My 3 Worst Investments When Scaling
I remember exactly how I felt.
Drinking champagne at the Plaza hotel lobby bar in NYC.
It was my 26th birthday.
My best friend Natalie had ditched work for a boozy champagne lunch with me to celebrate my birthday, and the fact that I had officially made six figures in a year by the time I turned 26.
This was a huge goal of mine.
Having started my business making $45k per year when I was 24, I couldn’t wrap my head around a six-figure salary. Especially one that I created for myself vs. one a company paid me.
My idea of treating myself was splurging for the Yogi tea at Walgreens on pay day instead of using the generic tea we had at my law firm’s office.
So to be at the Plaza, on a Tuesday, in my first ever pair of Louboutins… it was insane to me.
AND, I knew even then this was only supposed to be a nice rest stop. It wasn’t the destination. I wanted grow quickly even from here, and I was willing to go into more business debt, reinvest anything I didn’t need to survive, and work my butt off to do so.
Then I entered into what I see so many people experience:
The six-figure slump
It’s not a bad slump exactly. This was one of most exciting and thrilling times of my life.
But it’s CONFUSING.
Because you can get to six figures by being pretty good at most things. Posting enough on social media, sending enough emails, doing enough guest podcasts, networking enough, etc.
After that, you have to focus on excellence in a few things vs. pretty good at a lot of things.
And it’s hard to know where to develop that excellence.
Here are three things I tried, invested time and money into, just to realize they weren’t for me:
1- Growing my team
There’s SO much hype around building a team as you grow your business, and it seemed like an obvious next step. I couldn’t do everything alone.
I hired my sister full time (yep, health insurance and all) and invested in a program designed to help you build out a team.
It had a thousand SOPs, encouraged you to do daily meetings with your teams, had in-depth onboarding processes, in-depth hiring processes, instructions on a company handbook, culture trainings, meeting structures, heavy emphasis on processes and scripts and intense advice for CEOs to follow if they want to lead a team.
I even flew to Austin for a live event.
I invested thousands into the program and even more resources via my own time and my team’s time. And about a year into it all I realized…
I actually hate this. 
No part of me wanted to manage a huge team.
I didn’t want to be on DAILY MEETINGS with anyone. I couldn’t think of a worse use of my time.
I craved the days of having a blank calendar with white space to be creative, dream and scheme. And those days and windows became fewer and far between.
(Nowadays, blank space days are my norm, not my exception, thanks to my Passive Park Sales System.)
Living and dying by systems didn’t make me feel stable like they said it would.
It made me feel suffocated. It totally ignored my intuition, creative flow and ability to move quickly.
Perhaps most importantly, though my income DID grow quite a bit, my profit margin did NOT.
Team is nearly always the biggest expense for any business, and it wasn’t worth it to me.
I realized the trade off of lower revenue numbers but higher profit and more mobility was the right trade off… for me.
2- Ad Agencies
Hands down, the worst investments I’ve made in my business have been in ad agencies.
I invested in two in particular, each to the tune of five figures (and equalling around $30k each over the span of a few months).
To be fair, the two agencies were very different.
One was very sophisticated, well-run, thorough and had a a team of very smart ads managers.
One was, let’s just say, not.
But in either case, it was a poor use of my money.
With agencies charging around $3k- $5k per month in management fees, plus a lofty initial payment to onboard, your return has to be solid. Those fees don’t even consider the cost of the ads themselves.
So I went from spending a few grand on ads per month running them myself, to around $10k on ads + the agencies.
And it never felt like I was making more through them than I could’ve made running them myself.
To be clear, ad agencies do amazing work. If you’re spending over five-figures per month on ads, by all means, get the support.
But if you’re not, like I wasn’t, it was a far worse use of money paying agencies to run the ads I could run myself and using that money for the ads themselves instead.
3- LinkedIn
A longtime client and dear friend of mine has had her business take off thanks to her sophisticated LinkedIn strategy. She’s totally crushed her lead generation with it and it’s saved her thousands on ads.
I knew it worked, and it does.
So when I paid a team member to go through a LinkedIn training and start implementing it for our business, I was excited to reach a whole new audience of professionals eager to leave their 9-5 jobs.
And yet… I realized I just couldn’t do it right.
I’m all for efficiency and repurposing when appropriate, but I also think it’s lazy to expect one piece of content to perform on every single platform when they all function in their own way.
Plus, this was before the AI craze when we didn’t have these sophisticated repurposing tools.
I realized that it was more important for me to excel in email marketing than to try and create content in too many different places and not excel at any of it.
So we retired the LinkedIn strategy and it joined the long list of my investments made in things meant to get me beyond six figures that did not.
So... what's the right way then?
The point of this post wasn’t to declare three strategies as wastes and blacklist them.
The truth is that many people would swear by each one of these strategies being what changed the game for them.
But they weren’t right for ME.
And when you’re scaling, you have to make the shift from doing a lot of things pretty well and into going “all in” with a select few strategies.
They must be the right strategy for you.
That’s why I’m focusing on coaching women in this slump of $150k-$275k (ish), into the $500k+ revenue mark directly.
Sign up for my coaching waitlist to see if you’d be the right fit for this support.
Trust me, the investment in coaching with me will save you the tune of $50k I wasted on trying to do all the things.
Working with me, I won’t ever tell you:
- Whether or not to use LinkedIn, Instagram or any other platform
- That you can’t outsource things you don’t like doing
- That you NEED a certain marketing funnel
- How many hours you’ll need to work
Instead, know my values are:
- Building sustainably vs. a hamster wheel business
- Having minimal expenses and profit over revenue numbers
- Excelling at one or two platforms (whatever they may be) vs. having you do all the things
- That no goal is too big with the right mindset and faith
