$5K Blitz - Part 1 - Service Provider Purgatory

0:00Welcome back to the Yaffer Business Podcast. It's me Courtney Shaw. This week we are doing something totally different. I took the plans I had, threw them out the window so to speak because I saw an urgent need. And so this week you can expect to have a new episode from me every single day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. We are going to break down this topic into a five part series because I really want to dismantle and break down and show you what's happening right now because what I identified is that the majority of service providers out there are in what I would call service provider purgatory. You've been doing this work for more than a year, maybe more than two years, maybe more than that, and you have still not consistently cracked five K months.

1:02That stops now. There is no reason why anyone should have to get stuck there. You're not stuck there or below there because you are inherently flawed as I'm going to hopefully very methodically break down this week. It's not a you problem, but because we have made some mistakes and got lost on our journey a little bit, again, not a you problem. I'm going to really show you what's happening here. I'm going to show you, I'm going to be permission to admit that maybe things got a little bit lost. And I'm going to show you how to get back on track and how to get out of this stage once and for all because I am so frustrated, I mean, I've been in this service provider purgatory before. I don't think this part of it is just like my BDSD from that. And then I'm so frustrated seeing the same people year after year be at the same level of their business and not actually crack out of it and be able to do something like I

2:07teach in the six figures print, whether that's with me or on their own to create a machine that's bringing in regular money and creating that freedom. And it's almost like because we want the freedom so badly that we put the freedom in front of everything else. And then we don't do the process that is actually going to create that freedom, which I'm going to be outlining in detail over this week. These are going to ideally be shorter episodes because I want them, I really want them to land. They're very intentional. They're a bite size. What we'll be talking about is what I'm calling the 5K Blitz. I want you generating $5,000 from your business in the next 30 days. We need to put constraints on this to make it happen because part of the problem is we are allowing ourselves to not. We're making it possible to not. We're making a goal to hit certain numbers, but we're not making it a must and we're not creating constraints around that.

3:07And so the first decision I want you to make, if this applies to you, right? And by the way, if you're already making 5K or more a month from your business on average, and you still would just love to generate more cash flow and you still just love the strategies I teach, you are going to get so much out of this series too. It's just that this series is really crafted for those of you who have an offer and offers. You've been tweaking them and you've launched them and you've relaunched them and you've done lots of things and you're not new to business and yet you are still in this purgatory. You're still in the below 5K a month purgatory. This is not a punishment. I'm not calling you out to shame you. I'm calling you in to show you that you are far from alone. There's the majority of people in my audience. These are not dummies. These are not people who are in bad at business. These are people who have fallen into purgatory. We're going to explain exactly why that's happening and we are going to get you out of it this week. This is where it ends right now.

4:08Okay. So let's paint the picture of this purgatory, all right? And we're going to go through this and then at the end of this episode I'm going to tell you more about what you can expect from the rest of this series this week, okay? Because right now this is where most people are living, most service providers are living. You've been at this for a while. You're not new. You've invested very real money, time, energy into building a business. You've taken courses. You've hired people. Maybe you've had someone on your team. You've probably been through cycles and fluctuations of all of these things. You've rebuilt and offer more than once, usually. And yet you're still here. And because you have not been able to break through, your brain is starting to tell you a story because that's what brains do about why that's happening. Your brain has to make sense of it.

5:09So it starts to tell you a story. And the story is what is keeping you in this position. All right? So we're going to talk about that. We're going to break all that down. Okay. Stay with me. You're not necessarily broke. You might be. That's a relative thing. But it's not necessarily being broke, but you are not where you thought you'd be right now. And maybe even me saying that is making a little uncomfortable because it's really not something that you might even want to turn off this episode right now when you hear me say that. You're like, I don't want to be confronted with this Courtney. This is not what I asked for right now. Well, if you're listening to my podcast, it is this lack of consistency, this every single month having to be like, when am I going to get clients? When am I going to get clients? When is the money coming in? It's it's awful. It's absolutely awful. Okay. So let's name it. It's purgatory. It's not failure. And it's not success. It's just a really shitty in between.

6:14So what I want to talk about now is I want to share with you the three phases that every service provider should go through building a business from zero to six figures. Okay. There's kind of three-decor milestones here. Let's call them milestones. And what happens is that instead of going through these three milestones rapidly, you're like half checking off one and then kind of going back and then skipping steps and then and you're just you're just not making progress. You're not booking clients. The offer is not selling. You learn a bunch of stuff. You've created packages, but it's not selling point blank. That's the question I asked people. Do you have a signature offer? And by the way, people often tell me they have a signature offer and I'm like, that they're a signature offer. But do you have a signature offer that is 1K absolute goddamn minimum that has sold to

7:16at least three people? Sometimes people tell me they have and then I look at the data and I'm like, not really. You don't want to fit this. You want to say no if the answer is no because if you say yes just to make yourself feel better and you move on to the next step, you are signing up for more purgatory. Okay. So people think they're moving on through this process, but they're actually constantly signing up for purgatory. So let me tell you about these three milestones that I that I want to see you go through. Okay. All right. So milestone number one is making it exist. It's getting it out there and it's getting your first $1,000 from some offer you've created. Okay. So some of most of you listening to this, not everyone listening to this, has made $1,000 in some way freelancing or whatever. And that counts, but making $1,000 freelancing or doing a custom proposal or something like

8:19that is not the same as making $1,000 with an offer you created that somebody bought. If it's freelancing or if it's a custom thing that you did for someone, I'm glad that happened. That is great progress. But I want to see you make your first $1,000 with an offer that you're like, I made this and somebody bought it. Not somebody said they wanted something and then I made it for them and then the next person came and I had to craft a different offer for them. Like I want it to be one thing that you made before someone bought it. Okay. So that's the first $1,000. I don't really care what that thing is, but it has to be you made it, they bought it. Okay. In my case, what that looked like was I had a website copy rating package I made and then I had three people buy it. Okay. And then that would get you past the one came mark.

9:21Okay. So this is just like I can sell a thing and people will buy it. All right. That phase currently I expect you to be at before working with me, however I realize that if you have done that through customizing offers, you have technically passed that milestone. But I just want you to keep in mind that creating the offer first and then selling it is a different ball game than having a leap comes you and then creating the thing that they want and selling it and then not being able to rinse and repeat that for the next person. Okay. So I just want you to keep that in mind. All right. But you just need to make sure you understand that like that's something we really need to make sure happens. Okay. The second milestone is what I'm going to call the two to five K cash.

10:23Okay. So what I want to see is yes, two to five K initially and then the ability to do two to five K on repeat. Okay. Somewhere in that range. Once you're in the two to five K range, that's all the same to me. It's a matter of tweaks and details whether you're at two K or five K. And if you're in there and you've been stuck at two K for a while, you know how to get to five K, like I can talk to you about that. Like I can we can look at that. But if you're in that range, that's great again. It's something that like proves that you can like repeatedly sell a thing. Okay. And then milestone three is then taking that thing that you repeatedly sold sold and building a machine around it. That's what I do inside of the six figure sprint. Okay. Is we're like, we're going to take this thing, this concept that we have and we're going to turn it into like a really clear signature offer and we're going to build a sales machine,

11:28a client booking machine around it so that I'm actually building a business not a reactive like I need money, uh, kind of situation. Okay. Now, here's what happens. Here's where you are probably getting stuck. You think you're in phase three. When you actually need to go back and make sure you've done phases one and two, all right? This is not a you problem. And what ends up happening is so many of you are so stuck on creating signature offers that are not selling. And then you're like, some of you are like tweaking and retweeting those offers, but they're still not selling because you don't understand fundamentally why they're not selling because you did not pass milestone two correctly. And some of you think your problem is marketing when marketing zone, I'm going to solve the

12:29problem. Not that in the next episode, I'm going to talk about, you know, the problem you think you have versus the problem that you actually have, which is why cash is stuck. It's like out there waiting to get to you and you are actively blocking it. You're actively saying, no, no thanks. Don't need that. Okay. So this is this is the purgatory is you're trying to get to that consistency with a signature offer, which is great. Like that's what I teach. But you're doing it with an offer that is not proven and you're over complicating the offer. And so you keep going back and tweaking and retaking the offer and you're not in love with the offer and you're you're assessing of the offer offers should be so fucking simple. In fact, through this series and in the 5k blitz program that I'm going to be running the first round of, I'm going to tell you more about that next week. We're going to talk about, I'm going to give you like literally what the offer needs

13:30to be. The problem is y'all are trying to invent offers. I, when I, even in the year for clients, okay, people all the time go through the year for clients and they are like, oh, I have an idea for my free mini service. I have this great idea for my signature service or I have this service already and I'm like, I don't, first of all, if you have an idea for a free mini service, you're off the plan. You're showing all ideas. I give you a formula that you input information into and it tells you exactly what the service is. So you're making it up. It's not going to work. You guys got to stop creating offers and you've got to start understanding it's not about the offer. It's about the positioning and your positioning is your problem and this isn't like a messaging problem where it's like, let's go work on a sales page. It's like a fundamental issue of, of over complicating where money comes from. So I'm going to give you a really, really simple system. And that's the whole idea here is I want you to have a 30 day plan to get 5K and to fix

14:30this problem once and for all, the get rid of all the fog and the haze and the walking through molasses and all the clients going to come from like, all of that is a sign of an offer problem, not a marketing problem. I'm getting ahead of myself here, okay? So what does this purgatory actually look like? Here's some signs that you're in that purgatory. You know, I'm vacillating between 3 and 5K every month or I had somebody say, I make about 3K a month, but the last few months, actually, I don't have even doing that and that's been going on for a year, okay? I just need a dial in my messaging. I just need to get consistent with my marketing. If you don't have clients lined up, that's not a marketing problem. I know that might sound confusing, I'm getting ahead of myself again. I've rebuilt my offer again because the last one didn't sell, so you're assuming the offer needs to change and working on something new. Oh my God, the one that drives me absolutely bonkers is service providers who are like, I

15:31just need to create digital products. I just need a smaller offering and a digital offer. Oh my friend, oh my friend, that is going to take you down the rabbit hole of rabbit holes. You are just literally signing in blood your soul over to purgatory with that. No, no, and no. I'm going to challenge you in this series to decide if you actually want to make money or not. I'm going to challenge you to decide do you want cash or do you want to be committed to the thing that you're decided that you want to do because you don't get to do both. We're going to dismantle the business that you thought you were building so that you can build the one that's actually going to generate revenue. This is exactly what I had to do when I was a service provider in this exact purgatory. And ultimately there's a moment where I just had to go, you know what? What do I have to lose? And I finally did the thing that brought in the money and I've never looked back.

16:35I have never looked back. So what I'm asking for if you continue to listen to this series is to decide who you are. Are you the person who is like, I'm ready to do what it takes to get 5K cash coming in? I'm ready to do what it takes. Or are you the person who's like, we'll see. I don't know. I don't really want to do this in that. I really like this offer. I just want, then you're not ready. And that's fine. No judge. I mean, like, I might have a little judgment because I think you're wrong, but that's just me. It's maybe a human with, this is maybe a Scorpio. I think you're wrong, but that's okay. Like you get to be wrong or you get to be right and move me wrong, right? But I'm here for the person who's like, I'm ready to make cash courting. Let's figure it out. So I'm going to give you this series this week. Next week, I'm going to share with you all about the 5K Blitz program that I'm launching. The inaugural first launch and the opportunity there for that.

17:36There's a link in the show notes that I want you to go to to get on the VIP wait list for that. The first one to get all the details in the special offer I have for that, for the VIP wait list. And I'm going to leave you with a couple of things today. I want to leave you with the two roads into purgatory and a permission slip, okay? So here's the two roads that lead you into purgatory, path A, freelancer trap. You are a skill-based person. You have something you're really good at. And so you're looking for, maybe it happens a lot with copyriders and of course because I was a copywriter, I tracked a lot of copyriders, but you could be a photographer or graphic designer or some other kind of marketer or whatever. Like it could be non-marketing too. Like there's lots of different types of freelance work. So you're like, I have a skill set, I sell and then the client, potential client tells me what they want. And then I craft a proposal and tell them what I'm going to charge for that.

18:36I hate this. I hate freelancing. I don't know why anyone signs up for this life. Again, that's my opinion. But I just think it sounds like everything terrible about having a job. It's a little job you have to re-get hired for all the time, but with none of the benefits and none of the benefits of having your own business, all the downsides. It just sounds absolutely terrible for me, to me. But that's my opinion. And you're still listening, so maybe you have that opinion too. And the second path in the purgatory is this. We're going to call it the art, the artist trap. OK, so there's the freelancer trap and the artist trap. The artist trap looks like this. You have a vision, you have a passion, you have a thing you want to do. I want to do this kind of work. This is what I do. And you can kind of look down on anyone who follows the money. And you're not like that. You are above that. You're not a sell out or whatever it is.

19:36But what you've done is you created offers that nobody you know wants. And you've crazily, you want to exist, that you think is important, that you're lit up about. And all those things are great. Those are great qualities, but that's not how businesses work. So this is where it's like you got to decide. Do you want to do that or do you want to make money? Those are the choices. And again, I'm here for the people who are ready to make money. And the clients I work with who are finally willing to put down the freelancer trap and the artist's trap are the ones who are the most successful. If you're not willing to put those things down, I don't think I have any success with people who aren't willing to put those things down. That's like, I can't, the stuff I do doesn't work if you're committed to those paths. OK, both of those paths to me are an insane amount of effort for no reward. You cannot build a real business doing those things, those are not businesses. One's an artist, one's a freelancer, they're not businesses.

20:36A business is an entity that exists outside of you. And it's never going to get you to past milestone to doing it that way. OK, so let me give you your final permission slip. You're not behind. You're not. There's no such thing as behind. You are where you are. But where you are is in a situation where you haven't really committed to running a business and to making money. You've fallen into the passion trap or the freelancing trap or the artist trap, whatever you want to call it, right? And that's not your fault. Like I said, most people do that. You don't need to double down on that. What you need is a more simple way forward. But it's going to require following the money, which we will talk about in a later episode. OK, again, you're not behind, but you are focused on the wrong problem.

21:39You are never going to solve it doing what you're doing right now. You will continue having this problem for literally years, forever, if you do not follow what I am sharing in this series. I dropped everything I was doing in my business to do this series because this is such a big problem that I'm seeing. OK. In tomorrow's episode, we're going to talk about what you think you need to do to get clients and why that's not what you need to do and what the problem actually is that the diagnosis you're making, marketing is not the problem. But why you think it is because it makes sense. Again, not your fault. You're smart. You're looking at it. You're looking at the information, and that's the conclusion you're coming to. So I want to share with you a different way of looking at this so you can see what actually is going on. Please go down to the show notes and get on the VIP wait list if you want to hear more

22:41about the 5K Blitz program that I'm going to be launching next week. Let me give you a little rundown of the episodes. This one's going to be, it's, we're at like a little over 20 minutes. This one's probably going to be the longest one. OK. So today we talked about part one is service provider purgatory. Part two of the 5 K Blitz, we're going to talk about the misdiagnosis. That's tomorrow's episode. In part three, we're going to talk about the sunk cost trap in part four. We're going to talk about following the money. And in part five, I'm going to give you the 30-day plan. OK, then make sure you get on that wait list next week. I'm going to be giving you all the details to like about the 5K Blitz program. And if you want to work with me to actually get that 5K in the next 30 days, that's what we're going to be doing. But again, as always, the series in and of itself is going to be super valuable.

23:43That said, if you really are dedicated to making this happen, the program that I'm about to release is where we're going to make those changes and where you get a chance to work with me to help you to make that happen. All right. So super excited. Can't wait to take you on this journey. And I will talk to you tomorrow.