Episode 453: My big business failures that ended up being huge wins

Welcome to my office carpet! It’s a Podcarpet episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, and in today’s episode, I want to share with you five big business failures that ended up being huge wins for me in my business.

I thought it was a good podcast conversation to bring down onto the carpet, get a little informal, share with you behind the scenes of my business, and be upfront and honest about some of my big business failures.

Let’s dive in!

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I find unpacking some of my failures and mistakes in my business to be a very cathartic process.

Thank you so much for being part of this little process for me, and I hope that you find it really valuable for you as well.

I’m going to dive straight in, because I’ve got five pretty ginormous failures to share with you, and I want to share how they became big wins for my business.

Failure 1: The Heart-Centred Business Conference

As you may know, I run the Heart-Centred Business Conference every single year now.

I run the Virtual Conference in March and the in-person conference in Noosa in September each year.

If you want to attend either of those conferences, you can find out more below:

• In-person Noosa Conference – heartcentredbusinessconference.com
• Virtual Conference – heartcentredbusinessconference.com/virtual

What you may not know is that the first Heart-Centred Business Conference ran at a $27,000 loss. A $27,000 loss!

Thankfully, at the time, my business was able to sustain that loss. But on paper, that conference looked like an absolute failure.

If you were to look at the bottom line of what I created, the work that went into it, the time and energy that I put into that conference and then to see that it ended up netting me a loss of five figures, you might decide that it would be best to not run it again.

But being in that conference room, I knew I had created the start of something magical.

I knew that I had to make it profitable and sustainable for my business. But I also knew that it was bigger than just its financial contribution to my business.

The number one contributor to my business all the way up until 2024 financially has always been my Take Off program. And because Take Off is an online program with relatively little cost, it’s highly profitable.

In 2024, conference actually turned over more than Take Off did. But it doesn’t bring in the same level of profits, because I have very high expenses with running an in-person conference.

The first few times I ran the in-person conference, I didn’t even include my time or my team’s time in running the conference in its expenses, because that would have just blown it out to even bigger losses.

These days, conference does sustain itself and make itself a little profit. But for the time, energy and effort involved, I would probably be better off focusing all of that time, effort and energy on running and launching the Take Off program.

But the more consistently I’ve run the conference, the more it contributes well beyond the bottom line of my business.

Conference is responsible for me growing my network with spectacular people.

Conference contributes to my positioning in the market, and attracts some really amazing guest interviewees and experts into my programs and on this podcast.

It contributes to my business in ways other than just financially. But in true Tash style, it was a big failure the first time I ran it. Hand on heart, I’m going to claim that and own that it was not done particularly well the first time around, especially from a financial perspective.

But it was so magical, and having people in the room together was just so precious to me. It filled our cups in such brilliant ways, and it created other opportunities for me in my business.

And so I decided I wanted to run it consistently. And I have!

Failure 2: The Take Off program

This may come as a surprise to you because I just said it was the number one contributor to my cash flow.

The first time I launched the Take Off program, I expected to sell 75 to 100 spots.

I thought I was going to have AT LEAST 75 people join the Take Off program the first time that I launched it.

The reason why I expected that was because I was in an online course where that was flaunted about as a very reasonable outcome to expect from doing this online course.

It was pitched in the sales webinar as though that was the normal result that everyone got when they launched online courses. They made $50,000-$100,000, and they sold 75 to 300 spots the first time they launched a course.

I launched my course and thought I would get the same results. Why wouldn’t I?

But looking back at that first launch, I realise that I had:

• Under 1,000 people on my mailing list
• Under 1,000 followers on my Facebook page
• No structured launch plan whatsoever

I didn’t run a webinar or a challenge. I literally just told my audience it existed.

That was my idea of launching my online course.

I told my audience it existed, I told them there was an early bird price, and then once that early bird price closed, I talked about it for a couple of weeks before the course started.

That’s all I did to launch that course… and I made 13 sales.

It’s so fascinating to me to look back on it now, because at the time, I felt like it was an abysmal failure.

I felt like I had completely wasted my time. I felt like everything was just shrinking in front of me.

Prior to launching the Take Off program, I was bringing in around $18,000 per month in the months leading up to that launch. And so launching the Take Off program at the early bird price of $398, I was expecting to make $30,000-$40,000 in sales.

I was expecting at least $20,000 in sales because I’d made that selling one-on-one services, and at the time, it seemed like everyone online was saying that if you sell one-to-many, you can uncap your income and earn way more money.

But I launched the Take Off program, I sold 13 spaces, I made under $5,000, and that was my entire income for the month because I told everyone I wasn’t taking one-on-one clients for a while whilst I focused on launching my course.

What I did was I actually dried up my income. I didn’t sell as many spaces as I was expecting, and I’d actually sent out this message telling everyone I wasn’t working one-on-one for a while.

I ended up making a lot of mistakes in that first launch.

But now, years and years later, Take Off is one of the biggest successes in my business.

Just because that launch wasn’t as successful as I expected it to be, didn’t mean that I threw out the program. Just because that launch dried up my income and took me from consistent five-figure months down to making less than $1,000 the month after my launch, didn’t mean that I gave up on my business altogether.

Instead, I had to go back to the drawing board. I had to eat a bit of humble pie and go out to my audience and tell them that I had made a mistake.

They didn’t judge me for that.

They were just happy because they got to still work with me one-on-one.

There were some people who I think were quite gleeful in seeing me fail so miserably. And there were some people who rubbed it in a bit, and that really hurt my ego. But at the end of the day, I knew that my mission for the business and the Take Off program was bigger than the ego and the mistakes that I had made in that first launch.

If you were to look at the first launch of the Take Off program, you would have seen it as a failure. If you were to look at the first launch of the Take Off program, you would think I’d made the hugest mistake of my business ever.

And to be honest with you, if I could go back and change one thing about my business, it would be delaying the launch of group programs and online courses by at least a year, and really solidifying my baseline VIP income, setting up waitlists for one-to-one work with me, growing my mailing list in preparation for my launch, and doing all the runway stuff that I teach people to do.

But it was able to be recovered. Everything is able to be recovered.

I don’t think I’ve ever met someone in business who has made a mistake so big and so terrible with their business strategy that it can’t be recovered.

But it does sometimes take eating that humble pie, admitting that you’ve made a mistake, and going back to the drawing board and the basics and foundations, which is what I did to recover my business.

I didn’t relaunch the Take Off program for another 11 months. But in those 11 months, I rebuilt the baseline income in my business. I got serious about growing my list and growing my audience. I got serious about generating leads for the program before I launched it again. And I got serious about making sure that the program delivered for the 13 people who purchased it.

Initially, I hadn’t planned to do a lot of live calls with the Take Off program. But I could see after four or five weeks of people doing the program that they needed a lot more mentorship.

It wasn’t as simple as just recording a course, putting it out in the world, and people would get the results regardless.

I feel like I’d been sold a false economy and a false idol in the program that I’d done. It pretty much told me that you just create the course once, you sell it thousands of times, make millions of dollars, and you’ll never have to deliver one-to-one again or answer any questions.

But I could see that that wasn’t necessarily appropriate for a course that was going to help people start a business. This is because when you’re starting a business, you don’t need step-by-step modules on their own.

You actually need mentorship.

You need someone to:

• Bounce ideas off
• Give you feedback on your messaging
• Give you feedback on your offers and ensure that you’re sticking to your messaging and your niche and you’re not re-broadening out every time someone has an objection to working with you

That mentorship is something that I love giving people, and it’s now an integral part of the Take Off program.

But that all came from me recognising that the model and the launch process I was taught wasn’t going to deliver the results I was promised.

Instead of looking for someone else to teach me how to successfully launch it, I realised that I knew my foundations enough, I knew my audience enough, and I knew what I was doing enough to find a way to make this program work. And I knew what brought the income in in the early days of my business was focusing on VIP one-to-one and really getting those foundations nailed.

I could see that there were some big gaps in my foundations that I had let go of and jumped straight into selling online courses when I wasn’t necessarily ready for it.

It looked like a failure. It was a failure in the first launch, and it certainly didn’t grow my business exponentially the way that I thought it would, but ultimately, it has been a huge success for my business.

Failure 3: Facebook ads

My first attempt at Facebook ads was a total disaster.

It was my third or fourth month in my business. I ran my first webinar, and I had 13 people sign up. It was suggested to me that if I ran ads to promote that webinar, I could get people signed up for about 50 cents per person signing up for my webinar.

If I had 130 or 1,300 people signed up for my webinar, it would multiply my results from that webinar and the sales that I would be making.

I jumped into the Facebook ads manager and I set up an ad to promote my next webinar.

When I woke up the next morning, the ad had spent $1,000 and had zero registrants for my webinar.

I hadn’t set up that ad properly, or I’d done it with the wrong outcome in mind, and I’d basically blown through $1,000 in 24 hours.

Because of that, it made me very shy of Facebook ads for a long time to come.

I’m really hesitant to share this, but for three years, I never ran another Facebook ad. And that was a mistake.

I wish I’d got over that a lot sooner and started running ads and running them effectively in the early stages of my business, because back then, you could get 50 cent leads very easily. That was top of the range that you would be paying for someone joining your mailing list, grabbing a free resource or signing up for a webinar.

These days, I see people saying that if they get a webinar registrant for under $10 per person, they’re celebrating.

In those real glory days of Facebook ads where my peers were growing their mailing lists by 1,000-3,000 people every single month, I was growing my mailing list in tiny numbers comparatively, and doing it all organically.

That meant that my conversion rate and the amount of money that I made per person signing up to my mailing list was a lot higher because I had a lot more connection with those people. It was done more organically.

There are pros and cons to both.

But these days, running Facebook ads consistently is one of the core, foundational things that I do that grows my business every month.

In 2024, I had a reel on Facebook go viral, and I had to turn off my list growth Facebook ads for a little while because I had been running them to a warm audience, and I saw a huge drop in growth of my mailing list. It also meant that leads coming into some of my live launch lead magnets (things like coming to webinars, joining challenges or participating in Tashmas) really dropped off in the second half of 2024 because I needed to stop running those ads.

They’re back up and running now. They’re doing a great job again and contributing significantly to the ongoing growth of my business and in particular my mailing list.

Another of my big business failures that ended up being a win for me in my business.

Failure 4: The first print run of the Heart-Centred Business Planner

The first-ever launch of the Heart-Centred Business Planner was a digital product only, but I got some feedback from people that first year that they found it very expensive to get the planner printed.

They preferred to do it with pen and paper, but to get the planner printed out, it cost them $70 or so.

I had a lot of people asking me if I could get them printed in bulk, and therefore we would all save money.

The second year of the Heart-Centred Business Planner, I decided to get a print run of planners done.

I was very smart, I set up a waitlist, and I had around 200 people sign up to say that they would be interested in getting the Heart-Centred Business Planner printed and delivered to them anywhere around the world.

I went and got 200 copies of the Heart-Centred Business Planner printed. It cost me about $19 to get them printed, and I sold them for $29 plus postage (and I didn’t even charge the full amount for postage because it was quite expensive to get it overseas). I promoted the print version, and I sold less than 50 copies.

Then I did a discount offer where I sold them for half price in January (which was below my cost price) and I sold another 20 or so. But over 100 copies of the planner ended up being pulped and recycled because I couldn’t sell them.

Another of my big business failures.

How did this end up being a win for me?

First and foremost, I then decided I would only print to order.

It meant that I had to find a new way of launching and promoting the planner so that I had the exact number I needed before I sent them off to the printers.

That’s when I started using Kickstarter to launch the Planner.

But in that second year of running the planner, I recognised that people didn’t just need the planner. A lot of people from the first and second year of the planner would fill the planner in, but they needed help with actually implementing it. They needed help with the self-management side, with their productivity, and with making sure that they were creating a plan they could actually deliver on.

They needed help ensuring that the plan didn’t just sit on the shelf collecting dust, it actually was something that they used.

For the third year of the planning system, I sold it as a year-long program, rather than just selling the planner on its own.

That’s really where the Heart-Centred Business Planner became the go-to planning system for a lot of people in my audience.

Every year, I’ve had around 100 people or more participate in the planning system, and we’ve spent the year together.

We have the live calls for our yearly and quarterly planning, we have Q&A’s, we have the Facebook group, we have people form little mastermind groups and pods, and it does a spectacular job of helping people not only have a super clear plan of what they’re doing in their business, but actually implement it in a way that is aligned with their lifestyle goals.

It’s been responsible for a huge up-level of the planning system.

Another failure that ended up being a big win!

Failure 5: Having my 30-Day Business Blast course on Udemy

This is a failure that only recently turned into a win.

My intention when I created that course and launched it on Udemy in 2018 was that it would be a great way to grow my audience. I thought that by launching a low-ticket course on Udemy, I would be accessing millions of potential clients, because they have millions and millions of users of Udemy, and I would be able to tap into a new audience and grow my audience by selling them a low-ticket course.

When I first created and launched that course on Udemy, 99.9% of the people who purchased it were from my existing audience.

It wasn’t actually getting me in front of new audiences.

That’s to be expected the first time that you launch it. But something that I saw a lot of people do in the early days of Udemy was that they would create multiple courses, and the more courses they created, the more they would be known as a reputable provider on the platform, and so therefore, they would be promoted more by Udemy itself. Their courses would get in front of more of their audience, and then they would grow their user base.

There are some amazing entrepreneurs who have grown their audience purely through being a trainer on Udemy, and that was going to be part of my business model moving forward.

However, after the first launch, the sign-ups to that course on an evergreen basis were pretty dismal.

I had 10-20 sales a month come in for the first year or so, and then I’d have five sales a month come in for a couple of years. And now I get one to two sales a month maximum.

Part of that is because I don’t promote that course to my existing audience too much.

I never created another course for Udemy. It was always on the to-do list, but it fell down to the bottom of the to-do list, particularly over the last few years when I’ve been unwell.

I never really tapped into that new audience.

It was mostly people from my existing audience who purchased that online course.

The reason why this has now become a win is that Udemy are now taking the contents of the courses created by their 100,000 creators, and plugging it into their own special AI tool to create new courses.

In essence, my understanding is that by offering courses on the Udemy platform, you are also agreeing to have the intellectual property of those courses fed into Udemy’s AI tool, which will create new courses that don’t require facilitators. Those courses will be generated by AI.

That’s not something I particularly want to be part of, and I’m grateful that I didn’t get my butt into gear and create dozens of courses on Udemy and grow my audience into thousands of people on Udemy, because there are a lot of people who create and sell courses on Udemy who are now scrambling to get their audiences over onto their own mailing lists, and who are closing down their courses on the Udemy platform.

Unfortunately, the IP cannot be removed. But the course can be closed to new purchases.

That’s what I’m going to be doing with the 30-Day Business Blast.

This brings me to my special offer for this podcast episode.

If you would like to do the 30-Day Business Blast, you’ll have ongoing access to it as long as you purchase it before I take it off the market.

You’ll be able to do it whenever you like.

To purchase the course at the cheapest available price currently, head to: tashcorbin.com/udemy

I’m going to be taking that off the market and making it unavailable for purchase as soon as I can. There’s about a 60-day notice period, so I will be initiating that process to remove this course from the market now.

It’s an interesting mistake that has kind of led to a win because it’s just saved me a bunch of work and heartache. I’m really glad that I focused my energy and attention on growing my audience in my mailing list, rather than doing it through a long-form process on someone else’s platform.

I’m grateful that that’s where I’ve been focusing my energy and attention, because a mailing list is an audience asset that you actually own, and can move across platforms.

If I move from the Kartra platform, I can take my mailing list with me. If I move away from Udemy, I can’t take my student list with me. And if I move away from Facebook, I can’t take my followers with me.

Your mailing list is a foundational asset that should be a priority to grow.

If that foundational reminder is particularly poignant for you today, I recommend you also check out my Grow Your Audience freebie.

You can find it at: tashcorbin.com/audience

I hope my failures have given you some insights or helped you to see how things that look like values at first can often be transmuted into some amazing successes.

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.