Today is the day, my friends!

I’ve been DYING to share my refocused podcast message with you.

We’ve got a new look and a bigger, more inclusive focus around here — and, YES, I’ll still be talking about marketing funnels.

Because (SPOILER ALERT) — you cannot have Profit Without Worry in your business WITHOUT a marketing funnel.

But there’s a lot more to it than that, and we’ll use this podcast to dive into allllllll the goodness around creating Profit Without Worry in your own business.

For me, Profit Without Worry means that I can sleep at night because I trust my business to support me. It means I can go on field trips with my kids. It means I can take unexpected time off when I’m sick or have two loooooong weeks of snow days where my kids are climbing the walls and driving me nuts.

It means I’ve got space and support in my business.

Profit Without Worry happens because I have systems in place that work 24/7, so I don’t have to worry, guess, or hustle to get the results I want. Once it’s set up, I just let my marketing funnels run.

Profit Without Worry means that I have a business, not a hobby fueled by hope, fear, and a prayer.

And I want that for you too.

I’ll be honest, over the last seven and a half years of running my business full-time, I haven’t always had Profit Without Worry.

In fact, for the majority of that time, I had little profit with a whole lot of worry. And looking back at my journey, I could see there were three phases I went through in my own business, and I’m going to walk you through them so you can see if any of these sound familiar to you:

Biggest Show Takeaways:

Phase 1: The Guesswork Phase

• TRUTH: I hated this phase of my business when I was in it.
• I was trying to figure out what the heck my business was about and felt too nervous to share my message. I hid behind my computer screen and didn’t feel like there was anything special or unique about me.
• Every day, I’d have a pit in my stomach about what I *should* do, what other people were doing, and how inadequate I was compared with other people. This led to a lot of anxiety and second-guessing myself.
• I was guessing about what my message was, so it would take me two to three hours each day just to come up with a Facebook post. I’d spend FOREVER trying to find the right image and say the right things. Sometimes, it would take me months to get a blog post written because I didn’t know what to say, who I was talking to, or what I was trying to accomplish.
• I took a couple of classes, but they made me feel even more inadequate because they’d start off by asking me to create a customer avatar — which felt really hard because I wasn’t grounded in a signature offer or even a focus for my business — so I didn’t really know who I wanted to attract.
• I was doing consulting and workshops for corporate clients trying to figure out how to take my years of experience and turn it into a real, sustainable business with the actual people I wanted to work with.
• I needed an offer. I needed buyers. I needed to prove to myself that I could do this.

Phase 2: The Hard Work Phase

• I also call this the Random Acts of Marketing phase.
• I entered this phase after trying to launch an online program and having it flop — big time.  The kind of flop where I couldn’t even give it away for free.
• I felt like I only had two choices at this phase: Go back to the corporate world OR ferociously commit to my business and do whatever it took to make my business work. I decided to do whatever it took and went ALL IN on my business.
• I put my money where my commitment was, and I joined a 12-month mastermind program that was $30,000 because I reasoned to myself: “What better way to commit than to get a super successful 7+ figures a year coach and peers to hold me accountable so that I actually do whatever it takes.” Major, very expensive lessons learned there.
• I loved my peers in the mastermind; in fact, I’m still connected with many of them today. That was a major benefit that came out of the mastermind — many of those peers gave me tough feedback and challenged me to see my value in a way that I never could have done on my own.
• The coach who led the mastermind was a bad fit. She was and still is all about the hustle, hustle, hustle 24/7 to build your business. Hard work and hustle plus big investments to buy your way onto stages and events was her only advice to growing a business.
• I tried that approach. I went to over 50 events in a nine-month period of time. I got myself on big stages, featured at events, had my own tradeshow booth and was a featured speaker in person and virtually.
• You know what that did for my business?
  • It cost me time with my family.
  • It cost me a lot of money.
  • It cost me my health and sleep.
  • It didn’t actually bring in new business.
  • All that activity, all those random acts of marketing, weren’t leading anywhere. It was just about making a name for myself — not about serving and connecting with my audience.
• One day about nine months into that mastermind, I woke up in the middle of the night with a panic attack. The day before, I’d just made my 1000th sales call to someone I’d met at one of these events and gotten my 1000th NO. People had no idea why they’d want to work with me. I felt lost and confused after putting in so much effort to get out to all these events.
• I knew I had to change what I was doing because all the events, travel, and money was costing me my sleep and my happiness.
• I asked myself a simple question: What’s missing here?

Phase 3: The Framework Phase

• It was at that point that I realized my business was built on only one thing: ME. And I couldn’t do it all by myself all the time.
  • If I got sick, nothing happened.
  • If I couldn’t attend an event, no new leads were generated.
  • If I couldn’t make follow-up sales calls, nothing got sold.
  • If I couldn’t convince someone to buy from me right away, I had nothing else to offer.
• When I woke up with my panic attack in the middle of the night, I knew what was missing. It was this aha that got me on the path to turning around my business.
  • • I needed a framework that would work without me.
    • I needed a framework that would connect with my audience consistently and automatically.
    • I needed a framework to attract the right people that could become buyers.
    • I needed a framework to help my new connections understand what it was I could do for them.
    • I needed a framework to help me understand what worked and didn’t work in my business so I could stop guessing and get focused and stop all the random acts of marketing.
• When I got focused on a framework — which is a marketing funnel — I was able to take my marketing from hustling and random acts of marketing to Profit Without Worry.
• Within three weeks of rolling out my marketing funnel, I sold out my one-on-one client offering to 12 new clients, I had a waiting list, AND I had great insights into what else I could offer my clients.
• For me, that marketing funnel framework became the foundation that supports any marketing effort I do. No more disconnected random acts of marketing; now, everything follows a system and a framework for success. That’s why I want all coaches, experts, and online business owners to have a framework for Profit Without Worry.
• By creating a marketing funnel framework, I’m better able to serve my audience because I’m clear on the problem they have and my process to help them. I’ve created a proven path to help clients get the results they want and that helps them decide if I’m the person they want to work with or not.  
• I talk with hundreds of people a year who are on a similar path.
  • In fact, anyone I speak with who is frustrated about their marketing not working, it’s always because they don’t have a marketing funnel framework as the profit engine behind their work. They’re usually stuck in either the Guesswork or the Hard Work phase of business, and it’s not until they sit down, get clear, and create a marketing funnel framework for their business that everything comes together.

So, what about you? Do you have a deep desire to create a marketing funnel that feels connected and personalized for your audience? Are you looking for a system to take Random Acts of Marketing and turn them into a way to engage and attract your buying audience?

• Want to know which marketing funnel is right for you and your business? Take this free and easy quiz, and in less than 5 minutes, you’ll know EXACTLY which funnel is right for you.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Marketing Funnel Quiz: https://www.michellelevans.com/marketing-funnel-quiz/