Episode 420: The lies we believe about starting a business – Podcarpet

If you were to ask a hundred different people what their top three pieces of advice for starting an online business are, I don’t think you would be able to narrow it down to thirty consistent things.

In fact, I would say the most common things shared by all of those different people would actually be lies.

In this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, I’m going to share with you the ten lies that we believe about starting a business – that aren’t true!

They may have been true in the past (or they may not have been true in the past!) but they certainly are not true today.

Let’s dive in!

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I’m going to get straight into this one because I want to rattle through this list pretty quickly.

Lie 1: You have to spend money to make money

This is no longer true.

For a lot of people, the fact that they still have that rattling around in their brain means that they don’t see the opportunities that are available to us as business owners, especially online, as much as those of us who have been able to let that go.

It used to be the case that you had to spend money to make money in business because we didn’t have access to an audience absolutely free. We didn’t have access to the free/very low-cost tools that we have access to today. And we didn’t have opportunities to have a platform and make money from sharing our knowledge, advice, healing capacity, and our ability to help people achieve their goals.

The types of things that we do as business owners today didn’t exist as businesses in a time when you had to spend money to make money. They didn’t exist in a time when you had to craft a product, get prototypes made, ship things and advertise before you ever made a cent in your business.

Those realities are not true anymore.

If you still believe that you have to spend money to make money, I want you to do some internal reflection:

Is that always true?
Is that true for the situation that you’re applying it to today?
Are you actually better off finding a way to make money without spending money in the first place? To validate your offer, validate your messaging, and validate what it is that you’re doing before you ever spend a cent?

That’s something that’s available to us now!

Lie 2: Small businesses take years to be profitable

Again, that used to be true for a lot of different business models. But that is no longer true for all businesses.

In fact, my business was so profitable in its first year, that I had a huge surprise tax bill that I had no idea was coming. My accountant underestimated how much profit I could make based on the turnover I had in my business.

You can have highly profitable businesses very quickly as an online business owner.

People that I’ve worked with as clients over the last couple of years (even if we take into consideration the money that they’ve invested to work with me), still have 80%-90% profitability in their business in their first year.

That’s because the cost of entry to business and the cost of running a business is so much lower these days.

It does not take years for businesses to be profitable. You can turn your business into a profitable one very quickly with the right strategy.

Lie 3: You need to build an audience first

This is a hangover from probably 2010-2015 in business, where the most prolific and well-known business owners who emerged in the online space at that time built very large audiences very quickly. This means the strategy that they taught was very audience growth-centric because that’s what they did.

But that audience growth was often available to them organically and far more easily than audience growth is available to people starting a business today.

My take on this is that you do not need to focus on audience growth in the early stages of your business to make money, to make sales, to validate your offer, to validate your messaging, and to validate your niche.

You just need access to a handful of people.

You do not need a big audience.

You’re better off validating with a teeny tiny audience that you can reach through your existing network now rather than growing a large audience and then testing whether that audience is actually an audience that will buy.

I think the audience-first strategy is a very expensive and time-intensive strategy in which to start a business in this current iteration of how businesses grow online.

A lot of the people still preaching this whole approach of building your audience first haven’t caught up to date with what it takes to build profitability early in your business these days.

A lot of the marketing strategy and messaging that you see online is talking about trying to spread the word about your services and your business anyway, anyhow, anywhere and on any platform you possibly can.

They’re very focused on reach as a driver of business growth.

But reach is the most expensive and time-intensive part of your marketing strategy and your client attraction process, and it’s the least likely to result in sales.

Rather than being reach-centric, my recommendation is to be validation-centric first.

It’s a lie that you need to build an audience as one of the first strategies in your business. I do not believe that at all.

Which brings me to lie number four…

Lie 4: Follow and copy the experts

The reason why I say that this is a lie is because, in a lot of cases, the self-proclaimed experts aren’t as experienced as they would like you to believe. Alternatively, a lot of the experts and industry leaders started their businesses a long time ago and haven’t kept abreast of what the current startup environment is like.

They’re still giving advice based on how they started their business 10 years ago.

That’s something that’s very important to me as someone who specialises in helping people in the early stages of their business. I am not teaching people how to build their business the way I built my business back in 2013. Because a lot of the strategies that I used back in 2013 would not and do not work today.

Those strategies would not have the same level of success and profitability.

If I just continued to rinse and repeat the same old messaging and the same old startup strategies and techniques, my clients would be less and less successful in those early stages of startup.

That is not the case, because I pride myself on really paying attention to what is validated, what works, what is profitable and what creates income and sales quickly for startups in this current climate.

You do not need to follow and copy experts and do it exactly the way that they did it, because either they aren’t telling the full story, or you don’t realise how much money they’re spending behind the scenes to get the results that they’re getting.

Lie 5: There is one right formula or strategy to start an online business

That is a lie. There is no one right formula. There is no one right strategy. There’s not one platform to rule them all.

If you are going to start a business, it’s important that you find your right strategy and your right process.

That does not come from following what someone else did. Even just buying into the belief that there is one right strategy can be dangerous. What that then sets you up for is looking for that one right thing, instead of just implementing the strategy that you have and then adjusting your strategy based on your results, what you are seeing in your business, what your strengths are, and what you love doing.

Most people who join the Take Off program (my program where I help people get their business off the ground and start making that regular $3,000-$5,000 a month income) are already doing a giant list of 50 things. They’re frustrated that it’s not making the money, but they’re still asking the question of what they’re doing wrong or what’s wrong with the strategy. They are fixated on trying to find the one right way to do something. And that is the problem.

The more people you ask, the more advice you’ll get, and the more you’ll be told what you’re doing is wrong, or you have to add something else in, or you have to change your messaging this way/that way.

Instead, remember there’s not one right strategy. What you’re looking to do is build a strategy that fits you, fits your market, and fits your products and services. Then make micro adjustments based on the data and the insights that you get as you implement moving forward.

That’s far more effective.

Lie 6: There’s some kind of secret to starting a business successfully

This is a lie that’s proliferated by marketing people to try and convince you to pay them money because they’re trying to convince you that there’s a secret behind that paywall that all successful business owners know, but you just don’t know that secret yet because you haven’t paid to be part of the posse.

That is not true!

There is no secret about marketing or business.

It’s why I really struggle to be a conspiracy theorist or buy into some of these conspiracies out there because I just don’t trust that enough humans could keep that secret together.

If there was a secret that all million-dollar business owners knew but were refusing to tell people unless they were paid for it, there would be one rebellious millionaire business owner who shared that secret for free.

We know that to be true of human nature, so don’t believe the lie that there’s some secret out there that you just don’t know yet.

It’s not a secret. Everything is on the internet. Everything. It’s all there.

The big problem that a lot of people face is that there is so much advice on the internet that it becomes overwhelming. Everyone has conflicting “secrets” to share.

There are almost too many secrets! There’s too much information on the internet. This is why we need to have that trusted mentor or listen to our inner mentor more consistently so that we can stop buying into this lie that there’s this secret that would make everything okay if we knew it. It’s not true. That’s not a thing.

You need to design your business strategy and your marketing strategy in alignment with what works for you, what works for your audience, what works for your market, and what works for your product.

And really, the hard truth of the matter is it takes practice. It takes consistency. And it takes a willingness to fail quickly and make a lot of mistakes.

It’s not about getting it right or wrong.

It’s about doing something and learning, doing something and learning, doing something and learning.

That’s really what it takes to create and build a business.

There are no secrets involved whatsoever. You do not have to pay someone to know some secret formula. That is just a way of them manipulating you into paying them money.

Lie 7: You need to work harder and be hungrier

There’s so much hustle culture out there, and I think a lot of people believe this lie that you just have to want it more than someone else… you just have to work harder than someone else.

If the hardest-working people in the world were the ones who got paid the most, the world would be upside down in terms of the wealth profile that it currently is.

You do not need to work harder. You do not need to be hungrier.

In a lot of cases, that is just turning everything back on you and blaming you for why you haven’t got the results you’ve got just yet, or why someone’s strategy hasn’t worked for you.

Often, this is a big lie that’s used if you join a program, follow the steps of the program, do exactly what you’re told, and it doesn’t work. The mentor will just brush you aside and say that you weren’t hungry enough or you didn’t work hard enough.

That’s a lie. You don’t need to work harder. You do not need to be hungrier.

There’s also that meme that gets shared around every now and then saying, ‘Work hard now and do what other people wouldn’t do now so that you can have what other people won’t have later, and you can reap the rewards that other people won’t experience later.’

I’m not saying that hard work doesn’t pay off. Yes, hard work absolutely pays off. But what I am saying is that it is a lie that the only way to create success and start a business is to work harder, hustle harder, be hungrier, and burn yourself out.

When you start a business, you train that business in what it can expect from you in terms of time, energy, money, attention, and headspace.

I am a big proponent of starting your business in the way that you mean to go on.

If you want to create a lifestyle business, build it around your lifestyle from the outset.

If you want to create a business that fills your cup and doesn’t burn you out, be mindful of that from day one. Stop convincing yourself that one day you’ll have the time, energy, space and money to be able to relax and take days off as a business owner.

Start taking the days off now. It has been proven time and time again that there’s only a certain number of productive hours that we can get out of ourselves. Remember Parkinson’s Law: a project will expand to take up the time that you give it. The more we boundary up the time that we put into the work that we’re doing, the more we will learn how to be far more strategic, effective and productive with that time.

You do not need to work harder, you do not need to be hungrier, and you certainly do not need to train your business to expect 60-hour work weeks from you from now on. Don’t do that to yourself. It’s a lie!

Lie 8: You need to maintain an “image”

Often when someone first starts a business, they think they need to put on a professional front. They think they need to be a very disciplined, professional, corporatey business owner.

We see it in people’s social media content, and we see it in the way that they write about their offers and their services. That is an absolute lie.

Some of the most successful business owners that I love and admire are so unprofessional if you look at them through a corporate lens. But they make millions and millions of dollars because people love and adore them for who they are. They don’t show up with this image. They’re not wearing a mask to try and look more businessy.

You don’t need to conform to anyone else’s ideals of what a business owner looks like.

In fact, as business owners, we are changing the image and the energy of what it means to be a business CEO.

If you look at me, being a CEO involves working under 15 to 20 hours a week, spending lots of time with your puppies, being very creative, using lots of color, and showing up on Facebook lives with a messy bun and no makeup.

If you looked at me showing up in my business through the lens of what a corporate CEO looks like, of course I don’t look like one. But I am a CEO, and I’m a very successful business owner.

I want you to collect evidence of all of the business owners that you admire, and look at the fact that they don’t all show up with this pretentious mask of how amazing and eloquent they are.

A lot of the people that we love and admire who are CEOs and business owners are just themselves. They’re human. That’s part of the reason why we love them so much!

It is a lie that you have to have this professional image and this corporatey type way of talking or writing.

That is not true at all.

Lie 9: “You have to do XYZ to sell” messaging

I’ve clumped a lot of things together into this one. It pretty much is all the fear-based marketing out there.

Some examples are:

• “If you don’t buy things quickly, you’ll attract people who don’t buy quickly from you.”
• “If you don’t say that there are limited spaces, people won’t buy from you.”
• “People won’t be motivated to purchase if you don’t use countdown timers.”
• “You have to dial into people’s pain points, exacerbate them and agitate them for them to be uncomfortable enough to take action.”
• “You need to use persuasion and manipulation to get people to buy from you.”

It’s all lies.

There is no need. There is no necessity to use fear-based marketing, toxic marketing, agitation marketing, or aspiration marketing.

You can use consent-based, heart-centred, deeply connected, powerfully honest, very gentle marketing strategies and make millions and millions of dollars.

It is an absolute lie that you have to use any of those toxic strategies.

I saw someone recently who labelled a lot of the things I would call ‘toxic marketing strategies’ as ‘abusive marketing strategies’ and it gave me goosebumps. Because a lot of it is abusive! It’s gaslighting. It’s minimising people’s lived experiences. It is dialling up their shame. It’s tapping into their worst beliefs about themselves.

That’s abuse, and you do not need to resort to any of those kinds of tactics in order to successfully start a business.

Lie 10: A certain platform/strategy is dead

Facebook pages are dead.
Webinars are dead.
Low-ticket is dead.
High-ticket is dead.
Payment plans are dead.

Different marketing strategies, tools, platforms and tactics come and go. They come into favour and out of favour… and then into favour and out of favour.

I remember in 2014 when leads from Facebook started to go up above around $1 a lead. Fear mongerers were running around Facebook saying paid Facebook marketing was dead, Facebook ads were far too expensive and there was no way anyone could do Facebook ads profitably anymore because they’d become far too saturated and it cost far too much to get leads from Facebook.

People today would give their left arm for $1 leads. But back then, we were getting 10-cent leads, and it just kept going up and up.

Similarly, I have seen the narrative change from webinars being the best lead magnet, then the worst lead magnet, then being back in favour…

It’s a lie when someone tells you that a certain strategy doesn’t work anymore or it’s dead, or that if you’re not doing X strategy, you’re leaving money on the table.

The more you buy into that, the more you will find yourself chopping and changing your strategy so many times that even you can’t keep up with yourself.

Instead of buying into all of that, why not stand firm on your ground knowing what your strategy is?

If people say webinars are dead, don’t look for evidence that they’re right.

If you run webinars consistently and webinars are still working for you, collect evidence that webinars work for you.

When everyone on the internet is saying that webinars don’t work and they’re a terrible strategy, guess what has very little competition? Running webinars! This means that when you run webinars that are amazing and give a lot of value, people will be running to sign up for them because not many people are running webinars at the moment.

Sometimes bucking the trend is a better marketing and business strategy anyway.

One of the big things that happened in April of 2022 when there was an algorithm update on Facebook and Facebook pages were deprioritised in the algorithm, was that a lot of marketing gurus and experts (not me) were running around the internet telling everyone that Facebook pages were dead and you could never get organic reach on your page again. Because of that, a lot of people abandoned their Facebook pages.

Then six months later, there was another algorithm update, and pages were reprioritised in the algorithm. But everyone who had abandoned their Facebook pages couldn’t reinvigorate them again.

Then there was a further update in early 2024, where people who had been consistent with creating and sharing content on their Facebook pages were brilliantly rewarded when Facebook had another algorithm update that highly prioritised original content creators.

But unfortunately for a lot of people, that wasn’t them.

They didn’t get to experience that amazing reward because they had bought into all of that fear-based stuff around Facebook pages being dead, so they’d stopped paying attention to optimising the content on their Facebook page.

If anyone tells you a certain strategy or a certain platform does not work, you need to remember that what they are actually saying is that they don’t know how to make that strategy/platform work.

If someone says Facebook pages don’t work, they are saying that they don’t know how to make Facebook pages work. Or if someone says webinars don’t work, they are saying that they don’t know how to make webinars work.

On the other side, if someone says that the ONLY way to make sales of your course is to run five-day challenges, what they are really saying is that the only way THEY know how to make sales of their course is through running five-day challenges.

Don’t believe the lie that certain strategies don’t work. Instead, set about finding the rhythm, the strategy and the processes that work best for you and your business.

That closes up the ten lies we can sometimes believe about starting a business.

I’ve got an amazing free resource for you with this episode.

It’s my Fast-Track Your Business training.

This is where I take you through the things that are solid in creating and building a business online that are going to fast-track your income, your profit and your sales, regardless of what platform strategy or marketing approach you use.

Register for this free training here: tashcorbin.com/fasttrack

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.

Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.