38 Lessons I’ve Learned Running A Successful Digital Business (Part 1)

Last month I celebrated 38 years on this planet. For those that know me, I like to try and give back – to leave the world a better place than I found it. This is an important element of the “Kindness First” mantra that I firmly believe in and follow.

Recently, I found myself sat down with a notebook and fountain pen, writing down all of the lessons I’ve learned in the last 2.5 years of running a digital product and educational business. I aimed for 38 of them, one for each year of my existence.

Some of these lessons might seem obvious to you, while others might be an eye opener. They’re things that we can all face in our own businesses.

So without further ado, let’s start with a quick bit of background information…

A quick intro… hi!

In case you don’t know me, my name is Matt (as would be obvious by the website name).

I’m a former digital agency owner, having owned and operated a digital agency for 14 years between 2006 – 2020. Prior to this I worked as a freelance web designer since the year 2000.

During Christmas 2018, my partner Mel and I felt called to a change of direction in our business. We wanted to help other agency owners (our peers) to avoid some of the difficulties that we had faced over the years. After many hours of discussions and brainstorming our first product idea was born – Funnel Packs.

Funnel Packs are pre-built marketing funnels that you can use in your digital agency. They’re designed to help you generate and nurture new leads, while saving a ton of time (something that agency owners never have enough of).

We launched Funnel Packs on April 16th 2019. The night before was insanely stressful. I paced up and down the hallway from our office to the front door and back for hours. Mel and I put months of our time into this and we were hoping that it would pay off.

Our initial plan was to work on Funnel Packs temporarily for 3 months and to give it everything we had. If we crossed the $20,000 revenue point then we’d continue working on it full time. If we didn’t, then it would have to be a part-time project that we’d fit around continued digital agency work.

Thankfully we crossed that point within the first month and things kept on growing from there. It enabled us to start firing our agency clients and passing retainer clients on to friends in the industry.

Since launching in April 2019, Funnel Packs have helped over 1200 agency owners, designers and marketers to generate more leads in their business. Not only that, but we’ve built up a wonderful community of people that we are honoured to call our friends.

In early 2020, we started plans for our next product – Nurture Copy. We had heard from our own customers and across the digital agency space that people were struggling to send email newsletters. This was something we were experienced with and we wanted to help.

Unfortunately, as you’ll be aware, the pandemic swept across the world in early 2020. We chose to delay the launch of Nurture Copy as we wanted to focus our time and attention on helping our existing customers.

For example, the Funnel Packs first birthday celebration in 2020 was focused on helping others. We spent a week sharing content along with some great friends of ours. You can find that on the Funnel Packs blog, such as this post teaching people how to sell website audits.

At the end of the year, we felt it was finally time to release Nurture Copy to the world. So on December 7th 2020, our second product was released.

We were really excited to welcome over 100 customers to Nurture Copy within a couple of weeks of launching. Since then, over 200 people have benefitted from the content that we provide each month.

The feedback we’ve had to the Nurture Copy content has been fantastic and we’ve got big plans to keep growing the brand as we move forwards.

Mel and I are delighted with what we’ve achieved so far. We’ve been lucky enough to be able to help over 1400 customers with our products, generating over $500,000 in revenue.

It hasn’t been easy. Not even close. We’ve struggled with chronic health problems and learned many valuable lessons. Lessons that I want to share with you.

The 38 lessons – Part 1

These 38 lessons are all things that every business owner will face at least once in their lives. Some of them will be very familiar to you, others might be something you’ve not yet seen.

My original plan was to have all of the lessons in one post, however this first post alone is well over 6,000 words – so it makes sense to split things up into four parts. This might even end up being a book by the time I’ve finished it.

There’s no set order for the lessons. They’re in the order that I wrote them down in my notebook. So you’ll get to read them exactly how I thought of them, curled up on my sofa and scrawling in my spidery style.

It’s my hope that you’ll find something here that gives you some inspiration, guidance or a helping hand. If your life or business feels a little bit easier after you’ve read the post, then it has achieved its purpose!

Here’s the first 10 lessons…

1. You are enough

This is something that I think every person on the planet gets stuck with at some point in their lives. A simple feeling of not being good enough.

A feeling like this can drag you down and make it hard to be positive. You may lose confidence in yourself or your skills. You might find it hard to focus on things in your life or business.

It’s far too easy to compare yourself to others or to feel you’re not good enough. This is especially true in the world that we live in now, which is dominated by social media.

Everywhere around you, people look like they’re having so much fun. They appear to be living their best lives, being highly successful and never struggling with anything.

You have to remember that social media allows people to paper over their cracks. Most people won’t share something that makes them look vulnerable, weaker or negative. They only share the positives. They just want to be appear more successful or like they’ve got everything in order, even if they spend every evening broken and crying into their dinner.

Social media can be incredibly damaging when it gives this viewpoint to you. All it serves to do is make someone who feels like they’re not good enough, to feel even worse. It’s a very dangerous place to be comparing yourself to others, since you’re overwhelmed by the quantity of positive content out there.

I want you to know that you are enough. You don’t need to compare yourself to others.

Believe in yourself and the skills that you possess. There’s a reason why you do what you do, and a reason why you’re great at it.

Your clients and customers trust you. They can see that you’re the right person to help them with their problems. You are good enough.

I sent this in an email to Funnel Packs customers in August last year, but it’s just as important for you to read this today:

“So, I want you to know that without any agenda or motive, I am genuinely proud of you.

• You’re running a business and creating a better life for yourself and your family.
• You’re selling products and services that are changing people’s lives.
• Your work creates jobs and supports local businesses all around the world.
• You’re strong and you refuse to give up, even when the world does its best to fall apart.

You’re part of the digital revolution that we’re going to be experiencing over the coming years. Helping businesses to better reach their customers, with some finally realising that it’s time to be online just this year.

Thank you for everything that you do in this world. You are appreciated, loved and special.”

2. Don’t waste time doing stuff you hate

You really need to make sure you love the thing that you do. Whether that’s creating websites, helping businesses with paid ads or painting portraits on grains of rice. It’s impossible for you to sustain a business if you don’t love your work.

That doesn’t mean that some days won’t suck. Those days can and will still exist. There’s always the potential to have a negative experience with a client or customers. However, when you love what you do, it’s easier for you to overcome a bad experience.

Motivation is absolutely critical to your success. It’s the thing that will get you out of bed every morning. It helps you to work through your to-do list and not to run away from it.

When you love what you do it doesn’t even feel like work. Everything just becomes a little easier and flows a little more naturally.

But what about the stuff that you don’t like doing?

There’s always something in your business that isn’t your favourite task. For example – accounts or admin paperwork. That’s why a lot of business owners will ask a third party to help them (especially with the accounting example).

It could be that you hate writing or you don’t enjoy creating Facebook Ads. That’s no problem because you can easily outsource this to someone else.

One of the most common mistakes that you’ll make in your business is trying to do everything yourself. I completely empathise with this, as I was exactly the same running our digital agency for 14 years. I found it really hard to trust anyone else to do a task to the same level as me.

Yet, outsourcing tasks that you don’t like or don’t have time for is a powerful step for you. It frees you up to focus on the things that you love doing. You know just how precious time is as a business owner, since you never have enough of it.

I highly recommend making a list of the tasks that you either don’t like or don’t have time for in your business. Once you’ve created that list, rank them in order of importance. Note: The most important things should not just be the ones that generate you leads and sales, but also the ones that nurture and grow your existing relationships.

You can then take that list and find partners to work with. This could be a freelancer, a service provider or even a new employee. Ultimately that will depend on the type of task and the budget you have available.

I’ll even let you into a little secret. Mel and I are bad at social media. Go and look at the social media accounts for our brands if you don’t believe me.

It’s not because we don’t like or enjoy social media. We both really enjoy creating content and interacting with our audiences. We just don’t have the time to fully embrace it.

Unfortunately this meant that social media became something that we haven’t given proper love and attention to. So, if you’re a social media guru who loves everything social and can demonstrate this, do feel free to reach out. You never know where a conversation could go.

Use your time wisely and don’t spend it on things that you hate. Time is the most precious resource that you have. Once it has gone, you can never get it back.

3. Honesty beats everything

Human beings respect honesty. It’s a vital part of who we are and how we judge others. Being caught in a lie is one of the fastest ways that you can lose your credibility.

Even in the worst moments, when something is going terribly wrong, honesty can help to get things back on track. To give you an example, let me share something from Funnel Packs.

Right from the start, I was optimistic with our content creation timescales. On an ordinary day there wouldn’t be anything wrong with this, and the work was certainly more than possible for two people to complete fairly easily.

Unfortunately I was overly optimistic. Mel and I were only really functioning at about a 50% capacity at best each week due to illnesses and chronic pain. Working with chronic pain is something I talked about on Episode 4 of the Nurture Flow podcast.

We tried our best to keep up with the work and keep our customers happy, but there were times when it was a huge challenge. I lost count of the number of all nighters that we worked, with me especially often sitting up until the birds were singing outside, just to get a product finished for our customers.

Over time our delivery schedule slipped a little and we were worried about the reaction from our customers. Outwardly we kept our spirits up, but inside we were hurting. We needed to do something about it.

So we sat down at the end of January in 2020 and recorded a message for our Funnel Packs customers. It was important to us that it was audio-based, as it was a personal message. We hit “publish” in the customer Facebook group and took a deep breath.

Thankfully the reaction from our customers was incredibly kind and heartwarming. Not only did that post end up having well over 100 comments, but at least 15-20 of our customers also shared their own stories about chronic health issues. Mel and I were encouraged to slow down a little, because people wanted us to stay healthy and to actually be here to keep making them great products.

We’ve launched two brands and released well over 30 products since April 2019. We’re working hard every day to feel better and be better. Being honest gave us the freedom to not be afraid of chronic illness affecting our business.

Sometimes it will feel hard to be honest. Not because you want to mislead anyone, just because you fear the reaction, which is completely natural. Yet, taking the step of being honest actually makes you more trustworthy. You’re not hiding anything behind a curtain – you’re being open and transparent… something that a lot of people could learn to be.

4. Make time for your own business

When you’re running a digital agency or a service-based business, it’s incredibly easy to spend all of your time working on client projects. Whether you’re working on a new project, an existing project or answering queries from your clients – your time disappears fast.

The big problem that occurs when you’re entirely focused on delivering work to your clients, is that you can lose sight of your own business. This is exacerbated when you operate a ‘company of one’. There’s no-one else to hold you accountable.

One of the first things that slips is your own marketing. You don’t have any time to spend on it, so it becomes an afterthought. It doesn’t matter to you at the time, because you’re busy working on client projects.

But what happens when you finish your client projects and there are no leads coming in? Suddenly it’s a situation of panic, especially if you don’t have a consistent level of recurring revenue in your business. This can lead to you making bad decisions such as onboarding clients that you’d otherwise say no to.

So there’s a simple question you need to answer: If you don’t spend time on your marketing, who will? Be honest. If you aren’t able to answer this question then you need to be smart and make time for your own business.

The easiest way to make a change is to schedule time in your calendar for your own business. Even if it’s just half a day per week. Treat your own business like its a client and spend time on tasks that move your business forward.

You could choose to work on marketing activities. Perhaps there’s some copy on your website that you’ve wanted to update for years? You could build your email list and spend time nurturing your audience. Or perhaps you’ve always wanted to create your own digital product?

Spending consistent time on your own business each week will establish a habit. It won’t happen overnight, but the small consistent and achievable actions will bring results to you. Over time your habit will grow, giving your business the love and attention that it deserves.

To be clear – the same issues occur with digital products or training businesses too. It’s not solely an issue that occurs with service-based businesses.

Mel and I experienced this with our business. There were many occasions where we didn’t feel like we were able to market effectively, as all our time was being spent in our own business. We were constantly delivering new products to our excited customers but we weren’t spending the time effectively marketing. That’s not forgetting that we were also struggling with the aforementioned chronic health issues.

At a conservative estimate, we’d have been able to make 2-3x more revenue by spending time on effective evergreen marketing strategies.

Is that something we can regret missing out on? Absolutely. But we can still be proud of the results we’ve achieved so far and use this as a learning experience.

5. Don’t dwell on negative comments

Fun fact: Not everyone in the world is going to like you or the things that you do in your business.

I know that’s not really a “fun” fact, but it is honest. There is always going to be someone that doesn’t see the world the same way as you. Someone that won’t appreciate what you’re trying to do in your life or your business. And it’s absolutely okay.

I remember back when we first launched Funnel Packs. Half a dozen of our friends sent me a message talking about how excited they were. Then they followed up that message with a comment along the lines of: “I had the same idea a while ago but just didn’t have time to execute it”.

It’s such a simple throwaway comment to make, but to the person receiving it they feel hugely disrespected. Of course I’m sure they didn’t intend things to come across that way. But it’s not helpful to make that sort of flex to someone, especially if you didn’t have the time, energy or inclination to actually bring an idea to life.

No matter who you are, when you do something great in your business, you’ll have jealous people watching. Jealousy can lead to people saying and doing stupid things.

One of my good friends Kyle, runs a Facebook group for digital agency owners called The Admin Bar. He gives up a ton of his time to help other people, through creating content, products and sharing ideas.

There’s a problem Kyle has experienced on a number of occasions. People steal his content and in one case, his entire website. As you can imagine this is an intensely frustrating experience.

Because he is so visible and helpful, there are some agency owners who join his Facebook group and decide to take rather than give. Sometimes it’s through jealousy and sometimes through laziness. Kyle then has to waste his time chasing people up on this and asking them to delete the offending content.

Over the last couple of years we’ve had some interesting experiences.

One person told us that they’d steal all of our products and sell them in their own native language. (They didn’t)

Another person reached out in July 2020 to tell us that our products and website were boring and that we should feel bad. My favourite part about that was being called a “boring narrator”.

We even had one customer steal content from our website and use it on their own site. When we politely reached out to ask them to remove it, they got extremely rude and angry.

You need to be able to find the positives in any negative comment. Yes, some comments can sting and some people will go out of their way to be an arsehole. That’s just part of life – something we see on social media every day.

Mel and I choose to find the positives. We’ll send a reply based on kindness and move on. Words are just words at the end of the day. They mean little when they come from someone that you don’t respect or have a relationship with.

6. Not everyone is an ideal customer

This should be obvious but sometimes we can all lose sight of who we want to work with.

It’s easy to have an idea of who you want to work with, although when you start out it can be difficult to pinpoint this exactly. I remember when I started my agency, my ideal client was anyone that would pay their invoices and treat me with respect.

Over time, you figure out who you like working with. Perhaps there’s a specific industry that you really enjoy, or a problem that you love to solve. That’s where you’re able to start niching down and truly understanding who your ideal customer is.

When we started Funnel Packs, our ideal customer was really clear to Mel and I. We wanted to help people who were like ourselves. Agency owners, designers and marketers who knew that they needed to market themselves better. They all suffered from the same problems, with the biggest being a lack of time.

During the last 2.5 years, we’ve been lucky enough to attract a lot of ideal clients into our ecosystem. Many of them have become great friends and people that we love talking to on a regular basis.

We’ve also had plenty of people who weren’t such a great fit. They tend to qualify themselves out, but occasionally we get a snarky message every few months if we’re really lucky. As I said above, no need to worry about negative comments though.

The more you refine your ideal customer, the easier it will be for you to deliver your products or services.

While we’re on this topic, we should talk about refunds. This is more aimed at people selling products than services.

Refunds will happen. Some of them are genuine and others very clearly aren’t. We’ve seen a few very suspect refunds over the past couple of years, which can be an extremely frustrating experience.

Here’s the thing with refunds though… at the end of the day, they really don’t matter. That’s a difficult thing to say at the time, especially when it’s early on in the life of your product.

In the early days a refund request feels like a personal attack. It’s a devastating shot across the bow of your fine ship. The kind of thing that can keep you thinking about it for hours and wondering how you can win the customer back.

If you’re ever in that situation stop. I mean it. Refunds are just a part of life and you should be proud of the fact that you’re not like the people who have zero belief in what they sell, hiding away being a “no refunds” policy.

The greatest thing you can ever do for your own mental health is just to process the refund request, politely thank the customer for giving your product a try and move on.

Funnily enough, when you do that, that customer who asked for a refund may even come back and buy many of your products in the future. We’ve seen that happen more than once.

For the record we have a refund rate a little under 2% which is well below average when it comes to digital products and courses. If you told me that 100 people would purchase something of ours and 2 people would find it’s not for them, that’s awesome. 98 people love what we do, and they’re people that we can build a stronger relationship with as we move forwards.

7. Pre-sales are a great way to validate your ideas

Before you dive in and excitedly create a new product or service, you need to be sure that your audience actually want it.

I’ve owned a business since 2006 and carried out freelance work since the start of this millennium. If I had $1 for every time someone had an idea, created it and then heard crickets… I’d be happily sat on a private island in the Caribbean by now.

This type of thing is seen every single day, especially in social media groups. Here’s an example:

“Hey guys, I’ve just made a new service for dentists that helps them to predict when their patients teeth are hurting and sends them a toothache gif via WhatsApp.”

Then that same person follows up with asking how they actually market their new service, and a variety of other very basic questions that should’ve been answered before a line of code was even written.

If you don’t know if your audience are interested in your idea, you should not be wasting your time creating something. It’s inefficient and at the worst point, could cost you a ton of money and time.

Pre-selling your idea lets your potential customers put their money where their mouth is. It’s super simple…

Create a sales page, write out what your product or service is going to do, add in any appropriate images or videos and then include a button to purchase.

Now put that sales page in front of your potential customers. Let them look at what you’re planning to offer and see if they are willing to purchase your pre-sale offer at a discounted rate. Is it interesting enough and does it solve a problem that they have?

Your pre-sale instantly validates your new idea. Behind the scenes, you’ve set a minimum sales number that would make your product or service viable. Once you hit that threshold, now you can start writing your code.

If the idea doesn’t connect with your audience then you have two options. You either refine the offer and try again or you refund the people that purchased and let them know that you didn’t hit enough pre-sales.

Choosing to use pre-sales gives you an opportunity to refine your ideas based on customer feedback. That first cohort of users for your product, course or service can provide invaluable feedback that can shape the direction you take moving forwards.

Let’s not forget that pre-sales also provide upfront revenue. Your customers are purchasing the product at a discounted price, with the understanding that it will release at the future date you’ve specified. Your business benefits because you receive a lump sum of revenue that will help with the planning, development and creation of your new idea.

We used pre-sales with almost every Funnel Packs product that we released. This helped us to see which products most people were interested in and also covered 30-50% of the development time of each product.

You can see there that we didn’t choose to fully cover 100% of the cost of the products up front. This was mainly because we were confident that plenty of customers would be interested once the products were released. The smart people that purchased the pre-sales made sure they were at the front of the queue and received the best price.

At the time of writing, all but one of those 30+ products sold via a pre-sale has been profitable. Sadly the one that wasn’t was just on a topic that hasn’t had as much traction with our audience. 97% success rate isn’t bad right?

8. Nurture, nurture and nurture some more

If you want to build great relationships with your customers, you absolutely must make sure that you’re reaching out to them on a regular basis.

We’ve all heard the story of the digital agency owner who was surprised that a client of theirs suddenly chose to work with someone else. Yet when you dig deeper, there’s a common theme that comes up time and time again.

By choosing to not communicate regularly with customers after the point of sale, you’re failing to nurture a relationship. You become someone that is easily forgettable as you’re simply not front of mind at all.

Think about the agency owner who built a site a year ago but never spoke to their client again… should they be surprised when something shiny catches their client’s eye?

Email marketing is one of the easiest ways to nurture and build great relationships. It’s a regular process where you’re sending out weekly, bi-weekly or monthly emails to your audience. (You could also choose to send daily emails, but that’s a very quick way to burn out and makes zero sense if you’re already “busy”).

Despite the name, email marketing doesn’t mean that you always need to be promoting or selling to your audience. Your aim should be to send out valuable and helpful emails – content that provides solutions and assistance with the struggles that your audience face.

Of course, you can still send promotional emails. It’s a great idea to mix those in from time to time, especially if you have a new product or service to offer. Letting an audience of people know about your new offer when they already know, like and trust you, is a no brainer.

Email marketing doesn’t have to take a long time. That’s one of the barriers to entry that stops a lot of agency owners, especially those who already believe they are too busy. The fear of committing to something that you can’t fit into your schedule can be very real.

The other stopping point tends to revolve around not knowing what to write. This is a fair reason, but it’s a mental stumbling block that can be easily overcome. Your audience are mainly customers or people who’ve opted in to hear from you. This means many of them already trust you and others are a little earlier in that process.

Write as if you’re talking to someone on the other side of your desk. Personally, I like to write to one specific person. They’re not “real”, but they’re my ideal client and I want to speak directly to them.

The topics that you use in your emails should be things that your ideal clients are interested in. If you don’t know what those are, pick up the phone and talk to your favourite clients. Ask them questions and learn more about their strengths and weaknesses. What are the areas where they could really use help? Find those out and you’ve got some perfect topics.

Email marketing doesn’t have to be scary. It doesn’t have to take up too much of your time. You can write your emails in advance and schedule them to be sent out weekly to your audience. At the longest, this might be half a day of your time each month.

Finally, as a very small “pitch”, allow me to talk to you about Nurture Copy for a moment.

Mel and I launched Nurture Copy in December 2020. We created the service specifically for agency owners, designers and marketers who wanted to nurture and build better relationships with their audiences.

Every month you get a selection of emails, blog post ideas, tutorial videos and more. These are designed to help you send great emails and write awesome blog posts.

If you want to take a look at some samples, they’re ready and waiting for you on the Nurture Copy website.

Nurturing your audience is one of the most powerful things you can do in your business. It allows you to nurture and build better relationships. Regular emails will help you to lead with value and stay front of mind.

9. Collect testimonials – make it a priority

Reviews are one of the things that can make or break a product or service. They’re something that you’ll look at almost every time you make a purchase online. I say almost, as you usually don’t need to look at reviews if you’re buying something simple like soap or cotton swabs.

We can combine reviews, testimonials, recommendations and case studies into a single term – social proof.

Social proof is one of the most valuable forms of sales currency that your business has. It shows people that are interested in your products or services, that there are real humans using and enjoying them.

It even makes a difference for your digital agency with the search engines. If we take Google as an example, users are able to review your business through your Google My Business (GMB) listing.

All those reviews give you attractive star ratings that will show in the search results when someone is performing a search that generates a map result. The more reviews you have and the higher average score, the more you’ll stand out amongst your competition. Plus you have the obvious benefit of having your review score weighting your position in the search results.

The reviews your business receives can be used in so many forms of your marketing. They can feature on your website (home page, service pages, sales pages, landing pages, etc). You can use them on social media to highlight positive feedback from your customers.

Reviews can even be used in novel ways to inspire you or your team. Mel and I have a wall of kind words in our office, where we’ve printed out some of the many awesome emails and comments we’ve had from customers over the last few years. If we’re ever having a really tough day we can look at that wall and be reminded about the good things we’ve introduced into the world.

It’s important to note that getting testimonials or reviews isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of just assuming people will say nice things about you without any sort of prompt. While that would be lovely to see, it’s not the reality of the world. Everyone is busy in their own lives and it’s extremely rare for someone to send you a review without being prompted at all.

You need to ask for reviews and to make it easy for your customers to leave them for your business. The more you reduce any friction in this process, the easier it is for someone to take a few minutes out of their day and give your business the praise that it deserves.

Don’t forget also that you should mix up the locations of these reviews. Google’s terms of service are a little limiting in terms of how reviews left on their platform can be used – so don’t think you can copy and paste these everywhere. Instead, make sure you capture reviews through some of your own processes too so that you’re free to use these in your business how you see fit.

Finally, look at every opportunity you have to automate the collection of reviews as much as possible. Your time is precious and doing any of this manually when you have more than a handful of clients is going to be tedious.

A simple automation example here would be a Zapier automation that is tied to the “final” invoice you send to a client for a completed project. When that invoice is paid in your accounting software, your zap triggers and kicks off the automation with your review platform or your email software. From here, the client is sent an automated series of emails that request a review – written or perhaps a video, since videos are insanely powerful!

Don’t worry if you haven’t yet figured out the best way to collect reviews. It’s something that Mel and I dropped the ball on a little with our business too. We let people come to us with unsolicited reviews rather than proactively asking for them. It’s something we’re working on changing for the future.

10. Don’t over promise – better to under promise and over deliver

Over promising has been one of my own biggest personal downfalls over the years. That’s not because I’m a terrible person, just that my actions are often based on my enthusiasm.

It’s very easy to be too enthusiastic and set unrealistic delivery dates. This is something that every agency owner, designer or marketer will have faced at least once in their lives. It’s usually an error that you’ll make a few times and learn from quite quickly.

Picture the scene… you’re talking to your prospective client and they’re looking to go live as soon as possible. You hear this and in your desperation to secure the project, you completely underestimate how much time the work will take. In your head it makes sense though, because you can make this happen.

A little while later, you’re in the middle of the project and something has gone wrong. Maybe it’s a problem at your end where you’ve had to step out of the office. Or perhaps it’s a problem with your client forgetting to send over some content that they promised. Either way, you’re going to have an issue as the delivery schedule that you agreed to is going to move.

Nobody wants to have an unhappy client or to face an awkward conversation, especially if it’s something that could’ve been avoided.

I made the mistake of over promising with Funnel Packs in the first year of our business. It wasn’t because I was stupid or trying to mislead our customers. I was just really enthusiastic with what we were creating, but I made a crucial mistake. I didn’t factor in how Mel and I were feeling.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, that over enthusiasm led to some delivery dates slipping. Thankfully we were building and nurturing good relationships with our customers and they were overwhelmingly supportive.

There are still times where something needs to change even now, but with clear communication we’re able to keep customers informed and stay on the same page.

The lesson here is that you need to be kind to yourself and allow time for the unexpected.

Instead of being too enthusiastic or stretching yourself too thin with your delivery dates, consider under promising instead.

I’m not suggesting that as a negative, instead I’m recommending that you give yourself a buffer. Let’s look at an example…

You’re taking on a new web design project. It’s work that would usually take you 4 weeks to complete.

Your normal process would be to write down a delivery schedule of 4 weeks in your proposal. But that doesn’t give you a buffer. You’ve got no room to manoeuvre if anything goes wrong.

Instead, consider writing this down as 6 weeks. That would give you an additional 2 weeks on the project in case there is an unexpected delay or problem that arises.

And if you finish the project after 4 weeks? Awesome, deliver it to the client. They’ll be delighted that you’ve over delivered and that everything is ready sooner than they expected.

Whatever happens in your projects or business, the only thing you need to do is keep your customers informed. Silence helps literally no-one. From time to time, you might have someone that is unhappy with a delay, however your honesty can help to make things right.

End of Part 1

That’s the end of the first part of these lessons. As I mentioned above, it would’ve been great to include these all in one post – even if it was just to see how small the scroll bar gets in your web browser.

Ordinarily this would also be where someone would ask you to opt-in so you could join their email list and receive updates when the next posts go live. I’m not looking to do that with this post, so there’s no CTA.

This post, and the ones that will follow it are merely intended to help you with some of the lessons that I’ve learned over the last 2.5 years in business. If you find it valuable and it helps you, then I’ll be over the moon as it has achieved its purpose.

I’d love to hear what you think about the first ten lessons above. Is there anything that really resonates with you? Let me know!

Part 2 will be available within the next week.