the same industry and that's and find out what those conversion rates are.
So for example, in the course world, when we were getting started, the industry average was like 2 to 2.5% is what our mentors were saying is like what you should aim for. And then now I would reach out because I have so many people in the course world. I've have a mastermind of course creators. I could easily now reach out to my network and I have and that conversion rate is actually like across the board, so vastly different.
And so when you're launching something new, you want to probably skew on the lower end of that for a course, depending on your like no trust factor. So for example, if you were a coach for many many years or a service-based business owner for many many years and you have the like no trust factor. And going back to what we're saying, we're creating a product and service for our audience, not a new audience for our current audience. Then maybe you could, you know, hit that industry standard or be above it, or you can kind of give yourself good, better, best goals, knowing you already have an audience built in.
If you are brand new, either launching a service or launching a digital product and you are currently building up your list, building up your like no trust factor. Even if you have a ton of followers on Instagram and think that you have like no trust factor, you will not actually know if you have like no trust factor until you launch a course. Trust me. I have seen people launch and expect extremely high results and get very little results. And I have seen the opposite of people being like, I have no idea. I just have this really amazing free content platform that I've been so passionate about. Let me try and monetize it. They do. And it goes super well. Give yourself a lot of grace and know that like the, you are taking an industry average. That's where I start.
And then once you do your own launch, then I just start using my own conversions. And I say, this is my conversion rate. I want to improve it. Let me understand my audience on a deeper level. And like, I don't really care about the industry standards anymore. I am trying to just improve my launch over my other launch. You base it off your own numbers.
There are lots of people in my industry that do way higher conversion rates than me. And I just don't let that get to me. I'm like, I'm staying in my own lane. I'm serving my audience and who wants to buy for me will buy for me. And I'm happy with that and feeling good about my marketing messaging and my strategy and my courses.
(Paige)And you're doing very well with it.
Okay. I want to get to the juicy bit. Can you tell me about a bad decision that you made in your business related to like picking some sort of new idea or new project?
Okay. So this is going to sound super cliche, but I don't really have any projects that I feel like were a bad decision.
But the one I want to talk about didn't come to fruition. I think it was because of the pandemic specifically and other reasons - basically, I didn't evaluate it.
So I wouldn't, necessarily want to consider this project a mistake because it was a really fun project. We didn't evaluate it the way that I now, I have an evaluation system for a project.
And so that's what I want to share here. Because if you are also in the BB community, you are probably curious about why we did not launch the BB shop…
Which was going to be lines, clothing that had like our logo on it or different like cute sayings like t-shirts and hats. I have like so many in my closet right now of all the samples.
I would just do it now for swag, for fun, for giving it away. And maybe putting it on the site in a chill way - it'd be a full passion project.
The challenge was that it was such a different industry. It was a physical product. There was such a high learning curve. And we spent months, like half a year developing it. And we were super passionate about it. We did a photoshoot in Vancouver. It was made for our audience. So that wasn't the issue. We did a survey of our audience. We had them, do something fun with us picking designs.
This was in 2019.
We started developing it. And we, we were developing it for our audience. So that felt good. But then the learning curve was so high and it was taking our time away. We didn't evaluate it from that perspective.
It was taking a lot of our time away, like doing more launches, maybe, and being able to serve more people in our courses. So we kind of put off launches and we put a lot of work onto our plate, on our team's plate. And so it definitely became like our capacity was very maxed out during this time. Because once we had the idea. We thought, this is going to be great.
We pitched it to our audience. They were like, yes, we want that.
And I said, every time I wear the hat, I know people still want it. And it's not an idea that is dead, it's shelved for right now, so to speak. And like what could be something that we bring back at the right time.
So I think at that time in 2019, there was like a bunch of projects we were doing. So we were, our team and ourselves were fully maxed out. And I think with the learning curve of it all and no forecasting on the money side. So it was like time and money were not evaluated on this project.
And that's where I've learned my lesson to really be able to see a project through to fruition.
We weren't going to lose money necessarily on it, but it wasn't going to be as profitable.
So adding a significant amount of revenue. So we just sort of bypass that. We said, that's fine. We're just going to do it because we really want to create these, you know, swag stuff for our audience and our costs will be covered. So it's fine.
But then the shipping side of things got really complicated.
And so we're like, okay, well, originally we're going to launch it to all of the 60-plus countries that we have students in. And so then we had to reevaluate and be like, well, there was like certain tax laws and there was shipping and anybody who's in the e-commerce store, I'm sure knows so much more about this. And it's not, it's not unachievable. We're smart people. Their businesses have done it before. It's not like it's a model. It's like, oh, this is so new. It was more that because it was a passion project, we, because I personally were taking on pretty much the full workload of the project.
We had team members help us, but because they were already maxed on our regular projects, this again is where I didn't really evaluate it. We were taking on the brunt of the work in terms and like we were getting maxed out in this learning phase was starting to really hit me anyways, because I ran into these things.
We're like, okay, we're just going to launch it to the States because that's where our business is registered. So we already have our business set up in there - it will be fine.
And then you have to decide though from a marketing perspective, do you do free shipping or do you make people pay for shipping?
So that's like a whole thing that was like, there's so many different opinions on this strategy. And we were like, but then your costs are very variable. So then you're, we were like, well, then, okay, well, we can't offer it to Hawaii because like the shipping cost is too high that is like, or we'd have to at that point, then it's like, okay, well, then you decide.
And I think that e-commerce make decisions like this, you decide, okay, well, that's fine. I might not make a profit off of those sales, but like something else will balance it out over here. But again, this was so new to us. This is all learning new marketing kind of going back to what I'm talking about before this is like, it was to our same audience, but it was such. It was so outside of our realm, like we'd only ever offered remote digital services. So it was like so new.
So we did bring it to almost life. We did have the photo shoot here in Vancouver for those listening. If you were there at the photo shoots and our amazing students came and joined us for that. We had a meetup. It was so fun.
We were ready to go.
We had made all the decisions and the pandemic hit.
And the fulfillment center that was going to produce our clothing shut down.
And then everything shifted during the pandemic.
It was how do we take care of our audience?
How do we take care of our family?
How do we take care of ourselves?
You know, where what is the future of our business?
Like it the physical product because it was so new to us in the amount of time and money freedom that we were starting to lack when it came to that one was that we just we had to show that it wasn't the pandemic made it not a priority anymore.
And we switched gears into the things that were a priority.
While I do think people who follow us on Instagram and haven't purchased from us would like these products. They're more so when we do research, they're really more targeted to our current members of people who have purchased a product or service from us. And so I think to reevaluate this passion project, I think that we would bring it back in the capacity of we would factor in the cost of it into our products and services and like maybe offer it as a as a bonus or something.
(Paige) They’d be the most popular giveaways like any time that you want to do something like hey, whatever draw for this sweatshirt people will go bananas because also it's like so exclusive because basically just the two of you have them!
(Shay) Yeah, exactly. That's where you have to like, it's okay. It just didn't work with the timing. But I feel like it was a blessing in disguise because it was just such a different industry like we were, I don't think ready to bring it in because I think everything happens for a reason.
Like I don't think it was meant to come into this world at that time. But that doesn't mean that that idea can't be brought back, you know, like, or it can't come into fruition at some other time. So if you're like, it is something that I think is really cool, and could be a really fun part of our brand.
And if we did it more like giveaways or swag or a small like now, there's so many more tools and stuff also since the pandemic for e-commerce.
And if we figured that you know, we learned a lot so we could totally implement an e-commerce side, so we could do it. And I think that's just really fun. And that's something that it's always on a list. It's like, okay, we're at our annual planning or at our quarterly planning, we have our idea phase items.
And we're like, which ones do we want to bring into the learning creation execution phase?
(Paige) Shay, this was so interesting. Honestly, thank you so much. I think your insights on decision-making and mistakes and lessons are so extremely valuable. And I think people be very well served to go by your processes because they have definitely served you very well.
So thank you so much for coming and sharing. I really appreciate it.
(Shay) Yeah, thank you so much for having me and if anybody wants to get in touch, you can always find me on Instagram at bucket list @bucketlistbombshells or if you're at this stage of scaling your business and want to be coached by Cassie and me, you can join us and sign up for the wait list for our mastermind. It's called the scale with purpose mastermind program. It runs twice a year. And you can find that at bucket list bombshells.com/mastermind.
(Paige) They take care of you so well in that mastermind, I could say, and one of my past students just joined in. So it is really wonderful. So definitely do go consider that.
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