Sunny Lenarduzzi: This was the slap in the face that I needed when I was building my
business, that I needed to see and be like, oh my gosh, I'm putting myself in a crappy
situation and I'm going to keep repeating the same mistakes.
So until you get that part sorted, everything is going to feel hard.
Everyone makes mistakes, myself included, and I wish that someone had been a little
more honest with me about the potential for making mistakes when you have a business.
I have been in all different kinds of businesses for the last decade.
I started when I was around 20 years old, really diving into entrepreneurship.
And the things that I have learned have been a plenty and I've shared a lot of what I've
learned with all of you but I've never really talked about my biggest mistakes.
But I think it's really important because if you don't talk about the mistakes, you
can't talk about the lessons that came with them.
And my hope is that if you watch this video and you listen to some of these mistakes and
you haven't made them yet, it will stop you from having to go through the pain of making
some of these mistakes.
And at the end of the day too, I don't really look at any of these as mistakes that you
can't bounce back from.
I do think mistakes need to be looked at as lessons cause the inevitable part of having
a business or trying to start a business or being an entrepreneur is you're going to screw
up, period.
You will make mistakes, and if you're not making mistakes, you're probably not moving
fast enough and you're probably not thinking big enough.
So it's a kind of a badge of honor to screw up, to be honest, but also something that
I want to help you with because if the more we share, the more we can all grow a little
faster and leapfrog over some of the hurdles.
So I will be talking about how my biggest mistakes in my business and getting pretty
transparent with you about some of my biggest booboos I have ever made, one of which costs
me close to $500,000 and yeah, we're going to dive into that story in just a second.
If there's one thing that I can teach you right off the bat that I feel like has been
one of my greatest lessons is that, there's two things that are going to really be a problem
for you in trying to grow anything, and that is your cashflow and your bandwidth.
So in your business if you don't have cash in the bank, if you don't have what they call
runway, which is basically how many months can you sustain your business if everything
stopped today.
Now I know you're sitting there listening to this and you might be feeling like, oh
my gosh, I have no idea, I don't know the answer to this question, that's okay.
I remember one of my mentors did this exercise with me and I was like, well, I have about
half a month sitting in the bank, and that was like two years ago.
Now we are well set up for months, if anything were God forbid to go wrong.
But what I have learned and my biggest mistakes have come from a lack of bandwidth, being
exhausted, tired and vulnerable and a lack of cashflow.
And that also leads to you being really vulnerable because you make decisions that are based
off of being reactive instead of being proactive and you get into situations where something
is going to go wrong.
So my first big mistake that I ever made in my big business was I relied solely on word
of mouth.
I was building my consultancy before I even was on youtube talking about any of this stuff,
and I was behind the scenes, didn't really market it.
And the good thing was I was really good at what I did and I was helping businesses build
their brands using social media and I was doing all the management, everything.
So naturally people started to talk and I was just getting clients coming to me.
So that's awesome.
But I sort of was just coasting along thinking, well, this is great, I don't even have to
market myself, I don't even have to do the extra work to put myself out there.
I didn't really want to cause I was a solopreneur and I didn't have more bandwidth to take anybody
else on, but I also didn't have the cash flow in case something went wrong.
So one of my clients went bankrupt and boom, majority of my revenue gone overnight, and
I was living on my own for the very first time.
I had just gotten my apartment and I remember sitting down with my parents and being in
a full panic of, I don't know how I'm going to pay my rents, I don't know how I'm going
to make this work, I don't know where my next client is going to come from.
I should just go get a job.
And I remember it was this pivotal moment and thank God I have amazing parents and I
hope you do too, and if you don't you need to have this belief in yourself and I'm telling
you it will work out.
If you just start putting yourself out there and start sharing your genius and start networking
with the right people, the work will come.
So that's what I did.
I basically went into fix it mode and I started reaching out to anyone I had ever met who
worked in the business space in Vancouver and I said, I have this consultancy, I've
been working with these clients, here are some of my results and case studies and I
just grinded and I started putting together proposals, which I had never had to do before.
And you just learn, it's trial by fire, but again, it would be amazing if I didn't have
to be reactive about it and I could've been proactive.
So my biggest mistake there was that I had no marketing plan.
I had no idea how I was going to get new leads.
I had no idea what I was going to do if one of my clients just disappeared on me, which
does happen.
People can't pay their bills.
People flake on payments unfortunately.
So always having a lead flow coming into you is vital to the longterm success of your business,
and being in a place where you can make decisions from abundance and from, yeah, we want to
do this, I don't have to do this, which leads me to my second mistake, which is working
with clients.
I fricking hate it and we've all been there, but I have worked with clients strictly in
that particular moment in my life because I needed cash.
I needed to run the business and I needed to take on clients, and so people will always
want to hire you if you're good at what you do but it doesn't mean you always want to
work with them, because what I learned was just any clients isn't really a good clients.
And just because someone wants to work with you doesn't mean you need to work with them,
and I learned it the hard way.
I also think the big lesson that came out of this was that bad clients, maybe they're
paying you and they might even pay you really well, some of my worst clients have been my
highest paying clients, but they also take up so much mental energy, so much time and
space.
So much of your bandwidth again and your capacity that they soul suck you into hating what you
do.
So my definition of a bad client is someone who takes up like 90% of your time without
any reward really outside of monetary.
So if I was just in this to make money, I would have just gone and been a lawyer or
something or a doctor, I don't know.
But I would have gone to school and I would have done something that was stable and secure
and I knew I was going to be making X amount, but I didn't do it for that.
I built my business for freedom.
I built my business to have a choice.
I built my business to make sure that I could work in any situation that I wanted to work
in and with people that I wanted to work with, that I was excited about.
So again, having minimal cashflow, having no backup plan, having no marketing strategy,
having no way of getting new leads, having no social media presence, put me in a crappy
situation where I was having to take on clients that I hated, which then was this awful cycle
of hating my clients, being exhausted, having no energy, hating what I did and not even
wanting to do my work.
So that was the second biggest mistake that I ever made, if you can relate to that, let
me know in the comments.
My third biggest mistake ever is not testing.
And what I mean by this is I worked my face off on this product, this offering that I
had created, and it took me so long to put it all together, and I didn't think through,
okay, I'm doing all this work, but I actually haven't tested what I'm putting out there.
So I put it out there into the world, the business generated close to a $500,000 but
I didn't think through the fact that a lot of it was time sensitive information that
then required a crap ton of updates.
And so I built this successful business but I couldn't actually sustain it because I constantly
had to be updating it and tweaking it, and we were getting customer issues and customer
complaints and it was just a nightmare.
So I had to basically axe the whole business after putting in all of this time and effort.
So if you're building something, I'm such a big proponent of testing it with a small
group of people or just a couple of clients before you create something that you kind
of put out into the entire world.
Because if you have the trust and the credibility, that's amazing, which I do and I'm very good
at what I do, but that also meant that people were super eager to buy what I was selling
and I hadn't thought through the amount of upkeep that it was going to require to keep
it going and to keep the customers happy.
So testing, testing and testing, testing your ideas, doing beta groups and beta launches,
so, so important to the sustainability of your business and truthfully also to your
own happiness and peace of mind.
My fourth mistake is not hiring a team earlier.
Hiring people for me, I don't see it as this output of money, I see it as an investment
in my growth of the business.
And so there's a book that I have read probably five times at this point, if you haven't read
it, every single person who wants to run a business should read this book.
It's called the E-Myth Revisited.
This thing is gold.
I have listened to it on audio book, I have read it, and it's all about building a business
that can sustain itself without you being involved, which for me is the true definition
of a successful business.
You should be able to run your business without being burnt out all the time, without you
having to run every little detail because God forbid something happens and things do
happen, what's going to happen to your business?
So you gotta think about how it's going to sustain yourself if you're not around, and
that's been the biggest game changer for me.
So I wish if I could turn back time, I don't have regrets, but I think if I were to change
something in a big way, I would have hired someone a lot sooner to help build and scale
the business to a greater place, so that I could move more so into my genius zone and
do more stuff that really push the needle on growing the business.
Like the marketing, like the lead generation, like building relationships, like being able
to go speak at the big conferences and gain recognition and credibility there, because
as a one woman show I wasn't able to do that really.
So this book, game Changer, read it, and yeah, one of my biggest mistakes is not hiring a
team sooner.
My fifth big mistake goes back to money and cashflow, and it's the least sexy part of
running a business but it's also the most important because without money, without cash
flow, you don't really have a business, you kind of just have a hobby that's working you
into the ground.
So I read this book, another book recommendation, Profit First, I interviewed the author of
this book on my podcasts Mike Michalowicz, it's a really good episode, we'll link to
it below.
But it's all about eradicating entrepreneurial poverty because people get into business to
build freedom, to build wealth, to build abundance, to make as much as you want, to have no ceiling,
but then the funny thing is you start to build the business and you start paying yourself
last.
You start taking peanuts instead of actually making any money at all.
And that's normal in some early stages of the business, but eventually if you have a
successful business, you should be reaping the benefit, it is your business after all.
So Profit First is all about how to structure your allocations and how you allocate your
money and your company to make sure you have this really healthy business, and that you
have a safety net in case shit hits the fan and you have a couple of months that are a
little bit slow or you don't have as many sales or whatever it might be.
So you're not in this constant state of stress and reactivity, and instead you're super proactive
and you know that you can just like be in ease and do things that you want to do in
the business, grow the business at the rate that you want to grow it instead of having
to be in this reactive cycle all the time.
So highly recommend that you read that book as well for sure, it changed the game for
me.
I went from being in that cycle of needing to make more money, make more money, make
more money, bringing more leads, bringing more leads, bringing more leads and like constant
stress to, okay, I can show for a second, and we have the team in place and we know
we can pay the team and I know I'm making money and I'm not getting everything last.
I'm not just taking the peanuts that are leftover.
I'm actually prioritizing myself in this business so I'm happy, because the more happy and healthy
you are as the entrepreneur and founder of the business, the more happy and healthy your
team is going to be and your culture is going to be and your community is going to be.
And your audience and your followers and everything else, and the more free you'll be to do the
things that you're the best at in the world.
So again, I think to wrap everything up and I just want to hammer this point home because
I had gotten myself in some really crappy situations, a lot of which I just mentioned,
by being vulnerable and man, woman, doesn't matter, we're all susceptible to that if we're
not focused on the most important thing in your business which is sustainability.
The most important thing in your business is your profit, is your income coming in,
is your revenue.
But revenue even that is not the thing to focus on because if you're making as much
money as you're putting out, that's not really a fun business to be in either.
So you want to make sure that you actually have cashflow, that you have profit, that
you have a safety net, and that sometimes requires building a little bit slower and
making sure that you're making smart financial decisions in your business.
And again, if this is triggering you, I'm sorry but I'm also not sorry cause this was
the slap in the face that I needed when I was building my business.
That I needed to see and be like, oh my gosh, I'm putting myself in a crappy situation and
I'm going to keep repeating these same mistakes until I'm not vulnerable anymore, until I'm
in a position where I have bandwidth, I have help, I have abundance on my team, I have
space, I have financial freedom, I have the cashflow.
So until you get that part sorted, everything is going to feel hard and you can't really
scale to the place that you want to scale to because you're constantly stressed and
your energy and your head mentally is going into this negative place and going into a
reactive place like I said, instead of being able to move with ease forward and to grow
in a way that feels really good for you, your business and your community.
Okay.
So it's the first time I've ever talked about my big, big, big mistakes, if you guys enjoyed
this, let me know in the comments.
If you want to see more videos like this give me some suggestions below of things like this
that you want to see.
It's kind of therapeutic to talk about it because no one's perfect and I think it's
really easy to put people on a pedestal that you see killing it or crushing it.
But just know that everybody's got their stuff and everybody is making mistakes and you just
have to learn from them.
If you keep making the same mistakes again, I think that's the definition of insanity
is doing the same thing but expecting a different result.
So I wanted to share this with you because I want you to know that it's normal and making
mistakes is part of this game, but I also hope it's going to help you avoid some of
them.
So let me know in the comments what you thought.
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Love you, thank you for watching, see you in the next episode.