Giving To Your Audience Until it Hurts with Simon Hall | Episode 50

Giving To Your Audience Until it Hurts with Simon Hall

If you want your audience to give you their loyalty, their support or their hard-earned money, giving to your audience FIRST is key!

That’s why this week on the #PrettyAwkward Entrepreneur Podcast, I’m chatting with veteran entrepreneur Simon Hall all about giving back to your audience, being authentic AF and so much more. This conversation with Simon was honestly just so much fun and full of surprises, and I know there will be plenty of quotes you want to write down and pin on your vision board!

But before we dive on in, let me introduce myself. My name is Megan Yelaney, and I have built two six-figure businesses and one multi-six-figure business by fully embracing my authentic self and not trying to hide the quirks that make me, ME. Meanwhile, Simon Hall has been in the entrepreneurship world for 12+ years and traveled the world while he was at it, and he has his own #prettyawkward entrepreneur story to share with y’all.

So if you’re a female entrepreneur looking to learn, grow your business strategies and mindset, and scale your biz to multiple six figures while having fun doing it…you’re in the right place, girl! Because I made this podcast exactly for YOU!

And today, we’re talking ALL about the importance of giving to your audience until it hurts, being authentic online and all sorts of related goodies.

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The Secret to Effectively Giving to Your Audience, Point #1: Simon’s story.

Before we dive into the real meat of this episode, I wanted Simon to share a Reader’s Digest version of his amazing story with you. His parents actually put him into gymnastics at a very young age, so from age three, his entire life was extremely structured. And when he came out of that career around age 14, he really struggled with questions like, “Who am I? What do I want to go and do now?”

Then he had a death in the family, which led Simon to start working in the health and fitness industry. The fitness industry then blew up in the local area, so Simon had a two-year waiting list. At that point, where Simon worked was one of the highest-charging service-based companies or people. That’s when Simon realized he was burning himself out, selling all his time for money. A lot of entrepreneurs and people in the service-based industry can probably relate to feeling driven and inspired by changing the world and helping a lot of people. But that also requires a lot of sacrifices, and Simon was saying “yes” to people when he shouldn’t have and working 17-hour days. As a result, his relationships fell apart and he wasn’t the picture of health himself.

Then when Sion was 19, he realized the potential of the online world. He built a rather large global business, which was doing the whole health and fitness thing. But Simon and the business grew too quickly, and so while it blew up, it also fell down. The good thing about this was that Simon learned a lot of lessons from that business. Its collapse also forced Simon to figure out who he actually was, versus just staying in the fitness field because he was familiar with it.

That has now led to Simon being on the verge of launching one business with six substrate businesses today.

The #Prettyawkward Entrepreneur Podcast

This podcast was created with YOU in mind.  The female entrepreneur looking to learn, and grow your business strategies and mindset, to get your business off the ground and scale to multiple six figures and have fun doing it.  To inspire and empower you to take the required action you’ve been putting off to create products and make sales.

Each week we will be covering topics that will help you start, grow and scale your business.  Some topics that you can expect to be covered include:

• The top mistakes online entrepreneurs make when signing clients
• Strategies to grow your instagram engagement and connect
• How to break through mindset blocks that are keeping you stuck in your business

I can’t wait to hear about what you learn, what makes you laugh, and what tips allow you to grow your business and brand as your authentic self.

Stay #prettyawkward

The Secret to Effectively Giving to Your Audience, Point #2: Pivoting your business and the beauty of being an entrepreneur.

Like many of the clients I work with every day, Simon has pivoted his focus as an entrepreneur and learned a lot doing it. So, I asked him to share some of his biggest takeaways on the topic of pivoting.

One of them is that you can reach the same end result by taking a lot of different routes. A lot of the time, people know they need to pivot a lot longer before they can feel ready to actually take that step. Personally, Simon also struggled with having a lot of pride and ego wrapped in with his first business and not wanting to let it go, even though he knew he needed to. So it’s important to understand why you want to move away from what you’re doing and to find how the other choice can inspire you a little bit more than where you are.

And I couldn’t agree with Simon more on all of that. When I switched from network marketing to running my own business, I felt like I’d built this big business up and now I was just going to start over from scratch. But I slowly realized that it wasn’t a waste of time to work on one thing and then pivot. After all, you spent time learning something, and now you can take what you learned and apply it to the next thing that you’re really excited about.

It’s also important to realize that you’ve got time to make plenty of transitions and pivots in your entrepreneurial career. You could transition and pivot 13 times and you’d still be 30. The real mindset shift that needs to be made in the business world is that you need to succeed at a young age. The actual average age that 96% of people earn their first million is 43 and up, so why not try things? Find out with 100 percent certainty the thing they want to put your effort, your time and your life into and really focus on that. Because confidence and focus become a lot easier when you know the why behind your work.

And worst case, you can always start over. That’s the beauty of entrepreneurship: you can ALWAYS start over.

The Secret to Effectively Giving to Your Audience, Point #3: Why NOW is an especially important time to give back to your audience and lean into business opportunities.

If you want to excel at branding, it’s vital to make sure that everything in your business is aligned with your mission. Because if you think about what makes powerful brands SO freakin’ powerful, it’s transparency and clarity and alignment. Plus, these brands typically aren’t in it just for the money. They’re also crazy passionate about their product or service. So yes, if you’re an entrepreneur and running a business, you need to make the mula and to support yourself. But you end up making SO much more when you don’t focus on a number and you focus on really spreading your message.

This also lets you market from a place of inspiration and actual service, which is especially powerful during this time of struggle for so many people. There is a real call for authenticity right now and the world is looking for heroes. And the issue is in business, some of us become so focused on the financials, we forget about the service. But especially now, it’s so important to give until it hurts because people are looking for leaders and heroes, and YOU could become that. And when things become a little better in that person’s life, you’re going to be the first person they reach out to or support because you helped them through this cruddy period. Amazing, right?!?

Right now, a lot of businesses are leaning away and pulling marketing costs, but that also makes now the perfect time to LEAN IN as a business owner. There are SO many opportunities that aren’t being seen right now, and ad costs are the cheapest they’ve been for ages. Many major brands have emerged from recessions and that’s because they used that time to strengthen their weaknesses. They’re checking their systems, their team culture and maybe even giving away until it hurts to keep their customer retention.

So to any business owners reading or listening to this episode right now, I encourage you to ask yourself what giving until it hurts would look like for you and your audience. Because that’s where you can start to get really creative and think of different program and product ideas, even if they start as free training or free series. And look at this period as an opportunity to see the weakness of your business and strengthen them.

Check out the good stuff!

 

Launch Like a lady boss

Three Rock- Solid, Step – By- Step Plans for Confidently Launching Your Programs And Cashing In Big Time

Client Attraction University

Your 12-Week Fast Track For Getting More Clients
Who Love Ya, Pay Ya, And Keep Coming Back For More
(Um, FINALLY!)

#PrettyAwkward Business Posse

Connect, grow, and scale your business to 6-Figures. Awkwardly.

The Secret to Effectively Giving to Your Audience, Point #4: The importance of following your joy and defining your own version of success.

This isn’t the first recession Simon has faced as an entrepreneur. And from that first experience, he has a couple of lessons to apply to this recession experience. First, it’s important to realize that businesses do not fail. The person fails the business. And in Simon’s case, he had to change and evolve by traveling the world and following his curiosity to make his business really work. It’s true what the industry says that income, like energy, follows whatever we’re excited about. So if you follow joy, everything else will follow.

Besides defining your own joy and interest, you also need to come up with your own definition of success. It’s easy to get caught up in our little bubbles and to compare yourself to someone else in your industry. But at the end of the day, you need to decide what success feels like and looks like to you. Usually, success actually doesn’t have anything to do with a monetary goal at all. It’s how you’re living your life, who you’re spending time with, how you’re helping people and all that.

And on a related note, remember to appreciate the journey to the end goal and take time to reflect on just how far you’ve come along the way. Acknowledge what you’ve done and celebrate how far you’ve come!

The Secret to Effectively Giving to Your Audience, Point #5: Simon’s final pieces of advice.

Simon packed this episode with so many pieces of insight and advice, but here are the final takeaways he wanted to offer:

• Be aware of what you really want to create with your business. When Simon is at a speaking event, he regularly asks how many people have created their own business, and a lot of people raise their hands. But so many people never actually create what they WANT from that business. For example, they may start their own business to have more flexibility and freedom, but instead of spending more time with their family, they end up spending less.
• Be productive as sh*t! Set a timer for an hour and notice how productive you are during each and how much time you wasted. You can also try working for fifty minutes and then taking a ten-minute break to turn into a productivity queen.
• Lean into your business right now because your people need you. They need a beacon and they need a hero. So be the hero!
• Whatever you’re not doing is the thing you need to do the most. So every night, make a “should have list.” Reflect on what you should have done that day and didn’t, and then turn that into your next day’s to-do list.

The Secret to Effectively Giving to Your Audience: Main Takeaways

Lean in, be authentic and give until it hurts…I know I’ll be telling myself a lot of the quotes and mantras Simon shared in this episode, and I hope you all put them to good use as well!

And as always, stay safe, stay healthy and stay #PrettyAwkward!

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR LISTENING!

Thank you so much for taking the time to check out the #PrettyAwkward Entrepreneur Podcast.  I would LOVE to have the opportunity to connect with you, check out my #prettyawkward Female Entrepreneurs Create Impactful Passive Income free group on Facebook!

To connect with Simon, check out his Instagram and his podcast, Nourish Life.

If you like what you saw and heard here, head on over to iTunes to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.  And don’t forget to come follow me on Instagram and Facebook!

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