The Trena Little Business Tour: The Haunted (Speak Now) Era

You’d think that a second year in business would be significantly easier than the first. 

You have more experience. You have a bigger audience. You’ve learned from some defining mistakes you vowed never to do again. Sounds great, right? 

But that isn’t how it was for me. While I did make more in 2017 ($24k compared to $10k in 2016), there was a lot I was still struggling with both personally and professionally that kept things from feeling easy breezy. And that’s why I’m dubbing this era the “Speak Now: Haunted” Era. 

***psssst: want to catch up on the first part of the tour? Catch the Our Song Era here. 

January 2017

2017 for me didn’t really start until February since I was on maternity leave for one month in January. But I started the year with four clients and was super busy. Which was great! If I hadn’t signed myself up to make another course. 

The first one I launched wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped, but I thought I had learned from my mistakes and could pull this one off. 

So, I created a challenge leading up to the launch in hopes to generate more interest. I remarketed the model from the original course as its own, full of updated and restructured information. I ended up getting around 80 signups!

But that 80 signups never felt like it was enough because it only led to 10 conversions. I thought it was priced too high…but in reality, I was misinterpreting the numbers. My conversion rate was 12%, which is amazing! But because I wasn’t seeing those six-figure numbers I thought it was a flop. 

And to this day, I wish I had known more about how to analyze that data back then. It would have saved me tons of trouble from constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. And I wish this was something people talked more about at that time because all I saw were business owners making a boatload of money and not explaining why, and it made ME feel like a flop. 

All of this gave way for some pretty heavy problems that year. 

March 2017

The focus of my channel in 2017 was live trainings and having guests join me. I wanted to get as much exposure as possible since ads weren’t a thing yet. But behind the scenes, I felt like doing anything but showing up. 

Having my son at the end of 2016, and then having the immediate stress to grow my business right after spun me into a period of postpartum depression that went under the radar. 

Long story short — things got better at the end of the year, but it was something I fought to keep up with while everything else in my life was happening — growing a business, building a house, and raising two toddlers at the same time. It was A LOT. 

May 2017

Later that spring, I kicked off my first ever YouTube Bootcamp (fun story —someone ripped off the name and logo for the exact same concept a few months later, so that was fun to deal with!). 

It was the first time I pre-sold a course because I didn’t want to create something people didn’t want to buy. The good news? I had around 3,000 subscribers on my email list, and ended up enrolling 30 people that first round! It was a nice feeling. 

This was also the year I hired a copywriter, who now is a good friend of mine — Ashlyn Carter! She created some amazing launch copy for me and I definitely contribute much of the success of that launch to her work! I also like to think this is when I sold her on the greatness that is YouTube because she actually bought the course from me after (and then she later became a client of mine)!

October 2017

Big jump — I know, but those summer and early fall months were filled with work, work, and more work. I was constantly focused on launching something and sending emails to my list. Basically, I was on a launch hamster wheel. 

I launched the same program in October, and this particular launch is what helped my business finally make money. And I’m grateful for the income, but the work leading up to that launch, coupled with struggling with the postpartum depression, was a heavy load to bear. And when you add imposter syndrome to the mix…it’s never a good outcome. 

I was still comparing myself and thinking I was a failure because I thought I could crush this thing but still hadn’t managed to come up with a six-figure launch yet. I was stuck wondering why my business wasn’t hitting those numbers, wracking my brain for what I could possibly be doing wrong even though I was doing everything I could to grow my business.

Hindsight is 20/20, but I couldn’t see then that these things take time (and again, if I had known how to take a deep dive into my numbers, I probably would have had a much different perspective of my business back then). 

November 2017

Later that year, I invested in a YouTube workshop. At the time $3,000 was a lot of money to spend upfront and it was scary (because, remember, I only made $24k that year, AND I was going to be away from my littles for a week), but I knew I needed to take the next step and expand my skills. 

I was around people like me — business owners who focused on YouTube — for the first time ever and it made me feel so good to be seen and heard. I finally felt validated as a business owner and could see that, yeah, maybe I wasn’t failing at this thing after all. 

I also networked and got a great opportunity with the YouTube educator who hosted that workshop to help him out with his programs. Consistent monthly income and basically working part-time for him (I was still a contractor, but I frame it like this to show you the hours on my plate)? Yes, please!

Overall, I ended the year on a much better note. I was starting to feel more confident in my business, and starting medication for the depression helped me make strides. At the end of 2017, it felt like I could finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. 

Coming up next: 2018 — The State of Grace Era

Success doesn't happen overnight and unfortunately, we all have to go through some rough patches to make our way to that big breakthrough. At the end of 2017, I still wasn’t there, but things were looking up!

Want to see how it shook out? Stay tuned over on my YouTube channel, where I’ll be dropping the rest of the Trena Business Eras Tour videos (again — won’t be running out of tickets people). 

Check out the video below from my State of Grace (Red) Era!