Energetics in Business with Sabrina Gebhardt

Colie: Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of Business First Creatives podcast, y’all. It’s a happy day when Sabrina joins me. I just wanna warn you, we had a topic for today and I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, and Sabrina’s just gonna have to give me some grace.

This episode was supposed to be about us exploring human design. Our business, and the problem is I still don’t know my human design because my mother cannot tell me what time I was born. Now I have tried to get a birth certificate before any of you guys hop on and are like, Colie, just get a birth certificate.

It’s not easy. I even sent my mom to the courthouse in Dallas and apparently because I was born before a certain year, which is just rude. I can’t get one in person unless I go to Austin and I wasn’t gonna make my mom drive, two and a half hours to Austin just to get a birth certificate. So I went to order one online and it said 25 business days.

So I just figured there had to be another way, but I have exhausted all of those possibilities. And so now I am just finally ordering one. And so the next time Sabrina comes on, we will be talking about human design. We came up with a different topic for today. So Sabrina, welcome and I’m excited about our newly found topic for today.

Sabrina: Hi my friend. We always have a good chat. I don’t even think we really need a topic. I think we could just talk. So, uh, it’s gonna be a good one, and I love that. Now I already have like another podcast date coming up, you know, like it’ll be sooner than later. I love that.

Colie: Yes, and when my birth certificate actually arrives to my house in Colorado, from Texas, that is when I will send you an email and be like, okay, Sabrina, let’s pick a date and now we can get this rocking and rolling. But guys, here’s what we landed on for today. I threw a couple of ideas out and then Sabrina came back and hit me with.

Do you remember that conversation that we had a few weeks ago? I’ve actually had that conversation with multiple people, so maybe we need to discuss that publicly on the podcast. Now, in case you are unfamiliar, Sabrina and I actually do a business bestie chat every quarter. It’s already appeared on the shoot at Straight podcast for Q3.

If it hadn’t, this would actually be a really good topic to cover in that chat, but we’re gonna bring it to my podcast today. I mean, it’s gonna feel like the business Bestie Chat has come to Business First Creatives, if only for just one brief shining moment.

Sabrina: Yeah. And the reason it’s gonna feel like that is because this is something you and I talked about. Voxer, like we had a friend to friend conversation about this, and that’s the kind of stuff we talk about on the business. Best quarterly chat. And so I love that we’re bringing this over here.

Colie: So guys, lemme give you some context. So, um, I think you guys know I have been struggling a little bit behind the scenes. Things have been not slower in business. Things were going on personally, and it kind of spilled over into business and I was unable to work for like five months last year. And even though this year I feel like I’ve been going.

Things have not been catching up to where I needed them to be. Now, I didn’t realize at the moment that I had this conversation with Sabrina that I just needed to wait two weeks and then everything was gonna be better, but. The conversation that I had with Sabrina was that after a weekend of just really thinking about where I was and all the energy that I had put into my business in the last six weeks, and that I wasn’t seeing the same kind of returns that I have always seen in my business, I, you know, shared with her, I’m gonna give this until the end of the year.

If things don’t change, I think I’m gonna shut it all down. And so, you know, Sabrina in her coach and friend role gave me some advice that we’re gonna talk about today, and then we’re gonna talk about how, I don’t even remember saying that and don’t even feel that way anymore. But Sabrina, what was your advice to me when I told you this?

Sabrina: Oh man. Okay. So, uh, and again, to the listeners. Colie and I did have this conversation, but ironically or not, ironically, I have had this exact same conversation with at least three other people since Colie and I talked, Colie was the first one I heard it from, and then it was like it just opened the door.

And so I’m, I’m thinking there’s probably some of you listening that are maybe in the same space, but basically what I told Colie is, no ma’am. You are not allowed to make a decision about the future of your business when you are at a low point, whether it’s economically, what’s going on around you is low, whether you are emotionally at a low point, whether. The, you can’t make a decision from the low because it’s not gonna be a true reflection of like what you really want. You can absolutely shut your business down. Any of you listening, Colie as well. Like if that’s what you really want, but you have to make that decision from a high point. Because then you’ll really know if you get to six months or a year from now, and inquiries are good and revenue is good, and things are feeling good, and you’re still like, uh, I don’t know if I wanna do this anymore.

By all means my friend, go after what you wanna do. And if it’s not for you anymore, shut it down. But you can make that decision from a good spot, not a bad spot.

Colie: And I mean, I will just admit that even though I had that conversation with her two weeks ago, and you know, at, at the time of this recording, this is August, so I had this conversation with her, I believe like at the beginning of July. I had already been putting off. Things are not going well. I am tired. I don’t have the capacity that I used to.

I am physically and mentally much older than I’ve ever, well, I mean, of course I’m older than I’ve ever been. That doesn’t make a lot of sense guys. But like, I do feel like I’ve aged quite a bit, especially physically with all of my health problems, which are seemingly, um, also pretty much resolved, which, you know, hey, I mean, it feels like everything is finally coming full circle.

But when I had this conversation with Sabrina, I know better than to make a rash decision when things are not going well. But it took discussing it with my business bestie for her to like, I don’t wanna say put the fear of God in me, but basically she was like, no ma’am. And the funny thing is I then told my husband about the conversation and I added a little spark.

So let me, let me tell you what I told him. ‘ So what you and I discussed was if I got to that point and then I was like, but you know what, now that I talked to Sabrina, uh, making that decision at the end of the year is absolute shit. I was like, because I could have a Q1 that was so great that it could make up for all of my lost income and, you know, ’cause guys, Q1 is when all of you, particularly photographers feel like y’all wanna all do your systems.

And so. Making that decision even at the end of the year, I was like, oh no, that’s bananas. So I actually told my husband, no, I think I’m actually gonna have to wait until April of next year because I do legitimately have to see how Q1 rolls out because in a good year, I make 30 to 40% of my annual income in Q1.

Or leading up into Q1 because a couple years ago, I mean I had a really great December, but it was like a bunch of people paying me for stuff in, you know, January. So I took what you said and I added on that extra layer, and I had the conversation with my husband, and you and I both know, I don’t, I don’t make business decisions with my husband.

I am definitely not one of those people that’s like, oh, I have to talk to my partner. No, he doesn’t own my business. I own my business. I was merely discussing it as like, Hey, you know, I had this conversation with my friend. Just letting you know what I decided. And he was like, yeah, all that sounds great.

So I was there, and then I feel like everything just kind of turned around. Like I finally, I’m back on social media, which I hadn’t been on Instagram in like seven months. I was forcing myself to talk about my offers every single day. And guys, it’s amazing what happens when you actually talk about the shit that you wanna sell, right?

Am I right?

Sabrina: You are right.

Colie: So I did a sales parade at the Be, I’ve already mentioned this on the podcast multiple times, but I did a sales parade with seals Lockley, where you have to talk about your one offer every day for 14 days, four times a day, which means you really get your flex in, you know, 50 times. And I had already ramped up emails like I have been emailing my list.

3, 4, 5 times a week ever since April when I started an email challenge. So I do feel like this is a good point to also say something that Sabrina always tells all of you, and like I hear her say it all the time, the lag effect in marketing is real. And so I think I had such a good July. I really started ramping it up in April ever since I did the email challenge, and then I went into the blueprint launch, which I only sold four seats.

I keep reminding people of this because I want you to realize things are low for me too. Then I did my email launch and I think I got 18 paid people, but like, because I’ve been continuously and like consistently talking about the shit I wanna sell. Things are now happening July and August because of all of the effort that I put in inside the last 90, 120 days.

Sabrina: Yeah. Yeah, there’s, there’s two things that I saw happening that I just wanna point out and make sure the listeners hear. Number one is. You had been doing the work and doing the work and doing the work consistently, but there was like a patience piece, right, of like, dammit, why aren’t things happening? Why is it taking so long? And. Then there was this energetic frustration of damnit, why aren’t things happening? Why is it taking so long? And when you are in that place of frustration or scarcity or fear or any of those like negative, funky things, it’s like a little energetic gate closes around your business and it says, Ooh, you’re not in a good place to receive anything.

So, okay, cool. And then nothing happens. And then you. you’re not seeing opportunities, you are not seeing potential dms or emails or it’s just, it’s like your eyes are closed to everything. ’cause the gate’s shut energetically. But when you and I had that conversation, and then when you took it further and had that conversation with James, you felt a little lighter because you had like a plan that made sense.

You know what I mean? And so it took you out of. frustrated. Nothing is working. I’m going to shut this down to, okay, I’m still doing the thing. I’ve got a timeline I feel good about, carry on. And it’s like the gate opened.

You know what I mean? And then what happens?

Colie: I mean, I, I totally agree. So the gate opened. I joined, like, I’ve already joined one program, got a coach like I am just all in now. So, other things that have happened since you and I had that conversation, I am all in on systems in session. I just can’t stop talking about that program enough. I have welcomed five.

New people in the program in the last 10 days, when this episode airs mid-August, I’m gonna have five new people in the program. And it just, it went so well with the first five beta students. And the thing is, they were all in very different places. They had one thing in common, though.

All of them had systems, they just weren’t done very well. They were babysitting them like they had the pieces in place, but nothing was kind of happening to take the ease off of them. And each one of them needed, like this one piece that someone else didn’t need. And so now I am in a period of revision.

Now that I’ve got these five new people, I am trying to systematize what the offer promise is from systems in session and then kind of making it to where, you know, some people are gonna hit a goal faster than others. But the idea is that at the end of your 60 days, we are going to design and implement your full client experience inside of Dubsado or HoneyBook, and it’s going to be completely customized for you, which is very different than the course.

The course, I’m telling you what to do and it works, but like if you’re gonna customize it, you gotta do it. Versus systems in session, we customize it together and then you actually implement all of the pieces. So with this revision, I am redoing intake forms. I am, shoring up the systems behind the scenes that do things.

When you submit support tickets, they’re actually getting like a course hub. It’s gonna have like some videos and some trainings that I have now realized I ended up sharing with at least four of the five initial beta people. So like it’s really growing into like a, oh my gosh, this is like my new signature program and I will say.

People have joined so easily in the last 10 days. Oh, it’s, it’s getting a price increase. I mean, so sorry. If you happen to be one of those people that inquired about it and you didn’t jump on it, because I can already see, like, my goal was to get to 2K, like, you know, maybe September Oct No, it’s, it’s, it’s already there.

So as soon as I’ve like done these last few pieces, because that’s what happens, right? If people are saying yes too easily, it’s probably too low.

Sabrina: Right. Right. But how, how great does it feel like. Your energy just 30 days difference. You know

what I mean? From that point of like frustration and I’m doing everything and nothing’s working and I have these ideas I’m excited about, but nobody’s responding. And you know that, that to where you are now, where you’re like, everything’s easy and it’s, it’s happening easy and growing easy and I’m selling it easy

and I’m feeling good and I had ended up having a great month. How much can change? How quickly? How quickly things can turn around, and thank goodness I hadn’t let you just shut it all down.

Colie: Well, I don’t think that you would ever let me do that, so let me just put one more piece in here. Back in April, you know this part, but I haven’t actually spoken about it publicly. Back in April, I did a growth audit with Emily Williams she told me some things after my growth audit, and you, you can ask Sabrina, my response was Absolutely not. Have you lost your mind? I’m gonna tell you guys now the things that she told me, and while I wasn’t ready to tell her that she was right then. I have since told her that she was right and honestly, making these kinds of decisions is why I feel like I’m prepared to move forward in, you know, this way that I haven’t felt energized in quite some time.

So number one, she asked me if I actually had the capacity to sell low ticket items. And guys, low ticket items are like things that are a couple hundred dollars and under, you know, they give people quick wins and as you guys know. Almost exactly two years ago is when I set up the system shop and in order to set up the system shop, I pulled templates and toolkits, if you will, that I was including inside of the course, and I started selling them separately.

Why? Because people kept telling me, oh, I don’t need a full course. I just need this. Well, you know what happened? Yes, people bought the templates, but they didn’t buy them. In the capacity, that’s not even the right word. They didn’t all run out and buy them all at once. Lemme put it to you that way. And I think that two years is more than enough time where I have talked about them.

I have, you know, emailed, I have blogged, I have put them on Pinterest. I have talked about ’em on the podcast. And guess what? Template sales still have not grown, even though I have done all of the things except for run ads, which Sabrina would talk about me, but I did all of the other things. But here’s the thing.

When it comes to your energetics, which again was what Sabrina and I were originally gonna talk about, I don’t feel like I have ever felt energetically fantastic about selling templates because I don’t get to see what you do with them. And I am nosy as fuck. I want to see the finished product. I want to see you actually gaining an ROI from whatever you put in your business.

And so I finally said, you know what? Enough is enough. And so the system shop is basically no more guys. Something else happened that made me do this, but as of last week, I have put currently unavailable on almost every single one of the templates that I saw on the website. And guess what?

I am feeling absolutely fantastic about that decision. So that was something that Emily Williams told me back in April. She also told me that Systems in session is, it should be my new signature offer. She also talked about how excited I sounded when I talked about the offer, the ideas that I had for it.

And you know, so many people have to tell you the same thing before it finally rings true. So yes, she is right. Systems in session is what I wanna do as my signature offer, and you know, I’m already putting all of the pieces in place to do that going forward. The last thing that she told me is something 

Sabrina: Yeah, I, 

Colie: a little bit with, 

Sabrina: I love that. 

Colie: this works out.

Sabrina: You. I love that you can admit that she was right. Like, you know, we’re coming back around and now you realize, but you’re right. Sometimes we have to hear things multiple times from different people ’cause we’re too close to our own stuff, you know?

That’s why it’s so beautiful to have a coach and to have other experts have their eyes on your business and your life because they can call out stuff that we can’t see or. We’re choosing not to see. So I love that. But I also wanna circle back around just to the whole capacity thing, because I am sure that the listeners are thinking, how can you not have the capacity to sell a digital product, right?

So what I want the listeners to hear is that, you know, they think there’s this, there’s this longstanding thought of like, oh, well if you create a digital product once, then it’s just gonna sell. And as great as that is, in theory, it’s absolutely not true. You have to market your offer. You have to have the capacity to talk about it and build it into your marketing plan.

And in Colie’s example, you had this, shop with all of these templates and bundles and various things. So you had all of these offers in addition to your larger offers in addition to your PO podcasts that you market, in addition to summits you participate in and conferences you go to. I mean, you got a lot of. Stuff to talk about, right? And so there’s energy behind that. And when you either don’t have the physical like time, capacity to talk about something or energetically your heart’s not in it, like you said, you, when it’s a digital product, you don’t get any feedback. You don’t get to see your clients’ win and succeed. That stuff matters. And so I love that you recognize that and you feel really good about it. I will say. I don’t know if Emily would agree with me, but I feel like, the templates are there. Maybe this could be like a, a comes out for Black Friday and then close it like it’s a once a year situation.

Colie: Oh, no, no. I have, I have plans. 

Sabrina: Okay, good. 

Colie: I don’t wanna sell the templates every day. Here’s the thing. When I did that webinar with Maddie last month, that went exceptionally well. I actually created a whole new toolkit specifically for branding photographers, and I sold it on the back end of that webinar.

It did well. I sold six live, sold another three that day, and in total we ended up selling, I think it was 12 or 13. I mean, that’s, that’s really good. Off of one webinar, right?

Sabrina: Yeah. That’s 

Colie: But here’s what I will say. What I specifically told Emily was after, you know, 60 days later when we had another conversation, I said, here’s the thing.

I don’t know what you intended for me to do with the templates, but here’s what I’m gonna do, and you just tell me how you feel about that. I said, I absolutely have the capacity to sell low ticket, but not to pay my bills.

Sabrina: Right,

Colie: I cannot rely on low ticket to pay my salary, but doing one of these webinars once a month to different audiences and selling them a low ticket digital product on the backend, it gets me visible, it gets me emails, hopefully, you know, adding to my email list.

And also it will give me a tiny cash infusion, which I’m all about, but. At the end of the day, when you consider how much time and effort it takes to like do something and launch a digital product and market it, the the amount of money that I was making. I could have just done two clients and made the same amount of money.

I mean, I could have just in some cases, done one client and made the same amount of money. And so when you think about how much time and energy you do, and you think to yourself, oh, but once you, you know, once you create it, you can just sell it. Okay. But once you create something and you just put it in your shop.

It is not that hoards of people, just find it on your website and just buy it at the capacity that you would expect. In order to make a decent amount of money off of it, you have to do targeted marketing campaigns. You have to, you know, make it visible to people, and the more things that you have to market, the more watered down your message is.

And so that’s when the, Hey, I’ve got this whole shop to help you. I don’t have time to talk about all those things that are in the system shop. I just don’t.

Sabrina: Yeah, it, it’s kind of like my old course that I was dragging around for a couple of years that was not selling. Everybody kept saying, well, don’t get rid of it. Don’t take it off your website. Don’t stop mentioning it from time to time. It’s already built. You already made the thing. It’s, it already exists. And when I finally decided to retire it like a. Officially it’s done. It is gone from the world. Um, it’s not because I don’t believe in the, the content, it’s not because the people who went through it didn’t have a great experience. It’s because I needed the mental noise of having this quote unquote digital product available for sale off of my plate

because it was just buzzing around like a little mosquito, and it was annoying me constantly, you know?

And so energetically, it was not in alignment and. Just like you said, when you decided to basically shut down the template shot, how great it it felt. Same thing when I decided to retire this course. I was like, oh wow. It’s like a huge weight off of my shoulders. This is amazing.

Colie: I mean, it’s kind of like, I wish someone had told me that it would make life easier if I just did it. Well, ’cause the other part of this conversation is that your course. You got rid of was, I mean, it, it wasn’t really tied to your bigger offers, but it was kind of in a way, but mine was actually part of my bigger offers, like these templates.

And so I always struggled with, okay, if I’m gonna get on Instagram today, what am I gonna talk about? Am I gonna talk about the templates? Am I gonna talk about the course? If I talk about one, will it, you know. Will someone not be a good fit for that, but they would’ve been for the other. It just, you know, question after question, and I really do feel like in some ways I thought that people would buy the templates and then naturally upgrade to the course, which don’t get me wrong, that has happened a handful of times and it’s been great, but.

I feel like now if I don’t give people the lower option, more people are just going to buy my course. Like I feel like giving them the decision made a lot of people not actually decide to buy anything because they weren’t sure what they should be getting. Even though I had a fabulous quiz that you could take that would tell you which template would help you the most based on your answers, I still wasn’t getting.

The ROI that I thought that I would get by having and maintaining the system shop. And so, you know, everything says currently unavailable. And when I decide that I’m gonna do a webinar and I’m gonna sell one of these digital products on the backend, I’m just gonna turn it back on. But the other part, the other thing that I finally came to the realization, you know, a couple days ago after you and I had that conversation, I made it currently unavailable because one of the struggles is.

For example, my Dubsado workflow, shop page, that thing gets me ranked in the top 10 for Dubsado workflows. So I can’t turn the page off.

Like, do you know what I mean? I don’t wanna harm my SEO, but if I leave it up. I just say currently unavailable, then all of the text is still working for me to kind of bring in the juju, and then somewhere on that page, if I’m mentioning, Hey, this is part of the CRM blueprint, go check it out here.

I mean, hopefully that’s gonna lead people to checking out the full course, whether they’re ready to buy it at that point or not. At least it gets it in front of them and they know that it exists.

Sabrina: Yeah. Could you put like a wait list onto the template shop page? It’s like, Hey, you wanna hear when it opens? Put your email here.

Colie: So I have that for, you know, the workflow FastPass that I was so excited about selling in July and promptly turned that shit off. That currently has a wait list. And I tell people, listen, you know, as the mood strikes me, I’m gonna open up a few slots. But I decided that wasn’t something that I wanted to sell to people who were brand new.

To my audience. The workflows are not the first thing that I wanna do for you. Like I just, I don’t think that I’m doing you a service if it was there. So you’re right. I should have like a find out when this product is rereleased or becomes available or something like that. I should make a form. I should make an Airtable form and they should choose which products multiple they’re interested in, and then they’ll just automatically get a notification when that one is ready to sell.

Sabrina, that’s brilliant. I’ll have that done by tomorrow.

Sabrina: I’m glad, I’m happy to help. If anything else, it’ll get you some emails and then you can nurture them and maybe they don’t actually want that. They want something else,

you know? So yeah, I would totally use it as a lead magnet because I think, when I’m shopping for like on Nordstrom or something and they’re outta stock and you’re able to say, like, notify me when it becomes available.

And I’m like, I want those shoes notify me when they

become available. So yeah, I love that.

Colie: Yeah. And it, it’s, it’s funny because out of all the things that I was selling in the system shop, I took down the Airtable once, except for the content hub that’s $9. I’m not, that’s not going anywhere. Like I love that thing. I think everybody just needs to get exposed to it. But when it came to like the templates that were directly from the course, the only one.

That I want to publicly sell going forward, and I don’t think I’m ever gonna take this down, but I’m not removing the proposal and booking file templates. Those are still going to be available. Why? Because if you don’t have the time and capacity to do anything else related to systems in your business, everybody needs a five minute booking process.

If I can give you a template that you can take an hour and customize it, and now you’ve got this ready for the next person that you make your offer to, and the next one and the next one. I think that that is probably going to give you the biggest return on investment out of anything else that I was selling you out of the shop.

So that template is staying, but almost everything else has been turned off and says currently unavailable.

Sabrina: I love that. And I think that’s really smart because it is a really good starting point. And that’s, that’s the perfect kind of offer that even if it’s not getting a ton of organic hits, uh, like if somebody’s DMing you or sending you an email, you can direct them to that, you know, and say, I’ve got the perfect place for you to start.

It is inexpensive. This is, you know, this will get you going. And it can be almost like a backdoor offer, even though it’s public

still. 

Colie: so, and along those lines, I do wanna say, when I say that I have made things currently unavailable, what I mean is that on the shop pages on my show at website, where there used to be a button that said Buy now, or there used to be an actual checkout embedded at the bottom, those have been removed.

It doesn’t mean that I disabled the products in thrivecart. Here’s why. If someone hires me for a client experience audit, part of that offer still includes 35% off of any templates that I recommend that you purchase in order to fix the things that I found in your audit. So I still need a way, as you said, to make those backdoor offers to people who hire me for an audit.

Or maybe someone hits me in the dms and they’re like, Hey, I’ve got this one very specific problem. Like, you know, and they explained to me, and I think that one of them is a good fit. If I’m in the mood, I could send them a direct link to a Thrive Cart checkout page, but they won’t be going to the official public shop page in order to get that buy now.

So I haven’t disabled the products. I’ve only disabled people’s ability to directly buy them off of my website.

Sabrina: Yeah. I love that.

Colie: I mean, Sabrina. Okay. So we have talked about where I started and where I am. What else do you think that we need to discuss in order to give the listening audience like a full picture and kind of like a download of what we were trying to hit today?

Sabrina: Yeah, so I. Just knowing what I know, you know, being connected to so many women in different parts of the country. And, and also, let me just say this, not just photographers, right? This is conversations I’m having with just entrepreneurs, just entrepreneurs in general. It’s weird out there.

And. Because it’s weird, you know, I wanna go back to the energetics because it’s weird and things have been slower and felt harder, and a little bit like we’re marketing through mud. You know, like we’re not getting any momentum. It, it creates this frustration. Then like you and I said, it becomes this negative energetic circle where the frustration becomes, fear, becomes scarcity, becomes, what am I doing?

Why am I even doing this? Why bother? And I just, I’ve heard it so much. I just really want to reiterate. My friends, now is not the time. Now is not the time to make any drastic decisions. You can have seeds planted of, do I wanna be doing this anymore? And that’s fine, and I will allow you to mull that over until the tide turns. But do not make any drastic decisions. And that goes for not just the drastic decision of like shutting it all down, but like changing niches drastically changing your prices. I, I don’t want you to do anything drastic except I want you to keep going. The tide is going to turn. It always does

for the photographers listening, you’re so close, we’re so close to busy season.

Please just hang on and then reevaluate. And, and then there’s the, the energetic piece again, you’ve got to be able to release the frustration. The panic and the fear so that that gate can open up a little bit. Because right now you cannot energetically receive anything that includes good ideas. Okay? And if you can’t have any creative, brilliant ideas of a new thing to say or whatever you’re it, it’s just one big fat block.

Uh, and then the other reminder I wanna leave you with is that people are spending money. Period, full

stop. People are spending money and not just on necessities. People are spending a lot of money on things that matter to them. They’re booking vacations. They’re buying luxury goods. They are buying homes, they are whatever. So we are not in a depression. We are not in a situation where like it is a. It’s not as bad as you think people are spending money, and so if you can focus on that instead of being in this negative Nancy position, if you can just make it a mantra. People are spending money. I am spending money. Money is floating in my community. Just open that gate a little bit energetically and hang on until the tide turns.

Colie: We don’t, we don’t wanna talk about how much money I’ve spent in the last, what, 45 days. Y’all, when I say that I got energetic. ’cause here’s the thing, and I think a lot of you guys actually know this about me. If I spend money, I put my money where my mouth is, so. One of the things that kind of gets me going is if I spend money on someone, oh, I’m gonna do the things that they tell me to do.

I’m gonna implement the things that they tell me to implement, which this, there’s just one more thing that I wanna mention before we wrap this up, and it’s because I kind of left you hanging. The third thing that Emily told me back in April that I was like, absolutely not. I literally said, have you lost your fucking mind?

She told me that I should go back to just being the Dubsado girl. And I want that to sit with you guys for a minute. Those of you that have been paying attention know I started doing HoneyBook, almost two years ago. Well, a little less than two years ago, and I have had to convince you guys over and over and over.

That it’s okay to have HoneyBook. Like I used to talk shit about them all the time, but they made such drastic changes. And while there are things that I still don’t like, like I actually recommend them, I do setups. I have a course, the toolkit that I just made for branding photographers, I made a HoneyBook version.

And so to hear her say, you should just go back to being the Dubsado girl. I heard her guys and the reason that she’s saying that is because it is easier to talk about the one thing. It is easier to be known for the one thing. And so I was definitely the IT girl for Dubsado, for photographers for a very long time.

And I do feel like, you know, again, 2023, I did a lot of things. I added HoneyBook, I opened the sy, the system shop. I started, you know, I made my course self-paced, like I made a lot of decisions in 2023. And the funny thing is, is at this point I’m actually walking back almost every one of them. But again, it just, it took me a little while and then I told her she was right about that too.

And Sabrina, you’ll enjoy this. When I left her the Voxer, I was like, I just wanna start by saying, um, you were absolutely right and I don’t get to say that to many people. And so I’m gonna say it one more time. You were absolutely right. When she responded to my Vox, she goes, can I first just say thank you so much for telling me that I was right and allowing me to tell you I was right and I knew that I was right, and I knew that you were gonna come around to my way of thinking.

You just needed time to process it. And I did. So this is coming back to what Sabrina told me, and is now telling you the listening audience don’t make rash decisions. When you are at a low, don’t you know, immediately change things in your business just because you’ve got an idea. Like you really do have to weather the storm.

Lord, I can’t believe I just said something like that, but you really do have to just stay on the path until things get better, and then you can make life altering decisions about your business, about your personal life, whatever it’s gonna be.

Sabrina: Yep, a hundred percent it. It’s so much wiser to make a decision from a good place because you’ll never wonder, you know what I mean? Like if you make a rash decision when things are low, you’re gonna always wonder like. Could I have done something different? Should I have like none of that? But when things are good, you have that clarity of like, things are really great right now, but I’m still not loving this offer or this business, or these people, or whatever. Absolutely. Then I’m giving you the green light. I will cheer you on the whole way to make whatever decisions you want.

Colie: All right. Guys, I feel like this should have been like our pitch to somehow bring business bestie chats to business first creatives. So when I stop, hit record, I’m gonna, uh, talk to Sabrina about that. But guys, I really hope that you guys have enjoyed like a taste of what goes on when I vox my business bestie and I’m like, Hey, help me coach me through my, through my current drama point.

If you enjoyed this conversation, you would absolutely love our business Bestie Chats that we have over on, Sabrina’s podcast. So I’m gonna have a link to that in the show notes. I’m sorry that they’ve only been on the shoot at Straight podcast, but you should go listen to them because they are always super insightful.

We always talk about what decisions we made, how they went, and then how we’re proceeding in the next quarter. All right, my friends, Sabrina, thank you so much for joining me for this like, you know, very last minute episode.

Sabrina: Thanks for having me, friend. It’s always a good chat.

Colie: Yeah. All right everyone. That’s it for this episode. See you next time.