Vedika and you are doing everything right”

This is what a fellow agency owner told us the day before.

But us tell you something, it may seem like we do ‘everything right’, but the truth is that every right is backed by 1000+ wrong decisions.

We’ve made so many mistakes, they’re..uncountable

We wish someone would have told us these things to us before we started.

But, the good news is: we can.

So here are 10 mistakes we made in the last 3 years that you can avoid and not lose $$:

1. We ignored red flags (read: signs of bad team members)

Red flags are important to spot in any relationship obviously, but we didn’t know we were ignoring them for team members too. And it got really toxic (lol).

Don’t involve too many emotions in your professional relationships else, you stand a chance of being ditched here, too.

1. Business always needs fuel to grow more

Who doesn’t love spending their income on the things they love? But we learned this the hard way – putting money back in the business helps in expansion. If we would have done that a bit early, our agency would be at a different scale.

We invested in:

1. Courses
2. Full-time employees
3. Higher salaries
4. Consultation calls
5. Pampering ourselves and our team (so that everyone feels like working hard)

In total, we’ve spent over $20k in the last 1 year. But the ROI we got was worth it.

1. We didn’t update our portfolio every 3 months

Portfolios should be updated every 3 months to reflect the newer work.

We were too lazy to do it at first, but the kind of deals we closed after each improvisation, we were down to do it more often.

1. Thinking that revenue = success

Who doesn’t think – the more the revenue, the more the success?

We often used to think about this and we finally discovered the answer – there are more things to it like the scale, quality, trust, audience, etc.

Say I’m making 15 lakhs but I’m working 8 hours Cut to 2 years, I’m still making 15 lakhs but working only 3 hours.

That’s success too.

1. Disorganized processes

We did not document anything.

Client’s persona, how a LinkedIn post should be written, do’s and dont’s before posting and so so many more things.

We thought that the team won’t be able to maintain sheets for everything and that it would be a waste of time.

Fast forward to now- everything is running smoothly only because we have defined processes, SoP’s, and separate documents for everything.

1. Comparison/ Imposter Syndrome

We all have been there. Comparing ourselves to others and competition brings the feeling of disappointment more often.

It’s good to compare yourself to others but not to the point where you are constantly trying to up them. Understand how you can learn from them and try to implement that.

1. Sell results

Show your processes to your clients but more than that show them the end result.

How can they benefit from your service? If you can’t show them that it’s time to rethink your service altogether.

We show them the different ROI’s that all clients have gotten, and ask them which one they want.

1. Did not build a personal brand sooner

We weren’t preaching a personal brand like this back when we started.

But as we grew in our journeys, the most important thing we realized was to put our agency and academy on steroids, personal branding is #1 source of organic traffic for us.

We have not looked back ever since (clearly).

1. Feeling guilty about not setting the bar high

It’s okay to not think very big. It’s okay to not think that “I will grow my business to $10M”. It’s fine if you are taking baby steps and being realistic about your growth.

Dreaming big is not always necessary. Growing at a sustainable level is.

1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

A year back, we were just growing on LinkedIn.

Cut to now we:

1. Have a newsletter with 5k subscribers
2. Have an academy with 1000+ students
3. Grew our accounts on Twitter to 70k+ followers
4. Grew our accounts on Instagram to 88k+ follower

Diversify.

Phew.

There’s more, but this is becoming too long so we’ll save it for later.