Leah Gervais: Hi, visionaries. Welcome back to the show. Leah here. Very excited to be here with you all. Especially as we end February, I don’t know about you guys, but I had had, I had such a just happy month. Um, I focused so much on myself. I really made it like the month of love the month of self-love the month of, um, just focusing on relationships and the things that I love in my life. And I also have been so giddy about our new membership. So people are not part of our virtual visionary membership yet. 

Then now is the moment to do so you can join by just going to LeahGervais.com. And there is the whole page that under the work with me section you also, can you just go to LeahGervais.com/virtual-visionaries, and you will find all the information there. Um, and I’ve been so excited about that because it really came out of what I viewed as such a need in my business, but also kind of in online business and in, in the niche of helping creatives where it’s, it’s just really focused on community, bringing people together that think similar similarly, and it’s focused on energy.

And when I really look at all, my milestones strategy has always been secondary to my energy. And so that is what is so exciting about it is we have all these resources, all these mindset tools, visualizations, things to just really tune you into the way that you want to think, the way that you want to feel and support them in taking action from there. And it is only $74 a month, which is far less than any of our coaching programs. So if you had been wanting to work with me, or if you’ve been wanting to work with a business coach, or if you’ve been wanting to learn the behind the scenes of six figure years, all the way to six figure months, and you have not wanted to pay for coaching, this is the moment to have the opportunity to do all those things. Cause we still do live calls.

We still do direct interactions with all of you. We just don’t do the coaching. As you know, we don’t do coaching within it. So that is why you’re able to access kind of all the knowledge and content for only $74. You can cancel anytime. So there’s literally no downside to trying it out and it’s been so fun. It’s just felt so good to get up every morning and be so excited to share it, to create it, to see all the people joining all the successes people are having. It feels so good to birth something new. So anyway, I hope that you’ve had as good of a February as I have, and that you are looking forward to March and today I wanted to take you behind the scenes of a decision we made earlier this year when we decided to cancel our multiple five-figure scheduled and predicted launch.

So this I’m hoping will help you, if you are wondering about whether or not launches are right for you, or if you’ve been in a situation where you’ve kind of needed to push, and you’ve wondered if it’s the right thing to do with the launch, but I also hope that this you, with any part of your business that you might need or want to pivot, and you’re struggling to kind of find that permission for yourself to do so, or even kind of finding the blueprint of how to do it, because I know sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between when you should throw in the towel versus when you should push harder. And it also can be scary to make those decisions if that is how you’re relying on income coming in. So whether it’s a launch or not, um, as you go through your business, I hope that it helps to hear kind of the behind the scenes of how I thought about canceling something, right, right.

At the last minute, like it was literally the day of, and I decided to cancel it and how we obviously were still able to make up that income, um, quickly. So a little bit of backstory. Um, this was, well actually, I’m just going to go ahead and dive into the reasons. And I think the backstory we’ll kind of come out with it, but we were supposed to, we were scheduled to put on a launch at the beginning of the year, near the beginning of the year. And our launches are something that we think about four months in advance. You know, we, we have, uh, a launch system that works really well for us that we really liked doing. It just kind of fits, the way I like to teach and my business model. So we were kind of, we knew what we were doing.

We were kind of plugging and playing what we usually did. And then on the day that it was supposed to start, we, we decided not to. And I knew that this was going to require us to change routes for how we were going to bring in that income. You know, I wasn’t willing to just lose the income, so to speak, um, or swallow it. 

So I think that that’s an important thing to point out because I think that even just a few years ago, something like this could have paralyzed me and really made me worried that, that the only option if I didn’t go through with it would be to kind of bag the whole thing and have to swallow that income. And that’s not true. And I know that now, because I understand that where there’s a will, there’s a way. And so if the intention was to feel an alignment in my business to feel good in my business, to serve in my business and to bring in that income in my business, I know that there are so many more ways to do that than just one particular launch.

So just keep that in mind, as you’re going through decisions you make in your business. And if you are, it can be very sneaky when scarcity comes in, you know, we can make decisions thinking that it’s like the responsible thing to do, or how else would we be able to achieve that outcome? And I think that that’s why it’s also so helpful to be clear on the intention behind things, not just the goals. 

So the goal was to make X amount of money from the launch, but the intention behind that goal was to serve our clients, to feel connected with our audience and to bring in the money, to sustain our business. The intention is not, and should not be attached to the goal, which is how we’re able to, you know, meet our intentions and live them because we allow them to come in from different ways other than maybe one goal that we originally thought.

So why did I decide to cancel it the morning of even after all the months of prep beforehand, all the money spent on ads beforehand, all the, all the heads prepared to go during all the emails prepared to go during et cetera, et cetera? Three reasons. So, first of all, I, this is maybe something I could do a whole podcast episode on. So let me know if you guys want to hear more on this, but I’ve started to become a bit skeptical and honestly, even a bit critical of the launch model. 

Now you might be listening to this if you know my business well, and you’re likely, or you launch things all the time. I do. So I have two programs that are very, um, much in integrity with the launch model. That is my program scale, your side hustle and my elite mastermind.

And I say that those are in integrity with the launch model because though I thought about it a lot and I’ve had a lot of, you know, very smart entrepreneurs tell me, otherwise, I believe that the, one of the strengths of those programs is the cohort aspect and is the reality that people go through those programs together. At the same time, they go through the content at the same time. They really kind of have that community. So it’s not just about this kind of like, you know, you can come and go whenever you want, and it would still be the same experience. I do think it’s important that they go through it together, that they have the same level of commitment together and that they experience it almost like, you know, a graduating class type, so to speak where they have that, that shared experience, that grounds them as they move forward.

But the launch that we were supposed to do didn’t really have that so to speak. It’s such a good program. It’s my sales program, service-based sales that I honestly feel like it should be something people can access just whenever they’re ready to increase their sales. Um, I don’t think that it should be relying on me opening or closing the doors, you know what I mean?

I think that that’s the issue that I think the issue sounds a little more judgmental than I want it to be, I guess maybe just like the skepticism I’m having with, with all these, this launch model, which is just like so many online businesses too, it’s very common. It can be very successful, but I think that our product speaks for itself. And I think that we don’t necessarily need all this urgency around doors opening a few times a year, or, um, you know, you have to get in now or the doors will close and then you won’t be able to improve it.

I think that the urgency should really lie in people wanting to grow their sales, you know, and, and, and deciding that I wanted people in service-based sales that were there for that reason, not because the doors were closing, but because like they were ready to do the work and really ready to transform their sales, that is who’s going to get the best success in it. Um, we just had our final call for the previous round of it when we still did do it with the launch model. And, you know, one of the women on there was saying how she just went into it, like so confused and just consistently felt like she was behind and not able to understand what she wasn’t like, kind of cracking. 

So speak about this code, and now she’s a waitlist of clients. Um, and that was just a few months. So it’s, that’s why people should want to take service-based sales is because they want that to happen for them. Um, and because they’re ready to do the work that it takes to have that happen for them, not because the doors are closed, so to speak. 

So that was the first big reason is that I just started feeling like this program is so good that I don’t want to rely on the doors closing for it to attract the right people. I wanted to attract the right people because they are so invested in their success that they are just willing to go through and do the work.

So I think that it’s so important for us to really listen to the why behind why we’re doing things. And look that even itself is a little bit of a scary decision. I’m not gonna, you know, I’ll be transparent about that because the launch model works well for us, you know, we’ve used it so often we had used it with service-based sales successfully. So to then decide that we just weren’t going to do it is strategically a risk, you know, it’s sort of like throwing, like breaking, what’s not broken, so to speak. And I recognize that, but I’m so unavailable at this point in my business to make decisions from a fear-based place or from scarcity. And I don’t think it’s an integrity for me to do so. And that’s exactly what that would have been. It would have been thinking. Yeah, well, it would like if we just had this open all the time, so people could take it whenever they’re feeling the need to.

Um, and you know, that’s not to say that I might not put the program on sale from time to time or add extra bonuses from time to time. I think you can use your creativity to fuel you. And if you’re feeling inspired to, you know, add something to a particular program, or even if you’re inspired to launch something, I’m not trying to say like, launches are the worst thing ever. I think it just made me feel, made me realize that I had a deeper desire, which was at the time to just allow people in this program when they wanted to increase their sales, like period, full stop, you know?

I think that that is a good direction that people should be going in with entrepreneurship in general, because it requires you to know yourself. It requires you to like, not be told when or how you should be doing things, but to have to kind of feel that out on your own. So that was the main reason. And then I want to just point out the following two reasons, because I think that they hopefully will give people a little bit of insight on how we think about things and maybe a little bit of permission to think about them yourselves.

The second, lesser reason where the metrics. So we have metrics that we, you know, um, estimate estimate before we sell anything before every launch at the beginning of every month, we, we look at the numbers and we think, okay, about how many people would it need to take this tapping to make this amount of income and just like, do we have the audience for that? Do we have the ad spend for that? Do we have like, are we setting ourselves up for success here? 

I don’t get hugely bogged down in the numbers just because I don’t, I definitely don’t think that they’re like the thing that matters. And I don’t think that they, I actually think they’re a relatively small percentage of the bigger picture that happens. Um, one of the best books I ever read that really helped me shift that I think it was called “Aesthetic Intelligence. Yes. And they talk about how so many, so many businesses get so caught up in their numbers and in their marketing as, as like rule, when in reality, those are all based on like logic and they’re based on people using their logical minds to make decisions, but people only use logic for, I think it’s like 10% of their decision-making power. 

The much higher percentage is emotion. So knowing that I don’t base all of our marketing, where all of our decisions are all of our launches on purely the numbers, because I know that there’s so much more involved people’s emotions, my emotions, my energy connection, relationships, higher powers, um, that are just, you know, at much have much more sway than Excel spreadsheet.

Nonetheless, these no numbers are really helpful. And I think that they keep us grounded in reality about what it is that we are doing. And they just kind of give us a good mile markers to go off. And so, right, as we were about to start the lunch our prelaunch numbers, weren’t quite where I wanted them to be. This is not unusual. I always push myself like always, you know, have really high goals.

So it’s not out of the ordinary for our numbers to be, for me to overestimate what I think our numbers could be, them not get there quite in time and then I kind of have a few decisions that I can make from there. Decision number one is to decide to push and do whatever it takes to get the numbers to what I want them to be. This is usually this, if I did not have the issue that I had with launching and it no longer feeling aligned for this program, then I probably would have done that.

I probably would have just said, okay, you know what, no obstacle is too big. Let’s figure out how we can make this happen. Let’s get creative, let’s crank. And I think that that is a really empowering choice to make. I think that that’s a great mindset shift to just realize that just because things are where you want them to be now, doesn’t mean that you, that they can’t be. And like, how can you step into your power to get them there? Uh, if you don’t want to do that, the other option is to pivot, which is what we ended up doing. We ended up thinking, okay, well, this isn’t exactly how we want it to look. So instead of kind of making it how we want to look and really pushing ourselves, how could we make it look different? What would different look like?

And really ever my two options. If things don’t look exactly the way that I want them to, for anything, any sale, any launch, any monthly income goal, whatever the case may be, the option that isn’t there yet. I see so many people do. And that’s why I wanted to point this out is option C I guess, or option three, go into magical thinking. So, so often I see people, you know, realize that there’s a lot of power in advertising, or they realize there’s a lot of power in live video, or they want to do a webinar, or they want to have an opt-in or something like something that they know could get them more sales. And they have these goals like, well, I want to get 100 people signed up for my live. Let’s use that as an example, because it’s just so easy.

And that’s something that I would recommend by the way, if you are new to doing lives, I would rec I highly recommend them. I think they’re a great way to connect with people. Video is not going anywhere. And I think it’s a great marker to not have less than 100 people signed up for those lives and people get excited about that. They’re like, okay, great. I’m going to do that. And then they get way less than 100 people signed up yet. They still kind of carry through with the strategy as if they had a hundred people signed up still doing the same type of webinars, still doing it at the same time, still expecting the same amount of sales and that is magical thinking. Now I’m not trying to say that miracles don’t happen. I’m not trying to say that you can’t make sales from a smaller amount.

Of course you can, you know, we’ve had webinars with far fewer people, 10 people, and we’ve been able to make a sale. It’s not that none of that is possible, but it’s that usually from a mindset perspective, it leads you into this form of denial where you’re just thinking that things are gonna work out for you, just because, and to me, that is a form of spiritual bypassing to me. 

And I think people think like, Oh, well just attract, you know, the sales from it or I’ll manifest it. Or if I just believe enough and it’s like, to me, it feels like you’re, you’re, you’re missing the spiritual work. Like spirit is guiding you to think outside the box. How can you get 100 people there? How can you maybe postpone it for a day or two? So you can get more excited about inviting people from different places.

How can you reach out to more people? How can you believe in yourself more? How can you step up more? That’s that’s what I believe is the invitation. So I think that it’s just important to recognize that if you do have some benchmarks that you want to have before you execute on something, and you’re not there, that doesn’t mean it will work, but you do need to kind of look at that honestly and think, okay, well, how either could I make this work by getting the numbers there? Or how could I pivot and do this differently? Not: okay how can I pretend this isn’t happening and just continue moving forward as if it was this as if things were exactly the way I thought they’d be all along. And I think that that is going to save a lot of people, a lot of money, um, because it allows you to just get good at pivoting and get good at thinking quickly and get good at thinking like, how else can we do this? How else can we do this? How else can we do this? 

My first webinar that I really got clients from, it was actually just a live voice training. This was like back before Facebook live was as big as it is now. Um, or webinars or, well, action. Sure. Webinars are baked. But my point is, it was just like an audio training and I had to go, I think my goal is I wanted 400 people to signed up or like 350. I had a pretty high goal. And I think I got from my own email list and from running ads and et cetera, like all the kind of traditional models, I think it got like 340. So I wrote a DM message draft on my messages in, um, on my iPhone. And I wrote like a kind of different snippets advertising what this live would. And I called the DMD people and did as many stories and went live on Instagram.

I don’t even know if there was Instagram live, but I think I did stories. And what I’m trying to say is I made that 400 happen. I emailed people that I used to go to school with, like people that I hadn’t talked to in a long time, I kept emailing my list. Like I just really thought outside the box of like, how can I make this happen? And I’m so grateful that I had that experience because now I never rely on any one particular kind of medium to get me anywhere and know that, like the only thing you really should rely on is yourself 

Okay, the third reason. But like I said, I would have, you know, the numbers, aren’t a reason usually for me to like, just bag the whole thing. It was, it was because of the much stronger reason I stated at first, which is just that, like, I didn’t feel in alignment with this launch model so much anymore the F and, and, and I want, I want to corner myself here.

This doesn’t mean, I don’t know if I’ll ever launch service-based sales again. I’m excited to try it differently. That’s the point of this episode? And that’s point number three here, reason number three is I, my motto of this year has been like, follow your sparkles, follow your sparkles, do where there’s glitter, you know, go there. And I just like, didn’t feel glitter there. And, um, I don’t think that maybe one day I will, or maybe there’s a different way. I want to do it. That does feel more sparkly. That does feel more creative. That does feel more in service to the people that come to it. Um, I don’t know, that’s the fun of entrepreneurship is that you don’t have to know all the answers in order to move forward and you don’t have to know how in order to know what or why, and you don’t have to see it.

Like you can, you can ask for a way to do something and still go forth and trying to do it. You don’t need to cancel something. We’re not wanting to do something only because you know, a different way. You can simply say no, because it isn’t what you want to do. Um, and even this, I was a little bit nervous to share, because I think that sometimes this whole attitude of like, Oh, just do what lights you have to do what feels in alignment, always follow the alignment. 

I agree with it. I totally agree with it, but I think it can be misinterpreted as allowing people to kind of like, not stay disciplined and I do believe in discipline. I think that one of the biggest reasons people don’t make as much money as they want is because they just don’t stick with something. And so, yes, do what feels aligned, but don’t mistake human, you know, exhaustion, or even just like passiveness for unalignment.

Not every day, not every task is going to feel like Christmas morning, most day, should I believe that, but not everything is going to feel like it is the most fun thing in the world. And have you jumping out of bed, hopefully, most things that you do though, are leading to something that’s going to make. You want to jump out of bed, whether that’s a bigger business project, a bigger income goal, a trip you’re going to be able to pay for, you know, you can have fun with it from there, but that doesn’t mean that every email that you write is going to be the funny email you’ve ever written, or every launch that you do is going to make you jump for joy because you have to send cold DMS or whatever the case may be. You know, those things come with the discipline of seeing a goal through and still, I know that I can get creative and excited about different ways to see this school through, which is why I felt comfortable canceling this.

Um, and from that, you know, kind of had been a little bit of a time coming, but my membership, the virtual visionaries fell together so effortlessly and so perfectly. And it just felt so right to have something that could bring creatives together that could bring people from all sorts of different backgrounds together, not just people that want to make $10,000 a month, which is really what service-based sales is for. Um, and there, it’s not a launch model, you know, you can join whenever you can cancel whenever that’s, what’s so great about it. And so it all lined up perfectly because I said yes to my values. And because I didn’t go into like bypassing the challenges and the misalignment that was coming to me. So I just wanted to share this with you guys in case you are sometimes wondering if you should continue going through with things, if you sometimes are doing things because you think you should, but they might not feel great.

Which is like how that launch model ended up feeling to me at the moment. Um, and mostly just that you continue to follow your sparkles, follow the glitter, go where the glitter is. Like, keep your life sparkly, keep your why sparkly and keep that bottom line at the forefront of everything that you do, because you did not come this far and build a business and quit your job, or invest heavily in it, all these, all these risks that you take in order to build something that doesn’t light you up and doesn’t, doesn’t make you sparkle. 

So I hope that you guys enjoyed this DM me. If you liked this, let me know if you want to hear more info about any of these points in particular, because I could feel like I could do an episode entirely on them, but I hope that this helps continue to leave you to your vision, continue to help you stay in alignment, continue to help push yourself to that next level that the universe is often inviting you to and leads you toward your biggest vision. I’ll talk to you soon.

Monthly reports: https://vision.leahgervais.com/monthly-reports-p/

Website: Leahgervais.com

Virtual Visionaries: https://leahgervais.com/virtual-visionaries/

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