#POV | How to take messy action and experiment more in your business

If I had a catch phrase, it would be... “Let’s try it!”

I know I talk A LOT about approaching everything in business like an experiment, but I think it deserves a little clarification and expansion, so here we go. 

Experimenting and taking messy action is a critical part of growing and scaling.

In fact, I firmly believe it's only of the biggest reasons why we've grown so quickly. 

Messy action doesn't mean pushing and hustling without intention. 

It doesn't mean acting on every single idea you have (because trust me, I know you have way too many than you can actually act on). 

And it doesn't mean totally winging it... 

Messy action is all about intentionally trying new things and looking at your successes and failures through the lens of trial and error. 

It means kicking perfectionism to the curb. 

Because growth doesn't come from perfection. 

It comes from getting comfortable with doing things even when you have no idea whether they’ll work or not (hello definition of being an entrepreneur).

And it comes from looking for ways to make everything you do in your business EASIER....

This episode is ALL about how you can incorporate some experimentation into your business and some of my favorite ways to make it fun! 

Tune in and then come hang out with me on Instagram and let me know what you think!

Work with Jordan:

• Apply to join The Advisory -  The only high-touch mastermind for female coaches and online service providers that combines effective strategy with done-for-you execution.

Connect:

• Website: easyscaling.com
• Instagram: @jordanschandaking
• Leave a review: easyscaling.com/podcastreview

Transcript

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Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. Today I wanna talk to you about experimenting in your business. And I talk about this a lot. I feel like I talk about this constantly. Maybe you're sick of me talking about this. Well, I'm gonna talk about it anyway because it's that important and I wanna approach it a little bit differently than I usually do. So I feel like. . Typically when I'm talking about experimenting in business, I'm, I'm just generally talking about how I think it's really important. I personally have and still do on a regular basis, experiment a lot in my business and I, I really believe that that is one of the reasons why we have scaled this business so quickly.

And I think it's fun. I, I love it and, and really, , like if we wanna zoom out and and talk about experimenting in your business, I think it's important to always balance it with also being deliberate and doing planning and getting data and taking action in a way that makes sense. Like we don't wanna always be wing it.

We don't wanna always be experimenting and throwing spaghetti at the wall and just flying by the seat of our pants. Right? Like I think every entrepreneur. Knows that phase of business knows . They know what that's like to approach their business from that perspective. And if you had to choose yes, like we want to err on the side of taking action versus staying in planning mode for too long and.

allowing that to keep us from actually taking action and getting the data. But it is, it is a balance. We wanna find the balance. Like everything, there's, there's moderation here that we want to find because we don't want to be doing it too much, but we also don't wanna be planning too much. So we wanna find this middle ground.

I wanna talk today about how to, Incorporate experimentation and messy action. More into your business, more into your operations, more into your marketing, more into all of the things that you're doing on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis in your business. And then I'll follow that up, in another episode all about actually, Integrating planning more into your business.

So we'll have these two different, different pieces, of the puzzle here. These two different sides that I think were, are equally as important. But today I just wanna focus on experimentation and how you can incorporate that more into your business. So, I've got a couple of of examples here that I actually wanna run you through.

This is just to like get you thinking about different things that you might be able to do, different areas of your business part. You might be able to play with things, try things, and ultimately what I'm trying to get here, trying to get you to here is realizing and like fully integrating this concept that not everything in your business, not every decision, not every action or thing that you try. needs to be treated like a life-changing decision. A lot of times when I'm working with clients, they're struggling with like, how should I do it? Or What's the right way?

Or, you know, I've got these options. What should I, what should I go with? And I would say, 90% of the time, my answer is, well, let's just try it. . Let's just pick one and try it. I don't think there's a wrong answer here. Like I, I feel like a broken record a lot of times that I'm saying I think either is fine, I think either could work and none of us can tell the future.

So let's pick one and let's try it and let's get the data and let's see what happens and that that. approach to your business that focus on experimentation, that that perspective is really freeing because it takes the pressure off of you. To have to come up with the exact right thing at every moment, at every pivot, at every like inflection point in your business.

You don't have to know the right thing. You just need to try something. Like if you have data, use the data that you have. If you don't like, you literally aren't gonna know. So put it out there, try it, and then we can figure out if it works. If it doesn't work, we can go back to the drawing board and try something else.

Right? So you have to. Comfortable with knowing that you don't actually know and just trying something and knowing that it's gonna be an experiment. So these are some examples just to walk you through some of the ways that I experiment in my business, some of the ways that I've, that I frequently encourage my clients to experiment, experiment in their businesses.

and hopefully you can get some, some ideas here, some encouragement, some inspiration, whatever, to help you experiment more in your business. The first thing is to raise your prices. Raise your prices. This does not have to be a monumental decision or shift or planned out effort. When I was first getting started in my business, I set my prices kind of on a whim.

I think like most people do, and I then once I started getting data, did some more, quantitative assessment of my prices. And I've got a bunch of nerdy spreadsheets that I use and do price analyses with clients and all of those things now, but at the beginning I didn't know. And, and what I realized was it doesn't actually matter what, what I think, , it didn't actually matter what the data said and what the math said, because pricing is more complicated than that.

It's not just about the value or it's not just about what people will pay. There's a big emphasis on confidence when it comes to pricing, especially when you're new. So you have to just put a price on. So, , try it out. You've gotta feel good about it to sell it. And then you can always come back and raise your prices.

And this is where I think people forget to come back and actually raise their prices. So they typically start with something lower than they should. I know I did. And then they never come back to raise it. And then it, it becomes this huge thing that's like, oh my gosh, raising my prices. It feels so intimidating.

It's like such a big decision. What are all the things that they're gonna do? How are they gonna tell people? Like it does not have to be that complicated. So, . The approach that I took that I think is really, really easy and simple and fun is to, every time you get a new client, you publicly raise your prices like it's that simple.

It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. You don't have to go raise your prices on all of your current clients, and we can have a discussion about that separately because sometimes that does need to happen as well. But public facing prices is super easy to experiment with. You can change it anytime all the time.

Every week, every month, every quarter, every year, whatever, like whatever frequency makes sense. For me, early in business, every time I got a new client, my public facing prices were race, and I experimented with that until I got to the point where I was like, okay, this feels really good. Like this feels.

like appropriate compensation. I'm excited to do the work. People are still paying it. This is where maybe things are gonna level out. And I eventually got to the point where I wasn't, I wasn't really getting clients very easily anymore, so I decided to stick with that, bump it down a little bit, and go back to the price where things felt easier and still felt good for me.

So it's just an experiment. Have fun.

Okay. Let's talk about another way to experiment more. So this comes up a ton. This comes up a ton because I work with a lot of coaches. I work with a lot of people doing one-on-one. Work. And oftentimes the biggest sticking point that they have, the biggest issue that they have that they're trying to solve in their business is how to serve more people, how to make more money.

But they feel like they're already at their capacity, they're trading time for money, whatever it is, right? So a lot of the time, not every time, but a lot of the time, the solution to that is to create a group program or to create a course, something that's a little bit more passive, something that's more scalable.

And I wanna talk about this specific example, this idea. , it's, it's a really common thing that I see when people want to launch memberships or they wanna launch group programs or they wanna launch a course, is they think that they have to have everything created, everything done, everything in its final form before they launch the idea, before they launch the program.

And in my experience, that is actually. The opposite of how you want to approach launching something new like this when you're going from one-on-one to scalable offer. So what I always recommend experimenting with is, Creating the container, creating the program, creating the offer, launching it, and running it live.

First, before you go to all of the work to create the materials, to create the course content, to create the slides, to create the videos, to create all of the different resources and materials that you know you want people to have inside the program. Do it live first. Do it live. If anyone knows what I'm talking about and referencing there, please DM me and we can ta, we can chat about it If you.

also DM me, and I can send you the video, but we wanna do it live. We wanna do it live because what often happens, and this isn't a bad thing, but what often happens is we think we know exactly what our clients want and exactly what they need. But when we get into a group situation with them or an evergreen situation with.

We find that what they really need is just a little bit different. Sometimes it's a lot different, but usually it's just a little bit different than what we originally thought in our mind was gonna be the thing. Like it could be they could need to spend more time on a certain topic. They could need something that you didn't even think to include.

They, there's all kinds of things that they could need. that's just a little bit different than your pre-planned content, your pre-planned course, your, you know, resource and its first iteration. And so you go to all of this time, all of this energy, all of this effort and probably money to put together the thing that you think is gonna be its final form.

You put together the videos, you put together the course, and then you. launch it and people go through it and maybe they complete it, maybe they don't. maybe they still leave needing more. Maybe people aren't actually even interested in it because it's not actually what they need. I mean, there's so many things that can happen and you end up wasting.

Time, effort, energy, money, and I don't want you to do that. So this is where experimentation can come in really handy because we can launch the thing, we can get people into it, and we can serve them in real time with the things that they actually need help with. And that doesn't mean it has to be totally unstructured, but maybe.

You plan your content, maybe you're gonna do a six week course, okay, great. Run it as a six week live course where you're presenting the content to them in real time and you're getting feedback and you're adapting the content as you go. You're, you are getting the questions from them, and then you're giving them more information.

Maybe you find halfway through that. You thought week three was gonna be all about, you know, finding your ideal client. Well, they actually wanna spend the entire rest of the six week course on that because that is the thing that they really need to solve. Or they can't quite drop their head around it, or it takes more time.

Like again, there are so many things that you can learn by, by. Working in real time with a group of individuals and then you use that information, you use that data, and you use that time to actually co-create the content with them, and it saves you a ton of time and it creates a better product in the end.

So this is one of my favorite ways to experiment. It's one of my favorite ways to take the pressure off, and not force yourself to have to create the final product. Immediately right off the bat and, and get it, get it. Perfect. Right? So this is one of my favorite ways to experiment. Let's talk about another, okay, I love this one.

I, I love this one because I do this a lot. And that is to just play, play with your marketing strategies, play with your marketing tactics. Before you go all in on any particular strategy or tactic. I think this. Particularly important in in the online space when we have a lot of people all of the time telling us that they have the one solution for us.

They have the information about the one way we need to do it, that's gonna work and. . I see so many people going all in on something because they're told that it's the thing that's gonna work. Or maybe they're not even told that. Maybe they just feel like that's the thing. That's the idea, that's the format, or that's the platform or whatever it is that is gonna work for their marketing, and they go all in on it.

I spend a lot of money, maybe a lot of time, maybe a lot of energy, effort, all of the things again, and it doesn't work out. And. I'm not saying that that always happens. Sometimes it does work out Totally. It does. But it can take the pressure off of having to get it right and having to have it work to like, you know, for the sake of your business.

if you were to, if you were to just test it first. So I, I do a lot of this, With my own marketing, I just play with things. I put ideas out there. I ask a lot of questions. I'll throw an offer out, I'll see what kind of response I get. I always test things, and this just recently happened. 

I'll give you a super concrete example. Cause I think this can kind of be hard to wrap your head around. Very recently, I decided that I wanted to test.

A two week trial of our membership. And so I was gonna build out an entirely brand new funnel for this idea. I was going to record a masterclass, which means I was gonna have to script this masterclass. I was gonna record it, I was gonna build a brand new sales page. I was gonna build, you know, promo emails and all of these things I was gonna have to create from scratch.

And I was like, wait a minute. Okay, , yes, maybe we want to go all in on this idea, but why don't. Test it first and get the data, there's almost always a way that you can test it first. So for us, we had never done this two week trial before. So a really, really easy way to test that is to put it out to your organic audience first, or we also have ads running all the time, and so I could add that as an upsell to the end.

So we're in the midst of testing this. Right now, we will then be able to gather all of the data and decide does this actually make sense for us to pour our time, energy, and effort and money into building out this brand new funnel with the goal being to get people into a two week trial of our membership.

Wow. Does that take the pressure off of me to have to know that this is a good use of our time? I can test it, I can test it, and I can get the data. So that's exactly what I'm talking about here. I do the same thing with our podcast. I test new things all of the time and instead of just, instead of feeling like this has to be set in stone and something super rigid that we're gonna stick to forever.

I play with ideas. I, I play with the idea of, oh, okay, I'm gonna do this type of solo episode and I'm gonna see what the feedback is, or I'm gonna play around with doing this mini-series format, or I'm gonna play around with doing this kind of frequency for these types of episodes. That is, that is what can bring a ton of ease to your business, is just experimenting with it, playing with it, and knowing that it doesn't have to be like that forever.

So that's another, another idea. . Now the next one that I wanna tell you about is, around cutting things. So, so far all of these ideas have been around trying new things in, implementing new things, testing out new ideas, adding things on. I wanna talk about experimenting with cutting things out because this, I feel like is a very overlooked strategy when it comes to making your business easier, when it comes to being more profitable, when it comes to all kinds of things, when, when you wanna optimize your business.

Sometimes people forget to just cut shit out. Okay. So again, experiment with it. Play with it. It doesn't have to be the decision that sticks forever. You just have to try it. And sometimes that can be scary because we build, we build. Especially a lot of our operation functions and our, a lot of our marketing tasks and our marketing duties and our marketing like responsibilities that we have in business or that our team has, we build them up to be very important and we think, oh, well, if I stop doing that, like something's gonna break or my business is gonna fail, or I'm not gonna be able to get clients or, We can tie up a lot of those worries into very small actions and decisions that we have in our business.

And so, one in particular that I just experimented with, and again, I'm still in the midst of this experiment, is around my podcast show notes. So this is where it, it becomes really important to listen to your gut.

Listening to your gut is super important and really tapping into. , knowing what feels easy and what feels hard. knowing the things that you avoid and knowing the things that let you up. Like the, these, this dichotomy of how things feel in your business. And, and on the one side, feeling good and being easy.

And then on the other side, feeling hard and being a drag. And we avoid them. Like we need to learn to tap into those feelings. And when you can do. You can start to see little things in your business that you can just cut out like, because a lot of times they probably aren't necessary. They're probably not serving you in the way that you think that they are, that you've built them up to, to to represent.

So for us, that was show notes for me, that was show notes because I had always put a lot of pressure on our show notes being very detailed and. A very literal representation of what someone would get in the episode. And so that meant that every time we did a podcast, I would listen to the entire episode and I would create the show notes.

Now we can talk about me being a control freak another day. There's definitely an element of that going on here. But what I found was that it was creating these show notes. That was the biggest barrier to us actually getting ahead and batching our episodes. And it was really weighing me down. It was kind of like this thing on my to-do list. I'm sure everyone can resonate with this.

It was this thing on my to-do list that I would see every day and I was like, oh my gosh, I haven't done that. I need to do that. I don't wanna do that. like that, that kind of, ugh, feeling like . I don't know what that sounds like in the mic. Probably not good. . It was that kind of like a drag on my energy, and it took me a really, really long time.

This just happened recently that I decided, we're not gonna do that anymore. We're not gonna, we're gonna make this easy. And this is a question that I love to ask, that can help, that helps me experiment more in my business, which is asking myself, okay, what would this look like if this were easy? How can I make this easier?

How can I take away the things that I don't like about this? And so all we did, I stopped listening to all of the episodes. We stopped writing show notes, and we put like one or two sentences in there, like a super brief description that usually I can pull straight from the intro that I do, or I can pull straight from our social team writing for the post that's gonna go out with the, with the episode or from some other source.

It's not detailed. It's not comprehensive. I'm not giving you play, by play of what's actually included in the episode. And so far we haven't seen any kind of like impact on our downloads or our messages about how much people love the episodes or whatever it is.

All of the positive feedback that we get hasn't changed by not having really detailed show notes and. . In fact, I've talked to several people about this since then, and every single one of 'em has said, oh, I don't ever even read the show notes. And so, wow, I was actually wasting a ton of time for no reason.

So now that we're experimenting with it, very likely that we're gonna stick with that. And we have evidence now that our business didn't break, our podcast didn't break, just because we're not doing the show notes in the way that we were doing them before. So again, permission to cut things out. Of your processes, of your business, anywhere in your business.

Cut things out if it's straining you. Okay. Let's see. Do we wanna cover one more? no, I don't think so. Okay. So there you go. . Those are my ideas. I have lots of others, but maybe I'll save some of those for their own episodes. I think it's also really important to repurpose your assets and play with the different formats that your assets are in.

I think it's also really important to play with your offer structures, but I think I'll definitely save that one for another episode because we can get really deep on offer structures. If you have any questions about that, let me. Happy to incorporate it into an episode, and I hope this was helpful. I hope this gives you some kind of idea or inspiration or permission to do things differently, to experiment more in your business.

I really hope that it's helpful. It was fun for me to talk about, and always a good reminder for me to rethink how I'm doing things. Have fun with it. Keep it easy. Keep it. Most of these decisions that we're making on a daily basis, or as it relates to our marketing and our operations, most of them aren't gonna break our business. Okay? So have fun and DM me if you wanna chat. See you on the next episode.