#130 – 2024 Year in Review

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Hey there and welcome back to the profitable web designer podcast. And today I'm bringing you my 2024

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annual Year in Review podcast episode. I tried to lump all of this in together with my December 2024 income report, but it was so long, so I wanted to split it into two episodes for you. So if you listened to Episode 129

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my December 2029 income report, I shared with you how much we made in December. I shared with you our total inflow and outflow for the entire year of 2024

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so if you didn't listen to that, and you want to, you can go back and listen to episode 129

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but just to recap really quickly, our total inflow for the year in December of 2024

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or for the entire year of 2024 was about $233,000

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our total outflow for the year was about $233,000

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and so for this episode, I really want to share with you like all of the things that we tried and tested and experimented with, and what some of our takeaways are from

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everything that we tried last year. And really it's like my full year of doing income reports again. So I have a lot of insights in terms of, like, what's working for our business specifically, and what didn't work so well, and changes we're making for 2025 so

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I'm going to pick up where I left off in the last episode. I was like, I need to just edit this out and put it in its own episode,

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so that I can really share with you, like our experimental mindset that we adopted and

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a lot of the things we tried, what the results were, what changes we're making as a result, and yeah, so I'm going to dig in with really, the story is best told through our conversion rate optimization work that we've been doing with Lee Scott and her team over at Zane atin consulting. So I'm going to kick off with talking about that, and I'll share with you all of the things that we tested and experimented on in 2024

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and then we'll wrap up with some things that we have in store for you in 2025 so Let's dive in.

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So you know how I talk about one of my monthly outflow categories is conversion rate optimization with Lee Scott from zainontaine Consulting. So Lee is a web designer Academy student, a Next Level Mastermind member. She joined our program back in 2021

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renewed into our next Level Mastermind program. I'm not going to ever let her leave. She's amazing. We talked in our profitable web designer podcast interview number 17. So if you want to go listen to

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Lee and learn more about her, you can go to web designer academy.com. Forward, slash, oh, one, seven,

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but her

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experience, her expertise, her zone of genius is like getting to know a business's goals, their customers, the motivations of their customers, what their customers really want,

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and then learning like why they make the decisions that they make, and what would like drive them to make a purchase, what would get in their way of making a purchase and then designing tests and hypotheses and experiments and customer journeys to

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influence the customer. But I like to think of it as like, ethically influencing the customer. So when you think of conversion rate optimization, it might sound like all we do is like, study the website and see how people are interacting with it, and AB testing button colors to see which ones get more clicks. But that's really not it at all. It's all about like, creating an ethical customer journey in the way I think about it is like, I have a mission, vision and goals for

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for my students, right? So it's not like for this business and for our revenue and all of that, but it's really about like, Who do we serve? Why do we do what we do? What do we see for them that they may might not see for themselves and like? How do we once they come, once they make the decision to come to work with us, how do we help them realize their full potential and achieve their goals and.

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So that's like, my client journey, right? It's like, when you come to work with us, I want to help you

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achieve your full potential and reach your goals. Where Lee comes in is like, Okay, how do we lead someone from

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knowing that they want to reach their full potential and making the decision to start working with us to do that. So my part that I'm great at is like, once you work with us, I'm going to help you get there. Lee's part is like, I'm going to help you make the decision to work with Shannon in the web designer Academy, and we do that in lots of different ways

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because, and I like to think of it as an ethical customer journey, because, like, I want to help you make a decision that you want to make anyway, I don't want to influence you to do something that you don't want to do that's not going to help you. I want to influence you to do something that you want to do and that is going to help you. And we need to figure out, like, Okay, if you want to do this, what's in your way, and how do we create

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a path for you to feel like safe moving forward to do this because

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we want people to hear of us, join our programs, stay with us and grow their business and evolve with us, And we want to help you through every step of your web design business. But what I missed happening around me in late 2022 and 2023 because I was not writing income reports,

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was a shift in the customer journey. And this is just a theory, but like 2020

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so in 2020, and

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2021, 2022,

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I feel like our programs were a distraction from what was happening in the world. So say most of 2020, all of 2021, halfway through 2022 right? What we were doing at the web designer Academy, people were joining us. It was to distract them of all of the uncertainty of what was happening in the world around us, a way for people to feel like they had control over something. So, yes, of course, like people had extra money because they weren't able to go out, they weren't able to travel. They were getting checks from the government,

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you know, just extra money. Maybe they were working from home, and had two hours back in their day from a commute that they didn't have before. Had a more flexible schedule that they didn't have before, and they just were eight, we had a captive audience that was flush with cash, and we were able we were there as like a benevolent distraction from what was happening in the world, and a way to help people feel like they had control over something when Everything felt so out of control. And so in hindsight, I didn't need as many stepping stones in my sales process to take people from just meeting me to becoming a student of ours, because everything else around them felt so uncertain and so unsafe. We felt certain and safe, right? So I could run a Facebook ad to an application to a pre recorded webinar about our program, and have someone who just met me pay $5,000 to join our coach, our full on coaching program, and it would happen in the span of a few days, and it's because it felt like more safe and more of a sure thing than everything else going on around them, and

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that's, that's what that was back then.

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And so that's just my theory. That's my perception of, you know, yes, we could say, oh, it's all the economy, it's all money related. But I think that it was more like everything is so uncertain, I'm going to try to take some control. And the way I take some control is by joining this program and like, doing what I can do to kind of control my life and my outcome right now, When Everything Feels like I can't, right

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So,

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and we're all just like waiting for things to go back to the way they were before all of this happened. But then as things didn't go back to the way they were before 2020

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and the world started to feel more and more uncertain. People started getting more and more hesitant to part with their resources. It No.

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Felt to them like it's like, okay, well, there's nothing to be distracted from anymore. This is life now, and

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everybody's feeling uncertain. And what do people do when they feel uncertain? They hoard their resources, right? Like they pull back on their spending. They want to save more. They're more afraid to make decisions, because they're more and more hesitant to part with their resources right. Feelings of fear, anxiety and certainty create Fight, fight, fight, flight, freeze and fawn, right? So it's like,

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okay, I'm no longer I no longer feel like I can control anything. I don't even feel like starting a business will will give me more control. That actually feels less certain, less control. And so I I'm not just gonna, like, meet somebody and invest in their program. And also, I think a lot of people started programs in the, you know, the pandemic heydays, that weren't really prepared to, like, serve a client fully, like we had a strong foundation before that happened. We didn't just pop up during the pandemic and say, Hey, we have a course we can teach you something, like we already had

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all of that built before any of that even happened. And so I think that there were a lot of people who had

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negative experiences with with businesses that weren't established, and so everything just felt like saturated, unsafe. Will I really get these results? You know, everybody's hoarding resources, and for what I missed because I wasn't writing income reports,

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is that people needed to get to know me more. They needed to trust themselves more. They needed to hear more student stories and see more results from people. They needed to feel safer. They needed to feel like they had choice and certainty, and I was operating from the captive audience stays right? So if you like, imagine a river with stepping stones across it. When the water is calm, you're like, cool, yeah, river with stepping stones across it. I think that steps a little far away, but I can totally make it. And if I fall in and I get a little bit wet, no biggie. I won't get swept away. Like I won't I won't get swept away. It'll be fine. I'll just get back up and keep stepping.

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But like 2022

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second half of 2022 2023 that water was rushing. It felt so unsafe.

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It felt like one wrong move, and you would just get swept away. And I didn't put more stepping stones across the river, or string some cables, or, like, build a bridge, or, like, give extra things for people to hold on to. I was just like, Come on, jump. Get over here already. Like, I got you just get over here. Once you get over here, I got you. And people were like, uh, no, it feels way too dangerous, and I don't want to risk falling in. So what the work we did with Lee's team was really to be like, okay, there are people waiting on the other side of this rushing river who really, really, really want to come over and work with us. And they're they're over there, but it like they're looking at this and they're like, I don't think I can do it, or now's not the right time for me to, like, brave this river or whatever. And so what we what we did is, like, we went over and we talked to them, and we're like, who are you? Why are you over here? Why are you waiting? What do you really want? What do you think's waiting for you on the other side of this river bank? And what do you need to feel safe to come over. What would have to happen for you to start the start the journey to coming over here?

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Why are you getting stuck on this stepping stone halfway across the river? What's going on there?

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Why do you keep coming halfway across and then going back to the bank and then coming halfway across again and going back to the bank again? So we started asking all of those questions, and from those answers, really creating hypotheses and experiments to try to add more stepping stones or maybe even bridge some gaps, right? Maybe there's some misinformation. Maybe they're like, oh my gosh, like, this river looks like it's raging, but maybe the river is only, like, six inches deep, and there's soft sand at the bottom, and it just looks like it's rushing because it's shallow and there's a lot of rocks that it's going around, but No, there aren't any Piranhas, and you can't drown and you and it You only get wet to your shins, right?

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So that's what we started doing. And we started looking at that back in September of 2023 they did a deep dive on all of the analytics, but they also interviewed our customers, the people waiting on the other side of the river bank, the people who came to like every single free thing we did. But.

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Never crossed the river. The people who seem to come out of nowhere and then join. Why did they choose to join? And so from that initial deep dive, we came up with a lot of experiments to test some of those were, like, low hanging fruit, like, hey Shannon, like, there's just a stepping stone missing here. If you put one in, it's going to make it easier for people to cross and so, you know how earlier I said, like, I do B minus work, when I'm the one doing all the things, it's like, I just left a lot of dead ends on the website. There were things that made sense to me, because I was keeping everything all in my head that were just like confusing to people seeing it for the first time, like, just even website, customer journeys, things like that, and I'm like, oh, yeah, you just click here, here, here and here. But like, that's not obvious to certain people when they're seeing it for the first time, but it's obvious to me because I look at it all the time. So that's why sometimes it is so important to bring in fresh eyes, because people see what you don't see when you're the one doing it. So we had a lot of low hanging fruit that we were able to just fix. But then we also uncovered patterns and characteristics in the people who said yes to working with us, as well as patterns and characteristics for the people that were like, Yeah, someday, but not right now.

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And people who we knew were like, never going to work with us, but are going to, like, tell other people about us. And we decided to, like, figure out, okay, where do we prioritize our time? Do we spend a lot of time trying to get the people who are just standing over on the end of the river bank? Do we just keep trying to coax them over and coax them over and coax them over.

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Do we try to get more people to the river bank?

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You know? Do we try to turn the people on the river bank who are never coming over into cheerleaders for the ones that do decide to start the journey over to working with us? So 2024 was the year of experimentation. We, like Lee and her co worker, Jamie, are brilliant. Erica, our client success coordinator, also has been deeply involved in all of this. And so it's like based on everything we know from talking to our customers and from gathering the data. Here are some hypotheses that we have, and here are some experiments we've designed to test out this theory. And so it's not just like if we change the button color from gold to Berry, are we going to get more people right? It's like, if we move this button above the fold, because it's five scrolls down, you know, will we get more people and if we change what it says, because, you know, people feel some type of way about the application. So if we, instead of saying apply now, we say, learn more. Will that make them feel safer to, like, take this next step, right? Stuff like that. So we learned so much.

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If I listed all of the experiments and everything we learned, we'd be here all day. But I will share with you the most 10 most important things that we learned. I mean, like, there's still 10 things to share, and this applies to us. So you know, if you were, if you are curious about, like, what works and what doesn't work in 2025

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I can't sit here and tell you that these 10 things apply universally to all businesses, because we got really specific about our business model, our customers, our data and our goals. So I just want you to realize that, like this service that I,

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that I

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contract with Lee to provide, yeah, she's working. She's, you know, her own expert. She's an expert in conversion rate optimization. She keeps her finger on the pulse of trends. She's always looking for new ways to do experiments and things based on the data that we learned. But our data is unique to us, so if you're looking for something super custom for yourself or even for a client. Highly recommend

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talking to Lee about how to develop this level of insight into your own business, or to, you know, helping your web design clients with it, with it too. So I'll link up her website in the show notes. But these are the 10 things that we learned in 2024 and first, we stopped running all ads. So in 2022 and 2023 I'd invested in a YouTube ads accelerator program. It was recommended to me by a business coach of.

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Mine, who had a program structured similarly to mine and YouTube ads had worked really, really well for her to get in front of her ideal clients. And so I worked with that same team to develop an ad strategy. I paid them for consulting. I spent money on ads. They developed a video, and it was a really, really fun, interesting, exciting process, and we stopped all of that at the end of 2023 so we those, those ad just weren't converting. They were bringing us new email list subscribers, but they were not turning into

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new web designer Academy students. So I'd also worked with a Facebook ad strategist. I think it's both 2022 and 2023

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again, experimented with running our own ads after we stopped working with her because, you know, they everybody's always like, well, if you put $1 in the Facebook ads, and you get $4 out when you do that all day, every day. Well, what they don't talk about is like the timeline, the time horizon for getting that $4 back out, and when you're trying to do it yourself, versus paying an expert, and just so many costs that go into even

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testing and experimenting to figure out what ads work, and then they stop working. And there's just a lot of investment in it that if you have the scale to pour the money into it that you

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that's required to get it to work.

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Um, awesome, but we don't have those kind of resources. And so we even tested Google search ads, and we discovered that while our ads, like I said, had we were getting email subscribers, they were not converting to paying students. And I just had this conversation the other day with someone on my podcast about all the people that teach ads talk about you're supposed to have what's called a self liquidating offer to offset the cost of the ads. So some your ad is for something, and then they they click on it, and then you pitch them like a trip wire or like a tiny digital product. And when they buy that, they basically paid for me to advertise to them.

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But if the ads aren't bringing people likely to invest in high ticket business coaching for their web design product, but they're bringing people likely to buy a cheap digital product to pay for the ads, then why am I selling something that's not going to help people the way that I know that they need help, and a digital product's not going to do it just to give all of that money to a company that I'm not convinced is having a net positive effect on the world. So like when I said I was in alignment with all but some of the money I spent, I can truly say that every dollar I gave to meta hurt my soul. It was such a relief not to have to give them any more money. I could justify it by like, Oh, well. But if it, if it brings me the people, if it gets me in front of web designers that I can help, you know, then it's worth it. But it didn't. It didn't. And so,

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you know, all of the resources that I invested in the strategist and the companies that I worked with, sure, those were amazing people. They were doing lots of cool things. They were very smart. They tried really hard, but at the end of the day, it just wasn't a match for us. Ads are not a match for us, and we stopped running all ads. I just don't see a day in which we do that again. And, you know, scaling with ads just didn't work for us. And if someone's listening to this and we're like, Oh, you just did it wrong. That's okay. I don't need to.

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I don't need to play on that field. So the other thing that we did in 2023 is we stopped off social media marketing, so our data shows that our best students don't come from social media. And what a relief, because I personally just don't vibe with creating social media for many reasons, creating content for social media for many reasons, but I am not a social media consumer personally, so I can see why, because I don't consume social media, I don't scroll Instagram, I don't scroll Facebook like I never have that I would feel inauthentic to intentionally create content on a platform that I don't consume content on, right? And I do, it feels inauthentic. I feel like I can't be myself. I feel like I'm getting

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I'm in this box, and I'm like, trying to market, and I have to have an image, and I have to have a hook, and all of these things that I'm like I don't want to. Can't I just be myself and

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express myself the way that I want, and the right people will find me right? So we stopped all social.

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Media Marketing, our data supported that. I do feel like it's a two way street though, like if I had a different opinion about social media, our data might support that our best customers came from social media. I don't know, but

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we might experiment in 2025 with reels pulled from our podcast, directly from podcast interviews, but that would all be from a relationship marketing perspective, like, if I'm going to do anything on social media, it's going to be to generously give to my podcast guests to help them get in front of more people as like a thank you for coming on my show and in a relationship nurturing aspect, but if our content isn't even being seen at all, I have zero qualms about not being on social media at all. Like, in fact, one of our plans for 2025 is to, just like, put a, not quite a good buy post, but like a hey, here's all the places you can find us. And this is the last thing I'm posting here. So if you want to engage with us, come here, and if you want to, if, if you're a social media person and you don't want to follow us other places, that's cool, too. I'm fine with that, like I feel like I can have much more impact

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on platforms where I feel authentic,

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and that I feel like I can

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that they're, they're adding, they're adding a net positive to the world instead of a net negative. So the third thing that we learned is that people find us through search speaking other people's podcasts. A lot of the search is like search for my name, so maybe they've heard me speak somewhere,

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they search their podcast app for podcasts for web designers, they see us as a recommended podcast in their app. They hear me speak on someone else's podcast or at an event. For service providers. That's how people discover us, and the trust from that type of discovery is way higher than scrolling past an ad or a post on social media that's just surrounded by all of this other stuff, right? And the feeling, the feeling that most people get from being on social media, is not a good vibe, right? So we're doing so much more of that, of getting, you know, putting ourselves in the room with our our ideal clients. And I actually hired someone at the end of 2024 to put together a podcast tour for me. I'll be pitching all of those people on that list throughout 2025 to build more relationships, just like a teach inside our program. So I'll tell you more about how that how that goes as I start

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meeting new strangers intentionally as a human to human, and

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I'll be sharing that on the podcast in 2025

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The fourth thing that we learned are people are way more likely to join us after having listened to me coach other people. So whether it's participating in a live challenge with me or hearing me on the podcast,

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like when I put replays on the podcast of our of some of our coaching calls.

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So I think that's more about the psychological safety and the Will it really be worth it? Will I really learn anything like they get to experience what this quote, unquote, coaching thing is all about. So that's why we launched our profitable web designer premium podcast back in February of last year, and we started putting our old replays of our coaching calls from 2020 going forward.

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And people can subscribe to that feed for $10 a month. They get a drop of 10, one hour long coaching calls, and then two additional calls every single week, and they can just listen in on me coaching web designers on their businesses and mindset and pricing. And so people if, if you're interested in that, you can go to web designer academy.com premium, or web designer academy.com forward, slash premium. You can subscribe to that now. And people who subscribe to that podcast eventually become our students, because they're they realize, like, oh, there is so much they're talking about, the strategies. But what is the strategy like there? There's resources and templates that they're talking about. What are those? I actually want coaching from Shannon, so you get to basically

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see what our program is like before actually joining, and it's $10 it's fascinating to me that we don't have

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so many more subscribers than we do, which tells me that I get to do a way better job of marketing it, because it's totally a stepping stone to work with us, And it's like $10 a month for information that can help you make 1000s of more dollars in your web design business without even having to, like, implement our strategies, just by, like, cleaning up some of your existing time and money lease and changing your mindset. And so I used to think things like, well, people must not want that, but.

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Now I'm like, Okay, I'm going to be responsible

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for that. And I bet if I actually gathered some data, I'd learned that I just haven't been talking about it nearly enough. So if that's something that you're interested in, go check it out. Web Designer academy.com, forward slash premium. So the fifth thing that we learned is that really short landing pages work well for conversions, and I'm very wordy, so we launched a new free course for web designers,

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and the landing page for that, like the opt in page for it was like a heading and a sentence and an email sign up, and that free course is all about, like our it's like a four part training series. We put together four trainings that we've done, and so I get to be less wordy and be more direct. And that's kind of hard for me, because I think out loud and I think through writing and I think through talking. So I get to think out loud and then Pair it way back.

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And

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so that new free course, when we launched it, we got a lot of new web designer Academy applications and sign ups. But like with everything, there are diminishing returns over time. So we're looking at like what we want to do in 2025 to freshen that up. The other The sixth thing we learned is that the time it takes from meeting us to becoming a student could be anywhere from like two days to 450 days. It is all over the place, which is why it's hard for us to be to to fund ads, because if we are like, well, we could spend this now and maybe get it in two days, and maybe get it in 450 days. Like, we need to have a lot more cash flow to put to ads that we just I'm just not interested. So what that tells me is that we just get to make more offers more often, instead of opening the doors only a few times a year, being cool with less people joining every time. And also, like, what are you doing on the other side of the river for 450 days? Like, just start coming over here. Let me help you. But that's also like, I need to find out why you're over there. It might not have nothing to do with me, why you haven't come over yet. If it had, if there is something I can influence, then I get to find out what that is and decide if it's sustainable. For us to do that, because, you know, the thing about running a profitable, sustainable business is that you make decisions that are win wins for both you and your clients. You're not going to make a decision that's not a win for you, but that's a win for your client, just to get the client right. So it has to work for both of you, and we do that with our with our business too. So the other thing that we learned is that we sold lots of things for $97.02

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$197

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so we tested out selling some of our strategies at standalone courses or one off workshops, just to test out some different price points. But I think what we really learned more than what we learned about price point is that people will buy when they don't have to commit for the long term. And so, you know, when I talked about 2020, through, midway through 2022, people were like, Oh, let me buy this thing to create some certainty for myself. I think the shift was buying this thing isn't going to create certainty for me. It's actually going to make me feel more uncertain. So I don't want to commit to something long term, when the world could change on a dime tomorrow, and not go back to the way it was before. I think that's like the collective like trauma that we all have is how abruptly things change and that they didn't go back, and even if we can't articulate it as to why we're so hesitant to commit to something for an entire year, because we're like, Well, I don't know what my life's gonna look like in a year, because look what happened back then, and I have no control over that, and so I don't want to commit to something for a whole year, because what if my life changes? I get it. We hear you. I understand. And I think it's not about price, it's about commitment. And people want to be able to dip their toe in and pull it right back out. And it is a theory that I will be testing more in 2025 you know, they want to be able to dip their toe in and pull it back out. They want to be like, hey, if life changes in six months, I want to be able to make a different decision. So that's where we're, the direction that we're headed, and it is a theory I'll be testing more in 2025 which leads me to number eight. We offered a 30 day trial in 2024 for the web designer Academy. So in 2024

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web designer Academy

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was an application only program with a one year commitment. At the time of recording this, that's still what it is. But also we're going to try some different things in 2020

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Five so stay tuned.

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And the way that we tested out this, like, okay, let's allow you to make a different decision, is that we offered a 30 day trial. And so it's like, Hey, if you come in and you decide that after 30 days, this isn't right for you, you can leave and you just pay for one month in the program, and that's it. So we had a handful of people take us up on that, and the feedback every single time was, I love this so much, and I plan to come back when I get more clients. And I'm like, Okay, so without the 30 day trial, these people never would have joined, because one month wasn't a stretch, but committing to a year really put them out of their comfort zone.

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So it was interesting, the 30 day trial really laid the groundwork for a test that we ran in January, which I'll tell you about in next month's income report. But like, the feedback and the what we're getting from that, I'm like, Hmm, I have another theory. I have another theory about, like, people's willingness to commit for the long term, which is, which is kind of driving some of the decisions that I'll talk about

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in our next income report. The ninth thing that we

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tested, I would say, is that we launched our Next Level Mastermind to web designers outside of the web designer Academy. So previously, it had been like, join the web designer Academy and then you can from that, come into the next level, mastermind, which is like the more advanced program. And what I realized was that there are so many web designer, web designers, who are too advanced for the web designer Academy.

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Well, they think they're too advanced, which is interesting. They think they're too advanced for the web designer Academy,

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but there isn't really a place for them to go, because a lot of the business coaching programs and memberships out there are for more beginner web designers, and they think that the web designer Academy is also for more beginner web designers,

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which is really interesting and is informing some of our plans for 2025 as well. The web designer Academy is kind of actually for mid level. Mid level web designers, people who have already, like, they know how to get clients. Maybe they want more clients or more consistent clients, but they're not like, oh, how do I get clients?

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And Next Level Mastermind people are like, I have clients. In fact, I have too many clients. I want to make more money, but I don't have the time to make more money, and I don't want to go into a room like the web designer Academy where I have the misconception that people are

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beginners and struggling and I'm beyond that, and I would feel bad going into that room and saying that like money and clients aren't my problem. I have enough money, I have enough clients, but I want more, and they feel bad wanting more. So the Next Level Mastermind is kind of for people who like want more, whether you feel bad about it or not.

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But you know something isn't working about how you're running your business now, and you're not sure what the next move is. You kind of feel stuck because you're like, Well, I want to I want to make more money, but I don't want to manage a team or, you know, there's so many ways that you have your foot on the brake and the gas for next level. And so it's really for people who are like, Yeah, I've been doing this on my own for 510, 20 years. I know how to get clients, but I want more. I feel unfulfilled. I feel like I had a vision and I'm not living to my vision. I feel trapped by the success of my web design business, and that's who next level is for. So we launched it as a standalone like you can come directly into next level, and we got, like the most amazing women web designers coming directly in to next level. So we get to do more of that, like the web designer. You don't have to go through the web designer Academy first just to get into next level. And I also know that, like we learned, there's an opportunity to really help people understand who is the best fit for each of our programs, so that you know exactly there's no like, do I want to be here? Do I want to be here? Like, you know exactly where to be. And so the 10th thing that we learned is that we have a lot of opportunity to work on our SEO strategy.

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So we do a lot of relationship marketing, but we also have the opportunity to there's just a lot of opportunity out there to fill some gaps with our content, because I love creating long form content, and SEO loves that too, and so it's a it's a good match for us. And I get to I've created so much content that I didn't bother to SEO optimize, just because I've been like hustling and get the words out and turning it out. And that's brought us.

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Traffic, and so we're going back through all of the content and optimizing it, and I've been writing pillar posts to enhance that strategy. And we'll probably test adding our podcast to YouTube for search, because we know that our best customers are searchers, not passive scrollers. So those are that's just the tip of the iceberg of things we tested and decisions we made in 2024 which gave us a lot of insight about what to test and try in 2025

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and I will talk about all of that in my January income report. So to wrap up, I think the biggest insight that I had from reflecting on 2024 and all of our experiments. And you know what really rose to the top in terms of creating the safest steps for people to say yes to their dreams, their goals and what they really want to create, is we talk about this a lot in our web designer Academy trainings, they're called the three core needs. And the needs are psychological, safety,

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resources, so time, information, money and energy and autonomy, choice. And I think that one of the places that I'm really going to be focusing on in terms of our sales process in 2025 is the choice aspect. So we are already super committed to the psychological safety piece, like making sure that you know, you know what it's like to work with us, that you understand, that we take

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you, know, feeling safe inside of our communities, very seriously, lots of things to make you feel like you will be warmly welcome and cared for and accepted when you come to work with us. And then the the resources, the time, information, money and energy, just putting a ton of information out there on our sales page, on this podcast, to really close all those open loops for you in terms of what it what do I have to commit to this on my end? And I think that the opportunity for us and for so many other businesses in 2025 is this, this autonomy piece, and how do we

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give our students even more autonomy to choose the level at which they want to work with us, to choose their commitment all of those things and really just come from a Place of like, I don't need to protect myself anymore. I think that I never needed to protect myself in the first place. But I think that that has been one of the biggest shifts for me personally. And I talked about this

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in the episode with Nadine nethery that just came out a couple I think it was episode 128,

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about how I had created this customer journey that was like an obstacle course, like an American Ninja Warrior obstacle course, and then if you made it to the other side of this obstacle course, well then I knew it was like safe for me to work with you,

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and I Didn't realize that's what I was doing at the time with with our customer journey.

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In hindsight, I can totally see that my reluctance to change the customer journey and to add more stepping stones in the face of evidence that, like, sales were slowing down and the market was shifting, and that, you know, there required more trust from people who wanted to work with us.

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I was slow to adapt to that, because I felt like I still had to protect myself, protect my business, hold certain things tight.

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And it's really interesting to reflect on that. And I think that that had really nothing to do with business, but it had everything to do with

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anxiety, things going in my purse, on in my personal life that fell out of control, that made me feel like I needed to exert more control in the places that I could control, and since I own the business, I get to control all of it. And so I was making a lot of decisions to make myself feel safe and in control, and I just realized now that I just can let go. I do not need to control all of it, and I can trust that the people that make their way across the river

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have my best interest, like, have you know, they're not thinking about me, right? It's not even that they have my best interest in mind. It's like I can trust them. I can trust them. I can trust.

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Them. I can trust them, and I don't need to have so many hoops to jump through. I can remove the hoops, remove the friction, make that, make it easier for them to say yes, and just kind of let go of some of those old vestiges of my my own self, trying to create some sense of control in an uncertain world, just like everybody else was, you know, it's like, I've just settled in here in 2025 I've settled in that I can't predict the future. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what bananas thing is going to go on in the world next, trying to control it all is making me anxious and miserable. I get to just let that go and lean into the best parts of myself, the best parts of everybody else. And as my biz bestie and business coach Alicia Saint Germain, loves to say, let the problems come to me. I'm resilient. I can handle them. I've been through a lot in the past 10 years in business, so many challenges and obstacles that I have come out on the other side, more resilient, more knowledgeable,

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and every challenge that I overcome or work my way through, is something I have to offer to my students. So I don't need to protect myself from that stuff, because those things allow me Give me a richer experience from which to guide other people through it. And so that's really what I want to leave you with for the end of my 2024 year end review. It's very exciting to me to kind of close that chapter with all of those insights and take them into what we have planned for you in 2025

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we're updating our branding. We're doing a little brand refresh that you guys will see. We're

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updating some of our platforms, just a lot of things to

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really set us up for the next 10 years, which is really, really, really exciting. So that's all I got for you for my 2024 year in review. I hope you heard something that was helpful to you. And if you haven't left a rating or review, I would so appreciate it. If you know a web designer that needs help with their package, pricing, positioning, marketing, all of the things, just send them our way and I'll see you back here next week, bye. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai