Celebrations, Stress, Self-care and Statistics

You’re listening to the Mastering Money in Midlife podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 56.

Welcome to Mastering Money in Midlife, a podcast for midlife women in business to overcome financial anxiety and make more money without burning out or sacrificing their families. Join Certified Life and Money Coach Debbie Sassen, as she shares practical business strategies and mindset shifts that help you dissolve the money blocks that keep you stuck in a cycle of underearning and undersaving, sabotage the growth of your business and prevent you from building the wealth that you desire.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. Today’s podcast is all about celebrations, stress, self-care, and statistics around my recent launch of my group mastermind Wired for Wealth. The launch that I did during the month of November, we actually started October 31, but basically November was the second launch for my program.

The first launch was back in June. At that time, I enrolled nine students into the program. It was a $5,000 program. Nine times five is $45,000. For this cohort, the December cohort, I enrolled seven students, it’s still a nine-month program, and the price is $6,000. I had a $42,000 launch. I love talking about money. As you know, the name of my podcast is Mastering Money in Midlife.

I also think, as entrepreneurs, it’s very important that we get comfortable talking about numbers and talking about money, and especially celebrating money. If we think about our lives, we go through school, we celebrate graduation.

My children celebrated their graduations from high school, college, master’s programs. We celebrate when our kids get driving license. I don’t remember when I got my driver’s license. I was, back in the day, 16. I know it was a very big deal in my life. I had to get down to the DMV on my 16th birthday to do it.

These are things that we celebrate. When my brother, I have a brother in Los Angeles, Hollywood area, and he earned an Emmy Award for producing a commercial. And again, that was something that he was able to celebrate in his career.

As entrepreneurs, we get to celebrate things in our careers, in our businesses. And what we celebrate is money. Because we put our goods and services out into the world, and the energetic exchange for the work that we do is money. I am here to normalize celebrating all the money. The more money you’re making in your business, that’s a reflection of more value that you’re creating in the world.

So, I am celebrating $42,000 in my business, that I created in November 2022. And, I invite you to celebrate with me. Here is a debrief of my launch for you; what it took to get me from concept to actually launching the second cohort of my business, Wired for Wealth.

The first thing that I created was a four-day training called Money School. It was similar to the four-day training that I did in May, called Money Alchemy Accelerator. I personally love the name. And I also thought that it was a little bit cumbersome; it didn’t roll off of my tongue very easily. Although I loved bringing the word “alchemy” into money, and believing that God is the alchemist that makes all of our dreams and thoughts and things we do in our business and with our money, come to life.

But I decided to simplify the training. It was very similar to the training that I did in November, to the training that I did back in May. So, that was something that I was able to reuse and repurpose in my business. And I invite you also, to look at what you are doing in your business. Things that are going well, you get to reuse them, repurpose them. You’re going to tweak them, refine them, make them a little bit better. But we don’t always have to be reinventing the wheel.

So, that was something that worked very well for my business. I wasn’t stressed about the training that I was doing. I watched what I did the previous time, and I was really reflecting on it and how can I make it better. I changed my presentations a little bit to make it work with the theme of school, and I really loved what I did.

When I did the four-day training in May, I had over 200 people sign up for the training. This time, I had over 300 people sign up for the training. So, I see that as a growth area in my business. The way I advertised what I was doing, was on my social media channels; I’m on Facebook®, Instagram®, and LinkedIn®. And of course, through my email list.

I send out several emails, advertising and inviting people to sign up for the training. And the people on my email list, they did. I also did one piece of paid advertising. There’s a Jewish email blast. I signed up for that, it went out to thousands of people; I spent $85. That’s the only money that I spent on my launch. And because of that email blast, a lot more people joined my list.

When I started my launch, my email list was about 1,870 people. At the peak of the launch, it was just over 2,000 people on my list. But since the launch and the number of emails that I sent out, which I’ll tell you about shortly, my email list is now down to 1,950. So, I increased the number of people on my email list, which is beautiful. Because now, there are more people in my orbit, and we’re connected, and they know what I do, and they’re, you know, connected to me.

Also, some of the people unsubscribed along the way. I have no thoughts about the people who unsubscribed, I hope that when they were with me, they got what they needed. And when they left, they were ready to go on and take the next step in their money journey. Many of those people have been on my email list for years, and they were really just quiet.

The number of emails that I sent out during the launch, sort of shook them up and they realized that this wasn’t the place that they belong to; they didn’t really want to hear from me. Rather than just receiving an email once a week and hitting delete, when they were receiving day after day after day emails from me, that was their trigger to unsubscribe. And, that’s beautiful; bless and release. They’re not meant to be in my universe any longer, and that’s a beautiful thing.

So, we did the four-day training. And on the third day of the training, that’s when I launched my program Wired for Wealth. My launch window was open for about two and a half weeks. And if I had to do my launch all over again, which I will do… I’ll be opening up the next cohort; it’s going to start at the end of April. I’m going to do a launch in February, beginning of March, maybe.

I will definitely shorten my launch window, because two and a half weeks was a long time. I think it actually extended to almost three weeks. That was a long time to be in a launch. But that’s something that I learned through the process.

And so, I opened it up on the third day. I invited people in for an early-bird. And two people signed up for the early-bird, that was great. In the first launch that I did for my program, I had worked through with my coach what I thought about the numbers of people whom I might enroll in the program. I even wrote an email to my email list about this.

My thoughts were, that if nobody signed up that was not the worst-case scenario. Because if nobody signs up, nobody needs to know that nobody signs up. But one or two or maybe three people signing up, that was like a disaster. Actually, if I think about, I think one was okay, because one person would get like, one-on-one coaching for the price of a group program. So, I think I was okay with that.

But two to three seemed devastating to me, at that time. That, to me, was the biggest failure. And this time, when two people signed up, and it was about a week or so before more people enrolled in the program, I was very solid and happy and okay with only two people signing up for the program. I was good with that. I saw that, for me, was a big growth area. That it was never going to be a problem for me, that two people said yes.

Then, by the time the launch closed, there was one day that three people said yes. On one day; that was after the early-bird. And on the last day of the enrollment, two people signed up. So, that was that was a beautiful growth and celebration for me. I’m celebrating seven wonderful new students, new clients, in my program Wired for Wealth.

Back to statistics. I had 13 consultations for the program, and seven people said yes. That’s a 54% conversion rate. And, I think that that’s great. Not everybody gets such a high conversion rate. When I go to the next launch, my goal will be to expand the number of consultations, so that I will hopefully enroll more people into the course. So, those are the statistics.

There were also, by the way, a couple of people who reached out for consultations. I think when you’re showing up big and you’re being visible, amazing things happen; just the vibrations that go out into the universe bring people into your network.

So, two people signed up for consultations for one-on-one work. One, was actually for coaching. One, was more like financial planning. And neither one said, yes. I guess, I was just a little bit off in my energy. I was very focused on the launch of my group program, and it wasn’t the right time for them, or for me, to do one-on-one coaching.

That’s where I’m ending up the month of November; is with seven new people in our program, and no new one-on-one clients. So now, let’s look at what I did for self-care. Because this, for me, is a huge growth area.

You know, if you’ve been listening for a while to the podcast, I’m one of these hustlers that can work all night. And, it happened a little bit. There was one night that I stayed up till three o’clock in the morning, before I went to sleep. But mostly, I got into bed by 11, 12, 1, depending on what was going on; sometimes, even earlier.

I scheduled two massages for me, during the launch window. And that was a huge growth area of self-care that I hadn’t done before. I loved that I did that for myself. Looking back… Because after the launch Wired for Wealth closed, then I had a four-hour live event, where I invited the students from the current cohort, the June cohort and the December cohort, for a four-hour live event. I was emotionally and physically exhausted after that. And it would have been amazing to have had a massage scheduled for the day after that event. So, that’s something for me to remember for next time.

Also, because I was so focused on the launch, and I had a lot of my emotional capacity and my emotional reserves invested in the launch, my nervous system was expanded a lot. And, it was also fried. I mean, I would say that I was in a stress cycle for much of the month of November.

Sometimes I was able to use my coaching tools myself. Sometimes, because I was having regular coaching sessions with my coach that I work with, for, you know, healing my nervous system, I was able to calm myself down.

I’m gonna let you know that there were times that I took half a sleeping pill to go to sleep at night because my brain kept racing and racing and racing. And especially, after the live event. I was lying in bed at night, and my whole body felt like there was this electric charge going through it. I couldn’t get myself to calm down.

And so, if that is your experience, for whatever growth areas you are having in your business, I just want to let you know that it is 100% normal, and you can plan for it. I think I’m gonna look into other healing remedies and modalities that I can bring into my business and my life, for the next time. Maybe it’s vitamins, maybe it’s more massages, maybe it’s, you know, I don’t know, reflexology, other types of energy healing.

But in order to take care of myself, and keep my nervous system healed, and make sure that I’m sleeping well at night, I continued on with my exercise routine. There was that one night that I went to sleep at three in the morning, so I just didn’t show up for my exercise the next day. I slept in and that also felt like self-care.

The day after the four-hour live event, where there were 17 people on the call, you know, I think at the most. Sometimes it was 15, 16; people had other things that they were doing and not all of my students could attend. But for much of the time, we had 16 or 17 people on the call. And the day after that live event, I took the whole day off.

I sat on my sofa wrapped up in a blanket, and I read a novel. A novel that I read in the past, but I just pulled it off the shelf because I really wanted to take care of me. I served myself some nourishing chicken soup for lunch, which was just a great way to take care of myself. And it felt like a lovely, delightful, nourishing self-care day.

A couple of other things that were happening during the launch, and I need to be mindful of this, because I always have things going on in my business. You know, I’m a mom of a large family. But number one, we have a fundraising event in our community every year, in the fall, where we are raising money for needy brides in Israel.

That also happened during launch, and that takes a lot of my energy and my resources. I manage the distribution of the auction prizes and the raffle prizes for the week, two weeks, three weeks after the event. I still have, in my home, a few prizes that have not yet been picked up. I show up on the night of the event. I read out all the winners, and then I take the prizes  home, and I have to work on making sure that they get distributed. So, that is something else that was going on in my life at the time of my launch.

I want to make sure that in the future, I plan my launches not during the same week that I’m working on another big event. The second thing, that was also requiring some of my emotional capacities, was that this year I signed up to do an advanced deep-dive coaching certification.

That started the day before my launch. My Money School program started on October 31, and this program started on October 30. So, I was doing something new and stretching myself in my business, for my skills and my tools and my training, while at the same time doing something new in my business by doing the second launch of my program.

That’s also something to notice, is when there’s an overlap, really checking in with myself, and seeing if I really do have the energetic capacity to do them all; I love to do all the things. I probably, if I had to do it all over again, I would not have delayed the launch because of the coaching certification that I’m doing. But definitely, the fundraiser is something that I should have been more mindful of.

I think the last thing that was happening, which worked in my benefit, is I had several clients who finished their six-month contracts during the period of the launch. And I was so relieved that my calendar was opening up and it was becoming more free during the time of the launch, so that I could have more self-care time for me.

But again, just noticing where I’m working with clients and when I have to be in my sort of coach brain, and when I’m doing my launch and I need to be in my business entrepreneur brain. Just doing the switch between the two of those is a challenge for your brain, for your body, for your nervous system. It’s not something that’s so difficult to overcome.

But giving myself the time and space to really slow down and be in my body, and just sort of like take stock of where I am, is hugely important. I spent time during my lunch, I think, doing meditations and visualizations. And making sure, you know, on some occasions, that I was slowing down and taking care of myself, but it didn’t always happen.

Anyway, that is what I have for you today on the podcast. I really just want to celebrate money, celebrate what I’ve accomplished, invite you to celebrate with me, and I want to talk about all the things from a really real perspective. And also, just putting out there where my growth areas are, for the next time.

If you have any questions about launches in your business, and if you’re running a group program, and sometimes you might be running a webinar or doing a launch to invite clients to work with you one-on-one, feel free to reach out. Let me know your thoughts. Let me know what you have found to be the most helpful self-care techniques when you are in the middle of a launch. I would love to learn from you also.

Thank you for tuning in. And I will see you next week on the podcast. Bye-bye.

Thanks for listening to Mastering Money in Midlife. If you want more information on Debbie Sassen or the resources from the podcast visit MasteringMoneyInMidlife.com.