Uncensored Money Season Three: Plan, Pivot, Plan – My Latest Launch Debrief 

Melissa Browne: Ex-Accountant, Ex-Financial Advisor, Ex-Working Till I Drop, Now Serial Entrepreneur & Author, Financial Wellness Advocate, Living a Life by Design | 01/06/2022

Show Notes

In this episode, Mel discusses comparison culture by opening the curtains to share what was going on behind the scenes of the recent launch of the My Financial Adulting Plan.

Mel discusses the importance of forward planning and goal setting, focusing on what you can control and what action you can take as well as understanding what you’re prepared to suffer for. Plus she discusses the importance of having a buffer account and a plan for when stressors in your life occur so that you don’t sabotage your goals. 

If you know you need more help with your finances make sure you join the waitlist for the next round of the My Financial Adulting Plan. 

If you're not already, come play over at insta at MelBrowne.Money and make sure you are signed up to Mel's Money Musings and Monday Money Moments (yep, we love us some alliteration) for more tips, tricks and ideas on how to best work with your money.

Finally, if you love this episode please make sure you subscribe and leave us a review.

Transcript

Mel: Welcome. So today I wanna talk about comparison culture. Um, and I wanna do it through a bit of a different lens because I've just completed another round, another launch of the My Financial Adulting Plan. And for this round, we welcomed over 400 incredible humans and many of their partners and kids into this round. And what I know is I've been doing online courses for a couple of years. This is my third business. It's actually the third time that I've been able to build a seven figure business from scratch. What I'm loving is they're getting faster and faster to get there. And do you know it would be very easy for people to look across the fence and going, ugh, she's got it so easy. That looked effortless. I wish I was her. Ugh. I don't know how many of you are saying that last one, but I know I do it. I look across at other people and go, ugh, they just seem to have it so easy. I wish I had that. So we all do it right. So what I wanted to do is just talk about what was going on and unpack the last round of the My Financial Adulting Plan launch. And I hope through that, it gives you hope for wherever you are at and it makes you realise that, huh? What I see the veneer I see is often not what's going on behind the scenes and maybe. Maybe to be a little bit kinder to yourself as a result.

So, as I said, the last round was I think it's about the seventh time or the eighth time we've launched the My Financial Adulting Plan. We've been doing it for about two years and the last round was the second most successful round we've ever. So we had over 400 humans through, and this financial year we've smashed the budget that I set back in July, which was quite a stretch budget I had thought at the time. So as I said from all, intent and purposes, a super successful launch.

But there are a few things that were going that happened during our launch. And what I wanted to do is share those with you and talk about what they meant for me, but also to talk about what they mean for you, where you are at, and maybe with your finances and your business, and to help you ask those questions for where you are at. Decide what you are prepared to do to move your finances and business along.

And you know what the answer to that is gonna be very different for every one of us. And that's okay. There is no judgment with anything I'm talking about today, it's simply sharing so that we don't have that comparison culture. We don't have that, ugh, she's got it so easy. Because what I know is that's very often not the case.

So when we started the ads. We plan our launches 12 months out. So we sit down at the beginning of every year, we work out the dates that we wanna launch. We work out, cause we wanna make sure they're staggered. We work out what we want the database to be, all that sort of stuff. So in the same way that I talk to individuals about having both those long-term goals and then those 12 month shorter goals, as well as your 90 day and your 30 day and your seven day actions, we do the same in my business because your finances, I believe, it's really helpful to run them like a business. So we had our had our long term goals and our 12 month goals around when we were gonna launch and our targets for each launch. And then the action items that we wanna do are for each launch. And we had the dates for me set in place for a long time and around them were some things so that in the end those dates really couldn't be moved. The husband was going away traveling. I had a very good friend's 50th, where he wanted to go away for a long weekend to somewhere where there was possibly no internet and a whole bunch of other stuff. And plus you just wanna make sure the launches are far enough apart that, that they're not impinging and cannibalising one another, or they just don't work that well.

So of course what happened is we knew that an election would probably be called in May. But the election weekend was smack bang in the middle of launch. And, you know, I looked at that and I've launched during Australia Day long weekend. I've launched in others sort of, not necessarily fantastic times where people are wanting to switch off.

So I thought, you know what? I think this is gonna be okay and it's gonna be hard to move. So it didn't really occur to me to change. But what I discovered is that obviously politicians have huge budgets and we are not all watching TV anymore. Certainly I don't. So where is a lot of their money going social media. And so that meant a couple of things happened.

One, it meant that ads were ridiculously expensive. So I run my own Facebook ads. I've taught myself through training, how to run Facebook. And I thought it was strange when I went in to start running them, that they said the ads are going to be more expensive. I'm like, oh, okay. Alright. That's obviously just what it is. And then over time I realised, oh, this is what's happening. I'm competing with these budgets. But beyond that, what it meant was even on social media, people didn't wanna be on there because they didn't wanna be hearing about politics.They didn't wanna be fed ads. And it got to the point where we send out EDMs. So electronic mail and during launch, we send more than usual. And the weekend of the election we had for one day, no one click on that email, to the point where I thought, hmm, I reckon that's broken. So two emails on the Saturday, Sunday really had no open rate and it's because people were just fatigued. They were tired of being sold to by politicians and it infiltrated everywhere. And I remembered this from accounting, but really in the accounting world, people have to get their tax done. They've given it to you a long time before it doesn't really happen. And I know I've heard builders, I've heard car dealerships, I've heard all sorts of people say that people don't spend around an election.

And I experienced that fatigue when it came to being sold to firsthand in the business when I launched. So that was an extraordinary moment for me, where it was, you know, you can't just abort a launch where you're starting. But it meant that I could do a couple of things. Cause when we face those times where things, those unexpected events happen, right. And that's gonna happen with your finances, that's gonna happen with your business. So my lesson for that for you is when those unexpected times happen, that you can't control with all your great planning, those unexpected outside events. For you, it's asking the question, well, what can I do to keep going? What else can I do? What else can I add in order to keep going? And for us, what we did is we looked at it and went well, do you know what the noise outside? The noise that people are experiencing is just prohibitive. And so that's actually stopping them from buying and it's stopping them from clicking.

So what could we do to cut through that noise? And I sat down with Lawsie and I said, I think I'm gonna have to do individual really teeny, tiny videos to people. And I'll talk to you about why that was problematic in a moment, but we looked at each other and I said, okay, well, what if we just did it to the most highly engaged of our database? And I've got a wait list of about 1500 people. I said, what if we only did it to those people that opened an email in the last seven days? We know they're engaged. We know they wanna hear from us. So let's just do it to. So that meant when we ran the report, it was over 700 names. I remember thinking, oh, and Lawsie just looked and went you can't do that. I remember going away and thinking, well, what would be the worst thing? What if I just started? Yeah, I can't comprehend doing 700 videos, but what if I just started doing three hours today? So it was Sunday and I started and on this Sunday, I think I got out a hundred and I went, huh? Well that wasn't so bad, you know, I'm tired and I've stared at the screen for a long time, but that wasn't so bad. So on Monday, I'm just going to choose to keep going for Monday and Tuesday. And I'm just gonna see what I can get to. So I didn't put pressure on myself, but I decided to take action.

I did a little tester first to see how it felt, and then I chose to get going. And in the end, I think I sent 600 up to 20 second personalised videos out to people on the wait list. And that absolutely turned the tide from people then being willing to click and buy.

So my question for you is if you have that external thing, if you have those situations where everything feels out of your control, whether it's with your finances and with your business, it's asking the question, what can I control? What could I do now and in this moment? And for you, it's almost asking that question, what are Mel's version of the 600 videos that I can do? Would you choose to do it? Potentially not. Does it seem absolutely astronomical or just far too much when you first consider it as it was with me? Absofreakinglutely. Will others tell you that's too much like Lawsie did, who knows me very well and is super engaged in my business and wants us to do well? Absofreakinglutely. But only you can answer as to whether that's gonna be right for you.

And I have a question when it comes to finances, when it comes to goals. And that question is what are you prepared to suffer for? Someone else might not have been prepared to do 600 mini videos because they're not prepared to suffer for that, right? For me, with my energy as it was. And we'll talk about that in a second, with everything else, being completely out of my control, I wanted to move towards those goals that we'd set.

So those small videos felt, whilst they felt enormous, it felt like something I could do to keep moving. And I'm the sort of person that freezes. When I am backed into a corner, when things don't go well, what I'll do and I know there's a fight and flight as syndrome, I tend to freeze and it's really easy when it comes to your finances is to freeze, to be overwhelmed, to suffer paralysis by analysis.

But sometimes it's figuring out one action you could take and then figuring out what is the start of that action. And then just simply starting, you may not finish it. I didn't get all of the 700, 800 videos done that I could have, but hell 600 is a whole lot better than nothing at all. And I guess the question is, could I have done something else that had a more significant result?

Sure. Potentially I could have. And that's that thing with finances as well. There are so many things that you've sometimes feel like you could be doing that you are overwhelmed by choice and you actually don't know which is gonna be the right path and the right actions. But just like I did, sometimes you just need to choose something and then start.

And for me, I decided to test it in that first day, in that first few hours. And once I realised I could keep going with that, Then I just decided to absolutely keep going. Were people buying initially? Absofreakinglutely not. But I thought, you know what, nothing else has turned up that I feel like I could do in this small window of the last 40, 72 hours that I have, but I can do this.

Um, and so I did, so my question for you, wherever you are at now is: what are you prepared to suffer for in the next day? In the next week? In the next 90 days? You put that timeframe on, but what are you prepared to suffer for? Certainly Lawsie and I, we talk about this inside the My Financial Adulting Plan in one of the stories for a house deposit where Lawsie and her husband decided for 12 months to buy absolutely nothing. Not to go out, not to have any entertainment, to do nothing for 12 months because they decided that they were prepared to suffer for 12 months. After that, they wanted to holiday again, they wanted to eat out. They love all those things. However, they said, you know what? We can do it for 12 months. And they quietly literally spent nothing for 12 months. Only you can answer that though for yourself. And it's, what are you prepared to suffer for?

The second thing that we had going on in launch that no one knew about was health. So my husband had been unwell for a number of months and I was facing that during that time. And I also, so for four to six weeks beforehand, I had a chest infection. I'd actually lost my voice for a couple of weeks.
Um, and energetically was so low, both from worrying about him, about not being well personally and bringing that into launch was hard. You know, it, would've been a really easy kind decision to myself to go, you know what? Just don't worry with it this time, but I've got responsibilities I feel to my team. I've got obligations to people that have said they wanted to do this.

So I felt that no, I can do this, but it is something where people don't know what's going on for you. And what I know more at now in the last few months than I ever have is that health is so freaking important and managing that can mean. When that is obstructed can mean everything can be affected. So making sure you are prioritising your health is more important than anything, but it's also important during those times of sickness and illness, etc, is again, to have a plan to ask the question, what can I still do even with this going on? What can I do even with this still going on?

But it's also why buffers are really important. You know, my husband and I were talking about how we are so grateful that we live in this country, but he reckons he spent at least two grand in the last 30 days on health related things on tests and specialists and all that sort of stuff.

If he didn't have that cash sitting there, then it could be really problem. That's when you are either putting it on credit card or saying, you know what, I'm just gonna have to wait until I can afford to this, or I'm just gonna have to wait until there's a spot in the public system, which, who knows if that's gonna be in six or 12 months time, and sometimes you cannot wait for that. So having buffer accounts, making sure that you've got those cash reserves so that you are able to say yes to things and have them sorted out is so freaking important.

But again, it's also understanding that people don't see that's going on for you. They can't see that. And you sometimes you just need to show up and put that to one side and do it anyway for me.

Um, I look at this second webinar that I did during launch and I was not myself because of all of those health issues. And I had weighing on my mind where I was and I stumbled. And there was a moment in there where someone, I think they were trying to be funny, but they said, hey, I'm here because of the Melissa Caddick podcast and I think that you're gonna have to really work hard here. And there were a few other things like that where it threw me, like, normally I would've gone. Yeah. I don't have to work hard cause I'm not investing your money. Maybe you need to go and do your research or, hey, that's an example of financial illiteracy.

You know, I would've had a comeback normally so quickly. But that threw me and I've gotta be honest. It took me a few days to recover. And I beat myself up and all that sort of thing. But again, people don't see that they don't know. So it's having that plan. And I do, you know what Lawsie and I have sat down straight after and said, okay, so life's gonna happen again in future.

Some twit is gonna get on and make a really foolish comment as well. And they're not gonna know what you're going through. So how are we gonna make a plan so that my energy's protected in future, no matter what I'm going through. So we've sat down and made a plan for future around making sure chat is taken care of by her for part of the webinar, and her being there with me in the space so that I have energy from someone else and all these sort of things. So I didn't just go, ugh, well, never doing that again. That sucked. In life, that's a luxury that most of us aren't afforded. And yet I see that happen a lot with finances. Oh, well I did that badly. Oh, well, I stuffed up there. I'm obviously not meant to do that and I suck at it and I'm not doing it again.

I know I'm freaking good at what I do. I know I'm freaking good at webinars and my course is worth getting people into. So instead of me throwing the baby out with the bath water, Lawsie and I have made a plan so I am protected in future, no matter what is going. So again, with your finances, I call it having a plan for when stresses arrive.

It's having those tools in your toolkit so that when stressors come and they're going to freaking come, whether it's health, like what I've been dealing with and scary health, whether it's someone being nasty, work, whether it's family dramas, whether it's an accident or what have you. So you've gotta plan for that so that you don't self sabotage so that you're not tempted to throw it in.

And that plan might be around exercise. It might be around getting your dopamine hit from other places. It might be around meditation. It might be not having credit cards. It might be keeping your savings in an account that you can't access or having rules around when you can spend, but it's having a plan so that when those stresses happen, you and your finances are protected.

And as I said, Lawsie and I have done exactly. So far we've looked at the unexpected external, which is those ads, etc. We've looked at the unexpected internal, which is for me the health issues.

But the third is just, you know, and this is where, for me this launch was just ridiculous. So it's the last day of launch. I'm smashed, essentially. I haven't slept properly any night because I'm so worried as I said, with the health issues and all sorts of stuff, and I woke up at five o'clock and decided I'd get up without waking up my husband. And we've got really steep stairs at my home. They are so not so code. We, my husband and I have both slipped on them many times before, and we're planning a renovation to move them because I am the world's largest clutz. I'm gonna break my neck.

That morning I slipped down every single one of those stairs. So I torn my, oh, I didn't add that. I torn my meniscus the week before. So during launch on the Wednesday, so I'd already had a dodgy knee. You just can't make this shit up, right? And as I fell, I was so worried about that knee that I lifted it and I landed on my butt down every one of those 20 something stairs. And I apparently I was yelling out to my husband the entire way down. I was terrified thinking, okay, I'm breaking something like, this is just the scariest moment. My husband's ran. He's got outta bed and ran cause he said, it sounded like there was, you know, people jumping around in the house. Apparently I just yelled out his name the entire way down. And I remember sitting on that bottom step shaking going, okay, something's broken.

You just need to start to have a feel and figure out what's broken. And I don't know how nothing was, but I have the largest bruise on my butt. Like it was a shelf. I can't tell you, like it's a purple black bruise, the size of one entire butt cheek, plus bruises everywhere else. So for that last day of launch already with everything that had gone on. I'm now moving an ice pack from my butt to my thigh, to my leg, to whatever, chewing down Panadol, all and thinking what the hell. And you know what? At that point I was so tempted just to go, let's just pull the pin, like honestly, what else can freaking go wrong? But you can't right? You can't pull the pin.

You can't just say that's it. I'm just gonna, oh, you guess you can. But for many of us, we can't. So I just said to, I'd already organised for Tony, my husband, to have that day off, because I know what that last day of launch is like. So I'd already planned, which I hope you've heard me talk about plan this whole podcast.

So I'd already planned for Tony to have that day off. And that forward planning meant that I could just concentrate on simply bringing it home on the final Tuesday. So he made sure I had ice all day. He made sure that whenever I was freaking out that my butt was broken. Which I quite literally was. He'd come and, and look and go, no, look, I get that it's scary. I get that it's enormous. I get that it's black and it hurts, but it's not broken. He got the ice ready. He cooked for Lawsie and I and fed us and just made sure we were looked after. So that forward planning meant that I could then concentrate on simply being looked after and bringing home that last day of launch. It meant that I posted reels. I did another, maybe 200 videos that final day. Um, it meant I could just sit here and keep showing up and no one knew what was going on. It wasn't until the very last story that I decided to tell that story. I think it was about seven o'clock for the last live, because I thought, you know what? There are a lot of people that have had that unexpected thing happen and wanna just stop and can't, and I'm gonna tell the story of me falling down the stairs today to encourage them that they can just keep going.

So that was the final day of launch with my bang knee, with my quite literally, having fallen down my entire flight of stairs. And I'm so grateful that my husband said he, he got outta bed going, okay, I'm gonna see her on the bottom of the stairs. She's gonna have broken her neck. Cause he thought I'd topple forward. It's only that my knee had a tear in it that I lifted it up so that I was forced backwards onto my butt and my back and the back of my arms. Otherwise Lord knows what would happen.

So the reason I'm telling you, and the reason I wanted to do this podcast is, it's really easy to look across and go, God, look, she's done it again. She's had another 400k plus launch and she's had a seven figure year. You know, she's just killing it.

And our reason I wanna do that is cause comparison culture can make us stop. Comparison culture can make us give up. Comparison culture can be the thief of our finances and our businesses. And you never know what is going on for that other person. You never know what they're moving through. And I wanted to tell that story to encourage you with your finances, to encourage you with your business today to keep going.

But it's not just to keep going. I believe that even with all of those extraordinary events that happened during launch, the reason my launch was as successful as it was cause of three things.

One, I forward planned. I planned for Tony to have that last day off. We'd forward planned already all of the things so that, I simply could turn up and be on autopilot for a lot of it and do.

Two is we took action every single day. I took action. No matter how I was feeling, I followed the plan. Cause it's one thing to set the plan in motion, it's another thing to turn up and to actually do it. So no matter how I was feeling, I turned up and I did it. And my incredible mentor Tina Tower contacted me at one point and went, honey, you just seem like you're dead behind the eyes. And I'm like, yeah, I kind of feel like that. So she then sent me a beautiful meditation and got me to do some breathing exercises, which really helped. But again, it's taking action, right?

Three is you gotta pivot. I hate that word so much, but when life happens, you've gotta adapt. And for me, that election result meant that yes, in a normal launch, I would've done so much more than I did for this launch.

It would've been an even greater result, but I truly believe that if I hadn't decided to send all those videos out, I would've got a far worse result than the incredible one that I did. So the pivot was okay, what can I control? I can't control the fact that they're having an election. I can't control my husband's health. I can't control my own health or anything else. I can't force people to open emails or to ads to be working, but I can send personalised videos that I believe, if I make them personal to everyone that I send to and make them short and timely, that's gonna make a difference. And it's also not second guessing yourself. Could something else have worked better? Sure. But it's choosing a path and then committing to it and then really have following it through to have a real crack. So I hate the word pivot, but sometimes you need to, with your finances you need to, with your businesses you need to, and then you need to take action again.

So it's plan, action, pivot, action. And then finally it's plan again. Because what we did as a result of that launch is to go, right, this is what we're gonna tweak next time. We're not gonna rest on our lo laurels. We're not just gonna assume, well, that will never happen again so we can just run the same thing we always did.

No, I know life will continue to happen. I know there'll be future stresses and I wanna make sure that we look after me. We look after my energy, but we also make sure that we hit all those goals and I affect the people's lives that I want to affect. It's really important. The legacy I wanna have, and if I want that, then we need to keep changing.

So Lawsie and I, as I said, have already made plans for the next launch. We've already changed how we're going to go into it. We've made sure that with some things we're gonna keep, we're gonna make sure Tony or Adam, her husband's there for us the last day, but we're gonna change up some stuff with the webinar.

We're gonna change up some stuff with those videos. They work so beautifully, but I don't wanna be doing that right at the end, if things go wrong. So we're gonna move some stuff to the start of launch. We're gonna make of the periods shorter. And we've already looked to next year to go, right. We're also changing how things are gonna happen there as well to manage energy. So plan, action, pivot, action plan, action, and above all else. Next time you look across whether it's on social media or other and think, oh God, they're killing it. I am not at the stage that I should be, whether that's my business, my finances, or what, whatever I wanna promise you, that you do not see what's going on behind the scenes that you don't know what's truly going on for that person.

And to decide to run your own race, maybe to be motivated and inspired by someone else. And if you're not, if you're finding, you're just comparing and it's actually preventing you from taking action, no matter how inspiring you think that person is just unfollow them for a while. Run your own race.

Figure out ahead of time, what's important to you with your finances and your business? What do you value? How can you protect your energy? What plans do you need to put into place? And then simply start.

I hope you found that helpful. I hope you found that debrief something that you can take back to your finances.

I hope that you are gonna ask questions. Like, what am I prepared to suffer? What are my 600 videos? Where do I need to pivot? Where do I need to take action? Where do I need to plan? What are the stresses and sabotages that I need to make a plan for? And then to simply start. Make sure you check out the show notes for anything extra we talked about today.

Get the podcast at all your favourite locations, or jump through here: