Business Experiments That Flopped—And What We Did Next (Mixtape Edition)

This mixtape is one of three I'm sharing as we head toward episode ninety-nine. I asked past guests (and I chime in, too): What’s one experiment you tried in your business that didn’t land the way you expected—and how did you respond? You’ll hear quick stories, what they noticed, and the next moves they made so you can translate the lessons to your own context.

Topics:

• Why energy and scope are part of quality control
• Keeping the parts that worked and letting the rest go
• What to do with “failed” assets so they keep paying dividends

Rachel Lee is an Artist, Designer & Co-Founder of Neo Genesis, a personal branding agency for creatives & misfit entrepreneurs who are ready to own their weird, and (finally) rock it online.

You can find Rachel at:

Website: racheltylee.com

Instagram: @racheltylee

Tracy Stanger is an anti-hustle business coach who believes we shouldn’t have to choose between meaningful work and feeling fully present for our own damn lives.

You can find Tracy at:

Website: tracystanger.com

Instagram: @tracy.stanger

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Intro and Outro Music: Atomic by Alex-Productions |https://onsound.eu/

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Creative Commons / Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC BY 3.0)

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Transcript

Hey there, welcome to Here's What I Learned. I'm Jacki Hayes, a system strategist, unapologetic, smutty romanticist lover, Dungeons and Dragons geek, and your no BS guide to building a business that works for you. This is the place where we swap stories, share lessons, and get real about the highs and lows of creating a life and business that actually feels good.

No cookie cutter advice here, just honest conversations about what's working, what's not, and how to rewrite the rules to fit your version of success. So grab your favorite beverage, get comfy, and let's dive in. Welcome to a special mixtape of Here's What I Learned, one of three I'm sharing as we head toward episode 99.

For this episode, I asked a few past guests to drop voice notes answering what's one experiment you tried in your business that didn't land the way you expected, and how did you respond? You're going to hear short, honest stories you can translate to your own next step. First up is Rachel Lee. You can catch her most recent episode of Here's What I Learned on November 26th of 2024.

In that episode, we talked about building a brand that feels like you. Rachel is a designer who can do it all, and that was her experiment. She tried a one-stop shop delivery across strategy, messaging, design, and sites.

The work looked great. The end-to-end drained her. Take a listen to her experience.

This is Rachel Lee, and this is my answer to the question, what is one experiment you ran in your business that didn't give you the expected results, and how did you respond? So one thing that I have tried with my business that I think I needed to try but didn't end up working is I tried to be the one-stop shop that did everything. And I'll give a little background to this where I say I was the archid. I'm a creative unicorn where I could literally make anything that I put my mind to.

And when you have this beautifully dangerous ability to do everything and make anything look good, you have this tendency, and especially for me, I have helper syndrome, which I'm still working on developing a better relationship with, where I feel like when clients, people come to me for help, I have this natural tendency to be like, oh, I can help with that. Let me take that on for you. Let me help you with that.

And even though that is normally a very, very good thing from a business standpoint, it's led me down this path of trying to fix everyone's or to support everyone's needs because I know that I can, but then in hindsight, realizing that I ended up spreading myself too thin. I started off my business as a freelancer, so it was very much kind of like a waiter, right? Like, let me just take your order. What do you want? I can do that for you.

What do you want? I can do that for you. And it was like that in the beginning. I eventually discovered and fell in love with branding, which is how I ended up just moving my business towards a more branding focused sort of support for my clients, where for a while I offered brand strategy, messaging, design, and website setup.

It's very standard, honestly, from a branding agency standpoint, but this is just me solo as a person. And obviously, I did all of the things for my clients and I mean, the end result was amazing. I still look at some of the brands that I've made and I'm like, oh, I'm so happy and I'm so proud that I was able to just walk with my clients the whole way through.

But I remembered after doing a few of those engagements, just the end to end engagements, even though me and the clients, we were ecstatic over the end results. I remembered at the end of those engagements, I would be exhausted. It took a lot out of me, I realized, to really oversee all of those different parts of my client's branding journey.

I came to understand that not every single one of those parts was in my zone of genius. And me, I have a background as the art kid and as a designer. I naturally see the world in pixels, fonts, and colors.

And it's just like a second gut reaction where I know exactly what people's styles are the moment that I talk to them. Once I get your vibe, I know what your signature look is supposed to look like. So that comes so easily to me.

But the other things, like when it comes to writing website copy, for example, it's so, so important and it has to be done well. But if I were to be honest, it takes me twice, maybe even three times as long and as much energy to write a piece that works as effectively as somebody who has writing in their zone of genius, where they could snap their fingers and be like, I could just do that in my sleep. And so I've come to understand that.

And it was great that I tried because I'm the type of person where I need to try something in order to emotionally understand that it doesn't work for me. I could know all of the things, but I'm like, but I just want to have the experience. And if it's not a good thing, then I know, and then I could just move away from it.

So trying to do all of the things, it was a great experience. And after trying it, I realized like, ah, crap. Okay.

I'm realizing that I work the most effectively when I am only operating in my zone of genius. And as a result, I ended up scaling everything way, way, way back to the point where now I only specialize in one week, um, mostly visual brand transformations for my clients. And it's, it's a very specific bite-sized package and it's a very specific way of working.

I have my processes down to a T where it's like a very strict regiment that I take every client through. Like it's like an airtight procedure, but it gets the results every single time. And so, um, I, I did the thing where I went broad.

I tried all the things that I realized what I didn't like doing. And instead of holding onto the scarcity of, Oh no, what if clients come to me for this thing? And I can help them, but it's like, you know, like that situation, I ended up deciding to do the brave thing and being like, Nope, you know what? If I'm not going to have a good time working on this, then I'm not going to take this project. And that ended up becoming the bottom line for me.

So, so much. So now where I'm, I mean, I offer visual branding and I also do offer messaging services. That's more like a side thing.

Main thing is honestly visual branding. Um, but now it's like the visual branding is the main thing that people come to me for. And even though, um, I know a lot of people, they struggle with this.

They're like, Oh, I I'm worried about like losing out on business for me. I'm like, I am signing myself up for a horrible experience. If I say yes to anything that is not in my zone of genius.

And that, um, rewiring has just been like, it's made the biggest difference in my business. And it makes it so that I'm actually excited when I show up for work. Like when I work on projects for my clients, I'm like, Oh, I can't wait to do this because every time I just get to do the thing that I love doing.

And I'm like literally the best at it's like second to breathing for me. Um, and so that was a cool experiment. I definitely wouldn't have done it differently.

I feel like personally for me, I needed to try it in order to know it's kind of like, you don't know what you like until you see it. Um, or you don't know what you like until you taste it. That was that, um, a little experiment for me, but now that I've tried it and I've seen the other side, I am never going back.

Thank you, Rachel. On to the next note. This one is from Tracy Stanger.

Tracy has appeared on three episodes, most recently on September 17th, 2024, where we talked about the weird shit only you can do. Tracy sketched a premium optimized offer meant to blend fast results with a supportive experience halfway through building and validating it. The signal said, no, let's take a listen.

Hi, my name is Tracy Stanger, and I'm going to talk about one experiment I ran that didn't go as planned and how I responded. First, I love that this is your question, Jacki, because this is such a Manny Jen thing to think about. And I know we are both manifesting generators, so we know how to experiment.

And that's literally how we figure out what we want to do. We have to take action to see how we feel about a thing or to learn from it. So my experiment was to build a new offer called Optimize.

And how did I respond when things didn't go as planned? Well, I quit halfway through, and it's one of the best decisions I ever made. For a little background, I'm a business coach who helps people, usually neurodivergent, chronically ill, caregiver, people for whom traditional business advice just feels icky and doesn't work anyway. I help my people figure out how you can do less but better, have time for your whole life by designing your most you business, one that fits you, your personality tendencies and strengths, your capacity, your actual life circumstances, because that's how your biz is going to work best for you sustainably.

I usually work with people in three-month cohorts, either in my tiny group with hot seat coaching or one-on-one over Voxer. But over my July off last year, I was driving through the nicest neighborhood in our town, looking at these beautiful, expensive houses and thinking about how much money people must have to live in those houses and dreaming about how my work could be helpful to those people with all that money so they could give me some of that money. My next thought was things can either be fast, good, or cheap, but they can't be all three.

So I thought my already pretty fast coaching that's hella good could also be hella expensive if it was hella fast, so like over a couple of days instead of three months. I was also inspired by my friend's recent hotel staycation where she took herself for a planning retreat at a nice hotel. So I imagined creating this plan and pamper experience where I'd use my comfy space-making skills and my make shit easier to get done better in less time skills to force this busy, rich person to take a break while also making their next quarter so much more impactful by focusing in and cutting out anything that wasn't fully aligned with their goals and their strengths.

So like I said, I would call it optimize. My plan was to build this offer and also to write about it each week. So I teach sharing the who, what, when, where, why, and how of your offers as part of my simple human selling process, because basically your people don't need you to be more clever or trick them into buying.

They just want to know the details of your offer so they can feel comfy buying, knowing whether it is actually the right thing for them. So I plan to write a series of emails as I'm going through building this offer to both share the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the offer as I was deciding it, but also to showcase how I would coach my clients through building an offer and figuring out how to market it. So over the first three weeks, I wrote three emails, one about the parameters to decide, like the what, designing your offer.

So relying on your strengths, your actual capacity, and your unique way of doing things. I wrote one about designing the marketing strategy for your offer, using your personality type, talking to your people to see how they see your offer, and talking about it to everyone in the easiest format for you, like how I had chosen talking in the DMs and writing these emails. And then I wrote one about actually building the offer, thinking about how and when you will literally deliver this thing, considering your capacity and your client's capacity and making it so easy for people to actually pay you for it.

But by the fourth week and the fourth email, I had decided to can the whole project because in talking to my people, the ones that I thought were closest to that, I'll pay the big money to relax and do this work faster market, showed that they weren't as excited as I was about all the pampering I was going to do, or they just didn't want to pay for all that. And so if it was going to be like they wanted a lower cost thing, if they were going to want a lower cost, do it on your own thing, like they were asking for it, then I'd rather just direct them to my lower cost, do it with me current offers without adding this hard scheduled high pressure meeting to either of our calendars. So I use the fifth email to talk about some of the questions I might ask you along our offer design and building process answers that you really might not have until you start building the thing like I did it.

I'm going to share those questions now because I feel like this is the moral of the story, right? You can experiment and still absolutely learn from the experiment, even if things don't go as planned. So then you can think about, does this offer or more broadly, did this experiment actually help you hit your goals? Is this the most impactful thing you could be spending your time on right now? And then maybe my favorite question, what part of your personality, tendencies, and strengths did this experiment excite? And how can you use that in your next step forward? So I'm going to share a little excerpt from what I wrote in this final email about that last question for me. I wrote, I want to stress that this was not a failed project.

Business is a journey without a finish line. And this was a fun exercise for me and hopefully for you as the reader in sustainable business. You take a step without too much effort sunk in to get started, observe with questions like these, and then take the next most right step for you.

I really liked the creating a space part of this offer idea. So I can look for ways to play with that in my current offers or even something new down the line, or maybe just go buy those dining room chairs I've had my eye on all year and create a new space in my home. I also really loved writing these extra emails to you and writing is my one content that's most fun, comes out of me the easiest, and I'm hoping to use to help my people the most eventually in a book even.

So back to now, side note, I actually am writing my book now and I have the space for that because I knew to put this optimized offer down last fall, focus back on my existing offers, and make that space for writing that I love so much in this experiment process. Thanks again, Jacki, for this awesome question. And I hope you, listener, will have fun experimenting your way toward your most you business because that's going to work the best, fastest, having the most fun for the long haul.

And if you want a helping hand with that, come see me on Instagram at Tracy.Stanger. Now my turn. I mapped out a course, big, playful, full of mythology and D&D references called Launch Your Way. Six weeks, flexible paths, a whole ecosystem.

I loved building it. And when I started sharing teasers and warming people up, nothing. Crickets.

So I shut it down before I even opened enrollment. That sting was useful. I sat with what I actually wanted people to experience, not videos sitting in a portal, but live shared momentum.

That insight became the quarterly launch planning collective. Short teaching upfront, then co-working and light workshopping so folks left with real decisions made and next action set. Same expertise, different container, same goal, better launches, delivered in a way that matched how my people actually finished things.

I treated it like a beta. I set a small cap, invited the waitlist first, and priced it accordingly so I could learn fast without overbuilding. Within 24 hours of opening doors, five people enrolled.

Folks who had been looking for a way to work with me that wasn't a full VIP day. That was enough validation to keep going. Over the next few days, it climbed to seven with one person choosing a replay plus resources option because the live times didn't fit.

Small group, right signals, and clear feedback loops baked in. Here's the messy middle. While launching the beta, I also said yes to two new retainer clients.

One supporting a certification program on a tight deadline and one local brick and mortar who needed foundational systems yesterday. Great fits, wrong timing. That stacked my weeks, slowed down some deliverables for the collective, and raised my stress.

I had to right size my own expectations, communicate with participants, and prioritize what's needed for the next session over polishing everything at once. In short, I stopped pushing the course that wasn't getting traction, distilled what people actually needed from me, rebuilt the delivery around co-working and decisions, launched it as a beta with tight scope, and learned fast with a small right fit group. Was it perfect? No.

Was it progress? Absolutely. Thanks for spending time with this mixtape on experiments that didn't go as planned and what came next. As we head toward episode 99, let this be your reminder.

You can test, learn, and right size without turning it into a big story. If something landed, name one next move you can make this week that fits your capacity. I'll link the guests in the show notes if you want to follow their work.

The next mixtape in this three-part series drops next week. I hope to see you then. Thanks for hanging out with me on Here's What I Learned.

If today's episode gave you an aha moment, a laugh, or something to think about, make sure you're subscribed to my email list. That's where I share even more tips, stories, and behind-the-scenes insights to help you simplify and thrive. And remember, you get to do business and life your way.

Until next time, keep experimenting, keep simplifying, and keep learning.

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