Why Businesses have to adapt to avoid Failure (and a mistake that was holding mine back)

I recently found myself making some big mistakes in my business and if I’m being honest… I kind of hate myself for it. See, I’m a little bit of a purist when it comes to some of the ways I do things for my business – even if it’s maybe the hard way.

One of those things is that I write all of my blog posts and any page for my website in the text tab (I code HTML as I write)… not in the visual editor. Okay, so I have other reasons (like I think the Visual editor in its current format is total crap) but that’s a story for another day.

Unfortunately, this often means that a single page design can take hours. No seriously… I spent over 5 hours on my about page alone, and that’s because there was a lot of coding involved.

This was a big mistake, and I was facing a lot of problems due to a failure to adapt to better ways.

I wasn’t being open-minded

I have always been pretty anti-visual type theme builders – ones like Divi where you use a special tool to build the entire page in blocks. I’d heard so many great things, but I didn’t like that if I ever changed themes, all of that hard work was just… gone.

So I stuck to doing things my way. I was building pages using a combination of HTML and shortcodes associated with a plugin I’ve been using on my websites for more than 5 years. So instead of using a page builder that would do the work for me, I was using the same types of shortcodes and having to try to keep the codes from becoming too much of a mess. Hence, pages that took me 12+ hours to complete.

Yes, I recognize how incredibly stupid this is.

I was “leaving money on the table”

There are a lot of pages for my business that I hadn’t gotten around to building – ones that I wanted to make so badly, but cringed at the thought of having to spend so many hours to make. I just couldn’t see spending the time and energy to do it.

These were important pages that frankly could have earned me thousands of dollars by now – things like tripwire offerings after a subscriber signs up for something free, thank you pages that offer a better user experience with more direction, better looking opt-in pages that entice people to sign up, etc.

I knew I needed these things… but I couldn’t bring myself to code all of that mess.

I was making everything way too hard

My “ah-ha!” moment came after spending more than 12 hours on the sales page for Get Pinned Academy and finding that something had gone amiss and parts of it were randomly not mobile responsive.

I sat here at my desk and I cried.

I literally told my husband “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. I can’t work this way. I don’t even know how to fix this.” – not that I didn’t try to anyways because I am #stubbornaf

But as woo-woo as it sounds, the universe saw fit that day to give me a nudge. I decided I was going to give in and seek the help of one of the page building plugins I’d heard about. I went to my Facebook group where we’d just been talking about better opt-in landing pages, and a few different plugins were being recommended.

I chose to try Elementor, a free WordPress plugin for building pages.

I was being a hypocrite

Elementor was rather foreign to me because I’ve spent so much time coding everything out (I confess, I’m still doing it right now writing this post). I was starting to get an idea of what it could do, but it was still taking longer than I’d have liked and I wasn’t really sure of all of the features or how to create different types of sections or what settings were necessary.

But again, in came the universe.

Members of my group were talking about these landing page templates.

I’d seen them before and thought that they looked nice, but my brain kept nagging me and telling me that buying such products would make me seem inauthentic or lazy. I kind of felt like I had to do things the hard way… like it was some sort of testament to my entrepreneur prowess.

I know… It’s really dumb. Worse, I sell products that help people who can’t design or want to do so more efficiently – and I don’t think they are being inauthentic or lazy!

Honestly? It increased my productivity so much that my audience has commented about how I’m “on fire lately” or that they “wish I could get as much work done as [I] do”. But I know the truth… It’s these templates. 😏

When you aren’t spending hours of your day just trying to code out the layout of the page, you get a lot more work completed.

That means my sales pages are done.
My tripwire product is in place.
The opt-ins look nicer and are converting better.
I’m making sales I otherwise wouldn’t have.

I wish I’d bought them sooner

And no, not just because I missed a good sale on them. 😄

If I hadn’t been so stubborn… if I had accepted that maybe I can’t do everything for my business or that maybe there’s a way I can work smarter if I just let go a little… I could have had all of this work finished a year ago. Yes, a YEAR ago.

I cringe when I think about how much money I could have made in a year… how much I could have grown my business. Ugh.

The Moral of the Story is…

You have to adapt. There are new, better ways to achieve your goals all the time. For me, it was investing in some landing page templates so that I could spend less time doing something I’m not as efficient at as I hoped for.

In order to succeed, sometimes we have to totally fail first. That’s okay. I honestly believe in having some good ole-fashioned failure in one’s business and learning from our mistakes.

What are you being stubborn about in your business?