Yep.
That title is true and I'm going to get into the nitty-gritty of how I've passed this massive
milestone in my business, and it was a perfect time to reflect on this and share the story
with you and also follow up on last week's video where I talked about the importance
of testing and failing and risking and being very imperfect in this very perfect social
media world.
I heard a story that kind of changed my whole perspective on all of this.
I used to have all of these Post-its on my mirror in my room where it would say things
like revenue goals that I wanted to hit and social media metrics I wanted to hit and all
these things.
when I heard this story, I took them all down and I replaced it with just this, test, fail,
learn, grow, repeat.
Test, fail, learn, grow, repeat.
The story, ironically, is from the founder of Post-its.
So I don't know if you know this story, but it's really interesting.
Post-its weren't really ever supposed to be a thing.
It actually started as an adhesive that was meant to be used in aerospace and it was considered
a pretty epic failure when the guy created the adhesive and it was very weak and really
couldn't hold much together and that's how Post-its eventually came to be and it's brilliant,
but it was 14 years from the time of that failure, the aerospace failure with the glue
that didn't actually stick to anything to Post-its being created, which I think is a
really valuable lesson in the amount of time that it can take for an idea to actually come
to life and all the failures along the way that sometimes are required to get there.
So for me, I mean, Post-its now are doing 50 billion, I believe it's 50 billion units
a year are being produced, which is a crazy number, but $10 million is a crazy number
for me.
I never would have anticipated this.
I never would have seen this coming four years ago and I've had so many failures along the
way.
I think as much as it's important to celebrate your wins and talk about what you're really
proud of, I think it's really important to share the actual, honest journey of how I
got here, because I know it's going to be helpful for you and I don't know that it's
often talked about enough.
So the numbers, just to break it down, I don't remember the exact dollar and cents so I'll
pull that up somewhere on the screen.
But the breakdown of how we got here.
So we have two products.
We have YouTube for Bosses, which is a self-study course.
Maybe you're in it.
It is for anybody who wants to grow on YouTube.
Then we have the Authority Accelerator, which is our consulting program and we help people
build an online course business from the ground up and scale it organically to elevate their
impact, income and authority online.
So those are the two core pieces of our business.
YouTube for Bosses launched four years ago and that's when this iteration of my business
really started.
So in those four years, in 2016, we did 457,000.
In 2017, we did 1.3 million.
In 2018, we did 2.7 million.
In 2019 to 2020, which is now, we did 5.4 million.
It's really crazy to say that out loud.
That's so nuts.
It's still sinking in for me and that's another reason I wanted to share this, because anything
is possible if you just keep moving forward.
So I wanted to share my most epic failures, my top four, because there were too many to
actually count, in hopes that it'll be helpful to you wherever you are on your journey.
So the first one, this is not what I went to school for.
I did not go to school to become a YouTuber.
YouTubers weren't even really a thing when I was in school.
I went to school, and much to my parents' chagrin, I actually was supposed to go to
this really prestigious university, and the week before I was supposed to start, I decided
I didn't want to go because it was going to take me too long to get to where I wanted
to be, which was I wanted to be a journalist.
So I ended up going to a technical school and I ended up going to journalism school.
I graduated early and I got my first job in radio.
I was like, "Oh my gosh, I have made it."
I was making $26,500.
That was my salary and I felt rich.
I was like, "This is it.
This is the most amazing thing ever.
I've got my dream job.
I'm going to work in radio.
This is all I've ever wanted.
I want to be Oprah.
Oprah started in radio.
We're good."
So I did that job and it evolved and I ended up working in television and then I landed
my dream job at the Olympics in 2010 and it was the pinnacle of what I was trying to achieve.
I get there and it doesn't feel right.
I'm like, "This is not what I thought it was going to be."
I'm being told what to say, what to wear, what to cover, and the whole reason I wanted
to be a journalist and get into media was to tell stories, inspire people, help people,
connect people, and it just wasn't really panning out like that, and I'm also very impatient.
So I was like, "This isn't for me."
So I left the Olympics, finished my work and everything and it was an amazing experience
because it was such an epic time in our country, in Canada, it's where I live, but it just
wasn't my dream job.
So I was really disappointed.
I felt like a failure.
I didn't really want to tell my friends or my family.
I was like, "What can I do instead?"
I said, "Oh, I can be my own journalist."
So my very first business, I decided to start an online magazine and the online magazine
was, who knows where this idea came from, but it was an online magazine written for
men by women.
So it was kind of like a Cosmo, but for men.
Brand-wise, it was great.
I built up this brand.
I built up a following on social media, and social media really wasn't a thing at this
time.
No one was really using it for business, but I didn't have money to be spending on ads
and all of these things and billboards and trying to get the word out there.
So I was like, "What can I do?
Okay, I'm going to turn to Facebook and Twitter and YouTube," at the time and figure this
out on my own.
So it was basically this huge testing ground.
I figured out how to use the algorithms if you know how to use social media.
The business made a whopping $500.
Seriously.
I actually don't remember the exact amount of money that this business pulled in, but
it wasn't much.
The only reason I remember the $500 is because I was actually going door to door in Vancouver
finding people to advertise on the site.
I was knocking on doors and this really, the business still exists, it was this men's skincare
store and they were like, "Sure, we'll advertise."
They paid me $500, and again, it was such a huge win and I felt rich.
The money meant nothing to me.
I was just like, "I did it.
I made a sale," and I've been turned down so much.
Honestly, this is going to sound so silly, but I didn't really realize the value and
the importance of understanding the art of selling, and selling always felt gross and
icky to me and like something I was never going to be good at.
Then I realized that if you have something that is going to be helpful to people, selling
is actually a huge act of generosity.
So from that business, my biggest thing was I learned social media, I learned how to sell
through social media and I learned how to sell in general and be confident about it
and know that I had something good and helpful to offer.
So I built up the brand.
I don't really have a great monetization strategy for this business at all, clearly.
I start getting noticed by all of these people because of what I'm doing with the social
media and that I'm building this audience for free on these social platforms.
So companies start reaching out to me and they're asking me, "How can you help me and
my business?"
I started taking on clients and I build this little consultancy.
Over the next four years, I just become obsessed with social media.
I don't have a brand, I don't have a following, I don't care to have one.
That's not even really a thing at this time.
I just want to learn this inside and out because I can see how powerful of a tool it is to
engage and connect and do all the things that I wanted to do as a journalist.
So I honed my skill sets.
I'm getting lots of clients, but I'm a one woman show and I really don't want to grow
at this point.
I don't want to have a team.
I want to be a solopreneur.
I want to travel the world.
I want to do all these things.
So I do that.
But at a certain point, I hit a ceiling, maybe you can relate to that, and I couldn't take
on more clients.
So I decided, how can I get around this?
How can I not have to hire a team, but also help my clients and maintain my roster of
clients?
So I decided I'd go to YouTube.
At the time on my YouTube channel, I had family videos, some random vlogs that I attempted
to make, all of these random things, but no strategy, nothing, and barely any subscribers.
I just decided to post a video to answer one of my client questions, because a few of my
clients at the time were asking about it and they were asking about live streaming on Periscope
and so I decided to make a tutorial about it and I didn't put any effort into it, really,
outside of I wanted to just really portray and help the clients so they wouldn't ask
me more questions to be totally honest.
So make the video, and lo and behold the next day, it's got a lot of views, shocking to
me because I don't understand, I don't really have any subscribers.
Where are the views coming from?
But I realized I was the first person to make a video on the topic and it was a topic that
was being highly searched because it was a new tool.
So I started getting all these inquiries of people wanting to work with me and hire me
for social media expertise and I'm already at a limit with my clients.
So now, I have to figure out how can I help more people when I'm a one-person show?
So after that thing happened where I was getting all of these emails and requests and speaking
engagements and all these things started flooding in because of YouTube, and truthfully, I was
awful at YouTube.
When I first started, I was awful at YouTube.
You can go back to my oldest videos.
I did not know what the hell I was doing.
So I got better and better, and because I was so bad at it, but I knew that it had such
potential because of that first video I made, that's how I developed the Sunny system and
the Sunny system has now been used by thousands of people all over the world.
We got 8,000 clients that have used Sunny system to grow their businesses and grow their
brands using YouTube, and the only reason I created it was because I was so freaking
bad at it and I failed at it the first time around and I really wanted to crack the code.
So I start building out my YouTube channel.
I start building up that business and it's bringing in so much demand that out of pure
necessity, and this is if you can take one thing from this, do not do anything in your
business out of boredom.
Do anything that you can in your business out of absolute necessity.
If it is not 100% necessary, you're just bored and you have shiny object syndrome and I had
been guilty of that.
So every move that I have made that has actually made a huge difference in my business has
been born out of pure necessity.
So I get all this demand from YouTube and I discovered the idea of online courses and
I realized, "Oh, you can actually package your expertise into an online course and that
would help me reach more people without actually doing the one-on-one work."
So I decide, okay, I'm going to package my knowledge and I'm going to create a course.
My first course, I wouldn't call it an epic failure, but I didn't know how to create the
best possible course at the time.
So it did okay, but it wasn't amazing.
I had a couple other ones in between there until I landed on YouTube for Bosses.
YouTube for Bosses, as I said, has been around for four years and we have served people all
over the world.
It's really incredible to see the results that people have.
We have 100K club with all these people who have achieved 100,000 subscribers and more,
and people making $100,000 in revenue per month from their channels and more, it's amazing.
But that wouldn't have happened unless I had had those previous failures.
Then from there, my team starts to grow and the sort of pressure starts to grow because
then it's like a real business.
It's not just me anymore and I have all this demand and these clients and all these things,
and we're building the course and the course is doing super well, and I just start to feel
like I have to be perfect all the time in order to maintain this.
Then I try and get the fanciest equipment when it comes to YouTube and I'm feeling like
I need a big new set and all these fancy things to really be worthy of the success that I'm
getting, and that for me was a massive one mindset shift and it led to burnout for me.
I was trying to do too much.
Just having the course, I felt like, okay, this is almost like too easy.
I should have other options in my business and I started doing customized work for people,
which was the worst because I was just constantly reinventing the wheel when I had a strategy
that worked.
So I was doing one-on-one, [inaudible 00:13:15] an agency at one point, the team grew, it
was a lot.
It was a lot at once and I ended up in the hospital with burnout.
Now, I'm hesitant to call this a failure, but it is, and it's still a sore subject for
me because I still carry some embarrassment about it, which is silly, and I know that
I don't need to be embarrassed about it.
But it's frustrating to me that I ended up here.
I guess if I could have help you with one thing, don't end up here.
There's an easier way to do it.
But the whole blessing out of this burnout and this failure is I was forced, it was 100%
necessary to be able to figure out a business model that wasn't going to run me into the
ground, that worked with my life, not against my life, and that's honestly where the beginnings
of the Authority Accelerator Program started.
Now with the Authority Accelerator Program, we officially launched it not that long ago,
over a year ago now, but not that long ago, and we have close to 1,000 clients in that
program now, and it is game changing.
Our clients are reaching 100K months.
They're scaling their businesses from zero.
They are doing it organically.
One of our clients just put a down payment on her first home.
The results in that are incredible.
But the most beautiful part of it to me is that our clients always say that it's a system
and it's a method, and I never would have created it, we call it the rocket method,
for business owners if I hadn't gone through that burnout because I hit that low point
and realized there was a different way to do it.
That failure out of pure necessity created this incredibly powerful methodology to help
people build their businesses with less hustle and more flow.
Like I said, the results speak for themselves.
So all of those four epic failures have taught me so much and it's how these businesses came
to be.
It's how we've reached a point where we've done $10 million in revenue, which is still,
again, really strange to say out loud and still doesn't even feel like it's a real thing
because I am so committed to failure.
I remember this quote from when I was growing up watching Oprah, I heard her say it and
she said, "Think like a queen, a queen is not afraid to fail.
Failure is a stepping stone on the way to greatness."
It's still gets to me because I never would have anticipated I'd be here and I feel so
fortunate that I am, but I also look back at this journey and I'm like, "It has not
been easy."
I hope you don't ever think it is easy.
I hope I don't make it look easy.
It's hard, but it's so worth it because I know the impact that I'm having is going to
long outlast me and that's why we call it a legacy business and we help our clients
build legacy businesses so your impact goes on the loan long, long time.
Even now, and I want to know address this because I've seen some comments, et cetera,
my channel has shifted and there could be seen as like a perceived failure because I'm
not talking about a lot of the things that I used to talk about in the way that I used
to talk about them.
I've gotten more personal with you.
I'm sharing more of my inner workings and behind the scenes and the values that I hold
true to myself.
If you look at my channel recently, you could say, "Wow, her videos aren't doing so well."
You could technically say that low views use are a failure and I look at it as feedback
and I look at failure as something that fuels me.
I seek it out because if I'm failing, I'm doing something and I'm doing something different
and I'm challenging myself.
The minute I stopped challenging myself or thinking in a day one mindset, which Jeff
Bezos talks about a lot, he wants it to be day one mentality always, because when you're
in your day one mentality when you're just starting your business, you're at your scrappiest
and you will figure it out.
Regardless of what you have and you have no money at all, you'll figure it out.
You'll figure out how to make that money.
You'll figure out how to do it in a way that's efficient and cost friendly, and I think that's
such a great mindset to constantly be in.
So if you look at my channel and you're like, "Oh, kind of low views lately."
You may look at it as I'm failing.
I look at it as I have found my core audience.
I am listening.
I have connected with you in a deeper way than I ever thought I would and I know this
is a stepping stone on the way to greatness.
So I want you to understand that and I want you to celebrate your failures.
What are your most epic fails, even recently, today, if you had one?
I have them every day.
Listen, I didn't have time to talk about all my failures, but I fail every single day and
that to me tells me I'm growing.
So put them in the comments below.
Let's have a fail fest because I think that would be a really fun thing to do and to just
make it normalized.
The imperfection is good.
Failing is good.
Testing is good.
Testing creates growth.
Testing creates new inventions, and let's face it, this year has tested us.
I'm so excited to see what comes out of it because there are going to be some amazing
businesses and amazing disruptions that come out of this year.
There already have been.
So with every failure and with every loss and with every perceived setback, I really
do look at these failures and I really do believe that each one of them ultimately leads
you to your next win.
Are you with me?
If you are.
I have a free seeker group for people who are committed to showing up as themselves
and testing their way to their goals.
Click the link below to join and watch these videos next and don't forget to subscribe.
I'll see you in the next video.