SNM071: Turning Lemons into Lemonade

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turning lemons into lemonade on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by converted the ultimate list building tagging and segmentation tool to find out how converted can change your business and w profits. Served a master backslash convert kit today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. As we get started, I hope you can forgive me for a little bit of the background, Noise said. When they came out and set myself up to start recording this episode, it wasn't raining and the rain just started. What can I do? It's not too loud, so hopefully this recording will still be okay and I'll give you a sense of where I live. It's kind of crazy. I'm looking. The sun is out. It's a beautiful sunrise, and there's a little bit of rain just on one side of my building and a lot of the roofs here, of course, or 10 or corrugated. So there's a little bit of rain noise coming from a building near Liam. It's not coming from my roof. I'm hoping that we can talk about this very important topic together, and the reason I want to share this with you and I don't wanna wait is because it's fresh and emotional for me. It's very challenging when things go bad in your business and it's a nightmare. And I went through again a series of bad things. Now, as you guys know, if you have been listening my podcast for a while. A few months ago, everything. My business went down, and I changed most of my business infrastructure this weekend. It all came crashing down again Sunday morning. I was working on some new videos and then I want to start doing. I want to do more and more video content, and I got an email from one of my customers. One of my big fans. Let me know that my sales page was broken for words to profit and I forgot. I don't know how I forgot this, that when I switched over I didn't replace all the links when I moved from the old website side of the new one. And that's why that no one's been able to see that sales page for about 10 days or two weeks or something like that. Something really loved. So went back in, and I had to make some tweaks. I noticed they were a couple of steaks on the pages. I activated the creek page that aroused under the links were active so I could go back and activate the links. And then I realized that when I switched shopping carts and never finished that process. So first I had to finish. The sales page that wasn't quite done had added some images that I discovered the buy buttons were the wrong buttons at a designer. Help me rebuild that page and he made a mistake there. All the buttons were wrong and they're pointing the old shopping cart and they were wrong everything. So I had to go back in, make all these changes find and build a new button. It took me a couple of hours Then I realized that I never finished in my new shopping carts, sending everything up, sending up the checkup, pages setting. So just I spent another couple hours doing that took me quite a while. It totally derailed my morning by Sunday morning, but I wanted to get it done because it's very important that something that should be live. And it was my fault for forgetting that I had it finished it. Because when I look at my transition settings, I even have a check mark next to saying that Paige has been changed and updated. So I made a mistake. It's my own fault, but it really stinks. You know, you have all this happened. So then I send this link back to this amazing customer, someone who's probably gonna appear in my serving Buster hero section very soon. She started a new block and taking a lot of really exciting action. I watch all of my followers, anyone who starts a block and send me a link to check it out all the time. I like seeing that everyone commented on a couple of posts recently, very excited to see when people take action. I was want to reward that. So I'm thinking about either having a podcast episode where I talk about a couple of the really big heroes or maybe blogging about people's pot, whose blog's you should check out if you like mine. So I'm very excited about that, and the last thing I want to do is ever give a loyal fan or someone a bad experience. I was upset that I'd made this mistake and for gotten totally my fault. Then I get an email back from her about two hours later. She can't place the order because something's wrong. The shopping cart I then spent I'm going to say nearly 36 hours, maybe was just 30 hours. There's definitely more than 24 working with the Tech team to find out what's wrong. And, of course, when it's the weekend suddenly in, the Tech team's not available, so makes me crazy. Now I was dealing with the owner of the company the entire time. That's why that's why use because I can reach that guy and we worked on it like crazy. And it turns out for some reason the integration between my shopping cart in Braintree stopped working. Now That's insane because I made a Braintree order. A sale came in via Braintree on Monday. So something happened that had nothing to do with me but everything to do with this other company and it caused a problem. So the shopping cart was broken. Then Monday morning, I the next morning's This is on Sunday and then Monday morning, the site still down the known place orders, I realized, my sights loading slower than I want. So I began to implement a bunch of changes to make the site faster and go through this experience. I set up a bunch of technology, said Cloudflare. I set up Cdn network, set up improving my cashing, set up all these things in a really technical basically to make the website load faster and faster. I really wanted to load under a second and on some tests that loads it under a second and some tests. It takes like 2 2.5 and I want to just really get it super, super fast. I'm still working on that, and of course, while this is happening, my sight collapses again. Not the front and not the customer facing part of the Web site. But the part for me I couldn't edit pages anymore. And I'm freaking out because now I can't process orders. And now I can't even edit sales pages. I wanted to work on getting my blueprints product ready. It should be released by timing this episode. But who knows? I keep getting all these little delays to keep me from working on it. But I was working on everything, getting it all set up and something I couldn't work on pages. It was making me crazy. And that was down throughout five or six hours. I had to wait until I got email from tech support for from Thrive themes. And, of course, it took them one sentence to fix the problem Is that the sentence that at this one line Cloudflare set up in a fixed Everything was amazing. I couldn't think of the right way to structure this one particular line of code, and they sent me the way to do it. So I actually my thinking was kind of close to figure out the solution, but I did need them to actually tell me, because I couldn't figure out a way to use this one this one variable, but I was going through all this all the same time. Okay, over the course of 24 hours, my sales pages of broken my shopping cart's broken. I can't edit pages, my websites to slime dealing with all this problems and became very, very frustrating. And I finally just stepped away from the computer and said, I got to go hang out the kids. I can't do this anymore. It's making me crazy. I can't work on the things I want to work on. It's very hard for me when I get locked into something I wanna be working on when I really want to be working on these sales pages and as well, some other parts of my funnels and want to upload in these photos videos. When I wanted to do it and I can't it's hard for me to go. Oh, no, I'm gonna watch training videos instead. I'm not very good doing a big shift because you're sitting there thinking about them. I wish I was doing what I want to be doing, and it's very distracting. It's one of the things I suffer from by being good at focusing and design when I would work on for the day. If I have to change it, it becomes very hard. So dealing with all of this, it's overwhelming. So then, finally, last night, finally, after hours of figured things, tech support goes of the problems with Braintree gonna turn it off. You have to make stripe your default gate. We not pay power, whatever. This is why I have multiple pain process or set up. I wish they told me that right away I could have fixed everything right away if they just had turned up. Raintree Switch to strike. That's why I have it set up as a backup. Set it all up and everything's working. And then they push out an update and for some reason, and this is astounding. This company, they announced last week, they're putting out better check out pages and instead of adding them to the list, so what? I set up your check out page when I said in my checkup pages, I actually have a lot of things like in control, which is really great, and I say I want a template 123 or four. Instead of adding templates 5678 They deleted the tweet, the templates that everyone was using their entire customer base. They changed all of the template. So I check out Page was about to work, and then it looked awful because they change me to a template where the background was this dark blue and my logo that I was using on the page, which was a previous white page, suddenly looked awful. And so I had to go back through. And there's some problems with HTML now. It doesn't show my product image right now. And I was like, Guys, I finally finally ready to send the link to someone and say I could finally take your order and no, something else is wrong. All of this happens and you could get very frustrated. Could feel overwhelmed. And I'm sharing this personal story so you can see that even though I'm doing pretty good, things still happen. I don't like when I can't process orders. I don't like what I have this problem to get very frustrated because they always want the experience re perfect for the customer. I'm not even worried about for me about losing sales and more worried about someone wants to place an order. Now they can't and it makes me look bad and there getting a bad experience. And I know what that happened. Anyone. The good thing about my customer base and the reason I put so much free content out here. Reason. I'm always putting on efforts because they get so much feedback. And when people find problems on the website, they always email me that. Email me if they see misspellings emailed. Tenant Religious is very valuable to me. This feedback I really appreciate it and helps me a lot. So that's why I work so hard to cultivate this feeling of a tribe, this feeling if we go back and forth because that's where we can really connect and that encourages people to help me in the ways that I need, which is to notice when things are broken into, tell me sometimes he will go to a website. The sales page broken. Don't tell anyone, then I get fixit. A lot of times I check stuff and then something goes wrong. Like brain. She was working a week ago, so I was shocked when it stopped working. The good news is now at the end of this experience. Number one, my websites Way faster. Number two. The sales page in the shopping carts. Finally working. I hope I have to check my E most this morning. Make sure everything's working and number three the end of this process. When you go to these things, you're more ready to deal with these situations. You realize you could handle them, see, become a little emotionally stronger, so the next time doesn't stress you out as much. But it also helps you to strengthen your infrastructure, your business, my websites. Now better. My checkout process is now better than evil. Back and forth has been a lot of what Skype last night with the owner of my shopping cart company, and he's making a bunch of changes to match what I want, I said, Here's some changes I need. They're actually putting out a new update specifically for Braintree, just for me to the software. That's the reason, even though I'm using software that's a little bit newer. Okay, they only released the shopping cart, the general public in the last two months, and I was one of the early beta testers who got aboard before they shared it with everyone for a resurgent republic is because they make changes I want that's very valuable to me. Sometimes I send an idea and it's further down the line. They're gonna admit it over the next few months, but when I have an idea that's important, they push it within 24 hours. That's really valuable. The ability to adapt with a more established shopping cart coming with coming around for a long time with the last company working. When you ask for changes, you get nothing. And I spent most of my time talking to the bottom level text people. They're getting paid five or $6 now or less to field customer support complaints. Now I deal with the owner of the company. I talked him directly and we talked at least once a week. That really allows me to adapt, and that's the reason that I went with this company when I was making my decision. And I've been very pleased with that because even though sometimes there's challenges, they work to fix them very quickly. And I did find their decision to replace all their templates pretty shocking, and so did everyone else who didn't completely read the E mail, they sent out an email telling everyone. But I thought they were just said they were adding more templates. I didn't read the fine print, so it was a big surprise for me, which means I have to go back in and change all of my check out pages. But they are going to add in the ability to have a product shot for each one, which I love should be there already. But that's great. So my ideas get implemented. I love all that. What I want you to see from the story grabbing just give me a list of ways to deal with problems is that when we overcome things, they become better. My website is now much better than it was before. I change the website, my infrastructures now much stronger, even though I had a couple of days of toughness now to fix all those things, took a day and 1/2 or is the last time I had a problem, took almost six weeks. I'm in a position now. I could fix things a lot quicker because I've dealt with every structures and problems in the past and I want you to learn from your mistakes and realize that there's gonna be tough days. They're gonna be days where different challenges hit. Sometimes it's gonna be a tech challenge. Yesterday I was talking to someone that I work with working on a future project one of my parenting products in He hopped online right when I was at, like maximum frustration about my website being frozen. It's kind of the last thing I want to do is talk to someone when I'm really frustrated because I don't want to leak. My frustration is someone who is not their fault, But sometimes you want to snap it someone when you're so frustrated. And then he updated one of his plug ins and his website crashed, and I don't want to admit it, but sometimes it feels good to have a little company in your misery. Now I helped him fix the problem. He fix this problem less than three minutes. I know how to fix what happened him because it's happened to me before. So as much as a little apartment, like at least now he really knows how I feel. I would also didn't want to have an extensive problem. It took days and days. I'm glad it was able to fix it. I'm glad I was actually one was able to tell him exactly what to do to fix it. But we go through these moments where we emotionally when other people have bad days, too. So when you're working on project, when you have a day where nothing selling, when nothing feels like it's doing right where your kindle sales dip and suddenly you make eight cents when you're making $100 a day before these things happen, you're gonna have these tough days and the way to find success. The path to success is to find the way through most people who try to work from themselves, who try to follow my path, try to write their own books, will fail. They fail all the time. People been failing for thousands of years because they give up too soon. They give up right before the moment of success. I can't tell you how many people get excited about when I teach you start following me, they start emailing me, and then they're the one who stops responding because they stopped working on their book and they feel guilty or something. And then I realize that that guilt is what's killing them. Because if they kept talking me, they probably inspired again. But I always tried to be there and connecting the audience provide as much value as possible because I know that's what we get stuck. Its until you make that first dollar. Nothing feels real. It doesn't feel like anything more than a pipe dream, which is why I always encouraged people speed thio implementation as soon as you could make that first dollar that everything starts to feel real. When you're going through these tough days, you have these down days. How you do with it will define the way your business goes if you see it as a reason to quit. And that's how most people see the world. You see the mountain in front of you go? Nope, too dangerous. I'm not doing it. It won't work. Why should I try if I won't succeed? Is almost the battlecry of people who never succeed. You don't know what you're capable of until you try. I never thought that I would be where I am right now. I never predicted this. I didn't think I would hit this level of success pushing out when I was first starting when I was first. Starting out is all I want to do is make enough money move out of my mom's basement. I want to make enough money to able to eat to pay for my own gas bill. Two. Being adult again I was finding my way out of a very bad situation for a long time when I lost my teaching job. It's tough we go through these moments, but if you change your mind set from reason to quit and replace it with, I'm gonna do whatever it takes. Then you become capable of this amazing greatness. I've had many struggles in my business, many bad moments, many challenges and walls that hit. And when you hit these walls, when you hit these challenges, the key is to keep going. About a year ago, a lot of other people who are kingdom marketers quit because Amazon made some changes and they didn't know how to adapt to those changes. So when this wall appeared, I said, Wow, if I can get over this wall 90% of the competition's gone and That's the new market I'm in, and it's amazing. The competition is really diminished in certain areas because all the people putting out inferior content or God, when you see this obstacle funny, that would stop most people. If you overcome it, you're suddenly in an era arena, an area where you don't have as much competition. That's crowd anymore. You can breathe in that rarefied air I've crossed through that phase. Okay, The very first phase you go into is when you're really tried to succeed is any boulder? Any obstacle is an opportunity that minds that will get you very far. And then you reach a point where failure becomes not an option. I am completely and totally unemployable. No large company would ever hire me because I've been working myself for way too long. They wouldn't trust me to be able to deal with having a boss, and they'd be right, and they don't like it when your resume shows that you haven't been a drone your entire life. When your resume shows gaps in your employment, even if you run a company was very successful for five years, no one was hiring. They don't like that I don't trust it. You know, like independent thinkers. Now, now I have plenty of friends who would hire me in a second. If I said to send my friends having trouble, will you give me a job? They certainly would. But I wouldn't be able to do it either, too. Used to being the boss and to use to make all my own decisions. I'm used to having complete and total control of my destiny because of the changes in my character. Because of the changes in my business and where I am in life, I have no choice. Have an entire family independent my girlfriend, my two kids, kid number three, which were in the discussion phase about. But he, he or she could be on the way any any time now, you never know when the next kids on their way. They make the decision, not you. All the people that work for me on this island, all the people who are local employees, they depend on us to support their families. They depend on us to feed them and to feed their kids. So I have nearly 100 people who completely depend upon me too feed them, clothe them and put them in some way to live. Because let's be honest if things hit the fan, if my business shrinks, the first thing that's going is all the staff. You know they're the ones we're gonna lose their jobs long before my kids stop eating. That's just the way it works for everyone, right? If your business is shrinking, you start firing people. I don't want to do that to anyone. I want Thio be able to take care of my family, Everyone else around me. These people depend on me and that's a bit of a burden. And so I'm in a situation where I have no choice but to succeed. This is why I put in long hours to make sure I'm always ahead to make sure my next project's ready. This entire project here is totally unnecessary for my business. I could just focus on a couple of things I'm working on and do really well, but I wanted to build out serving a master because it's my passion. Project hopefully doesn't turn out. Like most movie director's passion projects, so far, the business it's a new business has only been around for less than a year. I just started around every March. It's doing pretty well. It's not huge, but it's growing. And in order to get to the level I want, I have to build out huge amounts of infrastructure. I'm putting a lot of money, time and energy into building out the infrastructure, this business so that I have 20 products so that I have really amazing courses. So I have all these amazing block posting content so that when people find me, they could really enjoy me and learn a lot actually achieve the success they want. So what? I approach a project. I don't have the option of quitting anymore. I got too many people. Depending on me. That mindset of I have no choice but to succeed will change you. And I've read about this before when I talk about ringing the bell and Navy seals Very interested here. I've known a couple of Navy seals. I've known a couple of those trainers, and I've also guys and other Special forces branches. But think about Navy seals when you go into the training. Any time you wanna quit, you'd have to ring this bell. You bring the ballot that they are, You're out. That's fine. No more shouting in your free. Most people ring the bell. Of course, most people bring the mail. That training is brutal. It's so tough. That's why they're in the elite of the elite. All the Special Forces trainings do this, but he's won. The Navy Seals happened. Have the bell, which I want to talk about today, and when you ring about they go. Hold on, Let me give you a second chance. If you want to go back and keep going, you can't. And sometimes people say, You know what I wanna keep trying. But those people who have already writing about once they never finish once quitting becomes an option once failure becomes an option. When you're doing something hard enough, it becomes inevitable. There are a 1,000,000 reasons why I should quit my job. There are many reasons why I should just move back to America and start working with some of my friends were very recently, So I have some friends who we started at the same time, and now they're doing eight figures. They're doing crazy money, and I could work for them or with them into projects with them. If I was face to face, that would be very big. But failure is not an option now. There are kids here. It's not an option anymore. I don't wantto leave where I live. I do. Well, I have a great life, but I'm not doing eight figures. You know, I'm not making a $1,000,000 months. I want to get back to that level. I want to get huge again and build out something amazing. But you have to control your internal state in order to achieve massive success. So when you have those days, that stink. When you have those days when you're thinking about shutting it all down, we have those days. Were you thinking about quitting? You have to just keep fighting. You often find that the moment you quit your 10% of the way from success. Most people only quit when they're within the final five or 10 years of the end zone. If you want a football metaphor way quit when we're so close to success. And I've seen people do this before. People around me quit and I'm like why you were so close? Most people quit after they've written their book. After they've uploaded the book to Amazon and they're struggling in the first week or two of release, they quit. Then what is going on? Why would you quit when you're on the cusp of achieving your financial reward? That's what I find devastating and disappointing. I don't want that to happen to you, So I share stories about moments where it's very tempting. I could have said, You know what? All this stuff is cost me money every month. It's costing me stress. Shut it down and I could have shut down everything I could have said, You know what I'll do Serving Masters, The blogger. I'll have a little bit of coaching and that's it. Shut down the shopping cart. I'll change to another thing. That's a free shopping cart. Whenever decrease, everything cut down my costs. Let it all go. It's tempting, tempting to take the easy road, but that's not what I want to achieve. The things I want in life. I can't stay where I met. I don't want to just do well. I want to grow and become huge and make more and more amazing things happen, and that requires sting, of course. So when you face those challenges, remember that I face challenges to remember that in those moments where you get tested, those of the moments where you achieve your greatness, your days where you discover you have to rewrite your entire book and you three days to do it. I've been there. You have days where entire website crashes or where customers are all that very first product ever released. 100% of the customers couldn't log in the members area after the first day, 1671 e mails to my tech support email, which was just me. What a nightmare it happens, But I adapted. I overcame, and it's never happened since when you face those tough days when you have those days where you think about quitting, I hope this little story inspires you and reminds you that on the other side your business will not be the same. Your business will actually be stronger. It's the challenges that force us to improve. If I didn't run into these problems over this weekend, I wouldn't have improved parts of my website. I would have sped up the website. I would have improved the infrastructure. I would have made these decisions that I've made that are so valuable, and they have improved my business in a major way. By going through the fire, you become forged, and I want to encourage you and remind you that when you go through these tough days, you could take these lemons and you can turn them into delicious lemonade and sound eliminated for a profit. So if you have a bad day, know that I'm with you know that I've been there before and I'll be there again. And then on the other side, after the darkest of night, the sun still rises. Your business will continue to grow better and better. Things are waiting for you. You don't need to quit. You could be, Ah, one percenter. You could be one of the 1% of people that when they see an obstacle, they see an opportunity. And when you have that mindset, you become on stoppable. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No, Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's best seller Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to the serve. No master podcast. Make sure to subscribe so that together we can achieve true freedom.